by Alex Wells
No collection we’ve read this year has struck such a wild and distinct chord as Chris Zeischegg’s Creation: On Art and Unbecoming—brimming with sex, violence and questions about the nature of our identity, art, and reality. We caught up with the porn-actor-turned-indie-lit-phenom for an insight into his enigmatic and ambiguous world.
So, Creation strikes me as a wonderful sampler of your work for people who might consider delving deeper—do you agree?
I guess I agree.
I’m not 100% sure if I’ll stick with this decision, but the book is supposed to mark a change in trajectory. I’ve spent the past ten years mining my past in sex work to create these (often) hyper-violent autofiction novels and short stories.
Creation: On Art and Unbecoming contains a lot of that material.
But it’s also an exploration of my real-world friendship to the artist, Luka Fisher. She’s a close friend of mine who collaborated on a lot of the most extreme and volatile art I’ve put into the world. She also facilitated much of the writing that came together for this collection. But she and I have a very sweet, platonic friendship. We’re both still interested in underground art. But I think we’re less willing to fuck up our lives in pursuit of accomplishing some aesthetic goal.
For better or worse, the collection is meant to be this balance of brutality and joyful sincerity, which seems like a good jumping off point to move forward.
The Magician and a few other stories texts feel as if they’re somewhere between a kind of cathartic—dare I say magical?—writing that exorcises some kind of ghost combined with a kind of skeptical point of view that keeps forcing us to question not just the value of the mystical but of art at all? Am I imagining things?
The “cathartic” part has been true for all of my novels thus far, at least the beginning of writing those books. I think the easiest way to get into a headspace or mood is to just start writing out whatever real-world problem I’m experiencing. Then, it evolves into something more fantastic.
I think the mystic elements of my published work have come from two places. My skepticism and mockery of those things. And my internal longing for a spiritual path. In recent years, this has manifested into a daily prayer practice and sincere belief in God. Some of that has probably seeped into my writing. But I’m mostly hesitant to divulge what that means to me right now.
I don’t want you to say any more about your faith than you want to in public, but I am interested in the idea of mockery vs earnestness. Sincerity or earnestness in your work often feels like a trap or like it will doom the character. Can you expand on that idea a little more?
I don’t know that anyone’s explicitly made that suggestion about my work before. But maybe you’re right.
At least, I tend to write characters—even those who share my name—who lack self-awareness and are kind of the opposite of the Joseph Campbell style “hero.” Their goals are unclear. They often just fall victim to whatever the world has in store for them. Maybe, once they come to any realization about what they want or what they’re after, it’s too late.
I don’t think these narratives are consciously constructed when I start writing. But I obviously keep repeating the same structure.
The easy answer is that this is the trajectory of sex work, which is the focus of so much of my writing. In the beginning, it’s always like, “Wonderful, I’m getting money and attention, and some minor bit of self-esteem because people think I’m attractive and want to fuck me.” Ten years later, every horrible thing has happened. It feels like there’s no way out. If you want some other kind of life or have different aspirations, it feels like you don’t deserve it. Sincerity is off limits.
That’s my experience anyway. Even though I’m kind of breaching past that in recent years.
So your writing includes nonfiction, fiction, and autofiction and, one might argue, also horror genre fiction and literary writing—can you quickly lay out for the readers which of your books is which?
I think all of my books blend those “genres” together. Even Body to Job, which is marketed as my porn memoir, leans heavily into autofiction and magical realism in the latter half of the book.
The Magician is probably my novel that leans most into the horror genre, though I think it’s more often referred to as LA noir.
I have a novel called The Wolves That Live in Skin and Space that I wrote near the end of my porn career. I sometimes describe it as an existential horror novel about sex work. But there’s nothing supernatural about it. I was mostly just trying to figure out my own style by trying to emulate the authors who influenced me: Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion, etc…
Do you always know when you begin a story whether it will stay within the bounds of nonfiction or whether you’ll be pushed into inventing things? Or is it an organic response?
Up until recently, I would begin a book by just writing about something volatile that was happening in my life at the time.
For example, the first few chapters of The Wolves That Live in Skin and Space and The Magician are more-or-less true.
I don’t outline my books in a traditional sense. But I’m constantly thinking about how they should evolve. Writing explicit non-fiction has never really interested me. I think everything should be possible in a novel.
You use language very directly. It’s not exactly Hemingwayesque but there’s a certain curtness. Do you think about saving up your flowery language for the devastating important detail or else how do you think about it? Do you find yourself with a thesaurus often?
I think this just has to do with having first been excited by literature via authors that lean toward minimalism: Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis, and Joan Didion. They are my foundation for understanding what a “good” sentence looks like. Whether or not the prose is poetic, their work is clean and efficient. You could say each of the aforementioned authors have a cinematic style in that there’s a heavy emphasis on dialog and action rather than robust descriptions of environment or a character’s emotional interior.
Over the past decade, I have discovered authors, who I love, that lean the opposite direction. For example, Samuel Delaney and László Krasznahorkai. When I’m reading a maximalist text that I enjoy, I do find a subtle influence seeping into my writing. But in the editing stages, my instinct is to cut everything down to its leanest form.
Although most readers will probably be aware that you were an adult film actor, many of the details in your stories are outside of ordinary experience but not yet fully supernatural. There is a lot of “outsider” life and extremes of wealth and poverty, readers will never be sure when the real-life details have ended and the fiction begins, is this something you think about? Do you imagine the audience trying to guess?
I’m not attempting to construct a puzzle for my audience. The only consideration I have for the “assumed reader” is that I’d like my work to be clean and cohesive.
I’m just going in with the assumption that contemporary media literacy suggests that all manufactured representations of our lives pass through a myriad of personal filters before we’re willing to share those details with other people.
I often make the analogy to music, particularly the underground hardcore and metal scenes I grew up in. A lot of the lyrical content is coming from a place of emotional volatility. That could be related to something as mundane as breaking up with your boyfriend/girlfriend. But there’s this language of poetic violence that’s often used to make it feel larger than life.
I like that. Because a lot of universal experiences, like love and suicidal ideation, seem trite if you stop to think about how common and ridiculous they are.
When this stuff is happening to you, it feels like life and death. So you might as well allow those feelings to have their full power if you’re going to put them down on paper.
I love the analogy to music, in that we don’t break music into “fiction” and “nonfiction”—if Bob Dylan says he’s a cowboy in a song we don’t immediately put it in another category. When did this idea hit you? Does writing feel like songwriting in this way?
I only started thinking about it that way after writing several books.
I don’t have much insight into preparing to write a book. For me, and for a lot of writers who I speak to, the answer to, “Why do you write this way?” is mostly, “I don’t know how to do it any other way.” In hindsight, it’s easier to see patterns and extrapolate the reasons behind your own process.
The connection to music is that it’s been a part of my life since I was very young. I grew up playing in hardcore and metal bands. That was my scene as a kid.
Now, when I write prose, I do recognize a tendency toward cadence. I’m not sure how much other people will pick up on that. But I often get stuck on a sentence because the rhythm feels off.
In terms of the energy of that music and how that has influenced the way I write. I mean, off the top of my head, I can say, “Listen to something like ‘Heaven in Her Arms’ by Converge.” It’s such a noisy, violent, chaotic piece of music. But it’s just about being in love with a girl.
Chris Zeischegg’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriszeischegg/
Images: Courtesy of Artist