Jazmina: I like this idea that we’re all lighthouse keepers at the moment. Lighthouse keepers have to isolate themselves to take care of other people, what they´re doing is looking after people at sea. We’re also isolating ourselves to take care of those around us, even strangers. The book has had a strange relationship with readers during the pandemic. It talks a lot about solitude and many people have recommended it for these times.

Katy: There is also movement in the book, which contrasts with the static, stoic nature of lighthouses. You take us from the Oregon Coast to New York to rural France to Asturias. There’s an opportunity to escape the confines of home. How involved were you with this journey, Christina?

Christina: I was very involved with it, in that sense of travel. The moments I really loved were moments when Jazmina lets the light shine on her. You have these amazing stories around her, but there is pain and sorrow and worries. All those things are going on with the lighthouses, and that reflects on the experiences of lighthouse keepers—for example, their isolation and depression some of the time.  That’s what I really liked about it, I felt I had been given an invitation into Jazmina’s life.

Katy: Ishmael, in Moby Dick, suggests that all men’s roads lead to water. At what point in your life were you drawn to water, specifically towards the act of collecting experiences around lighthouses? 

Jazmina: It started with a trip I did to the coast of Oregon. I went with my family and we stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel, where the rooms were all decorated according to certain writers. There was a beautiful lighthouse near the hotel. I was also reading To the Lighthouse, so I wanted to write about the reading experience in combination with the travel experience.

Katy: I see that pattern play out throughout the book—the way you pair the reading and travel experiences and in traveling, how you literally collect places.

Jazmina: It’s true, I was traveling to lighthouses in Spain when I wrote the travel log at the end of the book. It’s interesting that the book starts with a dialogue between To The Lighthouse and the travel I was doing while reading it, and the book ends with this reading experience of the Sir Walter Scott book [Northern Lights: Or, a Voyage in the Lighthouse Yacht to Nova Zembla and the Lord Knows Where in the Summer of 1814] and the travel I was doing at that time.

Katy: It’s interesting that you write about Sir Walter Scott in the present tense and your own journey in the past tense because, as you write in the book, you feel “as if what happened to Scott so long ago is more present than what” you’re experiencing. How did you approach the integration of literary texts like this, Christina?

Christina: One of the things I had to think about was what to do with the literary sources that are used in the book, how to integrate them into the text in English. After you do this a few times, it’s a bit like Chinese whispers. Things don’t always match up from one language to the other. It was particularly true with the Sir Walter Scott part in the final section of the book. Sometimes he’s using quite archaic language in English, which isn’t really there in the Spanish. I thought, “I’ve got to look at these references, find the originals.” The world he’s describing  isn’t that long ago really, but it just felt like a thousand years ago.

Katy: Do you enjoy this research element of your translation work?

Christina: Yes, and it was particularly fascinating to learn more about the technology of lighthouses. Sometimes, I was tearing my hair out, putting myself in a science position. But I quite loved the responsibility of getting the terminology right. I couldn’t just make it up and hope that readers wouldn’t notice. That was something that took me to a different area, which was a nice thing to do.

Katy: And how did your personal research influence the writing of your book, Jazmina?

Jazmina: I was initially doing research on lighthouses out of curiosity. I got obsessed, and I fell in love and started reading more about lighthouses and taking every advantage to visit other lighthouses. It began to build as this collection of experiences, travels, and books. I wanted it to be like a cabinet of curiosities. It was a visual process for me. I wanted the fragments to be like objects. Because collections are an important theme in the book, I wanted the whole book to be a kind of collection. I wanted the fragments to dialogue with each other, as the objects in a collection talk to each other, in a way.

Katy: You write that you’d like to rescue lighthouses from invisibility or keep some of their stories alive, as well as be guided by the objects themselves. How did you visualize your texts as objects in a collection?

Jazmina: I actually had a program called Scrivener. It has an option to play with Post-Its and move them around and put labels on them. You can have a board. I don’t know what I would have done without that. I was living in New York at the time, so I didn’t have the space to move physical objects around.

Katy: During your research and process of assembling texts, did you consult some of the log books of past lighthouse keepers? Did that inspire the log at the end of the book?

Jazmina: Yes, I did. Many of them are quite technical and talk about things like the weather, or times of day the lights were lit. Yet, with such scare information you can put together a story. A couple of books were very evocative for me: Robert Louis Stevenson’s book about his family of engineers, and the Sir Walter Scott book that he wrote when he was in a boat with Stevenson’s grandfather traveling to lighthouses around the Scottish coast. At the end of my book, I wanted the log to have a direct conversation with Scott’s book.

Katy: In a way, your book represents subjective motives in conversation with the external world. That idea that a journey is the externalization of an interior seeing. Was this intentional or accidental?

Jazmina: It became a question of the book: to what extent do we write about ourselves when we write about something else? And vice versa. There is, for example, the metaphor of the lighthouse as the travels, the external elements, stories, and I used the metaphor of the well to talk about introspection, the subjective and the personal. The book tries to combine those two discourses and to reflect on the differences between, say, the travel log and personal diary. What kinds of genres are they, and how do they relate to each other? I really enjoy those kinds of books, the ones that create a relationship between the subjective and the external and the rest of the world. I tried to do that and to talk about the necessity of escaping oneself and the impossibility of doing so at times.

Katy: How were you trying to escape exactly? 

Jazmina: By placing my attention in nature, in other stories that were so appealing to me. The topics around the lighthouses that are so attractive: solitude, madness, the sea. What became rather obvious at one point was that all of that reflected, in a way, what I was feeling, so there was no escaping the place where I was. It finally got through in the book. In a way, it’s a very sad book. So I think that even though I wasn’t trying to write so much about myself, it became a book about myself at that point in my life.

Katy: Christina, when you were translating the book, was it difficult to convey the emotional resonance of the text? I suppose it’s easier to translate facts than emotions.

Christina: I’m not sure translating factual information is any easier. When you go deeper and deeper into the text, to some extent, you are sharing the emotions.

Katy: How did you get at the rhythm of the text?

Christina: I’m not 100% sure. Some people have an ear for music and can pick up a tune very easily. I seem to have an ear for music in a text. Maybe it’s the way my mind works, or the way I read. I’m truly reading with that music, that rhythm. Maybe it’s one of those things you’re born with. You’re sort of dancing to the text when you’re translating—with your fingers.

Katy: I suppose the tone emerges as the text takes on rhythm?

Christina: The tone, I think that comes about itself. It develops. Translation is like stepping into someone else’s shoes and walking around in them. Once you do, the tone becomes natural to you to some extent. Then you go to some other project, and the tone is all wrong. But the tone in the translation can never be exactly the same as in the original.

Jazmina: Yes, and every language is also a tone in itself.

Katy: Did the English version become its own entity apart from you, in some way?

Jazmina: It’s wonderful for me to read the English version. It’s like reading a book I really like, written by someone I have a lot in common with, but that is still new. The words feel fresh. It’s a very different entity. I love the feeling of reading the translation.

Christina: The translation allows the authors to stand back a little bit, to put some distance between themselves and their work.

Katy: Jhumpa Lahiri’s bilingual memoir, In Other Words, reveals that she feels freer writing in Italian than in her native Bengali or in English. Is there a language in which you feel more free?

Jazmina: I don’t think it works that way for me. I studied English literature, and although I love it, I never felt I had as many tools as I needed to be able to write creatively in it. Beckett said something about saying what you need to say in fewer words. That’s an interesting challenge as well.

Christina: There are some things I find much easier to talk about in Spanish than in English. Sometimes Spanish molds itself to what I want to say more easily.

Jazmina: Yes, and it happened to me a lot in New York, where I found myself thinking things in English, things I was living in English. It’s an interesting thing to think about. I don’t know if there are things that are easier for me to think about in English, but I suppose there must be.

Katy: What was it like working closely with a translator, watching your text evolve into a slightly different version of itself?

Jazmina: First, I have a friendship with Christina so there was a lot of interaction in every sense. More communion and communication.

Christina: After we met at a book launch in New York years ago, I thought, “This is somebody I like, this is somebody I want to read.”

Jazmina: Oh, thank you! Every translator has a different style, and you really engage with the text, Christina. I remember you sending me questions and problems related to the text, but you always suggested such wonderful solutions. I think, in a way, it’s a better book in English than in Spanish because it has an extra layer of work. I’ve taken notes of everything so when the Spanish version gets reprinted I can use what we did to make that version better. 

Katy: I’m glad to hear the book will be reprinted soon. How has the reception been overall?

Jazmina: I really liked the experience of being published in small presses around the world. Next year it will be published in Argentina, in Italian, in Dutch. The excitement of the editors is palpable, and it translates into the excitement of the audience. This energy speaks to how lighthouses are a universal symbol.

Katy: To quote the book, “A controlled flame is an indication of human presence; their message is, first and foremost, that human beings are here.”

Jazmina: Yes! Even if people don’t have the literal building of the lighthouse, many people use fire in ways that work as lighthouses for fishermen in coastal towns. People everywhere relate to this book in one way or another. The English translation was a bittersweet experience because it started with so much excitement, and we had so many plans for the book tour in the US this year.

Christina: It was great to see how people engaged with the book. At Two Lines Press, our editor was initially uncertain about publishing it, but he said, after a while, that he couldn’t get it out of his mind; that it was there all the time. This is the effect it has had on many people.

Katy: Will you write more about lighthouses in the future?

Jazmina: It’s a book I could have kept writing forever because it has such a free structure, you could keep traveling to lighthouses. There are so many of them, and each one is like a house of stories. So it’s an infinite book that I decided to abandon at a certain time, because I wanted to write other things, not because it wasn’t interesting for me anymore.

Katy: Lighthouses are constantly personified in your book. You describe it as the guardian of the sea, a constant watchman, a “living and intelligent person.” So, out of all the lighthouses you’ve “met,” which one has been your favorite?

Christina: My family is Irish and we spent every summer on the southwest coast. One year, when I was about 8 or 9, we rented a cottage in the coastal town on Ballybunion. I shared an attic room with my sisters. On our first or second night in the cottage, I climbed onto a chair to look out to sea through the dormer window. What I saw was a strange light flashing on and off in the distance: I watched for a long time and convinced myself that the light was in fact due to pirate activity. The next morning, all excitement, I reported to my parents that there were pirates in Ballybunion and maybe we needed to tell someone. They laughed. That day we drove to Loop Head, across the estuary of the Shannon. My pirates were a lighthouse.

Jazmina: That’s a beautiful memory, Christina. You should write it!

Christina: You write it, and I’ll translate it.

Jazmina: My favorite lighthouse is not actually in the book; I went to visit it after I had finished the book. It’s a lighthouse off the southern coast of Chile. You have to take a boat to get to this island, where there’s only the lighthouse and a large colony of penguins. It’s such a wonderful place, a fairytale. I kept imagining living there and being the lighthouse keeper and having a relationship with these beings that are so human like, in a way, so strange and beautiful.

The post On Lighthouses appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Matt Berninger: We’d just put out Sleep Well Beast, and my friend Casey Reese had done all the videos for that, so we were just finishing that whole package, all the videos and everything. We were at a phase where we were about to go out on tour, to promote that record, and that’s when he wrote, and I think he was thinking about doing some sort of video or working with us for that record. I was such a huge fan of his, and I was so excited that he reached out that right away I said, if you’ve got some free time and you want to work with us, let’s work together on something for a little while. I didn’t want to lose him. I was trying to pull him in further than just one video, and right away I started talking with him about more than one video, and I sent new music, I said, well, here’s all this new music, ‘cause we were anxious to just keep moving forward. So, when he got that he started to get very excited about the possibilities of what he could do with all that.

At the same time, Alicia Vikander had reached out to him and said she wanted to work with him. And he said, I’m maybe going to start working on this weird project with The National, and she was a fan, apparently, and they started talking about this idea for this film. We had this half-baked songs, not even half-baked, they were the beginning of songs. Some of them were finished, like Rylan (we didn’t know what to do with Rylan, yet), and a few other things were further along, I can’t remember which ones, but, he then started just taking all those songs and pulling them apart, and we gave him stams, which are, the drums alone, and all the strings alone, and all the vocals alone, and he actually deconstructed the stuff we gave him and pulled it apart and was putting musical bits disconnected from all the other musical things that we had designed and put together as a song. He was using them as paints in his films in all these other ways, and that really just cracked open the opportunity for us to go into it and write new songs, and to write those songs in new ways. By bringing somebody in who’s never done anything like producing a record, but somebody who knows very well how to work with sound and work with storytelling and all that kind of stuff, he was put right in the middle of our process. We kind of put him in the driver’s seat in a lot of things and let him lead the project in a lot of ways.

ER: It’s interesting that the film is obviously about the life of a woman, but it wasn’t necessarily what you had in mind when you had written these first versions of the songs.

MB: Well, the songs that were written before we gave them to Mike, songs like Rylan, that was already about a sort of an androgynous character, but I did think of Rylan as a woman, so that kind of felt right for this project. And then, my wife has been writing with us for a long time and I write about women, a lot, a lot of it is about my wife, a lot of it is about being a father –as I have a 10 year old daughter–, so it was very easy for me and for my wife to be able to write for this character, as we were both writing from her perspective, and just from our own perspectives, we were writing about ourselves a lot, and Mike was writing about himself, but all through this character or the network of characters that you meet with her. Alicia’s character, a female embodying the person in the film, allowed us to really dig into that, lean into that. I was writing very much from the idea of my daughter, the idea of my wife, and all that kind of stuff, and my own, so it gave us a flexible costume or something for us to be able to write even more honestly. You know how in Halloween sometimes you feel more honest and more yourself and you feel freer when you’re dressed up as something else, so in a funny way Alicia was our costume, even Mike’s, in order to tell our own personal stories a little bit, too, and communicate them in a subtle way to everyone. You have to be personal for anything to connect, I think in any writing you always have to write about yourself, even though you’re going to put it through a character or through a play, or a movie or a song. That’s the packaging, but the writing is usually really personal.

ER: In terms of the vocal presence of the women who are singing in the record. Did you or your wife write specifically for a female singer, as if you were writing a stage play for that character, knowing that you yourself were not going to sing that?

MB: We knew that we were going to bring in a lot of other singers, but I think when we were writing the songs, I don’t think my wife or I had any idea so specifically that a specific part was going to be sung by a female voice. The lyrics and the voices that we use in the record and in the film aren’t gender-cast in any way, necessarily. A lot of the female vocals are singing songs that I wrote from my perspective and I’m singing a lot of songs that my wife wrote, like, for example, Hey Rosey. On a number of them that I’m the lead singer, she wrote most of the lyrics. But we’ve been doing that forever. She’s written a lot of lyrics in which I’ve often been the personification of her ideas. So, I also allow myself to be the personification of other people’s ideas, and I allow my ideas to be personified by other singers, and Alicia in the film and all that kind of stuff. So, that liberates me and I think Carin as well, to write maybe more honestly, knowing that someone else is going to be doing it.

how can you be an artist and not make art about the fabric of your contemporary time?

And we’re working on a musical too, a stage play, so there’s a bunch of actors, singers and dancers, there’s a whole production, but we’re writing the songs. It’s exciting to write and have someone else deliver it and perform it and it changes it entirely in very exciting ways, so we wanted to do that, we wanted to break the mold of what our band sounded like. I sing so much that, just because my wife also writes so much, I think people thought of our band as sort of my personal diary entries, which they are, about 75%, but there’s a lot more to the band than that. I think I was maybe more anxious than anybody to get out of the spotlight, to not be the tip of the spear, or something like that.

ER: I don’t know if you agree with this, but I think that I am Easy to Find might be a less political album in a way than Sleep Well Beast, for example, but I was curious about the song Not in Kansas, specifically about the verse “I can’t go back there anymore/Since alt-right opium went viral”. Is this song, with its reference to The Wizard of Oz, is it talking about the impossibility to go back home as if it was the break-up of the American Dream?

MB: Yeah, that song was written really fast, very stream-of-consciousness, really really fast. There were another 12 stances that we didn’t even use. I’m usually just pouring everything into the song all the time, I’m usually not saying, “Oh, that’s for this song, this goes into that bucket for that song, this idea fits right for that song”. I never do that. All the songs have a lot of ideas in them. Some of the ideas maybe touch on politics, like the alt-right and the stuff in Ohio, yeah, but I think the other stuff is just as political. I think any love song, any song that is empathizing with complex emotions and with weird, hard to untangle knots, emotional, political, social, family, all that stuff is political. By just referencing issues, or politicians or something like that isn’t what makes something political. I think a good love song, where you’re honest about your own emotions and your own situation, is often much more political than the direct stuff.

Still, you can’t separate politics from art. I don’t know why anybody would. It’s like, why would you separate love or sex or humor, from your art? It’s part of the fabric of stuff that we’re all chewing on and digesting and processing. If you’re keeping it out of your art, you’re stressed. I don’t think you have to put a platform, but I don’t know how people avoid politics, just with what’s happening, especially now, but anytime. I think someone like Nina Simone, the idea of not being engaged politically in everything, made no sense to her. I mean, how can you be an artist and not make art about the fabric of your contemporary time? I don’t know of anybody who cannot think about what’s going on and not lay awake at night, anywhere, no matter where you live. I don’t know how any American can avoid thinking seriously about what’s happening right now. And any artist who avoids it in their art, I don’t know what they are making, it doesn’t seem like it would be art, to me, because an artist puts it all out there, puts everything that’s going on and I don’t know how a human mind can filter all of that out. I can’t, so, I don’t try.

ER: In that sense, you know that your music has been referred to as depressive, or dark, or reflecting an ambience of the times. I don’t know if you like The Simpsons, but there is an episode in which Homer is touring with Sonic Youth and The Smashing Pumpkins and others, and when he meets Billy Corgan he tells him: “Thanks to your gloomy music, my kids have stopped dreaming of a future I can’t possibly provide”. (Matt laughs). To which Billy Corgan replies: “Thanks. We try to make a difference”. I’m not saying that you’re happy making people depressed, but I think people do connect with the feeling in your music because it’s something that’s out there.

MB: None of us think of our band as a depressing band. We know that term is used, but the reaction to our music is the opposite. I feel myself relieved of sorrow and depression and anxiety while I write about stuff. I don’t think much of our stuff is that depressing. Yeah, it’s about relationships and they look at the edge, it looks deep into the pit, it pulls the onion apart all the way as much as you can, and, why not dig into the center of the soft spot, and why not grab the live wire, why not go out in the middle of the lake with the thin ice, when you’re making art, because you can’t die, no one gets hurt. You have a responsibility, and there are consequences to irresponsible art, but I think you have to throw it all in there, you have to be irresponsible and reckless and fearless with all that stuff.

So, the depressing stuff, maybe I throw more of it into songs, but I don’t feel I’m more depressed than those people, I think I’m pretty happy, and I think it’s because I make something out of all of that stuff, and I think that’s what people love about it. People come in flocks and people are lining up to sing these really sad things out loud together. And sometimes people come to our shows alone, and most of these songs are written alone, and to see all these thousands of people all together singing them with such pleasure and joy and getting drunk, you know, there is something very very very very very healthy about making art out of all of our biggest fears and our biggest self-loathings, the things we hate the most about ourselves and the things that the world tells us we should be ashamed of. Even though we maybe should, you still make art about these things because you get to know yourself better. I feel like I know myself better for having thought about all this stuff and trying to make something out of it all.

ER: Music and songs can mean many things to people, and I was thinking about this in terms of one of your songs that I like the most, Mr. November. I always thought you were singing about a parody of this character who sees himself as “the new blue blood” and “the great white hope,” but then I read it had to do with people like John Kerry, politicians running for president, and that Obama used it on the campaign trail.

MB: Mr. November is about someone who… I remember thinking, “What kind of mind would want to be president of the United States?” It takes a bit of delusional… You gotta be kind of a crazy person to think, “Yeah, I can do that”. And I think at the time I was just imagining: how do you pump yourself up in the mirror, to go out and say, “I’m going to be the president of the United States of America”? It draws the finest and the worst, those who want to stand up and say that. So Mr. November was pre-Obama, he was a senator at the time, so even though he was already on the radar, that song wasn’t about Obama. It’s not a cheerleading song for “I’m going to be president”. It’s much more of a Travis- Bickle-in-the-mirror sort of pumping yourself up, putting up your suit and thinking “I have what it takes to take on that”. Which is crazy. So I think the song is about the absurdity of ego.

ER: But it’s funny that Obama did use it…

MB: Yeah, that’s great. With Obama, he became a really inspiring president, a very inspiring voice, in what had been far from inspiring my whole life. I had never been inspired by that many politicians. Fake Empire was written in a different way, in a sense of trying to turn it all off and avoiding all, and ironically that became probably our most political song. It’s been used in the most political sort of contexts, and I like that, as long as it’s used by the people I like.

ER: And The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness –which, by the way, I have to show you this (and I show him a tatoo of the title of the song in my arm, to which he replies “Oh, nice”), – is it a song about the United States of Donald Trump?

MB: You know what’s so interesting is that right before we finished that song, the chorus of that song was “Aaron takes his acid trip through Copenhaguen”. (You’ll notice it has the same number of syllables, I think). We loved the song, but there was something not working about it, and my wife, right before, it was literally the day we were supposed to finish and master it, it was all done, she said “You know, I think the lyrics for that one aren’t right”, so she went back and found some mumbled stuff –because I just mumble lots of stuff over tracks, and go back and see if I can find ideas in there–, so she went back to see if she could find one thing that had me try another lyric, we were looking for the chorus, and she found something that she said sounded like I said The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness. So, nobody knows what I was mumbling, but she heard that bit and we thought “Here we go”, and so, you could have had tattooed in your arm “Aaron takes his acid trip through Copenhaguen”.

So that’s an example of how sometimes you think you know that a song is finished and you’re done, and then at the last minute you think it isn’t as good as it should be, that it could be a better song, and sometimes it’s the lyrics. So that was a good example, when she said “You haven’t done your job yet, everyone else did a good job”, and so she pulled a lot of that song together and she ended writing up a lot of that song, and many others. She’s been an editor and a writer since the day I met her, and that is a perfect example of what a good editor and a good writer can do. She’s a member of the band. I would think of our band as 20 or 25 people now, and she’s been in it for almost 15 years.

But, what does the song mean? I think the reason we liked it is that sometimes things have to fall completely apart for you to figure out how to put them back together. I’m of the opinion that there is significant damage being done globally by the strongmen, but I think also a lot of people are waking up to how corrupt the entire network is, and how connected the entire network is, globally, the whole game, the whole system: the oil, and the power and the corporations and Wall Street and big tech and the media, it’s a massive, interconnected, rigged system, and I think people are realizing how corrupt and rigged it is, and mostly for men, for white men, mostly. The catholic church is a rigged system for white men, and all these things. That is, for a younger generation, people under 50, under 40, a significant number, enough, are realizing that small changes, incremental changes, got us nowhere. Obama did manage to bring a certain level of health care to the US, but we have to make much more significantly large changes and I think that’s about to happen.

I’m excited about what the next generation of politicians and artists are going to start doing.

So, I think we’re in the darkness, though I think it’s actually lighter than it was a little while ago. I think the darkness is starting to crack, the light is starting to crack through. I think that song is an acknowledgement of the fact that this pendulum swing, this minor pendulum swing, has not been enough to move the world forward, and Trump is this massive swing that is making us realize that we need to break the pendulum, smash it, throw it on the floor and start all over again. And I’m excited about what the next generation of politicians and artists are going to start doing. They’re already doing it, with the language that people are talking with. It’s changing fast and it’s like the tide going way out, it’s way out, it’s nasty, we’re in dead low, and it feels, I feel it, like a big thing is about to shift. I feel more enlightened, more educated, I feel like I know the world a little better, how it works and what my role in it is, than I did a couple of years ago. I think Trump, and what’s happening in America, and what’s happening in Britain and what’s happening all over the place is enlightening. It’s been enlightening to me, and ultimately I feel healthier of mind and with a better plan for what I’m going to do. I think I would have been more in the dark had Trump not won, and it’s terrible, because genuine real damage and genuine real suffering, undoable, unfixable stuff is happening. But also, an awareness that we have to change it drastically from the center out. It’s daunting to think that everything points to the fact that it’s impossible, but I don’t think it is. Massive change has happened in these phases, the civil rights at least in America in the 60s and 70s, that was just a pre-tremor for what’s about to happen.

ER: So you think something good might come out of this…

MB: I think a lot. Well, a lot of terrible things are coming out. People are losing their lives and people are suffering, but I do believe that so many more people know that even tweaking that entirely corrupt system, it’s still just an entirely corrupt system, that tweaks aren’t going to do it, so, I’d rather lose to Trump again from a progressive, much more visionary and healthier place, than to win from an unhealthy center, that’s already corrupt. It doesn’t work at all.

Trump got elected after Obama. How it’ll work, I don’t know, but it feels like it’s going to, it feels like it must. So, I feel optimistic.

ER: I wanted to ask you about projects like your brother’s documentary Mistaken for Strangers, in which through a metanarrative of a film on the impossibility of making a film, you expose the –I don’t know how you say this in English¬– insides of the band…

MB: You pull the curtain back and allow to see.

ER: Yeah, exactly. And also about this piece you did with an artist in which you played Sorrow non-stop for about 6 hours…

MB: Oh, yeah, Ragnar Kjartansson.

ER: Yeah. So those are for me two examples in which the The National project goes beyond the music, to become more wholesome artistically, maybe like bands such as Pink Floyd have done before. So, I wanted to ask you about your views on this and how you conceive your art as an expression that incorporates other elements, besides obviously the music.

MB: When you start a rock band, you name your rock band and you name your first album and it seems like the whole world, it seems like your whole world. All of our identity has become “Matt, from the National”, and “Bryan, the drummer of the National”, everybody is this person from this thing, and it’s great, that’s what you want, for your band to be famous so that your band is known before your own first name, and it’s amazing. But I think all of us think, after so long, that this idea of what a band is was disingenuous to the reality, meaning what it is to keep five friends and their families and everything else that comes together and how you travel and things evolve. And it’s not The Beatles, which weren’t The Beatles for very long, and everybody has this romantic idea of a rock band, and some bands like U2 or The Rolling Stones can keep that idea of that band together forever, but it becomes a brand, it becomes a logo at a certain point, and we didn’t want to be out there as The National playing The National’s hits. We wanted to keep evolving, as artists, in everything we’re doing –everybody had different bands before this band and everybody is working with different people, and everybody has ambitions beyond just making rock records and touring– and so, when other artists from other fields are saying “Hey, come and be your band but I want to do something different from the idea of a band”, like Ragnar had us playing one song over and over…

ER: How many hours was it?

MB: We played it like 104, 105 times, it was six hours…

ER: And did you sing it…

MB: Consecutively, yes. I think I took one bathroom break, but everyone took their break and then came right back on. Ragnar even brought us chicken wings and coffee. But his idea was: what is a band?, what is a song?, what happens to a song when you play it so many times? He was obsessed with that song, he would listen to it on repeat, and then the song began evolving for him and he wanted to see if that would happen to us. So, all that kind of idea, breaking apart the idea of what is a song, what is a performance, what is a band, what is a video, what is a record. These are really flexible ideas: a record can be a lot of different things, it doesn’t have to be 45 minutes broken into 12 different ideas, the whole thing could be one idea. Maybe there’s no record, maybe there is just a film. There was a time where we thought: “Maybe we won’t put the record out, we just put the film out”. All that stuff is interesting because it opens up all these windows and doors for us to try things.

Our band puts all of our kids through college, and it’s the luckiest thing in the world that a group of friends started an art business and people are buying the art, and you do it with a bunch of friends, together. There is something so crazy about that. But it also gets weird, because if you make a movie with your five best friends and then you made another movie with your five best friends and for twenty years you tried to make another movie with the same exact team… that sometimes can feel like it’s really hard to make the kind of movies you want to make. And all of us, we started making movies that people thought The National should make. We didn’t do much of that, but at times it felt like we were servicing a fan base, or trying to give them what they expected, and that’s right where we hit creative walls and start fighting and not getting along, because for everybody, the internal motivations weren’t there. The internal motivations sometimes are to quit this band and to work with other people. Once we let those motivations be healthy and be welcome in the band, we just bring other people, so the band has become a network of friends that try to respect each other and get together as much as possible and make songs. So that’s what our band is.

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Jenny Molberg: Thank you! It took me a long time to come up with the right title for the collection, because I wanted to capture the spirit of the collection in a single word. I went through the book and circled all the words and phrases that I felt captured a sense of a collective empowerment against abuse, the notion of healing from patriarchal oppression and the ways in which addiction can injure a family, and “refusal” stood out to me as a word that captured my intended purpose. I was reading Adrienne Rich’s essays at the time, and came across her powerful use of the word in “When We Dead Awaken.” I wanted to supplement that with a reference in literature that investigates female agency and thought Jane Eyre captured a character similar to my speaker. I was delighted to find that Brontë uses the word “refusal” in a passage where Jane is fighting for her own autonomy, so these two quotations became my epigraphs. I think the word “refusal” also captures the way I wanted to represent my modern-day Ophelia speaker, who refuses to be gaslighted by Hamlet or to succumb to the narrative Shakespeare enforced upon her.

LC: What was the final poem you wrote or revised for the book, and how did that affect your sense that the book was complete?

JM: The final poems I wrote for the book are the collection of poems in which Ophelia encounters and subsequently destroys the Demogorgon. “Loving Ophelia Is” is, I think, the last poem I wrote for the book. When I was at a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, I set out to transcribe all of Ophelia’s lines from the play to illuminate her story, after I read a critic who argued that “Ophelia has no story without Hamlet.” Read alone, her lines tell a story of gaslighting. I spent hours each day inventing a world in which she and the Demogorgon would interact. These poems were probably the most fun poems I wrote for the book.

LC: In an author’s note for your poem “Different Kinds of Sadness” at the Missouri Review, you describe the piece as a “love letter to a friend” and said you’re “interested in challenging the traditional canon of heterosexual love poems by focusing on the often unshakeable and quantifiably more stable relationship that can occur between two women.” I love the idea of love letters to friends. Why did you choose the epistle, versus some other form associated with love poems (sonnet, etc.)?

JM: That’s a great question—thank you. I’ve always been interested in the epistolary form, especially as an address rather than a dedication, wherein the “you” can be in a more direct conversation with the speaker, versus a more removed beloved you might find in a form like the sonnet. I think of this collection as an embodiment of a collective voice, and as a conversation with my friends and other women and men who have suffered abuse, trauma, and gaslighting. I wanted to leave space for dialogue, for the reader to feel like they were actively engaged in a conversation and could respond. After my divorce, I was talking with a friend and said something like, “I wish there were a hospital for this, where the other patients would also be recovering from a similar kind of invisible struggle or trauma,” and she said, “write that poem!” I imagined the speaker sending epistles out from the ward of her hospital for cheaters, and then I just kept writing these poems until the collection took shape as a kind of box of unsent letters.

LC: How do your teaching, editing, and writing lives intersect? To be clear, I don’t mean time management/balance. I’m curious how the different pursuits influence each other for you.

JM: This is such an important question. I find that I grow and learn so much from my teaching and editing. In crafting prompts and exercises for my students, I often work alongside them. In a recent course, I took my students on a Text Quest (thanks to Traci Brimhall for the idea!), in which they were each tasked with cultivating an obsession with a topic other than poetry. Then, they write poems in response to that obsession, engaging in persona, cento, erasures, and research-driven poems. I did this exercise along with my students, and that Text Quest has begun to shape itself into a third manuscript. Editing, for me, is also quite inspiring—I find in reading and selecting work for Pleiades: Literature in Context and Pleiades Press that I am fortunate enough to encounter some of the best poetry being written today, poetry that challenges and excites me, and so much of that work resonates with me as I craft my own poems. Being an editor also helps me to be more forgiving to myself when I send out work: I realize that when we must reject work submitted to Pleiades and Pleiades Press, that, because of space and a focus on a particular issue, we must say no to work that is eminently publishable, so it gives me comfort to recognize that when my own work is rejected, it can be for many reasons other than “it’s not good enough.” As an editor, I have the privilege of engaging in a literary dialogue, and to help usher work into the world that I believe in, and I am very grateful for that opportunity.

LC: What’s next? What are you looking forward to right now?

JM: Right now, I’m looking forward to AWP and my subsequent book tour (see you in Dallas!). I’m also looking forward to being a fellow at the Longleaf Writers Conference in Florida this coming May, to getting married to the love of my life in May, and to spending the summer on a much-needed hiatus from teaching to work on my third book manuscript.

Jenny Molberg will perform on March 11th with also poet Kathryn Nuernberger , at Inner Moonlight, The Wild Detectives monthly poetry reading series. More info here.

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Kathryn Nuernberger: The title is meant to evoke the sequence of poems that describe the botany, history, and folklore surrounding plants historically used for the birth control and also, since the book is also about feminist fury in the face of patriarchal hegemonies, to evoke the idea of that someone (maybe a husband or a boss or that guy on the street or that other guy at the bar or a senator or doctor or supreme court justice) will come to “rue the day.” I also chose rue as a the titular plant because it is a plant that can be used for birth control, but it can also be used as a medicine or a culinary herb, it has been used in amulets to prevent the evil eye, and in spells to see a person’s true nature, among a host of other marvels. It is a plant that doesn’t exist for any one particular reason, as none of us exists for any one reason, other than to be fully itself alive in the world.

KD: RUE features plants that were historically used for birth control and interweaves them with poems about key figures from the history of botany and ecology, as well as more personal narratives about family and love. How did you come to explore these intersecting themes?

KN: When I was living the loneliest version of my life on a small farm in rural Missouri I developed a habit of going for a walk in the fields behind my house every morning. I’d give myself the challenge to meet a new plant, harvest it sustainably for food or medicine or a bouquet, and then do some research and writing about it. I soon learned that a great many of the plants in my field were abortifacients, which eased my sense of isolation; I felt surrounded by and connected to at least this kind of radical group of friends who shared my frustrations and indignations.

That research also took me deeply into the history of science – I became interested in the stories of other people like me who seemed to find their most meaningful connections in the green world as opposed to the human, though for the most part those human scientists disappointed me in the end with the limitations of their understanding and how permeated their work was with racism, imperialism, colonialism, and sexism. As I have at times been just so disappointed in my own work and my own self. RUE is a book about telling the truth about anger and though a lot of that anger is directed outward, a lot of it was also directed inward. It wasn’t until I came to other side of the wringer this furious muse was running me through that I began to be able to imagine and write about participating in human connections and friendships and love again.

KD: Your poem “Translations” remarks on different shades of green, as well as the ways we register color. How should a poet use color?

KN: In that poem I was particularly interested in the ways that the visible spectrum has posed a number of challenges to philosophers who contend with what perception is, whether we can trust our perceptions, and how we can trust that we are actually sharing experiences of perceptions with other perceiving humans. “Translations” is a conversation about perceiving color that is really a conversation about whether inner and outer worlds are different and if they are different, whether a person can perceive that difference. I wrote the poem in the months after I had a miscarriage, when I was feeling a very confusing and sad blur about where I ended and other beings began – thinking about how humans perceive color was a way of thinking through how to live with grief, loss, and mortality.

But I have no guidelines for how a poet should use color. Poets should follow their bliss!

KD: Many of your poems point to the natural world around us, to the prairies, to the forest, to the homes that snails build. How are we like the living things around us? What have they to teach us?

KN: I would say that we aren’t like the living things around us so much as we are part of them and they are part of us. We are all beings sharing ecosystems, eating and being eaten by each other, fracking or not fracking each other’s groundwater, pollinating or fertilizing or spraying poison on the blooms that will become someone or other’s foods. I try to avoid thinking about non-human beings as metaphors for human ones – I fear it is disrespectful to all parties and I also find it is a missed opportunity that prevents me from perceiving the fullness of being. I do try to imagine how it feels to be other beings – a bobtail squid, for example, has a colony of bioluminescent bacteria behind its eyes that it can use to camouflage itself to the moonlight filtering through the water. That process of imagining does bring me into greater awareness of the various relationships that are in closer proximity to this body of mine – my symbioses with various bacteria living in my mouth and gut and brain, my responsibilities to and impacts on my human loves, the places the water I’m drinking passed through to reach me.

KD: You often investigate the intimate relationship between parent and child, as in your poem “Toad,” which feels at once tender and painful. How do you strike that balance?

KN: I find parenting to be a balance between tenderness and pain. I’ve written elsewhere about the terrifying realization when my child was first born that the best case scenario for the two of us is that I would see her watching me die, as opposed to the worst case scenario, which was that I would lose her first. That feeling of constant precariousness has subsided since those first post-partum months after a frightening and medically-complicated delivery, but there are other tensions too. In “Toad” I explore feeling pulled between a child’s desires and needs and the parent’s desires/needs/responsibilities/obligations, which is a sensation that is often intensified by this sexist culture for people in the mother role. I think the balance you have described finding in this poem may be a consequence of my desire to tell the most complete truth I can about an experience, which often means articulating parts that are taboo alongside more socially acceptable material. Another interpretation is that I am chronic ditherer and dithering in poetry can be understood and appreciated as “balance” unlike the way it is totally “annoying” in daily life. I do love how everything is made better in poetry, most especially ugly feelings.

Kathryn Nuernberger will perform on March 11th with also poet Jenny Molberg, at Inner Moonlight, The Wild Detectives monthly poetry reading series. More info here.

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Alexandra Cornth – These experiences have provided new contexts in which to explore the body with my creative work. I have often written about my body—whether through the dysphoria of eating disorders, gender, or sexual assault. This journey of diagnosis has provided yet another lens with which to view myself, to consider how my body fits in the world around me, and how other bodies like mine exist in unexplained pain every day. All of these considerations give dimension to my work, even the art I make that doesn’t directly address chronic illness or disability.

While this collection focuses on “cold surfaces,” my encounters with the American healthcare system have also opened me up to a broader community of chronically ill and disabled artists and activists. I believe that community is essential to creativity, and while I would never wish this process on anyone, I am grateful for the circle of friends I have made through our shared experiences. These relationships help me be a better advocate through my work.

KD – In “MRI #1” you talk about the “the limbo of almost diagnosis, almost Understanding.” Where do poets and doctors fit within this space? Can they occupy the same space?

AC – I believe they absolutely can occupy the same space, especially in the “limbo of almost diagnosis.” However, I feel that poets and doctors speak different languages of the body.

I try to explain my symptoms to my physician, and she asks me to break it down more plainly, more clinically. But the experience isn’t always a clinical one—it is visceral, near violence, and I struggle to find another way to describe it.

It has been a learning process, for sure. When I am too emphatic, I risk being dismissed as overdramatic or not truly ill; when I am too detached, I risk hiding the severity of a symptom that could lead to the right test or scan. Neither is a risk I cannot afford to take.

I am lucky to now have doctors willing to learn how to speak with me as much as I am willing to learn how to speak with them—but that too has been a journey.

KD – In “Bloodwork,” you mark disease with geographical resonance: possible routes, an atlas of syndrome, “roads erased as bruises fade.” Why this metaphor?

AC – For many years, I thought of “diagnosis” as a physical place—one with borders and a mayor and laws that would change my life and unravel every unknown into understanding.

When I wrote “Bloodwork” in late 2018, it seemed like doing each blood test was akin to choosing a direction on a map. Thinking of them this way helped me see them as productive—I have had more than 20 blood draws in three years, totaling hundreds of individual diagnostic tests. They were often painful, but if I focused on their potential, that didn’t matter as much.

I usually got the results around the time the bruises faded from the draw site. Since all I’ve learned is what my condition’s not, it’s like those roads to “diagnosis” were erased from the atlas and my arm simultaneously.

KD – You write that sometimes “this pain yields no answers” (“EMG”). Is that why you write poems, to try to get at some of the answers science doesn´t or won´t provide?

AC – Yes and no. I think I write poems for all kinds of reasons, but mostly I write to understand something. That could be what’s happening to my body or why Sara Amato was such a compelling wrestler or who the last queen of Yugoslavia was.

One of my favorite questions is, “Then what does that mean?” I ask myself this over and over when I’m writing until I’ve found whatever I’m looking for.

KD – The DFW metroplex is studded with world-class medical centers as well as museums and other art venues. How do you see those worlds colliding, and how does your art fit within the overlap?

AC – DFW is where I have found myself as an artist and where I finally started getting answers about my chronic illness. As such, those worlds for me are one and the same.

Beyond DFW, science and art are two halves of the same brain—they communicate, they cooperate, and they need each other to survive. Accessibility is a great example of their collaboration—where medical needs meet creativity, engineering meets design.

I hope my art serves as a reminder of science and art’s inevitable coexistence—and repays the cities that have given so much to me.

Alexandra Corinth will perform on December 11th with also poet Mag Gabbert, at Inner Moonlight, The Wild Detectives monthly poetry reading series. More info here.

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Nomi Stone: Kill Class is borrowed from military language; I heard the term when I was doing fieldwork as an anthropologist, in a war training camp. In one segment of the training, the training soldiers are tasked with surviving in the woods and learning how to slaughter animals, the kill class. But for me, the term is bigger; I saw the whole training project as something like a kill class. Many of the war games are staged in fake Middle Eastern villages within fictional countries, and soldiers rehearse cultural and tactical interaction with Middle Eastern role-players before deploying. Understanding the culture of the adversary was lauded by the military and media as a way to diminish violence. Meanwhile, as a military instructor explained to a classroom of soldiers: “We’re not trying to make you into lovey-dovey singers of kumbaya. Hopefully this class will give you the ability to be that much more lethal.”

Rose Skelton: Homescar refers to the mark that limpets – cone-shaped sea molluscs – leave on rocks after a lifetime of returning to the same rock. The interesting thing about it is that as the limpet grows, it also takes on the contours of the rock, so that in the end both rock and mollusc bear the shape of each other. My collection of stories is inspired by the island I am from off the west coast of Scotland, and each character is in one way or another formed by the island they are from, and in turn, the island is also changed by its inhabitants. I think a lot about place, and how we as people are formed by the contours of that place. I am from a remote island and I think my happiest place is alone on top of a hill, looking at the sea all around, a kind of safety net from the rest of the world. My wife is from the suburbs of Maryland and she is definitely happy when surrounded by people. We are products of these extreme landscapes, and I think both of our bodies of work lean towards thinking about this, and how it can play out on the page. 

LC: Tell me about your current joint project. What does it look like to collaborate? I’m specifically interested in genre here, since you both write in more than one. Why the essay form? 

RS: At the moment, we are working on a collaborative essay on the writing and reading life, love, solitude, and togetherness. We chose the essay form because it is a third form, a somewhat new form for both of us. The project came out of a class we taught together about science and language, and then changed into the epistolary format inspired by the intense conversations we would have – at breakfast, in restaurants, before we go to sleep at night – about whatever thing had come up in our work that day. We are both obsessed with language and can often be found in diners doing line-break commentary or sonic analysis of the menu, or lying awake at 4 in the morning talking about why a particular word in an email or book elicited such an emotional response from one or the other of us. I suppose these conversations spilled over into the essay.

We have been going backwards and forwards for a year, writing to each other about what’s been going on, what we’ve been reading and writing, sometimes about the things that have been hard in a new marriage (living together for the first time, sharing a small apartment, the green card process (I’m from Britain)!). We are hoping that by the end we will have a conversation that we can share with others about what it looks like to be a writer, because it definitely isn’t what some people think – all looking at nice scenery and “getting inspired”! 

LC: You are both teachers. How does teaching intersect with your writing life and creative work?

RS:  I think everything I do in life has the single aim to help me become a better writer, one way or another, and teaching is a pretty direct way for me to enable that. It’s a way to dig back into the books and stories that have changed me and my writing, a chance to go back through them with a fine comb and look at things I might have missed. I think as writers, it’s easy to become lazy, to fall into patterns that we know work, to write the same story over and over again. Teaching helps me to break out of that, to remind myself that there are infinite ways to write a scene, and that it doesn’t do me any favors to lean on trusted patterns. 

It’s also a way for me to spend some of the excitement I have for literature, because sometimes it just bubbles up inside me and I don’t know where to put it. I still get giddy thinking about the end scene in “Sonny’s Blues,” where Sonny plays the piano in the club and his brother sends over the drink. I’ll never get over how beautiful that scene is, and I’ll never get over wanting to talk about it. Teaching gives me that.  In the end, I would hope that my classes help students of writing discover that literature too, can change them, and that they can eventually become better writers themselves.

NS: Teaching helps me fine-tune my own craft, and to read more deeply into my own obsessions. This fall, teaching poetry workshops at UT Dallas, it was such a joy to think about syntax and structure and sonics with my students, questions that obsess me in my own poems. My two favorite things as a professor: to pair collections of poems with philosophical essays and craft essays to deepen my students’ inquiry; and to have my students do anthropological fieldwork as a catalyst for their poems. I’m particularly excited about the class I am teaching this spring, called “Laboratories: Ways of Knowing in Science and Poetry” – a hybrid class exploring our relations with the phenomena of the natural world.

I also love the thrill of connecting with students. I have this wonderful graduate student who is new to poetry, and her vocabulary for talking about poems is getting richer and richer, and it is so exciting to watch. She comes into class with such excitement to dive into poems. Recently, she came up to me after class and said she had no idea that poetry was so technical, and to tell me how much she appreciated what goes into making a poem. The most wonderful feeling is sharing a masterful poem with my students that they have never encountered, a poem that changed my own life when I read it for the first time twenty years ago. My heart thuds in class when I share a poem like James Wright’s “A Blessing.”  “Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body I would break/ Into blossom” — Will that blossoming change the direction of anyone’s life in that room? Or even of anyone’s day?

LC: Tell me about something beautiful that you both love. This can be a book or a movie or whatever, just something you both really enjoy or take inspiration from.

NS: We both love the wild garlic (ramps) that grow on the hillside path by the ocean, towards the lighthouse, in Rose’s home, Mull, an island off the western coast of Scotland; Rose makes gorgeous wild garlic pesto out of it, and we eat it on sourdough sandwiches with cheddar, and on pasta and on everything. We both love the Greek island of Aegina, where we have spent the summer writing the last two years, and zipping around on our moped by the sea, and reading a novel out loud to each other in the hammock: this past summer, it was Chris Castellani’s glittering, heartbreaking novel, Leading Men, about Tennessee Williams and his lover Frank Merlo. When I read the end of a poem I love, I cover it line by line so that I can’t see what’s coming, and we did this too at the end of the novel, both bursting into tears in the final paragraph.

Nomi and Rose will perform on November 13th at Inner Moonlight, The Wild Detectives monthly poetry reading series. More info here.

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Opalina Salas: Black Sparrow Dress is an homage to Black Sparrow Press, the publishing house that brought the world Charles Bukowski. Although many won’t consider my poetry very much like his, I feel that his spirit of ‘observe and record’ has been my guiding force throughout my experience as a poet. Bukowski’s writing was influenced by the social and cultural spirit of Los Angeles. I feel that my work contained in this collection is inspired by the same spirit of my home, Oak Cliff. He wrote about the ordinary lives of the poor, alcohol addiction and the act of writing. My poems also reflect these concepts but are written in the perspective of a woman, therefore, the idea of the symbolism of a dress came to mind. I have also recently been through a very transformative phase in my life that has had me questioning the ideals of femininity and all that it entails for a modern woman in these tumultuous times. Also, I think about Frida Kahlo’s piece ‘ My Dress Hangs There’ https://www.fridakahlo.org/my-dress-hangs-there.jsp , when I think about the influences I have as a Chicanx woman and the duality of experiences and the feeling of ‘not fitting in.’ 

LC: Which poem from the collection was composed first?

OS: The first poem composed was ‘Hang Drapes’ which was written at the lowest emotional space I have ever been in. It is about the act of placing drapes on the wall to cover the reality of the beauty of the world that I was unable to see. I was lost in a world of fantasy that was covered by gold threads but was constantly fighting the images of a past that kept me trapped in emotional chains. The drapes still hang on my wall, and were the subject of a portrait I was featured in by photographer Danny Fulgencio for a 2011 interview in The Oak Cliff Advocate. https://oakcliff.advocatemag.com/2014/07/moonlighters/ This was my own little Factotem. 

LC: Which poem from the collection was composed the most recently?

OS: The most recent poem is ‘Saving Snow White’, which is the last poem in the book. It has the resolve and strength that the first poem’s voice was searching for. The chronological spread of the two span almost 20 years in the development of the body of work. I am thankful that my editor, MH Clay, was able to see the progression and find the story that tied all the pieces together. 

LC: I think all writers have obsessions. What are yours?

OS: People? I think that maybe I am the kind of person that can fall in love with anyone, and does quite frequently. It isn’t odd to find myself composing poems for strangers on the bus, or for the new poet I may have seen perform at a local open mic. I love to hear voices and try to mimic them to myself. I am a master at eavesdropping just for the delight of conversation and dialog. I love storytellers and gravitate to them naturally.  

LC: How does the DFW poet community affect your work? How do you envision your role in the community in terms of your identity as a poet?

OS: I feel very influenced by my peers and mentors in the DFW poetry community. I have been an avid participant and organizer of open mics in the area now for almost 25 years. In the early days of performance I was astounded by the works of local poets Clebo Rainey, GNO, Jason Carney, Cj Crit and her Angry Girl Sextet, Question Authority, Fran Carris, Paul Sexton, Megan Harris and my beat papa Dick Sevrens. These poets took me under their wings and gave me time and guidance to help me find my voice. Today I find myself surrounded by great talent and drive that the new generation of poets brings to the community. I know that I would not have been inspired to make this collection happen without Mad Swirl and the poets I love who are involved in its incredible creations. I am also very influenced by the local music scene that for me is anchored by Jeff Liles and his curation of The Kessler Theater, and by Tradewinds, an amazing spot for local indie and experimental bands to spread their talent.  Being surrounded by all these influences has made me want to be a mentor and an open heart for others as they were to me. I host open mics, and am a part of WordSpace, in hopes that if it is someone’s first time, that it is as memorable and warm as mine.

LC: What’s the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

OS: No Dictionary of a Living Tounge by Duriel E. Harris

Opalina will read from her collection of poems “Black Sparrow Dress” at Inner Moonlight, on Wednesday, May 8th.

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From the entrance to Laura’s whitewashed home and through its interior lies a steady stream of plants large and small. Even the studio feels more like a botanical garden than a work space. Fresh and atmospheric. When I come to visit, Laura and her husband are in the middle of a move; it takes them several trips to transport all of their beloved green pets to the new house.

Everything is in full bloom here in Almería. In fact, the region builds its economy around vegetable production, with 100,000 acres of greenhouses, supplying much of Europe. Like the buganvilla—draped around the front porch in heavy curtains—Laura’s art thrives on the guidance of an imagination as bright and steady as the Andalusian sun.

At one point, Laura thought she needed to live in a city like Madrid or Barcelona to meet other artists and attend conferences. “I mean, I still feel that way sometimes, but now I think it’s much more important to have a lot of followers.” Even more important, a creative curiosity, which Laura has in abundance.

I really had no idea that I could dedicate my life to drawing comics.

“I was always drawing when I was younger,” Laura says. “I went to Madrid to study Bellas Artes, but I wasn’t interested at all in comics then. I started to study restoration of paintings. After I graduated, I worked for two years doing restoration in Zaragoza.”

But then came a period of hardship. Laura found herself unemployed. She searched for internships in Europe and attempted to study restoration in Boston, but nothing worked out. “I returned to Almería. I had to move back in with my parents, and it was challenging. But I started a blog and started publishing comics daily,” Laura says. Producing art takes courage, and one isn’t born with courage but develops it by doing small courageous things. For Laura, these things include showing up to her desk day after day.

Much of what Laura does is self taught. “I studied fine arts [bellas artes] at university, so I learned how to draw a statue, but I didn’t study Photoshop or technology at all. So for me, it was a real challenge to start things, like the blog. And when I started it I had no idea anyone would ask me to publish for a magazine. I really had to learn all the technical aspects very quickly,” she says. Her efforts paid off. Over the past 6 years, Laura has collected clients such as Google Spain, Intel, Aquarius, Kia Motors, Ron Barceló, El País, Editorial Planeta, Penguin Random House, and SM Editorial.

When Laura moved back home to live with her parents in 2011, family life provided the material she needed to create her first book Let’s Pacheco: una semana en familia (originally published in 2011 by ¡Caramba!), an autobiographical graphic novel co-created with her sister Carmen about their yearly Christmas family reunion. Carmen wrote the text while Laura illustrated. They would collaborate again on the book La verdad sobre la Vieja Carola (Ediciones SM, 2012), which tells the story of a young boy named Marcos who strikes up an unlikely friendship.

Laura’s next book Señor Pacheco: Agente Secreto (originally published in 2013 by ¡Caramba!) is a comic book co-created with her father, “el señor Pacheco,” with the two of them posing as secret agents who embark on a mission to North Korea. Laura’s father had already retired by the time she moved back home, so her first stories were about him. “He was really a character,” she says. “Specifically, with this project I was sharing the things my dad said or did that were not common at all, but I a

lso wanted to do the exact opposite—convey something that everyone has experienced.”

Which reminds me of Maya Angelou, who once said her success as a storyteller comes from “seeing us as more alike than we are unalike.” In that sense, we are all connected to one another and to the stories we tell. Laura’s stories come from a singular place but express relatable truths, as in her relationship with her father.

Sadly, Laura’s father passed away 2 years ago, so these projects are even more special because of that. Señor Pacheco was written with her father and an experiment in “meta-fiction,” while Let’s Pacheco contains autobiographical elements based on events involving her parents and sister. “These first projects were very personal.” Laura says. “I really had no experience, so I was just experimenting and was starting to draw again. I hadn’t ever written anything. I’d never written comics. I was really just experimenting. So now when I look at these, I look on them fondly, and they bring back memories of those times, but I wouldn’t do something like that now. At that time, I really had no idea that I could dedicate my life to drawing comics. Now I see my art through a much more professional lens; I’m making my living from this. But these early comics are special. I’m really proud.”

To a certain degree, Laura’s work is still a family affair. She’s currently working on two books with her sister, both set for publication in 2018. One is based on a comic series they worked on together, Divas de diván, published weekly in the style section (S Moda) of Spain’s preeminent EL PAÍS newspaper. The series draws its inspiration from the women of film noir.

“These are the very first comic strips (‘tiras’) we did. They tell the story of several different characters, but almost all of them are based on women from the start of the 20th century. Women with a certain character, with a lot of moxie,” Laura says. It represents a brand of feminism in which women hold a lot of power but also display a sort of eccentric flippancy.

“Right now, what I like the most in my job is specifically the aesthetic part of the drawings. I like to look up ideas,” Laura says, pointing to her pinterest board. A parade of black-and-white images flash by, all featuring women who commanded the big screen in the early days of cinema. “It’s a lot more open with my sister, because she tells me the story but doesn’t specify each frame. Even though she writes the text, I also feel like an author because we work really closely on the project.” Laura authors a narrative not through words but artistic depection, which sometimes tells another story.

Her comic series, Problemas del primer mundo, also published in S Moda and later as a book (Penguin Random House, 2014), features narrative where visual content sometimes overtakes text. It is no longer the word but the image that takes precedence, as in the story featuring a girl’s fashion choices continually thwarted by the weather, or in the story where a couple who loves to dance loves to tell others they don’t, or in the story of a girl trying to read in bed. The size, shape and style of each panel, as well as the placement of figures and speech balloons inside it, are thoughtfully crafted to affect the timing of each vignette. Panels envelop and disclose sequences of events in a narrative that resonates at the heart of everything we know.

What Laura communicates through comics and illustrations that cannot be expressed any other way is a kind of humor. And you can’t really teach someone to be funny; you’ve either got it, or you don’t. As a follower of Reading Quirks, Laura’s comic series for The Wild Detectives, humor is one of the main characters. Andrés, WD’s brand director, supplies the weekly narratives and his vision of how the story should unfold, then Laura adds an additional layer of humor through artistic design. “I’ve been using this graphic tablet for the past year to produce the drawings,” Laura says, as she demonstrates how to translocate characters through one click and drag of the mouse, or how to control shading from the side bar. “But before that I drew them out with pencil and paper,” she says, a more labor-intensive process that created the kind of patience necessary to stay with the drawings longer.

Andrés first approached Laura when he asked her to revamp The Wild Detectives’ menu design, and idea for “Reading Quirks” eventually emerged out of that collaboration. “Now that I know him [Andrés] better and understand his sense of humor better, the process goes much faster and easier,” Laura says. She presents me with a series of extensive email exchanges to demonstrate how the two go back-and-forth, making precise changes to each panel, altering emotion or pacing of the story, until the comic arrives at its final stage. The series also invites instagram followers to collaborate on future editions by urging them to share their own reading quirks in the comments below each comic. This way, “Reading Quirks” puts out a collection of narratives that revolve around our shared experiences of reading. And let’s be honest, the act of reading may be individual, but the ultimate function of reading is to reflect on shared experiences.

I try to have regular office hours

Last year, Laura illustrated the book La decisión de Ricardo, by Mexican writer Vivian Mansour Manzur, which is something akin to Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It follows the life of a young boy, and his moments of decision and indecision, after his parents announce their divorce. Themes we know well but get to know all over again through the thoughts and actions of Ricardo.

For the time being, Laura wants “to focus more on illustration” as an art separate from comics. I’m sure other books are in her future, waiting to be brought to life by her illustrations. Laura loves what she’s doing so she doesn’t mind the work. In fact, she probably clocks in more hours than you or me, yet there’s a an indescribable lightness about her. I know this from observing her at work in the studio, and from listening to her describe her artistic process over steaming cups of green tea.

There’s also a structure to her work day that reminds me of an accountant’s schedule, with its discipline and regularity. Only by rendering many aspects of daily life automatic and habitual, William James once said, can we “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.” The path to invention is paved with a thousand tiny rituals.

“I try to have regular office hours. I wake up very early, have breakfast, and try to be here [in the studio] to start working at 9,” Laura says. “Depending on the projects I have going on, that will determine my work for the week. I’m usually at different stages for each client, so my daily work depends on that. But sometimes I do need to leave the house. It’s very easy to be a workaholic when you enjoy your job.”

Check Laura’s work here.

The post Meeting Laura Pacheco, illustrator of “Reading Quirks” appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Two years ago, Carmen visited Dallas to present her latest novel, Texas, the Grand Theft, published by Deep Vellum. “The first time I came to Texas, I was terrified!” she recalls, “I didn’t know how would the Texan public will receive the book, and it was Will Evans first book.” Carmen smiles broadly, “It has been a wonderful adventure. Will is marvelous publisher and a marvelous person. Working with him takes me back to when I started publishing. I worked with editors that were also my friends, Juan Pascoe from Taller Martin Pescador, Federico Campbell from La Maquina de Escribir, Neus Espresate from Editorial Era, and Octavio Paz from Editorial Vuelta. Will has taken me back to the real adventure of being published. Me ha llenado de vida (he has filled me with life).”

Since then, Carmen has been busy. “I’ve published Narco History, a book I wrote with my husband. It’s a historic essay about how since the prohibition of psychoactive substances, Mexico and the States jointly created the Mexican Drug War.” She also published the essays; “When Mexico Recaptures Texas” translated and published by Nicholas Kanellos, and finished another essay about the Mexican Antigones. “There are several cases,” explains Carmen, “Javier Sicilia, Marisela Escobedo, Juan Nepomuceno and many others… I compared the classic Antigone with specific stories of fathers, mothers, sons who paid to bury their dead, many times with their own lives.”

Carmen is a prolific author, a poet, playwright, and novelist. Her books are difficult to categorize, different formats, varied scenarios from the Caribbean Islands to Arizona, from her first novel Mejor Desaparece (Just Disappear) to Texas, she has changed subjects, eras, topics, so I wonder what is it that unifies her books. “What do all your works have in common?” I asked. “My fury,” she pauses, “My love for life. It is a strange combination, but defines me… I started with poetry… it has been many decades now,” she stops and looks for a word, a phrase to help me understand, an image “I’m a die, not a spin. A spin top dances on one spot; I had been a die. I’ve pressed through many layers, other surfaces, not just the topics. Even in the form, I’ve become more irregular, more odd.”

“Mejor desaparece, it’s very bizarre, but so is Texas, imagine the first two hundred pages are just about three or four minutes. I never do a conventional thing,” Carmen smiles proudly. “My new novel is a fairy tale Boullosa style,” she affirms “a mix of my fury, my passion for life and literature. I’m a blend between the 70s and the Spanish Golden Century.”

Siruela will publish Anna’s Book in May. The story is based on Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina. In the novel, Anna writes a book but refuses to publish because it’s just a draft. “I was rereading it, and thought… of course she wrote it again!” Carmen’s eyes sparkle while she remembers “and I have to tell that story! It’s mentioned in Tolstoi’s novel that is a book for the youth. Russian’s passion at that time was fairy tales. I initially had several approaches to the story; I tried verse, then novel. It ended up being how does Anna’s book appear at her son’s house, a day before the Russian Revolution. Then we see her novel, a brief novel, a maddened story, fairy tales written by a woman that uses opium every night to be able to sleep, a feverish woman on the verge of suicide.”

I am not 100% a woman; I am a person with chromosomes and a cultural background

Woman, women, women that write, and feminism… I know she dislikes labels, but it’s inevitable that we talk about the subject. “What’s your opinion about feminine literature / feminist literature? Does genre matter in literature?” “It is a very complicated subject. I am not 100% a woman; I am a person with chromosomes and a cultural background,” she explains. “I was very close to the feminist movement in the 70s. I always have been fond of female authors; since I was young my bookshelves were full of Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolf, Silvina Ocampo, Rosario Castellanos. It was not because they were women, but because I was drawn to their world; the same way I was interested in Lawrence Durrell’s world. I’ve taken the feminist banner several times, because women author’s are often relegated to a second place.”

“I finished a book about an Ecuadorian writer, Marieta Veintemilla, that has been totally forgotten. I found her work and fell in love with it, I brought it to the Fondo de Cultura Economica, and they said write a introductory study about her. Well, I did 200 pages on her. That’s my cause. But I want to think that if I were a man, with good literary taste I also would have written a book about Veintemilla, I would be devout of Rosario Castellanos, no matter how much soccer I would watch. If I were a man, I would also be a writer.”

I always kept in the closet that I love to cook. I’ve decided to come out of the closet.

Carmen is always in the move, always thinking about the next book. “What are you working on currently?” “Right now, I’ve come back to a project I had in the back burner and mixes two of my passions: women authors and a passion I always kept secret,” she pauses and I feel the anticipation of a discovery. “Maybe for my generation, or because I’m a feminist… I always kept in the closet that I love to cook. I’ve decided to come out of the closet,” she smiles. “I’m writing a book inspired by Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. In her piece she invites 39 prominent historical women to dinner, she sets a table with ceramic plates made for each one of them. There are no Spanish-speaking guests among them. So, I decided to make my own table.”

Once again, I can see her raising the banner of the forgotten; “I’m inviting around twenty Spanish speaking female authors from Teresa de Avila to Rosario Castellanos. I’m writing their literary profile and creating a recipe for each one as homage,” she explains. “I’m rehearsing the recipes, preparing the dishes in my kitchen, mixing the ingredients that they could have used, I use any reference in their works or simply what I logically think they might have liked. So far the title is “Aristotle’s Apron” in reference to Sor Juana’s quote “had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more.” I’m having so much fun with it, I letting loose my passion for onions, garlic, rice!” she sentences.

I don’t believe in inspiration. I’m a soldier. Completely masculine, I believe in work, love for reading, writing and editing.

Certainly she is difficult to label, I am simply amazed at her versatility. “What inspires you?” I asked naively. “Reading,” she answers simply but then adds, “I don’t believe in inspiration. I’m a soldier. Completely masculine, I believe in work, love for reading, writing and editing. Inspiration to me is walk on the street and suddenly start dancing. Writing is another thing; it is discipline, dedication, devotion, and fight. It is a battle, it’s love. It’s a continuum that you have to keep building.”

“It’s daily work, every book asks for something different. My ideas come from one book to another,” she tries to explain, “for example, now I have an idea that I obviously not going to write, but still haunts me. When Teresa de Avila died – if she was truly dead, cause she had catatonic episodes before – the doctor cut her hand and he kept a finger. They thought she was going to become a saint so every relic was precious. Apparently, he also took her heart out, and gave it to the Alba family. Indeed, it’s said that when the doctor fell prisoner of the Otoman corsairs and his ransom was paid, he had to pay extra for Saint Teresa’s finger. Anyways… the point is that Teresa de Avila died from bleeding, there was something in her uterus that made her bleed terribly. Maybe tumors, but nobody knows for sure. That’s the story, but I imagine that when they were piercing her body, someone took what was in her uterus… and that was a demonic thing used for witchcraft. I thought it would be great to make a novel about the Teresa de Avila’s tumor… but I wont do it,” she smiles. “Of course, reality goes further than fiction,” she adds “Spanish dictator Franco always carried with him, her hand. His family returned to the church once he died. Imagine, the tyrant traveling with the saint’s hand… My point is there is always something to write about, there are stories everywhere.”

Carmen spends considerable time in New York, so I wondered about her take on Spanish-speaking Literature in United States. “It has a rich tradition in the States, Nicolas Kanellos has dedicated his life to rescue it. You also have writers like Martí, that wrote their most important works here, so did Octavio Paz. There is an intense relationship between Latinamerica and Spain and the United States, a continous exchange, a love-hate history. Right now, something wonderful is happening in New York. Eduardo Mitre, the great Bolivian poet, Jose Manuel Prieto, the wonderful Cuban writer, Sylvia Molloy, Alvaro Enrigue, Lina Meruane, Valeria Luiselli, Alejandro Zambra are there.”

This winter, Deep Vellum will publish the English translation of her second novel, Before. “It’s a very dear book to me,” affirms Carmen, “I published at Octavio Paz publishing house. It received the Xavier Villaurrutia award and has many readers to this day. Peter Bush translated it and tried to edit it sometime ago, then we got distracted and we left it there. When I was presenting Texas with Will, I remembered about Peter’s translation. I thought it would be a good idea to link a legend in the translation world with a new publisher.”

So many things have changed in Dallas these last two years, and many of us dream about a Literary Dallas. “Is it possible? I asked.” “When you fight you get the best outcome, it is difficult to find a bookstore like The Wild Detectives or an editor like Will Evans in the world. The battle produces something magnificent.”

Her words are contagious, they give hope, awaken curiosity and wonder. Her thought process, her non-stop idea-generating mind, amazes me. I’m moved by her passion and conviction, and her thrive to never repeat herself. She inspires. As we close the interview she tells me, “Si quieres ser feliz, lee. Quieres escribir, lee. Leer da mucha vida, y escribir es una demoledora. No se puede escribir sino se lee. Se escribe en dialogo con otros autores.” (If you want to be happy, read. If you want to write, read. Reading gives life. Writing is a wrecking machine. You can’t write if you don’t read, you write in dialogue with other authors.)

Gracias, Carmen.

The post Stories Everywhere – An Interview with Carmen Boullosa appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

In our ‘Bestest’ of 2015 list, Louisa Hall’s novel has been repeatedly chosen as book of the year by not just some of us but also by some of our collaborators and friends. She was at The Wild Detectives last September presenting the novel and she certainly made us all ponder on our human capacity–or the lack of it–to connect with others. Her insightful answers made that Q&A one of the most interesting we had in the shop last year.

We had to talk to her again. The book was so rich that questions and comments were piling up. Following the format that Gaby –a kid– and Mary –a chatbot– speak to each other in the novel, we proposed her to do an interview on an online chat, to which she very kindly agreed. Here is the conversation we had.

WD
Hi Louisa, how are you today?

Louisa
I’m fine, how are you?

WD
Yeah, good. Happy to be chatting here with you. Thanks so much for your time.

Louisa
Of course, I’m really happy to talk. I love The Wild Detectives.

WD
Oh, thank you. Much appreciated. It was great to have you here presenting the book.

Louisa
Yeah, that was a fun event!

WD
It was.
Ok, I’m going to start shooting.

Louisa
Shoot.

WD
One of the most interesting things about your novel is how your exploration of Artificial Intelligence unravels so many insights about the human condition in general and human communication in particular. The idea of how the act of replicating our own brain can say so much about ourselves… that’s very original, a fascinating place to write from. How did you come up with that space for the novel?

Louisa
When I was younger, I wanted to become a psychiatrist. I finished my pre-meds, and took a lot of classes on brain chemistry. I was interested in what models of the brain say about our humanity. In the end, though, I ended up feeling frustrated with that discipline. I wanted to find a more nuanced language–more mystery, less diagnosis–to understand human nature. I turned instead to poetry and fiction. Speak sets the science of artificial intelligence against the science of storytelling, a science we humans have been developing for many, many centuries. It allows the latter–which is the science in which I believe most deeply and profoundly–to inform the former.

WD
That’s the eternal tension between humanism and science in a paragraph.
Could you tell us a bit more about the conception stage of the novel. What made you want to talk about AI and human communication?

Louisa
As a result of some things I was going through in my own life, I was thinking a lot about failed attempts at communication–two people who are trying to understand one another and failing. And I was thinking a lot about how our attempts to communicate are so often mediated by machines: phones, or computers. We seem to talk to machines as much as we talk to each other. So I started to imagine a group of people trying to communicate with each other and often falling short, often having more intimate conversations with their computers than with their loved ones.

WD
Your characters are fascinating, very human and vulnerable. 5 timelines and 7 + 1 voices spanning from the 17th century to the near future. The novel is carried completely by those characters. How did the story you wanted to tell shape those characters? Or was the other way around?

Louisa
It was the other way around! The characters shaped the story. I started with five characters and had no idea where they’d end up, how they’d relate to each other, if they’d come to any conclusions. It was a really exciting way of writing a book: each day I was waiting to learn where the characters would end up.

WD
It sounds very exciting indeed being all of them distant in time. Apart from Alan Turing, are there any characters inspired by a real historical figure?

Louisa
Karl Deetman’s work–his creation of the first conversational computer program, and the way he ultimately turns against it–is based on that of Joseph Weizenbaum, who created ELIZA. Like MARY1, ELIZA was based on the techniques of a Rogerian therapist. The program would simply turn your statements around and make them into a question. But people were enchanted by her. Weizenbaum tells stories of secretaries in his lab staying up late into the night, talking with ELIZA. He was horrified that they’d so willingly exchange real human conversation for such a limited program. But the other side of that argument is that those women were clearly starved for meaningful conversation. Clearly no one–other than ELIZA–was listening to them when they talked.

WD
It’s fascinating. Your novel says so much about our longing for connection. We’ll talk later about that.

We find Speak to be a very poetic novel in the way meaning comes from the relation between the different stories. Being a quite philosophical book there are no categorical statements here; it’s the thoughts and reflections of your characters which mingle through the different timelines that creates meaning by association in a very lateral way. You leave a lot of space for the reader to connect the dots, and that fills the reading process with a good amount of very pleasant eureka moments. How did you work with that? How did you build that net of meaning connecting the different stories?

Louisa
That’s a really interesting question. Writing the book, I didn’t want to force any connections between the five (or really seven) different storylines. I didn’t want to create a fictional universe ruled by coincidence. That seems like a slightly tyrannical approach to writing a novel. But I did alternate between the different storylines each day. On a Monday, I’d write Turing; Tuesday, I’d write Gaby; Wednesday, I’d write Karl, and so on. So clearly my brain was steeped in Turing’s concerns when I was writing Gaby. I think of them as seven characters engaged in a long conversation with one another. Sometimes they’re talking at angles, missing each other’s points; other times they’re addressing each other’s concerns.

WD
You titled the novel Speak. Speaking, the ability to materialise thoughts and share them with others, plays an almost biological role in the book. Speaking is the giving, it’s what ultimately creates love and the lack of it that destroys it. But what about the listening? The chatbots are loved because they listen –or people feel that they listen–, they ask the right questions so people can explain themselves and feel connected, but it seems a very sad and narcissistic kind of connection. Do we long for connection so badly that we just want to be listened to, and we don’t care about what the other has to say?

Louisa
That’s another really interesting question! I’ve thought a few times that my next book should be called Listen. It could examine all the different kinds of listening, from the recording that MARY3 does to the empathizing that a human can do. One of the parts of the book that felt most hopeful to me was when Ruth is remembering the story her husband told her, and understanding it in a new way. Earlier in the book, it seems like she’s not listening. Later it becomes clear that she was, and that what she heard has had the power, over time, to change her idea of the world. That seems like a good kind of listening to do.

WD
We love the idea of a sequel. We’re in.

Loui
Great! I’m glad you’re on board.

WD
Let us quote a line from the book “When we ask questions we know the answers already. We’ve grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance.” How bad are we communicating with others nowadays? Is technology making things better or worse?

Louisa
I think we’ve always been simultaneously terrible and brilliant at communication. We have our moments of perfection, times when our language crystallizes into something that feels as weighty and substantive as a stone passed from one hand to the next. But we also have moments when we miss each others’ meanings completely. Our job, I think, is to constantly strive for the first kind of language, knowing that it will often elude us.

WD
We especially loved the way you explain the seduction equation using the fibonacci sequence as a model for meaningful conversations; each statement is made out of two previous terms pushing empathy and connection forward and expanding them in spirals. This is so ingenious. How did you come up with this idea?

Louisa
When I started writing about the seduction equation, I’d already been writing the novel for some time, and thinking a lot about the effects of a pattern such as the fibonacci sequence, which looks backward in order to move forward. It struck me as a reflective pattern, one that could be educated by its past experience. So I was sort of in love with that pattern, and found myself wondering which aspects of life could be improved by hewing closer to that kind of pattern, and I thought: conversation! I moved from there to seduction.

WD
Diaries, letters, online chat, memoirs… Each voice in the book speaks in a different medium. All of them are documents, thoughts frozen in time, words that speak to us over time, memory. In parallel the AI machines you talk about recollect memories, stories –some of them from those documents in the novel– to fill their patterns of thoughts. It seems like storytelling is in a way some form of artificial intelligence, preserved voices that speak to us. Aren’t books a rudimentary form of AI?

Louisa
Yes! I agree with that completely. And not even rudimentary–they’re a magnificent, terrifying form of AI. I truly believe that every good book is a machine that contains, as Milton put it, the “precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” As I was writing Speak, I was also finishing a dissertation on seventeenth-century literature, and I was amazed at how often people in the seventeenth-century talk about books in the same way we now talk about AI: as cutting-edge technologies capable of containing human patterns of thought. In the seventeenth-century, books were the frontier of AI. Actually, I take that back. Books are still at the frontier of AI. Good thing we have bookstores like The Wild Detectives to keep us technologically savvy.

> > > >

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