Native Voices Won’t Be Silenced

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As a blogger for Ploughshares I cover indigenous and Asian lit from around the world. My coverage also, naturally, includes the US, Canada, and other Western nations. When blog readership stats came in recently I saw something that confirmed my suspicions of the reading and writing public who supposedly champion POC authors: There’s a lot of talk about reading POC, the C or color part of that acronym doesn’t extend beyond the Caucasian or African American mainstream.

Where is the indigenous element in POC?

That’s where critically acclaimed Native nonfiction writer Elissa Washuta comes in. Author of personal essays and the memoir My Body Is a Book of Rules, she doesn’t dress up her writing with literary versions of moccasins and beaded buffalo hide dresses. Her skin might be a little too pale to suit the stereotype, as she’s said and written, yet she is an “unapologetic” member of the Cowlitz tribe.

Elissa holds an MFA from The University of Washington and currently serves as the undergraduate adviser for the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and a nonfiction faculty member in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a faculty advisor for Mud City Journal.

I interviewed her about November as Native American Heritage month, where to find work by indigenous writers, and being an edit-as-I-go writer.

Nichole L. Reber: Some of my friends from other countries have been asked by editors to mitigate the ethnic references in their work. My Guyanese friend, for instance, is a poet who’s been told he should eliminate his inherent Hindu references to be more accessible to readers. Have editors tried to censor you like this? Have you come across Native writers who self-censor?

Elissa Washuta: An editor has never told me to take out references to being Cowlitz/Cascade from my work. I don’t know that this means that I haven’t been censored. Like pretty much every other writer, I’ve been rejected many, many times, and I have wondered whether any of those rejections have to do with the fact that my work might be seen as “not Native enough” by readers who are looking for work with markers from a set created by Hollywood writers, fake shamans pulling a profit from paperbacks, and other non-Natives whose representations have come to be so strongly associated with us in too many people’s imaginations. Regarding other Natives who self-censor: it’s not something I think about, and certainly not something I’d call out a writer about. Each of us has an individual relationship with Indigeneity and it’s not up to me to evaluate whether it’s all there on the page. Not everything needs to be shared for readers’ consumption.

Reber: At the beginning of the month, Americans will vote for a President, then at the end of the month they’ll gorge on food and football in a supposed celebration of thanks for Natives’ helping out the first colonists. Few, however, recognize that it’s also Native American Heritage month. Does Native American Heritage month mean anything to you?

Washuta: I’ve become pretty jaded about Native American Heritage Month, because I sometimes see outlets only paying attention to Native voices and issues during November. That’s when the lists of notable Natives come out from publications who don’t publish work about Native writers the rest of the year (and still might not actually feature any Native bylines in November). Last November, the brick-and-mortar Amazon.com store in Seattle presented my book in a special “Native Voices” display in November. The book wasn’t in the store when I returned during the first week of December. All that said, I do look forward to the flurry of activity — readings, gatherings, other events — that happens in my communities in November.

Reber: What’s your favorite/most irritating myth about Natives? How would you set that record straight?

Washuta: Most irritating myths: That our identities are based completely in what a DNA test might say about us (bullshit) or in what we present that’s in alignment with something someone saw in Thunderheart (bullshit) rather than in our relationships and our roles in our communities. I try to set the record straight every day by continuing to live authentically and visibly as an unapologetic Cowlitz woman.

I try to set the record straight every day by continuing to live authentically and visibly as an unapologetic Cowlitz woman.

Reber: What are some of the best resources to find Native writers and their works? Who are some Natives you read, in this country or others?

Washuta: Facebook groups and pages are good resources for me. I recommend following “IAIA MFA in Creative Writing” to see the incredible things our faculty and students are doing. Follow Daniel Heath Justice on Twitter — he’s a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a writer, and he tweets the name of an Indigenous writer every single day. Read The Yellow Medicine Review, Red Ink, As/Us, and Mud City Journal.

Reber: What’s your favorite part of the writing process? In a Poets & Writers piece you wrote that perhaps it’s not daily word count that gets a writer where she needs to be. Can you elaborate on how writing entails more than marching the words across a page?

Washuta: It’s true — I’m not into trying to hit a daily word count, ever. I don’t write every day, but I know that if I have three days without distractions, I can write 10,000 usable words. I binge on writing time just as I’ve always binged on Tootsie Rolls — I’m an all-or-nothing person, and having large chunks of writing time allows me to become deeply immersed in the work, which facilitates the making of connections between personal and public that come up throughout my work. Bringing together documents and fragments from American pop culture and history with my own experience, and being an edit-as-I-go writer always seeking to get the first draft to be stellar, makes for a slow process for me.

In the Poets & Writers piece, I talked about the fact that writing breaks are important for me in protecting myself from the process of working with traumatic memories. I have PTSD. I am resilient, but the work of remembering, uncovering, and rendering traumatic experiences is still likely to be deeply triggering. Being triggered in this way has a very real impact on my life: I will be emotional and reactive, I’ll have brain fog, I’ll be exhausted, I’ll feel unsafe and insecure, and I’ll have a ridiculously heightened startle response that makes me jump out of my seat or choke on my food. The work that leads to this cannot be a part of my everyday life.

Reber: In addition to My Body Is a Book of Rules you also published the novella-length Starvation Mode. Many nonfiction writers don’t seem to be aware that that length exists. What are its benefits and, because “novella-length” irritates me with its inherent fiction reference, how might we nonfiction writers agree to some kind of neologism for it?

Washuta: I think the benefit of the short book-long essay — which is what I like to call it, rather than “novella-length memoir” — is simply that the size and shape of stories’ containers are incredibly important to me, as important as the content (or more important), and some work just needs to have a container that is smaller than the standard book and longer than the standard essay.

Your ultra-cool style of writing, which incorporates so many forms and hybrids and lengths, is so refreshing. How do you encourage other writers to enter the world of alternative/hybrid forms?

Washuta: Thank you! I think a necessary first step is to shift one’s thinking about what an essay is “about.” For me, essays like this aren’t just “about” the subject matter — the form is the content. It’s important to consider the significance of any presentation of a subject, whether that’s a traditional, chronological narrative structure or something in the form of a term paper. What’s the very best vessel?

Reber: There’s a doc on Netflix called Reel Injun that discusses Hollywood’s perpetuation of a certain Native narrative. Have you seen it?

Washuta: Yes! I used to teach classes on Native representations in film at the University of Washington, and I used Reel Injun often.

Reber: Some of the clips used in The Reel Injun are from Terrence Malick’s The New World. I can imagine how you feel about that film but would like to hear your words. Malick tries to humanize the native experience, and he shows European actions as ridiculous and barbaric. But the film isn’t merely centered in the politics of history. It’s exceptionally artistic. I think this, like the rest of his films, is a lyric essay set to film. It’s visually poetic, told in snapshots, up to audience interpretation. Have you noticed that?

Washuta: It’s been a couple of years since I watched The New World, and I’m sure I’d have a lot more to say about it if I were to watch it again — but what I remember most about the film is that it’s long, pretty, and mostly without dialogue. The natural world is something to look at, something to appreciate for its aesthetic qualities. This is unlike any Native peoples’ views of the world that I’m aware of. While cultures differ quite a lot in land-based practices and stories surrounding them, I think a common thread is that Native peoples have long-standing relationships with the land — living on it, working with it, having a history with it, respecting different ideas of personhood embodied by it. Just looking at the landscape seems to me to be a practice brought here by settlers. Scrolling through a National Geographic digital image list has pretty much nothing in common with the act of going to the river for salmon ceremony because of a long-standing obligation to honor the gift of their lives that the salmon give us. So I see The New World as a piece of art that looks at the land (having been filmed, I see, very close to the place where the events took place) but can’t possibly embody the people’s relationships with that place.

I also think the silence in the film is a continuation of the representations of silent Indian maidens that have such a long and troubling history in film. I’m thinking of Sonseeahray in Broken Arrow, who eventually does speak quite a lot, but says very little when she is introduced as White Painted Lady, placed in the role of healing Tom Jeffords’s wounds while looking lovely. And I’m thinking of “Look” in The Searchers: she is mostly without a voice, she’s the butt of jokes, and Martin’s violent act of kicking her down a hill is meant to get laughs. And there’s Disney’s version of Pocahontas, too: she’s the protagonist of that film, and she does speak quite a bit, but when she meets John Smith, she has no words until she adopts his language. In all these roles, the Native woman is quiet, subservient, nice to look at, compliant.

The silencing of Native people has been an important tool of genocide: in boarding schools, Native children were forbidden from speaking the languages of home. Stories have been lost, and stories tell us how to live in our world: how to honor the beings with which we have longstanding relationships, how to treat one another, what to do and what not to do as human beings in order to live as well as possible. The replacement of these stories with silence is the replacement of old and durable ways of living and knowing with young, convenient, and untested narratives about “progress” and “improvement.” Native storytellers maintained these ways of knowing over many, many generations. So for a non-Native filmmaker to build his representation of a Native community from silence seems consistent with the erasure that has been happening for hundreds of years.

The silencing of Native people has been an important tool of genocide.

All that’s to say — I don’t remember the film, entirely, but I remember how it made me feel, which was uncomfortable. And so it’s possible that it is like lyric essay, in a way (although I think it’s a fiction, in that it’s not an accurate depiction), in that I think lyric essay relies a lot on reader effort.

Reber: Speaking of lyric essays, we talked earlier about alternative and hybrid forms. There are many nonfiction writers out there, even those who studied writing at uni, who remain unaware of forms such as the braided essay, the fragmented essay, the hermit crab, all of which are increasingly popular. You in fact write in some of these styles. Could you take a stab in explaining what these are and why you think they’re gaining in popularity?

Washuta: I think all these formal approaches to the essay rely on a heightened awareness of form (the visible shape of the text, determined by organization of its paragraphs, breaks, and other elements). Both the writer and reader are aware: in essays that most people think of as more formally “traditional,” I think the writer is often aware of the form but crafts the essay in such a way that the reader doesn’t have to be.

In many of these more fragmented or formally innovative essays, the form is as important as the content, and the two rely on each other. In my own work, I do make a lot of formal choices to create what people are calling “hermit crab” essays. I’m not sure where that label originates, but it might come from Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, who write in Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, “This kind of essay appropriates existing essay forms as an outer covering, to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly.”

I like that way of looking at these essays, but it’s not exactly how I think of the work. I think of form and content as vessel and contents held. My yellow bottles from the pharmacy are meant to hold pills, but I can also repurpose them to hold safety pins. I can’t use them to hold apple slices, because they’re not the right size. Similarly, I can appropriate the text form of the prescribing information that comes with those pill bottles, employing the direct address, elements of voice, progression of information, and other characteristic elements. I used that form in My Body Is a Book of Rules to tell the story of my own experience with prescription drugs. I don’t think it would be useful for holding contents that have to do with my experiences with online dating — I’ve used a different form for that.

I think this kind of formal innovation is gaining in popularity because people are encountering them more and more, in part because of online journals and digital resource sharing (like recommending essays via Facebook, which I see happening a lot). I think the more people see formally innovative essays, the more prepared we are with the tools to prepare us to learn an essay’s internal logic and rules, and we’re less likely to see these essays as weird failures because they don’t follow the rules. “Fragmented” used to be seen as a problem — now people are beginning to see that it’s a neutral quality.

Reber: Have you written any collaborative works? How do you imagine the collaborative works benefit the writers and the reader? Do you have any suggestions on how we/readers might start one? Most of the collaborations I’ve seen and read are from Julie Marie Wade and Denise Duhamel.

Washuta: I haven’t. I imagine that I’d be a terrible artistic collaborator. My writing process involves pushing myself further into traumatic memory than I think I can safely go without being completely overtaken by my PTSD, and simultaneously pushing myself to put that content into a container that’s more unusual than what I’ve come up with before (or at least as unusual). I can’t imagine subjecting anyone else to that, and also, the process is so personal and intuitive that I don’t think it would hold up if I let someone else in.

Reber: In your piece in The Weeklings called “I Am Not Pocahontas,” you wrote about that age-old question Americans like to ask: “How much Indian are you?” I love this essay because it reminds me of when I temped at a DNA firm in Sarasota, Florida, and received dozens of phone calls from people who believed if they could prove their Native heritage they would receive a bald eagle. It took quite a few of those phone calls to learn how to answer them without laughing. Yet on the other hand I could relate because I too wanted to verify what my father had told me about having Native blood. I do have some, a DNA test indicated, an infinitesimal amount that would, unfortunately for my mother, not qualify me as getting a full-ride to uni. Somehow having that confirmation, despite decades of my father telling me so, added another dimension to my existence. On the flip side I wonder about the times I’ve heard Natives banter friends or family members for not being Indian enough. What does that mean? How does one get to be Indian enough?

Washuta: There are so many different ways of being Native (enough) that it would be impossible for me to answer for anyone but myself. When I was in high school in New Jersey, where I didn’t know any Native people I wasn’t related to, I was anxious about being “Native enough” because there were white kids who questioned my authenticity and presented themselves as arbiters of Native realness. But their conception of Native authenticity probably came largely from Hollywood representations and from passed-around misinformation about what it means to be a tribe member — all that bullshit about Indians not paying taxes (so not true).

Now I’m an adult and I am very sure that I’m “Indian enough.” For me, that looks like enrollment in my tribe, which means that I have a formalized relationship with my community and am able to participate as a citizen. And it means having relationships within that tribe. And it means that I’m descended from people who lived in North America before settlers seized the land, people who have stories and land-based practices that have endured despite deliberate efforts by the U.S. government to eradicate our ways of living and knowing.

Announcing Papercuts: A Party Game for the Rude and Well-Read

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Attention all literary fiends, card game junkies and holiday gift-givers: Electric Literature has just gone live with a Kickstarter for Papercuts: A Party Game for the Rude and Well Read! Until now, the game was just a chimera — a whisper of a rumor of an idea — but after months of painstaking R&D (i.e. — wine, pizza & night shifts at the EL editorial offices), Papercuts is now a fully designed, ruled and playable game. All it needs now is your backing!

Here’s how the game works: the “Editor” draws a question card, and each of the other players (the “Writers”) submits an answer card. Based on whatever clever/twisted/idiosyncratic/perverted/erudite criterion suits the Editor’s mood, a winning card is chosen and a point is awarded. Pass the deck of questions, name a new Editor, and keep the fun going. Have you ever played Apples to Apples™ or Cards Against Humanity™? Then you get the gist. Things are going to get rowdy — and literary, and possibly a little crazy, but also probably mind-expanding and definitely weird. Papercuts has been exhaustively play-tested by EL staff and calibrated for maximum bookish fun.

The Kickstarter campaign, which was launched today, needs to raise $15,000 over the next month. Papercuts will then go to print and be ready by the second week of December — just in time to ship for the holiday season. Rewards include first-run sets of Papercuts, totes, t-shirts, year-round submissions to EL’s Recommended Reading, and review of your work from EL editors.

And remember — Electric Literature is a non-profit dedicated to paying writers, amplifying the power of storytelling, and ensuring that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture. So support this game!

A Lifetime in Personas

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D. Foy’s Patricide, his second novel, is an unusual hybrid that pushes against the edges of literary fiction with the unfiltered violence, frustration, and angst typically found in noir novels but does so with an elegance and lyricism that echo giants like Cormac McCarthy and Walt Whitman. Equal parts devastating coming-of-age (and beyond) narrative and philosophical examination of fatherhood, Patricide is, more than a novel about a man who survives a devastating, abusive childhood, a text that explores both identity construction/deconstruction/reconstruction cycles and the generational recurrence of aberrant behavioral patterns and falsehoods.

Patricide follows Pat Rice as he suffers through and eventually tries to leave behind an awful childhood spent at the hands of a lying father with a short temper and heavy hands and a mother who shifts between molesting him and assaulting him. As Pat matures, the fabrications he has been exposed to since birth begin to crumble and his parents are slowly revealed for what they truly are. Unfortunately, the damage is already done and constructing a great future from a shattered past is impossible, especially when drugs, alcohol, constant uncertainty, and resentment are part of the equation. Told in first and third person and from the unique perspectives of ten different personas that range from the scared, abused youngster to the (in)mature self-destructive addict who is unable to cope with his past or present, Patricide is a narrative that contains a lifetime of fear and growth filtered through philosophy and mercilessly dissected in search of ultimate truths and understanding.

Foy’s novel inhabits a space between all its elements. This is a narrative about dread, hatred, anger, weakness, truths revealed, and resentment, and the story takes places in a plethora of places within that bleak psychogeography. Pat, like any other child, is placed on a route of discovery, both of the self and of those around him. Unfortunately, those around him are deeply flawed individuals, especially his parents, and that has a direct and very adverse effect on his development. The formative years, those that are supposed to be spent in a semi-constant state of amazement, are for Pat nothing more than a perennial and unfruitful quest to be accepted and to escape the vicious wrath of his mother and father. This state, in turn, becomes a desire to escape, to break free of his own life, to move into a new set of realities that differ from those that are constantly being revealed to him:

“You are stricken with wonder. But this wonder isn’t a wonderful wonder, this wonder is no wonder of serenity and grace. It’s a wonder of madness, a wonder of terror and doubt. It’s a wonder that civility, concern, humility, kindness — that compassion itself — haven’t utterly collapsed.”

While Pat is the main character, his father occupies the epicenter of the narrative. At first, the father is The Father and, albeit somewhat inadequately, he manages to provide what his son requires of him: support, moments of positive reinforcement, and a few intellectual, moral, and philosophical building blocks that will help him become a man. Then cracks begin to appear in the construction that Pat and his Father have built together and two moments, one of violence directed at his father and one in which both of his parents deny him a guitar, destroy the idea of The Father. The catharsis that ensues is a maelstrom of suffering that shakes Pat to his fragile core and signals the escape/expulsion from the home both literally and figuratively.

“Either the father is The Father, or he’s just some other guy.

Because The Father is invincible, indefatigable, impermeable to bribery, sleaze, and vice, beyond corruption of any sort, purity incarnate, authority supreme.

The moment of The Father’s tainting is the moment of The Father’s death — he crashes into the slime of being with all its hateful masses.”

A lot of things lead up to the shattering of The Father and the painful emergence of the father, but that shattering also signal a rebirth within the narrative. Furthermore, that break allows Foy to explore pain and ennui and those things to addiction, violent behavior, and destroyed relationships. In a way, Patricide is an intellectual and emotional map of agitated stagnation and ennui: “The ennui was endless, the lunacy, too, and the sadness, and the heartache and injuries and illness, the plain old dirty pain.”

Patricide is a literary ouroboros that explores how abused sons become abusive fathers who have abused sons who become abusive fathers. Inside this cyclical dynamic, Foy has packed a philosophical treatise on fatherhood, a cautionary tale about vices and the lives we build around them/because of them, and an extremely poetic novel about family and redemption. The result is a novel that digs deep into Americana and pulls out its most embarrassing, chaotic, tender, and scatological scenes and brings them to center stage so that they may, for one brief moment, shine so bright that they transform into mirrors.

Behind the blitzkrieg of ideas and lyricism, Patricide is a celebration of language. Foy constantly alternates between writing that sustains conversations with thinkers like Foucault and Freud and one-line paragraphs that rival David Foster Wallace’s most vivacious passages. This is writing that erupts like a volcano of words and then folds in on itself only to begin the explosive process all over again.

“My father is a man of such limitless contradictions that it doesn’t seem possible he walks this earth. And how is it possible I’ve survived this long, having been raised in this world by such a man as my father… And how can I live each day in the midst of such terrible ambivalence, how can I hold at once such awesome love and despicable burning hatred?”

With his previous novel, Made to Break, Foy announced the emergence of a voice that worked inside a framework it had built for itself. The novel was dark and poetic in ways that heralded great things to come. Patricide delivers on that tough promise and cements its author as one of the most talented and polyrhythmic voices in literary fiction.

Wendy C. Ortiz Chronicles a Dreamscape

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The idea of pure transparency is pivotal when discussing the work of Wendy C. Ortiz. Her most recent book, Bruja, is described as a “dreamoir,” and the book opens with a definition of the form— “a narrative derived from the most malleable and revelatory details of ones dreams, catalogued in bold detail. A literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind.” From there, Ortiz launches into those malleable and revelatory details. The most shocking and exciting part of reading them is recognizing that through this catalog of unguarded and subconscious moments, we really do see a sort of narrative emerge — a recurrence of characters, settings and situations. The book itself is organized by month, opening in the spring, with April. Each dream ranges from a few sentences to a few pages, with the only discernible indication that the dream is ending and another beginning is through an artful use of white space. One passage appears this way:

“I found an invisible button and pushed it.
Everything — everything — turned white. A complete blank white slate, no forms, shadows, dimensions.
It reminded me of Bugs Bunny cartoons when the animator showed up and erased the backgrounds around the characters, then erased the characters.”

The secret conceit — and the brilliance — of this book is Ortiz’s ability to cause the reader to relate. It’s a feat that ought to be impossible, considering we’re reading the transcriptions of someone else’s dream. But after a few passages, we can’t help but reflect on our own dreams, our own subconscious desires, the recurring settings that transfer in and out of our dreamscape like a computer background, and the recurring cast of characters from our lives that transport themselves into our own personal dream spaces.

Ortiz and I talked about social media, the book’s cover art (Bruja’s is the work of another LA-based artist named Wendy Ortiz), and giving over to your most personal moments.

Nicholas Rys: I’m very curious about the inception of this project, how the idea of publishing a chronicle of your dreams as a work of literature came about? I think it’s beautiful.

Wendy C. Ortiz: Thank you. Initially it was text I captured from a website I was keeping, exactly like the text that would become Hollywood Notebook. I was keeping notes on dreams at the same time. When the website went down, I knew I’d want to work with the text down the road, so I saved it. When Michael Seidlinger asked me if I had anything for him to look at for CCM, I knew this was probably something he could appreciate. In my first emails with him I called it a dreamoir and explained briefly what I meant by that term, and he was immediately on board and supportive of the work.

Rys: So I’m fascinated by this book conceptually and the process of it. Is it safe to call this a dream journal? Did you take notes right after you’d wake up or did you write these much later?

Ortiz: It’s safe to call the original text a dream journal, though when I published it online I made sure to never use the word “dream” or point out that it was a collection of dreams. At different periods in my life I’ve kept some kind of dream journal, and have several volumes of them, sometimes in small notebooks or more formal journals, some on loose pieces of paper I kept. I typically wrote them just after waking, but would impose some form on them before publishing them on the website.

Rys:Are the passages laid out chronologically?

Ortiz: These dreams are totally chronological. The original version had exact dates, but in editing, we decided to go with just the months, and several dreams were edited out.

Rys :For some characters, full or first names are given, while others go by abbreviations like Sh or N. could you tell me about the process? Were you protecting certain identities? How did you decide who would be anonymous and who be given a name?

Ortiz: I mainly wanted to keep hold of the pseudonyms I’ve given others in all my previous writing. “Abigail,” for example, is a character in Excavation, and she appears frequently in Bruja under that pseudonym. “Michael” shows up constantly in Bruja, but has made only one appearance in a published essay. “Sh.” and “S.” appear throughout Hollywood Notebook, and so on and so forth. A few names are not pseudonyms in Bruja, and my feeling was that they did not need protection, and frankly, I enjoyed what could be read into the dream. “Sandy” appears in Bruja, and she is Sandy in real life.

Rys: How does the title relate to the book?

Ortiz: My grandmother and my mother are women who I describe as witches, with their particular abilities and insights, though they would never describe themselves as such. For much of my life it’s felt like a given that I have some sort of vibe that others have described as “witchy,” and my partner and I see this in our daughter as well. A bruja, to me, is one who can, among other things, live on other planes than just the one we think we know and refer to as reality. In Bruja, I’m describing the world I lived in while asleep, that felt just as real, just as emotional and vibrant and frightening as the world I lived in during the day. In that sense, I lived in two different planes and tried to document that experience. The word bruja, Spanish for witch, then, just references one of the identities I inhabit.

A bruja, to me, is one who can, among other things, live on other planes than just the one we think we know and refer to as reality.

Rys: So I’m curious if writing about your dreams adds more distance or makes you feel, I don’t know, almost more vulnerable, like you are giving over your subconscious, in some way. I suppose I’m curious how writing about your dreams compares to writing about other, personal aspects of your life? I’m really in awe of how brave you are, specifically as a memoirist, in the manner in which you confront difficult, personal experiences so artfully and sincerely. I’m curious if writing about such an unguarded and private aspect of your life feels logical, as you’ve already given so much of yourself to “The Reader”, or if it was in some ways different, more difficult, more challenging? Does any of this make any sense?

Ortiz: This makes total sense! I do feel an additional sense of uncomfortability with this dreamoir. It’s like removing another veil. Some of the dreams I omitted felt they like they gave away too much of my psyche. Seeing dreams placed this way — and taking into consideration when the dreams occurred, what else was going on in my life on this plane — feels very revealing. But then there is the way in which a dream works as a lens, and it can also obfuscate. I like this element — you might feel you understand more of a person via their dreams, but you might actually understand less.

Rys: Did you find any dream/passage surprising as you read it back during the edits?

Ortiz: I’m always surprised reading the constant dream conversations and conflicts I was having when it comes to partners. Do I marry this one or that one; I don’t want to be married at all; I want both; I met “The One.” It’s hilarious.

Rys: I love the book because as it progresses the reader can begin to see recurring images, motifs form water/water creatures, traveling/packing for traveling, settings that pop up again and again. This is fascinating to see unfold, to watch settings recur and characters drift in and out. Inevitably — perhaps it’s unavoidable as someone else who writes — but I found something at least vaguely resembling a narrative structure emerges. Was this something you thought about from the onset? Was it something that just happened to emerge as you were writing the book?

Ortiz: I did not set out with a narrative structure to impose on the book but imagined it would become on its own through the editing process. I also see a narrative structure that no one else has access to because I was the dreamer and the main player even in the labyrinth that is dream life. I also imagine that the lack or presence of “narrative structure” in the book will depend on the reader and how she reads (into) it…

Rys: Could you tell me about the cover art?

Ortiz: On instagram I found another Wendy Ortiz, an accomplished artist. I had been receiving stray emails meant for her, and started following her — and my first thought was, These are the kinds of images I imagine I would wish to illustrate if I had even one artistic bone in this body. Her images are haunting, beautiful, and dark. I got in touch with her and she lives in Los Angeles, too. I’m very pleased and fortunate that she was open to letting me use her work for the book cover.

Rys: What is your writing schedule like? Do you find an importance in a daily routine?

Ortiz: I don’t have a schedule, really. Every morning I write two longhand pages in a journal, that’s it. It’s more of an exercise, a wish to keep going with the journals I’ve kept since I was a kid, only there’s a discipline to it now. It’s total bullshit writing with occasional moments of aha, but mainly it’s what I will use maybe ten years from now when I write the memoir about this particular period of my life.

Rys: You are very active on social media which, in some ways, is a sort of self-curated live stream of our day to day — I’ve been sort of thinking about the ways that social media is almost like an extension of or at least connected to the concept of memoir — to what you do. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Ortiz: I have so many thoughts on this. The platforms I use — fb, twitter, instagram, tumblr, snapchat — for each I utilize what could be described as a different persona because they each definitely have a different and particular audience. I sometimes think, if these platforms were layers, the outermost would be fb, next would come twitter, then insta, then tumblr, then snapchat, snapchat having the most potential for the innermost layer, because it’s there I could tell a secret and have it be deleted from my story and from the snapchat servers 24 hours later. Each layer requires a different persona. This, to me, is fun to untangle, get tangled in, and mess with. Also, I find that a lot of readers seek me out in these places and do seem to appreciate the occasional windows into my day to day life — and that sometimes even builds into relationships with readers and other writers where these virtual spaces can be generative, warm, and supportive.

An Elegy for Ecuador

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Mauro Javier Cardenas’s first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, links the stories of three graduates of San Javier, an elite prep school in Guayaquil. Antonio, Leopoldo, and Rolando were all once part of the same Jesuit volunteer group, all idealistic, all ambitious, and, by the novel’s start — and certainly by its finish — they all have had that idealism and that ambition suffocated.

But more interesting than any aspect of The Revolutionaries Try Again’s plot is its language, which also looks rather conventional, at first; then the sentences start to lengthen, and we run into Spanish phrases here and there, and some theatrical dialogue; by the end, the reader’s wavering between pages-long sentences and phrase-fragments cordoned off by dashes and slashes.

Cardenas seems to have telegraphed his influences. A quick Googling will unearth his interviews with literary heavyweights, particularly ones known for dense, monologue-driven novels, where politics press upon the lives of individuals: Laszlo Krasznahorkai (Hungarian), Antonio Lobo Antunes (Portuguese), Horacio Castellanos Moya (Salvadoran), among others. Enlivened by foreign influences — including those of its Ecuador-born author — the English of The Revolutionaries Try Again expands and contracts, twists and deforms. In every sentence is a churning mind. Words tumble on, and the experience of reading begins to resemble the the sensation of thinking, of remembering.

…what Antonio will remember of that spiritual retreat is that after their evening Mass, disregarding Father Lucio’s warning that no one was to leave their rooms upstairs — stay alone with the lord, Drool — Antonio escaped from his room and evaded the pack of Dobermans that had been unleashed by the priests and sneaked inside Leopoldo’s room, where late into the night they argued about what god wanted from them and we have a responsibility to him, Leopoldo says, the lord has chosen us, Antonio says, the Dobermans barking outside Leopoldo’s room as Leopoldo raises his glass toward the light and says we must be transparent like this glass so that god’s light can pass through us.

This is a typical sentence not only in its form — how it meanders through sense and memory, its plurality of voices, its sheer length — but also in its nostalgic treatment of religious belief and friendship. And nostalgia, of course, follows loss. The Revolutionaries Try Again is about lost faith, and not just in God, but in institutions, such as religion and government, and in people, such as your friends and yourself.

Through Leopoldo, who grows up to be a government economista, we get scenes of bureaucratic absurdity. Antonio presents an alternative: as soon as he graduates from San Javier, he leaves for the United States. Antonio is the novel’s central character, and his biography resembles his author’s: both from Guayaquil, both of their fathers were ministers in Cordero’s government, both attended San Javier and Stanford. And Cardenas says that he, like Antonio, planned to return to Ecuador and run for office. But instead of returning, he wrote a novel.

Antonio, at the novel’s start, has all but given up the dream of his triumphant return. (Now he’s a writer who “imagine[s] the possibility of deforming American English as revenge for Americans deforming Latin America.”) Leopoldo phones Antonio on an impulse and convinces him that they should run for president like they had always talked about. It’s a dramatic instigating event, the fateful call made possible by a lightning-struck payphone, a scene that seems to suggest that we’re in for some sort of magical realist political thriller. But no, this is literary fiction, a genre whose authors only rarely deign to tell an exciting story. So The Revolutionaries Try Again is a a sort of mocking title (though it suggests a harsher irony than the book actually possesses). It’s not about a revolution; it’s not even about trying, certainly not trying again. Antonio and Leopoldo’s prospective candidate is another San Javier grad, a rapist from a rich family, who doesn’t even care about politics. They all chitchat, go to parties, and spark no upheaval. The Revolutionaries Try Again doesn’t quite fulfill the drama that its opening seems to promise, but nor does it get mired in the doldrums of typical lit-fic plotlessness. The book succeeds because the mechanics of the mind, much like those of politics, tend to whirl in place rather than move forward. For a novel about stifled ambition, this form fits.

Or these forms fit, that might be more accurate, because the novel’s always shifting; its syntax twists and untwists; lines stagger down the page; two chapters are in Spanish. But the form that makes the strongest impression first appears in the Rolando and Eva chapters. Their story takes up far fewer pages than Antonio and Leopoldo’s, but when the novel’s focus trains on Rolando and the two women whom he’s obsessed with (Eva, his lover, and Alma, his sister), Cardenas writes in his least conventional mode.

…the surface of the road on the way to Eva’s house shifting abruptly from pavement to gravel to craters that rattle the bus that’s speeding by with a hand-sized flag of El Loco attached to its antennae that sounds like the shuffling of cards — which reminds Rolando of nothing — of his father who never played cards backgammon chess — switching off the headlights as he parks by Eva’s house — to remain silent is to give the impression that one wants nothing — to shut off the lights in one’s house is to give the impression that one wants — a surprise? — shut up — that one is asleep — that one is embracing someone other than Rolando Alban Cienfuegos carajo — stop that — that one has shut one’s eyes to the world — let it rot Rolando — winning the chess championship at San Javier three years in a row but his classmates turning it into a joke — Gremlin eat Queen ha…

It’s a destabilizing effect, temporally distorted and fragmented, fitting for the unstable Rolando. (In his first appearance, after his father tells Antonio and Leopoldo that he is starting a radio station, he lashes out at his former classmates, screaming that they are “thieves.”) Eva wants him to use his station to produce and broadcast political radio dramas, but Rolando rather play Ricky Martin, because, he believes “nothing changes without violence.” Violence looms over these chapters, which do not only stand in contrast to Antonio and Leopoldo’s on stylistic grounds. This is how the moral weight of the novel starts to accrue, with the human consequences of systemic corruption made manifest.

A self-consciousness about literature and literary convention; a distortion of linear time; a depiction of reality as fragmented, using various, internalized, questionably-reliable perspectives, as well as grammatical and syntactic irregularities: this sounds like a Modernist novel. Cardenas uses the trappings of Modernism to traditionally Modernist ends — mirroring the workings of consciousness, and depicting a society, reeling from violence, that has lost faith in itself — but The Revolutionaries Try Again is set in a country and time that we don’t normally associate with Modernism: the Ecuador of the mid-90s, in the months leading up to the demagogue “El Loco” Bucaram’s election.

So, in a sense, this novel belongs to the past—to Ecuador’s history, and to Cardenas’s life, and to the innovations of Modernism. But I hope, as thousands migrate northward, that this novel belongs as much to the future. Wouldn’t that be fantastic, if this dense, brilliant, bilingual novel by an immigrant is what the future of American literature looks like?

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: The Equestrian Collection: DVD Collection

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★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing The Equestrian Collection: DVD Collection.

If you enjoy videos of horses, then this DVD collection is for you. It’s 38 DVDs with a total running time of over 19 hours. This may seem like a lot, but when you consider that horses can live up to 30 years, 19 hours isn’t so much.

The horses are beautiful, and do everything you would expect to see, including running, sitting, eating — you name it. It’s hard to tell the horses apart but I counted about six different ones. One of them might be a mule but it’s hard to tell because the videos appear to have been filmed through someone’s living room window, across the street from someone who has some horses on their property.

At several points there are big trucks driving past that temporarily obscure the view of the horses. Between traffic and moments when the horses wander out of frame, the actual screen time of horses is probably more like 16 hours. Still a pretty good amount though.

Unfortunately, even with 19 hours of video, we never learn what any of the horse’s names are. I named one of them Black Stallion because it was the only name I could think of and I was in a hurry to name it.

There’s a barn in the distance and I wonder if there are more horses inside it. Hopefully if there is a sequel to this DVD collection, we might find out more about this barn and the mysteries it holds.

I found these DVDs for sale at a truck stop and no other stores I have been to seem to carry it or even know what it is. There are no references to it on the internet and no one I’ve met riding a horse has ever heard of it. The fact that this is such an obscure collection makes me think it must be incredibly valuable, but it only cost me $11.99. I imagine one day my descendants will be taking this DVD collection to Antiques Roadshow and discovering it is worth thousands of dollars. I hope they’ll remember my name and say it on TV.

The only real downside to this is it’s very hard to distinguish the DVDs from one another, especially because they aren’t numbered or anything. So if you’re not careful, you may end up accidentally rewatching some and not immediately realize it. That happened to me a few times, so it actually took me about 23 hours to watch all of these. That was a little aggravating.

BEST FEATURE: There’s a sex scene.
WORST FEATURE: A passing truck hits a pigeon and it looks like one of the horses wants to eat the dead pigeon but can’t reach it because of a fence in the way.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a bag of flour.

Werner Herzog Is Our Witness

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Though there’s no photographic record of the fatal encounter, no eyewitnesses, we know that on October 5, 2003 a large grizzly bear killed and ate most of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. All that was found of Tim were his spine, his right arm and hand, the watch still on his wrist. Everything else — bones, flesh, viscera — had already been eaten or scattered into the dense Alaskan brush. Amie’s partial remains were found nearby, half-covered in a pile of dirt and leaves, suggesting that the bear had gotten its fill and was saving the rest for later. Most of what we know of Tim and Amie’s deaths has been pieced together after the fact, from Treadwell’s journals, his film footage, and an audio recording of the fatal attack that speaks to the cataclysmic end of their relationship.

Timothy Treadwell in ‘Grizzly Man’

The would-be rescuers who arrived on the scene shot and killed a large male grizzly, which had been dubbed “Bear 141” in Treadwell’s notes — a bear he had not even bothered to name, perhaps because he knew that to name and anthropomorphize this bear would mean acknowledging that he couldn’t control or contain it. When they later cut open Bear 141, they found evidence of human remains. From the campsite they recovered a video camera, which contained a gruesome six-minute audio recording. Or perhaps the right word is “grisly.” It stays with you… At least, I imagine it would be difficult to leave behind, to get the sound of it out of your head. I can’t know this, however, because I’ve never actually heard it.

In one of the more powerful scenes in Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary film about the attack, Grizzly Man, the director himself bears witness to this auditory horror. Herzog is presented on-screen, sitting in front of Treadwell’s long-time friend, and former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak. The camera peers over Herzog’s shoulder, revealing the thinnest profile of his face at the frame’s edge, its gaze instead focused on Jewel’s face while she herself watches Herzog, a large pair of headphones clamped over his ears, as he listens to the recording of the attack.

There is something odd about making this craft choice in a documentary film. To have the director appear in-scene is clearly not an example of cinema verité, where the camera functions as an impassive and objective fly on the wall. Instead, we get a film in which our narrator is also the director, the controlling orchestrator of what we can access, as well as a character, witnessing the things we cannot, the things we have even been kept from witnessing. The movie offers up Herzog as the surrogate for our morbid curiosity, a vessel to contain the violence and the horror. We watch Jewel watch him listening, in an intoxicating loop of subjective, mediated witness.

Herzog tells her that he can hear Treadwell yelling for Amie to run away, to get away; that he is screaming for her to run. Herzog puts his hand up to his face. We cannot see his reaction, only Jewel’s, who, like us, has also never heard the tape. In the gaps of silence we just barely approach something close to the experience, although we cannot get all the way there with only our imagination. There is no other sound during this scene in the film. When he hands the headphones back to Jewel and tells her never to listen to the tape, and not to look at the autopsy photos, he also warns that the tape will be “the white elephant in the room all your life.”

The white elephant in the room all your life. It is such an odd thing to say, though I suppose it does suggest a truth about the recording: it’s the thing you don’t talk about but that you still feel the presence of in the margins of your everyday existence. When I watch this scene and hear Herzog’s warning, part of me still wants to ask him to hand the headphones to me. I want to hold them over my ears and tell him to rewind.

What does it sound like when the line is finally crossed, at the moment when there’s no turning back? I can almost imagine Treadwell’s high-pitched voice, frantic, shrieking at Amie, saying anything he can to get her to run and hide, to go away. It’s true that you can now find online what claims to be the actual audio recording of the attack. I could easily hear it with a single click, one tap of my finger. But I don’t. Ultimately it’s not the grisly reality that interests me, but the ecstatic reality: I want the mediated truth more than the actual recording. I want to watch Jewel watch Werner Herzog listening.

In an interview in Harper’s Magazine, as well as in a number of other interviews and lectures, Herzog has said that what he’s seeking in his documentary films is the “ecstatic truth,” a truth shaped not strictly from facts but also from fabrication and imagination. He has admitted in the past to scripting and staging certain “real” scenes in his documentary films, even to using actors instead of the actual people. But it is clearly also not pure fiction or fantasy he’s after.

In watching Grizzly Man, you would be forgiven for wondering whether the coroner, Dr. Franc Fallico, is really an actor reading lines he’s rehearsed for the purpose of playing a part. Throughout the movie, in every scene, he seems to overact, speaking with more clarity, poise, and enthusiasm than truly seems natural. At the end of one scene, set in the morgue with what appears to be a body on the table, hidden and unaddressed beneath a plastic sheet, Franc delivers his final line, before looking off-camera at Herzog, as though for approval.

The camera lingers in this moment for a beat or two longer than seems appropriate. Franc’s hands drop to his side and his posture relaxes. The resulting scene feels bizarrely amateur; it reads as messy and strange, like an editing mistake, a tail that should have ended up in a trash bin of cuts. But Herzog intentionally keeps it in, leaving us suspended in an uncomfortable space, uncertain about how much here is real and how much has been scripted, rehearsed, or even fabricated. It is an oddly seductive state of not-knowing; it is actually a kind of finely crafted and principled confusion.

This confusion leads us back to another question: Did Herzog actually listen to Treadwell’s death, or just act like he did? And does it matter? Whatever the case, Herzog thankfully did not resort to giving us a dramatic recreation of the attack, which would have been a different kind of ecstatic truth — too easy and simple, too reductive, melodramatic, and sensational. In a sense it would at once have been too fictional and too representationally “realistic,” instead of being, merely, true. Something about our filtered witness of Treadwell’s death — the strange experience of watching Jewel watch Herzog as he listens (or pretends to listen) — invites us into the experience in ways far more nuanced and complicated than a traditional documentary recreation, or a first-person, wholly factual testimony, could achieve. In making room for us to use our imagination, to speculate and to wonder, we feel our way towards what might be true.

The ecstatic truth is a truth that at once creates certainty and uncertainty, a truth that’s bigger, more wild and vibrant, more alluring and often more convincing even than a truth shaped entirely by fact or by one person’s interpretation of the facts. Stories that are apocryphal but undeniably appealing, ghost stories, tall tales, myths — perhaps all stories we tell each other again and again — depend on such ecstatic, felt truths. It is these truths that put us into a state of sublime confusion, a state out of which true knowledge of self and of the wider world emerge.

In the early Fall of 2009, my wife and I took our two kids camping in Sequoia National Park. We’d just come out of a rough patch in our lives and in our marriage and were trying to do more together as a whole family, working to stave off a divorce, our own little white elephant in the room. As it happened, the trip came during a particularly active bear season in the park, and there were signs everywhere warning about their presence. Early snows had pushed the bears down from higher elevations in search of food, desperate to pack on pounds for the coming winter. Nonetheless we remained undeterred, and I was even a little extra excited.

Our campsite was a patch of dirt beside a picnic table perched on a hillside, surrounded by other campsites with little space between us. We kept our food in a locked metal bear-proof box, and made sure that we didn’t have anything with an odor inside our tent. After setting up camp I loaded our daughter into a backpack carrier, and the four of us set out on a short hike, up a main road to an area with trails. We were hardly more than a few hundred yards away from the camp, winding through clear-cut forest on a dirt path, when we saw our first black bear. He was ahead of us, off the trail, foraging in the thicker brush but still clearly visible. And he looked big, at least three hundred pounds. We all stopped and watched him for a few seconds and it was exhilarating. I wanted to get closer, and took a few steps towards him with my daughter on my back.

“What are you doing?” my wife asked.

“I just want to see it better.”

“Um — no. Seriously. Come on, Steve, let’s go.”

Behind me, my daughter chattered and pointed at the bear. She tugged on my ears. My son meanwhile looked up at me with concern on his face.

“Really?” I implored. “You guys don’t want to see the bear.”

“We can see it from here, Daddy,” he said.

We turned around and went back to the camp. Later that evening my son and I were sitting at the picnic table as dusk settled over the campground, and we heard something in the distance, out in the half-light. It was slowly walking, crunching the twigs and leaves. It was coming towards us.

I turned on the flashlight, playing the beam down the hillside from our camp, moving it back and forth until I caught the glow of a pair of eyes, and the silhouetted form of a bear. My son and I stared and watched it come closer, its head wagging back and forth, sniffing the ground for food.

My daughter was asleep in the tent with her mother. I wasn’t sure what we should be doing. I was about to yell or throw something, make a ruckus to scare it away, but for a moment I continued to dwell in that space of awe, just before fear sets in. It was as if I were frozen there, in that brief, transient state, a state which had an undeniable attraction.

Before we really had a chance to be afraid, out of nowhere, it seemed, several men approached wearing headlamps and carrying guns. In addition to a number of large, bright lights, one of them held some kind tracking equipment. The Bear Suppression Unit — a special team of Park Rangers, trained and charged with protecting park visitors from hungry black bears — had appeared from out of the dark, armed and highly illuminated. My son and I watched as they shone their beams across the bear and blasted it with either propelled bean-bags or rubber bullets — something non-lethal, I assumed. We heard but couldn’t see as the bear crashed off into the brush, fleeing back to the dark. And, just as quickly, the rangers also departed, leaving me and my son to stare out into the waning light.

“That was crazy.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go to bed.”

As my family slept that night I lay awake, listening to the night sounds, my mind spinning and racing, as it often does. Strangely it wasn’t so much fear as curiosity and overstimulation that kept me awake, as though I’d taken a bump of some drug. It was in this heightened state that I heard the bear again, listening as it approached our campsite, the sound of its soft paws plodding on the dirt. I felt, at once, both afraid and curious. More than anything, what I wanted was to unzip the tent and to see the bear up close — to smell its musky odor, run my hands through its dusty coarse fur — but I just lay there listening, the fabric walls just separating me from the bear. The bear itself meanwhile didn’t waste any time. I heard it slam its paws into the door of the bear-box, making a loud racket, but then it quickly moved on to look for another, easier mark, leaving me alone in the ringing silence.

The next morning, as their mother slept on in her tent, I told the kids about the bear once again visiting our campsite. I recounted to them about the beast slamming into the metal box, trying to get to our food, and how, unsuccessful, it had finally left, roaming on to another campsite. Their eyes widened, and they asked to hear the story again. And again.

But somehow, between my telling them and their subsequent retelling of the tale to friends and family later on, the story subtly shifted. In their memory of the event, crafted from my narration and their imagination, filling in what I’d only heard in the dark, the story became one in which the bear not only banged against the box but also broke into it to eat up all of our food. To this day, my children are convinced this is what happened. They sometimes even conjure up corroborating images from the next day — torn chip bags, scattered crumbs, open, tattered boxes, their mother’s shock at the mess, the whole family together confronting the aftermath. They argue against me, knowing that the ecstatic truth they hold in their possession is bigger, wilder, and more vivid than the paltry facts I can offer. At some point I have to concede to them and agree: the narrative of the relentless bear that broke into our camp and consumed everything on which we’d planned to survive really is a better story. And not only that, but it also happens to be true.

The Strange Horrors of Robert Aickman

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One had to lose the noise of the mechanism, not least the ever-deafening inner echoes of it. One had to dispel practicality. Then something else could be heard — if one was lucky, if the sun was shining, if the paths were well made, if one wore the right garments, and if one made no attempt at definition or popularisation.

— Robert Aickman, “Into the Wood”

Thirty-five years after his death, Robert Aickman is beginning to receive the attention he deserves as one of the great 20th century writers of short fiction. For the first time, new editions of his books are plentiful, making this a golden age for readers who appreciate the uniquely unsettling effect of his work.

Unsettling is a key description for Aickman’s writing, not merely in the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together. The supernatural is never far from the surreal. He was drawn to ghost stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost story writer as Salvador Dalí was a typical designer of pocket watches.

Laird Barron once noted that “[t]he surest way to comprehend Aickman is to read a lot of Aickman.” Until now, that task was, for many, all but impossible.

Tartarus Press has done heroic work over the years to keep Aickman in print, first with 1999’s two-volume Collected Strange Stories, then, beginning in 2011, with exquisite reissues of each of the individual collections, culminating with The Strangers and Other Writings in 2015, a collection of work previously unpublished, as well as nonfiction that had never been reprinted before. The Tartarus editions are jewels, but they are limited editions, and most casual Aickman readers will not want to spend the money on them (even though they are bargains given the quality of their production).

In 2014, the centenary of Aickman’s birth, Faber & Faber released in the U.K. inexpensive paperback and e-book editions of four of Aickman’s story collections, as well as his novella The Model and novel The Late Breakfasters. Over the next six months, Faber’s editions of the stories are arriving in the U.S., and Valancourt Books has recently published The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories.

For the first time in decades, the majority of Aickman’s work will now be generally available in the U.S and the U.K.

Such a wondrous situation poses challenges for new readers, though, who might wonder where to begin. That question is easy to answer: You can’t go wrong with any of the four Faber collections, particularly The Wine-Dark Sea and The Unsettled Dust, both put together posthumously to reprint some of Aickman’s best tales. All together, the Faber collections reprint just over half of Aickman’s complete stories, with only “Bind Your Hair” appearing more than once. The Late Breakfasters and The Model are odd, fascinating, and beautiful, but a bit atypical; the stories are what sit at the heart of the Aickmanesque.

The question of Aickman now is not so much what to read, but what to do with what is read: how to experience and interpret his work in the most satisfying way. Aickman is a difficult writer for many readers, but the difficulties are not inherent to his writing (which is usually quite accessible) so much as they are to the lenses through which we see that writing.

It is among aficionados of esoteric horror stories that Robert Aickman’s name is best known. But Aickman himself preferred other labels — he associated the horror story with sadomasochism, a goal different from his own. Even if we define “the horror story” more broadly, however, focusing on Aickman only as a horror writer does a disservice to the range and originality of his work. Further, such a focus sets up expectations that may warp how the stories are read. It is one thing to start reading expecting a horror story; it is another to start reading expecting an Aickman story.

He typically called his fiction “strange stories”, an accurate label, and one that sets the right expectations for any reader making a first journey into Aickman’s world.

The “strange stories” label also helps us place Aickman in a broader lineage: not just that of great writers of terror and the supernatural, but also of great writers for whom there is no one label or even a recognized tradition. Though it is certainly accurate to say that Aickman’s work often falls into the realm of the ghost story, we will understand his achievement better if we think of him among such unsettling writers as Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bowen, Paul Bowles, Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, and even — particularly in his approach to story structure — Anton Chekhov.

In his introduction to The Wine Dark Sea, Peter Straub writes:

Aickman’s characters find themselves trapped in a series of events unconnected by logic, or which are connected by a nonlinear logic. Very often neither the characters nor the reader can be certain about exactly what has happened, yet the story has the satisfying rightness of a poem — a John Ashbery poem. Every detail is echoed or commented upon, nothing is random or wasted. The reader has followed the characters into a world which is remorseless, vast, and inexorable in its operations.

Much of Aickman’s best work obliterates any certainty between real and unreal, dream and waking reality. In one of his greatest stories, “Into the Wood” (in some ways an ars poetica), an insomniac tells the protagonist: “Dreams … are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses this support of dreams, life dissolves.” Aickman’s project was to explore all the repercussions of this idea.

“Dreams … are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses this support of dreams, life dissolves.”

Given his stories’ frequent interest in dreams, imagination, and the unconscious, it is no surprise that Aickman read plenty of Freud. Yet while Freud’s influence is clear in many of his stories, they are far from being simple illustrations of Freudian concepts. (In this way, they are interesting to compare to the tales in May Sinclair’s 1923 collection Uncanny Stories, which hew closer to Freud.) Large, dull theses could be written relating Aickman’s fiction to Freud’s “The Uncanny”, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Civilization and Its Discontents at the very least. In the first of the introductions for the eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories he edited from 1964–1972, Aickman declared:

Dr. Freud established that only a small part, perhaps one-tenth, of the human mental and emotional organization is conscious. … The trouble, as we all know, is that the one-tenth, the intellect, is not looking after us: if we do not blow ourselves up, we shall crowd ourselves out; above all, we have destroyed all hope of quality in living. The ghost story, like Dr. Freud, makes contact with the submerged nine-tenths.

Here, then, Aickman sees the ghost story as a melding of Romanticism and surrealism: it escapes the intellect via the subconscious. He also saw it as related to poetry, reiterating throughout his Fontana introductions (all collected in the Tartarus Press edition of Night Voices) something similar to what he said in the fourth volume: “The ghost story, like poetry, deals with the experience behind experience: behind almost any experience.” Such a story is an expression of imagination, not reason, and as such Aickman viewed it as superior to science, which he tended to denigrate. Truth, he thought, lay far beyond rationality, and science, along with the technologies it sprouted, was smothering the truths available via imagination, poetry, and religion. The power of mystery must be respected:

The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives satisfying form to the unanswerable; to thoughts and feelings, even experiences, which are common to all imaginative people, but which cannot be rendered down scientifically into “nothing but” something else. In a world of meaningless fact and meaningless violence, people shrink from admitting that they still harbor entities of the imagination. The element of form in the ghost story is, therefore, crucial.Giving satisfying form to the unanswerable is what makes Aickman’s stories often perplexing on a first reading, because satisfying form is not the same as satisfying answers. Seeking answers for the unanswerable is, to Aickman, the murderous foolishness of modern science, and his stories stand in stubborn opposition to such quests.

Aickman is often celebrated (and frequently condemned) for the ambiguity of his stories: ambiguity of cause and effect, ambiguity of motivation, ambiguity of resolution. Few Aickman stories have a neat ending, and it is in this sense that he seems to me most Chekhovian, though Aickman and Chekhov came from almost entirely opposite world-views: Chekhov, after all, was a doctor with much respect for science and little use for religion or mysticism. Where they overlap is in their sense that individual human perception is immensely limited, and that, to compensate for such limitations, the prose must pay careful attention to objective details. (“The artist should not be a judge of his characters or what they say, but an impartial witness,” Chekhov once wrote in a letter.) Michael Dirda also makes the Chekhov connection, writing in the introduction to the Tartarus edition of Tales of Love and Death,

Like Chekhov, Aickman seldom attempts to rouse our emotions: he sets down what happens without narrative histrionics. Not even the most astonishing turns of event elicit much surprise or wonder. As a result, that affectless, unruffled tone adds immeasurably to his work’s distinctive, unsettling eeriness. Odd or horrible things occur but they do so without fuss, and they are observed with a dispassionate, Olympian clarity.

Not even the most astonishing turns of event elicit much surprise or wonder.

The dispassionate tone is especially important to third-person narratives; the first-person stories of both Chekhov and Aickman betray the two writers’ passion for theatre and often read like extended monologues.

Aickman, who cherished Oscar Wilde, was drawn to epigrams and aphorisms, and first-person narrators allowed him particular opportunities to employ his wit:

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely. (“The Unsettled Dust”)

It is amazing how full a life a man can lead without for one moment being alive at all, except sometimes when sleeping. (“The Fetch”)

There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous. (“The Clock Watcher”)

If one goes to parties or meets many new people in any other way, one has to take protective action quite frequently, however much one hates oneself in the process; just as human beings are compelled to massacre animals unceasingly, because human beings are simply unable to survive, for the most part, on apples and nuts. (“Ravissante”)

…it is no joke being a married woman in East Anglia, if the woman has the smallest imagination. (“Wood”)

Regardless of the narration, though, in both Aickman’s and Chekhov’s stories, seemingly irrelevant details serve to indicate a world beyond the protagonist. In Chekhov, it’s often a larger world of social systems and of nature; in Aickman, it’s a world beyond the limited realm of human perceptions. Aickman was as interested in subjectivity as any Modernist, but he chose the seemingly outmoded conventions of the ghost story for his explorations of perception’s limits, rather than the conventions of interior monologue. In stories like “Meeting Mr. Millar”, Aickman plunges us into a character’s consciousness, but does so without fanfare, simply letting the accumulation of what the narrator chooses to relate contribute to a steadily-growing feeling of claustrophobia.

The portrayal of consciousness as limited and perception as narrow is not an end in itself, though, which is why, for Aickman, the uncanny is essential. The world is not what our consciousness presents, and our conscious mind cannot bring the world’s truths to us. The supernatural, like the subconscious, can be glimpsed, sensed, even experienced, but it is often beyond most sorts of perception, and always beyond understanding. The first sentence of “The Hospice” could point to the location of truth in all of Aickman’s stories: “It was somewhere at the back of beyond.”

Another key to Aickman’s writing is his hatred of modernity. His collaborator and (briefly) lover Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote in her memoir Slipstream that Aickman believed “everything had declined.” She says he felt that

Before the beginning of the century, life had held more promise. The arts, architecture, hotels, food, clothes, furniture, the governance of the country — everything you could think of — had been better. … There had been nothing, since those unspecified and halcyon days, but a steady diminution in all standards. We were approaching the end of civilization.

This sense of civilization’s decline and impending fall rarely leads Aickman’s stories toward nostalgia, but instead toward an always-present sense of doom. His characters generally survive their encounters with oddity, but there is little sense of triumph, and anyone who still believes in the possibility of triumph is a dolt or a cad. Aickman had more than a little impulse toward satire, but the sharp despair inspiring the satire is what makes any laughter provoked by Aickman’s stories disturbing on reflection.

Consider, for instance, “Growing Boys,” a tale of twins who grow quickly and don’t stop until they have become destructive giants. It’s a darkly funny story in its premise and even its title, taking a familiar, happy phrase and literalizing it. But the story itself is no lark — it enters the territory of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child. What are parents to do when their children are, truly, monsters? To this, Aickman also brings in questions of gender and imperialism.

Quite a few of Aickman’s best stories feature women as protagonists, and for all his preference for the life of the past, he does not seem to have wished to return to a time of conventional gender roles or sexual expectations. Millie, the mother in “Growing Boys,” is plagued not only by monstrous children, but by an oblivious and self-centered husband and a patriarchal uncle who wants nothing so much as to protect fragile white womanhood as he thinks he did in India and Africa. (He is a devoted reader of The Imperialist magazine.) Millie’s salvation comes from a woman who represents a very different tradition: Thelma, a gypsy fortune-teller (an unfortunate stereotype, though not used for entirely stereotypical purposes in the story). Thelma tells Millie to flee and make a new life for herself. Later, Millie dreams of climbing Mount Everest with Thelma. The story’s enthusiasm for female homosociality is clear. Thelma is the only person who gives Millie useful help, the only person who sees that Millie needs somehow to get away from men who take advantage of her (her husband), from men whose masculinity is predicated on war and domination (her uncle, whose guns prove impotent), and from men who want nothing so much as to eat her alive (her sons).

After reading the story, Joanna Russ wrote:

I can’t shake off the impression that “Robert Aickman” is a pseudonym and the author is a woman, since the tale’s subject is the cannibalistic horror of family life, from which the Everywoman heroine is offered two escapes: decamping with another, friendly woman (the heroine dreams at one point that they’re happily climbing the Himalayas together) and an ideal, protective substitute father. The ending is the kind mothers — but not fathers — dream of.

Men in Aickman’s stories tend to suffer all sorts of repression, while women are often more liberated, their terrors the result of proximity to men who are (or yearn to be) good patriarchs who follow the laws of the fathers. The chaos that comes to their lives is a chaos caused by repression and patriarchy, with violence and imperialism often linked to that patriarchy. (For all his conservative tendencies, Aickman was a pacifist and had been a conscientious objector during World War II.)

Of his own experience with a patriarch, Aickman wrote in The Attempted Rescue (one of his two autobiographies), “My father, as I knew him, was impossible to live with, to be married to, to be dependent upon.” Aickman assisted his father some in his business as an architect, and architecture is important to many of the stories, where traveling characters often encounter strange houses and buildings. In such stories, Aickman feels close to Kafka: not just The Castle and the various spaces of The Trial, but also the confining bedroom of “The Metamorphosis,” the tunnels of “The Burrow,” and other structures. Walls protect no one, and building them only creates new areas to hold mysteries within the greater area of the mysteries of the universe.

It is his devotion to the mystery of the universe that leads Aickman to the images and forms in his stories, and those images and forms link him not only to his fellow writers of supernatural fiction, but also to many writers who find unanswerable worlds in everyday experience — there is no reason, it seems to me, not to speak of Aickman alongside such celebrated “realists” as, for instance, David Constantine and Joy Williams. The reading protocols we use when making our way through the pages of Tea at the Midland and The Visiting Privilege are ones that would serve us well when approaching The Wine-Dark Sea and Cold Hand in Mine. Some volumes of strange stories get shelved as horror fiction, and some others do not; that has as much to do with marketing and happenstance as it does with how we should read and value those books.