Charlene Elsby Interview

Charlene Elsby is the author of Hexis (CLASH), Psychros (CLASH), Agyny (SELFFUCK), Affect (Porcupine’s Quill), and Musos (Merigold Independent), the latter of which is only available until May 18. Through crystalline prose, her work explores our darkest impulses. With a philosopher’s eye, Elsby dissects the psyche, laying bare the human desire to lash out, whether through sex, violence, or a combination thereof.

In Psychros, an unnamed narrator grapples with her lover’s suicide. Grief manifests as a series of erotic encounters that turn increasingly dangerous. We absorb her most intimate thoughts, drawn into her obsessions, her calculations, her rage. As intelligent as it is unnerving, Psychros is a short novel that cuts straight to the bone.

I was fortunate to correspond with Charlene between the release of Psychros and Musos. We discussed the marriage of phenomenology and existentialism, the psychotic internal monologue, and conjuring dread on the page.

When did you start writing fiction and what drew you to the form? Do you see any themes, ideas, images from your early attempts manifesting in your current work?

I started writing in high school. I wanted to be a psychologist and wrote journals emulating Freud. Then I figured out that psychologists don’t do that anymore, and I wrote poems. I was really into Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and then August Strindberg, and I wrote little scenes. I published a chapbook in 2005 under a pen name that was never distributed after the publisher was convicted. I sent two copies to Amazon to stock (back when that’s how it worked), and they’re still trying to sell them. I think it’s prescient you’re asking the question, because that’s also when I started writing what will be my next book, Musos. It’s about a man who’s obsessed with his high school girlfriend, Laura. I was into murder stories and still am.

I’m not surprised you mentioned Freud, as I found Psychros to have a certain psycho-analytic, almost clinical quality. Even the title plays into conjuring all things “psych-“ (looking it up, I noticed psychro is the Greek word for cold). Where did the initial concept for the book spring from? How long did you spend working on it?

Psychros was a natural follow-up to Hexis. Christoph from CLASH Books was calling it the “spiritual sequel.” The dead male character is actually the same character, and I was thinking about how certain people force you into a state of coldness. The initial concept for the book was, what if this guy actually offed himself? (After I killed him 10 times in Hexis). What then? Then I let her go wild. I worked on it sporadically for a few months in early 2020. Hexis was released just after I finished it, I recall.

I took the title out of an ancient Greek medical text. There it also means cold in general, but with respect to people it gains a whole new meaning—to say that someone is cold, or coldhearted. The human was conceived as being a mixture of the cold, the hot, the wet and the dry. Those who have excessive amounts of any of those qualities are deemed imbalanced.

For all her coldness, as you mentioned, the narrator of Psychros is such a compelling character. She’s dealing with the trauma of her lover’s suicide, though admittedly theirs was an unhealthy relationship. It seems like there’s a mixture of grief and ambivalence in her reaction. Her thought process also has a kind of disturbed logic to it. She goes from using promiscuity to self-harm and ultimately murder as a coping mechanism (though perhaps that’s the wrong phrase). Can you walk us through the way you developed this character? Was it ever challenging for you to inhabit her headspace?

With the character, we’re getting into some other things I may never otherwise admit. It happened with Hexis too, that the character is interpreted as psychotic, when all I’ve done is written down my thoughts but loosed them of some social confines which I have always experienced as external constraints (rather than integrated rules of thought). The trick to writing those characters is just to admit to your own thoughts and write them down—and to excise any anticipation of how those thoughts will be received. That’s the difficult part—writing things without regard to how they might be received by someone else.

I believe her logic is sound. It’s her situation that’s unorthodox. So the method of writing goes like that—you take a rigorously logical consciousness, free it of social confines, and put it in a violent situation. That’s just natural for me. It’s getting more difficult now, because when I wrote Hexis and Psychros, I had no concept of the audience and how the text might be taken up by an external consciousness—god forbid, an external consciousness who might have feelings about the text or want to talk to me about it. The psychotic internal monologue is just a compendium of private thoughts on display—things I’ve exorcised from my own consciousness and expelled into the world. It’s less challenging for me to admit to my own thoughts than it is to cover them up all the time.

Yes, the narrator’s voice has an astounding clarity and honesty as opposed to rambling, deranged incoherence, which makes it all the more chilling. Speaking as an external consciousness who has thoughts and feelings about your text, I’m glad you were able to forego any concerns about audience reactions, though I agree it’s challenging. I think we often overlook how those social confines can limit our work. It manifests as self-censorship—I can’t write this! What would people think? I struggled with that when my first book came out. I worried readers would think I was completely out of my mind. To remove the barrier of other people’s expectations is liberating, especially when it comes to our art.

I’m also curious about the other central character in the book—the narrator’s dead lover, who haunts every page. He’s paradoxically both absent and omnipresent. He’s the catalyst to this streak of violence without actively participating in any of it. He seems like a total bastard in retrospect, but we only have the narrator’s perspective to inform our own perceptions of this non-person. How did you approach handling a character who exists only in the memory of others?

I did not have an approach to handle those sorts of characters, but I can speak to the theoretical grounds that allow us to write them. Fact of the matter is, we know most things about most people only through a sideways perception. (Brentano would call it in obliquo, like when you see a type of flower and think of a dead loved one, that dead loved one is presented in obliquo.) Same for my main man. And I argue it’s a normal mode of perception for humans, both to conceive of other humans and to be conceived—we depend on this form of perception and learn to manipulate it. There’s a line in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness about how you can make an infinite number of inferences about someone’s character based on the minutest of actions, utterances or mannerisms. And it stands out because that’s correct. While on the one hand, we want to believe that people are infinite wells of potentiality, whom one can never really get to know (and sometimes that, in a problematic way), sometimes all you need to know about a person is one thing they’ve said, or to watch them jump over a puddle. We fill in the rest by intuition and by using a reference framework of loose generalizations and our own conceptual baggage. It is a paradox of absence and omnipresence—an individual infinity contained in an instant, the crook of a little finger. He’s just a regular guy in that sense.

Earlier you mentioned part of your method was placing characters in violent situations. There are some gruesome scenes in Psychros, but the portrayals of violence aren’t necessarily explicit. It’s more subtle. Much is left to our imagination. What attracts you to exploring violence in your work?

You’re right. I feel like Psychros is more violent than it is. I only noticed when reading the proofs that there’s really only one murder. There are ten murders in Hexis, but it’s always the same man.

I think I came around to violence the same way a lot of people do. You grow up with the ambient threat of violence, and then there it is. Maybe then you date someone for a while who’s really into serial killers and especially the sexual aspects of it. You buy a copy of Murder Ballads at HMV and read everything by the Marquis de Sade. Violence becomes integrated with your worldview. You just kind of know that life and death aren’t all that far apart and that violence is the shortest path between them. You sign up for philosophy and talk about death all day and whether or not the soul dissipates at death or is left to wander the graveyards, having taken on visible form after becoming too enamored with its flesh. Then it comes time to write something down and what comes out first is violence. You don’t realize you’re a creep until other people notice and mention it to you, but really you think that people are violent and it’s more authentic not to pretend they aren’t.

I think eschewing graphic depictions of violence is what makes the book so effective. There were scenes that genuinely induced anxiety as I was reading. I’m reminded of the old horror movie trope where the audience sees the killer while their victim is oblivious. I knew something bad was coming but couldn’t be sure what it would look like or when it would materialize. As you write, are you conscious of inciting dread on the page or is it more intuitive? What tools does the writer have at their disposal to create suspense?

It’s more intuitive, but this is something I have discovered I can manipulate a little bit. The first draft of something is how it is, but I found with Psychros that, abandoning it to the publishing process and coming back to it after almost a year for edits, I could read it like someone else would. And then I discovered pacing—and that when a character is known to the reader mainly through their thoughts, the extent of those thoughts needs to correspond to however long it takes for them to do whatever it is they’re actually doing, which isn’t always clear. So you get bound up in these tangents of consciousness, and what’s actually happening becomes obscured for some amount of time. We assume the character is doing things, but it’s not the focus of the narrative, and we become more concerned about what they’re doing the longer we don’t know (like when we’re expecting someone to show up, but they’re late and haven’t communicated). That also can’t go on for too long, or else we get exasperated with them. So there’s a virtuous mean there.

A lot of the narrator’s inner monologue in Psychros has a philosophical bent. She’s constantly deconstructing and analyzing what she thinks, feels, sees. I understand you studied philosophy, so I’m curious how your academic background bleeds into your creative work. Are there any particular philosophers or theoretical frameworks that have been especially influential?

Phenomenology and existentialism are the big ones, and there’s some stoic fatalism in there. Phenomenology is a method for reducing lived experience to reveal the phenomenon’s essence, so that’s what I’ve come to do by habit. But the method itself doesn’t account for the fact that our lived experience is often plagued by a vague and omnipresent threat of non-existence and a sense of the futility of human endeavours, so when I started reading existentialism, that really filled a void. Stoicism comes in with respect to the metaphysics. There’s an order to how the universe is organized, and we are able to know that order and sometimes even influence it, but there are inevitabilities, things you just cannot avoid living through. My discipline is realist phenomenology—“realist” because we believe that the way the world and lived experience are organized is real and not a construct of human consciousness. That’s the logos.

It factors into writing because ideally, writing makes some part of the logos physically manifest. You have to seek out and trap it, wrestle it into a form comprehensible by humans, and then sell it to them for about $15 on Amazon.

Psychros is a quick read, clocking in under 150 pages. There’s so much compelling prose happening in a relatively short span. I think you accomplish the kind of impact that other writers fail to muster in books that are twice as long. There’s no wasted space and the book doesn’t overstay its welcome. Are there certain signals that tell you a book is finished? What are some similarly slim novels/novellas that you've enjoyed?

I had a professor who, when I started writing philosophy papers, used to give me back my drafts with the comment, “Make this twice as long without saying anything new.” I make the reader work for it, apparently. But CLASH lets me get away with it, and I think the difference is that people actually want to read every word of a novel. Everything should count for something.

I can tell a book is finished when it feels dead to me. Some works have a sense of propulsion that feels like something is still missing, and other works feel complete. You just keep writing until the former turns into the latter.

For slim books that don’t waste any words, we’ve got Elle Nash’s Animals Eat Each Other, Lindsay Lerman’s What Are You, Mila Jaroniec’s Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover, and whatever you can get by Duvay Knox. This is a really hard question, because I’m enjoying the hell out of Michael Seidlinger’s Anybody Home? but it’s just not slim. Sorry, Michael. Oh! Logan Berry, of course. I just received my copy of Transmissions to Artaud. Booklets are slim.

As a writer with several published books under your belt, what advice might you offer someone who’s just starting out? Is there something you know now that you wish you had discovered much earlier in your career?

Damn, Matt. That’s a rough question. What if somebody reads this and actually takes my advice seriously? I feel like there are things everyone should know but aren’t necessarily my experience, and then there are things that are so particular they might not help anybody else. Or maybe it will. My advice is to always write in the dark. Don’t force yourself onto any schedule. The words will come when they’re supposed to, and the right person to work with to print those words will either come along—or they won’t. You can trash a whole book if you want. Don’t worry; you can write more, as long as you’re not dead yet. Remember that the “big importants” are just squishy fleshed humans too. And don’t listen to anyone on Twitter.

Charlene Elsby is a philosophy doctor and former professor and the author of Hexis, Psychros, Affect, Agyny, and Musos.