Interview with Don Television

Don Television has the best writer's name since Mark Twain. Here is his great website: https://www.dontelevision.com/

Don Television, or DT as you might know him, has been publishing experimental writing for some time. You'll find his work in places like X-R-A-Y, Identity Theory, hex, Dream Pop Press, and other innovative platforms. I first encountered him in ergot., the rollicking classics Jennybaby Swing the Ax and Barn on a Hill, and I was delighted to find a fellow writer rooting around in absurdist territory. I’ve asked him here to discuss his false origins and true motivations.

1) How do you cope when you intend one thing with a story, and a reader takes something entirely different from it? 

I’m excited about it! If not slightly concerned about my ability to communicate exactly what I’m trying to say. But I am excited about it. Cuz it means I’ve provided at least some analytic surface. You’ve beamed your laser onto it. It’s refracted, etc. I’m excited that you read it. That’s the main thing, right? There are no right answers. Making something shouldn’t deem you an authority on anything but your own intentions. What you were going for. I might want to tell you what I was going for. I might feel extreme compulsion to explain myself, make clear, etc. But I'm excited. Think about it like in food terms. I thought it was sandwich. You thought it was soup. As long as we both agree it tasted good, who cares? I am excited, but I'm going to go in the kitchen and make sure I’m reading all these labels right. Just, you know, to make sure.

2) Who are some of your old-timey writing inspirations? 

I have a system for reading where I take in an author’s work in order of release. If I find myself truly blown away, I will break out and read those authors who are purported to have influenced the first, again starting with their debut, staggering the old with the new. That way, you can see not only the development of the first author’s work, but also what it says in conversation with its forebears, the different stylistic tacks taken, and so forth. I’m trying to homeschool myself through college, so I keep getting smacked in the face by what maybe a lot of people have read already, but is new to me. I keep saying things like, William Faulkner is good. I got into him through McCarthy this year. It’s both 1925 and 1975 in my apartment. It’s 2025 cuz I’m working on my thing. I'm all about dispelling the notion that anyone steps into this long tradition without first committing a bunch of theft. Grave robbery. I’m pro-grave robbery. I say loot the crypt. But also, bear with me. I am overwhelmed by the size of the mausoleum. There’s only so much I can carry at one time. I will have to take multiple trips. If I come to you and talk about all the shiny jewelry on this one corpse, and you’ve already catalogued it, deemed it not worth taking, out of style or whatever, well I just found it. It’s new to me.

3) You include an interesting array of voices in your work. You often change register quickly, too. 

For example, after a vivid and adroit description of a scene at a swimming pool in "Bobby's Whistle," you go: "I swore this summer I would stop taking mondo doses of lysergic acid before I was supposed to go on-duty as a lifeguard. I swore I would stop using words like sick and tubular and mondo to describe things, but I haven’t. Actually, I would say it’s gotten harder not to."

Do the voices come to you, or do you have to summon them?

That’s tricky. I feel like a very early piece of advice you get is to always read your material aloud. For flow or whatever. I have always done voices and characters and things. Borat changed my life as a kid. Changed all my friends’ lives. I thought, well, why can’t I just do that for this? Then I thought a lot harder about it, and I still am. Like, is your prototypical authorial narrator not just that? A person in a room doing a voice. And why do we hear certain voices and think, that’s good, that’s proper. It cuts all the way back to the oral tradition of storytelling. People talk in a lot of different ways. I think if you attune yourself to that and try to capture it, you can achieve a higher degree of fidelity or realism, even if what you’re depicting is totally irreal, never happened, ever will. I think if you think about characters in that way, as voices, that’s how they’ll present themselves to you. Probably so with any quality you could fixate on. Think character’s heights all the time, you’d go, ah this one’s real short. Oh, she's eight feet tall. But voices are important. They’re the medium of the story.

4) What are some themes you find yourself frequently exploring?

Themes are tough, because, on the one hand, there’s what I think of as like the normal ones: loneliness, anxiety, drug addiction, fear of insanity. But those feel universal—are in everyone I’m close to’s life—so they don’t belong to me, or they feel like a backdrop or set dressing, rather than thematic, whereas as to the reader, they may occupy the space of theme in a piece, when in my head, it’s really something so specific it couldn’t possibly be extracted. I don’t expect it to be extracted and it underlies a joke. The joke or the joking is the point. There are of course subconscious components to humor and no agreement as to what’s funny. What I love is tonal incongruity. That to me is very human. You see something horrible, you have to laugh. Something beautiful, a nice tree, you feel terrible inside. At least I do sometimes.

5) Any new projects on the horizon? 

I am writing a book. 

6) For people who are turned off by experimental writing, any advice? Why should they give it another try?

If you’re a writer, as any reader of this interview likely is, you’re already experimenting, even if that experiment is just “Can I personally write this thing?” Even if that thing is another entry in a very stable genre tradition, or true to your life, it’s still an experiment in the sense that you don’t know the outcome. My attitude is, well you’ve got all these cool chemicals. Why not pour that on there? See what happens. If you recognize everything is an experiment and there are no rules in the lab—you set up the lab, it’s clandestine, there’s no safety protocol—why not get to concocting wild evil shit? Why make Advil, which you can buy off the shelf at any store for like two dollars? I’m not saying Advil’s bad. I have headaches all the time. I’m saying look at all these chemicals. What’s this beaker do? I’m more interested in the product of the basement lab than Advil. I’d rather get in contact with a person online, have them send me something in the mail with their sweat on it, all their greasy little fingerprints on the vial, than go to the store. If you love Advil and it solves all your problems, I wouldn’t say stop taking the Advil, take this. Just, Advil doesn’t solve all my problems. I have a pretty wide definition of experimental writing, which is basically, are you trying to push it? Are you playing around? Could only you make this? Maybe it’s a problem with definitions.

7) You avoid social media like Twitter. How has this helped your peace of mind? And how can people follow your work in other ways?

It’s less about peace of mind and more, what do I have to offer to this? I will still go in there and follow other people’s work. That’s where you have to go to do that. But what am I going to say? It’s a loud cafeteria, am I going to climb up on the table and try to be heard? Am I going to wave my arms around and act crazy? Maybe, but it feels like a lot to start. In the meantime, I will stand outside the window with a sign that says donatello.vision and you can type that into your browser and if you like what you read, you might remember and check back and see that there’s more of it. That feels doable to me. You can send me an email on there, I will ask you what you’re making and surely I’ll probably send you a link when there’s something else. Don’t that sound nice? I don’t have to scream at anybody.

8) What do you do to feel inspired? 

Lately, it seems like more and more I meet people where the whole thing of what they are, it doesn’t make sense to me. I try to go towards that, mentally. Talk and listen. See what the world is to them. Inevitably, that will make me want to write, if only to explore our base perceptual differences. Everyone’s a character. It’s fun to think about what the story is.

9) Anything else to add?

In lieu of promoting my own book, which don’t exist yet, I would like to tell your readers about two short stories I keep coming back to, which have truly upset the Don Television applecart this year, in that I had to put all the apples back in the cart and I couldn’t figure out what order they went in now, after, and that’s Atsushi Ikeda’s The Yellow Pill Game and Zebulon Hourse’s Object markers; or, My death, an irratiocination, in ergot. and Sleepingfish, respectively. Apples went everywhere! Off the side of the road. Some of them appear to be pears now, others trees. What’s happening? You should read these.

Thanks, Don!!