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D.S.Bigham

Where it’s still damp, the clay feels cold and the paint smells acrid. You shake your hair and bat your eyes and the cold subsides and the smell abates and colors begin to form. They grow saturated and warm and you expect them to get brighter and louder but they don’t. They stay just this side of gray and drab pastel.

“Marjorie!” a shout from the hall, “Marjorie! Dammit, where are you? I need help with this button!”

You are not Marjorie (nor were you ever) so you don’t answer. The shout fades as the shouter heads downstairs, or so you figure, based on how the echo moves. You wipe at the edge of your mouth and find there’s a taste of something on your tongue that you can’t place— like leather and copper and rabbit meat and that old cheese Someone brought back from Montpelier, the summer you moved back— er, moved away. You hadn’t gone back yet, not then.

The door swings open, “Hey have you seen—” the voice stops, the eyes widen, a giggle echoes out, “—oops, nevermind.” And the door closes softly again.

It’s fine, you weren’t interrupted, not really, anyway. You’re basically done here. You should have locked the door, but— no, you did lock the door. Or you thought you did. A jiggle on the handle confirms it and, well, a locked knob on a door that never fully closes is about as useful as, “as you,” you say to the thing grinning on the other side, the thing that glows.

“Ha!” the thing on the other side says. “The door was already open anyway. You never closed it. ... ... ... You need me, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” you say, “Not right now, at least.”

“So you’re just going to leave me here? I don’t even get a room at least? A room in the, sigh, The Palace?” it says. “Are we really still calling it a palace?”

“No.” you say, as a sledgehammer strikes an upstairs wall, or so you figure, based on how the echo moves. “and Yes. It is a palace.”

“If it’s a palace, that means it has a dungeon.”

“See?” you say, uncapping the marker and drawing sigils on the silver glass, “that’s why you’re staying in here and not out there. You wouldn’t be happy remembering buttons and practicing arpeggios. You’d do something stupid, something dangerous. You’d knock down a load-bearing wall instead of one that’s just empty plaster and torn paper. And then the whole thing would collapse.”

“But then we could build something new, ooo, like a nice yurt, maybe.”

You sigh; you pinch the bridge of your nose in frustration and in doing so you smear some paint, making tacky goo gobs between your eyes. You sit down and sigh again, with more growl in it this time. “We don’t need a fucking yurt,” you say.

The thing on the other side, the thing that glows, begins to say something, but stops. It would be nice to claim there was a silence between you, but the palace is way too loud for that. Voices shouting for buttons, for bobbins, for bullets; toy trains and trampoline springs and typewriters; soft crying, hard sobbing, roiling laughter never subsiding; the sound of a chainsaw mixed with spaghetti mixed with a piano playing something by Grieg or Bach or Bernstein; a ringing; a buzz; a thrum. But aside from all of that, aside from all the echoes, it was relatively silent between you two, for just a while.

You stand back up.

“You’re gonna hate it without me. You’re gonna hate everything without me,” it says, or so you figure, based on how the echo moves, but you’ve already turned away, closed the door (well, as much as possible), and gone to the window in the room across the hall.

At the end of the day you want to be grateful. Grateful to them, to us, to whoever else is listening, even if they’re never listening, even when the door is open. Grateful to community and ancestors and the dozen of genius loci ... (genii locis? locix? locae?... fucking Latin... “It’s genii locorum!” the thing in the mirror shouts from across the hall and behind the door, making you feel small and dumb, but hey, you’re out here and they’re in there, so— “Shut up!” you shout back at them.) ... Grateful to the dozens of genii locorum you’ll never meet. You want to be grateful, but you’re not. You’re not grateful, but you are a little pissed off, maybe.

This is a spell to keep you safe, to bind the vibrant, the loud, the ecstatic thing within you. It won’t hold forever, and it certainly won’t hold very well, but you whisper the spell to the clay and the paint, drying the last patches with your hot breath, watching in the reflection on the windowpane, growing mute, bound but bursting.

Interview by C. VanWinkle

October 6, 2021

Can you please begin by describing the piece that you responded to?

Sure. It’s a visual piece called Together Apart, and it has these two crescent-roll-alien-girl-children-looking beings intertangling their little tendrils together. Some, like, bunting is behind them. It’s really nice. I think it’s maybe watercolor. It’s pretty gorgeous. My first impression was very quickly, Oh this is an Alice In Wonderland situation. I’m not just responding to it like I’d respond to something else. This is a prompt. This has to trigger something in me. And the first trigger was Alice In Wonderland. Something about duality, mirrors, the self reflected on the self.

That’s so good! What happened next?

I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with that. One of the earlier drafts was this back-and-forth conversation between a “me” and Marjorie. At that point, I was trying to do something funny. Not like comedy funny; whimsical, at the very least. And that all got erased because it was trash. Absolute trash.

How did you want to change it? What was your goal?

The draft reminded me of a thing that I wrote many years ago, which is this conversation between these two guys at work about Taco Tuesday and how his wife trying to do Taco Tuesday on a Wednesday leads him to think that he’s getting a divorce. It was a little too much like that. Maybe I started out responding to the piece, but then it turned into just writing something that I already knew, and I didn’t like that. I wanted to do something that actually made me feel like the painting makes me feel. So I erased it. Also, in the visual art, there are these tendrilly things that are coming out and they’re meeting over this white bar. It became very important to me to somehow note that it’s not just a conversation. These two beings are in some way entwining or mitosis-ing or something like that.

I thought it was a fun twist that it starts being a conversation between Marjorie and someone, and then we find out that it’s really a conversation between the narrator and the “you.” Are either the narrator or “you” actually you personally?

Yeah, I think. See, they reminded me of schoolgirls, right? So it definitely started out that they were two younger women. And then by the end of it, I realized that in order to make it work, in order to explain the mind palace they’re trapped in, it’s going to have to be me. So yes, unfortunately, they’re both me. I wrote something about pinching the bridge of your nose and it creates goo gobs between your eyes, right? That is referring to those tendrils. That represents those tendrilly curls meeting each other. So that actually turned into a thing about mitosis. The narrator and the other person in this piece are a being that is split from itself.

You mentioned being trapped, and it struck me that it was more than once in your piece that you wrote, “Or so you figure, based on how the echo moves.” There’s the recurrence of being shut out of something, but still trying to figure out what’s going on in there. Is that something that is significant for you in your work?

Yeah. I like the idea of unreliable memory. That concept has been really important to me for as long as I can remember. Unreliable memory and the way that memories can just echo and reverberate, and you don’t really know what’s going on with them. And sometimes they can get stuck. Pieces of a memory get stuck that may or may not be significant to the memory as a whole. Then, as you go through life, that piece becomes detached from whatever else is going on. The notion of the echo reverberating is just that. It’s this piece of memory that keeps knocking around in your brain.

I’m interested in that, too. The imperfect memory, the unreliable narrator, the idea of the things that we rely on for information being unreliable.

There’s this whole thing about rumination. I think that’s what it’s called in therapy. It’s how people, especially people with ADHD, deal with rumination. And they don’t deal with it well.

Do you deal with it well?

I do not deal with rumination well! I ruminate too much!

In this process, there isn’t a right or wrong way to do it. Does that worry you? Is that freeing or is that scary?

For the first week that I was staring at this piece trying to figure out what to write, it was terrifying. I was like, What the fuck—How am I gonna—What?? I’m bad at writing for a goal. For the first week, it was really difficult. Then once I knew that it was going to be this Alice In Wonderland kind of thing, figuring out how to actually get that written was very difficult. Once I started, it evolved nicely. And then I was able to go back and add little touches in the editing that went back to the prompt. I wanted to make sure I included those details that I liked. It’s not just a picture of a cloud, right? The picture gives a lot of room for interpretation. It’s a very evocative picture. It’s very narrative, abstractly narrative. And then since I knew that my piece was going to get interpreted, I was trying to leave it pretty vague, more than I normally would. And I normally write pretty vague to begin with. So it’s intentionally a little vague which, I don’t know, is maybe frustrating to read?

I’m into it. I like things that aren’t too paint-by-number. You said that you have trouble writing for a goal. Was it harder that this was based on a prompt, or did that make it easier? I don’t know if having a concrete starting place is helpful or not.

I don’t know. Another time I wrote something that was prompted, they said, “Hey, we’re doing a thing about gerrymandering, so write something about gerrymandering,” and I was like, “Okay!” It ended up evolving way past that. They said, “Okay, we don’t actually want you to write about gerrymandering anymore.” I was like, Ohh great.

So prompts are fine. If you had told me to just write anything, that would have been scary in a different way. Do you want a sad poem? Do you want a little story? Do you want some kind of piss-porn fetish fanfic? What are we looking for here? So yeah, having a prompt is scary, not having a prompt is scary, writing is scary.

Is that why you do it?

Yeah, I hate writing.

Do you like collaborating?

I do like collaborating! But it is always more frightening than not collaborating. Had this thing I gave you been completely off the mark, that would have been a weird feeling. It would have been fine, I would have dealt with it, but it would have been uncomfortable. I think all creative people have this fear of people interacting with our stuff. It’s so weird! We’re producing stuff, ostensibly to be consumed, and the idea of someone consuming our stuff is terrifying, at least to me. Absolutely terrifying. It makes me a little too vulnerable, a little too raw. I want them to think I’m a genius and at the same time I want them to not think of me at all. When it’s just a piece that I’m writing and anybody in the world gets to react to it immediately, that’s terrifying, because I don’t have any idea if people are going to like this. But I don’t have to interact with them if they don’t, whereas working with you on this, it was different. I knew I would get feedback from this person who I respect. If they have feelings about this, I will have to confront that head-on. You might have said, “You missed the mark and this is not what we’re going for.”

But the thing is there isn’t a mark to miss!

I mean, had I submitted a 60,000-word novel, you might have said it missed the mark.

Well, it would be easy to put on the website at least.

I’ve submitted to magazines before and been rejected, and the reason is, “This is not right for us right now.” And they don’t really give you any more information than that. Is it because they think my writing sucks? My writing doesn’t suck. I think I’m fairly good with writing. Or is it just that they didn’t like the theme? I never know what’s up.

Maybe they don’t want a piece about depression or maybe they think you’re not talented, right? A little more detail would be nice.

So now somebody’s going to get this thing that I’ve written and do something with it. If they paint a picture of a dumpster fire, how is that going to feel?

[laughs] And in the interview, they will say the person who wrote this is clearly very disturbed and depressed.

This is a piece of trash, clearly the writing of a depressed twelve-year-old child, right?

Right! So how does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

One of the reasons that I have not been writing a lot recently is because a lot of my work circles back to depression. I’ll be writing something, and I’ll get to the end and think, Aw fuck, it’s about depression again, Jesus Christ. Or mental health in general. I would not say this piece is about depression, actually. It’s about something else. A different kind of mental health issue. So it’s like this thing that I can’t escape, even in the fiction stuff that I do. (The story fiction, not this kind of “jazz fiction” stuff.) It all comes back to, Oh, yeah, you’ve got trauma based on your childhood that you maybe need to process. So it relates to it in that way. I can’t escape writing about childhood trauma, in whatever veiled ways I end up writing about it.

Do you have any advice for someone else approaching this project now that you’ve done it?

The first week or nine days I spent worrying about doing it was dumb. I think you told me, “The intent is not to be super serious. The intent is to have some fun.” I wish I had remembered that going into it because then I wouldn’t have missed my deadline twice! [laughs uncomfortably] Just jump in. Allow it to be freeing.

And you will have this experience to draw from when you do it next time. I like to assume that there will be a next time.

Oh, I am definitely ready to do it next time.

Call Number: C55VA | C57PP.biUnti

A broken-hearted indie-punk intellectual whose idea of heaven is 2014-era Tumblr, D.S. Bigham is a writer currently trying to get the fuck out of Texas.