"Fearless, In-tandem"
Featuring prohibition, not protection; combustion, not consumption; anonymity, not inheritance; intuition, not observation; and T-Pain
/ Now at AC: 2 Prose Works by Minseo Kang
Switch
Back then, passing your house, flinging ourselves off our scooters with a sort of patented viciousness that you’d come up with in the living room after seeing too many videos of siege catapults. Fearless, in-tandem: crash, bam, pow!! And the stubble of the concrete rubs my leg. The feeling of it was unfamiliar, but it was prohibition, not protection, that had kept me off the ground thus far, as you’d held a blanket ban on injuries until that afternoon rolled around. We had it all figured out, see. Twin scrapes on our knees to tide us over for a few years, and then on your seventeenth birthday we will fall upon the same sidewalk with the same eleventh-hour vehemence and come strutting out the other side in blues and reds, roguish smiles on our powder faces. There’s two of everything, isn’t there? There’s two things you can’t ever forgive me for, and one is that I wasn’t there at the start of things. If I could have a wish, you said, I would say, To have been with you inside your mother, and I said, Why always your mother? I wasn’t listening, was I. If you’d been there at the start of things, and I hadn’t done the other thing you’ve never forgiven me for, which is that I lost my first tooth before you and so you had to take a stapler to your jaw instead of having ice cream that same afternoon, we wouldn’t have to be so stingy with the details. You said we could have been the same with no effort, no effort at all. I scooped up my skin from the bearded concrete and went to work peeling at the other parts. They will be matching glow-in-the-dark starbursts on your floor. You observed for a while, as you always do; then you marched us downriver, where I have been holding my head under the water, waiting for you to say the word.
Read “Switch” and “Int. Secret Government Disinfection Facility – Day,” now at Always Crashing.
/ Introducing! New AC Editor Meghan Lamb
I’ve been an admirer of Meghan’s work for many years now, ever since we were both neophyte writers in Chicago, half-stumbling half-bouncing through the city, crashing into things. I was blown away early on by her story “GIRL,” published in the sadly now-lost online journal > kill author (domain currently on offer for $2995, if anyone’s interested in resurrecting it), and her short novel/pamphlet Sacramento. She’s published a wealth of strange, terrifying, and beautiful work in the years since, most recently the collection Mirror Translation from horror publisher Blamage Books. We featured her novella All Your Most Private Places in full in our first print issue. When I mentioned we were looking to expand our editorial team and she said she was interested, it was like: Oh yeah. That is so obviously a good idea.
In short, we’re thrilled.
Here’s Meghan in conversation with AC managing editor Tadd Adcox:
What are you looking for in a story or a poem?
I’m always looking for something that defamiliarizes or—even better—disturbs my expectations of what something “normally” is, whether that means, “descriptive details that compel me to perceive an environment/object in new ways,” or, “explosions of form that challenge ideas about the reading experience/the division between reader and writer,” or, “surprising inversions/amalgams of genre,” or, “language that expands my sense of what’s possible in a piece of writing.” I’d much rather read a daring, weird, risk-taking piece that maybe doesn’t come together (maybe resists the very idea of “coming together”) than a piece that makes all the anticipated “right” moves (whatever that means).
But beyond that, I’m looking for some sense that the author really cares about the work, that there are personal stakes—that there’s some kind of personal search—within the work’s experimental gestures.
How do you see your work as an editor intersecting or otherwise interacting with your work as a writer?
This is a really big question for me, as someone who does so many different kinds of editing, between editing for several publications with wide-ranging aesthetics (Bridge, Nat. Brut, Lover’s Eye, North Central College’s 30 North literary magazine), navigating different goals and audiences (independent magazines versus college-affiliated), and working with magazines versus working with students (on projects in different stages of the process).
While my relationship with this question is always evolving, I can attest that my editorial work (in my various editorial capacities) makes me more aware of my own writing process(es), and what the different stages/elements of the writing process(es) mean to me. I see a lot of pieces that have potential, but don’t feel “finished” yet, and engaging with the question of “why this feels unfinished” helps me recognize what feels “unfinished” in my own work (and what that means for/within the context of my own work).
We were talking earlier about certain trends or common moves in contemporary experimental writing, at least as they revealed themselves in our submissions. What are your thoughts on how contemporary writing might avoid or perhaps successfully negotiate with claims of gimmickness, and how might an experimental or formally aware work succeed beyond simple novelty?
The writer needs to mean it.
If they don’t mean it, I can tell.
Who do you read, outside of your editorial work? Who do you see as expanding the world of writing in interesting ways these days, and why or how?
So much of my “outside” reading is necessarily connected to classes I design, so—to the best of my ability—I try to design classes that intersect with my personal interests and investigations: Unlikeable Characters, The Walking Narrative, Writing the Dream World, Alternative Points of View, True Crime Fiction, to name a few.
Recently, I’ve been into nonfiction or autofiction (contentious as that designation can be) that’s invested in hybridity, in challenging its formal container, perhaps even revealing (or pulling up) the seams of its own construction. Writing that reveals its own limitations, perhaps, or even revels in its own becoming (and the explorations of what it can and cannot become). I love how Olga Ravn blends different modalities in My Work. I love how Annie Ernaux troubles the boundaries between personal experience, family legacy, and world-at-large history in The Years. I love how Renee Gladman deconstructs the writing of a book we never actually get to see in-full with TOAF. I love writers like Sophie Calle who approach writing as performance, and writers like Claudia Rankine who approach writing as field work. I love writers who examine the darker and stranger sides of sexual experience, like Camille Roy, Lynne Tillman, and (duh) Dennis Cooper. I love writers who develop a kind of personal through-thread between moments and fragments, like the way Nate Lippens investigates queer aging in My Dead Book. I love how much Gary Indiana delights in engaging with the artifice of the true crime genre (while infusing it with so much wicked humor and so much—I’m not afraid to say it—heart). I love Hervé Guibert, poor bastard. I love bastards. I can’t help it; I love reading about bad people who know they’re bad people and write about being bad people and compel us to consider what it means to be a bad person, perhaps because I live in a constant state of anxiety about being a bad person.
I wouldn’t necessarily say any of these writers are my abiding/eternal influences so much as, “figures who have appeared in the conversation between classes I’ve taught” or just, “a few of my recent-ish guys.”
In terms of “expansion”: I’m really interested in writers who are working with musicians (and/or who are also musicians, or even musicians first and foremost), like Nat Baldwin (I’m biased because Bridge Books is publishing his next project, Antithesis), Camae Ayewa (of Moor Mother), Thomas Boettner (of Straight Panic), and the collaborative relationship between Michael Berdan (of Uniform) and writers like B.R. Yeager and Maggie Seibert. I’m interested in anyone who’s curating an experience rather than creating a consumable/finished product, and music is an interesting way to elevate a piece of writing (beyond a consumable/finished product).
You're a musician as well as a writer, and have composed musical pieces based on your writing. Can you talk about how you see these genres fruitfully intersecting?
“Composed” is way too lofty a word for my weird, mostly intuitive process, haha. The relationship between my writing and my music is not composed, and I guess that’s part of the point. Music gives me a way of relating to my writing that often feels more intuitive, less overwhelmingly cerebral. Less planned. More fortuitous. That’s also because I have no idea what I’m doing (and part of the reason why I don’t really want to know what I’m doing).
My most recent writing/music intersection was a “noise album” Robert Kloss and I made together for my book Mirror Translation. Robert would create rough tracks of music/sounds, then send them to me to do whatever I wanted. I’d chop them up/rearrange them/add effects to them according to some inarticulable sense of “what felt right.” I’d add my own voice with lines taken directly from the stories in Mirror Translation (usually just flipping through pages and letting my eye land on things here and there that felt like interesting lyrics). I’d vocalize in a kind of intuitive conversation with the chopped up sounds. I don’t think Robert and I ever discussed anything we did with that album; the “conversation” (such as it was) occurred entirely via the process of “doing stuff.”
I think that’s the most fruitful kind of intersection between one art form and another: One that feels like “doing stuff” rather than passive observation or dispassionate analysis. An embodied experience. A living thing. Something that makes the reader/viewer/listener a participant.
/ A Call for Submissions; Or, What, If You Had to Define the Territory, Would Be the Territory?
Always Crashing is currently open for submissions.
If you’re a subscriber to our newsletter and you’re read this far, I feel like maybe you have a general idea of like, our vibe? Our thing? Our aesthetic? The sort of territory in which we exist (and which, for the record, can always be expanded or unsettled by the right work)? But if not, or if you’d like a reminder, or maybe a few good things to read, here—five pieces pulled semi at random from our archive, in the hopes of giving a representative sample of what we’ve been up to all these years:
Jennifer Lynn Christie, “Inside the Cave”:
In the hills of this unnamed paradise (anonymous to protect our identities), every family’s child lived off an undead inheritance, until the walls around her caved in.
This was me.
School wasn’t going well. I was too smart. You could put in me a quantum mechanics class, but I’d already dreamt up all the answers in my sleep as a teen. In dreams, everything between all the realms and force fields and dimensions slicked out to a precise point on my forehead, God’s drishti, the micro to God’s macro, the place God looked to keep from falling over. So, science and art, and all that, it wasn’t working out for me, because I already knew what the professors were going to say before they said it. Everyone around me was learning, and I was bored. I was deemed a full-blown distraction by teachers and pupils alike. I would start mouthing the very words that were coming out of the lecturer’s mouth, and then I’d be saying it out loud, too, in tandem:
“…in the microworld, there are neither waves, nor particles, or so far as we know—there is only phenomena. If you think of phenomena in relation to the measurement of their contexts, we can predict wavelike distributions. But this is in appearance only. Certain apparatuses will bring wavelike affects, but others will appear particlelike. Nothing is intrinsic in the microworld, from mechanics to chromodynamics. Nothing is indistinguishable.”
That kind of thing.
Nate Hoil, “Decoding the Code”:
Everything is stupid
when you’re as fucking smart as me!
I’m wearing a hat, but the hat is too small.
Sam Glover, “Ten Possessed People Caught on Tape”:
05.
There had always been inkling in her mind that she wasn’t observable by others. Before solidifying as a fixed idea she had made a compromise with her intuition, speculating perhaps that only 25% percent of herself was unobservable by the various people around her at any one time, both those known and unknown to her. But that unobservable portion steadily increased to thirty percent, fifty percent, seventy-five, until the current predicament in which 100% of her being is unobservable by any one. Only the other night she had spent hours in the company of long-term friends that were totally unaware of her presence. Initially, this had not been an entirely unpleasant situation. It only became dire when she began realizing that she was not just unobservable, but that they – her friends – and everyone else – were well aware of that fact she couldn’t be observed, were aware of the fact they were totally unaware of her, and they were unaware of any way of observing her again. This knowledge precipitates a falling sensation, a diminishing awareness – two wet fingers applied to a candlewick – that darkened things further. Now she was not just unobservable by others, but unobservable by herself, who was now and perhaps always had been totally other.
