Christopher Higgs lives in Los Angeles where he teaches narrative theory and technique at Cal State Northridge. His newest book, a constraint-based memoir entitled As I Stand Living, came out this past February from Civil Coping Mechanisms #RECURRENT imprint. Previously, he wrote The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney: a novel (Sator Press), and assembled the S.P.D. #1 Bestselling novel ONE, in collaboration with Blake Butler and Vanessa Place (Roof Books). In addition, he’s published two chapbooks and numerous shorter works for venues such as AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and The Paris Review Daily. Via an email correspondence, I had the opportunity to interview Christopher about his new book and the challenges of being a beginning writer.
Freddy:
In the introduction to your book, As I Stand Living, you mention that you initially wanted to write a fiction novel, utilizing Faulkner’s constrained writing schedule (i.e. “The Faulkner Experiment,” as you called it). But, during the construction of your book, something else happened–something in the form of a “radical memoir,” entitled As I Stand Living. Tell us a bit about the memoir and your experience writing it.
Christopher:
In a nutshell: as you say, I utilized the constraint-based compositional techniques William Faulkner used to create As I Lay Dying—no planning, no editing, only in the evenings, over a specific duration—but what ended up on the page as I wrote came across more like a confession than a work of fiction. I ended up documenting my life in all its mundanity, from tallying my twitter followers to descriptions of what I’m eating to what I’m watching on television to fantasies and dreams and gossip about the writing community and so on. It covers the period of my life when I turned thirty-five, became a father, finished my Ph.D., and went on the academic job market for the first time. The experience writing it profoundly impacted my thinking and my approach to composition. I write differently now because of that writing experience.
Freddy:
What was it about “The Faulkner Experiment” that prompted you to create a radical memoir?
Christopher:
I called it “a radical memoir” at the time of composition because I couldn’t think of how else to describe the confessional and fragmentary style. Diary? Documentary? Autobiography? Recently I came across the term “intimate journal” defined as “a literary form used almost solely by the French….fragmentary by its nature, forever unfinished,” in Ned Rorem’s introduction to Jean Cocteau’s Past Tense: The Cocteau Diaries Vol. One. I wish I’d have had that concept before, because I think it more accurately describes what I wrote. Rorem goes on to say, “The distinguishing feature of a diary as opposed to a memoir is on-the-spot reaction, the writer’s truth as he feels it, not as he felt it.” So, by this definition, I wrote a diary not a memoir. Definitional quibbles aside, I allowed myself a rawness unlike any I’d attempted before. It’s written in a very different style, I think, than my previous work. I approached it from the angle of documentation, whereas my previous stuff tended to primarily approach language as a machine capable of provoking the free play of imagination through complexity abstraction openness and indeterminacy. The unplanned aspect, the emotional situation I found myself in, and my sheer exhaustion with writing fiction, all contributed to the production of this “radical memoir.”
Freddy:
Does As I Stand Living provide readers with a candid portrait of the early 21st century persona, as well as the early 21stcentury writer? In other words, are your experiences, as human and writer, timely?
Christopher:
All writing is timely because all writing is written in the time in which it is written. Or so said Gertrude Stein. Another way to answer: yes and yes, but also probably not and probably not. Universalizing creeps me out, so I’d switch your articles: “a candid portrait of [an] early 21st century persona, as well as [an] early 21stcentury writer?” In that case, yeah probably. Or, yeah, you could read it that way. Maybe. But then someone else might read it differently. So I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t really care. The filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour told Indiewire recently, “Just because I give you something to look at, doesn’t mean I’m telling you what to see.” In other words, I’m not really keen on writers talking about their work as if there’s a definite answer. For me, art exists in two phases: (1) as an experience between an artist and the creation of their art, (2) as an experience between the art and its audience. I don’t conflate those two phases. What I think about my work is private. Audiences see the outcome and decide for themselves. What I can say is that I subscribe to William Zinsser’s description of writing as “thinking on paper” and this book does that. It documents my life from a splatter of angles in the same exact way my brain works: the way I talk and teach and think. That said, I never say or write everything I’m thinking. So it’s both “me” and “not me” both “true” and “false” both “candid” and “completely staged” both “timely” and “timeless.”
Freddy:
Some beginning writers find it challenging to write about the self. What advice do you have for them?
Christopher:
I have tons of advice. First, you have to love yourself. Know that you are amazing. Know that you are unique and important. Know that what you create is valuable. Know that you are the greatest writer ever to live, but as Kendrick Lamar says, you must also “be humble.” Work to balance confidence and humility. Next, stop thinking about the notion of “the self” as a singular authentic condition. “You” are not “you” in the singular. Each of us are multiple. We have selves. Plural. While our brains may serve as singular storage facilities for our various versions, brains only aggregate, they do not unify: the “me” who stands before a classroom of college students, the “me” who Caitlin calls husband, the “me” who Jasper calls dad, the “me” my brother calls brother, the “me” my close friends know, the “me” my casual friends know, the “me” my parents know, the “me” who interacts with other writers on the web, the “me” who interacts with other writers in real life, the “me” my colleagues know, the “me” others know through some reputation, and so on and so on. I have dozens of versions of myself and while all of them accurately represent “me” none constitute “me” as a singular condition. Perhaps more importantly, there exists no “real me” or “authentic me.” We are all fake. We are all pretending and performing. Embrace it. You and I are phony and irreducible. We cannot be pinned down. We must embrace that truth as self-evident: we are many, each of us, many and open and continually growing. Therefore, writing about “the self” equates to writing about “one of the various selves.” No one on earth will ever know “the complete you” because the only way to know that version is to coexist in the storage facility of your brain. Perhaps science will one day get to the point where machines can effectively facilitate interaction between human brains and in that case perhaps a complete experience of another person may become possible (the novel I’m currently revising explores that very scenario), but at present no luck. So relax as best you can. Consider the boundary zone within which you feel comfortable exposing “yourself.” Is writing about your childhood off the table because you wouldn’t want to hurt your mother? Is writing about your sexual abuse off the table because you’re not ready to confront it or not ready to admit it on paper? Is admitting to drug use or violent thoughts off the table because you fear it might jeopardize your job or your other relationships? What are you unwilling to say? Make a silent list inside your head, lock that list inside an imaginary vault, and then set up an alert to remind you to avoid those topics, and then everything else is free game so just think on paper and ignore the haters. As long as you create your boundaries and abide by them you have nothing to worry about. The “self” you’re presenting is never your “real self.” So don’t worry. You’re only ever presenting a small fraction of the “real you.” No one will ever know you. That’s the saddest most amazing thing about being alive. (And, as an aside, in large part one of the driving forces behind modernism in literature: the attempt to reconcile subjectivity/objectivity, consciousness, failure of communication, and epistemology.) Bottom line: you are completely, utterly, totally alone inside your head. You present versions to the world outside yourself, but all of them lack totality. Don’t see this as negative, see it as positive! Embrace it! As RuPaul always says, “you’re born naked and the rest is drag.”