I know you also write poetry. How does poetry influence your flash, and how does flash inform your poetry?
I think most writers working with poetry and flash, or the intersection(s) sometimes occupied by prose poetry and hybrid forms, will all give similar answers to this question—poetry demands a vivid specificity of image that demands a precision of language which demands a concision of thought, the exercising of all of which the formal brevity of flash homes beautifully. It’s fun that, ideally, there’s no room to be unintentional in either form. Dabbling in flash has also helped me develop a better poetic handle on something very much like filmic dynamism, something made more alive than the static image via a temporal quality, because of how flash demands a deliberate unfolding of one thing or another or multiple others even in its relatively short breadth.
Throughout the story there is such tension between violence and love. Can you say more about how you navigate that tension in your work?
I think desire (or a series of desiring-machines in perpetual flux-and-flow, more precisely, if we’re to get a little Anti-Oedipus with it) underpins everything, including and especially violence, and including and especially love. I was going to say, at first, that love can be one cog of the libidinal machinery behind (what drives someone to) violence, but I realized we’re all working with rather untenable definitions and value assumptions here when it comes to love, and I’m not too interested in universalizing a definition or defining it even for myself. But within the framework of desire having mothered both, with the implicit understanding that love and violence are sibling-like drives behind some of our thoughts and actions, I think we can broach the topic from a similar enough angle: love and violence will often turn (in)to one another in their shared loyalty to and servitude of the mother. Love runs to violence if desire is left unfulfilled; the mother-son push-pull bond of desire and violence, of violence as the thanatos (death instinct) to desire’s eros (life instinct), works to ensure that violence’s shared raison d’être with love takes the helm of who we are and what we do, often violently. In that sense, I don’t think the love-violence dialectical tension is something I have to consciously write in; it comes up quite naturally and resists an authorial “navigation” because it can’t—and if I have any say in it in my fictions, won’t—be “resolved”, so to speak. An uneasy coexistence of the two feels truer to reality, and all my attempts at keeping my characters grounded will loop back around to this.
There are so many wonderful details in the story, the “two-i Adiidas black tee and self-holed black jeans” for example. How do you decide which details to include in your stories?
Thank you!! But broadly, I think I’m borrowing a lot from the diffusive (and at times almost Soritic) associative approach that is attributed more, if not (wrongly) exclusively by some, to the poetic mode, where details/images make or at least majorly drive forward whatever is vehiculated in the text. I start out my stories not knowing their destination nor the nature of their journey; I think there is value in and a dynamism conjured by “fucking around and finding out,” colloquially speaking. That particular detail above, pointing towards 2000s alt kids’ deliberate and often simultaneous “underperformance” of femininity and masculinity, was driven in by another detail: the matter-of-factness with which Viola’s cross-dressing was summarized in the ELT Readers’ Twelfth Night (for which I did spend a whole afternoon digging around for my old copy, just to make sure it really was two sentences like I remembered). Together, those two details helped piece together Boys’ exploration of “boy” as a distinct subjectivity, in implicit subordination to “man” under patriarchy, being gendered through/as ambiguity in a way that I would later realize is very much mirroring the gender politics of Twelfth Night, in its text and staging both. The way I work with prose, I wouldn’t have gotten there without following the trail of images that “insist” on coming in/to the story.
You open the story with a poem by Burmese poet Aung Cheimt. How did Aung Cheimt’s poetry inspire this story?
The story came first and the “Hamburger Eater” epigraph came last, partially out of necessity to contextualize—and work meaning through—our narrator reading Cherry an Aung Cheimt poem that Cherry was not at all entertained by. If you’d let me take a bit of a detour to kind of touch on the meaning, I run in online circles where “yuri” and “yaoi”—oversimplistically speaking for brevity’s sake, Japanese terms for lesbian and gay literatures respectively—are casually used in discursive treatment of lesbian and gay subjectivities. I have been describing this story to my friends as an exercise in “yuraoi/yaouri convergence” as shorthand for the deliberate manufacturing of gender ambiguity that I’m playing around with in text; I think the interpretative expansiveness of “Hamburger Eater”, and its provocation and complication of the eaten and eater into a sameness/oneness, suggests the “yuraoi/yaouri” that is to come wonderfully. I’m glad the poem came to me as yet another story “detail”—much gratitude to Sayar Zeyar Lynn too, of course, for his translation and discussion of the poem in the Bones Will Crow foreword.
I love the ending and the image of butchering words and the idea of language’s inability to define or fully capture a moment, a feeling, a person. Can you share how you approach language and its limitations?
I think those limitations can be fun if you make them fun! I like to reframe the ambiguity they usually bring about not as a failure at a singularity of meaning, but rather a polysemous potentiality; there’s more room for play that way. And flash, much like poetry, gives us ample space for play with language and all that makes it and all that it makes.
