Since its founding in 2006, the Michigan-based press Dzanc Books has released a number of worthwhile reads, including Roy Kesey’s All Over and Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory. In the years since then, they’ve also acted as distributor for a number of other presses and journals (including Monkeybicycle and OV Books) and, more recently, announced the creation of an online journal called The Collagist, to be edited by writer and previous Agitation interviewee Matt Bell. Dzanc founder Steven Gillis is also the author of three novels, most recently Temporary People, a novel about a sort of meta-revolution that occurs on an island nation off the coast of Europe. (It also, it should be said, made for a fine back-to-back read with China Miéville’s The City & The City — politically resonant novels set in painstakingly created countries.) Temporary People and The Collagist were among the topics Gillis and I discussed via email for this interview.
[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]
Temporary People is subtitled “a fable”. I’ll admit that, initially, this threw me; given the extent to which you’ve created a distinct country and given it a visible, viable history– a degree of realism I don’t generally associate with fables. Did you know from the start that you’d be using this terminology? And if not, at what point did the book shift from Temporary People: a novel to Temporary People: a fable?
The idea to actually call Temporary People a fable came very late in the game, though the sense that what I was writing was indeed exactly that seemed to resonate within me for some time. I purposely called TP a fable as, to me, it is precisely that, though as you note, not in the traditional way people think of a fable. For me, TP has a moral center, it is a wild story of the quixotic turned on its head, with characters large and small, and I wanted there to be this sense of telling a tale. I could, of course, have left the fable reference off, but I like the association, the idea that here is a tale, modernly set yes, with factual and historical references, and yet completely separate and timeless like – well – a fable.
How much of the history of Bamerita had you worked out before you began writing the novel?
Again, like my use of the word ‘fable’ the idea of having Bamerita be this unique floating space in the world was there from the start, but the actual historical context evolved as the novel went through its many drafts.
Was Bamerita specifically based on any countries? Given its dictator’s obsession with films and filmmaking, I found myself thinking of North Korea more than once while reading the novel.
Not one specific country, no, though my vision has always been a Latin/Central American flavor, a bit of Marquez’s vision, and then with traces of Spain under Franco thrown in. There are so many countries today with madmen and despots at the helm, and as I read obsessively about all of them, Bamerita became a composite.
The novel’s treatment of revolution kept anticipating my comments on it: you’d mention popular music in the context of the novel’s revolution, I’d think “Czechoslovakia”, and within a few pages, you’d mention the unrest there in 1968; the same was true in the discussion of general strikes, which both called to mind and explicitly referenced Poland in the early 1980s. The events of Temporary People, then, seem like a kind of meta-revolution. To what extent have you found that revolutions tend to (or don’t tend to) build on what has come before?
If you mean the repetition in a single country as happens in Bamerita, the cycle is almost unavoidable because it becomes part of the culture, the fabric of the nation, sadly enough. If you mean revolutions in general, certainly there are aspects of revolution that are endemic to the process, regardless of where they take place. The eternal push and shove between powers, the internal struggle as it comes to a head, and then those cast to the outside after a revolution, begin to seed the same process again and again.
On the Dzanc side, you’ve recently announced the launch of online literary journal The Collagist. What prompted this? Do you consider it a part of Dzanc, or something distinct?
The Collagist is most definitely a part of Dzanc. We – Dan Wickett and myself – had discussed doing a journal for a while, and when we landed Matt Bell as our editor, we decided to take the jump. We simply want to use our platform to continue to bring the best writing to a large audience. The Collagist will have fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, novel excerpts, editorials and feature some of the best new and established writers working today. Our first issue will be out Aug 15 and when you see the material we have lined up, and the writers, I think you will be blown away.
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