Violet Spurlock + Jackie Ess
I first met Jackie Ess a few years ago while she was visiting the Bay Area. We went out for soba noodles with Brian Ng and then spent the evening at his apartment. I remember being dazzled by the speed and range of her conversation, which juggled topics ranging from Lil Wayne’s status as the GOAT to jokes about King Charles XII’s homosexuality. Also, she was literally juggling. When she offered to read us some excerpts from a novel manuscript, Brian and I were rapt with excitement –– each chapter had us giggling and shrieking in delight. We thirsted for more, and I pestered Jackie to let me read an advance copy of the book, Darryl, now out on CLASH Books.
Darryl, Jackie’s debut novel, is the story of a consenting cuckold, a man who participates in facilitating his wife’s infidelity, however begrudgingly, and tries to get off on it. He starts to fall in love with his favorite bull, discovers horrible things happening in the Eugene fetish scene, and obliviously flirts with identity politics from a comfortable distance. The novel blends humor, suspense, politics, and an incredibly unique kind of erotics into a cocktail unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. Her prose has distinctive presence, forthright clarity, and it generously invites the reader to explore and enjoy the world she is creating, warts and all. I ate the chapters like popcorn, and yet each one was immediately memorable and spoke to me with a rare level of trust and openness.
I’ve sung Darryl’s praises to anyone who will listen, even my friends who don’t really read, and so I’m very excited to present a conversation with Jackie about her writing process, Darryl’s roving sense of self, the tenuousness of his relationships, how the wealthy see the world, the veiled violence of shallow spirituality, and some hints as to what we’ll see in her next novel. This interview was conducted on Discord.
VS: I think I'd like to start by talking about your method of composition. As I understand it, the character of Darryl Cook began as a Twitter account you created – an Oregonian cuckold sharing his takes and looking to connect. This method of online roleplay feels like such a fascinating update to the traditional approach of a novelist researching their subject, and I'm quite curious how this ended up influencing your overall writing process. Could you speak to the experience of developing a character by imagining or simulating what their social media presence would be like? When you began the Twitter account, did you already have a sense that you were writing a novel? Who did Darryl interact with online, and what did you learn from his interactions?
JE: I'm a little cagey about this stuff in the sense that I don't really think I've written an "internet novel” –– there’s a tendency to make technology the star of the show, whenever it's there. But yes, I began by putting on a voice or doing a bit in a way I might compare to method acting. Then I made a Twitter account for him (whose @ was darryl2dream) and ran it for a little while, writing these sort of unhinged Twitter threads in Darryl's voice, before realizing that I had a world on my hands (it went like that: character, then world, then story), and that "this is the book." It wasn't a conscious method of composition, nor one I intend to repeat, just a case of accidentally creating an occasion, then rising to it.
I had been thinking a lot about a story I read as a kid, a retelling of Cinderella, and when the Prince finally gets the glass slipper she asks, "so what do we do now?" And the Prince says, "well, I don't know, I guess take it off and put it back on again?" And I'd been thinking about Sondheim's Into the Woods, which could totally end on the first act. There's this idea that if you had the stamina, you could look past the resolution of a story and that's where the real story starts. Darryl was the same way, he began his life as a joke or wondering if he was one, and then he sort of becomes a real boy.
I have to say that as a method, this isn't something I'm planning to continue. I actually did make another in-character Twitter account, which I ran for a lot of 2020, kind of a fun stunt. But as a method of composition, I'm not really inclined to repeat it. I've got most of a draft of another novel now, and I didn't do any of this stuff. Half of the plot came to me in a dream, and stayed mostly intact. I'm jealous of writers who can decide where it all goes, I think I have to just meet my characters and find out.
Thinking of Darryl's interactions, they weren't too interesting. That's part of why it isn't an internet novel, I mean, I didn't see Darryl's Twitter presence as anything but a means for him to have presence. In the book he doesn't use social media at all, and I think that's an improvement. He lurks a couple of forums, and gets as far as looking people up, but he's out of his element. He didn't use Twitter in a very interesting way, he wrote sort of diaristic long threads, which I also do sometimes, and they got a small amount of engagement. And of course he'd interact with me, that was sort of the basis for him having a trans woman friend, though the Oothoon of the book doesn't resemble me.
VS: Right, I don't mean to over-emphasize the social media element, I think I'm more interested in the role-play element. And of course, role-play is an element within the novel, both in the bedroom and as a fraught mode of identity exploration when Darryl cross-dresses. Darryl often remarks that cuckoldry involves ceding a sense of one's uniqueness, facing the fact that most of life is merely playing a role that could be played by someone else. And Darryl is quite uncertain as to which role he wants to play, or should be playing. In narrating himself, he constantly doubts the value of his story, but it's exactly his uncertainty and his tentative explorations that make him so compelling to me.
I'd like to ask about Darryl's erotics of self-negation. He views cuckoldry as being less about desire or sexuality than it is about confirming his weakness or inferiority, and that this relieves him of the pressure to be something he cannot be: a powerful, strong, confident man. He describes this surrender as an "ecstasy of shame that takes me out of myself, and deeper into this kind of ocean roar feeling." And yet, it is in identifying as a cuck that Darryl finds pride and self-assurance, even as he is aware that cuck is sort of a non-identity in the public sphere. I'm wondering: do you perceive Darryl's arc as a search for an identity, or more of a process of realizing that he doesn't need to have one? This question pertains to a few thoughts I had about Darryl's relationships with Bill and Oothoon, which we can maybe discuss next.
JE: So that is the tension with role-playing, Darryl is really opposed to it in some sense. His scenes are all about Truth, or so he thinks. Acting is the same way. In general, I wanted to show a guy who isn't actually less jealous, it doesn't hurt less, but somehow the experience is important to him anyway. He's very insistent that he's the only one who isn't acting. You're probably lost when you start to think that.
I definitely don't think that Darryl is searching for an identity in a recognizable way, he sees identity as maybe the thing that everyone else settles for. And he has an unsettledness, but that unsettledness isn't a longing for home. He says "I can take the waves." It's this shifting thing underneath the self that he is sort of too faithful to. That's why Clive diagnoses him, why he seems to reinvent himself, or see his lovers as gods and monsters. He imprints on everyone because he has no self, and he's found this very curious way in fetish life to burn away even the little bit of self he has. I think he has a lot of awareness of what he is, and even a kind of stability in instability. He knows himself as non-identity. He doesn't know if non-identity is survivable, but he doesn't want to fix it, and he doesn't want to blunt his awareness of it. Even when he takes drugs (in a stupid way, he probably doesn't even know what the chemicals are), he does so with this sort of psychonautical attitude. If you gave this guy a beer he'd say "set and setting..." Tim Leary said to "find the others," and I'd say Darryl is much more trying to do that than to find an identity.
He does do this cuck identity talk, in what I see as moments of unsustainable humour and pluck. Those are probably the sections where I'm having the most fun, partly because they're often formal substitutions for discussions about other identities, some of which I share…
VS: I'm glad you're the first to mention that method of indirect commentary, because I don't want to be the one to rush to the reductive interpretation. I'm fascinated by the way Darryl, as non-self, as this sort of question mark, becomes an experimental zone for you (and your reader) to think about identity from a very different perspective. Just to speak to my own reading experience, I found myself at first amused by Darryl's bungled attempts to analogize himself to various queer identities, then feeling empathetic for his uncertainty about whether he can ever fit in, then genuinely buying into his admittedly naïve insistence on simple human kindness as the way to cut through the Gordian knot of identity politics, then doing a double-take when I realized I was being taken in by the theories of a self-hating cuck, then noticing myself dismissing Darryl's perspective because of his identity. Quite the ride.
Can you tell me about your experience thinking through issues of identity from Darryl's perspective? Did you find yourself mostly expressing thoughts that you already had formed, or were you discovering new ways of thinking that seemed unique to Darryl's point of view? Perhaps we could take as a point of departure Darryl's annoyance at Oothoon thinking that he is clearly an egg that she can guide. I find this fascinating because Darryl's resistance to this narrative mirrors the novel's subversion of what initially seems like it could become a more straightforward plotline of midlife transition. And I wonder if Darryl's resistance perhaps even calls into question whether it is right to follow the temptation to use him as a proxy for rethinking certain conversations around transness, queerness, etc. rather than accepting the challenge of meeting him on his terms, taking him in without recourse to analogy. In a melancholy moment, Darryl writes: "I wonder what [Oothoon] sees in me, or whether I’m just a character to her.” Maybe I'm reaching, but it feels like he's also calling out to you as author, as well as the trans/queer reader who may be gawking or cringing at him.
JE: I'm really glad it took you through those distinct stages, and I think not in any particular order. Darryl is as scrambled on this as the rest of us are, talking sense and nonsense in turn. But I think he's closer to right than not.
I'm a little bit wary of offering too strong an interpretation of the Darryl/Oothoon connection, but I can at least say a few things. One is that when I wrote this, my assumption was that the only people who were going to read me would be people who knew some of my history (for example that I was indirectly responsible for the term "egg" and came to despise it), and knew Imogen Binnie's Nevada. Another is that while Darryl thinks that Oothoon is evangelizing transness, we never actually hear Oothoon say that. Darryl also thinks that Bill is Christ and Don Juan in one man and Clive is a vampire and Monsieur Teste and Hannibal Lecter and his best friend and Satori is a Goddess and the girl from Camarillo Brillo ("she said her stereo was four-way, and I'd just love it in her room"). I would say it seems more likely that Darryl hasn't learned to take responsibility for his own desires, and of course that's compounded by the baby bird "are you my mommy?" thing that he seems to do to with everyone.
Darryl is a guy who spills his gender feelings to trans girls, and then in the light of the morning blames us for bringing it up. As though we ever had. And blames us for making it so hard, rather than joining the fight to make it less so. It's a shoot-the-messenger approach. But more accurately it's just out of control.
To me, Darryl's most serious encounter with transness isn't with Oothoon at all, it's with the hamburger girl, in the dog chapter. I'm not trying to go JK on you here, I don't think it's obvious in the text that this girl is trans. But you recall the scene, he has this tremendous condescending vision of the girl at the hamburger stand, which you could summarize as like "your ugliness frees me from beauty, your poverty frees me from wealth, your failure frees me from success, your minority frees me from ambition" –– even Darryl can tell he shouldn't say something like that. But that's the moment that something moves in his heart, even if the realization isn't coming in time. Suddenly he has this idea of the female loser and actually it turns his ideas about gender upside down. And it's divine, everything is divine for him, even disgust. So the book has an epigraph from Walt Whitman, who has the same spirit. He lets anything transform him.
VS: I love that scene, the mixture of self-aware condescension and whole-hearted desire for kinship inherent to the 'female loser' idea feels like a perfect distillation of Darryl's general contradictions. And I was deeply provoked by Darryl's experience of the divine –– you're reminding me that I want to make sure we discuss my favorite scene in the novel, Moonbeam's guided meditation. But first, since you mentioned that long list of larger-than-life figures which frame the novel's characters, I'd like to talk more about Darryl's cartoonish exaggerations as they relate to comedy as both a genre and a way of life.
Every prospective reader should know: Darryl is tremendously funny, with laugh-out-loud moments lurking in nearly every chapter. The opening line promises, and the entire book delivers. (“You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys who fuck my wife. But sure, ok, I’m the weird one.”) And at the same time, Darryl is thinking about what it means to be a punchline. Everyone knows it –– his wife Mindy gives him a toy Oscar to award him best supporting actor in their marriage. He reflects on the repetitiveness and flatness of his role: “Coyote and roadrunner again and again, jumping off a cliff to slam my wife and accordion back. … How do you make a life out of that?” I'm wondering if you could speak to us generally about your approach to humor in writing, what you think it does to the reader to be laughing at Darryl or with him, perhaps not necessarily knowing if one can tell the difference.
JE: Comedy succeeds when I make you laugh, which I hope I do sometimes. Comedy is also sometimes a mechanism to defuse serious emotions and serious situations as they arise. I'm kind of a compulsive joker in real life, as you know, and I think that's part of my armor. Some have found it hard to get to know me, "I'm never sure when you're doing a bit." Sometimes we need to take ourselves seriously, not to overestimate the power of irony. We can miss out on a lot.
It was definitely my hope that Darryl not be a dunk on any of the characters, even overtly toxic characters like Greg or Clive. But we can laugh at them, and they laugh at themselves. How could you not? When I think about the coyote and roadrunner bit, I was thinking a little about the world of cartoons, which is like dreams, a world without consequences, everything resets and change is impossible. I think that's maybe a model for an erotic scene and the way we get stuck on it.
VS: I love that comparison, and the suggestion that there may be something rather static in the erotic scene. That also pertains to Darryl's view (shared by incels, as Clive points out) that sexual power is something you either have or don't. In terms of anxieties about wokeness, I’m really compelled by the way that your writing sticks so closely to Darryl's thought process that certain ideas fizzle out when he becomes uncomfortable thinking through them any further, or must be quickly resolved by simple answers like 'cuckolding isn't about race.'
Let's talk a bit about the formal structure of the novel. The chapters begin extremely short, and seem to generally increase in length as we move from Darryl's internal musings to his exploration of the fetish community and discovery of Brad's death. What drew you to the short chapters? How did you approach adding in the elements of a thriller in the third part of the novel? Or, I also might add – romance.
JE: I began thinking about Darryl, playing with the characters and world for a few months before deciding to try to make a novel of it. I would say that the thriller elements were part of what helped me make that decision. I started having fun with that. The book wasn't written exactly in order, but pretty close. the March Madness chapters, with Bill and Darryl, those were really the first moments where I was writing with some consciousness that this thing was a novel.
I'm not sure about chapter lengths, but I think part of the business with the micro-chapters is just that I wrote in the mornings and that was how much I could write in a day and not have it be awful. My next book has a slightly different structure, longer chapters with unlabeled subsections that are again, related to units of work or time for me. That isn't a very exciting answer, because I know there's supposed to be this magical connection between form and content. But the fact is with most of my writing I've been pretty agnostic about form.
Maybe I'd write longer paragraphs if I had a longer attention span. But then maybe no one would read them, since I think the rest of you are down here with me one way or another.
VS: That's actually sort of the answer I had been excited about, because I'm interested in the novel's relationships to work and time. The scene in which Darryl is writing down his thoughts often feels like a quick moment of free time snatched between obligations and distractions. Chapters often end with a sort of 'gotta go' moment, highlighting the boundaries of the moment of writing (and reading) in a way which I really like.
And yet, all of Darryl's time is free time, since his inheritance frees him from having to work. I'm interested in how this informs his relationship with Bill, who is unemployed but is a working man. In the fascinating chapter about Darryl's dreams, he offers this thought that fantasy life, mental freedom, and play are cucked by the demands of work. So in this sense, which closely follows a lot of the meme-y right-wing discourse, Bill is a 'wagecuck' and Darryl is a bull, financially, since he pays Bill's bills, finances Oothoon's surgery (although Mindy has her own power of the purse). Of course, Darryl's money is also embarrassing because it's a mere inheritance, and he idealizes Bill's strength and authenticity as a worker who earns his own living. When Darryl learns that his inheritance has been depleted, a totally new sense of time enters the novel: impending poverty. Darryl's dreamworld melts away, and he is no longer invulnerable to the pain which he so casually courted as a cuckold. Clive now inspires real fear in him, and he leans on Bill even harder than before. I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts about the forms of financial power and sexual power at work in the relationships between these characters, and how Darryl's protective bubble of wealth defines him as a character.
JE: I'm glad you're asking this. Jordan Ellenberg dropped me a note saying that I'd written a novel about wealth disguised as a novel about sex. I think that must be right. It's about wealth, but not about class. Money underwrites all of Darryl's relationships, and often underwrites a sense of condescending maturity. Darryl would say "when you grow up, you'll understand why I only go as far as I do, the value of certain kinds of security, etc" as though others were going to grow into money. I think that's some of what wealth does, it allows you to represent your position as an inevitable development, when in fact it is an impossibility for most, and even if it were possible, it wouldn't be an improvement. I definitely think Darryl is at his most insufferable when he's for example, lording it over a lot of punk trans girls who have every reason not to invite this near-stranger into their home. And what is he bringing with him? Isn't he likely to get them all subpoenaed potentially? Or their assets seized? Without spoiling anything I think it seems very plausible that the book leaves us in a place where there is going to be a multi-state criminal investigation involving a stolen motorcycle, murder, assault for hire, fraud and bankruptcy. Darryl is bringing serious trouble into people's lives, as passive as he may imagine himself. And that's another feature of money, leaving everyone around you holding the bag, and perhaps the bag has cocaine in it.
Darryl has a very ambiguous relationship to reality, of course in the dream section he is identifying reality with the virile, but this is also how he talks about Kit. That she is "such a real person" and that he can never be real. I do think that Darryl is obsessed with the idea that work, financial risk, in other words not having his money, that this is what it would be like to step barefoot into reality. And he can't do it. Here let's sneak in a Wallace Stevens poem:
Large Red Man Reading
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.
There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,
That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.
We ought to talk about another relationship where money is at work, which is Darryl's relationship to Satori. Satori is, I don't know if I made it clear enough, a sex worker. I am not trying to retcon anything, what I wrote explicitly is that she had been a Madam at some point in the shadowy past, and that she seems to know the Eugene underworld very well. I don't say what she is doing now, and the way I imagine it is that it's none of your business nor mine whether she has any ongoing clients, if she does, she's very selective. She operates in something closer to a gift economy, believes very much in community. And this stuff absolutely mystifies Darryl, he lays the Goddess trip on her really hard, and does not understand her at all. She is cool. But she is no more a Goddess than Bill is Christ, which is to say, a little. If you pare it down just to the words she says, she's actually often boundary setting, or checking Darryl a bit when he gets a little saviour act going. And what does she get for it? He completely loses his head and has a devastating fight with her boyfriend. She is in no way looking for that kind of trouble, and it's again, part of the behaviour of money to imagine that you can roll through poor people's lives and wreck them, treat them practically like dolls. It's very possible that Satori sees Darryl more as a client. We're in his point of view though, and I believe in respecting a character's privacy. So we don't know the answer to this.
This is also "transference." Also known as falling in love with your analyst. Part of what makes Darryl Darryl is that he has a transferential relationship to everyone he meets.
But coming back to it, there's a bit of Bukowski I always meant to weave in, he says somewhere in Factotum, "I understood it too well now—that great lovers were always men of leisure. I fucked better as a bum than as a puncher of timeclocks." I think I may agree with him a little, work robs us of something and Darryl has not been robbed of it. Maybe if I write enough scandalous books I'll become unemployable and can discover again what it was.
Because after all, it isn't just Darryl who isn't working in this book. No one works. Except the hamburger girl.
VS: Thanks so much for that generous response. I love that you're pointing out Darryl's savior act bringing disaster wherever it goes. I'd love to follow this thread of Darryl as a religious figure for what I think is my last question about the novel. I'm thinking about Torrey Peters comparing Darryl to The Pilgrim's Progress, and I'm also thinking about what you said about Darryl earlier: "everything is divine for him, even disgust." I'm curious about the interplay between Darryl's sense of an ontological hierarchy where the strong dominate the weak, his rendering of Bill as a Christ figure, and his fascination with the connection between 'life' and his life. At one point, he jokingly suggests that most founders of religions probably just had really good dick. His casual cocktail of vague spiritual insights is tested in my personal favorite scene in the novel: Moonbeam's guided meditation / spiritual stand-off with Darryl. Here, one's ability to attune to the present moment becomes the standard for a sort of dick-measuring contest (at least as Darryl sees it), and we pass through Darryl's rage at Moonbeam, as well as these beautiful insights about the nature of time, and this gorgeous image of Darryl as a tiny droplet of water on the taut surface of a drum. I'm so moved by this passage, and I'd just love to hear you say more about what's going on here and its relation to some of the other religious themes elsewhere in the novel.
One thing that really grabs me here is the richness of Darryl's internal spiritual experience, and its immediate dissipation into enmity and hatred. There's this passage:
"I don’t know what happened to all of the time, obviously the action that transpires in ten minutes meditation could fill a book if you really paid attention. Mostly you just let go of it. It’s much like dreams that way, an order of reality that doesn’t hold us at gunpoint and demand to be honored. We’re allowed to forget about it, and given all of the other important things we have to remember, maybe we should. Maybe its lack of necessity and purpose is what connects it to beauty. But this time, I had to remember, there was something on the line."
This echoes the previous thread of the dreamworld being cucked by the real world, and Darryl's spiritual insight is immediately dominated by a narrativization of competition and hatred of Moonbeam's smugness. But it also introduces this sort of fraught democratic ethos regarding beauty and aesthetic value - Darryl's divinity of everything, which valorizes (however patronizingly) the hamburger girl and the dying tree and puts the work of art on par with mundane experience. It reminds me of Bernadette Mayer's utopian visions, in fact she says something similar about a single experience easily filling a book, and then forwards an absurdist demand that every poem immediately be published in a gold-bound edition and that each one win the Pulitzer Prize (again, competition impinges upon the immanent beauty of the moment). By imprinting on everything, Darryl appears to hold a universal (albeit shallow) love for all things, people, stories. It is this quality which most makes me see Darryl as a vessel for a creative or spiritual energy which he ultimately cannot embody, due to his pettiness and egoism.
Sorry this went so long. I guess I want to ask: is Darryl partially a parable about the foolishness of seeing everything as holy? Is there a distinction being drawn at a deeper level between Darryl's botched, delusional sense of universal love and the more limited but potentially self-satisfied spiritual presence of Satori and Moonbeam, or are these just happenstance manifestations of different personality types?
JE: This is interesting to me, partly because my next book is in some ways a backstory for Moonbeam. His name is Adam, he's figuring it out. I'll have a lot more to say on this topic. I wouldn't say that Darryl is a parable about anything, it captures a lot of things I was thinking about over a few years, but I see what you're saying. Darryl is a little bit borderline and a little bit Walt Whitman, and he's very convinced that he's got hold of some truth there. The trouble is he really does, and so does Moonbeam, they have something to struggle over. Incidentally, I think "universal love" is a much better characterization of Moonbeam's point of view, or Satori's, than it is of Darryl's. Darryl is reckless, romantic, sees the abyss of the other and reliably tips on in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1iqX8YRp30). But there's nothing universal about it, merely indiscriminate.
One of the nice things about carrying this interview on over a few days is that you're catching me in different moods. Yesterday I told you how Darryl hurts people and fools himself, today I'd rather see how right he is. A little more Allen Ginsberg than Bernadette Mayer, but he's doing his thing...
VS: Well, as Darryl projects unto others, so too do we project unto Darryl, I suppose.
Let’s hear more about Moonbeam - how did he come to be the focus of your next novel? Is there anything else you’d like to say about the project to titillate readers?
JE: Well, the first thing for me was to try to take Moonbeam very literally. How has he come to have this "yogic" disciplined body, and come to have this easy access to mystical states and the ability to induce them in others. I think when you know the answer to that it is going to change the interpretation of quite a few things in Darryl. But when Moonbeam is Adam, you know, he's not particularly mystical. He's a Bay Area guy with a profoundly competitive personality which is barely suppressed by large amounts of LSD and other things like that, a devotee of Gary Snyder, an accidental friend to the local neo-burlesque poly scene, which like Darryl, he views with contempt and would die for in equal measure. But he's a very different guy than Darryl. Like for starters he's 6'2". Pretty good time too...
The plot of the next novel came to me almost entire in a dream, I wrote down the dream and sort of puzzled a story out of it, then wrote most of a draft in about two weeks, the struggle has been to bring some of this down to reality, and to remove a few actual resemblances. It's hard to work that side of things, because it's a novel that's very much about the Bay Area, during the time I lived there, just a slightly younger scene. But I think I've figured that out, nobody's going to sue me.
But you know, Moonbeam is trouble too. I wanted to somehow capture the way that Darryl is right about him. The competitive, even violent edge to his spiritual condescension. I think I have that now. You'll see. I wanted him to answer Wallace Stevens's "Mrs Alfred Uruguay" in some way:
…
Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose,
As it descended, blind to her velvet and
The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun,
A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,
Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,
Lost in an integration of the martyrs' bones,
Rushing from what was real; and capable?
…
VS: I’m tremendously hyped. I’d like to close by zooming out and thinking about the current landscape of contemporary fiction in which you’re working. Among other things, we’re seeing debates online about identity and representation which occur in cycles far more accelerated than those of publishing, lots of books about that onlineness, worries about the returns of moralism in the novel alongside the specter of ‘cancel culture’, etc. I really admire your book for clearly addressing features of this milieu while also effortlessly, playfully shrugging off the yoke of a critical or polemical mode. I’m really curious about what’s informing that approach, and it leads me to a cluster of three questions.
(1) Were there any writerly problems you encountered while writing the book and thinking about its reception? Any insights or realizations emerge as a result? I know you’ve mentioned being concerned about how people would take some of the rougher language about trans identity.
(2) Are there any recurring tropes in contemporary fiction/writing which annoy you? Any which you’d like to see more often? Writers you’d like to see getting more attention?
(3) Are there any writers or traditions from past eras informing your writing that you’d like to shout out? Especially pertaining to some of the topics I mentioned above. I know we’ve already discussed some of the book’s touchstones, but I also know your reading list is deep and varied.
JE: I would say that most of my questions about reception were simple matters of nerve. It takes a lot of nerve to put a book out to a mass audience, knowing that some authors have faced obscenity trials, accusations of being foreign spies, or that your work inspired mass killers or other horrible things like that. It's also possible for annoying people on Twitter to talk your ear off about how they don't see themselves in your book or they do and don't like what they see. But I really overestimated this side of things. Maybe I'll eat my words later, but I feel like basically audiences have been really generous with me, and really gentle. I think the thing I grappled with a little more is that like, the book is extremely incurious about Darryl's wife Mindy, and generally doesn't see a lot of female subjectivity at all. We are in Darryl's head for 190 pages, and he sees the world in colours of male hierarchy and competition, that's his paintbox. So like, is that mine? It takes a little nerve I think, as a trans woman, to write this way and wonder if after all the project isn't going to be taken as some kind of revelation of the author's innate maleness, even if Darryl's hold on masculinity is pretty tenuous. To say "this is the story I'm telling today, tomorrow I will tell another," was difficult. I had to trust myself and trust readers and basically I think that trust has been rewarded. The third book has more women in it...
As for contemporary fiction, I think I don't read enough of it to say. It's a bit horrible of me, because I feel like I should be using this moment to uplift so much writing, but I don't spend a lot of time reading my contemporaries. The exception is Frog K / Paris Green, who self-publishes these wicked little stories that are I think just starting to break out. She has one in Strange Horizons recently, but there's so much more: https://frogindustrialconcern.itch.io/
As for past eras informing my writing, I usually think that the things I'm reading from past eras puts my writing to shame. Right now I'm reading W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Flame trilogy. These are novels he wrote at the end of his life, the last one came out in the early sixties. I was shocked to find out they existed at all, I've never met anyone who's read them. That's where I'm digging in. I don't think the cultural milieu that I belong to has produced Du Bois's equal and I don't know that it will. But that's where I want to be spending my time right now. Then I come back to my little sex farce slash erotic thriller slash Pynchonian detective novel and I'm like "fuck, what am I doing with my life?" I don't know. Trying to keep my head above water and hopefully have something to say by the time I have a chance to say it. What informs my actual style? I don't feel a lot of influence in the way of imitation. Unfortunately when I read I'm a bit like Darryl, careless affection without reserve. I don't hold onto the cool list-making part of myself. But I like Ron Padgett…
VS: It’s really nice to hear that the reception has been positive and I’m glad you decided to trust readers with some of those thorny questions. I haven’t heard of that trilogy, I’ll have to check it out.
Ok, I decided I have to sneak in one more question, this one purely selfish and all too sincere in response to what may have been a remark made in jest. At an event recently, you said that ‘everyone secretly hates poetry’. Why do you think that is?
JE: A few people asked me about that comment, it was a joke and I truly didn't mean to stress anybody out. I love poetry, you can see that, but my connection to it as a living art form is pretty tenuous, and my tastes aren't very avant-garde or contemporary. The exceptions for me are like, Ted Rees, Holly Melgard, Brian Ng. And maybe I like them in spite of themselves, or in spite of what they'd say about their own work. Let's stop here, someday I'll write some appreciative criticism but I don't want to freestyle.
Poetry is safe. For now.
Jackie Ess is a novelist, the author of Darryl (Clash, 2021), which is her first book, of hopefully many. That's the main thing you ought to know about her for now. You can find other bits of writing here and there, or just visit her on twitter @jackie_ess.
Violet Spurlock is the author of the poetry chapbook Alloyed Bliss (Eyelet Press, 2021) and a digital project mapping dialogues into gridded structures VS VS VS (GaussPDF, 2021). She also facilitates a small writing group for trans and non-binary authors.