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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Hello and welcome to New Books Network. My name is Rachel Paif and I'm your host for New Books and Biography. Today I'm really excited to talk about reports and further reports by Brian Evenson. Brian Evanson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently Good Night, Sleep Tight. His novel Last Days won the American Literary Association's award for best horror novel of 2009. His novel the Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include the Wavering Knife, Dark Property, and Altman's Tongue. He's translated work by Christian Gailey, Jean Freeman, Clara Jacques Jouer. A list of names I'm Butchering Eric Cheviar, Antoine Volodyn, Manuela Drager, and David Beam. He's the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA Fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies program at CalArts. Today we're speaking about reports from 2018 and further reports from 2024, which are interrogations, relationships real and imagined with bygone chairs, vanished kitchen implements, Friends of yore, and the linguistic positioning that defines such interactions are subject to particular scrutiny. In turns, intimate and speculative, paranoid and expository, disparate and amalgamated, Evanson's observations and inquiries into the Nature of connection, description and signification will permit you too, to question the meanings that make your life welcome. Brian.
- [02:51]
Brian Evenson
Thank you, Rachel. Glad to be here.
- [02:54]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
So, you know, my first interview here on the Biography Channel was actually about a book about holes in which we treated the hole itself as the subject of a biography. And you mentioned to me that Reports and Further Reports are your most kind of explicitly autobiographical works. But I found the attention to objects and them really striking. I'm curious, what do you feel about the relationship between biography is attention to one life when maybe wavering a bit when you pay attention to chairs, lemon reamers, plates, beverages, painting, stairs, doors, mirrors?
- [03:31]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's a really interesting question. I mean, because I do think that people, when they tend to do a traditional biography, they really focus in on the details of someone's life in terms of the plot details as much as anything. And these two books are a series of very short, what I call reports. And sometimes they're a page, sometimes they're several pages, but none of them are all that long. And most of them do that. A lot of them anyway focus on objects. So there's one about chairs and then about all the kind of associations that the character in here, who's basically me, has with a particular chair having to do with, you know, how it was made and who was there and stuff like that. So it ends up being like a way of kind of coming at a sense of self slant wise as much as anything and figuring out a way to just think about the texture of a life more than the plot of a life. And for me, that's the more interesting thing. It's just thinking about, you know, what does one's life feel like? What's the texture of it, what it like to stand in the shower and not be able to tell something about a shampoo bottle, for instance.
- [04:52]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
I also noticed there's this note of inevitability about the object, such as in a report on sneakers, when the narrator gets these new shoes that he refuses to take off despite these rocks getting stuck in them, and kind of renounces himself to his fate. So I'm curious also, what extent do the objects kind of push back against the human interaction and have their own sort of life force?
- [05:14]
Brian Evenson
I mean, I do think they have their own sort of life force. And we do this all the time. It's like, I think of the number of cars I've had that have something tricky about opening them or starting them. And rather than going to the mechanic and getting it Fixed. It's usually just easier to just adapt your whole behavior so that you're really changing your way of interacting with the car rather than making the car be what it was supposed to be in the first place. And, yeah, for years, I had. Have. The house that we have right now has this front door handle in which it has a kind of screw that constantly falls out. And it's because of the way the metal works that you have to put the screw through. We can't put a bigger screw in. And so instead of like, all right, I could go and I could patch that door and I could start over and have something that holds together. But it's somehow easier for me like, every three days to, like, see that the screw's starting to come out and then kind of push it back in. And then, you know, and eventually it comes out all the way. And then I have to find it and then I put it back in. But it's like, you know, it's. It's that sort of thing where we, you know, modify our behavior rather than kind of dealing with what's there, I think is an interesting thing. And with the sneakers, it's partly. I'm just so cheap that I.
- [06:42]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Your mother, too, apparently.
- [06:43]
Brian Evenson
My mother's really cheap, too. Yeah, yeah, that's. That. That piece is about my mother also having sneakers that are kind of exactly the same as my sneakers. And both of us complaining about it. So it's genetic, I guess.
- [06:56]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
But, yeah, I think it also kind of goes into the topic of. That you explore a lot in the reports of how you can really describe anything, whether it's a subject or an object. And in that chair report, I liked one quote where you wrote, we never sit on the idea of a chair, but on particular chairs that are real and solid. Such particularities, which cannot be abstracted into chairness or othernesses, are the things with which we populate our lives. How do you also think that this tension between abstract and real, with the things, but also the narrator as kind of a character?
- [07:40]
Brian Evenson
I feel that. So I'm an academic. I was trained as an academic. I'm a writer as well. But I did a degree in critical theory. And so I kind of have this theoretical apparatus that I carry around with me a lot. And I think a lot of my kind of continued interaction in the world has been about that tension between what philosophy sometimes tells me about what the world. World is, and then my actual interaction with what the world is. And that thing about the chair is partly responding to people like Aristotle. This notion that you can have chairness, and that's somehow the perfect thing. But chairness is not something you can sit on. It's like chairness is something that's reflected in the actual object that you're sitting on. And it's often the particularities of the object that are more important than the chairness, I think. And so in that essay, it's so much about how those chairs were made, the people who were. The fact that they were made. When my ex girlfriend, now ex girlfriend, was kind of with me, and we were at someone's house, and it ended up being the person that she ended up with later. And so there's that on the one hand, and then there's also just, you know, how comfortable the chair is or how uncomfortable the chair is. It's like I have in my office here at CalArts, I have like four different chairs, and none of them are comfortable. But I cannot. I cannot get them to get me a chair that's actually comfortable. I mean, they're always like, oh, well, why don't you go look at these used chairs? And you can see this kind of like, you know, this equipment that's just kind of stuck away. Maybe there's a chair there that you would like. And so periodically I go and I sit on these chairs, alas. And then every once in a while, I think, oh, this chair is actually okay. I found a chair that works for me, and then I can sit on it for like two days and realize, no, this chair is just as bad as the other chairs are. So it's a weird. I don't know. I mean, I think that that thing of interacting with objects is. It's like. It's. It's always. You're interacting, acting with the particularity of the object. And at a certain point, it's like, this chair I'm sitting in right now is totally functional as a chair. But it's like I. The thing I notice more about it are all the ways in which it bugs me. So it's. Chairness is the thing that kind of is the. The ground for it. And then all that's particularity or is. Is the thing that. That, you know, I feel it in my back. I feel like, you know, should I. Should I raise this ar. One arm is stuck, the other arm's not stuck, that sort of thing. And that's kind of how we deal with the world, I think, as a whole. I mean, the way in which we move in the world is you interact not with the ideas of objects, but with objects themselves. And as you interact with objects themselves, they become particular. They become kind of characterized in a way that people are. I mean, they don't have the range of responses to you that people have, but they do still have an interaction with you, which I think can be significant and complicated in some ways.
- [11:01]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah. I found that it also really had an effect on the stability of the narrator. Like there's on Lemon Reamer. I mean, the Lemon Reamer and Report on the Report on the report on Lemon Reamers where the narrator admits that the original Lemon Reamer report. It was kind of an exaggeration. It was about three Lemon Reamers to discuss this interaction with his ex girlfriend.
- [11:29]
Brian Evenson
Right.
- [11:31]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
And yeah, I mean, it goes back into what you were just saying. But I think it's interesting. Like, on the one hand, it reflects on the process of self contradicts kind of the traditional biography's process of selfhood. But then it's also true to the experience of sharing one's memories over the years, how it changed throughout storytelling.
- [11:53]
Brian Evenson
Yeah. And I think that's something that is interesting to interrogate about biography in general. The way in which, I mean, it makes a claim for truth. One of the few differences between fiction and biography is biography kind of makes that claim for accuracy. And fiction is not as insistent about it. But at the same time, I mean, all the tools that you use in fiction, you use in nonfiction in terms of just rhetorical tools and things like that. So there is still this positioning that goes on. You arrange the story in particular ways. You arrange the biography in particular ways. You do things that position the reader in a way that they will accept the story as you're telling it. And so there is something that's artificial to begin with there. And so those two stories, which are probably my favorite pieces, I call them stories, but they're basically nonfiction. The Lemon Reader, Report on a Lemon Reamer and Report on a Report on Lemon Reader. They end up, first of all, kind of talking about something and kind of making a statement about it. And then the second one goes through and shows everything that was. Was kind of manufactured or emphasized. But the argument, I think, in that second piece is even though it's emphasized, it's still more accurate to how the situation felt. And that's where it gets really tricky, I think, with biography in general, especially with autobiography, is, you know, how are you tr. Not only to what factually happened, but also to the. To the feel of a particular situation.
- [13:36]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah. Because it's this feeling like of aggrievement. Like.
- [13:41]
Brian Evenson
Yeah.
- [13:42]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
I forget what actually the lie was. The lie was that there were.
- [13:45]
Brian Evenson
There were more lemon reamers. And so. So the. The first one is about how when my ex girlfriend and I broke up, she took all the lemon reamers in the.
- [13:55]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah. And then you were using. You were just squeezing it on the back of like, Right.
- [14:00]
Brian Evenson
On a wooden sp. And that's the other light. Yeah. Too, is. Yeah. The claim that I used a wooden spoon as a way of squeezing lemons once. I didn't have any lemon reamers, but of course I didn't do that. I just squeezed them with my hands. But it's like, it sounds. I don't know, I mean, it's that.
- [14:16]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
You needed a tool and the tool wasn't there.
- [14:18]
Brian Evenson
Right. Exactly. Yeah. It's like. It's less convincing if you say, oh, I really needed these lemon reamers, but, you know, I had my hands the whole time. It was fine. As opposed to, you know, thinking about the fact that if you have to kind of have a substitute that's a tool, then it just feels different. But it's also like. I mean, the thing that, for me was interesting about writing those two pieces too, is that it kind of started as a fun thing where I was just like, I'll write about these lemon reamers that I lost. We had two lemon reamers. And that she took both of them. And then it became three as I was writing it. And then it was only kind of. As I was finishing that and writing the second piece that I realized, you know, I haven't really thought about this in any significant way for years. And now that I've written this, it's like every time I see a lemon, I think about it. And that was interesting, the way in which just the inscription of an event or an inscription of a subject ends up kind of changing your relationship to the. To. To it and to. To objects in general.
- [15:31]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah, it happens a lot in reports, too. I mean, actually, it goes well. On to the next question I wanted to ask, because I think a lot of the reports also deal with past selves, younger selves, or selves that are no longer understood by the present self. And I was thinking about this in a report on forbidden beverages, where you reflect on which. Another one I liked. But you're reflecting on before you drank beverages or before you drink alcohol and coffee, like when you were within the Mormon Church and then after leaving. And then first you were a wine drinker and then a beer drinker. And you write, most of these selves are fractionally different from the person they elbowed out, but sometimes there's a decided break. So how do you see these reports as like a container for all these different selves in which they're not really merged, but are kind of discordantly, I.
- [16:24]
Brian Evenson
Guess that it is almost like taking an accounting of who one is and who one has been that these pieces are about. And there is something about this funny thing of, like, we like to think of ourselves as continuous, as beings for the most part, because we're occupying roughly the same body for the most of your life, even if that body changes and develops, even though sometimes, you know, you can feel betrayed by your body in terms of what it does to you. So on the one hand, we have that kind of commonality of having a place in the world that we occupy. On the other hand, it's like sometimes we just. Over time, we change so much. It's really hard to know how to kind of make sense of those connections or, you know, and almost at a certain point, it's like when I look back at the self, I'm. People probably don't know this. I'm an excommunicated Mormon. And so I grew up in the Mormon Church. I run into. Ran into trouble with them over my writing when I was working on my first book, and then I actually ended up leaving because of all the objections to that book. And so I went from this culture, which is very totalizing in terms of. It's like your whole life is kind of around things that are Mormon. You go to church not only on Sundays, but you have events you do during the week as well, to someone who's kind of outside of that structure. And so when I look back at that earlier self, it's like I can understand the connections that I have to that person, but it's almost more like a friend than it is like me in some ways. And there are things that are baffling about what I thought or believed. And one of the things that happens, I think over time, as you try to kind of integrate the sense of who you are, you begin to repurpose those memories. And you think, oh, you know, I wasn't. You know, I. I was in Mormonism, but I. I wasn't really that involved in it. And things like that, which in some ways was true, but in other ways is not. And. And, you know, trying to figure out, you know, how. How do. How do I kind of feel like I'm an integrated person, so. But, yeah, there's definitive breaks at different points. And, and the, the reason I did that forbidden beverages piece sometimes seems to be a reason for it and other times it's just super random. It's just things change. So.
- [18:56]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah, I think there's also this interesting element of selves that are trapped in a way. Like a report on ghosts I found interesting. You reflect I had never heard of this, this Mormon sealing ceremony which the selves are reflected in all of these mirrors that look like they're extending. Extended forever quite a distance. Yeah. And you, you write further report says my own ghosts are rather the ghosts of myself and my ex wife still remain trapped like insects and amber.
- [19:28]
Brian Evenson
Yeah. Yeah.
- [19:29]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
So yeah. How do you think this failure to reach the selves or these trapped selves that are kind of become eerie presences and are haunting there?
- [19:38]
Brian Evenson
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean I, I do think there is something very haunting about it. I think that's, that's, that's part of it is it's like. And for most of us kind of repress a lot of that. And I probably repressed still a lot of it too. But it's like there are these moments when you really come into an awareness of. I've lived like about three or four different lives and that's at once really strange, but it's also really exciting in some ways. The fact that you can kind of keep on escaping the life that you lived before. So if you're not careful, you get kind of addicted to that. I had this thing where every four years I was moving because I was doing academic jobs. And so it was just for whatever reason, like the first three academic jobs I had, I would move after four years. And so the first time I was like, I got to the four year mark and I looked like I was going to say it the job, I began to panic because it was just like, it just didn't fit my pattern. And so it was like, it was very strange. And in fact I applied for a job not because I was unhappy, but because this is what you do every four years and got the job and almost left. Came very close to leaving but ended up staying. So yeah, I mean, these patterns that we have, I mean, I feel like a life is made up of patterns and ruptures and, you know, variations and where it gets really hard I think, is everybody around you has a different set of patterns and ruptures and variations. And so people that you can be very close to maybe start to go on different paths than you and then you end up not Only kind of alienated from your past selves, but also thinking, who is this person that is my roommate or who's this person who's my partner or whatever, or who is this friend that I feel like I should know, but just seems really strange to me. So. Yeah, and I think what happens is that you have that sense of this past self being trapped in Amber is something that is partly what happens from your memories and other people's memories of you. And so it's. It's the number of times people ask you to be the self that they thought you, You. You used to be. Is. Is. You know, it can be a lot. Every time I go home to see my parents, they start talking about how I'm the black sheep. Because when I was a kid, when I was 18, I was the black sheep. I was like, I wouldn't come home at, at curfew time. I got grounded more than every. I'm. I'm the oldest of five and I got grounded more than all my brothers and sister and, you know, and I did all sorts of things that kids sometimes do. But. So they have it in their head that I'm the black sheep and I'm the difficult one. And, you know, in the intervening like 35 years, I've like, you know, I've gotten a PhD, I've gone off to. I've taught at multiple colleges, I've been a chair of a department. But it's like, it's so hard for them not to immediately say, this is what you are and try to make you fill that role again.
- [23:04]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Especially for parents.
- [23:06]
Brian Evenson
I think for parents, it's definitely hard. I mean, some parents, it's funny, some are very good about not doing that. And there are ways in which my parents are good about that. I mean, they do acknowledge me, but then somehow it's like that's the knee jerk response. It's like they can talk about, oh, you have this book come out and then it's like five minutes later. I was like, be careful about Brian. He's the black sheep. And it's really strange. So that's the other thing. I mean, I think about these ruptures of the self and this continuity or lack thereof. It's like there's so many people who want to remind you of who they think you are or who they think you were. And that's something that I feel like the reports are fascinated by. It's like partly because it's like you internalize a lot of that stuff. If someone kind of talks to you and, you know, says something about what, you know, this past self of you. It's. It's like, it's hard not to kind of, like, think through that or kind of churn it over a little bit. So I've had so many times when students, former students have come up to me and said, oh, you know, I had a great time in your class. And this is like, I haven't seen them for, like, 10 years. And they'll say, and, you know, that thing that you said was really important to me. And I was like, what thing? And they'll say it, and I'll be like, you know, I'll say, thank you. But the thing I'm thinking in my head is, there's no way I ever said that. And, you know, and. And somehow this has been something useful for them, but it's, like, completely opposed to how I think about writing sometimes.
- [24:39]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Oh, really?
- [24:40]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, yeah. Every once in a while. It's just. It's really strange. So. And you just, you know, politely thank them, and then you end up in this. This thing where you think about, all right, did my past self say this? How did that happen? How did they misinterpret it if they. If I didn'? It? And, you know, you end up going through a kind of inventory almost of who you are.
- [25:01]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah. I mean, the reports also, I mean, this, I think, is a big thread in your work, but it deals like limits of language, languages and translation. Yeah, I would say I feel like especially French in these reports, but it's often not outright said. You have the report. I liked a report on being in an imaginary country where you're contrasting. It is about these selves in a way, because you have on the. What you. Or for the narrator, the hominess of French literature, art and food. And then the too smallness of French chairs, doors, I think, and, like, facial configurations, which I found really interesting. And then you have a report on French doors where this is taken to the level of, like, embodiment, or the reader's hand forgets the difference between. Yeah, yeah, from the US And French doors. So is, how do you feel like this becomes a embodied kind of thing or a sensation?
- [26:03]
Brian Evenson
Well, I mean, it is. I think it happens more than we think about that. It becomes embodied. But I think we've really trained ourselves not to pay attention to it. Or you very quickly dismiss it. You're like, oh, I reached for where I thought the door handle was, and it wasn't there. It's, oh, yeah, it's a French door. And Then you just kind of forget about it. But I don't know. I'm fascinated by that stuff. And you're right. It's like kind of. My interest in translation is very much tied to embodiment as well. And thinking about how that works, I'd forgotten. It's like. Apparently I talk about chairs a lot in these stories.
- [26:43]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah, this one, I mean, it was fascinating to me because I think about it a lot with German. Like, I don't. It's not a spatial feeling, but definitely that you feel different in different languages. I think I felt that in this story that some emotions are more easily expressed or feel bigger in some way.
- [27:05]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, yeah, It's. It's. Yeah, I mean, it definitely is the case. I. I'm fluent in French. My German is not nearly as good, but. But it. It is. There is something about you. You hold yourself differently. You express things differently, partly because you have a different set of vocabulary to use as you're expressing things. And that, on the one hand, that's an act of translation. On the other hand, you're just. You're different, you know? And so I really do feel I'm going to France in about a week. And the thing that I always feel, especially if I'm there and mostly speaking French, is that I do start to become someone different. And I like that person quite a bit. But at the same time. Yeah, it's just. It's a very weird thing that. It's like there's this French person, not really French. It's like a person who speaks French inside of me who's just waiting there and ready to come out when it's time.
- [28:09]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
But who's obliged if you have to open a door? Like, then attention presents itself.
- [28:14]
Brian Evenson
Yeah. And that's the interesting thing is it's like, on the one hand, I'm very lucid in terms of, like, things French, but then it's like there's all these reminders that I like physically. And it is like, it is about embodiment, I think, as much as anything physically. It's like there's things that I don't have the same familiarity with. And so the way in which French doors work, for instance, where there's often the central knob and then you don't turn the knob, it's just there. It's something you hold onto and you just open the door with your key every time. Time is so different from American doors. I can't think of an American door that works that way. But it is like that thing of reaching for the knob at the side of the door, as opposed to the metal, is something that mostly I don't do it. I only do it if I'm distracted or thinking about something else or if I'm not feeling as French as I might feel, I suppose. But you do still have it. And those moments of. Of reminders are really interesting, I think. Yeah. So unless it's like the chair. I mean, the chairs and cafes in France are just small. And so it's just painful for someone who's as big as I am. Even though I love cafe culture in France, there's things that are great about it. But unless I'm like, in northern France, northeastern France, it's like everything's a little. Feels just a little bit tight for me.
- [29:40]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
I think I found it so fascinating, these kind of bodily modifications in these reports. It reminded me, in a way, of how amputation is a theme in your fictions, like phantom limb or amputation themes. But there was one report on a diet that was really disconcerting but interesting, where the narrator loses a lot of weight after this diet, but then has the sensation of having bees beneath his skin by Gary. And he can't describe it. He can't describe it. And there's also a note of fear there. So I feel like I'm curious how this fear, but also promise of embodiment works.
- [30:26]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's interesting. Some of my work anyway, and some of my most best known work has this kind of amputation thing running through it. And the amputation is often tied to religion in some way. And I do think that is pretty directly connected to some of these other things. We're talking about the idea that you have to give up part of yourself to be within a religion or leave a religion or things like that. And that story, the report on a Diet, it's like when my wife and I were first kind of together, she loved to do this thing where we would do these weird. There was one particular weird diet that we would do, and it was weight would just, like, magically fall off you. But then also you would feel insane as time went on, and you'd feel crazier and crazier. And so eventually, I mean, it's been a number of years since we've done it because it's like, on the one hand, it's like, oh, it's great to be able to lose weight so fast. On the other hand, it's like it did sometimes feel like there was something going on beneath your skin, which is not really something you want to experience. So. So. But, yeah, I mean, I. I think that so much of my other work, you know, I'm someone who has a foot in literature and horror and a lot of my other work, but. But a lot of the work is really about embodiment and about what it means to be in. In a particular body, in a particular space. And the thing that you were talking about, which I'd never thought about before, about, like, the kind of attention to objects, you know, that's something I just naturally do. And it's something that is all through my literary work as well, just this kind of, like, careful attention to just the details of things. And I think it's. I don't know where that comes from exactly, but I do think it has to do as well with embodiment and the idea that the objects that surround us are the things that kind of help us to understand who we are or keep us from understanding who we are.
- [32:37]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah. Or sometimes there's, like, a blurring almost between the object of the box and the object. Object. I mean, I was thinking. We spoke. Had a conversation before about how you first started writing the reports, which you said you had this very serious illness.
- [32:53]
Brian Evenson
I did, yeah.
- [32:54]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
And then you started writing, and you allude to it in a report on painting and a report on Briggs. So if you feel comfortable sharing, how was this experience connected to this particular form? Was there something about that that led to the.
- [33:09]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, yeah, I can definitely talk about that. So I had been in Portugal at a writing conference, and as I was there, I started feeling sick. And I thought, oh, it's just. It's a flu or it's a cold or something. And, you know, it's not always easy to go to a doctor in a country where you don't speak the language. And so I was like, I'll probably be okay. Just kind of held on. And then by the time when I was ready to go home, I realized I was really sick. And I talk about this. I have a little book which is called Raymond Carver's what We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which is a lot of. It's on Carver and his work. But the first part of it kind of talks in some detail about this experience. But by the time I got to the airport, I knew I was really sick. And then we had a layover somewhere. And during the layover, I was. I could not. I. I was kind of almost out of my body in terms of not being aware of things and. And. And so on and so forth. So when I finally got home, I realized, you know, something was really wrong. Went in to see the, the, the, the doctor and they took tests and they sent me home. And then not long after that, I started feeling so sick that I ended up going to the hospital and turned out I had a full body infection, which was due to. I'd had my appendix removed maybe six or seven months earlier, maybe even a little longer than that. And when they took the appendix out, they'd accidentally left some infected tissue in my body. And weirdly, like this infected tissue, which was not really connected to anything, kind of wormed its way around and floated around and then attached itself to the bottom of my lung and made that swell and it made it kind of rub. And so it filled my lung with fluid and it kind of went from there. And so first they tried to drain the fluid from my lungs. I don't know how specific if I'm grossing it out, just, yeah, they tried to drain the fluid from my lungs. And so it was super weird to watch them fill up these bottles with this fluid from inside of me. And during that process, I blacked out and kind of woke up hours later with. Surrounded by these nurses who kind of looked a little bit worried and slowly moved away once they realized I was coherent again. And so I ended up this huge infection. Eventually they had to kind of put a permanent tube into the side of my ribs until the infection was completely healed. But I was in the hospital for 22 days and it, you know, lost, I think, around 20% of my body weight. So it was a, you know, a good diet, but not a good diet. No. And, and, and then kind of as that was going on, it was very clear to me that my girlfriend at the time was also like withdrawing, that she. This was too much for her. And, and, you know, know, so on and so forth. So, so when I finally was out of the hospital, it became clear she wanted to break up. And, and so that stuff was all kind of gathered together in a way that was intense and weird and, and it, it kind of, I think it put me in a space that was different and more vulnerable, but it want to try to find some things to hold on to. And I think a lot of the reports once I started writing them were tied to that. It's like, how can I think about this small thing or how can I kind of undo it? So I don't remember which was the first report.
- [37:10]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
This game, I have it. It's Chairs.
- [37:13]
Brian Evenson
Chairs is the first report. I'm not sure if that was the one that I wrote first. Or not. It may have been.
- [37:21]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah. It's about the ex girlfriend and their friend Jay.
- [37:25]
Brian Evenson
Jay and Jay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that might have been the first one I wrote. And then as I wrote those, I mean, I started to enjoy, like, the different possibilities that they could lead to. So some are very object focused. Some, as you mentioned, have to do with translation. But I feel like there's all these. I think the embodiment issue, something that kind of ties them all together. And I do think it was that situation and being in a very different kind of physical state than I'd been in and also feeling somewhat bereft in terms of just personal life that made it possible for me to write them. And in fact, the second book, weirdly, most of those pieces were written during the pandemic.
- [38:14]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
I was gonna ask because I. It. I didn't know how to formulate it, but it somehow felt like that was a catalyst. Like, you have some reports on, like, the zoom squares of seeing people.
- [38:24]
Brian Evenson
Right.
- [38:24]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Kind of inside.
- [38:26]
Brian Evenson
Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. And so. So. And I. So I think that was something else. It was like you. You go from having a relationship, physical relationship with the people around you to having no physical relationship. And the In. In the pandemic, where you're isolated from people, where you're often masking. And so it. It really, again, it's just like it's this kind of shift in embodiment that. That made me think, all right, I want to. Want to do these things. And as I started to do them, you know, certain kinds of things would come up. So one. One piece would lead to another piece and so on and so forth.
- [39:07]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah, yeah. There was an interview you did a long time, I think 2016, for between the Covers, where you talk about. I mean, it just stuck with me because I thought it's a really interesting experiment where you talk about how often your writing is these kind of, like. It features these small experiments and miss seeing. Like, you talk about this experience of watching, like, what seemed like a creature in a parking lot. Then you find out it's a blowing leaf.
- [39:34]
Brian Evenson
Yeah.
- [39:34]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
And I was curious. It feels somehow like it also intertwines with these different kind of experiences of being bereft or miss seeing things because you're in different situations. But I'm curious how mis. Seeing also factors into this.
- [39:50]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, I mean, I think misperception and misceeing is something that does well all through my work. I mean, I feel like that kind of notion, that reality Is off or skew, and you're not quite getting it. It's something that just comes up again and again for. And I think here, I mean, you can see, like, that report on chairs. I mean, I think one thing that that report is about is it's like the chairs that I have in the house are being made by the person who was my girlfriend at the time and the person who she would end up dating after me. Part of it is.
- [40:32]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah, he signed.
- [40:33]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, and he signed it. And so I have the signature on the chair, which is weird.
- [40:38]
Marshall Po
Yeah.
- [40:39]
Brian Evenson
Or I signed it. Sorry. Yeah, it's their. Their chairs. I think it was his chairs. I'm sorry, I'm getting confused. And. Yeah, you know these. These pieces better than I do at this point. But. But, yeah, so. So I think part of that is it's like you revisit this situation, which at the time seemed very, very benign, and you try to understand what. What should I have seen? What was actually going on there? What does it mean? And it's not answerable. You're never going to know what you should have seen or if there's anything to see at all. But at the same time, kind of going back to these situations and reexamining them and also fictionalizing them to some degree. That story's not fictionalized so much, but some of the others are. Ends up kind of putting you in a different relation to them.
- [41:34]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah, with the fictionalization, I thought it was funny. Some of them are very paranoid, like they are, as expected of being a spy. The snack story, where the narrator is really suspicious of this kind of greasy snack that seems to be bought from the bakery down the street, but he's never not there before or is like being followed. And I was curious about what was so appealing about this paranoia, because there are many. This, like, suspicious quality.
- [42:01]
Brian Evenson
Right. I mean, it's weird because it's kind of funny paranoia the way that it works in those stories. And usually I have a lot of paranoia in my work, but usually it's not funny. So it was kind of a fun game to play. I had. The one about the snack is about someone who was a French scholar of American studies who had come to interview me, and she did one day bring a snack, but it was totally a normal snack. But we had a funny little exchange about it. And that kind of just stuck with me. And I thought, oh, I could play with this and see what happens. And that in a way, it's like a piece like that is me thinking, all right, I had this Moment where I needed to write these reports and they're doing something for me in terms of helping me understand my life in a different way or helping to ground me in a different way. But then there's also moments like that are like gestures where I'm starting to go back to the fiction that I'm normally doing.
- [43:05]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Yeah, you're expected of being a spy in one of the reports. You're appealing.
- [43:12]
Brian Evenson
Right, right, right. And that one is like. I mean, I did have. When I was at Brown, teaching at Brown, there was a graduate student there who became obsessed with the idea that I was a spy. And he. Yeah, it was. It was very strange. And I heard this. I started hearing it from other people, not from him. And it turned out that, like, every time he. Drunk at a party, he would talk about this and he'd be like, he had his. His series of proofs that I was a spy. And one was, oh, speaks multiple languages, you know, and has lived abroad a fair amount. And all these things that he kind of gone through. And I'm. I'm not a spy, in case you're. You're wondering. But of course, if I was a spy, I would say that, yeah, one.
- [43:52]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Of the pieces of evidence was that you would seem to not be the person who would be a spy and that.
- [43:57]
Brian Evenson
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so. And he did that. And then finally, you know, we got to know each other a little better. And he kind of talked about that in front of me. And then I think just the act of talking about it made him feel like, oh, he's probably not a spy after all. So it kind of stopped. But for almost a year, it kind of went on that way. And so when I wrote that story, I sent it to him just because I thought he was. Would appreciate it. And he did. But, yeah, there's moments that are very obviously fictionalized with that, but also moments that are very grounded in reality, too.
- [44:37]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Well, not to put you on the spot, but if you had to write a report about today, what do you think you would focus on?
- [44:46]
Brian Evenson
About our interaction or. About.
- [44:47]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
It could be anything.
- [44:49]
Brian Evenson
Yeah, well, so that's a really good question. I mean, it's like the thing. Obviously, politics are looming really hard for me. It's hard for me to know how to do a report about politics because that's such a big thing as opposed to kind of something that's like very small and specific. I don't know. I mean, I just took my. My son Max is. He goes to a French immersion school. He did this Thing where he taught himself French. And then we kind of felt like, oh, we probably should support that. And then we found an immersion school, and they were happy to have him. But it also means that every day I have to drive them to Burbank, which is about. It can be as short as 30 minutes, but it's sometimes an hour if there's traffic. And so often as I'm driving, I'm just letting my mind wander and thinking about things. And today, the thing that I saw is on the way back, the freeway was blocked off in two different places. And so there's a moment where I'm going kind of back the other direction. I'm like, oh, I should have waited a little later to go, because the freeway's totally empty here. And then you come to the place where there's a series of police cars and a bunch of people like. Like 3 or 4 miles of traffic backed up behind it. And then that went on for a while, and then there was another blank space, and then there was another set of police cars and more traffic. And so I think that the thing that I started, you know, you start wondering about what's going on, what the situation is. You start thinking about the drive. I start thinking about, you know, the fact that Max, you know, is going to the school and that I'm going to be. My wife and I are kind of going to have to take turns till basically the end of time, like, driving him there and back. And maybe there's something that's there. I don't know. So that, on the one hand, I mean, in terms of thinking about you and I. I mean, I think that, you know, as you mentioned, I do have a piece that's about zooming with a kind of Marxist discussion group with people around the world. And so, I mean, I think that. That there's something here in terms of, like, you're zooming from Berlin. I was in Berlin till recently, and so I think about it all the time. And weirdly, it's like, since I have been in Berlin, every book that I pick up to read seems to have a reference to Berlin in it. And I don't know if it just has always been there, that there's a lot of books that talk about Berlin, at least in passing, but. But I suspect not. I think there's probably something subconscious going on, so those sorts of things eventually might come together into something if I wanted to do it. But, yeah, even, like the new Pynchon novel, it's like I hit the section that there's A bit of it in Berlin, and I wasn't expecting it. Or I read an Ian McEwen novel, which also, like a ton of it, is set in Berlin. Not the one that just came out, but the one right before that. That lessons. I think that would be it as much as anything. I mean, there's something about one's relation to place and one's longing for places that once been and almost continuing to exist, at least partly in those places, even though you're out of them. That would be interesting for me to explore and which I think kind of extend from some of the stuff in further reports anyway. But I don't know. I don't know where I'll go with that. We'll see. Yeah. What usually happens, it's like that'll circulate for a while and then it'll become insistent. And if it does, I'll write it up.
- [48:47]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Well, thank you. Thank you for today.
- [48:49]
Brian Evenson
You're welcome. Thank you.
- [48:50]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
The last question we usually ask is just, are you working on anything interesting or just anything in the moment that you feel like sharing?
- [49:00]
Brian Evenson
I was working on a novel when I was in Berlin, and that's only kind of about halfway done, so there's a lot more to do with it. But also in Berlin, when I was doing that, I started writing kind of a possession novel, but kind of like absurd, strange and very funny, which I do think. Obviously, possession ties pretty closely to embodiment. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's something I'm excited about. I'm not sure where it's going to go exactly, but we'll see. Yeah.
- [49:34]
Interviewer (possibly Rachel Paif)
Cool. Thank you so much for today.
- [49:37]
Brian Evenson
Thank you. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.