Rose Dialogues #001
with Geoff Rickly

Geoff Rickly, author of the first Rose Books title Someone Who Isn’t Me, talks with Rose Books publisher and editor Chelsea Hodson.

Chelsea Hodson: What made you feel ready to write Someone Who Isn’t Me? I first became familiar with your writing through your Thursday lyrics, which always tell a great story, but how did you decide to make the switch from lyrics to a novel, and what were some of the difficulties you encountered while writing in this new way?

Geoff Rickly: My mother always thought I’d be a writer. But I took to music young. The first thing I remember buying with my own money was the cassette single for “Scenario” by A Tribe Called Quest. When I found Nas a few years later, I remember thinking that all the guitar music I loved—Quicksand, Bad Brains, Fugazi—should take note of his narrative perspective, to focus on the small telling details that make up a story. Looking back on my approach, as a lyricist, all my best songs kind of followed that basic blueprint.

I used to read about a book a week, passing the long drives that make up the majority of touring life. I dreamed of writing a novel but didn’t feel like I had a story to tell that couldn’t be crammed into five minutes of screaming. That changed after I got sober. I needed a bigger project to tie my ass to the chair. If I didn’t have something to concentrate all my attention on, I was afraid I’d drift back to the street corner and end up scoring again. So from the moment I woke up, usually with the sunrise, until about one in the afternoon, I’d sit and write, every single day, whether at home or on tour. And, finally, I felt like I had a bigger story: this ibogaine drug that no one’s heard of and sounds fictional. I wanted to write a fictional novel about something real that sounds made up.

Chelsea: What did those hours of writing each day actually consist of? Did you compartmentalize your process by generating and drafting for long periods first, before revising at all? Or were you more likely to spend a long time on an individual sentence or page to get it right before moving to the next page?

Geoff: In the beginning, I wrote much like I was still writing songs: spending hours on an image or a dialogue exchange. I’d play with the rhythm and melody until it sounded like a song in my head. The sentence would be fully polished… weeks would pass before I had twenty pages. This was how I wrote the first draft and every time I cut a chapter from that draft it was incredibly painful to throw a month down the drain. 

By the second draft, I was trying to learn to run through the plot, get the story and structure and characters down before I added any of the style. But I don’t read for any of those reasons—I like imagery and rhythm. I like a voice that seems clear and true. This meant that I hated everything I wrote in the second draft. It all had to go. By the third draft, I decided to run fully on feeling and instinct. That proved to be a good starting place for me. I would grab hold of a tone I connected with and just go. 

Part of getting sober was doing morning pages for ten minutes before I started my day. That helped short circuit my inner critic. I also made a rule for myself: I’d finish a draft before I was allowed to change a word. And in all these ways, I learned to separate the creation from the critique.  

Our mutual friend, Monika Woods, says that you learn to write each book after it’s finished. I feel like I’ve just about learned how to do this one. 

Chelsea: I love the idea of making a rule to finish a draft before allowing yourself to change a word—compartmentalization as freedom. In that third draft when you were more fully connecting to instinct and tone, did your emotion toward the work still fluctuate? Like, did you love it one day and hate it the next? Or was it more stoic, like “it doesn't matter what state it's in now, only that I get through this draft”?

Geoff: Drafts 3-6 were a combination of stoic and playful. I showed up every day and made myself present for the work. I was available for the characters and the movement of the plot. I didn’t worry if something wasn’t connecting, because I finally knew that I was writing… not attempting to write or stumbling through the dark in pursuit of writing. That’s something I picked up from my years in music: there has to be a period where you just enjoy your life as an artist. You sacrifice so much to live a life in the arts— money and relationships, primarily—that it’s important to take advantage of the pure enjoyment in getting to create.

It helped that I wasn’t trying to finish. That still seemed a long way off. So I accepted it for what it was. After the sixth draft I started to take on some anxiety about things that weren’t working. I wondered if I had written myself into a corner with my first-person present tense point of view. Then my emotions would fluctuate from one day to the next, in that problem-solving stage. 

With all this talk of multiple drafts, I’m curious about your work. When I read your essays, they seemed like they’d been carved out of marble in a single, continuous stroke. Do you have multiple drafts or is a Chelsea Hodson essay written quickly and revised once, like I imagined while reading?

Chelsea: To me, it is ideal for the reader to think the essay has emerged from me in one single motion. In reality, my process is very similar to yours: writing in isolation for several years before beginning to feel I'm making any real progress. Some of the essays in my collection were written over a period of weeks, but others were written over the span of five years. All of these were all relatively short essays, but I would continuously come to a point with each of them when I felt I'd hit a wall and couldn't continue. I'd remember what Jo Ann Beard taught in a workshop I was in several years prior: "Sometimes, in order to solve the problems of our essays, we simply have to live longer." By this, I think she meant that essays begin as questions, and it can take a long time to find the answers. I would turn away from the essay for a period of time as I began a new one. After a period of weeks or months, I would return to the previous essay and usually, I would have a new idea that would help me see it through to the end.

For me, being present in the way you describe, and finding enjoyment in writing, often involves convincing myself that no one will ever read what I'm writing. If I feel like a piece of writing belongs only to me, then I can do whatever I want. But by involving an imagined audience later in my revision process (asking, would someone else be confused by this?), I find my way to something that feels "done" at some point. By this time, I've assessed and interrogated the essay as a whole, but also its parts: the page, the paragraph, the sentence. My goal is to have a piece of writing appear seamless even though it's been labored over relentlessly, and perhaps you feel the same way.

I'm curious about the practical elements involved in you feeling "present." Do you have a certain routine in preparing your mind for writing? I know you're a coffee drinker, but do you always write in the same spot? Do you have any superstitions about writing or your routine? 

Geoff: I love that you present your writing as having always been already finished. I think you’re correct in this approach. Even after coming to know you and work with you, I view your writing as having diamond hard reflective surfaces. Beyond that, your reading voice has a hypnotic lull that I truly envy . Maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent as a singer, fretting over notes I’m afraid I won’t hit, but I dread the prospect of reading my work in front of an audience.

My superstitions around writing mostly involve pulling a good shot of espresso and picking a good perfume sample to spray on my hands before I start typing. One of the strangest things to happen to me, after regaining my sense of smell (heroin dulls the senses even as it dulls pain), was I became obsessed with smelling stranger’s perfumes on the subways and passing in the streets. So I binged Luca Turin’s definitive guidebook to perfumes and began sending away for samples. Each morning I’ll pick one to spray. Some are beautiful and multifaceted, some are repulsive. All of them are evocative and help to get my writing going.

Chelsea: It's fascinating to me when I learn that performers (in other mediums) are nervous to read their writing aloud. For instance, you've sung in literal arenas to thousands of people—I wonder, how can reading your work aloud to a dozen people be harder than that? But I totally get it—one doesn't translate to the other. You get used to performing from one aspect of your identity, but then it's difficult to perform from another aspect—is that it? Does writing feel more vulnerable in some ways?

Geoff: There’s a tension between writing and performing. In music, my default has been to max out the emotional register of the performance so there’s no space left for interpretation, it’s a kind of shock and awe strategy and it’s not meant to translate the record in a one-to-one ratio. It’s only meant to wake people up to the most explosive potential of the music, so that when they go home and listen, the records become suffused with that energy— hopefully they hear an intensity waiting inside of every lull. 

One of my favorite things with writing fiction is hiding deadpan humor inside the darkest moments. I don’t trust myself enough to deliver these parts straight, even when I’m just reading the work aloud.  Subtlety has never been my strong suit when it comes to live performance and I live in fear of getting too heavy handed.  

I’ve seen clips of Scott McClanahan read and I think he’s found a unique solution, not unlike the way I perform music: he also maxes out the emotional register and kind of shouts his passages. But that’s his thing and I love it for him. I’ll figure something out. But I’m an over-prep kind of guy. Not having this rehearsed and ready to go is very foreign to me. 

Chelsea: Isn't every kind of performance a balance between preparation and improvisation? For instance, I think someone reading their work aloud should be prepared to some degree--I think they should have timed their reading beforehand (I become furious when writers have gone 10 minutes over their allotted time and then ask if they have time to read a little more—no!), and they should have practiced once, but beyond that, I think you kind of just have to hope for the best. I don't think everyone can pull off a more stylized reading the way Scott does, but you can get away with almost everything if you present it confidently. But you already know this from being a performer!

I'm curious how you feel about the future readers who will inevitably want to know how much of the book is "true." This novel's main character is named Geoff, your real-life band Thursday and band members are named, but at some point in the book, the writing takes off into a more hallucinatory state. Did you consider genre distinctions and demands while writing this book, or is that something that you navigated later in the revision process? 

Geoff: Pretty early on in the writing of this book, I took a memoir class at the 92nd Street Y, with the brilliant Wendy Salinger. It helped me to realize that I wanted to write a novel and not a memoir. First of all, I knew I didn’t want to write anything sprawling. I didn’t want anything that felt like a collection of good stories about tour. So the first directive I imposed upon myself was that the entire book should take place in seven days(I was eventually persuaded to expand the frame of the story, but it was important to start with a tight temporal window). My second directive was that, since I love novels, I should write a novel. I love the form. All of my concerns are present in the mechanics of fiction writing.  

Of course, I was already familiar with autofiction but I reread Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Tao Lin to understand what their projects were really about and to see how they achieved their goals. At the same time I went through My Struggle, The Copenhagen Trilogy and Rachel Cusk’s Outline books for the first time to get a wider survey of the field. I knew I wanted to do something a bit different, something keying in on the surreal aspects of life and I felt that my experience with the drug Ibogaine offered a way to get into that space. Much later, after I had mostly finished my final draft, I read César Aire’s The Divorce and felt that I had found a kindred spirit. It was perfect timing: I was wondering if I had written something that was too strange and Aire made me proud of my weirdo book.

As far as readers wondering “how much is real”—-it’s very exciting to me. There are some things that readers will assume are 100% fabrication—and many of these things will in fact be real. Whereas some of the most mundane details have been constructed in a way that make my book work in the framework that I’ve built: the circular structure that mirrors a turning record, the characters who all have partners that mirror them or shadow them throughout the book, other characters who I’ve switched their names, so that I could space out the repetition of certain sounds. I have so many intricate little things that I’m always working on behind the curtains of each scene. Working with band members, I’ve had an interesting luxury; using characters that are real people but who are also somewhat recognizable as public figures. Few of these people are so iconic that they “mean something” to the average reader (in this way, the book is unlike Coover’s The Public Burning), but for the most part, they all have a documented history that is easy to investigate, if the reader so chooses.

Chelsea: Yes—I always tell writers to find those books that give them permission to write exactly the book they want to write, not the book they feel they should write. The risks you've taken in this book give the book a really exciting kind of pulse, and it's great to hear that you found and studied the writers who gave you the permission to double down on your decisions. 

You and I have been going back and forth over email to make sure we clear all the rights for the excerpts that appear in this book, so it's got me thinking about the idea of literature as conversation. The other writers that appear in Someone Who Isn't Me appear naturally, as if they were one of many voices you could have chosen to include (and I believe a former version of this book did have more excerpted material from other books!). I know you grew up in a literary household--have you always desired to be an active participant in that conversation rather than a participant? And does it feel natural to include other writers' work in your own work? 

Geoff: Long before it became clear that music was going to be my living, back when music was just my life, I had a dream that I might someday be a writer like TS Eliot or F Scott Fitzgerald. I mean this is when I was a kid, 11 or 12 years old, and my peers all wanted to be astronauts or firemen. But little serious Geoff over here wanted to be a writer — at 10 years old, I was worried about Ezra Pound possibly being an anti-Semite but I didn’t know what sport Michael Jordan played. Looking back, it’s kind of ridiculous. My mom used to lightly tease me, asking what writerly affectation I’d adopt: a signature scarf or an ugly beret. Had I followed that path without a detour through DIY, hardcore, touring in a van, sleeping on floors, and the rest, I’d probably be pretty insufferable. But as it turns out, it gets a lot harder to maintain pretenses when you get the nickname Tone Geoff because even your biggest fans think you might be tone deaf. Short answer long, I’ve always admired writers and harbored dreams of one day joining their ranks.

It’s funny you mention the text we got clearance for—how naturally it meshed with the story. You correctly remember that originally the novel contained so much more in the way of quotes, passages, epigraphs and allusions. From Anne Carson to Don Delillo to Roberto Bolaño, there was an entire other level of textual interplay woven through the book. But in the final edit we both agreed that it was leaner and more solid with the references paired back a bit. Ultimately, most of the sources that we ended up clearing were nonfiction. I’m not a big nonfiction reader but I wanted to establish some preliminary rules about interior and exterior spaces, so that when the main character begins to toggle between his own interior and exterior worlds, there would be some firm ground beneath his feet. Daisy Alioto, the brilliant writer who runs Dirt, was tremendously helpful in guiding me to nonfiction sources for this question: The Architecture of Happiness, Poetics of Space, Optic Nerve, etc. 

Chelsea: You've had the experience of creating albums and putting them into the world, so you're familiar with the sensation of creating something highly personal and then releasing it for other people to inhabit and interpret on their own. Is this something you're thinking about now that we're months away from the release of your book? When I'm writing, I think I take a long time to finish a book and hand it off to someone else, partially because I don't want to "let it go." When a book is published, it takes on a whole different life without me, so to speak. Do you feel similarly connected to the things you make and write? Is it important to you that this book be read or perceived in a particular way? 

Geoff: After I finish a record, but before it comes out, that record is mine. I love it in a way that I don’t love other things. Not because I feel responsible for it… my love isn’t parental, it’s utopian. For a brief moment, the perfect world that I’ve dreamt, is a real place. I get to live in it and love it, the way I imagined I would. When it finally comes out, it makes room for all the other architects of the utopian world: the listeners. This is such an important characteristic of art that I love… this collaborative space for another. Curtis Pawley from the Ion Pack (also in the band The Life) calls it “room to dream” and I love that. “You’ve got to leave room to dream,” Curtis told me. The moment I start getting feedback on a record, it starts to take on the characteristics that others ascribe to it. It’s not that they perceive it to be a certain way— it’s that they join in on creating it the way they see it. I don’t personally believe that we can ever fully control this co-building… it always gets away from us… as it should. But it can never be that thing that I made after people hear it. Right now, I’m still enjoying living in my book. I love it. I’m so happy here in this world. Soon, I’m sure it will be different. 

Chelsea: You mentioned the experience of ibogaine easily translated to fiction because it was so surreal, but is there anything about the experience in your real life that isn't included in this book? I've heard you in another interview say the experience potentially opened up your access to time and the future in new ways. 

Geoff: There’s so much omitted from the book that actually happened in my life. Obviously the book is “fiction” but the biggest edit that I made to my life was omission.  I put a very sturdy frame around what I wanted to allow the reader to see. I cut days, places, context, people, circumstances. Among the most interesting parts that I took out was the last 5 or 10 minutes of my ibogaine trip. This part was presented to me in technicolor and played out in a strange mythical Alphonse Mucha style. I saw a plague that would come (complete with a diagram of what the virus would look like on a microscopic level) as well as an image of war in Russia and a bunch of other strange things I couldn’t guess at. The therapist told me that the style was not uncommon: apparently five percent of ibogaine patients see “a vision of the future”—-mine was accompanied by a phrase: “no new spring queen”—-it’s haunted me a bit in the intervening years. 

Chelsea: Were there any particular struggles you encountered while writing the ending? I know you and I have discussed your concern that this not be a tidy ending, since life and recovery is not tidy. How did you manage to complicate the novel's ending in a way that felt satisfying to you? 

Geoff: I took great pains to animate the character’s persona in the opening of the novel. I wanted the reader to see the kinds of tendencies and desires that might lead him to addiction.  I see that the attitude around opiates is often “Heroin is for junkies” — I really wanted to put the average reader in an empathetic space. This character is driven by all consuming passions and aesthetics. It’s his greatest strength and his fatal flaw. Very classically Greek, in a way. Any ending that implied that he had “cured” this fatal flaw would ring hollow to me. The opening of the book starts with the character picking up the record and spinning his life around. He talks about “getting ahead” of himself. This is exemplified by the treatment of time in the book. So on the final page, I tried to complicate his narrative expression of time, jumping from past to present to future tense. I wanted the reader to watch the record slow down in the last book/chapter/whatever and stop in a place of perfect peace. Then I wanted the character to pick up the record and start it spinning again. He may not go back to heroin, but he’s obviously going to get himself into some kind of trouble. That’s what we love and hate about him. Well, if I did my job, it is.