In upcoming months, a conversation will be available between Adam Golaski and I—an exercise (which has been structured as an interview) that began in the autumn of 2017, one in which I was reluctant to conclude late last winter (the publication venue will be announced in due time).

About a year ago, Scott Dwyer (steadfast champion of the horror genre and editorial superintendent of the “nightmarish and…nebulous” site The Plutonian) had achieved breathing perverse life into his publicational labor of love, Phantasm/Chimera:  An Anthology of Strange and Troubling Dreams, for which he had a specific vision, fulfilling a specific vision for creating a project with a singular roster of writers.

In addition to writers, Dwyer’s “cast” included writers who I’d previously established contact via reader-writer interactions on social media, namely Jon Padgett, John Claude Smith, Matt Bartlett, and Chris Slatsky.  Still, there were others whose paths I’d not crossed but who’d inked impressive reputations in the weird-fiction, dark fantasy, and horror communities—among them, Thana Niveau (From Hell to Eternity); Brian Evenson (A Collapse of Horses); Mike Allen (Unseaming); Jason Wyckoff (Black Horse and Other Strange Stories); Livia Llewellyn (Furnace); and Adam Golaski (Worse Than Myself).

In the following weeks, I’d read some commentary Golaski had made about Dwyer’s P/C project on his Little Stories blog, and I initiated what would be a rather humorous and insightful correspondence.

One of the things I admire most about Golaski’s work is his practice of utilizing what might be judged as discarded (or neglected) “ingredients” or premises which lend themselves to story-arc fecundity.  Golaski has the knack of taking a segment of all of our ostensibly mundane situations, and augmenting them into something brilliantly discordant.  I am reminded, in that way, of some of the Dadaist aesthetics, and in others in the specimens of surrealists, with how he executes his craft.

One compelling parallel when describing Golaski’s inventive, non-conformist verve is from his story “The Animal Aspect of Her Movement” (Worse Than Myself, 2008).  In its opening sequence, the behind-the-wheel narrator—mentally magnetized to vehicle whose occupant is the source of a tepid obsession—alters his course to pursue a little red car; but Golaski deftly weaves his reader into a different lane all together.  With a seamless, anachronistic shift into the past, the narrator watches the girl (the object of perceptive fixation), after briefly exiting the vehicle and surveying a roadside overlook:

[she] returned to her car, shut the door, turned on the ignition, drove through the guard rail, and over the edge of the cliff. / I followed.  With deliberation, I backed up and drove my car through the gap she’d made in the guardrail, across a few yards of crumbling dirt, over, down.  I caught a glimpse of the picnickers, a delightfully absurd sight, as my stomach laughed its way up my throat to my brain.  My car hit the dirt, nose-first.  The river loud, a short distance from my shattered windshield.

And then, following the jarring crash, an understatement of normality:  “I was later coming home than expected.”

We, his audience, are repeatedly—sometimes subtly coaxed, sometimes viciously hauled—drawn across boundaries and reeled over cliffs of convention.  Often unorthodox, Golaski perpetuates his avant-garde undertakings while maintaining a resonate accessibility and an admirably dark weirdness (I defy you to read the final, uneasy paragraphs of “A String of Lights” without some sort of vertiginous, dread-induced shudder.)

In the wake of those occasional, conversational salvos, I’ve been, in this past year, reminded about the importance of this discipline—something which, in my mind, resembles a rickety, Temple-of-Doom rope-bridge conduit between writer and reader, and how an errant, conversational salvo can lead to genuine discovery.  It just reinforces one of the more rewarding aspects of this exercise:  that—though at times daunting and fraught with what might appear to be self-defeating futility—this thing works.

There’s recognition, resonance (think of Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth”—the trinity of fabrication, imagination, and stylization); and though it’s never necessary to reach out to other writers to converse about their work, our age (sometimes) makes it more feasible.  Conversely, the same platforms present myriad mirrors which can threaten to poison our private progress.  (Years ago, it seems, Golaksi was smart enough to preserve some distance between himself and social media, and he’s been fidelis about sustaining that phantomic fingerprint—yet another aspect about his ethos I’ll praise here.)

If you haven’t familiarized yourself with Adam Golaski’s brilliant stories, essays, and poetry, remedy the misstep quickly.  If you’re fortunate enough to find them, snag a copy or two of the Golaski-edited nɘw gɘnrɘ, which feature haunting, oppressively well-crafted short stories (stories by Stephen Graham Jones, Jennifer Claus, Eric Schaller, and John Robins are found in previous installments of nɘw gɘnrɘ—in particular, a clever tale by Jaime Corbacho, “Honeymoon,” makes me want to be a better writer); and keep an eye peeled for some difficult-to-find stories in the back issues of David Longhorn’s Supernatural Tales.

Finally, it was welcome news last year (not once, but twice) to have discovered that my stories would share the table-of-contents for a pair of publications with Golaski; you can read his unsettling story, “The Wind, The Dust,” in the (aforementioned) Phantasm/Chimera:  An Anthology of Strange and Troubling Dreams.  2017 also afforded a Golaski story in the pages of C.M. Muller’s superb, annual undertaking Nightscript, the third volume containing the pleasantly distressing story, “The Beasts Are Sleep.”  Most recently, Golaski has an essay featured in the Bennington Review (update:  read his essay, “On David Lynch’s Revenge of the Jedi,” here).  Beyond that, here are some other projects to add to your homework:

Worse Than Myself (2008)

Color Plates (2010)

Oh One Arrow (2007)

A Sing Economy (2008)

Personally, one of the compartments of innate validation comes in the form of candidly sharing tales of toil:  against the clock, against failure, in finding time to suture-together “things” in the face of daily obligations—the Artful-Dodger methods we, as writers, exploit in order to “make” time.  The cynosure of being published is, of course, a criterion of progress and a benchmark for industry acclimation, but our courses require channels of calibration, criticism, and conversation.  Accolades roll in ebbs and neaps, but the integrity of our intrinsic endeavors endure.  “Some kind of supernatural thing,” Golaski writes in one of his stories, “that thing that occasionally [makes] lonely moments profound.”