Geoffrey Morrison is the
co-author, with Matthew Tomkinson [see his recent "12 or 20 questions" interview here], of Archaic Torso of Gumby, a
collaborative book of experimental short fiction (2020, Gordon Hill Press). He
is also the author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier (Frog
Hollow Press, 2019) and was a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open
Season poetry and fiction contests. He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and
Tsleil-Waututh territory.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How
does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?
It’s an apropos question because “Archaic Torso of
Apollo,” the Rilke poem we riff on in the title of our book, ends with the phrase,
“you must change your life.” We play with this phrase, in a way I won’t spoil,
in the last story in the book. Change and metamorphosis are strong underlying
themes in the book at large.
Archaic Torso of Gumby (ATOG
for short) is a collection of experimental short fiction; it was written
collaboratively by my friend Matthew Tomkinson and I over a period of about
three years. Matt and I were friends before we started the book, but by working
together – including, for some of that time, by long-distance – we became much
closer friends. That’s the most obvious change!
Matt taught me so much as a writer. He already
wrote such beautiful prose when we met, and he is an endless repository of
ideas. He has a way – I think of George Saunders, or even Stephen Tobolowsky in
his podcast – of telling craftily high-concept stories with such warmth, such
genial and hilarious turns of phrase, and with metaphors that make you want to
say “Yes!” out loud. He turned me on to many great authors, too. To borrow a
metaphor he once used to describe our collaboration, I loved working in the
same factory as him.
Because we wrote under the conditions we did, and
for that length of time, I also learned a great deal about myself as a writer
and a human being. I came to this project from poetry, and perhaps more
immediately from an academic background in medieval and early modern literature.
When we started the project in January, 2015 I was newly 24 and in my first
year of a PhD program. By the end of that year I knew I did not want to remain
in the academy, for reasons that were at once practical, political, and
mental-health-related. The years after were often painful for me.
If you’re young and in debt and afraid, if you’re
from the class of people who have known financial precarity of one form or
another since childhood, and you realize that the thing you thought was going
to lift you out of that is absolutely not going to, that it wasn’t even
designed to, and that moreover it’s not going to confer on you that feeling of
self-worth you always found so elusive – well, the transition out of academia will
probably be hard. And on a very practical level I had to rewire my brain. I had
to learn how to write and think again from a fresh perspective during the years
that Matt and I wrote Gumby.
So when I follow the trajectory of the Gumby
stories with my insider’s knowledge I see a friendship where one of the members
is not just learning how to write fiction with a poet’s tools, but also
learning how to transmute academic knowledge into the materials of fiction, and
even in some sense becoming a new person. Perhaps that’s one of the deeper
reasons for all the metamorphoses in the book.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed
to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I think about this question, I think about how
as a child my favourite things to read were by far nonfiction books – books
about history, geography, archaeology, marine biology, space. You might think
this reading would have led me to nonfiction writing, but it always had a
strong imaginative element for me. Without realizing it, I was developing an
archive of images and objects and ideas that would serve me well later in
poetry and fiction.
Then a switch flipped in my teen years. I started
to feel everything so much. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Think
the narrator of Joyce’s “Araby,” Augustine in love with love. At this time I
was finally driven to write things on my own. But the experience of making
something with language was so overwhelming, so heavy with portents. Words felt
dense and volatile, like they were made of the same material as neutron stars. A
spoonful of matter weighed as much as a nuclear submarine.
Long fictions seemed impossible under these
conditions. I tried to write a few stories, but I always got tripped up by
questions of ambience, atmosphere, form, voice – poetry things – to the extent
that I could not go further. That plot-making impulse that for some writers
seems to be the first tool they develop came to me very late. I think I’m only
just starting to figure it out now.
Reading in the high school library on my spare
blocks, I encountered poets who were using language in a way that seemed to
signify with the compact intensity I hoped it could: Emily Brontë, John Keats,
and especially Emily Dickinson. They were my first models.
Over the last four years another switch has slowly
flipped, if a switch can be said to flip slowly (the image suggests a very
heavy lever, as in a power plant). I now feel most compelled to write fiction,
but I do so with many debts to poetry and prose-poetry.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular
writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow
process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does
your work come out of copious notes?
I think I’ve done every version of this at some
point or another.
I’ve written poems in one sitting and not felt the
need to change them much afterwards. I’ve written other poems over a period of
weeks, distilling from notes I took whenever an image or a phrase came to me.
I’ve thought I was finished with a poem and realized years later that I was
not. I’ve begun stories, abandoned them for months and months, and come back to
them when I was ready.
My early pieces in ATOG were often the kind
of thing you edit in your head before anything lands on the page. This meant
that I wrote very slowly, but also that the first draft, once I’d finally
completed it, was pretty close to the final one. This was probably a function
of my poetry background. But there were exceptions of course, especially as our
contributions got longer.
I should say as well that as a part of our
collaborative process Matt and I made our final revisions and line edits to the
book together. We printed out the whole damn thing and sat with pens in coffee
shops over the course of many evenings, looking for things to fix. Sometimes
this would mean one of us saying, of something we’d written, “I hate this
phrasing, I want to cut it!” and the other one saying, “No, keep it! I love
it!” Folie a deux.
I can’t say I want to do that whole “editing in my
head” thing again – for anything over about 2500 words that approach has tended
to induce a certain analysis paralysis in me. It’s better for me to at least
roughly sketch out a bunch of stuff so I know where I’m going, so I would say
that now I am a “copious notes” and longhand rough drafts kind of writer.
My little notebooks are a godsend. Once I got over
the sight of my very poor handwriting on the page and could accept that these
scrawls were an acceptable medium for my thoughts, I felt extremely free. I
find that writing longhand removes inhibition and distraction, and encourages a
kind of rhythmic prose, like breath. I can write these passages fairly quickly,
knowing that later I will revise them a lot.
Note that I work full time in an office
administration job so anything I’m working on evenings and weekends has to
fight for space alongside all the other life we try to live when we are not at
work. Notebooks are helpful here too. I can make some record of an idea that
comes to me during the day without losing it.
A final thought about speed. Marguerite Yourcenar
(whose thoughts on statue fragments we quote in ATOG) writes about how
she wrote her historical novel Memoirs of Hadrian over the course of
something like eleven years, and that for much of that time her attention had
been on other things. At one point she rediscovered old drafts in a pile of
correspondence she was planning to burn, and because the book is an epistolary
novel she thought they were simply letters to a guy called “Mark.” “Mark? Mark?
Who is this Mark?” She wondered. It took her a moment to realize that “Mark”
was Marcus Aurelius. I love that story.
I abjure the weird Protestant fixation on
productivity and quickness. I think the best things in life take time.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually
begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger
project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I believe that the majority of my pieces in any
form have begun with an image, a phrase, a sound, or an emotion, rather than an
“idea” or “concept.” A few times I might have started with an idea, but I can’t
remember.
When I was about 21 I learned the word
“affektkomplex” from a piece of criticism about Chaucer and it really helped me
realize what I was doing, especially when my primary focus was poetry. The
author of the Chaucer essay, Denis Walker, uses it to mean “significantly
clustered ideas and emotions, the logical relationships between them being left
inexplicit.” I guess this is just a funny way of saying what many theories of
poetic composition do (parataxis, spontaneous overflow, metro station, the way
a haiku works, etc etc) but you work with whatever you have at hand.
Anyway, I think I’ve always begun with these messy
little clusters that made me feel something powerfully. I trust my intuitions
at first, and then my more logical side comes in to help me follow the
implications through to completion, to see what ideas might come from them.
Naturally I was probably working through those ideas at some level already, and
just needed to be reminded.
Logic gets more important the longer the thing you
are doing, I think. In a shorter poem many things will have to be “left
inexplicit.” In a longer poem or a short story you can begin to build some kind
of causal architecture, get explicit about the logical connections. In a novel
you can let the logical-causal side do its work most explicitly.
As to the second part of your question, I’ve
written poems in a series several times, but never a single series the length
of a book. The majority were one-offs. My poetry chapbook, Blood-Brain
Barrier, includes a complete series of poems all written together, a
smaller series, several poems from a series that I decided not to use all of,
and a number of individual pieces. I don’t know that I could get up one morning
and say, “I am going to write a book of poetry.”
The short stories I’ve written since ATOG are
all one-offs, but when Matt and I began ATOG we knew we were writing
short pieces that we wanted to form a coherent whole as a book. We wrote it
kind of exquisite-corpse-style, so that each piece would fade into the next in
some way. Like DJ-ing. There are many call-backs, repeated motifs, and
recurring characters, and as the book comes to an end we try to make the
interconnectedness of the parts as manifest as we can.
My current big project is a novel, which I knew
from the beginning I wanted to be that.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your
creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am the sort of writer who is very anxious! If I
know I’m going to be reading something in public I’ll be on edge the whole day.
I’ll eat badly, my heart will race, I’ll feel sick. This continues until I
actually start to read, at which point I feel fine, better than fine, great! I
become a ham, I try to make people laugh, I ad-lib introductions to the pieces
I read. Afterwards I feel completely drained. It’s not something I can do very
often.
It’s kind of a paradox because I always write with
attention to how things sound when read out loud, and I have been so thankful
to people close to me who’ve let me read my work to them in private. Sound
genuinely matters to my work, especially in my poems. To further the paradox, I
loved to perform in high school drama class – I think I must have been
transmuting my anxiety into hamminess in a very similar way.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind
your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?
What do you even think the current questions are?
My basic view of the world is Marxist. I believe
that the concept of dialectical materialism can show us many things. It is a
tool of clarity and calm, and it cuts through bullshit. It gives us a way to
answer questions like: how do societies move in the direction of human
liberation and equality? How do they spin apart? How do ideas move through
history on the basis of material forces?
But I think Marxism, as a body of thought committed
to the emancipation of all people, completely defeats its purpose if it’s not
clear or if it loses sight of real human concerns. I don’t have much patience
for Althusser or whoever. That’s just tenured professors goofing around.
Some Marxist writers and thinkers whose lucidity
and open-heartedness I respect include C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins
and Beyond a Boundary, Raymond Williams in The Country and the City,
and Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origins of Capitalism. I don’t think he
considers himself a Marxist, but Byung-Chul Han is another writer whose critiques
have a clarity I admire.
I’m not a “theory head” but I do find philosophy as
a discipline useful for the honing of my thoughts – the seeking of truth and
the avoidance of error, as William James put it (we quote a funny thing he
wrote to his brother Henry in the opening epigraphs of ATOG).
What dialectical materialism also shows us is that
any fixed binary we look it is probably not telling us the whole picture, and I
would say that Matt and I both thought in those terms as we went in ATOG.
There’s even a sense in which the form of our book is dialectical: a story in
the book will suggest something, and the following story will tease or
burlesque the first, only to be burlesqued in turn. Thesis, synthesis,
antithesis. But we didn’t set out to do that on purpose so much as it just felt
right.
Often I think the influence of my worldview on my
writing is something like the physicist’s
“action at a distance.” I know it’s doing
something, but I can’t always say exactly what. It might inform my work more on
the basis of what I don’t write, the ideas that wouldn’t occur to me. We
can’t be sure of what those are until we encounter other people’s ideas that we
really don’t like.
It’s also complicated because, as I mentioned
earlier, I tend to approach writing through small things – objects, sensations,
images, memories, fleeting emotions – rather than “big ideas” or “concepts.” It
used to be a source of anxiety, this tension between big and small, as though I
were supposed to “solve” it somehow. But you can’t. The truth is that they’re
always coming together and pulling apart, resolving and sundering, and this motion
itself can be a subject for you.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer
being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of
the writer should be?
This is a complex question. For starters, you may
think you are doing one thing when as a matter of fact you are doing something
else. That’s ideology for you.
If we want to be strictly empiricist and
quantitative, it seems to me that writers (in the simplest sense, as people who
write) are reaching the most people in the larger culture through the mediums
of television, film, podcasts, social media posts, legacy print journalism, and
articles shared on the internet (although the bottom seems to have fallen out
of digital media like three times already). Writers in these contexts are fairly
obviously playing a role in shaping ideologies, in critiquing or obfuscating or
building or apologizing for them, whether they consciously want to or not. But
there are obvious differences between and among these groups. A Donald Duck
podcast is not on the same level of ideological formation as the local TV
nightly news.
Naturally the further out from these popular forms
you go, the more attenuated the impact. You may influence someone who
influences someone who has sway in the culture at large. You may not even do
that. You may be writing primarily to keep yourself alive, or a small group of
like-minded people. By “alive” I mean open to the world, thinking, seeing,
feeling as much as you can in an age that would rather you didn’t, much.
There’s a nineteenth-century German literary
concept called “happiness in a corner.” W.G. Sebald talks about it in his interview with Michael Silverblatt. I’m not sure about happiness (I’m not sure
Sebald was either). But perhaps from the very small corners of poetry and
fiction we can perhaps know clarity, perhaps a moment of calm, perhaps a taste
of the sublimity that reminds us of all that is true outside of us. In one of her late poems,
Adrienne Rich says poetry “isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must
come.” How else to put it?
8 - Do you find the process of working with an
outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both, I think!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard
(not necessarily given to you directly)?
I only ever took one formal poetry creative writing
class. This was at SFU, with the poet Broc Rossell. He was very patient and
kind. He told the class that an important mentor had given him some advice that
he took to heart. Three or four years later he saw her again and mentioned the advice.
She told him that she was saying something quite different to her students,
now. He shared this with us as a kind of advice about advice.
As a provincial dumbass, a first-generation student
who tended to think that my teachers were by their natures “better” than me and
probably had all the answers, this was a revelation. I saw that the people
telling me things were, like me, in a constant state of figuring things out – that
their words were not set in stone. I saw that I only had to take their advice to
the extent that it truly helped me at a given moment.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between
genres (poetry to fiction to criticism)? What do you see as the appeal?
I touched on this a little already. Sometimes it
was very hard.
I don’t know if I think of these movements between
forms in terms of “appeal” so much as I do “necessity.” In other words I had to
move on to another form because it was the only way to express what I most
wanted to at the time.
My interest in criticism is pretty straightforward.
I like to read and to think about how the things I read work. I like to compare
and contrast. I like putting things in context.
Going from poetry to criticism was the least difficult
adjustment because of all the essays I’d written for my English classes. But
there were challenges too. I believe that the language of some of my reviews
was sometimes too overwrought, had too much “poetry” in the prose. I think it
came from a good place, from loving what I was reading and being caught up in
the enthusiasm, and I stand by the love and the enthusiasm. I just wish I could
have been clearer in communicating this to readers.
Moving from poetry to fiction was hard as hell. I
think the seeds of fiction were always inside me, but they were meant to grow
into weird-looking trees. Once in Broc Rossell’s class I took the prompt “write
a very long sentence” and wrote one that ran for three or four pages. It was
formatted like a story instead of a poem. At the time I had just begun my long
love affair with the fiction of Donald Barthelme, and I knew that he had
written stories in this way. Broc liked it. He wrote in the margins, “there are
many poems in here.” I think this began to open some kind of door for me.
Around the same time I had discovered the early
modern essayists, people like Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Thomas Nashe, and
Rabelais. Their prose also had poems inside of it. I think it was through
Browne that I learned about W.G. Sebald, whose work introduced me to a kind of
plotless, digressive fiction that still means an immense amount to me.
Matt introduced me to Italo Calvino and Elliott
Weinberger. The latter is a fascinating case, as he spent his twenties trying
to be a poet and ultimately decided to instead be an essayist using the
sensibilities of poetry.
Anyway, all this meant that when I began to work on
the stories in ATOG with Matt, I had models and precedents for shorter
prose-poetry – Calvino’s fables, Borges’ fragments, Anne Carson’s short talks.
As the book progressed, our contributions got longer. By the end we had longer
narrative fictions. We obscure this a little for the reader by shuffling the
deck.
At the same time as Matt and I were working on
Gumby, I also began my first attempt at a novel – a historical fiction about
Giordano Bruno that I now think was extremely bad. This was where things got
really hard. It was bad partly because I didn’t have a clear sense of the story
I wanted to tell, but mostly because I was afraid.
I had to take two screenwriting classes at a
community college to get over this fear. You’d think that I would simply take a
course on fiction writing, but I was so afraid that I couldn’t even study it
directly. I had to study something that was more adjacent to fiction than
poetry, but was nevertheless not fiction. My brain is funny that way. You may
be discerning a theme. Much of what I do is a strange ongoing negotiation
between myself and what I perceive to be an unreliable brain.
Once I felt more at ease with the basic tools of
plot and character, I also had to give myself the license to grow that weird
tree with many poems inside of it. I saw that there are special rhetorical
tools that come with prose, and they allow you to water those seeds if you want
to. You have the opportunity to digress, to clarify, to make and unmake
connections, to weigh and measure, to leave no associative stone unturned. It
was liberating to see this. The hot, dense language of the neutron star could
be spun out into something clearer and lighter.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to
keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
This also relates to working full-time, and to
having a brain with a mind of its own. Time and myself are in a constant simmering
tit-for-tat. I would say that I proceed via a kind of systematic chaos –
tricking myself, with an established set of tools and rituals, into the most
amenable circumstances for writing, which may differ greatly depending on the
kind of day I’m having and what else I have to do.
I am the furthest thing from a “morning person.” My
initial reaction upon waking up is usually something like “oh no.” Compare and
contrast with Matthew, whose biological clock forces him to wake up early
whether he wants it or not. I have tried to get up early and write before work,
but this has rarely been a productive exercise for me. I got some images for a
poem out of it, once. Sleepy images about the colour of the morning sky.
This means that I try to write weekday evenings
after work and dinner, and mid-mornings-to-early-afternoons on weekends.
Sometimes an evening on a weekend. Evenings in general are a good time for my
brain. But don’t let me give the impression that I’m doing this every day.
Sometimes I can’t do anything at all. Sometimes on a weekday it’s all I can do
to write down one idea, or even just to briefly read something that keeps my
head in the game.
I’m sure if I was in a position to make writing my
full-time work I’d have something a little closer to the systematic daily routine
that bestselling authors talk about in interviews. But isn’t it sort of fake
when they say that? Aren’t they describing optimal circumstances, in the middle
of writing a book for which they received an advance or a grant, rather than
every single day of their lives? I wish there was more transparency to those infographics
and listicles and Guardian articles and so on, because I think they produce a
kind of cultural cringe in people who want to be writers.
Ultimately I think that they make people who are on
the outside of that world feel inadequate. Or at least I can say that it they
have made me – a product of working-class and lower-middle-class people, and
someone with a long history of anxiety and associated mental illness – feel
inadequate. But the truth is that there’s no single “right way” to do it, and
anyone who tells you otherwise is a bully.
I am heartened when people are open about these
things. So I appreciated Sachiko Murakami’s Writing So Hard project, and
when I read the very beautiful interviews with the most recent Malahat Review contest winners Patrick Grace, Ajith Thangavelautham, and Joshua Whitehead I was
likewise encouraged by the ways they spoke to this.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you
turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
There are times when the key can be found in other
books. Sometimes I stall in my writing at the same time that I stall in the
thing I’m reading. This means that I need to pick up a different book, one that
will reawaken my imagination and allow me to see possibilities I hadn’t
considered before. Sometimes I stall in my writing because I’ve neglected
reading altogether.
But at other times I need to go for a good walk, do
chores, sit on the balcony, move around, not think about my work at all. I
believe it’s when you’ve given yourself the freedom not to think about
something that it will be most likely come to you on its own. I’ll often
receive the idea I was looking for just as I’m settling into bed – I then have
to bolt up and run to my notebook before I forget it again. It’s very annoying
but I am grateful when it happens.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My mother used the same metal teapot for more than
twenty years. It had a kind of engraving on the side – a flower or maybe even
an ear of wheat. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t around growing up. As a
working-class woman from Scotland, she believed that you shouldn’t wash such a
teapot unless you really have to. As a result, its interior was a dark
orange-brown. I have never tasted better tea than the tea that came from this
teapot.
Imagine that you take the tea-cozy off the pot and
open the lid to see if there’s tea inside. There is – so much. Strong black tea.
It’s hot, and fresh, and the steam is rising to your face, and you breathe it in
deeply. That’s the smell.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come
from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether
nature, music, science or visual art?
Nature has always been important to me. I grew up
on the west coast and my favourite places as a gothy teenager were the
landscapes of the beach and the estuary in winter. Bare branches, parcels of
dark seaweed, little white berries, little red berries, the honey-coloured
grasses that grow near the sea and always made me think of the steppes (I have
never seen a steppe). I often return in my mind to landscapes like this. I
return to birds, to the sea, to dark trees, to rain at night, to snow on
distant mountains I will never visit up close.
Music is also crucial. In my current work I have taken
a great deal of inspiration from Japanese ambient music – artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Midori Takada who work in experimental forms, play with
minimalism and repetition. As with your earlier question about theory, it’s
hard to say exactly how these artists influence my writing. I think they
give me new metaphors for my own process of composition, in much the same way
that Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, meant to solve creative blockages
in music-making, has always seemed perfectly applicable to writing.
In ATOG we took inspiration from different
kinds of music (more emphasis on lyrics and songwriting), and often in more direct
ways. I structured a multi-part story around a day in the life of a young woman
who plans to go to a 1978 Grateful Dead concert at Red Rocks in Colorado, a
concert that actually happened. Matt has an incredible story, set in the same
year, about a gender-fluid child named Clay who is reviving the forgotten art
of quick-change. Clay’s routine is set to a song called “Change (Makes You Want
to Hustle),” by the jazz-funk trumpeter Donald Byrd.
In fact, there’s so much music in the book that we
even made a Spotify playlist.
It includes songs we mention directly, but also songs that felt spiritually
connected to the book somehow. We both thought John Cale’s “Paris, 1919” and
Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” just had to be in there.
ATOG is kind of just an
ekphrastic book, generally. Again, the title makes this no surprise! We write
about a modern dance show I saw, a mixed-media artist Matt saw, the early
modern assemblage-maker Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Mr. Bean, Recess, and many
other things.
15 - What other writers or writings are important
for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ve mentioned a few already in the course of
answering the other questions. I’ll mention some more:
W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Susan Sontag, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Andre Alexis, Annie Dillard, Yasushi Inoue, Franz Kafka, Dionne Brand, Gerald Murnane, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Donald Barthelme, Pablo Neruda, Italo Calvino, Elliott Weinberger, Roberto Bolaño, and James Joyce.
I want to say something about Gerald Murnane in
particular, because I think more than anyone he helped me feel free to write
fiction in the ways that made sense to me. Murnane lives in Australia and is
surely the strangest Australian who ever lived. He has never been in the sea,
has never been in a plane, has only rarely left his home state of Victoria, for
most of his life never wore sunglasses (he finally gave in quite recently due
to eye problems), he taught himself Hungarian late in life, and has designed a
complex imaginary society centered around horseracing. I’ve read that he grew
up in “modest means” and that his father was a “wastrel.” He and Teju Cole
exchanged two very beautiful letters that can be found in Music and Literature.
Hari Kunzru says he talked to him for a long time about yabbies, a kind of
crayfish. He claims that he is writing “reports” from the inside of his mind,
and his sentences have a kind of lapidary purity. I learned about him during a
crisis in confidence and I will always be grateful.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet
done?
I’d love to write in genres with fairly formulaic
structures (mysteries, horror, science fiction) and tweak those formulas to
achieve different results. Mystery stories without crimes or police (the form
of the “mystery,” as a kind of itch for the truth, is very satisfying to
scratch, but since when have the police ever had anything to do with
the truth?). Horror fiction that conveys, at most, a feeling of mild unease,
like Robert Aickman’s stories. Science fiction without techno-triumphalism.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to
attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have
ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Maybe a historian? But that’s a kind of writer.
As a teen I was influenced by an older communist
friend who regretted his Math BA and wished he’d learned a trade. So I had the
idea that I would learn a trade myself, ideally one with a good union. Many
people in my father’s family did things like that (logging, firefighting), but my
father tried to dissuade me. I can imagine alternate universes where I do it
anyway. In one such alternate universe I have my Bridge Watch Rating and work
for BC Ferries. In another alternate universe I am a horticulturist keeping
flowers alive in a greenhouse. But even these examples – the sea, flowers –
seem “writerly.” Maybe there is no escape.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing
something else?
Whenever I stopped writing for longer than about
two weeks, I missed it like I was a soul exiled from my body.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What
was the last great film?
For my own sake I’m going to take this question to
mean books that I’ve finished, rather than the ones I’ve got stacked up all
around me in various stages of completion.
I finally read Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman last month. This is a book that has a great kinship with many of
the Gumby stories, and that Matthew read a long time ago, but that I
never had. It had always been on my horizon as one of those books I could enjoy
imagining the contents of without actually reading (there are lots of those). I
finally read it and was delighted, stimulated, and afraid.
Last year I saw Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us. There’s no easy way to describe it so I will simply say that it
moves like folklore, like poetry, like my favourite kind of plotless novel. It
is a purgative of all woes. It is like being cradled by heaven.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m
about two-thirds of the way through a first draft of a novel called The
Frame in the Park. It’s an inside-of-the-mind book in the spirit of Thomas Bernhard, Annie Dillard, Gerald Murnane, Samuel Beckett, W.G. Sebald, and Virginia Woolf. It’s about a person in a park, ostensibly there to sell a picture frame.
He believes his brain is broken. His name is Hugh D*******. Over the course of
the book he thinks about many things. Writing it has made me very happy.
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