Life Sucks, Let's Go Shopping!

Marisa Crawford’s Big Brown Bag, my copy of it, anyway, begins with a hand-written epigraph that reads “life sucks, let’s go shopping!”, emblazoned in the blue of the pen I’d just handed her.  The printed epigraph is equally telling: an excerpt from Plath’s The Bell Jar, something about discarded wardrobe items disappearing into the “dark heart of New York.”

Big Brown Bag is a little brown book that is simultaneously perfunctory and deeply profound; it paints a world in broad, plastic strokes, which yield to pure moments of bereavement, and which seem concurrently brooding and blithely consumerist: “I got the long black dress. The dress that leads to nowhere.”  Crawford’s mourning is deemed unavailing in this first line of the collection, but it provides the impetus for the poems to come, which are rife with strongly voiced juxtapositions in the vein of this first tidbit.

Goodie’s, the fictional department store where our protagonist has found employment, provides a backdrop where she can mask her devastation in the trappings of modish fashion and sticker-prices.  Ok, there aren’t sticker prices, but there is a tension between authentic feeling and the culture of buying cool shit: “I am floating toward the earrings and I am pulling toward the world.”

Crawford’s speaker is authentic in the sweetest way.  Not “sweet” like Little Bo Peep sweet, but “sweet” like things were sweet in the 90’s, when 8th graders wore Smashing Pumpkins shirts and watched The Breakfast Club as a rite of passage.  All of these things figure in the broader narrative of Big Brown Bag, as the collection is interested in the perennial MacGuffin of “growing up.”  The speaker has “grown up,” is as grown up as 30 is, and debauches in naiveté with the acumen of the poetic eye.

This is a collection that finds something like joy in the art of masking mourning in the mundanity of trend-shopping facilitation; it is an aggregate of verse-moments that recall the zenith of childhood’s ambition and carouses in its weird disaffection.  Mainly, though, it’s good.

These poems are plainly stated, sharp, and strongly voiced.  They are well-wrought, without a word misplaced, but they paint a speaker who is less sure-tongued.  The speaker happens upon a kind of insight that conflates the agony of loss with the quiet satisfaction of having replaced the vital parts.

Life sucks, let’s go shopping.  Let’s wear different blacks and ride them into the dark heart of wanton anonymity.  Pick up Marisa Crawford’s Big Brown Bag, put Gazing Grain Press’ fourth chapbook inside, and settle down for a good read.  You’ll find your sense of self negotiable, but forward motion is untenable without a degree of caprice.  “Memory is a tire.  Change it.  Go from there.”

Gamut Kickstarter: An Interview with Richard Thomas

I met Richard Thomas when we selected him as a participant in the 2012 Flying House show – a writing and art collaboration project my husband and I host in Chicago each year. In his application, Thomas submitted two short stories he described as surreal – or was it magical realism? – or maybe neo-noir? He was still, I think, finding the space he would fill in the literary world. He was already a great writer, and a fantastic participant in our show, and also one of the hardest working writers I had ever met – but that was also seven award-winning books ago, 100+ published stories ago, before he became an editor of four anthologies, a columnist, an Editor-in-Chief at Dark House Press – you get the idea. He works hard. And, now, he knows exactly what his literary pursuits entail.

As of February 1, Thomas has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Gamut, an online magazine of neo-noir, speculative and literary fiction he hopes to unveil in January of 2017. He wishes to support voices that aren’t getting enough recognition, especially edgy fiction that straddles the fence between genre and literary fiction. If you’ve followed any of his columns, you know Thomas doesn’t write for free, and doesn’t think you should either, so he plans to pay a great rate to his authors – both solicited and not – and he also wants to include columns, non-fiction, art, flash fiction, poetry, and maybe even a serial memoir or novella. This excites me. But let’s hear a little more from Thomas himself…

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Hey there, Richard. I know you’ve probably been talking up your new lit mag nonstop lately, so let’s start somewhere different. When I first read your work, like I said above, it was as part of an application, which meant I was reading blind and it wasn’t until later that I heard your take on your writing. At the time, I thought it was interesting how you described your work as speculative, when I would have called it literary. Maybe I don’t know enough about speculative fiction – so what is it? 

Hey, Megan! Thanks for the kind words. I know speculative fiction covers a number of genres (such as fantasy, science fiction, and horror) and that it typically isn’t grounded in reality, but based on characters, settings, and elements that are created out of human imagination and speculation. For me, that also includes magical realism, and possibly other genres, such as transgressive, and neo-noir. And then of course you have literary horror and classic horror, and everything in-between, the same with fantasy and science fiction. I mean, what exactly do you call Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or The Road? This can’t be just straight literary fiction. You could call them westerns or post-apocalyptic, or even thrillers. What about Joyce Carol Oates and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” There are some supernatural elements in there as well, hints of a demon or devil, ESP, cloven feet maybe? And really, that’s what I’m most excited about as an author, editor, teacher and publisher. I love authors that straddle the fence between genre and literary fiction, taking the best from both. I want compelling narratives, that keep me turning the pages, a sense of wonder, as well as the thoughtful, insightful, more philosophical elements. An author like Benjamin Percy, for example, can publish in both The Paris Review and Cemetery Dance. Or people like George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, even Toni Morrison. 

Fantastic. For me, your description elevates my idea of genre fiction into the literary, and I had probably been a bit biased against genre fiction in the past, thinking of them as “fast reads” or formulaic (even if I love me some genre every now and again). I think speculative writing is becoming more popular, just as fan fiction and vampire fiction and Pride and Prejudice with Zombies fiction is growing in popularity. Do you agree? Have you encountered any of this snobbery along the way while writing crime/horror?

Oh there are snobs for sure. And there are genre fans that hate literary fiction, too. I mean there is innovative work being done in all genres, and really back writing in every genre as well. I see a lot of nose wrinkling in academia, but then again, there are programs that embrace it, such as UC-Riverside, which I just visited as a guest author—a fantastic MFA program there. Seton Hill has a Popular and Genre Fiction program, as well. I mean, I think it’s important to study the classics, to read Cheever, Carter, JCO and Nabokov. But there’s a lot to learn from reading King, Grisham, and Rowling, too. I see more and more speculative fiction easing its way into the Best American Short Storiesanthologies, into The New Yorker, and other places. With certain genres, there are definitely expectations—with horror you want to be scared, with mystery you want to solve something—and that’s fine. I understand wanting an “easy read” for sure. But the novels and stories that move me the most, they find that sweet spot between dense and fast-paced, between emotional and gritty, between lyrical and entertaining. For MFA programs to ignore genre fiction is—I think it’s irresponsible. Look at The New York Times best seller lists—you know what’s on there? Mystery, romance, horror, fantasy, science fiction, YA, and literary. 

I agree with you. That sweet spot between “dense and fast-paced, between emotional and gritty, between lyrical and entertaining” is what I call being immersed in a good story. And the easier a writer can make their world seem to the reader, the better writer he or she is. What is it about this kind of writing that made you want to write in this genre?

Well, I grew up reading Stephen King, and he’ll tell you he’s a great storyteller, but not exactly a lyrical author. I think I sought out a range of voices, such as early Ray Bradbury leading me to William Burroughs and on to Chuck Palahniuk. I like to be surprised, I like to be moved, and I want to be hypnotized by the characters, the story, and the voice. When I first discovered Palahniuk, he got me to some neo-noir authors—Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger, and Stephen Graham Jones. I loved how dense they were, how lyrical, but they weren’t boring or expected. They weren’t formulaic. When I write, I want to pull you into the story, to be the protagonist, experiencing what he (or she) is going through. I want to scare you, make you laugh, turn you on, enlighten you, and leave you spent. I want you to go hug your kids, lock the doors, and then stare out into the darkness wondering what might be possible, both the tragic and hopeful, the vengeful and mystical. I used to read a lot of mysteries, but over time, in a series, it’s all the same thing. If you pick up Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, I guarantee you’ve never read anything like it. The perfect blend of the horrific and the fantastic, the mix of light and dark, lyrical and visceral—it’s just amazing. 

I haven’t read Perdido Street Station, and now I will. What you say about pulling your reader into the story is right-on though. In your book, Disintegration, especially, I felt your protagonist pull – demand, force, coerce – me into his world in such a great and powerful way. A visceral way. A visual way.

Thanks. When I finished that book I broke down and started crying. I thought I might throw up. I’d BEEN him for so long, this unnamed protagonist. I guess you’d call it “method writing,” having sat in that place for so long, taking the advice of Jack Ketchum, and writing what scared me the most—seeing my wife and kids killed in a car accident. It was pretty intense. It also helped that it was set in Wicker Park, where I lived for ten years, in my old apartment, and old haunts. I could picture the rooms, the aqua stove, the people on the street—I could hear the Blue Line “L” train go by.

That takes some guts. Also – I’m pretty sure we were neighbors once upon a time. Small world.

I’ve noticed when your books are in the final stages of editing – or your anthologies – there’s quite a bit of hype around the artwork that will be included. More so, I think, than I’ve seen outside of the horror/crime/mystery category. Do you agree? Do you think that this is because this particular genre is so closely tied to the physical, visual world?

I do think the fantastic, the horrific, the magical, begs to be seen, and to be drawn. Whether it’s Neil Gaiman or Lovecraft. I think my personal attraction to art in the anthologies I’ve edited and published comes from two places—my desire to give my readers something more, the illustrations adding to the experience, and my background in advertising for twenty years as an art director and graphic designer. I want the books to look nice, to be fun, to be well designed—you should pick them up and hold them, turn them over, enjoy the imagery, all of the elements. I’m a very tactile person. I’ve also seen so many horrible covers, especially in horror, that I knew I wanted to use original photography and illustrations on all of my books. It’s important to me.

Does this have anything to do with your interest in including artwork in Gamut?

Definitely. It’s the same way at Gamut—there will be original drawings with every story. Luke Spooner will be doing that—he’s done most of the interior work I’ve published at Dark House Press. I can say, “Draw me a crib,” and it’ll be the coolest, creepiest crib you’ve ever see. And we have other perspectives, too, from George C. Cotronis, Daniele Serra, Bob Crum, and Jennifer Moore. They’ve all done cover art or other projects for me at Dark House Press. 

So…we’ve uttered the word, Gamut. Tell us what you are most excited about – the first thing you want to tackle – once your Kickstarter is funded (because I hope it will be!).

The stories! I have a list of reprints that I’m dying to get to, work I couldn’t publish in other places. These are my favorite authors, so I want to go get those dark tales and share them with the world. And the new work, man, I really have no idea what they’ll turn in, which is really exciting! I know a story from Livia Llewellyn or Laird Barron or Damien Angelica Walters will be something special. It’ll be new, just for our readers, and I can’t wait to share these with them. I’m being a bit of a patron (or maybe I should say fanboy) here, too, supporting the voices that matter to me, that inspire me, that push me to be a better author. 

Nothing wrong with that! It’s so important to support and encourage the writers we love.  

For sure. If people didn’t support me, encourage me when I was just getting started, I’d never have written anything. Craig Clevenger really pushed me to send out a story I wrote in a class of his, entitled, “Stillness.” I didn’t have any faith in it, but I sent it out. Of course, I sent it to all the wrong places at first, but eventually it landed in Shivers VIalongside Stephen King and Peter Straub. But I needed that initial push, that support. 

You’re a writer. You’ve edited a bunch of books. You’re more than qualified to start a lit mag, and you’ve told me you’ve been working toward this for years – so what’s standing in the way? I’m thinking you’re going to say money. Is it money?

Money, yes. That’s the big one. But really, I wanted to start this project WITH people. I didn’t want to do it alone. This isn’t about me, it’s about being a part of the landscape of excellent publishing that’s already going on—at Tor, Nightmare, Cemetery Dance, Apex, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, etc. I’ve been inspired by editors like Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, Paula Guran, John Joseph Adams, Michael Kelly, and many others. Not only did I want to surround myself with talented authors, but I wanted the original patrons and supporters to be a part of this as well. I want them to suggest people to me, to have an open discussion, and I want them to send in their work. With a vehicle like Kickstarter people are invested—literally. And whether it’s $30 or $130 or $1,030 this is where we all come together to create something new, and exciting, and interesting. A few places have closed, recently, and others are no longer taking submissions, so it seemed like the right time to step up and take this chance. We’re going to pay ten cents a word, which is more than most, and we’re going to embrace dark, weird, literary stories, which sometimes have a hard time finding a home.

Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahnuik, Marcus Sakey – they’ve all backed you. A mile-long list of authors have given verbal agreements to write for your magazine. A host of editors and artists have signed on to help once the magazine is up and running. It has to feel great knowing this dream of yours is about to come to fruition – or are you too worried to enjoy the love?!  

You know, Megan, if I wasn’t bipolar when I started, I probably am now. As we speak it’s day two, and we’ve raised almost $8,000. I’m both thrilled with that and also disappointed. I go back and forth. One minute I think we can’t do this, the next I think this is definitely going to work out. So, yes, I am pretty worried, but if everyone who says they want to change the industry, everyone who says there aren’t enough paying markets, actually steps up and contributes, we should be able to make this happen. I don’t want people to do this for me, I want them to do it for the authors who are going to write the stories, for the artists who will draw new work, for the writers who will now have a new place to submit and get paid—and for themselves, to create a new magazine for entertainment, enlightenment, and fulfillment.

I can’t wait to see how your Kickstarter project works out – and even more so how the launch of Gamut goes. Thank you for the interview, Richard, and best of luck!

Thanks, Megan, I really appreciate the continued interest and support. Means a lot.

The Erasure and Self-erasure of Women's Voices: A Review of Kristina Marie Darling's Women and Ghosts

The multiple modes of the erasure and self-erasure of women’s voices sit heavy with me this morning. I’ve read a beautiful and daring text entitled Women and Ghosts, by Kristina Marie Darling, which is part essay and part prose-poem, all experimental, where line-throughs, footnotes, multiple narrative lines, and alternating gradients of text are used to tell stories of female negations with silences and near silences—those that speak to the horror one can feel to realize that the acceptance of internalized conditioning to be less, to take up less space, is actually the most dangerous act a woman can commit or condone on a path to empowerment—and these have a long history. Kristina Marie Darling’s Women and Ghosts is a terrifying read, one well worth the time. For me, it felt like a beautiful funeral shroud, a gossamer wrap of a book I was reminded to cut myself free from in order to survive.

In this book, death, denial, self-sacrifice, and romance are inexorably linked. Gender and gender privilege are examined. The author is subversive in her inclusions and omissions, and the lines are meant to be catalysts toward appropriate rage. “In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia drowns under the weight of her own dress,” Women and Ghosts begins. “I had never imagined before that plain white silk could kill.”

But plain white silk didn’t kill, the reader may argue, jarred already by muted color of the words and the obvious falsehood they champion. Since when was a dress capable of killing? Enter now Darling’s world of realigning the reader’s reality by engaging in disruptive discourse. As the author expects the reader to remember, Ophelia, after losing her lover to palace intrigues, drowns herself in Hamlet. Surely her dress is not to blame, and neither is the water in which Ophelia, off-stage, drowns. At a deeper level, all readers familiar with Shakespeare’s play are aware that the lead character Hamlet’s rejection causes Ophelia’s complete self-immolation. And yet, in line one, Darling adjusts the narrative to hide the crime, makes excuses for it, blames a party blameless as a starry night or a sparkling lake, as written history often does, blurring the lines of blame in order to appropriately question them, where the dress in a virginal hue, ode to female innocence or purity, a highly gendered garment, takes betrayal’s place as villain.

Welcome to the nightmare gender labyrinth of refutation and disavowal. Not to read too much into this single line, but I already felt a chill travel my spine to see the exchange of correctly placed blame for self-defeating symbology and experienced a simultaneous awareness that this chill was intentionally created by the skillful author to highlight the contrast text the reader proceeds with as a paralleled modern “I” woman examines Ophelia’s plight and concurrently exists in a terrifying room where lovers spar and the ambient temperature grows colder and colder, as a modern man serves her joint bouts of gaslighting and liquor, tantamount to emotional abuse. Between doses of his cruelty and lack of returned care, in a sort of willful thought departure, the narrator muses on the aspects of Hamlet’s Ophelia plot most difficult and “unsayable,” at one point asking, “But what does it mean to give one’s consent? We are led and misled by those we love…” where a similar facility of displacement puts the reader right into the ghosted narrative of being two places at once, both interred in a historical play with a dead female victim of self-slaughter and standing in the midst of a new tragic history played out, where the “I” protagonist, already muted by pale ink, lives through a similar sort of identity reduction.

It is telling enough that this modern narrator says, “When he smiled, I felt my whole body grow colder,” where it seems as if a man’s cold judgment, masked by the false mirth of a smile, is on deliberate parallel with a lake in which to drown. Darling’s use of white space here, of incomplete interactions, of dissonance in the said/unsaid, is masterful.

Enter Shakespeare’s own words, often, as foil. Boldly on the pages that follow this opening line, interlacing at strategic intervals, the font periodically darkens, and the reader finds lined-through quotes from the bard, carefully excerpted to highlight the age old dilemma of inadequate self-valuation, of lost agency, of roles, one of such line-through excerpts reading, for example, “And I, of ladies most deject and wretched…”

Here we see the duality of the work’s intent. On the one hand, this text receiving line-through, seems an empowering strategy where Ophelia’s self-negation is defeated by being struck from the record by a female author. However, it is also a female author’s inclusion of a man’s depiction of a woman’s defeat in darker text than the narrative of the modern fictive woman beside it. As in a painting, a color is best read in context, beside another color—so, surrounded by the pale gray text of the I narrator, the stronger hue of a man’s words, lined out or not, seem to extend the struck sentiment well beyond the century in which it was crafted.

The status quo to be combatted, Darling’s line-through subtext seems to read, is hundreds of years of powerlessness in love. The status quo is women, in literature and life, silenced by men, whether they be those written by male authors as foils to kill for moments of tragic beauty in plays or simply real life lovers in the average living room scene of standard living—it is, after all, Shakespeare who killed Ophelia as a plot device, he who chose her undoing and drew a pretty bow on the tragedy of the tragedy of Hamlet. But you’ll note, in the tradition of entitling tragedies (Antigone, MacBeth, King Lear), that the title character is usually the protagonist. And Ophelia, memorable as she is, Darling wishes to remind us, has never had a play as her namesake. The tragedy was larger than the woman who died for it, her loss relegated to being just a pittance in another man’s more important drama.

It is a whirlwind ride to enter and learn the ways of reading this book, requiring more than just the absorption of words. One must stare at the pages and internalize the import in the way space and color is used. What is bold or shown in a darker font creates relevance in multiple sections where it seems a philosophical question has been asked of the reader, one with multiple hard answers. For my part, I found I was trained by the text to read with excitement when dark lines came, always hoping for more from a female voice rather than a male voice—yet, nearly each time Darling’s women spoke in dark font, what I came away with was a deepening sorrow where Darling had not given these women much voice but actually instead turned the screws of depicting a torturous silencing game, “my lord…my lord,” to reveal yet more dissection about how women’s institutionalized devaluation can be a learned, continuous, and self-regulating structure. It does so via reaching through much of Shakespeare’s canon—be forewarned, this book takes on more plays than solely Hamlet, pausing to meditate in women’s roles in others like Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Titus Andronicus, and more.

It then introduces the I character as a playwright and again establishes parallels between the doomed female characters in Shakespeare’s theatrical work and the hard work of women trying to write the matter that becomes publicly influential. A particularly difficult segment to read for this reader was the section called “Essays on Production,” where the “I” narrator discusses her work as an author of plays and the staging and reviews of her plays. For the entire segment, many pages long, the “I” character not only has a mute gray voice, a ghosted presence, but all her words are lined-through as well. Devastating. One excerpt that held my attention a good long while is found below, where a critic subjects our protagonist to the standard double-standard faced by women in the arts: Judgement made personal where slut-shaming is so ubiquitous it flows uncensored and there is no appropriate response for the artist to make since the artist, not the art, is on trial:

One critic did deliver a verdict, suggesting there must be some underlying reason that I cared so much about Ophelia, an unconscious obsession with the torn dress, a fixation on ruined clothing. I was the whore, the wronged beloved, the bride abandoned at the altar. I stood accused, but when I tried to plead my case, I found I could no longer speak.

So, if I am female, should I make myself more mute, are there more ways to do so, the narrative seems to ask the reader in multiple sections, with many strategies—and would you like to watch for how many centuries the same story of this abjuration repeats itself?

As Darling’s work in Women and Ghosts alternates between representations of Shakespearean women and scenes with or about her “I” narrator, the resultant despair that ensues for this reader is heightened when I am carried along as witness to the crimes, to the travesties, when the act of self-silencing as visible on the page actually serves as a cautionary tale to inspire agency for doing the opposite.

Perhaps an awakening for the reader was the goal of this book, the wake-up call, the warning. I am now awake. Thank you, Ms. Darling. One wants to test one’s voice after reading Women and Ghosts, to make sure it still works. Rarely does one read a book that holds such a narrative of disturbing dualities. Via stunning use of erasure and white space, Darling creates the kind of poetic narrative that twists the puzzles of representation in so many directions that the reader comes to live in both the darkness and the lightness of the font, in its presence and its absence.

Women and Ghosts is a trompe l’oeil of a book.   Inspired is the word I’d use to describe it, difficult, revelatory. Darling has written a text that speaks deeply to the violence of silence, of choosing silence, of being silenced. Anyone who has experienced this sort of relationship or actuality in reality may have a difficult time with this read. It brings it all back.

Women and Ghosts is a truly important book, the kind of book I would lovingly give to a female friend, but about which I would say: “This will hurt to read, but read it. Then read it again… Let us then talk and see what we can do to change upcoming history. And let’s make a different history, starting now.”

David Bowie Changes: A Review of Simon Jacobs's Saturn

I have always been very affected by pop culture. My eighth grade English teacher predicted I would become the editor of a women’s magazine. Despite not living up to her wishes (yet), when asked to name influences for my own creative practices, music and film are as likely to show up on the list as other writers and their associated presses. Unsurprisingly, some of my own published work has focused around celebrity, an example being Bound: An Ode to Falling in Love, a chapbook my partner Jackson Nieuwland and I wrote in homage to Kimye, imagining them as an interstellar, blended reptilian alien family.

One important precursor to the Kimye phenomenon was Bowie and Iman, two of my idols and touchstones in the creative world, both equally fabulous and worthy of praise for being the bright stars they are. In Saturn, Simon Jacobs imagines David Bowie in a variety of poses through a series of prose flashbulbs. Flash, and we see “David Bowie Bids on a Piece of Modern British Art”; flash, and we see “David Bowie Takes a Commercial Space Flight”; flash, and we see “David Bowie Attends a Charity Event Hosted by His Wife”.

While the focus of Saturn is ostensibly on Bowie, ‘his wife, supermodel Iman (for whom he has written songs)’ has a role to play in nearly every narrative thread, on close to every page of the chapbook. She lies beside him in bed, she is the mother of their child Lexi, she whispers to him in Arabic. She was his love at first sight, a constant reminder of his aging body. ‘Though she is well over fifty, David Bowie is struck with the realization that she looks exactly the same as the day they met nearly twenty-five years ago, that while he sits and grows old hourly, she, Iman, has simply, abruptly, and entirely stopped.’ Flash, and we see “David Bowie Watches Himself Age 200 Years”. When she leaves, he enters a death spiral.

The David Bowie of Saturn is an aging artist, confronting himself at what he perceives to be the tail end of his nearly fifty-year career. This Bowie, not so dissimilarly, perhaps, from the ‘real’ Bowie, is constantly reflecting inward upon himself. The art he paints, the art he purchases, the roles he plays, the characters he creates, are all versions of him. He speaks in quotes from his own lyrics, surrounds himself in self-portraits, finds joy in the discovery that Tilda Swinton is yet another version of him. Occasionally, this discovery is loathsome; Bowie describes ‘the terror of one who looks so much like his past’ while attending a film premier with ‘his son, BAFTA-winning filmmaker Duncan Jones’ (flash, and we see “David Bowie Attends the Premier of His Son’s Latest Film”) and in these moments, he begins to fade away.

Most notable is Jacobs’ recurring depiction of Bowie as Saturn, of Saturn Devouring His Son (flash, and we see “David Bowie Examines Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings Shortly after a Massive Heart Attack”). In a final flash that feels spontaneous, yet in retrospect was fully premeditated, Bowie cannibalizes the body of Duncan Jones. Bowie’s ultimate act is quite physical, but we have seen his thought process as it played out across Saturn: the jealousy harbored for previous selves, the terror and stagnation felt in moments of physical collapse, the astonishment he felt for others, which time had left unflawed.

Spork Press’ design principles work in total harmony with the aesthetic of Saturn. Their books are chunky and almost square, with thick board covers and rough hewn edges. (Think about trimming a book with a very precise chainsaw and you’ve got Sander Monson Jr. What he actually looks like is a mystery to me.) Illustrations throughout reinforce and replicate scenes from Bowie’s life, as Simon Jacobs as imagines it. One of these scenes, Bowie ‘gripping the bloody husk of a body before him’, gnawing on the flesh of his son, is embossed onto the thick cardboard cover of the book, with Bowie inked in copper; the blood, an alien green. Spork has made some of the most beautiful books I own (see also: Feng Sun Chen’s Blud) and some others I desperately want. (Full disclaimer: I went over the list of Spork titles I wished I owned in my head, then in a bout of mania went to their website and ordered six books. Don’t go to the Spork site – actually, don’t even think about their books – unless you feel ready to spend all of your available cash.)

In his acknowledgements, Simon Jacobs thanks David Bowie for his influence on the writer’s own personality. He calls Saturn ‘the result of years of devotion’ and more-than-casual research. My own first encounter with the icon was similarly formative, at age thirteen by way of a looping reel of his music videos at the Journeys shoe store in the Towson Town Mall. I was shopping for my first high school dance with my conservative mom when Ziggy Stardust appeared on the monitor and, thinking I was being shocking, I pointed him out. My mother and the sales associate immediately started raving about David Bowie, trading stories, glued to the screen, while I tried on some pair of wooden heels in the corner. That’s the day I realized David Bowie was the ultimate babe and the only sensible creative mentor for me, for all of us, going forward.

Berit Ellingsen's Not Dark Yet Is The Story of How Global Crisis Becomes Personal

Somewhere in a northern land, a man decides to leave his life and love in the city and sequester himself in a mountain cabin. The time is probably the not-so-distant future; but, as with so many aspects of Berit Ellingsen’s sci-fi novel Not Dark Yet, we’re asked to make up our own minds about that. The story is both a personal as well as a global one. In fact, Not Dark Yet is the story of how global crisis becomes personal.

The central character in this meticulously detailed narrative is Brandon Minamoto, a man in crisis—of identity, belonging, and loyalty. Although we know so much about him—his sexual orientation (gay), his job (photographer), and his ethnic heritage (Japanese if his name is an accurate indication of this); we also know he’s an athlete, an altruist and a dreamer—Ellingsen goes to great lengths to make this story about none of these things specifically.

There is one aspect of the character’s life that is central and telling: he has epilepsy. And while he has only a couple of seizures in the novel, they do give the reader an indication of what’s really going on in this character’s head. Not Dark Yet is about humanity’s quest for enlightenment. Of course it’s also about one man’s quest for enlightenment, but Ellingsen’s narrative technique of defamiliarizing the concepts of gender, language and place has the effect of universalizing this quest. But before I get to that, let’s talk about epilepsy and self-mummification.

There’s a brilliantly direct relationship between the Buddhist tradition of self-mummification and the central character’s decision to leave society for the mountain cabin. His epileptic seizures are described as euphoric glimpses of enlightenment—a brightness—more so than a malady. The Buddhist monk appears in a flashback, a scene with the central character’s brother. It’s one brief chapter, but it’s also a sort of key to the book. The description of the monk’s last stages of self-mummification are remarkably similar to the description of the main character’s seizures:

The monk:

“Yet, in the spring he dis­covered a brightness, a glow inside himself, that was beautiful and terrible at the same time. He had no words for it and did not try to explain it, but remained inside it when he could, and simply watched it when he couldn’t.”

Brandon Minamoto:

“During the previous spring the brightness became impossible to ignore, but he had gradually grown used to it. After the initial blast it usually faded to a glow behind his thoughts, but now, in the solitude of the cabin with nothing to distract him, the brightness over­took him.”

One can hardly ignore this consonance. And of course these are not the only similarities: the monk and the main character also share a strict diet, strenuous physical exercise, and the compulsion to leave this earth. This is, we shouldn’t forget, science fiction.

Being a hermit in the mountains isn’t enough for the central character. He’s also applied to the space program for a chance to fulfill his boyhood dream of going to Mars. And this is sadly all I can say about this part of the novel without giving away the end.

One important choice in Ellingsen’s narrative is how she defamiliarizes gender, language, and place. Other than somewhere in a northern country, we are not offered any place names. The city—as is often the case in Ellingsen’s shorter fiction—is described simply as, well, the city. The author has also reduced the continents to the points on a compass. She does something similar with the languages in the story. Instead of, say, Japanese, she uses the term “the language of their birthplace”. Though the story is transcribed in English, the reader occasionally has the feeling that the characters could be speaking any language. When the central character goes to a coastal town to get his medical exam for the space program, he has the following exchange in a shop:

‘He nodded at the man behind the counter, who addressed him in an eastern language he didn’t understand.

“Sorry,” he said in the language of the coastal country they were in. “Are you still serving lunch?”

“Lunch, dinner, whatever you need,” the man said, in their common language.’

In removing the names of the languages—and the names of the continents and cities—Ellingsen universalizes the themes in the story. This book is about enlightenment: global enlightenment during a time when humanity is just starting to feel the devastating effects of global warming, when global warming is starting to ruin personal dreams and impede individual quests for enlightenment. The title of the book may be a warning, or it may be a message of hope. It’s not dark yet.

An Interview with Carmiel Banasky

Carmiel Banasky and I sit at Crema Bakery & Café in SE Portland a couple days after her recent reading at Powell’s City of Books. We chitchat about Portland (where she’s originally from and where I currently live) and the giddy significance of reading at a landmark like Powell’s (a bit more on that later). After the interview, we talk for a while about agents, publishers, writing conferences, and things you might say when seeing somebody’s baby for the first time—like “hope he doesn’t grow up to be a serial killer.” Carmiel’s a delight, and her book is filled with the same wit, weirdness, and touches of humor.

Carmiel’s debut novel, The Suicide of Claire Bishop, is out now from Dzanc Books. It’s a story with two concurrent protagonists: Claire and West. A decades-old painting binds these two characters together. Claire is the original subject of this 1959 painting; fast forward to 2004 and West becomes obsessed with the idea that it was painted by his ex-girlfriend, the enigmatic Nicolette. The more West weans off his schizophrenia meds, the more real this connection becomes. As the story progresses, coincidences and clues pile up, and the reader wonders whether West is onto something. The novel moves deftly across generations and crafts an interwoven narrative of two lives, inexplicably bound together yet worlds apart. The novel delights in its own contradictions and challenges the reader’s assumptions of truth and untruth. In short, it’s a book about doubt; it’s about negative space; it’s about the fragility of the human mind. So where to begin? When the tape recorder rolls, I decided to dive into the most obvious question first; I’ve heard Carmiel answer this question before, but she always has more to say on the subject.

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James R. Gapinski: Why did you write a novel about schizophrenia?

Carmiel Banasky: I have been trying to find new ways to tell this story, but the basics are that I had two friends who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was just blown away by their experiences, but mostly I was blown away that I had never heard of those experiences before, and I had never read those experiences. I was just trying to write something that I wanted to read, and I wanted to write an experience that they could recognize on the page in a way that they might not have read before in literary fiction. It was also about my own fear of their experiences too. These were my friends, who I had known on both sides of their diagnoses—and just seeing how fragile the mind is—I wanted to investigate my own fear of madness too, and our own fragility as humans and our bodies. If I ever had an agenda, it was to make sure that West was relatable and that this disease was not so off-putting. The images that we see as schizophrenia are so often linked to violence because that’s what makes the nightly news, you know?

JRG: Yeah, I know what you mean.

CB: We’re not going to see a peaceful portrayal of schizophrenia on the news, so I just wanted to offer this other narrative.

JRG: We’re not seeing that on the news for sure—but we’re also missing it in other literature and pop culture too. I feel like people get this one view of what schizophrenia means, and it’s used in a specific way on the page for this over-the-top effect. Besides these sorts of violence stereotypes, what other preconceived ideas did you have to fight against or research more?

CB: Colloquially schizophrenia—the term schizophrenia—is used completely wrong. It’s used to mean multiple personality disorder. When you hear someone say “I feel so schizophrenic,” what they mean is “I feel of many minds” or something, and they feel like a different person one day to the next, but that’s not what schizophrenia is at all. That was interesting to realize. The other thing about schizophrenia is that when it has been portrayed really empathetically—like in the film A Beautiful Mind—the hallucinations were portrayed visually. Because how can you portray hallucinations on the screen if not visually? Usually with schizophrenia its actually aural hallucinations. Those kind of sound hallucinations might translate and feel visual or of this space [Carmiel gestures to the café table and surrounding physical space], but it’s more like sounds that you hear echoing throughout the day, dialogue you might’ve heard that morning, it feels like it’s happening right now. That’s how some people explained an episode, or feeling like a metaphor is real. Like if someone feels like their heart is broken metaphorically, to a schizophrenic person it might feel like their heart is physically breaking. I had to figure out ways to show West’s hallucinations on the page without making them visual.

JRG: And you mentioned earlier about an intrigue with how fragile the mind is. Without giving anything a way, at a certain point in the book you get into Alzheimer’s too. Did that all stem from this same exploration of the mind, or is that a personal connection too?

CB: I did know somebody with Alzheimer’s, so a lot of my research was recalling my time with her. It was another avenue to explore how easily our mind’s change. Alzheimer’s was another way to explore how we change and ask the questions “How can we trust our own selves?” and “How can we know our own selves” if our minds can so easily change. I think about that a lot about. I tried to write a short story that I think failed—it’s in a drawer somewhere—about someone with a brain tumor who becomes a pedophile because of this brain tumor pressing on their frontal lobe, but that wasn’t who they were before this growth on their brain which completely changes them, changes how the world sees them, and their family, and how their family sees them. Just finding ways to ask that question and explore it.

JRG: You mentioned some of the research involved with Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, but what sort of research did you do into different time periods? The book jumps between time periods, but the reader is with you and accepts it.

CB: A lot of it was trying to figure out the language of the time, and reading things from that time—like newspaper articles—and I read a lot of Village Voice articles from the ’60s, and language from then to now isn’t that different, but little key signifiers are important to both gain the reader’s trust that we are in this time period and to point out that context but without drawing attention to itself. That was important, and usually that was just through one phrase or one terminology. Also watching how Claire’s own language changes throughout the book. She calls black people in 1959 “American Negroes,” and in the ’60s she finally has to talk to a black person for the first time in her life. Thinking about that and how Claire changes—it was as much about character development as setting development. Listening to music, reading memoirs, but also interviewing. That was fun. I got to interview a lot of people who were both young enough and old enough to remember the ’60s and ’50s in New York City, and they loved talking about it and wanted me to use certain stories and details.

JRG: New York is prominently featured, so are different locations like Port Townsend, Washington. There’s a definite sense of place. How much of that was born out of your residency-hopping versus research, or pulled out of thin air, or what?

CB: I lived in New York for four years—all over the city and in Brooklyn—but I didn’t really start writing about New York until I left it. I think that leaving New York was a way for me to get back at it and to be able to write about it. It was the people at residencies who I met that I interviewed mostly—the older writers and artists who I met there. Of course, between residencies I always went back to Port Townsend, and I started working at Goddard in 2011. But I’d always gone to Port Townsend at least once a year. It was probably where I really first took myself seriously as a writer at the Centrum Writer’s Conference. Port Townsend had to be in the book. I tried to cut out Port Townsend completely—for a while West did not go back home. There’s two homecomings in the book—Claire’s and West’s—they both go back to their childhood homes. I fought leaving New York and tried to cut that section out, but then it didn’t seem full or whole anymore. We had to leave New York—just like how I had to leave New York—to come back to it. To come full circle. Does that make sense?

JRG: Yes, of course. There are too many novels that are all about New York anyway.

CB: Yeah, there are a lot of New York novels, that’s true [Carmiel laughs].

JRG: What are some books or authors who have influenced you?

CB: I love Michael Ondaatje, he was a huge influence. Coming Through Slaughter had such an impact on me. Colin McCann—especially Let the Great World Spin—and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Specimen Days. Stylistically those . . . [Carmiel pauses and grins] . . . those three white men [both laugh] were very influential on this book. But the first stylist who I think influenced them—and me in turn—was Virginia Woolf. With Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, how she portrays his view of the world, and how everything’s interconnected, and the language she uses to show his ideas of interconnectedness—I learned a lot from that on how to portray West’s ideas. The way she shifts between points of view. I love Mrs. Dalloway so much—not everybody does, but I do—and also some of Virginia Woolf’s books are not accessible, but that one is. A lot of modernists are not accessible, so learning from her on how she can still have everything she wants out of her prose and still write with such beauty. She’s always putting story first with Mrs. Dalloway, as opposed to Orlando which is maybe more about rhythm and sound than story. Also Ursula K. Le Guin. I love her work so much. We exchanged a couple letters many years ago, and that had a huge impact on me as a writer, and what it could mean to be a writer, and how to just do what you want.

JRG: What sort of context? Like “fan letters” or what?

CB: [Carmiel laughs] I totally wrote her a fangirl letter, but then it became a correspondence. I spent weeks writing as beautiful a letter as I could. Then she wrote back and told me how beautiful the letter was [both laugh], and that made my life. Then we wrote back and forth and then switched to e-mail. It was just really important to me—that tiny exchange, which lasted around seven exchanges or something. We talked about Karl Jung; we talked about love and characters. It was good. It was special.

JRG: I think a lot of writers are more accessible than people think as soon as you actually reach out and say “Hey, I like your work” and make the attempt.

Writers want to hear from readers—or some do anyway, and some are standoffish, but most want to connect with people and that’s why they’re writing. A newer writer who has influenced me is Melinda Moustakis, she’s really wonderful. She’s an example of someone who just writes so beautifully and experimentally but is also super accessible—the writing I mean.

JRG: This whole first book whirlwind thing: is it exciting or just long and drawn out and tedious?

CB: [Carmiel laughs] It’s anxiety provoking and exciting. I guess there’s tedium in there. I haven’t been writing for the last couple months. I’ve been sending e-mails about my book with all my spare time. I’ve been as proactive as I possibly can be, but it really takes a lot of time and energy to do that. But yes, it’s exciting. I’m never going to have the kind of homecoming that I had in Portland for any birthday or even like a wedding. It felt more like a bris or something the other night at Powell’s. Seeing all the people and love that I have in my life and the community that supports me and is excited for me—that has been really special. There’s ups and downs. There’s this weird high. This spotlight that I never had or ever sought out, so there’s obviously a come-down from that. Thinking about reviews, and will the book get reviewed, and questions like that—you know, questions about sales—mostly, I would like to just be protected from any information that I don’t need to know and just go about doing the events that I can and sending the e-mails that I can, but that’s in the back of my head too.

JRG: Even after you’re hit with the logistics and the reviews and numbers, then you still have this lull between your next release when you’re just working and not having all this spotlight.

CB: I’m looking forward to that—the quiet—because I would like to get back to writing and really living in the next book rather than mostly in this book and a tiny bit in the next project. That’ll be nice.

JRG: You had mentioned at Powell’s that you have a couple things on the burner. Do you know where you’re probably focusing or what your next project will be?

CB: I don’t know which one I’ll really dive into and spend the most time on yet. I have a couple things. I have drafts done of the fantasy book and of a TV pilot that I wrote—which my editor told me I should turn into a novel and then rewrite as a pilot, and I don’t know, I’m not sure how I see it anymore. But the thing I’ll probably write—which I did not mention the other night, I don’t think—is another book about suicide. And I don’t feel like The Suicide of Claire Bishop is about suicide, but it has it in the title [both laugh], and this next one is actually about suicide. I don’t really want to pigeonhole myself as a suicide writer—that sounds horrible—but that’s the story that I really want to write and has been really difficult to write. I’ve been writing it for years now, just in really short spurts, because it’s really sad and has been hard to write. I need to just do it. Maybe now is not a good emotional time to do it, but we’ll see. I think a lot about self-care for writers, so I’ll just need to figure out what I can do for myself to make sure it’s okay to write this thing.

JRG: What’s your usual self-care?

CB: I don’t have a ritual, but I do think about rituals of others. Like my friend Melissa Chadburn is writing a novel that comes out next year about a serial killer—from the point of view of his victims—and it’s so dark. So she lights a candle when she’s ready to write, and she writes for a couple hours, and then she blows out the candle, and it’s just a symbol to not take that darkness with her into life, into her every day. That helps her a lot, so maybe I need a ritual like that. Also things like making sure I’m exercising—I don’t exercise at all—but I need to be in my body, especially in times of writing dark things and being completely in my head. Meditating. Going dancing. Getting out of your room and going to be part of your writing community and talking to people who get it. That’s all part of the self-care.

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If you’re interested in getting out of the apartment, connecting with the writing community, and practicing some self-care, a list of Carmiel Banasky’s upcoming events are available on her website. The Suicide of Claire Bishop is available now.