Interview with a

Art by Elliot Skow

Q.

A. I guess because I'm exploring the format in some of my own writing.

Q.

A. It's not ready to show to anyone. In fact the project is more notional than actual—a few notes in a plain text file, which I peek at from time to time.

Q.

A. There's a story about the band Talking Heads, how they wanted to record a song that sounded like Joy Division, but they’d never heard Joy Division, so they relied on rumor and imagination. At first it was a bit like that.

Q.

A. I learned that Lydia Davis had modeled a story of hers, “Jury Duty,” on the David Foster Wallace story. So I thought I’d at least read those two.

Q.

A. I still, now, don’t know. There must be, right?

Q.

A. I was drawn to the fragmentation, dislocation, interruption; how those might contribute to the sense of something being “off.” That Hitchcock scene in Vertigo I’ve been obsessed with—it achieves similar effects, with different means. I think it suits the subject matter, but we’ll see.

Q.

A. Yes, you’re right, those other effects are also quite important. The question is what special aesthetic effects the form can achieve—what it can do, that can’t be done just as well by writing a monologue, or writing both sides of the conversation. Indeed, in the ideal, the story would become worse, if the “Q” side were filled in. I actually doubt that either Lydia Davis or David Foster Wallace exploited the form to its full potential. Too often it’s obvious what the interviewer asked. And in both stories the “A” characters, especially Wallace’s hideous men, are given to long, monologue-ish answers to what appear to be short questions.

Q.

A. The second interview does. It opens with the subject admitting that he does something vaguely awful, presumably to women. After a “Q,” he discusses the origins of this behavior—so that’s what the question must have been about. Then we get this: