Category: Process

With many thanks to Moira MacDougal, a poem of mine, “Bringing Back the Body,” is out in the Literary Review of Canada. Although it’s subscribers only, you can find the issue here.

The poem went through a first draft several years ago, and found its way comfortably into the dusty file of things with promise and unsatisfactory execution. Late in 2018, I started going through things I might submit with a little more polish. When I went back over the lines, I realized that basically what the poem needed was deletion. The story was familiar already. It need not be overexplained. The reader needed me to point them to the body, not tell them how to feel about it.

Tighter, more inviting for its openness, I’m pleased to have it come out in the LRC.

Many thanks for Aaron Schneider and Amy Mitchell, today I’ve got out a longish short story (at 10K words, Wikipedia suggests a “novelette,” and why not be oh-so-precious about it) called The Clinical Trial at The Temz Review. At one level, it’s a kind of disturbing, surrealist mystery about an experimental drug. At another, it’s an allegory for the double-consciousness of white nationalism.

I thought I’d write a little background note unpacking this one a little. If you liked the story, this might be of interest. If you didn’t read the story but like decontextualized commentary with spoilers, this is definitely for you. If you hate my politics, you might skip both.

This piece started a couple years ago just as an exercise in form after having read Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Southern Reach might be called an extended piece of surrealist mystery in the sci-fi genre, kind of doing for sci-fi what Paul Auster did for the whodunit, where the mystery is never really solved, but did-anyone-dun-it, why-would-it-be-dun, and who-are-we-in-light-of-the-ambiguity-surrounding-the-dunning-of-it take center stage. Anyways, I found that the form of Southern Reach permitted this beautiful and impressionistic piece meditating on some deep themes, and thought the form seemed so accessible, why not try my hand.

My setting was a drug trial. Once upon a recession I worked four jobs in twelve months and came out sick with all of them, and sat through an orientation for a clinical drug trial, just considering the potential. Filled out the forms, came very close to participating. The scene remains very clear, troubling, exploitative in my mind.

I had a character. An ugly fellow, resentful. Feels he’s better than where he is. Feels he’s better than who he’s surrounded by. Feels he’s better than the hand life has dealt him and his failures are all external. The drug isn’t what he thinks it is. Goes through a monstrous transformation. Becomes something a little more reflective of the inner ugliness.

It didn’t sing. I sent it out exactly twice without much enthusiasm. Parked it. Worked on other projects. It slept a long while.

A year later, men carried torches through the streets of Charleston shouting Jews will not replace us. A Muslim ban was tweaked inch by inch through the courts until it had cobbled a figleaf of diversity. A synagogue shot up in Pittsburgh, a Mosque shot up in Quebec City. By the thousands, brown people people died in Puerto Rico, or were turned into orphans at the US border, and the administration denied and exacerbated it. Black people were murdered on camera without legal consequence and sectors of the media spoke of the black community’s response as though they were describing ISIS. Politicians openly embraced white nationalism as an acceptable label.

It felt like more than a series of tragedies — it felt, at scale, like a shift in consciousness. And I realized that there was this little detail in my story that I’d tried to downplay – the exploitation of that room I’d found myself in was heavily racialized. That I’d perhaps been the only white guy there. It seemed to either beg more direct exploration or to be ignored, and at first, I’d chosen to ignore it.

I was reading, at the same moment, Robert Terrill’s text Double Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, which turned me down the rabbit hole to WEB Dubois and black existentialism a little more broadly. Double consciousness (roughly) was Dubois’ term for a psychological phenomenon in which the racial minority sees him or herself both as they self-identify, and simultaneously as the majority sees them (Terrill, if you’re curious, applied this to Obama in the sense that he was always implicitly trying to fold his critic’s arguments into his own, both to signal his awareness of and to deconstruct them).

I had this idea, fed by some of what was being said about the Obama years and their aftermath, that the rise in white nationalism in America had a distinctive flavor of its own kind of double consciousness. That the majority, just as it is starting to lose its centrality/objectivity, feels for the first time the gaze of the minority on them, and that they become aware of how they are seen. Which is monstrously. That this was a traumatic moment for them.

There are, of course, two ways to respond to that sensation. One is to take it seriously and work towards a better society and etc. etc. And the other is to identify with that monstrosity. To lean into it, to embody it more fully. Which is what we saw in Charleston.

There’s other complementary themes at work here, too – the extent to which both the white nationalist and the people he resents are manipulated by some other authority for their own profit. The extent to which our sense of identity and culture is informed by an obviously racialized intellectual canon.

But that monstrous inversion of double consciousness became the biggest thematic undertone for what this character is going through. It starts subtle, and towards the end gets heavier (incorporating a direct reading, eventually, from Ellison’s Invisible Man). Whether it’s too heavy-handed or not, I suspect, might come down to the reader – I’ve got both perspectives arguing in my head on that.

In an interview newly released for the first time in English, David Foster Wallace is asked about his taste for experimental fiction. A delightful quote pops out:

“When it’s experimental-looking, I never get the sense that it’s experimental because it’s trying to be experimental or trying to make some sort of coy point about structure. It seems that it’s experimental because that was the one and only inevitable way that the author could convey the dimensions of experience and emotion and cognition that was the story’s world.”

Which I want to probe just a little, because the implication suggests causality flowing one way – that the story exists independently, has its own world already, and in order to find expression, has to invent the language or the structure that would serve it.

When I think, rather, it may often be the opposite. That language creates story as often as the inverse. One of the sexiest ideas in neuroscience is how the language we speak shapes the way the mind functions (see also the documentary, Arrival). I think it follows that the narrative structures we use shape the mind in ways that are largely determinative of the kinds of stories we can conceive of, participate in, internalize, derive motive from, perpetuate all our little plots forward into subsequent stories, etc. Give a man a word for god, he will be able to tell the creation story. Take it away, and he will fumble, his sense of wonder grasping at air.

All of which is to say, when you create a new form for language to take, you also invite a new kind of story. And you may be surprised at the material that settles in to fill that container. Give us a new way of seeing a plot assemble, we might recognize points of tension that once lived outside our reckoning. Give a character a new mode of speaking, they might find they have new things to say.

If you’re wondering where the hell all this is coming from, I might be citing back to this post in a year or so, because it’s pretty good explanation of the process for a piece I’m working on now.

Many thanks to Susan Bianconi,  a recent flash fiction of mine, “Self-Similar,” is out today in The Yale Review.

As a light sleeper/vivid dreamer, once in a great while I have the pleasure of waking up having dreamt something that’s the seed of a story or a song. This is a flash fiction, so at 600 words or so, I would say almost the whole thing was there on waking. I typed it out first thing in the morning.

Without dumping on anybody’s work in particular –

Writing about mass trauma is tricky. There is a temptation to write paradigmatic — to essentialize the conflict into your characters so as to say you’ve done it justice — but then you’re probably in a derivative story, paying dues to the tragedy without saying anything new. I’d rather find novel characters and conflicts within the mass, even if they’re not representative — giving new faces and stakes to the subject, which begin to suggest to the reader how many staggering different experiences in absentia must be buried within that mass tragedy. Think of the guy in The Pianist – what do we remember about that movie? It’s not the Holocaust. It’s watching him play air piano in the middle of the Holocaust. It’s watching how much he aches to press his fingers down onto the real keys. It broadens what that tragedy means for us.

So use mass tragedy, but give us something bizarre and wondrous and new in the middle of it. Leave us with a sense of wonder at all the other infinite possible worlds that must be balled up inside of it.

Shakespeare died unknown, apparently. His plays weren’t being performed. There wasn’t a publisher holding his rights. His works wouldn’t get put in print until a while after.

I do believe that once a thing is written, it exists independently of the author. It has a life in the mind of each reader who gives it attention. That attention is where the book finally lives. A precious little bit of a widely read work really belongs to the author.

Which makes the true authors of Shakespeare’s legacy the ones who came after, who gave the plays their attention, who loved them, who offered them a world to live in. They are in a real sense the true heroes of the story, because they had no horse in the race. They came for the love of the work, and until they came, the works were nothing, almost dead.

Just to make explicitly clear that this is all a cry of spurned vanity, waiting for a publisher feels like this.