1 - How did your first book
change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How
does it feel different?
This
is a strange question because I have had the nasty habit of writing and
abandoning novels – I think two finished ones at this point. The first one
wasn’t very good (I started it when I was a teenager), and the second one was
good but, I suspect, a bit too self-indulgent. Mainly the lesson I took from
these was to try and make my self-indulgence more interesting to the general
reader. I’m still working on that.
In
terms of changing my life, for one thing it gave me a sense of my own natural
writing rhythm, how many good words I can reasonably put down in a day without
burning out, how much I need to plan ahead and how much I can just develop as I
go. Generally speaking I tend to find great creative insight in the act of
abandoning a plot outline, and the more detailed it is the better. As I went
through grad school and my other writing projects, these skills and this
self-knowledge helped me manage my other projects better, and generally gave me
more confidence in tackling complex projects. Being able to sit down and
reliably knock out 1,500 or so good words in a day is a big advantage when
you’re writing a thesis, or a novel, not so much for poetry. Don’t ask me about
plays.
For
my current project – still in its early stages – the self-insight of the first
project is still paying dividends. I have avoided a great number of mistakes
simply by being attentive to my work patterns and the way I tend to generate
new ideas
2 - How did you come to poetry
first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When
I was a kid and just starting to write, I more or less came to both at the same
time. I remember writing a poem about King Arthur that got published in my
school newspaper – after being censored without my knowledge by the teacher who
was running it. Around the same time I was also working on little stories and
trying to figure out how to get them published for real. I had a very intense
need to make words happen. When I was 13 I tried writing – well at the time I
called it a fantasy novel, but really it was just a long series of strange
events that never really amounted into a plot, sort of a picaresque.
Non-fiction
has actually been tricky. I have written quite a bit of it, but almost all of
that is academic. Personal essays and narrative non-fiction are very complex in
terms of their tone and the way they construct narratives out of factual
events, and it’s proven hard to write like that without it sounding like a
peer-reviewed article. Mainly, in writing as in life, I just need to learn how
to chill the heck out, drink some tea, stop adding footnotes to things, and so
on.
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?
My
current novel project has been in my head for about four years or so while I
worked on other things, and all in all I’ve written maybe 2,500 words of notes
and drafts, most of which I plan to abandon. Once I start “for real” I usually
keep at a consistent clip, with breaks between sections as I re-work my plans
based on what I came up with as I was writing. Fiction comes very quickly when
I’ve been planning it, not so much because I know what I’m doing, but because
the planning gives me a baseline against which I can improvise.
4 - Where does a poem or work of
fiction 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?
Stories
– big and small – tend to start as images, scenes, tableaus, that sort of
thing. I’ll get a picture in my head and then try to figure out the world in
which that scene would happen. I think this tendency is why a lot of my stories
tend towards the fantastical; even “realistic” works have a tenuous grasp of
the world to which they ostensibly refer. In some cases, though, it starts as a
relationship, or some kind of puzzle – a character who is A and has to do B,
but then C happens. Though these stories usually work best if they develop
scenically, not just as a collection of relationships and motivations, but
shots, moments, instances.
The
tricky part of course is that fiction needs to play out over time. Even if you
are describing a single stationary second, the text itself is moving forward,
as is the reader’s eye. The text on the page is timeless – it exists all at
once – but you can’t have reading without time. So the process of thinking
through and planning a story is really about allowing that single instance to
filter out into the surrounding moments, like water soaking outwards through
paper. But of course, that’s how we experience anything: the past and the
future are already out there, though we only experience the universe once slice
at a time. Yet each moment blends like dye in water with the next. And when you
manage to capture that blending, the surprise and excitement of a person seeing
it, into words you can put on a page – then you have a story.
5 - Are public readings part of
or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys
doing readings?
Not as much as I’d like. Performing writing to the public
is a skill I could probably be good at if I practiced, and I enjoy doing
readings. But I never write something with reading aloud in mind, or I should
say I can’t remember having ever done so. That often kicks me in the butt when
I do get asked to read something only to realize that none of my recent work is
all that suitable to be read aloud. Logically, I should learn from my mistakes.
But that’s quitter talk.
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?
I
have theoretical concerns about everything. I’ll probably spend the last hours
on my deathbed writing an essay about necropolitics.
That
being said, I don’t really go into my work planning to follow any theory or
argue any point. Often I’ll pretend like I did on cover letters when I try to
get something published, but then again I’ve heard it said (by me) that the
cover letter is the only truly fictional genre of writing.
Writing
a story feels to me like entering a new and interesting space and slowly
stretching my legs, until I reach a full repose, like some kind of metaphorical
relaxed person. Often it’s a little ways into the project that I start to feel
comfortable with the conceptual space and really begin to understand it. That
is all to say that the story is not an argument, but rather a process of
understanding. I guess the closest experience in everyday life would be when
you suddenly come to understand something in the middle of a dream and wake up
suddenly enlightened.
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?
Oh
god I have no idea.
The
people who by and large control what literature “does” in the broad cultural
sense and the ones who own and operate the publishing houses, not the writers
themselves. Sure, they’ll publish your detailed account of structural racism,
neocolonialism, or the decline of the labor movement, and that work is
important and will have some positive effect, but then they will also have a
separate imprint for publishing reactionary claptrap by the latest Tory reject
and/or their ghostwriter, and that will probably sell more copies. This is less
of a problem in the small press scene, though that scene is likewise more
marginal.
I
am very resistant to romanticising The Writer or The Public Intellectual, since
most of the people who fit those roles usually just end up repeating
Pinkeresque declarations of the world’s essential correctness and how great it
is that most of the world is owned by like five people. And that isn’t an
accident, or a matter of “the market” magically deciding which ideas are the
best – there are real material reasons why the popular discourse looks the way
it does, and none of those reasons are represented in the fashionable image of
an ideal writer.
Publishing
a book is expensive, so publishing is largely run by people who have a lot of
money, and so caters to their needs. That fact has way more sway than any
individual writer.
8 - Do you find the process of
working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s
probably a good idea. Honestly, I wish I had more options to talk about my work
while it’s in progress so to feel out ideas and work through problems. The
edits I got for my story collection were very good.
9 - What is the best piece of
advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Try
to minimize your student debt.
This
might not sound like a writing tip but, trust me, it is.
10 - How easy has it been for you
to move between genres (poetry to short stories)? What do you see as the
appeal?
Different
ideas feel different to me. It’s very hard to explain, but some concepts feel
better suited for a poem than for a story. Occasionally I will start writing in
one genre and move to another, but by and large I have nothing useful to say on
this matter.
In
terms of moving between genres, I usually have at least two projects going on
at a time, and I try to keep them different in tone or subject matter so as to
avoid burnout. So for instance, right now I’m doing early work on a novel,
editing a cluster of academic essays, and waiting on peer reviews so I can
finish editing a monograph. It all just kind of flows together, and instead of
exhausting me it allows me to take breaks from one project by working on
another one that feels different and works different parts of my brain.
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?
In
the absence of external pressures on my schedule – work, school, etc. – I am
basically nocturnal. I find I write best starting at roughly 2 am. A typical
day begins with a promise to myself not to start writing so darn late, and ends
with me starting to write at the exact time I always do. One of these days I’m
going to train myself to wake up just before 2 and then write a series of
wellness blogs about how great it is to get your writing done right when you
wake up. And then I shall walk into the sea and never return.
12 - When your writing gets
stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
This
is the benefit of having so many projects ongoing at once: when one stalls, I
can do another. When I turn from one thing to another, I always have the other
project running in the background, and if I just relax, distract myself, and be
patient, some idea will come to me. Inspiration is a myth; you need to be
thinking and working consistently, not always at the same thing, to ensure a
steady flow of new ideas. That could be another story, or it could be a
crossword puzzle, or it could be assembling a new desk – anything to keep your
brain going. Then you’ll have ten new ideas while you’re in the shower, or at
least that’s how it works for me.
13 - What fragrance reminds you
of home?
Cut
grass and pasta, not necessarily at the same time.
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?
I
read a lot of philosophy, some of it for academic and research reasons, but a
lot of it because I find the ideas interesting to turn over in my head. It’s
fun to take a concept and re-contextualize it, examine it from some alien
direction, that sort of thing. Lately I’ve read quite a lot of work on
disability and disability theory, in part, again, for research, but also
because its proven a very insightful perspective through which to look at the
world. Basically what I’m saying is that I am a giant nerd who is completely
beyond redemption. Abandon hope, all ye who etc.
15 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Joyce
is the author who I have read the closest and most deeply. Most of my research
is on modernist literature, so you could name off the usual gang: Woolf,
Proust, Beckett, Stein, and so on. Otherwise, I am quite fond of Helen DeWitt’s
work, which remains seriously under-appreciated, and I considered Toni Morrison
the greatest living writer before she died. Otherwise, Ursula Le Guin has had a
very strong positive effect on me, both in and out of my writing.
16 - What would you like to do
that you haven't yet done?
Acquire
health insurance.
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?
Most
of my income comes from academia in one form or another; the amount of money I
have made so far, over my whole life, from writing or writing-adjacent work is
less than $10,000. If I had to change careers – maybe I’d go be an editor,
possibly at a university press.
18 - What made you write, as
opposed to doing something else?
I’m
happy when I write and unhappy when I don’t write. I will continue writing
until I am physically incapable of doing so.
19 - What was the last great book
you read? What was the last great film?
Not
really “great” and not really “read” but I recently came across this great
Korean translation of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. I can’t read
Korean and don’t care about The Phantom of the Opera, but the edition
has these quite lovely illustrations that sort of look like Aubrey Beardsley’s
illustrations for Poe, but softer and in colour, resembling at times a paper
cut-out, like something Lotte Reiniger would draw.
As
for films, I watched Porco Rosso recently. It’s a Studio Ghibli film
about a pig who flies an airplane and beats up fascists. It’s great!
20 - What are you currently
working on?
At this exact moment I’m trying to
figure out what has my cat all bothered. I think he might have seen a bug that
startled him, but I’m not sure. The mighty hunter frets mysteriously.
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