Garrett Saleen is a writer and visual artist from Southern California. He studied playwriting at New York University. He lives in Seattle. His fiction has been published in The Collagist. He is working on his first collection of short stories about real people lost on the outer fringes of cinema. His art can be found on instagram, @jan_homm and garrettsaleen.com.
His story, "Falconetti Drinks the Water of Anguish," appeared in Issue of Seventy-Three of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about living too close to your art, first drafts, and pulling creativity out of its routine.
Please tell us what first inspired this story.
Two stories in particular: Robert Walser’s Kleist in Thun, and Büchner’s Lenz. I think Lenz must have inspired Kleist because they are very similar. In both stories, there’s a sense that madness is brought on by living one’s art, that these titular writers became deranged personifications of the German Romanticism they practiced, and could no longer function in the real world. Walser’s Kleist is a lot closer to the earth, he feels more anchored to the subtleties of human inner contradiction, and the anguish and self-loathing that results from that. But Büchner wrote Lenz when he was like 20, and it is some of the most beautiful stuff ever written. Every page has poetry that other writers find only once in a lifetime.
Other than that it was a question of timing. I watched Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc and was, I don’t know, hypnotized, enraptured, spellbound, whatever superlative you want to use, by it, and especially Falconetti’s performance, which of course is the movie. Ninety years on, plenty of film people who have seen a lot more movies than I have, still consider it the best performance ever. She performed without sound, and Dreyer mostly shoots her from the neck up, so it’s primarily just a face giving this performance. There’s a lot of trivia surrounding the movie that probably informs how people frame discussions of it: that Falconetti never did another film, that Falconetti was said to suffer some kind of madness so that she believed she was Joan of Arc, that Dreyer’s cut of movie disappeared for decades until it was found in a mental asylum. Around when I watched the film, I was reading Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia and things started to tie together. Kraus writes of Simone Weil, and anorexia in relation to hagiography. She also writes about Lenz. So I started thinking about how Falconetti starved herself to death in South America, suffering from the kind of madness that comes from living too close to your art, the art, in this case, of portraying a Saint. But I also wanted to write a story about a woman who was not motivated by family, or by marriage, or love, or being a mother. Literature is already full of those. We need to move beyond these modes. I wanted to write about a woman who was first and foremost an artist.
I love these lines: “Clutching a cup of tea. A bowl of vegetable soup in white china. She darkens the tea with a spoonful of broth. Sips the tea and looks out the window at the mud-colored water snaking alongside, and then off again toward a copse, or a copse come apart into a flock of long-necked birds.” The voice here is very patient, very calm and acutely aware of its surroundings. How close are you to this voice? Do you have any methods for inhabiting a voice that is unlike your own?
I’m not an eloquent speaker. I come from Southern California and we aren’t, generally, a very eloquent people. All our words run together, I call everyone “man.” So the calm and patience you refer to might be a reaction against my own ineloquence, a symptom of my self-consciousness. I think my goal is a voice of precise prose. The voice is a product of multiple drafts. Writing is pretty unsexy. I think young writers, myself included, often try to make it more so by really trying to nail something in one or two drafts. Writing on a laptop makes this a lot worse. You labor over a paragraph, keep deleting and rewriting, and then suddenly the afternoon is gone and you have to go make dinner. My approach now is to just get something down on the page for a first draft. A first draft is like going out and finding the hunk of marble for a sculpture. It is basically unshaped ether, which might be a fancy way of saying total shit. When I come back to the beginning some weeks later, I find my brain has been working behind the scenes, subconsciously, and suddenly I will know how to shape the story, and if I do this four or five times, adding layers and trimming fat, suddenly I’m reading sentences I don’t hate. It’s difficult, I think young writers know intellectually that they should be writing several drafts of something, but in practice it’s a much tougher discipline, because it takes a lot of time and frustration and effort, and at least for me, it doesn’t really gel with the romantic image of the artist at work. The reality is a lot uglier, a lot messier. As it always is.
What do you think a writer can learn about their craft from watching an actor?
If you think of the really talented actors, most have wide-ranging interests outside of their craft that they bring to their performances. I think it’s the same for writing. One of the many negative side effects of rampant MFA programs is that it teaches young writers about writing, literature, and very little else, and often even if another subject is taught, it is taught through a literary lens. So you have all these books about, surprise, young writers or young people in media, or twentysomethings drifting from walk-up to walk-up in the big city. Who cares? A good artist diversifies their interests. Getting back to actors, imagine if Daniel Day Lewis prepared for There Will Be Blood by only watching Flowing Gold. You’d get a performance, but it wouldn’t be very convincing. I don’t mean to be too reductive, but it seems to me that The Method teaches you that as an actor you are only as deep as your experiences, because that’s all you can draw from, otherwise you’re just getting away with it. This applies to writing to a large degree. Of course, reading is critical if you want to be a writer, but it has to be cut with outside influence, one must have other interests and experiences to pull from. If a writer learns about the world only by reading literature, you suddenly get a closed loop, a very insular art form that soon seems outdated, out of touch, and does nothing to stretch people’s empathy. Technology is the obvious example. American Literature is especially terrified of the internet and technology. Why? Well, part of the reason is that the writers coming out of MFAs are reading the last generation of American writers who were and are terrified of these things or simply choose to ignore them. These are learned opinions, I think, and they are passed down, so the problem of insularity just perpetuates. It’s more important for a writer to be an interested person rather than interesting one—Werner Herzog says, “The poet must not avert his eyes.”
You are also a talented visual artist. Do you find that your writing and your visual art come from similar places of inspiration?
My problem with writing in the past stemmed from thinking the thing to death before I got to the desk. David Byrne wrote this great book called How Music Works. I’m paraphrasing, but one point he makes is that an artist can find a way to express themselves in any creative medium, and that by doing this they demystify their own creative process to a degree. Collage was that for me, a way to find out how my creativity functioned by pulling it out of its routine. From it, I learned that I’m at my best when I go to the desk with very little idea where I’m going. I probably have done a lot of research, but narratively I’m flying pretty blind. I have a very vague direction, usually, I need some kind of distant lighthouse guiding me, for the collection of short stories I’m working on, that guiding principle is writing about people who have actually existed, who worked in or around the film industry, for collage it’s a little looser, often a single image or scrap of paper or it might be a title stolen from a classical painting. But I’ve learned to be more confident that I will somehow get to where I’m going, and it usually works out. Again, art is largely a subconscious thing.
Have you experienced any art recently that you would like to recommend?
There’s a Japanese painter named Kei Imazu. Her work is like walking through a glitch art museum in a fever dream. It’s wonderful, strange, fresh work in a medium that is very difficult to innovate. If there’s a better painter working today, I’d love to see their pieces.
I tell everyone I talk to about art to look up Kay Sage, and most of them have never heard of her. She’s America’s greatest surrealist painter, but her contemporaries buried her because of her gender. In the founders’ minds, women were supposed to be the exquisite corpses of Dada and Surrealism, not the practitioners.
I’ve also been looking at a lot of Alexander Gardner photographs from the 1860s, for some research. It’s unbelievable to me that he had such a developed aesthetic eye that early in the medium. In terms of photography as an art, Gardner seems about a hundred years ahead of his time, especially compared to Brady or O’Sullivan. And if it’s true that he staged many of his photographs, then all the better. Even his portraits. Lewis Powell was dangerously insane, and Gardner’s photographs of him look like they were shot yesterday afternoon for Vogue.
What projects are you currently working on?
It’s been a crazy year. I moved from Brooklyn to Colorado, and from Colorado to Seattle. I have three stories in various stages. Primarily, I spent about four months doing research for one story, and about five months writing it. It’s about Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. It’s a long story about her life up until she disappeared in LA in early 1947. Most of the research was trying to nail down what was truth and what wasn’t. Most of what we think we know about her life comes from legend, rather than fact, but the facts are pretty tragic. She bounced around the country, her fiancé was killed in the war, she knew hundreds of people but had no real friends, and then she was tortured to death at 22. I wrote like 30,000 words and cut it down to 10,000, so I’m just starting to send it out. It was a tough nut to crack, but I’m very happy with it. Elizabeth was a complicated person, and what happened to her haunts the people who study it. It’s very much a spiritual successor to Falconetti, told mostly in short paragraphs, almost like fragments. Early Ondaatje and early Didion were big inspirations. It’s called Ghost Dance. It’s available to be published, if you know anybody.
Christopher Parks is a psychologist and occasional poet who works with people experiencing addiction, mental illness, and homelessness in Detroit, MI. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Touchstone, Collagist, Red Cedar Review, Fanzine, and others. His writing often catalogues the trail from fundamental Christian to faithful heretic. Occasionally he backslides. 
