On developing tolerance for uncertainty

The Hearing Test reflects heavily on themes of chronology. Is there a set process that you follow when it comes to making things?

I have no order of operations. I work non-linearly.

It might be alarming for someone to look at a document of mine, as it would be filled with not only unfinished paragraphs but a lot of unfinished sentences. I jump around often mid-thought, and I guess leave room for the unconscious to fill in a bit over time… to understand why I started the sentence, the paragraph, the project in the first place. A lot of my writing begins more like an abstract, gestural thing before it becomes figurative.

When I commit to a project or a line of questioning, I follow it as far as I can and seem to find that I have always begun something for a reason…It can be hard for me to tell when I’m making progress or if I’m actually making anything at all. Then suddenly there’s a critical mass, and it starts to make sense, why I started whatever it is to begin with. Some questions start to become defined and that is when a project has its sort of second beginning. Then I find my way to the end with a more conscious intention.

Is there any pressure to finish those unfinished statements?

There is always pressure–and some discomfort. But it’s more comfortable to have a sentence that you’ve started and not finished than to have no sentence at all.

How is your process integrated into your day-to-day?

If I am writing prose, I write very early in the morning and for only about three hours. If I’m working on a script, I can write for a full day. And then there are the hours reserved for corresponding… I teach, and that also becomes somehow part of my process. I can’t write as much during the semester, but I get charged up by teaching, and I can edit and plan. If I’m directing a project, then everything else falls away, and that’s just all I’m doing. Overhearing and listening to conversations is very important to my process—hearing how people speak, narrate their lives. I try to spend conscious time each day listening to other people talk… I write to music always. Music without lyrics or lyrics in another language.

How do you relate to past iterations of yourself in past projects?

I don’t usually think too hard about past projects. I tend to be pretty concerned with what I am making or the question of “what will I make?” I’ve recently been back in the world of the book [The Hearing Test] because I’ve been writing a script that takes from it. It’s been nice to revisit the material I wrote four years ago, like going back to visit a home you once lived in. And staying there again as a guest.

After you finish making something, it’s no longer yours.

As a musical artist and performer, there is this expectation from a perceived audience for you to present the work as yourself. Since your writing is considered auto-fiction, and your filmmaking exists in a similar vein… how is the self involved in your work?

I just try to make work from a place that is honest, however that might look. Often, I try to notice what I shy away from and then try to make work from there. The thing that is feared usually is the most interesting! The narrator in the novel is not me, but she is some analog I used to walk around and have her play out things I was curious about and don’t understand, perhaps, about other people, about myself, about living… I feel far away from her on a character level, but what I shared with the narrator is her sensory circumstance, and this total outsideness from one’s life that allows for some internal investigation. Because of this, after the book came out, people assumed everything in it was true, which it’s not at all; it’s a work of fiction. I gave her my name because I was interested in twisting selfhood. The part that feels like “self,” and in many ways more vulnerable than any plot point or character trait, is just how writing reveals one’s way of thinking and assembling material. Revealing how one’s mind works is more intimate than any fact, I think.

You did have partial hearing loss, which was completely out of your control. How do you relate to the mundane and novelty as inspiration for making, relative to the fact that you experienced something so dramatic?

I wrote the novel as I was losing my hearing. I was dealing with the prospect of total deafness within a year to two years, and…it was also the pandemic. Although it was a painful moment, and I felt I might genuinely not only lose my hearing but also my mind, I have a lot of gratitude for that time because I think certain moments in our lives do function as these little portals that close over time. Access isn’t unlimited. I had access to a different well during that period. That well feels sealed up, not dry, but I have the memory of knowing it. It was definitely a moment of a prolonged opening for me, in its outside-ness from my life and routine. Noticing the physical and experiential shifting through recording my experience was a mode of survival and a way to avoid the reality of my situation. Though I do not believe you need to go through something intense to make things.

What is your relationship with control and collaboration in your work?

I love to collaborate. I also love to be in control. Directing a film excites me because you rely on the art and talent of so many people. And it’s pleasurable to be able to give up control–in certain ways. I like that a big part of filmmaking can feel like chance, even though it’s so structured (often) in its process. Writing a book, you can get a God complex in the document. People can say that about directing, too, but I find it’s the opposite; for me, directing is about listening, guiding, and creating a circumstance. You have to trust many people, and that’s very freeing. Whereas in a document, the only chance thing is not knowing what your next thought will be.

Jumping between both is very gratifying.

Is the “toggling” seamless?

The external deadlines can drive the necessity to toggle, but it’s also nice because whenever there’s something I shouldn’t be working on from a deadline perspective, that’s the thing that I want to be working on. I pity the thing that’s not getting watered. I write a list every day of my projects, current and ones I intend to make. A little compulsive.

What characterises your lists?

I’ll write the projects that I am working on, want to be working on, need to be working on, things I need to pick up from the grocery store, and who I’m seeing that night, the standard to-dos, maybe even a note of gossip–something I want to tell someone. It’s all in one place, and whatever doesn’t happen on one day gets carried over to the next. So I will keep writing down the title of a piece that I have maybe not even started, or that I’m halfway through, as well as things that are due the next day, the next month, and so on. It makes the larger-scale things feel more manageable, and the small-scale things feel important. I’ve found that when I look back on my list, it’s like, okay, that thing wasn’t crossed off for like 80 days, and then on day 80, you did cross it off. It’s the way I keep the plates in the air, even if it’s in the back of my head, I don’t let myself forget. I see my lists as writing. I don’t journal, I list.

How do you navigate burnout and blocks?

I work in cycles. I can find myself feeling a bit empty if I’m just focused on one thing for too long or if I’m working alone for too long, which is why having a few projects at different phases at once is useful. Often, when I feel what one might call blocked is when I realize I haven’t been reading or watching things. When I get too far into myself. I usually don’t feel burned out while I’m working a lot. I feel it when I’m too far away from my work.

I’m not plugging away at one document for hours every day. This can make me admittedly self-conscious at times when I’m in a room with novelists who’ve just put out a novel and are already done with the next, and ask me what I’m working on, and the best answer I have is just all sorts of things. I can feel like a hack even though I work very hard.

There’s also the pressure to produce to live! Part of each day is spent figuring out how I will make money, what will my next gig be.

How are you…?

Pieced together through teaching, writing, film work, and design work that I do as well, and I am always trying to figure out new ways to make a living by making things. There’s the dread of figuring out surviving off my own work, which is met by the delusion that one day it will be possible, and each day those two things battle, and each day one or the other wins. Usually, the dread sets in when I don’t feel I’ve gotten enough done. And the delusion sets in when I’ve written a sentence I love. As though the sentence will buy me a house… I fear my sense of general satisfaction is tied entirely to productivity in relation to making things…and I’m always waiting for the hit of feeling like I’ve done something. An addiction!

What does that “addiction” look like?

Well, I just get pretty agitated if I’m not working on a project. I think every day I’m always doing little things to scratch the itch too. It can extend to moving furniture around in my home or just coming up with a little melody, re-arranging my rocks… Just a little transfer of energy. Other than making things, teaching is the only other thing I have done that I can feel confident and okay with going off and being like I deserve to be doing something that might feel like leisure.

Such as?

Well, I’m a pretty social person, but I always have this guilty feeling like there’s something I have to “go be doing”.

So, how do you balance your social life?

Depends on the phase I am in with whatever project I’m working on.

It can be hard when you’re around people who don’t make things or who work on a conventional schedule. They’re like but it’s Saturday night, why are you working? I have a few friends with whom my ongoing dialogues feel incredibly central to my process/practice. These conversations are picked up often while “hanging out,” but I also am always texting these certain people…or finding times for long phone calls. In general, I love talking, and I love listening to people talk.

How does the audience play a role in your work?

I’m not really thinking of an audience ever. I’m writing towards a single person, but not to anyone in particular.

How did you get to where you are now?

I’m not so sure. I just knew I was always going to be living by making things. My parents were always encouraging of me when I was young. The way wasn’t clear and still isn’t. I feel very grateful that I get to do this with a lot of my time.

Something I really enjoyed about The Hearing Test was this recurring theme of a “permanent temporary situation.” How do you relate to this idea of constant renewal?

Often, when you choose a life of making things, you’re choosing a life where you’re always starting again. You’re also promised nothing. …of course, we’re never really promised anything. It’s funny, I find my friends who make things to be the most delusional people, and at the same time, they have what feels like the closest relationship to reality. You have to have some outsized tolerance for not knowing.

There is optimism in the constant of not knowing.

Yes. I had a lot of strange occurrences in my childhood. Regarding my health, not internal like my loss of hearing, but accidents—external things. Innocent bystander things. I got hit in the head and fractured my skull and suffered intense amnesia when I was in middle school, then a year later, I was hit in the face with a golf ball at a putt-putt place and had my jaw wired shut for months, and underwent two facial reconstructive surgeries. And then I suffered two other pretty significant head injuries. A metal rack came down on my head at school and caused another bad concussion. There was more. I won’t bore you. But this was all within a few years.

I think these events primed me a little for some level of acceptance of unknowns. When you’re put through certain things, I think you can start to play this game of trying to find logic, which I think is what the narrator does in The Hearing Test. Finding reason for things that we can’t understand…that is maybe the job description?

Finishing a body of work is such a small part of the experience. How do you come to terms with the end of your work on a project?

Finishing things is, of course, gratifying and also sad. I actually wrote the end of the novel right after I wrote the beginning, but I did not know that would be the end. I love being in the middle of a project. I’ve been complaining for like a year, saying, “I wish to be in the middle of something.”

The middle is where the certainty is.

Yes, or [to] just to be so inside of something that it surrounds you and you have to go through to get out. Whereas the beginning is not only full of possibility but also that sense of “maybe I could turn back. I know where the exit is.” When you’re in the middle, you don’t know where or when or how you’ll be shot out the other side.

How do you define success and failure in your process?

I don’t know that I ever think about failure or success. That feels too dangerous. But something feels successful when it draws out associations for someone else. That feels like a success to me. The transfer is so satisfying when you feel like it’s been received, and the material has been transformed by a new interaction with someone else’s mind who has lived a different life until that point, and you changed it a little or brought them back to somewhere they’ve been.

What do you do when it’s not received, as somebody who hasn’t always been as open in sharing their work?

I think that one can always find a way to be received. There’s always room for that transfer; it’s just about finding the right person to share with.