CutBank Interviews: A Conversation with D. Foy
by Emily Collins
William James famously said, “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.” True maturation occurs when we realize that deliberate separateness from others is no longer sustainable. I can’t help but think back to James’ thoughts on depths and intermingled consciousness when reading the works of American writer D. Foy. Foy’s work explores everything from collective beauty to cognitive patterns of individuality. His characters, while fierce and introspective, must contend with interdependence in the wake of our shared disconnection. Foy brings their slow and deliberate journeys to life in a both beautiful and wrenching prose style.
The following interview was conducted via email where we discussed writing, philosophy, and characters who, like all of us, are hurting, questioning, and connected in the deep.
Emily Collins: In another conversation, you mentioned you’re working on a new novel that could be described as “a novel of ideas.” While your previous books differ thematically and tonally, they share a hypnotic tenderness that feels utterly your own. In Made to Break, fragile relationships transform through what I can only describe as alchemical sadism, a process unique to friends hell-bent on loving and destroying one another. In Patricide, a fraught and beautiful father-son relationship disintegrates within the context of corrupt American value systems. Absolutely Golden reads like a cheerful exorcism of the heart. Do you intentionally write books that differ from your last, or does this happen organically? Does the novel-in progress follow a new protocol or do your previous novels offer some navigation?
D. Foy: All my projects are connected, I think, by what after a few years of doing this I’ve realized is my principle concern, or more accurately, even, I’d say, my uber-obsession—given it seems I’m never not thinking about it to one degree or the next—which is the difference between what seems to be and what actually is.
Another way to put this, I guess, is that I have a relentless compulsion to separate clearly, and, of course, to understand, things as they are from the trickery and guises that surround them, to varying degrees of effectiveness, and create in us anything from vague bafflement to outright delusion.
I’ve always been this way, actually. When I was a kid, my teachers would tell my folks they thought of me as “the little question man.” Basically, for as long as I can remember, I’ve never taken anyone’s word at face value, but have instead always asked another question of the I answer I get. “But why?” We do this, ask our question, and get our answer, of which, if we’re inclined the way I am, we can again ask another question, the same—“But why?” So, for better or worse my mind just clicks this way. In my work, no sooner do I seem to get to the bottom of something than I see something else beneath, whose mystery won’t let me rest. Magritte was very astute in this regard, and put it pretty simply. “Everything we see,” he said, “hides another thing.” And then, elsewhere, “We always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” From my own experience, this isn’t a matter of opinion, but of essential truth.
In Made to Break, I was motivated by the question of why a group of people would stay together despite their evident loathing for each other, and what, in the end, the story’s narrator learns from his experience over years with these people that enables him to find meaning and grow. It’s not the simple answers that finally show him the way, but the questions that, superficially, are simple but in the end more challenging and rewarding. Ultimately, he sees his life for the lie it’s been and commits himself, as best he can, to living in the truth, as disappointing or sad, and as beautiful, too, as it may sometimes be.
In Patricide, I found myself confronted with a similar dilemma, a man who’s lived his life believing his father, and his relation with his father, is one thing when on inspection it was something else entirely.
Absolutely Golden has at bottom the same quest, too. For years after a woman’s husband unexpectedly dies, she struggles to find love with another, but is stymied at every turn. It’s not till after she’s looked inside, as opposed to everywhere else, for the answers to the questions that have plagued her that she finds her peace.
Each of these stories take a different form, but all of them have as dynamos this compulsion to know the truth of their experience. My stories, essays, and poems are also more or less driven by this concern.
As for my current work-in-progress, it’s still hard to talk about. It is a novel of ideas, in that it’s more pointedly philosophical than anything I’ve done, though on the other hand, it’s also very much explicitly plot driven, and is set across a fairly vast expanse of time, three centuries, one in the past, another in the present, and a third in the future, each roughly a hundred years apart. While it’s been extremely satisfying work, it’s been grueling, too—it’s really, really big, page-wise. I know where it will end, inasmuch as I’ve ever known that sort of thing mid-work, but it’s still quite a way from the finish. I’ve kept myself going through a disciplined focus on the work at hand—the page I’m on now, this word, this sentence, this graph, this passage. It’s always best when I stay present with the immediate work. The moment I let myself drift into the what-ifs and maybes, I can fall into all sorts of traps, despair being the worst. At this point, I set an intention each day: just do the work, right here, right now. The rest will be revealed.
EC: Reviewers describe your books as existential and tonally bleak. I’d argue the work is also open-hearted. The work’s contrast of dark and unexpected light creates a kind of emotional chiaroscuro. Your characters remind me of Kierkegaard’s definition of a poet: one whose anguish and gifts are so deep that even his cries sound like “blissful music.” I love how your work explores larger ideas while setting the reader’s self-reflection in motion. Can you speak to any philosophical ideas that have influenced your fiction?
DF: The big heart’s the only heart worth telling, I think we agree. If we don’t love the people in our worlds, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, we’ve missed our calling. I’ve often thought about William H. Gass in this regard, whose project is for me a cautionary tale. Everything he did, he said, was motivated by hate. He wrote because he hated. But regardless of his mastery and brilliance, that hatred has been for me the reason his work doesn’t achieve real artistic greatness. It’s not that we can’t consider hate, but if hate is all we consider, we’ve only reflected in our work a tiny sliver of an indescribably vaster experience. This perspective belies a profound blindness. Anyone who’s unable to see past their hatred is someone who’s only ever looked outward for their explanations.
Life’s an inside job, which means art, too, is an inside job. The existential void, the bleakness I consider in my work are never for their own sake, but aspects of something much, much bigger whose ultimate value we can’t grasp without first reckoning with the void. Suffering is a fact of life. It’s an unbending indisputable fact. Our effort, our purpose, though, isn’t to endure it, but to transform it. And it is transformable, not the suffering, but our perception of the things we believe have caused our suffering. When we change how we see, we change what we see. From my own experience, I’ve found this to be so. For a long time, I believed—and I mean really and truly believed—the world was malignant. It was here to crush us, and we here not to escape being crushed but to endure our crushing. That view has changed pretty radically. It has struck me, again and again, that as opposed to being separate from everything, and therefore alone, I am, and we all are, as much a part of the world as a crumbling leaf and a waterfall, and that just because I may not understand why I’m here, I’m nevertheless here, and a part of something far greater than myself, to which, as such, my purpose is to give in the way that I can give, with what I’ve got to give.
I love that you mention Kierkegaard’s view of the poet as an alchemist of pain, someone who transmutes anguish to beauty. I can’t imagine an artist who’s never suffered making anything truly meaningful. It seems impossible to me that we can express beauty without having experienced pain. From this perspective, our pain is in fact our greatest gift. It’s up to us what we do with it. Kierkegaard also says that “purity of heart is to will one thing.” The true artist, for me, is someone who has determined and radically committed to a single thing, transmuting her experience, by way of clearing away the dross of her mistaken perceptions, into a vision of things as they are and not as we wish them to be. The clearing away, I’ve found, is always only ever a letting go. Our ideas of the way things are have nothing to do with the way things are. The less I bring to whatever’s before me, the more clearly I can see it.
You might guess based on your reading of my stuff and the things I’m saying here that the philosophies that speak to me most meaningfully at this stage of my life are Eastern. Essentially, whatever their starting point, they invariably wend to the single view that to the extent we perceive ourselves as possessing the unique mutually exclusive and abiding entity we call the “self,” we suffer correspondingly. This notion of the “self,” in my opinion, is the worm in the apple of most Western thought, and therefore of its morality and values, which are on the whole corrupt. The science of the West has long been a science of the self, working in the name of “progress”—of capital and industry, I mean. It’s a material ethic that at its base is an ethic of division, and the despair division breeds.
Science, finally—for example in the work of physics to reconcile the quantum and the mechanical—has begun to give the lie to this misconception of the self and the antagonism it infers. The doctrines of the mechanical haven’t aligned with those of the quantum. What they’ve found is that in fact most of what we perceive to be stuff isn’t stuff at all, but space, and that this space, or emptiness, is as necessary to the rest, and to the stuff around it, that without it, this empty space, we’d have collapse. Naturally, they still don’t know the answers. They’re still working to make everything fit into a single theory. Yet in one way or another, the sages for millennia have embraced the deep interconnectivity of all things.
The thirteenth-century mystic Eihei Dōgen, for instance, refers to what he at the time called “a statement from antiquity.” “If one falls on the ground,” the statement went, “one rises from the ground; there’s no way to rise apart from the ground.” But then Dōgen turns it. “If one falls to the ground,” he says, “one must arise from the sky; if one tries to arise apart from the sky, there will never be a way.” To the Western mind, this is gibberish. But this is because the Western mind sees through the lens of dialectics and discrimination, a way that started with Plato and went viral with Descartes, when he somehow convinced everyone that the principle of “clarity and distinctness” was the indispensable key to proper analysis and thought. Before we can understand anything, Descartes held, we have to separate this from that, break the world down into its constituent components and examine them apart from the rest. Yes, we get to understand things better this way on a micro level, but it’s been at the dire expense of the greater whole.
We’ve been doing this with keen proficiency ever since. It’s a program that, essentially, has invaded to the least every aspect of modern life. The American notion of the “rugged individual” is a direct result of this mindset. And this value of the individual that we hold so dearly has translated, essentially, to the destruction of everything around us, as the mass extinction of untold species and climate change and global warming makes excruciatingly obvious. Everything’s connected, all things are part of everything else, and when we mess with the one, we invariably mess with the other, to this or that degree.
The connectedness of all things lies at the core of all my work now. And since stories are about people (or creatures that sooner or later become tropes for people) are what literature is, the focus of my work is bent toward revealing the extent to which my characters see and understand their connection to others, or how they’re blind to it, and what the consequences of that blindness is.
EC: In Patricide, we follow Pat Rice’s search for meaning and grace as he pursues a life outside of his omnipresent father and arguably, the larger father narrative that dominates the world and our individual psyches. There’s this part in the book where adult Rice, now an addict trapped in a loveless marriage, realizes that his wife never loved him or the “wreck” he’s become. When I read that I thought, “We don’t accept the love we deserve. We accept the love the Father primes us for.” After Rice is hospitalized, he discovers the transpersonal nature of suffering. I feel as though your characters are more likely to find refuge in ontology than say, forgiveness. As a fiction writer, have you always felt at home in works (yours or another’s) that explore spiritual journeys within the confines of traditional storytelling?
DF: Well, the short answer is yes—always!
This business of my characters finding refuge in ontology, though, is really spot on, and a fantastic way to segue from what I was just saying. And it’s very apposite, as well, to note this distinction between the salvation this ontology offers and what we might get merely from forgiveness, which, while ultimately a good thing, doesn’t necessarily translate to salvation.
The salvation I’m talking about here isn’t something bestowed on us from without. As I sort of just implied, I believe we all make our own heaven and hell. Our suffering, once we’re adults anyway, is never imposed on us, but self-generated by our defects, for lack of a better expression, of awareness and perception. Our salvation lies in the opposite, which is understanding, and entails the very difficult process by which we attain it. It’s only through a determination to escape our suffering that we can begin to examine its various sources and the things we’ve done either to bring them to us or keep them around after they’ve arrived.
At the end of the day—again, for me, and from my experience—understanding, which is seeing things as they are, and not as we wish they were, is itself ontological, is itself being and only being. Time is in my opinion one of, if not the, greatest lies ever perpetrated on humanity. There’s no future, there’s no past. There’s only now, only this, only all things, which is the matter all things are made of incessantly churning, only constant transformation, the process that the present progressive being infers. When we’re able to see this clearly, and as much as possible to live in it, this moment, the now, we’ve found our salvation. The present moment is our only refuge. Shunryu Suzuki, a sage in the spiritual lineage of Dōgen, says, “The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact.” Pema Chödrön, one of our great modern mystics, whose work, in fact, has been radically fundamental to my education, says, “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.” What she’s describing is the ultimate spiritual journey. The ultimate fact and the ultimate spiritual journey are the same, a continuous movement toward understanding that now is all we have and that, moreover, the journey itself is all there is, and is therefore ceaseless, an ongoing process of acceptance of the present as the only thing we can conceive of “having.”
Forgiveness becomes moot when we see this. Accepting all things as they are is to have forgone any judgment, without which forgiveness is irrelevant, since absent judgment or condemnation there’s no crime to forgive. The Father is a terrible thing, in the sense that more or less The Father is a figure of judgment. The Father decides what’s good and bad and who’s right and wrong, and judges the world according to principles he himself has dictated from the vantage of what He wants. Worst of all, The Father has taught us all to think this way ourselves. The process of writing Patricide was the process of examining the terrible destruction The Father wreaks on us, starting from birth in the nuclear family and spreading from there into the dizzying complex of senseless morality and ethics that drive us moment by moment, in big and little ways, largely against our own interests, which are the interests of us all.
Donald Trump is the latest true paragon of The Father at His worst, a figure of consummate greed, and of the mass destruction greed can’t do anything but inflict. Trump is driven by a profound blindness to the nature of things. Nor did he simply “appear.” Our society, our culture, and the systems by which they run, created him, and so many of us have attached ourselves to him because he is a reflection of us. He doesn’t see himself in us—he sees nothing but his ideas of himself, imposed on him by his own terrible father—we “see” ourselves in him. He didn’t pervert or corrupt us. We have perverted and corrupted ourselves. Only a culture in ongoing ruin could beget such an abomination as Trump. The converse is impossible.
Again, like him, what we mostly see of ourselves is merely a notion. This is both a function and the result of the mass psychotic narcosis that Marshall McLuhan, among many others, has described, ad infinitum. This is what our system, embodied by The Father, teaches us. The Father judges, and teaches us to judge. And what’s the basis of judgment? Discrimination. And this discrimination begins with ourselves, in the delusion that we each of us constitute a unique mutually abiding self, alone in the universe, with no one and nothing to help us or depend on. Selfishness from such a vantage seems common sense, and greed thereby isn’t just rationale, but, to survive, obligatory. It seems obvious that we’re engaged in a zero-sum game from which without a radical paradigm shift of awareness and perception there’s no escape. The good news, for me, anyway—and of which I have to remind myself each day, especially when I look at any media—is that with a bit of willingness and openness this shift is more than possible, but in fact inevitable, and here for all of us, when we want it.
EC: So much of your work has a strong myth/folklore vibe. Can you speak to how the old stories have shaped you as a writer?
DF: The old stories are my foundational stories, and in a very meta-way have as a whole become the big myth that guides me in my daily life, in my way of seeing and being. “The big myth” is for me a trope for life itself. All the fairytales, folk stories, fables, tales, and myths that have influenced me—from the ancient Greeks, to the Grimm Brothers, Aesop, and Hans Christian Anderson, to T.S. White, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Angela Carter, to Jorge Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and on to Mary Shelly, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Atwood, Uchida Hyakken, and many more—ultimately offer us models through which to see how we can become our best selves, even if only sometimes by showing us what happens when we submit to the gremlins that seem always to be nagging in our ears.
What’s really interesting about these modes, I’ve found, is how they create a scrim, via this or that trope—animals, vices, monsters, heroes, and so forth—as well as through time—i.e., events, often, from the remote past—to create the bit of distance we sometimes need to see the lessons we need to learn. It’s a paradox, actually, in that this strategy of creating distance actually redounds to greater nearness to ourselves. Without these clear boundaries between us and the characters and events of these stories, we’d likely have a harder time seeing ourselves in the ways we need to relate our own circumstances to those the stories are showing us.
EC: Let’s talk about joy! Absolutely Golden, set in 1973, follows a thirty-something widow’s move to a nudist colony in the Northern California mountains. It’s a lush, anti-heroic journey bursting with compassion for its characters. It’s uproariously funny too. What inspired the novel’s humor, and will we see traces of it in the new novel?
DF: Writing Absolutely Golden likely gave me the most joy I’ve had writing, anything, ever. Its humor for me when I began was inherent to its characters and setting. Once I imagined them—first, Rachel, the widowed school teacher, and then her young hippie parasite, a stripper who calls herself an “ecdysiast,” a womanizing evangelist apostate, a bumbling Zen gardener, and a pair of aging drug-addled swingers from Holland—I felt anything I wrote would be funny, regardless. Make them all naked, all the time, and I found myself in the sort of “comedic fantasia” my friend Jeff Jackson says the book is. It was impossible not to love these people all in their strange fragility and power, and hard, actually, to write something, once they themselves had taken over, that was “serious,” though I hope that the seriousness of the work shines through, as well, because I did after all have a few “serious” things to say.
Among the many things I wanted to explore in the work was life’s essential absurdity, and how we cope as we stumble along through it. Everything we see is absurd, in the sense that at bottom none of us have the least idea how we got here, or why, and no amount of searching will deliver for anyone an “answer” that’s remotely satisfying. We’re all just here, and all manner of craziness happens, incessantly. We can laugh at and with it, and with and at ourselves, or we can bash our heads against the wall. Either way, none of what we do will affect the essential nature of things.
So, yeah, in my work-in-progress, you will see quite a bit of “humor,” given the gist of it. The book is all sorts of things—a novel of ideas, a Künstlerroman, a detective novel, a love story, a documentary, an autofiction, a thriller, an expose, and more—but at bottom really it’s a picaresque. The story principally follows a nameless unpublished writer who, exiled in Amsterdam, analyzes, ponders, combats, indicts, and falls in love with everything he sees and does. He’s the kind of guy who can’t help boring into anything that catches his attention. Sometimes his notions are brutally existential, but at others they’re flat out absurd. Sometimes the humor is very black, though at times it’s also, I hope, comically ridiculous. He’s in the grip of events that seem mundane, yet which for many reasons, he can’t escape. Just when he thinks he’s got shut of or solved this or that “problem,” another appears, which sooner or later he learns isn’t random but in fact deeply connected to all that’s come before. Like I said, I have a pretty good hold on it, even when it feels like I don’t, but it’s really big and the end is still a long way off. I’m in need right now of about my eighteenth wind.
D. Foy is the author of the novels Made to Break, Patricide, and Absolutely Golden (which in 2018 was also published in France). His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Salon, The Millions, Hazlitt, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, and the Georgia Review, among many others, and have been included in the books Laundromat, A Moment’s Notice, and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial.
Emily Collins is the Interviews Editor for CutBank and a MFA in fiction candidate at the University of Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, The Florida Review, The Atticus Review, The South Carolina Review, and others. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. When she’s not interviewing incredible writers, she enjoys hiking and volunteering.