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Rob GoyanesIn his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher pointed out that the standard translation of Freud’s unheimlich is a bit off. Instead of “uncanny,” Fisher wrote that “unhomely” is better. I think this resonates strongly with your stories. Homes often feature as settings, or perhaps we can say “unhomes.” Why is this?
Brian Evenson I don’t know why this is. I had a pretty good home life growing up. It may be that the stability let me think about the alternative in real ways. I grew up in the Mormon culture of Utah, and my parents were both super liberal Democrats. There was always a sense that I didn’t fit into that broader culture in some way. In my stories, there’s often a house that should be safe or secure, but it has something strange about it.
RG There’s usually an architectural detail that’s just a little off that triggers the plot.
BEI love those little details. In a story of mine called “Windeye,” there’s an extra window outside of the house that doesn’t exist on the inside. My mom’s an architect, which is probably really telling. We used to go on family vacations where she would take us around neighborhood streets. She would take photographs of little architectural details and talk about them. There’s probably a really Freudian reason for why I’m interested in houses.
RG The first story in the collection, “No Matter Which Way We Turn,” reminded me of this time when I was a kid: I woke up in the middle of the night, already sitting straight up in bed, looking out the window at this bright light that was receding, and immediately fell back asleep. The next morning there was a hard sphere above the first knuckle of my pinky finger. It moved around when I touched it. I was convinced I’d received an alien implant. I’m curious what personal experiences informed the details or the narratives in Song.
BE That story was originally written for a website called People Holding where they gave writers photographs and asked them to write a story in response. They gave me a photo of a bunch of evangelical Christians who were touching this girl and seemed to be baptizing her, but she was facing away. I think they expected me to write a story commenting on religion, but that picture provoked something quite different. I’m often looking for those things that can serve as a catalyst to really accelerate the story for me. With “Leaking Out”—that really came from deep fears I have. I grew up pretty phobic. So sometimes I’m drawing pretty directly on my own experience, especially if we’re talking about fear of the dark or fear of heights.
RG The story “Born Stillborn” is about a man whose therapist, or maybe the therapist’s double, starts to show up in his bedroom at night. A lot of your work includes a riff on the home invasion. And the invaders usually don’t make a violent entry; they just sort of appear in the room. What may be most unsettling are the victim’s reactions—how they’re usually just calmly confused or slightly startled. I’m curious how you arrived at that particular affect in your characters.
BE That’s something that’s been with me since my first book. Altmann’s Tongue includes a number of stories in which the characters don’t seem to be responding in the way you would expect someone to respond. Initially my idea was that the reader then would have to fill in the response, or try to understand why the characters are responding this way. There’s a kind of eeriness to that. When I had a book published in Japan, one of the people introducing me argued that my book is all about etiquette. There’s this weird thing where the characters seem to be waiting to decide how they should respond to situations. And often they’re just not responding in the way that you think they would. But I see it more as a delayed response, or they’re just waiting for cues. That’s something that happens a lot more than we would think, right? Sometimes we respond very strongly to things, but especially in extreme situations there’s a moment where you just don’t know what to think or do. Either you pull yourself out of it or you don’t. And these are characters who usually don’t manage to pull themselves out of it.
RG We usually only think of fight and flight, but there’s also freeze, the third hyperarousal reaction.
In your 2012 BOMB interview, you said you listened to Merzbow, Tim Hecker, and Sunn O))) while writing. What were you listening to while writing Song?
BEI listen to a lot of music when I write, and it really varies a lot from book to book. I do this irritating thing where, if I’m working on a story, I keep listening to the same artist, sometimes even the same song, until I’m done. Partly because it becomes a kind of white noise and occupies a certain part of my mind. That’s probably the reason I like noise music as much as I do—it allows things to come out in the writing. But with this one, it really did vary a lot from story to story. There’s a band called Samsara Blues Experiment, which is a German band with this psychedelic metal thing going on, who I was listening to. I was also listening to David Bowie a lot since he had recently died.
RG The story “Sisters” opens with the line: “We had just moved in, hadn’t even done anything to our neighbors yet…” There’s such a foreboding, creepy violence to this sentence. And yet, syntactically, it’s so straightforward and unrevealing. Let’s talk a little bit about how you arrived at your aesthetic position sentence-wise.
BE I’ve always liked that kind of clear, crisp, declarative sentence. I grew up under the spell of minimalism, and I think a lot of the work that was being done by writers like Carver and people who were published in The Quarterly (myself, Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Ben Marcus, etc.) was really important to me, especially as I was developing as a writer. I’m also constantly thinking: “What can I get away with in terms of doing the most I possibly can with as little as possible?” What I like about a sentence like that is that it immediately tells you something about the characters and tells you that the character is speaking to you as if you’re in the same world as they are, even though you’re not. That whole story has a weird speed to it.
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