– 1 –
Matthew Goulish: The “Note from the Author” that begins the novel states some facts that I know to be true. They concern the length of time that it took you to write the book, something like eight years, framed as a series of missed deadlines. You note the risk as slippage out of relevance regarding cultural context, in which the shifts continue and seem to accelerate. On the other hand, the work must have benefited from you living with it for that amount of time. I imagine that you worked and detailed the writing’s surface with some patina of repeated reading over those years. I believe the writing reflects that persistence. I wonder about the effect on the book of the long duration, as you suggest in the note that this was a long time for you, maybe for any writer, implying you took longer with this than with your other books.
Tim Kinsella: I should’ve known, given your love for introductions, that you’d begin by asking about the Author’s Note. This is my fourth book and three of them took seven years each from first draft to publication. This process didn’t happen sequentially, obviously—I didn’t start the first book 21 years ago. But it’s definitely a defining aspect of my process across disciplines to get completely immersed in a thing for a while then set it aside long enough to return to it with a fresh perspective. And as I repeatedly pick it up and set it aside, the various steps necessary for me to get through a substantial project in any discipline are like personal seasons I have learned to live through.
At the outset, once I have a well-defined starting point in focus, then I go wild from there and don’t censor myself at all, maximizing the combinatory possibilities of its elements as a means of expanding the initial impulse while remaining within the limitations that define it.
In the case of Sunshine, I initially plotted it using a thing called The Lester Dent Master Plot Formula, which is an old recipe for churning out 10,000 word pulp detective stories. I’ve never been good at plot. Every plot idea I think of seems corny and trite to me, which is why if you look closely you’ll notice none of my books have plots, just cliches or repurposed stories in new combinations. And by the time I worked thru The Lester Dent Formula—a period of about three months each morning at the library for about three hours—I had an 82,000 word outline, which is about 4,000 words longer than the book ended up being. (I should note that the sequence of the final book has zero in common with this first outline.)
When I returned to the outline after setting it aside for a couple months, I had two residencies back-to-back, which allowed me eight weeks to move line by line thru that outline, weaving meat onto its bones or garland into its branches or whatever. And at the end of that isolated eight weeks of manic and compulsive energy, I emerged with a 212,000 word first draft, roughly three times the novel’s current length.
The next 6.5 years were spent reworking variations on how to weave the narrator’s multiple voices into a coherent voice that could propel itself forward. Quite a few storylines and characters that I originally thought of as central got combined into each other or cut completely. Thirty pages on the Iran-Contra scandal ended up being one sentence. Dozens of scenes with the narrator’s sons got reduced to a couple passing mentions, which more effectively expressed his indifference toward them. Overall, the process felt like my ultimate undertaking of Keats’ Negative Capability—five years in, I still didn’t know how it might all come together. It was like living within one of those classic Russian Astronaut Stress Tests, holding contradictions in your head for as long as possibly possible without feeling the need to resolve them. But I knew that the longer I could live within that mess, the more possibilities would bloom for some small component to click into place in a way that’d make the whole thing work.
What got me thru the discomfort of this expanded sense of not knowing was that I knew all along that I wanted a sloppy book. I love sloppy art and I never allow myself to do it. Paradoxically this was an incredibly exhausting process to make it all appear appropriately loose.
And ultimately the final step was then to surrender it to someone I trust, in this case Sammi Skolmoski, the editor, who works as a florist and in the end cut away at it all with bonsai precision to make the whole thing make some sense.
So in summary:
Step 1: make a giant mess of an outline (three months)
Step 2: make an even bigger mess following the outline (two months)
Step 3: carve away at this giant mess until it has some coherent shape (6.5 years)
(Oh also simultaneously throughout steps 1-3 I was reading and re-reading the source materials and making notes and inserting it as an element of the ever-evolving weave—source material being not just the various conspiracies specific to the family, but also the philosophies and ideologies that enable and unify the conspiracies.)
Step 4: surrender it to editor and negotiate (three months)
Oh and to answer your question: yes, as the book’s discreet elements had time to soak and absorb each other, the book’s full meaning deepened and expanded far beyond what I ever could’ve imagined when I initially set out to follow its course. It seems redundant to note, but it’s important: the process made the book what it is.
– 2 –
MG: The form of this interview now strikes me as peculiar, requiring that I go on to the next “question” with no sense of your response to the last one, like calling out into a void. But I need to stay with the “Note from the Author” a moment longer, because now having read the book I recognize in that Note not you, or maybe not only you, but also the book’s narrator. As I said, I can testify to the factuality of the Note, that it in fact does appear to issue from you, but at the same time the vernacular, the mode of direct address to the Reader, doubles you, or folds you into, the narrator whom I come to know as he slowly reveals himself. The foundation of that narrator in the actual world, and his clearly stated motive in writing the book “to set the record straight finito and sans qualification re: my family,” the actual existence of the dynasty of which he remains the most uncomfortable member, would not seem to contradict anything in the “Note from the Author,” regarding the urgency of bringing the writing out to the world. Every first person speaks from a multiplicity, but in this case I’m struck by, and curious to hear more about, the particular double exposure of this voice, and the degree to which you consider it an act of projected ventriloquism, speaking as you imagine yourself speaking were you this person, yet keeping the differences in play, as if writing into the social imaginary.
TK: For a guy that has broken beyond the legal definition of poverty only twice in my adult life, both thanks to reunion tours in which I am hired to pretend to be my teenaged self, for whatever reason I’ve always had this keen sense of getting away with something. Maybe it’s just an awareness of how privileged I am as a 21st century American citizen: straight, white, male. But I’ve always lived with this weird shame about my ability to get away with doing things that interest me. So that Trust Fund Brat voice was a strand within myself that I wanted to indulge from the beginning.
I definitely took liberties using the Bush family as a way of making sense of my own family history. My dad grew up an Irish farmer, and continued his whole life to bristle against this conservative Catholic upbringing, but was never able to fundamentally shake it. Somehow it was his repulsion from his own belief systems that kept him constantly and endlessly off balance and fidgeting thru life. So confronting the cornerstones of these belief systems—both on the practical-administrative and psycho-emotional levels—seemed like a necessary point for me to attack, even if the book’s ostensible subject matter and that of my own family happen to differ in magnitudes of billions.
And for the record, compared to most of my friends thru childhood and high school, my modest achievements are a success story on the scale of the president of Harvard or a doctor on a moon colony. It is fair to generalize that a large ratio of them did not end up very well. So there might also be an element of survivor’s guilt that motivates this blending of narrative voices.
– 3 –
MG: I will note how, to my reading, the narrator speaks with more than one voice, and propose that his voices constitute the major weave in the book’s structure. In one tone, he narrates the events of the book’s present tense, those dates noted in the book’s three sections, over a period of 18 days in fall of 1988. Those events include an isolated homecoming of sorts for him, and I wonder about the specificity of those three dates, most of all about the middle one as Halloween.
TK: Well the election was pinned down from the start as the obvious climax, so the structure was a matter of working backwards from there.
That first date is my 14th birthday, and one of the various twists at the end of the book that didn’t eventually make the cut was that the narrator was revealed to be Timmy, the 14 year old little brother in River’s Edge, and that date was part of the reveal. This of course makes no sense since that kid isn’t a member of the Bush Family, but like I said, it meant a lot to me to make a sloppy book.
I would even go so far as to say that paradoxically this sloppiness is the very logic that the book ultimately depends on. For example, I am well aware that kids in the early 1960s did not look up to Chuck Norris, especially as a hero of the conservative cultural movement. But this sort of margin of error hopefully bleeds across voices to call each of the distinct voices and their sum into question. Because ultimately the book is about subjectivity, which is precisely why it takes on some of the most common historical events that are thought to be objectively objective as one of its central structures to dribble subjective experience against.
I am always struck—and I know I do it myself, too, but I can’t recognize it in myself—by how people code shift and their voices and dialects and mannerisms all transform according to social context. It’s always about power, a deferential response to power or a move toward establishing power. But the integrity of the individual identity endures intact, just lit from different perspectives. So I was aiming for this with the narrator: how is he around The Barbarians, by himself, with his beloved and his other beloved, etc. This is a tricky ambition to pull off in a way that the narrator remains consistent enough to come across as believable. But the only thing funnier to me than a know-it-all is an entitled lovesick know-it-all, so I nobly persevered.
Over the years, the book was restructured in so many different ways, sometimes sticking with one voice or another for 50 pages at a time, sometimes switching every paragraph. The whole central point of the book—its plot and its themes are its structure—everything depends on the sweet spot I hit for this weave to keep the reader engaged but not confused.
But I digress: re: the present tense action, yes, somewhere right in between my 14th birthday and the ’88 election there was Halloween. We all dressed up best we could and pretended, and many of us were disappointed by the need to wear a coat over our costumes.
– 4 –
MG: In another mode, the narrator essays, as if to convince, a sweeping American history in which his family plays a central, if conspiratorial, role, as, shall we say, aspiring puppet-masters. I found it particularly fascinating the way this voice obsesses about coding, about “The Family’s fetish for secret knowledge…” its secrecy and investment in secret societies, such coding an implicate thread of the world of politics as he knows it. At some point a threshold is crossed, and Orwell-style “rectification” of language gives way to a full-scale code switch, perhaps because some of the coding appears genetic. I mean that he can read these codes because of his heritage. He refers to real-world people with coded names, each one a play of sound as well as a micro-portrait. Very strangely, he need not even relay his speech as such in any detail, as the book substitutes the same stand-in phrase for every word he speaks aloud.
TK: Yeh it is a funny paradox: in faithfully rendering the squarest of WASP oppression on both the personal and political levels, I assume a low-grade hipness in my reader, like a wink to say ‘we all know what’s really going on here, right?’ I wonder if there exists a WASPy someone that might pick up the book and wonder, ‘well what’s so odd about all this?’
Mostly my targets are simple and common, it’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and I thought a lot about Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year Award, which was the single funniest thing in my childhood—I watched it over and over and over as a kid. And my own childhood, as I mentioned, did get a certain central priority here that I never backed away from or resisted indulging.
The trickier part with this voice is akin to when U2 covered “Helter Skelter” and introduced it as “Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles and we’re gonna steal it back.” Much of my reading in my late teens thru my twenties was pulpy “conspiracy literature” freely mixing politics and the occult and pothead philosophy. This is the Timothy Learys and Robert Anton Wilsons and Hakim Beys of the world, their books on small presses with paper cheap to the feel and full of typos and printing glitches, pre-Burning Man techno-utopians obsessed with reprogramming the software in their skulls. These books were not only liberating to me, I would go so far as to say they were liberating to me the same way that the Big Bang was liberating to the universe—my identity and worldviews came into being directly as a result of these books. Of course, yes, I had the impulse to seek them out, and they were secret knowledge not easy to find, but they had a magnetism I couldn’t resist. Being high brow and low brow simultaneously and brazenly is so different than being either one or the other. And it’s so different than existing politely between the two. It is expansive. And what I’m getting at here is that nowhere in any of this “conspiracy literature” did it ever come across as somehow right wing. It’s overall impulse was about the inherent equality and absolute total liberation of every sentient being. But in upside down Trump World Inc somehow the right wing maniac asshole moron liars get to have all the conspiracy fun. So my ultimate goal and challenge here was how to write about this stuff in a way that snatches it back from them so it can just be OK to laugh at pompous asses again.
My biggest fear with releasing the book years after it was first written, in terms of the shifting cultural context, was that the deep state conspiracies against the various presidents might be read as right wing defenses of that ultimate Fuckface whose name it makes me sick to say. Suffice it to say, this is not a binary: I have felt nauseous and weepy and haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since that disgusting dishonest criminal slob asshole moron was elected in November 2016. Also, I don’t fully trust the intelligence agencies. To do so is to misunderstand their missions.
But also, what your question refers to as Orwellian rectification of language is actually a Lao Tzu phrase, so simply put, my aim to rectify the language as a dutiful post-structuralist means aiming to rectify the self, which is what the book is ultimately about, however externalized its props and set dressings may appear.
– 5 –
MG: Third, we have his self-awareness as “a movie man,” conversant with all forms of cinema, foreign and domestic. This filmic currency supplies him with a vernacular of the irrational. I wondered in particular about his anxiety at the hallucination of an invasion of Tim Hunter’s 1986 film River’s Edge into his childhood landscape.
TK: I killed so many of my darlings in this book. It was a conscious and discreet step even, going beginning to end and cutting all the zingers and poignant epiphanies that I could. But in the end I couldn’t cut River’s Edge.
Before starting Sunshine I spent a few months starting a very different book: a shot-by-shot analysis of River’s Edge as a vehicle for coming to peace with my own childhood. And when I say shot-by-shot analysis, I truly mean shot-by-shot. I watched it over and over and over, pausing on each frame to riff on its contextual meaning and impact. Every camera pan, every syllable uttered, and every gesture was considered and reconsidered and then affixed onto my own childhood at whatever strange angle it’d stick. And by no means was this a film book. It was some kind of memoir using River’s Edge as the mirror.
1986 was a different world than the one we live in now. None of us—whether we were 12 in 1986 or 12 now—none of us could live in that world now except at the expense of denying real reality. That world is no longer an option. But there was a moment of social codes, mores, and class representation that River’s Edge captured, and it happens to be the world I came from.
And I know that Sunshine’s narrator is not me, but the greatest threat I could imagine him having to withstand would be the crashing in on him of my—the writer’s—real past. Here he is, the narrator, bristling against all the innumerable expectations of his limitless hoity-toity-ness, at peace slumming it with his Barbarian friends, when who shows up and threatens his subjective experience of the present tense, but these Barbarians who don’t have the privilege of the same self-awareness that he does.
– 6 –
MG: Finally, I want to ask you about the prose, since even through the dutiful circulation of the narrator’s shading from one personality to another, the work sustains itself as a monologue. It would be remiss of me not to mention the engine driving his speech deriving as it does from the dual imperatives of love and trauma in ways that I will leave it to the reader to discover. My last question (another in a series of questions without question marks) more concerns the speed of the language, and the way sentence equals paragraph. I could say this syntax renders each iteration an act of speech, and makes the book ultimately a text of performance, an epic aria, the singing of which changes the speaker forever, or so he hopes, through a purge or a confession, seeing himself as he does as world revelator rupturing his family’s veil. But I am drifting from my question, which concerns your thoughts on the units—small, medium, and large—sentence/paragraph, chapter, and part—the breaks between them, and ultimately how you thought about building with them the architecture of the book.
TK: Man, thank you so much, Matthew. I love the way you explain the effect of my unit choices. You are a better reader of my work than I am a writer of it! I mean, ultimately yes, that would be exactly the effects I hope the uncommon choice would have, but I could never articulate the ambition as well as you did.
I make things across a few different disciplines, but considering I am not really trained-trained in any of them, I have had to figure out my own way of making sense of exactly what it is I specialize in. And slowly I’ve come to peace over the last few years that I think of myself as a poet and a collagist, though I have never published a poem or exhibited a collage in any meaningful way. But those are the sensibilities that inform whatever discipline I am working in, seeing as I can’t keep up with musician-musicians and I never really saw the value in working to do so.
The largest unit of this book is a collage—the elements are largely historical, whether at the scale of global history or at the personal scale of my own lived River’s Edge. What’s new is how they are constructed on and into each other—the mission of the modernist!
And the smallest unit is the sentence. It’s not like I just prefer clarity at the building block level, I absolutely require it. Background noise drives me bananas. I need focus on what I am focusing on. So I think of this smallest unit as the work of a poet, getting each sentence to bump as it best can.
And I like how merging the sentence and the paragraph makes time pass in a dream-like way, warps the sense of scale. I guess ultimately that’s the imperative subversion I was aiming for—a warping of the sense of scale. Because yes, ultimately love and trauma are both the central seeds and the central puzzles of the book. Everything else is all just flailing swatting at stand-ins for love and trauma since both are so squirrelly to address head on. And the subjective experiences of both love and trauma are both ultimately defined by warped senses of scale.