Michael Kimball, interviewed by Peter Schwartz for Full Of Crow. Michael Kimball’s third novel, Dear Everybody, is available now- and he is still working on the ongoing interactive art project: Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story On A Postcard. Links at the end.
P.S.: I’d like to start out by thanking you, Michael Kimball, for agreeing to do this interview. My first question is when did you become so interested in other people and their stories? I think your life story on a postcard project is brilliant, I’d love to know exactly how that came about and what you’ve learned from what you’ve done so far.
M.K.: I’ve always been interested in other people and their stories. My older brother used to get annoyed with me for asking so many questions, so did my father. But the postcard life story project came about because my friend Adam Robinson (#45) was curating a performance art festival, the Transmodern in Baltimore, and he asked me if I wanted to participate. We joked about what a writer could do as performance and I suggested that I could write people’s life stories for them as they waited. The idea was absurd, but it was also fascinating, and it seemed oddly possible if it were contained to a postcard. Adam insisted that I give it a try and that’s how the postcard life story project started. I thought it would be fun and funny, that I would ask a few questions and write on the backs of a few postcards and that would be it. The first postcard life story I wrote was for a painter, Bart O’Reilly (#1). When I finished writing his postcard and looked up, a line had formed. For the rest of the night, I interviewed dozens of people and wrote their postcard life stories. It was intense and intimate. I remember being struck by how earnest and forthcoming most people were, how eager they were to share their life stories, how grateful they were for their postcard. It was later that I started the blog and opened the project up to everybody. Continue Reading…
Posted 2 years, 8 months ago. 1 comment
Mike Philbin is the author of “Bukkakeworld” and “Planet Of The Owls”, and the editor of the Chimeraworld anthologies. He was a good sport about all this, as I knew he would be. -Lynn Alexander
LA:You have been doing a lot of interviews, answering questions on everything from your work in the video games industry to vampire fatigue. Is there something people are missing, something you’d like to go off about but it doesn’t seem to come up in the process?
M.P. Is there something You The People are missing? Well, yes. Everything. Fact: You The People are stuck in a consumer loop from which you’re gonna find it very difficult to extricate yourselves in coming years of Obama-enforced austerity. You The People is the name of a novel I’m working on that will show just how asleep the majority of the general public are. It’s not a pitying book nor an admonishing book. It’s a work of genreclectic fiction in the same way that 1984 and Brave New World were works of genreclectic fiction. You The People projects contemporary complacency several microseconds into the future to show what happened to mankind as it languished in its societal slumber. It’s a stark warning to all 6.66 billion corporate persons of this cowed planet.
L.A.It seems like a particular challenge to make surreal horror, to push the boundaries of genre fiction, “genreclectic” fiction- and to also make it uniquely disturbing, distinct for the reader. Do you find yourself having to really work at staying away from some of the gimmicks and traps, do you ever start to fall into those grooves, or even into marketing grooves, then have to shake yourself out of it?
M.P. I think calling it ‘surreal horror’ is a bit of a misnomer. Surreal horror implies a subset of horror. And those who’ve read my interviews over the last decade know I don’t have the greatest admiration for the ‘dull grey horror product’. Genreclectic fiction is something that allows me to steer clear of the horror writer tag (and its legion of negative connotation) and simply write about all the horrors that haunt us when we have down time or when the demands of the world leave us staring into the middle distance with a high-pitched ringing sound in our ears. As far as marketing goes, you realise that ‘the reader is the enemy of creativity’ and kow-towing to his demands is like career suicide? How best to explain this, creative people never work to order, never tailor to audience, never truly ascend to the corporate-sponsored suck-top of bland popularity. Good for them.
L.A. Some of the art you seem to admire seems not to be necessarily or conspicuously twisted, but actually seems hyper-realist. For example, some of what I find unsettling is the way that some of the human figures in some of the artwork you are into are grotesquely natural- not distorted. Death-as we know but seem to forget when we are confronted by a realistic, albeit nasty element- is actually a pretty disgusting affair replete with fluids and strange positions. Can you talk about what draws you into a work, what kinds of qualities you seem to respond to more readily? Continue Reading…
Posted 2 years, 8 months ago. Add a comment
Bill Blackolive
Wild Bill Blackolive has been an outlaw folk writer since the sixties. His memoir, The Emeryville War, chronicles his life “on the fringe of Berkeley in the 1980′s…Wild Bill, who lives in a backyard in his broke-down car with his barbells and a litter of pit bulls.” (ULA)
I crossed paths with Bill and his daughter Madrea through the Guild Of Outsider Writers, and after reading Emeryville, I knew he was somebody I needed to interview!-Lynn Alexander
L.A. What are you interested in doing these days? What are you involved with? Plans?
B.B. I look after my 89 year old mother from one pm till seven thirty am when the good helper woman, Janet, comes.
Firstly after coffee and silly Corpus Christi newspaper then stretches, I take the two dogs I have currently out for an hour, bike or walking, depending on injuries, have an old bad back (visit a chiropractor lately but once in five weeks) and a few months ago I cracked my left kneecap which has caused complication. I next soon had cracked my left big toe with a fifty pound dumbbell, when the knee had suddenly buckled more complications for months now, and lately I am using a bicycle. We live just out of little Aransas Pass, a lot of trailers, some crank labs and maniacs driving insanely in the night but this is an easy enough environment for me and the dogs, and my mother’s yard is fenced. With dogs, I wave at all motorists, be they hostile or what, and thus it is for years here and the motorists just about all wave now, friendly or not, many very friendly. Continue Reading…
Posted 2 years, 9 months ago. 2 comments
Michael Jacobson presents collections of asemic writing at his website- The New Post Literate. Interviewed by Lynn Alexander.
LA: When I think of your work, I think of the asemic writing- of course. But what else are you interested in? What other kinds of writing are you interested in?
MJ: I am interested in many forms of writing, from the beat generation writers, to the French symbolists, Graffiti, undeciphered scripts, xenolinguistics, sigils, etc. I think a lot of these different forms of writing have greatly informed & added depth & substance to my asemic writing. I consider my work to be a bead on a string with regards to the history of experimental literature, with asemic writing being the most recent bead added in a long string of avant-garde writing. Continue Reading…
Posted 2 years, 9 months ago. 7 comments