Daniel Davis Wood interviews Richard Porter.
Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book, published by Pilot Press, is a novella composed of episodic fragments of text, some of them only a line or two in length, through which a narrator creates prose portraits of the friends and lovers he has lost to AIDS. Moving at a breakneck pace thanks to its sharp, curt sentences, it’s a short, shocking piece of work that details a succession of tragedies in the voice that veers from pitiless to wry, from cynical to numbed. With My Dead Book currently shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, Pilot Press editor and artist Richard Porter spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood about the origins of My Dead Book and its reception.
3:AM: Reading My Dead Book is an electrifying experience; the novella has a range of features that seized my attention and held it throughout. There’s the power of its central conceit, which is confronting in its own way, as well as the self-exposure that lapses into self-laceration and the steadily crescendoing sense of pathos. What was it about the book that made you sit up straight when you first came across it, and then decide you wanted to publish it?
RP: The acuity of emotion and clarity in the writing. It hit me from the first sentence and just kept going until the end. I’d not read anything like it. The closest comparisons I could think of, that were still fresh in my mind, were Queer by William Burroughs and Memories that Smell Like Gasoline by David Wojnarowicz. I remember thinking: who is this magician? Why are Picador or Canongate not all over this? When I asked if he would be interested in me publishing it, I never thought he would actually say yes! The rest is history.
3:AM: What is that history? Why do you think larger publishers weren’t willing to take on this book?
RP: Like in the art world, the bigger you get in publishing, the less frequently risks are taken. This is why capitalism at its core is faulty. You’d think the more resources a gallery or publisher had, the freer they would be to take risks. This is not the case. But as a small press that’s good for me!
3:AM: Do you mean risks with regard to the intensity of the material that appears in My Dead Book?
RP: I think there’s a huge surge in the popularity of what is called “queer” literature at the moment, but I think that it is a selective interest, operating within a narrow framework. You only have to take a look at the shelves of an LGBT+ section in a bookshop to see the vibrant colours and attention-grabbing designs, what a friend calls ‘Bubble Tea covers’, to get a feel of what parameters the big publishers are working within. My Dead Book is hardcore. It’s intense and unrelenting in its despair. I can see how it didn’t find an audience at larger presses.
3:AM: So did you take it on more or less as received, then?
RP: As an artist, I never interfere with anyone’s work. I accepted the book as it was.
3:AM: Part of its intensity, I suppose, comes from the way it seems to hew pretty closely to live experience. No doubt many readers will see My Dead Book as an especially dark work of autofiction, or even straight-up autobiographical prose, albeit one composed of small pieces in the manner of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. In your experience, how have readers responded to it?
RP: I was surprised by the number of straight men who said it was their favourite book of the year! I think the question of ‘is it autobiographical or not’ is really interesting. It’s a novel, it’s fiction, but people still want to read it as memoir. To me that’s the magic of fiction itself, but also a testament to Nate’s skill as a writer, and one thing that that the book has demonstrated is that good writing has universal appeal. It breaks through boundaries of sexuality, class, and race, and speaks directly to the soul of the reader.
As a reader myself, I wanted it all to be true because of how good the stories and characters are. How sad it is to discover it’s all just made up. These people never were. Or were they?
3:AM: Personally, I don’t want an answer to that question! I like the poignancy to not knowing the extent of the fiction in the novel, or the fictionalisation of lived experience. But there’s a representation issue at play here as well: one that will appeal to readers who want to see a greater variety of identities represented in contemporary literature, and one that also ties into Pilot’s mission. Do you have any sense of how the book has been received by readers who are perhaps closer to the narrator’s demographic and/or situation?
RP: Unfortunately, I don’t know that many people like the narrator in the book. I think most who I might have known are dead. It’s also set in Midwest America, so there’s a geographic issue there. I do know that the narrator spoke directly to my soul, and I’m a good twenty years younger. I think there’s a timeless quality to that sense of grief, longing, and ill-fittedness in society. I’m sure many who connected with it also connected on that level. It speaks to that feeling of brokenness and wild desire that, while trying to survive in a capitalist society, largely goes unspoken, unseen.
3:AM: Let’s hear a bit more about that mission. Pilot Press is five years old and has a very clear purpose behind it: it enacts “an attempt to recover a philosophy of publishing and a sensibility lost to AIDS and free market capitalism since the 1980s”. Anyone who reads My Dead Book will see clearly how it advances the purpose of the press, but it’s an outlier in the sense that it is Pilot’s first fiction title. How did you come to decide that fiction would be a good direction for the press to venture into?
RP: There was no “decision” as such. I simply read this book and that was it.
3:AM: New avenues to pursue the mission of the press, purely on the merits of My Dead Book?
RP: I’d never even typeset something of this length before! The desire to share My Dead Book with others was the main driving force, like everything else I publish. The press as a whole is very much an extension of my life as an artist in that respect. It’s just another form of communicating, of building a map of where we all are, where I am.
3:AM: It’s a very personal project, then, to look at the activities of the press as a whole.
RP: It’s highly personal. That’s the only way I know how to describe it: this thing made me feel something, so it might make you feel something too. That sensation of good writing is genre-defying. I wouldn’t say I was going in the direction of fiction, or encouraged in that direction because of the success of My Dead Book, but I’m glad to have added it to the fold.
My Dead Book by Nate Lippens is published by Pilot Press and is currently on the shortlist for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
