Mark Gluth <[email protected]>
Jul 4, 2020, 1:10 PM
to Thomas

Hey Man, I thought I’d kick off our conversation if you are ok with that.

When I think about Alone I think it is a very self aware book. I mean the mind beneath the surface of the book comes off as having a clear idea of what it is. It seems to know what it doesn’t know as well. In this way I see it as a book that impacts what it interacts with as opposed to being impacted by it. Conversely, with Come Down To Us, I always pictured the book being like a home movie being projected on a sheet hanging at the dark end of a barn. Drafts make the sheet move and distort the image and light makes it through the roof and blots out portions of the film.

Thomas Moore
Jul 4, 2020, 3:06 PM
to me

I think that you’re right. Definitely that the book is there and very much ready to collaborate with whoever picks it up, with their imagination or thoughts or whatever. I love how you describe Come Down To Us. It’s an apt scene that you imagine because I always think of your writing as being very visual – I see your books so vividly when I read them. You have a skill of being able to really help or entice the mind into building these super rich scenes – you can feel the damp moss on trees, the weather is always so palpable. Do you have these really strong images appearing to you before you write them – are the ideas born like that? I ask, because I’m very much not a visual writer. For the most part, when I write, it’s the language that occurs to me. I rarely see things and then write about them – the words are just there to be lined up and rearranged.

Mark Gluth
Jul 4, 2020, 10:16 PM
That’s interesting about how the words are there for you, I think that gets at what I was saying about how I don’t see Alone being impacted by outside forces. Your writing often has this vibe, a confidence perhaps, where it seems like it considers anything outside of itself as besides the point. That’s something I admire about it for sure. For me, the mood is always the most important thing. Everything beneath it is a hodge podge that serves the goal of conveying that mood. I rewrite everything so much, and I know the drafts are moving in the right direction that when I read them back they cause a vague little film to play in my head.

Thomas Moore
Jul 5, 2020, 12:27 AM
to me

I mean that the ideas come in words rather than visuals. The first sentence of Alone came first and hovered round in my brain for a while before I started the book – it doesn’t always start like that. But this one sentence appeared out of nowhere without any other context; there was no scene in my head or any notion of anything else. Rather than confidence, I always think that a lot of my writing is about confusion. Maybe because by the time they are finished I’ve messed around with the texts so much and edited so much out, perhaps they are just zipped shut and hermetic or something – maybe that comes across as the confidence you can feel? I dunno. Similar to what you say – I always think in terms of mood – that kind of trumps anything else when I’m writing.

Oh – I mentioned my first sentence, which reminded me that I wanted to ask about yours – that first sentence in Come Down To Us is really something! It’s like this spiralling sensation – straight away it pulls you around and forces you inside the text – it kind of calls for this extra level of attention that I think is really important with your writing in that there always seems to be a lot happening with the sentences. It can be disorientating, which I really enjoy as a reader. Can you talk a little bit about how you started the book like that – is that where it started?

Below is an excerpt from Mark Gluth’s new book, Come Down To Us, available now from Kiddiepunk. Order your copy here.

I.

The night sky hung above the sea with arrant darkness that the water’s surface reflected so that the sky may well have just  been some other sea, with a packed in pitch enveloping the both of them like what inkiness would be found in a closed off cave sunk under a forest that was buried beneath an avalanche  and hidden within some other night, one whose sky was  so thick with unlitness  that it just came off as loaded with the stuff which  it pressed on the planet that splayed beneath it so that  the landscape was some long thing which ran featureless and so fucking black that it seemed to be  some still sea upon which this night sky that’d been emptied of its moon and stars swaged it’s absent form.