Ben Spivey - 'You can’t count on things to stay how you expect,' a man’s lover tells him just after handing him a bag of her pubic hair

Ben Spivey, Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, Blue Square Press, 2010.


“Part Jungian allegory, part surreal dreamscape, part Odyssean tramp, Ben Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a romp through distorted time in a landscape carved by sudden oceans built from perpetual rain, where a cityscape has sidewalks littered with disappearing sages, and an edenic forest is graffitied with the father’s word. The sentences of Malcolm Blackburn’s midlife crisis are charged with the energy of a young man—the young man who penned this fucked up vision of pain and forgiveness, of what is ultimately the lesson of life: it’s beautiful, and it sucks.”–Jamie Iredell

“Ben Spivey’s alluringly melodial debut novel of a marriage gone asunder unreels itself with the indisputable logic of dreams and delivers, along its phantasmagoric and dazing way, emotional clarities that feel entirely new.”–Gary Lutz

“Reading like the troubled offspring of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus and the surreal ending of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold creates a deliberate and satisfying confusion between the habitations of the skull, of the word, and of the world. A strange and satisfying debut.” – Brian Evenson

“Malcolm Blackburn (motivational speaker, estranged husband of a bird with orange pubic hair, and lover to a mannequin) has a voice that throttled me from the first page, while Ben Spivey–an extraordinarily talented and shockingly young new writer–demonstrates that his own voice is versatile, vivid, funny, and trenchant. I read the book in one eager sitting. Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a bizarre and genuinely exciting debut.” – Nick Antosca

“In mental maps made of out of milk and hair, Ben Spivey negotiates the slick space between our dirt and air. ‘You can’t count on things to stay how you expect,’ a man’s lover tells him just after handing him a bag of her pubic hair and turning into a kind of bird. It is warning meant for him and anybody expecting any less than magic in the lean, prismatic, calming barrage of Spivey’s sentences and rooms and hours, built on the all too rare commodity of heart.”–Blake Butler


"Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, simply, is about understanding an altered position when all known context falls away. Literally, a story of a professional motivational speaker attempting to harness his life after a divorce, Ben Spivey’s debut novel quickly and beautifully submerges the literal for an appropriately poetic read.
After about 20 pages of concrete scene-setting, we begin to experience a more language-focused breakdown of the protagonist’s deterioration, a style that continues throughout to the end of the book. Normally, such contrast, from suited professional speaker to emotional vagabond in such a short number of pages might feel forced. This makes Spivey’s ability to seamlessly drift from concrete to illusive imagery, while never completely leaving the reader to wander the text, all the more impressive. (Much of this smooth transition might be credited to subtly planted character traits. For example, we get the feeling that the protagonist’s married life wasn’t entirely traditional; as a parting reminder, the wife shaves, bags, and presents her dyed pubic hair).
Much of the novel is spent with the protagonist after his divorce, where he has isolated himself in a will-bestowed cabin, having only coffee and eggs to sustain him. The metaphorical implications of such a setup, Spivey capitalizes upon succinctly: “I’m fixing holes. I’m making it better. I can leave whenever I want”. At times, the author extends his before-and-after comparisons:
“Morning dew rested on the tops of the parked cars lining the streets. The homes I passed, old and rustic next to modern imitations, the duality of the new next to the old, or better yet the original next to the imitator, I thought about those things: being and not being, consciousness, and unconsciousness, life and death”.
Flowing in the Gossamer Fold might best be categorized as “Emo Lit,” having all of the melodrama of Emo music, without ever dulling the audience’s senses to the consistent and powerful impact of the text. Take the following passage as testament, one that wears its emotion on its sleeve, so to speak, yet never feels false:
“I thought about wanting to sleep in a place so dark, about having a drink with my father. Wanting to sink farther into the mine. I turned off the light, and the light sucked from my eyes like blowing wind, like butterflies around the street lamp”. - Caleb J. Ross


"What's your background? When did you start writing?
- My mother birthed me in Decatur. I have a BA in journalism from Georgia State University. I decided to pursue journalism for a couple of reasons, one reason was the dead author Stephen Crane. One of my favorite short stories is "The Open Boat," which Crane wrote— I was fascinated with how Crane fictionalized reality. I wanted to learn that skill. It seems that a lot of writers are also journalists, however informal, or formal. I've lived in Georgia all of my life. But I don't consider myself a 'Southern boy' or whatever. Atlanta is a little haven to those wicked things. I started writing at a young age. I started to create at a young age. The idea of creation has been very important to me for as long as I can remember. As a child I read a lot of fantasy novels, played a lot of video games, mostly role playing games. Lord of the Rings, D & D, Final Fantasy, Zelda, very satisfying replacement for reality.
I needed that satisfaction of creation. I built great castles out of Legos for many years. I drew comics, as a boy, dreamed dreams, etcetera. I was maybe 13 or 14 years old when I wrote a story about a place of solitude— I think that was the first time that I had a simple taste of my voice. Your voice develops, changes, extends, fluctuates, but when you find it, you know it. When I found my voice it felt like the first time I'd seen the horizon over the ocean, the often lyrical. To me, being a writer or an artist is finding a missing piece to a puzzle, however complicated that may be. Sure I want to be appreciated, or respected, but making a story or a painting or a book object and sharing that with people is something that's ultimately selfish. It's also love, need, brutality. Too understand better, too be understood. All of that is the why.
How long have you been working on this novel?
- The novel started as a short story. I started to write the first piece or draft at the end of 2008. I believe it was December, it was cold. The draft was a little over 8,000 words, which is short, less than half of the finished novel. I submitted that story which was called "The Diner" to Adam Robinson at Publishing Genius Press. He mailed me a really nice rejection letter about how he didn't feel that the story was finished but that the sentences were pristine, that got me thinking about expansion, and I expanded the story's language and scope. The novel was torn apart and rebuilt at least 50 times over the course of about a year. I wrote the novel in segments. I had an overall feeling that I wanted to instill in the reader, that I wanted to share and explore. Several parts of the novel were written in Moleskine journals while I road Marta, or sat in class, or at red-lights, work, wherever— it began to bleed from me. The sentences or moments would hit me at some of the most inconvenient times. While driving I would jot a word or two on my hand or on paper. One time I got home with an entire paragraph written down my arm and hand, I kept paper around after that, or took notes on my phone. I was in deep, but it was not consistent inspiration or progression. It was early mornings, every morning, coffee, sometimes just starring at the computer screen. The quiet moments were the hardest moments.
Making Malcolm a motivational speaker wasn't my first choice for him. He was first a miner and for people who read the novel they'll see how that initial choice played into the story. I wanted to write a surreal novel, but I wanted the story to drift into that dreamy place in a believable way. A motivational speaker offered me some unique options toward that descent, namely I could have Malcolm interact with groups of people.
The sentences are really notable in Flowing in the Gossamer Fold. Do you shape these sentences through a series of edits or is this more of a "natural" rhythm?
- I approach sentences very aware and conscious of sound—the pace of each sentence is important, no matter how ambient, subtle, deep, or forward it is, the sentence should be purposeful and lasting. When I began to edit the sentences I often replaced words, choosing a word that had a better meaning or a word that made better sense because when I was drafting I was paying less attention to the word and more attention to the rhythm which required attention on the back end. Editing is where I like to be, that is where I'm most comfortable, shifting the sentences, moving commas, adding indentions. So the sentences are both natural and shaped through many edits, it's a process.
Do you feel like any books in particular had an influence on your novel?
- Yes, many. But not only books, some movies, too. There are probably too many to name but some that come to mind are EVER by Blake Butler, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, The Fall by Albert Camus, and Log of the S.S The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, all had some sort of influence. Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Lost Highway by David Lynch also inspired me. There really are so many things, influences. A primary influence over me for many years has been Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I experienced at a young, impressionable age—identifying with the symbolism of that series.
What are you reading lately? Anything that you'd recommend?
- I've been reading Child of God by Cormac McCarthy, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and Ugly Man: stories by Dennis Cooper. Some other books I've recently enjoyed are Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg, Everything here is the best thing ever by Justin Taylor, The Failure Six by Shane Jones, and Good, Brother by Peter Markus. I could recommend a list, but one book that I'm consistently inspired by is Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz." - Interview with Wyatt Williams

Jamie Iredell - I inhabited the inside of a mouth, the space between ass cheeks

"Like any classic tragedy, Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel. is broken up into three acts, in which the troubled hero recounts his life before he moved to Nevada, his life after he moved to Nevada, and his life after that, when he moved to Atlanta. Composed as a series of vignettes, pivotal moments in a troubled man’s peripatetic life, the narrative flits within the gray area between poetry and prose and, while it dispenses with linearity, finally coheres into a portrait of Larry, a fallen high school football star who never quite overcomes his self-destructive habits to live a life full of lasting intimacy and love.
Larry visits cabins, fields, bars, and strip joints peopled by “be-pistoled,” “be-suited,” “bespectacled” ne’er-do-wells fueled by crystal meth, amphetamines, ketamine, mescaline, cigarettes, psilocybin, Chianti, whisky, PBR, Vodka, Jack Beam, Strega, Oxycontin, Crazy Horse, weed, and cocaine with “actual cocaine crushed up into it.” Besides his own downward-spiraling actions, Larry is also troubled by a bear, rattlesnakes, and all kinds of creepy crawlies:
Herds of mosquitoes grazed the alleyways—mosquito-sized vampires—and heaved hordes of citizens above skyscrapers, then dropped the husks of their bodies to Peachtree Street. The hulls of destroyed brick rows lurked underground, and above, fiberglass rocketed into the rain. Hardwood floors lined my apartment, and cockroaches scrawled notes across my chest. With the humidity, I inhabited the inside of a mouth, the space between ass cheeks.
“There was nothing in the way of metaphor about me,” Larry tells us. Fortunately, this isn’t true—his observations are often drenched in carefully crafted metaphor. A lake is a mirror, blood vessels are lightning strikes, tuna cans are shining stars, clouds are saucers, and Larry himself is a “desert rat with a signature.” His similes are even more evident: “Leafless cottonwoods flew past us like enormous hands”; “Cara was like that: skinny as carousel pony poles…”; “The next morning the sun scooped my eyeballs as if they were mounds of ice cream.”
What I enjoyed most about Iredell’s narrative are his lyrical, almost Annie Dillard-like observations of nature, the elements, the landscape. But where Dillard’s evocations are solemn reveries sodden with all kinds of lushness, with prose akin to—[namecheck any American transcendentalist here]—Iredell’s descriptions are prickly, brittle, harboring all kinds of menace and malevolence:
The fog lilts in like a cat—perhaps a bear—as it stalks the coast and harbor, pounces artichoke fields, sinks its claws into the browned hillsides, and the fog’s teeth settles in bones like a cold stalk of broccoli, like the earth in which it grows, sunless black, the recesses of space, above the moon, past the atmosphere, far beyond this Pacific cloud cover, and below water the sharks missile-cruise the forested kelp for seals, for the succulent fat beneath their skin, and between the shark jaws, in place of teeth, flex rusty bear traps, and if the sharks could, and you could maneuver it, they would let you gnaw yourself free and swim a strawberry trail to shore for the lettuce ripening in the valley, and the strawberries reddening in the hills, because fog is also good for this.
Evidently, Iredell has learned his lessons well from Faulkner and Steinbeck, but his sentences are also informed by Kerouac’s cavorting cadences. But these influences are heard and not seen—you don’t think about them as you imagine the narrator’s bloodshot eyes scanning his surroundings. Iredell’s voice is his own.
While Larry doesn’t really change much—or change into much of anything—he is self-reflective and does have at least one moment of honest self-realization: “It’s only now that I can look back and say what kind of idiot I’ve become.” And while fights abound in Prose. Poems. A Novel. it is Iredell’s ability to wrestle beauty out of squalor and depravity that one watches most keenly. Though Iredell’s debut collection may be read as a cautionary tale about drug addiction and alcoholism, it is, paradoxically, also an adventure story through the empty roads of boredom. His chosen form, brief vignettes full of striking imagery, is the perfect vehicle for his sad, hopeless vision: the world can be understood only in glimpses, seen through a glass (bottle), darkly."- John Madera


"Title explains form in Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A novel. It’s a bold choice, and one that seems to suggest a sort of literary gamesmanship, a salvo in the form-versus-content battle, delivered in favor of the former. That the book opens with a epigraph from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, followed shortly by the author describing himself as “[a] whiskered goon at a notepad” should indicate otherwise. Through a series of brief, interconnected prose poems, Iredell tells the story of the first few decades of a young man’s life. The setting moves from California to Nevada to Georgia, encompassing relationships and friendships, births and deaths, remote cabins and dive bars. Each section stands on its own (the book’s three parts initially appeared as chapbooks), though there’s a clear progression as the narrator makes his way from childhood through a series of advanced degrees and personal relationships.
While the title suggests fiction, there’s a certain ambiguity to these pages — the “I” of Prose. Poems. has a similar biography to the author, and there’s one moment in which the narrator shows already-written pages to one of the characters, years after the events recounted have taken place. It lends a certain tension to the experience of reading — the title, after all, isn’t Prose. Poems. A memoir., but at the same time, these pages have a casual authenticity to them. Whether it’s his own life or one wholly imagined, Iredell’s skill at life distillation is impressive.
What shouldn’t be lost among mentions of the craft and subtle structuring on display is that Iredell’s book is a deeply pleasurable read. Each prose poem is self-contained, a story told in a way to conjure some combination of nostalgia, regret, or elation. Early in the book, Iredell volleys out this sentence: “We guzzled Zimas at a condo in Salinas.” It’s weirdly perfect, both in its rhythms and in its ability to evoke a particular moment in time and space. Like the music of Les Savy Fav or Golden Triangle, it’s art made by people who can argue theory all day but understand the value of bliss and release. And at the end of the night, Prose. Poems. A novel. stakes out its own unique space — finding that blissful overlap between beatific prose craftsmanship and a post-Cometbus generation of punk rock memoirists." - Tobias Carroll


"As the title might suggest, somewhere between poetry and prose sits Prose. Poems. a novel, by Jamie Iredell. On its surface, a collection of first-person flash pieces that highlight seemingly random moments in the life of “Larry,” a veiled-named high school football star turned middle-aged suburban comfort lifer. His life is hardly remarkable. But the way in which Iredell describes it, is.
With each vignette, the loose narrative arc comments upon a consistent sense of foreboding, which perhaps goes hand-in-hand with the prose poem form (is there ever a hopeful flash fiction piece?). The story is never linear, though never jarring. It’s a mistake to search for linear anchors in the text, as the setting and even the characters are fluid. There is a sense of story that meshes with the reader rather than dictates to him.
The strength of the novel lies in Iredell’s ability to acutely describe characters and settings, with a poetic sensibility that is often simultaneous stark and complete. First a setting:
“Then the sun tripped over the mountains like a clumsy fat guy. Ants followed one another over the rocks. We sucked up deep, cool breaths. For a minute they seemed like our last. But, go figure, they weren’t”.
And then our characters:
“These women wanted you to touch them. They’d been objects so long, only human fingers reminded them that they had skin”; “…a woman with more piercings than skin. It was like fucking the inside of a gumball machine”.
Prose. Poems: a novel is a slacker story, but a slacker motivated to understand not just his context (where slackers tend to top out; Douglas Coupland’s Generation X) but himself within the context (Dan Rhodes’s Gold). And much like the latter comparison, Iredell’s story benefits from its entrenchment in a captivating setting, one that both houses the characters and illuminates them." - Caleb J Ross

"The poetry of the prose is romantic and indulgent and perfectly ugly. I don’t know how he does it exactly, but Jamie never overwrites, while reserve and subtlety don’t appear to be his concern. And the anxiety of Denis Johnson’s influence doesn’t deter him at all. In so many ways – the topics, the prose, the form, etc. – there is so much Johnson in this book, but it lives confidently and compellingly apart. The scenes are claustrophobic and dire but I’m feeling a comfort and familiarity inside of them. Reading this book is enjoyable. Reading this book is like listening to an emo song that doesn’t suck really loud on your headphones (like Cap’n Jazz or the first Promise Ring album); it indulges whims and the poetry of adolescence without ever being cloying or cliched or losing its own voice. - John Dermot Woods

"Jamie Iredell’s first full book of poems, Prose. Poems. a novel., dares its reader to consider the book as a simple drug-and-alcohol-fueled rampage while moving towards manhood:
I always imagined that Jon wanted to feel the inside of the back of my skull with his knuckles. I swallowed another beer in two swallows. It’s only now that I can look back and say what kind of an idiot I’ve become.
Although drinking and taking drugs form an inextricable thread through the poems, the narrative thrust of the poems as a group—the “novel” part of the title—take the poems beyond this basic theme. These poems are not punk retreads of the remnants of the Beat movement; rather, Iredell carves out a unique space in his writings that gives rise to a singular voice of defiance.
The title of the collection serves as a bold declaration of war on the boundaries of genre. Iredell is not flouting the rules of genre, though. Instead, Iredell weaves his three titular genres together into a form that is all its own, containing elements of each. The poems are either prose poems or flash fictions, existing in this shared and contested ground between two genres. This shared ground is utilized for two ends: to create a singular instance of the poem as well as to move the poems as a group along a narrative path. In this shared and melded space, each genre is suggested and feels almost identifiable, but attempts to determine the specific nature of the book at any given point remain difficult. This elusiveness does not create distance between the reader and the text. Rather, it causes concerns of form to recede and become unimportant. What is most important is the poem and the exact moment being described on the page. What is most important is the story and how all the poems fit, in some way, together to form a whole. They are both the most important, logic be damned.
The poems are an exploration of location. Iredell’s alter-ego narrator wanders through all strata of his surrounding society in the same way that Benjamin catalogued Paris or Ece Ayhan treated Istanbul. The narrator here, though, is not walking through his location; he is always driving. The car becomes a main character inhabiting nearly every poem:
We’d driven to the top of the ridge, where the casinos were stars in the desert night. The smell of Greece permeated the truck cab’s air, something like old, unwashed blankets, and my friend, a Ph.D., who was from Greece.
Iredell’s main character does not inhabit condensed, walkable cities. He inhabits expansive American cities and the rural wildernesses in between. The car both embodies and creates the narrator’s relationship to his location. One cannot help but think of Creeley, “drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going”, and at the same time think of Kerouac’s On the Road. To be on the road, to drive, is a vital American experience.
The narrator moves across the nation, from west to east, against the flow of manifest destiny. The narrator’s quest against the grain of American history is also a move from the rural and outlaw to the civilized. We meet the narrator as a drunk and an outlaw:
The cops said, “Step out of the car.”
and as he and the story progress and move eastward, he also undergoes a process of growing and maturation:
I spin this out—this paragraph—from this desk, while Sally’s tiny feet, in their miniature sneakers, with the little swooshes, hike away this morning on her trek to the station. . . . Before Sally returns this evening, when I have finished this paragraph and said to myself, good job, I will bumble storeward for chicken and veggies and begin cooking them for her, my pretty doctor. And I’ll hope, like I do everyday, that she will in fact come home.
This is a bildungsroman that charts for itself a specifically American territory, that looks more to the American lifestyle than to the roots of the term in the German Enlightenment. The most obvious divergence from the bildungsroman tradition is the impetus for the change or journey: both of the narrator’s moves are prompted by admission to university studies, but it’s clear that, for him, studies are secondary to simply living and exploring. Writing does not come to the fore until the conclusion of the maturation process—in other words, not until the end of the collection. The narrator, instead of moving purposefully towards maturation, is, rather, drifting through America. The move from Nevada to Atlanta is not announced with fanfare or even any indication of a reason:
When I moved from Nevada: Moses and Fredo stacked boxes of books in the U-haul, cussing at the sage-filled lot adjacent the building…When I said goodbye they turned partway and shrugged.
This drifting might make one think of ennui. But although there is a relationship between the spirit of Iredell’s poems and the spirit of Rimbaud’s poems, the precise designation of ennui is not quite correct. A more appropriate term would be one that is entirely American and encompasses what it means to be American at the turn of the millennium. A more appropriate term would be disengaged:
Once, down above the junk, this feeling like I was part of something . . . There have been one or two times since when I felt almost the same way. That bar—the Summit Saloon, way out in the dark on Fourth Street—closed. Afterwards they put up condos. That’s the way it always is.
The surroundings are treated with an air of detachment and lack of connection or distinct caring. Friends, alcohol, and locations are all described and interacted with but fade in and out without leaving a mark on the narrator. He is not upset that the Summit Saloon closes. That’s just the way it is. He is not upset that he has only felt a part of something a few times in his life. That’s just the way it is. The poems are not an attempt to create meaning, which would just be a lie. They are recognitions of the reality of the narrator’s life and situation. And the reality of being American is movement and change. We are transitory, we routinely move from city to city and state to state; and our locations are transitory, as the Summit Saloon becomes condos, which later might become a school or a strip mall. To be American is to inherit nothing and create everything as we move along.
Iredell’s work skirts many boundaries and traditions: poetry, prose, and the European traditions of the bildungsroman and ennui. But it avoids each of these, if ever so slightly, and marches out on its own. The poems are not coming from a tradition because no tradition is the American tradition. The poems might recall traditions, but Iredell is not using these trappings to tell his story. Instead, he is telling his own singular story, creating his own specific tradition and genre as his story unfolds through this series of poems. A singular, American story. A singular, American poem." - Andrew Wessels