Amber Sparks
How did The Desert Places come to be? How did you
approach a collaborative work differently than working alone?
Rob and I had been talking about collaborating on something for a while,
and this idea of a monster kept coming up. In my head it was this sort of
sloughing off of man's corruption, and in Rob's head it was this more primitive
being, a force much older than man, and I think we sort of both realized - why
couldn't it be both? Why couldn't evil evolve just like any animal organism?
And it sort of took off from there.
Working collaboratively was
very different - and good for me, I think. Everyone should try it, because I
think it forces you out of your comfort zone, your go-to themes, your specific
rhythms, and it throws you off balance. It makes you reach for something
totally new. The way we approached it was that one of us would write a piece,
and the other would totally rewrite it, and then the other would totally
rewrite it again. It's almost like we were both writing ourselves out of the
work, rather than into it, which I think really makes it both truly
collaborative and also weirdly absent of us in a way. It was also kind of
gleefully fun to abandon parts of our own style, and to attack and kill each
other's darlings. I kept changing Rob's signature POV, and he kept slashing and
burning all my corny jokes and puns. It was the rare situation in which you get
to edit not based on the needs of the manuscript, but just based purely on your
own selfish interest.
How did you get in the mindset of writing evil as a
character? Was it difficult to find that distinct voice?
I think that was the
easiest part. Evil changes, grows, even multiples, during the course of the
book, so it just came very intuitively based on whatever period in history we
were writing about. And neither Rob nor I have particularly "modern"
voices - I think we're both throwbacks, in some way, to less contemporary
styles of writing - so the monster didn't have any sort of drearily Twilight-like sensibilities or anything.
It doesn't sparkle or live in Seattle or fall in love with thin human teens. It
may live and move in the future, and be aware of pop songs and slang in a vague
way, but it's formal in a much more ancient, primal way, I would hope. It is
never, ever human.
You often seem concerned with myth in your writing, as
well as death. How did you come to write about the origins and nature of evil?
How did your previous works inform this one?
Ha, true, true. I have
always been immensely interested in the human condition on an epic scale, and
also in beginnings and endings - and nothing tells those stories, and
humanity's attempts to explain them, better than myth. And I think, not to be
too pessimistic, but that the story of humanity is the story of evil - not that
we are inherently evil, but that there has always been, in all myth and legend,
the yin and yang of good and evil. And I was very interested, in this case, in
evil as understood by ancient cultures - as a necessary force that exists to
create balance in the universe. And what the sudden and unnatural growth of
human evil might do to encourage or thwart such a force.
Robert Kloss
How did The Desert Places come to
be? How did you approach a collaborative work differently than working
alone?
Desert Places either began when I began seeing the
monster or when Amber suggested we collaborate.
I try to write something that belongs to me, to my
particular way of thinking and seeing. This book belongs to us both, but in a
way it belongs to neither of us. We wrote in our separate corners, but we
revised to muddy the idea of authorship. I killed elements that Amber found
essential, and she did the same to my stories. And that attitude is quite
divorced from my usual philosophy.
How did you get in the mindset of
writing evil as a character? Was it difficult to find that distinct voice?
I came to the task with the mindset. I sat before the computer every morning and there it was. I had the voice inside of me.
The PANK review of How the Days of Love and Diptheria said you write like you have a fever. The review excerpt on your page for The Alligators of Abraham describes it as a "fever dream." I can see that same quality in The Desert Places, something almost hallucinatory. How do you think this quality relates to your writing style? Do you feel like all three works are connected in some way?
A fever is one way of entering into a
different kind of perception, and witnessing a work of art is another. So my
goal as a writer is to teach myself a new kind of perception, to bring about
the fever and to go into it, and to write a work in such a way that submerges
the reader in that perception.
One work follows into the next, and each work
should teach the artist a new way of perceiving, or extend the prior learned
perceptions. So Desert Places does that, in a way, but less
dramatically, because my influence is ultimately only a third of the total.
In The
Alligators of Abraham, you worked within the timeline of American history,
creating an alternate history. The
Desert Places is also a sort of alternate history. What draws you to that
type of story?
Those books are just other ways of seeing the past.
That’s the past I believe in or want to believe. The flame I hold my hand to.
I’ve heard people say they’ve looked up elements of Alligators to see if
they actually happened—which seems reasonable enough. My grandmother, however,
did not read with Google at her side. She took the events of the story as
historical fact, and she was absolutely fascinated, as you might imagine. And
that taught me something valuable about witnessing a work of art, you know; I
now prefer my grandmother’s method.
Well, writing about the past is another way of
writing about what we call the present. I try to bring about a kind of overlap
of events, in a way. It’s just a way of forcing a different way of perceiving.
I want to see different things. I want to see in different ways. I want to
believe in aspects of reality that the recognizable and contemporary world
fights me from believing in. I think it has something to do with Google maps
and satellites peering into every cover where once the corners held mystery,
and also the way everything is so well lit. We don’t understand darkness any
longer. The way darkness once looked, the way it sounded. The absolute darkness
had a way of shaping belief that we have lost. So I try to imagine a world that
retains that darkness.
Matt Kish
How did you get involved
with The Desert Places?
Robert Kloss first
approached me about it, asking if I would be interested. I had been lucky
enough to work on the cover and some interior illustrations for his earlier
novel The Alligators of Abraham and that book hit me so hard
and affected me so deeply that I knew I would work with Robert on anything, for
any reason, any time he asked. I was very drawn to the way he builds his
sentences, with all the metal and rust and blood and decay and smoke and ash.
It had been far too long since I had read something that I could really feel
slashing me open slowly like that. It was an incredibly powerful experience,
and although he didn't tell me much at the time about The Desert Places,
what little he shared about the nature of the book and the way in which it had
been conceived and created by both he and Amber was all I needed to know to
immediately agree to be a part of it.
At what point in the book's creation did you start working on the illustrations?
The text was complete at
the point when I came on board, so I was able to read the entire book over and
over again, to really immerse myself completely in its poison while my ideas
formed. In a sense, it was a kind of dream project for an illustrator because
no one - neither Robert nor Amber nor anyone from Curbside Splendor - told me
what to do. At all. I was more or less free to explore the text, respond to it,
create a vision of it, in any way I wanted. No one asked for a specific number
of illustrations or mandated a certain kind of aesthetic or anything like that.
The entire experience was quite strange in that sense because it was just the
text and me, sort of circling one another in these very dark places in my head,
ripping pieces of each other out until something even more horrific could be
assembled from the remains.
How did you arrive at the
subject matter and style of your illustrations, given that the book is about
the nature and history of evil?
I have always been drawn to
the mythic, and both Robert and Amber work with that in very clear and specific
ways. That is part of why their writing has such a visceral impact on me, and
seems to fire these visions in my mind almost effortlessly. For better or
worse, I tend to get very impatient and irritated with a lot of introspection
and character or dialogue driven writing. I have always felt that if I wanted
that kind of thing, I would just spend every weekend at some hipster bar
listening to 30-somethings talk about their lives. When it comes to writing that
I see visions of, that I want to illustrate, I need the kind of lunatic
ambition that something like The Desert Places exemplifies.
That ambition, that fearlessness, and the freedom that was given to me combined
in some very strange ways so these illustrations of mine were drawn from some
very personal places. It was as if Robert and Amber had given me this black
mass of text, saying something like "Here, this is what we think the
history of evil is like. Now show us what you think." And I started there.
I had just completed 100
illustrations for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and I had
spent nearly 8 months thinking about that book and its ideas constantly. That
black river flowed very naturally into The Desert Places and I
found a lot of common ground between the two books as well as some stark
differences. My illustrations were direct, personal, violent, visceral
responses to Robert's and Amber's writing. Every element of my art is connected
directly to their ideas. Genocide, lynchings, plague, war, conquest, rape,
oppression, corruption, futility, and the endless hopelessness of these
infections erupted almost uncontrollably from me. These pieces are actually far
more personal than my Heart of Darkness pieces in that I can
recognize myself in them, and I look at them with a mingled sense of awe and
absolute revulsion at what I had a hand in bringing into the world. Which is
honestly what I had hoped for. This is not an easy book. Not to read, and not
to look at. Which is one of the reasons why it is so important.
With Moby Dick in Pictures,
you were working in conversation with one of the cornerstones of American
literature. How was it different working with a piece of new fiction?
The way I read tends to
surprise a lot of people in that, whether the reading results in a visual
exploration of a novel or not, it is entirely, obsessively and maybe even
arrogantly personal. While reading Melville, or Conrad, or any author for that
matter, I never once thought much about things like their place in the canon,
their historical importance, their lives or even their personalities. Reading
for me is an intensely personal experience, a relationship between me and the
book. Maybe that's disrespectful, I don't really know and I don't really care.
It's been very interesting for me to form a kind of tenuous friendship with
Robert and, later on, Amber, both of whom I have exchanged a few emails with
but never met. But while working on these illustrations a concern about what
they would think of the art never arose. I can't work that way, and I don't
think any artist could. Or should. There is enough of my art easily available
for viewing online that anyone asking me to work with them should have a very
good idea of what I do. These images are the way I respond to the books and
what they say to me. They are often as much about me as they are about the book
itself. It took me a long time to understand that, and even longer to come to
peace with it. I suppose that in working with a dead author, especially an
author like Melville whose writings have been explored and interpreted by
dozens of artists over the decades, there is no real chance of rejection by the
writer which would seem to alleviate some of that burden, if it existed for me.
But I can honestly say that I never concerned myself with that kind of
rejection with The
Desert Places. I did what I had
to do. I did the only thing I could do with the art, and that was to make it
absolutely real and to not compromise on anything. When the journey is complete
and the work is done, I do always hope that it will be met with a positive
reaction, especially from the author. I feel incredibly fortunate to be have
been able to work with Robert twice now because I feel like in some ways he and
I are both mining the same vein of ideas, just in different ways. It seems that
way with Amber as well. Even better, both of the writers were very enthusiastic
about my involvement and seemed to indicate that they felt these illustrations
provided a different but equally powerful window on the ideas in the book. And
it's exactly that kind of response that I hope for. They welcomed me aboard as
an illustrator and when the work was done made me feel in a very genuine way
like a third partner and an equal collaborator. I can see that kind of thing
fundamentally changing how I work in the future, especially if I have an
opportunity to partner with a writer early on in the process of creating a
book, but it's still too early for me to know if I will get that chance. I'd
love to work with Robert again, basically on anything, and Amber's writing has
really made a huge impact on me in unexpected ways too.
Purchase The Desert Places HERE.
Read Taylor’s accompanying
review HERE.
