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Reading & the Flow of Time: Juls Macdonell interviews Rob Benvie

As a novelist and short story writer, what do you think of the novella as a form? Do you have any favourites, and what do you think made them successful?

Whatever the distinction is between a novella and a novel that’s just on the short side, I’m not sure I’m fully equipped to say. But there’s something possible in the form that allows for the novel’s sense of completeness while preserving the short story’s tightness of scope and scale. When you think of the shorter books of Camus or Steinbeck or Rhys, there’s something really potently elemental in how compact they are—an almost fable-like quality that a big, sprawling doorstop of a novel might not achieve. I think of something like László Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf as a cool book operating in that tradition. I’m also a big fan of Bartheleme’s The Dead Father, which I think of as a novella, but hardcore Barthelme-heads might quibble with that. My own book Bleeding Light is a bit like four novellas that together (hopefully) constitute something greater than the sum of their component parts, a structural premise I found really satisfying. Whether that was at all “successful,” I’ll leave to others to decide.

What are you hoping to find in a winning entry?

I think a lot about the relationship between the act of reading and the flow of “real world” time, and how the duration required to get through it affects the readerly experience it generates. Being able to digest an entire book in one or two sittings provides an experience entirely different from plowing through a big book over days or weeks while you’re on the bus to work or whatever. So a novella inherently does something different than a novel or a story or a poem, and writers who engage in the form should take that into account, however else they envision their thing.

As far as a winning entry, I just hope to find some entries that take chances. Your therapy journal is undoubtedly great for your mental wellbeing, but you should probably keep that to yourself. If you’re taking the time and effort to enter a contest, then your writing should be, at least on some level, an effort to engage/enrage/entertain/offend. Use the full extent of your authorial powers to make a dent in the reader’s consciousness. Rock our worlds! Also: use ellipses sparingly and no funky fonts.

Your short story "Shelby and Krystal and Kim", published in The Malahat Review's fall 2024 issue, is delivered non-chronologically; the narrative unfolded in a way that had me feeling like a detective, piecing it together as I read. Are you generally a fan of puzzle-like participation in writing (whether your own or someone else's), or does it depend on the genre and the story?

I guess it depends? I do like, and often aim for, a certain element of “mystery” in storytelling. Though all that really means is the artful withholding of information, followed by some degree of revelation (or non-revelation, as the case may be). The mystery without a solution is one of the quintessential devices of twentieth-century postmodernist fiction (à la Pynchon, Bolaño, Vollmann, et al.), which is the primordial sludge that spawned many a GenXer like me and something from which I’ll never fully detach. And why would I want to? That stuff rules.

The fractured/disjointed chronology structure, as in “S&K&K,” is one very classic, time-honoured approach to that sort of thing, so I can’t claim any points for originality there. But the trick is to wield those devices in a way that generates something deeper as a result and isn’t just razzle-dazzle.

In that story, the reader’s bewilderment re: time and character is meant to reflect that of the characters, hopefully creating some empathetic/emotional identification and/or blurriness. But I wanted the story to be enjoyable, not annoyingly impenetrable (the “participation” you mention shouldn’t feel like a punishment), so I tried to be sparing about creating any overly taxing barriers to entry and instead focused on the weird/funny/poignant stuff, rather than foregrounding any structural wizardry of my own.

Two of your novels, Bleeding Light and Safety of War, include speculative and paranormal elements. Your most recent, The Damagers, deals with a cult. As one of many people fascinated by cult psychology, I'm curious: did you find any parallels, or overlap in your approaches, to writing paranormal elements compared to cult psychology?

Well, I’ll be the first to admit that subtlety isn’t really my forte, and usually isn’t my ambition. I tend to be drawn to characters or points of perception at the furthest stretches of reality, whether attributable to forces of psychology, chemistry, or things of a more mystical nature, which can veer into the otherworldly. Sometimes the things I’ve written are explicitly “supernatural,” sometimes more ambiguously or open-endedly so. But I always dig the possibilities of blasting deep into a metaphorical conceit and wringing it for all its worth. And often by going deep into those zones that are kind of off the charts, you wind up back into the realm of the familiar or “real,” though maybe at a skewed angle, with some new light hopefully shed in the process.

The cult narrative offers interesting ways of going beyond the assurances of the knowable. All realities are invented, of course, but that type of setting presents a chance to really heighten the ambiguity as to what is verifiably true on a few levels: in the purported reality of the story, in the reader’s actual felt reality, and the conjured reality of the characters. Milking that uncertainty for all it’s worth can make for a cool scaffolding to build a story upon.

I've noticed an uptick in both peers and professors concerned about the looming, but still somewhat unknown, threat of generative AI. As a working writer, has it affected your career? Do you have any advice for hopeful writers who might be (more than usual, anyway) worried about their future opportunities?

I doubt anyone reading this needs convincing otherwise, but: if you use Chat GPT or any of that stuff for your writing, you are simply lazy and/or dumb. And, to some degree, ethically compromised. No self-respecting writer—or human, really—should be unduly worried about AI, LLMs, all that sucky stuff. The only people who are really pushing AI are those tech sector shysters who’ve overleveraged themselves into near-oblivion and are now desperately trying to make things right for their credulous investors. As the old adage goes: follow the money! Once the hubbub dies down a bit, we’ll all take a deep, cleansing breath and recognize these things for what they are: tools of various usefulness that in themselves possess zero actual relevance within the worlds of art and intellectual ingenuity. Unfortunately, the ethically decrepit scumbags who write the cheques seem to think replacing rain forests with data centres will insulate them through our presently unfolding apocalypse. A reckoning, hopefully, is nigh.

If you’re someone who uses AI or whatever to make a living—okay, sure. Times are tough out there. But if you think algorithmically generated K-Pop Demon Hunter fanfic is destined to replace actual literature, well, it’s safe to say you and I are in different rackets. But godspeed to you with all that. I really hope the people that use Chat GPT or whatever to make grocery lists and write bedtime stories for their kids are using all that surplus cranial capacity to solve world hunger or something, because otherwise that’s pretty sad.

Technology can be wonderful for doing things we imperfect, often energy-deficient humans can’t do. But humans are very good at using their imaginations, and robots don’t have them. So let’s leave the spreadsheets to them and we’ll keep on making gnarly stuff with our wet gooey brains.

What are you reading lately, and what are you working on next?

Right now I’m reading Daniel Saldaña París’s The Dance and the Fire, a novel that so far is very up my alley in its vibe of humdrum agony, alternatingly vast and tight. Plus I’m reading a lot of stuff about mid-century electronic music as background for a novel I’m working on, which at my current pace should come to about four thousand pages and be ready for publication in about 2076. What a joyful vocation!

 

 

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