“From the small bones of the middle ear can be fashioned a key.”
This summer has seen the release of the debut collection of strange fiction from one Timothy J. Jarvis, an enigmatic individual with a passing resemblance (but merely a passing) to yours truly.
It’s a collection of linked tales, that could all be loosely described as ghost stories, though they are haunted, not by ghosts, but by an obscure volume of French decadent poetry, a seventeenth-century murder ballad, a bone antenna, and by places where “the membrane is thin”.
Treatises on Dust is available from Swan River Press – the link to order is here.
And you can hear a few of the short tales from the collection here.
In early 2011, my friend Fiona G. Ment and I came across a mouldering and crumpled document in the apartment of the cult weird fiction writer Simon Peterkin, who’d disappeared under bizarre circumstances in late 2010. This document, a typescript running to over 200 pages, was entitled on the first, The Wanderer: A True Narrative.
Reading the tale it recounted, thinking it at first perhaps an abandoned novel of Peterkin’s, then wondering if it wasn’t something more eldritch, I felt it should see the light of day, though more as a curiosity than anything else. I didn’t think it would last. Samuel Johnson may have misjudged Tristram Shandy, but in general, ‘Nothing odd will do long,’ is a sound principle. And The Wanderer is odd indeed.
I’m fairly ambivalent about genre designations. Part of me is suspicious, both of the taxonomical impulse that lies behind their creation and of their use as marketing labels. I think the best writing will always be hybrid, difficult to categorize, and display an irreverence towards established tropes. But on the other hand, in my main job as an academic and university lecturer, I think genre is an important tool for understanding and teaching how literature works, and why it takes the forms it does. I’ve also always liked those scenes in contemporary music that define their own, abstruse, sometimes ridiculous genres as a way of expressing their difference from other forms, and as a kind of game. Further, I reckon that thinking in terms of genre can help when attempting to transgress certain ways of writing. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently interviewed Marian Womack for the Calque Press revised edition of her incredibly powerful collection, Lost Objects. I loved this set of sf tales, which incisively interrogates the slow catastrophe we’re living though in hauntingly beautiful prose, when it first came out (and reviewed it for the LA Review of Books at the time) so it was a real honour to get to ask Marian some questions about her vision and craft. This new edition of Lost Objects also features an introduction by Priya Sharma and is available to order here.
Q. The more pressing climate change has become, the more fiction has concerned itself with ecological collapse, and the last few years has seen an explosion of novels and story collections which explore environmental crises. Much of this is aftermath fiction. The trope of ‘plucky’ survivors on some kind of pilgrimage through a desolated world, driven by urges and whims opaque even to them, has now become almost rote. It seems to me that the stories in Lost Objects take a very different approach, climatic change depicted not as dramatic upheaval, but slow creep. In ‘Kingfisher’ there is even a question mark hanging over what precisely is being experienced. And even in the post-crisis tales, like ‘The Ravisher, The Thief’, the worlds feel less blasted, more convincing (maybe even more hopeful, though absolutely not glibly so). How did you go about developing this unique way of writing imaginatively about loss and decay?
A. Part of the problem with climate change is that it’s difficult for us to even acknowledge it: this is a clear ‘slow-creep’ wicked problem. As a writer I want to address this distantiation that we experience. I personally am a writer of liminality, rather than certainties. Perhaps this is connected with being a bit of an outsider: I look at English society from the margins, never fully included, so I myself am used to inhabiting these liminal spaces. Understandably, this has seeped into my writing, grounding it firmly in the ‘not-quite-there’. My main interest is in exploring these liminal moments, these grey areas, unsure spaces where boundaries blur and nothing is too clean-cut. Most of my fiction deals with these places, one way or another.
Q. One other feature of much contemporary climate fiction is that it is generally tied to human characters and an anthropocentric perspective. Your stories seem to approach change on a more universal scale and distribute consciousness to the non-human—animal and even insentient (the curious malevolence of the alien world in ‘Frozen Planet’). Was this a conscious choice? What lay behind it? How was it done?
A. All writing is political, right? All art is political. I certainly think that human beings + capitalism are to blame for this mess. I know this may sound a simplistic answer, but we, majorly, are the agents of chaos. I like giving non-human creatures agency in my stories, whether is a garden or a farm that reconquers space, a deer that throws a woman out of her own house, even a massive digital library in my new story ‘Player/Creator/Emissary’—an idea that I anticipated in my novel The Swimmers—all of them have something in common: they are fighting us, quite clearly. I am reframing the human as the main villain here. Perhaps I am also manifesting the kind of world that I would like to pass through? I think humanity’s time has passed, and we are not even aware of this.
Q. A simple question—why birds? Birds are key to so many of the tales—and in ‘Kingfisher’ the eponymous bird becomes totem and then catalyst—the protagonist’s husband dissolves into downy feathers of many hues, and she becomes miraculously pregnant. There is also a strand in that story about writers’ relationships to birds, Milton’s in the epigraph, and both O’Connor’s peacocks and Woolf’s Greek-talking birds are alluded to. What is your own relationship to birds?
A. Birds are beautiful, they are liminal creatures: birds move between realms. There is a song by Lisa O’Neill that I am obsessed with: ‘Birdy from another realm’, where she explains how in the presence of birds we are in the presence of something entirely otherworldly. Then there is their connection with something that truly fascinates me as much as it terrifies me: the idea of ‘deep time’. A bird is our closest connection, and in fact a direct one, with the dinosaurs. How incredible is that? I am obsessed with things that connect us with deep time. My partner gave me a Burmese amber ring recently: it is meant to be about 86 million years old. I cannot even start to imagine the concept of having something that existed then on top of my finger. We are so truly insubstantial. Throughout our lives, we become trapped, at times in cages of our own making. And it’s so hard to understand this while it’s happening. Birds encompass all of this at once: the idea of freedom, but of freedom to escape our world by moving between worlds, between different epochs even, the now and the then… And birds will be here long after we have gone. They are my metaphor for everything that we are not.
Q. Linguistic play and transmutation is at the heart of many of these stories. The protagonists of ‘Kingfisher, ‘A place for wild beasts, and ‘The Ravisher, The Thief’ are translators and a buried etymology is key to understanding the latter tale. How has your own work as a translator and your ability to move fluidly between languages fed into your writing?
A. Have you watched Only Lovers Left Alive? It’s one of my favourite movies. There is a scene when Tilda Swinton is packing to go and visit her lover, played by Tom Hiddleston, and she is not packing clothes, but books, in every language imaginable… Every time I see that scene, I completely relate: if I was immortal, and had all the time in the world at my disposal—Swinton is playing a vampire—I would definitely do two things: learn languages and learn to play instruments. I love the idea of reading what I want, of watching the movies I want, of travelling anywhere and being able to speak with anyone I meet.
I am aware that writing in a ‘chosen’ language is a privilege; but bilingualism, and even multi-linguality, must be celebrated: they allow you to understand somebody else in their own terms, which is outstanding. I am fascinated by this idea of understanding one another, of translation and language as a means of building bridges. Again, this is a political action, even if it sprouts from the act of writing, you are creating a different version of something, with the intention of expanding its reach. Translation can also be ideologically motivated, so as a tool we need to use it with care, be respectful, be aware of what we are doing. I hope that these small ideological actions are what are left in my writing. I write in order to understand the world, I also write in order to explain it, and to offer others the chance to reflect upon it. The possibility of doing so in more than one language, if you can, needs to be taken.
There’s also a more personal reason here: as much as a bridge, moving between languages can be used as a shield: I feel freer to experiment writing in English, to try things out, and to explore possibilities, in a way that writing in Spanish would not allow me to. Spanish for me is the language of growing up with Catholicism being pushed down your throat, or female oppression, in the household, but also outside of domestic spaces, openly, violently.
Q. Lastly, can you summarise your personal aesthetic as a writer?
A. When I published one of my first stories written in English, ‘Orange Dogs’, in Weird Fiction Review, the magazine had the kindness to interview me. I was asked to describe my personal aesthetic then. I hadn’t given this much thought, but three words came to mind at once, and they’ve guided me ever since: Beauty is complicated. I think that simply sentence comprises a lot about what I think about writing, about art. There is beauty in desolation, as much as there is despair in perfection. Everything needs darkness and light to become real. Our world is extremely polarised, and, as I explained above, I understand better the spaces in-between those dichotomies. I am a explorer of the liminal, and my writing wants to become a door to that. I hope some of it manages it.
Here are a selection of the reviews that have appeared online for The Wanderer. I’m extremely grateful to everyone who’s written something about it for their insightful comments and critiques.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been working on putting together the fourth in Swan River Press’s series of contemporary supernatural and strange tale anthologies, Uncertainties (you can find more details and order the volume here). It’s the first time I’ve edited a fiction anthology and it’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in writing. It’s been great seeing the thing take shape—as it started to come together, it began to take on a life of its own. Brian Showers at Swan River was incredibly helpful throughout the process, sharing his wealth of experience. He pretty much gave me free rein, his only brief being that I bring in some writers who hadn’t featured in the series before, and who might be new to the press. It has long been my feeling that innovative writing can enhance the uncanniness of a supernatural tale, so I solicited contributions from writers who I thought would be playful and experimental with their tales. And as cohesion was really important to me from the outset, I also asked writers whose work I thought would share points of similarity. As the pieces came in, I saw this had worked better than I’d dared hope and that there were lots of potent synchronicities between the stories. But there was also a lot of variety, so I starting thinking about how certain juxtapositions might work and also how to ensure an overall flow. The tales are all experimental in some way, but run the gamut from melancholia, to outright horror, to comedy. I wanted to balance and shift between tones in a hopefully satisfying way. It took me back to the days of making mixtapes for friends, and thinking about flow, moving between moods, and setting up a kind of loose overall narrative from disparate parts. Read the rest of this entry »
It was an astrological conjunction that led me to the work of D.A. Northwood, that of Sagittarius and the Pleiades. I was walking up from Highbury Corner to meet with friends in the Archer pub on Seven Sisters Road, when I realized I was a little early and decided to kill some time browsing the wares at the much lamented Fantasy Centre bookshop on Holloway Road.
I’d been in there about ten minutes, running my eye along the shelves, when a title leapt out at me, ‘What Never Was’, a phrase which chimed with a refrain then going round my head, a line from a nursery rhyme I’d heard some children chanting outside my flat at dusk the previous day: ‘This is the thing that never was.’ I didn’t recognize the author’s name. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, largely because I’ve been busy with teaching. The teaching is time-consuming, and does takes me away from my own writing, but, in addition to the satisfaction of seeing students develop and explore different ideas in their work, I also get, from the discussions we have in lectures and workshops, a lot to take into my own poetics. One of the things we’ve been attempting to formulate recently is how the storyteller’s imagination works in the increasingly fragmented, fractured world we live in.
There are a handful of songs on The Wanderersoundtrack posted yesterday, songs particularly apt and potent, but, in the main, I find vocals (and strong rhythms and melodies), too distracting for reading, writing, and editing. But much of the music I was listening to in other moments, while working on the book, did have a real impact on its tenor (or would have had, were the book my fiction and not something else, something more uncanny). The following is a short playlist of songs that particularly resonated.
Here’s the tracklist:
Scott Walker : Farmer In The City
Årabrot : The Wheel Is Turning Full Circle
Tiny Vipers : Development
Ghosting Season : Time Without Question
Buzzard Lope : Fag Ash Crow
Swans : You Fucking People Make Me Sick
Marissa Nadler : Dying Breed
The Body : Ruiner
Chelsea Wolfe : Ancestors, The Ancients
Botanist : Rhyncholaelia Glauca
Birds Of Passage : Belle de Jour
Pere Ubu : 414 Seconds
Boduf Songs : Last Glimmer On a Hill At Dusk
Most of the pieces on the eldritch soundtrack to The Wanderer posted yesterday could be described as drone works. Modern drone is a musical tradition developed from the radically minimal compositions of ’60s innovators La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, Eliane Radigue, Terry Riley, Charlemagne Palestine, Tony Conrad, and others. It has taken influence from a range of sources: the clanking and metallic whines of David Lynch’s and Alan Splet’s Eraserhead sound design; later industrial and noise artists, such as Coil and Nurse With Wound; the classical minimalism of New Yorkers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and of their Eastern European sacred music counterparts, Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki; the darker, less propulsive fringes of dance; the more lumbering styles of metal; and world folk and religious music.
This music has an incantatory power. Drone, repetitive and glacially solemn, yet emotive, with ghost melodic and harmonic progressions, is a kind of alchemy; it mingles, in its crucible, the ritualistic and the affective. The effect of this is transmutative: drones fire the imagination, summon into being that which does not exist.
This playlist is a selection of eerie tracks, by some of the very best contemporary drone, ambient, & noise artists (and a few other apt pieces) – an antic soundtrack to The Wanderer.
…chewing on his own teeth like a horse with the colic the man sat in the Starbucks swigging the swill they serve in there which they falsely give the name coffee scribbling in his notebook a rambling tract a pseudo-liturgy with no conceivable end and beginning chewing on his own teeth…
The evening of Thursday 4th October saw the launch of The Wanderer, in a very apt space – a cellar beneath an occult bookshop in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury. There was topery and merriment, and I stumbled my way through some brief thanks and a short reading from the foreword of the book (on the principle that foreword is forearmed, or some such). Then we went to the pub for more quaffing. Though my thanks were brief – I wanted to avoid that thing of listing everyone I’ve ever met, which is so endemic to Oscar speeches and the like (indeed most Oscar speeches seem attempts to resurrect the medieval idea of a chain of being – attempts to connect everything from inert matter through to God, who, it would seem, according to the denizens of Hollywood, is such an avid movie goer, that, in order to ensure good acting in the films he watches, spends much of His time divinely inspiring thespians) – there really are a lot of people without whose support, encouragement, and editorial advice the book could never have been written. They know who they are, and I’m very grateful to them. And I’m really grateful to everyone who came to the launch, and made it such a fine event.
Tomorrow, Saturday 6th October, I’m participating in this event, discussing walking, and its relationship to memory and storytelling. I’ll be on a panel alongside Maud Casey, who’s most recent novel, The Man Who Walked Away, is a sublime meditation on loss and the nascency of psychiatry, told through the story of a 19th century Frenchman, Albert, who is a dromomaniac, a fugueur, compelled by his illness to walk all over Europe, but unable to retain any memories of his journeys, only able to recall the brief moments of stillness his condition allows him. I’ve, therefore, been thinking a lot about walking and fiction in general, and walking in The Wanderer in particular.
An exploration of certain aspects of walking in fiction was a large part of what I wanted to do with the book; indeed the PhD thesis out of which it was developed has the decadently pompous subtitle, ‘Peregrinations in Eldritch Regions’. I wanted to engage with a particular British tradition of walking in fantastic fiction, a tradition exemplified by the meanderings of the protagonists of Arthur Machen’s stories, a tradition in which a transformative and terrifying sublime vista could be waiting round every corner. I wanted to twist the tropes of recent psychogeographical writing, to distort in weird ways; rather than writing tramping feet that wear down through the strata of London’s cultural, historical, and esoteric palimpsest – something that, though it can be revelatory, is always Gothic, and sometimes ‘heritage’, the routes walked into the city sigils to invoke the past – I wanted to write feet that stray from the path of the ordinary and everyday, and into eldritch regions (actually, less stray, than have that path wander from beneath them)… Darkness doesn’t lie beneath or beyond, rather it’s insinuated into rational spaces and distorts them. I hoped the book’s terrors would not just cross the boundaries that delimit them, but deform and erase those boundaries. I wanted to depict real places, known to many readers, as being rife with horror, so that, drawn into the perturbing regions described by the novel, they might find it difficult to mark them off from the spaces through which they move every day.
Or this would have been what I’d have wanted to do, were The Wanderer a work of fiction by me, which, of course, it isn’t…
Looking out the window, charred cloud in a hazy sky, houses topped with scaffolding wrapped in plastic. Some incubating brood. Gnawing on saucisson sec wrapped in a gingham napkinlike a good petty bourgeois. It ain’t half muggy.
Timothy J. Jarvis