Julian Carter writes about touch, complicity, recognition, and temporal change. His new choreotext, Dances of Time and Tenderness (Nightboat, 2024) is a transpoetic story cycle linking art, death, and kinky sex, through which he partners readers in intimate encounters with trans/queer histories from Neolithic burials to coffee in present-day San Francisco.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My new book, Dances of Time and Tenderness, began in queer art and political community and grew and shifted in conversations with both dead and living people. It's been a relational project all the way along. In contrast, my first book was lonely lonely work. It was my dissertation. I wrote it without an advisor and then revised it from the ground up 5 times over my 9 years on the academic job market before finally using it as a tenure book. I don't recall the editor who picked it up for Duke University Press talking with me about it beyond asking who should blurb. That book, The Heart of Whiteness, is not bad at all, and it's found some audience over the years, but the process felt contaminated. I didn't even consider writing another book for almost 20 years. Which was ok.
2 - How did you come to critical prose first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?
I started with poetry & switched to critical prose as a grad student (sadly, Ph.D. in history, not an MFA). My elegantly WASPy undergrad poetry professor liked me because I was interested in formal mastery; I was too innocent to realize that meant he might not be the best reader for a long, unmetered, explicit piece situated on the edge of sexual consent--I was contemplating the erotic and community repercussions of anti-dyke violence. When he told me this wasn't a poem at all, but a manifesto, I assumed he knew what he was talking about and turned my attention to writing critical theory and historiography. I've never stopped writing poetry, I just dropped out of the craft conversation.
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?
Words spill out of me. I have to do a lot of pruning to find the moment of silence inside, or alongside, the swirl of language. That's the point when I understand what I'm doing. Sometimes it takes years.
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?
Usually I latch on to a word or an idea, or one latches on to me, and then follow it until I and my friends can't take any more. I've just written my third long critical essay structured like a miniature book, with three tiny "chapters" developing a core image from different angles. I didn't start develop this form on purpose. It happened because I think most non-fiction books should be about 20% of their published length, and I hate the idea of someone reading my work and thinking "oh, he should have cut that out, he's just quacking away." I dislike filler.
Recently my poems have mostly been stories that began from something I overheard. I would like to make enough of these to assemble these into a cycle--something with an arc that lets you feel like you've been someplace. That sounds like it might be heading in a book sort of direction.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I adore doing readings! As a kid I learned how to read aloud in church, and also my mother read stories to us with different voices for different characters. I put care into the music of voice--modulating tone, playing with tempo--things like that have everything to do with how we receive meaning. I also read aloud to myself while I write. It tells me when I don't know what I'm saying yet.
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 big questions have always been historical, or even mythic: how did we get here, and how has our road been laid out for us? My current questions are about how we survive. I want to know whether there will be anyone to care about the past.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
We open windows.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
10% essential. Sometimes difficult also. Like any intimacy.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Take the advice you'd give to a student.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I am feral as a poet and professional in prose. I have mostly kept the feral under wraps; allowing it to lead is both exhilarating and scary. That risk is the appeal.
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?
I use birdsong as an alarm and prefer not to speak or be spoken to until I've had two cups of decaf, a bowl of plain oatmeal, and 45 minutes of writing by hand. The cat has opinions about all of the above. So do my children, partner, students, co-parent, department chair, writing partner, colleagues, therapists, garden, sourdough starter and a series of friends--though to be sure these have fewer feelings about the birds. My life is a constant series of relational interruptions. This means that ideas wander out for a long time in loose spirals and then the real conceptual and compositional work has to happen in highly disciplined spasms.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Open sky, other writers doing craft talks and interviews, and the Oxford English Dictionary.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My own body.
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?
Dance has shaped more of my life than anything else except maybe growing up in the country. Ballet, tango, contra, country-western two-step and line dance, country waltz. The attendant somatic practices (Feldenkrais and Pilates), physical therapy and cross-training, and bodywork are all techniques for increasing bodily awareness and self-presence, so that you know what you are feeling and what you are doing: a dancer is a way of being, like a writer is a way of being, only dancing for me cultivates enormous curiosity and joy that happen almost entirely outside of language. Like dancing, writing comes from deep attention, curiosity about what is, and joyous moments of not-thinking. For me, times of not-writing and not-talking sponsor being-in-words on pages.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Subject to change in a flash; yet a few things stick around. I learned to read from Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. T.H. White's The Once and Future King and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish both inform a great deal of my thinking and voice. Both books dig into the relational nature of power; White's sentence structures and tonal variation resonate in my own, and I love and emulate the style with which Foucault loops back and forth from broad strokes to fine lines, vast epistemes to single images from a single moment.
16 - What would you like
to do that you haven't yet done?
Study literary form (as opposed to following my inner metronome). Maybe even
write a villanelle.
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?
I am already so many other things--if I could choose anything it would be *only* to write. And read. Preferably under trees.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I couldn't help it?
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I think more in terms of great reading experiences rather than great books. The most recent book that pulled me entirely into its world was Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind; the most recent to make me read sections aloud to friends was Selby Wynn Schwartz's After Sappho. Not much into film.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I've just finished a short scholarly/creative hybrid-genre art-historical essay called "Kissing the Cavalier." It looks at van Dyck paintings, the history of lace, and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy to tell a story about how aesthetic response can loop us into systems of power we wouldn't have chosen to touch if we'd known what we were doing. I'm edging inexorably into a Southern Gothic book based on stories from my father's incredibly pathological Virginia family.
No comments:
Post a Comment