When did you start writing this book?

November, 2018. As the foreman of an apple orchard, I had a couple weeks of downtime between the harvest’s end and when winter pruning began, and so was eager to fill that time with as much new writing as I could. My intention was to compose a few short stories, but instead the original vignettes of Enclosure Architect began to take shape. Three-and-a-half notebooks, five drafts, and one year later, I was startled to have something close to a finished manuscript.

What inspired you to write about an artist’s creative life and making art in times of violence?

There’s this line in Open Mike Eagle’s “Raps for When It’s Just You & the Abyss” wherein he kinda tortures himself with the fact that he’s “trying to promote these rap shows when it’s the end of the motherfucking world.” As someone who is often trying to share new work within a public space—whether it’s a new book, a new record, a new multidisciplinary collaboration—there’s always this sick sense of unease before hitting send on an email or posting to social media. Like, how crass am I, drawing attention to my qualified successes while so many horrible things are happening everywhere all at once? It’s a sentiment I’ve heard from so many artists I know. In times of global crisis (which is to say, always), it’s easy to convince ourselves of our own irrelevance.

But a subconscious moment came when I must have inverted that internal embarrassed tic and dug deep into the reality of being an artist in the era of Endless War, created a reason to geek-out about art while also acknowledging the chronic violence and nihilism of daily life in post-capitalist America.

The setting of the book is semi-fictional but clearly grounded in the lived experience of the times we are living in—how did that take form on the page?

I’ve come to learn that I am terrible at writing directly about issues that are of principal concern for me. I come off preachy, which is no good for anyone: no one wants to read my diatribe about social injustice, and I don’t particularly want to write it. So my politics come out in the stories that I tell, the characters that fascinate me and the circumstances they face. And if the stories take place in the United States, then there has to be a certain amount of mass protest and mass violence of such a scale and frequency that it becomes part of the normalized background noise of daily life. Making such a statement in 2024, it’s the summer of 2020 that comes immediately to my mind, but when I was writing the book, it was the aftermath of the 2016 elections and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were informing my choices, events which in turn reminded me of the WTO protests in the 90s, which reminded me of the American Indian Movement, which reminded me of everything surrounding the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, and so on and so forth. Because the US has always been at war with itself. In some ways, it’s the reason—the primary purpose for which—the US exists. The rhetoric changes, but the fight is the same. Someone big is always trying to squash someone little.

Did you find yourself mainly relying on personal experience as a part of your process or was there any sort of research you did?

 While there are definitely details cribbed from my actual lived experiences, this is almost entirely an imagined story. I have never wardrobed myself with castaway clothes found in the abandoned houses I’ve explored. Only rarely have I had to improvise places to sleep, and none of those were derelict warehouses. But I do try to read broadly, so scenes of buildings getting mortared or people coexisting among urban wreckage have surely been metabolized from books about Bosnia in the 90s or the University of Mexico in 1968, for example. And in the drafting and editing phases, I certainly spent a lot of time expanding my knowledge of 20th-century art and artists and various schools of architecture and different periods in furniture design and whatever else the narrator’s omnivorous aesthetic mind might require of me. In this singular way, she and I are stand-ins for one another. She gave me the excuse to dive deep into subjects I wanted to learn about anyway. She’s the far-ranging expert I wish I could be.

Can you talk a bit about why geometry is featured in the book?

There was a moment when I was seventeen when I had to decide whether to apply to colleges for English or for physics. I’ve always been a storyteller and a maker-of-things, but I’ve also always been fascinated by (and as a student, excelled at) math and science. I ultimately decided to major in English because, in my experience, good math teachers are harder to come by than good English teachers and I was tired of working with inarticulate geniuses. (And I don’t mean this figuratively: I finished my high school career at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, a residential academy for accelerated studies. Not one course I later took in college challenged me the way even the easiest class at the MSSM did. Our instructors really were operating on a whole other intellectual plane.)

The language of numbers—and, by extension, the basic principles of how the Universe operates—have been a constant interest for me, so it makes sense that that interest would find ways to manifest itself in my creative work. And too, geometry figures heavily into a lot of modern and post-modern art, so there’s a natural convergence of interests there. While I do not actually remember this moment, I’m sure that when the opportunity became clear for a character to have a unified theory of numbers, multiple parts of my brain excitedly lit up.

The story is written in a nonlinear narrative that effectively captures the complex nature of memory. How did you go about revising and deciding the order in which these memories are presented?

 As a teenager, nothing gave me more joy than making a mix tape wherein each song flowed seamlessly into the next, not just sonically but thematically: I could create a new narrative by folding one musician’s voice into the next. Collaging narrative fragments into a greater whole, unsurprisingly, hits a lot of those same serotonin-releasing buttons. It feels correct to tell stories this way, feels genuine. So while there obviously has to be some very intentional placing of pieces—situation A has to be come before situation B for a particular emotional or logical effect to take place—there’s just as much, if not more, intuitive guess work at play. Like, what happens when these two vignettes are placed side by side? What happens if a third vignette interrupts them? What happens when this longer scene is chopped apart and scatter among other seemingly-unrelated details? Some of my favorite scenes came about because I saw a gap between existing fragments and recognized what kind of bridge was necessary. I’m sure this process of random-looking reshuffling would drive other people mad. But it’s kinda my favorite part. I can’t think of anything more boring than drawing a straight line with words.

The reader gets a sense of the story’s timeline based on where the protagonist is living. What is the importance of place and location in the book?

 Not to harp too much on my adolescence, but when I was teenager—and I’m sure anyone who recalls their high school years with any amount of dark feeling will sympathize—the space wherein I took the most solace was my bedroom. My social life at school was a mess and my hormones were a nightmare and, honestly, the house where I grew up wasn’t necessarily a very safe place either, but my bedroom was mine. I was safe in there. I could lock the door. And the spaces the novel’s narrator inhabits operate within similar parameters. She scavenges and steals food, gets into fights with drunk homophobes, nearly dies of hypothermia, all within a city that often explodes into unexplainable conflict. Her world is the definition of instability. Yet there are these specific places that, for her, are stable. Even if that stability is totally illusory. Even if the concept of safety is specious at best. There are places where she can always go and be welcomed by people who love her. And so these places take on (perhaps inflated) significance. The external world might be in chaotic dissolution, but these spaces are hers. She’s permitted entry. She can lock the door.

How does being a musician influence your writing?

The first songs I ever wrote were MIDI compositions programmed into a secondhand laptop, songs that most folks said sounded like something from a really intense RPG, like a nightmarish version of The Legend of Zelda or some other Nintendo fantasy. Later, when I started recording with physical instruments, people focused on the cinematic quality of the music, like it was the soundtrack to a really uncomfortable movie that didn’t exist yet. It took a long time for me to understand that, in both instances, what they were referring to was a narrative motion inherent to my songs.

Each composition was a little journey through a visceral space. That was something I could wrap my head around, something I could explore with intention and excitement. It also gave me permission to view my music and my writing not as separate endeavors but as different methods of telling different stories.

I no longer think of the time I spend making a record as time I ought to be spending on a story or novel. It’s more like, this is the kind of story I am able and eager to create right now. It makes my creative life feel more continuous and fluid.

Can you say what your next project will be?

 Since the interval between the drafting of something and its eventual publication can vary wildly—sometimes weeks, more often years—I can’t honestly say what’s next, but I can say what things are in the works. The past few years have marked an extended period of composing pieces for my chamber group, The Plaster Cramp, which currently has a completed full-length record that we’re just kinda waiting for the right time to release. Meanwhile, I’m working on a new novel that overlaps in certain ways with Enclosure Architect but is very much its own story. I also have a book of nonfiction slated for release in the spring of 2025 through Fomite Press, a very different kind of textual collage called Any Less You that hems together interviews and family photographs and fragments of memory to create an incomplete self-portrait. The printed galleys look gorgeous, which is great because between the covers resides some real ugliness, but hopefully some real beauty too. Like, I make friends with a dog. What’s more beautiful than a boy making friends with a dog?