Thomas Mar Wee

ELIZABETH: In your own words, could you introduce yourself both to me and to the reader and share who you are and what your artistic practice is?

THOMAS: My name is Thomas. I’m from outside Chicago, and I’ve lived in New York since 2017, when I moved here for college. I have been writing since I was a kid, and I have slowly realized that I want to try and make that into a career. It’s been a really long process of convincing myself to actually try to follow through with that realization.

I am at Hunter College for their fiction program. It’s my first year. I am also freelancing and doing a bunch of random stuff, but I have worked as a barista, I have worked in publishing, tutored, been an assistant for people, worked a bunch of part-time odd jobs. Ideally, I’d be writing and working as an editor and a critic—working with people focused on consuming art, talking about art, writing about art, and producing art.

Living here [in New York City] has been such a boon for all of that. I came here, and people were really serious about creating. They would be, you know, twenty or something and making a magazine or shooting a film. Meeting a bunch of people like that made me realize that I could actually take writing seriously. Something I love but that can also be annoying about living here is that people are very honest and often unashamed to be nakedly ambitious. I slowly picked up on some of that, and now I am less ashamed to be like “yeah, I’m a writer, even if you’ve never read my work.”

ELIZABETH: I totally get that, and, as someone who also grew up in Chicago, I do think Chicago is the city that pushed me into falling in love with writing. I think I would have fallen in love with writing no matter what, but for me, growing up within and around the Chicago DIY scene and seeing people create in a way that was fun, enjoyable, and feasible gave me the bug to do it myself. But, of course, Chicago is also a more affordable city than New York.

I would love to hear more about what parts of your growing up in Chicago instilled a desire to be a writer within you. How were you able to carry that with you in New York?

THOMAS: I think back really fondly on that experience of coming into myself in Chicago. I was very shy about wanting to be a writer. I had one friend who is still one of my closest friends—Ruby. She‘s a little bit older—we met in high school. She was the first person I knew who was like, “I am a writer.”

Ruby was really serious about writing in a way that was completely foreign to me. I went to a big public high school and there were a lot of people doing a lot of different things. I felt that I was in the middle of a divide–I was hanging out with people who were kind of considered burnouts and people who were extremely driven in a specific, academic way. There wasn’t much room for anything in between or just pursuing art very seriously.

Growing up, a lot of my friends were really serious about music, and that was the scene I found myself in. I was in band—I played clarinet and saxophone—and entered into a tiny DIY scene that was sort of spillover from Chicago. I met people who were more focused on school and people who weren’t but were still very dedicated and talented.

I definitely have the school bug. I still wanted to go to school, but I also always wished I could be the kind of person who was set on going to a conservatory or something. I had this one friend who dropped out of music school, and now they’re in this band that has gotten very big. They are touring the world. I’ll shout them out, the band is Friko. I bring them up because they are a Chicago success story. They were working very hard for a very long time, but they had a community in a scene that was small enough and really supportive, and they could get big in their hometown and then expand outward. There are plenty stories of that happening here [in New York], but I think it is harder.

For me, the point of origin when I realized I could be a writer was meeting my friend Ruby. She was like, “oh, you’re a writer? What do you write?”

At that point, I was writing fantasy and, honestly, fan fiction. Stuff that I did not take seriously. It was also so private. I was pretending to be this stoner music guy, but I was really going home and writing. Ruby was the first person who took that seriously. She was older and had a whole sensibility that I hadn’t been exposed to. It helped that she was older. She went to college ahead of me, and she came back and exposed me to all of this stuff that I was initially put off by. She would be like “here’s Kathy Acker, here’s Proust, you need to read this book, Thomas,” and the book was Swann’s Way.

I was like “why is this guy just writing about his mom for like fifty pages?” And then it became one of my favorite books by one of my favorite writers. Ruby was the first person I knew who took herself seriously.

I went to college, and I wanted to come to New York because I had swallowed up all these romantic notions of going to New York. I had seen movies, read books, and I thought I was going to live with the Beats or something.

ELIZABETH: Oh yeah, I thought I was going to go to CBGB every night.

Thomas: And then you realize that basically all of those places are gone, yeah? But you can kind of still do that, you can live in that spirit, but it looks really different. You’re living some degraded 21st-century version of it. I came here for college and honestly was really intimidated. Back home, in high school, I was a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Then, I came here, and I felt like everyone else already knew what they were doing.

I kind of retreated for a while, honestly. I was an English major, but I took some writing classes, and I think I had to slowly accept that writing was actually what I wanted to do. I had to accept that it wasn’t going to be easy, and I wasn’t expecting to be good enough to achieve anything–I knew what the odds were, and I had no illusions of selling my work early on. I knew that it was going to be years and years to even get a little bit of something in return from my writing.

I graduated, and I was really lost. It was Covid, and I didn’t know what to do. This is where publishing came in. I thought, “ok, I really love writing and editing and being an editor on [student-run literary magazine] The Columbia Review.” I loved the collaborative aspect of it, the ability to talk about writing all day. I was naive–I thought “this is a job, a career.”

Then, I realized it was a lot more complicated and harder to get into publishing than I thought. So I applied to MFA programs, and I got waitlisted and then did not get in. I was like, “what am I going to do now?”

I found my way into the small magazine world. I got really lucky. I got what is called an apprenticeship at this magazine, One Story.

They were so supportive in such a tangible way. I think some of these magazines, their heart is in the right place, and they want to support young people in publishing, but then all they have is an unpaid internship, and they promise to write you a letter of recommendation after the internship.

I had graduated, and I needed to pay my rent. One Story gave me enough money so that I could at least pay my rent. And then, I was working as a barista on top of that. Now, I am in grad school for writing. I had a period where I was working a nine to five at a literary agency, but now I am returning to that life of having the writing thing and then working a totally unrelated job in the service industry. I feel I’ve experienced both worlds of stability in the nine to five and the perks that come with that and working part-time and non-salaried jobs.

ELIZABETH: So many of our peers at The Columbia Review went into publishing because the magazine was a publishing world feeder. I remember in college, I so badly wanted to be in publishing. I was like, “I’m a writer, I want to be a part of this world,” and then I realized the number of hoops you have to go through even to get your foot in the door, and you’re making $30,000 a year without the guarantee of progressing. It’s so cutthroat and, also, it felt very stagnant. In a way, that was very frightening to me.

You’ve managed to take the experience of not getting into grad school, and now you have gotten into a program. I would love to know what made you decide to give grad school another go and how you made it work this time–whether it was luck or something else–and why you chose the program you chose?

Thomas: The short answer is that I was getting burnt out at my job. I graduated in 2021, I applied to one program, I got waitlisted, and it was a drawn-out, anxiety-inducing process. It felt like my whole future hinged on one decision beyond my control. And then I didn’t get it, it was like “oh shit, I didn’t get the thing I wanted, it didn’t work out,” and I did not know what to do next.

The publishing industry, right now, it’s not like in the “old days.” That’s a romantic view, but you used to hear stories of people who would show up at Penguin and be like “I’m bright, I’m a 21-year-old English major,” and they’re like “oh come on in!” That just doesn’t happen anymore.

I did three unpaid internships. I was home for part of that. In my senior year, I won an award for my thesis, and that was a strangely large amount of money that came from the English department and allowed me to finance a summer in New York while working an unpaid internship. One thing led to another. I was very lucky, and it also took a long time to get an entry-level job in the publishing industry. I got a job that felt like it was my dream job. It was at an agency that represented so many writers I loved. I got there, and I was like “oh my God, this is the rest of my life,” you know? I was riding high for a long time. And then, suddenly it came crashing down.

I realized what the day-to-day looks like. It was intense. I don’t want to burn bridges here because I had an incredibly valuable experience. At the same time, I realized this place was kind of notorious for being extremely intense, and the people who succeeded were willing to sacrifice a lot and dedicate their entire lives to being an agent. I admire my colleagues who are these selfless servants, to the art of getting books made. I think part of that requires almost a lack of ego, a lack of urge to produce writing, you know what I mean? You purely see yourself as an instrument. I realized, “oh my God, this could be the rest of my life,” and it was terrifying.

I saw people working at the agency who started right out of college 20-30 years ago. The type of agency I was at is rare nowadays, you really can be there for your whole career, which doesn’t really happen anymore. You always hear about editors leaving because the pay is shit, and they are stuck in this giant corporate structure shoved around, pushed out, forced into retirement. It felt like we were kind of a tiny ship in a crazy sea of publishing, which in some ways was lucky. We were independent a little bit from the rise and fall of the market.

I also knew that if I put in my time and worked there for the next ten years, financially I would not be making a huge increase. I found out that my colleagues weren’t making what seemed like much more than I was making, and they had been there for years longer, and they were full agents. The financial incentive was not that strong—you really have to buy into it. You really have to believe you are helping books get out there. The cool thing was, I believed in the work. But the day-to-day demands were intense, and honestly I wasn’t the best at it. I was good, even really good, at certain parts, but I was not the best.

I had a lot of hand wringing thinking I wasn’t smart enough, or good enough. Through the support of my friends and my loved ones, I realized I was good at some things. Maybe not at this specific kind of extreme version of work, but I was good. I was writing as an escape from the job. It was hard because the work was intense, but I needed something else. I think my self-esteem needed me to create something that wasn’t tied to my job.

There were days I would go in, I would mess something up, and I would think I was worthless. Then I’d go home and write. I’d begun a novel before I started, and I was able to finish a draft while I was at the agency. I think that gave me confidence—I felt I had at least a solid first draft, and at least I had finished something. I realized I could continue working on something long enough to see it through, at least for a first draft.

I kept applying to MFA programs after graduating. The third time I applied, I got in. I applied to three programs that third time around because applications are expensive and time-consuming. There are plenty of programs that are happy to take your money, and in some ways, I am skeptical of them. I think they are asking you to pay for something that does not promise a guaranteed return. I think there is something predatory about that. Of course some are more like this than others. But it’s impossible for an MFA to ask for tens of thousands of dollars and promise to get you published afterwards. That’s not how it works.

So, I applied to programs that were fully funded. For my own financial situation, that was a necessity. It narrowed the pool down to maybe ten or twenty programs. I wanted to ideally stay in New York, which left it to NYU, Columbia, Hunter, Brooklyn College. I knew that NYU did not offer guaranteed funding, and Hunter was fully funded. The Hunter program also seemed designed to give attendees space and resources to write rather than being billed as a pre-professional incubator. I get why pre-professionalism is a draw for people, but because I’d worked in publishing, that was less of a priority for me. I focused on finding a program that would give me time, space, and guidance to write.

I joke that the Hunter alumni magazine should interview me. It’s only been a semester, but Hunter is amazing so far. I’m very rosy on the program. That might change, but so far, it has delivered. The program is structured like a workshop, a place to experiment. It also attracts a certain kind of person, a certain type of writer. I’ve benefited from being around people who are less focused on selling their book and more focused on the writing. It’s been really freeing.

There is a part of my brain that wants a concrete return on my time and my work. I know how long and grueling the process of bringing a book to print is from working in publishing. It is both demoralizing and motivating seeing writers who are struggling mid-career, or people who would come to my boss with a novel they’d spent ten years of their life working on. Their whole future is hinging on this novel. You have to be kind of delusional, I think. You have to believe that one day it will happen, that it will all be worth something. I think it’s been good being in a program that doesn’t pretend to give a prescription for success.

It feels like an oasis from the outside world, the commercial and corporate ideas of publishing, where writing is something that, if you check the right boxes, your book will do well.

ELIZABETH: I’m intrigued to hear more about you as a writer, but before we get there, you talk about the support you got from your loved ones and your friends. Community can make or break one’s ability to muster enough courage to do the thing they want to do. How have your communities in both Chicago and New York, your friends, your family, nourished this urge you have to create, and how has that support formed you as a writer?

THOMAS: No one has really asked me that before, and I really love that question because community is a huge part of creativity. Sometimes you encounter people who are truly just, I don’t know, it’s like they were touched by God, and they know they are going to be an artist. I think that is rare. I think, most of the time, becoming an artist is something that your environment encourages you to do or, at least, it pushes you in that direction.

Neither of my parents are artistic. I grew up with a single mom, and she has always been supportive, full stop. The difference is that her world has been pretty traditional–she was a social worker, a teacher, she went through her life checking the right boxes. At the same time, she was never like “you need to become a doctor to make money.” I appreciate her because she’s honest. She took jobs that did not pay a ton but were in a line of work she believes in. That also means she can’t be like “you have to sell out and make tons of money.” Of course, at the same time, she is worried about my long-term stability.

She has been very supportive, but she is also cautious. I think part of my growing up has been finding my relationship with that and choosing things that are riskier. It was scary to quit my job. I have had moments this year where I feel happier, but I am more worried about money. I gave up a job with healthcare and stable income. At moments I am like, “was it worth it?” And then I go to class, and I am like, “yeah, it was.”

I would sometimes envy my friends who grew up with artist parents. I grew up in a pretty traditional household. My dad, who passed away when I was a kid, grew up first-generation Chinese. His parents were immigrants, and he did the pretty classic first-gen immigrant thing of being an overachiever academically. He went to Stanford, tried to be a teacher and then switched to computer science. He was someone who, as far as I know, loved music and art. But he was a very practical person from what I know of him.

My friend Ruby also grew up with a single mom but lived a much more precarious life early on. She experienced real hardship but also grew up in a family of artists. Her mom is now a very successful graphic novelist. As a kid, she went to her mom’s art school classes, and I was so jealous of that. For Ruby, there was no other option, becoming an artist was the norm. She struggled with the opposite of what I struggled with—how someone gets a corporate job was way more abstract to her than becoming an artist.

For me, pursuing the arts was like how does one even do that? My grandmother would scoff at my family members who were artists and would take unglamorous jobs to pay the bills, but I always thought they seemed happy. I was lucky that I grew up with a grandfather who was the ultimate English major nerd. He went to college, and his dad wanted him to be a doctor, but my grandpa rejected that. He became a professor of library sciences and had an amazing library. I felt like I got to know him through borrowing his books. I wish I had grown up with him, we would have had great conversations about Joyce and the Modernists.

He had an impact on me–that combined with growing up in Chicago around people who deliberately decided to do the DIY thing and work a million jobs and play in twenty bands and hope something would happen of it.

And then I moved here, and I think the reason I stayed here is because I met people who were really pursuing that and I really got along with them. To say the cliché, I found my people. It took a really long time, but what keeps me here are my friends who are making a lot of sacrifices to pursue the thing they really love.

ELIZABETH: And now, I would love to hear more about you as a writer. What does being a writer mean to you?

THOMAS: It’s changed a lot. There is the capital W version of being a Writer and then there is the thing you do every day. Sometimes those are at odds. I think part of my experience has been the romantic view of the writer clashing against the reality of writing. When I was younger, I was taken with the romantic view of being a writer. I had this idea of being in New York, and it did get me to come here, so I’m not upset.

I write a lot about my family. Writing has been a way to process my life, how I grew up, and to unpack a lot of experiences. I am definitely one of those people who needs to write about something for it to make sense, that is the deep reason. Surface level, I was an only child. I was bored and lonely and writing was one of the activities you could do by yourself. I think I developed a really rich interior world because I had to entertain myself for a lot of my childhood. That’s when I really started.

I also love language. My mom instilled that in me. She’s an English teacher, and she studied linguistics. I read books where I was like, “how does someone write like that?” Virginia Woolf was one of the first writers I encountered whose writing was so beyond my abilities. It was like seeing someone doing an insane gymnastics feat, and I was wondering how on earth a human could do something like that.

I write a lot about my parents, but not exactly my parents, and not necessarily my relationship to my parents. I have to distance myself more. I’ll write a character who is my age but is actually my dad. A lot of the writing I have been doing has been trying to understand relationships with people I didn’t grow up directly with. I didn’t grow up with my dad, but I feel like writing about him has enabled me to get to know him.

Right before my dad died, he wrote me a bunch of letters. I came across them again when I was eighteen and read them. They were intense and moving. They made me really emotional. I felt like my life had been building to that moment of finding those letters again. I felt like they were this ultimate text of my life.

If I have to point to some true seed of me wanting to be a writer, it was those letters. I was so grateful my dad had taken the time to do this, when he was dying. And I decided I needed to do something with them for myself, for him. I love writing. It has gotten to the point where I can’t imagine not writing anymore, even if no one ever reads it. I think, at this point, I am kind of stuck with it.

ELIZABETH: I think you answered this with the stories of the letters, which is such a wonderful gift to give someone and to receive. In a time when it is increasingly difficult to create, how and why do you keep creating?

THOMAS: That is kind of the answer. That is the big picture answer. There are a lot of romantic ideas about the act of writing. In my dreams, I wake up at five am every morning, and I sit there with my beautiful leather notebook, and I write, and I attack —the Hemingway thing of attacking my typewriter, and I am writing as if it were a noble craft, like the idea of going home and working in a woodwork shop.

It can be motivating to have that idea of writing, but the less glamorous version of it is that I write on my phone. I write at work. I would write at my coffee shop job in Grand Central. That’s not ideally how I would be writing. It’s an actively unpleasant way to write on this cramped screen, and I hate being on my phone all the time for that reason. But it was working–you know? I think once I accepted not to knock the thing that was working, I was like “ok, I am going to do this.”

It’s been slow, steady little drips for years now. I have moments where I have great days, where I sit down, and I bang something out. I think that really keeps you going. But I kind of came to terms with the fact that as long as I keep coming back to writing, that’s more important than the number of pages I am writing each day.

I like to tell my friends who are struggling with a creative block that, “as long as you believe that eventually you will write again, it can be months or years, that’s what matters. It’s more important that you are sustaining the marathon.”

ELIZABETH: Is this the mindset you brought to working on your novel, which is, in many ways, like running a marathon?

THOMAS: Yeah. I am not a long distance runner, but if you start a marathon thinking “oh gosh, I have to run over 26 miles, and that is so far and so long,” you paralyze yourself. If I knew how long it would take–and this first draft ended up being 400 pages—I would not have started. But I was able to psychologically trick myself. I started it while I was working this coffee shop job in Grand Central, and the story started out really small. It was just little bits here and there. The form of that draft and the premise is that it is a book of letters from a father to a son.

ELIZABETH: Does it have a title yet?

THOMAS: The title right now is Paper Son, and that’s probably going to stay. I took a course in college about the beginning of the novel. We read all these books that were written as letters because people didn’t know how to write novels yet. I didn’t love all of them, but there was something sweet in watching writers figure out in real time how to write a novel. I was inspired by that because I was also figuring out how to write a novel. I thought writing a novel in letters was a little forgiving. I knew I wasn’t great at the geometry or moving the pieces around the board to create a story, but I could get from one letter to the other.

ELIZABETH: Do you have any next steps for the novel yet, or are you holding on to it right now?

THOMAS: I’m holding it. I am probably going to work on it a little at Hunter. I am at a crossroads. I’ve worked on it for a long time. I would like to do something with it. I also know a lot of examples of writers who show up with their beloved first novel they have been working on for years. It’s their pride and joy, their baby. And then they talk to an agent, and the agent is like “you are a great writer, but we can’t sell this.”

That could easily be the situation. It’s hard to know when to move on, you know? But I honestly don’t know if this is—it feels worth pursuing, but I don’t know if it is the thing I need to be doing right now.

I also don’t know, honestly, if I am old enough and experienced enough to do this project justice. I feel like I might have made the mistake of choosing a project that would be better served as an older person. I like reading first books by young novelists partly out of curiosity for myself. There are common subjects and themes and approaches that make sense. You are limited by the experiences you have.

But I picked a premise of an old man who is dying and is writing about his son and fatherhood. I haven’t had that experience. It’s hard, and I am not as confident in doing that. I can’t rely as much on my own experience. Maybe, I put this in a drawer and come back in my forties, but I have invested a lot into this novel.

I think when you are young, there is this pressure of knocking it out of the park the first time, otherwise you are a failure. I try to tell myself that the first attempt is often shit and it continues that way for a long time. I am trying to remind myself that it is not a race.

I know writers my age who have much more raw talent than I do that are just too much of perfectionists or too afraid of rejection or they are afraid to share their work. I am like if you could see what I see on the other side: all the shit out there, people who are so confident, I have been tempted to be like you should read some of these submissions I have read.

If I could give one piece of advice: if you are a writer, don’t just read really good stuff. People are always like “read the best,” and that is important. Also read the really bad stuff. It’s motivating. That definitely inspired me to submit more.

At the darkest moments, my worst nightmare is that I am that guy who is sixty and believes he is the next Charles Dickens and is totally delusional. That is my biggest fear—being out of touch with where you actually are as a writer in terms of your abilities. Part of the reason I wanted to do an MFA was to be held accountable. Some of the danger of being in your own world is that you can get really out of touch with the quality of what you are producing—both good or bad. You can be writing something, and it can be basically publishable, and someone discovers it twenty years later, and you’re dead and they’re like “oh this was this brilliant writer.” Or the opposite where you’re like “I am a genius, everyone else is stupid” and your writing is really, really bad. But you are so trapped in yourself that you reject any kind of criticism…

I think writing is an inherently lonely profession. Sometimes I wish I had picked something more social. I think about my friends who are musicians. It sucks for so many reasons, but at least if you are on a shitty tour, you are hopefully with your friends and going through it together.

With writing, the highs and lows, you are the only one who ultimately experiences them. I am an avid consumer of these career help resources for writers. It’s really helpful hearing other people’s experiences, especially people you really admire.

There is this false impression that the finished product comes out fully formed and perfect when, in reality, it’s more likely that the finished product is draft fifty, and the writer was living in their car before the book got published.

Some resources I love are The Creative Independent. I wish I had found that sooner. They have great interviews from all different disciplines. I also want to shout out my friends who do a podcast and reading series called Limousine. They are great, approachable, fun people and writers. They do a great job demystifying the process. Hearing from people who are around our age is really helpful, too. You get something from an NPR interview with Zadie Smith, but with someone who is a peer, you can almost see how a person does it when they talk about the road that led them to where they are.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, as well as The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.

Thomas Wee: I thought that I would start by asking you about the differences between the forms of the short story and the novel. You had your spectacular debut novel, Real Life, and now you’re following that with Filthy Animals, a short story collection. I’m curious if you think that you can achieve things in the short story that you can’t in the novel, and if there’s one you feel more at home with?

Brandon Taylor: I think that there are some writers who are able to work on a story at a time. They are able to follow their impulses down into the morass of storytelling. Then they look up, and years have gone by, and they have written thirteen stories, and they all just so happen to go together. I am not one of those kinds of writers. I can’t start writing a story until I know the shape of the manuscript into which it’s going to fit, because the characters don’t just show up. Characters always come with constellations of relationships. I sometimes won’t start a story until I can feel out the four or five stories down the road from it.

Sometimes those connections are narrative, and sometimes they’re thematic, or sometimes they’re connected by location, or sometimes they’re connected by time periods in a person’s life. But I am always writing in constellations of stories, and I’m always thinking about the manuscripts. I’ve got what you could call “manuscript brain.” I can never just write a one-off. Even my stories that are not narratively connected are resonating with other stories in a larger system. My process is that I walk through the world and wait until I can feel a sufficient weight to power three or four stories, and then I’ll sit down and write them.

As for the difference in form, I think because I’m always thinking in terms of superstructure and thinking in groups of stories there’s maybe not much difference in my approach to the novel or the short story. I do think that the short story is my base narrative unit. That’s the form I feel most comfortable in, and that I’ve read the most of, and that I think about the most. I do think that there are certain things that you can do in a short story because they’re shorter. You can do experiments in voice in a story that you can’t do in a novel. The commitment isn’t as high for a story as a novel in terms of structural, or formal play, or voice work. There are things that you can do in a novel that you cannot do in a story. You can really tease out a character’s whole life in a novel. You can do that in a story, but it’s hard to do that in a story without cheating. [laughs] It’s hard to do that without having mastery over the techniques. 

I think that they’re different. They have different rhythms. They have different impulses. They demand different things from the reader and from the writer. 

TW: The point you made about constellations brings me to my next question on the recurring characters in your collection. Why did you choose to separate the Lionel stories and intersperse them throughout Filthy Animals? 

BT: I wrote those stories in 2016, and I wrote them at a time when my understanding of what you could do with a story was very narrow because I was still learning. When I was writing these stories, I felt like I hadn’t exhausted everything I wanted to say about this character, but I didn’t have a pattern or a blueprint. I didn’t know you were allowed to do it, back when I still believed in rules. 

Then, I came across the stories of the Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant, who wrote hundreds of stories in the New Yorker and a collection called Varieties of Exile. She has recurring characters in her stories, and NYRB Classics published two sets of her stories in one volume. It blew my mind. I thought, you can do that? You can tell one bigger story across different stories? 

As a clingy reader, I get attached to these characters and don’t want to let them go, so I knew I wanted to do that. I wrote until I had written what felt like the full breadth of the stories of Lionel, Charles, Sophie, Alec, and the rest of the characters. I could keep going, but then it’s just a novel. 

I felt that part of why they had to be stories was that with a story you could just cut out all the boring plot with stories—you don’t have to explain all of the backstory or include transitions to get to the big important moments. You can pick the parts that are interesting to you, and you can change point of view, mood, and tone. There is so much to do with that ellipse and white space that happens between stories, and that can be where you compress the boring material and leave it up to the reader. 

I wanted to follow these characters but not write a whole book. By putting the stories together, I used them as the central organizing column with interstitial stories that had different modalities and registers that expand the book and enrich it. 

Campbell Campbell: I want to turn to your use of interiority. Your books focus on interiority to the point where I feel like I have access to thoughts that I shouldn’t have access to. Could you speak about your interest in pursuing interiority? And what cannot be said in the fiction form? And how is this connected to your larger goals for Filthy Animals? 

BT: I used to not know what interiority was. I considered myself a naturalist and a disciple of Ibsen, and I was trying to compress everything to gestures and not give the reader any interior thoughts. Then, I went to Iowa University and was told that you need interiority because Iowa is the paragon of the fiction that descends from Henry James and Jamesian psychological acuity. I internalized this idea that every story should have interiority to the point where my stories would get so long and bloated with interiority. 

I found a nice middle ground, and I learned a lot from reading Jean Stafford and Mavis Gallant. I always try to make interiority flow from the natural context of the narrative, and I do not want interiority to be so overwhelming that it dissolves into abstraction. We have all read books, some of which were very good and very moving, that follow as, “We are having thoughts about thoughts about thoughts about thoughts.” There are no bodies anywhere, and the interior state is the whole of the thing. 

I think that interiority is important, but I try to locate the primacy of the story in the body. The more interesting part of a character’s interiority isn’t even the thing that the author says; the more interesting part is often what is underneath the interiority. The subtext of the interiority that the author is evoking. The pulses that grant access to the character. It’s like being in a plane and going over a body of water and looking down to see sometimes a flat surface and sometimes a dark surface, but there are sometimes flashes of light that you can see at the right angle. That is a well functioning interiority—moments of insight and illuminated patches of consciousness. 

When I’m writing about interiority, I always think that we have been inside for so long. Where are we? Where is the body? 

TW: I know that the terms of genre may not be useful, but where do you see your fiction in the lineages of modernism, postmodernism, and naturalism? 

BT: When I was a younger writer I thought, why is it so hard to understand postmodernism? Then, I read the modernists and thought that it was so bizarre. Now, I have read more literary theory and literary criticism and realize that it can be so much more confusing. I think that contemporary fiction is dominated by what I call “character vapor,” the disembodied and psychologically alienated narrator of Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, the roaming Sebaldian “all-seeing-eye” consciousness that I do not want to do. 

I hope that my work is embodied. The theme that I come back to again and again is, I want to capture, not the pulse of consciousness, but the pulses of embodiment. What it is like to live in a body and move through our three-dimensional world and come up against various systems that act upon the body. I think that there was this split in fiction like 10 years ago, where some people went the Sebaldian route and some people went the historical realist route. I consider myself more on the embodied side of things and try to think deeply about the paradox of being a consciousness and a body who’s moving through space. 

Sometimes I think, “Oh, I want to write Black fiction with Black people being in their bodies,” and then I read Ann Petry and Richard Wright and know that they have already done it sixty years ago. Finito. I have a vocabulary for myself because of them, and that’s why I locate myself as an embodied naturalist. 

TW: How do you feel about the label of “realism”? Do you consider yourself a realist, and do you consider that word to still be a valid description of fiction today? 

BT: I consider myself a realist. I think that realism is an acceptable term, if we acknowledge that there are a variety of realisms. One moment that frustrated me was writing a realism essay and having my classmate claim that it was not realism. It is real to me, and they were reacting against certain impulses in my writing that come from being a Black queer person. 

In my work, for example, there are people who believe in the devil and ghosts and coincidences. My classmates in my MFA would push back against some of these stylistic impulses of my work, and I said that we have different realisms. I’m from Alabama where everybody believes in ghosts. Then, some people would ask, “But you’re a scientist?” Yes, I am a scientist and an atheist and still believe in ghosts. I think that realism is any internally coherent system that represents a more or less legible relation to an agreed-upon reality, and that reality can look different depending on who is looking at it. 

People are silly when they insist that realism looks one particular way, as opposed to thinking of realism as a relation to some exterior reality that we move through in different phases and modes. But, yes, according to my definition, I am such a hard-coded realist that it looks naturalistic. 

CC: I want to turn to the running theme of language as a limited medium for communication. The characters often speak in references to which the main character does not have access, and the main character’s thoughts are not accessible to any of the other characters. Could you talk about your interest in limited communication and what is unsaid? 

BT: I grew up in a family that did not talk, so I had no access to the thoughts of people around me. When I went to college, I asked my friends, “Do other people have thoughts and feelings?” And they said, “Brandon? Yes.” Such was the extremity of my deprivation from the interior states of other humans. That is my experience with the world, and I was frustrated when I read a novel or short story and the characters would know what to say to each other. They have access to the same references, and the dialogue is so slick and smooth with no misapprehension or misunderstanding. 

I realized that one thing that characterizes my work is that I write characters who do not have access to collective social knowledge, social paradigm, or a set of references. They are trying to figure out the games that are being played around them. I think that this is such a dominant part of my social experience that I do not see in fiction: nobody is talking about the impenetrable set of references that coheres between people who do not have access to the same references. As someone who has difficulty in settings like that, I want to capture the absurdity and beauty of it. People are able to communicate in a way that goes beyond what they are saying, and there is extra-materiality that is real social communion. 

In Filthy Animals, Lionel is unable to communicate with others and is aware that they are doing it around him. That’s another element I am deeply interested in—the unknowability of others and the way that we are never fully privy to other people or their motives or their intentions. How do I know that people won’t hurt me? Do I have to take their word for it? You have to have faith that people who connect with you do not want to hurt you, and that can be a harrowing prospect if you have been on the outside your whole life. 

In my writing, I hope to capture the tensions, impulses, fears that a person brings to a social situation and to see social encounters as a site of inquiry and curiosity rather than a place to rehash received paradigms or scripts. 

CC: Do you think that this is an inevitable condition of the world? Or do you think that this is one condition that perhaps the character Lionel can overcome?

BT: I think that in the context of the book, Lionel’s condition is unique. But I do think that we all have moments, especially in a capitalist society, that one finds oneself in situations where you don’t have access to the references that signify belonging to that particular context. One example where people often experience this situation is when you do a class migration. I grew up working class, and then I went to college and I was suddenly among all these people whose parents had graduate degrees. They’re all talking in this very particular way, and they had a set of references that signified belonging to their class which was different from the set of references I had access to. This also happened when I moved out of science and went into writing creatively, with the people who had done MFAs and who had done English classes. I took two English classes in undergrad. Suddenly, I was among these people who had access to a whole set of idioms and references that I didn’t have access to. 

I think that one of the things that signifies the particular contemporary condition of alienation, be it migrating across class or moving from one context to another, is the fact that you’re moving into a context that has references that you perhaps don’t have access to. There’s a particular kind of alienation and loneliness that comes from that. I don’t think that is an inevitable condition for everyone, but I do think it defines our contemporary condition. 

TW: On a similar note, I enjoyed how you describe academia in a satirical but honest manner. Campbell and I are both steeped in this culture and were intrigued by how academia can seem like a performance, like birds signaling at each other. How do you think you’re expanding the campus novel tradition with Filthy Animals and Real Life?

BT: I find academia funny because I belong to it and am outside of it. I spent most of my life in academic settings, and I thought to myself, “What do I know enough about to fill an entire book? Being a student. That is the thing that I know best in the world.” It is why Real Life and Filthy Animals are centered around students. I love books about students and books set in schools. I cannot get enough of it. You would think that I had been traumatized enough. [Laughs]

But campus novels are often about people in the humanities, or white people, or straight people, or people who don’t have to work or worry about money or worry about what they’re going to do after they graduate. One of the elements that campus fiction lacks is the feeling of precarity that students contend with and characterized my own undergraduate experience. How am I going to eat today? Also, tomorrow? How am I going to afford coffee and make my scholarship stretch a whole semester? Even in an exam, I would be thinking, do I have enough money in my bank account for X, Y, and Z? 

Part of what makes that experience so urgent for many people is a sense of precarity. In the reception to Real Life, a lot of people focused on—and I think rightfully so—that I was trying to rewrite the campus novel from the position of a Black, queer lens. I think that’s true, but embedded in that was also an attempt to bring a sense of precarity back to campus fiction. 

TW: I wonder if this precarity is a historical phenomenon because going to college is now such a financial investment. College has always cost money, but I think that we are witnessing an inflation of college and a lot of pressure on students to make something of this risky financial investment. 

BT: It’s horrifying…I recently read an article on the rise of adjunct fiction on over-educated characters who work at universities and experience precarity at all times. It was a review of Want by Lynn Steger Strong and The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood and looked at the experience of many MFA students who work as adjuncts, make little money, and write about probing the system. It is so horrifying to get a college degree, get access to some middle-class cachet, and have huge amounts of debt and not receive the job you want. But that’s America. 

CC: Could we discuss the repetition of character dynamics throughout the book? I was interested in the multiple stories of someone alienated from an intellectual circle, or of someone estranged from their family, or of someone isolated from their sexual partner. How did returning to these scenes give you a new understanding of the anatomy of these dynamics? 

BT: When Roxane Gay was promoting her short story collection Difficult Women, she said that when writers find themselves returning to the same scenes, they should not worry because that means they’ve found their voice. I thought, ah, yes, thank you for validating this habit of mine. [Laughs] 

I think that it comes from a lifetime of being an outsider. Looking back at my early writing, I was always writing about displacement and exile and what it is like to be a satellite in a place where your “real life” should be but leaves you feeling displaced. The tension between the South and the collective. That theme animates all of my work. The idea of the forced return or one’s past being a country that you cannot repatriate. 

In my stories, I start at the same place—a character, a collective, and the gap between the character and the collective—and follow a character’s singular relation to that sense of the whole. It is sometimes a relation of resolution, it is sometimes a relation of continued alienation, and it is sometimes a moment of connection and the realization that they want to be on their own. I wish that I could say it changes over my next two books, but it is still me figuring out how one lives in relation to other humans. How does one figure that out? I don’t know how one does that! [Laughs] 

CC: We are reaching the end of the hour, so I want to discuss why you think critics and editors are choosing to read your books through an autobiographical lens. How do you feel about this reading, and why do you think this is a pattern in the industry with many authors, including Rachel Cusk, Ocean Vuong, and you? 

BT: My attitude is that this is fair play since I did title the book Real Life. I can see why you may be tempted. Writers of color, writers who are female, writers who are not straight white males, write books on, not their direct experience, but what it is like to move through the world in their mode, and readers think that this is harrowing and ripped directly from their lives. I wrote in a recent blog post that every Black writer is an auto-fictionist even if he doesn’t want to be and even if he isn’t writing about people like himself. 

I think that it’s a lens problem. White readers may consume literature about people of color from a sociological lens and assume that the greatest value of literature can be that it derives how a Black person lives rather than tells a singular account of one consciousness. 

In my case, it happened because I wrote a book about a Black gay student from Alabama and in a science program in the Midwest and I was a Black gay student from Alabama and in a science program in the Midwest. There are obvious topological similarities between me and the central character of the novel. Sometimes, editors and critics think that that is the most important part and stop thinking about other impulses in the book. It is unfortunate that the autobiographical mode becomes the main mode of the reading and narrowest mode of reading, and it is unfortunate that Real Life is not directly about me at all. Filthy Animals is a more personal book but not directly about me, so I am curious to see how readers approach the new book. 

I am working on a new novel that is directly from my life. Some authors play with that tension between the author and themselves, and they are autofictionists. Some do not, and they are assumed to be autofictionists. As a reader, I often do not know that a person wrote a book. [Laughs]  I’ll think, ah, yes, this book that I am reading and that just came from the sky and that has no history. Then, I will read about the book and be surprised. I feel really lucky coming to the book in a childlike manner where I care most about the book and hear the context later. 

CC: Could you talk about your goals and your intentions with the blog Sweater Weather? What are you hoping to pursue in the blog that you cannot pursue in your other writing? 

BT: Thank you for calling it a blog rather than a newsletter! I love that I have a blog! 

I thought about taking a break from the noise of Twitter, but I like that I can talk to people on Twitter. I revived the newsletter to have a continued dialogue with the world, and I started reading literary criticism and literary theory and having ideas on the contemporary literature that I was reading. I was developing a vocabulary for the content that I was reading, so I use the newsletter as a way to think through what I am learning in a way that is longer form than a Tweet. This lets me synthesize my ideas on contemporary aesthetics and literature and transform it into an essay form. I am writing these essays for myself and sending them out into the world. I am shocked that people are reading my newsletter and referencing me in criticism. [Laughs] 

I resisted writing essays for so long because a friend of mine, Alexander Chee, warned me that you have to be careful because white readers love brown people’s essays but they don’t love their fiction and that if you want to be known as a fiction writer you have to be intentional about the nonfiction you’re publishing. It is easy to make a name for yourself writing think-pieces as a writer of color. That being said, I try to write essays that interest me and on my own terms so that I am not a race prophet, and I try to capture the tensions and paradoxes and nuances on what it is like to move through the world.

CJLC editors Campbell Campbell and Thomas Wee interview Kate Zambreno on her most recent work, To Write as if Already Dead, a postmodern telling of a body in sickness and motherhood and a study on the collage, distrust, and friendship in Herve Guibert’s To The Friend Who Didn’t Save My Life. Philosophical in her approach, Zambreno turns to other thinkers to find a collective understanding of mortality and illness.

Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.

August 17th, 2021

Campbell Campbell: You write about questioning which novel you would choose to study and write about. What drew you to Guibert? Why To The Friend Who Didn’t Save My Life rather than The Compassion Protocol? 

Kate Zambreno: I love to cheat on what I am supposed to be working on, so when Jenny Davidson approached me and said that [Columbia University Press] is commissioning a series of book-length essays on novels, I thought that this would be my new secret project [Laughs]. I always need a secret project that I’m not supposed to be working on. 

There were a couple of novels that I considered for the study. Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, and Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds, a New Narrative work about friendship and community and volleyball at a Marxist conference. I love that Guibert is channeling Bernhard to write this fictionalized essay on Bernhard even though it is rarely read as a book about reading, a book about channeling, a book about an obsession with Bernhard.  

You ask about Compassion Protocol, and the truth is I do find Compassion Protocol to be more beautiful, more profound, more elegiac, more despairing, but I chose To The Friend because it is the book that troubled me and that I often think people misread. There has been such a wonderful Guibert renaissance by writers that I admire, for example Andrew Durbin, but a lot of the review coverage of the Guibert book from the Semiotext(e) reissue has focused on the book as an authentic and sympathetic AIDS portrait. I think that what he is doing is more layered, more bitchy, more slippery, and it is a work that I kept reading and re-reading to figure out, since around the time that I wrote Heroines. 

I chose the book because it was a problem for me. And I wanted to write through a problem, which was the problem of friendship and betrayal, the own writing I felt compelled to do through that.  I felt that necessary friction and tension about the ethics of betrayal and how he was ruining his friendships for the sake of his writing, yet I also felt a kindredness and elective affinity for him.

Someone has to reissue The Compassion Protocol, though! 

CC: I love that you mention Duras’ The Lover. I just finished it and found it exciting. 

KZ: When I moved to New York, I was asked to do a panel with other writers–you can Google this to get the real gossip–but I got into a fight on stage with a writer about Duras’ The Lover. It was supposed to be a celebration of the book with four writers speaking on stage, and I had come from a writing community who revered Duras despite, of course, that there is amazing Duras and less great Duras like there is a good Guibert and bad Guibert. These were writers who were very productive and rewrote their work over and over again to have this whole body of work that was fascinating, glittering, and constant. So at the panel there was this other writer there who wrote one famous memoir and taught full-time at an MFA program. He just tore Duras apart and claimed that this was not real writing and could be workshopped to be better. I took the bait, you know, because I had not learned not to take the bait, and we ended up in this fight on The Lover. 

I did not write a book on The Lover, though, because I didn’t know if I should be the one to write about it, especially the context of how she’s writing about race and colonialism.  Even though there is an ethical slipperiness  that I wrote about a person with AIDS, I did feel like I had to write about Guibert. If I didn’t write about him, that would be a deep loss for me because he is a writer that I think through and wrestle with. 

CC: Who won the fight at the panel? 

KZ: I don’t know! [Laughs] . I think that he was the famous writer that the majority of the literary audience came to hear speak and that he might have been perceived as winning due to his forcefulness, but I think that I won. 

CC: Do you see yourself borrowing, expanding, or perverting Guibert’s form in To The Friend? How are you both circling around questions of the intertextuality of the novel and of the self? 

KZ: I think that I was drawn to how much Guibert is reading Thomas Bernhad and channeling this mordant, nihilistic, fast Nietzschean ressentiment in To The Friend. Guibert was always channeling Bernhard,  and I felt like I was channeling Guibert by writing about my obsessions with the notebook, diary, body, time, but I was also channeling him and Bernhard in the second half of the book. 

I wanted to know what happens when you push a sentence into aggression, into despair, into absurdity, into an abyss, and I think that the person I have been ultimately perverting since Screen Tests has been Bernhard. I am not alone in my Bernhard obsession, and I think that it is his slightly fictionalized send-ups of artists and community and existential despair that I have provoked, and I have thought of my sentences through his sentences. 

I like to think of less of the sentence and more of the space on the page when I think of Guibert. I am trying to create energy, space, sentences in conversation to other writers and hoping that my own sentence emerges from it, right? I hope so, but I do think that I have been gently playing homage to both of them and hoping that some of my voice remains. What is a voice? What is the self? What is beyond the boundaries of the self? 

Thomas Mar Wee: There has been a lot of buzz around the “fragment” and the “fragmentary” in contemporary literature, including its prominent role in your own work. Do you agree with this label being assigned to your work, and how do you conceptualize the fragment as a unit in literature? 

KZ: I recently had an event with Kate Briggs who said an interesting remark by Roland Barthes in his later period of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse. He said, “Oh, all of this talk of the fragment,” but you’ll have to look at the recording of the event because I am merely translating Kate, the translator. He was annoyed by this buzzword, that everything that is fragmentary [Laughs]. In my novel, I am trying to playfully reckon with these two buzzwords that seem to be attached to my work: autofiction and fragment. 

The fragment–we can call it the F word–has been in discourse since the popularization of the lyric essay, and this brings up questions, such as what is fragmentary writing? Is a sentence a fragment, or is a paragraph a fragment? I do think that I am interested in the tradition of writing that is aware of the space of the page and of the rhythm and tone of writing, and I am intrigued by thinking of writing as language, of language itself as an object. 

In Drifts, I am in conversation with Maurice Blanchot, the great theorist of the fragment who saw that sort of writing as anti-capitalistic, anti-commodity, where it favored writing that was centered on process and practice and against the consumable narrative. My work is in the notebook, the fragment, but that fragment may go on for pages and pages. I am a student of Sebald and Bernhard, of the digression, and I think that Sebald is called fragmented because of his obsession with the list, the archive, the museum, the zoological garden, the Wunderkammer. 

I am philosophically interested in the fragment and bored by mainstream publishing’s commodification of fragmentary writing, and I think that there is a huge range of writing that is called fragmented that does not exist in the same tradition. It misses the vast mischief of contemporary writers who are experimenting. 

TW: This brings up another question: what is non-fragmentary writing? Is it Henry James? 

KZ: Campbell and I were talking about mysticism before you got on the call, and Amy Hollywood is a scholar of mysticism who has written about Henry James and his obsession with the object. He has a fetish with the object, so why is he not seen as fragmented? 

TW: Speaking of intertextuality, works of visual art (both Guibert’s work and the work of other artists) are a frequently recurring subject throughout this book. What led this ekphrastic inclination throughout the text?

KZ: I was looking through the Book of Mutter  this morning because I was sending it to a translator. Every time I do this, have to open a past work, I must confront questions like what is this book and is it any good. That was the first book in which I actively decided to write about visual art. I wanted to incorporate writing about Louise Bourgeois, both her biography and her process and her Cells, the magic and the form of the Cells. In this way I began to experiment with a collage that lets me leave the self, and that has been the way in which I have de-centered the “I” in my work, through collage.

I remember thinking that I couldn’t write about artists, such as Henry Darger and Louise Bourgeois, because I was not trained in art criticism. My partner John Vincler writes a lot about art, and we often ask: is it too easy to bring in other artists, what is the ekphrastic mode, why go to it, and what does it do for the reader? I think that we like to look at the visual to make the writing visual, and the visual world is what excites and disorients me that I feel a need to expand upon it. I have written catalog essays in the past, but I began to understand that there is a formula to it that I do not want to do. I will write about the visual for myself, thinking through the process of artists, and the way that these forms experiment in ways I long to, and sometimes it will later get published and become for everyone else and we can share in our elective affinities. I think that the process of writing about art brings me closer to thinking about my fixation on community and its relationship to capitalism and the ephemeral. I like most in the Guibert study–a moment no one discusses, and I don’t know why–is the long opening dealing with Manet’s friendship with Baudelaire, his unfinished painting on his funeral. Thinking about other artists is a form of historical and ecological thinking because it is centered in others. I wanted to pay tribute to Guibert, and his mentor Foucault, who wrote art writing and photography criticism. The most marvelously strange parts of To The Friend are the moments when Guibert is writing about 19th century artists and his own studies in drawings of everyday objects. 

I am writing currently about Joseph Cornell–still thinking about him, his process, his work, his biography—his diaries were just as interesting as his boxes later placed in museums, and I kept thinking about the line in his diary that says collage equals life. His diaries and his organization, his archiving and source files, were as important to him as the objects he created. 

CC: This text parallels Barthes’ Preparation of the Novel, which ponders the prerequisites of writing a novel. I love the passages in To Write As If Already Dead in which you gain inspiration and questions from your female friendships; how is female friendship essential to your writing process, and how does this contrast the male friendships between Guibert and his contemporaries who gossiped and betrayed one another?

KZ: I’m always arguing with Foucault in my head, who really revealed himself in his interviews, in conversation with others. While writing the Guibert study I kept returning to Foucault’s thinking about the formlessness of friendship, that was transformed from an interview and repackaged as an essay after his death, which focused on intergenerational male communities that could turn eros and bonding into knowledge. We can look at these ideas with suspicion and wonder how this may exclude anyone who does not fit the cute boy of the Foucault world. When I read his thinking on this I agree with him, am antagonistic to him, feel excluded by him. Do we always want friendship to be formless? No, we want boundaries, to protect from power imbalances. 

I carried these ideas with me when I was writing the Guibert study. I wanted to focus on community; I wanted to focus on women and non-binary friendships; and I wanted to capture the frustrations and beauty of the knowledge that we can produce in those spaces. It is a necessary and political act to turn to the community for narratives and not subsume everything into one authorial individual project. Guibert and I both write from love, but he also has a ressentiment side to his writing and personality that I admire. Writers are all supposed to be so moral and write from a place of empathy, but I confess that one of my drives is to look at the haters, the anti-humanists, the bitchy writers. 

That being said, I tried my best to be careful with my friendships in my work. Sofia Samatar is a frequent and playful collaborator, she often writes from our correspondences, as I write from ours in Drifts and a little in the Guibert study. Perhaps this sense of writing as a conversation, as a collaboration, comes from both of our experience in the blogging world, which is a desire for a space that is anti-capitalist, non-hierarchical, impossibly utopian, and at a time before the internet felt completely commodified. [In the book] I am paying tribute to that time when it resembled performance art. 

TW: It is very different from buying a subscription to Substack, right? 

KZ: Right, although there are wonderful longform essays  that seems reminiscent of that world. But still there is that neoliberal world  that forces everyone to market themselves and that renders everything business. 

TW: The first half of To Write As If Already Dead deals primarily with your online friendship with a writer writing under the pseudonym of “Alex Suzuki”. Situated within a book that is ostensibly a study of Guibert, this seems to call for comparison between these two authors. What connections did you find between Suzuki’s anonymous writerly persona and Guibert’s oeuvre of radical self-disclosure?

KZ: Alex Suzuki is a fictional name of a heteronym for a truly brilliant writer. It is interesting that French autoportrait writing by Guibert and Duras, was happening at the same time as New Narrative, but the autoportrait writers were celebrities and best-sellers in France while the New Narrative writers were often writing for each other, and did not get published by major publishers in the States, with the exception of Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper. I would associate the Alex Suzuki character, rather than Guibert, with the New Narrative tradition, at least in terms of community, but also for the desire and longing behind their writing, which is about a conversation, a Blanchot idea of communion, as opposed to for the market. I think that Alex Suzuki, at least the pseudonymous character who wrote on a blog, and Guibert are similar in their tone, speed, and ease of writing.There’s something bloggy about Guibert—and a link between the letter, the diary, the notebook space, that he wrote from, and theorized, but also a blog. There’s more commonalities between me and Guibert, at least in terms of being authors in the world, and speed and productivity. The author who was the inspiration for the alter-ego that was the real life persona of Alex Suzuki is a deliberate, slow, compassionate, writer who writes a book every decade, and although I  love him, that is very different from Guibert, and different from myself as well.

Larissa Pham is a Brooklyn-based writer and artist interested in chronicling intimacy in all of its forms. Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications. CJLC’s Thomas Wee and Campbell Campbell interviewed Larissa about her recent essay collection, Pop Song, which features a remarkable breadth of art writing in addition to personal essays. Cover photo by Adalena Kavanagh.

Thomas Wee: I want to start with the process of putting together the essay collection: What was the process of writing the essays and anthologizing them? Had you written any of the essays before putting the collection together? Did you start the collection with the idea that these essays were all going to be eventually unified?

Larissa Pham: I started this project with essays formatted as lists, which I mention [in Pop Song] in a very meta way. That was how the whole project started: I was in Taos on an arts residency, to which I had applied with something completely different in mind. I was working on this manuscript for the first time, and I landed upon the list format as something that allowed me to connect things without really connecting them. It felt liberating to write in the list format as opposed to the narrative and argumentative criticism that I was used to writing. 

Those four list essays became one component of the book. And I did draw on two previous written essays that were published in the Paris Review and titled “Blue” and “Body of Work,” but both essays were substantially revised in the final collection. It became a very holistic process—I was happy to write these essays, which I consider chapters, that speak to each other rather than act as discrete essays

Campbell Campbell: You borrow from many genres of literature in the collection—art analysis, memoir, cultural criticism, perhaps “MeToo” essays. Were you striving for one of these genres? Or something else? Did you hope to disrupt the conventions of these genres in writing this collection?

LP: I suppose that I was trying to disrupt all of those genres, but perhaps not intentionally when I was writing the project because I wanted to write freely. I wanted to write something that only I could write, and I finally had this book deal that allowed me to have more freedom. I didn’t have to think about the constraints of house standards, word count, or the seriousness of a review. I wanted to be able to flex and do what I am best at, so I was inspired by those genres but was not striving to write in a specific genre or mode. 

CC: You employ theoretical terms to understand yourself in this collection, and I was interested in how most authors borrow authority from theoretical material and slip it into the narrative, but it seems that you are doing something different. What was the role of theory and autobiographical material in this collection? 

LP: I don’t consider this book to be a work of auto theory because I do not consider it to be a book that argues anything. It was important to me that it didn’t. I don’t know if I could argue something clearly when life is so complicated. However, I do use theory and find it very helpful for giving language to and illuminating certain aspects of life. That’s the primary way that I use it. I know some writers who really like to just paste in a chunk of theory in order to bolster an argument. I think that’s one way of using it, but I think it’s a bit more interesting if we talk about, “Why this particular theory? What does it mean? How is it playing off of my other observations?” I enjoyed using theory in that way in the chapter “Camera Roll” with Sontag and in the chapter “Crush” with Barthes. I’ve always felt this way about theory:  you can take what you want and leave what you don’t want, and it is not intended to be an authority on the world. 

TW: I’m curious about your process of selecting the different works of art you discuss in your essays. I appreciated that there is an intermingling of canonical “high” art and—more conventionally thought—“lower” forms of art in this collection. Could you talk about that process of deciding which works you wanted to write about?

LP: I am curious what you might consider to be the “high” and “low” works of art because I like knowing my reader’s sense of references. Some reviews have pointed out that I write about Frank Ocean, but I think of Frank Ocean as high art! I included every artist in this book because I had an authentic experience with their artwork and wanted to write about it and ensure that I was selecting a variety of artists and different mediums. It is mostly contemporary art, which makes sense because it is based on artwork that I was seeing at the time. I wanted it to be accessible when I was doing the research so that, if the reader was interested in an artwork, they could reasonably find it somewhere online and have an opportunity to see it.  

CC: I was intrigued that you included works that act as intellectual and aesthetic objects; and it seemed important to you to find works that could be experienced with the mind and the body. How did this inform your writing process? 

LP: Writing about art occurs on two levels. You can think through art and experience it on a bodily level whether it be listening to music, dancing in the club, or looking at a painting. When I write, I like to think that I am not trying to replicate the artwork. A picture is not worth a thousand words because a picture can do something that words can never do. I am hoping to commit an imaginative act with words in which I convey what I am feeling and enrich the reader’s experience with the artwork. I am trying to understand why art means so much to me. 

TW: In these essays you write about several groups of experience that could be called experiences of the sublime. What do you think of the ability of art, and especially writing, to record or provoke experiences with the sublime?

LP: I’m glad you pointed that out because I had a whole chapter about the sublime and then my editor and I cut it because like it wasn’t quite fitting into the collection. I had a chapter called “On Beauty,” in which I wrote about the work of Anoka Faruqee, who is an abstract painter based in New Haven who I studied with at Yale. She makes these amazing color field paintings. They’re not exactly color field paintings, but they’re similar to color paintings with their abstract compositions. 

I didn’t get a chance to write about that in the text itself, but I do think that the sense of looking for something bigger than yourself does shape the text. Nature is a setting for the sublime, in  the standard romantic sense of the term. Like a sea storm—it’s huge, majestic, romantic, powerful. I think that we turn to the sublime in literature to take us away from the mundane and alienated moments in our day-to-day lives. 

CC: I want to turn to your fear of being misunderstood by your lover in the text and the reader. Could you talk about the way this fear of communication surfaces in this collection? What causes communication and knowledge of others to be limited?

LP: Ginger Greene pointed this out in a review in the Observer, “This writer resents the inability of language to convey everything that needs to be conveyed.” I do think that it’s tragic that language cannot do everything, which is the reason that I’m drawn to other art forms. A painting can do something different than what a book can. 

I know that words are my medium and all I have to express myself. Words are the only thing I have, and I am never going to know what is going on in another person’s consciousness. It is tragic to me that there is this gap between people, and I think that the collection is leaning toward the figure of a lover—it is an address—while knowing that it cannot pass the distance. This space is where knowing forms, and the whole project could be read as an attempt to grapple with the tragic condition of humanity. 

I have a tattoo from a moment in Anne Caron’s Autobiography of Red. Geryon and Herakles are two teenage boys in love and sitting in a car together, and they sit up in joint astonishment when the car starts, not touching but joining in astonishment as to fly parallel in the same flash. It is the space between them that is always going to exist, and they know it but are trying to reach each other anyway. 

CC: Doesn’t fear of miscommunication and being misunderstood suggest that we have knowledge of ourselves? Why are you sure of this fact? 

LP: I am not sure of it! My first book Fantasia was concerned with the idea that I have the trapping of the self, for example my glasses, nose ring, bangs, or general aesthetic, that may not be mine, but who am I if you remove these elements of myself? It is about a girl in college who meets her doppelganger at a party, and they descend into a web of obsession together. I do not know if the self can be known….

CC: You discuss Susan Sontag’s notion that, once you take a picture, it’s over and the image is dead. It would seem that you would have the same concern for writing, how can I write a book in totality if I won’t stay the same person throughout the writing process? What was your relationship to the book ex post facto?

LP: It’s funny because I clearly had to believe in this book to write it. I still stand by it as an artwork, but I wrote it over a year ago, and I think that its mission is to live with readers. It is not necessarily dead, but I know that I am more living than the text is. 

I think that there is a lot of pressure on young writers to write every single thought they have ever had in their debut work, and there is a lot of pressure for debuts to be works of genius and synthesis of their every idea. That is fake and not possible because I am going to write more throughout my life. This book is merely a snapshot of myself. 

TW: Building off your comments on the inability to know the self: Why does this book dramatize the distance between the authorial “I” and the character “I”, and what is your relationship to these two “I”s in this collection? 

LP: I thought about this topic a lot while I was drafting the book. When you write an event, you are writing from a specific moment in time. Fiction has a narrator telling the story, but nonfiction has the seat where I was writing from and the movement back and forth in time throughout the collection. I had to be clear where my narrator was in that moment of time, and the book is written from the authorial perspective of me during the pandemic. The “I” is moving through time and existing at different intervals, and I wrote “Body of Work” in the present tense because I was borrowing that literary trope that writes criticism as though it is currently happening. I thought to myself, I am going to analyze these memories as if they are pieces of art and I am going to use this convention even if it does not work out. There is an authorial “I” from the pandemic time and the character “I” who has porous eyes observing the world. 

TW: I am curious how you think narrative unreliability added to the text. Did you consider one of the “I”’s to be more objective, or are they both imbued with narrative unreliability? 

LP: The authorial “I” pops up at moments when I sit down to write the chapter and can make judgments on the other “I.” That is how you have lines, like I don’t regret that or I was that girl. I am directly grappling with the many lives that I had in the past and that I can see from a distance. 

Unreliability seems to be such a huge component of writing memoir and creative nonfiction. I think that most texts engage with that question—the unreliability of memory. 

TW: In terms of your use of the second person, did you have a specific individual or a general audience in mind? How is that functioning in the text, and how does it affect the intimacy with the reader? 

LP: It was the only way I could write the book. Bluets was a model for me during the writing process, and I think that many poetic texts address the reader as you. It is directed toward a lover, but I did not use a name because I wanted it to be anonymous and about the idea of the person and a literary device. I am still parsing why I did that, and I have asked readers if it affected their intimacy with the text and if they thought they were being broken up with in the text. 

Perhaps it is too much on the nose, but the second person does occur in music and specifically pop songs. It is equally about a specific person and about anyone who is listening to it alone in a room. 

CC: You discuss Carson’s interest in the body losing its boundaries in moments of love, but she further describes this phenomena as the cultural expectation for women from Ancient Greece to modern day in The Men. Do you view this phenomena as gendered? Do you have an understanding of why this happens and what are the benefits? 

LP: I do not think that it is necessarily a gendered phenomenon, but I will anecdotally say that my friends and I are all women and have expressed it. There is a meme that was popular that asks if romantic love was a myth created to manipulate women. Is that true? [Laughs] 

In dialogue with Barthes, all lovers wait for the sense of objections and isolation and have a fear of losing themselves in their love for someone else, and that is not gendered. 

TW: I think that we could even describe Barthes’ and your work as gender neutral in the essays; the notions of love could be leveraged toward anyone. 

CC: I am excited by mysticism and this notion that you can empty yourself to be filled by another person, and it seems that there is a connection between losing boundaries and embodied acts of mysticism, like meditation, BDSM, etc, that weaken you and fill you with something else. What do you think are the benefits and motivations to turn to the embodied acts? 

LP: I have an essay about this topic that is coming out in the Spring issue of a magazine. It is about how I want to believe in god and be religious, but I cannot believe in god and turn to other acts instead. I think that we are talking about accessing some other mental state when we discuss transcendence and mysticism, and I have tried going to those states but have not known why I am drawn to another plane. I do not know if it comes from any dissatisfaction from the instability of this earthly plane, but I strive to leave it. I love hot yoga, meditation, and exercise, and I see this as an important aspect of BDSM even if I have changed my relationship to it since I wrote “Body of Work.” I see myself going to places to be made into a vessel for something else to touch me, whether it be hot yoga or the club. 

TW: I think that it is interesting that many of the visual artists in the collection, including Agnes Martin, are fascinated by this subject and trying to provoke this response in their artwork. Do you think this state is more accessible in other art mediums, or do you think that writing can capture this vessel quality best? 

LP: It’s great that both of you have brought this topic up because I didn’t write about Hilma Af Klimt but do write about her in the new article I wrote for Document Journal. She is such a cool mystic figure and had groundbreaking work long before she was famous, and Yayoi Kusama is similar in her communion with another dimension. 

I think that nonverbal artwork helps us reach that place because the art is not literal and brings out speech rather than relies on speech—the language of the art is not verbal or written. I think that words and literature can take us to that place, but they do not take us there by describing the place. I think that I have felt like a true woman of transcendence when I have been so absorbed in a fictional story, transported to the setting, and made to care about what happens to the characters. I reach that place when I feel swept away by the masterful language in literature. 

TW: Could you tell us the writers whom you’re lovingly indebted to in this collection? Who were you reading and were present in the metaphorical room when you were writing? 

LP: This is embarrassing, but I read a lot of white women’s memoirs. I wanted to let myself go there and not question my ability to tell a story that was worthy of telling; that is such a hurdle to overcome. I read Bluets, Argonauts, The Folded Clock, Ongoingness, and Empathy Exams. I read literature by Kate Zambreno who is such an idol of mine because she is great at switching topics and talking about what she wants when she wants to. 

It is interesting to talk about style because I’m currently in a fiction program—the residency MFA at Bennington—and I’m reading books for the program that are very different from what I read while writing the book. 

TW: What are you writing now? 

LP: I have the article for Document Journal. I am in the fiction program and learning how to write a novel, which is hard [Laughs]. In the next couple of years, I hope to have a draft of a novel loosely based on my family and the aftermath of the First Indochina War, which turned into the Vietnam War and led to my family coming to America as refugees. It will be interested in what we inherit from our parents and what they’ve inherited from the parents—the idea of epigenetic trauma in our memory. 

I have never written about my family before, and I’m enjoying it. I’m also writing short stories to determine how fiction works and to play on a formal level. 

Pop Song available from Catapult Books. For more of Larissa’s work, visit https://larissapham.com/.

CJLC editors Campbell Campbell and Thomas Mar Wee interview Meghan O’Gieblyn on her new nonfiction book, God, Human, Animal, Machine (Doubleday, 2021), an expansive and rich text that traces the connections between the history of religious discourse and the current artificial intelligence discourse. 

Meghan O’Gieblyn is also the author of Interior States (Anchor, 2018), which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Wired, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, n+1, The Believer, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2017and The Contemporary American Essay (2021). She also writes the “Cloud Support” advice column for Wired.

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July 25th, 2021, 6pm.

Campbell Campbell: We hoped to start with a few questions to give our readers a sense of the topics in your book. What drew you to the connections between religious thinking and artificial intelligence discourse? How do you see religious thinking resurfacing in contemporary language around technology advancements such as artificial intelligence? 

Meghan O’Gieblyn: I grew up evangelical and went to a small fundamentalist Bible college, where I studied theology.  Two years into my program, I had a crisis of faith and left the school, and a few years later I renounced that whole worldview and became an atheist. I was living in Chicago, working at a bar, and one of my coworkers introduced me to Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines. It’s one of the landmark texts of transhumanism, a form of West Coast utopianism that arose in the 80s and 90s that insists that humans can use technology to further their evolution into another species. Transhumanists helped popularize a lot of futuristic possibilities like nanotechnology and mind-uploading–topics that now seem a bit dated, though some of their ideas, like mind-computer interfaces, are now being developed. They basically wanted to achieve immortality, eradicate suffering, and transcend human nature to become something “beyond the human.” 

I’d never heard of this movement before, but I quickly became obsessed with it. I wasn’t able to articulate at the time why I was so attracted to it, but it’s clear to me now that transhumanism was making the same essential promises you find in Christian prophecies. I grew up in this very millenarian strain of Evangelicalism that was focused on the “end times” and Christ’s return. We believed this would happen in our lifetime, that we would become immortal, get raptured into the sky, and live forever with Christ in a state of perfection. Most transhumanists are not religious people–they are by and large atheists–yet they are drawing on these hopes that have played a larger role in Western culture.

So that was one initial seed that the book grew out of. The other was the machine-learning revolution, which was generating a lot of buzz around the time I started writing the book. This was around 2016 or 2017, right after AlphaGo beat the world champion of Go. These advanced AI systems have since been incorporated into the justice system, policing, financial institutions, medicine. Because they rely on deep learning, most of them are black-box technologies, meaning it’s impossible to know how they arrive at their outputs. At the time, a lot of tech criticism was drawing on religious language to describe these algorithms. The popular refrain was that they are unfathomable the way that god is unfathomable. We have to take their answers on faith. One Harper’s critic drew on the Book of Job, which was a book I struggled with when I was studying theology. Most of the critics making these comparisons didn’t have a background in theology, so I was interested in unpacking that tech criticism and thinking about how these religious ideas were mirrored in emerging technologies. 

CC: I loved the humor and earnestness when you’re training your Aibo dog in the first chapter and thought that this was a great entry point into the discussion on artificial intelligence as it relates to the reader. How do you see people turning to technology for emotional intimacy, and where do you see this going in the next twenty years? 

MO: I don’t know that we’re seeking emotional intimacy in technology so much as it’s being thrust on us by companies. I never had the urge to have a phone equipped with Siri, but these features now come along with the technology. We’re increasingly forced to interact with social AI, these programs that speak to us, respond to us, joke with us–that have some of the trappings of human interaction. All of us anthropomorphize, we attribute human qualities to things that are not actually human, or that are not actually alive. And I think corporations know that they can maximize engagement if people begin to emotionally bond with their products. I think that will be the trend going forward. 

During the pandemic, there were a lot of stories about people who were so lonely they started talking to chatbots. I actually downloaded one of these apps around the beginning of the pandemic because I kept seeing these stories about them, and I was curious. The newer ones are eerily intuitive–it feels at times like you’re talking to a real person. And the technology is going to get better, especially with the recent developments in natural language processing. 

CC: I find myself wondering what need capitalism will create next. I couldn’t help but wonder if these tech companies were creating a need or resolving a need with the creation of emotional technology? 

MO: I’m interested in the extent to which technology is now trying to solve problems that technology created. The most obvious example is the app that blocks you from checking other apps, or from checking your email during certain hours. A lot of people have made this point in terms of social media.  Technology has isolated us and alienated us from real face to face human interactions, and now we turn to social platforms because we’re hungry for connection. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s an overstated argument, but there is undoubtedly some truth to the fact that living our lives online entails a loss of intimacy that then prompts us to engage even more with social technologies.

Thomas Mar Wee: You point to a discourse that has transformed from discussing religious subjects metaphorically to religious subjects literally, and you try to warn readers about making a similar mistake with technology discourse. Where do you see this happening in technology discourse, and what are the pitfalls of discussing technology in this mode? 

MO: When I began writing this book, I was interested in the idea that our brains are analogous to computers. This metaphor has become integrated into everyday speech. Even people who know nothing about computers speak of “processing” new information, or “storing” memories, “retrieving” memories, as though we had a hard drive in our brain. The metaphor is usually traced back to the pair of cyberneticists, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who pioneered neural networks in the late 1940’s. They were responsible for developing the computational theory of the mind, this idea that the human brain functions like a Turing machine, that thought is basically symbol manipulation.  It was a brilliant metaphor in a lot of ways, and it was also wrong in a lot of ways. 

The analogy has been crucial to both cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, and over time it’s become more literal than metaphorical. When people in AI speak of systems that “learn” or “understand,” those terms were once put in quotes to signify that they were metaphors. But now you rarely see those terms in quotes. People say instead that the computer’s visual system is actually seeing, the machine learning system is actually learning, as though there were no difference between the way a machine and a brain performed those tasks. As far as how this translates to religion, I grew up in a fundamentalist culture that often confused metaphors for literal truth. We read ancient myths and parables as though they were literal prophecies about what was going to happen in the future, transposing texts from the sixth century BC on to 21st century global politics. I’m really interested in the slippage that occurs with metaphors–how we often forget, over time, that metaphors are metaphors. What happens when we begin to think of them as literal? 

TW: Do you think your religious upbringing gives you a unique perspective on the topics of philosophy of the mind and consciousness in comparison to other thinkers and philosophers who are pondering these questions? 

MO: I suppose that growing up in a culture that held a great deal of certainty about the validity of its beliefs made me attuned to the presence of ideology in rhetoric–ideology that is pretending not to be ideology. Every intellectual framework, religious or scientific, has certain assumptions that are so basic to the worldview they’re not questioned. It’s more subtle in scientific discourse, but there are still premises that are taken for granted, or ideas that people have only recently started to question. The topic of consciousness, for example, is not really taken seriously in AI at the moment. It’s too vague, it has a lot of metaphysical baggage. People in the field tend to focus exclusively on intelligence. But they often appear to be talking around the idea of consciousness, especially when they’re discussing the limitations of certain systems. Another problem I discuss in the book is the question of what matter actually is. It’s such a basic question that most people never really think about it. But recently there’s been a renewed interest in panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious. More mainstream thinkers object; they think this is absurd. But then when they’re challenged to say what comprises matter, they argue that it’s not a relevant question. Matter is matter, end of debate. 

CC: I was thinking about the distinction you make between assuming that plants have whatever quality makes humans special and assuming humans have whatever banal quality that makes plants function. You make parallel comparisons between the thinking behind artificial intelligence and religion throughout the text. Could you make a similar distinction in this case: are you assigning wishful thinking—leaps of faith—to artificial intelligence discourse or are you assigning the rationality of artificial intelligence discourse to religious thought? Is this a matter of debunking AI discourse or elevating religious discourse, or neither? 

MO: I’m more interested in uncovering the wishful thinking lurking in technological discourse. I don’t think religious discourse is especially rational. I don’t say that in a pejorative sense. It’s not ‘irrational,’ per say (though some of it is, obviously) as much as ‘non-rational.’ 

I’m interested in frameworks like transhumanism, which shares some things with religion but is rooted in empirical realities. We have Moore’s Law that says that computing power is increasing at an exponential rate. All of the technologies that would be needed for mind-uploading and digital immortality are theoretically plausible–there’s nothing about them that would require a supernatural force, at any rate.. But these ideas are also clearly appealing to those deep emotional longings that were once satisfied by religion. It’s very difficult to accept the reality of death, especially if you don’t believe there’s anything after it. What appealed to me about transhumanism, when I first discovered it, is that it promised me everything that Christianity promised me, but through science. 

So yeah, there’s a lot of wishful thinking that is sort of sailing under the guise of empiricism, and I think this is becoming more true as secularization advances. The more that we eradicate those traditional sources of meaning, the more we’re going to look for them in other areas of our culture, including in science and technology. And I think there are dangers in mixing those two pursuits. Max Weber wrote that if you find yourself with religious or spiritual longing, you should just go to church. Don’t try to find transcendence in science; that’s not an attitude to bring into the lab. 

TW:  To what extent do you entertain fears that technology will exceed human functioning? You discuss the importance of being explicit in terms such as consciousness, thinking, information, etc, so I will ask you, where do you see gaps between the terms we are using, such as consciousness, and what is really happening with technology? 

MO: The largest threat with AI is not the classic science fiction scenario where robots are conscious, have a will of their own, and try to kill us out of some malicious intent to take over the world. The more likely possibility is that AI will exceed human intelligence, but it won’t have any idea what it’s doing. The machines won’t have a will of their own, or consciousness. 

But in a way, that scenario is just as dangerous. This is the concern Nick Bostrom illustrated with his famous example about the paperclip-maximizer. You program a machine with a very simple goal–for example, you train it to maximize the number of paperclips in its possession. If there were an intelligence explosion and the machine gained infinite intelligence, it would essentially destroy the world. It would take all of the available resources to create paperclip factories, killing humanity to fulfil this aim. That’s not because it’s an “evil machine.” It’s just doing what it was programmed to do. 

Norbert Wiener, the godfather of cybernetics, talked about this problem in his 1964 book God & Golem. He compared it to those folktales where a genie offers to grant someone a wish, but the person words their wish carelessly and it creates some catastrophic scenario. Computers, too, are very literal. So the terms we use really matter. The stakes are especially high with machine learning. It’s difficult to know how they are going to evolve or what new, creative means they might discover for fulfilling their programmed objectives. 

TW: To what extent are David Chalmers’ claims that GPT-3 possesses consciousness warranted? Do you buy into that claim? 

MO: [Laughs] I don’t really buy into that claim. And I think that Chalmers is being a tad facetious. I find it hard to believe he actually thinks that.

I’m more interested in the point where it no longer matters that AI doesn’t have consciousness. You can already see glimpses of this with GPT-3, where some of its writing is so convincing, it’s hard to believe that there is no human consciousness behind it. Add to that our natural tendency to anthropomorphize. The anthropologist Stuart Guthrie talks about how we are especially prone to assign human qualities to a machine that uses language because we’ve only ever encountered humans with that ability. Now we’ve created these systems in our image, with our language abilities, and we’re basically helpless, due to our evolved tendencies, not to see them as human, even if we know on an intellectual level that they’re not conscious. 

TW: Do you think developments in natural language processing, such as GPT, prompt a reassessment of our traditional hermeneutic concepts such as “text” and “author”? 

MO: There’s a way in which these systems literalize a lot of the poststructuralist theory that arose around the middle of the last century. The death of the author, the Lacanian idea that when we use language we draw from a public treasury of speech rather than consciously translating our preexisting thoughts into words. We are a medium for this amorphous system of language that is working through us. 

Natural language processing models are doing precisely that. They’re drawing from a public treasury of language, the internet, and are working blindly to produce language that looks like our language. It raises the questions of well, what are we humans doing that’s different from machines? To what extent do we understand what we’re saying? Is it unconscious or conscious? If you read about those systems, it’s very difficult to avoid questioning our own use of language and what it means to understand language as a human.

TW: Where do you place the role of the writer in a world where algorithms can generate believable, coherent, human-sounding prose? 

MO: I had this conversation with a writer friend a few weeks ago. She had asked whether I could ever connect with a book written by an algorithm, assuming it was as convincing and powerful as a novel authored by a great writer. Would knowing it was written by a machine make a difference?  I didn’t know how to answer, and I still don’t know how to answer. So much of the pleasure of reading, for me, is the sense of connecting with another consciousness. That feeling of being less alone. I suspect that if an algorithm ever produced a great work of literature, I would either not connect with the text, or I would end up convincing myself that the system was truly conscious. 

I do worry sometimes about my economic livelihood as a writer. Despite their limitations, the systems are probably going to be able to do a lot of standard magazine writing very soon. And in a sense, we’ve already paved the way for this to happen. We’ve reduced writers to “content creators,” a term that implies that the writing is secondary to the clicks and the ad revenue it brings in. Magazines have been, for a long time, using algorithms to determine what content gets the most views, which tends to be the content that hits some lowest common denominator–whatever is most popular. And language models are very good at producing this type of writing, stuff that isn’t especially provocative or original. Content that uses a very elementary level of language and avoids any kind of artistic flourishes. That’s not to say that writers are going to disappear or become obsolete. But I do think we’re going to witness a lot of changes to the structure of the media world. 

TW: Going off of this, what do you think about the general hesitation to grant computers attributes such as “creativity” or artistic “genius”? Is this an example of, as you put it, humans “moving the bar” for intelligence, or order to “maintain our sense of distinction” as human beings? 

MO: Daniel Susskind, an economist who writes about automation, uses the phrase “the intelligence of the gaps” to refer to this tendency to define human intelligence in relation to machines. He’s alluding to the  “god of gaps” theology, the notion that we attribute to God anything that cannot be explained by science. We do the same thing with machines. Whenever they come up against a limitation, we point to that and say there, that’s a distinctively human quality. But the bar keeps moving.

The cybernetic pioneers in the 1950’s and 1960’s wanted to build an enormous intellect that could beat humans at chess and solve complex theorems. This goes back to the Medieval idea that humans are unique, compared to animals, because we’re rational beings. For centuries, this is what made us distinct. But as soon as computers could beat us at chess, the terms shifted and we began to say that to be human was to be social and emotional, with feelings and intuition. 

That’s a natural reaction to have, but I am concerned about the ad hoc nature of these definitions, the fact that we are reconceiving what it means to be human every time a computer develops a new skill. What does it mean for humans if GPT-3 can write beautiful poetry and perform other creative tasks? For years, automation experts have advised us to work on being more creative so that we could get jobs that wouldn’t be outsourced to machines. Well, if computers can produce sonnets and compose classical music, to what extent is creativity a unique human quality? 

CC:  I am curious about how well GPT-3 writes because my knowledge is limited to your article and conversations with tech friends who say in a condescending manner, “We are coming for your jobs!” We may question if we are writing better throughout the course of history, but we cannot deny that we are expanding and perverting genres, to which we assign value in literary communities. Does GPT-3 have the ability to expand and pervert genres in the way that Piers Plowman can? 

MO: The way it works, to my understanding, is that the algorithm identifies the genre of whatever text you feed in as input, and then mimics it for the output. You input a Q&A or short story, and it will recognize that genre and continue in that vein, based on the examples it’s consumed during training. I don’t know if it can blur or innovate genres; I suppose that you could feed it genre-bending work and ask it to mimic it, but I wouldn’t really call that innovation. 

I would like to think–and maybe this is my own wishful thinking, trying to maintain some human distinction–that it would need some other kind of intelligence to innovate on the level of genre, something that the models do not currently have. That’s not to say that they won’t once they have more parameters. 

Thomas, you have experience with the algorithm and may have more to say? 

TW: I gave GPT my own poetry and prose, and I had to manipulate the text to resemble those genres because it currently does not know what a genre is. It does not have the human categorizations of genre because it is still interpreting it as a text and as ones and zeros. You can give it a genre-defying text, but it is up to the reader to say that it is prose or poetry or something in-between. It doesn’t yet have a theory of languages or literature. 

TW: One recurring theme in this book I noticed is the limitations of language to accurately convey subjective experiences such as consciousness and the perils of speaking metaphorically. I couldn’t help but think of the work of Wittgenstein and his claim that many of the problems debated in philosophy are actually just the result of a miscommunication or a misuse of language:  Did you encounter the limitations of language—such as its failure to accurately communicate subjective experience—while you were writing this book? 

MO: Yes, all the time. The first draft of the book did not have much of my personal experiences in it, and that was the result of my being overwhelmed by the research and wanting to privilege it. I kept resisting the use of the “I,” and then I would get lost in the writing and not know where I was going. The book only started to come together when I began discussing my personal experiences.

Subjective experience tends to be my anchor, my connection to the world. That doesn’t always require the use of first person, but it does require thinking about what’s at stake for me, and why I became interested in whatever question I’m exploring. When I’m not thinking about that, the words on the page begin to lose their meaning. It’s almost like I become some version of GPT-3, this disembodied machine that is blindly manipulating symbols apart from any real-world knowledge.  

The subjective, of course, can be treacherous territory. We have limitations and biases; we don’t always see our experience clearly. But I do think that the self, in writing, is useful as a limit, or a lens. It becomes a kind of filter, a way of understanding a world that is overwhelmingly complex from a specific vantage. I think that we need those limits, to some extent, in order to write. 

CC: For our final question, what are you reading and writing that you want our readers to know about? 

MO: I’m working on an essay for Harper’s on habit and automation, exploring the virtue of ritual in a world where many routine, repeatable tasks are being handed over to machines. I’ve been reading mostly fiction lately. The research for the book was somewhat intense, and I’ve been eager for something lighter in comparison to some of the darker subjects in my book [Laughs], so I’ve been reading and enjoying Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads. 

For more about Meghan O’Gieblyn, visit her website at http://www.meghanogieblyn.com/.

November 15th, 2020, 5 pm.

Poet, artist, and polymath Eileen Myles talks with CJLC about queer avant-garde writing, the New York poetry scene of the 70s, the instability of the writerly self, their ambivalent relationship to the archive, and more.  

Campbell Campbell:

To get started, I’m just gonna jump the gun and say—I’m interested in you being not only queer but also a writer of queer texts. What does it mean to be queer and a writer of queer texts to you? Does being queer necessitate a queer form, and how do you feel being placed in that genre?

Eileen Myles: 

I feel okay about it because it’s sort of irresistible. The thing about being queer is that if that’s in you, or a part of you, or who you are in a way, then I think that culturally we just file that way. I know I’m read more widely by people who are queer. I think, unlike being heteronormative, it gets to be a part of how you’re associated and how you’re arranged. In ways that are wonderful and ways that are weirdly discriminatory. It’s a mixed blessing, and it’s interesting in terms of how I talk about myself [rather than] what I do in my work, because my work is organic and a place where I can make playful and powerful choices. I’ve never regretted the decisions or felt that I had to go in a direction, one way or another, because of who I was. It just seemed part of the apparatus, my queerness. 

But I think talking about the work, it’s tricky. The comparison between queerness and race doesn’t really work, but I will say that the “double-consciousness” notion does compare because you’re always thinking about yourself in these two ways and knowing that it’s part of your richness and part of your burden. 

CC: How do you imagine a queer form?

EM: I think in the same way that people are increasingly talking about transness, it’s a way of thinking that transness is the root of sexuality. That there’s just a changeableness about human sexual nature. I’ve found perpetually that the most interesting writers, the ones I’ve gravitated towards, are almost to a one—queer. I think that radical form almost “queers” itself in a way. In the same way that historically most of the Americans who have won the Nobel Prize have been alcoholics. What does that say about America or literature?I just think that most avant-garde writing, that I know of, is queer. 

CC: I’m also interested in the fact that a lot of your works are autobiographical, whether that’s your memoirs, your poetry, your essays. I’m wondering if your experiences, specifically your queer experiences, are best conveyed in a queer form or an autobiographical text?

EM: I don’t really use “autobiographical” as a description of my work. I was in college in the late 60s, and one of the things going on then was “New Journalism”, which someone like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. People who were doing journalism in this ecstatic, poetic way. They were busting open the form and notions of objectivity. It seemed very related to the world of film and media that was starting to be really interested in new kinds of documentary filmmaking. I think what happened in the 60s is that people started to throw away notions of objectivity and truth being conveyed in journalism and recording. I think fiction and nonfiction started to blur, it seems to me, in the late 60s and 70s. 

    I’ve always said this about Chelsea Girls; I was responding a lot to Truffaut, who was the first “art filmmaker” I saw when I was in college. He was doing this fictional account that seemed also an autobiographical account of a young man. And I thought to myself, “Why isn’t there a female version of this?” And so when I started to write, I was probably more interested in making films, but I had no idea how to do that, but I thought about my writing as filmmaking. I thought, “I don’t know story, I don’t know plot, but I can imagine a movie about this moment in this character’s life.” So it just kind of felt like an assemblage. I’ve always felt very aware of the synthetic nature of identity, and that we’re kind of making ourselves up. Our name is a fiction that our parents gave us. And so I never felt very truthy about “Eileen Myles”, but I just thought that I would use them as my character. And so, I never thought of it as”autobiographical”. I thought it was sort of a wry commentary on the self, and someone who had, to my mind, some amazing experiences.

Thomas Mar Wee: Building off of that, you’ve mentioned some writers who have inspired you: the New Journalists, the queer writers that you alluded to, and even filmmakers who’ve influenced you. You mentioned in For Now about responding to the Beat Generation, your friendship with Allen Ginsberg, and I’m curious about how to situate yourself within the broader legacy and lineage of poetry in America. How do you see yourself and position your career within the people who have come before you and the people who have come after?

EM: I feel like the whole notion of schools has collapsed, but I don’t think privilege has collapsed. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but bopping around Twitter has been this thing that Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young did about the “American Poetry World”, and the reward system. They used some very obvious names like Pinsky and Louise Glück and this real system of…“these two were on panels that gave major literary awards for decades and they were all each other’s students.” 

    When I came to New York in the 70s I went briefly to Queen’s College. I had no idea what I was doing. I was definitely coming to New York to be a writer, to be a poet, but I didn’t know so much. I knew Ginsberg; I knew Sylvia Plath; I knew Baudelaire; I knew Dylan Thomas. I’d studied poetry in a general literature way in college, and I did a little bit of “in the world” poetry stuff in Boston, but I really had no orientation whatsoever. 

    So I came to New York. I very briefly went to Queen’s College for graduate school and I was tipped off by the guy who taught the writing workshop there, saying something about “St. Mark’s Church” and that was where denizens of the so-called “New York School” hung out. I had seen poems by Schuyler and O’Hara by then, and I was very excited by that work. It just seemed so vernacular. It seemed like something I had never seen before, except in something like Ginsberg. So I made a beeline to St. Mark’s church and then just became a part of that community. And then a guy named Paul Violi, who was kind of my first poetry teacher, made me a “tree” of all these schools.

    It was very: “this is Black Mountain, and this is Beat, and this is New York School” and he told me: “This is our camp because we’re the non-academic school of American poetry, and we’re outsiders, and we’re associated with music and politics and culture outside of the academy.” It was very exciting, and even the teachers who taught there asserted that they were working artists. We didn’t think of it as an institution, and it really wasn’t, you didn’t get accepted, you just showed up on Friday night at Alice Notley’s workshop with a beer and just began. It was kind of remarkable who went to those workshops. 

    And so, happily, I met all those people. I’m twenty years older now than John Ashbery or Allen Ginsburg were when I met them. I was in my twenties and it just seemed like the world was so open. It was a very small poetry world so that within less than a year of hanging out I was at a party at Allen Ginsburg’s and Robert Lowell was there, and we were like “Oh my God, how did this happen?” You could just move to New York and be in that room. For ten years, I was part of it. I saw Gwendolyn Brooks read. I saw Amiri Baraka read. It was white-dominant. It wasn’t heterosexual dominant, but it was very much that world. 

    By the time I ran the Poetry Project for a few years, we were interested in “queering” it. It was interesting because the “elders” were queer but the younger ones weren’t necessarily. And I started having my own gay life over here. I’m not really interested in Adrienne Rich’s work. It strikes me as conservative and just a different poetics, and so when she died, it was very funny because I kept getting asked, as an established poet, to write something about Adrienne Rich, and I kept thinking “Yeah, but I don’t have anything to do with Adrienne Rich.”

    I think what’s interesting is that we all read across these camps. I think even though you’re in “this camp”, you probably read some people from over “there”. And so when I had the opportunity to curate and edit, I made clear that I had a more diverse taste than the one that I was in. When you look at how publishing and power unfold, certainly in this country, it still is along these lines. “These people are not published by these presses, and these people are not getting these awards.” 

    I’ve never been nominated for a National Book Award. Not even long listed. It’s interesting, when I was a judge for the National Book Award, I was officially the “other” on the list. Fred Moten was the person I wanted to see win, and I just pushed and pushed and pushed. I had a lot of say in who the finalists were, but in the end, everyone loved Louise Glück. And she had never won a National Book Award. It was so interesting because we didn’t even talk about her. I learned that that’s how things happen: if you talk about something, people can take it down, but if you want something, you don’t even talk about it and it just moves ahead quietly until at the last moment they’re like “Louie Glück! Louise Glück!”, and you’re like, “how did that happen?”

    I can’t deny being somewhat of a New York School poet. As for the Beat thing, I had friendships there. Allen was very generous to me as a young poet, and I associated with St. Marks Church and Naropa [University]. Naropa was very interesting; I went there as a younger person and I continue to go there in certain ways. I came from a Catholic background, Catholic school, twelve years of it. So I had an essentially religious education and certainly disavowed that by high school.

    What was so funny about that was I arrived at Naropa being a kind of drunk, druggy, young queer. By the time I was a little older and was teaching there, I’d stopped drinking and taking drugs, because I come from a lineage that dies of it, and I didn’t want to die, so I stopped it in my thirties. What I started to realize was that Naropa was a Buddhist art school and that it had a practice. “Practice” is a Buddhist word. Practice is related, in a way, to spiritual practice, but also to art too. I found that it made sense to think of work in terms that engaged with process, and performance, and enactments. There was something about making work that was processive, and that I thought had a lot to do with Buddhism in the way that the Beats were thinking about Buddhism. I was unwittingly influenced by that and then actually influenced.

    I’ll also say, growing up I was very interested in Sci-Fi, and I wanted to be an astronaut. I had every desire to be catapulted out of this world in any way possible. As a practicing artist, what I started to think was no, the thing that’s interesting and difficult is to be here. To inventory where you are. Like when a rocket ship takes off, there’s a countdown. The “ten, nine, eight, seven, six”. 

    As a poet, I love James Schuyler’s work. There’s always an inventory that erupts into a kind of spiritual transition, whether it’s sexual or spiritual. It’s always based on this inventory of what’s there, and then you suddenly can go into a new space. 

TW: We’ve talked about the generation that preceded you, but I’m curious what you think about the generation of poets that has come after you. You’ve been publishing work since the 80s, and you’ve accumulated quite a large readership, so I’m curious if you can see the impact you’ve had on poets that have come after you and have been reading your work?

EM: The thing is, lots of them are my friends. I hate the word mentor, I just go crazy at it. I think the older poets that I met, we became friends, and that’s the relationship we had. It wasn’t so professionalized. I met CA when they were in their twenties. They called St. Mark’s church and was like, “do you know Eileen? How can I get in touch with Eileen?” And then I got this phone call. 

    There’s a transmission that occurs between younger and older poets. The young poet goes to, not necessarily someone older chronologically, but a poet who is someplace they want to be, and you go to this person and you start having a conversation. CAConrad was like that, and Arianna Reines and Michelle Tea were like that years ago. I recognize aspects of my work that are in their work, but everyone always pervertsit into a new direction. You’re kind of there to be used in a way and reinterpreted. I think it’s exciting because at some point I realized you don’t ever finish your work. You start things, and it never gets done….In the same way that the audience completes the work, so do the people that are influenced by you.

CC: You mentioned your writing changing, I love the moment in For Now when you say, “don’t hold me accountable for what I say about writing because it’s fluid, and it’s going to change.” I find myself very similarly disliking when people hold me accountable for something I said or thought months ago because I’m constantly changing. What is your relationship to your past writing in light of this idea?

EM: Friendly, sometimes I’m thinking “God I wish I could write that now,” but I’ve changed; I’m not that same person. The way publishing operates you have lots of moments of choice to leave certain work behind and pick certain parts of your past. So there are poems in books that never get in, say, a “Selected Works”. And sometimes I think, “oh, I was wrong, that actually was a good piece of writing.” But usually I feel I’ve chosen pretty well and I feel good about it. Writing prose is different because you make all those choices as part of the process of making the work. You leave paragraphs and pages by the side of the road as you’re constructing the narrative of the book. So it’s brimming with choices, but they’re made. Whereas with poetry, those choices are still out there somewhere. And sometimes, I reread things that I can hardly remember writing [laughs]. 

CC: How do you think your writing has changed over the years?

EM: I think it’s less personal. There’s less data. There’s less information. I think I don’t lean on information as much. I think it’s become more generalized in a sense. 

CC: Why do you think that is?

EM: I guess I have less to prove, I think. I’m more interested in the ways a statement is without specificity. It seems more about movement. The thing about writing is that you want the reader to do a lot of the work. It’s kind of like [Google] “search terms”. Like if I wanted to find this, what word would lead me to that place? In a way, that’s what I’m wanting to do in my writing. 

    It’s funny, Willem de Kooning had no mind left, and he was still painting, you know. My memory isn’t as good as it was in my twenties. It’s funny because when I was in my twenties and thirties and doing a lot of drugs and drinking, I feel like my mind was so dirty, I had all these shelves and crevices, and I could pack stuff into all these places. And I remember when I got sober I was scared because I felt like this water had rushed through my brain and it was clean. I was like “how can I work with this?” It was working in a clean room suddenly. 

    I think time does that too. I’ll work on these ideas. You start something and drop it, and I go off and digress with the assumption that I’ll return. My digressions have to be simpler now because I feel like I can’t keep that many balls in the air. I think sometimes it would be amazing just to tell one story that doesn’t stop until I stop. I’ve never attempted that. 

TW: You talk in For Now about your relationship to your work being archived, I’m curious if you could elaborate about your hesitance to participate in the archival moment, this fascination with preserving works from writers and having them on display for the public.

EM: It’s just creepy! [Laughs] It’s so weird because you spend so much of your life wanting to be known. All the desires I had when I was younger and at earlier points in my career, for my work to survive and to be known when those started to be realized it just starts to get fixed. 

   Fans talk to you as though they already know you, and as a writer, I begin to think of myself that way which is when it becomes dangerous. It’s hard. The trick is to get out from underneath your own archive. Writing in journals has come back for me, but it’s different from how it used to be. At this moment in time, Maggie Nelson is my literary executor, and I think to myself, “have I ever talked shit about Maggie in my notebook?” It’s weird to be observed by something that you won’t be around for. You are “post-consumed”. 

   You constantly have to figure out the new condition: when I stopped drinking, I wondered how I could write while sober. I wondered how I could write queer texts when I came out because, in my twenties, I had various sexual identities but operated in a heterosexual manner. When I stopped, I felt that incredible surge of energy and wrote as a queer person. 

   There’s always a new mode that you haven’t written in, so this archival moment will fall behind me. It’ll simply be the only writing I have. To be this person who was assuming that my work is being collected. 

CC: Do you think that it is an issue with the archive or how people treat the archive? 

EM: Both. I think that we are all overwhelmed with the archival question. It used to be, for a while, that every time I met someone and asked what they’re working on, they would say that they’re “working on the archive”. What does that mean! It represents the sheer capaciousness of time and history and our need to save work. 

TW: We are all being archived too, with the digital traces that we leave on social media. When you die, Facebook can preserve your account forever.

EM: Exactly. You are leaving traces at every moment. 

CC: Do you think, with our heavy surveillance of writers, that there is pressure to over-confess in the text? 

EM: Yes, but there is pressure to over-edit too. There is no private moment, and it changes how we disclose information. Everyone talks about how combative poets and artists were decades before me. There was no sense of a career, and you would say shit about people’s work. Now we’re more careful about the traces we leave behind.

    I remember when people started to record their poetry readings. People would gossip in between reading their work, and I remember the day we knew that the reading was going to be recorded and put on the internet. Now I have to be less voluble about what I say in the reading because people will hear it. Not only will they hear, they’ll watch me say it! It puts a chill on the community, and that becomes the new normal. 

TW: I am curious what your relationship is to Instagram? Do you see it as a part of your work, part of your profession, just a normal outlet? 

EM: All of those things. I have always loved taking pictures, and my account has become a public gallery. I showed at a gallery in Provincetown, the Bridget Donahue gallery. Every time I moved into a new genre, there were opportunities for reward and attention. I would like to be oblivious to that, but I realize that my putting pictures on a wall created desire. 

    You can take a picture and have it identified for its sense of beauty, but there is Instagram where I have no rules and can take more than one picture per day. That is a type of curating which is different from my past experience with it. It is more relational in how the photos are ordered, and it’s also obviously there for publicity needs. 

    I am obsessed with East River Park and its demolition, and Instagram has become a site of activism for me. It is nice to have a lot of followers who are affected by you. It can be a useful political tool. 

CC: You often collapse time in your work. You’ll show your thoughts in such detail that we are exposed to your present interiority, but you remind us that your self is constituted by past experiences and future goals. I wonder how you embody the present in your work and how you balance the acts of seeing, creating and living, writing. 

EM: What you said is the description of a writing process. I cannot keep the balance of these acts as a human being because it’s hard to finish a piece of writing and have a particular existence. It’s unsteady, yet writing is how I steady myself. 

   I was a part-time advertising agent in my past, and a friend, the traffic manager, got me the job so that we could drink and work. I think that writing and living is a form of trafficking.

 I’m writing a large novel that I hope to finish in under five years and an anthology. And I’m asked to write short pieces because I’m a known writer. There are all these kinds of writing happening, and it feels like a dog race where you have to let one dog win to finish the other tasks. After I’ve worked for so long, I know that I will not fail and I’ll finish the tasks at hand. I will make sense of the pieces that, as of now, just go go go and run off the pier without an end. There will be an end. 

I think that the poetry’s that is the greatest teacher follows that Frank O’ Hara line and goes on your nerve.You write and gain momentum, and you become comfortable writing it and being it. It will abandon you even when you write the work, and I think that editing saves the work as part of a synthetic process. 

I wrote poems because I knew “I could be this Eileen for the length of this poem.” I wanted to write novels, but I thought, “how can I write novels if I’m not the same person tomorrow?