I love your dream-like, mysterious style in these four flash pieces. Can you tell us a little bit about your process when you worked on these?

I write in the morning.  I wake up, try not to bump into things and then start generating a bunch of material. Then I take things out & move them around. I like editing.  So the pieces come together across morning. So I’m not entirely sure what accounts for it.

There are a couple formal things that I work with as well. I strip away all the punctuation that I can get away with because I like the idea that things have the same weight until you alter them as you read.  Freud talked about the unconscious being a space in which all kinds of data from multiple time-frames have a kind of equivalence--all present in dreams in the same way, differently weighted by associative logic.  And I don't use much detail in a conventional sense in my sentences. The words remain somewhat general. You might visualize details that you bring as you read.  The sentences are triggers.  This is the case with any reading, really, but I think this is especially true of micro-forms.

Past that, I’m not sure.  I’ve worked in improvised music for a long time and think I approach these stories in a way that is influenced by it.  So there’s a lot that happens in practice that I know about in a kind of indirect way.  And I’m cool with that, but when someone asks me how x or y happens, I realize that I only know how to talk about aspects of the process.


They also feel somewhat cinematic. Have you written in other mediums before?

I like the idea that my pieces are little films when you read them on the page but that they change into something else when you read them aloud.  I write them to be read aloud, but I don't know if anyone does it…

But to actually answer the question, no. 

I'd like to make tiny films but I don't know how to do it.  I have definite ideas about how they should look, but figure that making a film—even a tiny one---would be a collaborative undertaking and that what they would become would follow from the process.  The idea is to assemble some people and texts and put a process into motion.  The Troupe took off from an idea like this.

A Digression: As a writer I'm a good pianist.  There's a continuous bleed from working with sound into the writing.  I've moved out of working with sound for a while to focus on writing.  I’d like to bring the two practices together soon.  I miss playing.  And I have Joan Crawford's baby grand piano, too.  But it's in storage.  When I think about that, it baffles me. 


Who are you reading at this time?

If I read fiction or poetry that I like when I'm writing, I steal it.  The last book-length fiction I read was Richard Brautigan's, Trout Fishing in America. And of course I made a piece that copped something from the way in which he plays with names.  So I figure I'll read some of the writers I really like when I take a break, once I figure out how to do that.

Mostly I'm reading academic stuff; research papers on dynamical systems/embodied cognition, cognitive linguistics, some philosophy and newer work in geography. I steal from that too, but I don’t feel badly about it.  I figure we’re supposed to do that.


Any writers that have been major influences in your life?

I’m influenced by all kinds of people--writers and musicians and visual artists and theorists of information design and film-makers, recordings and films. Amira Hanafi played a fundamental role in getting this writing thing to happen, showed me possibilities that I wasn’t aware existed.  And her writing is really lovely.  Check out her book, Forgery (Green Lantern Press in Chicago.)  I don't really know Peter Markus, but he helped me try to figure out how repetition works in his writing in a bourbon bar in Chicago once. His sentences are beautifully crafted. I like Kenny Goldsmith. I aspire to his sartorial sense, too. I’ve learned a lot from other folk whom I don’t know personally but whose writing I like: Matt Bell, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, lot of folk on Fictionaut.  There are so many lovely writers.

Anyway, there is no way I would be able to write about this sort of thing had I not read a lot from people like Joyce, Calvino, Borges and J.G. Ballard, Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet and Gertrude Stein, Susan Howe and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge–and listened to hours and hours of field recordings and musique concrete after reading John Cage and other philosophers of sound—and worked with toy cassette recorders to make crap quality reproductions that we used in performances because they did not resemble the source material.  All that forms a circle: it is all interconnected.