This is a freewheeling roundtable discussion about digital means in literature between John Trefry and the 2 Castle Freak laureates to date, Mike Kleine & Joshua Rothes.

[A dog or coyote or some sort of animal with a snout, howls, off in the distance, somewhere. There is no moon outside].

John Trefry: Through my architecture background, where there’s an increasing role of parametric modeling and machine-learning-based oversight, I’ve been interested in the possibilities of literature produced through digitally-assisted methods, and personally, in the potential for new forms, new grammars, new rhythms that aren’t married to our human physiology and conditioning. It turned out I had no clue how to go about this at all, hence my creation of the Castle Freak remote residency. I wonder what prompted your interest both in the general concept of digital literature and the particular parameters of this venture?

Mike Kleine: I wanted to challenge myself and try something new—something I’d never attempted before. If I am being completely honest, I am not a programmer, far from it. Anything I know about coding et al. is supremely rudimentary. More, this entire process was a way for me to see what could happen in (potentially) failing. I entered the residency accepting the fact that even a failure might still yield interesting/usable results. I remember when we met IRL for the first time; I pretty much demanded we scrap Lonely Men Club because I couldn’t handle its imperfections. And you pretty much told me it was the imperfections that made it unique and interesting. I think it’s a good thing you were able to convince me to not jump ship.

JT: I knew when you told me that your favorite food was “leaves” that the book could not be kept from the reading public.

MK: Yeah! Eating leaves is something I still do, at least a couple times a week, if not more. You can pretty much do anything with leaves.

Joshua Rothes: You can’t write self-consciously and produce that many words in that short a timespan. I think that might have been the main draw for me with respect to the rules of the Castle Freak residency, even before my interest in technology-assisted (-abetted?) writing came into play, to see something of what I’m made of, which stylistic tics remain and which fall away under intense pressure—and which emerge. Even once the technological aspect was introduced, it was still about the human, ultimately. I designed the technologies I employed to act as a kind of biomechanical exoskeleton that might animate my tired flesh when I couldn’t go on much longer. Of course, that’s only part of the story of how it played out, as all bets are off once the clock starts. In the end, I used methods both analog and digital to spur my mind (and more importantly, my fingers) on. I’ve always liked to keep a pile of books next to where I’m writing so that I can, when stuck, flip around until my eyes land on a word, and then I work to incorporate that word into what I’m writing, letting it bend the mood and/or narrative in the process. The technologies I developed for the Castle Freak residency were meant to be augmentative, tools for accelerated automatic writing, surefire tricks to beat my normal writerly hangups, though there are large chunks of the finished text that are purely generative.

Mike, I’m curious, how soon after finishing Lonely Men Club did you read it back? I haven’t opened the We Later Cities file since I turned it in. I’m admittedly a little apprehensive.

MK: I don’t think I looked at it for a few months. Like, really looked at it, you know what I mean? I don’t remember the timeline, between when I had finished the text and when I met with John IRL. [JT: Mike, you did the residency in November of 2017 and then we met in Des Moines in February of 2018.] I recently just scanned through it and… man, there’s goddamn typos in French! Which goes to illustrate the types of “imperfections” I’m alluding to. Had this been a normal text, there is no way I would have accepted a typo in French (let alone other typos). (And by normal, I mean, given infinite amounts of time to revise and all that). Now, having distanced myself from the work after so many years, John was right. I appreciate the mistakes, absolutely. Like, the typos in French—did the computer do that? The Zodiac? Who knows? It truly was an out-of-body experience where you just had to let things happen/occur. I want to add that part of this entire project was also a way for me to let go, since I will generally spend years obsessing over small things no one will ever notice. The restriction of, “You only have five days,” was basically a death sentence. And I knew I had to experience it, even if just once. Fun fact: I still have not released any new (solo & full-length) writing since Lonely Men Club! I keep telling John the residency annihilated a part of me… a part I will never be able to get back. At first he laughed, I think. These days though, I don’t think there’s much laughing happening anymore.

JT: I actually have just recently suggested that Josh limit his edits. I don’t want the human to creep significantly into the way the final product looks, in that it becomes made to look the way “we” “think” “it” as a “book” “should” “look.” But I think the technical pursuit of Josh’s book was rather different than yours, from what I understand. Both in the goals of the proposal and the conceptual underpinnings of what the text was seeking. I still haven’t really read Josh’s book. I kinda don’t want to until it’s a physical thing. That is what I did with Lonely Men Club. I don’t even remember Josh’s proposal at this point, so reading the book will be very very fresh.

MK: Joshua (or do you prefer Josh?), how many iterations of your “idea” did you go through, before you were satisfied? I ask because I know the Castle Freak process involves a proposal/submission (something not everyone may realize) and you have to submit something that is coherent, in the sense that it provides a complete argument RE: why your project is worth it. I think I had three BIG ideas, and even tried them out, literally by hand, just to see how they looked/felt. Did you do anything like this? It’s an interesting concept. Approaching a press and convincing them to let you publish something that doesn’t even exist yet. Wild.

JR: I forget the exact context, but it was probably in the summer of 2018 that John and I ended up talking about how one might go about producing a book that was unique for each order. I did some research and sent John a long-winded explanation of how it could be done, and hinted at maybe applying that to a Castle Freak residency, though I didn’t end up having the time or energy to put into a full proposal that year. Fast forward to summer 2019, and I think writing the proposal was the first time everything really crystallized for me. I had some vague notions about wanting to use a neural net, and having an application that would jump in and produce text, but not a lot more than that. I’ve had the title We Later Cities (taken from McKenzie Wark’s book The Beach Beneath the Streets) for years, along with the conceit of the ever-expanding city, but the proposal is where I worked out a skeleton for a plot. 

MK: [Looks away, for a moment, at the television screen; Heat is playing and it’s the part with the handgun on the table in that house by the beach (Val Kilmer’s character’s?) and everything is shrouded in deep azure]. Do you think it would be interesting, or would there be any value, to posting our submissions/proposals, as a sort of additional behind-the-scenes featurette? Maybe, also, to see how much the final product detracted from the original vision; I know if I was possibly interested in participating in the residency, it might be nice to just see what the previous participants submitted—what it looked like. 

JT: I dunno, I always like to see what people will come up with unprompted. I hate showing examples of things in teaching because people are inevitably corrupted. I try to get students to use frames of reference that are unrelated to their work… so, let’s say they’re designing an apartment building, I have them research birds. I think there are so many ways the Castle Freak could be brought to life I just want it to be completely… baseless, I guess… wild west.

MK: Just a strange aside. Even cover designs. I know we went through quite a few, John, for Lonely Men Club. And I know you are actually heavily involved in the process of cover design, especially if the writer doesn’t have an idea or the resources to make their own cover—something else, I feel is a unique benefit of working with Inside the Castle.

JR: John nailed mine pretty quickly. He mentioned something about a classy, typographic cover, and I let him run with it. He was a big inspiration for me when starting Sublunary Editions… I’ve done all but one of the covers for my press, and it’s arguably one of the bits I find most rewarding, especially when I hear from writers that they had never had as much input in the process previously. I like the idea of seeing how the final product compares to the proposal. If nothing else, seeing what Mike and I wrote might help others formulate theirs. I’d also be curious how different ours were. I have a strange way of formulating ideas of texts, films, etc. before I’ve actually sat with them, such that the idea of a work can be just as influential to me as the work itself, if not more, and there are books that I haven’t opened yet for fear of what they’ll do to my image of them. I think I cited Jacques Tati’s film Playtime in part of my proposal, or maybe just when I talked about it, certainly in the few notes I wrote down before I started. I only watched it for the first time a few weeks ago, and while it was different than I had anticipated, the spirit of it did feel like it fit with what I tried to do in the early goings. I think I stuck more to the “plot” of my proposal than I did the technological piece… I built everything I said I would, but I ended up using them in different ways than I had intended (which, I suppose, is part of the point).

MK: I totally get what you are saying RE: “the idea of the work can be just as influential” as the work itself, if not more. That’s how I feel about all of John’s work. I’m only kidding! I’m very much a person who gathers phrases and ideas I like, onto several scraps of paper. I end up losing a ton of them in the process, of course, but that’s part of the fun, I guess. I started using Pinterest pretty seriously maybe five years ago. A great tool for developing mood boards if you are designing covers or want to give someone ideas. I guess, everything I write is literally an amalgamation of all the stuff that fascinates me—or rather, fascinated me during a very specific moment in time. So, going back and reading something I wrote and released in 2012, forever takes me back to that moment, as I am able to recall why I chose specific things to include in the book. In a way, I think this is why my stuff isn’t commercial. I am writing because it is satisfying to me, in the sense that I feel all of my media consumption: music, films and books is serving some sort of purpose, as it is prompting the ideas that turn into the texts I produce.

Do you believe in writer’s block—or have you ever experienced something like that?

[Lightning begins to happen, outside. No rain, yet].

JT: I have not, but I wonder if you guys see this digital resource as potential panacea for that kind of struggle. Josh was talking about having books beside him that he could thumb through for a kickstart. And I think his technical process kinda reproduced that? Mike I feel like your construction process maybe involved more upfront “writing” or input and then allowing the machine to construct iterations? Josh’s seemed actually like real-time composition?

JR: I’d say about sixty percent of We Later Cities was real-time composition, me at my desk checking word count against the time of day, weighing whether or not I could take a nap.The other forty was a lot of me putting in “seed” text and letting the neural network go to work, and then I would stitch together the best bits.

I don’t know that I ever think about lulls in writing as “writer’s block” anymore. When I was starting to write more seriously, I would tell myself that’s what was going on, but it was more that I had an idea of the work in my head that I could tell in two lines my writing would never reach the level of. Now I take the downswings as they come. I don’t always have an idea to work on, so I’m happy to jot fragments and notes down until something coalesces… a bit like star formation, in a sense, enough disparate particles clump together to form a viable center of gravity. I say that now, but it can be frustrating some days still, and I’d be lying if I said that the idea of finding some technological solution to breaking me out of my normal habits and thought patterns was a draw of the remote residency. (I have a weird drive toward prolificacy, I’ve found.) I’ve used titles and other bits generated from the neural net in other works since. For a while, I built it into my writing app, as a button I could click and a short fragment of generated text would come up. 

MK: Yeah, see, once the project was up, I abandoned the prototype I had created, altogether. It doesn’t even exist anymore, I think I’ve gone through two computers since then? Maybe just one. Yes, for me, it was literally inputting different sequence types that I felt worked with my vision. The first couple of days I took too long, stressing about unimportant things. But then I found a groove halfway through the second day and it all picked up from there.

I moved, recently. The old place had a built in bookshelf. This one does not. I got rid of the old modular bookshelves I had in the basement because they were of a darker wood and I didn’t care for dark wood, anymore, at that point. So right now, all of my books are in the garage, in boxes.

For me, it’s been interesting reading reviews of how people have been “reading” Lonely Men Club. While some accept it as something they will never read, from front to back, and treat it as such, others literally allot certain days to reading certain portions of the book. This sort of dedication (as well as the other methods for reading this type of work) excites me. It shows that there truly can exist a new sort of dialogue between the writer and audience—something I think Inside the Castle, or at least, this project, is basically striving to have happen. I don’t think were quite there yet, to a point where e-reading is as satisfying or enjoyable as the real thing. I think, something like the end products of the Castle Freak residency… this is the closest I am willing to come to reading something digital-anything. Even if, in this case, the digital aspect is simply that it was produced with the aid of a computer.

JR: Being a writer, publisher, and, by trade, software engineer, you’d think I would have some kind of intelligent opinion on how we might realize the potential that’s universally assumed to be there for digital literature, but I don’t. Probably because I do a terrible job of reading anything on the screen (I still print manuscripts when I need to take a close read/edit pass on them), I haven’t put as much thought into it. It’s hard to make being on a computer into the passive act that reading requires, which may just be my limited imagination, but I think part of that block is that we forget that how we experience content online is largely based on print, web pages, cutting and pasting, etc. Even now, we’re writing this interview on skeuomorphic pieces of 8.5×11 paper, but ones that strain the eyes more and cause me to strain my neck in ways I could get around better holding paper. That said, I exclusively write on a computer. I can’t write like myself on paper (a loaded statement). I’ve worked over the last two years to build a writing application for myself, more based on a text editor meant for coding than replicating something like Docs or Word or OneNote. John, I know you write in notepad a lot of the time. Mike, how do you write? I’m curious for both of you (and me as well, because I don’t know the answer for myself), how the digital environment you write in makes you reconsider the space of the page? Or does it?

MK: Lots of interesting points. When I wrote my first book, I was living in France and only had my 12-year old laptop with me, so that’s how I wrote when I was in-between teaching classes. Then for my second book, and back stateside, it was a combination of a desktop PC (which died) and a Nook+. After that, it was back to the regular old PC, for most of my writing. I say most because nowadays, for notes and thoughts and ideas, it’s a combination of the Notes app on the iPhone, Notepad on the computer, random scraps of paper and a still-functioning OG Neo2 Alphasmart. Why so many devices? It’s to do with how I am feeling in that moment, when I feel I need to write something down, but it’s also because I am very much after new ways of transcribing my thoughts. Kind of like the person who takes something they have written, translates it into a different language and then translates it back into the original language—it adds some imperfections and flourishes the writer might otherwise have not been able to include. I like the idea of the subconscious and just writing with feeling rather than trying to tell a complete story. I like moments of “flavour” in a text that might do nothing to advance the plot but they embellish. Kind of like mentions of the colour of the sky but it’s a description or uses descriptors you would never use when talking about the shade of sky. I guess that’s why I am more interested in poetry these days, the freedoms it allows, though I am still very much against the pretentiousness of it all, if that makes sense? I want more fiction that flows like a poem does—it doesn’t have to make sense, but I want it to elicit feelings and emotions and I want it to be memorable. John, your writing, does that a lot. I feel like you invent words a lot. And you write, sometimes like what it feels like to read in German, big and loud and clunky words with lots of capitalization. And I love that!

JT: I am using Notepad on my current project, ya. Plats and Apparitions of the Living were both written longhand and then collected and edited and refined digitally. I saw my current project as being more fast-twitch so I wanted to stay in the computer. The speed factor is out the window now, but the digital aspect is really affecting things. I basically maximize Notepad on the screen and type uninterrupted blocks of text. The effect I think is that the screen gets this nonhierarchical grain to it at some point, where you can’t find specific things that you might want to reference or revisit, so you just have to keep going… visually it has a striking ambient quality, and I think the text takes that on in the feeling of its reading. I would say my other two books used the digital to achieve more of a level of precision, this is using it as a way of oversaturating to the point of noise.

MK: I recently wrote about my feelings RE: experimental literature, maybe not necessarily as a whole, but more to do with the underground/indie lit scene. There’s this thing where people aren’t actually critiquing anything. Everyone is just great at writing, and this is not helping anyone! Granted, if you are showing me a piece of writing just to show it, like: “Hey, I finished something and I want to share how happy I am by showing you the final product,” that’s fine, but you flip that around, and everyone is much too afraid to actually say, “Look, this is dog shit and here’s why.” If you are going to ask me for advice or feedback, I am going to give you it. The problem with my impression of all this is when I say these kinds of things, people take it the wrong way. I received DMs and a few responses, telling me I shouldn’t be looking at it that way, etc. I am always willing to have a conversation with anyone, and I love to agree to disagree. Just because we disagree does not mean it was a useless conversation. It appears though, that a vast majority feels it is only important to shower other writers with “You can do it” sentiments and fluffed-out generic praise. I am not about that. That’s over and should be over.

For both of you, as publishers and editors, how do you respond to my “harsh” reality check? How do you deal with a piece that is either very bad or not a right fit? (What is “very bad” writing?). Do people even still want to become better writers, or is it just all a pat-on-the-back fest?

JT: At one point as an architectural educator I felt like it was my duty to keep people with no actual critical interest out of the field. I don’t feel that way any more. But I also don’t see it as my duty to energize that critical instinct in someone who is just trying to roll out and get a job designing chain restaurants. I feel like I look at writing similarly. I really can’t have any impact on people who are not curious about what the actual underpinnings of printed literature are. I don’t see Inside the Castle as being persuasive at all. It just exists. And perhaps you are aware of my perspective on “experimental” as a term. Historically, I see the kind of representation of causality we find in Balzac, Dickens, and Zola to be the experiment, where literature strove to contrive pat morality plays that did not actually engage with the real fabric of existence. I personally credit Huysmans with catalyzing the movement away from that tradition when he broke from Zola’s crew. I see Inside the Castle engaging more with those real origins of literature, where it broke away from the oral tradition in Sterne to become fixated on the possibilities of the written word that was meant to stay written. So I guess I see that as the project of what people are calling “experimental.” The other problem I have with the term, beyond it being historically inaccurate, is that it’s goal seems to be “self-othering.” I think it is adopted by many people as a mantle of superiority. Honestly that is something I have lamented in architecture too, where architects strive to cultivate an identity that sets them apart as having some sort of secret knowledge, that they possess a secret, and that only they may wear those stupid fucking Corbusier glasses. People whose identities are built around being “experimental” writers are really just trying to insist that there is some secret project at work in their books. And I think rarely is there much real thought into why the work is the way it is. I was talking with Grant Maierhofer about this and to transcribe my text message, I said, “Their interest in this type of work seems more masculine than curious, masculine in that they think literature should be impenetrable and that they alone are the people who orchestrate the way the book penetrates others.” And it does seem to be a mostly white male mantle in my observation. Someone like Noor Al-Samarrai or Carrie Lorig or Megan Gette isn’t out there puffing up about experimental literature. They are just doing their work. I would say their work falls into the vein that other people would look at and label thus… but I don’t think they are approaching it with the goal of being obtuse or destructive, I think it is just the way they work best… and that is a tendency I appreciate and aspire to.

JR: For me, the most common critique I make when reading a manuscript is that something took me out of it when, as far as I can tell, the writer didn’t intend it to, “out of it” meaning that the flow of reading stops for me and I’m acutely aware I’m reading someone’s manuscript. Sometimes it’s clumsy language, the writer showing off or falling back on a tired cliche, others it’s harder to explain, but the piece might feel a bit too contrived. By contrived I mean that I start to pay attention to how the writer is going about manipulating me as the reader, how they’re trying to get me to feel something, a sense of foreboding, etc. A ham-handed allusion, etc. There are instances where I can see writers acting out technique, like, “This is how I’m world-building” or “this is where I complicate the character’s past”. While I appreciate him on one level, George Saunders is someone at a very high level who does this when reading him. It makes me feel, as John once put it in his terribly misguided critique of the short story as a form, like I’m stuck in a contraption. As best I can, I try to look at what a piece of writing is trying to do and make an editorial judgement on whether or not it does it as well as it can, and, if the writer asks for my critique and I give it, they’re welcome to say I must not be the write audience, or I’m missing the point, but that has never changed an editor’s call on a piece of work. It is a way to avoid critique, one I’m sure I’ve used myself, and it’s an easy trap to fall into because if you take the average person you see reading a novel on the bus and hand them a book by any one of us, they might very likely shrug and say they don’t get it, and we, rightfully, would tell ourselves they’re just not our audience. But honest feedback is important, and negative feedback doesn’t have to just be about becoming better; you can find a lot of hints in consistent feedback of any tone on what makes you stand out, stylistically, as a writer. I didn’t really think much about writing long sentences until people kept pointing it out to me, but now it’s a point of pride, albeit one I’ve been careful to hone.

But overall, I agree with your point about experimental lit. I do think there’s something to remembering that, at least until a certain point in art history, most all of the artists who painted impressionistic, often very subjective works, could also do hands. In the literary sense, I’m still not sure I can do hands. A lot of transgressive literature hides behind taboo themes in a similar way, when what they’ve done might just be gratuitous. Gratuitous and contrived I stay away from.

MK: I am very much about the flow, as well. And it is very easy to tell, pretty much from the get-go, when a writer has naturally arrived to a point where they are comfortable with their prose and the way they write. They are capable of taking pretty much any situation, and turn it into their own thing. The best writing, for me, is the kind of writing that not only keeps me engaged (without me realising this) but it’s also, finding moments where I am telling myself, “Wow—I totally wish I had thought of that, that’s amazing,” or “I’ve never seen that done before like that and it’s amazing.” Granted, sometimes, this only hits certain readers. What I think is amazing is nothing in the eyes of someone else. And that’s fine.

I like your example of handing someone on a bus writing from one of us. I liken it to, if you have a day job, sharing your work with your co-workers. Usually, they are not going to be into it. They may even get it, but it’s just not what they want to read when they are reading. I don’t want to watch a Criterion every single night or an Oscar-winning film, it starts to feel like nothing, after a bit. I enjoy a trashy film just as much as the next person. And I think it’s this appreciation for both, the cream of the crop, as well as the not-so-great, that allows a person to sort of define themselves amongst all that noise. And this can be transferred to any form; writing, for instance. If you are only reading the airport best sellers or you stick with just Bizarro books, you aren’t really doing much for yourself. It’s important to find what you, as a creator, like and also what you do not like. And then you have to be able to explain, in words, why it is you like something as well as the inverse. This not only allows you to become a better writer (and reader) but it also (in my opinion) removes the issues of writer’s block or, I can’t come up with any ideas. The people who discipline themselves and sit down to write for a certain amount of time each day, no matter what… that’s one way to do it. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a way. Everyone has to find their way.

JT: The way I have found, through this process, is that it is best to just start a Google document, send it to two other writers, and then come back in a month and you’ll have a great little piece of work you can put your name on! Yall are my Castle Freaks!