I INTERVIEWED the author R. Faze in the wake of the 2024 presidential elections in the United States. The interview was aired on Locust Radio. This version has been edited for brevity, clarity and to appear in the print edition of Locust Review 12. — Adam Turl.
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ADAM TURL: How are you doing today? All things considered?
R. FAZE: I am doing as best as the times would allow. I got my good friend Bourbon helping out...
I also have a friend named Bourbon, although my partner prefers a friend named Scotch. We’ve been publishing the My Body series since around 2021. I’m going to ask about it specifically in a minute, but I wanted to ask, before we get into that, how you got started as a writer?
Well, it wasn’t so much becoming a writer as opposed to, I just found out that you can do a lot more with writing than you can do with speech. And I realized this by the end of elementary school, or first year of middle school. Basically speech, which at that age is mostly just conversational speech — with your aunts and uncles, your older siblings. I realized there’s this power structure to any conversational speech.
This interview appeared in Locust Review 12 (Spring 2025).
Basically, older people, especially if it’s your parents or your aunts and uncles, they decide the topic, they decide when you can talk and when you cannot talk, how you can talk. So that’s one side of the limitations on speech that you’re experiencing as a youngster, as a child.
When I got into school and I’m talking to my classmates who are peers, there’s always that one person that dominates the conversation, holds the floor more, interrupts you more. Even when you’re the person with the floor you have to restate and rephrase. And it’s just very messy. It all happens in real time. In daily conversations, you don’t get a chance to say everything you want to say, how you want to say. So pretty soon I realized, wow, you can do a lot more in writing. You have time, you can rewrite, you can edit.
You can add things, you can make it funny, you can make it whatever you want. You can also just create things that don’t exist in the real world. So it’s a lot more fun. It’s a lot more liberating.
So I got to like writing as opposed to speech as an expressive format. I tried other things, but I was never disciplined enough to be a good music student or a good painting student. So I just found that writing was what I clicked with, what I like to do.
By graduate school, many years later, I discovered Mikhail Bakhtin and I was like, wow, a novelistic approach to reality can be just as powerful as theoretical writing or analytical writing — with the added element of you have pathos. Writing relies on logos and ethos but novelistic writing can also tap into pathos. The passion and the feeling part was exciting.
I would write when I was in late elementary school for my aunt. She was overseas studying and I would write her letters about family gatherings. But I would make it funny. She would write back and say, this is great thank you, I had fun reading it.
I would write you know when we had composition classes in middle school. Our teachers would say to write whatever topoc that they would give us. I would write funny stuff and they would like it. I was one of the people that had to read their composition to the class. So I saw that this is this has an affective effect. I’m connecting.
So anyway that’s what got me interested in writing.
It’s interesting you mentioned Mikhail Bakhtin. His writings on Francois Rabelais and the carnivalesque and the grotesque were really important to me.
I love Rabelais. Because of Bakhtin, I went and read the first two books, Gargantua and Pantagruel. He lived in a monastery but his writing is scathing against the church. One of the things he does is — up to that point, you know, there was this literary idea of focusing on high spiritual things. And he was like, no, man, forget that. I’m going to, by creating these imaginary giants, slip in a lot of bodily language, to do with eating, fornication, all kinds of bodily functions.
At the time it was revolutionary. It was like basically giving the middle, double middle finger to the church and their supposed standards of what’s deemed legitimate or good writing or proper.
One thing Bakhtin picks up on, not directly from Rabelais, but one of the things that inspired me, was the the notion of utterance. He said look at any speech you make from a simple interjection like, “oh wow,” or “uh-huh,” all the way to a whole novel — these are all utterances, and for him, the singular characteristic of an utterance was that it’s a response to something.
It’s a response to other utterances, it’s a response to reality. Everything we say is a response to some other utterance. And it makes perfect sense, you know, we’re always responding, we’re not just talking to the sky, we’re not just talking to the wall.
So for Rabelais, he was responding to his time, and his dominant forms of thinking, and what literary works were “supposed” to reflect. And he was responding very forcefully and very clearly.
One of the central ideas or conceits starts with the first story you published with us, “I Live an Hour for My Body,” is this sort of bifurcation of self, having a doppelganger or a separation of body and mind, it’s like Descartes was taken in a literal but not precise way.
And this has a lot of literary, cultural and theoretical echoes. I mentioned to you in our email Edgar Allen Poe’s 1839 short story “William Wilson,” where the narrator talks about being shadowed by someone who looks like him for his entire life, causing trouble, leading Wilson to be tempted into evil and bad behavior. Wilson kills his doppelganger but realizes it was basically mirroring him. By killing his doppelganger he killed himself.
Of course there’s other examples like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s an episode of Star Trek, the original Star Trek, where Captain Kirk is divided into his meek self and aggressive self by a transporter accident. There’s a duplication of the self in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, reflecting post-war fears of suburban conformity and anti-communist hysteria.
I think there’s something very contemporary about the way the narrator in your series is separated from his body. Both the narrator and the body seem fragmented in a way, seeming to react with and against the culture of neoliberal capitalism, the disassociation of precarious alienated labor and alienated culture.
This made me think of Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness amongst black Americans. Something similar is described as Soviet dissidents -- kitchen consciousness versus official consciousness. There’s who you were at your kitchen table, and there’s the person you had to be under Stalinism.
And that got me thinking about the self more generally. What if your body doesn’t perform the way you want it to?
Or what if the contradiction between base and superstructure, as Marxists would talk about it, is happening within individual human beings?
The way you situated the narrator and their body in the text creates opportunities for these nuanced reactions to everyday absurdities and privations, as well as imagining against what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism, this stultifying sense that nothing can be imagined outside of capitalist common sense.
Well, the first episode was supposed to be it when I first wrote the story. And the concept actually came to me in a dream. Honest to God, I had a dream.
This is after my experience as a professional educator. Our school got demolished by an incompetent new management that came in, which is reflected in the story.
I mean, I couldn’t remember the content of the dream after a few minutes when I woke up, but the phrase, “I live an hour from my body,” just stayed with me. I thought, I can wrap my recent experience into this idea and I came up with the story.
Of course the story is not autobiographical, I didn’t vandalize anything. I just imagined those things but when I wrote it and sent it to a few places, nobody responded in a positive fashion.
And, you know, a couple of months went by until you wrote back and said, Hey, we love the story, we’d love to publish it. And I was shocked. I was like, wow, really?
Somebody picked it up. This is great. But then it occurred to me that. I didn’t like the ending. Although it had to end like that, it had to end with attempted self-immolation of the body, I didn’t like the ending.
But then it occurred to me, the narrator at the end says, “we were united.” So if the narrator is alive to tell that they were reunited, that’s not the end of the story
And then my sister read it and said it had a lot of potential. So it got me thinking, I can basically turn it into a book-length project.
For thirty years I’ve been teaching myself how to write a novelistic piece — just to learn. I wrote four other ones just to learn how to construct a novel length or novella type of story with some competence.
I think I am competent enough now that I can tell a good story that brings brings in all the things I’m experiencing and responding to in the reality around me. The reality of neoliberalism, the reality of precarious work, the reality of environmental destruction, the reality of right-wingers knocking on our door.
The working title of the book is Dead Bees on Hot Cement. Dead Bees on Hot Cement basically pictured what we’re going through. We’re killing billions and billions of bees just by the way we live. But the way we live is also killing us politically, economically, socially, culturally.
That’s the dominant culture, that’s what it’s doing to us. So I decided to turn it into a longer story than just the first episode, and I’m having fun doing it.
It really resonated with us when we got it because our whole project when we started, was to respond to this stultifying sense of capitalist realism with irrealism, with making stuff up that’s critical of things the way they are. One of the other things I really like about this series is I think there’s a striking sense of place in a number of the stories.
It strikes me in particular because my partner and I used to live in Nevada and we frequently drove to Los Angeles and drove some of the highways and towns you mention. My partner and I broke down in Victorville once, which is not a place I wouldn’t want to break down again. I mean, we were there five minutes before we saw casual racism displayed in front of us.
There’s a social poetry to the sense of place in a lot of the stories. I think in “My Body Planned Something,” you talk about the weirdness of place names, places like Crazy Creek and Dead River. I thought about lyrics from a recent Sister Wife Sex Strike song, “From the River of the Sea,” that’s obviously about the current genocide in Gaza: “I’ve walked on mountains, I’ve walked over graves, I’ve stepped in rivers that bear the wrong names.” And of course, they’re talking about American settler colonialism as a preamble to talking about Israel and Palestine, and the renaming of native geographies as part of the theft of land.
How does the setting figure into your series, as well as naming. I didn’t see at any point that the body or the narrator has a name exactly.
Well, place for me is what makes it interesting. Because there’s a lot of totally unreal things [in the work[, it helps to maintain readers attention.
I’m more attracted to stories that have real locations that I recognize. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Raymond Chandler, I was a fan for a while and one of the things that attracted me was the real locations that he names in his stories. Like South Bay is Santa Monica.
It brings a real element to a story that has, if you like, a superstructure of highly unreal things. And it will get even more unreal as the story continues.
For me that was an attractive notion, an attractive element. I like reading something that’s located in real places.
All those names are real. If you go on I-40 from basically from Barstow all the way to Gallup, New Mexico, all those names are real names. There’s a Crazy Creek. There’s a Dead River. There’s actually a road called Jolly Road. There’s a Devil Dog road. There’s a Holy Moses Wash. This is right before going east, right before you get to Kingman on I-40.
All those names are real. So for me, it was a no-brainer. I was like, I have to use these names. These are great. And also it locates the reality of the situation that the body is going through -- back and forth, back and forth on I-40 on this job that he has. So it makes it real. It makes it real in basically as a prelude before things get really unreal later on in the story.
What about the narrator and the body not being named?
If my arm hurts, I don’t give it a name. I say, it hurts. So I didn’t think there’s a need for a name. The other part is, why bother? It doesn’t matter. The story is not important as far as knowing the name of the body.
I thought of playing with the idea of an unreliable narrator. In 19th century realist fiction you often get an all-knowing narrator. I said no, I want to play with an unreliable narrator.
We are not sure whether the narrator is seeing things right or not. I’m off on a tangent here, not answering the naming thing, but more like, well, are we even sure the narrator is telling the truth about the body?
So I was more interested in playing with that. And I thought naming was just not necessary at all. It doesn’t matter what the name is.
When I was teaching drawing classes in comic book theory, the more specific the face looks, the harder it is for the reader to read themselves into the character, right? So, if you have a circle with a line and two dots, that’s almost everybody’s face. And then once you like make it a particular face, they don’t put themselves into that character as much. It’s one of the reasons why a lot of comics will have really detailed backgrounds, but then more simplified foreground characters.
I think what you’re talking about is more connected to the next thing I wanted to ask about, which is that both the narrator and the body sometimes seem to vacillate, as if the body’s the id, the narrator the ego, but it’s messier than that. And you even make a joke about that at one point in one of the stories, the messiness of the notion of ego and super ego.
On the one hand, the body engages, according to the narrator, in workplace solidarity, but also vandalism, self-destruction, but also astral projects against political enemies.
In “My Body’s Revenge Plan,” the narrator talks about the body engaging in a sort of prayer or astral projection against its enemies, the enemies of people, working class people, the poor and oppressed.
It reminds me of Jenny in the Bertolt Brecht poem (or song), “Pirate Jenny,” where she’s a maid in a hotel, probably a brothel. And her dream isn’t necessarily class consciousness exactly, but revenge on the people that are most proximate to her oppression. She imagines being a pirate princess who gets to decide who lives and dies.
And that kind of primordial urge can be directed in different political and personal directions.
I think the body knows that the center cannot hold. At one point, the narrator says to the body, “why aren’t you with the socialists or somebody else? Why aren’t you going after democrats? Why aren’t you wishing their demise?”
And the body says, well look, these fascists are coming after us. We only can buy time. That’s all we can do. We can only buy time and meanwhile hope that we can get our shit together so that we can face the oncoming storm.
The narrator wants normality, but this normality doesn’t exist anymore. It’s total nostalgia. It’s like the 1950s, wishing that, oh please God, let’s have some normal life, when we live, we work, we make a living and there’s no conflict.
But that doesn’t exist in the real world. The world is full of conflict. So in that sense the body is more aware. Of course what it is doing is not going to address the situation.
The other part of it is we’re all fragmented. I think actually in terms of fine arts, Picasso in his cubist period said it 100 years ago. We’re all split. We’re all fragmented. Nobody is one thing.
Even these right-wing Christian nationalists, they’re not one thing. They’re full of contradictions. They think Trump is a godsend or something. It’s just the epitome of insanity.
This guy is godsend? If there was a God, he would strike him down. So, I think everybody is fragmented and we could be even fragmented from one second to the next. You know, we could wish something and then the next moment wish something else.
We have been fragmented both as societies and individuals for at least a couple hundred years. I mean it just dawned on Picasso a hundred years ago, but I think we started with Marx’s 1844 philosophical writings. The alienation of self. It’s real. It has physical manifestations. It’s not just some abstract thing that Marx thought up. It’s real.
I can’t remember what Brecht it’s from, where a character says he he thought in other people’s heads and other people thought in his -- about how how fragmented consciousness. Of course he’s writing at a time before digital media.
I’m mostly a visual artist. I think about what does it mean to make art when there’s digital media everywhere, images everywhere. I’m not saying they’re bad, but they’re in this alienating capitalist idiom.
We have a print edition, partly to return to a handheld interaction. How do you conceive of readers engaging with your work when you’re writing?
First of all, it has to be read. That was intentional from the first story. It has to be read because it engages with your imagination, your personal imagination as you’re reading it.
Whether the story holds your focus and you keep reading it is a separate thing, but if you’re reading it, if you’re interested in keeping reading it. It is purely a reading thing. It cannot be a movie, it cannot be a theatrical production. It has to be read because it engages your imagination.
There’s all kinds of schemas that your brain has. So for example, when the body is on I-40, everybody has a schema of driving on a road. Everybody has a schema of driving through ghost towns that have names but there’s nothing there.
If you’ve traveled cross-country, even cross-state, you drive from one to the other end of a state, you cross so many communities that have names, but there’s just some boarded up structures, and that’s it, maybe a gas station or whatever, or a truck stop, that’s all there is.
So it’s really just a matter of thinking, okay, how is it that these things exist, they have names, but they don’t exist. the irrealism of the reality.
What we see around us, a lot of it shouldn’t exist, it shouldn’t be there.
But in terms of how I would like for the story to be read, it has to be read. For me, honestly, I think of it as like an illustrated comic story, illustrated comic novel. That’s the extent of how much visual can be added, but it still has to be read. Anyway, that’s my take.
One of the images I often think about is someone in Detroit next to where the River Rouge factory used to be, having a giant digital billboard advertising a succulent meal, and somebody is looking at that hungry -- this sort of weird disjointedness that occurs in the world.
I feel like some of that kind of absurdity gets worked into your series.
Historically, artists and writers have often been like sort of animated by utopian impulses for the future. And as well for a lot of artists, I hope their work would live on after them, a gesture towards immortality, either personal or social.
What does it mean for you to write in the Anthropocene, where human activity, capitalist activity, calls into question the future in a fundamental way? And of course, that’s not to mention the present, the culture of genocide, Trump just got elected, where there’s a seeming attenuation of the meaning of signs of words and images from what they’re referring to.
Your series deals with some of that chaos of everyday life, as well as environmental catastrophe and climate change. In “My Body Got a New Job,” there’s a road rage incident that flows into a mass shooting event at a casino while the body is hauling toxic materials across the southwestern U.S.
And in a vision of a dream of the future in “My Body’s Long-Term Plan,” the narrator describes trucks and crews salvaging lithium batteries from massive junkyards in a future where it’s already too hot to be outside, at least in certain areas at certain times of the day.
So I wanted to ask, what does it mean for you to write in the face of this sort of planetary existentialism?
That’s a huge question to answer. But, the way I think about it more in terms of: what effect does it have.
For example, one of my jobs is restoration of wilderness habitat plants. Most of them survive. Some of them don’t survive, but even the ones that don’t survive. after growing for six months or a year whatever, as they perish they enrich the soil, for other plants to survive. In the meantime, they probably produce some seeds, they flower, they produce some seeds, those seeds will come back up.
So, we know from basic physics, nothing is destroyed forever. Matter transforms into other matter, energy transforms into other forms of energy, energy becomes matter, matter becomes energy, etc. So nothing is destroyed forever. But everything has an effect.
So for example, to go back to Rabelais. Not many people read Rabelais, but he changed the way western, particularly French writers, were allowed to write about religion or about authority, or about monarchy or absolutist regimes.
The effect is important, not so much the actual individual piece of work. So if you have some good effect, of course you can have good effect or bad effect, but let’s hope that whatever you’re creating has some good effects. As long as that good effect fertilizes the soil that’s what I care about.
I don’t think, you know, anybody’s going to be reading my shit, you know, a hundred years from now or even ten years from now or whatever. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.
But what I hope is that the people who read it now, it will have some effect on them, it would inspire something in them, it would spark some imaginative thinking in them, just like my little dream inspired some imaginative spark in me to write this story.
That’s the way I like to look at it. I don’t really think about it in terms of, where will this story be twenty years from now? I don’t care.
I’m just responding as best as I can to the world around me, to this crazy storm that’s consumed my life from my teenage years through now. I’m in my sixties now.
You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, can you give us any hints about what’s happening in the future for the narrator and the body?
Well, a couple of things. I’m sure you have the latest episode, not to really give any spoilers, but more crazy shit will be happening.
Much like real life.
Especially right now, because of what Elon freaking Tusk is doing, Elon Musk, whatever.
Eton Tusk was your fictional mentor for Elon Musk, right?
There will be a follow-up on Elon. I don’t know if you remember, in one episode it is revealed that mother gave birth to a quadruplets. However the doctor said it’s a boy because they didn’t see the other three.
And the narrator explains that the narrator was one of the “stowaways” and then there was Missy and Giggly. Giggly, the little kid, passed away soon due to neglect. Missy committed suicide at sixteen or thereabouts So there’s future developments there.
So look out!
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