Interview with Author D. Harlan Wilson

New Fiction from D. Harlan Wilson

D. Harlan Wilson is the author of three new books. Recently he caught up with Dark Sky Magazine to discuss his work, influences, and the type of television that inspires him.

DSM: Your writing is often described as futuristic and nontraditional. Why is that, and do you agree?

D. Harlan Wilson: Yes, definitely. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in nontraditional modes of storytelling, and I like writing and reading speculative fiction that’s set in futuristic or alternate universes. Together, these elements sanction the most viable forum for narrative creativity and imaginative exploration, I think. I consistently try to push boundaries and chart new (or at least unique) territory in my writing. Setting stories in strange, estranging worlds, and stylizing and playing with the language used to map and articulate those worlds, allows me to do this.

DSM: You have three new books published. What can you tell us about them?

Wilson: Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria is a 40,000-word novel set in near-future Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up. It’s about the foibles of a Dutch American family and the bourgeois suburb they live in.

Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance is a shorter, 20,000-word novel set in an irreal version of a small, fictional Midwestern American town called Dreamfield, Indiana. This one is about a bunch of gangsters who terrorize Dreamfield and a guy who’s wife they kill. In addition to their basic plots, both books are critifictions that explore and attempt to theorize different topics. Blankety Blank addresses things like the illusion of memoir, the failure of memory, identity construction, and suburban sprawl, whereas Peckinpah addresses ultraviolence, smalltown life, religion, patriarchy and misogyny, narrative structure and function, and, as the title suggests, the biography of filmmaker Sam Peckinpah.

Unleash It!

Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction is the third book I’m currently promoting. It’s a work of literary and cultural criticism based on my Ph.D. dissertation, which I completed in 2005. I try to create a new theory of technological selfhood and subjectivity by analyzing what I call “postcapitalist” science fiction novels and films. Among the primary texts I study are the films Vanilla Sky, Army of Darkness, The Matrix and its sequels as well as the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs and Max Barry’s novel Jennifer Government. My analysis of these texts is informed by a lot of literary and cultural theorists (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, Paul Virilio, Scott Bukatman, Frankfurt school partisans, etc.). Technologized Desire was published by Guide Dog Books, the new nonfiction syndicate of Raw Dog Screaming Press.

DSM: Where do you find your inspiration?

The Gross Factor

Wilson: All kinds of places. Films. Literature. The news. People who go to Subway and don’t understand what a six inch sub is. People who think they perceive things clearly when in fact they are idiots. The image of a clover growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. Michael Gross. Dreams—when I started writing creatively, I often recorded my dreams and then converted them into stories. And so on.

DSM: Tell us about your writing process. Anything you’d compare it to?

Wilson: I would compare it to watching TV. I often write when I watch TV. Right now I’m watching Law & Order: SVU as I respond to these questions.

I don’t have a special or ritualistic writing process. I like to write in the morning with coffee, but as a fulltime English professor, husband, and soon-to-be father of two, I write whenever I can, usually in short bursts, fifteen minutes here, half an hour there.

DSM: Which authors influence you? Why?

Wilson: I like authors who simultaneously make me laugh and think. And I like stylists. Oldsters: Kafka, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Poe, Baudelaire, Melville. More contemporary: Steve Aylett, Alan Moore, Russell Edson, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Barry Yourgrau, J. G. Ballard.

DSM: Finish these sentences any way you’d like: Harry was too … for her, he knew that. She was a woman who liked…

Jules Verne: Ladies Man

Wilson: Harry was too Wellsian for her, he knew that. She was a woman who liked Jules Verne. He had a much more dynamic mustache than Wells and his books had cooler covers, featuring colorful balloons and flailing tentacles. Then again, Wells’ book covers had tentacles. He recalled the third British edition of War of the Worlds—how the tentacles hung from the Martian tripod like elderly genitals. And the sixth French edition of The Island of Dr. Moreau had superfluous tentacles emerging from the gaping chest cavity of a vivisected leopard-man. And remember the didact’s mustache during World War I? A singular unit. A unit of Nietzschean proportions . . .

DSM: Anything else you’d like our readers to know about you, your work?

Wilson: I will simply encourage them to visit my Web site, and keep their eyes peeled for Codename Prague, the second installment in my “scikungfi” trilogy, which will be published in 2010 by Raw Dog Screaming Press.

D. Harlan Wilson

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D. Harlan Wilson holds a M.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, a M.A. in Science Fiction Studies from the University of Liverpool, & a Ph.D. in English from Michigan State University. Prior to his graduate studies he worked as an international salesman, a model & actor, a casino dealer, a security guard, a garbage man, a tax collector, a sommelier, a town crier, & a flâneur.