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–Interview by Rachel Mennies
Rachel Mennies: We’ve talked a lot about you seeing yourself as both a visual artist and a writer—I was curious if you could talk a little bit about a “hybrid novel,” the term you use to describe A Film About Billy?
Daniel McCloskey: I call my book a hybrid novel because it’s a novel that has comics in it. The book has 250 pages and about 80 of those are comics pages, but that term could apply to a broad range of longish narratives that integrate non-traditional elements.
RM: Okay—so that’s one way to distinguish it from, say, a more traditional graphic novel?
DM: Yes. A Film About Billy is more of a true prose book that has chunks of comics in it. It’s a novel about a kid filming a documentary about his dead friend during an international suicide epidemic—so it was important for me to have this character show part of his documentary. [My original] screenplay format wasn’t working, so I decided the text needed comics to give that glimpse.
RM: That’s one of the things I thought was interesting about A Film About Billy: you have the hybrid novel, and then within the novel, you have the protagonist documenting his own life, and you’re seeing both the art that he’s making and the narrative of the story together.
DM: Yeah, it’s a book about justifying being alive by making things. It’s also about global epidemics and government conspiracy. Basically, it becomes a B movie about loving B movies with a character who is making B movies, and I think the comics help bolster the theme of lo-fi cheesiness that A Film About Billy is so interested in.
RM: I’ve noticed in A Film About Billy and in your [Top of the Line] zines—all of those works are so wildly imaginative—the fantastical strangeness of the characters themselves and the way they interact—I found it even more over-the-top to have them rendered in visuals. I’m curious to know: when you’re imagining, are you doing so visually or in writing? Do you plan this ahead?
DM: I do plan, but when I write or draw I never know exactly what I’m going to end up with. Each word and line shapes the whole as I go, and if I capture an image just right, it’s always a surprise. I find myself laughing out loud at the final stroke of a face or crying as I write. I think that’s where the beauty and play of storytelling comes from: the ability to surprise and delight yourself.
So for example, I’ve been working on this book, Cloud Town, and I have a general sense of what’s going on, but I’m not sure what it will look like in the end, and if I don’t figure out what happens, no one else on the planet will ever know either. That’s the most powerful suspense that exists in fiction—it’s in the fiction you write. That’s a joy I’m hoping to share with my readers as much as possible with my next project.
RM: Since you’re talking about it, would you tell us a little more about the new project?
DM: Cloud Town is another hybrid work about an alternate present, in which all but 100 square miles of Asia disappeared in 1945 and were replaced with a thick cloud-like substance. The story is about the people of that live on the remaining scrap of land in a community first built to study the Cloud and the creatures that emerge from it. The process so far is intimately affected by the fact that I am writing it while I travel the country living in a van. I’m writing the book by hand 24 pages at a time with no takebacks. It is ink and watercolor and pencil and glue. Hopefully the aesthetics will be a reminder to my readers that they are experiencing my story as I do, so that they might experience some part of that ultimate suspense—the joy of moose hunting in the dark.
RM: Yeah. (laughs)
DM: It’s been exciting to work on. Every time I look at the pages it reminds me that a book can be anything.
RM: You mentioned both when discussing your new book and A Film About Billy that you’re also making books, which is to say you’re physically crafting books and not just creating them as a writer. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you about the Cyberpunk Apocalypse house and the maker’s side of your art—both the physical process of bookmaking and the house you run.
DM: I have a frustrated relationship with the written language. I failed English all growing up. I had to go to summer school, the whole nine yards. But when I was 15, this guy Lew Houston handed me a sweaty wad of xerox paper out of his back pocket in the basement of a punk house. It was a little stapled book, a zine called Blurt #2: Picking Scabs. At that moment, for fifteen-year-old me, Blurt was the most perfect piece of literature in the universe, and that is what got me into writing.
The Cyberpunk Apocalypse is a writers’ project I started in December 2008 hoping to build community and build culture around writing in the same way I saw punk houses work for musicians. I bought a house for cheap, filled it with people, and at first I didn’t charge any rent as long as people were working on their writing and pitching for utilities. We read each other’s work every month, and set up events. Today the project is based out of an old, messed-up apartment building in Pittsburgh’s Northside, and it’s housed 45 writers from across the US and Canada. We have long-term residents who pay cheapish rent and run the space, and we have month-long residents who live for free as long as they give a reading during their stay.
Maybe the Cyberpunk Apocalypse is to grad school what the zine is to a traditional book—a cobbled-together substitute that is both more and less than its clean-cut cousin. There is a power gained by doing something differently, and there power in letting your parts show. Seeing a zine is knowing how to make one. All you need is paper, staples, and something to say. If you saw the Cyberpunk Apocalypse you would think “I can do this,” and you would be right.
It’s worth mentioning here that I’m ending the Cyberpunk project this spring. I’m asking the residents to move out at the end of April, and I’m having a funeral for the project in May. Maybe I’m done with DIY-grad school and need to move on, but I still like letting the pencil show through my drawings. I like the added magic an unusual object or unusual space can add to a life and a story.
RM: Can you say a little more about this house being a recreatable project, for anyone else interested?
DM: Sure. Here’s a three-step plan to creating your own artists’ residency program:
1. Carve out any kind of space you could imagine. If you have a car with no tires on it—aces. The nicer it is, the nicer it is.
2. Tell people about it on the Internet or word of mouth. Give it a name and accept applications.
3. Be okay with strangers in your space all the time. (laughs)
(Read Rachel Mennies’ review of A Film About Billy, here.)
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Rachel Mennies is the author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the 2013 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize (Texas Tech University Press), and the chapbook No Silence in the Fields (Blue Hour Press). She is a member of AGNI’s editorial staff.