Thomas Kendall Interview
[GS-INT-009]
I have to say, after starting "How I Killed The Universal Man" I was refreshed by how smooth your prose is in a sci-fi environment. But before I get too deep into that, I have to know, has becoming a father changed you as a writer?
Firstly, thank you. I'm quite obsessive about the style of my writing and I was curious how that would transfer into a work that had to embrace certain conventions of genre, so it's really nice to hear that. It's an interesting question and one I'm not sure how to answer. I want to be careful to avoid anything that might make any overt universalising claims regarding the value or experience of parenting as the thought of that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. So to start with, I think any form of love adds new intensities, new vistas, to both the charge of our emotions and our responses to them and therefore adds another layer of potential to anything we create. For me personally, I didn't imagine I could love the way that I love my children. The absolute, consuming, totality of it. How strange to suddenly have someone you feel that you could not live without, to feel the primacy of another's existence, one that happily supersedes your own. I imagine this responsibility is definitely feeding into the work albeit in ways that are beyond the investigation of the idea. Thematically I don't know that it has impacted the work I've published so far given the concepts my writing tends to revolve around. There's perhaps a greater necessity of hope in the work I've written since becoming a parent... and maintaining that alongside an intellectual authenticity I think is definitely something that drives 'How I Killed The Universal Man' and 'The Autodidacts.' Perhaps there has been an integration (with all the attendant confirmations, modifications and jettisoning that implies) around some of the ideas I work with. I'm very interested in how consciousness emerges and how life animates the body and where identity and agency interact and it's quite a rare thing to observe kids as they grow up, to be present as a subjectivity forms new articulations. Obviously from a practical standpoint, I also have much, much less time to write and read. That can be quite difficult but it just means I have to be more focused when I do get the opportunity.Â
It is very hard to talk about parenting because the topic touches the areas of those raising children that are of supreme importance. I cringe at the times when I was annoyed by crying babies in the store because I had no idea what that was until I had one. It's overwhelming the immense power behind radical empathy, in that it has the ability to permanently shift the focus of another person's life. Were you afraid that you would lose your creative spirit after your first child was born? And what was it like reconnecting with it after? Or was it even a reconnection?
I'm not sure I was afraid that I would lose any creative edge or drive as such...I hadn't been able to publish anything for years and years and I was receiving a lot of rejections etc. I don't know how many years. Six, seven, eight. There wasn't a great deal of encouragement in regards to my work being any good or that anyone would ever want to publish or read it. Though that was hard and dispiriting, I still couldn't stop writing or wanting to write. So in that sense I knew that I'd have to find a way to carve some time out. Happily both my published novels were either heavily revised or written after the birth of our first child, so if anything the impact on time etc maybe resulted in a condensing of process...there wasn't time to wallow in how shit I am or something. So, I don't know...if anything becoming a parent gave me a greater attachment to life and intensified the commitment to writing even as writing became less possible? There's an act of service in both writing and being a parent and it's profound and joyful but also has to be undertaken without expectation of any recompense or recognition. I do worry about how little I am able to read at the moment and what the consequences might be for my writing later on down the line etc. Still, I blame work for that more than I do parenting. BTW I just wanted to go back for a second to my first response and clarify that I wasn't intending to denigrate the genre of science fiction or anything with my remark about style. What I wanted to say perhaps is that the autodidacts, which is not science fiction, and the kind of work I intend to enjoy and generally want to create has a complex relation to the nature of convention.
I don't think you were denigrating science fiction at all. Genres are mainly defined by their conventions, and you were able to use those as creative boundaries (in my opinion) successfully. And made it into something all your own. Do/Did you find yourself purposely avoiding convention to the point that it stalls your ability to move forward in a piece you're working on? By that I mean, the battle to find a creative solution around something obvious becomes so cumbersome that the entirety of the work suffers for it.
Thank you, you've articulated what I wanted to say much better than I did. I've definitely found finding solutions to problems of my own making cumbersome at times and the solution usually ends up being simpler than I initially thought but even then I think it's about arriving at the relative simplicity of the answer. An inevitable part of the process? I also want my work to pose interesting problems that require interesting solutions and the narrative and stylistic aspects represent the hopefully elegant phrasing of those problems at a granular level. I spend quite a lot of time feeling generally inept and so very little presents itself as obvious to me and the weird suspended time and space of writing perhaps renders this way of seeing the world as unconventional.
I don't know exactly how purposeful any of this is…I mean for the most part I've never really been interested or even read much literature that we would consider 'conventional'...when I think of that word I'm imagining popular realist fiction or best-selling works of literary value that will probably be taught in secondary/high schools.... and there are probably skills or things of value within those texts which I've had to develop independently and which took a surprisingly long time to grasp and may have contributed to how slowly I write etc. I think I've definitely been guilty of holding onto certain conceptual ideas for longer than the work requires.For instance 'The Autodidacts,' which retains a quite complex narrative structure, was for a long time far more fragmented and non-linear than its published version. My initial plan was for it to be structured in the form of a double Helix with various timelines and narratives sequenced to parallel one another in both space and time etc. The result of that structure rendered it (a) almost unreadable and (b) didn't actually add anything to the ideas within the work. I was so focused on the idea that I forgot about the various emergent relationships or emotional affect I wanted the book to conjure etc and which required a certain balance to function. It was only when I was able to let go of this notion and restructure the work that anyone showed any interest. Initially every paragraph switched decades without any warning haha....the nice thing was when it came to edit again I only had to collate these fragmented sections, and they did actually cohere into the narrative I'd been so wrongfully intent on trying to obscure. And maybe again that's about process...Sometimes you know there's an idea in the combination.
I usually don't insert myself too much in these interviews but I feel it's important to say that the majority of writers who didn't go through any formal learning deal with the same thing and the result is something genuinely new. It's something I've become grateful for because it's not so much what I don't have, it's what I don't feel required to have. I have no expectations on my work. And in that, my defect becomes my superpower. Do you understand what I mean? That fragmented version of your novel was a complete picture because you were likely the only one who had eyes on it. And your round of submissions were also part of the process that led you to the next edit. Because part of experimental work is throwing something onto the threshing floor (in this case, of the publishing world) and asking "Does this do anything for anyone?" It was as vital as the next edit in terms of process. I struggled with the same thing, and once, Jeff [Jackson] told me that if you're making something truly experimental/unique, it's probably going to take a long time. The style you're cultivating, that you'll continue to cultivate until you die, is what will be altogether splendid to admire. And with that said, what is your favorite movie?
I think that's really beautifully put and I totally agree. I'm not sure I have too much to add except, and I think I've said this elsewhere, one of the beautiful affordances of writing is failure. Unlike say a sculptor or a filmmaker etc the material you're working with is free and so as long as you can maintain a belief in what you are trying to do and a drive to do it you can afford to keep failing. I think the difficult part to keep in mind is that when you're writing, even if your goal isn't to publish, it isn't solely for you, that it is the reader that 'completes' the work and that this reader can never be you.Â
I think, for me, the way to do this is to think about the affects of my writing … what experience I want to construct and doing that helps me attend to the notion of the reader without necessarily compromising the work I want to do.Â
Oof… favourite film. I would say it’s a toss up between Mulholland Drive which was really important for me in terms of understanding how fantasies can be constructed and break down, Stalker by Tarkovsky and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also really love Ordet by Dreyer and Pickpocket by Bresson. I’ve definitely cheated here haha. Â
That's a great answer. There's no cheating, it's just the way you answered it. I think that's a great place to end it.
Thomas Kendall is the author of The Autodidacts and How I Killed The Universal Man both of which are available from Whiskey Tit Books. He’s from Bournemouth, UK. He lives in London.