Darragh McKeon is the author of All That is Solid Melts Into Air. This is an interview he conducted with author Jeff Jackson about his debut novel Mira Corpora, published by Two Dollar Radio.
I’m always interested in how a writer begins. What was the first thing that went on the page?
A lot of the ideas for the book came to me on a long bus ride into New York City. Sentences, images, possible chapter titles, little moments, and feelings just started to suggest themselves. I took pages of notes, not knowing whether any of these things were related.
When I started working I found an energy constellating around these ideas and phrases and images.
That was the genesis of the book. It had never happened to me in this dramatic way before.
Do you think it was because of the landscape, being in these weird hinterlands?
It was more inspired by an inner landscape. Things that had been bubbling beneath the surface for a while. It was drawing on landscapes from my childhood, teenage years, college, and afterwards.
I was following the trail of little phrases that came to me. Like ‘I’m dreaming upside down. I mean I’m upside down and dreaming.’ Which was one of the phrases that made it into the book. It was a narrative voice that was trying to evoke something and then revising itself almost simultaneously.
Why did the first phrases stick? How did you know this is the road I’m going to walk down?
It had an energy. I was surprised when the stories began to come out in first person and that propelled the writing. Being in the present tense and the present moment also gave it a briskness and immediacy that I liked.
The writing walked a line between dreamlike but also realistic. If I crossed the line into something more overtly fantastical, it usually ended up getting cut.
I think I’m asking because it’s highly visual but it somehow avoids been too concrete. Often when you ask writers how they began they’ll usually come up with a specific image or scene, but that’s not the case here.
I did become conscious early on that I was interested in evoking that state you’re in when you’ve just woken up. Where you have a sense of place and you’re inhabiting remnants of a dream landscape at the same time. So it wasn’t a choice between surreal or realistic. I wanted it to be both, at once.
There’s such a strong cinematic feel here. Even our page layout really feels not like a screenplay but like the experience of taking in a movie.
For the opening chapter of the book “My Year Zero,” I was imagining the scenes as cinematic. The narrator’s memory would be dark, it would slowly bloom into a scene, then it would fade out again. My own memories of childhood are a chain of vivid images and moments, but with gaps between them.
As I was writing this section, I was trying to capture that feel of memory and the layout became part of the solution. This sense of memory welling up then dissipating away.
Can you give an example of that?
There’s a moment when the narrator is tied to a tree, smeared with dog food, and a butterfly lands on his shoulder and gets stuck. I wanted plenty of white space to let that image breathe and linger in the reader’s mind. I was trying to pack a lot into these early moments and I wanted the reader to feel comfortable slowing down and immersing themselves.
Did you draw on some other piece of writing?
No. I’m sure there are other books that have achieved similar effects, but all of my best solutions for Mira Corpora were born out of pure unadulterated desperation. This really isn’t working, how do I fix it?
I feel like ritual is important in the book. What did that come out of?
Yes, it’s very important. I feel like rituals are lacking in our modern lives, or at least in my life. I read about ancient rituals and feel like I want to believe in their power but I can’t quite give myself over to them. I wonder: Can you undertake these rituals with skepticism? Do they have an inherent power despite our disbelief?
For instance, there’s a moment in the book where a group of kids burn a dead body on a funeral pyre. They do it according to an ancient ritual, but it’s only a half-remembered one. Does that still have meaning and power? Can it tap into something larger than ourselves?
Even the way you’re speaking about it, there’s a parallel there with writing.
Yeah, it became clearer the further I got into the book. Which is why there are interstitial sections called “How to Begin,” “How to Continue,” and How to End.”
At some point I thought, if you were to ask some ancient civilizations how to begin to tell your story, they’d probably suggest that you undertake a ritual.
Right.
There’s a certain risk, a potential cost that might have to be paid when you write down your story. Often there’s this warm and fuzzy idea that telling your story leads to some kind of emotional catharsis, but that’s not necessarily true.
Harry Crews has this great story about writing his memoir Childhood: The Biography Of A Place, which is about his growing up. He thought that by writing about it he could get rid of this poisonous baggage, but he says what actually happened was that he nailed it to his back. And he carried the story around with him in a way that was even worse than before.
This is the danger!
This is the danger.
More might be asked of you than you’re willing to give. The outcomes might be asking you to change your life.
Sometimes you read a book and you pay no attention to its genesis. But here I wondered about what kind of situation you were in when you wrote it.
I guess the book is inviting you to wonder about these things. Partly because I gave the narrator my name.
Some of it came from having left New York City after living there for many years. I moved to North Carolina and I was in a new headspace. It’s a different culture. My inner sense of time, that manic New York feeling, radically shifted. Being in a new place also gave me access to a lot of memories I had blocked and the strangeness of being in the South unleashed something in me.
Was this book nailed to your back? I felt like this was potentially something that you carried around with you afterward.
At some points it felt that way. It took me five years to write Mira Corpora and for a long time I just couldn’t put it together in a way that worked. I felt like I wasn’t doing justice to all these memories and images and ideas that had been poured into the work.
It wasn’t that I was being haunted by the memories, it was more like I was being haunted by my inability to do anything with them.
When I finally found the right tone and structure for my story, I started to feel less haunted by it.
Tell me about the characters. How did they emerge and how did they move forward?
Mostly it was about following the narrator. Sometimes I would sketch out the scene he was inhabiting and then I would figure out how he was feeling emotionally within that situation. I had to keep immersing myself in the events until we connected.
Some of the secondary characters surprised me in what they did and I tried to allow room for that to happen. It’s always the best when something surprises me.
For example, in the section “My Life in the City,” the characters are obsessed with this underground rock star Kin Mersey and there’s a rumor that he’s living in this ruined neighborhood, and they see him one day and follow him. I had a feeling he was on his way to give a concert. He goes into the projects and ends up giving an intimate concert in his drug dealer’s apartment. I had no idea what this concert would consist of. He walked through that door and I had no idea what was going to happen.
That carries through the book. Anything can happen at any time. And yet it’s not frustrating for the reader, which is actually a pretty difficult thing to pull off.
I love movies that can do that. Anything can happen, yet it still feels organic. I wanted the text to feel as open as possible. Like with the concert scene. Kin is about to give a concert, but maybe his idea of a concert is building a table.
Talk to me about the research for the book. Was it mainly drawn from movies and music?
I mostly drew from old notebooks I’d kept growing up and it became about a digging deep into my imagination. I wanted to create a mythic undercurrent and specifically didn’t give dates or locations for scenes in the book.
I did have one reader say, “The book didn’t make sense to me until I learned that you grew up in northern New Jersey, then everything fell into place.” I thought, “Damn, what kind of northern New Jersey did you grow up in?”
It’s the place where anything can happen.
I was wary of doing too much research. I wanted the memories to feel like they were being trotted out in the present tense.
Was there one piece of inspiration that stuck?
Bill Henson’s photographs would be one. I’ve felt a real kinship with Harmony Korine’s movies, ever since I saw Gummo in its opening week. I was knocked over by it. There are so many books. Dennis Cooper, Don DeLillo, Issac Babel, Joan Didion, Nabokov. Their work is important to me. How they filtered into Mira Corpora exactly I don’t know.
I saw Philippe Grandrieux’s films when I was writing this. Watching Sombre, I felt an immediate connection. I thought, “This is what I’ve been doing.” It was productive just sit with his work. I could feel the logic of Sombre working in my gut, but when I tried to explain it to my friends, I just couldn’t do it. Which I take a sign of its success.
Robert Lepage says something like “I try to leave an audience with a feeling or an experience that they can’t articulate after they left the theatre.”
Yeah, for me that’s the best. When it gives you an emotional experience that you can’t quite put into words.
Did you feel like you had to give yourself permission to write in this way? It feels contrary to what’s happening in literature in a broad sense. It’s brave. It really stands out.
I did actually. At first I was writing through a kind of mask. I was almost creating a character to write the book for me.
You were pretending to yourself you weren’t writing it while you were writing it.
I was approaching it from the point of view—what if I was an editor that found this material? Eventually the mask was counter-productive and I needed to embrace the thing I was scared by and to give the narrator my name. By that point in the process, he had earned the right to my name. Even though we weren’t the same person.
Which sounds very like a catharsis after all.
It was a weird moment. I had started out 180 degrees away from that. But I realized what has to happen is that I need to fully embrace this identification in ways that are going to be uncomfortable for me.
Is that something you’re carrying through to your other work?
No. It was a moment in time. But there may be other moments in time when I come back to it. I don’t foresee it on the immediate horizon, but I could be wrong.