Novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer in conversation with Tony Burgess, novelist and scriptwriter <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Kathryn <\/strong>Kuitenbrouwer:<\/strong> I first met you, though you do not know this, in a Book City in Toronto. I had been told by the ReLit people to size my finger for a ring in the event I won the prize and, gleefully, I had gone down to a jeweler in Bloor West to do this. Then, I went to look at all the books of the competition, as if I could still affect the outcome. I picked up Pontypool Changes Everything<\/em>, your second novel, and I said to myself, \u201cShit, this guy is gonna win.\u201d And I was right. I am glad I am no longer a jealous person. Dear Tony, tell me about your new YA mockery, Idaho Winter<\/em>. Where does this strange hybrid originate?<\/p>\n Tony Burgess: <\/strong>Well, really it started with me wanting to write something my kids can read. It was taking the tradition, from, like, Little Dorrit on, of cruel childhoods \u2013 chewing that up with some high school drama teacher’s class performance of No Exit and a bad beta dupe of Night of the Hunter and some `rag and bone’ collections from under a kid’s bed and other hunks of stuff. The most important thing is making the writer the reader. That was the key. The writer had to have a similar memory of text as a reader. And sometimes not a very attentive reader. I did this part by putting the writing down for months and, in the longest stretch two years, and when I returned to it I would go forward and never back, never refresh, so that I had to go ahead with a text that was now a fog and try to resolve what I remembered and what I couldn’t.<\/p>\n The voice becomes a `now’ cliff. Terrific fun though. My favourite was forgetting the genders of two characters, who I had named androgynously. The amnesia, the headlessness had to happen; it couldn\u2019t be imitated. \u2028\u2028There is no unreliable narrator \u2013 agents of conventional objectivity are reduced to moles in a Wacamole game \u2013 the real maker is the unreliable reader.\u2028\u2028The tone, at least the tone that sets things in motion, is Reader’s Digest\/Boy’s Own Adventure realism \u2013 that is, the type of realism that presumes itself to be everystory’s natural guarantor…never challenged, always good and careful with diction.<\/strong><\/p>\n K.K.:\u00a0 <\/strong>I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve heard the reliability of the reader challenged but I like the thought \u2013 and it\u2019s true. We are all fallible readers, filled with bias, perception, and memory fugues. Idaho Winter repositions the writer too, into a place of not so much unreliability (though in the strictest sense this too) but more a place of ignorance, and also incredulity. Your author laments at one point that he has flatly formed one character, who now is so limited, he\u2019s almost useless \u2013 the fate of secondary and tertiary characters were they to come to life. This shamed me as a writer \u2013 no, it horrified me.<\/p>\n I liked the play of the writer who has created something out of the sludge of memory \u2013 for that is what we all do \u2013 and then had to actually contend with it. Do you think writing is so much grappling with memory and influences?<\/p>\n Also, have your children read the book yet?<\/p>\n T.B.: <\/strong>Griffin has read some, but my kids have been conditioned to believe that Daddy’s writing is bad for people. They’re afraid of it. It may take some time.<\/strong><\/p>\n I’m not sure how to answer your memory and influence question. Memory and influence are probably media. Maybe it’s the word `grappling’ I can’t quite meet. What I like to do, and pretty graphically in Idaho, is manufacture `now’ and maybe `grappling’ presumes `now’ is normalized, unseen.<\/p>\n Oh, I think I know what I’m talking about now \u2013 what interests me more is what happens when memory and influence are not <\/em>being grappled with. When they become automatic. When writing becomes a record<\/em> of that automatism.<\/p>\n K.K.: <\/strong>Why does this interest you?<\/strong><\/p>\n T.B.: <\/strong>Well, for a start, I’m interested in unintended marks and artifacts \u2013 noise and casings and things that can’t be accounted for, or made part of `voice’. The headlessness I was talking about before. The part that isn’t significant that persists. It can’t be unpacked or recognized or greeted, it is unwelcoming, has no face, its back is turned and so, without conversation to make it familiar we need a method of recording. And we have to accept that the recording will not resemble the face, or the front, or the meaning, it will only give a braille or a mold or a code for how we can see it on this side. This side is blind and in complete darkness. What changed Alix to Alex, female to male, wasn’t significant, it happened automatically when matter appeared on their names. Then we try to make the massive difference between the \u2018i\u2019 and the \u2018e\u2019 seem significant. I find this kind of peril fascinating. Not that you are in danger of being destroyed but that you are in danger of never having been here.<\/p>\n K.K.:<\/strong> It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, in a sense. What the subconscious can\u2019t unload. I\u2019m wondering how this relates to Ravenna Gets, your, by the way, extraordinary, gorgeously-written, horror-defined account of a town\u2019s inhabitants being systematically murdered by the inhabitants of another town. It\u2019s hard going, I must say, but in light of your earlier comments, I start to see it almost as the mind\u2019s detritus of violent video games in its inevitability and its repetitive trauma. What is witnessed against the emotional flatness of the experience.\u00a0 I hope I am not reading in.<\/p>\n T.B.:<\/strong> Reading in is the game.\u00a0 I wasn’t thinking specifically about video games (although, when you let yourself float a bit in writing you can’t always identify the forces attracting you) but certainly inevitability and repetition where the sturdy makers of, at least, the first half. Structurally, I was thinking about a long corridor of glass panels, the first few quite vivid with pinpricks in them, these pinpricks accumulate along the corridor, breeding and creating capacities and transforming echoes, that culminate with the Entertainment district, after that the world kind of returns. Something like that anyway.<\/p>\n Also experimenting with the idea of thoughtless lazy writing triumphing over precision, just to see if that would be a new kind of ghastly. I think it is. Kind of like a light clear picture being swallowed whole by a coarse noise. Variations on automatism and Acephaly.<\/p>\n K.K.<\/strong>:<\/strong> Can the writer be entirely headless though? I\u2019m wondering if you are suggesting that the reader is, in a way, parasitical. I suppose, the reader requires the guidance of the writer, and if this can be seen as a type of Acephaly, okay. Not to argue, but the writing in Ravenna is too evolved, and precise, for me to entirely buy its automatic delivery. Just like the violence, the writing, and its intention, feel premeditated. There is a head. Even if over and over, this head is removed.<\/p>\n T.B.: <\/strong>I\u2019m probably just referring generally to that way of writing as if it is evolved, in order to hide my head, or at least to suggest that not knowing what I\u2019m doing is a strategy.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll change my language: Ravenna is the record of a nightmare that terrain is having. It\u2019s something I have tried before and that is to spread (atomize? granulate?) a mind in the ground. This mind has a direct influence on people and things within it and those people and things are different than<\/em> it and people\/things must cope with this Lovecraftian event. It is mysterious and shifting and overwhelming and not mindful of how things matter.<\/p>\n Stylistically it\u2019s a bit of an auction and some very small items have quite specific ways of being there.<\/p>\n K.K.:<\/strong> The more of your work I read the more I come up against language, or more precisely words as these almost cube-like placeholders, so that, for instance in Pontypool Changes Everything, they become insertions that can shift meaning within a sentence to something unrecognizable or nearly unrecognisable. You are doing a kind of violence to logic — in all the books you are doing this. And this has an effect on the brain of the reader, more than the plot, or perhaps coincidental to the plot, which, to me, at least, is much scarier than the content of book, were it simply synopsized.<\/p>\n I\u2019m curious about your relationship to words.<\/p>\n Also, if not knowing what you are doing is a strategy, or a strategy insofar as knowing only something like you writing a story in which you \u201cspread (atomize? granulate?) a mind in the ground\u201d and then unfolding the story from there, how does that feel? It\u2019s antithetical to outlining, controlling etc. and it seems to me you get a pretty uncanny dreamscape going in all your writings. Do you suppose a writer goes deeper, to more uncomfortable places without strategy, or without a tightly defined destination?<\/p>\n T.B.:<\/strong> How does it feel? That\u2019s interesting. It often begins by listening, sensing and discovering a mania that is already in the ground. The feeling is that I am mad for thinking I am doing this so that when the mania reveals itself I have a euphoria (a mad\/not mad blend). So – listening (me) sensing (less me) mania (not me ) feeling mad (looking back at me)\u00a0 euphoria (me as the greater feeling). There has to be a harmony, a tuning of these elements – that is, they have to stay distinct but combined, so that different notes, tones will play different conflicts. I apologise for the music analogy, but it fits this a bit. Sound and noise. That way every word has access to a specific ambivalence – and as words accumulate, each with its specific ambivalence,\u00a0 you listen for how they want to occupy, infect, destroy, (pick an action) the conventional content (the story words are supposed to support) and you wait, listening again, because you have a spiritual copy of the ground now, so you can repeat the process with this new version. This can be done infinitely and in fact, what you are listening for now is to isolate a part (it should be a brief, obscure part, a behaviour even, something infra mince<\/em>) that does something transformative to you (not to the story but to you after the story and not because you `see the world differently\u2019 but because you can\u2019t see the world `properly\u2019 at all)<\/p>\n I\u2019m aware that it\u2019s grandiose and deluded (what a writer denies or avoids) but it takes grandiosity and delusion – wretched grandiosity and catastrophic delusion – to write. A lot of these ideas originate for me in early modern theories of rhetoric, occulted neo-Socratics, like John Dee, Giordano Bruno, Petrus Ramus and best realized in someone like Christopher Marlowe.<\/p>\n K.K.:<\/strong> Have you read The Spell of The Sensuous<\/em> by David Abram? He writes in this book about the emergence of words from nature, and many times while reading your work his words came to mind. I am reading his new book Becoming Animal<\/em>, and in it he writes:<\/p>\n \u201cWe identify our shadow, in other words, with that visible shape we see projected on the pavement or the whitewashed wall. Since what we glimpse there is a being without depth, we naturally assume that shadows themselves are basically flat\u2014and if we are asked, by a curious child, about the life of shadows we are apt to reply that their lives exist only in two dimensions.\u201d<\/p>\n He goes on to write about a bumblebee crossing the space of his shadow: \u201cIts visible trajectory\u2014gleaming, then muted, then gleaming again\u2014shows that my actual shadow is an enigma more substantial than that flat shape on the ground. That silhouette is only my shadow\u2019s shape on the paved ground\u2026 the actual shadow does not reside primarily on the ground. The dusky shape on the asphalt touches me only at my feet, and hence seems largely separate from me, even independent of me\u2014a kind of doppelganger.\u201d<\/p>\n I think you know why I am quoting this. There is an early moment in Pontypool where: \u201cThe horses, five of them, roll in a line through the gate and are swallowed by the south shadow of the barn before they disappear into an open barn.\u201d<\/p>\n And in the opening of Cashtown: \u201cWhen I scrape tar from the side of my sneaker onto the edge of the island, it passes through the world as both the idea that preceded me doing it but also as a shadow formed by my shoe leaning edgewise, and it forms a commanding ripple outward through all things.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not the stuff of a butterfly flicking its wings initiating some gesture on the other side of the world. It is a communion with the inanimate. A harsh one in your hands, but still, it\u2019s a removal of threshold between things we normally imagine to have clear boundaries separating them.<\/p>\n T.B.:<\/strong> Yes, communion with the inanimate is right. An abyss looking back. And maybe a series of paralyzing exchanges of `essence\u2019 — the inanimate proves itself to be me and I, the other. It\u2019s a cut that joins the shadow to me, or something else, something playful. The object and shadow is really such a philosophically crowded idea as to be almost constantly talking and arguing with itself. You can build a nice palimpsest there.<\/p>\n In Cashtown, Bob is, as he often does, grafting incomplete ideas to each other into the shape of something he feels is true in that moment. Like using parts of a turtle and a duck to cheat the silhouette of a tiger.<\/p>\n The Pontypool quote I had to go back and look at and can\u2019t recall what was specifically being done there. There\u2019s lots of this business throughout the book where positive and negative spaces take on different characteristics, oscillate. Shadows are holes, objects consume light, round is flat, and on. Sometimes eccentric enough to be gibberish.<\/p>\n The David Abram quote is lovely and suggestive and meditative. A kind of third eye opens. Any third eye I might happen to open, I\u2019m afraid, you\u2019re right, gets rather brutally punctured.<\/p>\n K.K.:<\/strong> And then there is the simple issue of narration, the self telling the self what is happening, which many of your characters do. I know this self-narration. I\u2019m familiar with it, for myself, as a sometimes real, sometimes affected madness, since clearly there is no external story driving my life\/actions. Your characters are extreme with it especially in the face of their own criminality\/depravity: they are almost like children in some of the outrageous explanations they create for themselves when the rational answer is out of their depth, or when they want to reject the rational answer.<\/p>\n The thoughts are breathing just as anything else, all formed through the matrix of the word. I\u2019m thinking what you are doing has a particular kind of authority. (Jesus, you are making me lose words\u2026) The work lacks the pretense of the sort of contrivance most of us aim for (what we like to call verisimilitude), since every aspect of it \u2013 the characters, the \u2018more than human world\u2019 (ie. everything), the language used to deliver all this \u2013 is energetically living. The meaning resides there. Does this make sense? Am I getting anywhere here?<\/p>\n T.B.:<\/strong> There are two words, (handily alliterative) that I am always always mindful of\u2026the first is phatic. The secret ambition of the book is to say hello to the reader. It tries many different configurations (frequencies? receptions?) in this project and it always fails because the goal is never within reach. The goal is that the reader hears the word hello<\/em> and sees the writer who sees the reader nod or say hello back. There are no literary conventions that allow for this ambition, so – and here is the second word – the writer must go feral.<\/p>\n K.K.:<\/strong> The writer must go feral because the uncharted intention requires wildness? Meanwhile the central purpose is social? This accounts for the under-my-skin effect your work has. This primitive resonance \u2013 it isn\u2019t like one reads Burgess and thinks, \u201cOh, the fellow can write.\u201d It\u2019s more, \u201cHoly Bejesus. This is messing with my neurology.\u201d You are in the head of the reader in a way I do not think I\u2019ve seen before or not as consistently. It\u2019s uncanny.<\/p>\n Earlier you write of \u2018recording\u2019 and this is the locus of my last question. What does that recording feel like to you, when that space is viscerally horrible, violent, and filled with pain as it often can be in your work. I guess I am asking something about the body as a vehicle within this idea of recording, because of the extent of your dare.<\/p>\n T.B.:<\/strong>\u00a0 As always I have to answer your questions by sliding some of the terms a bit. By recording I mean either taking an impression, or exploring how one thing registers on another\u2026other things. (Have I mentioned R.Krauss on this\u2026on mechanical reproduction? Her essays on this are great)\u2026so the impossible is to try a make the imagined something also the recorded something.\u00a0 And the body will be a bit of a developing room. The goal is not to invent a new imagined but to change the imaginer.<\/p>\n The pain, horror is, I suppose, because the project really is to destroy the familiar, to unheal to the point of oblivion. And to do this with great joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Horror! The Horror! Novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer in conversation with Tony Burgess, novelist and scriptwriter Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: I first met you, though you do not know this, in a Book City in Toronto. I had been told by the ReLit people to size my finger for a ring in the event I won the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-145","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":654,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions\/654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}