AUTHOR: RENEE GLADMAN

Renee Gladman is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), and a monograph of drawings, Prose Architectures (Wave Books, 2017). Her entire series of fictional works set in the imaginary city-state of Ravicka are available from Dorothy, a publishing project: Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017). The series explores the relation of individuals and their environments, whether human constructed or otherwise. 

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Danielle Dutton said, “As long as she keeps writing [the Ravicka stories], we’ll keep publishing them.”

Having published thirteen books with 8 different publishers—aside from finding an interested publisher—how do you decide which is best suited for a specific work? Is it their list or mission? Their resources? Working with specific editors or publicists within the publisher?

I think this happens a lot with small press publishing, and this was especially true in the late nineties and early aughts when I began writing books. Many emerging writers just really wanted to get their books out, but also were excited to support their communities. I was living in San Francisco when I began publishing. The world felt much smaller then, more things happening on a local level; so it made since to go with local presses. But I was lucky to be somewhere where I could find presses that were in alignment with the ways I was thinking about prose and what forms the novel could take within poetry. Having the early support of a long-established press like Kelsey St., which published my first and fourth books, and is also the publisher of one of my favorite writers—Mei-mei Berssenbrugge—gave me both the space and lineage I needed to push my writing in the directions it needed to go. And most of my decisions about publishers after that point were made along this same line of thinking. However, in this last decade, working with Dorothy and Wave Books, has been essential not only in bringing wider exposure to my work, opening up international opportunities, and allowing me to profit from my writing, but also and, more importantly, in providing homes for my thinking. They both feel like presses I would like to work with for a long time. They are professional, independent, and are risk-takers, which is vital for any contemporary moment.

In the Acknowledgments to Event Factory, you credit Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren. The crisis in Ravicka also made me think of the real-life crises described by Delany in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and another (ongoing) crisis described by Sergio González Rodríguez in The Femicide Machine. (The former where the buildings and businesses are being pushed out or altogether destroyed with the inhabitants left behind, and the latter where the landmarks stay the same and the people are ever passing through.) What insights about how cities work have opened up for you with the writing and reading around these novels? Have you taken any actions or pushed particular policies in your communities as a result?

What drew me to Dhalgren those many years ago (it’s been sixteen years since I wrote Event Factory, which is in itself unbelievable) was a desire for novels about cities, where the cities took on the qualities of a character or at the very least a presence or force in the story. Not just a place where things happened but an atmosphere, the city itself a question or questioning about subjectivity and time, etc. Delany’s Dhalgren and Julio Cortazar’s 62: A Model Kit were intensely influential at that time. But I was drawn to the dark in Dhalgren, to a sense that the air was affected by the condition of the place. I haven’t re-read it since, so I’ve lost many of the details, but I do think the fact that Ravicka has that yellow (“crepuscular”) air had something to do with Delany. 

I won’t say that the Ravicka novels are a-political, because my sense of what troubles urban spaces and what threatens communities, particularly communities of color is as woven into my thought as anything else, but they are also not intentionally political. As a writer and thinker, the city has provided an unparalleled topography for the thinking-through of many things. The fact that the city is an actual city is almost secondary to the metaphorical power of it as a space of difference, as a series of fields, as a very complex syntax that pressures how one moves and understands what movement is.

In an interview on Louisiana Channel, Zadie Smith describes reading novels from young novelists, particularly women: “Something emotional will happen and instead of responding either in the narrative or vocally as you would in ‘the traditional novel,’ the character will pinch a bit of their skin until it bleeds or do this or hold their jaw. It’s so strange, as if the body were a dissociated thing, you know . . . The idea of verbalizing an emotion is quite distant and the body is treated like this strange thing you have to drag around after you’ve finished your text messages and emails and virtual life, why have I got this flesh bucket that I’m carrying around?” (From 15:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LREBOwjrrw&t=106s)

In Ravicka, we find something like the other extreme where the custom and norms demand the full participation of individuals’ bodies. In The Ravickians, there is this passage: “My translators will have been stumped in finding an equivalent for pareis. There is no correspondent anywhere; no culture performs as extensively as the Ravickians. You cannot enter a place without proving to the occupants that you have a body. Not just to display the limbs and skin you carry around with you, but to prove you are in dialogue with them.” Could you discuss the physicality or presence of bodies in Ravicka? How conscious were you of not including popular, general use, contemporary technologies like smartphones and tablets in the city-state? How do you see them contributing to the future of cities? And how will their effects (if any) compare with those of print books (and maps for that matter), which are ever present in Ravicka?

When you invent a language and a culture, you find out what things, what interactions between persons are most important or most interesting. In English, we use our bodies to speak, but those choreographies are treated as accessory than essence. I wanted to think about a language that acknowledged how essential it was to have the body in speech, that a certain turn of the body can distinguish a phrase meaning one thing versus another, and that being able to sort through these differences is vital to communication. I also am quick to move to the absurd level of things, so it’s not just a lifting of the eyebrow in Ravic rather it’s a more elaborate lunging or bending of the body. I think putting body movement to speech helps one to feel less like one’s enclosed inside of something. I always want a more fluid and open channel between what I’m thinking and what I’m saying. Ravic allows for this. 

In terms of technology, not only are there no smartphones or tablets in the Ravicka novels there are no televisions. I would argue there are no cars, except I remember a scene where someone is at a crosswalk, waiting for traffic to clear, and there’s a bus in Event Factory. Are there computers at all? There barely seem to be elevators. But, to me, this isn’t a refusal of technology. I mean, if you think about the equipment and science necessary to perform geoscography (the measurement and study of the migration of buildings), you’d have to agree there are some very complex technologies in play in Ravicka. The body itself is a very complicated technology there. I think it’s more that I’ve just never felt compelled to prove there’s realism in my narratives. I never want to read about someone pulling out their phone and opening an app or answering a call. I literally don’t want those words in my brain. I don’t want to live those moments of someone walking to a cabinet, retrieving a glass, turning to the refrigerator and pouring a drink of water, unless it’s Woolf or Henry James, where a hundred other things are unfolding in the mind as the glass fills.

I found the Ravicka novels to center on two particular, mirroring experiences: a) the individual moving about, traveling through the city-state and b) the individual trying to understand, measure the presence (or lack thereof) of the physical spaces (both those purposefully constructed/controlled by humans and those not) and how they interact in relation to time and their surroundings. 

The elusiveness of the landscape called to mind something Giambattista Vico wrote, “The criterion of the true is to have made it,” a kind of Sisyphean task, where because the characters of the book did not create the landscape from scratch, it would always (at least partially) evade their firm grasp. In this way, Ravicka reminded me less of language and more of the human microbiome, billions bacteria coevolving with the human organism. In fact, there is this line in the note at the end of Houses of Ravicka: “To write was to wander through these folds, to try to see space as each of these things, always shifting, undoing, and to make the texts I built through this seeing vibrate,” which feels more feral, less conscious, a process closer to nature than the familiar formal constructs of city planning or fiction writing. Has the latest science on gut bacteria and the human microbiome influenced the development of these novels?

No, not in the least. But what I love about contemporary thought is the ways in which the vocabulary and methods of one field have the power to activate spaces in another. To think about fiction as comprising a billion organisms is to give fiction more space and more dexterity to be itself or push beyond itself. What I’ve loved most about having readers—being read by so many different minds coming from so many different perspectives—and how much the work expands from that contact. It changes the work and changes me the next time I go to write.

There is this passage in The Ravickians: “Why when I say dahar do you say ‘yellow’? I know that word. The air here is not yellow. It is dahar (yellow). If you are engaged in a translation and discover that a quality you need to convey does not exist in your language, the language into which you are moving, do not pick the next best thing. Sometimes you will have to put a ‘0’ there; this will indicate a hole” which closely parallels Anne Carson’s reflections on translating Homer in Nay Rather: “Μωλυ (mōlu) is one of several allusions in Homer’s poems to a language apparently known only to gods. Linguists like to see these names traces of some older layer of Indo-European preserved in Homer’s Greek. However that may be, when he invokes the language of gods Homer usually tells you the earthly translation also. Here he does not. He wants this word to fall silent. Here are four letters of the alphabet, you can pronounce them but you cannot define, possess, or make use of them. You cannot search for this plant by the roadside or google it and find out where to buy some. The plant is sacred, the knowledge belongs to gods, the word stops itself.”

How much of it was your intention to keep Ravicka, from their customs to the their landscapes, at a distance from readers? How do you use this tool as a writer?

I have no desire to make distance between me and my readers or between my subject and my readers, in fact I want the reader to get as close as possible to the conditions I experienced while writing whatever work is being read at that time. The reason that there is all of this foreign-ness and untranslatability and shifts in knowing and seeing is because these are the qualities of experience that make me most aware of being a person in a very large world. Writing about Ravicka, about its particular and sometimes bizarre customs, allows me to exist on many levels at once: I get to dream, to fabricate, to embellish, to be silly, be melancholy, be salacious, to think deeply, to interpolate whenever I want. It’s the best living.