Like most of N. Pendleton’s writing, his euphictional work in Cover Stories is in a league all its own.

Earlier this year, he explored euphiction further with the third episode of his MuseionCast podcast series. Inspired by the music of Nest, “SIX EUPHICTIONS” is a 30 minute tour de force that brings together fiction and music in a way that feels both familiar and new.

In this interview, I wanted to specifically address Pendleton’s euphictional work outside of the anthology, as well as learn some of his general thoughts about writing.

To start us off here, could you talk a little about the MuseionCast and what you’re setting out to do with it?

I had wanted to do audio stories and plays since around 2003, but I had no idea how to do it.  In 2007, I found that I was only really Mac compatible, and that they’d simplified the technology so much even I was able to figure it out.  Podcasting was finally easy for us dummies.  And here I had a pretty good stack of short stories I’d had no luck selling.  I wanted a venue for my work to get out to the public, on my own terms.  Thus MuseionCast, which is an extension of the MuseionArt.com “brand name” I’d established for my work.  It wasn’t until 2009 that it got noticed by Red House Art Radio.  Now it’s part of their family of shows, and gives me a new audience to confound, confuse, and frustrate.

We both have tackled euphiction in Cover Stories and beyond, but you’re the first to put further restrictions on the concept. Can you talk about why you did this? And if you feel this brings anything new to the table?

I knew I wanted to use the Roberts/Totland NEST EP for an episode of MuseionCast.  The album times in at just under 30 minutes, which made it a good fit.  But I found that 1000 word stories are worth three to five minutes of air time (depending on pacing), and I didn’t want to crowd out the music too much.  I also wanted to keep the euphictions more impressionistic, make them work more as compliments to the music as mood/thought pieces.  That’s why some of them aren’t really complete as “stories” but act more as episodes, and why one is just a single-paragraph prose poem.  Five hundred words or few worked well when overlaying them with the songs – you can tell on the longer ones where the balance gets precarious.

I also forced myself to write each fiction without edits and then to record each one in a single take.  These are personal exercises I like to do, and if I was being paid or sponsored or had a huge audience, I don’t think I’d do these restrictions very often, because they’re self-indulgent.  The writing a single draft restriction comes from my experimental series “BIG BOY,” the point of which is to turn off the internal editor and let the subconscious take over.  The recording a single take restriction comes from my desire to get my shit together and become more spontaneous as well as work on my public speaking skills.  If I ever get to perform live, I’ll only have one take.

I really enjoy your use of pauses to really let the music deliver. How did you map that out with only one take?

When you read aloud, somehow you can feel natural breaking points when mixing with music.  I left large pauses when I recorded.  One restriction I did not place on myself was post-production.  I snipped or lengthened pauses while mixing.  Usually to get it right, I’d do like four or five passes, spacing more here, less there, until the music and words were acting together to heighten the impact of one another.  You’re working with seconds and fractions of seconds.  It’s what I imagine knitting or needlepoint to be like.

The music of Nest is such an inspired choice and your stories really compliment the album. What was it specifically about this band that brought out these six euphictions?

I have no idea.  This was an album I’d had on my iPod for about a year, and then one day it crept up on me and dug right in.  I just listened to it over and over again.  I think very early on my subconscious began creating narratives for these songs, and it took me consciously a while to catch up, because when I decided to do “SIX EUPHICTIONS,” they just trickled onto the laptop with very little effort.  I wrote all of the euphictions in two short evenings.  The songs are very evocative, bursting with emotion, and that helps set my imagination loose.

It doesn’t Huw Roberts and Otto Totland are awesome talents.  They’ve since taken what was originally a free netlabel release, expanded it into a full length album called Retold, remastered the original tracks, and made Serin into commercial label.

Though they’re dramatically different, two of the stories deal with girls being abducted. Were there any doubts about putting these two pieces next to each other? Could you talk a little about why you explored this particular theme?

They both came from such different places, and are about such different things, so I counted on those differences as well as the songs themselves to keep it from feeling lumped together.  I also didn’t want to get into rearranging the track order of the original EP.  The musicians put those songs together in that order for a reason, and I didn’t want to tamper.  It was always a philosophy of compliment and symbiosis of words with the existing music.

One of the euphictions comes from fear, a place of deep anxiety.  As a father, I tend to see those things most clearly that can bring harm to my children.  Child abduction is unfortunately too common, and this is a “worst fear” scenario.  What most sickens me is that when I hear these stories on the news, my mind instantly jumps into a first person frame of mind.  I remember what it was like to be young – my earliest memories are from when I was three years old.  I put myself in the abductee’s place and it’s a maddening place to go.  This story is at some level an attempt to purge some of that.

I get the “maddening place” because you express it so well in the story. We can see the real horror with the little girl is how naive she is. While she’s being abducted, she’s worried about her parents yelling at her for disappearing, completely oblivious to what’s coming next. And I had been wondering if any of that stemmed from being a father, allowing you to take that perspective.

Your parents are your gods as a child.  They are the center of your loving world, but they also frighten you.  They give and take away.  This girl has no idea that she’s never going home.  The only thing she really understands to fear is the strictness of their response to her “disobedience.”  Her only context is family.

The other fiction comes from a handful of ideas fused together.  The strange fairy tale world and all the places and characters are from a book I made for my daughter when she was five.  She and her stuffed Bunny visit this world and goof around and have a good time.  I borrowed heavily from Dr. Seuss since my daughter and I are huge Theodore Geisel fans.  Then there’s the influence of Roald Dahl, who made no bones about dipping into darkness in his children’s lit.  And the secret passage to a magical world is of course a nod to C.S. Lewis.  I wanted to gather all of these things to explore what it might be like for a child when the fantasy didn’t go so well, when the world they visit doesn’t make them royalty or place any special value on them other than as a possession.  Long story short: I took something sweet and fun and made it dark and miserable.  You’re welcome.

That’s funny because from the description of the creature had me immediately thinking of Dr. Seuss when I first heard it. And I can completely recognize the other influences. I especially love the line “Five years before she discovered the gaping split in the trunk of the great oak tree behind the professor’s house.” It perfectly encapsulates all of those old children’s stories and the way there’s always darkness at the edges.

Yes, the best children’s tales are brutal.  I still to this day cannot read the last page of James and the Giant Peach without breaking into tears, because I’m just so damn glad he found a good life after all that neglect, spite and struggle.

The real killer, to me anyway, is that final story. Maybe it’s because I grew up hearing impaired and have had my share of things being placed in my ears, but the protagonist’s “reward” in that final piece had me cringing. I love how it has the trappings of a classic detective story, as if we were coming into it in the middle, particularly before the double-cross, and then there’s the twist revealing that this world isn’t quite right. And like most of your euphictions, you are able to turn the world on its head in one to two sentences. Could you explain what you were going for with that piece?

An editor I sent this story to said that, though they liked it, too many questions were left unanswered and the head-object is never explained.  That misses the point of the story entirely.  How many times have we seen this hand-off in a movie or TV show or paperback novel?  You’re absolutely right – I’m going right for the clichés, so I can use them as a shorthand to world-build.  I’ve only got a few sentences in which to do it.  I want that tone and color.  We know it right away when we’re there.  And it’s when we’re there that I like to do things my way.  Many of my worlds look a lot like the real one, but with certain surreal twists.  Words don’t mean what they used to mean.  People say one thing but really act out another.  Inanimate objects fuse with living tissue, and that fusion causes both flesh and non-flesh to take on new meanings.  I try to plant little ideas and impressions and what I really want is for the reader to fill in the gaps themselves.  All the magic is off screen.

This is why I came up with a concept I’m still working out, the “Evo-Devo Fiction.”  In biology, the genes contain the potential.  It’s how those genes are expressed that create the infinite expressions we see in fellow life forms.  It’s over simplified, but that’s part of Evo-Devo, evolutionary developmental biology, at least the way I understand it.  In the same way, each idea in the story is a meme, but it’s the interpretation of that information by the reader’s imagination that determines what the story really is.  I just set up the framework as the writer.  That’s the idea anyway.  Again, it’s still a work in progress.

As a reader, I understand this. You’re great about cracking the door open just enough to get my mind racing with possibilities. Which is why I’ve enjoyed listening to these euphictions a few times because I’ve been able to explore different avenues with each listen.

As a writer, what you’re talking about is problematic though. I’m always aware of paraspace, that area of distance where the reader and the text interact, and so many things can go wrong here. The text can be concrete but the reader is in a bad mood. The text can be abstract and spark an association with the reader no where close to what the writer had in mind. This paraspace can be a beautiful ballroom where the reader and the writer are dancing perfectly or it can turn into a battlefield.

And when we are dealing with minimalistic pieces like this, we have to have the reader do a lot of the heavy lifting in order to walk away with a satisfying experience. The paraspace is extremely fragile. When you’re writing, are you considering any of this?

I approach writing the way I do sculpture or drawing: it’s a million little gut feelings and decisions that add up to something in the end.  You know it when you see it.  If it doesn’t come out right the first time, you try again.  Often you end up with something that surprises even you, the creator.  If I go in with too much planning, I’m not doing it right.

First and foremost, it has to satisfy as fiction.  The reader has to get something from it, what I in my lack of sophistication call an “echo.”  If I’m not doing that, then I’ve failed.  It can be an insight into human nature, a different perspective on a situation, or just a chuckle.  They all won’t work for everyone, obviously, but it has to make some kind of sense.  Too abstract and you get this story:  “A person or people did stuff to things or other people and stuff happened.  The end.”  That’s interesting to me as an intellectual artifact, but it’s not engaging fiction.

If I’ve met my first goal, then I can play in the gaps as much or as little as I feel.

I’m not setting out to frustrate really.  That’s a joke to make a point.  I do like to engage with readers, and that’s not always making them “work.”  I believe very much in the idea that when you release a piece of artwork into the public, you no longer have proprietary rights to its meaning anymore.  Some people violently disagree with that idea.  I count on it being true.

Do you plan to write more euphiction?

Yes.

What’s next with MuseionCast?

I’ll always be playing with format, so that will change.  I would also like to feature other writers, not just my own work.  My biggest goal is to build the audience and find a way to cross pollinate it with an idea for a quarterly magazine of audio fiction.  I would also really love to record a live show in a public venue.  I say this now, yet the whole thing might completely change in a month or two.  I’ve found that while it helps to plan ahead, I should also be prepared to abandon those plans when it no longer suits me.  Some ideas don’t gel, and new opportunities crop up.  The good side of having no budget or investors or ratings goals is that I can do whatever I want with MuseionCast when I want.  And when it’s no longer fun, or when I no longer feel the need to express myself through audio, I’ll quit.  No problem.

Below is the MuseionCast discussed in the preceding interview.

And here is his latest MuseionCast with excerpts from N. Pendleton’s novel.