John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer, artist, and editor who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, The Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize, the Sator New Works Award, and has been shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Raymond Souster Award. JES is the author of the novels My Volcano (longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library’s Book Prize for Fiction, and named a book of the year by Kirkus Reviews and the New York Public Library) and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat. They are also a poetry editor for CV2 as well as a writing instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute. Visit johnelizabethstintzi.com.
In this conversation, they discuss anarchy, connection & disconnection, and the power of experimental explorations in narrative and craft.
CF: Hi JES! Thanks for taking time to talk about My Volcano! Where in our universe are you dwelling these days?
JES: My physical incarnation is currently bound to Kansas City, Missouri.
CF: Your book has been called everything from “kaleidoscopic,” “eco-horror,” “dread-inducing,” even “a folktale with added acerbic juice.” One reviewer gave the “like when Dylan went electric” nod, and of course, there’s that most memorable phrase—“this is very weird shit indeed.” How would you describe the project of My Volcano? And how do you wish readers to respond to the book? What kind of conversations do you want My Volcano to make room for readers to enter into?
JES: I feel like I usually start with “weird,” because it is full of many strange things, but I sometimes worry that word makes it sound like it somehow doesn’t add up. I would say that it is a book that is as close to representing what it feels like to live during these times we find ourselves in (and have found ourselves in for a bit) that I could have written. The book is composed of many different threads, with various textures of “reality,” and I think if there’s anything I want people to think and talk about with My Volcano is how clearly it shows that many of us are living in vastly different realities that exist on this big blue orb, and also that those realities rub up against one another in various ways.
CF: I’d love to dive a little deeper into the book’s title. It’s that use of the possessive—my—that so captivates me. Throughout the book, characters are laying claim to this strange protruding terrain, by way of their livestreams, their conquests, their marketing dollars, their imagination. There are dozens of individual My’s in this story, each one demanding something different from the volcano. It begs many questions: What land is theirs? What piece of the volcano capitalistically or conceptually belongs to them? What and where is the threshold of collective possession, as in, when does my volcano and your volcano merge to become our volcano? And what happens when the land pushes back and rejects possession? I’m curious how much of the volcano is yours; property of the author JES? Did you ever feel you were becoming a part of the volcano yourself?
JES: I feel like there is a sense that the volcano is mine, but I think the “my” is more complicated than that. I think you’ve touched on the many different lives who may describe occasions in their lives as their volcanos. I think there’s an interesting tension with the title, that I don’t want to try and overexplain. I want people to come to this book and find what they decide they want to find.
CF: I keep returning to the first sentence on page one, to the jogger—the first person to see the peak of the volcano sprout from the middle of the reservoir in Central Park. What is the significance, or the burden, of being a first witness? Have you ever been in this first witness position before?
JES: I haven’t been a witness like that before, at least not to anything significant in a social way. I don’t know that there is something that significant about being the first, I think there’s a sense that we feel that it is important, but I am not sure that is true. I think seeing something—or maybe noticing something—at all feels significant at this point in our history.
CF: I recently read an interview with the author Richard Powers in which he talks about climate anxiety, human alienation, and the urgent need to cultivate an “interbeing” network and community. My Volcano also grapples with this seeming ambivalence or apathy in humans when it comes to caring for and taking responsibility for the non-human world around us, not to mention the loneliness that runs rampant when people are displaced, isolated, or disconnected due to natural or manmade causes (a feeling that is quite familiar to us who have lived through a pandemic.) I’m thinking especially of the fact that after the initial shock and glamour and news-iness of the volcano’s emergence, the two-and-a-half-mile tall volcano in Central Park becomes yesterday’s news, something to just scroll past. Onwards to another cat video!
Then, later in the book, a glorious violet light ribbons and gyrates in the Antarctic sky, but no one is there to see it. The violet light is animate, so very alive and unwatched, yet the light surveys the earth with its own senses, searching for someone, anyone, who might be paying attention. This reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s famous question: If we say we love the earth, does the earth love us back? As we notice the earth, what is the earth noticing about us?
I’d love to hear what you think eco-conscious novels can do to stimulate the environmental movement that scientific studies or “the news” cannot?
JES: I think Richard Powers gets a little credit for helping clue me in on some of the magic of the natural world through his Overstory (which I admit to having read a chunk of but have never finished). I think that book helped usher me toward establishing the idea of the green “network” in my novel.
I think there are real ways that art can help reveal some of the magical facts about the natural world that might otherwise be hidden in academic or otherwise less accessible languages. I think there’s so much wonder and magic in the natural world, in what creatures are capable of, and that art (not just writing) can really help translate that into something that can make it easier for humans to relate to this world, or be delighted by this world. Like, what I read of Powers’ Overstory made me think about trees so much differently, in a way that I will never probably revert from. I think humans are a bit too self-involved to naturally be able to connect to nature, especially in this day and age, so art can really help slip some nerves into this business.
I don’t think that art is a solution to many of our problems, but I think that art can really help communicate the importance of nature to people in a way that can, possibly, help tune their souls toward the actions we need to take.
CF: Another theme that is present throughout the book is redemption and forgiveness. After the environmental collapse, it is said that the planet’s inhabitants “wanted to turn back time, and look at the world, and see it, and help prevent everything from happening as it had.” Have you ever been granted a do-over? What are the implications of getting second, third, fourth chances? I’m also wondering if you have read Olivia Laing’s brilliant and expansive book, Everybody: A Book about Freedom. Laing ends her critique on the human rights movements of the 20th century by casting a hopeful line into the future. She says: “Freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time…Imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear, without the need for fear. Just imagine what we could do. Just imagine the world that we could build.” As we continue to live through our own dystopian times, how can utopian thinking be utilized by society to mend and repair? Can you depict a sense, a sliver, a policy, or a smell of your ideal future?
JES: I feel more optimistic about dystopian thinking than utopian thinking, I think. Or, I think the thinking that is most productive is the kind that develops a tension between various topias.
I actually just finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which I think is a marvel when it comes to utopian/dystopian thinking in the way that it offers both the anarchist perspective and the archist/hierarchical/capitalist one. We get to see the ways in which people will, even in an anarchist framework, develop hierarchies to get power over others, as well as how completely senseless the more hierarchical world seems in comparison to even a flawed anarchistic one.
I think if I have an ideal future, it is one that leans more toward that anarchistic vision, where we are liberated from all the bullshit and everyone is on a level field. No one left behind, no one is rising above. I believe my life has been fundamentally ruined by my being given power, or being taught to want power, and that being liberated from that—and being guided by a mutual aid sort of framework—would probably lead to a much more meaningful existence for us all.
CF: At intervals throughout your novel, we encounter true news bulletins of hate and violence from the tumultuous year of 2016, including the Pulse nightclub massacre and Black lives murdered by police—thereby situating the phenomenon of the Central Park Volcano in a news cycle with very real and horrifying tragedies. Shockingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly, depending on the news network in question), news networks in the book are all too eager to shift their attention away from coverage about the queer and Black dead, and the Volcano is dubbed early on as “the greatest threat to American lives.” You, however, make space for both stories to exist. You give pages of your book for the acknowledgment of the dead and their memory. Can you tell us more about your decision to quilt together the factual and the imagined?
JES: This element of the book—as with the book more broadly, if I’m honest—is something I don’t really want to overexplain. I think that these are better left to be felt in whatever way that the reader chooses to feel them, as their presence should instigate the reader to feel something: be that anger at the world, sadness, anger at me, exhaustion, boredom, etc. I am not very interested in trying to give shape to a “correct” way to read these moments in the book, because I think that would be putting too much power in me and my intentions, and it would be assuming a particular kind of reader is the only one welcome to experience the book.
To justify the existence of these realities in the book—should anyone need it—I will say simply that they stand as evidence for some of the many volcanoes we are currently living under.
CF: There are over 20 different narratives that appear in the form of 232 interwoven vignettes in My Volcano. Will you pick one of the narrative threads for us, perhaps one of the narratives you wish you could have lingered longer in, and take us through how it developed? Unravel the inspiration behind it, help us understand its hidden metaphors, and how it fits into the grand tectonic puzzle of this novel. What are the aspects of this particular thread that only JES would know?
JES: I don’t think there is a thread which I would have wanted to linger longer in. I mean, I think that each of these threads could have certainly been expanded into something larger on their own, but something larger was not the purpose of this particular project, and the parts we do not see are the parts I want the reader to try and imagine.
Take Jahan, for instance, an Iranian immigrant experiencing homelessness in New York City after losing his wife and his job. He takes a particularly strange journey in the first part of the book, and a keen reader will identify his emergence in the late stages of the book, after he has gone through a very thorough transformation. There are many fascinating and wondrous things he has probably been through in the times between when we see him, but peeling that back would peel away the gnomic nature of this book in a way that would, I believe, bleed it of much of its magic.
I could pick many of the book’s most titillating characters—Hitomi, Old Otherwise, João, Galina, Ash—and say that there are moments in their past, future, or presents that would be interesting to write more details of, but I believe the reader is more than capable of filling in those blanks in ways that both keep the story moving along the page and making the narratives feel more alive in the mind.
CF: My Volcano is a massively transglobal book that, to me, succeeds in respecting and celebrating the unique facets of each location’s cultures, peoples, and lore. We are airdropped to homes in Hawaii, apartments in Tokyo, deserts in Chile, pastures in Mongolia, Persian marketplaces, Grecian hospitals, sidewalks in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and sacred sites in Tenochtitlan. This grand scope, this worldly tour, reminds me of one of my favorite films, The Fall (directed by Tarsem), which took the cast and crew on-set to twenty-four different countries—each country providing a new opening or feast for emotional depth and perspective wandering. What were the challenges and the freedoms of writing scenes that pinpointed across the entire world map?
JES: Well, the freedoms are fairly straightforward, but the challenges sprout directly from those: if you can write something that is set anywhere, you can write anything, but then you need to reckon with the problem of how you can keep the book from feeling like a collection of unrelated stories rather than an intertwining of them. The danger is having a reader to ask themselves “why do I care about this girl who woke up in a bug in Russia when the volcano is in New York City?” I think that My Volcano does a very nice thing to solve this problem, in that many of the pieces feel connected in some ways to other things, but not all of them necessarily do. If you tried to tie all the narratives together, some of them would fall through the cracks because they simply do not connect in any material way to the other narratives. Others seem to have their finger in almost everyone else’s.
I think this connection and disconnection (which is obviously also one of my core themes as an artist) was something I was struck by in Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission, which I read maybe a decade ago. There are two main characters in the book, and their lives do affect one another, but they never actually meet. The closest they get, if I am recalling correctly, is a moment when one of the characters looks at a plane flying in the sky, which happens to hold the other character. I think that striving for the story to feel like a matrix of shadowy Venn-diagrams is the solution to the challenge of “many narratives taking place everywhere” that works best for this novel. There is something that is so honest and sad and invigorating about the ways in which lives move past one another that we maybe need more of in this world, but which we also I think do see somewhat in our world—where ripples from a stone dropped into the great pond of the world can make waves for those whose lives are very far away. I wanted to capture that.
CF: When I write, I often feel a hidden, submerged bond to my works of fiction, more so than when I write any other genre. It’s like there’s an understory, a bed of weeds that only I reside in, and I think the existence of this secret self made out of language stirs up a special kind of vulnerability in me. I pour my most truthful emotions into the landscape and characters of the fictional world, though I don’t think it’s outwardly obvious to a reader which parts of me are horcruxed into the narrative. Inhabiting other bodies and non-humanoid lifeforms feels like the only way for me to most authentically explore many versions of myself at once. Do you ever have that out-of-body/secret-self experience while writing? And how does it feel for you to share your fiction with the world?
JES: Yes, most of my work is very much like that, where I am a sort of Lich using each of these fictions as little phylactery for my true feelings and beliefs (to pivot to a D&D/non-JKR related metaphor).
This said, I don’t necessarily think of it so much as intentionally hiding, per se, though the fictional/imaginative process is often quite obscuring in the result. It is more so that I want to write true things in ways that are fictional, because they are easier to consume, and more affective, in the forms that I give them.
I balk at the idea that to be true one must be autobiographical in plot to be autobiographical in feeling, and I think that there are many ways that what is “real” simply muddies the journey to that true thing I want people to feel, because to get the true feeling of something that has happened to me, you probably need to know the rest of what has happened to me—led me to that place—which would just bog down the story so deeply and make it so that everything is about me.
Instead, I am often taking feelings, or emotional moments in my life, and giving them to characters, which means I need to rework them so that their emotional effects spring from the character’s contexts rather than my own. In this imaginative process I clean stuff up, or mess things up, in ways that make it work better—or to larger effect. I suppose I am someone who simply resists the nonfiction impulse in my fictions’ plot because if I wanted to write nonfiction I would just do that instead. The joy of fiction is the joy of enlargement. I both want to manipulate the truth to make it truer, and I want the truth to be true without me.
CF: I’ve been thinking a lot about queer form, queer nature, and queer joy—and the importance for queer and non-queer people alike to see positive depictions and authentic representations of queer relationships, whether those relationships are among people, plants, birds, or language. In the same way, I’ve also been thinking about the importance of writerly joy, and how competition, productivity and our own egos can depress and distract us from the pleasures of creation and innovation. How do you invite play, experimentation, and queerness into your writing process, especially when you are also handling traumatic or catastrophic material?
JES: I feel like I am a writer who is mostly immune to the traumatic or catastrophic in my work—which is not to say that I go into writing recklessly, but I don’t feel particularly affected by too much of my writing in the way that others seem to be by theirs. At least, not with fiction. I do objectively understand that a lot of my work can be described as heavy and emotional (my first novel, Vanishing Monuments, especially). I am not sure why that is, I think it may well just be an advantage of my being a consistently depressed person—it is hard to get too far up or down from my numb little basecamp.
That said, I definitely try to have fun and be playful with writing, especially with My Volcano. I think that is very important, as the writing of the book is the thing that I find the most joy and satisfaction from, I want to try and make it as joyful and satisfying as possible for me (even if the work is dark, as often it can be). I do this partly by writing things that are very “self-indulgent” in the sense that I am always writing my favorite books. Be that a foggy weaving of heavy and poetic narrative in one of my hometowns (Vanishing Monuments), attempting to create a definition of something which is by definition definitionless (Junebat), or a sci-fi/fantasy/hyperrealistic whiplash of a book (My Volcano): I am always writing the sort of thing that I would hope my friends would recommend to me. This is often by finding ways to infuse the work with things that interest me (photography/art, volcanos, “reality,” story structure), so that I can use these processes as ways to learn more about things I would like to know more about.
With My Volcano especially, I pretty much used it as purely experiment/fun/expurgation of my frustrations. I would often sit down with a bonkers idea for a story, write it, and then challenge myself to find a way to make it relevant enough by the end of the story to be able to keep it. That’s how many of these threads started, and you might be surprised to hear that there were only a few that didn’t make the cut at the end. Many of the ideas stemmed from things like “wouldn’t it be funny if someone woke up inside a giant insect rather than as one, like in Kafka’s story?” and then I would write it and try and find some corner of the world I didn’t have a story yet to try and set it. The whole narrative really sprung straight out of these sort of experimental explorations (which I think is how it also reads structurally as queer), which as they developed began to weave their roots around one another—rising into the somewhat impenetrable, mystical jungle that stands before you.
CF: What projects do we find you steeped in now? Any books/art/dance/film you’re currently enjoying that’s fueling your creative fire?
JES: My creative fire is fairly extinguished these days, if I am very honest, but I have recently been inspired in working on my current project (a graphic novel) by the works of the French artist Moebius.
Cameron Finch is a cross-genre writer, editor, artist, reader, and collaborator. Cameron’s writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Common, CRAFT, Electric Literature, Isele, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tiny Molecules, and The Rumpus, among others. Find out more at ccfinch.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 