Kevin M. Kearney’s latest novel FREELANCE(Rejection Letters, 2025) is a dystopian thriller. It is a psychological profile of loneliness in the age of OnlyFans. It is a condemnation of AI and the gig economy. It is the story of a young man’s search for purpose, part character study and part surreal, page-turning romp. Above all, it is a lot of fun. The novel follows Simon, a driftless 19-year-old driver for the rideshare app HYPR, whose world is upended when the app offers him a seemingly life-changing opportunity. This combination of breadth, emotional acuity and fast-moving plot is nothing new for Kearney. His debut novel HOW TO KEEP TIME (Thirty West, 2022) is a portrait of marriage and family that reads like a mystery, with a dose of New Jersey folklore thrown in for good measure. In short, his books do a lot. Ahead of the publication of FREELANCE on May 31, I connected with Kearney over video call to discuss his writing process, building a universe across books and why Philadelphia is the perfect setting for a sci-fi noir. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Leo Vartorella: So FREELANCE is a book that touches on a lot of big themes. You’ve got AI, the gig economy, and coming of age as a young man on the internet to name a few. Did you set out to tackle all these themes from the beginning or did they kind of come up organically as you were writing the book?Kevin M. Kearney: I think the short answer is no. I had the idea to write about an Uber type driver. I thought that would make for a good narrative conceit, because you've got this character who, by the necessity of his job, has to interact with all these different people throughout the course of the day. So as a writer, it's entertaining, because you can just say, well, who would I like to show up next? Pretty much anyone with a smartphone in Philly could show up in his back seat. So what does that look like? It kind of started as a game, just to play and see what happens. And then I started realizing that it could be something larger, and it could probably be a novel. So that’s when some of those themes started showing themselves. Some of them were obvious in retrospect, but at the time they kind of came out of the storytelling.I left teaching and moved across the country in 2022, and I also started writing this book in August 2022 as soon as I moved to California. At first, I thought I was just writing this story about this rideshare driver. Very quickly I realized, oh, I'm actually writing about teaching, and I'm processing what it means that I'm no longer in the classroom. And then I also realized, oh, I'm writing about Philly because I'm no longer in Philly, and I'm processing what that city is or what my experience with it was. And then I very quickly realized, oh, all the things I'm writing about teaching are actually about work. LV: And what about Simon in particular? What drew you to him as a character and how did he start to take shape for you?KK: I taught high school for 10 years in Philly. I taught at this all-boys Catholic school that I also attended as a student, which is a whole other story. I had a lot of students throughout that decade who were a lot like Simon, kids who are a little over their heads, kids who maybe don't know what they don't know, but who are just trying to forge a path and figure out who they are and who they want to be. So I think that was the main inspiration. I felt like I'd interacted with this kid many, many times and the more I wrote about it, I realized at various points in my life, I had also been that kid.LV: From a construction standpoint, I really admire how you write chapters. They are always building momentum and leaving me as a reader wanting more, and I feel like you really know how to end them in a satisfying way without it feeling too on the nose. What do you look to accomplish in a chapter and how do you think about them as narrative units?KK: That's a great question, and I appreciate you saying that, because it's something that I have really worked on. You use the word unit, and I think that's the perfect way to describe it. I haven't thought about it in that way, but that's absolutely accurate. It is its own thing, right? It’s a living, breathing element in and of itself. It's not the same thing as a short story because it’s pushing along this much larger narrative. So I think of it more like a joke, like in the context of a sketch or a stand-up set. Sometimes a joke can stand on its own, but a lot of times they are much more satisfying and a lot funnier in the context of the larger thing, but they are also units that can exist on their own, because there's a premise, there's a setup, and then there's a punchline. And so I think when I'm writing a chapter, I'm always hoping that there's a buildup, there's a setup, and then there is some sort of punchline, even though a lot of times it's not funny. But there's something about how the end of a chapter lands that not only feels satisfying – you could close the book, if you want, and feel like an idea has been realized – but that hopefully it’s going to make you want to turn the page, because you're going to see that replicated in the next chapter and the next.LV: To speak about plot and momentum more generally, this book really zips along. We could use the phrase page turner. How do you think about plot as you're writing? Are you an outliner or are you figuring it out as you go?KK: I appreciate that, because that's something I think about a lot. I love page turners. I think for some people, that's seen as less than, like it’s a trait of genre fiction that maybe certain literary types kind of turn their nose up at. But I think it's really admirable and quite difficult to keep it moving and to make it feel entertaining and engaging enough to keep someone constantly turning that page. In terms of plot overall, I think for a long time I am writing scenes and just figuring out who the character is. And my process, when I first start something, is I'm just writing completely fragmented scenes, and I don't exactly know who the characters are, I don't exactly know where it's going. Sometimes just a paragraph, and then sometimes that's several paragraphs, and then maybe a sentence, but I'm just trying to get as many things down on the page as possible. And then over time, those connections start to make themselves more obvious to me, and I can start to see the threads between those seemingly disconnected fragments, and then I can start piecing things together. Then I can put together a pretty broad outline of where the story starts, where it's going to go next, and where, ultimately, I hope that it winds up. As the process goes on and things become more refined, I get a pretty detailed outline, and especially when I'm revising drafts, I'm outlining pretty intensely and doing reverse outlines to see if the story architecture actually holds up and makes sense.LV: In both of your books, a key element of that architecture is the way you deploy shifts in point of view. You don't really seem restricted about how you do it or when you do it, and I think it works very effectively. Sometimes you come back to a character, or sometimes like with Simon's parents or Tamika, we might just spend one chapter with them. How do you think about when and how you're shifting point of view?KK: Well, I think part of it is just like a very dumb reader view of it, which is that as soon as it starts to feel boring, hearing from the same person, that's usually a sign for me that I need to start moving in another direction. In the reverse outline that I mentioned, it’s one of the main things that I'm looking at. So when I'm reading the first full draft of a project, I ignore whatever previous outline I had, and as I'm reading it and marking it up, I'm outlining it as it exists on the page. So here's what happens in one chapter and here's whose perspective it's from, or here are the characters who are involved in the scene. And that allows me to then have a Google Doc that's pretty much just one page, and I can see I've got this character's perspective for eight chapters in a row. I’m always asking myself, is this interesting or has this become stale or mundane? Is this balanced structurally? Just trying to look at it all as objectively as possible.LV: I think some of the strongest characters across both your books are the parents. One element of the parent-child relationship that you explore nicely is intergenerational communication. Beyond their family connection, parents and children are products of different eras trying to figure each other out. Especially in a book like FREELANCE, why was it so important to give voice to Simon's parents?KK: That’s a great question, because someone who read an early draft said they thought I should cut the parents, there’s no need to hear from them. So I went back and tried to see if that would be possible, and I just thought that it would be totally unrealistic to think that there's this 19-year-old kid who had all these struggles, whose parents don't have any window into his life. I mean, obviously that type of person exists, but I think that that's a pretty rare experience now, considering who Simon is and where it's coming from. So I thought that it was essential. Also, I mentioned earlier that I had taught so many kids who were like Simon, and I inevitably met all their parents because they were failing out of school, or they were socially struggling in some way. So I would be emailing with these parents or talking with them on the phone or sitting with them in guidance counselor meetings or parent teacher conferences, and I really felt for these people, even though sometimes I could see how their parenting was maybe facilitating or passively encouraging their kids’ struggles. But, you know, they're just people who are trying to figure out what's wrong with their kid, or where maybe they went wrong with their kid. They're really grasping at straws and trying to fix this problem that is way more complicated than a simple fix.LV: Yeah, I mean, it's believable that there's a 19-year-old Simon who's going through life and not thinking about his parents, but that there are parents who are thinking about him is the important perspective that really adds a roundness to the book.KK: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that my therapist would have something to say about this, but I always find that I'm writing about parents, always writing about work. LV: Throw Catholicism in there and you’ve got the trifecta.KK: [Laughs] Right, and I'm always writing about a Catholic school. That always works its way in.LV: I feel like Cassie is a character who grows increasingly important as FREELANCE progresses. How crucial do you think her perspective is in a book that's otherwise about this driftless young man?KK: Yeah, I think it's crucial. She’s the wise character, not that she's perfect by any means. I don't think anyone in the book, or in life, is perfect, but she sees through all the things that hamstring Simon and a lot of the other characters, and she realizes that defining your identity by your profession is a losing game. It's a trap. But also defining your identity based on social capital, like maybe Dylan does, is also a trap. So that scene with her and Maya at the end, I think that is the crux of not only her arc, but the book as a whole. She’s not even a mother: she's Cassie. And even that name is a construction. Even that is artificial. She is this energy, this spirit, for lack of a better word. All the other things are artificial, and I think she sees through that, whereas Simon is really hung up on how he's perceived by others and whether or not he's successful enough.LV: Speaking of how he’s perceived by others, Simon lives with a group of privileged post-college kids who feel like they are figuring out their lives, but they're all on a path to security and success that is very foreign to Simon, whose trajectory is much more precarious. Tell me about putting Simon in a house with these people. Why was that important?KK: I think the first reason is that Philly is filled with people like that. It would be fair to say that I have been that person at times too, who's sort of poor but not poor, right? Sort of cosplaying poverty because you just graduated college. So for one, it felt realistic. If you're writing about people in their 20s in Philly, that's a not insignificant portion of the population. It was also supposed to echo Simon's experience in high school. A very elite school that’s in the city but not necessarily of the city. And I think it’s a dynamic he could look at and wonder if his whole life is going to feel outside of these people, removed from them and completely isolated when he tries to relate to them about seemingly normal things.LV: Staying with Philly for a sec, something I noticed in HOW TO KEEP TIME and FREELANCE is a similar arc for the characters where they go through a lot of shit in Philly, and the city kind of spits them out into Jersey. What is it about each of these places and the relationship between them that makes them so compelling to write about?KK: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that a lot of people in Philly, and maybe even a lot of people in New Jersey, view Jersey as this other planet. Even across the country, when I mention to people that I grew up in New Jersey, they think of a different New Jersey than the one that I grew up in. I grew up in South Jersey, which is like a Philadelphia suburb that very quickly becomes farmland and woods.Philly is very strange in its own ways, very haunted in its own ways. I think New Jersey feels like a counterpart to that. It’s also very strange, but in different ways, and very haunted in different ways. And it feels like a place that you could be exiled to. With Mercer in HOW TO KEEP TIME, that's the place where he's trying to get his head on straight and figure things out. And for Simon in FREELANCE, that's where he's cordoned off, a purgatory of sorts.LV: You mentioned you started writing FREELANCE after you had moved to California. Compared to the process of writing your first book, how was it different writing about Philly and Jersey from across the country?KK: With HOW TO KEEP TIME, the only way that I could think to do that was that fragmentary process I was talking about, taking all these seemingly disconnected scenes and making them work in a narrative. A lot of it was my day-to-day experience in the city or in the Pine Barrens, things I noticed, things that stood out to me – pretty much notes – then fictionalizing them and putting them in this very dramatic narrative. So I was able to, in real time, see something and then immediately put it into the story.Being 3000 miles across the country and trying to write about the place, that was about mining my memory. And I think the result of that is a more heightened or surreal version of the city. And when I started to realize that, I thought, oh, it would be cool to try and make this feel like a noir or a suspenseful thriller. So I started reading Raymond Chandler books to try and see how you make it feel like there are shadows everywhere, something always lurking around the corner.LV: I love Chandler.KK: Yeah, I hadn't read him before, and when I moved to California, I thought I should read a bunch of California books. Chandler was one of the things that seemed the most obvious, so I read The Big Sleep and The High Window. And I was thinking I should write a sci-fi noir, so I was reading those Chandler books and then, in quick succession, also read Neuromancer and the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I'd never read before. It’s really fun. So I was using my memory of not just what I moved away from, but also Philadelphia in 2010 when I first moved there as an adult, and then trying to infuse it with these hyper-real or surreal elements that sci-fi and noir allow.I also read this book called Hustle and Gig by Alexandria Ravenel. It's a sociological study of gig work including Uber, Airbnb, Task Rabbit, and a company called Kitchensurfing. It was super helpful, because it gave me actual data and experiences of people who have gone through this that were vetted by an academic. Because I was also reading tons of forum posts, subreddits from Lyft and Uber drivers, to get a sense of what the job is actually like on the ground. But it was nice to have the academic text to complement that and verify things. Because I think there's a lot of bluster on these forums, which are incredible texts in and of themselves. They are fascinating to read, because, for one, they're not written with any sort of artistic pretense. They're really just written a lot of times to blow off some steam or to talk some shit. And I think that's refreshing to read – something that is so intentionally anti-intellectual. There is no hoping that someone thinks they're smart because they wrote this. They’re doing it to express a feeling. I'm fascinated by digital texts like that in general, stumbling upon something on the internet that is made public for literally the entire world to see, and yet you still feel like this is a private document that you're not supposed to have seen. I love that. So then playing around with writing my own, it was fun. In terms of reader experience, I thought it was a nice way to break up the narrative and hit refresh every once in a while. Also, it allowed for a lot of indirect exposition.LV: You’ve mentioned how Catholicism and Catholic school are themes in both of your books. What impact does religion have on the lives of your characters?KK: I wish I had some thematic reason for why I write about Catholic characters, and, more specifically Irish-Catholic characters, but I think at the end of the day I’m writing from my own immediate experience. I also think there’s a lot of strange ethnic traditions that have nothing to do with religion but everything to do with Catholic or Irish-Catholic identity. In HOW TO KEEP TIME, it's the inability to say the thing – the absolute deferral to silence whenever something gets potentially uncomfortable. And I think that animates a lot of the tension between Simon and his parents. His dad in particular can't bring himself to say that his son is depressed, because what if that sets him on this certain path that's going to lead to all these other problems that could have been avoided if we had just not said that, right? His mom is more open, but probably too much. She’s probably overbearing with the amount that she's willing to say the thing. I don't know, it's something I constantly plug into, and I have found that there's no shortage of inspiration with writing about that world.LV: Speaking of HOW TO KEEP TIME, I was very happy to see Mercer make a cameo in FREELANCE. It’s not a particularly important episode for Simon, but it felt like a pretty revealing coda to see where Mercer is now, and kind of worked like an aftershock that brought me back to the world of that book. Why did you want both of these books to take place in the same universe?KK: Well, I think you describing it as an aftershock is incredible. That’s the effect that I was looking for. I love writers who build universes and then slowly expand them over the course of their bibliography. When I was in high school reading Vonnegut and burning through his books, seeing Kilgore Trout appear in multiple places, Eliot Rosewater too, I just thought, wow, this is so cool that a writer gets to do that. That they get to build this entire world.LV: Reading Vonnegut in high school and hitting your second Kilgore Trout mention – nothing can match that high.KK: Totally. I also love Jennifer Egan and I think she does that really well. She has built a universe of all these characters that start out in A Visit from the Goon Squad, and then they show up in a number of her short stories published after that, and then she wrote sort of like a sequel, but it's all about these very seemingly minor, peripheral characters from the first book. I think that's just so exciting as a reader and as a writer. It's incredible that you get to build your own universe, not just for a single book, but one that lives throughout an entire body of work. It's really fun and hopefully it maybe adds to a deeper sense of realism for a reader who's following book to book. This story does not begin on page one and end when you close the book, it actually continues. I have another idea that I'm working on right now, and it's about St. Luke's, the Catholic school that is in HOW TO KEEP TIME and FREELANCE, so that might be another way to kind of continue the universe.
With the short fiction collection My Child is a Stranger (AOS, 2025) Brandon Teigland offers a close reading of possible futures. Teigland’s exploratory voracity lays the groundwork for an examination of impulse, whether towards the limits of art or the human. The realm of theory has to live in our very real, fleshy heads, at least for now, but what happens when assumptions break down? I spoke to Brandon about this questing and interrogative collection.Rebecca Gransden: How long has the compilation of My Child is a Stranger taken you? What was the process of choosing the stories for inclusion like?Brandon Teigland: Over the past decade, while writing and publishing three other books, I was also assembling this collection—eighteen stories written between 2015 and 2025. In that time, the culture of contemporary fiction has changed. All the stories I've included in My Child is a Stranger are in some way about the time of their writing, whether they explicitly address the issues of the day or not. Everyone knows what these are: globalization, economic collapse, inequality, technological upheaval, environmental degradation, mass displacement, terror, war, and, with these, shifting ideas of what it means to be human.Is there a common thread among these? Probably not. As Jean-François Lyotard would say, there is no overarching metanarrative to explain and justify everything. There are only outcomes—ideas lived out in all their messy complexity. The 'child' in the title comes from Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, where he cites Isaiah 49: My child is a stranger, but a stranger who is not only mine, for he is me. He is me, a stranger to myself… However we relate to children in our own lives, the figure of the child—whether as an evasion or an embodiment of hope and despair—tells us something of the fears we as a species have for the future and what hope we invest in it.RG: What does the posthuman mean to you, and how does it manifest in your writing?BT: Posthumanism is a strange institution—one that allows us to be everything, anything. David Roden’s Disconnection Thesis suggests that posthumans would be radically different from humans because they would be 'disconnected' from existing human forms of life, practices, and conceptual frameworks. This disconnection isn’t just physical but involves a deeper ontological rupture—meaning posthuman beings may not be understandable in human terms, as they would operate outside the assemblage of human social systems.I see two kinds of posthumanism: ‘open’ posthumanism, which is unrestricted and capable of embodying anything, and ‘closed’ posthumanism, which imposes its own self-chosen limitations, restricting what posthumanism can be. I find both compelling and a little suspect, which is why I consider my writing a type of speculative posthumanism.Roden’s speculative posthumanism contrasts with critical posthumanism, which focuses on deconstructing the human concept within cultural and philosophical contexts. Instead, he considers the possible emergence of new kinds of beings beyond our ability to conceptualize—an unpredictable evolution where technology, biology, and autonomy break free from human structures. This aligns with my interest in posthumanism as a post-existential, almost unknowable state, where identity, transformation, and alienation lead to forms of existence outside human comprehension.To ask, ‘What is posthumanist literature?’ is to examine how writers might explore these feral forms of fabulist fiction. Literature is bound up with what it’s like to be us, to be human. How we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. Posthuman literature matters not because it helps us understand who we are today, but because it asks who we might become, or not become, tomorrow.RG: “The Last Shape” explores themes of aging and decay, of the ravages of time. You highlight how the pursuit of ‘beating’ time, the thirst for life extension, can lead to a state that pollutes the living environment. How do you view the concept of deep time? What is the contemporary relationship to the idea of primitive memory and evolution?BT: In “The Last Shape”, Professor Ali Abbasi, a biogerontologist, ventures into California’s Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in search of Methuselah, haunted by dreams of being trapped among its twisted pines. He realizes these trees endure not through vitality but by existing in a half-dead state, mirroring his fear that extreme life extension leads to stagnation and detachment.As he ascends, he encounters a breath-like entity dormant within the roots, suggesting that longevity is not just biological but an unnatural disruption of time. When he descends, his own breathing has changed—his body altered, his humanity uncertain. The story critiques the philosophy of senescence as a postmortal impasse, where longer lifespans sever us from evolution, erasing primitive memory and disrupting the natural balance. Deep time, embodied in these trees, reveals that life and death are inseparable, and immortality is not a triumph but a corruption of identity. The pursuit of preservation doesn’t just pollute the environment—it pollutes the self, rendering us unrecognizable. True continuity lies not in defying death but in accepting the decay and renewal that sustain all life—offering no solace beyond nature’s endless cycle.RG: We each have to face our own apocalypse. The collection confronts apocalypticism on both a personal and societal scale. How do you view the modern era’s version of apocalypse? Is there an apocalyptic zeitgeist in the literary scene?BT: The apocalyptic realism of contemporary literature is an as-yet-unstated movement, forming new waves around writers who are realizing that there is no limit to what literature can do: it can do anything it wants. It can be raw, risky, and random—deliberately unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. Most significantly, it can embrace a wilder edge, a kind of optimistic nihilism—something like a Crowleyian call to 'Do what thou wilt.'RG:I chose the wrong means of escape. I took an awkward shortcut that led me right back to where I was, left to compound the horror of living there, in that place of no escape, with the exhaustion of the journey. Empty-handed and up to my ears in student debt. If I wasn’t a destroyed human being then, I am now. Stagnant and useless. Full of false sensation. False scorn and feeble hatred. Not knowing which it really is, scorn or hatred, I laugh.“The Naysayer” pays particular attention to the concept of ‘giving up.’ What does ‘giving up’ mean in this story? To what degree did you consider structure in your approach to “The Naysayer”?BT: “The Naysayer” is a novelette written with the experimentalism and exploration of postmodernism and pessimistic fiction, chronicling a protagonist who internalizes failure as a metaphysical and existential certainty. The narrator, a disillusioned student burdened by debt and an eroding sense of self, isolates himself in a rented room where he discovers a lost manuscript, A Theory of Giving Up, written by the enigmatic Detlef Stefan. This "taxonomy of failure" becomes the narrator’s gospel, shaping his understanding of human effort as futile and resigning him to a state of inertia.Giving up, in this story, is not simply surrender; it is a conscious philosophical act, an assertion of negative will, a final form of resistance against a world that demands constant forward motion. Structurally, “The Naysayer” parallels this philosophy by rejecting conventional narrative resolution, unfolding in recursive loops of failed attempts, lost texts, and abandoned thoughts. Each passage feels like a false start, a directionless intellectual meandering that reflects the narrator’s inability to progress in life. The disquiet of “The Naysayer” is not in catastrophe, but in its quiet insistence that all roads lead nowhere.RG: How do you feel about the idea of anonymity?BT: I prefer to be a known unknown—recognizable yet obscured, present but absent. Absolute anonymity doesn’t interest me, but neither does full visibility. Slavoj Žižek describes the “Bartlebian act” as a quiet refusal, an opting out rather than direct resistance, like Melville’s scrivener who “would prefer not to.” Writers like László Krasznahorkai cultivate a similar aura of mystery, remaining at the periphery of mainstream literary consciousness while exerting undeniable influence. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms take this even further, fragmenting the self into multiple voices, each existing independently while the author remains elusive. In an era of constant self-performance, there’s value in resisting that pull, letting the work speak for itself, and leaving just enough space for the writing to haunt the reader.RG:I’m afraid to begin this story, a story with no definite end. There’s no single structure I can name here, no crystallized normality around which I can base the experience of my life, nothing that I can’t doubt any more than I can doubt the very room where I’m writing this now, a room in a city in a postanthropic culture on a planet in space. On an old bed, I lie down passively, supine, in a kind of resignation, and wait for the end.Are there stories that you are still afraid to begin?BT: “Cathedral of Spiders” collapses the boundary between fiction and nonfiction by making myself a character, testing how far self-mythologization can go before dissolving into alienation. The work teeters between self-aggrandizement—casting myself as the last human, the final perceiver—and the ironic deflation of that role through solipsism and cosmic insignificance. Writing becomes both an act of creation and self-destruction, a manuscript that longs to be burned yet refuses to end. I feared this erasure—not just of identity, but of the distinction between fiction and reality, between writing and self-annihilation, between the author and authored. The text spirals endlessly, a voice narrating its own extinction, unable to stop.RG: What does the future mean to you? Where would you like to take your writing?BT: The future is a place where writing literature is impossible—extro-literature. Extro-science fiction, as described by Quentin Meillassoux, explores worlds where science cannot be used to explain existence. It rejects science’s ability to establish objects or theories, confronting the idea that the laws of nature are not logically necessary. In a similar way, extro-literature suggests that writing itself becomes impossible in a future where meaning dissolves, where narratives are no longer anchored to human logic or perception.All my writing questions the limits of human-centered storytelling. I’m trying to understand how a posthuman novel both embodies and reshapes its own form—how a posthuman novel functions. If writing itself becomes impossible, what remains? Perhaps only fragments—stories that can no longer be told, slipping away. If posthumanism severs us from our origins, then posthuman literature must do the same—breaking away, leaving no meaning behind.
Over the last year or so, Amy DeBellis has been one of my favorite newer short story writers. Now she has a new novel, ‘All Our Tomorrows,’ published by CLASH Books, which is one of my favorite books of the year.Her writing is so skillful: the language, the plots, the pacing, the characters. But I also love her writing because I find many of her stories to be dark and bleak. To me, her stories feel steeped in depression, menace, and a kind of claustrophobic doom. I want to present the reader some examples of stories we’ve published by DeBellis:‘Purgatory’ –- a short story about a teen who becomes infatuated with a boy at her highschool who is killing animals. Soon he teaches her how to hunt and they start shooting animals together in the woods: deer, foxes, frogs. At one point the boy says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.” Then the story says: “She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull.” The story ends with them shooting the neighbor’s cat.‘His Body’ — a short story about a woman whose husband has caught an STD that causes incurable lesions to break out all over his body. The holes in the flesh never go away, until eventually his entire body is covered in them.We also published three micros by her:‘Yakutsk’ — about a woman who is getting ready to wander alone into the frozen taiga‘Wake’ — about a woman at her mother’s funeral. First sentence: “Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky.” And a micro titled: ‘Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill.’I spoke with DeBellis about her writing.
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Chris Dankland: Hi Amy! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Do you feel like your writing as a whole tends toward the melancholic, or does it only show up in certain pieces? Is that feeling something you consciously cultivate and lean into, or does it emerge naturally? Amy DeBellis: I do think it leans towards the melancholic as a whole. (In fact, it’s like the Tower of Pisa with how much it leans…) I’m trying to think of a piece I’ve written in the last couple of years that doesn’t have that darkness, and I’m coming up short. Even humorous pieces (“Upgrade” in HAD, for example, or “Persistence” in Roi Fainéant) have elements of darkness in them—it’s just that that darkness isn’t played straight the way it is in the majority of my writing. Yeah, it’s in everything. It emerges naturally. I love beautiful things—for me, in many ways, the written word is the ultimate form of beauty—but I also believe you can’t have beauty without something to contrast it. That discordant note. That, to quote Donna Tartt, “little speck of rot”. Except for me it’s a little bit more than a speck. CD: To me, your stories often feel physically heavy. Sometimes I get a weird image when I read your work of a stone sinking in water. You are very good at embodying emotion and describing it in a tactile way. Your stories feel like they live in the body: grief shows up as fatigue, sorrow has weight, dread feels like muscle tension. Is this a conscious part of your craft, this physical translation of emotional states? AD: I love the image of the stone! And that’s a huge compliment, that my writing could give you this mental image. I’ve always believed that the body is the seat of memory. There’s this wonderful Stephen King quote: “Art consists of the persistence of memory.” So the body and art are inextricably linked, being as they are both holders and representations of memory. And since the present runs continuously into the past, almost everything not held by the future is already a memory. I personally feel emotions very strongly, so no, it’s not really conscious that this comes across in my work. I mean, of course I try to choose the best descriptors for a feeling of dread, but the translation of emotional states to the physical—I believe it’s the most powerful way to get across emotion to a reader who might not have experienced the same thing that’s happening in the story. Let’s say there is a story about a grieving widow. Not everyone knows what it’s like to have lost a husband, or even to have lost a close family member, but everyone knows the feeling of grief. Describing it as a physical sensation is a way to bring the reader into their body (not their mind, where they’re thinking Oh but I was never a grieving widow) and force them to feel the emotions of the piece. CD: I feel like the three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows’ are all stuck in a depressive rut at the beginning of the book. The characters are isolated in the sense that they are always wearing some sort of mask around most people. They don’t feel a real human connection with others, and this only starts to change near the end of the book when the characters meet.For most of the book, each character seems trapped in their own depressive logic, their own sealed inner monologue. Was it challenging to bring them out of that headspace and allow for genuine human contact?AD: It was a bit difficult, but it was also really fun. I massively enjoyed describing each character from the viewpoint of the others—it allowed me to view them from the outside looking in, for once. I am not one of those writers (no shade to them though) who says that their characters are speaking to them in their head. But for the scene where they all meet—particularly the second one where they’re all together—I kind of just let the words flow. My characters took the reins more than ever before. I truly had no idea what Janet was going to say when [redacted]*, for example. Or when Gemma figured out that [redacted]*. It was truly magical seeing their personalities come alive on the page. *I am keeping everyone safe from spoilers.CD: I feel that climate change is mostly unstoppable. I have little to no hope that humans will solve this problem, and I believe that things are only going to continue to get worse from here on. Humans are survivors, but I think that the Earth in which humans will have to live, 200 or 300 years from now, will be so degraded that it won’t be all that different from hell. I don’t feel hope for the future, in the long run. The existential threat of climate change is a worry hanging over the heads of all three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows.’ How do you personally feel about climate change?AD: Sadly, I agree with you. I think we’ve all seen over the past few years that even if humans could solve this problem, we wouldn’t want to. And by “we” I mean the people who run the world, the CEOs of megacorporations, the billionaires who wreak the most environmental damage. It’s my opinion that they are almost uniformly psychopathic in their behavior and their lack of empathy. No normal person would want to do the things they’ve had to do in order to gain their position—and I believe that if a normal person did find themselves with that much power, they wouldn’t remain normal for very long. On the one hand, I truly enjoy my laptop, and my phone that allows me to contact my friends overseas. And parasite-free, running water. And medicine! But I also believe that our modern way of life is an aberration, a blip, almost a wrinkle in the way things are designed to be on earth. We are not entitled to live this way, it is not sustainable, and we are paying the price. People forget that for the overwhelming majority of human history, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. The Neolithic Revolution (when humans first began to farm) happened only ten thousand tears ago, which is around 3% of the time Homo sapiens have existed. And the Industrial Revolution, which gave us our industrial capitalism and modern infrastructure and nearly everything we feel entitled to as a part of “regular life,” happened so recently that only about 0.08% of human history has occurred after that. It’s mindblowing that we’ve caused so much damage to our planet in such a tiny fraction of time.And that 0.08% is what we think of as normal. Our own lives are so short in comparison that, looking back along the eight or so generations that have lived since the Industrial Revolution, it really does seem like it’s been forever. There’s a part in All Our Tomorrows where one of the main characters is thinking about the spiral drawing that’s mean to represent all the eras on earth — something like this, but colorful. Most of it is blue and green. Only the very newest end of the spiral is a different color. To quote my book, that’s “the Anthropocene, a slice so tiny you could easily miss it, a fingernail sliver of rust-covered gray. If you zoomed in enough you could see minuscule buildings, cars, an airplane, all hovering precariously just at the edge. To Anna it looked as though anyone standing on that edge was about to fall off into nothing, into the timeless black that surrounded the spiral.”I fear I’ve gone into a bit of a raving tangent, but I’ll wipe the froth off my mouth, do some deep breathing, and attempt to answer your question more succinctly: I don’t feel hope for the future in the long run, either. Climate change is multi-pronged, as it gives rise not only to fires and floods but also ancient pathogens thawing out of permafrost, mosquito and tick-borne diseases moving further and further across the globe, and so many other things we simply aren’t prepared for. CD: In a past interview, you mentioned that you were “gearing for a not-so happy ending” with ‘All Our Tomorrows’ but ultimately felt like the novel needed a more hopeful ending because you didn’t want the book to “leave readers feeling like the novel was a bunch of pointless doom—we get enough of that from social media and the news.”Are you concerned that readers will misread the darkness in your work as nihilism? How do you feel about nihilism? What do you hope that readers are left with after reading ‘All Our Tomorrows?’AD: I’m not really concerned that they’ll misread the darkness in my work as nihilism. If they do, I don’t mind. I would probably mind if I branded myself as some kind of “Hope Coach,” but thankfully that is not a direction I have gone in. One of the phrases you used earlier to describe the feelings my work gave you—“claustrophobic doom”—made me smile. I love claustrophobic doom! (Writing about it, not feeling it.) But I don’t think that all of life is claustrophobic doom. Existence is multifaceted, and I choose to bring attention to the darker parts of it. They’re a lot more fun to write about, for one thing. But I also see a lot of toxic positivity everywhere. You get demonetized on social media if your content is too depressing, which admittedly makes sense from a branding point of view. But at the same time, I don’t agree with phrases like: Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end. It has its uses during a panic attack, I suppose, but on the whole that phrase never made sense to me. Like, what if someone is dying of a horrible disease? What—are you saying that things will be okay in the end because of the sweet relief of death? Well, okay, I guess that’s one way to think about it, but I don’t think that’s what that particular phrase is going for…The most popular type of nihilism seems to be that life is meaningless and has no value, nothing you do matters, and there is no point to anything (and, I can’t help reading this into it—that you may as well just shuffle yourself off this mortal coil sooner rather than later). Honestly, I think those nihilists are overthinking it. I don’t like to burden my small monkey brain with the overall meaning of life. Like, yeah, duh. Nobody knows the meaning of life. Maybe there is none. Where I don’t agree with nihilism is that life has no value. I happen to like being alive, for the most part. There is so much beauty to be found in life. There’s beauty in pursuing creative activities, in spending time with loved ones, in listening to your favorite music, in eating good food. I don’t care if it’s meaningless—I still enjoy it. And hey, maybe it’s all meaningless in the end, since we don’t live forever, and you and everyone you know will eventually die…but honestly, I think immortality would be so much worse. It’s the ephemerality of life that makes it so precious. (And, going back to the psychopathic billionaires, this is something that the most powerful people on the planet seem to have forgotten. I truly believe they can’t enjoy small pleasures anymore. They want to rule the world and live forever because they can no longer appreciate things that would make the dopamine and serotonin receptors in a normal, healthy brain light up.) Towards the end of All Our Tomorrows, it was a bit of a challenge to keep the story realistic but also have it not be totally depressing. The ending of Janet’s last chapter, as well as the ending of Gemma’s last chapter (which is literally the last sentence of the book) is probably my most clear and straightforward answer to the question that snakes through the manuscript, which is essentially “What are we supposed to do about all this anxiety, all this uncertainty, all this pain?”So, to answer your question, I want readers to come away from All Our Tomorrows with a sense of hope, with the knowledge that they can do something—even if it’s just something for themselves, and not something that saves the world, because that’s impossible—but something. Whether that’s spending time with family, or doing something creative you enjoy, or being with the person you love. Something that has meaning, and purpose, and value. And that is what makes my book incompatible with nihilism.Order 'All Our Tomorrows' here.
Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection.Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t real, that it’s just a byproduct of our mental processes—as if the mind’s cocoon prevented us from remembering the future, from knowing the past was as much alive as the present moment.What do you think of when you consider time in relation to Whispering Gallery? From when are these pieces taken? What led you to include them in the collection? Will Cordiero: First off, speaking of time, thank you for taking the time to read my book and conduct this interview. It’s always a delight to hear questions and musings from someone who’s given my work such thoughtful consideration. It means a lot, especially given how many other things, I’m sure, compete for your attention on the daily. The manipulation of temporality is one of the storyteller’s oldest tricks: to reshuffle the chronological deck, to stretch out time like a taffy-pull, to quantum leap whole centuries with a paragraph break, or to freeze the scene and rove about with the camera’s eye. But time itself is also a central subject matter of many of the pieces in Whispering Gallery. There’s a kind of time that’s the objective rate of change and then there’s a subjective sense of the onrushing flow of events as they occur in our minds, a sense which is revealed by eddies of memory, or revels in glimmering intuitions of futurity. There’s a cosmological dimension to time, as well, a question of whether time exists independent of our perceptions of it. The paradox of time is one of Kant’s antinomies, not to mention the old (the timeless?) battle between eternity and the transitory things of this world. Then there’re specific cultural senses of time, too, such as the pastoral cycle of seasons, for example. All of which is to say that these pieces often juxtapose different understandings of the temporal order. The flash form affords me brief bursts and ruptures. I try sometimes to pull the rug out from under the reader by suddenly reframing the sense of this elusive dimension. I play with both narratological tricks (how temporality gets represented in a story) and with ontological questions (what’s the nature of temporality itself). We fall in love with the world then it’s gone in a twinkling. How can you capture that mysterious, that heartbreaking flux? Every time you remember something, you change the nature of that memory—you have no access to the past, only elusive rewritings of it. Is the future fixed and fatalistic or can it be changed with our free will? Time is at the heart of so many of our most tantalizing enigmas. I’ve been writing these pieces—and others like them—for over two decades. I assembled most of my favorite oldies together and added a sprinkling of newer work, too. There were many iterations of this book over the years. Even the draft the publisher initially accepted was markedly different than the final version. Along the way, I chopped, stirred, culled, seasoned, tossed in some cayenne, simmered, let it settle. I had overlapping principles of organization. Sometimes I like the contrast between two pieces, in mood or content or style; a short piece next to a longer one, a funny punchline against a somber tale. Other times I want pieces to speak across the book, letting a theme return in a surprising manner. Maybe a piece ironically turns another on its head. There’s an infinite branching network of ways these pieces relate to each other: I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed in imposing the order. I want to allow some breathing room for the reader to find their own connections and leaps. Or even flip around and reassemble the book to their liking, skipping over some, rereading others. Which, honestly, is what many of us do anyway when we return to a collection, isn’t it? RG: Have you ever had a nickname?
(Will Cordeiro / Will Cordeiro in an anime)
WC: Funny you should ask. I’ve had nothing but nicknames. My birth certificate nominated me “Billy Joe Bush.” However, my immediate family called me “BJ” when I was young. I grew up in downstate Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line. Not at the beach, either, which is the only area downstate anyone’s heard of. As a kid, I came up poor in the rural sticks—a land of swamps and chicken farms and trailer parks. It’s a warp-zone to the armpit of the Deep South. My mom had second thoughts. When she remarried, she had my name officially changed to “William Joseph Cordeiro.” Much fancier sounding. But I often went by “Will.” Later, in high school, that led my buddies on the track team to nickname me “Free Willy.” In college, I was dubbed “Fake” (long story). These days, I live in Mexico, so everyone who knows me here calls me “Memo,” which is the apodo for “Guillermo,” the Spanish equivalent of “William.” Constantly taking on different names probably gave me a more mutable sense of self, as if my many sobriquets were a form of cosplay, embodying different avatars and drag personas. “BJ Bush” and “Dr. Cordeiro” and “Fake” and “Memito” and the trunkful of other monikers I’ve gone by give me a malleable personality composed of aliases and fictional guises. To this day, I’m not keen to identify as any one thing: trying to locate a single locus of so-called “authenticity” seems like a mug’s game. But then, can’t most of us say, with Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? I’m not someone who’d cling to a stable narrative of self: the story of who I am changes with each retelling. Selfhood is not important. The elemental force of metamorphosis is what’s more vital. RG: Your style displays a relish for language, and an appreciation of word timbre and rhythm when it comes to construction. Do you rewrite a lot? Do you have an approach to drafting that repeats itself?WC: A few pieces—often the small ones—came close to their finished form in the first sitting. I tend to write slowly, weighing the words, waxing poetic, whittling things down even on my initial foray: I double back to adumbrate or embroider before I finish composing each sentence. Pieces emerge gradually, condensing into shape over many drafts. Yes, it is iterative: loops within loops until I’m totally loopy. On occasion, I’ll let a piece incubate in my head for some days: I work out the concept, dwell on a character, or figure out the narrative threads before hunkering down to scribble on the page. No matter, all my pieces go through countless revisions and tweaks. This collection is the fruit—the vinegar—of over two decades. I return to each piece, usually over the course of many years, fussing and fidgeting with syntax and diction, with rhythm and mouthfeel. With the grain of the voice. Even when writing stories, and not poetry, it’s very much like a musical composition where I listen for the overtones, the resonance and timbre as you deftly put it, as much as for the referential sense. Of course, with any piece I must also attend to the workaday plot, the tension, the turning points. I guard against becoming too precious, too self-indulgent, with the prose—the story’s pacing sets the momentum. After all, tempo is a crucial musical element, as well. These pieces may be miniatures, but they’re rarely minimalist in nature. I love textures and layers and lyrical excess. RG:Its antennae blinked like the cursor on a screen.Many of the pieces included in Whispering Gallery address the fundamental forces that constitute existence as we know it. Forces of nature and science that are at work while everyday life moves on. Do you view your work as having a philosophical component?WC: Sure, in the sense that many stories by, say, Calvino or Cortázar have a philosophical component. Professional academics don’t have a monopoly on philosophy. Analytic philosophy frequently has an off-putting, pedantic tone anyway. It often presumptuously arrogates the rules of the game to its own methods. Yet, for me, philosophy can also be the everyday process of reflecting, interpreting, questioning: of reconciling oneself to life. Besides, lockstep, knockdown arguments rarely compel me. Instead, I’m more intrigued by paradoxes and dilemmas. I like it when stories contain an enigma, or as Sebald says somewhere, a spectral trace of a ghost. Stories can act as thought experiments and intuition pumps. They help us deliberate ethical situations; they provoke us to imagine stranger, more far-ranging metaphysical possibilities; they sharpen our epistemic knives, showing us ways our equipment might be limited or faulty. My own thinking is so often unsettled. To dwell on any idea begins to disorient me. The hermeneutical circle’s not a smooth wheel—it’s wobbly and oblong, punctured by disruptions and bafflements and afflictions of doubt. My own elliptical insights can swing from sudden revelations to ignominious defeats. In many cases, it’s this inner adventure that I portray in my characters; that I want to recreate in my readers. I try to use tools like defamiliarization, humor, skepticism, and irony to move my readers, to incite new recognitions, to instigate a playful tension between differing values or perspectives. I don’t aim for any foregone conclusion. I hope my work acts as an invitation to contemplate nuances and ambiguities, at times holding contradictions in abeyance. Perhaps my work can cultivate a richer sense of “reality,” whatever that means. Or perhaps it only impels a reaching-forth amid vast ranges of uncertainty, a bewitchment of one’s curiosity. Stories can cast enduring spells. Don’t most of us want stories that can make the humdrum world thrum once more with the undercurrents of its secret magic? Plato and Aristotle both believed philosophy begins in wonder, which is the same place most of my stories start from, too. RG:Everyone had gone to sleep in the city. I wondered if the buildings might vanish—if they were only the collective apparition of the inhabitants. It was dark out my window. Only pinpoints of glister winkled in doubt: starburst, lamp-glow, hallucinations. The streets were empty. Wherever the people were, they must be dreaming of something else.“Lucid Moment” makes reference to hallucination and dream logic. What part do altered states play in Whispering Gallery?WC: I enjoy those moments when reading can induce a tripped-out and ecstatic wakefulness. Imagining a story is a bit like concocting an illusion: it’s knowingly dwelling within this hallucinatory space you’ve projected. Visionary flashes of perception don’t need to come from a mind on drugs or dreams or yogic navel-gazing or religious epiphany or tantric sex or Neuralink—though all those scenarios can be interesting. Merely thinking can be a kind of drug almost, generating a giddying habitation of umbras and insights; and thinking (one might think) is an activity that’s intrinsic to minds. To talk about “altered states,” you’d need a baseline of what a normal state of consciousness would be, right? To me, consciousness itself has a magical quality to it. If my work appears to explore altered states of consciousness, perhaps it’s a way to goad readers into recognizing the spooky inner workings of their own apprehensions; a method to defamiliarize and thus reenchant the world. If milk is the mildest of liquors, as Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus, maybemeditation—whether lovelorn or logical, lucid or ludicrous—is one of the strongest.RG: “A New Realism” raises some interesting questions on deception, authenticity, artistic practice and the right to privacy. What is your approach to the promotion of your work? How important is privacy to you?WC: I’m not temperamentally a self-promoter. No shyster barking and jiving, I. No desire to be an influencer, a marketeer, a celebrity shilling their own brand. Power, money, fame: none of ‘em’s my bag. Of course, I’ll exercise my power by voting; I want enough money to have the leisure time to read and write, to travel a bit, to afford healthcare; I’m not such a recluse holed up in my room that I won’t saunter out to give a talk once in a blue moon or respond to interview questions such as you’ve been so kind to ask. There’s no real danger of my becoming renowned or popular, in this lifetime anyway—it’s not like I need to disguise myself in sunglasses and a big floppy hat on the street or use assumed names at hotels to avoid the paparazzi. I don’t need to retreat from all media appearances to go plunk myself in a cave in New Hampshire. As if. But maybe I do live in a cave, sort of. And not just a Platonic one, like we all do. I mean—I’m not on any social media. Isn’t that pretty hermitic, hermetic even, in this age? I just find it a huge brain-rotting time-suck which is disastrous for one’s mental health as well as the health of the body politic. So, I’m also not famous to ten people, either, the way a lot of folks are these days. It's not that I’m private per se. But I tend to resist drawing connections between fiction and real life, as your question does here, for example. I doubt there’s some childhood trauma that’s fed my writing or some ghastly secret I’ve been hiding that impels me to tell stories. Whatever tales I spin out about myself probably obfuscate as much as they illuminate anyhow; I spin them out because it’s my nature to unspool these spider-spit writerly threads. One story hides behind another. Looking for the root of a text in an author’s supposed lived experience is an ubiquitous move in literary culture nowadays since audiences want to know about the author, hear anecdotes, feel connected to the source as if they could thereby come into contact with the work’s aura. Or maybe it’s just that authors are reduced to media “personalities” since often audiences haven’t read—don’t want to read the work. I’ve met a fair number of authors, and the majority are just regular Uncle Jim-bobs or Aunt Mays; some are a little dopey or true snoozefests. Others are snooty academics or anxious fusspots or doddering busybodies. They’re a scrapheap’s worth of skipjack jackanapes spooning boondoggerel. Myself perhaps included. (I’m ambivalent—as I am about most things). Authors come in all types. But a literary work distills an author’s ideas into their wittiest and most vivacious expression, if the author’s any good. Why should it surprise us, then, to feel disappointed when the incarnate human being can’t live up to those expectations? “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?” as Dickinson said. Who wants to end up “public—like a frog—”? I’d rather be the prince of my own solitary room, voyaging around my head. Sometimes I wonder if writing is a ceremony converting the stuff of our language—what could be more public? common as air—into the fabric of our interiority; and simultaneously airing our most inward-turning thoughts into chirps and croaks. RG:Looking back now, years later, the whole city seems an underworld, an air of cinders, foreshadowing its own downfall. A field of cenotaphs. Long rows of ruins frozen into schlag and marzipan. Pediments like dinosaurs. Everything half buried under the weight of what it once had been.Frequently Whispering Gallery contains a tension between the immediacy of your descriptions and a more contemplative framing. Are there pieces that stand out to you as being a memorable experience to write?WC: In what sense can you say that you will your thoughts? Thoughts, the better ones at any rate, often come unbidden. We do not think our thoughts; our thoughts think us. Writing usually occurs when I’m pinballed around by powers almost outside myself. The sounds entangle their own eerie melodies; ideas stray paths of errant logic; characters chatter in voices not my own. It’s not that I throw my voice—rather, I’m thrown by the voices. They ventriloquize me. Where these thoughts and voices come from remains something of a mystery. You harvest them from reading and experience, perhaps. They are what we vaguely term “imagination.” You can make yourself receptive to them, a quivering electrometer that picks up the subtle variations in magnetic charges that coruscate the atmosphere. But who has the muse on speed dial? No matter how much you plan, there’s always an element of spontaneity. The voices can’t be summoned at will. The best you can do is prepare and practice, listen and long for them to return. Afterward, the editorial and critical parts of your brain apply the scalpel to shape this material into a more handsomely polished, more sure-handed form. My descriptions often try to shed light on earthly flora and fauna, figuring the minutiae of landscapes and the immensity of dreamscapes, thereby gesturing toward how invariably blind we are to the larger cosmos around us. They juxtapose scales and temporalities, points of view and paradigms. Still, we don’t call a stone blind. As Heidegger says, blindness afflicts only those beings who are capable of seeing. To ask whether someone is blind foreshadows—shadows forth—the very possibility of their having the nature of a being with sight. I try to trace the contours of both our perceptions and our presumptions. I attempt to look closer at the things around us while reframing the background concepts that inform how we see those things. It’s this dual, this dialectical unfolding that unveils how the seemingly immediate experiences of our own body and environment are, nevertheless, already mediated by our mental and corporeal equipment. To see anew is to recognize that one has, all along, been blind to the world; and maybe thereby to recognize that this new sight could, upon another disclosure, reveal itself as a type of blindness, too. There may be no end to revelation.RG: For “Sadness” the world you create sees an air of melancholy descend. If eras are defined by a prevailing mood, what do you view as the tone of these times we are living through?WC: Chaos? Malignant asociality? A giddy, trollish nihilism? It’s hard to understand the era we’re living through. These, unfortunately, are interesting times. In my youth, reading history with the aid of hindsight, I’d often wonder how people could be taken in by the Know-Nothing Party or William Jennings Bryant’s “Cross of Gold Speech” or other such flights of demagoguery. Today, living through a tumultuous period of history, I’m equally baffled by how a good chunk of the populace can be hoodwinked by criminals and charlatans. Confidence men worry great pearls of falsehood upon tiny grains of truth. Then again, there’s plenty of born suckers. The broligarchs can manipulate people in nearly clandestine ways: think how innocuously an app might change its terms and conditions, for example, or the way algorithms spread misleading stories much faster than true ones. Lots of folks are upset, at what or whom they’re often not sure, and that very anger is then redirected to their disadvantage. The ethos of “move fast and break things” has become a goal unto itself, writ large. Democracy depends on an infrastructure of news sources, public forums, civic organizations, educational institutions. These are being atomized, privatized, or wiped out so that the robber barons can have unregulated control to exploit and extract wealth. Most people are too preoccupied with their everyday drudgery to pay attention, read, participate in their communities, or make art; this leads to a vicious cycle where the oligarchs can turn the screws on a disengaged and uninformed citizenry, beating you down and fleecing you even more. Everything’s a distraction from something worse on the horizon. Doomscrolling might be a good metaphor for how the system uses our own anxiety against us: we can’t help rubbernecking the wreckage that our tech addiction itself has caused. To bicker about the problem only fuels the flames—and flame wars—higher. We’re too burnt out to care that a handful of folks are burning it all down. Climate change isn’t happening fast enough for some folks, I guess. We’re accelerating toward a corpocratic state, a zombified corpse state, the necrotic triage of vulture capitalism: escalating scarcity for the many, overwhelming plenitude for a vanishingly few. But people just keep going about their business because business is what people do. RG: What was your conceptual framework for “The Lost Gospel of Caiaphas”?WC: I think the initial inspiration was reading excerpts from some of the Gnostic Gospels and chapters from Elaine Pagel’s book of that name. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were discovered in 1945 and only made readily available to the public in the 1980s. They were Coptic papyri discovered by an Egyptian farmer in a sealed jar with a likely provenance of the 4th century—and their impact was revolutionary, upending the scholarly understanding of the historical foundations of Christianity.Too, rewriting the gospel narrative is a veritable subgenre unto itself—novelistic examples include The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago); The Gospel According to the Son (Mailer); Figuras de la Pasión del Señor (Gabriel Miró); and King Jesus (Graves). Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist is one I recommend. Siddhartha by Hesse or Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra do something similar in other religious traditions. Apocrypha and heretical accounts have their appeal. They are the marginalized and forgotten stories that were refused a place in the church, that is, the dominant version of the church we know now—the one which survived from competing sects and schisms that cropped up as early as St. Paul (or one might claim, as early as the disciples themselves). At a time when revisionary histories (on the left) and “alternative facts” (on the right) are popular, when everyone questions the official version of a tale, when nobody is satisfied with a univocal canon, it makes sense that apocrypha would have its allure. Besides, the canonical gospels themselves are four wildly different stories that vary both in style and substance. There’s already a pluralism built-in to the structure of the gospels. Their gaps and contradictions gesture that no single version is definitive. Co-opting a gospel-like narrative gave me the freedom to appropriate a simple yet vatic tone to write parables, proverbs, and epigrams—to make mystical pronouncements: it’s a type of writing that, while I find it has a uniquely enthralling energy, can be very difficult to pull off in contemporary English without some such framing device. One can’t make oracular, rhapsodic pronouncements in propria persona. Yet, once that framework was established, I felt disinhibited and could make witty underhanded comments against authority, tell stories that took on different significations to different audiences, and challenge the reader’s habitual understanding of traditional values—all things that the gospel narratives (whether apocryphal or not) are often so good at, though we sometimes can’t appreciate their weirdness and originality. RG:There’s an erotic charge around these objects: they’re ghosts leftover from being handled. Things you would find in any mall, swap meet, flea market are transfigured at every turn. A remote control appears moon-beamed in from science fiction. A salad fork looks like a cannibal’s keepsake.The ordinary is given fresh perspective in “The Museum of Ordinary Objects”. As well as raising questions on the meaning attached to such objects, the story invites speculation on the nature of viewing in itself. How do you view this story? If you were curator of your own Museum of Ordinary Objects, what would you exhibit?WC: I went gallery-hopping during ART WKD GDL last Saturday. In one gallery, you couldn’t tell where the curated displays ended and the unfinished work and raw materials of the studio began. There was a Xeroxed paper affixed to the wall with blue painter’s tape next to the painting the image on the paper was of. Was this just the haphazard environment of a working artist’s studio or was it some kind of self-referential meta-conceptual hijinks? I liked not being able to tell. Across town, in a different gallery, I entered an empty room. My partner was looking at a prominent pile of debris exhibited at the center of the floor: multicolored paint flakes and assortments of concrete gobs were framed against the checkerboard tiles. This one was my favorite piece so far, I thought: the paint could be house paint from the wall; the dust could be the crumbling wall itself. It made me feel the transitory nature of the space—the visceral, immolating decadence of ruin porn. The whole site-specific exhibit up to this point had been about repurposing stretched canvas and frames and painterly materials in a sculptural, almost environmental way, that referenced the architecture of the gallery itself (it was a house designed by Luis Barragán). Barragán’s architecture transforms spaces into planes of color; the artist, by contrast, transformed planes of color into spaces. While we were rubbing our chins, shrewdly observing the piece, along comes the gallerist with a broom—sorry, she says, we’re still getting everything settled. In certain frames of mind, I inhabit a world where any object can become a Duchampian readymade. I’m reawakened to its aesthetic dimensions, its anthropological significance, the Barthesian mythologies it extrudes. I observe an item’s singular quiddity; its multivalent symbolism. Every point is the origin of the universe; every node stands at a crux reticulating it into the warp and weft of meaning. Perhaps I’m low-key infected by the disorienting palpitations in the presence of beauty, a condition known as Stendhal syndrome. Art has a way to induce a manic state in me at times. Or maybe it’s the mania of the gorging eye or florid mind that imbues an object, any object really, with the same arresting qualities we seek out when we view great works of art. It’s the opposite of museum fatigue. Looking can become a frenzy that feeds upon itself, rendering the dizzying optics of scopophilia. Any ol’ junk—gum-wrapper, paperclip, tissue box—begins to iffily shimmer and zing with ineffable brindles of import. It’s not the object that matters, it’s one’s susceptibility to cozy to it with a rigorous vulnerability. The process of being whelmed in the sheer presence of something, looking deeply at it, prompts a scatterbrained brainstorming, an ornery—an incorrigible—associational vigor where a thing becomes at once dis-cultured, relieved of its habitual connotations, and yet enwoven into countless symbolic networks. RG: “Masquerade Store” presents an ordinary town caught in the spell of a business that sells masks, identities. A deep sense of unease unfolds as the town’s nature is changed. How do you approach high concept stories? Where does the weird come into play in your fiction?WC: “Masquerade Store” was a later piece I added to the collection. I’m still uncertain if it really captures the full sense of unease I was going for. I’m glad to hear you think it works. During the writing process, there were a few adjustments that helped. I created two turning points in the story. What at first seems like a description from an impersonal third-person narrator about the facts of a garden-variety, deteriorating town (though it is “our town”) emerges as a fulsomely first-person voice about midway in the story, where you realize the narrator is implicated and complicit in the events being described. This shift of perspective, of narratorial vantage, relocates the stakes involved and may also undermine the seeming objectivity of the first part with hints of unreliability. What once appeared to be a sociological description of a town retrospectively turns into a fucked-up person’s defense tactic to distance himself from his problems by using a more clinical, arm’s-length tone. Another turning point occurs near the end, when the narrator suddenly gazes off into the distance, using a collective voice, “we.” The yearning both to watch banal superhero movies and to dress-up as some powerful if exoticized “other” is exposed, at the end, to be predicated upon inchoate heroic longings. A grandeur that’s glimpsed in sunlit oracles and sublime flames but cannot be realized, a longing that ultimately casts each person further adrift in their lonely quest to circumvent the self as much as to find it. Yet such drift, we might say, is what unites the citizens of the town as a civic body, too. Who one is must be projected and absorbed from those around one in a hall of mirrors; yet, doing so requires a motive power of self-transformation. Heck, rereading the story now, I realize that the third-person voice quite quickly begins ventriloquizing in the second person, using “you” in a way that is ambiguous between meaning an anonymous, impersonal “one,” calling out the real reader, or addressing a particular person offstage. This is even before the first-person voice fully emerges. These peculiar gear-shifts between points-of-view and subtle changes in tone help convey the breakdown of coherent identities the town is undergoing, whether these devices are explicitly noticed or not when you’re reading. Still, each story is different: a lot of my writing is a search not only for a compelling plotline, but for the adequate technical means to have a story express some conceptual dilemma, oftentimes one that’s a bit abstruse, so that it’s uncanny, disquieting, and affecting for the reader. RG: The collection was released by DUMBO Press on 31st October 2024—Halloween. For stories where the veil between worlds of strangeness is thin, this is a wildly appropriate date to present the book to the world. How have you found the experience of releasing the book? What is next for you?WC: Yes, Halloween felt like the perfect release date for this collection! These are eerie, metaphysical tales influenced by the likes of magical realism and Gothic and absurdism and offbeat speculative fiction. I’m happy to see Whispering Gallery launched into the world. To hold the tangible book validates the years of effort—the writing feels more real than when it consisted of dozens of little stories trapped on my computer or floating around online lit journals, many of which are now defunct. It’s gratifying when I gain readers. I’m very thankful DUMBO picked it up. At the end of the day, though, this book’s an odd duckling published by a small press. It won’t be everybody’s jam. That’s ok. My hope is that a handful of readers will really crush on it. Maybe a book goes in search of its true readers. Whatever others think, I write because I enjoy the process. The grind of sitting down to peck at my keyboard can feel ecstatic and ravishing. I’ll give two-three readings or talks, a couple interviews (like this one), maybe get a review or two if I’m lucky. That’s the nature of small press publishing. Small presses provide a space for such queer birds to take flight or just waddle around—for books to pursue their own ideals, and authors their own evolution, largely outside the pressures of the mainstream marketplace. I have several other projects on tap in different stages of completion. I’m currently sending out my second poetry manuscript while tidying up poems for another. I’ve been slowly accumulating essays for a nonfiction book, mostly dealing with art and travel, which has also taken decades to compose. And I just started a notebook to jot down plot points and outlines as I ideate my first novel. I write plays and operas on the side, too: I just wrapped up a new three-act opera that was produced last year, which could use a few rewrites maybe. But my most concerted task currently is completing a textbook, The NewFoundations of Creative Writing, which I’m writing with my long-time collaborator, Lawrence Lenhart. Our pitch just got a contract offer from Bloomsbury. We started this project from all the material we couldn’t fit in the first textbook we wrote together, Experimental Writing, which came out from Bloomsbury last year. Most introductory textbooks in the discipline feel twenty years out of date. It’s a very contentious time in the field—there’s a lot of debates and changes taking place in the discourse, both within academia and the industry; that will make this book quite a challenge. Or maybe that’s why we’re the only ones foolish enough to attempt such a preposterous errand?
Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of the Rat is subtle and riotous, “a fat California orange in the palm of your hand.” Hall invites us to examine how we are changed by our tragedies and our inquiries—every shard of human experience piled at the sides of our roads. It is an exploration of our private ruins and all that finds a home there. I sat down with Elizabeth in West Adams to discuss Season of the Rat, anal breathing, sex, shapeshifting, California, and what’s on deck for this literary powerhouse in the making.Aiden Brown: I was so excited when Allie [Rowbottom] asked me to read this book. Without knowing what to expect, or knowing you, it just blew me away. One of my favorite things about it is the ambiguity of its genre identity, so I have to start by asking how you describe Season of the Rat. Elizabeth Hall: I think I’m officially calling it autofiction. It’s definitely based on my actual life. I’m usually not very interested in writing just a straight memoir because I get bored easily. And so the research is a huge help to stay motivated, and also provide a necessary counterbalance of joy and exhilaration—so any memoirs or essays I’ve written in this vein dovetail heavily into research, for better or for worse. AB: That was one of my favorite things about the book—the research kind of weaves into and around the more emotional and personal narrative, which creates such a strong portrait of intellectualization while still resonating emotionally. Your protagonist’s—or your—exigence for the rat research is self-evident within the narrative, but what drew you to researching abandoned gay bars?EH: The bars were actually before the rats—I found this book about Orange County by an LA Times writer Gustavo Arrellano, and there was this anecdote in the book about them. My friend Caitlin and I started going on adventures to these places in Laguna. It was an avenue of research that served as kind of a reprieve from my other research about my mom, or the cult she was part of that was founded in Orange County. A lot of my work focuses on sex trauma. Some heavy things were coming up within my own family in that regard. So I think it’s natural that I gravitated toward locuses of queer joy, especially in what I tend to think of as such a stiff place. And that research, too, helped me navigate my own queer journey. It was easier for me to go to an abandoned place to discover my queerness in a way than to go to a gay bar with people in it. I took the introverted path.AB: That’s so interesting because in the book, there’s almost always someone with you in those scenes. Actually, that brings me to one of the things I loved the most about this book—I mean, of course, I don’t love that it happened—but the way your relationships, for better or for worse, kind of lurk beneath your research and weave in and around it. In particular, I found the connection between the trauma you endured and the research on rats, garbage, and ruin so striking. How did those connections develop for you? Was it something you planned going into the project or something that emerged over the course of writing it?EH: So, the origin of the book was the sex assault. It started, honestly, because of an argument with my wife. The scene was cut from the book, actually, this tiff about the tent. But it was the first camping tent I’d bought for myself, and I’d taken it on so many solo camping trips, including a journey from here to Portland for my first book tour. And when I was about to go camping by myself in Joshua Tree with it, my wife was like well, you’re not going to bring that tent. And I was like obviously I’m bringing the tent. I don’t have another tent. She and I had just moved in (this was during the pandemic)—my wife also works a corporate job, and so she was living at a very different income level than I was. So, I took the debate over the tent as almost a symbol of that disparity. Like, of course you can just buy a new tent while I have to be okay with sleeping in my rape tent. I also didn’t want to give [Mark] or the assault power over my beloved tent. Eventually, it became a joke between my wife and I—we had a riff on “rape tent” for a very long time. And so the first scene of the book was originally going to be about this rape tent. I had intended it to be an exploration of [Mark’s] and my relationship through the lens of class. Actually, the assault came to be more in the background compared with the original exigence of the project. I really wanted to emphasize how much resources play into why people stay in abusive dynamics. AB: Period. Absolutely. EH: This was around that time when it was really popular in certain lit circles to listen to edge lord-y podcasts like Red Scare. They had an episode—actually, just the other day—where the hosts speculated that people stay in these dynamics for psychosocial reasons—they were attempting to do a psychoanalytic read on various dynamics like narcissism, or codependency. So, there was also a part of me that wanted to write this in opposition, not to Red Scare specifically, but to that whole idea that people are addicted to their lover, or that emotional reasoning is even a primary motivator. I wanted to shift the conversation—people, I feel, are almost taking pains not to talk about the resource aspect. It’s expensive to live in Los Angeles, and a person shouldn’t have to give up their life in a place because someone chooses to do something to them. When the assault happened, we had already been broken up for a while, but we were still living together. My primary motivator for staying wasn’t that I was just having such a good time hanging out with this person, it was for want of choices which didn’t implode my life.The choice to stay was one I made to try and control the situation. I’d just gotten a nonprofit job, which I was able to turn into a full time position largely because of the stability I had at that time, and because of the stability I’ve had with my wife Heidi since. At the time I was writing this book, I was working at one of the most beautiful libraries in Los Angeles. And I’ve worked hard to get these two idyllic situations. Had I gone to a shelter or stayed on a friend’s couch, that destabilization would have been observable to an employer. And I’d never had a full time position. I wasn’t able to even get a tooth fixed. I’m a big proponent of Maslow’s Hierarchy—like, how are you supposed to concentrate when you’re worried about having your basic needs met? Without the stability I have now, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this book, at a minimum. AB: What is your relationship with [Mark] like now? How did it change or what changed about your perspective on it while you were writing Season of the Rat?EH: A part of me wanted him to bear witness to the pain he’d caused. Another part of me wanted to write about it quickly—I wrote it within months of leaving the situation—to preserve the sense of love I still had for him. Another myth that I’ve encountered is that you’re supposed to immediately hate someone after they’ve harmed you in that way. But we shared all kinds of deep intimacies with each other over the years. I understand why people do close their hearts, and my feelings toward [Mark] have hardened over time.I don’t think of [Mark] as a monster—I think doing that makes it harder to heal. While I understand why people would need to think of someone who did that to them that way, it created a dissonance for me between the reality of what happened and the ten years we spent together, the friendship we had. And even after it happened, we lived together; we were in a band together. Prior to his violations, I really did enjoy his company. After the assault, he was still my primary emotional support, which was that much more destabilizing. There’s a pattern in my life of being close to someone that then I had to extricate myself from—music I couldn’t listen to anymore. I always knew I was going to write about him, and I wanted to do it with a degree of diplomacy. I mean, I could write another book about sex assault two years later and write it totally differently. AB: You say this in the book—and really it was a gut punch for me as someone who’s had similar experiences—that he never denied the assault, it was just something that didn’t impact him on the day to day. EH: Yeah, he just went on living his life. The day after it happened, we dropped off the other person who was on the trip with us (who didn’t know what had happened) and I noticed that [Mark] was already on dating apps. He dropped me off in downtown LA to go on a date, and I spent the whole afternoon floating through the city. By the time I’d gotten in my Uber home to San Pedro, he was taking selfies in the desert with a new girl he was dating. I remember going home, crying and just thinking I can’t run away from this—I mean, literally—I didn’t have a car. And he got to just go on like everything was normal.AB: I was really struck by that portrayal of the banality of that kind of assault, and how human—or maybe diplomatic is the word—you were while still expressing that anger and that devastation that comes with sexual assault. I mean, we harden toward them over time, like you said, but making them monsters can also obfuscate a situation for us in so many ways. It is like floating, or like walking a tightrope. That brings me to this tension between fear, harm, and love. I felt that tension very strongly in Season of the Rat. What’s the relationship between those ideas for you personally?EH: I'm someone who grew up very much fearing showing emotion with the exception of, perhaps, within the church system. Definitely one of those people who went wild at a youth retreat—hands in the air, all that. I felt like it was like a safe form of love, I guess. I'm not religious now, but when I was younger, the idea of Jesus providing unconditional love was huge to me. Especially because that was not something I was getting necessarily in other aspects of my life. My mom is a wonderful person, but she has a lot of anxiety that tends to manifest as hypercriticality of herself and others. I think she moves through the world believing criticism is really helpful, and that it’s a loving thing to do. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home that created that lens of get it together, you know—“lock in.” That was translated to me and my sister through her, so I don’t think I was ever going to have that easygoing, free feeling love vibe. Part of [Mark] and my whole relationship was that we were both very much afraid of vulnerability and emotionality. The main thing we did together was smoke a lot of weed all the time and listen to music together—we really were not linked up in a soul-bonded, emotional way. In fact, I don't think we ever even said I love you until we’d been dating for four or five years—which is insane—and it only happened then because I was having an emotional affair with someone who was so free-flowing with love. That's why I was attracted to the affair, I'm sure. It woke me up to the range of love that I was missing out on. Even today, I'm married and I still get very embarrassed about showing affection. My wife worked on a really big live show, and I was making her a little card for when she came home, and then I was so emotional, and it low-key embarrassed me. I was like, I'm not going to put this out. And then I was like, wait, yeah, I am. This is so dumb! I am almost 40 and married. I don't still need to feel that way. So it still happens, that fear of being seen, to use a TikTok phrase…AB: The mortifying ordeal of being known.EH: Exactly. I mean, love is one of the most vulnerable things about us—the fear that it won’t be returned. I'm not like that now—compassion is free, love is free; it hurts me none to share these things with people. I think having access to love from Heidi—she's a very extroverted person, very giving, a very different person—and seeing her vulnerability with me and with her friends has been really helpful in navigating that vulnerability and fear, and letting love kind of effuse within our dynamic.AB: I haven’t had the pleasure of reading your first book, but I assume by the title I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS, that it explores similar ideas around vulnerability, love, and sex from a different standpoint, since you were in a very different place in your life when you wrote it compared to Season of the Rat. I’m curious how,if at all, your process differed between the two books?EH: Both were written during destabilizing times in my life. Going to CalArts for an MFA was a pretty good culture shock for me. I'm really more of an autodidact. I barely went to undergrad college, skipped a lot of classes; I thought it was like a hack to use a spreadsheet to track my class absences. It's not a hack, it was a waste, but I thought I was real slick. Going to CalArts was, in and of itself, a bit of a risky move for me. [Mark] had applied to grad school in California, and CalArts was the only place I got into near where he was accepted. At the same time, my mom was in the process of finding some things that had happened in the past with my sister which were pushing her to get divorced, and then she went bankrupt—her whole life kind of blew up. So, I don't think it was that surprising that I was drawn to an excessive research project. I think it was escapism. I'm a very escapist person, whether that be through marijuana or exercise. The idea for the clit book came from a poem that I had previously published, which was comprised of sex writing cutups, that people were responding really well to. I didn't feel like I had the writerly skillset for a novel, but what I could do—similar to the rats—was, and is, research. I can always do that because it makes me happy, and research is an escape in some ways. You get to live in another world. The clit research made me feel so alive. I’d wake up in the morning at like 5am (I’m an insomniac) and the sun would be shining—California sun, you know, every day.It was so beautiful, and I could travel to the sixth century or something and it felt crazy, and that made me really happy. I also was learning at the time how unhappy my sex life had been with [Mark]. Because I was raised really religious, he was the first person I’d ever had sex with. Even though I wasn’t religious anymore, there was still that internal backbeat of thinking it was cool that, although I was like 26 and in grad school, I had only had sex with one person. It was definitely misguided in retrospect. As I wrote, I was having a lot of compulsory sex with [Mark], because I just didn't know. I was having sex every day and giving blowjobs every day, and had no idea that wasn't a normal thing. And I never came, obviously, so—I'm only being this frank because it's a sex book—AB: No, I love it.EH: So, I was in the process of recognizing that cultural training, and of discovering that it wasn’t just me—it was actually everyone I talked to. I would talk to friends in the grad program and they all were like yeah we never come, even people who’d had upwards of twenty partners. I initially thought maybe it's just [Mark] and then it's like–, okay, no, this is systemic. Actually, until he read the book, I don’t think he had a desire to focus on my pleasure. I really think this comes from an internalized misogyny among many women and men, this idea that women's pleasure just doesn't matter. Like, no one comes from penetration. I mean, some people do.AB: Love that for them. Huge if true.EH: Right, it’s rare; the vast majority of people don't. And he was like Well, I've never had that problem with previous partners.AB: Okay, so those women were lying to you. EH: They're lying to you! Until he read the book, which probably hit home the ethical aspect of pleasuring a partner, did anything change in terms of us having better sex. But writing the book was eye opening for me and really changed a lot of how I thought about actual sex and agency around sex. It also exposed a lot of my own internalized misogyny, which I'm still working through.AB: Speaking of things you’re working through, I’m curious what your writing life has been like—how did you start?EH: I struggled with learning disabilities, and didn’t really read a book until high school, which was when I got into diaries—Sylvia Plath’s specifically. Then, I got into biographies of writers. Anaïs Nin was the first writer I was obsessed with. I was still very religious then, so I would go through and cross out the curse words and the sex words. I always knew I wanted access to a different life than the one I was living, and reading and writing were windows into other worlds. Reading shapeshifts time; you’re slowed down and almost living inside the book and alongside the book. I was interested in the lifestyle of a writer or what I thought that would be. A lot of my favorite writers were very craft-oriented like Nabokov, Miller. But Nin especially—she was self-taught and kind of a bad writer when she started, so revision was big for her. I knew with my academic sensibilities that it would be huge for me too, and that’s really informed the kind of writer I’ve become.AB: I really see the confessional style in this work. That’s so interesting you say that because my primary impression of this book (once I could catch my breath) was how well-crafted it was, both structurally and on the sentence level. Season of the Rat comes out in May—what else is on the horizon for you?EH: I’m not working on a big project right now, but I am working on some smaller essays. I write reviews, for Full Stop and other places. I really like doing critical work. I think I was scared to do any kind of review work because I didn't feel like I had the academic training to understand books systematically, but I found out I really love doing it and my editor at Full Stop, Fiona, is such an amazing reader and editor that I just want to keep working with her. I’m kind of loosely working a novel idea—the problem with novels is that I lose interest really quickly—but, it's about a health clinic that does anal breathing—AB: Oh, hell yeah.EH: —which doesn't exist, but it's inspired by trends in colonics. I've always written a lot about wellness and been interested in it, not as a practitioner necessarily, but as a cultural phenomenon. AB: I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see someone trying to harness anal breathing in a few years. EH: Oh, anal breathing is the final frontier. I feel like whenever my larger projects don't work out, they usually become a smaller piece. I have an essay coming out in Hobart that kind of dovetailswith Season of the Rat’s storyline. I feel like there is an idea for something about my mom that’s percolating. I tend to be inspired by things in a moment and then go hog wild over them. If I were a really disciplined person, my life would probably look different, as would my writing, but I let my ADHD take the reins creatively. I'm definitely here for the girls and for the messiness.AB: There’s a lot of really beautiful vulnerability in that too. Girls forever. I can’t wait to see what you do next.Season of the Rat is forthcoming this June from Cash 4 Gold Books.
Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book.Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an extended break from text of all types. They say the only way to get out of a black hole is to have never gone into it. While I don’t recommend going any further into this one, it’s already too late for you. -Roy Christopher, 2024 What’s the deal? When and how was this written and translated? Where does Roy Christopher fit into all this? Chase Griffin: Zoidoid was written in an alternate 1980’s by an alternate-me. And Roy is an alternate-Roy. And Roy has half-translated (half-translated because he suffered some Lovecraftian-madness while translating and he couldn't finish) Zoidoid from a fake future language (alternate-me is also a philologist) into English. Thanks for writing that intro, alternate-Roy!RG: How long did it take to write Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Did time pass fast or slow or in-between?CG: It took a year to write Zoidoid in my head. I was working as an overnight stocking clerk at the time. And it took a couple nights to let the whole thing pour out of my head onto the page. The year was long because overnight jobs are fucking awful. The two days passed slowly, but that was a pleasant slowness. I think one of the greatest feelings in the world is being in the midst of that fabulous kind of writer's schizophrenia when time stands still and the alien worm voice guides the pen.RG: It’s been a while since I've written in commonplace. I shouldn't be writing so sporadically in here... the way I’ve been writing in here for the past twenty or so units. I am realizing now that I should be much more diligent. What are your aims regarding language and style for the book? Any intentions regarding world building or backstory?CG: Context: Peter has this notebook filled with his archeologist, archivist parents' writings on the past (our present) and the language of the past and how the language might be able to unlock the secrets of the mind control device permeating all. Further context: So the commonplace book referenced is both Peter's diary (the back half of the fictional notebook which makes up the whole of Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace) and an archeologist book (the front half of the fictional notebook which we do not get to read).I went with this constrained epistolary style because that style best suits a story about translation and a world that makes unreliable narrators of its population.RG: Believe me, I wish I could turn off fresh emphasis. I don't want this trouble. I wish to be a googly-eyed wacko normie schmuck just like everyone else. Who needs this kind of stress?What would you like to emphasise?CG: I don’t know. Having a faulty, sparky monkey brain is great. There’s nothing wrong with the mass madness that is humanity. Because none of it matters. I love my madness. It’s my superpower. And only the outwardly mad ones are the sane ones. We’re all flawed and terrible because we’re gross animals. But who cares. Let’s all forgive each other for being born dumb animals. The sooner we get over this mass psychological determinism we are all bound to, then the sooner the big, dumb Doubt can begin, and then we can all accept it, and then we can go ahead and finally begin gently, cautiously being big, dumb monkeys attempting to not be big, dumb monkeys (which I think involves a lot of mass inaction and quiet and staving off entropy and the elders starving for the young (my modest proposal)). Maybe it is written that we will stop doing things for long periods of time. Maybe it is written that we will finally give up and realize we’re not good or better because we’ve done nothing bad. We’re just lucky. The circumstances we were born into gave us ourselves. We did nothing to earn a self. Not one of us has free will. So these words don’t matter. Nothing matters.God, I’m such a drama queen.Ask me tomorrow. I’ll emphasize a belief in something tomorrow.RG: Why am I still eating this dip?What is the best dip? What is your favourite dip? (Not necessarily connected).CG: Guacamole. Guacamole.RG: Have you ever smirked momentously?CG: Sure. After a good fart. RG: I believe I'm having a strange reaction to death. Makes sense. I often have strange reactions to many things.Have you ever had a strange reaction? Do you aim to establish a particular type of reaction in those who read your work?CG: Sure, I have strange reactions all the time. Life is weird and I have a faulty, sparky monkey brain. And no, not really. I'm not looking to establish a particular reaction in readers. I'm looking for readers who are down to have fun with the text.RG: I think I will crack open my briefing case. Today's setting will be archoniff sider and maybe it will help with my damn sass. What is the importance of sass to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Where does sass begin and end? How much is too much? Does sass have an objective measure?CG: It might not be sass. Sass might be a random word that Roy chose when he was translating. And I don't know about the beginning and ending of sass. Maybe there is no beginning or ending. Yes, I feel like sass has an objective measure and its measuring instrument is an oversized spanner covered in purposeless springs and gears. RG: Please introduce Bippy.CG: Bippy is Peter's dead mom’s cat. This prissy furball is the hero of the book and the best character I have ever written.RG: I’ve written too much and I am going to become an unshakable thing. How horrid!Have you encountered any horrid unshakeable things, either in the writing of the book or generally?CG: Surely. All the time. I encounter horrid unshakable things all the time. I live in a densely populated village. How could I not encounter horrid unshakable things? Don’t read the local paper, by the way. But what am I to do? Nothing really. I see it all as character building. I have to be like the Buddha Or maybe not. People suffer so much more than me, so why shouldn’t I suffer some too? I just got lucky because I wasn't born into terrible circumstances. No one earned anything. How horrid! RG: The book features song lyrics. Are there melodies behind these lyrics or do they exist solely on the page?CG: I have melodies for them, but the reader can make up whatever melody they want.RG: What significance does music have to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Do any bands or albums share common elements?CG: Music plays a big role in prosody, and prosody is very important to me.Music is always on my mindMusic prompted the writing of Zoidoid. One night at work, while I was listening to “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, I came up with the basic outline for Zoidoid.Also, Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace and its fraternal twin, Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes (they will be published together as The Ampersand Collection on Corona Samizdat), are like the twin Guided By Voices albums Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The common elements are the signal issues and equipment blockage. The books and the albums have these fun messages to send you but the low studio quality and signal issues (mostly due on both parts to limited budget) only allow fuzzy snippets of the messages to get through. And, of course, this fuzzy snippet-ness (this constraint technique) is all a part of the charm.RG: I am the only untranslatable person in the world. There's no one here who can decipher the whispered gibberish.Does your writing demand comprehension? What is lost or found in translation?CG: My writing doesn't demand comprehension. All that matters is the emotion and the emphasis, the incomprehensible human-ness (the faulty, sparky monkey-ness), poking through the rigmarole-membrane of the literal and figurative institutions. My works are more like fantasy and fairy tales (which don't require explanations for their motions) than science fiction (which is like a fairy tale giving excuses for its behavior).RG: How do you define New and Old?CG: Pre-old is our time. Old is the glorious golden civilization that arose from the ashes of our time. New is the oppressive society that followed the downfall of Old.RG: Does Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace have anything to say when it comes to politics and current affairs?CG: Not sure. I don't think there's much to say. We're all actor-bodies of the leviathan-theatre and all political conversation is a big script. It's all catechisms. Even what I just wrote. And also with you! Gesundheit!But maybe the book is asking about obscurantisms and mesmerisms. Are we searching too hard or too little for obscurantisms and mesmerisms? Are we too paranoid or not paranoid enough? Should we be putting our energy elsewhere? Is this, the searching and obsessing over possible hidden things, a design—like a figurative Air Loom? RG: How do you approach the use of signs and symbolism in your work?CG: Character and story always come first. The conceptual materials are handed to me by the characters and the story. Then comes the welding torch.Going back to music, this is how a lot of the great concept albums were made. Fellowshipping equals motif discovery.RG: Onomatopoeia—what are its limits?CG: What are the patience-limits of your ideal reader?RG: How would you advise someone approach reading this book? Any particular demeanour or method of engagement that would enhance the experience?CG: My books like to be read aloud (although many readers have told me they prefer to read them silently)—in the same way Shakespeare is best ingested when read aloud aloud. Not saying I’m Shakespeare by the way. I need to add way more dick and fart jokes to my work if I want to be Shakespeare. With something like Hamlet, even if you don't understand the language and the cultural references, if you read it aloud you understand the emotions and the emphasis. And maybe that kind of understanding is more important than direct understanding, which is an understanding that always ends up getting folded into the flux.Also, use whatever pronunciation you want for my made-up words. And then stick to whatever pronunciation you choose.RG: I looked back to Shea to make sure he wasn't examining my facial expressions too closely.What facial expression best expresses what Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace is trying to express?CG: How about that fun face Johnny Cash is making in that famous picture of him flipping the bird?RG: Do you hate computers?CG: Meh. I'm pretty indifferent. What even is a computer? Are they terrible for the earth, like air conditioners and cars?RG: Believe me. I didn't want to trust him. I didn't want to set aside my urge to stomp his brains in. I didn't want to not hate him, the fucking mentor fuck. But I submitted, and I set it all aside.Have you ever trusted someone to be your mentor? If so, what influence have they had upon Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: No. No mentors.There have been Lots of cool old guys and gals in my life though and they’ve given me really good advice. Please excuse this aside. The most trustworthy old people I ever met was this hippie-pirate couple who owned this fantastic used bookstore and junkshop called The Memex. I spent most of my youth sitting in the back of their store reading old copies of Mondo2000, the Illuminatus Trilogy, Rocco Atleby novels, Ursula Le Guin, and the Whole Earth Catelog.RG: Do you ever get the feeling of brain growth caused by reading? In a physical, oh jeez, something changed and I’m not sure in what way?CG: Yeah, definitely. I feel squirming sometimes. And I hear a little voice. The voice says things like, “It's just you and me, buddy,” and, “More guacamole, please.”RG: What portmanteaus, neologisms and/or spoonerisms do you like? Are there literary devices you would NEVER use, because they are lame? Conversely, are there literary devices you consider underused, so would like to advocate for?CG: I like whatever looks good on the page. And, I don't like to knock stuff. Because I wouldn't want to indirectly knock a fellow writer’s style. Everybody is allowed to do their thang. And, I don't know what's overused or underused. I use devices when the need arises.RG: Is there a chance that Bippy could have her own spinoff universe?CG: Yes, absolutely. Bippy deserves ten books.RG: Which renowned philosophers would read and appreciate Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: He’s a TV character, but I feel like Bernard Black might like my book. I had his voice in my head, impatiently making up words and saying sassy lil deconstructions, when I was writing this one.Although, Bernard would probably open my book, drop a piece of jammy toast in it, make a face at his mess, and then toss the book-jam-toast monstrosity at an annoying customer.RG: How is information transferred via Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: Information is transferred through the air via the Air Loom.Spoiler alert: The Air Loom was built during the golden civilization when we finally figured out the horrible truth. We built the Air Loom in order to hide the Lovecraftian revelation from ourselves.RG: Have you ever kept a journal, diary, or log?CG: Yeah, I keep a journal. I mostly write about the cute things my kids do. I keep a commonplace book too. That’s where I do all of my story and character mining.RG: What is your dream for the book?CG: My dream is for it to get folded into the book cocooning all of my current books, SCHLEMIEL GAUCHO, which is about this one-man Brothers Grimm who is collecting postmodern fairy tales (my books) before they are swallowed up by the flux and incorporated in the fold.RG: Where is Peter Zoidoid and where is Chase Griffin?CG: Peter Zoidoid is in the book writing with the slime-pen filled and Chase Griffin is in Tampa writing this answer.
Kyle Seibel is not a veteran writer or a magical realism writer, but he is a veteran and his writing has magical and realistic attributes. He is still breaking into the literary world even though he seems to have a hang of it. He’s witty on a website we used to call Twitter, and can write a hell of a short story. Rarely does he add quotes when his characters are speaking and he doesn’t capitalize his story titles. Seibel is based in Santa Monica and lives with his wife and dog named Snacks—who also has an established internet presence now. In this interview, Seibel and I chat over the phone, discussing what it means to be a “break out writer,” the literary industry, crafting a story cocktail of real-life anecdotes and surrealism, and his short story collection Hey, You Assholes(Clash Books, 2025).Naya Clark: The nuance in the situations and the characters you write sometimes make your short stories feel surreal. Do you consider any of your work magical realism, or is that just happenstance?Kyle Seibel: No, I don't know if it's intentional, and I don't know if I could say it's magical realism. I think that comes with its own audience, parameters, and guidelines. I read that kind of stuff, so I imagine that it's had some impact on my work. I think there’s that feeling of uncanniness to something that's normal. I really love art that does that. It's the normal stuff, and that’s subverted by something absurd. Those contrasts and that tension make really interesting stuff happen in art. And that's the kind of stuff that I'm drawn to. David Lynch is the really big kind of tentpole in this kind of stuff. But then also, I think of Denis Johnson. There's a book called Jesus’ Son. One of my favorite stories in this book [called “Work”]—these guys are ripping copper wire out of a house that's been destroyed by a flood, and sell it for money to do drugs. And while they're getting all the wire out of the house, they see a naked woman in the air, and she's parasailing, being pulled by a boat down the river, and it's this guy's ex-wife. It's never explained, but I love that. There's this crack in reality, where something extraordinary comes through, and it throws all of what preceded it into a new context. I think that's a trick that I try to bring to my writing.NC: I feel it’s the same with life. Sometimes there is no understanding of reality, or justification for why something happened, or why you, in particular, saw a part of someone or a situation. I'm particularly thinking of “Be Gentle”.KS: That one, especially, is such a special story. It's one of these stories where I was kind of writing it and putting it together and had an idea of how I wanted to have the basic idea that a veteran gets a job at a computer lab and befriends a weirdo student. I started to really think about the idea of the weird kid in class. So, I would ask all my friends about their stories about their weird kid from class. And everybody has this story of that kid from class. I started to put them all together. This character of E.J. started to take shape, and he just became a very real person to me. So I developed the story over a couple weeks, and edited over a month or two, and I got very attached to it. At the end of the story, I think E.J.’s fate is pretty tragic, and I wrestled with it, because I think what I really wanted to do was to give a really happy ending to this kid, and I knew that wouldn't be honest to the story—wouldn't be honest to what this character has seen in my mind. You get the fast forward of what happens to E.J., but what I wanted to leave the reader with is the feeling of what anyone is capable of doing—to be gentle enough to hold a bee.NC: It’s one of those things that has no explanation. I feel it’s more realistic that this character didn't have a happy ending. You said E.J. was a culmination of people's stories of this kind of kid in school. Is that the same for most of your characters?KS: Several real anecdotes braided together to form some of the characters in the stories. There's a story [called “I Suppose You’ll Want To Know About My Life Now”] that is about a guy who, on the day his grandma dies, goes for a run along the beach and almost gets hit by a car, gets a boner, and then gets stopped by the police...so that story is several stories kind of all rolled into one. I think what it ultimately becomes is a love letter to this guy's wife, and I think I use part of it in my vows. So part of my vows are enshrined in that story. There's some language that's pulled from that. And then my last grandma died. I was on a bike ride in Santa Barbara. I don't run, so the running part was fiction, but I almost got hit on my bike by this woman in a car. This was years before I even wrote the story. It was kind of funny that it was not written in the moment it happened—it was only in reflection, years after. The first line of the story came to me and the rest wrote itself. I mean, the first line of the story is the title of it. Then I would realize that I was writing about my grandma. Then I realized I was writing to this woman that I dated in the Navy who had died. And then I realized that was all to my wife, Ali. So it was just a bunch of different things. That was how I drafted it. Then as I edited it down and made it more digestible, it became what it is now, which is a little bit tighter of a narrative. But yeah, that's how it starts: taking from anecdotes or these shreds of memory or something that sticks in my mind, or I've written down for whatever reason, and then just kind of slamming them together on the page and seeing if anything jumps out. I think that's...a chaotic approach. Maybe other people will have something more intentional, but that's how I've been doing it.NC: Something I appreciate about your writing is that it’s complex, but not flowery. I feel everyone can read your stories. How have you developed your distinct voice, and how do you edit to ensure it comes across how you intend it to?KS: I think a lot of the stories in this collection are representative of this style. Stories that feel like they're being told to someone. I feel that makes it feel so intimate. So an occasional second person is addressing the reader. I think that it can be effective. And feeling like a story is being told to you personally is a big part of the guiding style of the voice. There’s a lot of first-person stories in this collection. They are not all me, thinly veiled, at all. I try to let the characters speak in their voice in the stories. In doing so, you're understanding a character, but also why they're telling their story. It gives a sense of urgency, and I think that makes them feel readable. I think sometimes you can be reading a story for five or six pages and think this is beautiful, technically proficient, but why is this story being told to me? What's so important about this story? That's something I really try to center on. Is there a reason this person is telling you this story? It’s because they can't help themselves but tell it. This is this person's one story to tell, they're telling it to you right now. Hopefully, that's the kind of energy some of these stories bring.NC: I do think that is the energy they bring. I don't know what's been up with people hating first-person stories lately.KS: I thought people were mad at third-person stories.NC: Whichever number story perspective they hate this week, I don't know. But I feel how you do it is very effective. I think it makes it more intimate. Like a story that you hear when you're grabbing a drink and you meet a friend of a friend, and they start telling you a story. I will admit that your book was my plane read. I've been traveling a lot lately. So it's what I read when I'm on a plane to stay up. Your stories feel like meeting someone while traveling and they start telling you a story. Another thing that makes it feel that way is the rhythm of how you write your stories. The character always has a goal, they're on their way to do something, then there's these characters that are just so fucking stupid. I could imagine these being my friends because of their decisions and personalities.KS: “Newlyweds” is definitely a story. Those guys are boneheads. They just can't help themselves.NC: That’s one of those rules in writing: make your characters do something that when you're reading it, you go “God, no, why are you doing this?” Again, a lot of the rhythm is because there is a goal. How do you maintain rhythm when you're writing a short story?KS: I hate to shout out my experience as a copywriter at an ad agency, but I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to give it up to the absolute boot camp of writing that being a junior copywriter is. You have so little time. Not just in an ad, but of your creative director's time and of the client's time and attention. There's something about being a copywriter that you innately understand how media — regardless of whether it's art or just dog shit — is a competition. It is a competition for your attention. Knowing that as a copywriter, and being able to bring that sense of attention and competition is just something that is very useful. You understand about attention span. You're just not gonna keep people around forever if you don't hook them immediately. So that's always on my mind when I'm revising things and tightening things and going back and rewriting. I ask how big is the hook of this story? What is the sentence that someone will read and have to read the second one? Those are the stakes really, especially when a lot of this book was previously published online. The rule of digital media is they must be hooked immediately. Obviously, it's different for literature, and I think that the immediacy applies. I think that ended up giving my voice a real distinctive quality, especially in these couple stories.NC: Yeah, I will agree. That feeling of I need to get to the point quickly, or something else needs to loop around to almost give the reader whiplash from what's going on in the story...I do feel it is great training. I'm not saying that most writers should be copywriters at all, but it is an exercise in brevity. My background in journalism is another thing. So much of my writing is about getting to the point. How do you get this information across quickly? But bringing in that creative, surreal element that you bring feels like breaking the rules.KS: I will read some stories—of the kind you would read in The New Yorker or a big publication like The Paris Review—where the stories are almost mysteries to be solved. In some ways they're to be figured out, and their value is to be assessed by the complexity of the process in which you have to figure them out. I think there are exceptions to this rule. I'm generalizing, but when we were submitting Skylarking [novel] there was just no interest. We kind of had to let Skylarking go. I don't know what's happening with it now. So that was my big bummer this summer. I was waking up in the morning thinking “Do I want to do this anymore?” I feel all the stuff with the collection has been going really well, and all the stuff with the novel is just tedious, and I feel frustrated. I think there's just really strong headwinds in publishing right now in general. Publishers are tightening budgets and doing layoffs and stuff like that. So the tendency is towards safe bets. It’s not really a climate where people are taking huge swings on new voices.NC: Do you consider yourself a new voice? When do you think being a new voice and being an up-and-coming writer, or being someone deep in the literary world, starts?KS: Well, I think that you can have an infinite amount of debuts. I think everyone's a new voice until they've really broken out. That term, “breaking out”—I've heard a couple of writers recently use it without any hint of irony, and it’s just strange to me. I don't know if it exists anymore. I mean, I think it's rare that people talk about breaking out. It feels to me like a term of antiquity. It was just funny how we people can have three or four debuts—if the last one didn't reach that threshold of audience, or whatever. “Oh, it was just a chapbook. It was just a mixtape” kind of attitude. Does that make any sense?NC: It’s when you can start breaking rules in what you do. Although you consider yourself a writer, that's just breaking in. I do feel you break a lot of rules in your writing style and your grammar. I feel you've maybe gotten to a point where you can say “Fuck grammar.” For instance, your lack of quotations when characters are talking—what is the choice behind that?KS: I'm trying stuff in the collection. A lot of them are new, and then a lot of them are from when I first started writing fiction. I’ve had a change of heart about quotation marks. There is something about when I remove quotation marks from a particular story, I always tend to think that means the entire story is in quotation marks. They could almost be monologues. Maybe that’s how I've intended them to sound; as if they're all contained within one quotation mark. I think I was trying different things—to use voice, and use a point of view and perspective in a narrative way to frame it, as a deeper dimension of the story. Here it exists outside the text, or in the blank that you fill in. I don't know how effective it is or how much it’s working, but that's how I came at some of those stories.NC: I think it works really well. I feel this is a major goal for a lot of writers. If somebody were to show me your writing without your name or the title, after reading a body of your work, I can tell that it's you, because it creates a distinct writing voice. It kind of zooms out and becomes its own monologue. When you write a short story in particular, what is your goal?KS: I think that changes when I'm in different seasons of writing. Sometimes I will sit down to write a story that evokes a special or particular feeling, or a unique flavor of a broad feeling, whether that's loss or anxiety, or joy or horror. There are special kinds of nuanced feelings being explored. Something that feels rather broad, but bringing it down to its sinew, examining it and exploring it at that magnification. It makes it seem much more specific—much more personal and intimate. That's sometimes how I approach stories, and I think that's maybe a first draft kind of thing. Then the narrative takes over, and there's other craft things to consider the different components. That’s usually when I sit down to write a short piece, especially a flash piece. A piece under 1,000 words, I'll be out to explore the nuance of a particular feeling as a jumping-off point, using a personal anecdote as a way to explore it. And I think that's really as simple as those two things coming together, and then it becomes something else that evolves into other things. That's my goal...to bring those two things together.NC: How do you find a humorous voice and inject that in your writing?KS: It's tough and humor is hard. I'm not saying that I figured it out. It's so individual. What you might find funny, someone else might not find funny. It's so weird, having done a couple of readings this year and seeing what I think are funny jokes that just go nowhere. Then what I think are pretty, plaintive lines of narrative get big laughs. It is so strange getting that kind of immediate feedback on different parts of the language of a piece. The collection as a theme, it's kind of—that these are all assholes, right? On any day, everyone, anyone could be an asshole. And they could have a story too. There's something about the charming asshole that is a very, very funny and bewitching character. And I think it holds multitudes. There's an element of selfishness and cruelty and casual violence that some of these guys [in the collection] seem pretty accessible to. But then there's also a little humility and tenderness as well. And in the distance between those two there's humor. There's comedy. So I'm glad that people think it's funny and I'm okay if people don't think it's funny at all. I'm okay with both reactions.NC: Some of it is the situation that your characters find themselves in are realistic, yet they're absurd. Veterans or Navy guys. How much do you pull from your own experiences?KS: It's because those are the characters and settings that I'm familiar with. I think it just feels authentic. Some of these stories are stories that have been told to me third-hand, or things that have survived as memories that are probably not true, in the way that I remember them. Sometimes that can have its own kind of internal magic. The veteran stuff is interesting, because I definitely write about military veterans, but I don't think of myself as a veteran writer. I just don't think that I fall into that category neatly. I don't know if I have anything interesting or particularly meaningful to say on the subject of service. I think it’s almost besides the point that some of those guys are in the military. It just happens to be where their story is taking place.NC: That's your experience, so that's where you're coming from. Do you think it's important for writers to write at least some of what they know? Does that help your writing?KS: I think so...It lends to the authenticity of the story's construction. It gives credence to the more incredulous elements of the plot. So I think that in that way, it can be effective. I think it's important to pull from your own experience, but more than that, it's important to follow the story and have the story be at the center. To lose track of the story, or distract from the story, or to make a choice that deviates from where the story should go because it happened in real life, or because it was part of your real experience, doesn't impress me. That doesn't convince me of it. I think that there should be a point where the story takes over, and all the details and craft, and all the tools and elements and language, roll up to in service of the story that you're telling, and that should be preeminent. And if it happens, the story becomes centered around the factual narrative that you're pulling from. It's a simple question that I'm answering currently in my life.NC: So are there elements that you feel aren't your experience that you add that aren't from your life. How do you write something that you haven't experienced? For example, the “Fish Man” story.KS: This was a story that was told to me in the Navy over a cigarette. One guy grew up on a farm, and was telling us about how there was some sinkhole in this lake, and they couldn't figure out why they had to take all the fish out. What happened in the story is kind of what happens in real life. They did their best to save all the fish, and in the end, they went back the next day, and all the fish had jumped out and died, and they didn't know why. It was this big, crazy mystery. But then I was starting to think about it. I don't know how I came on this idea of a guy getting drunk and finding these fish in a municipal area. It was such a delicious premise for me. It unfolded as fable to me, with the boys finding him and helping, and it being this crusade. Then the idea that it was supposed to be this moment where everything changed and got better. Instead, it was the last breath of hope on a downward spiral. Very little in that story happened to me, except for the feelings of imminent failure. I think everyone feels, or has had the feeling of, nothing going right. Being one of those boys feels so real to me. Having written that story, I don't think it happened to me, but where I feel I show up in that story is not in the main character. It’s in one of the boys that comes across him. So I think that there are different perspectives in the story that I associate myself with, but it's not always the first-person perspective in the story.NC: I feel a lot of the stories, they're all trying—on a mission, a side quest—to do something that's right. As a writer, it's exciting because you don't have to be the main character or the narrator in the situation. You can even appear or identify with a side character in a story. It makes it feel like a lot less pressure to tell a story from another perspective.KS: A lot of times the narrator is the least interesting person in some of these stories. I'm thinking specifically of “cullen”. The main character in that story is having a nervous breakdown and a complete manic event. If you really wanted to make the wildest story Cullen would be the first person, and you would see it from his perspective. You would get a front-row view of his paranoia. But you don't get that. You get this. You get states removed. You get countries removed. This friend that he calls and who's going through his own kind of crisis and you see the real main human crisis is being viewed through a telescope in the story,NC: Right. These things are happening at the same time, but also in retrospect. Then there’s this idea of making it out alive. Something I really respect about your writing is that the endings aren’t always in a neat bow. How do you approach writing the ending of a short story?KS: The endings are truly mysteries. One of my friends, Mike Nagel, has always said“A good short story ends on a sharp intake of breath.” You're just coming to. You're being removed from the moment where the next thing happens. Which I think is interesting. I don't think this is the case for everything, but it can lead to some interesting results. The endings, I mess with so, so much. I'm rarely happy with it. I think sometimes the stories just exhaust themselves. Maybe that’s not being fair to the stories that are a little bit more tightly scripted.NC: Endings are hard, but you do them really well. You trust that the reader is intelligent enough to take from it what they want. They’re not neat, but they’re perfect.KS: I think the endings kind of revealed themselves. It was one of those things where I gave them to a couple early readers, and they had a bunch of notes about how to fix the rest of the story. But there was this unanimous consensus that the endings should be as is. And I think that was the same thing with “A New Kind of Dan” as well. I worked on that story for a long time, and got a lot of feedback on that story specifically. But then again, the unanimous consensus was that the ending, and the content that that bookends, is something solid and to be retained.NC: Thank you so much for this conversation.KS: I sounded insane 85% of the time. You got a good 15%.NC: It’s totally workable. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
The Rose Books Reader Vol 1, “Primal Scream,” publishes March 20th, full of “prose that explores characters or narrators somehow on the edge or on the brink, in chrysalis or transition, in various states of emergency or desire, struggling to cope with the realities of our contemporary world in real or surreal ways, with some success or no success at all…” that is “an engagement with emotional extremes or environmental collapse or feelings of bodily entrapment…that is desperate, unhinged, hallucinatory, hormonal. In keeping with Rose Books’ mission—“we believe in taking risks for the sake of beauty[.]’” I asked the contributors to answer a question on the theme:What primal person, place, or thing are you most interested in, and why?
ESTHER ALTER
Transfemininity extrudes from the flesh and tapers into a spear tip aimed at the throat of this awful country that I live in, for I have made my body a political weapon. I am the patriarchy divided by zero, and I will write rage and beauty until you all go fuck yourselves.
KATE BARSS
Birth.
ERIC BOYD
I’d say that creativity’s role in society is becoming more primal. Major labels, studios, and publishers are all flirting with AI while churning out “content” whose greatest value is filling empty space. The screenwriters at Netflix are told by the execs to make sure characters in their productions verbally announce their intentions because they understand most viewers are fucking or folding laundry while the app is on. To combat this I think real art is becoming less obvious, more neurotic. Increasingly feral; imperfectly human. Evidenced even by Rose Books’ call for this anthology, I think there’s a need for artwork which challenges people, even if that means alienating many.I think this is true on the audience's end as well. The worst thing a piece of art can be is “mid.” People want to love things or hate things. They want to care. I read an article the other day about the rise of “anti-fans” who enjoy hating certain stars / films / artists as much as they might enjoy loving them. This mindset ends up flattening most art. Nothing is allowed to breathe anymore. A movie comes out and if it doesn’t make a bazillion dollars on day 1 it’s dead on arrival; if it doesn’t shake you to your very core then it’s bad. You don’t get to think, “Well, I didn’t like that at first but the more I think about it it was kinda good!” We’re living in an artistic age of homeruns or strikeouts, despite the fact that most games are won by a healthy mix of singles and doubles. I’d rather hear songs, see films, and read writing that's good at one or two specific things instead of beating me over the head with its omnipresent greatness, which is usually short lived.
MICHAEL BUCKIUS
The U.S. Interstate Highway System is a primal place. It connects the wide open spaces in this country. In many patches, it’s a strip of concrete surrounded by nothing. And then, a town blooms, barely watered and ragged around the edges. The LED beacons of a truck stop pierce through darkness. Often, there are moments of silence. Crickets. Then the howl of a big rig like a wounded beast. The windows of an old farmhouse rattle. Tragic accidents, big, smoky, and smeared. A clogged artery. Flyover country it’s not. It’s fly under country because everything feels under the radar, attached to a feeling, and not any particular moment in time. Here in the U.S., we have more roads connecting us than any other country on earth, but we remain, in many ways, completely disconnected from each other. The deterioration of these roads is too obvious a metaphor, but it’s there, like a giant billboard promising salvation through Christ.Recently, I visited my hometown of Lancaster, PA. I drove down my old street, stopped in front of the house I grew up in, and took a few photos. Then I curved around the block and turned down the potholed alley I rode my bike through thousands of times. There was one thing that was noticeably different. Thirty years ago almost every backyard was open. Now, nearly every one had a fence built around it. I still rememberwhat it felt liketo ride away from homeas far as my legs could take mepicturing great distances and what promise lay beyond them…
DANIELLE CHELOSKY
Sex.
CHRISTINA D'ANTONI
Sunbathing! Growing up in the early 2000s, every movie seemed to have a poolside montage, girls in threes rubbing on tanning oil, holding their foil sheets towards the sun. Studies show that sunbathing is addictive, a biological mechanism from when people lived in caves. We developed this sun-seeking behavior when our Vitamin D dropped too low.In my writing, my characters tend towards the indoors. It’s where they battle their brains, boil eggs, take a phone call from the toilet, sit and stew. It’s only in moments of sheer desperation that they seek the sun’s rays. I’ll open up their landscape, introduce a lawn or a porch. I like these settings because unlike parks or campgrounds, there’s nothing to do. The sun obliterates all. I’m similar to my characters—as soon as sunlight hits my skin, I remember that apricots exist. Tie-dye, daffodils, sidewalk chalk exists. From there my brain speeds on to sensations: tree-hugging, sipping a fruit-infused iced tea, wearing the good clothes. A friend offering you satsuma slices in the grass, plenty to go around. Sunbathing feels like catching up on lost time, all the days wasted pacing inside. Suddenly your endorphins have you racing towards anything else.I think about that popular painting Morning Sun by Edward Hopper often, especially in the colder months. A woman enjoys the sun’s rays from her bed. There along with the sun patches and her pink dress are the shadows, the worry on her face. The melancholy of the cave. If only she would stick her head out the window, engage in her primal instincts.
NATALIE WARTHER
Berries. Specifically, jumbo blueberries from Trader Joe’s. Just like the ones my ancestors scavenged for. Sort of.Did I pick these berries from a bush? Definitely not. But I did fight valiantly for a spot in the parking lot, which is, in some ways, a primal chore. Man vs man in the wild, etc.What do jumbo blueberries go with? Yogurt. Cereal. Ice cream. Have you ever pitted a date and stuffed it with two berries the size of a racoon’s fist? Because I have. Do I eat too many jumbo blueberries? Maybe. If scanned in an MRI I suspect my insides would light up blue like a bear’s. Or Andrew Huberman’s.What makes them jumbo? Science, probably, or chemicals, which normally I’d be against, but in this case I selectively ignore, given the rich antioxidant content of the fruit, which may or may not be compromised by the jumbofication process. But probably not.
ERIN DORNEY
Noticing—and then picking up—a pretty rock. This is a part of human nature that has existed forever & I love knowing that I'll die before my collection is complete.
KATE DURBIN
I first wrote about Hugh Hefner back in 2011, when I published a series of poems based on The Girls Next Door reality show. The poems are a tour of the Playboy mansion, where the women have all vanished, their rooms occupied only by their objects and the ghostly echoes of something bad that happened. (What that bad thing is, is never named).I wrote the poems years before #metoo, before Holly Madison’s tell-all, and the recent The Secrets of Playboy doc. Back when social media was something very different than what it is now, and tabloid culture reigned. Now I know my intuitions of just how fucked life at the mansion was, how trapped the women there really were–intuitions I picked up on by writing through the show–were spot-on. They’ve been publicly confirmed by the people who actually lived there. And now there is all this new material, in various forms, from the women of Playboy talking about their experiences directly–podcasts, Twitter threads, YouTube channels, books and documentaries, etc.And so I wanted to go back into the mansion again, after poring through all these new materials, and from inside the nightmare of this new Trump era. HUGH HEFNER BEDROOM FURNITURE, my piece, takes its name from the online auction that sold off all of Hef’s stuff after he died (he was a hoarder). It’s a tour of Hef’s bedroom. All the stuff in the poem is Hef’s real stuff. All the things that happened in the poem are the things that actually happened–that, in a way, are still happening.
OWEN EDWARDS
The primal is the first. It precedes rationality and language. It's a sort of energy whose consequents include desire and hunger. The primal is unmediated, amoral, taken for granted but never absent. It sticks around and demands ventilation. The basic needs that drive you around provide a framework for all that thinking that wants to get done. Sometimes you bump along the edges and glimpse where it starts and ends–everything within the pure requirements for life.The word calls to mind a pre-historic animal, a time before civilization. Primates are like wise older siblings, or a part of yourself you forgot but always knew was still kicking around. See an infant monkey eating fruit and lounging in a stream. Noteworthy cases of the primal include when you eat bone-in wings, let desire take over your life, abide power and allure, pick up a heavy object, wander in the woods and come across an animal, or speak without hesitation.Buster Keaton had primal intuition. His movies are direct and chaotic. What he does on the screen is understood without explanation. Keaton pursues love, shelter, money, brute survival. But the gags are meticulous and illusory. He was effortlessly inventive, which makes his work immediate and free. He makes you wanna do some crazy shit. When you're watching him, you almost think he's invincible. (The day before he died of cancer, he played cards with friends and paced restlessly in his room, waiting to go home. He was never told his illness was terminal.) You get a close-up of his pale face. People say he was stoic, but his eyes reveal measures of fear, sadness, and shame. Is that what they call bravery? He just breaks your heart without a word.
JULIET ESCORIA
Myself. Not because I think I am especially interesting or "primal," but because our own behavior is often the most difficult to understand.
JULIA HANNAFIN
Sea glass keeps showing up in my fiction, forged by the ocean and the primal force of its tides. Lately I’ve been seeing less sea glass, more mangled strips and beads of plastic. I miss the soft and clouded pieces I found at the beach as a kid. My mom taught me to watch for sharp edges—if the sides of a piece of sea glass hurt, it was too soon to collect. Back into the waves. I like the idea that force and time can soften us, not do the opposite. Resisting a defensive response to change.ORGhosts. Shadows of death, our maybe most primal experience. We miss the people who die. We fear the ghosts that return. I keep thinking about the ghost perspective—pissed that they’re stuck halfway between this world and the next, unsure why the living are so afraid of them. I most hear of ghosts as unwanted visitors, as if their longing to stick around is to blame. But what if it’s us, the living? If it’s our grief, forcing a natural process to halt? I have more compassion for the ghost, then, as if they must pat our backs as we process what they already know.
JAMES JACOB HATFIELD
I’m interested in primal instincts in regards to emotions and thoughts because it gives my life meaning.There are different definitions of primal. For me, when I hear “primal” I think caveman. Pre-conscious animal. This proto-human base layer.Most notably in the form of knee-jerk internal monologues right before logic and context come in and rewrite them—the split second where your mind is completely naked before deciding what mental attire to wear in response to the weather of this moment.In every interaction I have that small space where I am able to decide how I respond. I can ask myself “who do I want to be in this moment?”In that liminal space between stimuli and response, I am nobody. Which means I have the highest potential in terms of creativity.So in reality, I'm creating a new self for every situation. Which means I have no idea who I am.And the unknown always excites my curiosity. So it’s an endless well of interest.But through practicing awareness these thought protocols can be rerouted and actually reprogram my instincts. Over time, with effort, I can do the “right” or best thing in the moment without expending too much energy, similar to a near-automatic reflex.So technically, through effort and required maintenance, our primal can be updated; we create what is innate in us over time.After I’m done with a project I am ritualess and insane. So I like to use that excess RAM that was dedicated to the recently ended project to update my primal and become post-caveman in small areas, like doing laundry, until the next story comes along.And it should be said, I have far too much time on my hands to think about this. Go read Rose Books Reader. Let’s have fun.
J. KEMP
12/31/18, I made a vow with myself to squeeze accountability from the world. With only 3 letters and 4 numbers, I found out more than just the name of the rotten apple of my eye.Asher wasn’t laughing like he was when we first crossed paths. He was too fixated on how long Ihad waited in the parking lot to answer my simple question of why he waved his middle finger.His wife unloaded all the groceries while he locked himself in their 2014 GMC Sierra that they had owned for 408 days, now 2644 if they still do. The sale price is still more than I make a year.My persistence led to Asher telling Jess to call 911. Instead she just sped off.I stood their let down, like I had finally built enough courage to call the number I dog-eared in the phone book just to have a father get back on to tell me she doesn’t want to talk. I’d always pout briefly then forget it, but not with Asher.With him, I still fantasize about sitting at his desk. He makes little jokes during small talk, our foreplay. My eyes lay on a white mug on his desk that has a big-box insurance logo on it. In the bundle of too many pens, a letter opener calls to me with its shimmer. I cannot take it slow any longer. I make the mistake of asking him why after impalement, he just whimpers while trying to get his hand unstuck.The obsession to help someone who not only doesn’t want help, but also doesn’t even remember you. That is primal, isn’t it?
AMY LYONS
I’m interested in home and in how people decide where to live. I’ve lived in five different states and I am constantly experiencing the tension between wanting to go home and wanting to run away from home.
AMELIA MANGAN
Two days before I sat down to respond to this question, I was bitten by a spider. I'd already made vague plans as to what my response might look like: something quick and clever, something I hoped would make me sound thoughtful and incisive and witty, some funny little quip about the only subjects I ever tackle in my work being Sex and Death.A tiny red eye watches me now from beneath my upper right bicep; this is the arm that leads to my writing hand. Dark pink threads trail from each corner of the eye; this is the venom attempting to trickle down my veins, to embark on a voyage throughout my bloodstream (the attempt will be fruitless: the spider, dead now, was tiny and non-lethal and nothing will happen save my feeling like hell for another day or so before I am in the end returned to myself again: Thoughtful and Incisive and Witty). There is a thin, smudged veil between my brain and my world and my typing fingers; everything seems underwater, up in space, echoing, changed and charged.These altered and transformational states. These sudden shifts in what we see and seem. It occurs to me, at this addled moment, that this is the primal state my work returns to, over and over again: something, or someone, changed and charged. Sex and Death, yes; and venom boiling in the blood.
SHAY MCINTOSH
When they dug up the Egtved Girl, the thing everyone noticed was her outfit. Matching separates in a brown knit: miniskirt, crop top, freeboobing it. Blonde bob, short nails, pretty dykey. Chunky jewelry. All of it vintage—3,000 years old, in fact. She’d opted for a green burial (no embalming, just a hollow tree), but the bog had preserved her anyway. She was buried with some hair accessories and a bucket of beer. She was a teenager, after all. RIP angel, you would have loved Claire’s.As a 20-year-old irresponsibly wearing crop tops to my internship, I got obsessed with the Egtved Girl’s fit. Turns out, in the grand scheme of things, our centuries-long detour through hoop skirts and corsets was just a blip. Don’t lecture me, Dad, you’re eating paleo and I’m dressing Bronze Age.Like all European cool girls, she lives in Copenhagen. She doesn’t even have to pay rent—she’s got her own room in the National Museum. Pay her a visit sometime. She’ll remind you that some things, like a bare midriff, are timeless.
SHELBY NEWSOME
I am most interested in our internal landscapes, the primal and, often, hard-to-decipher feelings that drive our movements through life. As someone who is late-diagnosed neurodivergent, has struggled with mental health, and is a writer, I am in my mind a lot. I’m picking apart my behaviors and emotions, exacerbating my worries—but I know these aren’t unique to me, which is why I’m so drawn to these kinds of characters in my work. I want to see our messy interiority splayed out on the page. I want to understand our idiosyncrasies and how they inform our construction. Because at our cores, we’re all operating with the same set of emotions, regardless of how we let them instruct us. And this intrinsic likeness provides solace and brings about a sense of being less alone.
BREEN NOLAN
The primal part of me is interested in dissecting the idea of who I think I am to uncover what's really there.
JOANNA NOVAK
Bodies of water, man-made or frequented by humans, fascinate me. They appear in my fiction over and over again. In the story I contributed to the Rose Books Reader, the narrator finds herself on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, on a rocky beach in Brittany. In the story I wrote prior to that, a very dejected husband of a man stews by a hotel pool. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out how to write a certain story set in a bath. What could be more primal than water, analogous as it is to amniotic fluid? I like pools, hot tubs, dark water rides, lakes, rivers, peopled ocean areas, ponds, creeks, waterfalls––all of it. And, while we're talking water, let me recommend Leanne Shapton's wonderful memoir-ish meditation on aqueousness and almosts, Swimming Studies.
GINA NUTT
Nature—the natural world, human nature, all of it. Though isn’t it all intertwined? In the garden, disappointments aren’t personal, growth isn’t hubris; they’re part of a pattern in which death—or hibernation—is the only certainty. Memories of the stray who used to hang out on my patio exist alongside the knowledge that the cat was never mine (RIP Bones). How nature’s indifference reminds us our presence is finite, so too are joy, suffering, relief. I love the gentle, peaceful surprises that transform loneliness into solitude: when I’m out with my dog early in the morning and a rabbit darts out ahead of us; rounding a corner and finding a deer, or several, snacking on bushes. How private acts of observation inspire connections with others: voice note full moon reminders to friends, dividing plants and saving seeds to give away. How curiosity grows into fascination, simple care becomes intention. How worlds weave: nonhuman and human animals, insects, plants, environments. And so, too, do behaviors, consciousness, and being. Harmonious intersections and disastrous collisions; the humbling unpredictability. Longing and desire tangling thick. The moon and tides, so mysterious, grounding, and ancient. Anyway, what’s lonelier than your own voice echoed back when you call out? What’s more hopeful than a seed? Doesn’t survival ask of the living a certain amount of surrender?
ZOË RANSON
I connect to sounds, movements expressions and gestures we make to communicate that ultimately manifests as language. Syntactical curiosity is my daily excavation into how, in poetic forms, we are able to skip over the linking nuts and bolts - those tired instructional manoeuvres that claim to be essential in anchoring an audience - and use experimental form to tesselate and transmit the unconscious.Uncertainty is the usual state Isn’t it possible to win over and deeply connect to other human spirits without them understanding materially where they are? Through an embodied connection to making, I explore methods of portalling to Open Space, a glitch in proceedings that allows: the reader to experience the poemthe listener, or the audience to derive meaning from what is unsaidfor silence to hold - a negative space that connects the individual to something unseen that is both of language and more colossal than it.
BROOKE SEGARRA
The orgasm. It often doesn't stand on decorum and its strength, ferocity, and mysticism often disturbs. I'm fascinated with how close pleasure can look to pain, how pain can lead to pleasure, and how pleasure can shatter pain held in the body, mind, and spirit.
NICOLE SELLEW
I was going to be cheeky and just say sex, but I think that's reductive. Lately I've been obsessed with attention, which Simone Weil calls "the purest and simplest form of generosity." There is no divorcing either attention or sex from the economic conditions of late capitalism, though. It can never be that pure and simple. Engels writes that monogamy is “the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property.” I would probably define monogamy as deciding that you're only going to pay sexual attention to one person for the rest of your life. Is it primal that we should all live, own, and fuck communally? I don't know. I mean primal in the sense of ancient, but also as prime: best, optimal, excellent. Prime like Amazon Prime. But I’m getting off track.My story in the reader is about a woman in her late twenties having a dalliance with a teen boy, but really she's having a crisis of attention. Young women are sexualized—that's the way in which people pay attention to us. As we age, that attention wanes, and that drives some people crazy. Capital is another way of commanding attention. But attention is so, so slippery. It has this almost mystical quality ("Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” That’s also Simone Weil). But now I’m not sure I even answered the question. I should have just said sex.
CATHERINE SPINO
Breaking apart a rotisserie chicken with my bare hands. Reaching orgasm as a trance state. Large cats. Open wounds. Accidentally putting my car keys in my mouth and the way they tasted. Mold. The first time my gyno measured my cervix. Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31. Wanting more from a kiss. The fact Mary Shelley lost her virginity on top of her mother’s grave. The body as a piece of meat. Sobs of immense grief. The final scene of The Piano Teacher. Roadkill. The line “Ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.” from Patrick Marber’s Closer. And dreams, always uncontrollable dreams.
MARY ALICE STEWART
My answer—Wile E. Coyote, or my rabbit, Buster, or the ocean, or sun faded, partially mossed over roadside signs, the ones eroded by weather and time, or sickness (of mind, of body, of spirit), or spirituality, or when people sing together.
GINA TOMAINE
Probably the dinosaurs from 1993’s Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park has been my favorite movie since I saw it at the drive-in when I was 6. There was something irradiating about it, something I didn’t understand as a kid but knew I loved. Of course I idolized Laura Dern as Ellie Satler, who sticks her entire arm into a pile of triceratops shit without a thought, rolls her eyes as she walks off into the jungle alone to turn the park’s power back on, saying, “We can discuss sexism in survival situations later,” and finishes Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm’s musing of "God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs…” with her own edit: “Dinosaurs eat man. Women inherit the earth.” But it was more than that. All the dinosaurs in the film are bred by scientists to be female, but halfway through, it’s discovered that they’re gender-bending—they’ve found a way to naturally reproduce together and are breeding baby dinos in the park. “Life, uh, finds a way,” Malcolm notes. The dinosaurs are the movie’s “villains,” in the sense that they’re eating everyone, but they’re also not the villains at all. The dinosaurs, a stand-in for nature, are respected by Malcolm, Grant, and Satler, even as they terrify. There’s a sense of reverence for the unknowability of certainties in the world. Sam Neill as Allan Grant says succinctly, “We’ve decided not to endorse your park.” T-rex roars; nature overcomes the film’s actual villain: Ingen, the billionaire-funded bioengineering start-up, and its lack of humility, loss of touch with humanity, and ineffectual attempts at exerting control and categorization over what is primal—the inherent fluidity, violence, unpredictability, and beauty of everything alive. Life finding a way. Plus, Samuel L. Jackson saying, “Hold onto your butts.”
FELICIA ROSEMARY URSO
There’s nothing more primal than gut instinct. Mine told me to say Aileen Wuornos.
ADAM VOITH
There’s a studio apartment on Boren Avenue at the bottom of Capitol Hill in Seattle where my friend James lived in 1998. I was in Seattle for a few weeks that summer, before moving to California, and spent a lot of time at James’ place.James was starting a record label and running it from a desk in his closet. He rented an extra closet in the common hallway from the landlord to warehouse CDs and 7”s, and his rented mailbox was in a shop on the same block. He still had a day job at another label, but hardly paid attention there anymore.I’m trying to get my head back in that apartment for the novel I’m working on. The place was heavy duty for me in 1998, I was aware of that at the time, and it’s held that weight all these years. I’ve got photos and they almost get me there, especially this pair of Polaroids my buddy Kyle and I took of each other. We’re both leaning out the windows in the front of the apartment. In the frame you see the chipped paint of the widow frame moulding, the classic brick of the building’s façade, and our young heads and skinny torsos, leaning towers of dipshit, surrounded by the Pacific Northwest summer-blue sky. We’re high as fuck, happy as hell, and we’d left the Midwest.
A special offshoot of our Recommends series, where Scott Laudati enjoys the planet’s best foodstuffs and eateries.New York City, 2010. It’s a 24-hour city. Budweisers are $3. We complain about the rent but a one bedroom is $950. Something big is happening every night in Brooklyn. The So So Glos are playing in a loft and our friend Dasha knows the door code. The garment building hasn’t been annexed by Netflix yet, its basement is rented by an old Marxist who calls it “The CCCP Gallery” and Drew is having his art show there tomorrow. And most importantly, pizza, which we eat on the way into the party and then again on the way home, is $1.50 a slice, and every block has a lit storefront where men are stretching dough and spreading sauce until last call.This city does not exist anymore. I don’t know when exactly it happened. One day the bodega became a grocery store. Then it was demolished entirely and a one story building became a ten floor high rise. The Budweisers don’t come with a shot special anymore, they are just $7 now. And your friends, who you sat in parks with, helped move couches down impossible flights of stairs, they just disappear. Where did they go? Why didn’t anyone invite you? Suddenly you’re all alone with no friends, nowhere you can afford to drink, no galleries to just pop into on your way home, and you ask yourself, “Did I make it all up?”This is a New York City tale as old as time, though. It’s never been a place anyone stayed ’til the end. And if you’re the last one left it means you didn’t get the girl or the memo, and now you’re forty with roommates. But something is happening here that has never happened before. New York City is losing its pizza. It’s losing it to indifference, to age, to a change in taste, but mainly—it’s money. The landlords have chased out everything else that once made New York great, and now they’re coming for the pizza.Most people won’t care, because most people have terrible taste. You see, not all pizza is being targeted. Every day, in every former working class (ghetto) neighborhood, a small storefront transforms into a hipster-hell zone with pizza at its core, but you would never know that at first glance. Because you’d have to wade through the Japanese models who are never eating or doing anything really but getting their picture taken. Or the other influencers posing with whatever sets this pizza joint apart from the other one-hundred vaguely punk rock, sweaty, mandatory four-hundred pencil tattoos on the cook’s arms. And the gimmick always comes across like it was conceived in a boardroom. Like a cute cup of ice cream, or the merch that repurposes Basquiat’s crown in “fun” new ways. “Edginess.” “No conformity.” Somehow your slice is always charred. It takes twenty-five mins to come out because they have to grate fresh parmesan over one slice at a time. But you can get laid at this place. And a band in Ridgewood will eventually write a song about it. So if that’s your idea of a good time, rock ‘n’ roll. But it’s not my thing. I like real pizza. I like it served by two brothers who took over the business from dad and now their rent’s about to become unaffordable after sixty years. Or a brother yelling at his sister to hurry up with the cup of Coke she’s filling from an ancient soda fountain. He takes the soda, slides two slices over the counter to you, and says, “$6.” Nothing in this city has cost $6 in almost a decade. You can smell old New York emanating off the wood-paneled walls of these joints. The ingredients are always fresh. The pies haven’t been sitting around and getting reheated all day. A man who loved pizza founded this place with his family’s name, and he put his blood into it because as far back as his line went it was all leading to this, and now his children remember that legacy, the struggle, the commitment, what it took to put food onto their tables after grueling hours, and so they put their souls into it, and whether you show up on Monday at 11 a.m. or Saturday at 10 p.m. every slice has been made with the same care and pride.Here are my Top 3, gold-medal, all killer, Peoples’ Champ winners of Williamsburg:Tony’s Pizza (Graham Ave.)I wanted to start with my favorite. This is the place I walk my dog to. Somehow they’ve kept this small room looking exactly like the Italian restaurants you remember from your childhood. The ones you went to after basketball games when your coach was buying for the whole team. They’ve got the small tables with the red-checkered table cloth. The old-timers from the block drink espresso and dunk a biscotti in like it’s Pisan fondu. They look a little side-eyed when you walk in with a dog, because this is an old-school neighborhood, but they break when she jumps on them and looks for a pet. Two brothers run around doing the prep work, if you want to talk they stop and talk, they’re funny, they’re tough, and two very pretty girls take your order, pet your dog, and if you’ve said the right thing you might even get a wink and a smile as they hand you your plate. And this triangle that’s on the plate, it’s a Mona Lisa, it’s a hug from your mom, it’s perfect. It unravels in your mouth with each bite. It’s not just mozzarella, there’re hints of other cheeses, like parmesan, maybe pecorino, a sharp cheese but a subtle note, and little flakes of oregano to round it out. There’s good distance between the crust, the sauce, and the cheese. Light on the oil, no char. It’s a clean slice you can eat in front of someone and not need a napkin. A famous pizza critic gave this place a 7.9. Only someone from Boston would miss the subtleties that make this pizza exquisite. Tony’s gets a 9.5 every time. No debate. Sal’s Pizza (Lorimer St.)Sal’s is pretty much the same vibe as Tony’s, and at $3.50 a slice, they’ve got a lock on the cheapest pizza in Williamsburg. There’s not as much in way of ambiance as Tony’s, but that’s not Sal’s fault. The stretch of Lorimer Street it’s been on for decades has flipped to the yuppies with expensive baby strollers, so there’re no Italians out front talking about the old days like Tony’s. But that’s okay because the pizza comes out quick, and when you take that first bite the cheese stretches out but snaps before it slops on your chin or shirt. And it’s a great slice. It’s so simple I feel stupid even writing about it. Sal found three things that can’t be improved when you put them together. The hipster spots will hire a guy on a unicycle to spread honey from an upstate bee farm on a slice and charge you $8 for it, and if you’re from the midwest you’ll be dazzled by the spectacle, and if you’re an idiot your brain will tell you it tastes better because you’ve got every color of the rainbow staring at you. But we need you to be better. We need you to realize a great song isn’t just an endless chorus. What makes it a piece of art is your need to return to it. Not just a box to check on your bucket list, but something to live with. To spend your days itching to go back again. How can Sal’s charge so little for a slice and cover the rent? Well, luckily this ain’t Papa Johns, and the guy who owns Sal’s is usually behind the counter, so you can ask him these kinds of questions. “I bought the business from Sal a long time ago,” he says, “And Sal owned the building when he opened up.” Here we have the American Dream. A man who owes nothing to no one. A man who bet on himself and won. So now the prices don’t have to rise with inflation. The ingredients don’t have to take a hit to cover the bottom line. This is what we call a victory in the game of Capitalism. Sal’s gets a 9. I’ve never had a mediocre slice.Vinnie’s Pizza (Bedford Ave.)Vinnie’s is the correct way to bridge the old and whatever this nightmare is that’s happening now. It’s been on Bedford Ave. since 1960, but if I didn’t just tell you that you’d never guess it’s eligible for Social Security. Aside from the classic New York style pizza, the interior of Vinnie’s is a time capsule of the Williamsburg that existed when I moved here, when it was more like the Lower East Side and less like a tech-boy playground. Street art and pizza paintings decorate the walls, a thousand band stickers are on the door, and a Ninja Turtles bench out front brings a smile to the face of everyone born in the mid-’80s. There’s a body type I associate with Vinnie’s that I never even see here anymore—a fat dude in skinny jeans, in a tight band shirt with a balding head and big full red beard. Does that make sense? It’s punk rock but I can’t really tell you why. Maybe it’s because I ran into Andrew W.K. there once at 2 a.m. Vinnie’s has none of the Italian thing that I usually require with my food. This should be a deal-breaker, especially where I’m from. We require authenticity here in New York above everything else, but there’s this ability skateboarders and artists and punks and trans kids have when they find a neighborhood that’s been abused and neglected by time. They take all the influences, the blank spaces, the garbage, the possibility of redemption, and through raw power they build their own thing, and this hustle brings a level of cool that supersedes any idea of what a neighborhood or restaurant is “supposed to be.” This is Vinnie’s. It’s the original punk rock pizza of Williamsburg, on a block that less than two decades ago was the raddest place in New York. And though it’s become one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on earth, Vinnie’s is actually still pretty close to the roots. A slice is less than $4. It tastes exactly like a slice of pizza should. It’s like a Budweiser. It’s consistent every time. There are no frills. It’s just awesome tangy cheese over a sweet sauce. And it’s open late. Fun fact, last time I was there Kieren Culkin was dragging a kid and a kid’s basketball hoop angrily past the Ninja Turtles bench looking like every choice he’d ever made was the wrong one. I’ve also seen Rosamund Pike on that corner as well as Michael Cera, Nas, Sean Penn, and Willa Ferryra. If you’re visiting, grab a slice at Vinnie’s and sit on that Ninja Turtles bench. You’ll see someone.
Shifting states. The novel-in-flash Glass/Fire (Querencia Press, 2024) exhibits the unfolding travails of girlhood, a reality adorned in rich contradiction and symbolism. Mandira Pattnaik’s sumptuous language carries forth a deep and sensuous meditation on life’s volatility. The wildness of nature’s forces at their most capricious lend an elemental intensity to fate. A dynamic and revealing exploration of growth, I talked to the author about the book.Rebecca Gransden: In the mood we were in, fire could be liquid, could be sand, or molten like lava, or flames, licking the last of us.You open the book with the above line. How important are opening lines to you and what does this particular line suggest about the book in its entirety?Mandira Pattnaik: Thank you, Rebecca. I do not particularly stress over opening lines, though I greatly acknowledge their importance, especially in flash fiction. It’s helpful to think of the opening as the answer to the question: What does it all boil down to? So, it is essentially the essence of what I want to convey. I want readers to feel surprised, or jolted, or pleased, or offended—I want them to respond in whatever way. With fiction, I shepherd some of the things that I know as truths ignoring from which field of study they originate and insert them into my make-believe world. I’ve now grown to enjoy this kind of braiding. This line, while it braids certain facts about the nature of fire, also tells something about ‘us’. Do ‘we’, as much as we are ‘in the mood’, as yielding as glass yields to fire? I asked myself this question that hadn’t been answered or addressed in my mind and wished to take the narrative forward from there. That’s the way I approach writing—a kind of collaboration between knowing and unknowing. It becomes interesting how a fractured pattern forms that I must uncover in the process while exploring what remains unsaid. Since I had the scope of a novella, and it was the first time I was attempting something of this length, I had the liberty to take or not take the chance to provide answers, and hoping the reader will decide for themselves.RG: How did you decide upon the title—Glass/Fire—for the book?MP: Glass and fire are unrelated in ordinary usage, and it is easy to forget that something as common as glass is formed by subjecting moldable liquid to fire. But then, glass is fragile. Again, some of the toughest glass-made objects are very useful. Fire is energy, enormously potent, but it is shapeless. It has many forms just like glass. Firepower, however, again like glass, has been tamed to suit human needs. So, all these facts seemed very related, though not in a general comprehensible sense. When I set upon the idea of the novella, the opening story was already out in the world, titled as “Glass/Fire”. After that first piece was published, I was sure it was a title that was full of possibilities and that could be open to interpretation (which I kind of love about titles!), and I had to name the novella that I was writing with the same title.RG: A recurring theme is that of impermanence, the fluid nature of states, whether that be of the physical, tangible and chemical type, or the psychological or spiritual. What is your approach to transience?MP: In Indian Hindu religion and mythology, from a very young age, we’re rather familiar with thought-schools such as the cyclical nature of births and rebirths, the virtue of detachment (to possessions as well as relationships) as opposed to being attached, and how change and impermanence is in-built in the universe (as opposed to absoluteness). I understand the doctrine of impermanence is very important to us as a people. Neither are rulers forever, nor is the mortal body to last eternally. Similarly for wealth or happiness, as is bad times and sadness. In Buddhism too, which originated in India, ‘anicca’ is the same doctrine of impermanence, evanescence, transience. Just as life changes in empirically observable states of childhood, youth and death, so do mental events as they come into being and get dissolved. Friends and foes appear and fuse into the mind’s horizon when their job is done. I find this deeply profound. I realize that the recognition of impermanence alleviates the stress of modern living. I seem to course around the theme of transience quite often in my prose and poetry and somehow that has touched a chord with my readers. Simultaneously, I am a great believer of fluidity and interchangeability. These preferences, I understand, gain ground in my writing in a natural manner.RG: Your language is rich, sensual, often concentrated in its descriptions. You make extensive and poetic use of simile and layered meaning. How much of the style you’ve chosen for Glass/Fire is a conscious decision?MP: Thank you so much for saying so. I’m grateful for all the praise that my use of language gathers, given that I am not a native English speaker. Also, I am not a trained writer in any sense—no degrees or writing workshops, and nothing to do with writing in my family, so it amuses me when Granta, denying me a bursary that I had applied for, compares my sample piece’s style to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It also propels me to search for what is my true calling, but then I realize that, having had no training is a blessing as I have all the liberty in the world to use my natural style the way I wish to. I have often been appreciated as a lyrical and sensual writer, which of course, is gratefully received. As often happens, one is not prepared to hear anything about one’s writing—I feel so inadequate as an outsider, untrained, writer from the global south. And then one does get more comfortable. It kind of grows on you, and one starts believing in one’s writing—which I guess happened to me. It was never conscious. I am happy I am allowed my lyrical style, without the imposed regulations that academia might have suggested, or which formal training might have eroded.RG: Let’s imagine pure mechanics. Not fire. Instead of glass, let’s talk attraction and repulsion. What is to be stirred with two scoops of isinglass so courses of molecules change, or solidify like glue, or say, become viscous?It’s tempting to see a tension between the scientific and materialist language used in the book and the lyrical and artful, but the impulse to adhere to distinct categorizations on those terms is made moot early on. While you talk of the chemistry that makes us, the stuff of life, the novella interweaves aspects more broadly to present a holistic view. How do you view the scientific when it comes to Glass/Fire? Do you have a personal interest in the sciences?MP: It's really difficult to place science and art in two watertight compartments, isn’t it? There’s a constant osmosis taking place, and even one feeding on the other to enrich and enhance each other. I like this interplay. I tend to incorporate this tension between science and art amply in my writing. When it comes to Glass/Fire, the very basis of the work, starting at its title, is heavily drawn from various branches of science. I like to think of myself as a scientific and rational individual who also recognizes the limitations of science, both theoretically and practically. I have a background in science, yes, but I also graduated in economics and worked in accounts and audit—so these are all related and interwoven into my writing now. I’m also a big advocate of science explained and used in everyday life, as should the arts be. Instead of classrooms and seminars, science and arts should be part of life for the masses, not just the elite few.RG:But being suspicious in a relationship cemented with trust, is really cruel, it eats away the insides like termites.The novella addresses heavy themes such as adultery, marital breakdown and family strife. Your characters face the undermining of their foundations. How did you go about incorporating these aspects within Glass/Fire?MP: In opting for exploring certain issues, or the choices of themes we make as writers, I am not much interested in topics that essentially affect an individual or family, such as the themes above. I’d rather explore issues that affect society more broadly, such as hunger, civil unrest or apartheid. Having said that, themes of a domestic nature are no lesser in my mind, just a matter of what I am keener on examining as a writer. To me, issues of adultery or marital breakdown are simply manifestations of other problems in families and societies, and as you very importantly point out, in surviving these, the characters in Glass/Fire face the undermining of the very foundations on which their existence depends. These are ways in which the characters are forced to reevaluate the very basis of their being—and they undoubtedly fight back. I wanted to address how fragile existence sometimes becomes, when the truths and relationships you hold dear to yourself are shaken. I believe this kind of tangential approach to characterization requires more involvement and engagement. Instead of examining the said intensely domestic themes directly, or thinking about these issues as specific to one group or category, I asked myself if I could get to the core of their sadness or unfulfillment, and if there were several minor issues that were responsible for the situations the characters found themselves in.RG:There was a man dwelt by a churchyard. His wife was the enormous yew tree that shielded him from all. His children came by as autumn leaves, or as some say, they were the cattle that died grazing upon the yew. Sometimes the man coughed so hard, he’d want to be taken out to sea. But they’d trick him—his wife and his cattle-children—saying, the season’s changed and Christmas is here, when nothing ever changed at all.When it comes to narrative, the novella constantly highlights the meaning to be found in the everyday, that symbolic significance not only exists in a wider cultural manner but is amplified and changed by the personal stories we tell ourselves and are reinforced by family rituals. What was your approach to narrative for Glass/Fire?MP: I find the symbolism in ordinariness haunting me everywhere. It is like there are things on display, in nature and in people, waiting to be observed and newness discovered, until one realizes that it is only the form that has changed, and nothing ever changes permanently. I think I am going back to the theme of impermanence I discussed earlier. There is a lot of anguish, sense of betrayal, and a sense of forced mental captivity in Glass/Fire, and the only way out of it, at least momentarily, was to search for symbolic outlets for that feeling. I think the undercurrent of anguish is somewhat redeemed through the pursuit of, what I term as, ‘extraordinary ordinariness’. I’m attracted to natural, accessible objects' magnetic qualities, things and sights easily missed by the unobservant, which are significant in the way they enhance the beauty of the everyday and what is considered the regular or mundane. In that reference, my approach in Glass/Fire was to find that ray of hope in ordinariness as a signifier of extraordinariness.RG: How does the concept of freedom impact the book?MP: Ah, now that’s somewhat muddy territory for me—I mean, this concept of freedom. What is even freedom—how free are we? What is the freedom of mind? Is being free in the body enough? There are so many questions, and I can hardly begin to comprehend even if I knew the answers. But yes, I am very much an independent thinking individual and the concept of being free, or at least, feeling free is very important to me as a writer. I routinely turn down offers to write according to a certain theme or plan I’m not enthusiastic about. I respect others’ freedom, and in that context, I think it is very essential that we can be tolerant towards the ‘other’, whatever that may encompass. In this book, the narrator, Lily, their mother, Jo, and Heena—they are all seeking some degree of freedom. Some manage to achieve that ‘limited’ freedom they had been dreaming of, others don’t. So that again becomes slippery territory and I’ll leave readers to decide for themselves.RG:Gaze at the archipelago around, like it were the pores of a humungous indigo skin. Pass the tiny island where the market still spills with cheap wares people buy. Not you fancying something anymore, though—glass bangles and silk scarves and colored beads mean nothing today. Ceased to have any merit long ago.At a point in the novella you address the psychological consequences and emotionally disruptive impact of a devastating event. What struck me as particularly perceptive was the observation that in the aftermath of such an event meaning is drained from the world, rearranged or lost. Do you have a philosophical approach to meaning that is expressed in Glass/Fire?MP: I am not sure I am consciously incorporating the ‘meaninglessness’ of certain things in the aftermath of a particularly traumatic or psychologically draining event, but I think it follows as a universal truth of the human condition. When a relationship is thriving, there are several associated memories, and the lovers hold on to those as proxies of the ‘feeling of being in love’. But when there’s a disruption, the equations change, and the same things have no significance.The stories I’m interested in and truly invested in, and want to produce, are about finding the truer meaning underneath our superficial lives and delving into the raw, untouched material underneath. That is where the root is—the origin and consequence. After Where We Set Our Easel, my debut novella, I found myself thinking, What is the consequence? In my debut, I was particularly favorable to seeking a hopeful resolution. But in this one, because of its length which allowed me more space, I wanted to approach the questions of origin and consequence with more elaboration, and not necessarily a peaceful resolution.RG: Looking back, but with an eye on the future, how do you feel about Glass/Fire now? What is next for you?MP: I feel content with how Glass/Fire has been received by readers. I can perceive that it has generated critical interest and is being seen as a book that stands out from the crowd. This is extremely encouraging because I write about characters and settings that are not very common—especially because they belong to South Asia and the novella almost entirely happens in a coastal region of India. I am also happy that this means I can continue to be as original and faithful to my style as I want to. Following this, I have a collection of short stories that I hope will find publication soon. I am also excited about my debut novel that I am currently working on.
