Gina Nutt: In “Spiral Gardens” we meet a seamstress whose daughter has been taken by the State for training. As we get to know the seamstress, and how she spends her time, themes emerge, including connection, technology, the natural world, labor, and the government defining (and dissolving) relationships, imagination, and language. Could you share a bit about the seeds for this work? Where does this excerpt land in the novella’s longer timeline?
Blake Butler: The original novella draft was written between December 1 2019 and January 28 2020, which would have been about six months after my mom died. Mom was a lifelong quilter who I learned so much about creative process from observing from very young, so I have to imagine losing her suddenly to cancer during the middle stages of her dementia felt like being under assault, both in struggling to get her good medical help and with my own related depression. The Gardens very clearly represent our shared experience of her losing her mind, especially alongside the early emergence of MAGA and how America seemed to be on the verge of slipping into totalitarianism.

As it stands, this is the opening of the novella, with some paragraphs about a popular State serial TV broadcast removed. I’ve never known what to do with the larger whole; I didn’t have a plan for what it would be as I wrote it, and after I felt it was finished I realized it was too long to be a story and too short to be a novel, so I guess that makes it a novella. Later, I tried to use it as a section of another novel, as a sort of parallel universe within universe, but it never felt right, and that novel didn’t end up seeing the light of day either.

GN: The sentences here, plus a setting that is at once psychological and physical, are immersive. How do you steer toward clarity without sacrificing style? Or, another way to ask: Do you think moving toward clarity defines and hones style?
BB: Interesting question. I think I’d almost more likely say the inverse of the second question, that I think honing style moves toward defining clarity. I think a basic fundamental understanding of realism or even surrealism comes from thinking human experience, in any form, should be expected to contain clarity. That’s not to say there’s no point or meaning to experience, but rather that language, especially narrative language, stands no chance at representing it, even at its most basic. I prefer to let the style of what is selected and how it is described be the primary factor in delivering information, which I suppose tends to allow the reader the feeling of a greater degree of interpretation, and I like that; it feels more true, or at least more capable of brushing up against a representation of the world that might having something more to say than just being a funhouse mirror. Clarity without style is a phonebook. Style without clarity can be like a painting or just a mood or so many other things. It’s more fun to me to play with the ranges of what’s possible within the theoretical space of fiction than to try to simulate utilitarian authority.

GN: The camera shifts subtly throughout, and at times within, each section. We move from timeless panoramic narration in third person to close collective first, which creates the experience of both witnessing and participating. What point of view considerations were front of mind for you as you wrote and revised?
BB: I wanted the narrative to have a bit of a parable feel, but also to reflect the experience of the seamstress and the society at large in a psychological way, so I suppose discovering the trajectory of the text was a bit more like trying different lenses on a camera, and then moving around the set of the text to see what might emerge from different levels of awareness. There’s a strange mixture of internal resistance and discomfort being pushing up against the strictures of living in an authoritarian state that veils its practices with misinformation and propaganda, and so I think during the writing itself I wanted to make sure I kept exposing the reader to different clearance levels of a sort, including sometimes omniscience, as the Gardens end up being a place that facilitates freedom from monotony but also a disorienting space. Again, my real-world experience with being around dementia during this time really underlined that slippery slope—like which is really more deluded, an able-bodied citizen brainwashed by the demands of their own existence to the point they participate in the war effort, or a patient who can’t remember how to dress themselves and finds pleasure in throwing food on the floor? It seems like the answer depends on who you think you are.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
BB: I feel like it changes in waves, and I’m quite a different person than I was when I wrote this. Looking back at my reading list from Dec 2019 I can see shades of two books that feel like influences over the text: Belladonna by Daša Drndić and I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. In early Jan 2020 I was reading Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein, Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind, which probably also make sense in having bearing on where the novella heads from here.