The stories in this collection are instinctively written, more so than is normal for me. I find the starting point, get inside the story, and let the subconscious do the work of finding out where it goes. But looking back, yes, there is something very gothic about lighthouses: isolated towers in remote, storm-tossed and dramatic landscapes. I had wanted for a long time to set a story in a lighthouse. And I was very interested in the Selkie myth, which also calls for a watery setting. So it began with the land/seascape. The lighthouse and the rocks and the water allowed the woman, and then the story to emerge. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Kathy Page on Her New Collection and “Tourists Right At the Burnt-Out End of Human History”)

Though I do work with a set of ground rules, consciously using or mixing genres, I suspect that all of my stories are hyperbolic, including the more realistic ones, particularly when it comes to linguistic excess (when I was a child, my father blamed a pathology he called my “hyperbolic condition”). To me, genre is like any other trope that you can use as a vehicle to patch together a theme, make a plot move, or explore a character. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Julia Elliott on “Wilds” and “A Kind of Delirious Linguistic Excess”)

(via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Vol.1 Brooklyn’s November 2014 Books Preview)

It’s been a very fluid piece, and for the first years we worked on it, Ted and I explored a number of different directions. The piece continued to evolve as the other members of the creative team came on board in 2013–director Daniel Fish and video-designer Jim Findlay. And even very recently we’ve added movements and continued to work and rewrite. To take one example of how The Source evolved, we experimented at first with a mixture of pieces collaged from primary source texts and others with original lyrics. For instance, I wrote a song that imagined Manning’s background and childhood. But ultimately we realized that this was the wrong direction (it required to much invention and editorializing), and so, for the Chelsea Manning numbers, we restricted ourselves to her own words from the remarkable and extensive online chats that led to her arrest, which were subsequently published by Kevin Poulsen at Wired. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Discussing “The Source” With Ted Hearne and Mark Doten)

Grace unscrews the white lid and pulls out the dripping tiplet and applies the polish to one nail after another, then holds the drying almond surfaces up to the light. Fleck and aura of colour, against the ceiling, the slow chop of the ceiling fan. Tonight’s the night, though it’s not tonight yet. There’s music on shuffle: a mix called MISANDRY PINK GLITTER. She doesn’t know what misandry means, but it sounds tough and cool, and Grace very much wants to be tough and cool. It’s hot in this island city. Sticky-hot. She’s going out to mass first with her grandmother, because it’s a fast day, the wake of the feast day, and there will be an ash cross on her forehead which she won’t wipe off when she goes to her friend Marites’s house. Her fringe covers the cross anyway and if she rubbed it out, her grandmother would get so sick-sad. She’s been that way too much lately. It can’t hurt. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Sunday Stories: “Pink Glitter”)

Worlds do end, and that fascinates. Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven opens with the end of an era–the end of two eras, really, one personal and one global. Arthur Leander, a noted actor playing King Lear on a Toronto stage, collapses and dies of a heart attack in the book’s opening pages. Soon after that, the paramedic who attempted to revive him learns of a strain of flu that’s quickly exceeded the pandemic level, and will soon end society as we know it. The bulk of the novel is set years later, and is (in part) about how society endeavors to preserve its best parts and builds on the structures left behind. There’s an apocalypse in John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van, too, but it’s a fictional one, the setting of a game called Trace Italian played through the mail that the protagonist created while recuperating from a horrific accident. Sean Phillips, the novel’s narrator, lives in relative isolation, his face disfigured from the aforementioned accident, his primary relationships with the correspondents who play the game he created, journeying through the perilous geography of a devastated United States a century in the future. And while the landscape that Phillips has envisioned exists only the intricately-constructed world of the game, it transpires that this is a world that many find compelling, some to the point of obsession. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Fractured Chronology and the End of the World)

Our preview of notable October 2014 books is now up.

Tiff is very rational, including about her feelings. Stephen, her husband, is more like most people. Work hard, play hard. Tame by day, wild by night. Tiff is wild all the time. Possibly she’s a by-product of my wanting to write a sophisticated story. I needed a sophisticated person to tell it, and rational self-knowledge – not saving emotions for when you’re drunk – is a key ingredient. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Henry Adams, Expatriate Academics, and “A Dubstep Novel With a Bird”: An Interview With Nell Zink)

I feel conservative as a writer. I try to create things that I would enjoy as a reader, and I count on the fact that I am not a unique person, that there are many people out there quite like me. So if I craft something that suits my particular tastes, and I’m honest with myself about that, then some other schmuck with similar interests might also enjoy it. It’s one of the perks of being a humdrum person. And so that doesn’t feel like an experiment, but a kind of conservatism. Another way to say what I mean is that I don’t believe experimental fiction exists. Or: what is it. What is being tested. Who is the control group. Where does the data go. What technologies will be borne out of the results. It’s an absurd metaphor. Another way of saying what I mean is that all work is experimental. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | The Unfathomable and the Traditional: An Interview with Dolan Morgan)

I’m from New York and now I live in Chicago. To Chris, that’s insane. He’s a Vermont person. Has been forever. Maple syrup courses through his veins. He swims and sails in the summer, and in the winter he skis and snowboards down the Green Mountains, although winter sports, he warns me, are not as elegant as summer ones. Elegant is one of Chris’ favorite words. And he uses the verb to navigate effortlessly, not in its corporate sense of navigating the pitfalls in a project plan, but actual navigation on fresh water. I know Chris is excited to get back home, since Vermont’s sunny days are limited. All it’s done this summer in Vermont is rain. It’s caused some serious issues with Burlington’s antiquated drainage system. I read all about it in the local papers. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | What’s a Travel Essay?)

When I see the term “new filmmaking” in here, I’m reminded of the “new flesh” in the film Videodrome. Was that a conscious allusion? Wow, I saw Videodrome so long ago, when it first came out, and haven’t seen it since. It certainly wasn’t a conscious allusion but the “new flesh” must still be in my subconscious somewhere. And Cronenberg is also Canadian. I actually think there must be a few interesting parallels between Videodrome and Polyamorous Love Song, but I would really have to see the film again to comment further. Sometimes I feel like my work is such a strong reaction against Canadian literature, searching for something more international, less conventional, more unexpected or adventurous. But perhaps this desire blocks me from realizing the many ways in which my work is strangely Canadian. I find it hard to remember all the Canadian artists I like (Glenn Gould, Destroyer, Guy Maddin, the little known writer Juan Butler, I’m sure there must be so many more) and see how my work could be seen as well within this tradition of Canadian eccentricity. Do they like Canadians in New York? (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | “A Terrible, Even Paralyzing Goal”: Talking Narratives With Jacob Wren)

(via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Almost Live at Mellow Pages: Dan Magers)