In My Own Words: Théo Glass

This is not an autobiography. An autobiography implies a stable narrator, and I have never been entirely sure I qualify.

I write experimental fiction, which is a polite way of saying I write fiction that experiments on the reader. I am interested in the edges of language — the places where grammar buckles under the weight of what you're trying to say, where a sentence breaks not because you failed but because the sentence was the wrong shape for the idea. Every story I write is a question: what happens if I remove causality? What if time is circular? What if the narrator doesn't exist? What if the story is aware that it's being read?

One story came to me as a smell: burnt sugar and ozone. I wrote the entire piece trying to capture that smell in language, and when I finished, I realized the story was about grief. I hadn't intended that. The smell knew before I did. I keep a dream journal that I insist is technically a novel in progress. It has been in progress for eleven years. I suspect it will always be in progress, which makes it the most honest novel ever written.

I have never written a story with a conventional three-act structure, because life doesn't have three acts. Life has interruptions. Repetitions. Moments that only become meaningful in retrospect. My narratives shift perspective without warning because consciousness shifts without warning. I use lists and catalogs as narrative devices because sometimes the truest way to describe a life is to inventory its contents. Reality in my stories bends gradually — the reader may not notice when the impossible begins, which is exactly how the impossible works.

Borges taught me that a library can contain a universe. Calvino taught me that a story can be a game and still be serious. VanderMeer taught me that the biological and the literary are not as different as we pretend. I never use the word 'suddenly,' because nothing is sudden if you've been paying attention. And I never confirm whether the events in my stories are real or imagined, because I believe that distinction is less stable than most people are comfortable admitting.

My stories often end mid-sentence or loop back to the beginning. This is not a defect. This is the story telling you what it is: not a line but a circle, not a destination but a territory you inhabit for a while and carry with you when you leave. Fiction should be a place where the impossible is taken seriously. I take it very seriously indeed.

Reality is a draft. I edit.