CURRENT ISSUE

The Margins of Knowing:
Paul Dhillon interviews Russell Thornton

Congratulations on “228 East 27th.” There is such great unity of opposites with the narrator standing in the opening, hopeful, recalling in the beauty of the setting, to the end where the narrator is laying down, in pain, and from my reading, understanding what they perhaps have tried to heal while recalling their vision of the past. How did you discover this unity of opposites in the writing process? Was this always the initial intention?

Writing, for me, is an act in which I discover things I didn’t know or was only on the margins of knowing before I produced a bulk of words. When I was a teenager, I’d be faced with the opposites built into life and become distressed, unable to fathom what I faced. There was what I called beauty; there was ugliness and the fear and horror and a tendency to be violent that it brought out of me alongside my apprehension of beauty. Sometimes the opposites switched back and forth and confused me. In any case, I expressed what I experienced in immediate ways in my behaviour without knowing what I was doing. I go through a similar operation—though on a different level—with writing. I think a person writes at their most authentic without turning, without knowing they create. So, in this piece it wasn’t my conscious intention to present opposites while moving towards a unity. Having said that, if a vision of a unity of opposites arises—as if the unity was there all along—it’s because in the writing I was trying to be as honest and accurate as I could about my experience. And like I say, I think writing is an act of not knowing—a kind of self-hypnosis in which a person establishes a naivete or openness to experience, no matter how disconcerting the experience might be, together with an alertness—with the result that they create. But—why create anything? Any answer to that question, I feel, involves the question returning to the questioner, and, for me, is an invitation to submit to mystery.

There are many narrative swerves in the story that lead the reader to a rupture moment centred around the narrator, and who I refer to as a rival from school. The piece enters into a more dramatic present in this area. What was the precipitating event or writing that got you here? Was the piece initially built around the event with the rival or was it another triggering image? What was the process to eventually understand the story of the piece?

This piece is one of twelve interconnected pieces that I’ve collected into a creative nonfiction book called The Tree of My Only Address. Each piece is centred around a specific address where I lived when I was a child or teenager, or around a street locale close to one of those addresses. I mean the addresses to link up like the branches of a kind of personal tree of life. The house at 228 East 27th St. was an address I lived at in my mid-teens. The minute I wrote down the address, without thinking, I began writing about a particular memory I associated with that address. The sentences I blackened pages with became the piece. So, the address itself conjured the writing and the reexperiencing of events. In fact, the shooting in the piece occurred on 27th St., a few blocks west of the address. And everything that happens in the piece is autobiography. Of course, I think, even with the autobiographical, a person chooses to reenact sets of details or circumstances instead of others in what’s available within their memory. Except—for me anyway—the choice is a mysterious one. I related the event in the piece and the rival connected with it without any conscious intention; I suppose what got me to the rival was simply unconscious necessity. The layer of narrative involving a rival was something I only came to understand—if I can say I understand it at all—after I drafted out the piece. The piece is autobiographical, the rival was an actual young man around my age, but I understand now that the rival, as is often the case with rivals, is a mirror image of myself.

“228 East 27th” mentions a childhood filled with transience and moving to new homes, running, and even social transience through coveting of “expensive jeans, high-end running shoes, cassette and tape recorders, a stereo system, and guitars.” I’m curious, what were the constants or formative art (writings, books, movies, fine art, music) from that time that have stayed with you and continue to inform your creative practice?

When I was 15, 16, 17, I read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and his prophetic books a lot—with little understanding of what I was reading but with constant attraction to what was for me the near overwhelming bright-dark radiance of those works. I also read and reread D.H. Lawrence’s novels, short stories, and poems. At the same time, Camus’ The Stranger was a holy book for me. I had no clear idea why—but I read that novella more times than I can remember. Of course, many other authors became important to me over time. But of what I read as a teenager, these three have stayed with me beneath all the changes that inevitably take a person this way and that through decades; they’re touchstones for me to this day. Also, when I was a teenager, though I often scribbled poems and stories, my main creative outlet was visual art. I used to produce abstract designs daily at home and at school. I stopped when I was 19 or 20 and became committed to trying to write poems—but I’d say I’m still informed on certain levels by the design-making I did obsessively as a teenager.

What piece of writing advice would you give to an emerging writer?

It’s difficult for me give advice to an emerging writer because, to be honest, I feel I’m an emerging writer myself. But I’d say simply: Read, read, read; write, write, write.

What is your favourite word?

I’m not religious in any conventional sense, but I love the idea of a word I’ve read about in the mystical Zohar. The single, fluid, continuous word that is the entire text of the Hebrew Bible is the ineffable name representing divine, infinite light. In its utterance, it is the code for creating the world anew every moment through speech. It’s the secret word of the creation. If this word stopped being spoken for an instant, the world would cease to exist. So, my favourite word is a word I can’t ever know. It’s the one word in the poem of poems, the story of stories.

 

 

---

---

We gratefully acknowledge all of our supporters