THE WHIMSICAL ICEBOX
Conducted by Justynn Tyme

JUSTYNN TYME: What's your favorite breakfast?

D. HARLAN WILSON: It depends on whether or not I’m in a health-conscious mood. If I am, I like to eat an egg white omelette, a slice of multigrain toast and a piece a fruit. If I’m not, I like to eat a cheese omelette, a handful of bacon and biscuits and gravy. I’m usually in a health-conscious mood. But I’m making a concerted effort to be more unkind to my body.

JT: From your personal point of view, what is absurdism?

DHW: Generally speaking, I think absurdism is the experience of applying an excess of significance or purpose to something. What that something is doesn’t really matter. It could be a sense of selfhood, or a job, or a relationship, or a pineapple, or a handful of bling-bling. Whatever. Fact is, everybody perceives the world in their own unique way; the only perception of the world anybody has is their own subjective perception. It’s only natural that we place a certain amount of importance on certain things in our lives. But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter what we think is important, because everybody has their own ideas about what is important. Put simply, absurdism is the experience of taking yourself too seriously.

JT: What do you think are the main elements of absurdist literature?

DHW: I think the main element is satire. The great historical absurdist writers (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, Gogol, Carroll, Borges and so on) were all essentially making wisecracks about social structures and relations. Some other elements include nihilism, alienation, freakery, surrealism, paranoia, the death of meaning and individuality, and emotional and narrative violence?in other words, weird shit. Stuff that doesn’t happen in the “real” world according to the laws of cause and affect that bind us. A few of these things are basic modernist and postmodernist tenets. Place them together in a satirical context and you have yourself an absurdist narrative.

JT: What was your childhood like?

DHW: I had a good childhood. I was raised in an upper middle-class family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by two supportive, loving parents. I’m still very close to them. I also have a sister, Jain, and I have a close relationship with her. This surprises a lot of people. My books The Kafka Effekt and Stranger on the Loose each contain stories that feature wildly dysfunctional families. I don’t blame people for assuming that I’m the product of a turbulent upbringing. The only turbulence I really experienced as a child was in my head. I had nightmares all the time, and for no apparent reason. No reason I can figure out, anyway. Nowadays I’m thankful for my nightmares, though, past and present. They give me plenty of fodder for my writing.

JT: What was the defining experience that made you realize that your were absurd?

DHW: One day I discovered a hole where my navel used to be. I craned my neck down and looked in the hole. There was an eyeball staring back at me. It stared at me for about fifteen minutes without moving a muscle. Then it winked at me. At that moment, I realized that I was not inclined towards normativity. Nor was the world I was living in. I was two years years old.

JT: Does your absurdism spill over in to your everyday life? What do you see?

DHW: Unfortunately, no. I lead a fabulously boring life. I live in Lansing, Michigan, a culturally dead city that I can’t wait to leave in my dust. I’m currently working on my Ph.D. dissertation while teaching literature and composition courses at Michigan State University and a nearby community college. Writing the dissertation and preparing for and teaching courses occupies most of my time, and I spend much of my free time writing fiction and promoting my books. There’s nothing to do in Lansing except go out to bars and drink, so I don’t mind working all the time, but I’m constantly looking forward to moving. Right now I’m applying for jobs as a fiction writing professor at colleges and universities all over the country for the Fall of 2004. Hopefully, by next summer, I’ll be packing my bags.

JT: Who defines your absurdist views from the classics and modern versions?

DHW: From the classics, Kafka, of course, but also Gogol and Dostoevsky (especially his Notes from the Underground). I used to love Camus when I was younger, but now when I read and teach him, I don’t find him very provocative. From the moderns, my favorites are Donald Barthelme, Russell Edson and Steve Aylett. I’m actually devoting a chapter of my dissertation to Aylett’s neo-cyberpunk novels Slaughtermatic and Atom. And a bundle of Barthelme’s ironic stories and Edson’s carny prose poems have directly influenced many of my own stories.

JT: As a writer, are you in favor of concealing personal beliefs and/or enlightenments for a better society?

DHW: Most of my writing doesn’t contain any kind of polemic for a new and improved world. I’m not really interested in that sort of thing. What interests me is representing the world as it exists in distinctively imaginative ways. I suppose some of my fiction does point to particular crises and shortcomings in society, but only indirectly, for the most part. At its core, my writing is quite passive, although I don’t think most of my readers see it that way. But what I think is inconsequential. What any author thinks about his work is inconsequential. Once a story or novel is published and disseminated to the rest of the world, it takes on a new life, a life projected on it by the perceptions of others, all of whom are produced by different experiences and have their own assumptions, judgements and ideologies. In the end, all that matters is what readers elicit from a piece of fiction. I can only hope that what they elicit brightens or informs their lives in some way.

JT: Why do you write?

DHW: I’ve always had an overactive imagination, and writing allows me to sort of purge my imagination; getting my thoughts down on paper in the form of a narrative is a cathartic process. I didn’t always believe this to be true, but lately I’ve realized that I do need to write in order to maintain a certain sense of emotional stability. More than that, though, I like to entertain and educate people, including myself. I write in order to stimulate a certain readership as much as I do to stimulate me. Fiction is just a representation of reality, even if it’s fiction like mine, which doesn’t always conform to the norms of reality, and the process of conceiving and writing fiction permits me to flesh out the dynamics and vicissitudes of reality. I think it does the same for my readers.

JT: How do you get in the frame of mind to write? Is it random or spur of the moment?

DHW: Rarely. Usually I write every morning for a few hours. These days I devote most of my writing time to my dissertation, but I always make time for my fiction, if only for fifteen minutes or a half an hour a day.

JT: What do you think of the present community of absurdists?

DHW: They are a fine, talented group of people. Over the last few years I’ve developed relationships with a number of absurdist writers. Anybody interested in checking out some of their work should refer to the Absurdism! website at www.absurdist.cc.

JT: Anything or anyone you feel is underrated?

DHW: I mentioned Russell Edson earlier. There’s somebody I think deserves a lot more kudos. A great deal of intellectual savvy lurks beneath the surfaces of his bizarre prose poems. The problem is, most people can’t get past his bizzareness. That’s a problem many absurdist writer’s face: trying to reach a readership that is resistant to suspend its disbelief and look beyond the closed-minded confines of reality.

JT: You are an accomplished writer, possibly an icon. Is this where you want to be? What do want to do either with your writing or as an artist?

DHW: Thanks for the compliment, Justynn! Right now I’m just working on spreading the word about my stories and books. I’m a relatively new writer and I still have a long way to go. My professional utopia would be to teach literature and creative writing part-time and to write full-time. And to get paid handsomely for it, of course!

JT: If given the opportunity to say whatever you want without limitations of subject or length, what would you say?

DHW: I’d probably just read a Philip K. Dick novel aloud. Then I’d go to a bar and drink a dry vodka martini in silence.