Interview with Addison Zeller

Addison Zeller's short fiction has been all over the place, including 3:AM, Propagule, ergot., hex, Revolution John, and a billion other places. Here's his linktree that will lead to these various stories, which you must read.

I'm a big fan of his deadpan, strange style, which reminds me of Bruno Schulz, Kafka, and some other favorites, including Felisberto Hernández (mentioned in his Twitter bio). He crafts strange characters and sets them in intricately-described worlds you soon feel immersed in. These worlds are often uncomfortable and always fascinating. 

Due to my own interest in religion, I asked him many questions about his religious influences in this interview, and I found his responses quite touching and surprising.

I'd like to start with some general background questions. I'll pretend I'm Krista Tippet for a second and ask you what your spiritual life was like growing up. While you're at it, can you paint me a quick picture of the landscape of your youth?

Well, Tippet, I’ll try not to make this boring: my dad was a Catholic priest. (I’ll return to that in a minute.) Like many children of clergy, I don’t think I had a spiritual life growing up. Religious life was just life, I grew up pewside, my parents often sat through monotonous theology lectures while my sister and I played in echoey church halls—frequently alone, or sometimes with similarly overdressed and very serious kids. It was only when I was no longer surrounded by that atmosphere that I felt any impulse to develop a spiritual life, but a lot had burrowed down deep, too. 

Anyway, Dad was an Episcopal priest when I was born. We moved to New Mexico when I was little. It is a dreamer’s landscape and it’s probably not possible to grow up there without dreaming about it constantly and building up a collection of associations; you would see mysterious forms everywhere, the mesas would turn into ships or cathedrals loaded with enjambed sandstone apostles. It was wonderful. I miss it very much and think of it as home. 

When I was around 10 or 11, Dad converted to Catholicism and became a Catholic priest through the protocols described by Patricia Lockwood in Priestdaddy. We moved to Illinois, a very flat landscape with many straight lines that has its own dreamy effect, but possibly without inspiring as much love. 

Being a Catholic priest’s kid has no real perks. Mostly I remember the feeling of being a weird thing—a Catholic priest’s kid—that nobody could process or really wanted to. My sister and I played around in Catholic chanceries while monsignors and bishops looked at us like we were ungainly and possibly diseased animals. The parishioners of our church were slightly more open, but there was always skepticism, a watchfulness that wasn’t friendly. (Under normal circumstances, Catholic priests can’t get married and have kids, for those who don’t know.) 

Finally, my parents divorced, the church heaved a sigh of relief that it didn’t have to deal with us anymore, Dad became an ex-Catholic priest, I had to survive on my own to the extent of my abilities, which were meager, and most of the continuities in my life dissolved. At almost exactly that moment, I realized I had no personal spiritual life, only a painful sense of the absence of one. So, I did the time-honored American thing and read some Zen stuff. 

What path did you take as a reader to wind up here? That is, what books tile the path to becoming a Felisberto Hernández pusher? 

The path was through weird fiction. I was introduced to ghost stories (the theological branch of weird fiction) thanks to an illustrated Bible stories thing Mom used to hand me when I got antsy in one pew or another—she was convinced I’d be excited by drawings of men hanging around sheep. Luckily, there was an evocative picture of the Witch of Endor conjuring up the ghost of Elijah. I remember the ghost quite clearly: he was wrapped in a cloak and had a somber blue face that caught the starlight (maybe I’m imagining this). I also started to read my dad’s old collection of Doctor Who novelizations (I was the one 90s kid who fell in love with Doctor Who when it was no longer being made). That probably nudged me in the direction of M.R. James, Shirley Jackson, all the usual suspects. When I was about 15, I happened on a ratty library copy of Shadowings by Lafcadio Hearn, best known as a writer/collector of Japanese ghost stories. The book also contains long, wonderful insect studies—very dreamlike but precise essays on ants and cicadas—and odd little “fantasias” in his deliciously overheated late-nineteenth century prose on subjects like the vegetable quality of Gothic architecture, the sensation of flight in a dream, the fear of being touched by a ghost. He also translated some French literature—Gautier and Flaubert, and from them I moved on to Nerval, Huysmans, Anatole France, Proust—so I have him to thank, ultimately, for expanding my literary appetites. 

This also led to a curiosity about the margins—the side alleys where the big books aren’t necessarily being sold; in fact, what you tend to find in them are toy shops, but the toys are made out of the same material and they’re often more beautiful, or at least they make you dream for yourself more. These are my favorite writers. Felisberto Hernández is a wonderful example of this kind of marginal writer because he doesn’t have big plans for what he’s going to do, he just sort of tinkers around until he’s got something that makes him happy—someone falling in love with a balcony, or turning into a horse who then wanders through a school play. And perhaps it’s easier to find these writers, and take them seriously, and want to be one yourself, if you come to them by way of something like weird fiction. 

What's your general writing process, from getting the seed of the idea to coaxing it out?

I wake up, take a sheet of printer paper, and write freely by hand with a stubby pencil until something happens. It’s pure spiritualism. Sometimes I get nothing, sometimes I get one sentence that gallops on with a clear voice until I’ve reached the bottom of the page or a natural end point. Most of my stories are very short. I have written longer stories this way, but the more intentional I am about writing, the less success I have with it. I almost never write on a computer until I have a full draft or at least a pretty good sketch. 

Sometimes there is more of a seed, but I have to be careful. I often ruin an idea by thinking too much about it, plotting something out, and then being stuck with a firm notion, far removed from the daydream or emotion that provoked it. The firmer the notion, for me, the more it tends toward a naturalist, classical story form that, frankly, I am not suited for. I have written and published a handful of stories like that and they are the ones I look back on with the least satisfaction. I much prefer to have a fainter idea of what I’m doing and to let it unfold as a monologue. There’s a story called “Pig Person” that appeared in Ligeia that is clearly something I wrote, but which I look back on with a measure of surprise because I hardly needed to edit or even really think about it: I just woke up hearing the voice and the sentences stretched out in front of me like train tracks; I was not really conscious of doing any work apart from moving my pencil. It was great. I would happily write like that all the time. But it doesn’t happen often. 

Your characters are often quite different from you. How do you briefly inhabit them?

I hope I’m successful at writing quite different characters, but it’s rarely my intention; it only really happens when I’m doing the thing I described above. If I have more of a plan, the protagonist or narrator just turns into me. I’m only mutable when I reject all that. And then it’s quite easy. It’s barely a conscious thing at all. 

That said, I think my focus is ultimately on mood and atmosphere, not so much character. My characters are really intended to be like whispery voices you’ve heard in the last moment of dreaming. What I want to convey is the mood of something you’ve just woken up from. 

Can you talk a little about your current experience with faith or spirituality? How do you think this affects your writing?

Well, I used to hang around churches out of habit, guilt, longing, and the like, but as I say, I never really had a spiritual life; it was a desire for something lost, continuity or family or childhood: everything had pretty much evaporated at the same time. I had a period of really wanting to situate myself religiously, but it coincided with more desperate things like the immediate need to eat and pay rent (this was at the height of the recession). Little by little, any spiritual ambitions were worn down by the jobs—the many restaurants, the occasional warehouse—and the fear of eviction and starvation. (I also wanted to be a writer at that age, but I stopped trying until I was much more settled, probably for the best.) It didn’t ultimately seem to matter much, since it became obvious that I wasn’t looking for whatever a church might have to offer (apart from free soup). 

It’s almost embarrassing to admit that my faith in the Christian God was inherently bound up with my faith in my parents. But the knot was severed. It really was that flimsy, after all. There had never been a personal side. What remained was a certain reverence for the person of Jesus, a store of biblical imagery, and an unfocused longing. The moments in my life that I think of as spiritual in nature are always extra-institutional and personal ones: experiences that provoke more than just emotional responses to objects and places, but which seem to have dimensions I can only articulate by calling them spiritual. I can’t explain them better than that and it is difficult even to provide examples. They can be perfectly rationalizable responses to very mundane things, but the precise register of emotion they provoke in me is what distinguishes them. This reminds me of something I read recently that Georges Bataille wrote in relation to Lascaux: how we have lost an intoxication we know we had–an intoxication that was natural to us–that “we know we have fallen!” I feel there must be some significance to this sensation, but it might lie only in the impression of incompleteness and loss that is also natural to us. Perhaps it is simply the effect of possessing consciousness and watching oneself move through time, etc., with all the complications of nostalgia and longing that entails, but an intuition persists in me, not entirely to my liking, that it’s something deeper still, a recognition of some quality inherent in things other than ourselves, but also in ourselves, that does not fully die, and rises up like a memory for which we lack the details: a memory, nonetheless, the details of which we somehow suspect we will one day recover. But in the caves of Lascaux, too, and Les Trois-Frères and elsewhere, are many images that produce a shock of recognition while also remaining merely interpretable: we have ideas, but we can’t recover something more than what is there, and perhaps this shock of recognition only underlines the basic reality that the forms of nature have their limits–they have cycled through our dreams already, and not more explicably. 

Even so, I believe these intuitions will always remain with me—in fact, I would say it’s the most basic, animistic sense of things that has survived or resurfaced. So, then, whatever greater significance they may or may not have, they work the same magic. And maybe I never felt anything stronger than that. Christianity was a family injunction, a duty to my parents and a household chore, but it’s also a very beautiful thing at heart, with very powerful images and promises; it has the power to make me want it back: the claim that our tears will be wiped away, that I know that my redeemer lives, these are powerful things to hear and they provoke in me a powerful emotional response. But that response is not belief, it is longing for something to be true that I do not believe to be true; the response is so powerful precisely because I do not believe it. I want these things but I don’t believe in them. That’s the simple reality. But the wanting doesn’t vanish completely, and without a way back up to the simplicity of childhood acceptance I have settled to the level of more indefinite suspicions, a more unbounded sense of being, more tenuous, presumably adjacent in some way–although I don’t interrogate it–to pantheism. I’m sure that all this has a thematic effect on what I write (certainly in terms of Edenic imagery) and that there is likely, at heart, something spiritual in my writing practice. I don’t think I could just sit there and plot out a story and execute it well; I need the experience to be meditative and transportive in its own right, or else it isn’t worth doing for me. But of course it’s also mainly pleasure. The pleasure of playing, believing, and accepting. 

What are your hopes/plans for your life as a writer?

Just to be a better observer and to sustain a voice or idea longer, preferably at novella length. I don’t think I’ll ever be a writer of big books. A handful of thin ones—novellas and collections—would do just fine. 

What stories that you've written so far that you are most proud of, and why?

I’m really proud of a story that has been rejected over twenty times… I understand why it has, though. It’s deliberately repetitive, the voice is naïve and simplistic, but I’m very happy with it. Apart from that, there are four stories published in 3:AM Magazine—three flash fictions and a longer piece (but not much longer) called “Barb City Manor.” I’m proud of them because they most successfully convey the mood that inspired them. A piece out at minor literature[s] in June is also in that category; it comes closest to the feeling that makes me want to write—the feeling of not being done with a dream. 

Thanks for these lovely reflections, Addison!