A Room Without a View: The Millions Interviews Thomas Kendall
With his debut novel The Autodidacts, Thomas Kendall has produced a truly rare work. His words seem to unspool in patterns that from one angle come off as ramshackle, and from another as precise and suffused with intention. Paragraphs thicker than bunker walls transform into these vaporous passages that hover off the page. It’s a text about texts, mystery, and all the liminal feelings that hover beyond the reach of language. I was awestruck when I read it, and I leapt at the opportunity to have a conversation with him where I could hopefully glean some portion of what his process looked like, or at least get to know the guy better.
Meg Gluth: I feel like conversations between writers about writing often default to questions about craft: “How do you capture ideas?” “How do you create a draft?” “How do you edit?” To be honest, these types of topics seem super superficial to me and basically miss the transcendent aspects of writing. I totally have an interest in how writers write, but the interest is more around the creative process than the mechanics that support it. I have this photo of Joan Didion smoking a cigarette while sitting at a desk with a typewriter on it in what seems to be a spare bedroom in what I believe is an otherwise empty suburban house in the 70s—to me that image tells me everything I need to know about her writing. Bearing that all in mind, I’d love to hear what it was like for you to write The Autodidacts.
I also share a kind of antipathy towards questions revolving around craft—maybe it’s something to do with the mundanity of craft as a metaphor. Like, why are you trying to make something less exciting and dangerous than it called “becoming imperceptible” that writes about in her book , which I think encapsulates my process and, in some ways, provides a key to the hidden narrative in . Braidotti writes:
