AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN ISIS

Colby Smith interviews Justin Isis in advance of the publication of the former's essay on the latter.

JUSTIN ISIS INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Though you’re relatively young, you’ve put out three collections of short stories thus far that are very progressive in terms of narrative, structure, and theme. What was your first memory writing fiction on your own terms?

I’d prefer to have published more by now, and I don’t feel that I can actually stand by any of the books I’ve released so far. The next two books (a story collection and a novel) will hopefully remedy that. I’m almost at the point where I’m actually doing what I’ve been trying to do from the beginning. 

As for background, I’ve been writing since I figured out how to put letters together, and I was making up stories in my head long before that. I’ve been doing this more or less since I was conscious. In some respects there’s a continuity between ideas I had as a seven year old and things I’m working on now. For example, I’ve recently finished a novella-length thing about “fake lawyers” and random public drinking—this is very close to the kind of story ideas I had as a small child. I’m just now able to do essentially the widescreen version of what I would have done then. 

When did you first get serious about writing fiction?

As mentioned above, I’ve been doing this more or less since I was aware books existed. I think I was about thirteen or fourteen when I realized I probably wasn’t going to do much else with my life but push forward with writing. This decision meant that the next ten years necessarily involved severe confrontations with my own inadequacies, along with multiple sustained and often overwhelming engagements with the works of the writers that have influenced me the most. None of this took place in an academic context (I found formal education pretty worthless across the board) and there were no real mentors of any kind; I just forced myself to do it whenever I had time, because it was the only thing that seemed important. 

I’m a bit of a tortoise in that I read and write fairly slowly, but I’m consistent and finish everything I start. I’m not anxious/self-doubting either. I wrote novels and stories for about ten years before showing anyone or trying to send anything out. I still see writing as a lifetime engagement, and I intend to keep improving. The books I’m interested in writing aren’t ones I consider anyone else capable of producing (otherwise there wouldn’t be much point in writing them).

Music is prevalent in your fiction. You’ve alluded to Morning Musume, Xiu Xiu, Rainer Maria, Rodan, and other acts in your pieces. How does music inform your writing?

This may change, but in comparison with how I felt ten years ago, I’m not all that interested in or impressed by music of any kind at the moment, although I continue to listen to it reflexively/compulsively, including while writing (recently it’s a lot of K-pop, interspersed with 90s IDM and random obscure hardcore). 

A lot of writers seem to be frustrated or failed musicians. This is an attitude I’m finding increasingly less tenable as I get older, and the things that continue to interest me about writing have little to do with any possible musical analogues. However I may have felt in the past, I have no desire to be a performer. 

At the same time, I continue to use what I’d consider a terminology of thought taken from music, including various ideas relating to flow, rhythm and pacing. Occasionally this is explicit, but it’s generally present even in stories which on the surface have little to do with music or sound. My awareness of sentence rhythm, paragraph length and the general progression of a piece seem to come as much from music and poetry as they do from straightforward fiction. I think I have a pretty good “ear” for prose, and all kinds of parody and mimicry has always come easily to me. 

With that said...I don’t expect there to be much direct correspondence between the musical tastes of people who’d be interested in my writing and the literary tastes of people who enjoy the same music I do. A lot of the music that people seem to expect me to be interested in, such as Throbbing Gristle and Current 93, leaves me relatively bored. Blasphemy!!!!!!

Your writing, I’ve noticed, carries heavy Marxist undertones. It doesn’t seem obvious to most people, but for some reason it immediately became obvious to me when I first read Welcome to the Arms Race (Chomu, 2015). Even so, your work doesn’t seem to fall neatly in the Marxist tradition of, say, Brecht or Pasolini. Could you elaborate on your particular brand of Marxism?

When I interviewed Damian Murphy, I noted that terms like “occult fiction” and “decadent fiction” are difficult to deploy meaningfully, because almost everyone assumes they know what is implied by them, even when the writing in question is nothing at all like their expectations in either style or content. With a term like “Marxist fiction,” this difficulty is compounded by a factor of roughly 1000000000. I’m sure at least half the people reading this immediately made up their minds and/or stopped reading after seeing it mentioned above (but don’t worry, those people can safely fuck off anyway). 

To start, I’m not interested in fictionalizing a predictable or teleological kind of Marxism with goodies and baddies, hip and likeable communitarian characters, sympathetic struggling part-time workers, etc. But the idea of material relations or material conditions constraining the actions of the characters seems to me one of the obvious markers of Post-Naturalist writing, demanding an appropriate sociological scope. This seems so basic as to be indisputable; I’m not sure how else it would be possible to write, except by imagining things happening in an ahistorical vacuum. This “timeless” approach seems not only dishonest but also lazy and boring. In practice there is never any safe or transcendent historical ground on which to stand (or sit?) while writing. 

Retreating into the past to avoid dealing with the present, or setting things in secondary fantasy worlds, strikes me as the least interesting response to real life. You’d be surprised how many writers are terrified to include smartphones, Instagram, etc. in their books. You’re situated in a specific time and place...why not attack it head on, even if it’s terrible? I feel suffocated by how nostalgic and escapist most fiction seems now, even things ostensibly considered “realist.” 

And anyone who’s made it this far and is still offended by Marxist influence, no matter how oblique, is probably not going to like my writing either. I’ll save them the trouble. 

You’ve made residence all over the world, yet you seem critical of most, if not all, human cultures. Is there any culture you identify with more than any other? What do you think could be done to improve human cultures?

I recently learned the term "third culture kid," which describes people who grew up in a country other than that of their parents' and/or the country listed on their passport. This describes my background fairly well. Apparently one trait associated with this kind of background is a comparative slipperiness/skepticism towards standard ideas of culture and nationality, combined with a hyperawareness of the edges of these concepts. An uneasy spider-sense that's triggered in situations most people would consider innocuous. 

In simple terms, while there are some countries I find easier to inhabit than others, I am not terribly enthusiastic about any nation or culture. Nationalism is poetry for the impotent and unimaginative. I also prefer not to romanticize the past and think all traditions should be subjected to constant tests of their continued relevance. I’d like to see more attempts at real crosscultural art, rather than mere globalization.

None of your collections really resemble each other. Your oeuvre, I think, can be best likened to an archipelago. They are islands, yet there are elements in each collection that distinguish them as a Justin Isis collection. What is your process for making one collection dissimilar to the previous one?

This isn’t premeditated, I just get bored easily. I’ve never understood the desire, for example, to write twenty novels set in the same fantasy world, about the same characters. That seems beyond tedious. I also don’t understand the insane compulsion to “fill in the background” with endless prequels and sequels. It seems similar to the horror vacui concept in art—fear of the void. I prefer to integrate the void. So, no sequels, prequels, trilogies or repeat business. Make it new, then make it new again. 

Many of my favorite writers and artists are stylistic chameleons: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Norman Spinrad, Lawrence Miles, Moebius and J.H. Williams III come to mind. My own books tend to occur to me as discrete projects with a clear structure and style, even when this is a collection of completely unrelated stories. This is perhaps where the musical influence I mentioned above comes in; I tend to think of collections as being structured like albums or mix-tapes, which implies detailed attention to story order and internal variety. This is true of Arms Race and Pleasant Tales II, both of which cycle somewhat schizophrenically through a range of styles and approaches. Other books, like Human Flesh and the upcoming Girl Revolution, are really closer to something like novels-in-stories or Cubist novels, where the stories aren’t necessarily related, but still form something like a coherent mood or world, which seems to demand a more consistent style and approach throughout.

What do you consider the most important message you are trying to convey with your fiction?

The obvious superiority of Neo-Decadent/Post-Naturalist approaches to writing and art. Aesthetic concerns override everything, even—hopefully—to an extent that could be considered unhealthy. 

Some people might be wondering how this squares with Marxism, which most would consider a supremely teleological stance. The answer is that I see it as a technical literary framework rather than an overriding principle. The world could be destroyed tomorrow for all we know; there may be no grand future. But so what? I’d still focus on style just the same, even if I knew this for certain.

Divorce Procedures for the Hairdressers of a Metallic and Inconstant Goddess (Snuggly, 2016) is your sole collection of poetry thus far. What did you aspire to do with this collection of poetry that you weren’t seeing in other collections of poetry, contemporary or otherwise?

Divorce Procedures was written for a specific purpose, to call out the beauty of various divinities. It’s a collection of modern Orphic hymns, expressions of religious emotions that are probably impossible in any other context. It was written during a period of focused ritual exploration and intense drug use. 

I had no real interest at the time in how the book would be received, and I still don’t particularly care what anyone makes of it. And I have no desire to engage with “the contemporary poetry world,” which seems about as airless and dispiriting an echo chamber as could be imagined. People make fun of the Instagram poets, but really the poetry of university professors is just as bad, albeit in a different way. I have to laugh at the exaggerated and incestuous acclaim heaped on the overwrought exudates of academic micropresses. 

I’ve written other poetry since Divorce Procedures came out, and I might publish it if enough of it accumulates. The recent poems I’ve done are less unified, more random, probably more liberated and playful in some ways than what I’ve done in the past.

On that note, Divorce Procedures seems to be your most explicitly occult work to date. I know you have been involved with the occult for some time. Could you describe your history with the occult?

Magick makes sense to me as praxis rather than a form of identity. I am not hung up on being considered a notable magician or outstanding occultist. That seems like one of the silliest ego traps imaginable. Neither am I interested in the politics of the occult world...I prefer to just get on with my shit.

Although I was drawn to these topics from a young age and had what in retrospect I’d consider mystical or occult experiences in childhood, it took me a lot longer than it really should have to directly get involved. I grew up steeped in both religious orthodoxy and scientific skepticism, neither of which look favorably on the occult or experiences deemed to be occult. Although I diverged into my own path fairly early, it still took me a long time to put aside that conditioning. 

I started as I suppose many people do, as an armchair magician, reading various well-known occult books. You could easily and comfortably remain at this stage for a lifetime, but as with many other areas of concern, in the end I wasn’t content to be an observer; sooner or later I felt compelled to take action. And here, I can't stress how important psychedelics were in helping me make the leap. To my mind, one of these areas implies the other. Now I see magick as the glue that holds various areas of my life together and makes apparent the correspondences between them. 

What is the most dangerous thing affecting literature today, and what should writers do to remedy this?

"Craftsmanship" and other carpentry/woodworking metaphors. Retreat into an academic guild system of ritualized networking and mutual genuflection. Workshops and the mediocrity they produce. Self-abasement, misplaced humility, lazy guilt, false wokeness, pandering of various kinds. And writers actually taking advice about writing. Who would you respect enough to accept it from? Writers should be irreparably beyond advice. 

This attitude is not popular at the moment. More precisely, it’s not part of the currently fashionable “writer pose” that you’re expected to take. Fifty years ago, the writer pose was much more pompously confrontational, with lots of obvious grandstanding. Nowadays that’s considered offensive and outdated; instead you’re supposed to be a nervous wreck barely making rent who’s soiling their underwear over climate change, or else penitentially enumerating the list of guilt trips everyone is supposed to piously send themselves on whenever the latest trigger issue is invoked. This pose does not interest me, to say the least (the earlier pose was dumb too, but for different reasons). 

“Professionalism” of all kinds needs to go. If you're trying to be a professional at this point, you're already part of the problem. Those American ideas of certified experts and “the proper way of doing things.” Exaggerated concern for “sensitivity” (read: touchiness and provincialism). True crosscultural and global thinking does not particularly require “sensitivity”; if anything it requires the opposite: patience, toughness, resiliency and a relative disregard for offense. Without those, you’re not going to last long in the wider world.

I also would prefer if writers intended to be writers rather than temporarily inconvenienced filmmakers or showrunners. If you’re setting out with the hope of having a Netflix series or whatever, I’d prefer not to read you. TV is fine, but sometimes I want to read books. 

Humanity?

Is forward.

What is the next direction for Justin Isis in the future?

At the moment I am mostly concerned with compiling Neo-Decadence: 10 Manifestos, which will contain important works from Brendan Connell, Quentin S. Crisp, Gaurav Monga, Damian Murphy, Jeremy Reed and myself. This collection will address all truly important areas of our current existence, which will relieve some of the burden of having to correct people in public all the time. One reason to write books is, of course, to forestall unnecessary conversations. 

Once this is complete I will return to my own books in progress....more specifically, the next books are Girl Revolution (linked story collection) and Invariant (novel). I have a Pleasant-style novel I’m intending to write at some point, called Gay Indolence. And yet another story collection has been stealthily assembling itself for some time; it seems to be calling itself Mars. It will be in the Arms Race vein of multiple styles, lengths and approaches. 

I'm also collaborating with Gea Philes on a graphic novel version of my story Destroying Sacred Objects with Sexual Fluids, which I'm pretty excited about.

There will be more anthologies too. I’m taking a break from editing for a while, but will return to it when I’m ready.

My overall goal is to reformulate all literature and alter its general trend in accordance with my personal aesthetic standards; I aim to achieve this by working steadily and not dying for as long as possible while making zero compromises and proudly committing commercial suicide whenever necessary. 

What do you consider your most important theme?

I have certain topics I’m preoccupied with that recur across books with varying degrees of emphasis, sometimes in more parodic or lighthearted form, and sometimes taking a more straightforward or even grim expression. Conflicting notions of identity, radical constructivism as a positive imaginative force rather than a wishy-washy relativism or loss of meaning, the contingent or contextual (rather than essential) nature of cultural and national concepts...these seem to recur with some frequency, alongside various examinations of physical life, the integration of sexuality and spirituality, and concepts of self-determination pitted against oppressive thought systems, traditions and daily routines. The emptiness of capitalist notions of “career” and “professional development,” etc.

There is also something like an internal mythology or personal worldview that runs like a silent motor beneath a lot of my writing, but I don’t want to spell it out in too much tedious detail here. I’ll just say that it has something to do with viewing humans (and what they may turn into) as integrated/expanded beings rather than fixed intellects or egos with unchanging components. But the emphasis is just as much on grasping, chewing, sleep, sex, and often fairly childish story ideas as it is on abstract themes or concepts. The exploration of language and the various realms it can produce takes precedence over everything.