Gina Nutt: We accompany the narrator of “The Chair” on a visit to a store that sells any and every kind of chair a person may imagine. I’m curious, what draws you to explore absurdism in your fiction?
WRB: Absurdity occurs quite naturally in my work. I’m an absurd person with a strong stomach for farce and oddness. But absurdity also comes from my relationship to writing and its priorities. I feel more compelled by the surprises of language than the logic of story, so my fiction can bring about an incidental strangeness. My susceptibility to sonic pleasures leads to odd proximities, repetitions, resonances, and calls forth a world like our own but differently tuned. I just read an incredible book, Goat Song, written by Konstantin Vaginov (and dexterously, lovingly translated by Ainsley Morse), in which a character known as “the unknown poet” articulates Vaginov’s principles of juxtaposition and disjunction:

Poetry is a particular kind of activity…It's a terrifying spectacle and also dangerous, when you take a few words, juxtapose them in an unusual way and sit down to observe them, first one night, then another, then a third, all the while thinking about these words you've juxtaposed. And you start to notice: a hand of sense reaches out from under one word and shakes the hand that has appeared out from under another word, and a third offer its hand in turn, and you are consumed entirely by the totally new world opening up beyond these words.

I can’t stop thinking about this passage. The written world is of and beyond this one. It’s lovely and strange to read a novel from 100 years ago and feel a writer’s hand extending towards your own.  While it makes me suspect that my writing is not as bold and daring as I might’ve hoped—a very dead Russian man did it better—and that generations of writers are doomed to repeat each other, I also know that to write any other way would be untrue to myself. The adventure and risk of writing towards a tune of language, to create a new rendezvous of words, is my priority. I am what I am, a literate sailor once said.

Sonic attention is too often considered the purview of the poets, though I sometimes think wishfully of my work as poetry wrapped in the robes of prose. Many of fiction writing’s enticements—the urge to shape and explore character, the pleasure of engineering plot, the sense of having a story worth telling—are not very attractive to me. At times I’ve tried to write with those priorities in mind; it has gone very poorly, for myself and a few unlucky readers. My stories do follow plot and contain characters—I’m interested in people and what happens to them—but I believe that language deployed with both care and recklessness creates its own events and consequences.

I think there’s a misconception that the writer always comes out of the reader, and while I identify as a reader—reading is my first love—I didn’t become a writer because I love reading. I came to writing because I love words. I have never identified as a storyteller, nor as a purveyor of reason and logic, and once I was able to shed a yoke fastened to many writers—write what you like to read—I found my footing. Why not write what you can’t help but write?

GN: I also admire the dream logic here, from the store to its wares to the chair man selling the furniture. How do you balance the grounded quality here with its dreamier pull?
WRB: I was with a friend the other day and she said, “Do you consent to hear about my dream?” We’re all aware of how tiresome the synopses of dreams can be. It’s like someone summarizing the plot of a movie you’ll never be able to watch. But I liked my friend’s dream: she’s on a train and the conductor comes on the PA to inform them that the next stop will be the center of the earth. I was reminded of being on a Q train a few weeks ago, in the real world, and some kids had somehow commandeered the PA. “Next stop is fuck you,” they said.  

Just because something has dream logic doesn’t mean it’s boundaryless or lacking rules. In fact, sometimes the logic of dream is all rules and strictures, to a maddening degree. Dreams are important to me, and dream logic is apt—though with stories like this one I’m eager to remove any explicit signifier. Not because it’s fatal to a story. Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is one of the greatest short stories ever, and dream is in the dang title. He admits it! Maybe I lack Delmore’s conviction, among other things.

The logic of dream is not so different from the quick and liquid shifts in reality. You think you recognize a face on the street, and then the face becomes another face. You’re startled by a crash—a car accident, a building collapsing—and it’s only a trashcan lid hitting the pavement, or a hunk of rubble being tossed into a dumpster. Or the Baader Meinhoff phenomenon: our desperate thirst for pattern and sign turning the real world into a projection, and reflection, of our own psychology. We misperceive all the time, and then only partially recover from our errors.}

I think that dreamier pull also comes from the studied illogic of lyricism. I’m not the best exponent of Lish’s concept of consecution—for that, I’d recommend Christine Schutt’s brilliant interview with David Naimon on Between the Covers, or Garielle Lutz’s dazzling “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” quite possibly the greatest essay ever written about the pleasurable tactility of words as they’re snapped into place and the way the sounds of a sentence can whisper and call to one another. As I understand it, with the right ministrations, a sound extracted from one word can light the way to the next. String enough of these glowing words together and it’ll lead to new and surprising results.

But lately I’ve been pulled toward the music of the lone word. Chair is one such word—a word I became obsessed with and couldn’t let go, and from that fixation this story arose. Chair. Or the word water. What an incredible word, water. I don’t think of English as an inherently pretty language by any measure—it hisses and spits, it comes out the nose—but some of our words are lovely. And words, especially those denoting a tactile thing, can be orienting, little objects the reader can hold onto no matter how strangely the story ranges.

GN: You shared with me that this piece is part of a larger whole. Can you share a bit about your experience crafting shorter standalone pieces that accumulate and build toward a complete manuscript? What pleasant surprises and unique challenges are you discovering as you work on this book?
WRB: I’ve been finding a lot of creative room and license in stories of this scale and scope. I think it comes from my affection for prose poems. I adore the work of Richard Siken, a forever inspiration, and of Mark Strand, whose “Mysterious Arrival of an Unknown Letter” is one of my favorite works of art—though I fear that citing it will expose the vast, eternal debt I owe the poem, in this story and others. I also love monologues, their momentum and internal rhythm, the way they can patrol the perimeter of the known world, or spiral inward in a maddening coil. The stories in this sequence have a flavor of the surreal, a touch of the banal—a happy collision, in my view. Shopping is an ordinary act, but it can also feel dreamlike, especially to those of us who find it deeply enervating. Sometimes I walk into a shop and feel that I’ve been drugged, so heavy is the feeling of lassitude and sadness. I seek out a couch, put my head in my hands. Being so overstimulated can make me feel underwater, a great weight on my face, as I try to peel open my eyes to see the blurry world around me. And a shop selling just one type of item? One time, in Maine, my wife and I went to a broom workshop, where they made and sold brooms. It was full of people making and selling brooms. I felt their eyes upon us, as if they were wondering if we could be turned into brooms too. They lived in a broom world, and brooms were all they saw, and the head of the broommakers was broomlike, and startlingly handsome. We had to get out of there. What if you were the only customer in a store like that? What a strange and charged air, the ominous intimacy of the shopper and shopkeeper. I respect it as much as I fear it.

So now I have many stories like this, of similar mood and temperature. The challenge with a project of this mandate is one of monotony, but I think that’s a pitfall I don’t have the good sense to avoid. I play close to that edge. Variety is terribly overrated in fiction and elsewhere and leads artists to make very poor choices, like the time I tried to write a romantic tragicomedy from the perspective of a cherub. You see, I had never written a romantic tragicomedy from the perspective of a cherub, and I thought, Yes, good, now is my time. It was fun to write, and I made the cherubs speak a little Italian—a language I don’t speak, not even a little—but ultimately the story was a disaster, and not in a cute way. I was trying to do Wings of Desire, but now it’s a cherub falling in love with a mortal woman. But, you see, cherubs are babies, with little baby penises, and the story had a pedophilic quality, which is something I try to avoid, in life and art. So now I don’t force myself to write about cherubs falling in love. I don’t run into that trap. I take things slow.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
WRB: I’ve learned to consume art with faith in my creative metabolism, which means keeping heart and mind open to what I might not naturally be drawn to. A writing professor used to tell us to “feed the hopper,” and I try my best. I have an omnivorous openness to the interests of others, and I’m lucky enough to have friends who are much smarter than I am. They know what I like and what’s good for me. I wrote a play because a friend told me to. I’m reading Edward Dorn’s GUNSLINGER because a friend told me to. I’m moisturizing before bed because a friend told me to. I am not a particularly smart man, but I keep an open mind, and I think my assessment of the breadth and depth of my own idiocy is a fearsome skill. There is nothing like the bliss, candor, and courage of the fool. Part of writing is making peace with what you don’t know, what you’ll never know, and writing from and toward a place unknown. I am always trying to learn and absorb, while also striving to enforce a certain naivete, a wide-eyed stare.

As trite and cliché as it sounds, New York is also very important to me, and my experiences in the city are constantly informing and energizing my writing in small but meaningful ways. Last week I was walking through the East Village and a man was shouting I DIDN’T HAVE TO TELL MY DOG WHAT TO DO, HE DID IT ANYWAY. I felt a profound affection for this man, who was bragging about his dog’s intuition—his dog who was gone. There was no dog. He missed being understood, and he missed his friend. I think I’ve lived for just long enough, and endured just enough of this life, to know how much I love being alive, and how much I love people—the stupid shit they say, the mistakes they make, the dreams they keep. I sometimes style myself as a misanthrope—a tempting posture for any writer—and I can hate, and hate hard, and, like William Gass, I write productively from a place of loathing. But the truth is I love people, even though they can be so cruel and small and dumb. It is humiliating to love them so much, though not quite as humiliating as writing, the greatest embarrassment I’ve ever known. For better and worse, I try to keep the doors to my heart open. “A flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing,” Nancy Lemann once wrote of New Orleans, and it’s true of people and stories, of songs and films, of dogs and cats—including my sad little Kitty, an ornery diabetic born with an underbite and a murmur in her heart that sounds like the sea.

Perhaps this ode to flaws is an unsubtle plea to the reader: be gentle with my flawed little story. I never aspired to write something perfect. Just a few words that, by the serendipitous meeting of aim and accident, may contain a fleck of life, a word of truth, a sweet little tune.