Interview with NM Whitley

NM Whitley is a mysterious writer…born in North Carolina, he now lives in Barcelona. Am I jealous of this? Yes. But there must be a dark side to living in such a cool place, because his fiction (found in places like Seize the Press, Propagule, and Short Fiction) is often quite disturbing. Funny, too! 

He’s a connoisseur of absurd fiction. His story reviews have introduced me to many new writers and venues. He also makes music, both as a solo artist and as drummer for Scandal Jackson. Today we will discuss his creative approach!

Did the music come first, or the writing? Do they affect each other?

The first time I ever produced anything of artistic value was definitely music (8^th period Jazz Ensemble being more immediately applicable to a creative practice than 4^th period AP English). Me and my friends have been in bands forever, and playing shows as underage kids and getting a positive response from older heads in the punk/indie scene was a majorly life-affirming experience, whereas writing was always (by nature) private and embarrassing. I actually threw out a bunch of my juvenilia, some old notebooks in a box at my folks’ place years ago, and I would deeply regret that decision were it not for the fact that a fire broke out in my parents’ attic like a year later which would have burned it all up anyway. I do wonder what it would be like to reread some of those stories, like “What was 17-year-old me up to, what was going on with that guy?”

As for the effects of one on the other, music has unquestionably informed the way I engage with pretty much every other form of art, but especially literature. Rhythm and prosody, for instance—when revising or even drafting, I’ll often find myself thinking about certain sentences or clauses in terms of whether they have a ‘triplet’ feel or a ‘straight eighth’ feel, for example. That’s a framing that clicks in my mind in a way all the stuff I failed to learn in high school about poetic meter and iambs and trochees never did. But yeah I could go on and on and on drawing parallelisms to music in my instincts and preferences re literature and how I react to it, for sure.

What do you think is your most absurd story? Where did you get the idea for it? 

Maybe it’s recency bias but probably the easiest answer for both questions is “The Ice Pick That is Made of Ice”. The idea came when a writer I admire named Elena Sichrovsky announced she was doing a guest editor stint at the literary magazine JAKE, with the theme “Elena wants to get stabbed with an icicle” and my subconscious coughed up that title pretty much immediately. And I think it does meet both definitions of absurd, whether “silly or incongruous” or “of or pertaining to the recognition of a universe in which human life has no ultimate meaning” which, yeah.

Sometimes you address political questions, as in “Some Reflections on the Abstruse Campaign”. If I’m reading the story right, there are no real solutions in sight. And yet, do you believe that political fiction can make a political impact?

“Some Reflections on the Abstruse Campaign” first came about back when Qanon-related shit was at its peak and everything was “an op” and people were discovering for the umpteenth time that “the CIA invented show-don’t-tell to own the commies or whatever”, and so the topic of psychological warfare was on my mind and I didn’t see, as you say, any real solutions in sight within that particular theater of combat. Depending upon how you interpret the ending (and at the risk of spoilering my own story), one might say the “bad guys” (i.e. “we”) are the losers, which is an outcome that could suggest a soupçon of hopefulness. But they’re not the only losers, and by that point the game itself has completely changed.

To be honest, this story took more inspiration from current events than I’m usually interested in pursuing. I usually avoid anything too didactic or programmatic or that has a clear 1-to-1 correlation to the current political stage. There’s a place for that kind of thing but it’s not my place, I am clearly just some dipshit and I don’t feel like I have as much to contribute in that sense as others might. Not to mention that there are more efficient ways of making a positive change in the world than by writing a book (tying the book to a brick and throwing it through a window, perhaps). 

I was especially affected by your story “Dorcas,”  which explores a lovely and bizarre haunting/afterlife. Again, you take an absurdist approach, and yet there are some real questions about spiritual life raised here. Same for “Clarinet,” I think. Am I reading this wrong, though? What (if any) impact does spirituality have on your work?

I am so glad you enjoyed it! And no, I don’t think you’re not reading it wrong at all, not that I as author should be arbiter of which is the “right” reading. If a reader responds to something in the text, if they see something in the Rorschach blot, then it’s probably there!

So here’s a funny story. I once had a job driving a van around the university campus delivering paper and toner to copiers and printers in offices and elsewhere. I was basically hired to do the heavy lifting for an older coworker with a heart condition who was on and off disability leave. On our downtime, said coworker and I would stop into one of the quieter computer labs along our route and log onto the ol’ world wide web to kill time and wait for our pagers to buzz. It was Web 1.0 days, and I did not have much experience with or use for the internet in general, but somehow I ended up on a Falun Gong website of all places, reading about Master Li and the tenets of Zhen Ren and Shan and learning the five exercises and what not. It seems really weird to me in retrospect, like: Seriously, what the fuck was I doing? I don’t recall reading any of the deranged racist, homophobic stuff; I think I was just skimming for the qi gong how-tos. Thankfully that phase only lasted a few months. Prior to my online brush with ultra-right-wing Chinese cult groups there was a very lax Lutheran upbringing on my mom’s side (further tempered by my dad’s very vocal hardcore atheism), and a superficial interest in the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, etc picked up from the Beat poets and 60s music and kung fu cinema. All of which is to say that writing-wise the spiritual per se is not usually foremost in my mind except to the extent that Death is on my mind writing-wise, which it often is (and not only in a story like “Dorcas”), and anyway maybe that’s the same thing? And maybe if a glimmer of the spiritual does come out when I write, it probably springs from the same weird impulse that led me to seek out the Zhuan Falun on the early-aughts internet while that elderly coworker of mine (I eventually realized) was checking out porn.

For our musical readers, could you recommend some songs you’ve made or helped make? 

My pleasure. For those who enjoy sample-based electronic music in odd time signatures a good intro might be “Oh Oh Uh Uh Oh” by Young Nickels the Great which is an older project of mine, and if you like that you could move onto harder stuff like “Yeah no. 6”. Or if bedroom lo-fi with nylon-string guitars and vocoders is more your bag, you could start with my more recent project The Movin’ Goalposts: “Wanter” and “El río” are some of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever had a hand in creating. Or if you’re more into verse-chorus structure and loud amplifiers, my band Scandal Jackson’s most recent song is called “¡Muérdeme, vampiro!”