3:AM Magazine

The main difference to me between depression and melancholia is that depression is what is occurring on the outside, one’s symptoms: (sadness, lethargy, loss of appetite, etc.) while melancholia is what is actually happening within. Furthermore, melancholia is a definition of what occurs when one is unable to grieve the loss of something because they are unable to determine what exactly it is they have lost. Because in melancholia one does not know what one has lost, there can be no resolution; there is no way to recover. This is the case for class trauma (the trauma that occurs when growing up working class/poor in the contemporary US) and trauma, in general. The definition of trauma is that the event that has occurred to create the trauma has created a shock and that shock results in a blackout where no memory exists (the psyche protects us from such traumatic memories). Because these memories are not recoverable, what has occurred cannot be remembered, which means it cannot be re-experienced and grieved.

Paul Rowe interviews Cynthia Cruz.

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I’m not sure they are stitched back together — in that yes, there’s a rough narrative to the book about parts of my life, and alongside that, a rough argument about trauma and suffering and attention and creativity. I hope those threads make the book more or less hospitable to a reader. There are those ghosts of through-lines that give it a bit of coherence. But in the main I experience the book as quite a chaotic, three-dimensional thing. A maze to go into rather than a line to follow. I laid all these different types of writing next to each other — the memoir, the fiction, the autofiction, the criticism, the pretend lectures and essays and epiphanies — as a kind of collage, where the rough edges where they don’t stitch together are much more important than any seamless stitching. 

Lee Rourke interviews Jenn Ashworth.

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I turned away from poetry because it had invited strange men towards me. They were amputee fetishists and I guess they mistook my first book as a solicitation. Many assumed that I would be flattered by their advances. I was 26. I was shocked by their suggestion that I’d obviously hook up with them. Who else would I hook up with? Culture must have given them the impression that amputee women can’t find dates, but every amputee woman I know is partnered, has been partnered, has multiple partners, or doesn’t want a partner. So it was all confusing and a little scary.

Élan Young interviews Jillian Weise about cyborg detective.

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The main character in Permanent Green Light, doesn’t intentionally commit suicide. That’s not his interest or goal. Others around him do, and he studies those suicides for his project. He wants instead to disappear in a way that has the most spectacular effect on the world that’s possible. He decides that his death is the way to achieve maximum impact, and his goal is to die without triggering any conventional, personal reaction to death, and to his death in particular. He’s trying to create a death/disappearance that erases him entirely and just uses the natural, inherent impact that suicide has as a powerful effect. He doesn’t long to die. He’s more like a very ambitious magician, I think.

Chris Kelso interviews Dennis Cooper.

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Occasionally it’s just that you’ve never seen language used in the way the author is using it. I often know within 20 pages whether I’m going to try and sign the book, which sounds odd since the whole book could go off piste after that. But if it maintains its quality, the voice of the author and doesn’t turn sour then you know it’s a belter. Whatever it is, it must be trying to do something with language or subject that is new, or inventive. Without that initial surprise and ‘oh I haven’t read many books like this before’ moments, it’s hard to get further with the reading. The funny thing is, hardly anything is new in literature and things are recycled, pastiched, borrowed, stolen, influenced etc. all the time. It just happens to be new to me.

Sylvia Warren interviews Kit Caless about Influx Press.

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Characters who behave outrageously are good because they transfer their (in this case negative) energy to other characters: they’re the movers and shakers of the story, and should stand-out as vital, in both senses of the word.

I’d emphasise, though, that any affection is for the writing of them (and reading them back). The reason you can hang out with these people between book covers / in your head is because they’re made-up. As long as they’re made up well, they can be as shiver — or warmth-inducing as you like.

Scott Manley Hadley interviews Mazin Saleem .

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All of my books are set in the same universe. I simply cannot leave the world (or worlds) I have created and start all over again, fresh—whether my next project is a book, or play or visual poem. Every single instance that takes place in my books is of the same world that originated in Mastodon Farm. There are ramifications and consequences to everything and a close reader will be able to pick up on these changes. But this is not something I consciously set out to do—not at first. And I don’t challenge people to try and keep track of all these things. It’s simply a neat little extra something for those who really want to delve into the lore of my books. The characters in my books are not wholly aware that their world is slightly different from ours either. But it is still very similar to the world we live in.

James Nulick interviews Mike Kleine.

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I think my sexual experience has always been in dialogue with philosophy. It’s something about justice. That’s why it comes out in that confrontation that you pick up on that was there on the beach—why does male desire have to be stronger than mine? So although my sexuality has always been in dialogue with my philosophical practice, it’s never been in contact with philosophy. I can’t find my sexuality in Kant. I think it was Preciado who said that nobody could have an orgasm whilst quoting Hannah Arendt.

Andy West interviews Victoria Brooks.

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I was reared as a world literature reader ( laughs). My parents were the children of immigrants and belonged to the intellectual left in New York.  My father worked on decolonization in Africa and we spent time in Uganda. I remember reading Tagore and Achebe when I was very young, alongside Chinese folk tales and the epic of Gilgamesh. In my early twenties I lived in Senegal and Algeria and was steeped in extra-hexagonal French literature and political thought. So if I have reservations about world literature it’s not because I’m in favor of re-provincializing reading.  It’s that I prefer a model of “world literatures in languages” over and against the institutional model of “World Lit” that one finds increasingly in the United States.

Krishnan Unni.P and Mantra Mukim interview Emily Apter.

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Londoner, Wayne Holloway is an unlikely candidate to be writing the next Great American Novel. Yet his latest book, Bindlestiff, abandons the city by the Thames, jumps across the Pond, and attempts exactly that. Part satire and piercing critique of the Hollywood machine, part dystopian rumination on a possible America to come (not too far away in the future), partly a tale of friendship and survival against all odds, Bindlestiff has been welcomed by outstanding reviews, particularly due to its experimental form. In early March 2019 I met with Wayne to chat about his work, politics, story-telling, and the not so rare phenomenon of British writers deconstructing the American Dream.

Fernando Sdrigotti interviews Wayne Holloway.

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