Zak Ferguson, The System Compendium, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2021.
T H I S I S N O T A B O O K
I T I S A S T A T E M E N T I T I S
A N anti - A N T I - A N T I - N O V E L.
I T I S A M A N I F E S T O.
A P A R O D Y.
A S A T I R E .
A C U T - U P – C O N S C I O U S N E S S - n o v e l.
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Zak Ferguson’s debut novel Eat Your Keyboard was released at the beginning of 2017, and before, during and after its release he was working furiously at writing the final two books of what Zak fully envisioned as a trilogy of books. The writing process was hard going – the book continually evolving – warping. The whole experience has been hard. Heart-wrenching. Zak wasn’t happy with it, nor felt much confidence as to the future books’ safety and the works integrity with the Press it was with initially.
Eat Your Keyboard was and continues to be a novel that has infected those of whom have read it. Many have enquired as to whether there are follow ups. Zak has reassured many, for the last two to three years, that the book was forthcoming. Alas, it wasn’t. So much had gone on between the first book and the ever changing two books that were bristling in anticipation, to mess up the readers it knew it could corrupt – Zak was undecided about the books fate.
After much turmoil and strife, both professionally and personally, Zak burnt out. The only thing that kept him going was the notion that he could now set up shop and continue on his career as a writer – but, wishing to add Publisher to his resume. And the Eat Your Keyboard cycle was not going to fade, it was going to be at the epicentre as to why he wanted to publish his own works.
Since then, starting his own Press, Zak has released 7 novels – though, no signs of the EYK follow ups/re-issues were made clear – to anyone, nor himself.
Over the past few years Zak has worked almost every single day on his 600-page experimental novel – that collects all three books of the EYK trilogy.
The difference is, the book is one big compendium, with new art exclusively made for this books release by Carlos Davila, and special adverts shoved in by DB Spitzer – to lend this book a whole new identity. And a few crappy pieces of artwork from Zak’s end, but, lets see if you can spot them?
If you have read EYK, not only do you get a new, expanded, re-written (like the best re-released experimental cut-up novels) novel, you get both of the follows up, DESTROY YOUR KEYBOARD and DISGORGE YOUR KEYBOARD - a wholly NEW huge beast of a book to weigh down your children when they won’t keep still, or to hold open a bank vaults door as you steal its contents – that, or it just makes your already heaving bookshelves bow under its madness.
As a person with a diagnosis of Autism, Zak strived to create a book that gives the reader the closest thing to an autistic experience, as possible, a roller-coaster ride that Zak experiences on a daily basis, a psychological and mental challenge that has been shaped into a physical form. The reader will feel most things associated with Autism by immersing themselves into Zak’s world and writing.
"Zak Ferguson's writing is like letting an electric virus invade your central nervous system. Nothing is left intact. You are left wiped out and ready to reboot. It's wonderful." – Seb Doubinsky
“The System Compendium is far and away the most ambitious thing I can remember reading for some time, and certainly one of the most ambitious contemporary books I’ve read in a number of years. Maximalist to the hilt and as expressive as a gob of milky spit in the face of a court-ordered psychiatrist, this is a book to live within and with, an author to keep close.” - Grant Maierhofer
“Not often does new fiction come to this world so fully formed and peculiar in its execution. Zak Ferguson’s work confuses me on the deepest levels- and I would not have it any other way- as it twists a thread of visceral narrative layers only to break it and start anew. Ferguson dredges the most specific and proscribed shapes and images to page, stilting and rendered through oblique and haunting vantage, riddled through to the baser aspects of the conscious and condensing as something more. Writers like this are born to it, when one might suspect a heritage - Bataille, Lautréamont, Bulgakov, or Burroughs - but also with a surprisingly delicate touch. Manic images somehow increasingly specific, like intimate sea-divers setting off a light-pulse from within a leviathan, merging with genres like science fiction or metaphysics and rant. It is writing that burns itself”. – Jared Pappas Kelley
Zak Ferguson, T E X T U R E Ss,
Sweat Drenched Press, 2021.
"So it begins, book-objects emerging from the Covid-19 UK lockdown and beyond. Artbook. Yes. That word.
I pause. I like it. Gordon Lish famously said literature is retrograde. Why are we not trying harder? Zak Ferguson is.
[Text] in TEXTURESs is immanent… already there. Bugger all images. Even the text is an image. Hieroglyphics of HTML. The negative space of text. Negentropic text. Keywords emerge: auto-fact, auto-fiction, IKEA meatballs, channel 3, channel 4, loneliness, boredom, vacant lots, tin-foil cocks, bubble-gum girls, ruins. Yes, ruins.
Lish also said: You don’t even have to make it up!
The opening & closing of a laptop computer… like a giant clam! This is Brighton, after all. And Eastbourne. The grunt-groans of existence are here. Existence as a cut-up experience. This book claims to be an accident.
It is. A big, beautiful fucking accident. Like the Universe itself.
Electronic waste. E-waste. TEXTURESs reminds us everything is made of particles. Box text. Text in boxes. Language prisons. Good luck, pal.
A writer reading a writer is something, eh? A writer reading a writer reading a writer… probably what you are doing right now. Am I right, pal? John Trefry famously said he is okay with Inside the Castle books only being read by other writers. That is what you have here. Zak Ferguson makes me want to write. TEXTURESs makes me want to write. Makes me want to “fuck around” with text. Echo chambers. Chambers without echoes. The anechoic chamber in Minneapolis is purportedly the “quietest place on the planet.” TEXTURESs is screaming. Zak Ferguson is screaming. Hear my tell-tale heart, indeed.
Life is a rough draft. I still don’t know what the fuck Nietzsche means by eternal return. What I do know: TEXTURESs by Zak Ferguson makes me feel alive." -R.G. Vasicek, author of THE DEFECTORS
TEXTURESs
{Or}
{The Autistic Experience} didn't start out as a book, it started out as a collage piece.
This is just the end result.
A book reflecting on Zak's ever evolving relationship with various artistic mediums; and the artistry even the most minor of details.
This is both a collection of prose, fiction, poems, essays and a novel length manifesto that relates to Zak's neurological condition and the condition of the interiority of a book. It is also about sweet fuck all.
Zak Ferguson, Dimension Whores, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2019.
Dimension Whores is a non-novel. A non-linear-experimental book. An ode to the works of William S. Burroughs and all the great literary masters who gained notoriety in death...rather than in life...a legacy Zak Ferguson won't even have a chance at even following in his own demise. Praise for Zak Ferguson, “Not often does new fiction come to this world so fully formed and peculiar in its execution. Zak Ferguson’s work confuses me on the deepest levels- and I would not have it any other way- as it twists a thread of visceral narrative layers only to break it and start anew. Ferguson dredges the most specific and proscribed shapes and images to page, stilting and rendered through oblique and haunting vantage, riddled through to the baser aspects of the conscious and condensing as something more. Writers like this are born to it, when one might suspect a heritage- Bataille, Lautréamont, Bulgakov, or Burroughs- but also with a surprisingly delicate touch. Manic images somehow increasingly specific, like intimate sea-divers setting off a light-pulse from within a leviathan, merging with genres like science fiction or metaphysics and rant. It is writing that burns itself”. – Jared Pappas Kelley (Author of SOLVENT FORM) "I don't get it, I truly do not understand how this is even allowed to hit the presses...he didn't even pass English Literature in his GCSE's"- Zak's English Teacher (year 9/10/11) "Anyone know of Zak's whereabouts, please get hold of your local Police"- Zak's Probation Officer
Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ?, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
Interiors for ? is an experiment. Nothing else.
Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ? mark ii, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
This book is about experimental literature, and its inter-inter-inter-inter--relationship with images, spaces, interiors and the ontology of not just words but their relation to the physical book and its form. pART 2 OF THE foUR-bOOK SERIES- iNTERIORS fOR ? Praise for Interiors for ? mark ii: "Interiors for ? Mark ii is a passionate experiment of form / structure / narrative. Navigating the interiority of the text, investigating the semiotics of the white-page and black-ink.Ferguson builds this machine with a steady hand. He converts the interiors of the head into the interiors of the text. Mapping this newly-formed space with the energy of a dadaist manifesto--employing the techniques of collage and cut-up to create simultaneously entrancing and enigmatic images. All of this revealing the fragility of the book-object. The inclinations of language to break down and distort / the limitations and potentialities of its construction.Interiors for ? Mark ii is an exciting exploration of what can be planted within text, what can be grown, seeded, destroyed." - Mike Corrao, author of Gut Text and Man, Oh Man
Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ? mark iii, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
The third part in the (Experimental, Pseudo-Non-Fiction, Innovative, Essay-Critique, Fictionally-F*cked-Up-) INTERIORS FOR ?Quadrilogy, where Zak Ferguson reaffirms, redesigns, alters, surveys, waffles on about the relationship of text, interior design and formation of a book, rediscovering the alternate dimensions of the book-space and all those great avenues of thought, interpretation, philosophy of the book and its overall dimensionality. It is full of meta-critical-evaluation, meta-fiction, born from such a construction- such as a place of de-con-struct-ion, ION-/i/o/n-contained, offered, delivered, via the physical form of a paperback novel. |Full| of| T/Y/P/O/S and error error errors-full of mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess.
Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ? mark IV, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
The final book in the Interiors book series. Where Metaphysics, Philosophy, the inter-inter-inter-inter-interior-expansive-overt-expansive-cosmic-inter-I/N/T/E/Riorssssssssssssssssssss-inter-RIORs-Equations-56666888888=========-Satire-Non-Fiction-Essays-Cut-Up-Collage-Semiotics-Ontological-Phenomenological-Illogical-ill/i/L/l-are offered-break down, mind, no mind, all mind. Art is the future. Expression=Expansion of avenues of pathways of opening ups of a variant and varietal osmosis of genetics where words make up known connotations where. . .this book is all up for interpretation.
Zak Ferguson, One of Them Days, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
One of them days we all have, whether young, old, racist, all-inclusive, tolerant, intolerant, gay, straight, bi, human, alien, we all have one of them days. So, here is a book of them, from many different people, having one of them days.
Zak Ferguson, Soft Tissues, Sweat Drenched
Press, 2021.
Soft Tissues is for all the current generation of whom have had issues and need a tissue.
"Exact— investigational retching— reminiscent of Apollinaire— or Saint-John Perse. There is spiralling flight— redolent imagery within Zak Ferguson’s writing— poetries constructed in lifeblood—assembled fibres and entangled bear hair— online apps and old static radios— social media and skid marks— slang terminology inside high rise blocks— fashioned overall debris and dormant wood rot— erected tequila slime within antisocial attitudes— taken apart and pieced together by fag ash and slow motion— structured infection combining— composed and created by milky forms— put up and knocked down. Zak Ferguson has written verses full of the shrill cries— the secret codes— and tricks of spit spray and skeletal frames— material worth reading. Poetry as pleasure buttons— the soft tissues— the synthesis of Alcools and Anabasis— muscle." – Shane Jesse Christmass
Zak Ferguson, Volatile Voice's, Volatile
Universe, Sweat Drenched Press, 2019.
We live in a reality that is supposed to be our own. Voices break through, in textural compositions. A reality crafted by our own hand. Our own, their own, a sum of many, many parts of this slop of material. We are existing on multiple plains of existence. Layered. Tiered. Dormant. Existing. Birthing. Dying. Fizzling out. Our decisions are not our own, it is dictated by a melange of our other selves. Our parallel selves. Our truer selves. And if that isn’t comfortable enough for you to accept, to compute, to define as a narrative streak, there is a billion others in the wings to be hung up for contemplation- {not entertainment}...then faith, objectification and all great emotions are greater served and rationalized, and made acceptable, by putting it to our greatest deities; to make our most basic of decisions somebody else’s fault. The Narrators? {who do you trust?} What if you got a TASTE of your own reality? What if every minute thing has cause and effect, rippling through the linearity of your(multiple-selves) LIFE-LINE(s)? What if every possibility of all potentialities submerge into "your" cohesive narrative life? What if you got a TASTE of a broader Cosmos?What IF… those voices, those rippling, bending, curvature-noise-made-material-ectoplasmic-events altered not one singular variation of yourself, but all of your selves..these phantom images, these intrusive thoughts, these Déjà vu-moments are our own extremely tempered voices...ever so V O L A T I L E Breaching...reaching out...Part of an even greater web-work and mapping, making its own sub-pocket in space and time, where, out there, in there {indicate to your own head, thus meaning your mind} personified within itself as a multi-layered Universe, itself ever so,V O L A T I L E...Meet a whole host of characters, whose singular, epic, contained stories all interweave to culminate into a broader far more {"pretentious} cosmic whole, where there is a sexually perverse demented youth Dimension-hopping, searching for his sick obsession, a young girl, of pig-tail innocence, a council-block dwelling witch with a penchant for pushing carers to their mushy-deaths, meet That Man who exists on the fringes of a young girls reality, a girl, who in question is the focal point to all of these characters, whose realities are splayed out, who is a key component to this fractured,
What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets. It's as simple as that....Or is it?He has a method. He has no plan. He has a vision. He has no qualms with being caught. He needs people. He has no friends. He has puppets. He has pray. His thoughts run like a whippet...they strike like mercury to flesh. He is damaged. He will damage. The art of killing has lost its obliqueness and contrarily its definition. Killing isn't art. Art is killing. Killing is enlightening. Not to sole perpetrator. But to society as a whole.Kill. Manipulate. Games. Mind. Bodily. Eruptions of instinctual possessiveness garnered by fear. Not of blade. Not of death. But of the loss of one's legacy.Impromptu imprints impromptu actions impromptu impromptu impromptu........pointlessness.The greatest thing isn't the whys and the hows of a serial killer. It's the internal coalescence of lust, greed, insecurities, control. It's not the making of that's interesting...it's the subconscious splay out played in real time that is the main and real focus one needs to truly understand and experience to comprehend a killers actual pure unadulterated motives and reasoning's.Experimental fiction hasn't been this outright f*cking audacious.What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets is an extremely experimental piece. Transgressive. Surreal. Disjointed. This book is petulance personified. This novel is a harsh critique on society, expectations, media-consumption, how expectations of self border beyond deity levels of narcissism and modern humans want to leave an imprint on this f*cked up Universe. Its a satire, a meta-commentary on experimentalism used in modern day fiction. But, be warned...
Zak Ferguson, A Taste of
Feeling, Sweat Drenched Press, 2018.
We live in a reality that is supposed to be our own. A reality crafted by our own hand. We are existing on multiple plains of existence. Our decisions are not our own by a melange of our other selves.And if that isn’t comfortable enough for you to accept, then faith, objectification and all great emotions are greater served and rationalized, and made acceptable, by putting it to our greatest deities; to make our most basic of decisions somebody else’s fault.What if you got a TASTE of your own reality? What if every minute thing has cause and effect, rippling through the linearity of your LIFE-LINE? What if every possibility of all potentialities submerge into your cohesive narrative life? What if you got a TASTE of a broader Cosmos?What IF…
Zak Ferguson, Eat Your
Keyboard, Sweat Drenched Press, 2017.
Have you felt the lure of T H E P R O G R A M M E Has T H E S Y S T E M worked its way through to your greatest most secreted depths? Or is it still massaging, kneading, soaking into your subconscious, into your extended being. Into your key-eat- boarD...Your.... THE BOOK YOU HOLD IS SOMETHING ONE COULD MISCONSTRUE AS A LIE. IT IS THE TRUTH. THIS IS LIVING PROOF OF A HIGHER CALLING, OF A BETTER WAY OF LIVING. ONE COULD ANTICIPATE AN ANSWER TO THE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. WE DON'T ANSWER...WE HELP YOU GAIN A TRUTH. HERE, DEAR READER YOU'RE GIVEN...snippets of experiences, one right after the next, all piling in a heap. Slowly, as they all decompose together, they will begin to form something. Again, not so much a story, but events that are all related by something, united to "shine a light" on something greater than the individual events. What are WE as a species shining a light on by our actions? Like scattering bones and the casting of entrails to seek some truth out of the random, through its "chaos" , its telling YOU something, telling truths about ourselves and what we, you, they, them- collectively create. Writer Zak A. Ferguson takes his readers on a rip-roaring rampage through the madness of one's mind. With this debut novella we, the audience, are subjected to literary experiments that take us from one existence to another, in flashes, explosions that tear the brain apart, leaving each piece to grow into its own character - one after another, they grow into agents of pure chaos. Their existence - a manic slideshow shown at 100mph. Sit back, open your mind and EAT YOUR KEYBOARD!
Mr. Nick. He’s the Devil. Or just good ol’ Nicky-Boy. Any who, Nick is suffering from a case of the mid-Millennium blues. What is his life? To serve others, and more? At the end of the day, it’s not like he’s got horns and breathes fire… …that, and he’s not the actual epitome of Evil. He’s an old boy wanting to live out the remainder of his (im)mortal life. After a few bevvies, and World Record for MOST CIGARETTES SMOKED IN HALF AN HOUR, Nick comes to the conclusion that it’s high-time to call it quits. To pass the baton. Heavy lies the crown upon the head of he who is: RULER OF THE WORLD. Of whom, you ask, would be the worthy heir to The Devil’s throne? Well, none other than Nick’s son himself – a simpleton with a devout passion for pushing papers, and sorting pencils. The REAL question is: Can this desk-dweller do what is necessary to keep Earth neat and tidy? That question is put to the test when Cupid is bequeathed his utmost desires… …desires full of beautiful benevolence – a fire too HOT for any level of Hell to contain, or control. From one fiasco to another, Nick’s spur-of-the-moment decision to quit his job couldn’t have come at a more hellacious time. Mr. Nick offers laffs (laughs, for the spelling police), gonzo-bonker characters (like a mallet to the head, and that soppy cartoon laugh), and moments that’ll most likely have critics throwing this book at their least favourite child.
THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #219: ZAK FERGUSON
BY JARED PAPPAS-KELLEY
Zak Ferguson’s work is mental in the best possible sense of the word. His work is unsettling. He is a self-professed experimental writer (I am an experimentalist!) and you can see how he approaches each aleatory novel or book with its own rules, lucidity, and structures as with this new series of “interiors” that are underway. The logic of Ferguson’s work is one of expansion and collapse, putting forward a thread only to subtlety fold in or snap under, yet still felt in body and under skin.
I spoke with Zak about his new book, Interiors for ?, and the second installment Interiors for ? Mark ii, which was published only two weeks later. We also talked about wandering burnt-out buildings in the UK, the legacy of underground or zine culture, vaporwave, his autism, and his awakening as a writer.
***
The Rumpus: I stumbled across your newest writing project Interiors for ?, and wasn’t really aware of the concept or idea of it. Can you talk a bit about this project, and the thinking behind it?
Zak Ferguson: Interiors for ? began as a whole other endeavor. To take images for a project. Maybe THE SYSTEM COMPENDIUM, or something else. So after and during photographing, I had this image percolating, not so much an image as an idea, that burned into that idea, where I needed to name a folder, to create one, where to place these images, to pick from—like a goodie box of images to use in experiments and to apply to certain pieces I am working on. Then this philosophy and appreciation for interiors, spaces, my relationship with the metaphysics, meta-contextual-textural-integrated notion—warped and took me over, wholly.
I needed a name, so I titled the folder Interiors for ? because that had been percolating inside my mind as I was taking the photos, too, and then this whole other plane of contemplation opened. Already spurred and accessed by having initially started upon this path of productivity, the images I had taken were taking on different resonances. The husk of a recently burned-down hotel in Eastbourne all of a sudden evolved, and was dislocated from this thing called reality, and took on a new meaning, relating to my art, relating to my procession of creativity.
The whole thing (the hotel) had fallen into itself, and only the outside, the walls, the façade, the foundations, the sides were remaining—it was wholly aesthetically and physically there in its exterior standings, its own physically embodied thing, but there was something supernal about it, too.
For me it was and still is about the spaces, the new being of this fucking burnt down building, and in segments, framed by its falling down, its eventual disintegration—the boring parts turned into anarchy-parts, the beautiful parts turned into textural-parts.
Rumpus: So, what are your plans for this project, and what is it about exactly?
Ferguson: I am planning on releasing four Interior books, from here on at the end of every week; whether it may be later, may be sooner, I have no clue, but I am enjoying myself because it is testing my skills as an artist, metaphysically, with pathways of contemplation and reflection and also my interrelationship with image-mockery, image-manipulation, my need to explore, embrace, extend, engorge my overall intentions, but in newer, for me, and far more innovative and puzzle-piece-experimental ways. My intention is to build on this work, because it has evolved, taken upon itself a whole new meaning. It is the first official release from my press, and it is an itch that needs to be scratched. To test. To push. To prove to myself.
What is it, exactly? I don’t fucking know, and I love that energy; it’s almost a synergy and cyclical thing that is issued forth from the ripples coming off my other works. Inside, outside of me, there is something cosmic happening here…
Rumpus: I was talking the other day about all this and about how it reminds me a bit of the glory days of zines and zine-making, but sort of like the next evolution of that sort of process. I grew up in places like Olympia and Seattle where a lot of that was going on and sort of in the air. What do you think of this?
Ferguson: That is very fucking cool. I have never been part of any zine, or publication that is circulated in a cool, underground, DIY way. I think that this can be bettered, considering how things are going, on a sadly commercial and capitalist level, by the accessibility of POD (print-on-demand) platform, if used well. But then as I think about this, I get agitated and the reality dawns, and that is—that it takes something away from what makes zines, well, zines… they’re printed, stapled, clustered, with art not approved but shoved in, because they need as much content as they could scurry together, collage, prose-poetry, rants, terrible advertisements for local businesses, where the time is nearly running out on the publication date they had set for themselves and told a fair few mates (greasy-haired, mascara-clad, with a few terribly ill-thought-out and self-applied tattoos)—who are willingly standing on the street corner from the “press” contemplating the jump from curb to road.
Rumpus: You mention this idea of underground, which makes me think of Baudrillard, who says: “You must create your underground, because now there’s no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more marginality. You can create your personal underground, your own black hole…”
What do you think of that?
Ferguson: Yes, we all must make our own underground, because there really is no avant-garde, no more room or spaces allowed for the people with the real rushing of blood keeping the actual heart of these creative movements alive any longer. But people creating zines, or chapbooks, or macro pamphlets, this reality, this place, that will never die, oh I so fucking hope it doesn’t, and telling those whose supposed positioning with these supposed wants to be DIY and so underground is truly all faux and disingenuous. But if it can be attenuated and captured in some minor way, that intent and well-intended motion is more than what most presses try to express and sell themselves off as.
Nothing will live up to the underground nature of pamphlets, and the only person I know of successfully doing this, using the POD platform, is Christopher Nosnibor at Clinicality Press. I love Christopher as a publisher, reviewer, and writer himself. His nonfiction really shaped my want to start writing, and is not as veined into experimental fiction, but perhaps into spreading experimental nonfiction.
Even though I may have been part of faux literary movements, all online, and only in existence in words, in boasting, and on the social media platforms these projects always live and ultimately die by—that try to capture that punk-rock-underground aesthetic, and in all honesty, in their failure, make it known that you just cannot capture that type of thing without experiencing it. So, no, I have never been part of it.
Rumpus: You talk about the idea of these small communities that exist online or these faux literary movements. That makes me think of some of the early intentions of vaporwave in music and its decentralized locale (online), the first entirely online music genre. Scott Beauchamp proposed that “vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online.” So what is this shift?
Ferguson: Things are so gentrified, but it’s evolved beyond its originally assigned and processed meaning, the process of renovating and improving housing or district, yadder, yadder, yadder; its about labels, about being this thing, in name, but not in execution. And with this motion of application it is just a knock-off. Being this thing, so people gravitate, towards it. To try adding to it, but if it’s not truly the encapsulation to begin with, it’s just assigning its own fizzle/burn out.
Rumpus: I sort of think, what would’ve happened back then if we’d had access to this sort of immediacy with POD with zines or for similar projects. But as you’ve said, there’s now this desire for the physicality of the printed object as well or the sort of irony, if we want to think about vaporwave as an example again—all of this digital music that was produced and released online is now being rereleased on vinyl, the sort of uber-analogue holy grail. But is this POD also kind of brilliant in its potential?
Ferguson: Oh, it is brilliant. Really brilliant. For creative endeavors, to circulate art that usually, in the past, needed to be approved and were then made to wait. The POD platform has given freedom to people of great intentions, to get other artists, other experimentalists, innovators together and out there, to have their work out in the open, without a committee board judging it, editing it, breaking it down, and stating it is this, labelling it as that. I do not know of what platforms they use, but publication houses like Inside the Castle, headed by the genius John Trefrey, Dostoyevsky Wannabe by Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown, are doing things in literature that I wish to achieve. For the art. For the artist. For the love of making and creating books and content.
Though POD encourages a lot of amateurism and bad books by some people of whom shouldn’t write, there is no stopping that and nor should those people be stopped. POD is a great place to create careers, but also a great freedom to make presses, and through that and the books, fuck yeah, POD is a masterful ingenious and necessary platform and maybe a future scape where the best of artists end up creating—because you can either learn, grow from it, or be stuck in the same old rut from the beginning. You can put out there whatever the fuck you want as an artist.
But, it needs to be learned, not taught; it needs to be felt out. It needs to have a person with a mind to think outside the box, because those who think inside the box are dictated by the rules of Amazon, marketing on Facebook, which is an echo chamber, and so forth—those people are lost.
Rumpus: You mentioned it in passing a bit, but maybe you could mention your ideas about experimentalism or experimentalists briefly? What is its significance or what might it entail?
Ferguson: Being me. I feel everything I have spoken about is the encapsulation of what it means to be an experimentalist, such as my methods, my attitudes, also when paired with the reality of having autism. Autism allows one to be an experimentalist, whether they know it or not, to be a discoverer, whether they want it to or not. It’s a continual struggle—social niceties, social rules, and supposed law-governed rules of how to behave or come across—that is an experience born from an altered angle and perspective and a consciousness. That is something one tries to attain with their art: the experience, the mechanisms running the mind, the cerebral nature of those with autism. Autistic people are born creators and born experimentalists; it is how the “condition” dictates and such. Just pair with it and become one. It then will be a benefit and not a detriment.
Rumpus: Something else you’ve spoken a bit about in the past was how your autism relates to your process and viewpoint in your work. Does that relate to what you are doing with this new project?
Ferguson: It is my art. Autism is the product of my mind. My emotions. My personality. These are wholly dictated, controlled, steered, corrupted by my non-typical brain. Thus, it is heavily tied to me. Everything you read, experience, process, read, enjoy, hate, loathe, don’t quite get, appreciate, is part of my autism. Having autism is now a piece of Art itself. It is a hurt, an ache, as it affects my living situation societally, housing-wise, my processing and survival.
My work is a total obliteration of those emotions, a capturing of those odd moments, odd traits, odd-angled vistas from the way I look at the world, that gets the creative mind and accompanying imagination boiling over, and the autistic episodes and frustrations to my existence with this alternate way of thinking and feeling and living—sees me process, molecularly break it down, via experimentation, of prose, prose-imagery, imagery, short films. It is me. The full me.
Rumpus: I also know that you have been working on a new book, Art Is Autism. can you speak a bit about that?
Ferguson: It is a manifesto. A pseudo-memoir. Talking about my life with autism, and my coming into myself as both writer and reader. It is almost an experimentalist autistic (passionate) meltdown, full of rants, critiques, studies, emotional pleas. A wholly intimate portrayal of what writing and experimental and innovative fiction means to me.
https://therumpus.net/2020/05/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-219-zak-ferguson/
Zak Ferguson’s work is mental in an unsettling and best possible sense of the word. He is a self-professed experimental writer (I am an experimentalist!) and you can see how he approaches each aleatory novel or book with its own rules, lucidity, and structures as with this new series of “interiors” that are underway. The logic of Ferguson’s work is one of expansion and collapse, putting forward a thread only to subtlety fold in or snap under, yet felt in body and under skin. Some books are pulpy in their page turning and others are a task, but one never doubts there is something at stake or a very real risk, taking place in their execution.
I spoke with Zak about his new books Interiors for ? and the next instalment Interiors for ? Mark ii, as well roaming through burnt or torn down buildings in the UK, the legacy of underground or zine culture, vaporwave, discussing both his autism and awakening as a writer and an opening up of a literary world, as well as the launch of his recent publishing venture Sweat Drenched Press.
Read it here: https://www.invertextant.com/post/interview-zak-ferguson-s-sweat-drenched-interiors
Zak Ferguson is an Autistic, mental health-suffering much despised entity, barely a person, just an irritable itch, on the ear- lobe, on the fringes of your conscious-self; whose reality consists of words, literature and the pretensions garnered from art.
If you like literature that tests your perceptions of literature, that tests your patience, that entices, arouses, annoys, irritates, breaks into you machinations of consuming literature, literature that confounds, upsets, and semi-forms itself as entertainment and all such and sundry as accepted and marketed in the full fledged market place of book-building and publication… then Zak is probably somebody you’d like to beat around the head with, said book, and tell him what a waste of time it was…
If, and this is a BIG if, this is an experience you wish to partake in, if only to get a chance to beat him publicly/privately…read his stuff.
He exists online in some vague form. On INSTAGRAM under some name or other…and TWITTER…under another name based around his issue with sweating…
Zak lives in the seaside town of Brighton.
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