A family tree of vogue: A conversation with Douglas Glover

APRIL 20, 2020 I FIRST came INTO CONTACT with Douglas Glover when he became the editor of a literary journal I admired very tons, Numéro Cinq. I persuaded him to take me on as a author by providing him an interview with Gabriel Josipovici, whose work I knew we both cherished. I’d develop into interested in the creative manner, and the interview lined the span of Gabriel’s profession in the variety of a artistic biography. by the time it seemed in the journal, I knew I needed to do whatever identical with Glover. there is any such startling full of life elasticity to his imagination, and a reckless thrill to his innovations in kind. You examine him to be dislocated, unsettled, and yet deeply moved. The singular great thing about his work was a compelling reason to discover extra. What focus to select? Glover is the author of six collections of news, 4 novels, and 4 books of literary nonfiction, versatile physique of work. within the conclusion, I determined to pay attention to the brief reports because his novels, principally Elle, which won the Governor-regularly occurring Award for Fiction in 2003, had obtained so a great deal consideration already. additionally, they applicable my ongoing curiosity about creativity, as Glover told me he had at all times found the short story effective in finding new forms, new the right way to write, as adversarial to novels, which require such an extended investment of time that (he spoke of) that you can’t have the funds for to be too playful. The reports I selected to focus on are “Dog attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon” (1985), from the assortment of the identical identify, considering the fact that it marked an incredible transition towards his liberation from ordinary narrative kind, and “Uncle Boris Up in a Tree,” from his most fresh assortment, Savage Love (2013), in order to see the place this trajectory has to date taken him. As we sifted during the artistic genesis of each story, we discovered ourselves tracing his development faraway from naturalistic modes of writing and towards the darkly humorous innovation he has made his own. ¤ VICTORIA best: The genesis of the story “Dog attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon” became a real-existence incident, yes? What took place, and the way did it seize your imagination? DOUGLAS GLOVER: This changed into in the dead of winter â€" just before Christmas, 1979 â€" in Saskatoon, the place the story takes region. I had quit my job as sub-editor on the city newspaper and turned into heading south to New Mexico, but my historical Rambler insurrection kept threatening to break down on the frozen, loss of life-dealing prairie, so i was camping with my female friend. She had a floor floor condo looking onto Rotary Park and the South Saskatchewan River. just upriver, on the contrary bank, an industrial outlet pipe kept a stretch of water ice-free and steaming. everything was deep in snow, and so bloodless that individuals ran extension cords from their properties to the street to plug of their vehicles’ block heaters. I happened to be staring on the snow when a police cruiser pulled up. The policeman took a short survey of the river, then plunged towards the financial institution, the place he immediately disappeared. I nonetheless had those ambulance chaser instincts from my reporting days. i was directly out the door, forgetting coat, hat, gloves. after I reached the riverbank, the policeman changed into scrambling on fingers and knees toward a man in the open water clinging to the ice shelf. A black guide dog, harness flapping in opposition t his shoulders, paddled subsequent to the blind man, pawing at him as if to sink him. Three young adults, two boys and a girl, have been running alongside the ice. We converged on the policeman and formed a human chain so he could safely method the ice lip and lever the person out. Then we slithered sideways to rescue the dog. Sirens had been drawing near. the man lay on the ice with the boys’ coats draped over him. The dog became drenched but happy. i assumed it could freeze in the frigid air. I informed the policeman where I lived and took the dog. after we reached the residence, it ran in circles, knocked over the Christmas tree, and ate two of the items. When the policeman got here to retrieve it, the dog leaped into the air trying to bite the bill of his cap. The blind man lived, and the dog lived (in contrast to the fictional dog in my story). A 12 months later, I heard from a friend whose spouse become a nurse in Saskatoon that man and dog had reunited, and the dog had taken to leading him into brick partitions. here is all true-ish. but no longer all of the reality. Jokes aside, it regarded that the person could have supposed to kill himself. My girlfriend wrote a sanitized version for the paper. and that i left city. just like the couple within the story, we had been already collectively in the past demanding. but a good deal as i love that anecdote, it’s no longer a short story. Your question highlights the mystery of creation, the transformation of a little whatever thing, perhaps a true-existence incident, into a work of art. i'm a formalist, not a reporter. I write in a convention of irony and structural improvisation that tracks again through Schlegel, Sterne, Nashe, Cervantes, and Rabelais to the Menippean satire. I don’t write fiction to tell you what took place. in this case, it doesn’t interest me a little bit no matter if the husband or spouse stay together or why the dog led the blind man into the river. those are shallow calls for. The image of the dog pawing at the man’s shoulder is completely clean in my mind. It become perverse, comedian, enigmatic, and, like all issues to do with canines, open to myriad anthropomorphic interpretations. however equally powerful in reminiscence is the smoking, churning river sliding beneath the ice, and the completely alien nature of the weather in Saskatchewan at that time of yr. i will be able to’t think about how they survived at all in that river. in the story, the dog dies, the marriage ends, all sentiment is overridden by using the implacable inevitability of dying and endings. And the narrator doesn’t in reality comprehend the story, is barely struck through the juxtaposition of things and the surplus of which means it engenders. The dog trying to grasp the person below water is an image of a mysterious singularity too complicated to be utterly represented. And, of direction, the dog has to die. Any nod to sentimentality and closure would betray the story. The deeper theme has to do the ineluctable rhythm of things coming into existence and going out of existence. The swirling, smoking river is Anaximander’s apeiron, the detached, undifferentiated substrate out of which things emerge and to which they return. (Heidegger has that dazzling verb “whiling” for the transient being of issues.) The picture of the dog and the man in the water serves as a symbolic intensifier of the theme. the two figures in combination â€" husband and wife, dog and man â€" and the language that links them, began to coalesce as a story in my intellect. Then I begun to play with the patterning, the quite a few elements of form that contribute to elaboration and orchestration. a narrative is the application of kind to a concept. during this case, the foundation thought changed into the utter strangeness of that incident, the dog and man in the river, that strangeness having whatever to do with the bedrock of human existence, whatever thing we commonly negle ct. You’ve outlined to me that this story was a departure, an experience for you. are you able to contextualize this story on your writing lifestyles a little extra for me? This story changed into written in 1983, in longhand, in a little many-windowed conservatory in conjunction with a mansion on round street in Saratoga Springs. Clark Blaise and his wife Bharati Mukherjee lived there, notwithstanding Bharati became away instructing in Iowa at the time. The condo became tremendous and down-at-heel. within the back changed into an octagonal garage with an residence above, where the first owner of the residence saved his mistress. He might look out the returned windows and wave to her after which go and hang around together with his wife and youngsters. There turned into additionally machinery inside the storage for turning his car around so his driver wouldn’t need to back out. earlier than Clark bought the vicinity, it had been used as a boarding condo for Hassidic Jews who got here up from Queens each summer season to take the waters. This apartment, the octagonal residence, and the mistress performed upon my intellect in odd methods and inspired ye t another story altogether. i was 4 years far from the routine in query, concerning the appropriate time for incubation. and i became anxious to write whatever, anything else, after spending the outdated yr salt-mining over a novel called The South Will upward push at midday (1988). i used to be mired within the conventions of what Northrop Frye called the low mimetic mode and ill of it. I had a philosophy background however was determined not to lumber the story with philosophy. So, my protagonist had to have rejected philosophy for journalism (as I had myself, though much less dramatically). My Saskatoon female friend turned into in my mind, together with recollections of the Mendel art Gallery and the slaughterhouse. All of this flew together right into a plotless narrative that spirals amid its concerns, held together by way of the blind man and his dog, the husband leaving his wife, and the incessant reminder of the story’s incapacity to be a narrative (the antithesis of what I had been attempting to do with that novel). The narrator takes the blame upon himself for the story’s failure, however I don’t truly think there’s a observe out of area. Is there basically a narrative the narrator is lacking? not truly. It’s ironic, a trope, not an argument, the vanity of the poète manqué. The narrator (who is additionally a philosopher manqué, a journalist manqué, and a lover manqué) become quite enjoyable to put in writing, his self-confessed failings a bit of an in-shaggy dog story for the author who had begun to think that not being capable of write a straight story may truly be the signal of a better calling. In “Dog attempts,” the narrator is untrustworthy, an Existentialist poseur, and a serial practitioner of incompleteness. he's pointing at whatever thing lacking in himself, for certain. however that missing something may no longer be a personality flaw so lots as a token of the basic incompleteness of things. Our tendency to sentimentalize often veils obtuse statistics. The entire story becomes an image of fracture, failure, incompleteness, and the mysterious complexity of life it is always evading us. “My spouse and i come to a decision to separate after which we're virtually satisfied together.” you utilize this miraculous sentence again and again to anchor and reorient the story. are you able to inform me how this happened? My first semi-aware try to break the mimetic lock on my soul changed into to start messing about with refrains. It become 1975, and i become working the in a single day shift on the reproduction desk at the Montreal big name. I lived on my own in an enormous three-bedroom condominium (my whitewater kayak had a bed room all to itself) on Sherbrooke highway in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, between the Loyola campus of Concordia school and a steamy joint I used to frequent. in the future (within the Loyola library at a analyze table underneath a two-story duplicate of Michelangelo’s David originally supposed for a suburban mall), I read Conrad Aiken’s “Morning song of Senlin,” which opens: it is morning, Senlin says, and within the morningWhen the easy drips throughout the shutters like the dew,I come up, I face the dawn,And do the things my fathers learned to do.Stars in the red nightfall above the rooftopsPale in a saffron mist and seem to die,and that i myself on a hastily tilting planetStand earlier than a glass and tie my tie. Vine leaves tap my window,Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,The robin chirps within the chinaberry treeRepeating three clear tones. it is morning. I stand by the mirrorAnd tie my tie all over again.whereas waves a long way off in a pale rose twilightCrash on a white sand shore.I stand via a reflect and comb my hair:How small and white my face! â€"The eco-friendly earth tilts through a sphere of airAnd bathes in a flame of space.There are homes hanging above the starsAnd stars hung under a sea …And a sun a long way off in a shell of silenceDapples my partitions for me … it is morning, Senlin says, and within the morningShould I no longer pause in the light to bear in mind God? Bless me, I didn't understand what anaphora became. but whatever unprosaic in these strains, pattern and rhythm, inspired me. I went home and began a narrative with a refrain, and that bought published, which quite convinced me i used to be onto something. “Dog makes an attempt” is a end result of that trajectory. A chorus creates steps, rhythm. It marks time. It brings the reader returned to the beginning element and units the stage for brand new construction. i was feeling my way out of the restrictive assumptions of mimetic realism. by “mimetic realism” I mean an aesthetic described by means of Ian Watt’s the upward push of the radical (1957) and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), two books that shaped the bought wisdom of contemporary commonplace criticism, business publishing, and the MFA workshop. The general reveal-don’t-tell rule originated with Lubbock, Ford Madox Ford, and the dramatic imperatives of early-20th-century literary Modernism. I don’t despise mimetic realism. It’s one approach to writing, with its personal benefits and obstacles, just no longer an method that suits me. however when a person started out to jot down in Canada within the 2d half of the 20th century, this aesthetic amounted to a popular unthought cultural bias, a choice you didn’t understand you were making. Roughly coincident with my Conrad Aiken second, I found Hubert Aquin’s novel Blackout, at first Trou de Mémoire (1968), in a Montreal used bookstall. I’d examine Frantz Fanon within the Nineteen Sixties but had no concept how his theories could follow to me (in what techniques my provincial upbringing might oppress me) till I encountered Aquin’s mad, drug-addicted, super-fucked, failed progressive. the unconventional is a good looking example of disrupted kind, a dramatic riposte to conventions of mimetic realism, represented in the text by using the malaise of Anglo-Canadian neocolonialism. In Aquin’s literary universe, disease and failure are the best avenues purchasable to the oppressed (he became writing about himself and Québec). Then I examine Leonard Cohen’s novel desirable Losers (1966), which unexpectedly spread out to me within the mild of Aquin’s ebook; both are extremely-Canadian, both are experimental, each feature screw ups, losers within the grip of an oppressive system (Cohen’s note). These books offered me with a deal with on my very own provincial upbringing and the restless feelings it engendered; they provided an option aesthetic universe. however, within the Canadian context, Aquin and Cohen have been divine eccentrics. Aquin killed himself; Cohen stopped writing novels. Later, I study Stanley B. Ryerson’s two-volume Marxist heritage of Canada (1960, 1968) and Tony Wilden’s Lacanian, postcolonial, disrupted The Imaginary Canadian (1980). also, the American experimentalist John Hawkes, who mentioned that plot, personality, surroundings, and theme are the enemies of the novel (Ian Watt turns in his grave as I utter these words). Then Christa Wolf’s the hunt for Christa T. (additionally, coincidentally, first published in 1968), one other novel about failure, ailment, and a poète manqué. That become my early getting to know curve. at the start, I didn’t have a map. You learn to make your own map. It’s like doing genealogy; you sort through background picking out your ancestors, and also you get better at being yourself. I wrote a booklet about Cervantes, essays on Juan Rulfo, Albert Camus, Jane Austen, Cees Nooteboom, Thomas Bernhard. Rabelais is a personality in my novel Elle. The current summit of this line of building (i'm not dead yet) coincided with my discovery of Witold Gombrowicz, primarily his diaries, during which he gifts himself as a self in battle with form â€" form here which means each literary kind and social and political expectations (the unconscious well-known social power to fill household, community, and patriotic roles) â€" this battle intensely complicated by using the fact that we’re born with a formal integral, an inborn aesthetic impulse to fulfill form (the theme of his 1965 novel Cosmos). it's colossal that a good deal of Gombrowiczâ €™s life changed into spent in poverty, self-exiled from his personal country. It looks to me that freedom and entrapment provide the warp and weft of this story, each in terms of the love affair and the narrator’s storytelling. Following what I simply referred to about Gombrowicz, that you may construct the popular plot because the self finding out its relationship with other kinds. You want to devour however now not be eaten. At its core, the self is an absence, the unconscious, a proven fact that inflects and subverts the familiar plot. You’re now not even certain of the nature of your personal wants, which even so lead you straight into a world area filled with entities that desire you to conform to the sample of their desires â€" the need of the other is another kind yearning to be filled. Some such conflict situation figures in every story I write, therefore the freedom and entrapment axis. Now imagine love and the issues of a form not totally at peace with itself having an intimate come upon with an extra kind no longer absolutely at peace with itself. That other kind (it generally is a lover or the USAman or a refugee immigrant or your cat) tries to incorporate you into its constitution and also you do the identical â€" two fuzzy desires making an attempt to recreate one one other as enough love objects. You both are attempting to translate however with out a lexicon. That other kind is a savior in case you’re trying to break out your self or an oppressor if he or she demands too a good deal, or switches roles over time. In my studies, this self-assembly-no longer-self experience spawns innumerable plots and interchangeable issues together with a religious theme having to do with transcendence and redemption (metaphors of break out). now and again, as within the existence and instances of Captain N. (1993), the stumble upon with one more self is tentatively redemptive. “becoming an Indian is like coming into a swarming madness. however might redeem you.” In Elle, I hypothesize a hybrid impact. In 16 classes of need (2000), the right-level theme is releasing oneself from love. but in Savage Love, many of the reports turn on a comic, magical transformation enacted in marriage. So, entrapment and get away, sure. and you may see why my protagonist in “Dog makes an attempt” must be such an interrupted person. Failure to fulfill kind is the route to existential purity. i'm not that, i am not that both, the self keeps asserting. all the deepest stories are apophatic. If we flip to “Uncle Boris” and revisit the subject matter of plot, I felt that this story turned into the most scrumptious meeting between the picaresque and the wedding plot. are you able to inform me extra about the structural genesis of this story? The kernel for that story got here from a photo-bombing web page on the information superhighway, the place i noticed a picture of a darkly clad family unit in a row with a barn behind, late 19th century, probably eastern European. pretty boring apart from that, simply above the community, stretched along a tree department, there’s a bearded, smiling goofball. I simply gave these individuals names and started writing their reviews. however the deeper inspiration for the story lies within the widely wide-spread trajectory of my development as a author. Early on (analyzing myself as different), I gave the impression most comfy in a primary-grownup, single-personality narrative. Yet i was aware that on the different side of literature there existed an enormous trove of ironic third-grownup, single- and multiple-personality texts. I likely avoided third grownup early on as a result of its huge affiliation with mimetic realism. however boredom is a pretty good motivator. After some exp eriments in brief stories, I cracked the code with The life and instances of Captain N., which is third-person-dissimilar on steroids, with in all probability a dozen narrative aspects of view or modes, including the narrator at two different a long time, two first-person threads, letters, and interpolated essays (which I learned to put in writing from Hermann Broch). After that it changed into a small jump to the multi-plotted ensemble stories “Shameless” and “Uncle Boris” in Savage Love. It sounds somewhat dry to assert I composed the story for technical factors as a result of that gives you no idea how excited I get once I work out how to do something new. It’s just like the finger of God accomplishing out of the firmament. I consider “Uncle Boris” has some thing like 18 features of view. What an artist enjoys is developing complexity however preserving it below handle. The joy is within the power. I tend to believe of intercourse for your studies as evocative of an customary bestiality. It’s charming how intercourse is both compulsive and annoying for your characters, the way it pushes them into chance and recklessness. Compulsive, disturbing, harmful, and reckless â€" your words very nearly sum up how sex works in both stories and lifestyles, although it’s also pleased, rhythmic, reproductive, and liberating. intercourse is the physical idiom of affection. From a writer’s factor of view, what’s now not to love about sex? It’s a standard reagent. Human sex is not really bestial; beasts are lots tidier than we are. For animals, the swap is either on or off, often off, depending on breeding cycles. For humans, it’s always on, and the operative big difference is between what you exhibit and what you don’t show. intercourse presents entry to the style a personality manages his or her deepest emotional machinery, how she negotiates love with a accomplice, how she presents want to herself and to her lover, family unit, and the prevalent public. a character’s sexuality is a sophisticated messaging device at the center of which is a spot (the unconscious once more) and a mysterious, embarrassing, thudding passion to do some thing with our genitals. I discover this pretty comical. however’s important to bear in mind that these thematic ideas are notion experiments for the goal of developing characters and plots. believe of them as musical motifs. It makes no sense to ask a composer if he believes in a melody. What’s essential is the structural use he makes of it. Most of what seems thematically in my stories bears little relation to what I may agree with. Characters are driven via desires fashioned through ideas. I spend a great deal of time hypothesizing strains of concept, rearranging subject matters, and then following the good judgment with my characters (as in actual existence, their ideas are often absurdly wrong). themes aren't premises; they are conceits. do we talk a little bit more concerning the “comic, magical transformation(s) enacted in marriage” that you point out as a function of Savage Love? It’s a perfect description for what’s going on in “Uncle Boris.” I’d love to be aware of more about the way you see those transformations working within the story. First, marriage is a motif for the publication as a whole. this is in response to my outdated story assortment, 16 classes of desire, which could were subtitled “The disasters of love”; the habitual motif in that ebook is the tag line “All my existence has been an effort to liberate myself from love.” It makes little sense to question me what I trust in all this. I didn’t all of sudden have a private revelation about love and marriage. I noticed The Tempest at Stratford in Ontario; they staged a good looking wedding scene on the conclusion. on the equal time, i noticed i used to be bored with the conception of liberating oneself from love. It had no extra dramatic probabilities. (What I truly believe about love isn't a question that pursuits me. however ask me what I believe about boredom as some of the first-rate human motivators and that i can go on for a long time.) So, I inverted (how i am keen on the rhetorical gadget of inversion) the strategy and determined to peer w hat I could do with happy marriages. In “Savage Love,” marriage liberates the two men from their depression obsession with the identical imaginary woman. on the story’s shut, they locate themselves in a price Chopper food market fretting over a girl, jealous and paranoid, but because the scene advances, a sparkling wind blows through, infiltrating the diction. Then this: Time passed. youngsters neither man believed in time. So it passed very quickly. They talked of love and poetry in the historical method, staring at Majory Sass who gave the impression to be replacing e mail addresses or mobile numbers with the checkout boy. somebody had changed the price Chopper muzak with a Stevie Ray Vaughan choice. Shelby loosened his scarf. He observed something about the magical attraction of atmospheres, how things could trade for no purpose except that you unexpectedly felt more suitable, because of Stevie Ray Vaughan and a little 420 action in fee Chopper and customers turning into individuals, against all odds, and preserving conversations. however you could never write a story like that. The magic is signaled in the unexpected absence of time (root of verisimilitude) and naturally the words “magical charm.” There isn't any psychological construction, no personality motivation, simply â€" a metamorphosis. And a hint of metafictional commentary on story-writing. Shelby decides there may still be a wedding however handiest as a result of “[a]ll the most effective reviews conclusion with a wedding. believe of Shakespeare.” They build an altar out of crates of baked bean cans. Shelby intones the ritual (Anglican prayer booklet). Irony runs via every line. however on the very end, both men are transformed. seem to be, I don’t accept as true with in essences. What we believe of as essences are logical elements, limiting concepts, or conditional: if it had an essence, it might be like this. We inhabit a universe of phenomena that rise, take form, trade kind, and dissolve. My thinker of choice is the primary one, Anaximander. What humans consider of as fact is a nostalgic retro-formation, a nevertheless-shot from the movie. you could at all times play with inversion. Irony amounts to retaining choice versions of an idea for your head at once. So, I ask what if a stack of baked beans tins is a sacred vicinity? What if the historic rite of marriage is actually magical? What if existential transformation can simply turn up “on account of Stevie Ray Vaughan and a bit 420 action in expense Chopper”? To me, it’s a religious moment. “Uncle Boris” likewise performs with the themes of love, intercourse, marriage, and artwork. It’s an ensemble story, with multiple plots. The backbeat is the Pa and Ma plot. Pa starts painting a mural inside the barn and becomes a famous painter. He and Ma have a horny, cheerful marriage. His only issue is that his kids preserve coming to him with their problems. The entrance plot or melody is about Bjorn and his wife Olga, who's discontented and having an affair along with his brother, Jannik. Olga acts hideously towards Bjorn, but he has his personal line of construction no matter what she does; he becomes a Robin Hood funding tycoon, also a poet, and when Olga has a son, he becomes an attentive father, even if the boy is his or not. he is a fine, decent man, exceptionally so for the reason that he works in a financial institution. There are different plots with every of the ultimate toddlers. Two of them conclusion in a marriage. just as the weddings are about to take place, carried away in the moment, Pa drops to his knees and asks Ma to marry him again. Then this: Bjorn, misty eyed from the mist, can’t support but smile. For no intent, he offers Olga a bit poke in her deflated belly. She glances up at him irritably. Bjorn is thinking about Bjorn 2, how they have turn into inseparable, united, interestingly, by using their lack of ability to love one yet another. nobody has ever understood Bjorn in addition to Bjorn 2. With a jolt, a surprising anguish like a fuel ache, Bjorn realizes that perhaps here's love. Olga sees that he's smiling and thinks, Oh, Bjorn is being idiotically sentimental or just idiotic. but he keeps smiling, and there's something abnormal in his eyes, an expression that's directly unhappy, far away, weighing, pondering, alive. Olga feels a pang of compassion. It happens to her that Bjorn can see his demise coming toward him. Bjorn thinks: The universe is a complete mystery to me. How should one behave? What does it mean to be a person? All my life I even have considered my death coming toward me. Then he says an surprisi ng issue, words that damage the form, a blind soar. He says, “We should still get married, too.” Olga says, “What?” Waspish, irritable, impatient, shocked, puzzled, bitter. Bjorn says, “We should get married once again. I believe I haven’t adored you adequate. I married you the first time out of pity since you had been the final of the gruesome Klapp ladies and with no dowry. Don’t mistake me. i believed that was love at the time, however now I see it in a different way.” He keeps smiling that inane smile. He feels all at once free. the entire world’s cares, tasks and claims seem to drop away. He knows that he is giving up on himself, and that, ironically, he has not ever felt more like himself. He feels like a corpse climbing out of a grave. Olga takes a breath and thinks, most likely I even have been preserving my breath these ten years. there's a hint of a smile on her lips. She says, “i'm plain as a pine plank.” “Whoever stated any such aspect?” says Bj orn. “The creator,” says Olga. “anyway, it’s authentic.” She says, “i was at all times afraid you’d never like me, that you’d run away.” “It doesn’t count,” says Bjorn, a little annoyed in regards to the creator. “i really like you now.” Olga asks, shyly, tentatively, nevertheless with the faint wisp of a smile breaking on her skinny lips, “Even in spite of everything the bad issues I even have finished?” “because of everything you've got achieved,” Bjorn says. “they're indications of existence,” he says. “I wish to start once more,” he says. There are key phrases that code the exchange. First, every little thing gets misty (twice, “misty” and “mist”). some thing happens subsequent will occur “for no reason.” Olga justifiably complains concerning the creator. Then “words that ruin the kind.” What form? The melancholy variety of fraught, unhappy relationships, the quotidian struggling of domestic lifestyles. but also the variety of a narrative. And breaking the kind is freeing. Bjorn feels free. here the textual content takes a paranormal flip â€" giving up on oneself to discover oneself. Breaking form allows for Bjorn a space in which he can forgive and alter. And the impact is contagious as a result of all at once Olga has a spot to forgive and alter. the mystical flavor is intentional, as in all my fiction, however balanced with whimsy and irony. in the last paragraph, the narrator returns: “four couples get married under the tree, a mass expression of baseless, irrational optimism.” Bjorn’s psychopathic brother murders one of the catering assistants with a pitchfork, however “everyone lives happily ever after. For a long time.” this is might be near the nub of how I write. One eye on the gods, one eye on the human comedy, and a mind for the punning use of the observe kind in each life and paintings. (Three eyes.) ¤ Victoria most desirable is a contract author who has posted essays in Numéro Cinq, Cerise Press, and Open Letters month-to-month. She is at the moment writing a booklet on disaster and creativity.