Richard Froude - At first seem like high-stakes non-sequiturs, then a study in perfect, surprising aphorism, then a deftly woven web of profundity

Richard Froude, Fabric, Horse Less Press, 2011.

"The complexities of alienation hybridize the mouth, double the tongue. The logic of Froude’s syntax gives us, mercifully, the poetics of the divided tongue: in the space between multiple possibilities, we are invited to trespass our own borders . . . that we might – finally – hear (and learn to speak) radical change and transformation. FABRIC is a remarkable and necessary book, a wonderful achievement." - Selah Saterstrom

"Of FABRIC: Accepting whatever its elegant sentences say, in their not conventional logic, I’m convinced it contains whatever I need to understand it. It says it’s about memory, numbers (sequence), consciousness. . . And I guess it is, I really like reading it (a big compliment). Being in the fabric of it, though it is so mysterious – an amazing book." - Alice Notley

"I love Richard Froude’s declarative, incandescently plain sentences, which at first seem like high-stakes non-sequiturs, then a study in perfect, surprising aphorism, then a deftly woven web of profundity. The formal distillation and intellectual range of this book are impressive enough; even more so is Froude’s gentle but insistent touching on questions of God, mortality, war, memory, family, intimacy, and history. Froude sets up poetic shop in the fraught space between ‘terror and fertility,’ and wrests from it this exceptionally beautiful, intelligent book." - Maggie Nelson

"This is a British blurb, because we were both born in England. Richard Froude is sort of brilliant. To translate: he is a complete and utter bloody genius. I am thrilled to stand behind this gorgeous, fused book. I remember when I met Richard, and we sat on some stairs at Naropa. I tried to explain to him that he was doing something strange and beautiful in his writing, that was different to other kinds of writing. I said: 'Have you ever considered the possibility that you're actually a novelist?' He looked at me blankly, but now I think the prediction has come true. What is a novel? That's separate. Ask Richard. Ask the person who mutates the given form." - Bhanu Kapil

“The United States contains at least ten cities of Bristol. Each is in a different state: Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Maine.
We flew home from Orlando International on July 17th, 1992. I took everything: pamphlets, menus, cups, even a toilet roll wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper. I believed that if I carried these things with me, then they would stay with me, become part of me. I mention this in relation to Frank Sinatra, Howard Carter and the realization that in these rooms inside apartments we are collecting the items that will grant us passage.
This is how Bristol, Indiana exists as the dream of Bristol, England. And America, as it is known, as the waking dream of all who have arrived. What is known as the American Dream is a reduction. The common and singular dream of these dreams simplified into linear narrative. I am trying to write the perfect American story: the book whose name is God.
It becomes difficult to explain just what is happening in American poet Richard Froude’s first trade collection Fabric without wanting to quote from large swaths of this extended narrative, this extended essay-poem.
Subtitled “Preludes to the Last American Book,” Froude’s Fabric is even difficult to describe in terms of straight lyric poetry, despite the many qualities they share, existing somewhere between prose and poetry, but something other than the straight “prose poem.”
There is a sharp and deepening wisdom here, writing out a series of narrative threads that begin to reveal themselves, later on in the book, and wrap around each other, swirling across breathless pages. How do his poems manage to know so much? As he writes:
I have tried to understand death as related to the idea of waking. I am not certain of the name for this relation. It may be more appropriate to ask somebody better acquainted with mathematics.
We drove to a beach where the rock was said to be rich with fossils. I knew about ammonites and trilobites and harbored dreams of owning a metal detector.
Fossils, like windows, are moments of discourse. Music is distinct from the measurement and transcription of sound. It is a form of recurrence.
I have tried to understand waking as the moment when the world ceases to make sense. Maybe one day everything with be collected in sequence and bound with leather.” - Rob McLennan

„I just got a copy two days ago and read it in two sittings: the first in the downstairs handicapped bathroom at my college’s student center, and the second while wrangling my youngest daughter. In both sessions, it seemed like time well spent, with essayistic entries–prose poems, poetic prose, linked and lovely and learned–dancing from page to page. It’s more lean and perhaps less ambitious than other poetic prose meditations, and yet it is that small scale, that personal cabaret performance, that makes this a cut above for me.
“Every book is an account of its own failure,” Froude writes.
But what a failure! I haven’t looked up who Froude is, other that he is on the young side (gleaned from the bio) and has blurbs from the right people to get this book in the right hands (Alice Notley, Maggie Nelson, others). Here’s hoping you’ll pick it up.“ - Daniel Nester

„Prediction:
Richard Froude’s FABRIC: Preludes to the Last American Book is a sentence you will be hearing.
Wolf in a Field heard it from Seth Landman, and we hear it here (or you heard it from ____ _______ or from Selah Saterstrom, Alice Notley, Maggie Nelson, or Bhanu Khapil, who gets it just right in her “British blurb”:
I tried to explain to [the author] that he was doing something strange and beautiful in his writing, that was different to other kinds of writing. I said: “Have you ever considered the possibility that you’re actually a novelist?” He looked at me blankly, but now I think the prediction has come true. What is a novel? That’s separate. Ask Richard. Ask the person who mutates the given form.
Yesterday I tore FABRIC–its subtitle calls to mind, as does, at first crack, the blocks of poem and days inside, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; its title, in turn, reminds one of another Richard (Rick Myersº) and the other Mayer, Rosemary, whose 41 Fabric Swatches I recently cataloged: does anyone know if there were ever swatches?–from an envelope, in which it was buffered by Thuggery and Grace (ed. Froude, Anne Waldman, & Erik Anderson), which is mailed to you, while it lasts, if you ask for it. Ask for it. Thing starts with Renee Gladman’s “Syntax and the Event of Reading”, which starts “I want to talk to you today about two possibilities of the sentence”: when Renee Gladman–who was reading, when I first read FABRIC, in the City where Lutz will be reading, as I read it again, with Lisa Robertson at SpaceSpace in the Poetry Time between; damn “I do not live in New York” (meaning: move) is a lonely sentence: at least there’s now a Poetry Time audio archive and there’s always when Gladman–wants to talk to you about the possibilities of the sentence, you listen. (Gladman: “It is usually from this perspective that the sentence begins to align itself with the city.” Froude in FABRIC: “I tried but could not write the city.”)
Also inside are two hearted Ohio poems by Sasha Steensen, Ohio’s own Merrill Gilfillan, goodgraphs from Noah Eli Gordon‘s Dysgraphia, Laura Elrick, and more, including two poems by Susan Scarlata, whose It Might Turn Out We Are Real is the other first full-length offering from Horse Less Press, of chapbook fame: Tobin, Cohen, Schapira, Schomburg, Starkweather, Browning, Rexilius, Becker, and so many more, including forthcomers Brian Foley, and Jennifer Denrow (four poems in T&G, and more at Brave Men Press), who took just the right photograph on the cover of FABRIC, which does everything I like to see a book do. Hear it go:
FABRIC: A Prelude to the Last American Book. A preliminary catalog.
• Memorable epigraphs from Jabes, WCW, Woolf, Dock Ellis (…”I was zeroed in on the glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much.”…), Jabes, etc.
• It has four sections (the fourth, anti-first, has three parts, the fifth section is a Preface), begins alphabetically (“At Bristol Zoo”) enough and ends equally. The sixth section is a blank canvas dashes everything forever
• St. George, New Year’s Day, all the days of the week, all the days/months/years, Deleuze/Cortazar/Darwin/Lincoln, The Great Fire of London and Portland stone, Wittgenstein’s (sister/perfection/design) “genius”/”failure,” Emerson/Sappho, Giotto, Caravaggio, Sartre, Satie:
From the first section, TYPE:
What is 1982?
A silent movie.
What is silence?
Simultaneously a window and a bird. Like similar movies, it would have often been accompanied by piano. When Erik Satie claimed to be a phonometrician rather than a musician, he meant that he measured and wrote down sounds. The word ‘poet’ makes me uncomfortable.
Like Satie (like Cage after, like Duchamp and Dickinson and Coolidge during), like Gladman, like Lutz, like Robertson, like Jabes, like Rosmarie Waldrop, like WC(like Diane)W, like Woolf (before Borges before Homer before Joyce), like Dock Ellis (like Eliot Weinberger), like Genya Turovskaya‘s DEAR JENNY (like Jenny Boully, like Jennifer Martenson’s UNSOUND), like Jean Day, like Stephen Rodefer, like Steve Benson, like Michelle Taransky, like Blake Butler & Dana Ward (Happyesterday), like Gertrude Stein, like Donald Sutherland (tho I guess Gallop said: “Pigeons on the granite, damn it.”), like Judy Garland (Wizard of Oz is all over FABRIC and vice versa), Richard Froude is a writer who makes lines (“straight and jagged”: between blanks, between other lines, between poetry and prose) uncomfortable.
{Placeholder: perhaps this post is a prelude to a new breed of Hybrid, measured with due louditude to New Wave/York/School(s) and (Big Other’s) New Sentence, & on the analogy of Vila-Matas’ Writers of the No, Writers of the Third Word? Probably not, tho I just read in Lewis Freedman’s notebook from when he was writing The Third Word: “measure / meant”}
When Satie enters, early in the book, I put on his furniture music, and was rewarded four pages later:
What is night?
It is best understood as rhythm. We gave most of our furniture away.
On the back of FABRIC, Khapil asks, What is a novel? In the first section alone, the book answers: What is 1982? What is silence? What is night? Another answer:
What is transition?
A movement between states. I am trying to remember the various ways I’ve understood the afterlife. For example, my uncle [...]
In Sartre’s No Exit, it takes the form of what the Eagles sing about in Hotel Californi–a strange boarding house from which departure is deceptively impossible. [...]
Similarly, I believed that when I died my mind would freeze. Whatever I was thinking at that moment I would think forever. At times when I suspected mortal danger (before a rollercoaster, on a plane) I would think only the best thoughts I could. This still seems reasonable. What troubles me is that I can’t remember what any of those thoughts were.
What follows are four more answers to “What is 1982?” (A Dorothy, Atari, Apocalpyse, and Augustine are not the answers, but close.)
In the second section, CONTEXTURE, another type of answer:
So, it is a work of becoming?
It is a work of straight and jagged lines onto which language is superimposed. The chamber does not exist in the original pattern but in the curvature that language affords. Such was the response of the patent office. Such is the story of the drugstore.
Midway through A Confederate General from Big Sur, Richard Brautigan refers to the ‘rivets in Ecclesiastes.’ Specifically, this is a reference to his lead character Jesse’s method of reading by punctuation. When I started writing this I understood its relation to the preceding although now it isn’t as clear. I think I am remembering Erik Satie: reading (as well as writing) can exist as a practice of measurement.
And another:
On a website where users post questions for others to answer, between ‘What does your birthday mean?’ and ‘How do Volcanoes work?’ I found ‘Have you ever seen a dead body?’
The third section, THE DASHES (A SILENT MOVIE, A DREAM) has answers by the name of Alfred:
Insistence on decisive battle will be retained into the twenty first century. I can offer no illustration but this mirror. Am I to play Alfred? I think so, for now.
In place of logic, may I offer you these trinkets?
Here are my medals. Here is my gun. Her silence is white. / Cut with a dah or needle. / Dear Marjorie: These are my wishes of the season.
I want to type everything that plays out between Alfred and Marjorie and THE DASHES, but I will stop short. I will type only three more pieces of many:
This disrupts the logic of prayer. The text becomes deranged, split into its constituent parts (though these parts are themselves deranged: one molecule strontium, one molecule zinc).
These are weak bonds, the likes of:
DASH#1 Sticks
DASH #2 Straw
DASH#3 An old brick shithouse

After he was born it took Yuri Gagarin 34 years to die. It took Alfred only 40.
In the corresponding illustration, a garden. Alfred leads me down a path lined with pink rhododendron. he has led me this way before. Beneath a yew tree we stop at the bust of a gorilla. Its name is Alfred. We stare at it for days.
Such a prayer is conceived without discernible truth value.
I chew these terms until they turn to powder.
_ _ _
There was a rumor that ‘all’ meant ‘everything.’
There was a rumor that to breathe was forbidden.
Don’t you have a machine that puts food in the mouth and pushes it down?
In that excerpt, the three (actual) dashes (which actually top every page in every section) represent a page break. The next page looks (partly) like this:
What is a novel? The third section, like the whole book, begins with a book (a “prayer book”: but turning the page we learn that “The first eighty consist of three short plays”) and ends (after eleven wildly entertaining pages) almost as it began (“By January”). In between, it asks “Is this the argument?” (The third dash is offstage, but answers anyway.)
The fourth section, OCEANOGRAPHY (ANTI-TYPE) has two enviable epigraphs (Jabes, again–What, in fact, haunts me, is the last book: the one we will never write and which all our books try to look like, just as the universe in its becoming each day resembles a little more the pre-existing universe.–and Hejinian: Sway is built into skyscrapers, since it is natural to trees.) and three numbered parts (dashes?). One paragraph, respectively, from each:

1. Typically, recollections such as these are misconstrued. I first caught sight of her through stained glass windows. Her arms colored orange, her neck a deep blue and the twelve apostles danced sadly upon her saffron forehead. She drew my attention away from the vestry. Led it out onto the lawn. I followed her through the dusky streets as the last operational lighthouse, suspected of barbituate manufacture, quietly roused the trawlers.
2. Dear Gretl: I know that an American book is a book of movement. I know that movement is only seldom accompanied by silence. On her first night in the hospital, Marjorie heard a heart monitor flatline. It was the heart monitor of a woman two beds down on the opposite side of the ward. This is the ward to which I always return.
3. The last book is the unwritable book. The book that by its absence enables aperture, the means by which we touch the world. Jackie says that dying is like waking then realizing the life you thought you’d lived was a dream. And from this, instead of a new day, all that begins is your own absence. I have been calling him Jackie but his name is also Alfred. I can carry him no further.
Finally, a paragraph from 5. APOLOGIES FOR THE TIN MAN (A PREFACE), the last section of the book (at least the last with words) and the first with blanks:



What is a novel? What it’s not is not new.
Whatever else it is, FABRIC is a BOOK.
GO, etc.
ºI don’t know if Rick Myers is actually named Richard, but I’ve been wanting to remind myself to write about his work as well and why not now. After all, it fits this post that the work currently at the top of his page is called (in part) “(Afterimage Prologue)”- Nathaniel Otting

„ How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
- In a way my first book was Tarnished Mirrors, my translation of Baudelaire. Then followed two chapbooks. Although the second of these—The History of Zero—was a book length manuscript, it always felt like stuff I had to work through before I wrote a “first book.” So I’m going to talk about FABRIC in this question. That’s what I think of as my first book.
It stopped the anxious feeling that nobody would ever deem a book I wrote publishable. Other than that, if anything changed my life it was the circumstances in which I wrote the book forcing me to face things I had avoided for a long time. This was not because of the book, but the book was because of these circumstances. In the time I was writing most of FABRIC I often found myself overcome with sadness and anxiety. I was meeting with a counsellor who encouraged me to address the things I was feeling by writing: chiefly, absence from my home country, issues with my health and ultimately my own mortality. These were not things I wanted to think about. It’s not like I’m “over that” now, but you could say that being present with those thoughts has changed my life, that is, my interior and imaginary life. Day to day things are pretty much the same.
I think the biggest difference I feel in my recent work comes from allowing myself to stop consciously trying to be a poet because it was something I felt I should do. I have divorced that title. I don’t need it and, of course, it doesn’t need me. If people say I am a poet that’s fine. I just don’t need them to. Now I can write whatever I want.
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
- Well, I don’t think I really did come to poetry first. I don’t necessarily consider FABRIC to be a book of poetry. I’ve been more comfortable thinking about it as nonfiction. I have been to school twice for writing and only applied to those two schools. The first time I had to decide what genre I was writing in was when I applied to the MFA at Naropa. I applied to poetry because you only needed 15 pages of writing rather than 30 for fiction. I was only confident in 15 of my pages. Then when I applied to the DU PhD, although I had not written what I considered to be a poem for two or three years, I applied in poetry because I generally prefer the conversations that happen around poetry over those around fiction or nonfiction. I think the conversation around nonfiction is changing for the better and is now more interesting to me than poetry. But things change all the time.
How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
- I make lots of notes. I love notes. I don’t know about how long things take to get started, it really varies from piece to piece. But when it happens, it happens very quickly, then nothing for weeks, then an amazing three hours.
Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
- I nearly always write with the larger work in mind. I think perhaps I write more like a novelist in that way. Am I a novelist? A nonfiction novelist? Maybe I am. I very rarely write shorter pieces that are not part of my larger work. When I do, they often find their way into the project.
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
- That’s interesting to think of readings as part of the creative process. I hadn’t thought of that but yes, absolutely, they are part of my creative process. They press me to make my work as good as it can be. It’s one thing to have it on my computer or even published in a book or magazine. It’s another to stand up in the flesh and deliver it to people. I do enjoy giving readings. I think I’m quite good at them and I love doing things I think I’m good at. Shooting pool, Gameboy Tetris, Facebook Scrabble.
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
- I don’t know what the current questions are. More important to me is that I know what some of my questions are. I do not anticipate satisfactory answers. I think there are also questions I am addressing that I don’t even know I am addressing, or am unable to articulate. I don’t mean to suggest these questions originate with me. They are just the things I come back to:

What does it mean to be alive? What happens when we die? Why do we die? What does “God” mean? Where have I come from? Why do I think I am the person I think I am? Why does this feel like that which also feels like the other? Why do I miss everyone so much? How will all this information around me help? How can I express any of this in language?
I think of these questions less as theoretical concerns and more as just concerns. I mean, qualifying them as theoretical (even if it’s correct) feels unnecessary. I do not come to writing with a theory of how any of these questions might be answered. I want to think of writing as begetting theory in its own becoming. I want to, so I do.
What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
- Yes, writers have a role in larger culture. Everyone has a role in culture.
I think the writer’s role should be to discern and express things that matter, undertaken with brutal and disarming honesty about these things and themselves. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done in fiction. I think the core of fiction is honesty.
What matters? Well, do you feel something deeply and powerfully? Does it frighten or overwhelm you? Does it fill you with joy, dread, love, compassion etc.? Does it feel like premonition? Does it not leave you alone? If the answer to any of these questions is yes then it probably matters. When Pound famously said that literature is news that stays news he was pretty much on it.
But, all this said, whatever role you want, that’s your role. You decide. Who am I to tell any writer—or anyone—what they should be doing?
Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
- I’ve only had to do it twice and both times I found it difficult, although I must say that the two people I worked with were very intelligent, talented, generous people. It didn’t matter. It was still very difficult for me. Both of these occasions were journal publications. I’m still open to the process. I think I can see how it could be amazing.
What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
- “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
That’s what came to mind. My own literary pretensions aside, it certainly bears remembering, especially if, like me, you happen to be a straight, white male.
How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
- The notion of genre has very little appeal to me as a writer. As such, movement between genres appeals as an act of quiet subversion, especially when that movement can occur without moving at all. That is, to stay still and let other’s ideas of genres move around you. This may seem passive. I’m fine with that because I don’t think it is. Imagine there’s no country. It isn’t hard to do. I love how John Lennon described that song as the Communist Manifesto set to music. I also love how in this interview (http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&extrasfile=A09F76BE-B0D0-B086-B653FFBC137719A6.html) Kathy Acker talks about Pasolini’s refusal of separation as an approach to genre. It turns the passive into active: an intentional act of refusal.
Excerpts from the project I’ve been working on have been published as fiction, nonfiction and poetry. I see no generic distinction between these excerpts, now or as I was writing them. I mentioned my strained relation to the title of “poet.” My major trouble was thinking of it as something I could call myself. I prefer to think of it as a destination, something others can attribute to you.
I was talking to a writer in New York about this and he said that by choosing to publish writing as a particular genre you are giving instructions on how it should be read. I respect this but I do not feel the need to give that particular instruction. It feels more like a limit. I don’t want limits. Open the doors! Go crazy!
I think moving between translation and my own work is a different question. To me, translation is the greatest apprenticeship I could possibly take on. It feels very different to my own writing. In translation, I am much more concerned with the text beginning at the level of the word rather than the sentence. I love how the intimacy with a text I have translated leaks into my own work. For example, I translated the “Song of Songs” last year. I have found that syntax possessing my current writing in the strangest ways.
What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
- I wake up, use the bathroom, feed the cats, read the internet (email, Facebook, ESPN, BBC, Wikipedia), eat toast and Marmite. Most days I don’t physically write. I mean, I write emails and lists and all that, but I don’t generate writing that is part of my creative practice. I make this physical distinction because every day I think about it and this thinking constitutes the largest part of my creative practice.
When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
- I tend to just let it stall. It has taken me a lot of time and anxiety to get to a place where I am OK to do that. I think I’m there now. The writing always comes back. If I notice that I’m not writing a lot then I make a conscious effort to read more.
What fragrance reminds you of home?
- I have no real answer so I will tell you this: the year after college I moved back to live with my mum. I drove to work every morning at 6am past the docks and the industrial estates. On one side of the highway was a huge bakery (more like a bread factory), on the other side a chemical works. The smell was amazing but something wasn’t right. I’d always get a whiff of chemical scent mixed with the fresh bread. I couldn’t tell where one smell ended and the other began. That was in Bristol in 2001. I’ve lived in Colorado now on and off for 6 years. Whenever it’s about to snow, Denver smells like dogshit.
David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
- The books I am interested in reading and writing come from everything. I wrote out a huge long list of things I am influenced by then deleted it because I realized I was trying to write down everything that I can remember. I tried to answered this question in depth in conversation with Selah Saterstrom (www.zeroducats.com/resources/Conversation.pdf). But, to address the idea that books come from books: books have to originate in engagement, engagement doesn’t have to originate in a book.
What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
- I’m going to make this list that will surely leave off many I should have included. The most important writers to me have been: Allen Ginsberg, Alice Notley, James Joyce, William Blake, Marie Redonnet, Kathy Acker, Kenneth Patchen (especially The Journal of Albion Moonlight), Neil Young, Bob Dylan, William Carlos Williams, Richard Brautigan, Roland Barthes, Edmond Jabès, Jack Kerouac, Virginia Woolf, Whitman, Emerson, JD Salinger, Donald Barthelme, The Bible. Then the other hundred I didn’t mention.
Thinking of contemporary writers, I am energized by the writing of (among others) Renee Gladman, Erik Anderson, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine and Selah Saterstrom. Anne Waldman is a writer who has made my world a lot better by her very existence in it.
What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
- See England win the World Cup. I’d also like to go to a posh restaurant and order a porterhouse with a lobster tail. One day I’d like to drive to Alaska. Maybe for a year I could live in Tokyo?
If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
- If all goes to plan, I finish my PhD on April 22nd this year. This summer I am teaching at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program and starting pre-med classes at UC Denver. This, in earnest, will mark the beginning of my attempt to be a physician.
I don’t think of being a writer as an occupation. Not that it doesn’t involve a lot of work, it does. And yes, there are people who earn their living just by writing, so I suppose I don’t consider my writing as my occupation. It’s in one of Salinger’s books (I think Seymour, I throw this around a lot so I should probably check) where the narrator, Buddy, gives his occupation as “writer” and Seymour tells him that writer isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.
Why did I get a PhD in English/Creative Writing if I wanted to be a physician? Well, I didn’t know I was actually going to follow through with medicine when I started the PhD. And they paid me to read and write for 4 years. After all, they don’t teach you about Blanchot in medical school.
If I wasn’t going to do this I would like to be a carpenter, a professional cricketer or a spaceman. Or maybe all three. Imagine watching the earth rise from a wooden rocket ship you had built with your own two hands after playing a crisp cover drive off the bowling of Glenn McGrath. Doesn’t get much better than that.
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
- I like this question a lot but I don’t think I know how answer it. I write rather than draw, paint, play music etc. because I am better at writing than any of those other things. Creativity is a function of consciousness and as such I don’t think it is in opposition to doing something else but just a part of it. What is that other thing? Being a college professor, being a librarian, an attorney, a physician, a schoolteacher, a secretary, a mother, a father, an insurance salesman, a bartender etc. I do not mean for these to be exclusive. That is, I am interested in people who embrace the overlaps.
What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
- I read The Sound and The Fury in December. A little late to that party but holy shit! Last week I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again. I cannot get over that movie. The last recently published book I read that I thought was really great was Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I really liked There Will Be Blood.
What are you currently working on?
- I just finished CAST, a book that orbits Carlo Collodi’s wooden boy Pinocchio. It’s the second in a series of three thematically connected books. FABRIC was the first. I’m about to start the third one which I think will be called RISE. It’s not really a trilogy. Maybe a triptych in the way Redonnet uses the term. The three definitely go together.“ – Interview by Rob McLennan

Excerpt

and here

Richard Froude: Apocrypha #9a

From The History of Zero