Poet and novelist Sasha Fletcher writes like poet and novelist Sasha Fletcher. With a contagious excitement found throughout his literature, he consistently showcases his love of the word, of the line, of this newfound world you’re together stepping inside. Having published (and reprinted) one novella, one collection of poems, and one YA sci-fi under a pen name, Fletcher also has an unpublished Western, an unpublished collection of prose poems (they’re beautiful, truly), a detective-story-in-progress, and a novel-in-progress known as BE HERE TO LOVE ME AT THE END OF THE WORLD. I spoke with Fletcher over the course of a few months and he talked about falling teeth, police brutality, his obsession with revision, movies that don’t exist, and more.
Let's begin with an icebreaker. If you could take up a writer's residency in a secluded estate with any author (living or dead), who would it be and why?
Hanging out with the dead seems awful! I imagine the smell would be difficult to adjust to.
The last shitty and weird decade came to an end and the 20s are upon us. When we're all long dead and gone, what do you think the 20s will be remembered for?
Cops murdering children in the streets.
Your writing style is so unique and signature, often with very lengthy and energized sentences. Does your writing process begin with putting a lot of words on the page and then trimming, or do you slowly make your way to something you're satisfied with?
Oh! it really depends! So much, for me, is about finding the voice, and the letting the language come from that. My process involves an endless and constant revision. I like revision as a form of generative work. Another way of putting it is that if you're not satisfied you keep working until you are. You're the one that has to live with what you made. You're the one who it has to feel the most alive to, because how else will it feel alive to anyone else?
With this book, so much of it has come out of slumps, lately. It has been so hard at times to write this. I like editing and rewriting so much better. I usually cannot wait to get the first draft done so I can fix it. So the sentences can sing. And so much of this book, every step forward I end up needing to go back and rewrite things to make what I just did work better. The whole thing is alive and moving when I'm not looking. And between work and depression and the whole struggle with why any of this matters and the end of the fucking world at our backs like a shitty boss, I lose track of it all from time to time. And then I dive back in again, and see so many things to fix before it can move ahead, because it all needs to be moving towards the same point, and I will not see that point until I get there, and it's a very very weird way to travel. A stanza is a room, right? This house is maybe a fucked house, but it will be one hell of a house.
Your novella dances with prose poetry and your collection of poems dances with narrative storytelling. How do you view titles/genres/hybrid work? Did poetry or more proper fiction come first for you?
I started out writing fiction but in the public schools I went to they wanted you to plot out the story before you wrote it and for me as soon as I knew what was going to happen I just couldn't see the point in writing it. The idea of working without mystery just seems so fucking boring. Then in college, all the people I was in fiction workshops with told me I should just be a poet because all I seemed to care about was getting the sentences to sound right, so that's what I did. For the most part I feel like genre is a box we invented to bury people in, I mean that language is language and it does to us what it does to us, and segregating things seems kind of fucked.
Along with your two books, you also have a novel/manuscript in the works. Is it finished? Can you tell us a bit about it?
So I had this book of prose poems called EVERYTHING HERE IS OK that was a finalist for about 3 years with Octopus but that never got published. Almost immediately after that I started working on WHEN ALL OUR DAYS... right before grad school. Mud Luscious was just starting to do novellas and I thought it would be a challenge to try to do that. I put that away by the time I was trying to get my thesis into shape. That came out as IT IS GOING TO BE A GOOD YEAR, and while that was getting wrapped up I got hired to write a YA sci-fi series so that the press could try to turn the IP of the book into like a movie or TV thing since that's pretty much where the money is, but then my editor quit, so just the one book came out, under a pen name. Around that time, I lost my permalance job [lost is a fun word to say like as though I forgot where it was] and was out of work so I thought I'd write a novel, and I wrote a western. There are a lot of excerpts from that floating around, and it was built up out of this chapbook Greying Ghost put out in....2010? Anyway I got an agent and we couldn't sell the western, which was real weird, the western, not the fact that it didn't sell, that makes a lot of sense, and now I'm working on BE HERE TO LOVE ME AT THE END OF THE WORLD. It was finished but then I threw almost all of it out. Structurally it's like SPEEDBOAT and content-wise it's like my poems. It's a love story in a bad dream about America. It is not at all finished. I am always talking about this book now.
Intermission: What's the last dream you had that's worth sharing?
I almost never remember my dreams! I had a series of recurring nightmares as a kid, and I had like a year of teeth spilling out my mouth into: cups, cupped hands, plates, baseball mitts, bathtubs, etc. The recurring nightmares as a kid were weird. To have a version of the same dream almost every night. But I haven't really remembered a dream since the teeth just pouring out my mouth like a faucet when I was a teen. As an addendum, the other week I had this dream where Alex told me we were pregnant, but that I had to get the abortion because it seemed like a lot to put on her, and so I had to take like a bottle of morning after pills, and she told me they recommended pre-booking a stay in an emergency room, which is also funny because the week before my friend Ted went to Boston, which is not even a city so much as a pile of shit with cobblestones, and tweeted "anyone every book a hotel online then find out when you get there that it's actually just a room in a hospital? ok cool. me too."
Absurdism and the fantastical are such wonders throughout your writing and I love how the normal and mundane can quickly turn into a distortion of society. Have you always been fixated with surrealism and the altering of reality?
Yeah. And then you run into the idea of the reader dismissing what you're doing as make believe, and so then how can you trick them? How can you build a world where you talk about cooking dinner and running out of money and burying your bills in the yard the same way you talk about falling in love or the fact that your chest is full of birds? I only really know how to write one way. The world, to me, is a thing that makes such a small amount of sense. So it seems dishonest of me to try to build a world that makes sense, where things line up and are explicable. People like to talk about that story about how, when babies close their eyes, they're never certain if the world will be there when they wake up. It's a good story. It's something to think about, anyway.
Some of your writing feels cinematic and reminds me of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Alex van Warmerdam. Does film/television play a role in your writing at all?
So much! Roy Andersson's LIVING trilogy was hugely influential to me. That like early-middle Godard sweet spot where he was super into love stories and how capitalism sucked. Everything a fever dream of color and outfits, the state is a crime, and not even our love can save us.
You live in Brooklyn, but your Twitter bio says Chicago. Since this is a Chicago-based website, are you originally from here? Any Windy City anecdotes / recommendations worth sharing?
I am from Allentown, Pennsylvania, and went to art school in Philly, where I lived for a few years before moving to New York for grad school. My twitter bio used to read "i get so emotional" but then I saw PARASITE (2019) and so now here we are. I put it back, though.
Assuming your novel, Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, is finished, what are you currently working on?
O god I wish it was finished. I have a detective thing I was working on, there was an excerpt of that in Bomb a while back, which was reprinted from TINY CRIMES, which as I understand it you just picked up.
I'm still very slowly working on BE HERE TO LOVE ME AT THE END OF THE WORLD. I threw so much of it out. And I keep needing to go back and rework large parts of it, as it's the sort of book where, in order for it to get where it's going, all the pieces of it need to be aligned towards that. I mean, I don't know where it's going. But it feels incredibly important that everything be working together, towards some sort of end. I got really into the way some Leos Carax movies are basically all middle, with hardly any beginning or end. I really like that. I think I hate endings that try to wrap everything up, as though the world was a thing you could explain.
Outside of your own work, who/what have you been reading recently? I'm also a music nut, so what album/song/artist has received the most plays from you these past few months?
I was listening to Orville Peck a lot because it's nice to feel like a mirror universe Chris Isaac. The singles from Red Hearse had me losing my mind this summer. Every time one of them pops up somewhere I get ecstatic. I tend to be the sort of writer who makes a lot of playlists for going after very specific moods, and then i just run those into the ground until it's time to find another way to feel a thing. I do not think that only writers do this. I do think that I am a writer.
I have been a really bad reader this year. I saw some really great movies.
If you can, provide a photo of your workspace or describe with words. What are some essentials while you write?
There is absolutely nothing in the world like glass of cold clean water.
For this ongoing author interview series, I'm asking for everyone to present a writing prompt. It can be as abstract or as concrete as you choose.
Describe a movie that does not exist.
In closing, do you have any advice for writers trying to grow and/or make that leap into publication? Or rather, what's something you would have liked to have known when you first started taking your writing seriously?
OK so once, when I was younger, there was this excerpt from the novella that I'd placed in this journal I was so incredibly excited to be in, it was one of my first print publications and every writer on the internet I loved had been in this journal, and the guy basically rewrote the whole piece. It wasn't mine anymore. And I let them publish it like that because I wanted so badly to be in that journal, and because I didn't know you could say no. I think everyone should understand they can say no, if they're not comfortable with how the piece is going. In creative writing, we don't really every make any money off of these things. So if you're not getting paid, and it brings you discomfort, and I mean even if you are getting paid, it isn't worth it. Your work is yours and I think you should always be able to be proud of it. I wish I had known that earlier.
