Poured Over: Justin Torres on Blackouts

Jenna Seery

“I wanted it to feel like stepping off the world…”

Blackouts by Justin Torres explores love, loss and the stories we leave behind with inventive and transformative form and prose. Torres joins us to talk about the source material for this novel, the importance of telling queer stories, navigating legacy, loneliness and identity and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.    

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   

Featured Books (Episode):
Blackouts by Justin Torres
We the Animals by Justin Torres
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis
City of God by Gil Cuadros
My Body is Paper by Gil Cuadros
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Punks by John Keene
In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been a fan of Justin Torres for I don’t, I went, I think we met in like 2011 or something it was before We the Animals had come out officially. And I am wild, for this tiny little book with the three brothers and that beautiful, beautiful first person plural, narration and you’re back, you are so back with a beautiful, gorgeous, amazing, complicated, wild, gorgeous thing called Blackouts. But as I was saying to you, before we hit record, I had a moment when I started reading Blackouts, and I’ve read it twice now because your editor sent me a manuscript a really long time ago. And then I was reading it, prepping for the show, and I had a moment early on is we’re just walking into the palace, we’re with our unnamed narrator. We haven’t quite met Juan yet, but we know he exists. And he’s not in a good space. I thought, Hmm, it felt like this sort of 1950s a little bit, you know, like a little bit of that Michael Cunningham opening to The Hours a little bit John Fontaine and I may have layered in the phone type, because I know you live in Los Angeles these days, but I really felt like we had stepped back in time. And then of course, like, I think it’s very early on, there are a couple of time markers where you’re like, Oh, I’m actually in the 90s. At least. Yeah, yeah. And I love what you do with time. I love what you do with language. I also know that this was maybe not the first start to your second half. There was that story of the laptop pre cloud. But I want to talk about the language and I want to talk about the opening of Blackouts before we go too deep into things.

Justin Torres

I mean, I think that that I’m really glad you had that response. I wanted, I want it to feel like a bit of a time machine. Because it’s taking, like the opening is taking you somewhere that is kind of outside of time, right? Like the palace is just this place in the desert. I wanted it to feel like stepping off the world like the narrator’s just like leaving life and stepping off the world and going and actually trying to visit the past. And so the fact that it feels like that, like I love that, I think, especially the very opening pages are like very much mirroring Pedro Páramo by Rulfo. And, and again, it’s about this, this journey, and you’re like, Is this a real journey? Is this like, what, what’s happening here? Yeah, I wanted to I wanted to invoke this kind of sense of, we’re going somewhere, we’re time functions differently, and not have the kind of hybrid contemporary sense of the 90s.

Yeah, I really, I needed to sort of step away and be much like you did with We the Animals, which did have a contemporary setting. And I was very aware of it. Although there were a couple of old reviews that were like, well, there are no cell phones, and there’s no internet, so it must be like 1949. And I’m like, No, this is what poverty looks like in America. Thank you very much. Dude, you don’t have the internet when you can’t buy food. I and I say this is a person who walks around with two phones because I like to keep things separate. But sometimes the world is just the world and I do I love having a nameless narrator. I really liked this kid. He is very complicated. And I really like one. And they’re sort of the anchors, right? Like, let’s, let’s call them the anchors. I mean, you obviously introduce many, many other people.

But yeah, that is largely a dialogue between them.

Yeah, it really is. And, and you use this device of having our narrator tell one, the story that he’s kind of looking to hear, but kind of not by pretending he’s narrating a film. And the book is illustrated. Yeah. And it’s this sort of 3D kind of sensory explosion as it were. I mean, I love this. I just I love everything about this book, but it’s not necessarily what people might expect after reading We the Animals, right?

Yeah, yeah. That was the most important thing to me was to do some really, really different I, I loved what happened with the animals I got so lucky. And it really like it. It’s it’s still taught in schools, I still get people coming up to me and, and it’s, it’s wonderful. It’s a very important book to a lot of people. It’s important to me, obviously, I love that. But for myself, I was like, I don’t I don’t want to write anything similar. I want to I want to really push and stretch and experiment and really do something incredibly different and, and it took me a really long time to figure out what that It’s going to be, I think that the visual elements and the kind of textual stuff and the blackout, eraser poems that are, you know, the kind of photocopies that are throughout the book, all of that stuff. And, you know, it felt like, I was doing so much research for this book, I was like, I was just coming across all this ephemera, and all this random stuff. And, and I was struck by how, how, like, two things would be side by side that didn’t seem to relate to each other. And, and, and I wanted to have this, this kind of experience of juxtaposing all this stuff and creating a puzzle and, and a bit more of a challenge, I think, for the reader than then we the animals, that was that I wanted to do. I was nervous. I was nervous. You know, the word challenge. It’s, it’s loaded. Sometimes people don’t want to be challenged in that way. But I don’t know, it seemed like I was going to, if I was going to if I was to write another book. If I was going to do it, it had it had really had to be something different in order from for myself, you know what I mean, for like my own kind of artistic growth.

I do want to drop a note that we’re taping this after you’ve been long listed for the National Book Award for Fiction for blackouts, and we don’t yet have the shortlist, and I’m not jinxing anything. So I am moving along very, very quickly, very, very quickly. But I do want to toss that out there because there might have been some yelling in the office when I saw. I was quite pleased.

I was shocked.

Okay, you can be sure I was just pleasantly surprised. Many, many. But you know, you’ve talked about this in the past where you didn’t know necessarily that you were writing a novel when you sat down to write with the animals. And this is a period in your life where things are a little messy, and you’re doing lots of different things. And I think there was a stunt dog walking, which I did not know until recently. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So there was a lot. There was a lot happening. Yeah, yeah. You had dropped out of college, though. You end up going to Iowa. You end up getting a Stegner fellowship, you are now a professor and assistant professor, excuse me.

I just got tenured.

Congratulations on tenure. But you’re a professor now. Yeah. And that’s not necessarily the trajectory you would have seen for yourself when you sat down to scribble. Yeah. I mean, you didn’t know you were writing a novel and having read with animals more than once. That blows my mind every time. Yeah, I think about that. And now we have blackouts and the way the to sit on this continuum. Yeah, there’s, there was one piece of overlap that I am going to sort of bring up there’s a character are nameless there. He and Juan, do you meet when they’re both institutionalized? Yeah. And there’s a tiny, you know, if you’ve read with animals, you know what I’m referring to? Absolutely. You haven’t I’m not spoiling anything pretty promising. Go back and enjoy it anyway. But was that something that was gonna happen? Sort of as you were driving? Because you’re very particular about how you write? Yeah, and I can’t I have a hard time believing you didn’t know that. That was going to be there somewhere in this new book.

Yeah, you know, what, I think that what happened was kind of like to go back to the directory, you know, that, that you’re laying out? I yeah, I my whole world was spun around by we, the animals I was really, like, really struggling and a lot of ways and, you know, just like, also just a mess in my 20s like living…

We were allowed to be messy in our 20s. Like, I just want to be really super clear about that.

Exactly like it was it’s not an unusual path. But I did, but the the idea that I would be a novelist and then and then go on to a Stegner fellowship at Harvard, whatever. I mean, it was just, it was so outside of any kind of thing that I imagined for myself. And when it started to happen, I will, you know, the next book that I was writing was about somebody who is a mess in their 20s and doing a lot of sex work. And that’s the manuscript that that got lost. I mean, there are vestigial bits of it in here, because that’s what I had, like in an email somewhere. Yeah. Or the cloud existed or, or at least before I knew about the cloud? Yeah, you’re absolutely right, in that the kind of seed for a lot of blackouts is, is like this person who’s in their 20s, who’s kind of wandering through their own life and struggling in a lot of ways, and dealing with precarity all kinds of precarity and, and that person coming into contact again, with somebody who met in the mental hospital, when he was when he was a teenager. And so that Yeah, I think you can see a relationship between the young boy and we the animals, and he was like, And when he’s a teenager and then the young man in a younger name, the narrator Blackouts, absolutely. I think there’s, you know, there’s a continuum there. It’s like a persona, it’s obviously much similar, a lot of overlap with my own life. I’ve talked about that a million times. Yeah.

I just want to be clear that we’re not talking about auto fiction here. Like it is possible to set some framework maybe or like to use a bad house building metaphor, like you set the studs, right, and you do the framing, and then you move on and do whatever. But I just there’s always this kind of presumption, and it seems to happen, obviously. Well, I think more with writers of color than some and just this assumption, especially if there’s complications, life complications, like, oh, well, that’s it. It’s like, well, actually, I make things up for I fake it.

Totally. Yeah, it’s strange, the this, this idea that everybody’s not doing that, right. Everybody is doing to some degree. They’re just taking from what you live, you have experiences and turn them into fiction. That’s how that’s how the whole process works. But yeah, I think that this book, in particular is also about somebody who’s like, trying to get outside of themselves. Yeah. So whereas, whereas with the animals, it’s very, almost claustrophobic, right? It’s about a kid in a very intense family, and everything happens at home. And it’s this book, it’s like, he’s, he wants to know about the book, he wants to know about the past, he’s grossed out in search of one because Quan is, is he’s representational to him have this connection to a lost past or a suppressed history or whatever.

Yeah. And I mean, you and I both been around for more than a minute. And one of the things that I think sometimes it’s hard to put into context is, you know, certainly, we’re missing a generation of men and women because of the AIDS crisis. Like we’re literally missing a generation of artists and musicians and dancers and bankers, and lawyers and doctors, and like, it was catastrophic. Yeah. And so the idea that you’ve got this kid, right, who’s leaving his very messy life? Who’s turned to an elder? Yeah, I think that’s really important. Like, I have friends, you know, who were part of act up in the early days and whatnot. And it’s wild to hear some of those stories, right? Yeah. But there aren’t a lot of people left.

Yeah. And I think in queer lineages, like, there’s, there’s not this natural, like, you have to seek out elder, like, you have to seek out this connection to other generations, it’s quite possible to get cloistered with, like, you’re in a bar with like, 20 people who are within five years of you, you know, and, and you have to make, like, an active investment in knowing both the people of, you know, the generations that have come before. And knowing about yes, that missing generation. I mean, that was, that was enormous to me, when I was growing up, I felt like, just, you know, I was like born in 1980. Like, I came into the world at the same exact moment, as you know, aids on the map, I think that everybody just above me, was so absolutely decimated by this. Of course, they didn’t want to talk about it was so it was all like, you know, like, as soon as the drugs came that started turning things around radically. People were ready to kind of move on and in a big way, and so painful. And, and then of course, there’s all this is missing. There’s just missing artifacts, right? There’s missing culture, there’s missing books and paintings and everything that you’re saying, right? Like it’s like, just not, it’s not there. And, and so I’ve always been really interested in kind of how things get passed down. What are kind of what’s the what is the idea of queer inheritance, right? Yeah.

And you’re doing it in so many ways, in this book, so many ways. And then I got to the indexes. Well, the back. I mean, do we technically call it a bibliography? What do we call that? Yeah.

I mean, I call it like end notes, because it’s from the perspective of the character.

It’s really fun to read. But also, I think there’s more actual fact, in that section than some might suspect. And there are a couple of phrases I want to poke you on, because I know they’re part of the research you did, but they kind of made me a little itchy every time I hit them. And one was variants where it made me bananas every time I saw it in the text, and we’re gonna come back to what you were referring to. And also Puerto Rican syndrome. Yeah, dude. I know you found them in the room. But we need to language matters, right? Language matters. And yes, we have stepped outside of sort of what we know is, as you said, you wanted us to step off the planet right?

Yeah, I mean, those terms are real medical terms and real medical journals. And it’s shocking that in the DSM four, you know, this this Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that, that all of the kinds of psychiatrists in America refer to that there was this diagnosis called Puerto Rican syndrome, which is just, I mean, the idea of a culturally bound syndrome. It’s, it’s a strange idea, right. And it’s very, it’s very similar to like, you know, like the idea of hysteria, right, this election that affects only a certain kind of people. It was also fascinating to see that the terms don’t come from nowhere, right, that like there’s reference to something that’s going on. And I think that, you know, it, it’s first discovered in, in the military, even though the people who are talking about it are not talking about circumstances in which Puerto Ricans are sent off to combat, right. They’re not talking about the rampant racism that they’re encountering every day in that very institution. And so it’s like, there’s such blindness, right? What can what can be seen as that these Puerto Ricans are having this kind of reaction to stress? And we’re going to call it a Puerto Rican syndrome. Right, rather than anything else. Right. And I think that the same thing with the term variance. You know, that was, that was the more polite term than deviance, right?

I mean, the bar really low, just really low when we’re saying, well, variance is less offensive than deviance. But, I mean, we, we were barbarians. We didn’t have the language. And yet, I mean, in the 20s, and 30s, there was a queer culture, there was like, there was a lot of drag, there was a lot of just sort of, yeah, like, why are we pretending that suddenly all of these things were invented in like, 1995?

I know, I know. I mean, I think that, again, I think that this is part of ruptures, right. And, and a lack of a sense of continuity in history, I think that there’s a kind of forever present, or there can be right that this, this sense of everything is, is new and invented for the first time. And if you actually look at what people were getting up to, in the, at the turn of the century, in the 10s, and 20s 30s, like, then really kind of radically queer ideas of how to organize themselves, their relationship to the world, the relationship to others, and they don’t really they’re, they’re kind of taxonomies of, of queerness, right, like the way that they identify, don’t really map, you know, onto what we, what we the way that we identify nowadays. And so there’s a lot like, but also, it’s fascinating, it’s absolutely fascinating, and a lot of it get lost, I think I think you’re absolutely right, that there’s this kind of presenteeism that happens where we’re just like,

I mean, you’ve written a book about a book, right. Blackouts is a book about a book and lost history. And who gets to tell history? I mean, it’s one and our unnamed narrator certainly the heart of the book. I mean, they’re the structure. They’re the heart. There they are. But there is also this sort of secondary story. About Jan gay. Yeah, yeah. And this book and the credit that she does not receive for the work she does. And of course, I’m thinking back to sort of Kinsey and all of that. Yeah, work that came. So can we talk about the idea behind using that book as a device? Yeah, so.

So when that book came into my life, it was just this strange, you know, it’s just called Sex variants and studying homosexual patterns. And I was just like,

What is this? And when was it originally published?

It was published in 1941. And it’s about a study that took place in the 1930s. So it’s synesthetic kind of goes through the 30s. And they finally bumped in 1941. And I was just like, completely taken by the case studies because somebody took a lot of care and transcribing case studies somebody was like, because there’s so much pathology in that book, right? Like, there’s so much language that is just like demonizing and stigmatizing these people. That’s medical language. But there’s also like real care and getting down to vernacular, the different ways that people talked about their experience, like the kind of vocabulary they’re using. I was just like, who did this like who were and so then I started researching there was not a lot that I could find out about the origins of the study. But there were a couple of books which I which I referenced in the notes of the book, that were super helpful, and that’s where I learned about Janet gay, and I learned that oh, this was actually her idea. She was a lesbian. She was an activist. She had the idea of on her own, she had interviewed all of these women in various cities who, you know, all these others lesbians and, and she had taken down their case histories and she was going off Magnus Hirschfeld model, which is a kind of Berlin, free thinking kind of. And so she brought this study to somebody, and they were like, This is a great idea. And now we’re going to take all her research, take all of your contacts, have you recruit people to come in and participate in the study of you take down their testimonies. And then, at some point in the study, they just took it all away from her. They basically erased her from study entirely. She was furious with the end result, she was really, really angry with how pathological they made these, you know, she had, like, she invited a lot of these people to participate herself, you know, a lot of artists and very successful and very confident and they’re asked to recount things that in ways that felt dehumanizing to them, you know, they were like, photographed, their genitals measured. I mean, a lot, it was a lot of this kind of, yeah, like red pretty much infected by the kind of Regenesis thinking of the time. And so when I learned that story, I was like, I want to, I didn’t want to write historical fiction. I was like, I want to I want to talk about Tanguay. I want to put her in here. But I don’t want to write historical fiction. And so how do I get it some other way?

What you do, just want to be clear. I love the way the images just pop up. And some feel very, very immediate. And some I kind of had to go back and think about again, and others are just kind of like, all right. All right. Okay, I see where you’re going with this. There’s the blackout poetry, certainly, and whatnot. But obviously, you’re working on the text before images are being added. But this device that I mentioned at the top of the show this idea that our narrator is telling the story to on by narrating a film. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Ah, you know, it’s a great device. Yeah, is a really good device. It makes perfect sense for this kid. Right? Yeah, it makes total sense for this kid. But when did you sort of commit to that idea, because I wasn’t expecting that from you. There would be lots of literary references, and maybe some poetry. But and it works. It works so beautifully. But I wasn’t expecting it. So yeah,

That’s just I just take that from, from Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s like one of the most influential books that like I’ve ever read, I love, love that book. And, you know, two men in a jail cell in Argentina, and one of them is there, because he’s queer, and the others there because he’s like a revolutionary, and they just talk. And Molina, the queer one tells these film plots, please. But it’s kind of just making them up. It’s other. It’s kind of a hodgepodge. And I just love that book. And so when I had the two of them in a room together, and I had a neighbor realized, like, Oh, my God, like I’ve written a chord, there are these two people with very different life experiences. And one of the and they’re trying to teach each other something, especially one is trying to tell the narrative and kind of draw him into this a sense of the past and the sense of history. And it’s like, well, how, how are they going to do it, if they’re just like lying in the door together. And I had written a short story a long time ago, in which two lovers narrate because they’re living somewhere, electricity, and they narrate to each other in the dark and, and that was like, part of this digital stuff that makes it and, and then I was like, oh, that’s Queeg. And then I was like, oh, and then it just, it just kind of started started happening. I think also, I recently read this book by Jaime Enrique, which was called eminent marry columns, which is about his experience meeting week who has himself this figure in his in his life that you didn’t mean that is like this literary figure that and I don’t know, I was I was really interested in in that kind of exchange right in like, not, I didn’t want to be too didactic. But I wanted somebody I wanted to kind of Socratic dialogue, right? Like I wanted somebody old and wise to be talking. It’s like, how do you make that dynamic? How do you how do you how do you make that come alive?

And I landed on this kind of this device of the movie plots legacy though, right? Like we were talking about this missing Generation, we’re talking about how you get erased from the work that you’ve done, right? I like Jan gay, she gets taken out of this project that she created. And it’s handed over to a couple of dudes who are not as careful. Certainly, as she would have been, but this idea of legacy, right, like Juan and his legacy, what does it mean? What is this kid actually pulling from him? And in a way, we’re talking about found family. Right? Like we’re talking about found family with Jan and her wife and their connections to other people like it just what works? What doesn’t?

mean, I don’t think this is a spoiler. But in the very beginning of the book, when they’re in the mental hospital, you know, there’s a flashback to when the guys have the book opens that there’s, the narrator is just a teenager, and he’s been institutionalized and, and one kind of comes and sits next to him, and just watches over him and looks over him. And, and I think that there’s something that happens when there’s a kind of intimacy that can happen, they didn’t know each other very long. They weren’t, you know, they were in the same place for like, two weeks, you know, but there’s, when you’re trapped, or you’re basically, in the hours, just stretch and stretch and stretch, and you’re under such pressure, there’s an intimacy that can happen, a kind of super accelerated pace, and that’s what happens. And they become family in that moment, right. There’s something that they recognize in one another and the narrator’s you know, like, like, whatever, you know, half Puerto Rican, one scene was born in Puerto Rico, you know, like, there’s, there, there’s that kind of tribal connection that they have. But also, it’s a recognition of queerness. It’s also just like sensibility, like a recognition of, of a certain kind of, like, literary tenderness that like, Can lapse over into depression very easily. I think that like there’s a lot that they that they share in that moment, that bond to them that makes them Yeah, kind of chosen family. And that’s why in this moment of crisis, the narrator seeks out one,

It’s also the difference between loneliness and being alone. Right. And like when you find someone, even if it is that accelerated connection, right, that happens under, you know, extreme circumstances kind of thing. It’s so clear that our narrator just is looking, it’s not just solace. It’s not comfort. It’s just he’s, he’s looking for home, ultimately, I think and knows that the only way he’s going to find it as if he makes it himself. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can’t really rely, you know, one story kind of makes it clear that you can’t necessarily rely on the other people may or may not continue to, like you just have to make a thing.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m thinking so much about what you just said about loneliness and being alone. And I, I love that. And I think that one of the things that one is doing like this book is a lot about nothingness. It’s a lot about nothingness. And blacking out an eraser as it is something that can be quite terrifying. But also that could be a protective gesture, right? Sometimes, when we like, lose time, stop recording memories, or whatever, it’s because what’s happening is too much right? Brain to just like, No, it’s not gonna remember this, right? It’s just like, No way. And sometimes, like, you know, with the blackout poems, that can be a kind of way of trying to get rid of that pathological language, get rid of that overlay of, right. Like there’s other ways in which the nothingness, the emptiness, those gaps can be embraced. They’re not they’re not just necessarily ruptures and in a negative sense, and as far as loneliness goes, I think that one is somebody who can very much be allowed, right? I mean, he’s there. He’s just in this room, like, getting ready to die by himself with books like he’s just reading. And it’s, it’s enough, right, the companionship he needs the clients and the kind of literary way. And I think the one one of the things he’s teaching the dieters Not, not to be so terrified of his loneliness or his aloneness. Right? Not to write to like, like, you know, to kind of, it’s like, I do yoga, you know, and like, the goal is always like to get towards nothingness. Like, that’s what you’re that’s the product of like, a lot of Buddhist thought, right? Like, it’s like, nothingness as, as something to aspire to. Right, to be comfortable with that nothingness. And so, yeah, I think I think it is about a lot about loneliness and our aversion to sure kind of that the void, and yeah, how do we comfortable with that?

There’s another piece of the story too, though, which is shame. And you know, we still as a culture, right, we have This thing about shame and who shame gets applied to. Yeah, versus, you know, and I’m talking about the athlete or let’s say the applications of shame, right? And the idea that you know, okay, occasionally I joke about shame as a tool, like, please get off your cell phone in a small enclosed space, like I really do not need to hear you yelling on your phone, like what is wrong with you? May we never ever have, you know, the ability to make phone calls on a flight, please, please, please never let that happen. But shame is something obviously that gets transmitted in lots of different ways. And it certainly appears throughout the original sex variant. I mean, you’ve hinted at it,

I was thinking a lot about the difference between shame and stigma as well when I was there. So there’s this in the back of the book like an alternative epigraph, which is from Erving Goffman, which is about which is all about stigma, right? And it’s about how, I mean, stigma is like, like, shame is one of those things that you feel, right like you, like somebody shames you, and you feel ashamed inside, right? Like, it’s, it’s like, and sometimes we can feel shame about things. Anybody else would be like, Why are you ashamed of that? Like, it’s like, don’t worry about it. And you’re like laying about at night anxious, you can’t stop thinking about some stupid thing you said at a party, you know. And it’s like, there’s that kind of shame. And then there’s like stigma, which is just like, You were born to this world with like, this body, this sexuality, this is alright. And it’s just like you are part of a stigmatized group. And that is something that you can’t, if you can’t rectify it within yourself, right, something that has been placed upon you. And I think that one of the things that the book is interested in and that one is trying to encourage the narrator to do is to be like, interested in stigma, right? Like, where does it come from? Like, what? Like, what, what were people saying about queerness? In the 1930s? What were people saying about Puerto Ricans, the 1950s? What you know, like, like, where’s the kind of institutional official rhetoric coming from that produces this stigma?

One strikes me as a really puckish kind of character. And I realized we’re talking about a character who’s a man who’s dying, and yet just sort of the way he needles are narrator in that way that you’re like grandparents do, right? Like, Oh, you think you know everything? You really think you know, every, right? Like? Or you look at your parents, and you’re like, Oh, right. You were people before you had children? Like, how do I process that? I don’t want to, I do not want to know, thank you. No, but there is sort of this puckish sensibility to him that I really appreciate. And yeah, he’s just sort of gently and very lovingly trying to get our narrator to maybe open his eyes a little bit. And to laugh at himself. Yeah. And, I mean, kids are not there yet. But he’s getting, there’s so many pieces that you pull into the story. There’s the children’s book, there’s the drunken animals, and it’s very fun. There’s a lot of charm in this book. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of sort of love and charm and heart and all of the things that you hope to have. You’re doing a balancing act, right, which is obviously as the writer, it’s your job, I get that. But I also know that you’re picky about sentences, I know that I’ve known this for years that it’s not rewriting for you, like you really will sit there and stare at a blank page until you get the thing that you want.

Absolutely, yeah, it’s it’s a really slow, slow, slow way forward. And I think that one of the reasons that this book is so dialogue heavy, is because I think that because I because I like work. So slowly, sentence by sentence, I can kind of get trapped in, in self seriousness as I’m composing, right? Because it’s, it’s not free enough, it’s not loose enough. And so the dialogue, it was really helpful to have one who is able to tease who really laughs at himself and, and really pokes at the narrator and get and tries to get him out of this kind of self seriousness. Even though one also wants to teach him things about the world. He just wants to teach them how to be in the world a little bit. Like, how to like not think about himself quite so much and think about others a little bit more, and all of that stuff. And it was really freeing for me on a sentence level because dialogue, there’s a kind of call and response right there’s there’s there’s like, it really pulls you to the next sentence and and I obsess so much on on each sentence unit that to have these tiny little units going quickly. It was like freeing for me it was like stepping on the gas a little bit. Yeah, I think those two things are related. Yeah.

When did you start this version of novel? Number two, as I refer to it, because, you know, obviously, there was that last one that was lost, but I don’t know how far along. You were in that and it sounds like that entire thing, you just literally let it get you lost, you let it go and start it. So when did you start physically writing this one,

This sex variants book came into my life, right? Before we the animals came out. So I was working at a used bookstore, like a new and used bookstore and tech school doesn’t exist anymore. But it suddenly dropped off this box of books. And so I knew that I wanted to write about it, since like, 2010, basically, and I would just carry their huge books and me everywhere, and I would, but I didn’t know how or why. And I just didn’t honestly have the stability in my life to, to like, do the research, etc, etc. Right. So, but I always knew that it was something I wanted to write about. So they’re kind of like parallel tracks, right. And then I had the kind of more immediate stuff that were these kind of stories about a sex worker that I was writing more quickly, and they were kind of more in line with with the most wives. And I was trying to change the way that I write because I was just like, I don’t want to,

I don’t need to be that guy who keeps coming back. I love I do I the first person plural. I love that voice. I also love a really close second like that. When you is deployed. Well. Yeah. Oh man, like How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia that most inhuman? There is a lot of really fantastic writing. But you don’t need to be the guy who writes every novel, the same?

Yes, exact. Exactly, exactly. When I lost this manuscript, it was, in a way it was freezing, I lose everything all the time anyway. So like, I’ve become very good at just being like, well, that’s gone forever. But also, I was like, okay, I can kind of merge these projects. And I would say, I was writing this for a very long time. But not in a very focused way. I was, like, learning how to be a teacher, professor, I mean, living life, like I had jumped class in this dramatic way. And I was just like, feeling whiplash, I was like, This is what is life, who am I, and so was really COVID that allowed me to sit down and be like, Okay, I’m finishing that. This is, this is, I’m, it’s this is, this is the time, I’m gonna get it done. And so I had a lot of the pieces and fragments that were floating around, get pulled together and stitched together during COVID.

2023 has been a pretty good year for books, but it’s been particularly good for me because I get a new novel from you. And a new novel from i, Hannah Mathis. And both of you, you know, for your own reasons, you took your time, that’s okay. I can be patient. But it’s been a really, really good fall. And I didn’t know you convinced her to apply to Iowa, that you got into Iowa. And you were like, You have to come with me. And I really love this idea. And I’m just wondering how much of each other’s work do you get to see and I should have asked her this question, too. But, you know, we were galloping all over the place, too. And I just figured I would catch up with you and get some of the answer.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we at that time, we were like, so close. We were just like super duper, super duper close friends. And yeah, and I was like, I’m going to Iowa, you’re coming with me, like, I really loved it. She came and applied while like already living in Iowa City with me. And then of course, she like went on to be a faculty member. Because she’s just incredibly talented and incredibly charming and smart. And she’s just, she’s the real deal. And so, at that point, we move at everything and we were living, okay. I mean, like, ever, like, you know, like, sentence by sentence. Like, we’re, like, we’re just together all the time, always reading everything. And then I think after I went after graduating after our books came out, it was, you know, like, I got this job in LA, and I go to the West Coast. And so now, I mean, I’ve I love I love, love, love, love the book, but I read it in galley form. I mean, I didn’t see it before the guy Forum and the same thing, you know, we sent each other galleys we’ve had them, but I think that yeah, and also, I think it’s probably like second book stuff. We both took a really long time. You know?

I’m just gonna enjoy the idea of the two of you just sitting in a corner somewhere working on stuff together that you know, I mean, okay, maybe I’m gonna stall trick for something that doesn’t actually, you know, impact my life but when I think that we got we the animals and the 12 tribes of Hattie. Oh, But I’m pretty happy as a reader. And now we have blackouts in the unsettled.

Yeah. And it is so good.

Yeah. But you’ve been teaching for like, 10 years, right?

Yeah, at least. But at UCLA, I think eight years, but I was teaching. Yeah, ever since we came out, yeah.

What’s it like, being the adult in the room? And you know why I’m asking you this question. I mean, like, I just, I love the idea that you are, where you are, and that all of these things happened. And you were able to turn them into something that so many younger people are actually going to be able to benefit like, very directly from

Yeah, It’s wild. It’s wild. I mean, I have a, I have like, another kind of Yeah, persona that I step into. And, you know, I think like in this format, you know, it’s like talking to some, like, even somebody that I really liked, but I haven’t talked to in a long time. I’m very just myself and this and whatever. When I teach I think I’m very much like, Alright, all right, because it also there’s so there’s so babies. And so I so I do kind of do this authoritative thing. I’m not like, in a nasty way, but in a step into the role, right. But it is, I always feel like slightly like, I’m watching myself, like doing Professor drag, you know? Like, that’s me, but it’s also not really, you know, but you do it for that mix, as well. Right?

Yeah. I love that idea of you do it for them. What are you teaching now? Like, who are you teaching? I should ask, actually,

Luckily, I’m on sabbatical at the moment for, like, do book tour stuff at UCLA. I teach a lot of creative writing courses. And then I teach also, like Latin X literature, courses and courses. I have, like, always teach quadros this book, the City of God, which I just absolutely love. It’s hugely important to me. And he has a new book coming out next year of uncollected writing, so because he died at like, 34, with AIDS, and so I’m really excited about that. I wrote a foreword to that, like pushing that I’m talking about it wherever. Okay, I think it’s important book for the culture. So like in a course like that, I’ll teach and Munoz I’ll teach, like Ghannouchi cruise, I’ll teach. If I’m doing something very contemporary, like I’ve taught a classical annex now. And I taught this, like, really in the book, like, other sometimes I’m teaching more historical stuff. I’ll teach John Ricci and I love it. I love coming up with new syllabi, and pushing myself like, it’s a great way to be like, here’s a list of books I’ve been meaning to read. And this is going to force me to engage with them in a really deep way.

It also sounds to me like you are reading for voice first. And language comes second. I mean, not in your own work. Language comes first, obviously, but that’s what it sounds like to just the names you rattled off. I’m like, Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, it all starts with what are like even plague and because of the Spider Woman I’m like, Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it’s true. You know, that. That’s, that’s a really good point. I think that, especially when I’m thinking about what to teach as well, right, because you can get, you can get students who don’t see themselves as readers to really fall in love with a chair, if voice reaches out and grabs them, right? If something’s really subtle is happening on, on a kind of language level, you can get them there. But it can be more difficult to kind of make them fall in love in the book, The voice is just jumping off the page, then that’s usually what makes them think about what’s happening on another level as well, you know,

I’m part of what I’m excited about with Blackouts beyond the fact that I got a really great read out of it is all of the young people whose brains are going to blow up because I’m so excited. Like, I mean, listen our peer group like we’re ready for this book, we want this but like, you know, it’s gonna fill in some gaps or whatever but like, oh man, some 20 year old somewhere his his are going to x bola food. best possible way like here you are on the page in a way that you haven’t seen before. It’s a really sticky boys, right? Like even though our narrator doesn’t have any really sticky boys like one is kind of the grownup you want to hang out with. Right? Like if you’re our narrator, I totally get why one is the person who’s gravitated towards without a doubt and, and to be able to face someone as they are actively dying. Yeah, when you’re a young person, I mean, that’s a trip.

Yeah, it’s really strange experience to think about four or 200 Whatever. 300 pages.

Like for me,it’s not that way. It’s not even 300 pages. What are you talking about?

I’m trying to look at the final…

okay. If you if you go through the illustration credits, you get to 300 pages, but the actual writing of the thing you was 295.

And a lot of those are pictures. Oh, those are pictures. It’s a short it’s a relatively short book. It’s a short book.

But did you get to read Christina Sharp’s Ordinary Notes? Which

I haven’t read it yet I have it, but I haven’t read it.

just stylistically, she does some similar things to what you’re doing with text on the page. I mean, there’s actually one of her one of her notes is, I think copy from a post it and I say this ad with total admiration because I am the queen and post it and it’s like I have I have a giant screen on my desk computer screen that I actually don’t use. It really just holds posted my taping schedule. I live and die by post it notes. Oh, it’s it’s because I have a very large laptop. So it’s not like I need the second screen like I’m not one of those people has to spend all my time with spreadsheets and obviously, you need a second screen. I’m like no, post it note holder. Absolutely posted. As long as I can see who I’m taping with. And what day,

I really excited to read that book. Are we I think we have shared editors.

I think you do share an editor.

I haven’t read it yet. Because you know how it is right? I do have a book coming together. It’s like, the stack is enormous of things that came out right when I was finishing this one.

Yeah. We have we’re lucky that I mean, I laugh about it all the time. Because I’m producing sort of three hours, sometimes more of original audio, we can have like, yes, my reading is slightly prescribed in a way it was not previously. But then you slide stuff in here, like how quickly can I read it? And luckily for me, I do read like, I have a superpower I read very quickly and I can retain but sometimes you’re just playing. How am I going? Okay, have you read anything lately that you love? Even though you just said I know all of this came out when I was but

I can just I’m just like thinking books on my desk. There’s this Oh, I love Oh, it’s like, I’m very late. Like this is a thing. Right? It won the national award. But it was only last year. It’s not like it was 10 years ago. But I mean, I was been excited about since what else is on my desk. I’m really excited about this, which is touching the artist side.

punks is the is the poetry collection that we were just raving about. It just occurred to me I was like, oh, I should say the title because we’re looking at.

This I finished a while ago, but it’s still on my desk because I’m still thinking about it. I tried to read a lot of stuff in translation to kind of get me to New Horizons with language instruction, or I think that it’s just, it’s really interesting to, to see what’s happened like what you know, what actually makes it into this market, what actually gets translated because it’s got to have done something really incredibly special because it’s so hard for those books to even get dressed.

Well, what gets translated. And now, you know, when you’re reading something, and you’re just like, Oh, I think this is not what it was intended to be. Yeah, I’m not saying I am not claiming to be multilingual in ways where I could, you know, do crazy things on the page. All I’m saying is, I think as a reader, you get to a point where you know, something’s off. Yeah, yeah. And so to have a good translation and to have something where like, like, you know, that no earthlings, the sack of Murata know, all right, I’m gonna get a copy of the Genesis. You can get it. Yes. And yeah, but it’s one of those books. I’m like, I can feel the Japanese Enos of it. Yeah, in a way that, you know, if someone handed it to me, in Japanese, I would be like, Hi, thanks so much.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that translation like it’s, it’s a friend of mine does translation where my name is Mariam Romani. And she translated this book called, in case of emergency by this Iranian writer that’s like, it’s like super queer. And it’s about it’s about like an earthquake. And in this in this in this person who’s like dressing, cross gender, so that can traverse the city without getting harassed kind of thing. You know, it’s like, it’s really fascinating, amazing book. And, and I had so many conversations with her about translation, transcending culture, at the same time that you’re translating the actual words and language and meaning and rhythm, but you also have to translate culture like you have to, and that is so hard, so hard and so hard. And the more people read, studying translation and doing translation, like the better off our literature is going to be in general, I think, and so I’m always, I’m always trying to, I mean, it’s funny because like I’m in, I’m in an English department. But I’m always trying to push in and recommend, I mean, there’s just some people are amazing translators that were like, you know, I’ll read everything that they write, translate,

I also just think are really should reflect who we are at, like, we shouldn’t be so provincial. And sometimes it pays off in wonderful ways. And sometimes I’m just like, well, I guess I’m not gonna finish that. But like, so what’s the worst thing that happened? I didn’t finish a book. Exactly. I like it’s fine. I don’t have to finish every book. But I do. I mean, I read, because I want to see what else is out there. Like our narrator, right? Who wants to know what else is out there? Yeah, and I cannot wait. I’m so excited for blackouts to be published. I’m so excited. And I’m just going to sit quietly while we wait for the shortlist. From the lovely folks, the National Book, who also you know, if you’re starting on literature and translation, actually, they’ve started a prize, and it’s a really good way to check out what’s happening. Like, right now in literature and translation. They’ve been picking some really interesting smart stuff.

I mean, it’s so funny, because when I saw the long list for the translator, I went Instagram and I was like, I was like, does anybody want to start a book club where we just read the long list of translators with me, because I was so excited. And I had no anticipation of being shortlisted or being on the long list itself. And, and then that happened. And now I’m like, actually, I’m gonna read all of the other books, a long list that I haven’t read yet, because, well…

I’m really hoping I get to see you in New York in November. Justin Torres, thank you so much for giving me all this time and letting me wander all around Blackouts with you because I really, this book is, it’s really special. It’s really special. It’s really great. It’s exactly the kind of thing we need in this moment. So thank you.

Thank you. And thank you for doing this. It’s like, so important that people are so smart about books, talking about books in the culture, so I really appreciate it.

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