THE DREAM ZONE
Conducted by Paul Bradshaw

PAUL BRADSHAW: Firstly, why D. Harlan Wilson? Is this your genuine name? Why not David Wilson or D. H. Wilson or David H. Wilson ? Tell us all!

D. HARLAN WILSON: My genuine name is David Harlan Wilson. Harlan is my father's first name. I write under D. Harlan Wilson because, first of all, it seems to me to be more dynamic than the fairly banal David Wilson or David H. Wilson, and D. H. Wilson makes me feel like a D. H. Lawrence impersonator. More than that, though, I like the idea of my first name being one letter—for me, it's a kind of cryptic expression of the way I often feel isolated, alienated and estranged not so much by society as by my own self. Kafka is one of my primary influences as a writer and I think he was trying to convey something like the same thing with his K. characters in The Castle and The Trial.

PB: How did you begin to write fiction? What gave you that first urge to do it? Tell us about your early work and how it has developed.

DHW: Like many writers, I started out writing bad poetry. I was in college at the time and I continued to write bad poetry after college and during my graduate school experiences at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Liverpool. I began writing fiction while I was at UMass. The first story I wrote, I remember, was for a creative writing course I took in 1996 that was taught by the novelist Patricia Powell. It was about this guy who developed an obsession with the film A Clockwork Orange. He went crazy and drop-kicked a cat across the street, then fell down a stairway and broke his neck or something. It was atrocious. But I recall how I thought it was ingenious at the time. Few things make me cringe more than looking at myself in retrospect. At any rate, I gave up poetry, but I stuck with the fiction. After the creative writing class, I began writing novels. I wrote three of them over the course of three years and they were all crummy; I never tried to publish any of them. Then I turned to the short form and found myself in a much more comfortable place. I want to return to novels in the not-too-distant future. For now, though, I'm happy doing what I'm doing.

I've always been interested in writing offbeat, weird, speculative literature and for the most part that's all I've ever written. On a number of occasions, I've tried to represent the world in a more normative fashion, but frankly, I stink at it, mainly because it bores the hell out of me. I often write for the sole purpose of entertaining myself and I'm not very interested in the normativeness of the world. What interests me is the absurdity and the freakery that lies beneath and on top of and in the middle of everything.

PB: What kind of things influence your writing, and which writers give you inspired you and your work?

DHW: When I began writing, my dreams were my building blocks. I dream like a maniac—that is, I have maniacal dreams that I remember and record my with manic intensity—and my earlier stories are mainly dream extrapolations. But over the last two years I've relied on my dreams less and less, and while I still record them religiously, I rarely use them as infrastructures for my stories.

As for writers that inspire me, I already mentioned Kafka. Three writers that I read on a regular basis are Philip K. Dick, Russell Edson and Steve Aylett: the imaginations these guys pack, and especially the way in which they articulate their imaginations, is superb. I'm also inspired by a lot of philosophy and literary theory. Often my stories will manifest themselves as interpretations or satirical expressions of certain philosophical or theoretical passages. In my new book The Kafka Effekt, I use Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser for this end.

PB: Your imagination is so wild and unique, your characters always find themselves in impossible situations. How does your mind work in this respect? How do you develop your short stories from the original core idea?

DHW: I have a special penchant for core ideas that take the form of weird, outlandish afflictions or situations with which I might antagonize my characters. The problem is, sometimes I don't know where to go from there. I'm writing a story right now about a man who expresses joy when bad things happen to him and grief when good things happen to him. The discovery that somebody has keyed his car, for instance, prompts him to laugh his ass off and buy the first flaneur he bumps into a drink at an expensive bar. I provide a few more examples in the story itself, but as of this moment, I don't know what to do with this protagonist. Still, that's part of the fun of writing for me; while I'm going through the motions of my daily routine, I can think about the ways I might toy with and expand upon his eccentricity.

PB: How often do you write? Any strange places you write in, do you require total silence or are you surrounded by noise, music maybe?

DHW: I usually write every day, even if it's just a paragraph or two in my journal. In fact, even when I'm writing stories, I only manage to churn out a few paragraphs in one sitting. My mind is slow-moving and I write like a snail, and the prospect of spending a large chunk of time in front of the keyboard is anxiety-inducing. I've always been a very antsy person and have had trouble sitting still. I'm also teaching college courses and working on my Ph.D., and my days are packed with infinite little tasks. But typically I try to set aside an hour or two every morning in my apartment for my writing with a big cup of coffee and some jazz playing in the background. Once I complete a draft of a story in this atmosphere, though, I shift gears. The morning turns into the night, my apartment turns into a smoky bar, my coffee turns into beer and scotch, and the jazz turns into jukebox music. I love revising my stories in that kind of turbulent setting. In one way or another my work tends to express the schizophrenic nature of the postmodern human condition, and I like to think that the schizophrenic way in which I produce my work is symptomatic of its content.

PB: Have you ever considered using a pseudonym, or does your ego insist that everyone should know it is you that has produced this weird stuff? How would you describe your ego as a writer?

DHW: The only pseudonym I've considered using (but never have) other than D. Harlan Wilson, which really isn't a pseudonym, is Harlan Will ... which really isn't a pseudonym. I guess I want people to know that "David Wilson" is producing the stories I write, but at the same time, I want people to know that my stories are not representative of the "real me"—whoever that is. I'm a firm believer in Baudrillard's claim that in contemporary capitalist society everybody's name and hence identity and reality, whether they like it or not, is something that is chronically bound by quotation marks. In any case, my characters are invariably harassed by some kind of psychological turmoil, often self-engendered, and whereas I am without a doubt my own worst enemy, I communicate a sense of normalcy almost everywhere I go! I write for me, but it isn't therapy. It's shits and giggles and the odd self-discovery. I'm never absolutely pleased with my work and I'm more than wary of my inadequacies and shortcomings as a writer; I revise neurotically. What I demand of myself is that I reach a point of tolerance.

PB: Your book The Kafka Effekt is a bizarre gem, 44 stories from your vivid imagination. How did the book come about? Tell us about your involvement with Eraserhead Press.

The founder and editor-in-chief of EHP is Carlton Mellick III. Early in 2000 I submitted a few stories to him for his magazine The Dream People. He was receptive, and asked me if I would be interested in publishing a chapbook of stories with EHP. Of course I was interested. Later that year EHP released Kafka-Breathing Sock Puppets, a collection of 11 stories, most of which appear in The Kafka Effekt (the chapbook functions as a sort of sampler for the larger work).

Before 2001, EHP had focused mainly on publishing chapbooks in addition to The Dream People and another magazine The Earwig Flesh Factory. Then Carlton decided he wanted to start publishing book-length works. The Kafka Effekt is part of the first wave of books that EHP released in December 2001. There are five other books, all of them novels (or rather, anti-novels), written by Hertzan Chimera, Vincent Sakowski, M.F. Korn, Kevin Donihe and Carlton himself. They're an eclectic bunch of guys, I think, and each of them expresses the Bizarre with their own unique style and acumen. I feel privileged to be part of the gang. Now let's hope we sell some books!

PB: Tell us what it is about Kafka that brought you to produce the book.

DHW: It was Kafka's shorter works, namely the posthumously published stories and short shorts (i.e. "The Bridge," "The Vulture", "Hands", "The Student", "Description of a Struggle") that really got me interested in him. The first thing I read of his was, not surprisingly, "The Metamorphosis." I was a freshman in college and I remember being captivated by the grotesque and absurd depiction of Gregor Samsa, but I was young and idiotic and on the whole the novella, with its interminable paragraphs and lack of action-packed sequences, put me to sleep. It wasn't until about 6 years later that I came back to Kafka. At the time I had just begun writing fiction and I had it in my head that all good stories had to be lengthy, intricately woven, clever as hell, and full of twists and turns. Then I bought his collected stories and started reading his simply written yet profound paragraph-long stories, and I realized I had found my man. I started patterning my stories after Kafka's, in structure and to some degree in content. The first story I ever published—"An Unleashing" in Liquid Fiction, a now defunct webzine—was basically a rewrite of "The Vulture." So I was using Kafka as a crutch. I don't do that anymore, but I continue to write in a similar milieu, and I wanted to call attention to this by naming my book The Kafka Effekt.

PB: And what about the future? What can we expect from D. Harlan Wilson in the coming months or years? Any projects you are working on right now?

DHW: Right now I'm in the process of putting the finishing touches on another collection of stories called (ahem) The Kafka Effekt 2. I always encourage my students to be creative when they devise titles for their papers; I guess I'm just a big hypocrite! Then again, the affect that cinema and the Hollywood ethic has on the American consciousness pervades my writing and I want this sequel-title to allude to that affect on top of the allusion to the Kafkaesque ethic that already exists in the title.

A recent review of The Kafka Effekt, which was mostly very generous, criticized me for being a kind of imposter in that I don't write in the vein of Kafka but rather in my own distinctive style. To a certain extent, I agree. "Kafka may start with an absurd premise," says the reviewer, "but he deals with its consequences realistically." What the reviewer doesn't mention is that the "reality" in which Kafka's characters deal with consequences is not the "reality" of the objective world, but a subtly modified alternate reality that deceives readers into believing that that timespace is the "real". My stories are almost always propelled by absurd premises or devices, but the alternate realities in which my characters work things out are not subtly modified. They're screamingly modified.

I would never go so far as to position myself on the same intellectual plain as Kafka; if I did, I hope somebody would take me out back and shoot me in the face. The point is, the basic conceptual essence of my work is indebted to him. I wouldn't want to have cocktails with him or anything—if his biographers are correct, Kafka the man was a social dufus. But the literary produce of that dufus was extraordinary. I usually don't like writing, no matter how good it is, produced by authors who I know are inadequate as people, particularly if they're assholes and egomaniacs or, in Kafka's case, nerve-wracked introverts. But sometimes I can't help making exceptions.