In April of last year we—Alana Friend Lettner and M. Leander Kalil—encountered Maggy Hamel-Metsos’ installation Simile Aria at Fonderie Darling in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). We knew very little about Hamel-Metsos; we did not yet know of her predilection for conceptual interrogations via sculptural means, nor of her various obsessions with opera divas, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, and bullfights. We knew only that she had a residency at Fonderie Darling, that she had exhibited internationally, and that we had to see Simile Aria before it was taken down, according to urgent encouragements from several of our friends. Simile Aria featured a single repurposed church organ suspended from the ceiling of the immense room in seven isolated clusters, each of which was attached to an air compressor set on a timer. One by one, and over the course of nearly an hour, the clusters sang their disparate and highly dissonant chords. After bursting forth, each chord was surrounded by a silence that was so generous, so palpable as to seem as much a material component of the installation—as much as the organ pipes themselves. Off in its own hemisphere of the room, two tripodal contraptions, each affixed with an empty clip and a magnifying glass, stood opposite a mirror looming high on a lighting stand. Later we would find out that the clips had held photographs of opera divas and infants, and that sunlight coming in through the high windows, bouncing off the mirror, and concentrating through the magnifying glasses, had incinerated them. We were the only people in the room. Eventually, we lay down on the concrete floor and looked up at the ceiling, listening; after some time a gallery attendant approached us and, with an extreme gentleness and in a tone of voice reserved for sleeping children, informed us that the gallery was closing and that it was time for us to go. What emerged from our encounter with Simile Aria was a correspondence with Hamel-Metsos (who is represented by the Montreal-based Eli Kerr Gallery and has a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University) in which the three of us exchanged letters, handwritten and hand-delivered to each other’s houses over the course of several weeks. We were driven, first, by a perception of shared interests and resonances: as a poet and student of osteopathy, one of us (Alana Friend Lettner) was compelled by the experiential and bodily aspects of the installation, and by Hamel-Metsos’ sculptural practice as a “reactionary stance towards a technocracy that flattens our corporeal experience of the world.” As a filmmaker with an interdisciplinary, architecturally influenced practice, the other (M. Leander Kalil) was compelled by its oblique musicality and its propitiation of movement through space, without becoming easily subsumed into the categories of either music or architecture. In the end, our meandering conversation touched on: material affinities and aversions; conceptual scaffoldings; stratagems of reversal; the objectification of pain and the freedom to vanish; etc. But we were also driven by a desire to sustain a sense of mystery, of tension and surprise in the process of our exchange. “I indeed willingly put myself in the tumultuous position of anticipation and revelation.” So says Hamel-Metsos, and so, in turn, say we. In retrospect, we realized that the structure of our correspondence, which involved both spatial and temporal distance between each reply, shared a shape with Simile Aria itself: like its clusters of organ pipes, we were calling out to one another across the expanse of Montreal’s wintry cityscape. As Hamel-Metsos puts it: “Each chord is an exclamation in the void.” — Alana Friend Lettner & M. Leander Kalil I think of ideas as internal visions that I have to translate into a physical plane. Sometimes my ideas fail to translate directly; that's where the work takes a life of its own. Someone once said to me: If you can't get rid of it, make it a feature. Alana Friend Lettner (AFL): What I remember most of Simile Aria was its physical impact on me. The organ pipe clusters felt so bodily in spite of their almost industrial composition, like lungs from which voices emanated. This makes me think of the mysterious in-betweenness of breath: voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious. To me, Simile Aria was like this, both intentional and controlled while also allowing for something autonomic into the work. The organ pipes were abstractions of embodiments without becoming too conceptual or burdened by semantics; they really sang.  Perhaps the breath can be an analogy for making art. As you were making Simile Aria, were you consciously considering the installation as a somatic experience? I'm thinking about how we register the voices of others on not only a semantic level, but also on tonal, vibrational levels. Or were you indeed driven by some conceptual scaffolding? Maggy Hamel-Metsos (MHM): I think that what you refer to as somatic experience is an inherent quality of sculpture—it's perhaps why I do sculpture. Sculpture is my reactionary stance towards a technocracy that flattens our corporeal experience of the world. My favourite example of this is the trading of gear sticks for buttons in a car. But the bodily aspects of Simile Aria were answers to questions entirely different. The red compressor hoses branching out like bronchi exemplified the singular vs. the multiple, the loneliness of a single voice being absorbed into the cosmos. Of course, the only true understanding I can have of other bodies is through my own body, and once you read it that way, it's endless: the tanks are the lungs; the pipes, vocal cords; the hoses, bronchi; the organ, an organ. (Funny also that you mention the tonal and vibrational levels of voice, as I’m working on a rendering of some opera pieces, but solely through vibration—no sound.) That being said, what's at the forefront of my thinking is indeed the conceptual scaffolding. The central thought, the core idea, of Simile Aria was to make the divine become human. Specifically, to reverse all the stratagems that make the organ divine—its endless breath, hidden blower, hidden pipes, hidden player. I had no idea what anything sounded like up until two or three days before the vernissage. When I heard it for the first time, I was alone, it was late at night, and I burst into tears. I had been working on it for seven to eight months, and it felt like I could breathe for the first time. Leander Kalil (MLK): What you experienced the night that you heard the chords for the first time strikes me as an allegory for something I sometimes feel: that upon finishing a work, I at last encounter it as something totally separate from me. Like Pinnocchio. What is your relationship to lucidity while you're working on a project? Do you like it to remain a mystery to you? Especially as you mention your current project, in which you're taking the "heardness" out of opera pieces, I'm curious about your relationship to music. I always wondered to what extent you had "composed" these chords in a musical sense. And now I have my answer: you didn't. It's more that you were composing as a sculptor. I recently heard the composer and professor of composition Matthew King describe Stravinsky as having a talent for making "sonic objects," his distinctive, sharply defined chords, of great density and striking form. I've always thought of Anton Webern as having done something similar with isolated tones—they feel like bodies, animals that appear only as you pass by them in some nocturnal space. I think it's the severity with which you spaced out the utterances in Simile Aria, in addition to their incredible harmonic density, that leaves them, even in their sonority, as sculptures (rather than as music). As Alana said, "They really sang." But I almost imagine them like a choir that has dispersed, leaving singers or smaller groups of singers still calling out with their parts, lost. I'm fixated on what you beautifully described as reversals of stratagems of divineness. I'm sorry to break it to you: the work has divineness! And to me, the clusters you've made are quite gothic, and, like columns shifted out of place, they form a sort of misshapen nave. MHM: It would be a lie if I told you the clusters in Simile Aria were not sonically composed at all. I knew I wanted them to "sing out of key," but I also wanted them to try to be harmonious. I asked Maria Gajraj, Montreal-based organist and co-founder of Sapphonix Collective, to split the organ into seven distinct chords. From there, I chose the exact pitches. The non-musical feature, for me, is that there isn’t care for sequence. Each chord is an exclamation in the void. Regarding lucidity, I indeed willingly put myself in the tumultuous position of anticipation and revelation. I love the thrill. Because often my ideas are practically unfeasible, the shape they will take is a mystery. The scale of both O.W.M.B., at Joe Project (2023), and Simile Aria made it so that I wouldn't see what I was working on until the eve of the vernissage. I think Stravinsky and Webern still thought of what they were doing as music, but I never think about my projects in these terms. I never had the discipline for learning an instrument, so I can only use instruments obliquely. My great uncle was a renowned organist and organ-maker. But I don't think these things run in the blood. Since I have zero background in music, and because I have always wanted, deeply, painfully, to express myself in this language, it becomes about expressing the desire towards music, rather than the music itself. So in Simile Aria there needed to be a loneliness, like whales singing in the depths of the ocean. That's why there's distance between the calls. The figure of the dispersed choir you highlight is maybe my choir of whales. Regarding divinity, there was clearly a desire to have a lightness, a hovering, levitating, celestial, sculptural quality to the pipe structures in order to counterbalance the heavy terrestrial quality of the compressors. AFL: Like Leander, I was struck by your description of Simile Aria as enacting a reversal of stratagems that render the organ divine. It made me curious to know why you felt compelled to facilitate such a reversal—what was the root of your desire to de-divinize the organ? The language of reversal reminds me of my recent studies of physiology and pathology. If you reverse the normal functions of any bodily system, you will end up with a pathology, an illness. The philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky writes in her book Wisdom & Metaphor: "The experience of struggling with illness is the experience of the fundamentally metaphorical nature of the self: one is, and is not, one's body." So, there is an inherent alienation or loneliness in illness. (Incidentally, there is a long tradition of illness as the precursor to divine encounter: Hildegarde von Bingen, or the mountain poet Hsieh Ling-yun.) I bring this up because earlier you mentioned a preoccupation with illness, and you also mentioned the need for the evocation of loneliness in Simile Aria, effected by the distance between the sounding of each chord. And yet to me, whatever loneliness you cultivated was offset by almost blinding moments of communion between chord and listener. It seems to me that we are rescued from loneliness by witness, by being seen. Your comment about doing sculpture as a reactionary stance against technocracy resonates deeply with me. (I am currently studying osteopathy.) How would you characterize your relationship to tactility, to your hands? MHM: Regarding tactility, I believe it's one of my intelligences. I grew up extremely manual. With the experience I've acquired, I feel it's very easy for me to predict what a material wants to do or not. But it makes it very hard for me to work with others, as I am just in a dance with materials, and so much of it is about feeling, being sentient and attentive. As for the organ, I think it’s this almighty, omnipotent instrument, and I needed it to show some vulnerability by altering its functions. Maybe it's this stepping down from a state of power that lets us relate to it better. But most of all, it was a decision based on the Main Hall of Fonderie Darling. It's a very tough room to work with because it’s already so incredibly beautiful and grandiose, shaped like a church, and with very high ceilings. (At first, I wanted to show works on the ceiling so that our gazes would be redirected upwards. I like that stance, as it reminds me of the experience of the world as a child.) Some works try to compete with the divinity of that room, but I thought that my strategy would be to take something that is already divine and bring it back down to human height. Instead of us bowing in front of the organ, it bows down to us. It's like watching a loved one, who was always strong to us, in a hospital bed on artificial respirators. I profoundly relate to what you mention about normality, pathology, and being seen. But I think we suffer in lights as much as we do in the shadows. I am quite obsessed with divas of opera who end up living the tragedies they perform. In this moment of intense, almost fetishistic, consumption of images of the pain of others, it was important to me that the chords sing and the photographs of babies and of opera singers either performing pain or being truly afflicted burn away not only when people are there but also when there are no witnesses, and that they don't suffer just for our gazes. Tragedies big or small happen every day, whether we witness them or not, and not all tragedies should be circulated in the media sphere. The pain of others is not for our entertainment. Images of exhibitions are entertainment, in a sense, but being there is wholly different. Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Simile Aria, 2025. Vue d’installation à la Fonderie Darling/Installation view at Fonderie Darling. Sound installation: air compressors, silver-plated hardware, rubber hoses, aluminum, Casavant Opus 2586 organ pipes, variable dimensions. Image credit: William Sabourin Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Simile Aria, 2025. Vue d’installation à la Fonderie Darling/Installation view at Fonderie Darling. Sound installation: air compressors, silver-plated hardware, rubber hoses, aluminum, Casavant Opus 2586 organ pipes, Variable dimensions. Image credit: William Sabourin In this part of Simile Aria, the photographs held by clips in magnified sunlight will eventually combust and burn away. Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Simile Aria, 2025. Détail de l'œuvre à la Fonderie Darling/ Detail of the work at Fonderie Darling. Image credit: William Sabourin AFL: This imperative you felt to allow the chords and the photographs in Simile Aria to exist for themselves and not only for an audience interests me, especially since part of this gesture entails their freedom to vanish. The freedom to go unseen is increasingly difficult to achieve, given the ubiquity of surveillance technologies, and yet it seems to be a critical aspect of what it means to be free. How do you negotiate your own visibility as an artist? What does it feel like for you when an exhibition opens to the public? I like what you said about being in a dance with materials. It seems to me that your difficulty collaborating with other people arises from your fidelity to your primary collaboration with the material. Are there particular materials you share a special affinity with, or, conversely, materials you feel unable to relate to?As a writer, language is my material, and it's very tangible and physically expressive to me. Years ago I read a theory about the origins of language that has always stayed with me. The theory goes that kinship bonds were primarily established through physical acts—of grooming, say—but as human communities became bigger, it was no longer feasible to be in a physically close relationship with everyone in the community. So language emerged as a form of touch at a distance. Whether or not this origin story is historically accurate is not so important to me, but the thesis at its core informs everything I write. MHM: I love this theory of language emerging as a way to touch others. Some writers touch me so deeply it feels like a violation of personal space (Clarice Lispector, Anne Carson). It's always curious to see how people will interact with a work. At the opening night of Simile Aria—I never expected it—people were rushing to gather around the chord that was singing, and they formed a circle as if around a fire, or like that scene in The Grinch when they all sing around the Christmas tree. That was so touching. Perhaps you're right about my fidelity to the material, but I also think that my difficulty collaborating with others stems from not really knowing what the fuck I am doing. When I’m handling an object or a material I’m making so many microdecisions simultaneously that it would be hard for me to explain to others in the moment, they’re just intuitive responses. I share no affinity with anything digital or in cyberspace, but I also have no affinity with ceramics, or materials that are very malleable. I have to struggle with something more rigid, that resists, something that comes with its own limitations, story, an already-formed thing. Working with an organ, or with metal—that’s character. When the material is more malleable, like with paint or clay, the attention is too much on me, on my self. My own visibility is something I struggle with, definitely. I find being visible exhausting. Out of self preservation, sometimes I want to be more cut-throat, but I seek communion before aversion. I understand my medium as thoughts, and being in dialogue with others is how I think, so conversations are very important to me, and exhibitions allow me to talk to so many people with so many different backgrounds. MLK: The way you characterize your creative process as not really knowing what you are doing brings to my mind again Alana’s description of the breath. I, too, am fascinated by the interplay in artistic process (and in life broadly) between the voluntary and involuntary, will and reflex, navigation and getting lost. And I often find that the most profound synchronicities in a work are not results of conscious decisions, but more like the work putting itself together. This stuff unfolds through process, but the initial appearance of concepts, too, can happen through a similar tension between the voluntary and involuntary. Simile Aria has incredible conceptual elegance, while also being so layered in its figuration as to still be truly mysterious, like plant and animal bodies. The way you describe your preferred materials as having a rigid character that you must reckon with could also apply to instruments, tools, that are designed to be used in a certain way, or, if it’s a musical instrument, played in a certain way. I think that your oblique use of musical instruments, arising from wanting to engage with music without having musical ability, is precisely what we hear in a lot of great music and musical practices. I find that music that searches for the secret sounds of an instrument can be quite moving, music that misuses musical techniques or structures, or misuses the instrument or plays it "broken," or plays it less like an instrument and more like a material (I have in mind the composer Ernst Reisjeger, whose cello, it seems to me, is more like a material he plays with than an instrument he plays, more like the clay itself than a throwing wheel or shaping tools). The line between instrument and material is blurry to me, and not just in music, but in general, and perhaps especially in architecture. What are your thoughts on the relationship between material and instrument? MHM: I would be tempted to say that instruments, perhaps in addition to thoughts, are my material. It's true that I most often start with objects, vases that hold flowers, pipes that sing melodies, objects/instruments that I melt down into plaques. I like it when things do something and are not merely representational. I guess a lot of my work is also partially concerned with misusing things. MLK: So you start with objects, instruments, and thoughts. But how do you get from there to an idea? What is the transformation between your encounter with that thing and the idea of what to do with it, or what to reveal about it in terms of what it can "do"? MHM: I can rarely connect my ideas to an exterior factor. I mean that they come to me in half-dreaming states, and because they take place in a malleable world that does not necessarily reflect reality, they are hypotheses and questions, i.e.: Can I have a film run horizontally in a custom lightbox? Can I power an organ with air compressors? The course of these ideas is just a symptom of an unknown gastric phenomenon happening inside me, from which I get a sensation, or, in the case of Simile Aria, a vision. And things are so well digested that it's very hard to recognize or isolate an origin in this mush. I don't keep note of ideas. There has to be a manifestation. I think of ideas as internal visions that I have to translate into a physical plane. Sometimes my ideas fail to translate directly; that's where the work takes a life of its own. Someone once said to me: If you can't get rid of it, make it a feature. Maggy Hamel-Metsos, O.W.M.B., 2023. Vue d’installation à Joe Project/Installation view at Joe Project. Ektachrome film, galvanized steel, spools, sprockets, plexiglas, lights, motors, hardware and a metronome, 250 linear feet. Image credit: Atlas Documentation Maggy Hamel-Metsos, O.W.M.B., 2023. Détail de l'œuvre à la Fonderie Darling/Detail of the work at JoeProject. Ektachrome film, galvanized steel, spools, sprockets, plexiglas, lights, motors, hardware and a metronome, 250 linear feet. Image credit: Atlas Documentation AFL: I recognize much of what you describe in my own process. Something emerges out of the ether—a fragment of voice, a bodily gesture, a desire—and then I am compelled to follow it. Any time I try to make work from an idea or a concept that I can already articulate in advance, I know I won't ever finish it. Because, in a sense, the process is over. What you said about making a feature of that which you can't get rid of reminds me of how I approach revisions. If there is an intractable problem in a piece, eventually I am more or less forced to consider how I can incorporate the problem, what the problem has to teach me about what the piece can do. Could you describe how, during the creation of a particular work, you made a feature of something that appeared to be a problem? MHM: With Simile Aria, the whole show was based on something I could not get rid of, which I mentioned earlier: Fonderie Darling's Main Hall, and that includes its acoustics. It is impossible to have a conversation in that room, that's how echoey it is. So the piece was conceived to highlight this feature of the room that would have otherwise cost me tens of thousands of dollars to fix. But more generally, I'd say these types of negotiations happen on smaller scales. In Vues de la Plaine at La Gn-o (2024), when I was reproducing the plan of St. Gall's Monastery, the chalk line was often too loaded, which created a sort of cast or halo of diffused chalk around the line. In the end, I kept these diffusions, these haloes, because they made everything seem more like bruised scars on concrete than simply architectural chalk lines—it was a sort of building stigmata. I truly resonate with what you mentioned about knowing the outcome of a given idea—if it doesn't involve hard work and/or thrill, I’m not interested. MLK: I'm always amazed at how there really is no substitute for the action, the play, the touching of the instrument or the material when it comes to the emergence of ideas. And in this sense, one's own work can always be surprising. Your description of hearing the sounds of the organs, as well as of the unexpected appearance of the chalk in Vues de la Plaine, seem to me like descriptions of surprises. Have you ever found yourself wrestling with a project that is manifesting in contradiction to an expectation or intention you had for it? We've spoken about bodies, music, materials, and spaces as the provocators of your work. But I'm curious about what other features of life, the world, and culture compel you. What beyond your disciplines and mediums proper do you marvel at? MHM: The work is just always a bit misaligned with what I had intended or expected. But that’s good—it means it speaks outside of me, beyond me. The work has its desires and paths of least resistance, and I have my own, but we do have to meet somewhere. It’s an encounter. To your point about contradiction, I can't say. What I can say is that I am almost always deceived. But I don't give up, I keep pushing until it's at least a fair negotiation with reality. I think the struggle can be elegant and moving. Trying is beautiful in itself. A failed attempt is better than no attempt at all. Don't you both feel that way in your own work? A lot of my aspirations come from literary figures. I love the immaterial presence of the author through writing, like a timeless spectre that appears. Then I have obsessions, which are not what one would think of as a source of inspiration; it's quite different, it's more angular and complex. Opera, bullfights, machines in general... I marvel at the process of photography but not at the photograph... What's the relation you have with the things you absolutely love and adore, especially if it's somebody else's work? AFL: The way you describe your process as encounter, negotiation, even as passing through a kind of deception, actually reminds me somewhat of bullfighting (or the little I know of it): a blend of play and danger in which there is antagonism and elegance, moments of grace and even mortal failure. What do you mean when you describe bullfighting and other unlikely sources of inspiration as "angular"? I very much consider writing to be a process of encounter with the world, certainly a negotiation with reality—and not just its representation, but the actual creation of an experience that a reader can inhabit and live through. Could you say more about the writers, like Lispector and Carson, with whom you have an affinity? As for my relation to that which is other to me and which I adore, I would characterize it as tension. Simone Weil once wrote that the beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. I don't think that's true for me. Beauty for me, in the art of others, and in others, is the hunger and the satiation both, it is the experience of that opposition, neither wholly unrequited nor wholly consummated—not two, not one. MHM: I used the term "angular" to describe the friction I experience with these obsessions. "Knots" could have been another word. It's a mixture of fascination, irritation, something that excites the neurons because of its contradictions. I agree with you about writing that creates an experience, and maybe my literary attractions reflect that. To me, Carson, Lispector, and Jon Fosse are writers who each in their own way passed beyond the merely representational force of language. Lispector's The Hour of the Star has to be the most painful reading I've done lately, because she makes you experience emotions—disdain for others, the pathetic—at an intensity that is best kept in the fictional world. In a way, she forced me to feel those things so that I wouldn't have to feel them in real life. It was transformative. It's a Jesus type of sacrifice. I will just say this: upon having conquered an esteemed warrior, Romans would eat the heart of their enemy to possess their admired attributes. MLK: I do feel that a real attempt is beautiful, often not in spite of its “failures” but because of them. Sometimes I will lucidly defend an aspect of my work that I know doesn't really work, by affirming its value as an incarnation of a longer-term realization that I'm not yet capable of realizing, which also puts it in a position of specialness, like mudskippers, those fish that have legs. I adore things in tension, for example tension between epochs, like music from around 1600 (Renaissance turning into the Baroque), or the tension between grace and collapse, like the scene in Chaplin’s The Circus when the Tramp ends up on a tightrope without a safety line (a fact he only discovers after showing off a bit), and while up there is harassed and undressed by several loose monkeys. And I like to try to figure out how these tricks of tension are done, while somehow remaining under their spell. Your description of reading The Hour of the Star reminds me of my recent experience watching Olivier's Hamlet. I found its tension, its insanity, and its lonely atmosphere almost too much for me to bear, too real. And all the while I was in wonderment at how this was being done to me. When you make work, are you ever seeking to elicit a specific emotion? Are you one to push for levity? For gravity? For neither? MHM: I, too, like to defend the odd parts, or that which "screeches." I used to explain what something was supposed to be, to express the complexity of the thinking behind my work, but over time I’ve stopped doing this (or I want to stop, though I am sometimes still too candid). Sometimes artists get attached, perhaps too much, to the intention, and they simply stand in front of something that was supposed to be otherwise. I was recently discussing with my friend, visual artist and performer Betty Pomerleau, how we just like to follow the viewer's lead and agree to whatever intention or interpretation they attribute to us or to our work—to a certain extent of course. It's freeing up or opening up the work, because even for us what we do is just one physical manifestation of a boundless thought. I do think there's a clarity and simplicity to what I do, such that people often find themselves right where I was going. But even then a lot of it remains a mystery to me, too. Except in frequencies—I know when I vibrate, and I just trust it will make others vibrate the way I do. Some works just speak to you in a way that is like finding the right frequency on a radio. This has happened many times with Simile Aria, and in this sense it was truly operatic. Through the performance of my song, I touched some and for a brief moment we felt understood. The above conversation was conducted by poet Alana Friend Lettner, and interdiscplinary artist M. Leander Kalil, who are both based in Montreal.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock.  Cover image: Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Simile Aria, 2025. Vue d’installation à la Fonderie Darling/Installation view at Fonderie Darling. Sound installation: air compressors, silver-plated hardware, rubber hoses, aluminum, Casavant Opus 2586 organ pipes, variable dimensions. Image credit: William Sabourin

Despite the quintessential plucky gallerist represented in many a media about ”life in the big city,” literature depicting the commercial art world, and doing it well, is far and few between. Enter James Cahill, an academic, art critic, and one-time gallerina (a decidedly gender neutral term). The British writer, who currently lives stateside in Los Angeles, made a name for himself as a novelist in 2022 with his debut Tiepolo Blue, exploring the psychological tailspin of a Cambridge art historian preoccupied by Rococo frescoes, as the Young British Art movement of the 1990s begins to encroach on his aesthetic worldview. His sophomore outing, first published in 2025 and released in North America earlier this spring, plays out against the contemporary art scene thirty years on, going one rung down the rainbow with the T.S. Eliot-inspired title The Violet Hour. In the book we meet Thomas Haller, a Swiss artist whose vivid paintings are touted by blue-chip gallerists as abstract masterpieces, Lorna Bedford, the British owner of a mid-sized New York gallery, and Leo Goffman, an elderly, American real estate tycoon and bigtime art collector. Our three protagonists (or perhaps antagonists) are deeply intertwined, with Thomas and Lorna best friends from art school but whose relationship, both professional and personal, has now somewhat soured, and Leo as Lorna’s aggressive client and Thomas’ avid admirer. Cahill explores these characters through their memories, sexualities, decisions, and indecisions, especially in the wake of a sudden death amid Thomas’s career comeback at a London gallery opening. But while the promotion of the novel has put its art-foot forward, complete with quotes from such art world luminaries as Jerry Saltz, Michael Craig-Martin, and Sarah Lucas, Cahill assured me that the contemporary art scene is merely the backdrop of the story. Rather, the novel uses the art world setting to interrogate far larger themes–nostalgia, loss, betrayal–as the narrative oscillates over many months between the lives of its three principal characters. A fellow art world disciple, I caught Cahill back in London at a bookstore café on Piccadilly, appropriately sandwiched between the city’s gallery epicentres of Mayfair and St James’s. Over coffee, we delved deep into the challenges and pitfalls of writing about art and its industry, reflected on everything from thriller tropes to defenestration motifs, made a brief detour into Heated Rivalry, and discussed why The Violet Hour is about so much more than art. As a novelist, I’m always interested in that process of going beneath the surface of people. Much as I’m interested in and fascinated by surfaces, I like to also think about what lies beneath in terms of people’s characters, but also in something like the art scene or “the art world” as we always describe it. Let’s start with the violet motif, which we see in the title and then throughout the novel itself. I wanted it to be this violet thread all the way through, literally at many points. It has a literal presence in terms of that violet scarf that one of the characters sees somebody taking out of a bin. Quite early on there’s a scene where Thomas Haller, the main artist character, has come back to Claridge’s Hotel in London and finds his dog dead on the carpet. He conducts this really peculiar ritual where he bathes the dog’s corpse, and it turns out he’s been dyeing his dog to keep it looking youthful and beautiful. Then the dye leaks into the water, and the effect is this violet water. That’s one of the earliest manifestations of this violet motif that happens all the way through. That episode is also useful in hinting to you what a strange, peculiar character you’re dealing with in him. Because this is so much a novel about art, I wanted it to have a sort of a particular colour that was a unifying motif. More specifically, the title is a reference to a line in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In the novel I wanted there to be an equivalent atmospheric shift from time to time between moments of epic beauty and something much more abjectly real such as you get in Eliot’s poem. The phrase came into my head while I was writing the story because I knew that Thomas was going to produce this suite of paintings in lilac or purple or violet. And that’s another one of the appearances of colour in the story, those paintings that he made at the beginning for this major comeback exhibition in London. He’s been a recluse for a few years. No one understands why this renowned artist has run away from the New York art scene, and his comeback exhibition in London is the occasion of this group of studies in violet. Another thing that is important to say about the colour is that it has this whole sense about it of twilight, and endings and evenings, that transitional moment between day and night. A number of scenes take place at that twilight hour, such as the one much later in the story in Venice where the old man Leo Goffmann, the billionaire real estate tycoon, is reflecting on his life with Lorna, the art dealer, who by that time, against her better judgement, has semi-befriended him, or at least comes to see some of the human aspects of this otherwise monstrous man. They’re standing together in Venice at the violet hour, and he’s reflecting ultimately on his mortality and his life and regrets. I wanted the whole novel, actually, with each of those three main characters—Leo, Thomas, and Lorna—to be about looking back at one’s life either with regret, melancholy, or just resignation. They have different attitudes towards their past selves, but it’s very much a novel about reconciling yourself to your past, and so that, again, made the title, that image of twilight appropriate. Your first novel, Tiepolo Blue, takes place in the 90s at the advent of the contemporary art craze, whereas this book is very explicitly in the present, post-COVID era. Those people who came of age in their lives or careers in the 90s era are now all grown up. What made you transition between writing the two novels in this way? They actually overlapped in the writing quite a lot. I began The Violet Hour sometime before I finished Tiepolo Blue. Obviously, there are all sorts of correspondences between them in terms of the art theme. Contemporary art, whether that’s in the 90s or now, figures quite prominently, and that’s probably a reflection of the fact that I’ve worked in the art scene for a long time, and the gallery that I worked at in London, Sadie Coles, represented a number of the artists that had been at the forefront of that 1990s scene. Even though it was at least a decade on, at that time, from that 1990s moment, it was still very much alive in everyone’s memory. I was twelve when Sensation happened at the Royal Academy, so I was very aware of it even though I didn’t get to see it. It was a big thing in the British media. That was partly why I set Tiepolo Blue in the mid 90s. You’re right that The Violet Hour is in some ways a continuation, in the sense that it then deals with the art world of today. In the narratives of Thomas, the painter, and Lorna, his oldest friend and one-time dealer, the flashbacks take them back to that 1990s moment that is the main subject of Tiepolo Blue. Thomas is thinking about being at art school here in London in the late 90s, which is where he meets Lorna, and they strike up this intense, life-defining friendship that for each of them is absolutely formative. I wanted to evoke, or portray, a platonic relationship between a man and a woman that is as intimate and intense as a platonic relationship can be, and, in fact, it does tip into something more than that at least once. But that 1990s London is very vivid in each of their memories, perhaps Thomas’s especially. He’s desperate to get back to it in a way that is impossible. Despite the fact that The Violet Hour is primarily set in the present, it still, through its main characters, expresses nostalgia for the 90s, which is the setting of Tiepolo Blue. Between the two novels, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the art world in London has changed over the past thirty years. You see in The Violet Hour how much more international the contemporary art world is, even in terms of the roving setting which takes you from London to New York to Switzerland to Hong Kong, versus the more static settings of Tiepolo Blue. On that roving nature, I noticed that in The Violet Hour, you can recognize essentially all of the moments of the art world calendar. Besides the events, you also have all of these characters, in addition to the main three—emerging artists, the super curator, the art critic, etc. When planning the book, did you have kind of a checklist, to have all of these art world signifiers in it? Not as such, although you’re right, there are certain stock characters that probably had to be there—not that I want the characters in the end to come across entirely as archetypes. It’s a funny thing to some extent with a “super curator,” whatever we mean by that, you’re dealing with somebody who is a bit of a cliché, and that’s the case with that character Fritz Schein who pops up quite often throughout the story. He’s closer to parody than most of the characters in the story in that he’s sort of the epitome of this globetrotting, theory-spouting, impresario of contemporary art. But even in his case, in the end you do get to see a little bit more inside his mind and his motivations and memory, rendering him more complex and more human than just this cardboard cutout ridiculous figure that he might initially appear to be. That’s what I’m interested in doing with the art world, not simply showing this kind of technicolour, high-gloss, glamorous veneer, much as it consists of that. You want to be able to show what the people that make up that veneer actually consist of. As a novelist, I’m always interested in that process of going beneath the surface of people. Much as I’m interested in and fascinated by surfaces, I like to also think about what lies beneath in terms of people’s characters, but also in something like the art scene or “the art world” as we always describe it. Thinking about the kind of fixtures on the art calendar, it’s true the Venice Biennale does feature really prominently towards the end as this scene where all of the characters come together for this big denouement. There’s an inevitability to that because, of course, the art world does operate on a schedule. That naturally offers us a structure and a certain sequence for the storyline. But one thing I’ve always been aware of is that I wanted this to resonate with people beyond the contemporary art bubble. I hope you don’t need to know much or even care much about art to find something in this novel, because, even though that contemporary art scene which I’ve worked in for a long time is the setting of it, it’s not ultimately the subject. It is the entire world in which these characters move, but fundamentally—going back to the title—it’s about retrospection, loss, longing, betrayal, and the impossibility of escaping one’s past self, particularly in the character of Thomas. He’s somebody who, on the one hand, clings desperately to an earlier version of himself from long ago, from before he became this globally renowned abstract painter—which is an identity that he struggles terribly with because it’s really a misrepresentation of what he actually feels himself to be. He’s caught between that longing for the past and in some ways a desire to be shot of the past. That, I think, is the subject of the novel more than the machinations of the art world, although those naturally make for quite a fun context. I find that there’s not that much media out there that reflects the art world compared to every other creative industry, and when art critics or others in our industry write books, it’s usually non-fiction. There are not a lot of art critics that go into fiction, especially novels actually about art, as opposed to literary critics for example. I don’t know if you agree with that assessment, but why do you think that is, and why do you think you have taken a different path in your writing, as compared to most art critics? Well, speaking just about my own case, I always wanted to write fiction, and I actually did from a very early age. I wrote quite a large portion of a novel when I was 14, but then, of course, life comes along, and you embark on a career. When I was very young, I loved writing stories. The desire was always there. But, over time, I took more of an academic interest in literature and art history and ended up working in contemporary art. But it’s probably true to say that the impulse to write fiction came before everything I did career-wise in art. So I was coming full circle when I wrote the novel. The first one took a long time. Over the ten years I was working at the gallery, that novel was just gradually percolating. In all of that time I was writing art criticism and reviews, non-fiction work as well. I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I’m not employing my sort of art critical faculties when I write fiction. In fact, I’m quite careful not to do so because for me, fiction should not just be another conduit for expressing my ideas about art and what makes good art or what its function might be. These are all questions that a critic might well have to grapple with, but it would be a mistake to try to articulate them too bluntly and too overtly through fiction. The problem, then, is that the fiction becomes an instrument for your own ideas as a critic, and it would look really clunky and odd to try and reduce the novel to a medium of your art critical ideas. In general, I try to avoid expressing opinions of my own in novels. Your characters can have opinions, and sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that what one of your characters thinks is what you think. Obviously, that’s not the case, particularly with my characters who are often really compromised, difficult, not terribly pleasant people. I don’t want what I think to be at the forefront of the novel. In some ways I want to disappear inside there. Book cover (UK/Commonwealth) for The Violet Hour, Pegasus Books, 2026.   Talking more about art in media, I read your Artforum essay from the September 2025 issue. In the essay, you talk about Sex and the City and Girls, The Gallerist with Natalie Portman, and the upcoming Apple TV show The Dealer, among others. I find that a lot of the discussion of art in film and television goes back to the same content, such as what you covered there, only because there’s so little of it. I’m thinking about art and media in general, but also art in literature specifically. When I have read books that take place in the art world, or include characters that work in art, it’s always young women working as gallery assistants, and oftentimes it reads, to me anyway, like it’s written by people who don’t seem to have ever worked in the art world. Why do you think this visual industry hasn’t really translated very often or very successfully to the written word or even to the screen? I think you’re absolutely right that these portrayals on the screen and in fiction tend not to get it right. They tend to lean too much into parody or satire. Particularly in the case of the high end contemporary art world, one could so easily roll one’s eyes at it in terms of the excess and some of the big personalities and egos that you find in this sphere. The problem is that any attempts to parody it quickly turns it into a cartoon version of itself, and you lose a lot of the nuance, complexity, and frankly, a lot of the realism of the thing. The situations often that we encounter in this industry are weird enough already. They don’t need to be heightened. I think you’re right that often people who portray the contemporary art business on TV or in films haven’t observed it closely enough or just haven’t existed within it and don’t understand it. They’re looking at it too much as outsiders, and they end up just reducing it to a set of clichés as you say, the art gallery girl. Invariably, don’t you find that the art itself is just nothing like what we tend to see on the walls of actual galleries? Sometimes that might be a legal thing, but the worst thing is where you get these dreadful pastiches of what somebody who doesn’t work in this scene thinks contemporary art looks like, and it just doesn’t ring true. Going off of that, how did you decide how to render Thomas’ artwork? Obviously there are no images, but it’s very evocative how it’s written, and easy to imagine how it looks. You essentially create a whole oeuvre of his practice, talking about different exhibitions with different series of work. How did you come up with that? What were the challenges? I had to begin with his character and have a properly developed, vivid sense of him in order to think about the kind of work he would have made and what it would look like and the different progressions it would have gone through. That was all dictated by my understanding of the kind of man he was, and particularly by the fact that he is an individual who has memories and experiences that he cannot be open about with people. In some ways he has to protect his identity as this celebrated, lucrative, top-selling abstract artist, but there are aspects of his experience that are very present in his mind that can’t outwardly be expressed. That concealment, that inability to voice certain things about himself and his past, is then reflected in the work that he makes. It was logical that he would be an abstract painter, because abstract art in many ways is more oblique and subliminal. The work that he makes, which has seen him hailed as the new Mark Rothko, are these turbulent, colouristic abstract works. In some ways it expresses much in terms of his emotions and psychology, but in another way it conceals an enormous amount. It’s a veil that’s screening certain aspects of his psyche and, more specifically, his life experience. I’m thinking ultimately of this infatuation he develops as a young man for the older and more powerful man, Claude Berlins, his eventual gallerist. In fact, that infatuation grew and became a net that he could never escape, even after their love affair was long finished. Along with the relationship with Lorna, this love affair, infatuation, dynamic with Claude has been the other, much darker, defining relationship in his life. In the end, Thomas’ whole choice in the novel, his whole dilemma, is between which of those old friends he’s going to ultimately align himself with. The recurring question all the way through the story is what kind of a painter he is. Is he actually an abstract painter, or a figurative one? It may seem a fairly technical question, but it matters because, symbolically, it has to do with which of those people from his life he has decided to align himself with, sell his soul to, so it has fundamental bearing on what kind of person he is going to be, or, actually, already is. Talking about his relationship with Claude, I noticed that in both books, there are a lot of relationships or more casual encounters with people of very large age differences. Where has that come out of? I’m quite interested in relationships where there’s a difference in age and in life experience and naturally in power. There’s an interesting power dynamic in those sorts of relationships, and this is also a story of the power dynamics in the art world more generally, and power imbalances—what it means to be successful versus somebody more on the outside or the periphery, fighting to get in. You see that reflected in the characters of Marianna, the video artist who hasn't really made it, or Em, the performance artist who really is on the periphery and doesn’t understand what the art world is. To get back to intergenerational romantic relationships, you don’t see them represented enough on the screen certainly; perhaps novels do a better job representing them. I was watching Heated Rivalry recently. I don’t know if you saw it? [laughs] No, I haven’t seen it yet. Everyone was talking about it so I felt like I had to see it. The one issue I had with it is one of many ways in which it felt very tame and safe. The characters are all good looking men of pretty much the same age, almost interchangeable. The differences between people fascinate me, and often these differences do attract people into relationships with one another, although those differences can also create all manner of tensions and problems and resentments. I’m talking about differences in age, but also in class, race, level of privilege, etc. When you see that kind of contrast in a relationship and the power imbalance that inevitably results, that I think is more intriguing than just seeing two people who are more or less mirror images of one another in an implausibly happy union. In my own life, from when I was an undergraduate, I’ve always had friends who were much older than me. That could be to do with being gay, and certainly when I was first encountering the gay scene in university and in my early twenties in London, it was always a very mixed world. I think straight people of my age didn’t encounter something equivalent. If you went out on the gay scene, you were mixing with people of entirely different ages and backgrounds from yourself. That was a very exhilarating experience, and one that left a mark on me. That kind of plurality I hope has come into the novels. It feels more real to me. Talking about queerness—when I went to take the book out from the library, I was surprised to see it labeled GAY, in the gay section, especially because a lot of the promotion, and maybe I’m biased coming from an art perspective, has been about The Violet Hour as an art world novel. So I’m just wondering about your novels appealing to these different audiences and being categorized amongst two often overlapping communities? I’m very happy for the novels to appear on a gay table or a general fiction table, for them to have visibility is already a fantastic thing. I don’t really see them as gay novels, but then it’s not my job to assign labels to them. It’s probably better if I don’t. Certainly in The Violet Hour, one of the main characters, Leo, is straight, and it was important to me to have a character whose life is entirely unlike mine. This is a real estate billionaire in his mid-80s who lives in melancholic isolation at the top of this skyscraper in New York. Nothing about his existence resembles my own. And he’s heterosexual and haunted by the memory of his dead wife. Yes, I feel like Deborah was basically her own character. I’m glad that you suggest that she is like a character. She’s a ghost in his mind, in his memory. That marriage and Leo’s life, persona, and sexuality, are all important dimensions in this story. For that reason alone I wouldn’t want to typecast this as a gay or queer novel. On the other hand, you know, you could very reasonably see it as that because it is about gay or queer characters and gay experience. I suppose this is why any label is a little problematic or limiting, because even when it comes to queer experience, I wanted to reflect the sheer diversity of that. I want the gay characters to be every bit as compromised and real and complicated as any other person in the world. I don’t think, for example, that the gay character needs a redemptive arc, and in the case of The Violet Hour, Thomas, who in many ways is the main character, doesn’t get one. If you take Lorna on the other hand, I really see her as the conscience of the novel. She is also gay, but a very different kind of person from the others. In writing about a lesbian woman and her experience and relationship, obviously I needed to think very differently and project myself into the life, again, of somebody entirely unlike me. Something else I noticed that reminded me of the art world, are the instances of defenestration, people falling from windows. That made me think of Ana Mendieta, who I feel like is having a resurgence—people are very interested in her story. What made you decide to do this? You’re the first person to have asked me that. That was one of many points of reference in this storyline. It’s obviously a tragic but also a fascinating story. On the very first page, the young man falling from the tower in London was inspired by all sorts of things. On one level, it was a thriller trope of the young person dying at the beginning, and it’s going to take you some time as a reader to find out how this tragic event is inter-threaded with the lives of the three main characters. There’s, in a way, a murder mystery element to it, and that was quite deliberate. I was playing with a cliché there that you find in all sorts of things, including Twin Peaks—where Laura Palmer dies that start. I mention Bruegel in the first couple of sentences, and Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, so that was something I was thinking about, but certainly Ana Mendieta as well, and the persisting uncertainty about exactly what happened. That lack of resolution has been one of the most painful and intriguing things about that case. It was one of several points of reference for this storyline, although it would be wrong to say I was referring very directly to that. Also, the rivalry that developed between Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, their resentment of one another—his fame, her frustration, and then increasingly, her success and his frustration over what she was achieving—I’ve reflected probably in some of what you see in Thomas and Marianna, the young artist who goes to make a film about him. There are a lot of other mirrored images in the story, such as child loss. Were you interested in doing a lot of these mirror images? Yes, I love these sorts of things. I have to be careful not to overdo them, or to conceal them within an essentially realist story. I don’t want it to feel too postmodern, but, of course, there’s a certain element of design as a novelist. This again takes you back to that violet motif, the way that forms this repeating conceit all the way through. There are all sorts of patterns, but I hope they don’t come across as too crafted. This idea of the lost child is actually one of the central themes of the book. It transpires quite early on that Lorna had a child when she was younger. The ways in which she is haunted by that is key to her whole story here. Parenthood comes into Leo’s story gradually. He’s childless, and this has an important bearing on his life as an art collector. For him, art collecting has been a compensation for everything he doesn’t have. He regards his collection almost as a form of legacy, of immortality. He obsesses, obviously, about what will happen to the collection when he dies. He’s playing these two auction houses off against each other in terms of who is going to be granted the posthumous collection sale. That theme of childlessness or the lost child comes in all sorts of direct or indirect ways into each of the three main characters’ stories. I won’t go into it for fear of spoilers, but there’s a bit of suspense regarding whether one of the characters is another’s child or not. It was one way in which I like to use some of these thriller devices actually to engender and then to subvert an expectation. I wanted The Violet Hour to have a certain thriller element, and that also comes in in the form of the film noir references. Cinema is a really important influence here, particularly mid-twentieth century cinema, not just Douglas Sirk who Thomas is obsessed by and watches in his home cinema—these really high colour and melodramatic films—but also film noir. When I was talking about the title, something that I didn’t mention is that the film Sunset Boulevard is a touchstone for the plot and the mood. I wanted it to have this film noir or neo-noir ambience to it, and Sunset Boulevard is even there in the title, like “sunset,” ”violet hour,” the same sort of idea. In various ways, the characters in this story carry resonances of the characters in Sunset Boulevard. Take Norma Desmond, who is the aging film star in that film who lives in this mansion, bewitched by memories of her own former greatness. That’s sort of what Leo is in his penthouse in Manhattan. Looking ahead, do you think you will continue to explore art world themes in your future literature? It’s hard to know what is going to happen in things that you write, because experience and memory well to the surface, and before you know it, you're once again writing about the things you know best, but I’m not planning on it. Whatever I write next, at least in terms of fiction, probably won’t have such a strong focus on art. I’m interested in thinking about something a little bit different next time. I do have a non-fiction book coming out in the autumn, The Beverly Hills Housewife, which is in some ways an art book. It’s the story of a single David Hockney painting from 1966-67 called Beverly Hills Housewife and Hockney’s arrival in LA, his love affair with LA, and more importantly, perhaps, his enduring friendship with the woman he painted in that portrait, a collector and music patron called Betty Freeman. The book in the main is the story of Betty’s life and what she went on to become, so this, again, is very much an art title, but it’s a non-fiction book as well. Once that’s out, I might be on a bit of a vacation from art for a while in terms of what I work on. But who knows, because it’s been so much a part of my life. I’m not going to leave it behind entirely. I wouldn’t be able to—it’s what I do. The above conversation was conducted by Rachel Kubrick, a writer, editor, and art worker based in London, UK.Editorial support by Tom Kohut.Cover image: James Cahill. Photo by Denise Quinlan.

On a bright February day, I arrived at the Toronto shoreline of Lake Ontario bundled in my winter layers covered in a dusting of fresh snow. I tapped the slush from my boots against the Harbourfront Centre’s doorframe to visit The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Conscious of swishing fabric and leaving melted snow in my wake, I entered Vuntut Gwitchin artist Jeneen Frei Njootli’s solo exhibition The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze. The Power Plant exhibition brings together works from a period of over ten years, revealing the artist’s sustained engagement with the relationships between body, land, and material transformation. The first artwork I encountered, As we fly through each other (2024), is a set of work overalls that appear as if they have been hung to dry. Like many garments and objects in the artist’s practice, they have been dipped in resin, glistening as though still wet. Throughout the installation, textiles and resin are joined by other materials that have endured over the course of Njootli’s practice—such as steel, hide, and beads. Each material registers subtle shifts in atmosphere, producing surfaces that glisten, refract, or absorb the light that drenches the gallery. Working with what is available in their remote community in Yukon territory, Njootli foregrounds material as both a site of constraint and a tool for survival. Garments are cast into stillness, tools are reconfigured, and gestures from performance persist as residue within the gallery space. Sound and smell operate as equally vital extensions of the work, permeating bodies and architectures while remaining resistant to containment. After visiting the exhibition, I connected with Njootli, who joined me virtually from their home outside of Old Crow. Before diving into the interview, we chatted about the community meeting they were attending that evening for a letter writing campaign, focused on recent events impacting Porcupine Caribou’s calving grounds. It felt fitting to informally open with their participation in and commitment to community events and Indigenous activism, which is woven throughout our interview as an embedded part of their life and art practice. Throughout our conversation, the artist’s work is situated within a constellation of influences, collaborators, and kin—positioning relationality as a foundational principle. Njootli speaks to the presence of family, children, and community within the exhibition space, challenging institutional norms around who is welcomed and how. Acts of refusal—whether through obscured visibility, distorted sound, or the withholding of documentation—become strategies of care and sovereignty. Situated within a broader network of kinship, influence, and shared knowledge, Jeneen Frei Njootli’s practice emerges not as an individual gesture, but as part of an ongoing, collective process of making and world-building. I think we're taught in some ways that the goal is to centre your voice and be the loudest in the room, but I desire that less and less. I just feel like there's always more people to credit and different things that could be said. The first time that I saw you perform was back in 2019 at the Art Gallery of Burlington. It’s a bit of an arbitrary time frame, but I am wondering if we can start by considering what has shifted in your practice in the last five years or so. What has changed, or what has endured? I've really enjoyed returning to working with steel. Back then I was working with grease or impressions of my body into steel, but now I’m doing epoxy screen prints onto it. I've been thinking about the steel as land, the steel as body, and always being informed by the work of BUSH Gallery. I’m still figuring out how to collaborate with the steel, to make images, but through a different process. I've worked in a way that is photography-adjacent, but I want to just saddle up a little bit closer to it. Photography makes me so uncomfortable. I didn't trust it in 2019 and I still don’t. Do you feel like your relationship with photography, this mistrust, is shifting a bit? Or what was it in you that sparked the curiosity in terms of working with the steel differently, moving closer to representation? I'm pleased with the 2024 steel works in The Power Plant exhibition because they're so hard to photograph. Sometimes when people see digital documentation, these works are dismissed. But then when people encounter them in person, something else is allowed to happen, or the impact registers differently. That’s some of the feedback that I've gotten about those pieces. I'm thinking about the fugitivity of images, and thinking about making fugitive images—I have to mention theorist and critic Fred Moten here. The steel works also came out of a period where I was trying to figure out how to make work while living in Old Crow, and I'm so grateful to Sarah Macauley of Macaulay + Co. who has really supported and helped me maintain my art practice while living so remotely. I work with what is available to me, and at times that has meant packing work in kind of sketchy cardboard boxes. I had also done this exhibition attachment (2019) with Macaulay + Co., when I started to dip things in concrete. Or, with the work Have you ever whispered under your breath, “fuck you aunty” (2024)—it’s a hanky draped over a drill, cast in resin—these are all tools for survival and for making a livelihood. I like taking something that's been on the body or in relationship to the body and then making it static in a way that doesn’t produce a legible image, but still gives that sense of its relationship to the body in movement. All these materials that you're mentioning—whether it's the steel, or the provisional use of cardboard to ship the works, or the cement—whatever it is, these are all relatively accessible materials, they're functional. To respond to your comment about fugitivity, I was really struck by the idea that certain kinds of work can resist documentation. There's something so interesting about the way that light moves through that space at The Power Plant. The wide range of materials that you work with interact with light so differently. Some glisten, some refract, some absorb… I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the space of the gallery itself, its architecture, its place in the city. Did that site shape your decisions around the installation or around working with acoustics or choreographies? The installation team removed the drywall that had been covering the south facing window—not all exhibitions allow for the light to pour in that same way. It was a joy to see the way that the light reflected off the lake and onto the steel works, the body of water, the body of the gallery, the body of work—which are images of regalia I made for beloved little ones—reflecting and echoing. Also how the grid of the window frames would cast a shadow at certain times on the floor in front of the triptychs. I was also really interested in working with the cracks in the concrete floor. Oh yeah, there’s some interesting history there with different installations. I know about this because I was working at The Power Plant at the time, but the artist collective Tercerunquinto excavated a large square of the concrete to reveal the ‘foundations’ of that specific gallery in Mine (2015). A few years later, Kader Attia also inserted these large, industrial staples that ‘held’ pre-existing cracks together in The Field of Emotion (2018). I loved how the loose beads from your performance have collected in these cracks. There’s already the residue of other installations that remain in that space and you’ve now contributed to that accumulation in your own way with traces of your actions. It feels very special. Thank you. I also want to say I loved working with the team at The Power Plant. They were so supportive and honestly, as a parent with two children—wow, what an unreal and unheard of experience to have in the art world. I had to drop out of a residency at the Banff Center recently because they changed their policy around children in studio spaces. I saw a quote—I'm trying to remember who it was from—but just about how different it is within matriarchal societies, where it's not about centering women, it's about centering children. If people say they want to support Indigenous artists, that means you also have to support children because they are our community. That's why we say ‘all my relations.’ It's actually for all of your relations, it's not just about centering the self. In terms of thinking about the architecture, I don't know if I can talk about it without talking about my children. I think there's some museum and gallery architecture that inherently feel inhospitable. Whether it's our youth or our elders, whatever it might be, who is welcome there and how are you welcome to show up in those spaces? Grandmother Kim Wheatly, who is an Anishinaabe Elder, did a blessing in the space with me and my family, artist Lucy Raven, and the staff at The Power Plant before the exhibition opened, and one of my children was taking up so much space while Kim was talking. I tried to prepare us for going in and I just remember feeling so anxious about the acoustic space my kids were taking up while Kim welcomed me and my family and the work to these shared territories. At the end of it, she just reassured me and thanked us for being there and was like ‘your kids were perfect, that's what they're supposed to be doing.’ People want to talk about decolonizing spaces but I'm like: Let's bring a child in there and see how true that is! Let’s see how much of this is just theory or rhetoric. How welcome are children in these spaces? I brought a caribou antler to gift to Kim and the caribou antler punched its way through my bag on the way to Toronto in three different spots. I thought, ‘oh, that alone is a sculpture’. It's this blue floral printed bag and then the caribou antler just poked its way through. I just love that—the antler not knowing how to be contained! Bringing gifts from my homeland to share was important to grounding my work here and I brought some moose that my brother and nephew hunted to share. But I also need that. I need for me and my kids to be eating our traditional food, and I'm so thankful to my family for sharing with us so that we can share with others too. That's all a part of how I think of being in this place. How do we enter a space, and how do we try to do that in a good way? Jeneen Frei Njootli, Dreaming of new futures, greater empires have fallen, 2024. Hot rolled steel,epoxy. Courtesy the artist and Macaulay + Co. Fine Art. Installation view: The skies closedthemselves when we averted our gaze, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation. Jeneen Frei Njootli, 1973, 2025. Cotton, bleach, ribbon, rope. Courtesy the artist and Macaulay + Co.Fine Art. Installation view: The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze, The Power Plant,Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation. Jeneen Frei Njootli, The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze, 2025. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation. I’m so glad to hear about the relational aspects of being here and realizing this work. This bleeds into my next question. Many of the artworks in the exhibition are rooted in and formed from your home community in Old Crow. How do you navigate bringing this into disparate context, or what has it felt to share this work with the community in Toronto? It was really cool. My mom and dad both came out to support me and we went to 2 Spirited People of the First Nations, an organization with a space east of downtown Toronto. We did a public program there and my dad shared with the group. It was absolutely incredible. I have to say I felt so grateful to hear my dad share and speak like that, I wasn't sure what kind of presentation he would share. And again, relationship building involves sharing food and being with community: having some youthies or some of the people who work there just being like ‘wow, it's so it's so cool to hear an elder support two-spirit Indigenous youth’ and talk about the importance of including our rights when we're talking about the rights of Indigenous people. It's important to talk about the rights of two-spirit Indigenous people when we talk about governance and it was really validating. I’d like to linger with this conversation about community. You recently had a conversation with writer Lauren Wetmore for the Momus podcast which was really illuminating for me in terms of understanding your relationship with writing and language. I’d encourage readers to spend time with all that you’ve so generously shared in that episode. You touch on the place of refusal in that interview, particularly in relation to Gwich’in language and community knowledge. I wonder if you can share how that translates to the material elements of your installation—deciding what is shared, what is withheld? For years, I've made sound tools. I've turned different belongings, different items into sound tools and then I've run the resulting sound through distortion pedals, an amplifier and a subwoofer. I would sing or speak language through those belongings. The distortion shifts the intelligibility of my utterance and maybe shifts the sovereignty of making an utterance within a certain space or within another person's territory. More recently, I’ve started to work with my children in performance which is just as unwieldy as working with feedback. These two elements make the sound work and performance an exponentially more dynamic thing to navigate. Sometimes it’s stressful! (laughs) But I’m also thinking about protection and have not been working with photographers when I'm performing—to protect my children and myself, and maybe invite a viewer, listener, or witness to think about the forms of labor that are happening. I decided to make regalia that can also be a tool of refusal, so having the fringe coverings over the face is part of that. But fringe is also traditional for us as Gwich'ins. I love how Hunkpapa Lakota artist Dana Claxton talks about fringe as a relationship to the land, to the body, to spirit. She and performance artist James Luna have had a huge impact on my practice and in performing with my son. It's so cool to invite his agency into a space that's usually so serious. Dealing with refusal as a parent and then dealing with refusal in an art space—it's a totally different thing to navigate. It's so cool that my son loves performing and loves performing with his face partially covered in fringe. I just absolutely love that it's not overstimulating, he doesn't feel claustrophobic in there—it's really special to be in that space together with him. That's amazing! Thanks for sharing a bit about what the experience is like for him, too. It sounds like it's a really joyful way to be together. We got to perform together at BUSH Gallery, Mackenzie Art Gallery and The Yukon Arts Centre, all in the last year. Amazing! I’m wondering what shifts for you between the moment of performance to the durational exhibition format, where material traces are left behind. I missed those garments that we performed in. I kind of wished I had them during the run of the exhibition at The Power Plant, but it's good that they were there. I wanted people to feel a sense of aliveness in the exhibition space, which is also why I love working with performance and having the sound from the performance in the space afterwards. To have a solo exhibition at The Power Plant is not something that I thought I would ever achieve and to get to see so many of my works from over the years together under one roof was so meaningful—it was so exciting for them to get to meet and share space. Especially installing in the clerestory space—the former coal storage. The exhibition had an incredible constellation of work, and there's this accumulation of output from your process over several years. I wanted to ask you about revisiting works like More Than Medicine Should Burn for You (2020) and Sky Daddy Undid Their Flags and Braided Others (2020). In the narrow clerestory, these older works have been brought into dialogue with a new work, 1973 (2025). Can you talk me through that process of revisiting these older works and bringing them into dialogue with newer works, or what it’s like to see them in a new light? Mahsi for this question. It felt emotional to get to showcase these works. They were made with such urgency and were in response to very loaded, political moments. I’m glad that they got to be together in the exhibition space. I think a lot about belonging, or what's shared and what's not shared. When I look at these works, I also see the works that are not shown, the ones I have gifted to people or have made for people that I love. I've been a kitchen table artist for many years now and although I have had certain achievements, I’m still humbled when people find things that I have made important and give them space. I think we're taught in some ways that the goal is to centre your voice and be the loudest in the room, but I desire that less and less. I just feel like there's always more people to credit and different things that could be said. I want to acknowledge that this work is generational and it's not just me out here, we're all working in these kinship systems. So many people had to work so hard for us to have what we have now, but we are still in colonial peril. In many places the strategic violence needed to feed capitalism is ramping up. I hope that this leads more of us to a deep space of undoing, of community building, of parallel balanced systems so we can move towards wholeness. Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Cuba, Free Turtle Island. If anyone hasn't read “The Glossary of Haunting” by Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck, please do. Earlier, before we started recording, you and I were talking about the fact you can stew in the darkness alone, but we really need to be leaning into community. I’m just appreciating all the ways of building community. We all need to learn how to grow food. I'm really enjoying listening to “How to Survive the End of the World” by writers, facilitators and activists Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, and spending time with Anishinaabe educator and artist Quill Christie-Peter's book On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation. I want to uplift Quill in the amazing work that went into making that book—the way that she's holding space, making and building community, and challenging so many of us to dig deeper and do the work, to be part of undoing and world building. I think it’s beautiful that you’ve organically shifted to generously sharing about the community members who are shaping you, texts that are shaping you, world events that are shaping you—and it came from this prompt to thinking about the outcomes of your practice in recent years. For some, it might seem like a meandering path, but to me, it seems like having the ability to sit with these older works gave you an opportunity to really value and celebrate those you’re in a sustained dialogue with—to recognize what has allowed you to continue making over that period of time. To me it makes sense that when we revisit the work we've been making, sometimes what comes up is just all that gratitude we have for what allows us to do that work, even if as we're doing it we're not quite sure like where it's leading…Does that resonate with you? I don’t want to project! Wow, yes, thank you so much. I mean those works are connected to community, but were also made as a response to and processing of violence. I also want to also acknowledge Cree scholar Karyn Recollet who talks about ‘kinstillatory’ relationships with stars, and oh my gosh, there's just so many people… like curators Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson with their publication Soundings that just came out, it's so gorgeous. There’s my friend Anishinaabe artist Olivia Whetung—we were in grad school together, too. There’s just so many people. I think that's the goal, we're shaping and influencing each other and get to be open to that. Thank you for calling in some of the folks who are a part of this bigger conversation for you. I want to take this as a cue to talk a little bit about one of the sculptural elements in the gallery space which hinges on this topic. There’s a plastic folding table that sits on the ground as a kind of plinth for three artworks—Polycrisis while that, hope harbours in this heart (2024), Doing butch things (2024), and Have you ever whispered under your breath, “fuck you aunty”(2024). Can you tell me a bit more about your decision to work with the folding table as an object we gather around to share meals, to have meetings, to come together in ceremony? I was in an exhibition with artist Dayna Danger, A Fine Pointed Belonging (2019), that was curated by Genevieve Flavelle, and we made work for the exhibition space around this black folding table. We wanted to exhibit the table that we made the work with or that we made the work on. And as somebody who has done community organizing for 12 years or more, I could close and pack the biggest folding table with my eyes closed, you know? There’s a way you like, kick this hinge, kick that hinge, click that down, and then you kick it up. Folding tables are just deeply familiar to me. They feel like community, they feel like painting with youth outside, they feel like a barbecue, like a bubble party, they feel like reading important documents before a meeting, they feel like fighting for our sovereignty, they feel like cutting fish. All of those things are brought forward, and I love that the marks of the labor from the back of house crew at The Power Plant is made visible there through all the X-ACTO knife cutting marks. I'm not really a big fan of plinths. For May we all know sovereign skies (2024), I think that was the first time I felt that the work needed a plinth. Other than that, I just want everything on the floor. This work just felt so sensitive, it needed to have that space around it and that elevation, that respect. But otherwise, I've always enjoyed using fur as a plinth or a trolley or a moving cart or the collapsed table. Jeneen Frei Njootli, Glove with wing, 2024. Leather and fleece. Courtesy the artist and Macaulay + Co. Fine Art. Installation view: The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation. Jeneen Frei Njootli, Caribou antler fiddle, 2014. Caribou hooves, caribou rib, caribou antler, string,metal, beads, speaker cable. Courtesy John Cook. Installation view: The skies closed themselveswhen we averted our gaze, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation. Jeneen Frei Njootli, As we fly through each other, 2024. Work overalls, resin, metal wire. Courtesy theartist and Macaulay + Co. Fine Art. Installation view: The skies closed themselves when we avertedour gaze, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation.  I feel like it really fits into your material vocabulary so well. It calls up all these things. As you were describing the kind of muscle memory of kicking in the legs of a folding table, I can feel that in my body. Let’s talk a bit more about gesture and material transformation. This kind of folding table has many possible configurations but there's also other material interactions going on in the space. I'm thinking about beads pressing into the skin, wrapping textile, piercing hide, amplifying sound… How do you think about the body, movement, and material change when you’re making work? As I mentioned, I avoided photography by having my performances hinge on creating residue that's held in the space through gesture, or creating performances whose gesture is held in the space through residue. This is a part of image sovereignty and how Inherited (2019) was made—it’s a smoke print of a caribou that I harvested with my cousins. I was thinking about how we pull knowledge through our bodies and our relationship to time. Like I said, this work is generational and I feel like the answer to some of that is also in my titles. I'm so glad you brought up that piece because I feel like it embodies the answer to that question. When I first made Inherited I was a professor at UBC and the smell from the smoke was so strong in my studio that in the morning I got an incident report notification because security had to break into my studio thinking there was a fire. Smell has an ability to permeate spaces and bodies. It's so ephemeral and it's also fleeting, right? Because the work has been exposed to air for so many years now, the smell is so incredibly faint. I’ve also talked about sound’s ability to permeate spaces and bodies—like scholar Walter D. Mignolo talks about decolonial theory, and the artist collective Post Commodity has done work about that as well. That relationship to sound and smell as immaterial things is so interesting and beautiful, alongside their relationship to time. I was thinking a lot about the seasons and cycles of time when I visited your show. It feels important that it happened in winter. Of course, the winter I know here is very different from what it must be like for you experiencing it up in the arctic circle. As we fly through each other (2024) is installed at the entrance to the main gallery, a set of work overalls that really appear as though they’ve been hung to dry, coming in wet from the snow—as if they’re frozen in a moment where they still appear wet as an effect of the resin. I was wondering if you could talk about working with resin, in particular embedding objects or garments in resin. It snowed the day after I performed. I mean, one day I made a series of sculptures in the winter and it was just things that I freeze fully over time and then document outside. You know, for years I made in a certain way where I was like: read these texts, go to these talks, be in your big studio, and then make art in a very academic space in a very cerebral, very referenced way. And now it's so nice to permit my practice to shift, to allow ourselves to be transformed, and to have the root not be so firmly placed in academia. Is it more of an intuitive material exploration? Yes, this is the material I want to use in relation to some of these belongings. Anishinaabe artist Maria Hupfield talks about thinking with your hands, and I’m allowing a little bit more of that to happen. But I mean, you've got to do a lot of planning with the epoxy work. I have to tarp the inside of a whole house so I don’t permanently alter anything inside with epoxy spray, I have to make sure that there's ventilation, I have to have consistent child care for three days to set things up, make my hanging apparatuses, prep the materials, and make the work, all so I can use my hunting rifles again, you know? I had one family member get pretty angry with me for trying to make a resin cast of one of my firearms because it's what allows me to literally put food on my table. The gun in My grandma used to check her traps with lipstick on (2022) I cast in between hunting ptarmigan. I harvested ptarmigan, I made the epoxy cast, I demolded it, I continued hunting ptarmigan. I have a system for working with the epoxy now. I have to complete the system for my livelihood. I had to rescue one firearm from my epoxy process because it was a bit too close to the heat source. I was borrowing a house to make art in, and it was minus 40 degrees out, so that one cured faster than the others. I had to abandon that work so I could save my gun. I started casting with epoxy and that's what led to doing the epoxy prints on the steel that we started this conversation with. I had first made those images of me laying on the land in a residency at Le Frac des Pays de la Loire in response to French artist Gina Pane's art. There was an exhibition following the residency, Noise of the Flesh: Score for gina pane (2023-2024) that was curated by Mathilde Walker-Billaud. The residency was amazing—I was able to complete it from Old Crow while everybody else went to Carquefou, France. For quite a few years I just didn't want to leave Old Crow. It takes multiple days to get to Toronto, let alone over to Europe from here and it just takes up so many resources—I’m trying to be mindful. I was also at that point politically where I just really needed to be in my homelands. If I’m making work about the body and land, I will not be able to make the work that I need to if I go elsewhere. I would have loved to see more of Gina Pane's work in person and see everybody. I miss getting to talk with other artists who are invested in contemporary art in the same way that I am—or other thinkers, makers, writers, and curators—but that time will come again, you know? Anyway, I was thinking through that and made that first work in this residency with Matilde. We did a screen print of Vaseline on the steel and then sprayed it with vinegar. I so appreciate this loop, bringing it back to those steel works we started talking about while broadening your thinking about epoxy and resin. You've been able to work with them in these very different ways to think about body and land and time. I think that's beautiful. And yeah, different seasons of life… You need to be rooted where you are right now. We’ve already spoken a little bit about the experience of light in the space of the exhibition, and how the different materials you work with respond to changing conditions. This exhibition opened in the depths of winter and as we’re connecting now, the days are slowly getting longer. I know that the sky, and particularly the night sky, have been central to your practice lately, perhaps we can close with some reflections on the coming seasonal change. I always get a little bit sad when the light comes back. I love the night. I get anxiety about the incremental increase in sunlight. I can just settle right into winter, I can settle right into the 40 below. I really like it, it feels pretty good for me. And when the sun starts coming back I kind of grieve my relationship with the stars. I also grieve the end of hoodie season (laughs). I’m trying to build a relationship with the stars but the daylight is shifting every day where I am right now, drastically changing from two hours of daylight—and that’s not even with the sun above the horizon. Scientifically, there are three different stages of twilight and we're just in those three stages of twilight—civil, nautical, and astronomical—back-to-back for weeks. When the sun comes back, it just signals to our body that there's different things to do, there's a different busyness that's coming. I just want to stay up till two in the morning with my sewing machine, but I can’t do that in the summer. Going back to the question about the epoxy, I just was so enamored with stillness. The objects look like they're caught in an element. For me, maybe they're small monuments about grief. They were when I made the piece Ache (2019) that's in the McMichael collection. They’re also pieces that I've made, that I've worn, that people that I love have shredded just through their own use, through their own agency, through their own relationship to the land, but then they're frozen by epoxy. Then I wonder about that relationship to the museum or the gaze of the museum visitor. There's something about authoring that stillness, but then because they're cast in epoxy too, there's this preciousness. They don't need a glass case, they're rock hard, they’re protected. It’s also about finding ways to honor or draw attention to the ways these garments hold a person's labor over time. I'm also someone that grieves the end of winter, I hadn’t quite thought about it in terms of the loss of extended time with the stars. I also want to acknowledge my friend Brandon Kyikavichik who I worked with on an event in my community, So’ Gatr’agwaandak, which was a celebration of Gwich’in star stories. He speaks about how Gwich’in have stories about where the stars go when the sun comes back (24 hour daylight) and how they relate to the sun coming back. This softens the grief I feel about the stars being eclipsed by light—they’re still there, you know? They're still there and we'll see them again. The above conversation was conducted by Katie Lawson, a curator and writer based in Toronto. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Jeneen Frei Njootli, The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze, 2025. Installation view: The Power Plant, Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation.

Lucy Frost, the narrator of Lisa Robertson’s brilliant new novel Riverwork, is a woman in her sixties: she’s a self-professed “failed poet,” “a hag.” She’s a “scoffer and a scrawler,” “a fibber, and a snipper, a doubter, and a haunter of shame.” She spends her mornings slowly reading the memoirs of Chateaubriand, just ten pages at a time, such that she may experience “the sensation of personally containing the duration of the book.” She spends her afternoons cleaning the homes of Paris’s professoriate class, and her long, sleepless nights reading, sifting thru, and transcribing the notebooks and bundles of paper, the scraps and envelopes and jottings, the lists and scribbles and annotations, the files, copies, and folders left behind by her great-aunt Em, who also lived and wrote, just like her, and then, one day, mysteriously disappeared. The subject of Em’s preoccupation, and after her, Lucy’s, is the long-absent tributary that once ran through Paris to feed the Seine, a river called the Bièvre. Once the site of dense industrialization, with mills, tanneries, and slaughterhouses built along its bed, the Bièvre was also the site where the women of Paris’s servant classes gathered to do the city’s laundry, where sex workers and vagrants roamed, and where in the spring of 1871, they all came together to organize and participate in the Paris Commune. Long since rerouted or canalized below the slabs of concrete that now comprise the city, the Bièvre too, has all but disappeared. A central question: What doesn’t disappear? “Entire languages and cultures violently disappear,” writes Lucy. “Things disappear. People disappear.” But what resists this sentencing—what lingers, remains, repeats? What parts drip, trickle, and fester? What courses through, what makes its way, what gushes into the present, as a fragment, or a document, or a memory? “Like a language,” Lucy also writes, “a ruin speaks to say nothing disappears.” Robertson’s Riverwork is a novel about an aging woman who exhumes and sutures together a sprawling story of female dissent. Nothing, her narrator suggests—neither history nor its supposed disappearance—is ever total or complete. Always something seeps through. “Disappearance repeats in a fabric.” Fabric (and fabrication), theft, labor politics, philosophy, architecture, ruin, ornament: this is a partial list of the many topics that appear across Robertson’s oeuvre, comprised of more than a dozen books of poetry and several essay collections. Riverwork is Robertson’s second novel, after 2020’s The Baudelaire Fractal, in which a narrator named Hazel Brown, also a poet, wakes up in a hotel room to discover that she’s the author of Charles Baudelaire’s entire corpus. As in this novel, Riverwork is densely in conversation with others. Some figures are fictional, such as The Archivist, Lucy’s nonagenarian boss; and Kemi, a Senegalese scholar of queer history and caregiver; while others resurface from history to speak through and to Lucy: Thelonious Monk, Alain Gomis, Edward Said, Chantal Ackerman, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Genet are among these interlocutors. I had the pleasure of speaking with Robertson one afternoon early this spring. She’d just sent final proofs of her novel to the printer. We spoke on Zoom, myself in New York and Lisa in her home just outside Paris, near the banks of what remain of that river she’s so richly unearthed, the Bièvre. [...] the ways we give space and assist one another in our work are forms of collective political action. That is the commune, and it persists despite its impossibility. Riverwork just went to the printer! Congratulations. How do you feel? My predominant emotion is relief. I'm very detail-oriented, so it's difficult for me to let go of a text. Because of the very intimate editorial and publication process at Coach House, I was given the space to intervene, until like, literally 15 minutes ago, when my book went to print. But that’s all over now. I suppose I’m nervous, in the expected way, but I’m in very good hands with Coach House. The writing of Riverwork was very closely accompanied by my editor, Alana Wilcox. For two years she came to Paris on her way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, so that we could spend a couple of days’ time intensely talking about the book and working on it together. My strength as a writer is not exactly in constructing narrative, but in writing sentences and paragraphs, and in thinking about texture and pacing. Alana gave me the space to do that work and then guided me in terms of narrative structuring. I know she wouldn’t have even suggested a publication date if she didn't feel like the book was ready. Publishing with Coach House is unusual and astonishing. The kind of attention they give is practically unheard of elsewhere. How did you first learn about the Bièvre River? What sparked your interest? I first learned about the Bièvre River about 25 years ago, much in the same way that the characters in Riverwork learn about it, by reading Rousseau. I was not yet living in Paris, but I was visiting frequently, and I was working on a few different projects, making digital sound recordings. One of these projects, which formed the basis of my essay “Disquiet,” that appears in Nilling, involved systematically following the early 20th century documentary photographer Atget’s movements across Paris, and making ambient recordings at the places where he would have stood to take his photographs. At the time, I was also trying to produce recorded sound walks following the routes described in Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Some of those aren't really even walks. In one, he's floating on a boat in a lake in Switzerland, for example. But there are others that you can follow—the sixth walk takes you out of the city, following the banks of the Bièvre, which I had never heard of before then. These recordings placed the site of the Bièvre in my mental landscape. And I suppose it percolated there for years and years. Then, at some point, after finishing my first novel The Baudelaire Fractal, I was having lunch with an artist friend of mine, the Vancouver-based artist Sydney Hermant, who asked me what novel I would write next. “Oh no,” I told her, “I'm not going to write another novel. I don't have an idea.” It took me until I was 55 to get the idea for The Baudelaire Fractal—ideas just don't drop out of trees! But then she asked me another question, “Why do you have to have an idea to write a novel?” I took her prompt as a challenge, thinking that it would be interesting to start a novel not with an idea but with a site—specifically the site of this disappeared or absent river. The way into the novel would be to find the river within 19th-century and earlier French literature where it's mentioned, though not always by name. In reading Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, for example, I came across the name of the 19th century French journalist Alfred Delvau, who I later learned wrote a whole book about growing up on the banks of the Bièvre River, Au bord de la Bièvre: impressions et souvenirs (1854). Benjamin (who never once mentions the Bièvre) cites Delvau’s writing about Paris’s working classes, about the small trades, and prostitution, which is what he was interested in for his Arcades Project. I read Delvau, and I read the Goncourt Brothers, Hugo, and various other 19th century accounts. In their descriptions, the Bièvre was a morbidly polluted, stinky, festering environment, teeming with transgressive, popular energy. The river was no longer maintained after the French Revolution. The whole infrastructure of the city collapsed when the monarchy ended. The annual dredging stopped. Certain aspects of that infrastructure were never fully reestablished, neither by the Napoleonic governments, nor by the governments that came thereafter. The kinds of industry that would have been supported by the Bièvre River within the city of Paris before that—tapestry weaving or dyeing—lost their prestige after the revolution. Nobody was buying tapestries because there was no longer an aristocracy. Those class and economic changes, of course, immediately affected the site, which fell into neglect at the same time as it was industrialized. Huge weaving mills were erected, replacing small artisanal workshops. It was a place where the laboring classes lived according to their own rules. The 19th century descriptions of the river really drew me in. The texts had such a raw, nostalgic feeling about them— they reminded me of the images of water towers by German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, or of the aestheticized presentation of the remnants of defunct industry in Robert Smithson’s “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967). All of that retrospective documentation was already happening in the literature being written between the 1820s and the 1850s, vis-a-vis the Bièvre. That was fascinating to me. I should say that I read most of these books in French—which meant that I was reading very slowly. My French is pretty good, but I acquired the language after I was 40, so it’s not impeccable; it’s a serviceable, bumpy French. But I've discovered how beneficial that pace is for me. The slowness of the reading makes my experience as a reader extremely visceral. I can retain what I've read because I might only be reading five to ten pages of a text a day—that's all I can handle. But that’s good, you can hold that in your mind. The combination of this difficulty and this slowness caused an intimacy with the sites the writers were describing, and it opened up my sense of narrative potential when it came to writing fragments towards my own book. River water is a character in your book. It’s “debauched,” the narrator says. How do the other characters that appear within Riverwork, including the narrator, emerge? It probably won't surprise you to hear that I don't really think in terms of building character. But, I do think in terms of voice. Not only narrative voice, but characters’ voices as well. Discovering what that voice is gives information about the character—about their emotional state, their history, their livelihood, their relationships. The great aunt was the first character to arise out of my thinking about the Bièvre and my fascination with its disappeared status. The book isn’t autobiographical—nobody in my own family lived in Paris or researched the Bièvre River. But there is a person in my family history whose story parallels that of the great aunt. She was an intellectual, a teacher, and had no context for that as she aged. Like my character, her mental health suffered, and she suddenly disappeared. I remember this moment in my childhood. It was a big event. I was trying to understand, what is a disappearance? When somebody is said to have disappeared, what does that mean? The voice of my narrator, Lucy Frost, emerged out of my thinking about these two disappearances—of the river, and of the great aunt. I also had a broad idea, almost Goth, to write in contradistinction to youth. In The Baudelaire Fractal, the voice emerged from the wit, lightness and sparkle that’s associated with youth and girlhood and becoming. For this novel, I wanted to do something very different. I wanted to write about old and aging people whose experience of life was not necessarily positive. Riverwork is a book about lastness—lateness, failure and last things. Lucy Frost is tired, insomniac, symptom-ridden. She thinks about death a lot. But she has a certain ironic distance in her voice. She doesn’t wallow but she’s world-weary. She can toy with her own dissolution. Once I realized a few things about my narrator—that she’s older, and that she earns her way cleaning houses—her character became clearer. Lucy Frost is an aging person who has failed in her passion in life, to become a poet. She couldn’t maintain a community or publish her work and eventually her energy for it fizzled. She became a person who cleaned the homes of more successful, professional writers, as she wrote privately in notebooks; she hasn't totally given up writing, but she's given up any sort of public ambition. The four-and-a-half years it took me to write this book paralleled my slow reading of Chateaubriand's memoirs, written near the end of his life. Not only was his health deteriorating, but his mistress was dying, and the systems of government he was passionate about were failing and he did not think well of any of the developing aspects of capitalism and social life after the failed revolutions of 1789, 1831, and 1848—He wrote these memoirs from the point of view of failure at every point. At some point, I also realized that I wanted Chateaubriand’s voice to inflect the voice of Lucy Frost. It amused me to have the morose, self-dramatizing, lofty tone with which he writes his late memoirs taken on by a cleaning person. Only later did I discover the voice of the other characters in the book—Lucy’s client, a very elderly woman named The Archivist, and the Archivist’s private nurse, Kemi. Each character became a means for me to present different threads of my research, different chains of thought, and to bring different kinds of language together, hopefully in an energetic way. Kemi, for instance, is a Senegalese immigrant and a doctoral student in queer studies at Paris 8 University, who, like many Senegalese immigrants living in France, supports himself as a care worker. His academic interests gave me a way to present certain threads of my research about the debauched nightlife of Baroque Paris and, for instance, Proust's failed business experiments in homosexual bordels. The Archivist is probably the funniest of the characters. She makes gnomic pronouncements that are really off the cuff, often cosmological in nature, such as on the cosmic origins of dust, which I find quite hilarious. She’s judgmental, a know-it-all. But she’s an adept reader of character, with a certain tenderness. How did your ongoing research on the Bièvre come to inform the novel’s organization? The organization came last. At first, and for a long time, I was writing fragments. Descriptions, catalogues, dreams. I didn't yet know about the characters, their relationships. I was learning the history of the river. But at a certain point, I printed out all the fragments and did the old scotch tape and scissors thing. I had something like sixteen chapters because that’s how many pages I could place along the length of the long farm table I have in my living room. Each one of these chapters grew into a long, shabby ribbon of text that eventually dangled off the table and curled onto the floor. At some point, I placed my computer on top of the taped together text and intuitively wrote into spaces between the fragments, to build relationships and linkages, then I’d print out those new sections and immediately tape them into the text. But even then, I was going by ear, intuition, and sound. I still did not have a narrative structure. That was probably the most pleasurable, and the longest period of the composition. I absolutely adored it—the tactile, material making. I would also do readings directly from these long, crumpled fetishistic ribbon-like objects, which I carried around rolled up in a scroll. There were, of course, other pleasures: narrating the erotic story of Chateaubriand following Bassompierre following the laundress, and then all of them subsequently followed by Lucy Frost. That was fun. And writing the Archivist. About three years ago, when Alana was coming to Paris to work with me on the book, I retyped all of what I had accumulated in the form of ribbons into a new document, so I could send it to her. It was maybe 50,000 words. Then she encouraged me to pull it apart again. It was a real construction site for almost the entire time of writing. There was no first draft, followed by a second, then a third. It was just this large-scale muscling around of chunks of text. There's a cognitive sort of muscularity you develop, constantly moving things around without knowing why exactly, building connections. That’s how I discovered the narrative form of the book, by muscling the text into different configurations and then writing into the reconfigured pieces. Once the book had a form, it needed loads of cutting. I'm thinking of publishing a little booklet of off-cuts, because we had to take out quite a few chapters that were fun but didn’t function in terms of the book’s narrative. What’s the difference, for you, between writing a book of poetry and a book that’s called a novel? The big difference for me is that novel writing is about problems in the representation of time. A novel asks how different experiences of time can be brought into relationship with one another. Had this been a book of poetry, I would have left the fun stuff in. But once you've established a logic of time—or more like multiple logics of interpenetrating time, which is the case for this book—you have to attend to those logics to keep the structure afloat. I'm not talking about causation and logical chains exactly, but instead about the opaque systems of relation between various experiences of time. In this novel, for example, there's the time of my reading through Chateaubriand; there’s also the time of the great aunt’s research in the 1920s, and the time of her life, during which she moves from France back to Canada, teaches in crappy rural schools, is institutionalized, and escapes. There are also geologies of time in the book—the time of dust, for instance, which is astral and cosmic; and the time of the Bièvre, which is an absent temporality; and then there are the times of all the literary texts, which are folded into the narrative. That’s the intensely difficult, but stimulating and intriguing aspect of working in the form of the novel. As you discover what these wedges or layers of time are, you realize how some of the material—however fun to read, or to have written—does not serve the temporal problems that you've set up. It can be hard to let go, but you discover that just because something is possible does not mean that it's functioning in the narrative. I’m not saying that writing a novel is more complicated than writing poetry, but that in terms of its duration—both the length of time it takes to work on a novel, and the sheer word count, the potential reading time—it’s something else. The duration opens different possibilities of continuity, recursiveness and cut. Now I cannot imagine wanting to have such a difficult writing experience again. I'm ready for lightness. Now I just want to write trashy fashion prose. Book cover for Riverwork, 2026, Coach House Books.  Well, this relates directly to one of the questions I wanted to ask you: What are you wearing today? I'm wearing a Comme des Garcons smock I bought on eBay years ago. It's very early Comme—when she wasn't doing these ornately asymmetrical, slightly monstrous, beautiful things that we think of now when we think of Comme—but when her garments were more aligned with a sort of Japanese peasant or worker garment tradition. It’s a very soft cotton, and must have gone through an interesting dying process: it’s a single piece of cloth with two colors on the two faces of the textile—the outside of the cloth is dull red, and the inside is this soft, fuzzy brown. I’m also wearing some enormous baggy pants I sewed myself, which could easily fit three or four of me into them. I found out about these Japanese sewing pattern books made by young, very interesting designers who are doing stuff inflected by designers we know well, like Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Junya Watanabe, Issey Miyake, and so forth. The books include huge sheets of paper that have the pattern pieces for each of the garments printed to scale. If you pull out the sheets and then trace the various patterns for each garment onto tracing paper, you can make your own funky home sewn versions. I love Japanese fashion, and these pants are so comfortable. I made them out of some weird striped denim I used just to try out the pattern. But once I made them, I loved them. I never moved on to the fancy Italian wool I had originally planned for them. At first, I thought I’d only ever wear these at home to clean the house and garden and sit around, but I wear them in Paris all the time. They're like the trousers of a two-year-old going to play school. But I'm an almost 65-year-old woman. You see, I'm most enthusiastic about talking about clothes. This is the thing—this whole book, Riverwork, was just an excuse to find out about the outfits of the women participants in the Paris Commune of 1871. Can you tell me about the laundresses—the riverworkers—whose daily labor and organizing efforts are at the heart of this book? Well, yes! For most of the history of the city of Paris, there was no indoor plumbing, so it was impossible for people to do their laundry at home. People lived in very cramped and tiny spaces, which meant that hanging wet laundry inside was extremely unhealthy; the humidity could cause buildings to slowly rot and crumble. People had to go outside to the rivers to do their big, heavy washing. All that washing and laundry was done by women workers who comprised the absolutely lowest of all the social classes in the city, but whose movement around the city, and whose independence in their mode of work (they were not overseen by men), made them very socially and politically astute in terms of the structure of labor in the city. Because they were river workers, they were also direct witnesses to the ecological desecration of the Bièvre. The Bièvre was a river of fiber. This meant that a great proportion of the industry along the river was focused on cloth production, treatment, dyeing, as well as the production of paper, which was made from leftover rag scrap that was left out to macerate and rot. Once it softened, it was pulped, and the fibers were turned into paper. The smelly processes of maceration and rotting were a big part of textile production as a whole, and were used to turn the stems of flax or hemp into long bast fibers that could then be spun into thread and woven into cloth. The Bièvre River is where all that happened. So, a lot of my research was about the forms of labor undertaken by the girls and women at the site of the river. These laundresses became exemplary for me because they were the least respected laborers in the city: being a laundress was synonymous with being a prostitute. They were loud and noisy. All the descriptions say so. What’s more, the laundresses along the Bièvre were blamed for the river’s pollution, which was not caused by laundry work, but by dyeing work and the tanneries. I became interested in the laundresses as political agents, and traced their initiation of early ecological movements through to their participation in the Paris Commune of 1871. I also became interested in the work of specific laundresses, such as Victorine Gorget, a Black woman who co-organized the Paris Commune. There’s still no book about Victorine Gorget. I found her voice and her photograph in transcripts in police archives. I hope, now that she's in my book, that somebody will now write a book about her. They would have to go to New Caledonia to do that work. That's the penal colony to which she was exiled from France, and where she lived the rest of her life. This politicization of laundry work, and the status of maintenance labor that holds households and cities together—not only who the workers were, but the conditions of their labor as well as their materials—became a central focus for me. It became a point of intersection with Lucy Frost’s work as a cleaner. Riverwork ends with the sentence, “I want a commune of the impossible.” Who or what does this commune consist of? I've been very influenced by the work of the cultural and literary historian Kristen Ross, especially her book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2015), which is about the artisans, often in the decorative arts in Paris, during the time of the 1871 commune, and their interrelationships with socialists in Britain, including William Morris. In Ross’s earlier book, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988), she discusses the nearly three month period of the Paris Commune, during which the working and laboring classes in Paris took over, defended and ran the city with a completely horizontal, collective form of governance. The Communards spent much of that period teaching one another how to continue to do that political work via talks and lectures and workshops. There were constant meetings all over the city. They took over the churches. Some of these meetings were military in nature, because they had to build barricades and defend the city from the police and army. The barricades were sewn! Women sewed the sandbags used in urban defense architecture. Other meetings were about administering first aid and medicine, caring for the injured, or running daycares and looking after the children. They lost, of course. Tens of thousands of members of the commune were slaughtered by the French army. Women members were also killed, but many of them were exiled, along with the more prestigious men, to the penal colony of New Caledonia. The general consensus about the Paris Commune is that it failed. However, the fact is that there was a period of two-and-a-half months of total success, which proves the possibility of a participatory, horizontal system of autonomous self-governance, where people make decisions collectively, respecting one another’s personhood and livelihoods, and equitably distributing what's necessary to thrive. Some things have persisted since the supposed failure of the commune: People today are envious about the state-sponsored daycare system in France—that’s the same childcare that was established by the Paris Commune. It survived. So did the secularization of children's education. In France, the building of free and secular public schools for children, as well as the infrastructure for childcare and pedagogical advancements were initiated by the Paris Commune. Ross talks about how, at any point in time, there are always resurgent communes. The challenge is to recognize these moments of resurgence. In a certain way, the Paris Commune is a form of extension of the French Revolution, which is also historically narrated as a failure. And yet, there was a resurgence of an autonomous collective life outside the hierarchies of prestige and outside the impositions of capital and property. Another glorious moment of resurgence of the Commune is the student worker revolution of 1968, which happened in many places in the world at once. There’s an incredible hopefulness in Ross’s reading of history. What has seemingly failed endures nevertheless. But it must be perceived, it must be recognized to be brought to the surface again. Yes. Even in the particularly dire present moment, there are examples of the commune’s resurgence. I’m thinking about the organizing efforts led by students across campuses in opposition to the genocide in Gaza, and more recently, the organizing happening in cities against ICE. Maybe this is not an accurate statement, but it seems to me unlikely that a communal workers' movement will be able to totally take over a city under current historical and political conditions. But we are still able to think about communes on different scales. There can even be a commune of two or three people, for instance, or within a neighborhood, as we saw in Minneapolis. Because, what even is a commune? It is a way to recognize the terms of our relationship with one another as time unfolds and is lived in, with all the difficulties and joys. It is an actual, circulating politics that connects us to earlier moments and makes us aware of the radical capacities of our labor—whether that labor is doing the city's washing, or cleaning houses, or doing maintenance and care work, or doing intellectual work, which, under current conditions, is also becoming a kind of maintenance or care work. This is already the work of a commune. We can feel like we're failing to a certain extent. And yet, the fact of our current interaction with one another—the ways we give space and assist one another in our work are forms of collective political action. That is the commune, and it persists despite its impossibility. The above conversation was conducted by Shiv Kotecha, a writer and editor living in New York. Kotecha was a 2025 editorial resident with Public Parking. Read Kotecha's previous features here, here and here.Special thank you to Lisa Robertson for participating so generously in the above conversation. Cover image: Book Cover for Riverwork (2026), Coach House Books. 

Last year, the independent art book press Primary Information published Stay away from nothing, a look at the relationship between Peter Hujar, the photographer of 1980s New York’s downtown artists, and Paul Thek, the mercurial and somewhat mythic painter and sculptor, from 1956 to 1975. Studiously edited by Francis Schichtel, the book presents facsimiles of Thek’s correspondence with Hujar, taking place on postcards, in letters, on notebook paper, full of notes and scribbles, as well as images of Thek taken by Hujar. The book ends with a short afterword by Andrew Durbin, author of the recently released biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Reading Stay away from nothing, one can get close to Thek’s words, tracking the progressions of his relationship with Hujar. Meanwhile, Hujar’s photos, already showing the power of his artistic integrity, show an intimate side of Thek that few have ever seen. In November, I attended a reading celebrating the release of the book organized by Ann Stephenson, who runs a fantastic series of readings at the Manhattan bar The Parkside Lounge. The readers were Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz and Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, Stephen Koch, novelist, essayist, and head of the Peter Hujar estate, and the famed photographer Nan Goldin. Cynthia Carr read some of Thek’s letters with an air of warm, sarcastic wit. After that, Koch stepped up onto the stage, wobbling just a bit without the aid of his cane. He read more letters from a trip Thek took on a large ship–charming, flirty travelogues. At times, he paused to collect his emotions, coming through in his wavering voice as he brought up memories of his friends. He remembered something Thek had said to him on the street after his AIDS diagnosis: “This virus is all about white blood cells,” he remembered Thek saying, then, after a breath, “And I’ve got none,” Koch emphasized, his voice breaking. We sat in silence. Nan Goldin took to the stage. “In typical fashion, I’ll be reading the sad ones,” she cracked. She gave new life to Thek’s words written to Hujar toward the end of his life, as paranoia and money trouble overwhelmed him, and he became more fascinated by Catholic faith. It was a tremendously moving evening in honor of a tremendous book, another first-rate job by Primary Information in their impressive line of art literature. I recently met with the book’s editor, Francis Schichtel, to ask him about how Stay away from nothing came to be. I’m interested in what people actually have to say, not a researcher or a historian coming in and putting whatever bullshit they want onto the work. I like when it’s what the actual artists said to each other, the actual factual information.  What was your introduction to the work of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek? There was this gallery exhibition in 2015, I was a freshman in college–Lost Downtown. It was a nice little show. I was a photography major. It just blew me away. I didn’t know anything about them, I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo. What made you want to put this book together? There’s been a remarkable resurgence in attention toward Peter Hujar in recent years. My boyfriend and I published Peter Hujar’s Day. That was an exciting archival find, and that painted a beautiful picture of Peter. I’m interested in what people actually have to say, not a researcher or a historian coming in and putting whatever bullshit they want onto the work. I like when it’s what the actual artists said to each other, the actual factual information. I read the letters out of order–I was looking for my next project at the Hujar archive and the letters were in a digital folder. I knew immediately that this was a very powerful story. They were written amazingly– By Paul Thek. By Paul. They’re about everything. Romance, travel, making art, life. I feel it transcends their relationship. Did you find that, because all of the letters contained within the book are from Paul to Peter…there’s another Primary Information book, Dear Jean-Pierre, letters from David Wojnarowicz to Jean-Pierre Delage, which lacks any response from Delage…did this lopsided access prove difficult in any way for you? No, it was kind of a thing that people kept bringing up, but I read them over and over and over again and the feeling I was left with was that it kind of made you feel more like Peter receiving the letters. You kind of fill in the blanks with how Paul’s responding. It doesn’t feel lopsided to me. It feels very clear to me. Postcard from Paul Thek to Peter Hujar, August 1960. Courtesy of Primary Information. © 2025 Estate of Paul Thek. Postcard from Paul Thek to Peter Hujar, August 1960. Courtesy of Primary Information. © 2025 Estate of Paul Thek. Most of the book is made up of these letters, but one page includes a contact sheet of photos from the catacombs in Palermo, Italy. Can you explain why these photos in particular are so significant? It was a big turning point in both of their artistic careers. Paul spoke about this more eloquently than I would be able to–he’s quoted in an interview right before he died, talking about the power the catacombs had on his work. When you look at Thek’s artworks, the meat pieces and The Tomb, it’s all very clear. In Peter’s work, too…I mean, what year is this? [Schichtel looks at the page in the book.] 1963. So, over ten years later, he starts working on Portraits In Life and Death which is all based on this work. We see a lot of different looks from Paul Thek over the years in these photos that Peter takes. Do you have a favorite era of Paul’s? Like when he’s prettiest? [laughs] He’s very handsome throughout. I like the long hair before he gets into full-on hippie. Long hair, classically beautiful. The hippie stuff is a little much. And then the end is so sad–with him on the beach. He doesn’t look well. Andrew Durbin describes Paul here in his book as like a martyr. Andrew’s book is coming out–were you guys in conversation at all? He helped a lot on this book, especially with the dates. It’s crazy, when you’re doing research especially on people like Peter. The 50s and 60s are kind of just a blur. A lot of the people are gone and pinning down dates is very difficult. I relied on Durbin because I’m not trying to pretend to be a scholar. He’s a beautiful writer. This book was about letting people experience the power of what Paul wrote to Peter and the power of Peter’s images. I love the sort-of chapter timeline, from letters to pictures, letters to pictures, and Peter is so present in the book through the photos and through the letters, because they’re all directed to him. They start romantic, and then Paul’s traveling and missing him, and then he becomes super needy and starts getting kind of annoying throughout the book. [laughs] What was the process of working with Primary Information like? It was great. I found these letters and during that time I had read the Dear Jean-Pierre book, which I loved. So I sent James Hoff an email, like, this is just a little taste of what I want this book to be. He immediately was like, let’s do it. We were in complete harmony of design and not wanting it to be an academic sort of thing. Just letting the information be what it is. Tell me more about that. Why was that important? I just hate that…there’s a lot of people researching this time period and putting themselves into it. I just don’t feel so bold as to do that. Peter and Paul, everyone always talked about them, it was kind of a mythical relationship. And then I found these letters and it was like, okay, this is so clear what their dynamic was. People are hungry for more biographical information on these artists. For whatever reason. I’m not sure why, but people are crazy for it right now. I mean, that’s not the reason I did this book. I just thought, this is such a beautiful thing about life. Why was it important for you to have a hand in preserving these histories? I’m hearing all these firsthand stories. I worked for Stephen Koch, who just passed away, very intimately for seven years. With his support, he allowed me to reach out to as many people as I wanted, people who knew both of these people intimately. I didn’t necessarily want to do a book of interviews, but I thought people would find it interesting because they care about these artists. I think people look to Peter and Paul as people from a more pure time, and I think it reflects in the letters. Photograph by Peter Hujar, 1956. Courtesy of Primary Information. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Letter from Paul Thek to Peter Hujar, February 1968.   Photograph by Peter Hujar, 1966. Courtesy of Primary Information. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. What were some of the stories Stephen told you? Oh, God. There were a few. He was Susan Sontag’s protege, and I don’t remember if he met Peter or Paul first, but they were around Susan a lot. Paul had inspired Susan’s book Against Interpretation and Peter had inspired Notes on Camp. Stephen describes going out with them, and very specific scenes of Paul dancing, and Peter not dancing, and Susan awkwardly dancing. [laughs] It’s better if he were to tell it. He always thought that they were the perfect, coolest gay couple. [laughs] What did you think about the book? Well, I really appreciate that instinct to let the documents speak for themselves. Did you read it cover to cover and one by one? I didn’t read it one by one, but I would jump around a little. Certain things stick out to me, I think I remember Stephen reading them at the Parkside Lounge reading. You were there? Yes. I thought it was so gorgeous. I’m glad I went and got to hear Stephen read those letters. It was his last public appearance. I love that there is still a space for that kind of “happening.” I didn’t realize how many people were going to show up to that particular reading. I didn’t do a guest list or anything, and people were pissed at me, because they were very important people and they couldn’t get in. But I didn’t do a guest list, it was in the back room of a bar! How did it feel for you to hear the letters being read after you’d been looking at them for so long? Incredible. It was really, really powerful. Stephen was like a father to me. We had spent so much time together. It was a sad reminder of his age, too. I’ve been saying this for years, but his generation is not going to be around much longer. And it’s so sad, because they’re so much better than what remains. And Cynthia too, her reading was incredible. I don’t know her that well, but her tone was so fun. And Nan, I had worked for her for about four years. Oh, I wanted to ask you. I went to a screening of Nan’s new film, You Never Did Anything Wrong, about animals, and I saw that you had filmed it. How did that come about? The eclipse was coming up, it was April. I was like, “the eclipse is coming up, I really want to go see it.” It was going to go through Buffalo, and my family has land outside of Buffalo. And she said, “I really want to film it because I want to make a film about animals and about the end of the world.” So we went, and we were filming, me and my friends and my boyfriend all drove up to Buffalo. It was magical. Every week we’d go to different farms and find people with animals…it was like summer camp. Every Sunday we’d go get bagels and get in the car and go upstate and film. I was getting paid to do it, and it was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun. The above conversation was conducted by Conor Williams, a writer and filmmaker based in New York.Cover image: Photographs by Peter Hujar, 1962. Courtesy of Primary Information. © 2025 The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Colloquially dubbed the “multicultural biennial” and maligned by mainstream critics for “preachy” politics, the 1993 Whitney Biennial was a historic juncture in contemporary art history. Films on view explored queerness and civil rights activism, and visitors became immediate, unwitting performers by way of Daniel J. Martinez’s artwork comprised of multicolored admissions buttons: metal pins worn as proof of entry, each containing a fragment of the phrase “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting To Be White.” It was a landmark display; the curators prioritized media-based works, and the selected artists engaged equally with formalist techniques and political theory. Today, it is lauded as a great success of institutional evolution and the avant-garde: reflections by its head curator, Elisabeth Sussman, were published in 2005 and 2016, and its resonance was celebrated with a symposium and multi-city exhibition by Hauser & Wirth in 2023. The universe in which the exhibition was raised is the same one inhabited by the characters of Stephanie Wambugu’s 2025 novel, Lonely Crowds. Set in the 1990s art scene, the ambitious debut grapples with themes of existentialism, cultural alienation, and suicidality with subtle wit and modernist prose. Upon its release, critics were enchanted by Wambugu’s wry toneand approach to obsessive, homoerotic friendship, and she has since been awarded the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” She has also gone on to publish essays in The Nation and Frieze, and short stories in House House Magazine, Buffalo Zine, and Granta. While studying at Bard College, the writer came to recognize the 1990s art world and its relationship to representational politics as sharing a curious similitude with our contemporary one, and situated her characters’ artistic rearing between their liberal arts education in the Hudson Valley and a bygone New York City. “There were parallels between the ’90s that I wrote about [in Lonely Crowds] and what was happening in art while I was a student in the late 2010s, early 2020s,” explains Wambugu. The duo at the core of the book, Ruth and Maria, embody the novel’s exploration of convention and contemporaneity, in both their chosen mediums and personalities. Against the backdrop of an artistic setting, Wambugu says, “you can transmute some of these themes and ideas in subtle ways.” Her protagonist, Ruth, is a girl who struggles to verbalize, or even recognize, her own desires; drawing becomes the only conduit through which she can conceive of her circumstances. From the moment she lays eyes on Maria, the only other Black girl in their town, an adolescent Ruth is enraptured. Maria becomes the epicenter around which Ruth orbits for the rest of her days. What’s a life without fixation, anyway? Wambugu captures a sense of naivete and self-disconnection through scenes of Ruth’s life. We meet her and Maria at various crossroads—as Catholic schoolgirls in New England, exploring fledgling relationships in college, and navigating 1990s New York City, finding disparate degrees of success and bearing its consequences. The author and I spoke over the phone this winter to discuss the literary and artistic influences that informed the novel. I didn't know that I wanted this, but I realize now that I did and do want to write books that many people read. I want to be a writer's writer on some level, but I want to write something that has broad appeal because I think that's what literature is at its best. You've spoken about Toni Morrison’s Sula as an inspiration to Lonely Crowds. That feels really apt, and it was nice to see the reference within the text—these parallels between Nel and Sula, and then Ruth and Maria, in regard to sexual politics and the agony of coming together and apart over a lifetime. A lot of the press around the book has to do with friendship and fixation, and I'm curious to hear from your perspective why you think that's resonated so deeply with readers, and what led you to the topic? There's a distinct genre that's made up entirely of love stories, the romantic or sexual variety, but there's a growing interest in friendship as an equally important dyad in fiction. My Brilliant Friend [by Elena Ferrante], which was such a sensation, is one example. I think that in life, people deal less seriously with friendship than they do with romantic relationships, buta book can give you the space to say, “I had a friendship that was as impactful, potentially wounding, as a marriage might be, or any other kind of romantic relationship might be.” And I think that Sula is an important model because that's said pretty explicitly in the book. The major betrayal in the book is that Sula, having slept with many men in town, has left town and come back with a reputation. She then commits what is seen as the ultimate transgression: she sleeps with her best friend Nel’s husband, Jude. And what we come to understand at the end of the book is that though they stopped speaking, and though Nel feels profoundly betrayed, the real source of the pain is that she's lost this friend, and that her friendship is actually, in some ways, more important to her than her marriage. What she really mourns at the end of the book is the lost time that she missed out on with Sula because of this surface-level betrayal, this infidelity. Because of a man basically. I think what's really interesting about Sula is that it takes as seriously a platonic relationship as it might an erotic or romantic relationship. These two characters, Ruth and Maria, are artists. I'm curious how you arrived at artwork as the conduit through which they express these fixations and desires, and how you decided to set this book in that world. It was partly because that was the kind of work I was doing right when I graduated from college. I worked first for a private art collection in the Hudson Valley, and then at the Noguchi Museum. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was in grad school for writing, but a lot of the writing I was doing at the time was freelancing—writing about art, about painters. For whatever reason, it seemed to dominate my life before I started seriously working on my novel. And so, it seemed like a natural subject. I also think that there were parallels between the ’90s that I wrote about [in Lonely Crowds] and what was happening in art while I was a student in the late 2010s, early 2020s. There was a racial reckoning in America, one mainly concerned with police violence, and one of the ways it manifested in the art world was that people were incentivized to collect, exhibit and celebrate certain art made by certain demographics. A similar thing happened in the ’90s, where these discourses around representation were becoming mainstream, and I identified the 1993 Biennial as one example, a biennial I watched a friend give an art history thesis presentation on when I was a senior at Bard. So, there are periods when a group is culturally ascendant because of what is going on politically, then other things happen and people move on, they stop caring. Recently, there was an essay in Vulture about how the Black portraiture boom completely exploded, then went bust. What happens to those artists then? Many of whom presumably just wanted to make their work and not be spokespeople or representatives of an institution’s ideology. Some of the Black artists who I was thinking about while I writing this book were people like Kara Walker, Lyle Ashton Harris, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson: people whose careers were taking off in this period, who now—for people who have an interest in art or write about art—are something close to household names, but a lot of the material in their work must have seemed very new at the time that they were making it. I wanted to write Ruth and Maria as characters who embody tensions between novelty and tradition, in more ways than one. Maria is a video artist, who represents the new, or a more digital medium. Ruth represents an older world and an older sensibility, and she's regressive in a way that extends beyond her figurative painting practice. I think that art was a fitting and effective backdrop for many reasons, because you can transmute some of these themes and ideas in subtle ways in terms of their professional lives or what objects they're actually making. It offers a helpful narrative container, the künstlerroman. That's all resonating really deeply. Actually, when I was an undergraduate in ethnic studies, I wrote my thesis about the parallels between the ‘60s and ‘70s, the ’90s, and the 2010s art world. Oh, that's really interesting. I was talking about Harlem on My Mind, then the ’93 Biennial, and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. So, this is all really resonating, and I think it all worked its way into the novel in this really beautiful and astute way. When I was looking more into your work, I saw your review of Janiva Ellis's exhibition at 47 Canal. You wrote: the paintings “attend[ed] to the burden of representing racialized subjects in a way that evades and confronts viewers, metabolising the traps and tropes of representation within the work itself.” That observation felt really relevant to Lonely Crowds and specifically how you wrote about Ruth's attempt to grapple with racialization in her work. How were you contending with that concept while writing, and what were you hoping to convey? Well, I guess my feeling, and the character's feeling, is ambivalence. Recently, while researching for an essay about a few photographers, I was reading about James Barnor, who is a Ghanaian photographer in his nineties. He was born, of course, before Ghana became independent. He photographed Kwame Nkrumah many times, and he's a sort of living testament to a nation's struggle for independence. And I thought, How ridiculous and flippant of me would it be to say that that kind of representation isn't important? And I think that sometimes, out of a desire to overcorrect, people will say that representation isn't important, or it's trite, and we don't need to make art that's about our racial or ethnic group. But I think you can't help but feel pride or admiration for people who really devote their lives to an idea, or even people who just happen to have been born at a time of revolutionary struggle andsee it come to fruition. I think the trouble is when something becomes framed as being emblematic of its group, or people suggest that's where the power of a work of art comes from rather than formal or stylistic choices. I think that instead, people should aim to make things that are very specific and local and personal, and from those very specific particulars, maybe you can make a more universal work of art. I think that Ruth really doesn't have a very clear sense of self. That's where the voice and the style of the book come from. She's sort of a naive narrator, questioning everything at every turn. I think writers like Kafka were a huge influence on this because there's this mock simplicity in the voice or the characterization of the narrator that's actually a tool to make clear that you have to question the very foundation of the things you're observing. In a sense, we're all unreliable narrators in that we are completely, forever stuck in our own subjectivity, and we can't see things in a clear way. Ruth dramatizes that, because she's very confused about her sexuality and the clash between her culture of origin (her parents' culture) and the culture she grows up in (this religious, small-town milieu). Then she enters a drastically different culture, going to liberal arts college, becoming an artist, and so on. She feels very deracinated or dislocated from her origins, and she tries to express that and can’t. But really, what prompted her to first make that work is a very complicated, unclear, vague relationship she has with her friend. She starts painting in order to paint Maria, because she doesn't understand her. The very origins of her painting stem from an unsettling dynamic, and so, once it scales up and she has a professional career and is being celebrated for making this kind of figurative work that came from a place of deep uncertainty, she feels very confused about it. On another level, she wonders, “What does it mean to paint Black figures and be paid for it, when I don't know how I feel about the material myself?” When I was writing this book, I did not have a sense of a readership because I didn't know if it would sell. No writer can be sure of that. I didn't really expect anything to come out of it. And so now I wonder if it was preemptively expressing some of the ambivalence or mixed feelings you have about how you're read once you have an audience, even before you think you'll have one. Some of the contention in Ruth's life, which feels on a parallel track to her confusion over the ways that her art would be read, is the consideration of upward mobility and the material and spiritual consequences of that. There's a sense of alienation throughout the book—of course, her observation of Maria from childhood into adulthood, but also Ruth’s continuing struggle with the idea of success once she has found it. I think the narrative around upward mobility is not as neat as one expects. I think that—whether it's true or not—she feels corrupted by her success or feels like it was cheaply won. And when she's at this major show, where all of the works have sold before the show even begins, it's a milestone for her, but she's in such a state of despair that she can't even be there for the celebration. Book cover for Lonely Crowds (2025), Little, Brown and Company.  So many of the characters, not only in Lonely Crowds, but also in some of your short stories, seem to be in search of experiences that they have been told are unacceptable or they're afraid to pursue. They're looking for these sorts of erotic livelihoods, queer livelihoods, or livelihoods that go against the institution of marriage. Thinking about “My First Husband” or “Women Without Children”—while I was reading these, I was thinking about the voice of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy or Gayl Jones’ Corregidora… Oh, I love that book. Yeah! This idea of a character who's irreverent and pleasure-seeking, and seeing that show up. I'm curious, when it comes to portraying that voice, what that experience is like, because I do think that it's in this lineage of these phenomenal writers. Thank you. A piece of conventional writing advice that people give is the question “Why is this night unlike other nights?” which comes from something people say at Passover. The advice is to start a story at an exceptional moment; either there’s been a crisis, or the routine has been upended in some way. You meet literary characters, typically, at a point where things are going to change in an irreparable or irreversible way. I want the characters in my story to speak in a fairly calm way and have a fairly calm demeanor, but to be at the point where they're like, “I cannot take this life anymore. I can't take the situation that I'm in anymore.” Typically, I think that's the feeling you have just before you have an artistic idea or an idea for a story. You are following an impulse that you can't resist, similar to someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as many of my characters are, even though they're not expressing it in the typical ways. They're not necessarily spiraling out of control or seeming delusional. But something about their day-to-day lives is becoming intolerable, and they're acting that out. I think irreverence is a good word for it. Their lives are imploding. We spoke at the beginning about the influence of Morrison, of Sula and Song of Solomon, on your writing. I'm curious to hear about any other authors who inspire your writing. I've talked about them at length, but Toni Morrison definitely, and Gary Indiana, another American novelist and critic. I'm very inspired by the way he writes about people who are on the fringes of the cultural elite. He was a critic at the Village Voice for many years and there’s a great book of his collected reviews. He was really brilliant and a real intellectual, and was able to write about powerful artists in such an incisive way, never writing hagiography. At the same time, he was able to capture, in his fiction, the underbelly of society and write about people who were lost to the AIDS epidemic, or people who were strung out on drugs, people who failed miserably. I think that writers or people who work in art are uniquely positioned, in that they get access to the real heights of wealth and status, and also the very low points. Being able to write seriously about both extremes is something I want to do—to be able to look closely at all sorts of ways of living. I think that Gary Indiana really embodies that. The other big influence on my work, who is someone who does the same thing, is Jean Rhys. There's this meme, this joke—now it’s a few years old—where someone says, “I miss being a young woman because you could go out with nothing but $20 in your purse and have a great night.” Yeah. [laughs] You know what I mean? [laughs] I think it's about what's fun and seductive about someone buying you a drink or being carried along by an evening because you're an attractive young woman, but actually having nothing—no control or power of your own. Though that's just a meme, I do think that Jean Rhys’s characters lead lives that are kind of meandering and directed by other people in a similar way. They depend on other people's charity, the charity of men. In her books, there's the drunken feeling that you're being carried through life not very lucid. I think that is interesting, and was influential to me. What are you reading right now? Right now, I'm reading Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, which is an erotic novel, but the part that I'm at now is all about psychoanalysis and someone fantasizing about having an affair. I've just started it, but I'm really enjoying it. It opens when [the protagonist] is on a plane to Austria with all of these analysts, and she's been treated by six of them and married another. It's told in the snappy voice of a fairly uninhibited woman from New York—a sophisticated, interesting voice. Also, I'm reviewing the novels of the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth, and so I've been rereading her novels and just finished that piece. She's one of my favorite contemporary writers. I didn't really discover her until I was at the very end of writing [Lonely Crowds], so her influence isn't necessarily apparent in that book, but I have come to love her work, and I think she's a very important writer to me. Her new book, Repetition, has been translated into English and will come out next month, and I highly recommend it. It's so interesting to hear you mention a writer that you admire who you found at the end of your writing process. As a writer, you're constantly going to be barraged with this influx of influence and new discoveries, et cetera. I'm curious if we could end on any reflections you've had now that Lonely Crowds has been in the world for some months, and what that's been like for you as a writer to share a work with an audience at this scale. I didn't know that I wanted this, but I realize now that I did and do want to write books that many people read. I want to be a writer's writer on some level, but I want to write something that has broad appeal because I think that's what literature is at its best. Someone like Toni Morrison, who I admire so much, is a writer's writer in every sense. She can really be situated in a modernist tradition; you could devote a book to scholarship on a single Toni Morrison novel and people have. But also, a housewife in a bookclub or a young student could read The Bluest Eye. It's working on many, many levels, and as a result, it's not just for one kind of reader. As [Lonely Crowds] was coming out, I discovered that that was something I desired, too. I can have a certain kind of conversation with you about my book, about influences or the art historical material, but I also am happy for people to read the book who are like, “I want to read about a homoerotic friendship, and I don't really care about your influences.” That reader is as important to me as any other reader. To return to the original question, I was thinking about this earlier while I was walking to the grocery store. Once you publish something, it doesn't really belong to you. What I'm coming to understand and accept is that the book that really does belong to you is the one you are in the process of writing. So, what I'm writing now is private, it's mine. I can talk about it with people in my life. I don't really have to disclose anything about it. But as soon as that's published, it will take on a life of its own and be contextualized however readers want to contextualize it. I think that you can't be too neurotic or fixated on how people understand your book. Of course, in the early weeks or the early days, you want some contact with the outside world and the people who are reading your book. But as time passes, it’s possible to say, “Okay, that was something I published, I'm proud of it, I'm interested in its ideas.” When I started writing this book, I was 22, almost 23 years old, and now a few years have passed, and I'm a different person in many ways. Over the summer, before the book came out, I had the finished copies, but it wasn't published yet. If I'd gone to a party or I'd had a few drinks, I would come home and reread the book. And I would think, on one hand, I'm so excited, and I'm very eager for it to come out. But even then, they felt like the words of another person. And, in a sense, they are. The above conversation was conducted by Jasmine Weber, a writer, editor, and artist from Long Island, now based in Brooklyn, New York. Editorial support by Claire Geddes Bailey.Cover image: Stephanie Wambagu

I had already learned so much from Rainer Diana Hamilton’s poetry before reading This Reasonable Habit. Co-written with Violet Spurlock and published February 2026 by Spunk Editions, the long poem begins with a bicoastal phone call and unfolds at an imaginary summit where 26 characters—A through Z—convene, over the course of three days, to answer questions like: “Is ‘shyness’ a moral failing?”, “What makes good sex?”, “What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone?” Ever searching for guidance on living, relating, and loving, I finished the book with a rush of gratitude for the sheer abundance of thinking it opened up, meaning I wept. This investigative impulse is seen across Hamilton’s work, and, as they say in our conversation, the idea is to “find the form that can represent a thought you otherwise couldn’t represent.” Near the end of This Reasonable Habit, Violet says over the phone to Rainer: “Haven’t I loved you in loving to wonder alongside you about the nature of that love?” Friendship is a form, too—Hamilton’s work reminds us of this fact. I first encountered their poetry in the fall of 2018 at Participant Inc. in New York, where they read from God Was Right. Listening to those poems, which were essayistic, I admired the way their deliberate, steady sentences carried such rigorous, digressive, and free thinking. Their poems neither rush to attain closure nor spin off into unbridled rumination, but hold us on the cusp of understanding until we arrive at a completely unexpected yet inevitable end. Recently, reading Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, I came across a passage about what he terms “the mortal point”: “the nearly central point at which we know that if the author remains there, he will die in the undertaking.” Hamilton’s poems exist in the glow of this central point—a blushing region, at once precarious and propitious, that feels like dwelling somewhere after hours, or like what is said after everything’s been said, after we say goodbye but stay on the line. In Lilacs, published in late 2025 by Krupskaya, Hamilton develops “a form of long poem that promotes sense memory.” With a poem for each of the senses, and a sixth for love, Lilacs begins with a lost sense of smell and a speaker who sets out to recover it by cooking for scent. What unfolds is a path through memories and other lilac-inflected texts, towards a “forest dream,” and finally towards being able to smell everything, “and not just the past.” Hamilton is also the author of The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017) and Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012). They live in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We spoke over the phone in early February about their recent collaborations, friendship, and the roles of contingency and constraint in their work. I don’t want digression for digression’s sake, or to get lost in a totally unguided way, but to represent all the actual digressions that one thought requires. I’d like to take the reader with me. I’d been wondering why your parentheticals and digressions were so moving to me from their outset. And nested tangents, even more so—as if I was being gently pulled farther into a field. Towards the end of the book, Rainer and Violet are trying to end their long-distance phone call. Violet says, after Rainer refers to a Henry James novel: ...And you would try to introduce some new point of reference just as we’re really needing to call it. And continues: I guess I did my own lingering, but maybe now we get to enjoy our privacy together, separately. I want you to sleep and to dream as much as I want you to keep talking. I realized what I was feeling in the drifting of your Lilacs was this sense of deferring the end, deferring the separation, a move I experience as warm and generous. Do you think about this when writing a poem? About giving into digressions—how much to—or resisting it? A lot of what I try to do in my poems, but especially in Lilacs, is take the things that I do by accident in other writing and let myself play them up. In God Was Right, that meant letting myself take on this too-academic tone of inquisition. In Lilacs, it meant indulging a real desire to never let a thought end, to try to keep the unit of one idea as long as possible and see how much it could contain. Your question reminded me of a professor I really loved in college who told me that, when she was in college herself, she developed intense separation anxiety around books, such that she could only read really long books—that had multiple volumes, if possible—because she would become so distraught when one ended. I have a version of that around the sentence., as it’s really upsetting to me to read short choppy prose. In my own writing, I have to check that feeling. When I write a review for a magazine like Frieze or Bomb, the editors will insist each idea be as clear as possible, which for English-speaking readers often means containing it in some little syntactic fragment. I understand why that's the expectation, but it bears no relationship to what thinking is like for me. I don’t want digression for digression’s sake, or to get lost in a totally unguided way, but to represent all the actual digressions that one thought requires. I’d like to take the reader with me. I love this story about the college professor. I think I was feeling that while reading Lilacs. When a digression would move into another one, it gave me this sense there was going to be a long way back. That if we were being led this far out, we’d be guided back. That’s my hope, that there’s a way of setting it up so that there’s some trust that the point of origin is still there. I think I would have felt the floral form of Lilacs even if the title had not been Lilacs. The way the writing cascades, clusters, is multi-stemmed. At first, the poems were titled “Trance Essays.” How did calling them lilacs alter your writing or thinking about them? The first poem in the book was “Trance Essay for Remembering Images,” which I wrote without planning to write more. Lilacs is also quite a collaborative book: I wrote it over the course of a year, when the poet Brandon Brown and I were in a writing group of two, where we would meet and each send a poem every couple of months. His son, Earlie, had just been born, and Brandon would call me at Earlie’s bedtime, when it was 10:15 pm in New York—he is in California—and we would talk for a couple of hours about writing. Before we started this habit, I hadn’t been able to write for a while, and I thought, well, I don’t really have any other ideas in mind, what if I try to write another trance essay for remembering a sense? So, I wrote “Smell” second, and Brandon encouraged me to write poems for all five senses. I am repeating what I wrote at the end of Lilacs in my explanatory note. Later, my roommate at the time, the writer Shiv Kotecha, pointed out that when I said “trance essay” aloud, at readings, people thought I was saying “trans essay.” I don’t articulate “c” and “s” very well, I suppose. I found this misrecognition profoundly embarrassing, and I realized I needed a new title. It was Brandon who said, “what if you called them Lilacs?” I think that was the image we had gotten stuck on in our conversation that night. This change freed me from something in the project, not just the sonic accident of the figure of transition hovering above it, but also from my vague annoyance I was writing a second book where each poem had “essay” in the title. I didn’t want to be writing poem-essays; I wanted to be writing poetry. The idea of the trance was a joke initially, but as it was repeated, it became too serious. I have no ability to enter a true meditative state. I wanted to emphasize that as much as I’m pretending to represent thoughts as they come, doing that involves a lot of piecing together memory from disparate parts, including academic notebooks. Somehow the flower form felt like it could contain more of what I was trying to do. In “Image Lilac,” you’re trying to remember your block, and basing it off a lilac tree on your neighbor’s lawn? Exactly, and lilacs come up in both “Image” and “Smell.” But there was something else to it—I like that the lilac is a common flower that grows in a lot of public spaces. It’s not hard to maintain. And it has a really noticeable smell, so people tend to know to identify it, people who don’t otherwise look at bushes and name them. Lilacs are both recognizable and temporary. God Was Right was published as part of the Dossier series with Ugly Duckling Presse, which puts out books with an “investigative impulse.” How do you think about that framing: “investigative impulse”? Is it more exact than “experimental” or “formally adventurous”? I like the framing of the Dossier series, and I was happy that that’s where God Was Right appeared. As to these terms: “experimental” feels like a lot to claim—either it applies to everything, or I couldn’t say what narrow subset of things it applies to. I understand it best as a rejection of certain things I don’t want to do. You call a poem experimental often because you want to say, ‘I promise it’s not going to be a one-page poem that ends in an epiphany,’ right? And formally adventurous, I think, makes sense when talking about a period when poets seem, on average, to have agreed on a form one could then break from. But I don’t know what received, strict form we are supposed to be upending right now. Young writers often seem indifferent to form, as if expression defeated history. Investigative is easier, because, unlike experimental, adventurous, or avant-garde, it doesn’t require a point of departure. The poem is a way of apprehending or knowing something else. A poem might be good at a certain kind of thinking, at finding the form that can represent a thought you otherwise couldn’t represent, without positioning that form as innovation. That relates to something you said in an interview at Triangle House a few years ago. You talked about your gradual fondness of writing that is contingent rather than intentional. You said, “In my imagination, a good writer would have a book in mind that didn’t take a wholly different course because of something she happened to have read, or because she made a new friend. At some point, I remember accepting that this good writer was not going to be me. And then, later, I found myself not wanting it anymore, even: I like that writing is a record of the kind of thoughts you get a chance to have only because some circumstances conspired.” You’ve said you were resistant to collaboration, which I was somewhat surprised to hear. Do you think your poetry has moved further towards an openness to chance? I’m grateful you’re reminding me that I said this in the wake of The Awful Truth and God Was Right coming out. After that, I forgot again, and I entered many years where I couldn’t write. I had to accept that I was writing a book again only because my friend Brandon asked me to. I feel open to all the chances that friendship affords. To decide you’re going to write requires a profound self-seriousness. To think, nobody has asked me to do this, I have no obligation to publish, but for whatever reason, I think that I need to write a book. I mean, God bless the people who are good at doing it, but it’s hard. And I think because it's asking a lot of yourself, people tend to outsource that to those with some literary authority, regardless of whether they actually trust or respect that authority. They look for an agent, an editor, a publication, a prize, to offer a sign that they are supposed to keep going. I don’t want to do that, and I also don’t want my friends or my students to. I don’t want them to think that the thing that should license their writing is a panel of judges convened for the purpose. But when it is a friend, or even a stranger you’ve appointed to the role yourself, someone whose opinion you love or trust, someone you read or talk about art with, that’s a better compromise. That has always been the most generative space for me: there being a specific person, whose mind I’m interested in, who seems to want me to write something. I was resistant to collaboration in the form of actual co-writing for a long time, because it felt like for both writers to feel happy with it, they would have to be quite harsh. To collaborate means that you have to be clear about what you don’t like in the other’s writing, it means to subject your style to someone else’s style, it means a lot of giving up control, and a lot of asserting control. I imagined it as very stressful. Or, on the other hand, I imagined it as a series of unhappy compromises. But instead I found that, in the two collaborations we’re talking about here—Lilacs and This Reasonable Habit—my work could not exist at all without the other writer’s voice. I was uncertain Lilacs was a book I wanted to publish until the writer Bianca Rae Messinger wrote her poem in response to mine, in “Taste Lilac.” And then, the fact that the book was a home for this poem by Bianca made it possible for me to feel a lot of affection for the book. With Violet it was a many, many year process of writing This Reasonable Habit, but I similarly became fond of the representation of our talking in this ridiculous form. I guess it’s easier to love someone else’s voice than your own. It is, yeah. I think if my published work feels like talking to a friend, it’s because my writing is at its worst when it doesn’t, when I’m trying to write to some abstract other whose desires I don’t know or care about. This Reasonable Habit—first of all, this book helped me—I learned a lot. There are so many amazing questions—I’m so grateful that they were chosen as questions. For example, the section that asks, “Is ‘shyness’ a moral failing?” will literally help me this weekend. Others are: “Is conversation art?”, “Is writing accidental?”, “What can the libertine and nun teach each other?” How did you and Spurlock decide what questions to include? This project with Violet started in a very different form. When we first became friends, she wanted to collaborate on something, and for all my hesitations about co-writing, I thought it could work if we each maintained separate authorship of our own sections. At the time, for reasons really unclear to me, I was trying to write metered sonnets, and I asked her if she wanted to join me in that. We decided we would make them what we called “conversational sonnets,” where we each made a list of ten questions we wanted to ask each other—or maybe it was five questions we wanted to ask each other and it came to ten, I don’t remember the exact number—to answer in the form of a sonnet in iambic heptameter. We did that until we grew tired of the constraint. Each poem was signed “Violet” or “Rainer,” and the lines between us were clear. When Noah Ross and Eric Sneathen decided to start their new press, Spunk Editions, they asked us for that manuscript. Violet and I didn’t want to publish those poems as we’d written them, but we wanted to return to working together. We wound up taking the sonnets apart and reconstructing the answers and language, giving them to new, imagined characters. We created an imaginary conference where the attendees were talking to each other about the same questions we had previously been asking each other in the form of poems. That doesn’t quite explain how we decided what questions to include, other than that they were questions that we thought the other would write well in response to. And in the end, each line was really co-written, after all, as if the narrative’s polyvocality made it possible for the writing to be one, merged style. I underlined this part from This Reasonable Habit: …E was half laughing bored by his lover’s actual words, but drawn to the personality compelled to produce them. It reminded me of a question I haven’t really been able to articulate before: why it is that we aren’t necessarily moved by particular words a person will use but more so by what urges them on? I don’t know if you have thoughts on that. I think I do, but can you say just a little bit more? Yeah, give me an example. I hesitated to include this question because I’m not sure I really know what I mean. But that line really resonated. I was thinking how, usually with a book that I’m reading, it’s not exactly that the author is using, I don’t know, an amazing set of words, but that something in their impulse is more compelling than the words they’re using. It goes a few different directions in my mind. The first is not related to writing at all. If I’m really in love, I don’t need the things that a lover says, in happiness, to be particularly inventive. You wind up repeating, “I love you, baby,” “You’re so beautiful,” “I need you in my arms.” Not even a little bit experimental. What you’re experiencing in terms of specificity is something other than language, even if this repeated language helps you to encounter the specificity of this person you feel crazy about. But in a fight, that goes away, and suddenly the language has to be precise, such that the exact turn of phrase is analyzed for all the evidence that love has been withdrawn, or that somebody hasn’t been thoughtful. There’s something about loving attention that can let familiar language that isn’t particularly crafted or designed hold onto specificity, whereas feelings of defensiveness, or hurt, or vulnerability suddenly require this precise language. I think there’s something akin to this in poetry. The poem that is so fixated on its special vocabulary or precise enjambment can feel defensive or guarded like a hurt lover. That’s maybe not where you were going, and I might not mean that. I’ll try again. Written language represents whatever it says or argues or describes, but it also represents the impulse to write itself. Certain texts really make you encounter the impulse for them to have been written, and that can be a pleasure—to see the desire to write at play in the writing. Robert Glück has said of your work: “Hamilton is the greatest company, a friend who invites you to refract your life through their refining lens” and Kay Gabriel in her introduction at the launch of Lilacs said: “Here I handled evidence that poetry could persuade with as much force and intention as it charmed the senses, could introduce ideas with more acuity, but then again revise itself with more humility than professional criticism […] Could do all these things in the tone of a friend taking you on a walk or writing letters to prompt your ideas.” Why do you think your writing has this conversant quality? If you imagine that you’re talking to a friend, you get some of the best impulses. You get a desire to breathe, a desire to make yourself understood, the permission to get side-tracked. You can ask your friend a question and wind up telling each other 20 interrupting stories before returning to it, not because you want to confuse them, but because you can trust that they’re with you. You don’t have to make yourself more or less comprehensible. I think if my published work feels like talking to a friend, it’s because my writing is at its worst when it doesn’t, when I’m trying to write to some abstract other whose desires I don’t know or care about. I want to return to Lilacs—there is a part in “Touch Lilac” that describes Frances Ponges’ “kings who do not touch doors” and therefore “do not know that happiness.” The speaker subsequently tests this theory, pushing their own body up against the wooden door, flattening their face, palms, chest and knees against the surface. Later you write in the poem: “I committed to keeping this poem from describing sex.” Had you developed rules for the poems prior to their creation or did rules emerge as you wrote? There were light rules. The first lilac, “Smell Lilac,” has one-line stanzas, and the second, “Image Lilac,” has two-line stanzas, and the third has three-line stanzas and so on, until, “Love Lilac,” which cycles through the forms, so each stanza goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That’s barely a constraint, but it helps me give the thought a little shape. There were other restrictions. With “Taste Lilac,” I love to eat and drink and think about those pleasures, but I didn’t think it would be very interesting to have a long poem that was mostly accounting pleasurable feasting, so I decided to make it about the other meaning of taste, discernment, especially in an 18th-century context, instead. And the same with touch: I thought that if it became too much about sex or physical sensuality, it would be a little bit like listing good meals. “Touch Lilac” is probably the one that I had the least clear sense of beforehand. I sat down and wrote it in one sitting, with a more constrained sense of time. But I wanted it to be about this question of how touch relates to happiness. Yes, I had wondered how “Touch Lilac” began. Because it starts with touching a bookshelf that doesn’t feel good to the fingers… And I love the part about putting Cetaphil on your hands and greasing up the wood. I tried to imagine how that poem came about. The speaker is at the bookshelf in the first place to find a quote about happiness for their friend’s birthday. It had a very specific premise. It was the writer Elisa Gonzalez’s birthday, and I was trying to find a line that I could use to wish her happy birthday, but I instead wound up writing this poem. Did you send her the poem? I did, yeah. Well, I think I’ll end with this: does friendship help you write? I have benefited from extraordinarily generous writing friendships. God Was Right was really produced by Jameson Fitzpatrick seeing a form in one of the poems and suggesting a form for the rest of the book. God Was Right and The Awful Truth were both written almost entirely through the premise of Shiv Kotecha having just moved in and us writing together each night. And I started writing the poem to Bianca Rae Messinger in Lilacs when she was living in Buffalo, but she moved in later that year, and I finished the book with her in the next room, finishing her own. Then, Lilacs itself, as I described earlier, was written through talking with Brandon Brown. This Reasonable Habit is the first truly co-written one, but it of course comes out of friendship with Violet. It’s great to use the writing of a book to maintain friendship across great distance. It went the other way: instead of friendship being a way to help me write, writing became an excuse to talk to my friend more often. The above conversation was conducted by Jancie Creaney, Editorial support by Hannah Bullock.Cover image: Rainer Diana Hamilton and Violet Spurlock 

I can’t quite remember when I first encountered Sameer Farooq’s work. It may have been during the years I was working full-time in a museum. What I do remember is the surprise of seeing his name, years later, on the roster for a movement class I was teaching at Mosaic Yoga on Sterling Road—just a few doors down from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. I felt shy about striking up a conversation with an artist whose work I so deeply admired. Eventually, though, I gathered the courage to introduce myself as more than his Pilates teacher and asked if he might be open to talking with me about his practice. We met after class one afternoon in early March, settling into Mosaic’s small studio as the season began its slow shift from a frigid winter toward the promise of spring. Farooq is warm and generous, immediately turning the conversation toward my transition from arts worker to movement teacher and acupuncturist. We linger for a while on the more difficult aspects of working in Canada’s arts sector—how rigid and joyless it can sometimes feel. In what now feels like another lifetime, I worked in gallery archives and museum collections: operating in dark, cold and quiet climate-controlled basements where objects rest in carefully monitored stillness. We note, with relief, that today we are sitting in sunlight. Over the years, Farooq has closely observed the museum, often making its structures and habits the subject of his work. For Farooq, the museum is never a neutral container. It is a site where objects are ordered, narratives stabilized, and histories made to cohere—until someone unsettles them. Across sculpture, photography, film, and research-driven installations, he enters institutional spaces to rearrange their logics. What happens when a display is disturbed? What new relationships emerge when objects are allowed to lean on one another differently? Farooq has exhibited widely, including at the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the The British Library. His exhibition The Fairest Order of the World, curated by Mona Filip, is touring across Canada through 2027, stopping at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, the McMaster Museum of Art, the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Varley Art Gallery, Art Windsor-Essex, and the MacKenzie Art Gallery. The exhibition considers the museum’s authoritative voice—its vitrines, taxonomies, and carefully regulated timelines—while gravitating instead toward adjacency, iteration, and fluidity. In our conversation, Farooq reflects on fear and fragility within museum culture, the interplay between intuition and intellect in his creative process, and the generative potential of gaps. We return, again and again, to the possibility that the museum might be something other than a temple of preservation. What might unfold if it were understood instead as a permeable, relational space—resilient enough to withstand a little rustling around? Things need to be able to be easily moved around inside of the museum. Vitrines need to be able to be opened. People need to be able to touch the materials, cry over things. The title of your exhibition “The Fairest Order in the World” comes from a Heraclitus quote. Can you tell me about how you relate to this passage, and how you came to this as an organizing theme for the exhibition? The complete quote is from the pre-Socratic scholar Heraclitus, who is mainly understood in the world through fragments. They’ve discovered these incomplete, esoteric fragments of his writing. Fragments have a way of transmitting knowledge in the world in far more interesting ways than cohesive, calcified narratives or stories. The full quote is “the fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.” And I loved that because I really believe that how histories are formed is that things cohere and break apart again, and cohere and break apart again. They keep forming in different constellations and iterations. This idea of how history is formed in museums is that narratives are set. They're decided and solidified in museum displays, and then they stay like that for 50 years until there's a rehang based on the politics of the moment, and then it sort of changes again. This quote is about unfreezing museum time. Museum time really aims to stop a moment in its tracks and then expand on it through display, and through arrangement, and through conservation. That's why I was really drawn to it. When did your interest in museums and collecting institutions start? When you're separated from your country of origin, you scramble to find remnants or fragments of where you come from. My mom is from India via Uganda, my dad is Pakistani, and all that they managed to keep through processes of migration was this one metal chest. When I was a kid, growing up on Cape Breton Island, I used to go down to the basement and rifle through it, and it was like a little museum in itself. There was a dried six-foot-long snake skin that I think my mom kept from Africa. And then there were these etched tin vases from Pakistan, and some photographs and some papers. I think from a very young age, I was really interested in this combination of materials and what it said about our family, and myself, and where we came from. We couldn't have moved to anywhere more different—this rural Canadian life, this island. It's cut off more than most places. So I think that impulse came from trying to make sense of the world. In my work that's not research-based, you still see that compulsion to organize and arrange, to create meanings by adjacencies, and opposites, and symmetries, and dissonances. Growing up in Cape Breton, what were your early experiences with museums? That's a great question. There wasn't a lot. All arts funding was cut except for music. So there wasn't a lot of money going into museums. I think my interest was solidified a lot later when I moved to Amsterdam for art school. I was in Montreal for my undergrad in anthropology. But I don't think my interest in museums developed until I was in Amsterdam, where I saw these vast collections that were built out of theft. The first museums I started to build were called The Museums of Found Objects (2011) with Dutch artist Mirjam Linschooten, who I still collaborate with. We started building these speculative improvised museums based on neighborhoods. We did one in Istanbul where we told the stories of different neighborhoods through the objects found in them. In the one we did in Cairo, we asked 50 people to suggest 50 items that were looted from the Egyptian Museum during the revolution, and to replace objects that were looted with objects from their homes. We were really interested in personal collections. Collaborating with museums came later, when I had a little bit more of a reputation as an artist, and then I would be invited by museums to decolonize their collections [laughs], whatever that means... To perform in their collections. That came a bit later. Much of the work that you do is about the provenance of objects, their use, their display, but also the ones that aren't on display—the ones that stay in collection spaces, and the collecting or hoarding that happens in these institutions. Often, you are embedded in the museum, in the belly of the institution. Can you talk about some of those experiences? I think these days museums are very interested in having contemporary artists come in and work in their collections. Museum workers are often overwhelmed by the size of their collections. Often the provenance of their collections are not known, and they see relationships with contemporary artists as very collegial—in that here's somebody who we can support to rechoreograph the collection, to play within the collection, to make some discoveries. With older encyclopedic museums, this also builds public, you know? Like, “Oh, this artist is coming in. They're gonna offer a series of workshops.” I've worked with youth in museums. I've worked with visitors, like, in terms of them making donations. I've worked with deaccessioned collections; I had this whole project where this creepy doll collection was being deaccessioned from a museum, and I built a huge doll museum, and then invited all the kids from the community to come and loot the museumand take all the dolls back into their homes. So I think that there's this desire to work with contemporary artists. I’m thinking about a repaired museum, or repair in the museum. If you were to imagine an ideal museum, what would that space look like? And have you come across any examples of things that museums are doing that work towards that ideal? Is there a perfect museum that you've come across in your research and all the work you've done? My favorite museum in the world is the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. Have you been? Yeah. So you know[chuckles]. That's a purpose-built museum by an artist for his own collection. And the materials speak to the materials of what he's collecting. There’s these gorgeous vitrines and combinations of things. And now they're inviting contemporary artists to make very autonomous works in certain spaces in the museum. But that's a bit of a different type of museum than I’m usually studying. The ideal museum I haven't seen. Because I think a lot of museums are overly concerned with security and safety. There's a lot of fear around the collections, a lot of fears around conservation. And I think that impedes the museum to develop a type of fluidity it needs to match the richness of the world around it. You know, if you think about a museum, there's a thick wall that separates it from the outside world. But what I’d love to do is have an exercise of having objects on the outside wall be at a one-to-one relationship to stuff that's inside, so that they speak and rely on each other. I think a lot about the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh's belief of interbeing, which is that everything is really connected as a long chain. Everything is everything else. Everything is relying on each other. A piece of paper relies on trees, trees rely on sunlight and rain. In order to get this piece of paper, there's all of these relationships. And in a similar way, I think a museum has to be cracked open. This idea of relationships and cross-pollination needs to be achieved more. How do we do this? I think display mechanisms need to be more flexible. Things need to be able to be easily moved around inside of the museum. Vitrines need to be able to be opened. People need to be able to touch the materials, cry over things. Sacred belongings that belong to different communities need to be able to be accessed and cried over, held, used in ceremony. There are moves in that direction for sure, but, for the most part, they're still very concerned with arranging things in one line and telling a single story. And then I think if an object is returned through a process of repatriation—or rematriation—I think we should leave those gaps in the museum and see those as incredible opportunities to use them as spaces of contemplation, use them as spaces to really meditate on the human desire to hoard, to collect, to own, to calcify stories. Like, why are we so obsessed with stories? Why can't we allow things to form and reform and shape-shift? There's so many things we can think about in those gaps if we just leave them. Museums are generally gorgeous spaces that are kind of built to look like temples, so why don't we actually use them as temples and actually get into our bodies and encourage people to work somatically in museums? So that's sort of my ideal. I'm sure you've even taught yoga in the museum. [laughs] But I wish we would go a little further and really allow ourselves to question these deeper impulses because the museum is a bit of an old compulsion, and I think we have to really allow the public to think through that in these spaces. So that would be my ideal. I also think large encyclopedic museums have the potential of introducing new relationships that don't exist already. So when I visit the Metropolitan Museum in New York, sometimes I toggle between different rooms that have nothing to do with each other but are next door to each other. For example, the South Asian Buddhist room, like the Gandharan Buddhist room, is next to the Korean ceramic room. And I just love to think, like, what relationships do these series of objects have with each other? Maybe it's formal. Maybe the curve of a bodhisattva's cheek is similar to the curve of a fermentation pot or something. And then, you know, that talks about how our bodies are made, how sculptures work across countries and across disciplines. So to me, there's a lot of value in these large encyclopedic museums and within their collections. I just don't think we're allowed to work in them as fluidly as we need to, and I don't think the public is able to do that. There's so much security and surveillance that you can barely even lean against the wall. Or you're told to, like, stand upright. Sameer Farooq, “The Fairest Order in the World.” Installation view at the McMaster Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Darren Rigo. Sameer Farooq, Ascension (Onions), 2022 (detail). Fired ceramic, mason stain, bricks, steel poles. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Paul Litherland. Sameer Farooq, Ascension (Omphalos), 2021. Fired clay, stepped display. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Darren Rigo. Thinking about your way of making, it sounds like you're toggling between intuition—this inner sense—and intellect—a more outer sense—and moving between these two spaces when you're creating. Does that sound right? It does. For sure. There's always a research component where I lean on theorists to give me the language and a roadmap to how to look at things.So, you know, I think about someone like Édouard Glissant that talks about the joy of crossing one boundary into another, and rather than seeing it as a barrier, to see it as a relation. So that's very much how I walk through museums. But then at the same time, you're right, I really like to counterbalance. I put the theory aside, I put the reading aside. My partner's an academic, so we often get in these big conversations about these issues. And then I put it aside, and I really try to allow the spaces and the materials to speak to me as well. So what's always been important to me is, like, a process of evocation, and I think you sort of have to sit around in silence for a while to allow things to appear. I'm really excited that something always appears—whether it's an image, an object, a text. And then that usually will be the starting point of the actual physical work that I'm building. Speaking of the idea of uncovering, can you talk about some of the texts that show up in the work, and about that intentional veiling that you're doing? Those texts are a collaboration with the poet Jared Stanley, who is a Bay Area poet, who currently lives in Reno, Nevada. I work with him a lot because we figure a lot out together. I was making these meditation prints where for three years, I sat, and did different somatic practices. Actually, at this period, somatic practitioner and Executive Director of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre, Indu Vashist and I were talking a lot about this stuff. I realized that repetitive movement was evoking a lot of images from my internal eye—my third eye or whatever. I was coming up with these prints that were mirroring what I was seeing after periods of movement, and then I told him, "Rather than having museum labels about these prints, I want you to take all the liberties possible to interpret what you're seeing." So he then also went into a guided meditation with these prints as anchors. What you're seeing in these prints is that one phrase appears really strongly in one, and then it's faded in the other. The idea is that all of these texts are like a cyclical poem that is appearing and getting duller in different pieces of paper. It’s operating in this way where no narrative is calcified, the poem is also appearing and then going underwater. Moving away from the work in the touring exhibition, I also wanted to talk to you about Flatbread Library (2024)which was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art during the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art. What first drew you to explore flatbread as a subject and material? I went to Pakistan in 2019 with my dad, after 22 years, and traveled around the whole country. What really stuck with me was the tandoor ovens and how they were these central community hubs. We would bring dough to the tandoor and have it cooked every evening with my family. I just became obsessed. And then my dad, I realized, is also obsessed with bread. He had a lot of stories around flatbreads. He said this beautiful thing: that growing up, the flatbreads were like newspapers. That the baker would bake them, and then he would deliver all the news and gossip of the town by delivering the bread door to door. Mmmm… Wow. So there was all of this lore around bread. We come from a family of traders—we used to trade kitchen utensils along the Silk Road. Baking bread ahead of the journey was always a huge part of it. I didn't quite know how poignant the project would be when I set out to do it. I started building these tandoor ovens in different spaces. One was at the Scarborough Museum. One was at an art collective called Materia Abierta in Mexico City. I started making tandoors and baking bread. Then I began to be really interested with the forms of bread themselves. When the Toronto Biennial asked me to come up with a new work, I suggested a flatbread library for Toronto because it was almost like the next logical step—going a bit deeper into all the breads that are made in vertical ovens. I wasn't prepared for how rich the actual project would become in this city. Within 20 kilometers of the museum that it was shown in, I discovered almost every type of flatbread that is produced in the world—within this pretty small amount of space in Toronto. That's really how it started. It was a move from tandoor to the bread itself. I learned a lot from that project. So, in contrast to these very intense cultural critiques of museums, this project felt more universal and more joyous. People really wanted to open up and talk about it more. That was a real discovery—I was talking about the same ideas in museums but it was a gentler entry point. Can you talk about how you worked with flatbread—an organic, perishable material—to create this display? You bring up a great point about perishability—it's supposed to challenge what gets left out of museums. If we think about what gets left out of these collections—anything that's live, anything that's perishable, anything that's gestural, is not represented in museums. But they're such huge parts of our human history. So, that's a real gap, like, how are you gonna understand human culture if you don't have any bread in your collection? You know what I mean? It's pretty simple, you know? Or, like, if you don't have apples or onions. You know? I did a whole piece about onions and I'm like, "This is the beginning of every evening in every kitchen in the world." Wow. Yeah, you chop an onion. You chop an onion. So that was a real push to think about—how do we sort of make a taxonomy of bread? The process involved flattening and drying the bread under drywall sheets—an old tile making technique. The water gets pulled out of the bread, and then they stay flat. And then I coated them with shellac and flexi paint, which was this acrylic medium to preserve them. The display is meant to look almost like a textile piece, like a woven archive. I didn't want to put individual specimens separate from each other on a wall, for example, because bread is a very fugitive object. It crosses borders and boundaries in a very, very fluid way. So you have lavash from Iran and lavash from Armenia, and when it crosses the border, it's still called lavash, but it, like, shapeshifts slightly. Or you have scorvegi from Romania and Indigenous fry bread. It shows up in these different areas, but it's the exact same looking bread, you know, just with a different name. I knew I had to come up with a display that was not just a typical scientific display. So that's why it kinda looks like this huge hanging curtain of overlapping breads. Also in Pakistan and Afghanistan, bread in bakeries are displayed around the doorways of bakeries as these overlapping curtains of bread that are put on nails, and then the baker will just pull one off and sell it to you. So it also spoke to this historical example. But I like to think that that was how bread wanted to be shown, and then I just mimicked that in the display. I like the idea of it being like a tapestry. I’m thinking about your work Bring It Up From the Dark (2025) which was shown at The Gibson Art Museum at Simon Fraser University (SFU)–it is also a piece that integrates weaving. Did one project inspire or lead into the next? Oh, for sure. People saw the Flatbread Library and they said, "Wow, this looks like a big loom." And I was like, "Oh, a loom." A woven archive, as opposed to a taxonomical archive. Pushing relations between things, dissipating the edges and the boundaries between things in order to create interrelationships. Again, interbeing. So at SFU, my whole idea was to translate an archeology museum into a loom. What would that look like? Imagine all these objects migrating out of their very distinct cabinets and then going onto a loom and, like, what would that look like? If you put those two pieces beside each other, they are very similar. They're these large wooden structures with this almost-textile hanging from them. They both originate from this idea of encouraging relationships between things that have been kept apart for their entire lives, or for a large part of their lives. Sameer Farooq, Flatbread Library, 2024 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid. Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley, Bring It Up from the Dark, 2025. Wood, polyester silk screen mesh, ink, paper, linen, sample bags, polyethylene foam, polyurethane foam, glassine, ace-tate, polyester batting, Tyvek soft wrap, bubble wrap, polyethylene plastic, cotton twine, packing tape. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Rachel Topham. In Bring It Up From the Dark, you have these objects that come together in assemblies on this loom. Can you talk about the objects, textures and forms in the installation? Are there particular dialogues or contrasts you wanted to foreground? The loom is divided into three sections. So the bottom part is a sort of collaged tapestry where I transfer images from the collection of the museum, and you have things finding each other in a formal way. Things nestling into each other and forming these different constellations of objects that do not appear in the museum. The second part is concerned with conservation and the materials of the museum. I've been really interested in this since 2012 around the lives of conservators, the materials they use, and really foregrounding the materials as a subject in the museum itself. I think often conservation culture hides. They try to be invisible and put the object up front. But I also want to show that that's part of the practice of the theater of the museum. They very much are part of that. So you see in the middle part this constellation of materials that come together, and the pattern it's making are these sedimentary layers that I found in these archaeology journals that were also in the museum. Students would go out on these big digs, and then they would draw these sedimentary layers of what they were finding on their digs. And so I did the same with the materials of the conservators. And then the final section is these screenprinted pages that run the materials from the conservators through a press to make an imprint. When a weaver is starting to make their work, they have this guide that they call a cartoon. The cartoon is like the layout of the tapestry. And they have it printed on sheets of paper, and then they hold it within the strings of the warp, within the strings of the loom. I thought that was a really nice display method. The top is like the guide for the rest of the loom. You know what, I'm curious when you saw it, what were your initial impressions? Just because I don't know really many people who saw that work. I thought it was beautiful in the space that they put it in. Because it's showing objects that are from a collection space. I've worked in collection spaces. They're in the deep, dark basement. Yep. [laughs] With the HVAC system, the proper lux of lighting, and not too many humans breathing carbon dioxide around the space. To “protect” the objects. And then to see—I mean, it wasn't the actual objects—but representations of those objects in this space that is so light-filled, and with life—with people. You could see the trees outside through the strings of installations. And the sky. And then to bring you back to the collection space, you have the contrast of seeing those purple polyethylene gloves of the conservator. The hands touching and prodding and poking, and hovering, and guarding the objects. I thought it was really, really poignant. I was really happy with it too. I hope it gets shown in other places because, yeah, I don't have such a huge community in Vancouver. I would love to show it here or somewhere else one day. You reminded me what I was thinking about that piece. I made it in collaboration with Jared Stanley, the poet, and a lot of our discussions were around using the action of the loom to also unfreeze museum time. So to sort of stir up how things are held in collections and encourage them to be in new relationships with each other. There was his poem accompanying the loom, and it took a Malay form of the pantoum poem, which is this poem that repeats itself every few lines. So the poem itself is like a weaving—you have different lines repeating and weaving back and forth to each other. The poem was built from statements in the journals from the students. We started pulling language out from the journals and the notebooks, and what we discovered was a very dark, very sad, very morose account of stirring up the earth. These students would go on these digs, and there would be a lot of expectation, a lot of, like, sadness about the lack of finding things. They were encouraged to write down everything, so a lot of, like, crushes and failed romances and fights between mentors and students. It was just really, really... It was, like, the most unscientific thing, you know? But then it's presented as archaeology, as a science. It was really, really bizarre. If you read the poem, there's just a realization of impending death and that the actions that they're doing are quite futile in a way. [laughs] And it really came out in these journals and in his poem. Did you say you studied archaeology? Anthropology. But I took an archaeology class before. Ah, ok. I was wondering if there was any connection to seeing those student journals and if that brought up anything for you. Yeah, I only just took a lecture class on it. I never participated in any digs. Maybe I should ask to go? I don't know. It would be really funny. [laughs] Have you ever done anything like that? No. I studied photographic preservation. So I was in the darkroom or, like, collection spaces. You just love these cavernous spaces. [laughs] Oh God. [laughs] Ok, I have just a couple more questions. Can we talk about the ceramics that you make? It seems like you like to work with repetition or iteration in your ceramic works. With the ceramic works in the touring exhibition,The Fairest Order in the World, there are three pieces that are these monolithic, iterative ceramic works. Each sculpture was an image that appeared during a meditation. So the first piece, which is called, Ascension (Omphalos) (2021), I envisioned this piece that had a flat bottom that was pointing upward. Which is similar to the cornerstone or what they call an omphalos in ancient Greece, where a village would start from the beginning of this stone. Because it's pointing upward, it's meant to symbolize the earth connecting to the heavens. I saw that in a meditation, and what I'm trying to do is, through repetition, get to know what this thing is and to really figure it out and to see how it transforms over time. With the second piece called Ascension (Radio) (2021), the meditative vision was of an egg cracking and splattering and then going up along the side and turning into an egg again.So it was almost this egg cracking on a loop. I tried to do that in ceramics, and that was more trying to perfect it and do it over and over and over again and try to get this egg form, and I really failed. It doesn't look anything like that. [laughs] And there’s Ascension (Onions) (2022). I meditated and envisioned this unfurling onion. In a lot of these interior images, things are moving and repeating all the time. I'm just not envisioning a static image. So in one way, the iteration is about figuring out something, but in another way, I really see all these works as a representation of my body over time. You can see my breath in all of the work. You can see my body, like how my arm is attached to my shoulder and how my body is working in time. You see a documentary of the ceramic studio I'm working in—what glazes were available. I was using what was around me. I think these pieces are really about bracketing time, and then showing a process that's going through time. My mother’s grandmother, my great-grandma—who I'm named after—was a ceramicist. We have some pieces at my parents' home. She coil built her work—which is a handbuilding technique—and you can see where she put her fingers or thumb in some of the pieces. And I can slip my thumb into the spot where she slipped her thumb, and it just feels like I'm connected to her. Oh, completely. I love this quote by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco who said, "What does my body want to make?" And I think clay gives you the chance to make an imprint of your whole body and what it wants to make. I think dough is like that, too. Why I think bread making is so interesting is because it is bread, but it's also your embodied knowledge imprinting onto this medium. And there's something about clay and bread that are so malleable and shapeshifty. That is really, really interesting. Where was your great-grandmother a ceramicist? Here or— In Britain. Yeah. She was never a big artist or anything like that. She was a crafter, you know? And, she taught pottery to kids with disabilities, like how to work with clay. It’s a special medium, because it's evocative and simple, and something we all have access to. Oh, that's the best. How amazing. Yeah. I have one last question. I was thinking about the film that you made in collaboration with Mirjam Linschooten called The Museum Visits a Therapist (2021). In the film, the museum is being asked these questions by the therapist and is able to respond. And so, you’re thinking about the museum as a sentient being. So, if the museum became this sentient being and you were able to ask it a question—what question would you ask the museum? [pauses] What keeps coming up is, like, are you afraid? I don't know. Like, are you afraid of losing your objects or are you afraid of ... There's just a lot of fear and surveillance. There's a lot of actions that are provoked by fear in the museum, because once you steal something, you work very hard to manufacture a story that isn't about that, and you work very hard to preserve what you stole. So yeah. Yeah, I would just ask if it's afraid, I guess. Not afraid of me—but just afraid in general. But, also, maybe—Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid of me coming in and rustling around? [laughs] The above conversation was conducted by Lodoe Laura, an artist, writer, and movement instructor based in Toronto. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock.Cover image: Sameer Farooq, Flatbread Library, 2024. Installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid

Prior to reading Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, 2026 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14), I had frankly a very brief and limited grasp of Peter Hujar's and Paul Thek's lives and work. The art gallery I used to work for in 2022 curated an online presentation from a selection of Paul Thek’s etchings, reprinted from copper plates originally discovered in his storage unit in 1989, the year after his death. Among a few that the website presented were depictions of “Plums,” “Bouncing Earth,” “Burning Book,” and “Tarbaby.” In my role at the gallery, I had the privilege of encountering Paul Thek’s work in real life for the first time. Artists Paul Thek and Peter Hujar were deeply captivated by rendering the evanescent beauty of the world as well as its atomization. The Wonderful World That Almost Was (2026) is its cinematic testimony, a never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art, written by Durbin. Resurrected and rendered as flash and bone, I was captivated by Durbin’s extensive account, navigating art criticism and personal narratives of the two most relevant American artists of their time. Like a cultural archeologist, Durbin sifts through the private notebooks and diaries and chats with artists’ peers to reveal one of the gay love stories of the 60s and 70s. In his deeply researched portraits of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, Durbin is not out to expose but to understand both artists, and who and what shaped their unapologetic, truly visceral rendition of the world transpiring into their art. Durbin walks alongside them on their trips. Composed of five consecutive parts and thirty chapters, the biography forms the collective memoiristic testimony and includes a multitude of voices—including Susan Sontag, Ann Wilson, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz—that orbited around Peter and Paul. As one reads, one asks: Where was their frontier? What lands and shores have they grown close to? Who were their friends and lovers? What legacy have they left behind? Born in Orlando and raised in South California, Durbin, the editor in chief of Frieze magazine, is the author of two novels: MacArthur Park (Nightboat Books, 2017), a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland (Nightboat Books, 2020). He also edited Fascination (Semiotext(e), 2018), Kevin Killian’s collected memoirs of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives and works in London. Durbin, just a few days before the official release of the biography, told me about the process of his research, writing the biography and how he fell in love with many incredible people whom he interviewed. I asked him about the young generation of queer artists being aware of the legacy Hujar and Thek left behind. A biography can only capture so much of real life, there are so many unknowns, so much that escaped the record. I loved the challenge of assembling a true story from all these disparate parts, the letters, the diaries, the memories of friends. Your readers know you for your previously published fiction—Skyland (2020) and MacArthur Park (2017). Both novels embed the recurring topics of gay male figures asking what it means to belong to a place. Your new book is a biography. What was it like to dive into writing non-fiction this time? It was a completely new process for me. I’ve never had to research at this scale, and unlike with a novel, I could no longer just play around and invent, I had to tell the story of these real lives; if I had a question, I had to find an answer. That said, biography, nonfiction—they’re about narrative choice and emphasis. A biography can only capture so much of real life, there are so many unknowns, so much that escaped the record. I loved the challenge of assembling a true story from all these disparate parts, the letters, the diaries, the memories of friends. It was much more creative than I realized. In The Wonderful World That Almost Was, you excavate and “reincarnate” the lives and work of Paul Thek and Peter Hujar, as well as their friends, lovers, companions, and places that have been crucial to their artistic lives and existences through new extensive lenses. I’m curious—as the editor-in-chief of Frieze, you wrote and oversaw many cultural topics. What was the pull behind devoting your research and time to writing The Wonderful World That Almost Was? When did you decide to write the biography? And how have you approached its research, information collection, and the writing process? Before I wrote this book, their work always raised more questions than answers. I was fascinated by them, but I knew very little about how and why they made what they made, and who they were. As a writer, I’m always drawn to those lingering questions. Once I decided to write about them, I called people who knew them—Vince Aletti, Stephen Koch, a few others. I slowly began to build a picture of their lives through the people who knew them. Eventually, I entered the archives. Every conversation, every document suggested more lines of inquiry. I followed as much as I could in the time I had. It was so much fun. One of the hardest things to do in the book was to stop researching. The title of the biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was, carries a tender and ephemeral promise. A twinkling of the daylight and the apprehension of fading—its inevitability, if one can be “Didionesque” here. Nevertheless, the title is a testament to one of Paul Thek’s notebooks, a kind of novel he was writing at the time (starting from 1977). This writing is addressed predominantly to Susan Sontag. How did you decide on the title? About half-way through the process of researching and writing the book, the title seemed inevitable to me. Thek’s notebook is a proposed autofiction/treatise, only partly completed, in which he planned to write a kind of personal history of some of the most important relationships in his life up to that point. If I squinted, he was basically describing my book. And Thek’s title was so perfect; it encapsulates the mood I was aiming for. I was particularly drawn to the parts about Paul’s and Peter’s fascination with relics/reliquaries in the catacombs of Palermo. You write: “They were obsessed with death, and if they can be said to have shared a subject, it was almost certainly death. They looked for signs of mortality everywhere in the world of the living. Peter photographed corpses in the catacombs, and the catacombs inspired Paul’s wax flesh,” [artworks]. Although they were certainly magnetized and drawn to the underworld, their work informs us about the living and the way to live on one’s own terms, unapologetically, artistically, and sexually. As you say, “Both artists, drawn to death, were also captivated by birth and renewal.” What emerged in my mind during my reading was the image of a phoenix rising from its ashes and being reborn. Their work truly outlived them. The process of self-transformation would become a habit for Paul. What are your thoughts on this as a writer? Yes—rebirth, resurrection, renewal are important themes throughout the book. As I write in the introduction, Adam Phillips’ idea of a culture oriented toward birth—which sounds very Thekian to me—became an important organizing principle while I was writing. While Peter’s photography was rooted in how he rendered the inner psyche of his subjects: animals (especially horses), children, his lovers and friends. How he managed to get under the skin, be intimate, not because he would judge but because he would comprehend them: “Peter had a core of sadness. Above the sadness was the anger, and above that was the absolute appreciation of beauty—of finding beauty, offbeat beauty.” Paul’s sculptural environments seemed more ephemeral, delicate, collapsing, unfinished, ungraspable and graspable only by a few who could perceive its potential at the time. They were more ideas than realized works. The sublime way he approached his art was close to the way Eva Hesse’s works spoke to the public, meaning their ephemerality. Do you encounter such ephemerality in today’s cultural sphere? I think people are afraid of ephemerality, even though we’re surrounded by ephemera. They don’t want to think too much about the enormous loss we face every day. They were afraid of it when Thek and Hesse were making their work, and they’re afraid of it now, because ephemerality is too close to death and nobody wants to think about death. But “nothing lasts forever, other than paradise,” Thek writes. I find that so comforting. It frees you to live. Cover for The Wonderful World That Almost Was (2026) Farrar, Straus and Giroux. While the book is dedicated to following both artists’ figures, their love and fall, it also examines gay histories, the social upheaval of the Stonewall Riot in 1969 and the economic poverty of the 60s and 70s in the US. It has a political feel, religious background, and includes descriptions of trauma, self-destructiveness, paranoia and depression in parts. It has a psychological dimension, too. How did you navigate and balance writing about this? I followed my artists wherever they went. When I began the book, I did so with an open mind—I didn’t know what it would and wouldn’t encapsulate. For instance, I had no idea how important the Be-Ins would be to this project, but then there they were, in Hujar’s pictures and Thek’s notebooks, and so they had to find their way in the book. Hujar and Thek lived in the world; they weren’t isolated from their times; their work thought a lot about what it meant to live, and die, in the twentieth century. Three years ago, I traveled to Ponza. At the time, I had no clue that this remote island had been a retreat for Paul. Like many places, for Paul and Peter, their Fulbright residencies were places of creation but also their atomization. Light follows darkness. Do you believe that the true magic of their artistic work would not have developed the way it had without the sadness, depression, and losing oneself completely? We probably overemphasize sadness and depression as generative in artist’s lives; a lot of the time, depression delays and disrupts creation, and making art is the last thing you think about. As a reader, I was entertained by the inclusion of Fran Lebowitz’s quotes on Peter and Paul’s world. Susan Sontag wrote, “What she liked was ‘mad people,’ that is, ‘people who stand alone + burn. I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.” I wonder if, during your research, you encountered people who refused to give their take on either Paul or Peter? What emotions have the conversations about them generated for you? A few people said no. Sometimes the “no” was really a way of asking me to woo them. But if it was a firm no, then I didn’t press any further. Most people said yes, which I am so grateful for, because the book would not exist without the support of Hujar and Thek’s friends, lovers, collaborators—especially Linda Rosenkrantz and Ann Wilson and Gary Schneider and John Erdman. Their memories, which they so graciously shared with me, were always emotional; there are conversations I had with them that will stay with me for a lifetime. I fell in love with a lot of the people I interviewed. Although non-fiction, a memoir, the book includes, retraces and pays tribute to works of fiction that were inspired by the artistic and personal life of Peter and Paul. It’s Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964), Linda Rosenkrantz’s novel Talk (1968). You also mention William S. Burrough’s Nova Express (1964), Edmund White, and John Rechy’s City of Night (1963): “malehungry looks hidden by the darkness of the night.” Apart from being their peers, why was it essential to mention them in the biography for you? It was important for me to bring in some first-hand accounts of the larger world Thek and Hujar lived in. All those writers bore witness to their time and wrote so clearly—and fiercely—about it. The literature of the sixties is so rich; I couldn’t resist! Do you think the younger generation of gay and queer artists is aware, or pays attention to what their “ancestors” or “fathers” like Paul and Peter and many others achieved for them? What’s the post-Hujar and Thek legacy like for you? I hope so. Many of my artist friends cite them as important touchstones for their own work, and Thek is regularly taught in art schools here in Europe. In fact, almost every young artist I know is obsessed with both. For a long time, it was difficult to know much about their lives, and their work was exhibited only sparingly; seeing a Hujar or Thek was a rare thing. Thankfully, that’s really changed in the past ten to fifteen years. They’ve become much more accessible. The only way to really know them is to see the work in person, and once you see their work, there is no getting over it. Have you watched Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), directed by Ira Sachs? And if so, what did you think of it? For the New York Review of Books, I wrote that I generally liked the film, and I liked that Sachs was willing to adapt such unconventional material. But I brought so much baggage to my viewing of it, too; I was always going to have strong opinions about how Hujar was portrayed on screen after spending so much time with his work and life. I can’t say I loved Ben Wishaw’s rendition of him, but I adored Rebecca Hall as Linda Rosenkrantz. She was spot-on. For many years, perhaps even today, artists like Paul and Peter and many more were/seemed “stigmatized.” Do you think the biography can help dismantle it? That, to the reader and a wider public, it reveals the true essence of their work and life? I don’t think I agree that they were “stigmatized,” necessarily, though they have certainly been side-lined or under-emphasized in most histories of twentieth century art. For a long time, nobody seemed to know what to make of them, especially Paul Thek. Mike Kelley speaks about how difficult it was for the conservative art world of the 1980s to assimilate Thek’s installations into its view of art history—his “cosmic junk piles.” But I hope my book helps to reestablish their place at the center—where they belong. What’s the oddest place you’ve ever read? And what are the most recent books you read? A few summers ago, I was staying alone in a hotel in a remote part of Crete. Every day, I walked about an hour through the desert to a faraway beach where about six to eight nudists, all Greek men, erected little shelters by stretching their towels over these boulders. It felt like Mars, except for the NATO jets practicing manoeuvrers overhead. At the time, I was reading Henry James’s Princess Casamassima, which I didn’t think was very good, though I was committed to finishing it. The men kept distracting me by performing these odd rituals to attract each other’s attention, since it was a gay beach and in theory we were all supposed to be having sex. I don’t remember if anyone did. Right now, I’m reading the collected stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Martin Duberman’s biography of Lincoln Kirstein, and Jean-Jacques Schul’s Dusty Pink. The above conversation was conducted by Filip Jakab, a writer and editor based in Brussels.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Andrew Durbin. Photo by Suzannah Pettigrew.

Aline Bouvy is a Luxembourgish visual artist who lives and works between Brussels and Luxembourg. Trained at ERG – École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, she has built a multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, installation, sound, moving image, and publication. Rather than treating objects as self-contained statements, she uses the exhibition as a constructed situation where norms and social codes are tested in public. Bouvy’s work is informed by a feminist outlook and an acute attention to the power mechanisms that shape desire. With rigorous systems, careful construction, and a deliberately offbeat humour, she returns to what society labels clean or dirty, proper or inappropriate, visible or marginal. Shame is central to her thinking, not as confession, but as a cultural instrument that regulates what can be shown, who can speak, and what must be concealed. Her projects often respond to their sites, borrowing from architecture and display to create thresholds, detours, and moments of uneasy recognition. Her recent trajectory includes the large-scale solo exhibition Cruising Bye at MACS Grand-Hornu (2022), as well as presentations at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), New Space, Liège (2020), Kunsthal Gent (2021), and Triangle-Astérides, Marseille (2024). In 2025, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain hosted her solo show Hot Flashes, a choreographed passage that played with scale, reflection, and shifts from childhood to adulthood. The exhibition embodied her conviction that the exhibition itself is her primary medium, a place where space and relation intertwine. In 2026, Bouvy will represent Luxembourg at the 61st Venice Biennale with La Merde, on view on the first floor of the Sale d’Armi in the Arsenale from 9 May to 22 November. In the conversation that follows, she speaks about moving between research and production, and treating filmmaking as an open process that stays flexible until the end. She also returns to her long-standing interest in sound as a spatial experience, and to wit as a way of creating distance without neutralising discomfort. The result is a film project that confronts impurity and social sorting, while insisting on the viewer’s active role within its staging. Alongside the immersive audiovisual installation, a publication expands her archive of scatological images and references, developed with designer Olivier Vandervliet and including texts by Jessica Gysel and Robert Garnett. Curated by Stilbé Schroeder, the Venice presentation sharpens Bouvy’s focus on how expectations are enforced, and how they can be unsettled. I need to find a way to make the space speak so that it starts to reveal something very deep or hidden within itself, and becomes the catalyst for the feelings and perceptions I want to provoke. Last fall you presented the solo exhibition Hot Flashes at Casino Luxembourg, exploring stages and passages across a lifetime. Where would you place yourself now? What phase are you in? I’ve had a little more than a year to focus almost exclusively on the Venice Biennale project, conceived as a film, an installation, and a publication. It seems like a lot of time, certainly because it’s also a project I’ve been nurturing in my mind for nearly a decade, and yet everything has happened very fast. Many aspects of my practice are coming together with this project. There are ideas I’ve already tackled in previous works. The publication part was deeply fulfilling, as I could indulge my interest in digging and researching. My interest in space and architecture comes together with a different intensity through close collaboration with people I’ve been working with for a few years now. Sound, and the ways in which it is experienced in space, is also a recurring interest of mine, but it takes on a new dimension within this project. Nevertheless, there’s also an unfamiliar, and therefore exciting, new way of working, which is filmmaking. Translating my ideas and feelings into a script, gathering a film crew, organizing the whole shoot, and then entering the long months of editing, both image and sound, have all opened new processes for me. It really is my favorite part, and I’m still very busy with it, reorganizing, changing, experimenting, actually working on this film as if it were an exhibition in its own right. I wanted the process to remain very open. I’m lucky enough to be working with patient and committed film and sound editors, as well as with a graphic designer who is constantly flowing with invaluable ideas. You’ve said before you don’t privilege any medium, because the exhibition itself is your medium. What do you mean by that? I understand it as thinking and working towards the idea of the exhibition as a whole. I might first think of its general design, atmosphere, and light. More importantly, I need to find a way to make the space speak so that it starts to reveal something very deep or hidden within itself, and becomes the catalyst for the feelings and perceptions I want to provoke. I really need something to happen with the space. So the individual works in the exhibition almost become subordinate to the larger idea of the exhibition. The exhibition is like a stage, a construction, just as artworks are constructions. Does this make the works become props? Maybe. They are all important, but in the end I’m not that attached to the individual works. For me, only a few of them are separable from the exhibition context they were conceived for. That’s why I rarely produce works on their own. Space and architecture feel decisive here. I’m thinking of your mirror-glass and steel installation, structural, almost pavilion-like, with an echo of Dan Graham. How do you direct the viewer’s movement through your works? That work, Wall, is a good example of how I like to approach a given space. On the floor plan, I noticed there was a possibility to play with the different entrances to the Casino’s exhibition space. By placing a divider, the public would have two different route options to experience the exhibition, and also experience their own perception through the mirror-glass, in a choreographic way. My interest in the perception of space is inseparable from a reflection on how we perceive one another as human beings, and more specifically, the mechanisms that inform that perception, moving from architecture to psychology, from spatial perception to relational perception. Dan Graham is of course an important influence here. The reference is very clear. But where I believe the work drifts away from Dan Graham is with the addition of the two hybrid sculptures, E.T. The Excremential, a morphing between E.T. and myself, positioned to face each other across the partition wall. Wall, 2025. (glass and metal structure, one-way mirror film) E.T. The Excremential, 2025. (PU foam milling, resin, pigments) © GRAYSC Wall, 2025. (glass and metal structure, one-way mirror film) E.T. The Excremential, 2025. (PU foam milling, resin, pigments) © GRAYSC Aline Bouvy, Hot Flashes (installation view), Casino Luxembourg, 2025 The body—human, non-human, gendered, in glory and decay—reappears throughout your work. What keeps drawing you back to the corporeal? I guess the experience of my own body is the closest tool I have from which I can think and work. I think about its social and performative expectations, and how it feels shame, desire, or rejection. I often put it in weird situations that can sometimes be uneasy for me, but that’s how I can push the boundaries of its limits and, with a bit of distance, keep it manageable. Humor is also persistent, as if you’re winking at the viewer. Is it a strategy, or is it simply how you move through the world? This distance I’m mentioning can certainly happen through the use of humor. Humor creates a gap. It lets discomfort exist without immediately shutting it down. Humor engages in an affirmative process of becoming. Whether it mirrors who I am in daily life, I don’t know. You’re preparing to represent Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale with a project titled La Merde. Why this title? Why “shit”? It’s the subject of my film, in all its splendor, in all its sadness, in all its tragic, comic, abject, and deeply human dimensions. Who is the protagonist, and how does the narrative take shape? There is a central character that changes appearance throughout the film. At times it’s a puppet, at others an animated figure. It can also appear as an abstract presence, a stain, a smell, or an embodied character. What matters is not psychology or narrative development, but the effect this presence has on its environment and on those who encounter it. The film is composed of different scenes, and I prefer to describe them as arranged in a circular structure rather than in a loop. I like to think that the film recycles itself once all the scenes have played out. This structure reflects what the film is ultimately about. Shame seems to be an important thread. Shame about what, and how do you handle it? I’m interested in shame as a social mechanism rather than a personal confession. Shame regulates behavior. It marks what should remain hidden, controlled, or excluded. By placing viewers in situations where attraction and discomfort coexist, it can make those mechanisms perceptible without explaining them. Do you consider yourself a feminist? Should we read this project through that lens? That feels like a bit of a euphemism. I don’t necessarily want the work to be read through a particular lens, including that one. Feminism certainly informs how I think and work, it’s part of my position in the world, but I would rather the project be encountered as it comes, through the experience it creates. Aline Bouvy, La Merde (film still), 2026. Courtesy of the Artist. Aline Bouvy, La Merde (film still), 2026. Courtesy of the Artist. How will the pavilion installation be structured? What kind of setting will hold the film? It is structured around a modified version of Wall (2025), a work I first presented at Casino Luxembourg. It will be transformed into a half-circle architectural structure, lined with acoustic padding on the ceiling and inner walls. I think of it as a kind of communal headphone. The idea is to create an enclosed, immersive environment that holds the film acoustically. The audience sits inside this space on chairs that also appear within the film itself, functioning as a sort of extension of the film. I’ve been closely collaborating with Pierre Dozin, aka Late Bush, on the sound design and musical score of the film. He also developed the 4DSOUND programming, which allows the main character to sound different at each viewing, making it feel even more alive. In recent years, there’s been a clear rise in moving-image presentations at the Venice Biennale, often with highly elaborate productions. Why do you think that is? I’ve only been to the biennial three times, with long gaps in between, so I don’t really feel in a position to comment on that. There will also be an accompanying publication. Is it a catalogue, a making-of, or something else? The publication has been an amazing process. In 2024, I started frenetically collecting images of shit-related artworks, films, photographs, and more. At first, I thought I would include all these images in the film somewhere, but later, together with the graphic designer Olivier Vandervliet, we developed the archive into a non-exhaustive anthology. It has been a crazy process getting in touch with living artists, directly or through their galleries, to ask for permission to reproduce their works. Some really interesting conversations have come out of it, and it feels like I’ve made a new network of ‘shit friends’ around the world. The publication itself is quite small. It looks a bit like the Bibles you find in German hotel rooms, with a dark brown textured cover and LA MERDE printed and embossed in gold. Furthermore, the publication includes two excellent texts by Jessica Gysel and Robert Garnett. I’m very happy with how it turned out because it works as an autonomous object, while also showing how artists have used bodily material, both literally and in a more symbolic or conceptual way, to speak about politics, life and death, or simply for sheer fun. The Venice Biennale is a milestone. What do you hope this participation will open up for you? I feel lucky that Stilbé Schroeder, my curator, shares the same mindset as me. Of course it’s an important event, but we don’t overthink it. I see it as a celebration as well, certainly with artist friends like Pavel Braila representing Moldova. For Moldova, it has been a long process that required a lot of effort to finally participate in this year’s edition. Pavel is a longtime friend. We were together at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and we even went together for the first time to the Venice Biennale in 2001, along with Robert Garnett, who is also contributing to the catalogue and who was in the theory department at the same time as us. It feels very special to be here ourselves as artists, 25 years later. I have no idea what it will unlock for me. I’m more curious, and concerned, about how the Biennale will respond to the state of the world, and what it might or might not unlock at that level. The above conversation was conducted by Nicolas Vamvouklis, a curator and writer focused on contemporary art and performance, based in Athens.Cover image: Aline Bouvy, Hot Flashes (installation view), Casino Luxembourg, 2025

There’s perhaps no better emblem of contemporary existence than a shattered phone screen. Abundance and dysfunction, it turns out, are not mutually exclusive. It follows that a broken phone recurs in Flat Earth, the debut novel by Anika Jade Levy, billed as “Speedboat for the Adderall Generation,” which is to say, zeitgeist-y and written with abrupt prose that skewers a certain downtown artistic scene—but with its own dissociative flair. Flat Earth follows Avery, an aspiring writer, occasional sex worker, and grad student living in New York. At the outset of the novel, she accompanies her best friend Frances on a cross-country trip to help shoot an experimental documentary (which shares a title with Levy’s book) about the decline of middle America and the rise of right-wing conspiracies. In one of the novel’s more wayfinding passages, Avery observes: “It occurred to me that the players in the downtown art scene weren’t so different from the flat-earthers in flyover country—we each thought we had some unique insight into the way the world works, but in reality, we were all part of one big consensus machine, downstream from everything.” In addition to being a writer, Levy is an editor and co-founder of Forever Magazine, a literary publication that champions provocative girl-coded short fiction. Cut from the same cloth, the novel includes a series of omniscient dispatches which report back on the state of our faith (“Many of us pretend to be Catholic, but only two join a convent”); wellness trends (“Right-wing nutrition fads fall into fashion that year: an uptick in bovine meat, unpasteurized dairy, seed-oil skepticism, vaccine hesitancy.”); and regressive gender dynamics (“The girls are upending all the progress our mothers made, demanding lower hem lengths and mandatory home economics course”). Flat Earth primarily takes place post-pandemic, on the heels of a period of overwrought hyperpoliticization and a collective recoil toward reactionary, sometimes performative conservatism, as evidenced by Frances’ hard pivot to become a tradwife and Avery’s brief stint at a right-wing dating app called “Patriarchy.” The novel operates on lucid, if ungenerous, terms. Avery is a dogged scorekeeper, constantly tracking her value by way of metrics like youth and fertility. At various points throughout the book, Avery is told that she’s not as young as she thinks she is, a sobering refrain delivered by an ex-boyfriend, her grandmother, and a mentor. In another passage, Levy writes that “youth is something borrowed, a non-fungible currency, a cup of salt water scooped from the ocean, already evaporating.” The naked transactionality of it all can be bracing, but Levy is surgical in rendering how beauty, youth, and clout circulate within the economy of the art world. Incidentally, my conversation with Levy took place just as the term looksmaxxing was completing its ascent into common parlance. We spoke about the aestheticization of belief, channeling cultural whiplash into prose, the prescient legacy of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and having your brain rewired by reading Shoplifting from American Apparel in middle school. I’m interested in what conspiratorial thinking and hyperpoliticization does to people socially, especially in milieus where belief is aestheticized, and where having a transgressive take is treated like a sartorial choice. Flat Earth takes place in a moment where conspiratorial thinking, religious faith, and hyperpoliticization are on the rise. What drew you to write specifically about this moment? I’m suspicious of the idea that this moment is uniquely conspiratorial or hysterical. The writer Caroline Busta has spoken about the parallels between the present—the narcissistic psychedelic AI surveillance apparatus we’re all inside of—and the advent of the printing press. How Europe was suddenly flooded with competing authorities, and then everyone had sources, citations, and enemies. It made the culture sort of schizophrenic. I’m interested in what conspiratorial thinking and hyperpoliticization does to people socially, especially in milieus where belief is aestheticized, and where having a transgressive take is treated like a sartorial choice. Would you say that beliefs have become the new basis for subculture, the way music or other cultural products once were? Maybe. But it’s hard to say what subculture is in the absence of any legible monoculture. Maybe those terms have outlived their usefulness. Avery has a Bolaño tattoo but admits she hasn’t read him, and at one point she pretends to read A Fan’s Notes. Rather than telling us much about her interior life, these moments seem to reveal how she wants others, especially men, to perceive her. How were you thinking about the performance of identity while writing? The unflattering answer is that the book itself is probably a performance for men on some level. But with Avery, I was interested in writing a passive and porous narrator, someone who comes into view based on her anxieties and observations about other people. And I was thinking about how identity is flattened and optimized for a small screen, how taste functions as social capital and how we assess people based on the novels they reference, the magazines they subscribe to, the theory they pretend to have read. Much of the book shows Avery procrastinating or avoiding writing. But on a date with a guy from the Patriarchy app, she receives a scathing assessment of her diminishing value in the sexual marketplace and suddenly feels inspired. How did you approach that moment, and why does such a brutal critique trigger creativity? Why do I find the idea of young women as objects of sexual commerce so creatively compelling? I guess that theme came up in my own life while I was writing the book. Muriel Spark had this refrain about being a “magnet” for the experiences she needed to write whatever she was working on, and that seems to have been true for me so far. She’s also one of a million artists and writers who spoke about the idea of creativity as a channel. In this instance, that monologue came to me fully formed. It was one of the few moments where I was actually writing the way I want to be writing. It seemed natural to me that Avery would become productive and creative after an experience of acute embarrassment. And embarrassment is usually just an inopportune instance of visibility or exposure. She felt like that man saw something in her she’d been trying to conceal. Avery’s fixation on fertility and youth reads as symptomatic of the moment. How much of this anxiety do you see circulating in your milieu, and why did you choose to make it such a central obsession for her? My friends basically don’t think about their fertility, as far as I know. But I could see how all the manosphere chatter about throwing empty egg cartons might make a woman neurotic, and that was something I wanted to satirize. Certainly, people are waiting longer to have children. Some are mourning the disappearance of the single-income household. Mostly though, I was thinking about the idea of youth as a currency, and that there’s not really a right age to be a woman. By the time you’re old enough to be taken seriously, old enough to feel self-possessed and worldly, your beauty is allegedly plateauing. That cruel paradox plays out between Sally and Avery. There’s a scene where Avery notices Sally has had a bad facelift, and it’s devastating not because of the facelift itself but because seeing the insecurities of someone you admire laid bare produces its own kind of vertigo. Yes. Because Avery imagines that Sally’s status and professional reputation are enough to armour her against those anxieties, or, more charitably, that someone as sensitive and intelligent as Sally wouldn’t be so neurotic about aging. Book cover for Flat Earth (2025) Catapult Press. Something you do especially well in Flat Earth is capture the uneasy coexistence of wealth and precarity in the art world. Avery is wealth-adjacent but can’t pay her rent or replace her busted phone screen. I’d love to hear your take on how these dynamics play out in art and literary scenes, and how that informed the relationships between the characters. I think that in the same way Americans have incoherent political ideologies, we also have very warped relationships to our own class backgrounds. The coexistence of poverty and decadence in New York City is something I set out to capture, and of course, many of us will continue to live beyond our means—people with debts going to dinner and whatnot. But I think I was also trying to untangle my own upbringing, and how it accounts for my whimsical attitude towards money, my inability to understand it, my ambivalence towards my credit card debt, etc. The flash-fiction cultural reports punctuate the text with a delirious, predictive tone, almost like a slightly unhinged trend forecast at the end of the world. Where did that voice come from? That material came from somewhere else. I don’t know where it came from. I’d be curious to hear about non-literary influences that were on your mind while you were writing as well. I’ve watched Mad Men all the way through at least a dozen times, and I owe some of the book’s ambient regressive misogyny to that. I’ve been listening to Bright Eyes since I was a child, and I’m sure that’s had some effect on me, helped me to retain some sentimentality. The Christmas I was fourteen, my older brother gave me the book Shoplifting from American Apparel and The College Dropout on vinyl, and I think that combination probably rewired my brain. That’s like a crash course in the spectrum of American Masculinity! Yes. My brother is going to hate this. The Whole Earth Catalog shows up in the text and is referenced on the cover design. In recent years, its brand of countercultural techno-optimism has come under fire for being, at best, politically apathetic and, at worst, recklessly libertarian. It’s hard not to draw parallels to Silicon Valley’s recent turn to the right. I’m curious how you think about the catalog’s legacy and how it’s meaningful within Flat Earth. I’m happy you clocked that. I don’t think I realized what a perfect nested literary object The Whole Earth Catalog is for this book until I finished writing it—I just thought it was a cute Mise en abyme. It’s easy to romanticize a project like that, something that emerged when counterculture was more than just a set of hyper-niche consumer demographics, especially because it’s so aesthetically compelling. But if anything was radical or prophetic about the catalog, it’s that it was a lifestyle object, a way of signalling you were in the know, well before counterculture was focus-grouped and redistributed as a menu of consumer identities. In terms of its legacy in Silicon Valley: The techno-fascists at the fringes I satirize in the book are reckless and probably genocidal, but in general, I don’t think the average Bay Area tech-bro libertine has changed that much. If you look strictly at social and cultural values, a lot of the behavior that codes as right-wing today—I’m thinking about distrust in institutions, vaccine hesitancy, survivalism—circulated at the turn of the century as lefty, back-to-the-land utopianism. In addition to being a writer, you’re also an editor and co-founder of Forever Magazine, which champions, in your words, “style over plot.” What styles are you seeing emerge right now? I haven’t been reading much contemporary fiction lately, other than the work of my students. I will say that some of the undergraduates I work with are playing around with mid-century experimental short stories in the tradition of Donald Barthelme, and that excites me. Otherwise, the only contemporary novel I’ve finished this year is Claire-Loise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye Bye, which feels fresh in some ways and mannered in others. The book is almost entirely about correspondence, which gives it a sort of Victorian tone, but I was happily surprised by how enrapturing this book is, being that it’s just a woman checking her email for 250 pages. As my friend Mariah Kreutter put it: I’m glad Bennett wrote this book so I don’t have to. Around the same time I was reading Flat Earth, I came across an interview with Chris Kraus where she reflected on her early work and how she was able to be a bit reckless in a way that became difficult once she gained recognition within arts institutions. I’ve been wondering whether it’s possible or even desirable to preserve that edge as the stakes shift. I’m curious if this is something you’ve thought about, having just published your first novel and as your profile has expanded as the editor of Forever. I think that what passes for recklessness in this book is actually just freedom. Chris Kraus writes with a lawlessness that I admire and rarely achieve. I was neurotic about reception from the moment I started writing Flat Earth, but I’ve never been particularly careful about curating a public profile or a serious reputation. The successes and the failures of this book are self-evident. I’m not so concerned with preserving my own edge, and especially not if that kind of rawness comes at the expense of developing taste. The best moments in this book were a surprise to me as I was writing them, and that creative intuition is the main thing I care about preserving. At one point in the novel, Frances’s film, also titled Flat Earth, draws criticism. You write, “People were writing that the film made a spectacle out of white poverty… others denigrated the film for humanizing the conspiracy theorists allegedly tearing at the fabric of our democracy.” Was this meant as a provocation to critics or a reflection on the pressure for art to resolve itself into a moral position? Since the book came out in November, how has the press cycle been so far? It wasn’t meant as a provocation to critics. I do think that we’re in a moment where art is expected to announce a moral position, which this book refrains from. But my press cycle has been thoughtful and generous for the most part. Last question, what are you working on now? It’s a secret. The above conversation was conducted by Madeline Bogoch, a writer, editor, and film programmer based in Montréal.Cover image: Anika Jade Levy. Photo by Bronwen Wickstrom.

An auctioneer wearing a judge's black gown sits stern-faced, between an international currency conversion table suspended in midair and a large abstract painting for sale. Above him, a foreboding night sky appears where one expects a ceiling. This is the scene of Nicole Eisenman’s The Auction (2025), where a painter is also present, with a canvas, similar to the one on sale, by his side. Positioned within the composition as if he had been called to testify, he’s rendered in flat Cubist color blocks, which make him look gobsmacked—if not by the fact that he might be on trial than by the sight of an eager bidder before him whose hand is reaching way too high for anyone’s comfort, Sieg Heil style. That sharp discomfiture you feel in your gut when facing total contradiction was at the heart of Eisenman’s STY, her most recent solo exhibition at New York’s 52 Walker. Comprised of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and videos made between 2024 and 2025—after the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s presidential re-election—the exhibition depicted the artist and her milieu amid a battered social and civic landscape. These works were shown inside a floor-to-ceiling enclosure of Homasote board, a material commonly used by artists to allow for easily installation and deinstallation inside the studio, built inside the gallery walls, suggesting that Eisenman’s STY was not only a reference to an increasingly paradoxical outside world, but the effects of such a world on the walls of the mind. Here, no amount of focus, intent, or artistic autonomy can keep a person from brushing up against the threat of fascism, or from their own obliviousness to the violences that are every day surrounding them. We’re in this together. Shortly after STY closed, Eisenman and I had a conversation about the collision of styles and sightlines that inspired her exquisitely rendered canvases and sculptural works. We talked, also, about humor and its limitations; about narrative and abstraction; about the difficulty of making anything, including sense, during the present moment; and about the things that we are compelled to hold very close, even if we don’t yet understand them. I like the idea of edging up next to a joke but not making or landing one. The paintings might be jokes without punchlines. They don't resolve themselves. You just closed STY. How are you feeling? I'm feeling satisfied! I think it was a good experience. Going into it, I was worried about the show holding together and wasn’t totally able to wrap my head around how all the works were connecting to one another, but, in the space, it solved itself. It took a couple of weeks for me to really see the show and to understand it. The show was also up for so long—about three months—so I went in periodically and started to see connections that surprised me between the paintings and between the paintings and sculptures. When did the work for this show begin? The work for this show began with the painting that has a giant pig floating above an art opening, Archangel (The Visitors) (2024), which I made before Trump was re-elected. Making that painting at that moment was important, because it’s about what I thought might happen—and what, eventually, did happen. It’s also a painting of my world here in New York. There’s an art opening, a lot of my New York friends are there in it, and there’s some extremely ugly figures in it as well, which is also true to life. It’s often like, here we are, at the same opening as this guy. In the art world, we traverse this universe with that kind of feeling all the time, like: I don't know who all is in the room. When I was first offered to make STY I knew that I needed to get that painting back. I wanted it to be the anchor of the show. Your work straddles humor and discomfort with very serious restraint. I’m thinking of the self-portrait that appears among the throng of art people in Archangel (The Visitors). “You” are pickpocketing a collector. That’s pretty funny. But then, one looks around, to see that, for fuck’s sake, Goebbels just into the room. Your paintings are comic, for sure, but there’s almost no joke to land. What’s your relationship to humor? I like the idea of edging up next to a joke but not making or landing one. The paintings might be jokes without punchlines. They don't resolve themselves. Though, I’m not even sure what the joke would be, like “How many pigs does it take to screw in a lightbulb at an art opening?” I don’t know. I don't feel like I have jokes in me, or at least I don't feel like a very funny person. I work with absurdity, but you have to keep it on a tight leash on it or it slips into the surreal. I want my absurd worlds to make sense—in fact, I feel like the paintings are incredibly realistic in a way. They're very close to something inside me, my realism, perhaps, or, what's real for me. My project has always really been about looking at the world and all the abhorrent politics going on in it, seeing how that experience lands emotionally, and then assigning a kind of symbolic language to those feelings. Once you find the symbolic language for the feeling that this shitstorm is producing in you, you've got your painting. To me, they are not meant to be funny, insofar as they are honest and realistic depictions of what I'm experiencing. The title, STY, suggests a group or crowded space, which we see in paintings like Archangel (The Visitors) and The Auction. Two of the other paintings show artists alone in their “studios.” What role does isolation or solitude play in STY? Most of my time is spent alone; I think that might be true for anyone who paints or writes. The figures you are referring to are both painters; both are a sort of self-portrait. One of them, in Fiddle V. Burns (2024), is in a hole in the ground, with treads of a tank on the ground above him. I was thinking, with this one, about the ditches soldiers sat in during World War I. The other artist, in The Bunker (2024), is surrounded by insulation foam, cinder block, and noise reduction foam. There are layers and layers of things isolating that person from the world. To me, this painting was very much about what I feel like I have to do to paint. Or rather, it's a psychological portrait of what all of us as artists have to block out in order to function. The painting is very much about this impossible position that these psychotic governments put us in. It’s about balancing what it means to witness things like the genocide in Palestine and then to take care of yourself. It has been artists, poets and activists who have adequately, with rage, responded to what’s going on in the world. But, even still, since the start of the genocide, I have a feeling of embarrassment that I can just be in my studio, not thinking about it, and instead thinking about painting. I feel like the artists in the paintings look like total jackasses. One of them has his big thumb up in the air. And the other, the one in the hole, has this smug look and doesn't seem aware of their surroundings. Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  What role would you say art plays in a moment of despair such as this one? Art is, of course, a safe harbor. But it’s also like one of those places that were popular in like 2015 where you could pay to go into a room and throw plates at a wall and break electronics. What was that called? A rage room? Art is a rage room. It’s helpful for me to not only understand my fear and anger, but to do something with them, you know? I mean, what else are you going to do with life? You have to spend the time it takes to live through it, so you might as well make art. The Auction (2024), for instance, was an outgrowth of a moment that was truly one of the vilest moments I've ever experienced in the art world, which has obviously, by and large, treated me pretty well. When I was 12 or 13 years old, I would often draw mean caricatures of my teachers in the margins of my textbooks. It was my own small revenge. Rage is such a pointed feeling, but it can feel so abstract. To me, your paintings are so the opposite of that: they’re precise and orchestrated. They’re narrative. What role does narrative play in your work? They're definitely narrative. I like that word to describe my work, because when I'm designing those big, multi-figurative canvases, I feel the same kind of writerly angst that my writer friends talk about when they're doing their work. In terms of process, I feel more aligned with novelists than I do with most painters. I understand how difficult writing is because I know how difficult it is to construct a story. It's sit-at-your-desk-and-pull-your-hair-out kind of work. But, if you get it right, it's also really satisfying. It can be really amazing to orchestrate a story in an image. I feel very influenced by the idea of subtext and the subconscious—all the sub stuff. I try to remember my dreams every day and to analyze them. I find it very helpful personally but it can also help spur ideas for work. Since STY opened four months ago, I’ve been trying to think about what the story is now. Like, now the pig isn't floating above us like this big abstract thing that nobody's paying attention to. Now the pig is down in the room and walking amongst us. It’s here. I love that STY came with a list of “Related Reading.” Balzac’s The Unfinished Masterpiece,a favorite of mine, appears on the list. And there’s another I want to ask you about. It has a great title: Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis’s 1979 book,Catastrophe Theory… Oh my god, that's a great book. It's a mathematics textbook, so I don’t know exactly how to read it. The copy I have, which I found at an antique shop, is old and beautiful. It has these great illustrations and graphs of when equations change from one form into another; it's about tipping points. That's not a book I read. That's just a book I have. Maybe we ought to adjust what “reading” means. Carrying a book in my bag for months or a full year—can’t that be reading too? Yes! Carrying a book in a bag is one of the great pleasures in life and should count as reading. I mean, this weird old book, I can't understand it but it's still inspiring and magical in its implications. What you imagine it to mean is important and drives imagination, but also, in a way I can loosely pick up the idea. Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.   When I think about your sculptures, I think about found objects and plaster all smashed together, and I think about the visibility of touch. The sculptures in STY are made of scagliola—a composite plaster technique the Medici family once used to make swirling ersatz marble and terra dura constructions. They have such a smooth and pristine texture to them. But they’re also very complex. I want to call them “poetic” in the sense that they made me think, long after I saw them, about how the materialcame together to make them. How did you come to scaglolia? I’ve been thinking about color and sculpture for a long time. It’s a baffling question. Color at first seemed extraneous to me. Coming to sculpture as a painter, I needed to take color out of the equation in order to keep things simple; there was enough to think about just making stuff that sits in the same world as us. In recent years I have been wondering how to use color without simply throwing paint on a 3D form, where color would seem extraneous and decorative. As for the scagliola, it's dumb how I came to it: I first saw the material on Instagram and immediately liked the idea of using colored plaster, like fresco but thick. It’s hard to teach yourself. There are very few people outside of Italy who know how to do all the techniques, but I found this woman in the Midwest, Melissa Vongley, who was taught by people in Italy. I invited her to come to New York to teach me how to do it. So, we worked together to produce the sculptures in the show. They're extremely complicated sculptures to make, so I'm glad they feel complex to look at. It’s tricky material and it easily requires like ten times the amount of touching than any other substance I’ve used before. It’s mind-boggling just how soft they are. If a bunny rabbit could be hard, it would feel like that. I was nervous about the slickness, about how angular and svelte they are, and about what it means to put figures out into the world that look like they could be based on some fucking supermodel or something. But, as you point out, they are also weird, cut up, sliced and diced. I was thinking a lot about the trans body while I made these works. One of the figures has indications of top surgery, for instance. All three sculptural figures carry a flat-screen TV playing video works you produced in collaboration with Thomas and Anna Eisenman, your nephew and niece. Unlike the paintings, the videos depict some pretty abstract stuff, like hurtling through space. What was this collaboration like? Do you think of the videos in terms of abstraction? Thomas is a filmmaker and Anna is an artist who has used a lot of video. The three of us conceived of the works together, but the two of them really made and directed the videos. The videos seem abstract but if you were to watch them back-to-back, a story emerges. So, I wouldn't call them narrative but there is an arc that goes through them. The titles of the sculptures that carry each one of the three videos in the cycle are called Creation, Burning and La jetée. The entry point is the video that rests on the head of the black-and-white figure. In this one, an idea floats above you in its perfect state, before it comes down to earth and becomes embodied. The embodiment is terrifying—that's shown in the video that the figure with red and blue limbs is holding, which is the part of the sequence that's like a zombie apocalypse, with figures emerging from the mud. In the third video, there's a re-emergence from below and into a state of exaltation. That’s the subway surfing part. I look at footage of kids doing this and ask what it might be like to have that feeling, of being a teenager standing on top of a train, of feeling invincible. You’re basically like a god. One figure carries the TV screen on its head; another one holds the TV to its side. They imply different ways to be attentive to things, including art. They favor distractibility and suggest, to me, how you might spend quality time with something you don’t totally understand. Right, like how carrying a book in a bag is reading. It's heartening to imagine how these pieces could suggest a way of interacting with art rather than being simply burdened by screens. I wish we could take a painting out of the Met to walk around with for a day, or perhaps a month. A month would be good. They could provide you with a nice, strong leather portfolio so the painting doesn’t get damaged, and you could open the portfolio to take a peek at the painting while you’re riding the subway. Okay, Nicole. If you were to pull an item out of the Met to have for a month, what would it be? This is not a reasonable object to take out of the Met but there's this one samurai armor that is so wicked and fierce and gorgeous. It frightened me as a kid. I might take that and just wear it and walk around. Maybe I should choose something more realistic to carry around. No, that’s perfect. You’d be like Lancelot in Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail. He’s all worked up and has this great line: “If no one fights me, I’ll have to wear this armor / All my life.” The above conversation was conducted by Shiv Kotecha, a writer and editor living in New York. Kotecha was a 2025 editorial resident with Public Parking. This is his final contribution as part of a four-part creative exploration with our publication. Read Kotecha's previous features here, here and here.Special thank you to Nicole Eisenman for participating so generously in the above conversation. Cover image: Nicole Eisenman. Photo by Brigitte Lacombe.

“I wanted the dangerous love built on long-distance plane rides, trauma, and failed girlhood,” the unnamed narrator of Grace Byron’s Herculine confesses, walking quietly along the narrow river that runs through a patch of land in rural Indiana inhabited by 15 or 20 trans girls, inhabited, in turn, by their 15 or 20 corresponding demons. 700 miles from New York with a broken-down Honda Civic and spotty cell service, she weighs the risks of remaining long enough to trial the return to her first love, her ex-girlfriend Ash. The most notable risk is that of demon possession, which would tether her eternally to Ash’s trans separatist demon cult. “Choosing T4T was just choosing one kind of hurt over another. It’s no more valiant. It’s a survival tactic.” Amid the onslaught of both the U.S. administration’s executive orders and Canadian provincial and federal bills directly attacking trans existence across the continent, anti-trans rhetoric has moved from the fringe into the core of right-wing political agendas and proliferates in mainstream culture. When it was released by Saga Press last October, Herculine arrived into a world infected with severe anti-trans hostility—a not uncomplicated moment for a novel populated by demonic trans girls and themes like in-fighting, identity politics, conversion therapy, and convoluted spiritualities. In the mainstream literary world, flattening marginal narratives is made compulsory and coerced—but, with Herculine, Byron breaks from what is easily digestible and, influenced by trans horror novelists that came before her, pushes her readers to tread further “into the muck.” The muck of trauma, jealousy, regret, dissociation, disappointment, and so on. Byron has forged a space for herself as a journalist and critic, with a long roster of publications in spots like The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Baffler, and Vogue. Her work spans art and literary criticism, political reporting, memoir, short stories, and profiles. Byron’s debut novel Herculine is a departure in many ways—her first longform fiction project, her first engagement with horror writing. The throughline of her work, however, is an unfaltering and exacting critical voice that pierces through the haze of violent social and political schema, grounded in a real, mundane, and clear-eyed sense of solidarity. I spoke with Byron about all of that, and about constructing gritty characters, how criticism and fiction bleed into one another, and the use of horror to write in the shape of trauma. I think literary fiction has always been about people fucking up. I don’t care about characters being likable or good people. The idea of reading as a manual for morality is pretty grim to me. How does it feel to have Herculine out in the world and to be on the other side of your book tour? It feels good! It reached a lot of wonderful readers and it was fun to interact with people in person. And also, to see Herculine have a life of its own is a strange thing, since I wrote it a few years ago and at a very different time in my life…it’s been interesting to see what has and hasn’t changed both in the culture and personally. Well, the book is really about community—its promise and its pitfalls—so I wonder how it was to gather around Herculine in community and discuss its themes? I think it really forced me to refine what I was wanting to say. A book can be a really flexible thing in a wonderful way, but when there are political stakes, it feels important to say what you mean very carefully. Like, it felt important to say that community is not all bad. The book has a pretty pessimistic take on community and T4T, but there are obviously great things about both of those political endeavors. It’s more “here's what not to do” rather than “this is always bad”—I think, in the book, that’s clear. But talking about it is tricky. I want to get into the world you’re building in Herculine. It was such a fun read—so spooky and horny in a perfect way. But it's also such an incisive work on trauma. The horror genre was a beautiful choice for this kind of project—it’s especially fitting as an exploration of religious trauma where the ‘monsters’ are literally demons, straight out of Christian demonology. How did you come to build this sort of internal world for the book, and what was your research process like? For most of my life, I was really anti-horror. I was raised in a religious household, so I had a lot of encounters with demonology and exorcism. I grew up in the church and youth group, and I was a big reader and took a lot of Christian studies classes, so I felt very versed in it. In the same way people use the mythology they grew up on in a flexible way, I used Christianity. So instead of Greek myths or whatever, I turned Beelzebub on its head. That was the context I started to play with, and it felt electric to change it and make it funny and weird and horny and strange. I think that element was always in my work—thinking about the vexed relationship between queer and trans people and religion or spirituality. I wanted to build that out, and then that interplay became the most interesting thing about the book. I was thinking about memes and internet culture and trans culture and also demons and the church and religious trauma. So those binaries sort of ricocheted throughout the book—cis and trans, New York and the Midwest, demons and God—they became the engine of the plot. And then, my boyfriend and I started watching a bunch of horror movies—that’s a big thing they enjoy, and I was like, okay, fine. We watched Candyman and The Blair Witch Project and Ari Aster movies that I’d never seen. Well, the horror tropes are so potent in Herculine. Like this doubling you mentioned, where two things are presented as opposites, one seemingly good and one more sinister, so it casts a shadow over its other. It comes up with this faith or belief in T4T separatism, or in utopia in the kind of queer leftist sense, which is doubled by Christianity. The ‘back to the land’ commune project is doubled by a demon possession cult. The horror comes out of this suggestion that they aren’t as opposing as we want to think. Complicating those binaries felt important. Queer and trans community is difficult—there can be a shadowy side. And, there are moments where the main character is getting something from Christianity or spiritual community. But, I think I've always been fascinated by cults. I grew up watching the X-Files and there are so many cult episodes. And I thought Midsommar was an interesting film, not because it's the best film ever, but in a way it really executes the sort of eeriness of wanting belonging, and joining a cult—this need for belonging being weaponized against you. I’m curious about the banality of cults…like, it makes so much sense that people want to feel belonging. I think that can be hard for a lot of queer and trans people, so it’s rife for being taken advantage of. But the need to feel loved makes sense. People want to feel like they have community, and if you can't find that in a more traditional way, you're going to go outside of that. The way belonging is presented in the bookbecomes this never-ending series of returns to a sense of belonging or sense of family. The narrator goes back to the Midwest, back to her ex and T4T community. Then, at the end, there’s this return to the mother and the childhood home. But at every turn, the home is no longer a home. The familiar is made strange or dangerous—mostly with the demons that keep popping up—so the narrator has to keep moving. It felt tied to this idea of trauma, of moving with it; it stays in the body. It's not something you’re getting away from, but you're moving with it. There's this line where the narrator is recalling how, as a kid, every time she got home from a conversion therapy session, she would drop her backpack and go for a walk, because the house felt stagnant. The ‘therapist’ and the house were these sites of ongoing violence and walking was a way of letting things move, even if she eventually returned to that place. The book’s form sort of mirrors this process of leaving the house and walking around the block, even if the eventual return is inevitable—so, also the shape of processing trauma. Oh, for sure. There's such a relationship between geography and trauma. Trying to outrun something and it still being there, returning to the wound again and again. It makes sense that the narrator has to return, physically, to the site of the original trauma—that happens in a few different points in the book. She has to confront the conversion therapist in a sort of spiritual and metaphysical way. She has to confront the house she grew up in and the state she grew up in, and then she has to confront this ex of hers, which also means breaking with the idea of T4T being a completely good thing in her life. Yeah, there’s a lot of moments where space is playing a pivotal role in processing. You can’t outrun the wound. And you can't return home the same way twice, you know. I found those two truisms to be interesting cliches to play with. Yes, and once she gets to the commune there's this real ambivalence around leaving—there were so many opportunities for her to have left sooner but she’s hanging on to the idea of Ash and this notion of real love. Like, of course her car gets destroyed. As a reader, you're like, oh my god, get out. Absolutely. That is the mark of trauma. Like, you can see a friend enacting and reenacting their trauma and be like, don't do that. Don't date this avoidant person again, cut this person out, whatever. But when you're in it, you are just not operating on the same logic. You do it again and again and again. Some readers have been like, why doesn't she leave sooner? And it’s like, what if your first love called you back? That is a pretty seductive siren song—that is the promise of utopia. Cover for Herculine (2025). S&S/Saga Press.  The book also thinks about the inverse relationship of trauma and solidarity. I think especially in queer and trans spaces, we want trauma alone to build a shared foundation for solidarity, and a sense of real belonging or community. That can be a risky logic. The risk is that you build unity or a kind of misplaced allegiance rather than solidarity. And things crop up in our spaces that can mirror the outside; almost nationalistic, carceral ways of thinking about community—casting people out, or having really intense rules for engagement. Solidarity means I don’t have to be like my neighbor, but I will fight for them or care for them. And, solidarity means a more expansive idea of who I consider as my neighbour. Community takes work and a shared ethic—shared identity is a starting point, but it's not an ending point. It can be beautiful, because you can share each other's burden, but it shouldn’t be a closed door. I think the narrator comes to that very slowly by the end of the book, though she never fully articulates it in that way. By the end, there is real solidarity, and it's just a lot less glittery than she imagined. It’s not always sexy. It's not always triumphant. Sometimes it’s eating at a fucked-up diner with your friends and complaining. But I think those things are actually really important, like, that is the glue that holds people together. It’s worth considering as an important praxis. Definitely. So, Herculine is a bit of a cautionary tale, but there’s still this grounded ethic of community that’s rooted in that mundane sense of friendship. It’s anti-utopian but there’s still a hopefulness. That ethic seems to guide a lot of your writing—your criticism and political reporting. You invoke a sense of care and commitment to the world and your communities through a very honest, incisive lens. I think that's true. That is the ethical framework that my work operates on, regardless of format. I also just really didn't want to write a well-behaved narrator or a how-to ethical guide. I care about characters that are grittier, I don't really have any interest in writing for the Goodreads crowd—there's enough romantasy novels if that's what people want to read, and more power to them. But, I think literary fiction has always been about people fucking up. I don’t care about characters being likable or good people. The idea of reading as a manual for morality is pretty grim to me. You’ve written about this trap of good vs. bad representation discourse where, as a trans author, everything you write has to do some kind of explicit political work for your community. It makes sense to use fiction as a vehicle to move away from that. I feel like the book riffs on that more than engaging with it. Like, it derides that kind of binaristic thinking with its jokes about the freelance crowd or the trans clickbait titles. I took a lot of courage from writers like Gretchen Felker-Martin or Alison Rumfitt, who cared more about putting grossness and ugliness into the world in a way that got at something deeper than, like, a trans memoir that’s like “here's how I overcame my challenges.” That kind of representation is fine. I’m sure that is really important for some people. But, Herculine isn’t for a reader who doesn't want to get into the muck a bit. In an article in The Baffler on trans literature and the present tense, you write “We need books that acknowledge the pain of our current moment and books that imagine how to live in the ruins.” Herculine sort of straddles this line of the real and the constructed, fantastical. It is really rooted in the actual present. Well, it's hard, too, because I feel like so much has changed about trans culture and discourse, even in the years since I wrote it. This isn’t a book you could write during the second Trump term. It's about a different era. Perhaps it could be set during Trump's first presidency, but I think these characters would have a very different set of concerns if they were operating in the contemporary moment—it almost feels harder to try and write about the current moment in a fictional way, even if there are resonances that ricochet out to now. I don’t know…I feel like I can never write good fiction about the contemporary moment. I need a little bit of distance usually, to engage with it. I want to hear more about your writing life at large. How did you come to your current writing practice? What’s been nourishing you throughout that process? So, I went to school for film and that just never really came together in a real way. At the end of 2020, my friend Erin Taylor became the arts editor at New York Observer and asked me if I wanted to write anything, so I started doing reviews for them. I did a review a month, so I felt like an unofficial book columnist there. It ranged from, like, Sally Rooney to Agatha Christie. Then I branched out to reviewing art shows, I wrote about Greer Lankton, and then I started learning how to pitch articles and pitching at other places. So I was writing every day. And to be a good writer, you have to be reading a lot—reviewing books forced me to be reading. I also put myself through a Classics crash course… and that's really how it started. I was ambitious, I started to do bigger pieces and more political journalism because it was in demand. It was all very random, a lot of falling into things or finding the right person at the right time. I like to invite the reader in, and make them feel like they're getting a take—not in a ‘hot take’ way—but getting an opinion, getting something at a slant. That does seem to be the way it works these days. How did you find your voice within your criticism work? It was hard! I think it took a long time. I know some writers who are very young who came up very quickly, and I think that that's brutal. It was nice at the beginning to have the room to develop a voice and try things out. I think every writer will say the first few years of writing criticism can be embarrassing or difficult. A lot of it was about repetition, just doing it over and over again. And, it's important to have some sparkly bits. You have to have a few lines that feel true to your voice as a critic, and that takes time to figure out. I also think not enough critics are reading and admiring each others’ work. Patricia Lockwood is an amazing literary critic—reading her was really important. And Jenny Diski is one of my favorite critics of all time, she makes really interesting and surprising connections and just has a really natural voice. I also love Andrea Long Chu. I think she's such a great writer, very detail-oriented, but also has really beautiful, vicious prose. I just immersed myself in the world of criticism. My work has a political tinge and a bit of a voiciness that is hard to get into some places—a lot of critical outlets have a house style. But there are still ways to say what you want to say in a fun way. I like to invite the reader in, and make them feel like they're getting a take—not in a ‘hot take’ way—but getting an opinion, getting something at a slant. Well, the impact of your critical voice on your fiction is very clear. Has that been a two-way process? Like, did delving into this longform fiction work shift anything in your nonfiction practice? I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think it is important to tell a story with criticism—to have a sort of narrative arc. You can’t force it, but I think a good review is a conduit to say something else, other than just what the book is about. How was it shifting between the two modes, having these overlapping projects of longform fiction and shorter nonfiction pieces. Was that nourishing or just difficult or…? I think I kind of thrive on creative chaos. I am a bit of a workhorse, but I also think I like doing different modes at once. Fiction feels so much more magical and strange. With nonfiction, it feels like there’s something I’m reporting on that I have to excavate, whereas fiction often feels like making something out of nothing. And the interplay is always interesting—seeing what does trickle into the fiction—because it's never a one-to-one. The interplay can be really elusive and subconscious. I really admire writers like Joan Didion or Annie Dillard or Ursula K. Le Guin, who could jump between those modes. There’s something very politically potent about that kind of fictional work that can be really overlooked or neglected. But it seems like the temporal distinction is big—the sort of political work being done in shorter-form nonfiction has a really different texture to that of fictional work. Less time to gestate, for sure, yeah. There’s definitely a pressure to be reporting on trans issues right now. I feel a pretty intense obligation and ethical commitment to doing it. Especially when I’m writing for places with a wider readership, it feels important to get in as much as I can, not giving into sentimental narratives about transness and getting as many voices in as possible. It is difficult, because being trans isn’t my whole life––it often feels like people want to make that my whole life, whether I want it to be or not. There are a lot of ethical quandaries that come up when writing nonfiction, both internally or externally, I think both are important to pay attention to. You wrote a piece for Lux calling for a return to the feminist polemic, where you write: “The polemic has taken a backseat to other genres of feminist literature because such texts are seen as inherently naive. It’s considered militaristic rhetoric of a bygone era. This is a loss. Polemics, even when ostensibly ‘wrong,’ offer a starting point to move discourse and energize debate. They give us a common language. The ability to take positions, to build an erotic charge on the left, to build and articulate feminist positions based on more than just dispassionate historicity.” It’s interesting to think about polemics in the context of cults like Herculine––cults have that “erotic charge,” that, on the left, we’re really allergic to because we sometimes see a strong politic as a ‘hot take,’ something prescriptive… Absolutely…which I think is fair. I think it's good to be skeptical of ‘hot takes.’ I guess I’m circumspectly defending the polemic. I have probably not written very many polemics…I think this piece is a polemic about polemics. I think I’m defending polemics and polemicists that I've enjoyed from being tossed aside—there are pretty few polemicists right now, which is sad to me. I think it’s a really interesting form. I would love to write a polemic. Well, as you said, Herculine is a bit of a “what not to do” thing, but is not trying to tell anyone what to do. Will there be a sequel, or a new book project, that might take that on? I could imagine a kind of Monique Wittig-esque Les Guérillères type thing. Oh yeah, maybe there should be…[laughs]. No, I don’t know. That's definitely not what I'm currently working on. I’m not very pro-sequel. I really like the work of Hayao Miyazaki because I'm sure the temptation for him to do a sequel is strong but he’s so against it. I like how each of his works is a self-contained world. What are you working on right now? I'm currently working on an essay about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and the new Ryan Murphy show, on her mythology. I am working on a new longform project, but I don't want to say too much. But there is something cooking. Very exciting. The above conversation was conducted by Abby Maxwell, an artist, writer, and gardener based in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal.Cover image: Grace Byron. Photo by Hunter Abrams.

I annotated Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi, in the middle of February, while I was visiting my boyfriend in Zürich. Each day, I walked to the library and clutched the printed galleys in my hands, sandwiched between my iPhone and a bottle of Swiss Alps water. I spent most of my time with the neurotic-and-slightly manic narrator inside the brute-concrete wing of the Swiss National Museum, or Zürich’s Landesmuseum. From the beginning of the novel, the melody and baroqueness of Koestenbaum’s sentences (sometimes spanning across an entire page) harmonized with my view of the Crystalline-clean Limmat river that I faced. My Lover, the Rabbi, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, on March 17, cascades the lyrical rhythm of language with overtly faggy submission and obsessive adoration toward the one and only center of the narrator’s world: the Rabbi. Hyper-sexed, yet tender, and piercing with passion, it is laced with pompous discoveries, frisky fiction and liturgies of incubated love, reflecting darker, more decadent, gripping, yet distinctly human traits. Set between Hoboken and Charlottesville, Warsaw and the Hamptons, the ornateness of Koestenbaum’s narrator resides in his “mission” to decrypt the bond between him and the rabbi. The 400-page novel reels between flaccid and erect genitals; sermons and sinners; synagogue attractions and “kosher” trips; the rabbi’s hairy chest and narrator’s pull to absorb the unabsorbable—another human being on their own orbit. To the readers of Dennis Cooper and Kevin Killian, or Robert Glück, Koestenbaum’s fiction adds to the legacy of extravaganza-queer writers. The author grants the reader a “gayscape” or “gayage,” of seductive, titillating litanies about a gay love between a fuckable narrator and a less fuckable rabbi. Beyond the corporeal, the novel asserts that the vast unknown of love is a force of human nature so vivid and potent that it may move or detonate mountains. Who are lovers if not another fleeting matter, someone you go into in search of yourself, or who you never wished and wanted to be? The writing of Koestenbaum, a San Jose-born and New York-based poet, critic, fiction writer, painter, filmmaker and performer, spans more than twenty books. His devotees may be familiar with Stubble Archipelago (Semiotex(e), 2024), The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables (Semiotex(e), 2021), Camp Marmelade (Nightboat Books, 2018), Figure It Out (Soft Skull Press, 2020), Jackie Under My Skin (Picador, 2009), Humiliation (Picador, 2011), Andy Warhol: A Biography (Open Road Media, 2015), and The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality (Grand Central Publishing, 2001). The author’s poems and essays have appeared in Vogue US, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the London Review of Books. His artistic bravura extends to compelling solo exhibitions of his visual art and musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at the Hammer Museum, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center and other venues. He is a distinguished professor of English, French and comparative literature at CUNY. On Zoom, Koestenbaum and I spoke about his new nonchalantly written stream of lust and diaristic phallic adoration. Through the screen, Koestenbaum wore a Pucci-like shirt and his signature square glasses in the same hues. His ubiquitous grandeur and zeal sparked through the entire conversation and peaked when I asked him what he would wear to a fancy literati event. He confided about writers he admires and how poetry shaped his entire life. In a dream on February 23, I kept persuading the author of yet another title. “Perhaps the book,” I said, “should be: My Boyfriend, The Architect.” When I DM-ed Koestenbaum about it, he said: “That’s astonishing!!! My husband is an architect.” Asymmetry, like conflict or ambivalence, generates literature. I mean, literature demands asymmetry. The lascivious sentences in My Lover, the Rabbi emanate with gay poetic gestures, like strokes of painting or a choreography of queer bodies in space between the Hoboken apartment and the Charlottesville of the financier. Your stylistic keyboard is ornate; words and sentences are opulent and baroque-injected. A mélange of jet-set queer private diaristic stories erupt from the pages. Although vividly sexual and manic, the writing never sinks or bottoms out toward the depraved or filthy. Can you tell me about the behind-the-scenes and the writing process for My Lover, the Rabbi? Yes, thank you first for that eloquent, sparkling description. I wrote the first draft of the novel in one burst, over a period of 6 weeks in August and September 2024. I hadn't intended to write a novel; I had finished a book of poems, which has yet to come out, called The Group Tickling Experiment. I had space to think about what I wanted to write next. I had just read two novels: Maurice Blanchot's When the Time Comes, and Constance Debré's Playboy, and I wanted to write something that had honesty and directness, but also a sense of metaphysical and melancholy distance. The first sentence of the book just came to me, and I wrote it down, and I said to myself that I would write 100 sentences just like that, and that I would make a tiny little book with one sentence on each page. And each sentence would begin, “my lover, the rabbi.” I started doing that, and it grew into an actual novel, rather than, in a way, a litany or a serial poem. The novel blossomed from that original, diary-embedded outburst. The first sentence was the DNA of the whole book. And I had no notion, when I began, that there would be characters, or anything like a plot. Writing in the first person, the narrator of the novel is ubiquitously obsessed with all the rabbi’s universe, his fixings, decor, past and present. He says, “My dislike of his body could coexist with my attachment to his body because of the extreme alchemy that his flesh made when it stamped me, sealed me, authorized me to breathe and sleep and wallow and press harder into his body.” His frantic, uncontrolled adoration—almost ceremonial—has a vector of asymmetry. All points to the rabbi, his crotch, his orbit. We don’t know much from the narrator’s background, except that his teen years were a blur and his parents were actors. At one point, I thought the narrator would devour the rabbi, that this would be the end of the rabbi. How essential was this asymmetry, this imbalance, to you? And how were those scenes driven to reach a final crescendo? The asymmetry was essential. The core of the book was that the narrator desired the rabbi, with a ferocious, unsatisfiable intensity. An intensity that would never be, in mortal terms, met or reciprocated. On the other hand, I understood that such an intensity of desire included, as well, a measure of disgust. And so I would need to convey a sense that the narrator also feared and was repulsed by the rabbi. The core asymmetry is that the younger, unnamed narrator, with a sketchy background, with no identifiable personality traits except for his obsessiveness and a certain loftiness of language, desires this rabbi. Asymmetry, like conflict or ambivalence, generates literature. I mean, literature demands asymmetry. The inter-connected gay quest for a family—the adoptive son, Dito, his boyfriend Pablo, the financier Atlas, Dominic the dogwalker, etc. Though fiction, it’s not far from some of the realities that occur in life. The throuple. The young generation of gays is mingling with the older one. There’s push and pull that tie and untie them together. In the novel, there’s a beautiful part when the narrator asks the rabbi about the impossible. In the current political climate, do you believe such a quest for the gay multi-family is possible? Or is it some periphery of the distant, utopian imagination? I feel strongly that the complex, uncategorizable queer family needs to exist, and does already, and is existing all over the place, with new language to describe it, and new confidence felt by the participants in these families. There's an efflorescence of descriptive experiential language surrounding such families. I felt it deeply in the novel. You worked on the novel with your editor, Jackson Howard. How was that experience for you? It was delightful. It's such a luxury to have somebody enter your imaginative world, because the process of writing a novel or writing anything is so lonely and so internal—particularly a novel, because nothing in it exists. And so you're alone as the writer with all these phantoms. It is remarkably consoling when the moment arrives and there is a sane, reasonably objective fellow traveler who can step in and offer advice. I greatly benefited from Jackson's sense of reality. His edits were tactful and not exorbitant or invasive, but they gave me a sense of when I needed to be watchful over certain kinds of temporal and spatial continuities, which are ambiguous enough in this novel. He helped me tether some of these coordinates. There are two book jackets or covers for the novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux released a more stripped-down, abstract version with a rose over the faded pink backdrop. Granta opted for a hairy chest image. As a writer and visual artist, what are your thoughts on the cover and how do you think the two represent the book? What’s your reading of the two? I'm fascinated by both covers. I love both covers. I'm fascinated by the divergence between them. I feel somewhat responsible for that divergence. I was asked by FSG if I had any wishes for the cover, and I think I said that I didn't want any representations of the rabbi. I didn't want people pictured on the cover. I didn't want stereotypically gay or Jewish iconography on the cover. I wanted it to look like a work of severe, molten literature. FSG produced this floral cover, which I love, by Evan Gaffney. I don't think Granta asked what I wanted the cover to be, or maybe they did, but they sent me this cover, designed by Jack Smyth, and asked for my approval. It was so titillating and hilarious that, of course, I said, yes, understanding, too, that in the UK, there's a different semiotics of book covers than in the U.S. And understanding as well that in the U.S, a cover like that Granta cover might not go over as well. It might lead to a sense that my book was a niche book, indistinguishable from soft porn. But the way Granta did it is sexy and witty. And FSG’s cover is also very gender fluid, if we investigate the nature of a rose. Cover for My Lover, The Rabbi (2026) Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  What came to me while I was reading the novel was some scraps of Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe—particularly, the story of her devotion to Jesus. This obsession, the feeling of being submissive to the god-like figure, the iconoclast, feels like an affinity to the relation the narrator has with the rabbi and, somehow, also toward his housemaid and protector, Monica Prague. Have you read Robert Glück’s book? I have read all of, or much of, Robert Glück's published work, and I deeply admire it. I think of him as a compatriot in this zone of a recognizably gay male literature that is nonetheless anti-representational, or that plays with—or toys with—a reader's wish for security. Robert Glück is famously associated with a literary movement, as you know, called New Narrative, and I'm not part of that group exactly, but they're some of my favorite writers. Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian. They're my allies. And so, yes, I definitely think of my book as in conversation with the work of Robert Glück, and also my book, like New Narrative works, is heavily autobiographical, but also entirely fictional. You have previously published ten poetry books and two fiction books. As a writer, what do you feel you can do with fiction that somehow is not perceived with, or you can’t do with poetry? Which genre is sexier to you and why? I'm always more at home as a poet, and becoming a poet was a decision I made very early in my writing life, in my early 20s. I decided to devote myself to poetry rather than to fiction, and that was because I understood that my strengths lay in language play and in semi-surreal, imagistic scenarios. I wasn't as interested in a conventional plot or consistent character and motive. I was also more interested in reading poetry than in fiction. So, I felt a cultural, intellectual, and spiritual alliance with the values of poetry. My Lover, the Rabbi is, in a secret sense, a poem. It is fiction, but it's written with the structure of a poem, in that it's based on intense repetition and on a fealty to the errant law of the voice. There's a line by the poet Frank O'Hara in his poem “Homosexuality,” where he says, “It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.” That's a poet's credo and it's also the credo of this book. Once the characters began to enter the scene, the book’s nature shifted. It begins more in the realm of a poem: apostrophe, invocation, salute, and love song. But once the people start clogging it up, the tone changes and becomes more, not conventionally fictional, but more recognizably novelistic. Your publicist from FSG, Tracy, shared with me the image of your handwritten first drafts in a pile of colorful notebooks. Do you always handwrite at first? Do you archive these notebooks? I archive everything. My archive up to 2018, except for my diaries, is at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. So it is literally archived, and maybe in a couple of years, all the notebooks for My Lover, the Rabbi will also enter the library at Yale. I don't write everything longhand. These days, most of my essays I write on a keyboard. I dictate sometimes. In the last few years, I've often dictated my essays into my phone and then transcribed them and edited them. My diaries are always longhand, and I began this novel in my diary. I stopped writing my actual diary for a few weeks, and I just started keeping the novel in notebooks as if I were simply continuing to write in my private diary. Then I typed it all up and started editing it. In the past, I was very devoted to actual typewriters. And I still miss them. In your interview with Ben Shields from The Paris Review (March 15, 2018) over Camp Marmelade, your poetry collection, you talked about figures like Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag. You also said you’re a reader of Dennis Cooper and one of my favorites: Elfriede Jelinek. What’s your relationship with their writing? Yes, I really love Elfriede Jelinek's books. They are difficult and weird. They are not cozy. They are volcanic. They are astute in their analysis of gender and cultural politics, and they are relentlessly visceral to an ugly extent. And I identify with that tropism toward the visceral. She's a real role model of mine. Did you see The Piano Teacher? Oh, yes, many times. That's a very important film to me. Not only because I'm a pianist, and I've had many piano teachers, but because I am an Isabelle Huppert completist. Toward the end of the novel, the phallic-driven scenes and their extreme alchemy—“each time I rubbed my body along his coil-rich body, I was siphoning funds from my diminishing nest egg,” seem to warp into more inner-and-reflective-fueled periphery. The rabbi dies in the fire. The narration softens. It’s more intimate. The narrator still tries to comprehend what had happened to the rabbi, his death and his wish of the impossible—undying. It’s a beautiful and deeply touching ending. He finally seems to detonate his obsessive submission, as though the fire purged and melted his encrusted heart. How have you approached the end of the novel? In general, I plotted the novel a day at a time. I would write little notes before each composition session. Each day, I would write fragmentary indications about what was going to happen next, what loose ends needed to be dealt with. As the writing progressed toward the climax, those notes got longer and longer, and I deliberated a lot over what would happen. I didn’t know how the book would end, until I finally wrote the last scenes. In fact, I remember considering the book finished right before the last section. The lines with which the book originally ended were Chapter 187, the penultimate chapter of the book. But then I felt a sense of restlessness, and the next day I wrote the truly final chapter, number 188. It's almost a musical feeling that I am familiar with from writing poetry, where you sense that there are still some beats missing in the phrase. When I wrote the end of chapter 187, the plot had ended, but I felt the need for another melodic trespass. Another gesture. Another leap across the stage. Even if it was a surreal leap. That was a beautiful part of that dream that he had, or whatever it was. And it's also a great momentum, where it kind of peaks, and then it just collapses, cocoons itself. Now I'm also thinking about the use of the symbolic number 6, which appears in the novel. The events in the rabbi's past formed the investigative core of the book. A lot of the plot is about delving into the rabbi’s repressed, mysterious prehistory. Those materials seemed governed by magical logic, magical reasoning. And to that extent, the numerological play is also a function of sorcery, or alchemy, or superstition. So I don't have a fixed symbolic program for what the recurrence of the number 6 means in my novel, but I'm aware of the number’s biblical significance. I felt that the rabbi's past, which is never very easily documented, has, for me, as it did for the narrator, a sensation of sky-writing, or ancient relics found in Pompeii. What are your favorite gay/queer novels? And what books are on your nightstand? Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten, even though people don't consider him a queer writer. To me, he is, and that book is really queer. It's about an obedience school. Others would be Gertrude Stein's A Long Gay Book and A Novel of Thank You. Neither of those, of course, are strictly speaking novels, but she calls them novels, and so there they are. Also, I would add her novel, Lucy Church Amiably. Those are three very important queer books. But also Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher because it covers all the bases of perversion. The novels of Dennis Cooper, aforementioned. Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies. A deep favorite of mine. All the novels of Willa Cather, especially The Song of the Lark. James Baldwin's Another Country and Giovanni's Room. Some of the essays of Hilton Als in his book White Girls are essentially fiction. Jamaica Kincaid's book, My Brother, is an autobiography, a memoir of her brother. It’s not fiction but it’s novelistic and it's a very queer book. (So is her Autobiography of My Mother.) She's one of my favorite writers. The book on my night table right now is Kincaid's Talk Stories. This is a collection of her New Yorker Talk of the Town pieces. Now I’m in the middle of reading Modern Woman, a book of poetry by Edith Södergren, translated by CD Eskilson, published by World Poetry. What kind of columns have you written for Vogue? That was a really long time ago. I wrote small pieces for a section called, People Are Talking About. I think the first thing I wrote was a tiny essay about the photo of the actor Jeanne Moreau on the cover of a Miles Davis CD, the soundtrack for a Louis Malle movie, Elevator to the Gallows. I interviewed the movie star Alec Baldwin, the opera diva Renee Fleming, and Vanessa Redgrave. Some of these pieces are collected in my first book of essays, Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics. You’re invited to the VIP literati event and dinner. It may seem like a drag but you know you must go. You can take three of your friends. What would you wear and who would you take? There's a little Comme des Garçons shop around the block from me, and I would go to Comme des Garçons, and clearly, someone else is providing me a clothes budget for this VIP event. As Vogue editor Anna Wintour said in a recent New York Times interview, “To be clear, Jessica, we have a very healthy budget at Vogue.” I would buy tight velvet pants, a floral shirt, and a hat. I definitely need hats. And I would buy a little purse—a white, shiny pocketbook. I have a necklace of Murano glass that I bought in Venice several years ago, and I would wear that, just like Anna Wintour does. She wears layers of necklaces. I would definitely bring my editor, Jackson Howard, and my UK editor from Granta, Daniel Bird, and my agent, PJ Mark. If I'm only allowed to bring dead people, I would certainly bring Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin, because I know they would get along. I know he could really work his charm on Emily Dickinson. I would bring Susan Sontag, though she might make a pass at Emily Dickinson, and literary history would be forever changed. The above conversation was conducted by Filip Jakab, a writer and editor based in Brussels.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Wayne Koestenbaum. Photo by Jan Rattia. Sourced via.

In the wake of what has been termed the "livestreamed genocide" in Gaza, images of Palestinian suffering have saturated our screens with an unprecedented persistence and immediacy. Yet these images demand something different from us. This conversation with scholar and writer Milka Njoroge brings us into the heart of her urgent question: “What demands do images of suffering place on our viewing practices?” As Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University whose dissertation explored the colonial logics undergirding humanitarian imagery, Njoroge brings a critical lens to understanding how Palestinians' own documentation of genocide represents both continuity with and rupture from historical modes of visual witnessing. The interview traces a path from Njoroge’s own research on nineteenth and twentieth century “humanitarian” images‚ and their role in establishing hierarchies of humanity, their mobilization of Christian missionary work, scientific racism, and up to the present moment, tackling the consumption and circulation of images of suffering in the digital sphere. Njoroge’s research and scholarly work sets up a fundamental challenge to what images can do. When Palestinians film their own survival, their clearing of rubble, their steadfast rebuilding amid systematic demolition, makes visible not only Israel’s genocidal warfare but Palestinian refusal to disappear. The conversation moves between theoretical precision and political urgency, between questions of digital circulation and questions of global solidarity. As an interlocutor Njoroge guides us through the reading of images as a condition to heed the call for action from Palestinians, and to connect this moment to expansive histories of resistance in Palestine, from the symbolic weight of the key of return to contemporary practices of life-making under the constant threat of annihilation. What makes this exchange particularly valuable is its refusal of easy answers. Rather than offering a definitive framework for how to view images of suffering, the conversation models a practice of sitting with discomfort, of resisting both “compassion fatigue” and the liberal impulse to collapse difference. It asks us to understand Palestinian image-making not as a plea for inclusion in "the human family" but as an invitation to participate in the abolition of colonial modernity itself. We are able to see, and what I'm also trying to argue is that if Palestinians themselves are documenting this suffering, then it is a call for us to also engage differently with these images. We cannot use the old imperial way of looking at these images. We now have to ask: how are the terms different? The legacy of Palestinian resistance against colonialism from day one has been to record, to document the brutalities of occupation, colonialism, genocides, the violences that have continued. I think back on a documentary I saw that was specifically on the occupation in the West Bank, directed by the prolific Muhammad Bakri called Jenin Jenin, it came out in 2002, it was a remarkable moment for me. The film is about the horrors committed by Israel that had just occurred in Jenin, a city in the West Bank. We saw the destruction and the bulldozing of the area, and the atrocities that ensued. I remember at the time, I was living in Montreal, and after the screening the people around me didn't want to watch stuff like that. They said things like this is too much, I don't want to see this. People didn't want to encounter the image. There was a refusal to see or hear the witnesses, to confront the reality of the situation on the ground through what was being depicted on screen. That moment marked something for me, it was a mix of pain, sadness, and frustration. I'm curious to know your thoughts around this for thinking through and with images because of your scholarship and writing, and all the discussions we've had together regarding the genocide in Gaza and in the West Bank.1 We really need to contend with this term of the “livestreamed genocide.” Why is it being called that? Why livestreamed? How is watching what is occurring different this time? But first, can you introduce your current research and the new text you wrote called “What demands do images of suffering place on our viewing practices?” My dissertation was primarily preoccupied with humanitarian images, that is, images of war, atrocity, genocide, and other conflicts that are intended to stir an emotional response that moves audiences to action. Humanitarian images have historically been produced and circulated as objects for sympathetic identification with the sufferer and as mechanisms for establishing distance between the fortunate and unfortunate. Christian sensibilities thus constructed codes that distinguished whose lives were grievable and whose were not. My dissertation was primarily preoccupied with images of female circumcision from Finnish photojournalist Meeri Koutaniemi among the Maasai people in Narok, Kenya, to consider Finland’s self-presentation and its messy entanglements with colonialism. In my theoretical analysis, I read a lot on humanitarian images because I wanted to situate Koutaniemi’s photojournalistic practices within a broader context of humanitarian visuality. For example, when famine struck the subcontinent of India in the late 19th century, white Christian missionaries in India embraced iconographies of suffering as sufficient visual depictions for alerting their U.S-based congregants to the horrors of the famine and as a simultaneous motivation for almsgiving. So the images played a very important tool for mobilizing a kind of Christian sensibility. This is not to say that Koutaniemi’s images of female circumcision are the same as those of starving Indians, but to highlight the kind of logic that underpins both contexts. In this sense, the circulatory practices of humanitarian images reinforce a kind of narrative that determines boundaries of belonging. And as Sylvia Wynter describes, Judeo-Christianity needed to establish this separation because that was the only way there could be a relation. So that's where I began. So, how I came to think about images of Palestinians, and especially in the wake of October ‘23 and the genocide, was because my dissertation looked at analog humanitarian photography. I was very intent on not thinking about the digital circulation of images because this kind of digital humanitarian visuality we are experiencing requires a more expansive analysis that I wanted to explore after my dissertation defense. So when images started coming out of Palestine in 2023 and were instantaneously and simultaneously shared on various social media platforms, there was a sense of “compassion fatigue” as well. This feeling of helplessness, while the demands of our other lives must continue, and where the images kept coming, and their production was rapid, instantaneous, and simultaneous, demanded, I think, a different kind of analysis. And I want to emphasize that these are images many of us have witnessed. Images I need not describe here because readers know what we are both talking about. I wanted to think about what the internet enables and what the accelerated advance of digital technologies makes possible. I found myself torn between competing interpretations: do they enable a kind of unthinking resharing, an almost automatic redistribution? I was particularly nervous about the phrase "livestream genocide." As someone who watches many YouTube videos, I knew the word "livestream" primarily through influencer YouTubers, where streaming has become its own category of visual consumption. The questions I was asking myself were: does calling it a livestream genocide undermine the genocide part of it? Does this framing merge body and technology in a way that makes Palestinian subjectivity disappear? Those are great questions. Wow. To invoke this question of does the term “livestreamed genocide” detract us from the genocide? I also wanted to add that what emerged from my asking this question, of what the word “livestream” enables or deters, led me to a published paper in Antipode called “On Grassroots Witnessing: Gaza and the Terrain of an Epistemic Intifada”. Who wrote it? Patrick Anthony and Gada Dimashk. You referenced them? Yes, I referenced them. And this is an article that really made me rethink my wanting to be repulsed by the term livestreamed genocide, because for them, the argument is that livestreamed genocide is also about Palestinians themselves documenting the genocide. This is their way of telling the world. I think what they argue in the article is that digital technologies also provided an avenue for Palestinians themselves to document, and to do so through “grassroots witnessing.” We are able to see, and what I'm also trying to argue is that if Palestinians themselves are documenting this suffering, then it is a call for us to also engage differently with these images. We cannot use the old imperial way of looking at these images. We now have to ask: how are the terms different? Yes. This is part of the call from Palestinians in Palestine that they're documenting and making evidence of what they are experiencing and what they are witnessing. While they are running from one bombed out building to another to save their relatives from under the rubble, they're also filming. If they are doing that work to expose this reality to the world, then what is our responsibility in receiving it? What is our responsibility, and how do we sharpen our ethics now? How do we sharpen our viewing practices so that they are not just informed by a liberal form of compassion fatigue? Or what Wendy Hesford calls “a professed egalitarianism,” which is trying to collapse Palestinians into a liberal humanism, rather than paying attention to Palestinian subjectivity. And as you say, as they are escaping the bombs, saving their loved ones, and pursuing many life-affirming and life-making strategies, they're also filming it and consistently uploading images and videos! There isn't a break. It's not like it's one video or image once every few months. It's multiple every day. And I think for me, I think the call is to reorient our senses, almost like even when we think about the eye, the eye as an organ that is not passive, but as an active organ, that whenever lights hit the eye, something is happening to be able to perceive that image. What does that mean for us to participate in this viewing, but also to make demands or several demands, in order to end the genocide, for the end of colonial modernity? We also must carry the call and like you said, start to activate these demands. Yeah. And I was also thinking right now as you're talking, there's another Antipode article that I came across by Kahlid Dader and Mikko Joronen titled “Fitful Infrastructures: Dwelling with Infrastructural Elimination in Gaza”. I appreciated this article for the way it describes how even when Israel is producing the edge of collapse, Palestinians are still working with and against this collapse of infrastructures. And we know this because Palestinians themselves are filming these videos where they go back to their bombed homes and clean the rubble. And living with this edge of collapse and urbicide, facilitated by Israel’s settler-colonial project, makes living a relentless and fragile endeavour. I watched this documentary on Al Jazeera about the political ramifications of the Balfour Declaration, a sustained zionist effort where Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland. One of the subjects of the documentary was the keys that Palestinians kept to their homes, and the symbolic and literal meanings behind them: to go back, to clear the rubble, to reestablish life again. Yes, the Palestinian Return. The Palestinian Return. Yes. [...] we should think of humanitarian images as invitations to participate in the abolition of colonial modernity. Rather than resisting these images, we must sit with them and engage in a different epistemology of the image. Yes, and I do want to put emphasis on that: the constant way in which Palestinians have rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt despite all these attempts at annihilation. We know this isn't the first time that Gaza is bombed. We know this isn't the first time that Gaza is destroyed. The shock is in how extreme and accelerated the complete destruction and razing of Gaza’s life sustaining infrastructures (I think the Israeli army wiped out 94% of Gaza’s infrastructure). We are watching this colonial project unfold in real-time as they attempt to completely extinguish life by completely demolishing infrastructures that sustain it. But Palestinians continue to rebuild and return, despite it all. This is the legacy of Palestinian resistance. Yes, absolutely. The first time, I started to understand what return means, not just as a literal return, but also the symbolism of the key to the home, and holding onto this key, for decades - is this idea that return emphasizes the temporality of colonialism. There are limits to the settler colonial project – its attempt at permanence. This is undermined by the Palestinian return. In order for the settler colonial project to establish a kind of permanence, it has to keep producing this image, to keep producing the story of violence, because it feels that it's constantly under threat. And that is something I've come to understand from thinking with Françoise Debrix’s work in his book The Global Powers of Horror: Security, Politics, and the Body in Pieces. He argues that permanent security is maintained by katechontic power which he describes as the instituting of military restraint as a way of fending off the threat to its theologically-ordained sovereignty. And so, I was trying to apply this theoretical formulation to understand how Israel’s settler colonial project is sustained by this nervous condition where Palestinians represent an entity that needs to be kept at bay through highly technologized and brutalizing efforts. This also means that, across the globe, we understand that we have to constantly be in solidarity with Palestinians, not just for Palestinians, but also for ourselves. Exactly. That's what makes for a more expansive solidarity. Palestine is showing us to what extent the larger colonial project is still very much at play. I cannot bear to hear the word “decolonize”. Feels violent to use such terms when others are suffering and dying because of another genocide caused by a massive colonial invasion that other colonial powers are invested in. And this allows us to also think about how the logic of settler colonialism is particular for Israel, but also we can map it on other colonial projects. We can map it in South Africa, Kenya, Namibia, Australia, Canada, and the US because its logic is to establish a sense of permanence. And when it cannot do that, it has to eliminate the threat. And eliminating the threat also means all the ways that Israel has been able to get so many Western countries to support its “anti-terror project,” where Hamas is solely designated as a terrorist group. So this way of thinking about Palestinian presence as a constant threat to Israel's own ontological narration undermines the way Israel understands itself as an everlasting project. Yes. This is brilliant. By the presence of Palestinians and by the presence of all subaltern groups, Israel is constantly reminded that it is not an everlasting project. Absolutely. That presence fractures the timescape of the colonial process. Which brings me to the kind of last prompt I had. I feel like you touched on it a bit, but yeah. Can you speak to how documentation, image making, image distribution, dissemination, recording through images has been key to Palestinian resistance and to the discourse of how evidence is collected through what Palestinians have filmed or photographed themselves. How does that help us situate the genocide in the context of today's colonialism and settler expropriation of land? What do these images do to break from, as you say, colonial visuality? By way of answering that question, I also wanted to return to a film we watched during your Open Secret screening series at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre: A Fidai Film by Kamal Aljafari. There was no dialogue in the film. It's just sonically a film that really captures, and deliberately so, the viewer's attention by demonstrating how archival footage can act as a counter-visual film that refuses erasure and colonial amnesia. It came out in 2024. These images and reels of documentation belonged to the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut that the Israeli army raided in 1982. The film left me not only reflective but also searching. I remember asking where the filmmaker was. I wanted to hear what they thought. I had questions, and the filmmaker was not there to answer them. In that absence, I found myself experiencing a nervousness familiar to graduate student researchers: the impulse to collect, collect, collect, to hear enough so that I could calm my own discomfort. Yet the film was remarkable precisely because it combined and transformed an archive of footage, editing it and compiling it without dialogue, without the filmmaker present to answer questions. This raised a crucial question for me: what is my responsibility as a viewer here? Beyond that, how do we think about the dissemination and distribution of the images we are seeing now? After October 2023, I wanted all of them to mean one thing—I wanted to see them all as colonial modernity at once. It took me one year to recognize that the technology Palestinians are using is the same technology through which I was viewing these images on Instagram. I found myself deeply conflicted because my previous research had taught me that the trouble with images of suffering lies in how they're produced and the speed with which they're reproduced. But what was I to do when the reproduction continued for one year, when it did not stop in October 2023? I had to confront my own affective nervousness about these images. Riffing off Jacques Rancière's concept, I had to sit with “the intolerable image,” asking myself: the image is still here, new images keep coming, so what now? Actually, they got worse and worse because the violence got worse and worse. Each day was worse than the other. What does it mean to hear that today is worse than yesterday? This question leads to considerations of image confirmation and evidence. Perhaps one way to think about evidence is to turn it on its head and return to the concept of “grassroots witnessing”—evidence that does not pursue a deterministic frame. Our responsibility as viewers is not to see these images merely to confirm our superiority as people who live in the West or elsewhere, who are not undergoing or being subjected to colonial annihilatory violence. What these images must do—what I refer to as breaking with colonial visuality—is refuse to confirm what anthropological scientists once did: establishing that non-Christians and non-Europeans were inferior to Europeans. We must reject that premise of the humanitarian image. Instead, we should think of humanitarian images as invitations to participate in the abolition of colonial modernity. Rather than resisting these images, we must sit with them and engage in a different epistemology of the image. This is why I insist that our viewing practices must break away from colonial visuality. They cannot perform the scientific measurement that race scientists once applied to such images. And you're saying that this is what you feel like might be the difference this time? Yes. Absolutely. And also, that because of the acceleration of technology, well, not that we ever do away with technology altogether, but can we reorder the world? Can we create a whole new world that is not informed by colonial modernity? Yes. Because it is not only for a liberated Palestine, but it is also a liberation of all colonized peoples. It's a relational solidarity as you and I have been talking about. Yes. Liberation for a new world to come. We’re in the “long middle of revolution” as the poet Fargo Tbakhi would say. Yes. And I think that is what the images are supposed to do, to situate us in the long middle of the revolution by inciting us to action and in solidarity with colonized peoples everywhere. The above conversation was conducted by Nasrin Himada, a Palestinian curator and writer. Himada was a 2025 editorial resident with Public Parking. This is their final contribution as part of a four-part creative exploration with our publication. Read Himada's previous features here, here and here.Special thank you to Milka Njoroge for participating so generously in the above conversation.Cover image: Film still from A Fidai Film dir. Kamal Aljafari 2024 © kamal aljafari productions.

Have any of you ever imagined logging into your Cloud to find your phone after your death? The strangeness and a sheer, frantic-like ineffability of it? Would a ghost remember a password? Would it qualify for a face recognition app? Perhaps not. I mean, how would or could we? How could we know that? Inside the bardo realm of Amie Barrodale’s novel Trip (2025), Sandra—the protagonist’s soul or its clumsy scraps—attempts to access her former Cloud on her laptop. The habitual memory of what’s left of her reels in between the astral realm of death and rebirth. Within a baffling waiting room with a tapestry of bizarre shapeless entities and spaceless anti-matter, she experiences a perpetual drifting hallucination: all’s twisted and helter-skelter. As though an eidolon from another sphere—never starving, never sleeping, Sandra finds herself always lurking among wispy realities. Hence, quite likely, facial recognition software would not perceive the presence of a nocturnal “bardo-normie.” At least not yet. Such is the karmic sap that sifts through Trip (2025), Amie Barrodale’s first novel published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. A writer and editor, Barrodale is the author of You Are Having a Good Time: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), a critically acclaimed, unsettling short-story collection of compressed tales that expose the chaotic, hidden desires of its characters. You Are Having a Good Time was named a Best Book of 2016 by the Wall Street Journal, Vulture, Financial Times, and Guardian. In January 2026, Trip was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. It was selected as one of the New York Times’s Notable Books of the Year and one of The New Yorker’s Essential Reads. Barrodale’s stories and essays have appeared in publications including The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, VICE, and McSweeney’s. In 2012, she was awarded The Paris Review’s George Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story “William Wei,” the first of her ten stories in You Are Having a Good Time. From 2014 to 2017, she served as the fiction editor of VICE, shaping a program that brought together established and emerging writers in an unlikely setting. To the ones who read the novel: There’s a before and after Trip. As a reader, you linger from one surreal perception to another. You’re looking through a person’s fingers and flesh, their former self, the soul-substance, and what’s left out of it, occasionally awakening to pinch yourself and possibly question your own existence. You are exercising to unfear it for whatever it is. Straddling the unhinged and the mundane, the incompleteness and unpredictability of life, Amie Barrodale’s Trip will clench you by your mind’s throat. During our early February tête-à-tête Zoom, Barrodale (raised Buddhist in Texas) and I spoke about the birth and behind-the-scenes of writing Trip. Publishing her second book nearly ten years after the initial success of her first, the author’s aura emanates from the pages with stark, comfortable interiority. “I like messier sentences now,” she said. I mean, that's the truth about motherhood. [...] In some ways, you just can’t win as a parent. Your first book, You Are Having a Good Time: Stories (2016), is a collection of 10 short stories. Trip (2025) is your first novel. There’s a shared, interlinked eeriness present in both books. But how different was writing Trip? How did you come up with its premise? I’m asking because I’ve never read anything describing a mother-son relationship and the bardo of such a surreal and unsettling, “impish” fiction. The novel really left me wide-awake in a great awe. I was in Kathmandu with my son when he was one year old, and my Buddhist teacher invited us to breakfast. He is a film director, and suggested that we should work on a novel together, a love story set in the bardo. I thought it was a good idea, but he just never wanted to talk about it again after that. I would email him some thoughts, no answer. I would write something, like Bradley Cooper in his living room on a spaceship or whatever I was thinking the bardo would be at that time. Nothing. So I started to write the book myself, but over time I realized that I wasn't really interested in romantic love at all, probably because I had a small child. And slowly the novel became about a mother and son, probably because that was where my head was at the time. From the beginning of the novel, there are several dramatic indications—as though bad omens are foreshadowing Sandra’s early death. It’s in a short detail when Trip plays with his phone and says, “It’s this game where you go inside people’s bodies. You can help them.” Afterwards, the whole journey to the local naga cave felt like a huge warning for Sandra. A picture of a snake is nailed to the wall in the hut. Then a rung from the ladder snaps. Sandra eats from the sacred vine—“I took food in the dark realm.” Before she tries to pass through the cave, she asks if she fits, and a shrine keeper says, “Only sinners cannot pass.” But she gets stuck there and fears this is her death. Except her actual death is quite comical—in its low-key bluntness, but the process of dying is written with a stellar plasticity! I loved the irritation of that hard-core, wry-wrought humor and softer sentient parts which felt “tectonic,” like grinding plates. And I wonder how you have intended to write that death build up? Was this something that you wanted to play with and construct through the narrative arc of the novel? I felt that for Sandra’s death to be plausible, I had to prepare readers for it. Actually, I had this agent ten years ago who really annoyed me once. She criticized one of my stories, saying that the problem with it was that there was no foreshadowing. That seemed like the most stupid thing I'd ever heard. Like, are we in eighth-grade English? What are you talking about? But it stayed with me, and I slowly came around to her point. In a story, we do need to have an idea of what's coming. Such an ordinary death of slipping on the hair brush felt wicked, and at the same time, it’s written with a great sense of hedonism, chaos and relief collaged altogether. More untethered was how you marveled at the whole process of Sandra’s dying. The hairbrush thing was borrowed from life. I knew a woman who died slipping in the shower. I'm a bit out there in some ways, and I do have friends who claim that they can speak to someone after they've died. One of them said she spoke to this woman, and the woman said, “At first I was really confused, but then I figured out what had happened.” That always stayed with me, because it sounded so true. It sounded like what someone would say after dying that way. Also, I have an acquaintance who almost died that way. He slipped in a hotel room, and had a really bad injury. So it just seemed plausible to me. That plausibility, precisely, was a great part of it. Because, as readers, we could identify with it. It was comical, but it was also very mundane in a way that this could happen to anyone. Yes, I think it is a common way to die. A quintessential element is the novel’s complicated mother-son relationship. The introspection we’re granted as readers. The bizarre and wry parts rebound in the more slowed and mundanely familial. Sandra’s made to understand that her son needed to be a different person, and that it was her job to change him. A maternal nexus clashes with what society expects from a mother, and how Sandra experiences it—that is a very unique portal into her character. She feels watched, evaluated, and judged on what kind of mother she is to Trip. It pressurizes and moves the story further. What was your construct behind this? I mean, that's the truth about motherhood. These descriptions are taken from life, mostly. In some ways, you just can’t win as a parent. I remember once, my son began to despise the place we took him for play therapy. He just was done. At first, we tried to work through it. Maybe we come five minutes late, we enter through the back. Maybe the speech therapist comes to the car and escorts him in. Just quick fixes. At one point, the people who run the clinic asked for a meeting with us, and they’d made this whole slideshow with this bullshit ladder of developmental needs. And at the bottom of the ladder, the first rung, was something called “felt safety.” And they said to us—and they believed it too, which was the worst part—that our son didn’t have felt safety. And we asked, you know, what are you talking about, and they told us he was afraid to come into their clinic. Like… they couldn’t see that maybe this had something to do with their clinic. No, it went back to our original failure as parents. And that’s something you’re dealing with all the time. I really hoped that Sandra would ultimately meet with Trip. I imagined that while he’s lost at sea, decrypting the stars in the night sky, he could draw some inner connection to his dead mother, whom he doesn’t know is dead. Despite that, Trip is portrayed as a highly sentient teenager, and a sense of eerie mirroring runs between the two of them. Trip’s knowledge of stars and objects in the universe is somehow metaphorical to how the novel operates in a realm of Sandra reeling in the bardo. Trip says: “The night sky itself is associated with Kali, goddess of death and destruction. But then they also say she is love itself,” and “I looked it up once, and read that it is a mistake, thinking that life is about being happy—that it is much more interesting than that.” and “He listened to the water. He thought if he listened to it long enough, it would reveal ancient wisdom.” I thought that Trip is more prone to perceive his dead mother. Was this “mirroring” essential to you? Yes, initially I planned for her to get to him inside of Donald’s body, but then I felt that was misleading. I didn’t want to suggest that if you really really try hard, you can reach the life you left behind. Also, if she were to reach him, that wouldn’t be the greatest parenting, or the greatest representation of life. I think in life, you can’t fix things for your children. I did let her influence him. She does get a message to him, you know. Through Donald. I guess like, this life, this being, this Amie and this Filip, are doomed. We’re going to die. But whatever awareness is experiencing us… whatever that is… is going nowhere. The dialogues radiate with quirkiness and loom with a madcap, wry energy. Even the seemingly most normcore exchange plummets into a tragicomedy, a satire, a loony place to feel. And I had a great time laughing a lot! Whether I’m thinking of Sandra and her colleagues at the death conference, the caretaker and Trip’s teachers, then Trip and Anthony’s journey, and Sandra’s new consciousness with various bizarre deities in the bardo. The crow and Sandra’s incomprehensible talk when she’s inside Donald’s body. That wit and wryness—is this something you consciously employ to “enlighten” and de-sentiment the story? Or do you regard it as something inherited in your writing in general? What do you think of it? Maybe a little bit. It’s who I am. I used to go see stand-up comedy in my twenties. I remember one time we had sort of attached ourselves to David Cross’s table. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to make him say out loud what he was thinking. I was like, “Hold on. Do I drink too much?” And he was like, “Amie. Yes.” I don’t know why I feel like telling that now. There’s something very specific about the uncanny craft of your sentences, which are, at times, cut short to deliver the profound “high.” But what’s even more enthralling is how you leave “chapters in a hang.” Each seems to hang in an open suspense, perhaps semi-finished; some are at their bleakest. Like hanging off the crumbling cliff—edging the reader to nudge further and through. From 2014 to 2017, you were the VICE fiction editor. How do you feel this role has contributed to or formed your fiction? When I was an editor, I was a lot more in touch with what would be interesting to read. I was opening a lot of things and starting them. I wanted my work to be immediate; I wanted it to be scene-driven, to move quickly. But now I'm getting all the vices of writers I used to be impatient with. I'm comfortable with interiority, and I like things that go long. I like messier sentences now. I don’t know why. It just appeals to me now. That’s interesting because I find your sentences stylistically nifty. And that niftiness is quite perceptible, and it culminates at the finish lines of some chapters. What do you mean by nifty? What I mean by niftiness or nifty in connection to your writing is a craft the author develops, or possesses and it becomes their very own DNA. A hallmark. Like a stream that runs through their mind and hands, without them perhaps really registering it, at first. Can you give me an example, maybe? “Trip found the star called Algol. ‘The demon's head,’ he said. ‘Okay,’ Anthony said. ‘Good.’ He stood, unsure what to do. Trip took the wheel. Anthony said, ‘I'll bring back some hard alcohol.” I just opened a random page to point to such an example. I don’t know. I remember once interviewing Renata Adler. I came in with a lot of specific questions about her work, and she deflected them all. So we ended up gossiping the whole time. She asked to cut the gossip, so I had nothing to send my editor but pages and pages of me saying, “Why’d you do this?” and her saying, “I’m not sure.” And he said I’d basically spent thousands of dollars to ask a fish over and over again what it’s like to be wet. While reading Trip, I have been thinking about “longevity,” and how this term invades and operates in public spaces and media now. It’s quite alarming and panic-striking. However, with the novel, you ponder and vector toward the contrary of that experience. Like, into a forever escape room. To me, the novel is less about transformation and more about transcendence. A vaster, cyclic and spiritual form of the soul’s longevity. Rei Kawakubo, a Japanese fashion designer (Comme des Garçons), was once asked how she wanted to be remembered. She replied, “I want to be forgotten.” And I’m bringing this up because forgetting and letting go is one of the ingredients the protagonist and deities fear but undergo in the novel. Eventually, they’re consumed by it, they’re swallowed by time. You wrote a book about bardo, afterlife, and rebirth in a world that’s obsessed with physical longevity, and seems mostly performatively-transcendental. How do you think about and relate to that? Does that affect your writing? At one point before my son was born, I went up to a drupchen in Maratika, this remote area of Nepal, and the Rinpoche leading the retreat said something about long life being unattainable, but deathlessness being in reach. This is based on a memory of something that I heard a long time ago. But I feel your question is touching on that. I guess like, this life, this being, this Amie and this Filip, are doomed. We’re going to die. But whatever awareness is experiencing us… whatever that is… is going nowhere. Book cover for Trip (2025). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  What really got me was when Sandra’s consciousness in the bardo revisits her past and then tries to locate her iPhone. Such parts to me were truly crispy, like this one: “I went upstairs to the bedroom. I opened my laptop to do 'find my phone,' but the cloud wasn’t accepting my password.” How have you imagined what souls-in-waiting in bardo do? It came slowly. I researched what the Tibetan Buddhist idea of it would be. And it changed. Initially, I had a view that it would be crazier, more like a story of Jacob's Ladder. As if everything were changing all the time. I thought it had to be like that, because I've read that. I think I mentioned this a few times in the book, that when you think of a place in that realm, you're there. I thought it would just have to be like changing channels all the time. But then, as I researched it more, I started to feel like it might be more normal. Like a normal part of life. What’s really startling in the book is how you imagined and wrote the surreal descriptions in the consciousness of the dead Sandra in the bardo. Creatures with tentacles surrounded by flames, ghouls, spirits, deities, a dog’s digestive tract, a woman with the head of a horse, the dead waiter, owl-faced lady, a man with a dull black crow’s wing instead of his arm, or “a pyramid who feels stupefied—physically dirty and lethargic.” At one point in the bardo, Sandra is not even sure if she was a man or a woman; she has only a memory of her hands. The surreal intensifies toward the end when Sandra switches with another soul inside Donald’s body. The whole descriptive tract is totally madcap, I mean, it’s just insanely great. A kind of fourth dimension penetrates the narration. There’s this liquidity of some sort hazing the novel. It reminded me of some of Remedios Varo and Dali’s paintings, perhaps even Hilma af Klint. Were you working with some visual maps while writing a novel? Those weirder characters were some of the first ones that I wrote. That was when I thought the bardo had to be crazy. And I kept some of them. That waiter, he came at the very end, and I really liked him. The crow is from one of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s talks about the bardo. One of the examples he used was that you might suddenly have a crow's claw. You might be putting a sock onto your claws, finding it’s not working, but not feeling bothered about it. In the novel, Larry, one of the academics refers to The Shining by Stephen King, and a movie by Stanley Kubrick. Some scenes in the novel brought the utmost neo-Hitchcockian perspective. I had flashes of films like Birth (2004), Ghost (1990), or even Transcendence (2014). My unconscious was perhaps registering them as references while I read, although these movies are totally Hollywoodized. Have you seen them? What have you recently watched? I haven't seen Birth and Transcendence. I've seen Ghost. One thing I think Ghost does really well is, right after—Is it Patrick Swayze? Right after he dies, he sees these other ghosts wandering around. A woman who's dropped her son off at school, sort of just wandering through a cemetery stops and waves at him, and I think that's really good. I think they really got that right. I also saw Enter the Void (2009) from Gaspar Noé. It was helpful, because he started out with a character doing DMT. I was like, oh, this is so stupid, and then I cut my DMT scene. You have studied and adapted a selection of traditional Buddhist writings. Apart from that, I’m curious what other literary writers and works have influenced your writing. And, what have you been reading recently? I really have been liking Ben Lerner. I know people get annoyed when I say that, because everybody knows him and everybody likes him, but I came to him late, because when 10:04 came out, I was so jealous that I couldn't read it, and I was able to read it just a year ago. Then I started reading all his stuff. And I've been enjoying that. I finally read Don DeLillo this year, and I liked him. Oh, which one from DeLillo? I read White Noise and Mao II. Actually, I was a little disappointed, maybe because I spent my whole life hearing about them and starting to read them, but not finishing them. And when I finally finished them, I was like, “Oh. Okay. I mean, sure.” We were exchanging DMs about Szalay’s Flesh. You read it, too, right? Yes, I read that. I loved it. He's a unique writer. For a while, I lost interest when he married that woman. The scene when they’re at the estate sitting by the pool got me nervous. But I finished it and felt a little bit destroyed. I admired what he did, but it made me nauseated and afraid, also. I really liked Susan Minot’s Don't Be a Stranger. She’s a special writer. What I really liked about the book was that she's writing about an uneven relationship. A 53-year-old woman is in love with a younger man. And when it gets to the part where he's pulling away, I feel like most people just can't bear to write that. They exaggerate it, or they gloss over it. The experience of being abject is just too painful and too embarrassing to see clearly, but she does it. I was wondering what you would do if you got a proposal to turn Trip into a script and film. Would you consider something like this if that were an option? Yes, of course. I’m not Sally Rooney. I’m not in a position to turn an opportunity like that down. Also, I love movies and I love TV, so of course. I really thought about Trip being turned into a series. Something like White Lotus could be fantastic. Oh, yeah, I loved White Lotus. That would be great. I thought about Steve Coogan, actually. He was cast in the next White Lotus 4, and he came to my mind as a good person for embodying Donald. As I was finishing the book, for some reason, I kept seeing Steve Coogan as Donald; it's weird. The above conversation was conducted by Filip Jakab, a writer and editor based in Brussels.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Amie Barrodale. Photo by Chase Castor. Sourced via.