A Word Please

Visiting me today is Pablo D’Stair, a man with a brilliant literary mind. His words are meant to be savored. His novels are the type that leave lasting impressions and have you contemplating their meaning long after turning the last page. Pablo has graciously agreed to indulge my questions about his book i poisoned you, his publishing company, and himself.

About Pablo:

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist and the founder of Brown Paper Publishing, an independent literary press. His novels *Kaspar Traulhaine, approximate*, *i poisoned you*, *twelve ELEVEN thirteen* (June 2010) and *witness nothing*(forthcoming October 2010) are distributed free-of-charge upon
request.

About i poisoned you:
After his brother drunkenly confesses that he thinks his own girlfriend has taken a lover, Aldous Kline decides to investigate whether there is any basis for the suspicion.

What begins as an evening of detached voyeurism-following the girl from her work to her apartment to a study date to a late meal-descends into macabre possessiveness as Aldous becomes lost to the amoral whims of his own latent obsession.
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Pablo, thank you for hanging out here with us!

1. First, to settle my own curiosity, why did you choose to have your title – i poisoned you – in all lowercase letters?

Very cool question, actually, and I have a long winded answer I’ll try to keep short. So much of the novel has to do with variants on personal identity—conscious versus unconscious, active versus reflective, victim versus victimizer etc.—and with a sense of turmoil that has no exact pinpoint, no dominating origin and so I felt there needed to be a subtle reflection of this in the title. Keeping both the I and You in the lowercase—neither given a sense of superficial domination, both equally diminutive—I think fit. Already, when the content of the story is reflected on, I felt the oddness of the expression ‘I poisoned you’ –as opposed to “You poisoned me”— was bound to come up, seem a bit off, and with the ‘I’ capitalized this seemed all the more pronounced. This all has to do with the surface story of the novel, but also touches just as much on what I meant to be the more abstracted canvas the novel hoped to present on, but I will not try anyone’s patience with that, here.

2. This is a short novel, more of a novella. Did you ever consider making it a full-length novel?
In general, I always aim my novels to be longer than they turn out—there’s something to the truncation, the cleaving, pairing down to the essentials, that I know is naturally going to happen, but that nonetheless carries with it a tension to the writing. There needs to be a kind of violence in my head, emphasis versus expectation, doubting myself versus an arrogant going ahead unchecked. So, with ‘i poisoned you’ I initially figured it to go about another ten thousand words—not necessarily more would happen, it would start and end in the same place, but I figured I’d spend more time on X or Y or Z point, but the clip of the novel just decided itself, had to be maintained and certain neat little ideas became ancillary. Blah blah blah. I don’t exactly differentiate between novella and novel, except on the most literal level—novella is ‘short novel’, relative to length, nothing to do with import, content, stature or anything. I’ve found in conversation with a lot of writers, that nowadays there is something of a qualitative difference in definition that I can’t be bothered with. Otherwise, artistically, philosophically, I get spooked, worrying that people would think less of ‘The Stranger’ or ‘Doctor Glas’ or ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ or the lot because they are Novella as opposed to Novel, as though they would be made more pertinent or improved-on by adding more words—it would be spooky to me. I used to write much longer things, really, much much longer, and now when I write I can hardly figure out how I managed it. I’d like to write a longer piece, again, I just haven’t found that anything I’m working on would feel correct that way.

3. Aldous, your main character, has an abrupt decline in his mental state, which leads him to do some horrible things. Without giving too much away, can you tell us where your idea for his character came from?

Aldous floated around in this or that form for awhile—I’m writing four novels, which I consider sibling novels (or at least cousin novels) ‘Kaspar Trualhaine, approximate’, ‘i poisoned you’, one about to be available called ‘twelve ELEVEN thirteen’, and there is a great deal of pleasant turmoil in me to balancing some superficial similarities I want—and need—to be there but at the same time not just retreading. Honestly, I abandoned two other ‘versions’ of ‘i poisoned you’ at about ten to fifteen thousand words in each because the tone just didn’t hit right—too ethereal, too contrived, whatever—but Aldous was always principally the same. To me, he is a character who, while of course having a literal, personal identity (one that he is wholly detached from) really only exists as vicarious expression, he exists ‘on behalf’ of someone else, his latent desires or anguishes or passions or guilts directed outward, observed and then rather violently confronted or interacted with. Aldous was always meant to be someone who first acts on behalf of what he perceives as a betrayal against someone and then acts against this act from the point of view of it being a more reprehensible betrayal of someone else. Not to sound too nonsensical there, right? In the novel, to me, Aldous (until the first confrontation) is Bertram, acting more or less a jilted lover, then is Lecia, acting as revenger, both rightfully and at the same time venomously spiteful. All of this, though, honestly is not meant to go as subtext, and so Aldous is, bluntly, for purposes of the story, a kind of trait-less person, a cipher.

4. You wrote this in the first person, from Aldous’ perspective, and you did a masterful job. Was there any specific process or writing routine you followed to get into his character so perfectly?

There’re little things, but nothing I have the talent to make decipherable—no process, just writing when I get a free minute here or there, though there does have to be an acceptance of the text as it goes, the inertia, the constraint, the tension of expressing-within-confines is kind of a technique. It’s odd, because before writing Kaspar I tended to never write first person, almost maniacally would set my stories in third person with the exact same intention of detachment I now use first person for. The shift was built around wanting get into novels that held to surface narratives, tangible, very recognizable progressions of events—my old writing wasn’t about that, so it kind of makes sense there would need to be a fundamental shift to the surface. As it comes to the character—and I feel odd every time I say it—the character (Aldous, Kaspar, whomever) is built very much outward from myself, I serve as a kind of anchor I suppose, so it doesn’t get too adrift from some recognizable humanity, doesn’t become too much a game of symbol, icon, semantic—it also allows me an imperative sense of sympathy for Aldous, that kind of unconscious acceptance of one’s own deeds, no matter how out of orbit they get, as being somehow fundamentally appropriate. If Aldous were a third person expression it would be a matter of a make-believed-true-crime-narrative more than an expressive work of paranoia, of shame.

5. You don’t necessarily offer an explanation for Aldous’ decline. Is this intentional?

Absolutely the thing of Aldous is the lack of explanation—principally it is necessary, because the voice of the piece being his—and he being someone who is behaving without a conscious understanding—he could never seek to give explanation in the traditional sense of motive, of keen psychological observation and so the novel could never offer such things. Even if Aldous could give such observations, coming from him (the one perpetrating the very actions being observed) such statements would seem perversely surreal, especially as he locked-in-the-moment. And picking up from that, there is a fundamental belief of mine that a close observation of anyone’s behavior over a period (without the comfortable remove of time-passed, of distanced observation) cannot help but lead to a sense of surreality—if moment-by-moment (no literary aside, even asides having to be made as time ticks by) the sensation of one’s life are fixedly observed, reasons, causation, connections become difficult to pinpoint, it gets disquieting. The novel portrays something like twenty-four hours, during which time Aldous goes through with what he does and it is the condensed time frame and the over-intimate proximity to him and his actions that I think (and hope) leads to the sense of foreignness, of no-intimacy to him. Were it possible to speak to Aldous a month after the events of the novel, maybe he could offer insights of gravity, explanations—but there cannot be explanation until there is event, and this novel—and much of my work—is about documenting the moment, the shift, the space between where ‘Nothing Has Yet Happened’ and ‘Something Has Already Happened’. I feel like I’m blathering a bit, but I suppose a concise way to get at one of the principles of what I’m writing is that one can have a theory of why one might do something and one can have a theory of why one did do something, but in the instant something happens, in that buffer, neither of these more steadying viewpoints can exist yet and this is where Aldous is speaking from, so in that a lack of explanation is very intentional.

6. I found your writing style – your word choices and phrasing – truly captivating. Is this something that comes easily for you and do you have educational background in writing?

I’ve no educational background, no, I’m just one of the lowly proletariat. My style, I think, it has a lot to do with a penchant for Norwegian literature, Scandinavian literature, French literature—all in translation—things I just happened upon or had handed to me. I really like to think of my writing as trying to get that really wonderful sound of work in translation, so that the phrases all have a distinct and absolute clip, but at the same time are obviously not saying exactly the thing they are saying, they’re stabbing at it, at best, but to a reader what’s the difference? I often think about my love of Knut Hamsun, for example, and the fact that gun-to-my-head I wonder if I feel I’ve actually ‘read Hamsun’ no matter how many translations I get my hands on and the same with a lot of my formative and favorite authors. And there’s something in that I don’t second guess, I treat my novels a bit like transcription, or at least like retelling something that’s been written already by somebody else, nothing to change, nothing to alter, just things to interpret, say how I’d say something someone else might as well have said—I mean, once the work is out, mine is no different to me than Camus’—I might find some passage in ‘The Fall’ I don’t really like (theoretically, not very likely in reality) but when such a thing happens with someone else’s literature I don’t as a reader think it’s a mistake or something to play with, I just think ‘That’s what it is, that’s what was said, how about it, what do I think of it?’ So I just try to be a foreigner to my own literature, which does make it easy and enveloping and I dig the sort of quirk to the style it’s created—it drives some people crazy, however, and I well understand that as well.

7. You founded a small independent literary press called Brown Paper Publishing. Can you tell us a bit about it?

It’s a lot more boring than you’d think. It started with the idea that I had no interest in pursuing publication, little motivation to get my own stuff out, but had this real fixation with independent literature, with Literature-for-the-sake-of-Literature, never found a press that seemed to offer writers what I always wanted from a press for myself and so I cobbled it up. It’s been going about five years now, gone through a lot of permutations and is finally running more or less how I always dreamed it—I just publish work I like, sell the books as inexpensively as humanly possible, give free copies whenever I can (to authors and readers) kick the writers every cent of the very paltry money that comes in and it’s a kick. Anything I can do to get out work I like is what BPP is about, provided the author knows I’m an art pour l’art sort of guy, cannot be bothered with anything remotely sniffing of commerciality—not that I’m down on other authors or presses doing so, quite the contrary, just not my thing. Brown Paper is a press that digs on being small, staying small, staying practically invisible, just making a few books available here or there.

8. Through Brown Paper Publishing, you give some of your books away. While this is great for readers, it obviously doesn’t pay your bills. What is your reasoning behind these giveaways?

Well, for the novels and collections by other authors, the free print copies and the free PDFs are tied in to my publishing philosophy—if a reader wants, a reader should have—and as nobody really takes advantage of it, people only ask if they genuinely have an interest, it’s just about getting these artists I admire read. If I could afford it, my dream would be to produce limited edition short runs of titles, a few a year, two hundred copies or something, no profit, just give them all away to people who want to read them—not willy-nilly, there has to be desire—and that would be that. BPP authors always retain rights, so it would just be cool to get some work into people’s hands in nice volumes, nothing to worry about, no stress. With my own work, it’s just that I’m truly only interested in the novel-in-conversation. I like to know every nuance of people’s thoughts about literature and use my own work as a prompt—some people just read my stuff, give it a little review, other people start with commenting on my work and then we just move on to general correspondence about matters literary. Literature is a constant strum to me, alive and moaning not just to be heard but to expand, so I feel like giving the book away profits me—it’s a fair exchange, at the least, and often I come out well ahead, as I always get what I want, but a reader might just get stuck with a novel they can’t make heads nor tails of.
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You can find Pablo and his work in the following places:
His novels: www.kasparta.wordpress.com
Brown Paper Publishing: www.brownpaperpub.wordpress.com
His e-mail: unburiedcomments@gmail.com

Pablo has a gift with words. Check out his work. You won’t regret it!

Tags: author interviews, Brown Paper Publishing, free books, free e-books, free ebooks, Guest Authors, i poisoned you, indie authors, literary novels, Pablo D'Stair, small press publishing