The Mumpsimus

Electric Literature  has now published a roundtable discussion between Sofia Samatar, Carmen Maria Machado, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, and me about a thing we provisionally call "speculative memoir". This began when Sofia had separate conversations with us all over the last couple years about fiction in fact, the creative possibilities of nonfictional writing, the perils and possibilities of memoir, etc. She and I talked for a long time about it when I was first putting together ideas for my dissertation, and I've kept with quite a few of the ideas we originally discussed. (Perhaps no surprise, as my interest in the topic goes back a ways with one of the subjects of my dissertation, J.M. Coetzee.) And as someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, the distinctions always interest me. Sofia also has a new book out, Monstrous Portraits , "an uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness", with drawings by her brother Del. Seek it out!

Electric Literature  has published an essay I wrote about Robert Aickman , one of the greatest of the 20th century's short story writers: Thirty-five years after his death, Robert Aickman is beginning to receive the attention he deserves as one of the great 20th century writers of short fiction. For the first time, new editions of his books are plentiful, making this a golden age for readers who appreciate the uniquely unsettling effect of his work. Unsettling is a key description for Aickman’s writing, not merely in the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together. The supernatural is never far from the surreal. He was drawn to ghost stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost story writer as Salvador Dalí was a typical designer of p...

The good folks at Electric Literature invited me to converse with Adrian Van Young, perhaps not knowing that Adrian and I had recently discovered we are in many ways lost brothers, and so we could go on and on and on... And we did. We talked about  Texas Chainsaw Massacre , The Sublime, writing advice, writers we like, Michael Haneke, neoliberalism,  The Witch , and all sorts of other things. It was a lot of fun and we could have gone on at twice the length, but eventually we had to return to our lives. Many thanks to Electric Lit  for being so welcoming.