July is is the month we celebrate our independence, and that makes it a fine time to celebrate interstitiality’s early roots in the culture of the American heartland.  One of the first to pilot the concept of 20th century multi-media performance art was that most American of American fantasists, Lyman Frank Baum.  Baum had a lot in common with his creation, the humbug Wizard of Oz — his early years were spent on the road as an actor, traveling china salesman, and purveyor of dry goods at a shopping bazaar in South Dakota.  But when a chronic heart condition put an end to his life as a traveler, he settled down to writing the fantasies that have convinced generations of readers that the Land of Oz was a great deal more real than the homework waiting to be done or the messy rooms soon to be receiving parental inspection.  Not only was he the inventor of an astonishing, original, and arguably feminist fairyland, discovered by a little girl from Kansas and ultimately restored to the rule of Ozma, the-girl-who-was-once-a-boy — but the array of works deriving from his original series — from the 1939 Wizard of Oz to The Wiz to the book and musical Wicked, to name just a few, would probably all have delighted him.  He was a proud adapter of his own work, and not above trying to squeeze every penny possible out of the musicals, early silent movies, and stage performances based on his books.

At least partly out of this desire, perhaps, rose his early creation of the Fairy-Logue and Radio Plays, “a two hour mixed-media show that dramatized his fairy stories by means of narration by himself, enactment by live actors, slides, and short films.” (This quotation, and much of the information that follows, come from Katharine M. Rogers’ excellent biography, Creator of Oz, published in 2002 by St. Martins.) A showman to his core, Baum would dress all in white, introduce his show by describing his encounter with a fairy who invited him to be Royal Historian of Oz. He would then step off stage, only to re-appear in the same white suit in a series of films and slides in which he would lead characters out of the pages of his books to re-enact their stories. Very unusually for the time, the films and slides were often in color, having been sent off to Paris for hand-tinting (then called a radio process, hence “radio plays” – this was still before radio was being pioneered).  A 27-piece orchestra played behind the silent film and Baum’s off-stage narration, and live characters interacted on stage with the stories.  This was a far cry from silent black and white film plus piano player (or for the very lucky, plus orchestra) most were used to in 1908.

Since we don’t have a YouTube video of this performance, which I suspect even today, with all our sophisticated expectations of people transcending genre and melding a variety of media, would be a lot of fun to attend, we will have to use our imaginations.  We’ll have to picture ourselves sitting in one of the beautiful, highly gilded opera halls that dotted up in the oddest places in America, from South Dakota and Kansas to the northernmost reaches of Maine, while the handsome man in the white suit introduced us with his smooth voice and salesman’s skill to the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, as the orchestra played.  He would offer his hand to each of the characters, standing immobile in a reproduction of one of the lush color illustrations of his work, and they would step off the page to meet us and talk and sing with each other on stage. (We might already know some of these songs from player pianos or sheet music from previous popular productions of the Oz stories.) Watching them interact with the meticulously tinted film of their adventures — and this might well be the first time we ever saw a film in color — we would probably have a few questions in our minds about the man in the white suit: was he a wizard or a humbug, like the character we would all already have known very well?

Some critics have said that Baum’s only motivation in creating the Fairy Logue and Radio Plays was to sell more books.  But after reading his books (and I have read almost every one of them), and knowing the man just a little through his biographies, I can’t quite accept that answer, although I believe he would be an eager and expert participant in our Facebook-influenced “everyone has a brand” current culture.  His love of the American heartland, his fascination with new technology, his delight in astonishing and thrilling his audiences, can lead us to a different conclusion: he was a pioneering interstitial artist, with a strong streak of American showman and salesman, who buoyantly led the way for the many artists, interstitial and otherwise, who were inspired by his work, his ideas, and his moxie.

(Ed.: Continuing our series of profiles of IAF people, Mike Allen is a member of the IAF Working Group. Previous profiles in this series have included Christopher Barzak, Larissa N. Niec, Stephen H. Segal, Felice Kuan, Wendy Ellertson, Deborah Atherton, Erin Underwood, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman and Geoffrey Long.)

Who are you, and what do you do?

I lead a somewhat surreal double life, though it’s all kind of interconnected. By day (though the hours vary) I’m the arts and culture columnist for The Roanoke (Va.) Times. I’ve been in that job for exactly a year - before then I was covering court cases (murder trials, lawsuits, etc.) for the same paper. I enjoy my new job more, though the old one generated more interesting war stories.

In my spare time I wear a number of different hats, some of which are reversible. As an editor, I put together the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series, subtitled “Tales of Beauty and Strangeness,” for Norilana Books. Stories from those books have been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards and reprinted in several “Best of the Year” anthologies. I also edit and publish the poetry journal Mythic Delirium, and have had pleasure of seeing three poems from those pages win the Rhysling Award and reappear in the Nebula Awards Showcases.

I’m a writer, too. My dark-as-crude-oil horror story “The Button Bin” was a Nebula Award nominee in 2009, and I’ve had other stories appear in Interzone, Weird Tales, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Cabinet des Fées and the anthology Cthulhu’s Reign. My poetry has appeared in all sorts of places over the last twenty years, including Asimov’s, Pedestal Magazine and Strange Horizons, and I’m a three-time Rhysling Award winner, meaning I’m tied with my own ‘zine. The Philadelphia Inquirer called what I do “poetry for goths of all ages” - make of that what you will.

Curiously, I may be even better known as a speculative poetry advocate than as a poet - I’ve talked about that topic everywhere from local universities to the Library of Congress. Public speaking somewhat suits me, though, because I also perform semi-regularly in local improv theater.

What first attracted you to the interstitial arts?

At first glance I’m sure that I and the concept of “interstitial” seem to exist at right angles. A review of my first poetry collection started out, “Mike Allen may be the embodiment of genre.” And what the reviewer meant was that if you were at all puzzled by what a “science fiction poem” was, you could read one I’d written and it would be clear as a bell.

My mix of tastes has always been curious. I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction, but in other areas, such as visual art or film, my interests are much broader, and I gravitate to the exceedingly strange. As I matured I began to appreciate writing that really pushed the envelope in the same way, that blurred boundaries not just of genre but within storytelling itself: the surreal fusions produced by Harlan Ellison at his best, the works of Borges, Calvino’s On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

I didn’t encounter the term “interstitial fiction” until my first ReaderCon, in 2005. I recall Theodora Goss saying those words and me asking her what on Earth that meant.

But actually, I was heading in that direction as an editor and as a poet at that time without being aware there was a word for what I was starting to investigate. I experimented with an anthology series that blended poetry and fiction, called MYTHIC, and when I selected work for it I deliberately walked away from the sharply drawn definitions of genre content that I’d used for past projects. I’ve never gone back to retrieve them.

How do you consider your work interstitial?

Is it possible to have an interstitial life? Setting out with plans to crank out science fiction novels, I became a poet. I studied art and film in college, so I became a journalist. But I imagine those sorts of motions against expectation are true of most any creative type.

As a fiction writer, though I’ve certainly produced some strange beasts, I hesitate to call what I’ve done interstitial. My poetry, yes - a number of the poems I’ve written over the past few years do all sorts of funky things with genre boundaries. And as an editor I’d also stake that claim.

I came up with the idea for Clockwork Phoenix around the same period that a number of wonderfully offbeat “manifesto” anthologies appeared such as The New Weird, Interfictions and Paper Cities. It’s hard to articulate what I had in mind: maybe the best way I can put it is that I wanted to create an anthology that made use of the approaches advocated in those predecessors without offering any specific assertions or definitions, a book that would “be” without an overt agenda to teach.

The individual stories in the Clockwork Phoenix books aren’t necessarily interstitial - Rich Horton’s review of Clockwork Phoenix 3 in Locus quite accurately describes the contents as a mix of wild science fiction, difficult to classify “slipstream” stories and out-and-out fantasy. But the organizing principles are interstitial, for certain: the only requirement for inclusion, really, is strangeness; genre blending is encouraged; and, with much help from my wife Anita, who has a talent for arranging, the stories are intentionally placed in an order that implies a meta-narrative in which related concepts evolve or contrast. The surreal introductions I write, sometimes described as prose-poems by nonplused reviewers, are meant to aim readers at that narrative rather than establish a traditional theme or thesis.

We also do this with Mythic Delirium. Our 21st issue, the “Trickster Issue,” not only involved myself and Anita ordering poems as we do with the Clockwork Phoenix stories, but poets like Catherynne Valente, Theodora Goss, Jeannine Hall Gailey and JoSelle Vanderhooft were invited to read and react to each other’s work, so themes and images spread like memes among the verses even before we placed them in order. And we’ve evangelized this approach to some degree: in our 22nd issue - the “Goblin Delirium” issue, guest edited by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick of Goblin Fruit - the young editrices tried their own hands at our method of editing, with what I think were spectacular results.

As I write this, the 2010 ReaderCon is just days away, and both Clockwork Phoenix 3 and the “Goblin Delirium” issue of Mythic Delirium have official debuts on the program schedule, so as you can imagine that’s keeping me pretty busy. I can’t tell you much yet about what I might be doing beyond that, but I certainly hope it will continue to involve these delightful dissolvings of boundaries.

Zoë Keating photograph by Lane Hartwell

I wish I could remember when I first discovered Zoë Keating. It’s hard to associate her work with a particular year, because there’s something about it that seems to hail from either some almost-here future or some funky alternate history. If steampunk is Victoriana with computers, Keating’s self-dubbed “avant cello” style is classical music with laptop-driven digital looping. Her work is lush, bizarre, mesmerizing – and absolutely fantastic.

According to her official bio on zoekeating.com:

Born in Canada and classically trained from the age of eight, Zoë spent her 20’s dabbling in computer software while moonlighting as a cellist in rock bands. Inevitably, she combined the two and developed her now signature style while improvising for late night crowds at her San Francisco warehouse.

Zoë’s self-released albums have sold 30,000 copies and several times been #1 on the iTunes classical and electronica charts. She has performed her music live on National Public Radio, on television, outdoors in the Nevada desert, in medieval churches, in punk clubs, and before thousands of screaming teenagers in mainstream rock venues across North America and Europe.

Zoë has worked with a wide range of artists, including Imogen Heap, Mark Isham, Curt Smith, The Dresden Dolls, Rasputina, DJ Shadow, and Paolo Nutini. From 2002 to 2006 she was a member of the cello-rock trio Rasputina. Most recently, Zoë has been composing music for film and ballet. In 2008 she performed her music live with the Valencia ballet, she composed music for a documentary called “Ghostbird” about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, and performed her signature layered cello on Mark Isham’s score for “The Secret Life of Bees”. She is featured on Amanda Palmer’s solo release “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” and supported Ms. Palmer on her 2008 European and North American tours.

The influence of her fellow travelers can be felt in much of her output, as a trees-meets-tech, sweet-meets-sinister vibe runs through her work. Most of Keating’s pieces start simple, but build to a kind of all-encompassing, all-enveloping tide of sound. For example, “Exurgency”, the opening track to her first solo EP One Cello x 16 (2004), opens with a wavering high line that suggests that we’re headed for something akin to “Flight of the Bumblebees”, but then Keating brings in an additional layer of darkly insistent notes, followed by another and another until it feels like something’s got to give – and when it does, when the song bursts into its next stage at the 1:58 mark, it tumbles suddenly into a softer place with quieter, regular notes like heartbeats for about twenty seconds before reintroducing an insistent, more energetic over-line, all the while being accompanied by a thrumming, sparse bass line that adds an almost sinister undercurrent to the whole thing. The mental image it conjurs up is evocative of childbirth followed by (or perhaps accompanied by) alternating senses of menace and peace, but with a recurring superpattern over the lot that eventually builds up to an ascending sweetness, perhaps suggesting some kind of transcendance before returning touches of the beelike insistence from the piece’s beginning.

	“Exurgency”

I use the term “piece” deliberately, as Keating doesn’t seem to be in the business of creating songs so much as soundscapes. “Updraught”, one of my favorite pieces from One Cello x 16, begins with a strange creaking noise that for some reason always makes me picture a centuries-old Japanese well. It’s accompanied by lightly swelling and fading waves of sound, eventually becoming subsumed completely by them before heavier notes come to the forefront, but even these notes have a subtler two-note rhythm set just behind them, like another instance of Keating’s recurring heartbeat motif. The well’s creak briefly re-emerges later in the piece, reminding us where we are, and then disappears again beneath Keating’s sonic waves. I initially expected the creak to reappear at the end of the song to bring it full circle, but Keating instead rounds it out with a slow solo that’s positively haunting.

Keating’s second release, One Cello x 16: Natoma (2005), is an album-length follow-up to the One Cello x 16 EP, and thus features similar sounds and patterns. There are departures – “Fern” feels more traditional, while “Tetrishead” feels like it would have been right at home on the soundtrack to a Dave McKean film and “We Insist” begins with a perky, plucky rhythm slightly reminscent of Ray Lynch before re-introducing Keating’s more familiarly menacing overtones – but pieces like “Sun Will Set” and “Legions (Reverie)” extend One Cello x 16. This is far from a bad thing.

	“Optimist”

There’s greater distance, both in time and style, between Natoma and Into the Trees (2010), which feels slightly more like a collection of songs than a series of soundscapes. “Escape Artist,” the album’s first full piece following a 45-second opener, and “Don’t Worry,” the album’s seventh track, both have more of a sense of verse-chorus-verse structure than her previous work. That said, the soundscapes are still very much in attendance.

For example, “Optimist,” the album’s first “single” (by which I mean it’s the sample track offered on Keating’s site for free) begins with a simple thudding drum beat, then introduces a number of trill-like high notes evocative of insects calling to one another across a night forest, an image reinforced by another set of low notes evoking a distant bullfrog squatting aside some hidden lake. This, combined with the album’s title, may hint at some circa-1995 New Age stuff, but in the next breath she’s weaving in a strand that’s slightly electric, followed by a strand of light, nimble plucking, followed by a strand of smooth, long notes that seem to be both touched with mournful longing and glowing with vibrant life.

A similar sensibility runs through Into the Woods’ sixth track, “Hello Night.” The piece opens and closes with strangely whistle-like high notes that again suggest spring peeper frogs calling across a pond – but the middle of the piece is built from a mix of lightly strummed notes that feel airy and delicate, with more solid bowing creating a warm, strong center. The overall feeling this creates is something that, like the rest of Keating’s work, is almost impossible to pin down yet fantastic in its own unique, curious beauty. One might even dub it – what’s the word? – interstitial.

Taken together, Keating’s albums form an excellent experience that alternates between sweet and sinister, while always remaining hypnotic. Although I love to put Keating’s albums on while working, it’s almost impossible for me to do any writing when “Legions (Reverie)” from Natoma begins because it always hijacks some primal subarchitecture of my brain, and it’s the end of the album before I realize my fingers have stopped typing and I’m staring off into space. It’d be infuriating if the music wasn’t so damned lovely. I wish there were more of it.

Author’s Notes

For more on Zoë Keating, please visit zoekeating.com.

People often ask me if I think I was born bitextual, or if something in my environment made me that way. Do I write both science fiction and mainstream novels, both fiction and nonfiction, because I had an absent father and an overbearing mother, or because I was exposed to too many different kinds of texts at too young an age?

I’m not sure I can give a definitive answer to these questions, but I can review the peculiar circumstances that led to my bitextuality. In fact, for those of you who have concerns about your own persistent wandering through forms, I’d like to come out to you now as someone who is not only bitextual, but also polyformistically perverse. That is, I not only write in different genres, I tell stories in a variety of forms – performance and script, video and audio and sometimes song. And even within a novel, I cross boundaries of consciousness and time.

In looking back over my life, I can honestly say that at least part of my textual preference is inborn. I could never color inside the lines in kindergarten, and I struggled with all those silly little forms you have to fill out in school that don’t give you enough space for an adequate answer. Often, the little boxes on them didn’t even have enough room to fit all the letters of my name.

But I also believe that my tendency toward bitextuality was encouraged by environmental factors. I can easily get in line on blaming the church, for one thing. I was raised a Catholic, and the ritual drama of that religion infused me with an early sense of the mystic, training me to cross boundaries of consciousness on a regular basis. And there were strong family influences in that direction as well.

	Like Scheherezade, I straddled the worlds of the oral and the literary tradition, playing with sound in speaking and in written text.

My father was a violinist and my mother a singer, so our house was filled with live music all the time. We all played instruments, often together, and that trained my mind to feel the sound of things as a source of emotional meaning. I can actually remember sitting at the piano and playing a Mozart Fantasia, all the while thinking that I wanted to be able to create this kind of emotion with words. I think I was about eight years old at the time, so clearly any polyformistic perversity was either engrained at an early age or already there, waiting to bubble to the surface.

However, I never talked about it. Like so many bitextuals, I didn’t even acknowledge it to myself until I got to graduate school. In a feminist lit class we read Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden,” where she admonishes women writers to seek their literary mothers. To fulfill an assignment I began seeking mine and found her in Scheherezade, the literary figure who told stories for 1001 nights in order to keep the king from killing women. Instead of writing an analytical piece about it, I wrote my own version of her story, and instead of handing it in, I told it.

I was well and truly out of the closet now, declaring my polyformistic stance for all of academia to see. Having taken that step, I went on to create a women’s storytelling trio, The Snickering Witches, with the bitextual motto, “we tell the old stories, and make up the new ones.”

Now, like Scheherezade, I straddled the worlds of the oral and the literary tradition, playing with sound in speaking and in written text. Having made the leap, I went on to tease out possibilities in novels, jumping not just between genres but also exploring the edges of things within each novel I wrote.

My science fiction character, Jaguar Addams, is an empath, and her novels are really more like mystery novels that happen to be set in the future. Since she and others in her world have various telepathic capacities, within each novel I played with ways that text can reflect and express the feeling of alternate consciousness. How does language sound/feel/operate when it’s expressed from mind to mind? How can you use words to transmit experience that occurs wordlessly? Really, that playground was a bitextual’s dream come true.

In my mainstream novels I began tentatively to see what was possible. I put a ghost in Feeding Christine, and a melding of family memory with the present in order to realign the future, all of it wrapped around the sensory experience of food, food and more food. My main character in These Dreams is a woman who lives in a dream world of her own making until a random killing takes her walking in nightmare as she seeks the difference between dreams and illusions. In each book, I wrote with an awareness of the glistening surface of life, and how it’s constantly fed by a profound depth filled with joy and fear and ancestral imperatives and longing and love and more. I carried this sensibility into other writing, so that when I was asked to write my first nonfiction book, Feathers of Hope, I created a narrative that moved between the daily functioning of a bird sanctuary, and the deeper human connection to birds.

Once I got my bearings in this kind of motion I felt confident enough to write in my own authentic polyformistic perversity, and I wrote The Amber, which melds upscale commercial narrative with ancient mythologies and stories. This novel (currently being shopped by agent Laura Wood at FinePrint) tells the story of a smart, ambitious 21st century woman involved with a man who sold his soul to the devil. At least, that’s one level of it. The other is historical, revisiting the oldest mythologies of Lithuania, and showing how those deeply embedded tropes continue to live in my very uptown kind of girl.

And all this, I suppose, is how an early tendency to color outside the lines combined with family and environmental influences can create bitextuality, tritextuality, polyformistic perversity and more in an artist. But wait. There’s more, because once you start on this path, there’s no telling where it will lead. The insidious nature of polyformistic perversity is that it makes you believe you can try just about any form, in any way you choose.

At least, that’s what it’s done to me. So lately I’ve been exploring computer-made art forms, a new consciousness for me and one that I haven’t easily related to. First of all, it has no smell, which means that a lot of information we gather without realizing we’re gathering it just isn’t there. Second of all, though computers are the communication tool du jour, they don’t really communicate well with humans. They take directions, but only if you give them in exactly the right way, which isn’t intuitive to Mac people like me. But as a committed Bitextual, I believed it was my duty to go beyond my own boundaries and toodle around. As a result, my latest project is a Keynote video of one of The Snickering Witches’ stories, melding technology with mythology and song, taking storytelling into the 21st century. And who can tell what I’ll try next.

I’ve long since learned to accept and then celebrate my Bitextuality, and I hope this small guided tour through my experience helps you to do the same. Of course there are difficulties associated with being bitextual in a unitextual world. Publishers tend to want work that fits their marketing plans, and you may find that, just like back in grade school, your work can’t be squished into the meager space of their forms. The world has gotten both larger and smaller with the internet, though, and that can work to your benefit so it’s a tool I recommend highly. And idealistic as it may sound, I truly believe that if we admitted bitextuals stand up and shout a little, the world will have to nudge its boundaries out enough to fit us in.

If not, you can take consolation in knowing that at least we get all the perks of our own polyformistic perversity, which allows us to make any kind of candy we want, in any kind of shop at all.

(Ed.: You can find out more about the work of Barbara Chepaitis on her website, www.wildreads.com.)

It wasn’t so long ago that combining feminism and science fiction was considered interstitial. Things have changed since then, and women have established a solid presence in the science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction fields. Still, this is an excellent example of how interstitial literature can evolve into a firmly established genre. In honor of the IAF’s upcoming collection of essays, Interfictions Zero, it seems appropriate to honor this once interstitial form of fiction and group of writers with a fun video treat.

The video “Diana Comet Presents…75 Years of Fabulous Writers,” a periodic table of 117 writers in 3 minutes, was created by science fiction writer Sandra McDonald. She’s done a wonderful job of incorporating feminism, science, literature, history, technology, music, humor, and advertising into this snappy video that is reflective and amusing. Given the combination of forms used to create this video, I’d call this piece interstitial all on its own.

At heart, this is a book promotion for McDonald’s new collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, but look closely and you’ll see some stars of the interstitial fiction world. Look closer, and you’ll see bread crumbs for the path that took these female writers from the interstitial side of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction straight into the heart of these established genres. Enjoy!