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T.B.: Griffin has read some, but my kids have been conditioned to believe that Daddy’s writing is bad for people. They’re afraid of it. It may take some time.

I’m not sure how to answer your memory and influence question. Memory and influence are probably media. Maybe it’s the word `grappling’ I can’t quite meet. What I like to do, and pretty graphically in Idaho, is manufacture `now’ and maybe `grappling’ presumes `now’ is normalized, unseen.

Oh, I think I know what I’m talking about now – what interests me more is what happens when memory and influence are not being grappled with. When they become automatic. When writing becomes a record of that automatism.

K.K.: Why does this interest you?

T.B.: Well, for a start, I’m interested in unintended marks and artifacts – noise and casings and things that can’t be accounted for, or made part of `voice’. The headlessness I was talking about before. The part that isn’t significant that persists. It can’t be unpacked or recognized or greeted, it is unwelcoming, has no face, its back is turned and so, without conversation to make it familiar we need a method of recording. And we have to accept that the recording will not resemble the face, or the front, or the meaning, it will only give a braille or a mold or a code for how we can see it on this side. This side is blind and in complete darkness. What changed Alix to Alex, female to male, wasn’t significant, it happened automatically when matter appeared on their names. Then we try to make the massive difference between the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ seem significant. I find this kind of peril fascinating. Not that you are in danger of being destroyed but that you are in danger of never having been here.

K.K.: It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, in a sense. What the subconscious can’t unload. I’m wondering how this relates to Ravenna Gets, your, by the way, extraordinary, gorgeously-written, horror-defined account of a town’s inhabitants being systematically murdered by the inhabitants of another town. It’s hard going, I must say, but in light of your earlier comments, I start to see it almost as the mind’s detritus of violent video games in its inevitability and its repetitive trauma. What is witnessed against the emotional flatness of the experience.  I hope I am not reading in.

T.B.: Reading in is the game.  I wasn’t thinking specifically about video games (although, when you let yourself float a bit in writing you can’t always identify the forces attracting you) but certainly inevitability and repetition where the sturdy makers of, at least, the first half. Structurally, I was thinking about a long corridor of glass panels, the first few quite vivid with pinpricks in them, these pinpricks accumulate along the corridor, breeding and creating capacities and transforming echoes, that culminate with the Entertainment district, after that the world kind of returns. Something like that anyway.

Also experimenting with the idea of thoughtless lazy writing triumphing over precision, just to see if that would be a new kind of ghastly. I think it is. Kind of like a light clear picture being swallowed whole by a coarse noise. Variations on automatism and Acephaly.

K.K.: Can the writer be entirely headless though? I’m wondering if you are suggesting that the reader is, in a way, parasitical. I suppose, the reader requires the guidance of the writer, and if this can be seen as a type of Acephaly, okay. Not to argue, but the writing in Ravenna is too evolved, and precise, for me to entirely buy its automatic delivery. Just like the violence, the writing, and its intention, feel premeditated. There is a head. Even if over and over, this head is removed.

T.B.: I’m probably just referring generally to that way of writing as if it is evolved, in order to hide my head, or at least to suggest that not knowing what I’m doing is a strategy.

I’ll change my language: Ravenna is the record of a nightmare that terrain is having. It’s something I have tried before and that is to spread (atomize? granulate?) a mind in the ground. This mind has a direct influence on people and things within it and those people and things are different than it and people/things must cope with this Lovecraftian event. It is mysterious and shifting and overwhelming and not mindful of how things matter.

Stylistically it’s a bit of an auction and some very small items have quite specific ways of being there.

K.K.: The more of your work I read the more I come up against language, or more precisely words as these almost cube-like placeholders, so that, for instance in Pontypool Changes Everything, they become insertions that can shift meaning within a sentence to something unrecognizable or nearly unrecognisable. You are doing a kind of violence to logic — in all the books you are doing this. And this has an effect on the brain of the reader, more than the plot, or perhaps coincidental to the plot, which, to me, at least, is much scarier than the content of book, were it simply synopsized.

I’m curious about your relationship to words.

Also, if not knowing what you are doing is a strategy, or a strategy insofar as knowing only something like you writing a story in which you “spread (atomize? granulate?) a mind in the ground” and then unfolding the story from there, how does that feel? It’s antithetical to outlining, controlling etc. and it seems to me you get a pretty uncanny dreamscape going in all your writings. Do you suppose a writer goes deeper, to more uncomfortable places without strategy, or without a tightly defined destination?