EXPERIMENTAL EFFECTS
an interview with D. Harlan Wilson
By Daniel E. Blackston

D. Harlan Wilson’s fiction is eccentric, imaginative, absurd, darkly funny, and likely to take you by surprise. His work can be found in a wide range of American, British and Australian magazines and anthologies, such as: Identity Theory, Jack Magazine, The Café Irreal, The Dream People, Horrorfind, and 3 A.M. Magazine. He’s also published two book-length collections, “The Kafka Effekt” and “4 Ellipses”-- with a third collection, “Stranger on the Loose”, shortly forthcoming.

When you sit a self-proclaimed Romantic like myself across the table from a self-procliamed, “absurdist, existentialist”, the conversation is bound to get quite lively. I’m very proud to present the following interview with D. Harlan Wilson, a memento of our recent discussion, which I only wish could have lasted twice as long.

Your debut collection, “The Kafka Effekt”, is a marvelous book. The forty-four short pieces in the collection display a dynamic authorial presence, a potent imagination, and plenty of spirited technical experimentation. Do you have a particular vision for the type of fiction you create? Do you see it as traditional for the most part or cutting edge?

Thanks for the compliments, Dan! I wouldn’t call my fiction traditional, but I wouldn’t call it cutting edge either. For the most part I write irreal fiction. By irreal I mean that the imaginary universes in which my fictions operate are not extrapolations or representations of the real world as it exists for you and I. My characters don’t react in normal ways to the antagonistic situations I often mix them up in. A coffee cup that suddenly grows a mouth and starts swearing at the person who is drinking out of it, for instance, might cause that person to scold the coffee cup for being rude, rather than cause the person to shriek in terror, or throw the coffee cup against the wall in a mad panic, or just run away from the coffee cup. Another thing is that various dreamy, bizarre, unreal features -- like, say, a coffee cup with a foul-mouthed personality -- typically distinguish my characters and the worlds they inhabit.

This is of course not mainstream writing. And it's not the type of stuff that a lot of authors write. But it's certainly been done before. Still, I like to think that my fiction is unique, if only mildly. I write under the aegis of an absurdist, existential ethic, but the way I exercise that ethic is, in some ways at least, fresh and original. So I've been told anyway!

Who do you imagine as your audience when you write? Do you think professors, critics, and writers appreciate your fiction more than others?

I don't think you need to be part of the literati to appreciate my fiction, although you might recognize certain literary elements, motifs and undercurrents. I imagine the readers who enjoy my fiction the most are educated, artsy, twenty-to-thirty-something males. There’s a distinct masculine ideal at work in my writing and I'm very interested in how the male subject is conditioned and affected by our increasingly anti-male culture. But when all is said and done, I just want to make people laugh. Of the eighty or so stories I've published in magazines, anthologies and books, all of them have been darkly comedic in some way.

Have you always written in an experimental mode, or have you tried your hand at traditional forms, as well?

I was much more conservative when I began writing fiction, but I've always written offbeat narratives. Frankly, that’s all I want to write. I write to entertain and educate myself as much as I do to entertain an educate a readership. But I don't make enough money to support myself writing in this vein, and if I ever want to, I'll have to curb my affinity for The Weird and become more mainstream. Unfortunately, as I see it, to become more mainstream will be to become more uninteresting, pedestrian and blasé, but it's something I'll eventually have to bear.

Quite a number of these pieces, especially the shorter ones ("Brain", for example) seem to lean very close toward prose poetry. I kept thinking about Rimbaud as I read through your collection and recalled his prose poems and also "A Season in Hell". Do you have any thoughts on where poetry -- meaning an emphasis on figurative language, symbol, meter, form, and image end -- and fiction with its emphasis on character development, plot, and setting begin?

That’s a good question, one that’s increasingly difficult to answer. The line that separates prose from poetry has been consistently blurred in the postmodern era, and that blurring will no doubt become more pronounced in time. One of the main reasons for this is the Internet. People’s attention spans have decreased considerably since the Internet came into its own. They don’t want to read long pieces of text anymore, whatever the text might be. They want short, punchy, pointed texts, which is why there are so many online magazines out there now that won’t publish long narratives. Given this constraint, fiction writers like me that dabble mainly in the short form are inclined to be more attentive to language, to agonize over the placement and impact of every single word, to make sure there is a certain fluidity that propels the narrative -- in other words, to make prose more poetic.

But the Internet isn’t the only reason for this, and narratives that exhibit a fusion of prose and poetry have been around long before the Internet came along. The problem in distinguishing between the two is the subjective nature of interpretation that a postmodern perspective necessitates. If you take a paragraph from a Stephen King novel, for example, and break it up into stanzas, does that turn his prose into poetry? One person might say yes, another no. But both people would be right . . . or wrong, depending upon how you look at it. Personally I don’t take that much of an interest in delineating boundaries between texts, but some people do. And that interests me: the desire to pigeonhole this or that text in this or that category. To me this ultimately indicates a nostalgia for the past, for a time when the borders that divided texts were much clearer and sharper.

I started out writing strictly poetry. I published a handful of poems, but once I started writing fiction, it wasn’t long before I abandoned poetry altogether, although much of my fiction does contain poetic elements. In my eyes poetry is heading towards extinction, at least in a traditional sense. In late capitalist society very few people read poetry, if they read at all. Today’s most revered poet laureates are Eminem and Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent and those clowns. Not to say that there’s no merit to their artistry. Snoop Dogg’s album Doggy Style is one of my favorite albums, and even though the radio constantly overplays that “In Da Club” 50 Cent tune, I still can’t get the damn thing out of my head. But the artistic merit in their work has less to do with them being wordmeisters than it does with them conveying the image of being bitch-slappin’ millionaires.

You have a new collection due out soon. Tell us what we can expect from your second book.

DHW: My new collection is called, Stranger on the Loose. Like, The Kafka Effekt, it’s a collection of stories, although there aren’t as many as in, The Kafka Effekt, and many of the stories are longer and more developed and plot-oriented. But the same irreal imperative energizes both collections. I’m very excited about this book. It contains some of my best writing to date, I think. A few of the stories in it are two years old, but I’m a chronic revisionist and they’ve been evolving since their inception. Also, the visual artist Simon Duric illustrated the cover and ten of the stories. I’m grateful that his work will be appearing in conjunction with mine. He’s a gifted artist and he and I both aspire to capture the dark, absurdist essence of the human condition.

I started reading The Kafka Effekt on the same day I happened to be re-reading Hemingway's "Nick Adams" stories! What do you think Earnest Hemingway would think about The Kafka Effekt?

Well, it’s tough to say. My writing is very explicit and there are no behemoth icebergs pyramiding down into the depths from the surface of my words. But their are lots of little icebergs. If I could get Hemingway to smirk and raise an eyebrow and maybe even chuckle a few times as he read my book, I’d be happy. Even if he threw it in the garbage when he was finished!

What are you reading these days? What writers currently have your attention? Is there a writer or publication that we'd be surprised to hear you really like?

Unfortunately I don’t get to read for pleasure these days as much as I’d like to. In addition to teaching college courses, I’m currently writing my dissertation for my Ph.D. in English. Most of my reading time is invested either in preparation for class or for my dissertation. I’ve been reading some good stuff, though. This summer I’m teaching a course in existentialist literature and philosophy and I’m getting my share of Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Keirkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Dostoevsky and of course Kafka.

I’m also looking at some decent books in my dissertation, which is a study of how contemporary film and fiction has represented the pathology that image-culture invokes in society. One of the chapters is on Burroughs’ cut-up novels, another is on the British author Steve Aylett’s novel, Slaughtermatic, and I’m also doing comparative analyses of the films and books, Fight Club and American Psycho. And since I’ll be using a certain amount of theory in my dissertation, I’ve got a few stacks of critical texts that I’m constantly pouring over. I wish I had more time to read for the sake of reading, but right now I’m trying to focus on getting my Ph.D. and leaving it in my dust. I did two M.A. degrees and I’ve been a graduate student for far too long. I’m only thirty-one, but enough is enough already!

Do you have any thoughts on where narrative may be headed in the future? What influence might technology have on narrative fiction? For example, can you imagine a "cyber-interactive" version of your fiction? A "virtual" landscape of the images and sensations embodied in, “The Kafka Effekt?”

Actually, I’ve published a couple of stories in online magazines that are kind of cyber-interactive. Their names are Locus Novus (www.locusnovus.com) and The Wildclown Chronicle (www.wildclown.com/chronicle/ezine.html). Both magazines uniquely digitize and animate the verbal. I’m especially fond of Wildclown. The editor-in-chief is the horror writer G. Wells Taylor. He’s a really talented and friendly guy, and if I’m not mistaken, he does all of the animation and CGI for the magazine. I think we’ll see more magazines like his in the future.

Care to give us a bit of insight into your compositional methods? Are you a "spontaneous composition" type of writer or a compulsive revisionist? Draw much inspiration from dreams or other "altered" states of consciousness?

I’m tremendously inspired by my dreams. Since I was a kid I’ve had an intense dream life, and I’ve been keeping a dream journal for about five years now. When I first started writing short fiction I used to convert my dreams into stories. The first story I published was a revision of one of my dreams, and I’ve probably published twenty or thirty since then that originated as dreams. I don’t do that so much anymore. Part of me feels like I’m cheating by using my dreams as templates for my fiction instead of using my conscious imagination to come up with ideas.

But more than that, in the last year or so I’ve been trying to structure my stories in more user-friendly ways, and the structure of dreams is anything but user-friendly, in my unconscious experience anyway. When I compose a story, sometimes I have a definite vision as to what I want to accomplish in terms of length, style, technique, character development, ambiance, denouement and so on. On other occasions, I won’t have the slightest idea where I’m going. I’ll just write down a sentence that comes to mind or sounds interesting to me and go from there. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I can usually tell if a story like this will work after the first paragraph or two.

So to answer your original question, yes, I am an occasional “spontaneous composition” writer. And as I indicated earlier, I’m a compulsive revisionist. I’m a firm believer in the notion that writing is not writing, it’s rewriting.

You spend a portion of your life "impersonating an academic." What impact to you think that persona has on your fiction? What kind of writer might you be if you lived as, say, a mechanic rather than an academic?

When I say I impersonate an academic, I’m half joking. The thing is, I don’t have much of a relationship with most of my colleagues. It’s no secret that academics have a tendency to be social invalids. And I’m kind of a social hyena. Almost all of my family and friends work and live in the corporate world. I do have a few academic acquaintances, but most of the time, when I intermingle with my co-workers, I feel like I’m pretending to be one of them.

That said, I have a sincere interest in the academic project; I like writing literary criticism, and I like teaching literature and critical writing and thinking. In addition, my academic persona informs and improves my creative writing persona, and vice versa. If I were a mechanic I wouldn’t write the stuff I do, if I wrote at all. Academia is really responsible for turning me into a creative writer. The first word of fiction I ever wrote was as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. Prior to that I had been working as an international salesman for my father’s company. Had I not given up sales for literature, I may have never taken up writing at all.

Where can people go to get more information about you and your work?

People can go to my official website, which is run by my personal assistant, Stanley Ashenbach, an aspiring actor, filmmaker and haberdasher. The address is www.msu.edu/~dhw/dharlanwilson/enter.html. Thanks Dan!

copyright © 2003, Dan Blackston