Interview

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L’Esprit Literary Review: How did your pieces come to be, and what do you want our readers to know about your new project? Is there any context you would like to provide to either the excerpt specifically or the collection in general?

Christopher Linforth: I’m currently working on some edits to my fourth story collection. Very Short Lives explores failed masculinities and cultural violence in the US, Europe, and online. The collection includes “Halves,” published in a previous edition of L’Esprit Literary Review, as well as the two stories included in this issue: “Verschollen” and “Acousmatique.” These two pieces explore the book’s themes in distinctly different ways. The stories interrogate notions of masculinity through diverse cultural/geographical/temporal referents, while also being surprising, challenging, and entertaining on the surface. For some, this can make the stories difficult to read. As in, they (the readers) can’t or shouldn’t enjoy the parade of negative behaviors. I hope readers stick with the stories.

LLR: Tell us a little about yourself and your writing background. How did you come into literature? Give the audience a sense of your literary influences, styles, tastes, and philosophy.

CL: It’s hard to know where to begin. Throughout my life, I’ve gone through lots of diverse reading phases: European existential novels, Anglo-American modernism, postmodernism, American dirty realism, world literature. These days, I just choose books that sound interesting, provocative, stylish. I admire the work of Nell Zink, Ottessa Moshfegh, Paul Auster, Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Vi Khi Nao, and many, many others.

LLR: Alongside fiction, you also write essays and reviews, and have done some work in theatre. How do these outlets intersect with your fiction?

CL: I rotate all my projects. When I’m low-energy or short on time, I write book reviews and edit essays. When I’m taking a break from writing fiction, I write scripts or note down “capsules” (essentially dense narrative summaries) for future projects. These projects are generally siloed. It helps keep me sane.

LLR: Let’s talk a bit about Directory, your forthcoming book from Indirect Books. One thing that I find fascinating is that, while the book is a collection, there’s very much a narrative arc described across it, and to an extent it operates as a linked collection, or story cycle. Can you talk a little about the construction of that, and how you came to that approach architecturally?

CL: Directory was an unplanned book. It manifested during an unseasonable heatwave in Vermont a few years back. The writer’s residency had no AC and so I sequestered myself in the studio, a powerful desk fan a few inches from my face. I decided to write something short. I wrote one flash (I prefer the term “density”) after another. After a couple of weeks, I had fortish stories. I left the project alone for a few months, then I saw that Otis Books had a call for experimental works of literature. I came back to Directory and sequenced it in a way that made sense to me: a series of images, a loose arc, a progression to some type of answer.  

LLR: Tell us about your use of the first-person plural fit in Directory. It seems to me that there’s a symbiosis between the readerly relationship generated by the POV–a collective that still delineates a boundary between “us” and “them”–and the sense in which the narrative arc only loosely consents to participate in the conventions of a plot, to paraphrase our friend Lucy Ives. This is especially seen, perhaps, in a piece like “Counterpoint.” Can you talk a bit about that?

CL: “Counterpoint” comes after “Chorus” and, in a sense, rebuts and refutes all that has come before. It offers a new reading for the text and leads to a dissolution of the book, of our previous sense of what was happening. Without giving anything away in terms of plot (not that there’s a great deal overall), I’d say that the book plays with plot and character and conventions then spits them out at the end. Readers make of the book what they will. 

LLR: Similarly, you employ both past and present tense, which gives Directory a feeling of fragments of these characters’ lives that swim up to the surface; the reader only has glimpses. How did you navigate the compositional choices there?

CL: The disorientating effects of the tense switches, of the changes in time and place, and in the notional migrating identities of the “we” narrator/s, were all deliberate choices in the construction phase of sequencing the stories. I never wanted the reader to feel secure in what was going on or know who was involved or how things had changed or moved on. I wanted to give a sense of fracture, of a narrator/s under pressure, of PTSD, of a world in turmoil. These effects were further complicated by my employment of  a variety of prose styles, some more in-your-face, some subtle and lyrical, some obtuse and clinical. The book is short, though, and I think it is easy to read in several respects. So the book never feels like a slog. Rather, readers spend an hour with a bizarre and intriguing text.

LLR: How would you characterize the elements of violence and trauma in Directory—personally, one thing I admire about the book is the frankness, the unapologetic nature of that treatment—and the manner in which they’re explored in the text?

CL: Some of the fragmentary scenes of violence and trauma are clearly tongue-in-cheek (the story “Timber”), others are quiet and lyrical (“Elegy”), some angry and unprovoked (“Gestalt”), others generational and familial (“Belief” and “Ceremony”), and so on. While I often use subtext, I prefer directness in my writing, in having the unsaid said.

LLR: What is your creative process like? When you sit down to write, how do you approach your work? More specifically, can you speak to the journey of working on this new project? 

CL: In the past, I’d start with an image or a description of a place and go from there. These days, I start with writing provocative opening lines and then seeing where the story takes me. I write the stories (usually under five pages) in one sitting, then go back day after day, finessing the language. Very Short Lives is a collection of shortish stories (one to ten pages) from the past decade or so. For many of the older stories, I’ve been sharpening them significantly or wholesale rewriting them. I’ve enjoyed exploring the stories’ original ideas in new and different forms and seeing where I can take them.

LLR: How has teaching intersected with your creative writing practice?

CL: When I teach fiction, I choose stories that are new to me. This helps me approach stories in a completely different way, thinking about causality, the connection of literary elements, how characters move through space. It’s a vital refresher for my own work, for trying to write in new and interesting ways.

LLR: What’s next for you and your work?

CL: After finishing Very Short Lives, I’m circling back to my novel-in-progress, which centers on outbursts of pre-millennium madness in California.

LLR: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

CL: The original publication of Directory was in early May 2020 and a series of factors surrounding the press, including the Covid outbreak, meant that the book could not be distributed until many months later. As such, I hope the readers order the forthcoming reissue of Directory from Indirect Books and share it widely.

Christopher Linforth is the author of four story collections, including the forthcoming Very Short Lives (JackLeg Press, 2027) and Directory(Indirect Books, 2027), and the award-winning The Distortions (Orison Books, 2022).

Photo Credit: Ayla Hamilton is a film enthusiast and photography student. She has been researching female film directors under the mentorship of a Brown University Modern Culture and Media student. In her photos, she aspires to capture the cinematic side of life through the evocative female gaze.