The Mumpsimus

In recent publicity events for The Last Vanishing Man , I have struggled with the question of influence. It keeps coming up because people seem to perceive the stories in the book as having different structures and styles from what they are used to — not bad, just different. "Where did this come from?" is a natural question following any such response. My answers have all be unsatisfying to me. Not inaccurate, because I always try to speak truthfully, but there is something deeply unsatisfying in saying, for instance, that "After the End of the End of the World" came into focus for me as I was reading the stories of Clarice Lispector and Gerald Murnane . This answer is unsatisfying because it provides hardly any useful information. If you like my story, there's no guarantee you'll like Lispector's or Murnane's stories (or vice versa); nor is it likely that if you read those writers that you will write anything like my story (because you're not ...

October 1990, New York City, photo by Tracey Litt This is the concluding installment of my conversation with Richard Scott Larson about fiction, nonfiction, autofiction, queerness, memory, community... Part 1 is available here , Part 2 here . Though this is the last installment, we deliberately kept away from any sort of concluding summary or anything like that — indeed, I'm not sure Richard meant his PS to be the final words here, it might have just been meant for me, but I thought it was absolutely the perfect spot to bring all this to a close.    David Wojnarowicz 15 Dec Dear R— Reading through your most recent letter helped me identify what’s been lurking in my subconscious without my awareness, a question I hadn’t thought to ask — why do I (and you?) hunger for explicitly, determinedly queer writing now ? I thought about this while reading a short piece by Sam Moore at Frieze about Daniel Levy’s Met Gala appropriation of David Wojnarowicz. I like Levy’s public persona, ...

This is part two of a three-part epistolary conversation in which Richard Scott Larson and I toss around a bunch of ideas and speculations about queerness, fiction, nonfiction, and autofiction. (Part 1 is here . Part 3 is here .) 24 Oct Dear R— It’s been a busy, hectic time at work, and in my occasional moments of freedom and lucidity over the last week I have jotted down notes toward a new letter to you. These fragments and shards for now are what will need to stand in here for something resembling thought. I will try to make my next letter coherent, but I can make no promises, as I’m not sure my coherence or incoherence is entirely under my control... * Andrew Chan writes of Louise Glück’s new collection of poetry: “Reading Louise Glück through the years has often felt like being friends with someone incapable of small talk.” This is indeed true of Glück (whose work I love) and also the opposite of what I cherish in, especially, the New Narrative writers, who sometimes (at their be...

Claude Cahun   For some time now, my friend Richard Scott Larson and I have been chatting about fiction, nonfiction, and queerness. At some point this fall, I proposed that we should maybe try exploring in a slightly more formal and public way. Thus, in October we began sending letters back and forth. Our letters are an exploration, so they are full of digressions, speculations, citations — rough drafts of essays, in some ways. Life was busy for both of us during this time, and we had a tendency to go long in what we wrote, so the whole conversation took a few months. That's a virtue of this experiment, I think, because we approached the material in different moods, under different sorts of duress, and the us of October is not quite the us of January. We are publishing the whole conversation here in three parts over the course of this week. This is the first part. (Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here .)   6 Oct Dear R— You and I have been talking informally for some time, here an...