Nick Francis Potter is a multimedia artist and writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife and two kids. He is a student in the Literary Arts MFA program at Brown University, and a recipient of The John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. His writing has appeared in Caketrain, Sleepingfish, >kill author, Untoward Magazine, and is forthcoming in the Yellow Issue of Fairy Tale Review. He curates the art and music blog, Forest Gospel, is a contributor to the literary group blog, Big Other, and publishes zines and chapbooks through his mini press, Paper Noise.
His story "Paul's Tomb: A Triumph?" appears in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, Nick Francis Potter talks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about the interplay of image and text, where stories come from, and multimedia art.
1. Where did “Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph?” begin for you, and how did it get to here?
The story actually started as a review of a Frog Eyes album that goes by the same name (though, without the question mark) for a music blog that I started a few years ago. In fact, the first paragraph of the story is essentially a slightly elongated version of that “review”. After writing the review, the idea of this Paul character who was the product of a sort of botched resurrection just really appealed to me, so I decided to replace the band (Frog Eyes) with a pathetic group of men and just let them loose on Paul. And the whole thing sort of evolved from there.
2. One of the many things I love about this piece is the artful interaction between text and image. For me, the images resonate with the text’s exploration of narrative possibility, the multiplicity at the playful heart of the transitions—“This happens:” and “Instead:” and “Now this:”. Moving to drawings represents one more permutation, this time on the level of the medium. Can you talk a little about your decision to include images? (How else have you combined image and text, and how is what you’ve done here similar to or different from your previous approaches?)
I’ve always loved finding illustrations or images in fiction, ever since I was a little kid. In fact, long before I ever thought about writing fiction I was obsessed with drawing. So when I began writing fiction a few years back it just felt natural to be adding in illustrations. What’s been a challenge, or what I’ve found interesting and exciting about working with images, is finding ways for the images and text to interact, so that the images do more than just mimic or represent what’s happening in the text. I tried to push that even further in “Paul’s Tomb” by drawing full sections of the story in comic form. I’ve used standalone images before, as either illustrations drawn by a first-person narrator or as an absurdist metafictional element in the text, but this is the first time that I’ve introduced comics as a form of the storytelling within my prose.
3. In your bio, you mention that you’re a multimedia artist. What have you learned from working in other art mediums that has had surprising applications in your writing? (And/or, what have you learned from writing that has had surprising applications when you’re working in other art mediums?)
As a visual artist I’ve worked mostly in collaboration with my wife, Erin. She is really an amazing artist on so many levels and I probably would never have taken myself seriously as either an illustrator or a writer if it wasn’t for her. One of the things we’ve always tended towards, regardless of medium—painting, mixed media, installations, screen-printing—is narrative. It’s something we’ve realized more in retrospect than anything else. We’ve rarely, if ever, invented a story as a starting point and built a piece around it. Mostly it just kind of comes together in the act of drawing or painting or whatever it is we’re doing; characters materialize and a world naturally develops around them. The same has been true for me in writing. “Paul’s Tomb” is a perfect example of a character more-or-less spontaneously arriving, and a world developing around it in the process of writing. Writing and drawing for me are both states of active imagination / ways of imagining.
4. What other writing/multimedia projects are you working on right now?
I have been writing a lot of short stories, a good portion of which use illustrations or have comic sequences, but not all of them. I also just completed the first draft of a novel this summer, which is kind of exciting and a first for me. It’s about a ten year old boy who grows a beard and finds The SS The Mrs Unguentine. Kind of an all-ages metafictional homage, of sorts, to Stanley Crawford, Donald Barthelme, and Flann O’Brien. And then a bunch of other half-ideas that aren’t worth mentioning here, but essentially a lot of writing and not enough painting or screen-printing.
5. What knock-out writing/multimedia art have you been enjoying recently? Are there any upcoming releases/exhibits you're excited about?
I recently saw an Os Gemeos exhibition in Boston which was really awesome and made me wish I had a little more time do some big paintings with Erin. And at some point I’d like to get out to MASS MoCa to see their Invisible Cities group show. I’ve also been watching a lot of Adventure Time with my son. I read Big Questions over the summer by Anders Nelson, which was absolutely amazing. One of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read. Also really loved Dina Kelberman’s mini-comic, Relax. She has a couple new books coming out that I’m looking forward too. And the new Chris Ware graphic novel coming out—I’m really excited for that one. In terms of prose, recent books I’ve really liked are Lutz Bassman’s We Monks & Soldiers, Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, and Reader’s Block by Markson. I just picked up Christopher Boucher’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, too, so I’m excited to read that. Also looking forward to Shadow Man by Gabriel Blackwell. And I’m always listening to way too much music, as my wife will tell you.