That’s probably my most direct take on 2020. One of the first stories I wrote during the pandemic was a short short about two people who were ill who had to share a breathing tube, and about one of them taking advantage of the other being slightly more ill. I’ve managed to do some writing but not nearly as much as I’d like…Ī lot of your stories seem to coalesce around people’s varied perceptions of reality, and, previously, you’ve spoken about how you grew up observing “the disjunction between people’s certainty and science.” I’m curious: given the events that continue to transpire this year, has 2020 steered your writing and philosophical investigation in a particular direction? So far, we’ve all stayed safe and healthy.

I’ve spent a lot of time preparing online classes-I find it takes me about three times as long to prepare, since part of it is asynchronous-and between that and switching off with my wife to help my son Max with his online school, I feel like I have a fraction of the time I normally do. We live in a neighborhood with something like thirty miles of paseos (extra wide paths to walk on) so that’s been great. We’ve been walking in the morning and in the evening, a total of six or seven miles a day. How have you been spending your time in quarantine? Sometimes there’s a lot of competition for bandwidth… But we also have a seven year old, who has been doing second grade online. We’re lucky enough to have a pool and a good yard, which makes things easier.

I’m doing okay-just sheltering in place, teaching my classes by Zoom and by an asynchronous learning site, and trying my best not to go crazy. I’m in Valencia, which is in Los Angeles county, just outside of the city proper. Hi, Brian, thank you so much for taking the time out to chat with me! Where are you writing from, and how are you holding up? These stories are devastating and treacherous, yes, and yet, so many of the conceptual underpinnings here reveal the fundamental strangeness and precarity of life today.īelow, I speak with the author about writing life under quarantine, the idea of ‘safeness’ in literature, and the structure of this collection-one which lends a narrative to the book as a whole an arc of gradual collapse. The stories in A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press), likewise, are treacherous things: a teddy bear is brought to life by a miscarried fetus’s heartbeat an off-planet mining operation slowly saturates with dust and dead bodies two men are stoned by the inhabitants of a walled town a man is imprisoned in a facility where torture is randomized. They stretch circumstance to convey the uncertain and unsettling they confuse, morph lead you to a room in your house that nobody else can see. Brian Evenson’s words unsteady the best of readers.

A collapse of horses by brian evenson