Aaron Schneider interviews Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Lee Henderson,

​and Darius James

(Gordon Hill Press, 2024)

Aaron Schneider (AS): The first question is a very basic nuts-and-bolts question about the practical details of how the project was conceived and carried out, and I have started with it because the only paratext you have included with the four novella’s is an opening quotation from Blaise Cendrars: “And the wheel goes round. It engenders a new language.” This suggests both uniformity and divergence. Do you see the four novellas working together as a whole, or as four entirely distinct pieces, or as both/and rather than either/or? And more broadly, how do you understand them fitting together? 
 
Jean Marc Ah-Sen (JMA): I have very strict parameters in my head about how I want the anthology-novel hybrids that I’ve been working on to function, of which Blasphemy is the second of four books being rolled out. All of these projects have to open with a quote contextualizing the assembled writing, for one thing. While the majority of the novellas were not conceived with a view to being collected in this way, my hope is that I’ve selected pieces that do in fact “speak” to one another and betray a certain amount of cohesion.
 
I only set out to write “Insolite” after deciding that Lee, Darius, and Padgett’s stories were channeling a similar type of energy about a certain subject—inquietude settling in your bones while aging and the consolations of memory as a primary recourse.
 
There are a handful of other overlapping elements too in the book—among others, moving images and the mnemonic imprint they leave on us both feature prominently in Darius and Lee’s pieces, while Padgett’s story and my contribution deal with the gaucheries of romance.
   
Lee Henderson (LH): I only knew that I was writing alongside three of the most innovative authors working in the English language today and I had to interrogate every choice I made. Every word had to have some fire in it. I was trying to disturb myself out of some kind of mindset. I was thinking about noir and in particular my love for Hammet’s The Thin Man. I was thinking about the original French film of Irma Vep. I was thinking about the old ideas about Jewish identity, our present time, and post-Zionism.
 
Darius James (DJ): I was not aware of the other writers involved when I accepted this assignment so I couldn’t conceive of the book as a whole. The only collaborative aspect I can point to is the relationship between Jean Marc and myself. Or the relationship between writer and editor.
 
 
AS: This is unlike most collaborative projects that I can think of: it is prose and there seems, at least to me, to be more collaboration among poets, and the pieces are distinct units that are gathered together but otherwise not connected in any particularly obvious way. Outside of Disintegration in Four Parts, an earlier project that Jean Marc and Lee were both involved in, I can’t think of any other precedents for the project. What books influenced the project? Where do you place it in the literary landscape? 
 
LH: I think Jean Marc Ah-Sen is one of the most innovative literary artists in Canada and these projects are entirely a product of his unique imagination and approach to the craft. He is so interested in the layering of literary identities, collaborative identities, the masks we put on and the personas we employ, as part of the stratagems of literary culture. This theme comes up in his writing and in the way he approaches publication.
 
JMA: I think collaborative precedents do exist—Oulipo, Sheila Heti’s work with Misha Glouberman and others, Mammalian Diving Reflex, maybe even the entire project of translation to an extent. But the big one for me was R.O.G.O.P.A.G., the omnibus film by Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Gregoretti. That was the key which disturbed all the categories of “authorship” I had previously clung to. 
 
DJ: The idea of collaboration has been a key part of my life for nearly thirty years. Initially, it began in the '80s on the Lower East Side with underground art parties featuring exhibitions, bands, spoken-word artists and avant-garde dancers. This was short lived due to a misguided attempt to avoid heroin addiction through marriage.
 
Collaboration again played a key role in my life upon expatriating to Berlin and getting involved with the European left. I was involved in a number of collaborative projects in Berlin, some of the most meaningful done with comrades in the former eastern bloc. Currently my collaborations are international in nature. For example, I'm developing a "trance"-based ritual performance with artists from the U.S., Haiti, Norway, Denmark, Nigeria and Ghana. I hope to open in a Rosicrucian temple in Northern California.
 
 
AS: How did each individual piece emerge? How did you initially conceive of it? Did knowing that it would be read with the other pieces influence your approach to it? And did your understanding of it change when it was placed alongside the other three pieces? 
 
LH: I’ve been reading Shaul Magid and Daniel Boyarin and others on the notion, or aspiration, for what they call “post-Zionism,” and looking at their work alongside older writing by Edward Said and thinking about the relationship this all might have to what I do, storytelling. I keep all that in the back of my mind, but it’s there. And then I mostly just try to listen. And voices appear. “Come back, come back!” a voice will say. Another will say something, “We’re each a letter printed in the book of fates,” and eventually a picture starts to emerge. But sometimes I don’t see anything until I’ve heard these voices.
 
DJ: “Aunt Katie's Tales” evolved over a decade. I wrote the initial draft over the course of a week. And then spent the next ten years approaching rewrites with my concerns about the nature of the story in mind.
 
In my teen years, while resisting my father's demand to get a J-O-B,  I spent whole days in the basement of my family home learning how to describe still life tableaus with unerring accuracy. Photos. Miniatures. Women in nude poses. My creative freedom was dependent on my ability to describe the world I saw with photographic accuracy.  What was missing was an exploration of story.
 
I asked myself several questions: What is story? How do you tell one? What function does it serve? How do you earn the right to occupy a reader's head? And what do you do once you sit there?
 
Unwittingly, journalism gave me the ability to tell a story from beginning to end. Everything was there. I only had to observe and record. I didn't have to construct the various elements that make up a story. I was the camera. My job was to document.
 
But what was "pure" storytelling? Who were the storytellers I admired? My Uncle Al and my Aunt Katie. So I wrote stories about both. By telling their stories, I reasoned, perhaps I might discover the underlying nature of oral storytelling. My real difficulty was memory...
 
JMA: My story was a direct response to the other Blasphemy pieces. I think I had to show deference to Lee, Darius, and Padgett—their writing has been pretty instrumental to my development as a writer. I had to cede to their command of the field, so to speak. It’s only now that I am aware of my subconscious incorporation of elements I lifted from their pieces.
 
All I know is hackery. My story features a character contending with a nemesis chasing him across decades like Lee’s “The Werewolf,” as well as a mentor figure imparting romantic knowledge like Padgett’s “The New Book.” Darius’ palimpsestic reworking of Imitation of Life in “Aunt Katie’s Tales” most certainly influenced my decision to loosely reinterpret the story of the awakened Siddhartha Gautama.
 
 
AS: Jean Marc and Lee, as I noted in an earlier question, this is the second project of this type that you have been involved with. You both contributed pieces to Disintegration in Four Parts. What were the similarities and differences between the process behind these two books? Was the experience different the second time around?
 
LH: I can’t begin to describe with any efficiency how meaningful it was for me to make that effort to write in the voice of Kurt Schwitters [in Disintegration]. I don’t know why exactly but it was the most fun I’ve ever had writing, and I learned so much about writing. I had just broken my leg. I was in a deep depression. I slept most of the day. When I wasn’t sleeping, as a kind of art therapy, I would make collages or learn Hebrew. Then I took February and wrote a second, entirely new draft of this piece on Schwitters. I was still really early in my healing. I was in a terrible state. But the story was constantly uplifting to me.
 
JMA: I could work with Lee until the cows come home. For me, it is impossible to produce work in isolation—not when my mind functions like a kugelblitz-shaped sieve. Lee has been involved in every single book I have ever released in some way, and the evolution of collaborating and my continued association with him is immensely rewarding.
 
AS: Lee, there is a notable, at least to me, stylistic shift between “Merz in the Arctic Circle” from Disintegration in Four Parts and “The Werewolf.” “The Werewolf” reminded me much more of your novel The Man Game than it did the novella from Disintegration in Four Parts. Can you talk about this? Does it reflect a shift in your relationship to the collaborative process, a change in your own creative process, in your relationship to your subject matter, or something else entirely?
 
LH: This is a very kind and generous question, thank you. “Merz” was based entirely on real events and from the perspective of a real person, and that changed everything for me, because that person was so incredible, and the situation was so unique. And Schwitters, he must be one of the greatest souls of the 20th century. He was such a tremendous person, and I learned more than I ever could imagine trying to inhabit his spirit. And you’re so right, but I didn’t see it until now how much ‘The Werewolf’ is an angry-sad satire like The Man Game, a fictitious slipstream in history, wrestling with a complicated, hard-to-talk-about subject and theme, ideas of exile and enemy, the explicit erasures and the conscious absences on the page, forms of othering, and the anxiety logic of the settler colonial mindset. Definitely. In this way, in particular, for example, it was very important for me that in ‘The Werewolf’ Benny Bloch made his fortune in cement.
 
 
AS: Because of the unique structure of the book, I’m also interested in whether there were particular sentences or passages that changed for you once the pieces were gathered together. Did this produce any changes in resonance or shifts in meaning? 
 
LH: I really wanted the fictional Bukovinian Jewish shtetl of Tžkr̃nǵnvwṽ spelled and accented differently each time it was printed, but in the end I lost track of all the spellings, got anxious, second-guessed the whole idea, and made them all conform to one spelling.
 
JMA: The last section of my story features an inner monologue by one of the reincarnated lives housed within my protagonist, Acton Quennell. I remember wondering if I should exercise restraint in the voicing and expression of its meaning. Considering the linguistic fireworks my collaborators were known for all throughout their careers, instead I chose to go at it hammer and tongs.

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Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, three story collections, and one non-fiction book. He has retired from a long career of schoolmarming which was necessary to pay for things to live.

 Darius James (aka Dr. Snakeskin, born 1954) is an African-American author and performance artist. He is the author of That's Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury), an unorthodox, semi-autobiographical history of the blaxploitation film genre, and Negrophobia: An Urban Parable, a satirical novel written in screenplay form. His work is influenced by the Voodoo religion. James lives in Hamden, Connecticut.

Lee Henderson is the author of four books, including two novels, The Man Game and The Road Narrows As You Go, and a short story collection, The Broken Record Technique, and most recently a novella in the collaborative book Disintegration in Four Parts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and Kilworthy Tanner. His work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Maclean’s, Hazlitt, The Comics Journal, and elsewhere. The National Post has hailed his writing as an “inventive escape from the conventional.”

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Aaron Schneider is a queer settler living in London, Ontario. He is the founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review, the publisher at the chapbook press 845 Press, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies at Western University. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Ex-Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, The Malahat Review and The Windsor Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed (Quattro Books), was published in Fall 2018. His collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), was published in Fall 2021. The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books) is his first novel. ​