I enjoy a bit of flowery excess and wit in my writing, I won’t deny. I’ve long been very much under the spell of show-offy writers like Nabokov, Pynchon, or even Dickens, who never hesitate to strut their stuff.

As a teenager, I read a lot of Horror and Weird fiction—the likes of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and HP Lovecraft. Indeed, my initial interest in writing was very much connected to those (and other) genres, but when I pranced off to college, I discovered a wider and wilder scope of Literature that was more interesting to me, and the genre mentality softened and squidged away. Nothing ever disappears, however, it only transforms. My writing has always retained a dark, transgressive element, along with a penchant for imaginative exuberance, channeled through language itself, and these are the qualities that have kept me enchanted with the form.

About a decade ago, more than that maybe, I encountered a flowering of Weird fiction in certain quarters online, which jiggled my nostalgia neurons, and I felt inspired to try my hand at it again, especially since it seemed to offer a malleable set of genre conventions, possibly amenable to a writer whose first impulse is to transgress “conventions.” My teenaged forays into the Weird had sought to produce an uncanny sensation through merely instrumental means—incident and plot—but now my style was more oriented toward atmospheric, “literary” techniques. Not that I was systematic about my approach, just intuitive—I followed the stories where they led me, and if that resulted in a somewhat decadent style here and there, I was happy to see it. I was also happy to host some Dickensian schmaltz when it showed up, or Nabokovian wordplay. I yam what I yam.

I’m not sure I succeeded in creating Weird stories, per se, but some of them came close, I hope! I did manage to get several published in Weird-adjacent anthologies, so close enough. I think my stumbling block is subjectivity…I just don’t care about the world beyond the character. In Weird fiction, there is generally some kind of supervening Reality that holds the character helplessly and inexplicably in thrall, whereas in my ficton, the character is all there is. The thing oppressing him or her is consciousness itself: the tortured is the torturer, the prisoner the prison.

Owen: In what has to be among the most interesting ‘reader: caution’ messages to introduce a book, you write under the title, Abandon All Ye Who Enter, in part, “A narrator speaks you through your life. You are a Word on the tongue of the world.” What brought this passage into being and how has it ended up introducing the collection? Was it conceived for this role or for something totally different?

Yarrow: Most of the stories in Divine In Essence were written in the 2010’s in the penumbra of my son Logan, whose sweet and purling presence was ubiquitous in my life at the time and inevitably infused into my writing. Whenever I read these pieces, therefore, fragmentary sensations and glimmers of his living essence alight on my ear, my cheek, a knuckle. It is a vessel for his immortality.

Thus, I wrote the preface to be an invocation of that immortality, transforming the book from a mere collection of my fiction into into a magical working. The preface is the only piece from the book written after Logan’s death, and its express purpose is practical: to draw Logan’s consciousness up from the well of language. It exists solely for my benefit, of course. Ultimately, the entire collection exists only for my pleasure. If anyone else gets some pleasure from it, all the better, but what I really want from my readers is for them to imbibe these words indirectly inflected by my son, thence to absorb and carry forward, entirely unconsciously, some eidolon of him into a future world.

You spend your life making choices, believing yourself to have made choices, when in fact, the choices made you the entire time. You’re not the speaker of the world, the world is the speaker of you. There is no escape from being so relentlessly and mercilessly used by the material universe…but in this preface, I assert—rebelling against the natural order—that to “abandon all” is to render the world speechless, liberating you to exercise a separate faculty under your own power, mysteriously, spoken in secret from one soul, perhaps, to another.

Owen: As I recall, I first became aware of your writing in spring/summer of 2011, while putting together Gone Lawn 4, and I was captivated by it. In that issue we published Memoir of a Mouth. How do you see things changing with you, artistically, since that story was published?

Yarrow: That piece ended up moseying into my chapbook Furious in the Expanse (Eibonvale Press). It was very Rimbaudian and earnest, Beauty-obsessed. I think in my youthful phase, I was more Beauty-obsessed because Beauty presents itself as an accessible mode of transcendence. I mean, you can see it: it’s beautiful. That’s as accessible as it gets! All you have to do is sit there and look. You feel like it’s going to take you up…any minute now. The only problem is, it just won’t. There’s this unbridgeable gap between you and that perfection. You can look and look, but you’ll never absorb the elusive photon that would’ve knocked you into the next orbital. You’re stuck with a nagging sensation, nevertheless, that somehow…by hook or by crook…eventually…something’ll happen.

Age and experience inform you, however, with all respect, that it won’t. You begin to poke around for other angles. The solipsism of being an isolated eye apprehending Beauty transitions to a more objective stance of community with the ineloquent apes around you, equally sealed off from transcendence. You begin to realize, ohhhh, I’m one of those apes, and my form is universal. It feels personal, but it doesn’t belong to me at all; it belongs to my humanity, and these other apes are in the same boat. We share something—this universal form—which is deliberately not beautiful since it can’t be seen, a spirit, something Gaze is blind to. Just spitballing here. (I should say, I recently discovered a guy named Lacan who produced a lot of foundational ideas around “Gaze,” which is a concept I just can’t stop thinking about, as you’ll soon discover, but I want to make clear that my awareness of his work is only glancing. I might look into it further, someday, and burn with embarrassment at my radical and improper deviations from the Lacanian Orthodoxy; however, in the meantime, I’ll continue to expropriate his term for my triumphant solecisms, proud American that I am, ain’t nothin’ wrong with that!)

Let’s say my writing has traveled a rough path from Gaze toward Grace, from youthful solipsism toward wizened compassion. Long after all these stories were written, to be clear, I found myself contemplating this dyad of moral forces in the world: Gaze vs. Grace. I originally encountered the idea of Gravity vs. Grace in the work of Simone Weil, a mystic from the previous century. According to her, a kind of moral physics governs human earthly experience, in which “Gravity” pulls you ineluctably down into an ignoble, empirical realm ruled by self-interest, while “Grace” intervenes inexplicably to save you, but only inasmuch as you relinquish yourself from being that which needs saving, which is to say, from even being a self in the first place. (I probably butchered that, so anyone interested should go read Gravity & Grace for themselves. We each must butcher it in our own way.)

For my purposes, you could replace “Gravity” with “Gaze.” Not only do they both begin with G, but mere Gravity feels insufficient to explain the pain and turpitude of human existence. That suffering feels to me less like a disinterested force than a very interested eye, watching you forever, luxuriating in the agony on display. Gaze holds you against yourself, immobilizes you in an image, dominates what you identify as your will. You might be anything until Gaze beholds and enshrines you as “I am.” Now, you’re walking around saying “I am,” but only because somewhere else, there might be an observor saying, “You are.” Before you conceived that observor, you couldn’t have conceived yourself. Which is to say, strangely, you had to be another before you could be yourself.

At all times, in order to continue being you, you are turning upon yourself a Gaze whose eye exists nowhere in Space or Time. You perform your entire life under surveillance, relentlessly sensing its caress on the skin of your being, so that nothing you do escapes its awareness, since that awareness only exists inside of you in the first place.

The reason I construct this parlance here is that I think between the stories of I, No Other and the stories of Divine In Essence, I moved from an idolatry of Gaze toward a cognizance of Grace. Unlike Gaze, which is inescapable and immitigable in this material Universe of ours, Grace—your invisibility cloak—is completely untouchable, unattainable…but you can at least approach it. Just imagine. In fact, that’s the only tool you have: imagination. The same tool that burdens you with Gaze can liberate you with Grace.

This movement is not anything I did consciously; that’s just sort of the direction my work took as I aged from one kind of asshole into another. I’m not advanced enough to have a goal in mind, aside from continuing to be some variety of asshole. That’s easy.

Owen: Your second story in the collection, I in the Eye, is one of my more favorites, where a boy ends up switching places with a simulacrum in his stepmother’s glass eye. How did the ideas for this story develop and evolve?

Yarrow: “I in the Eye” began with the image of the boy trapped in his step-mother’s glass eye. If you were a 7-year old child, why else would a step-mother invade your prepubescent idyll other than to capture you within her Gaze (I wasn’t thinking about Gaze back then, but it was definitely thinking about me!) and then force you to witness all the destruction she will subsequently visit upon that world of blissful innocence from which you have been permanently banned? It seemed like a reasonable premise for a Horror story with a fairy tale vibe, which is a very fun sort of thing to write, quite frankly.

In some degree, the proceedings in the story were modeled on the unbalanced dynamic I perceived between my son and his mother, the way his self-image was mediated (more accurately, overwhelmed) by her excessive and disordered energies, but now it occurs to me that the allegory in this story is actually more universal than that.

You aren’t born with a Gaze; it’s installed sometime afterward by your mother. It’s her Gaze that introduces you to the concept of being seen. Her eyes are the first eyes you become aware of seeing you, and thus it’s through her eyes that you first imagine seeing yourself. You are the child of your mother: that’s your first identity. You are the machine into which she has begun to install the software that will operate you. Her Gaze may be included in the base-level kernel of that software, but soon come the higher level systems—the motor skills, the language, the social and emotional grammar, the ratiocinative faculties, the religious and ideological programming…and so much more! Each of those subsequent powers, as they increase, hone and sculpt your bedrock psyche, giving your Gaze a sharper image to focus on, a fascinating identity to incessantly examine.

In “I in the Eye,” the mother’s Gaze is so powerful that the child has no capacity to push it aside, to build up his own Gaze independent from hers. I suppose I was looking for a language to understand it. I didn’t have the word “Gaze” back then, so writing this story was the only solution! Give it another decade or so, maybe I’ll uncover some other words that start with G.

Owen: I want to ask about the cover art, by Jeremy Hawkins. It’s not a quiet or polite image. It’s definitely a fun image. Were you involved in the choice of this art, and how would you describe the dialogue between this art and your writing?

Yarrow: Jeremy is a friend from my days working at the Yankee Candle factory. We had an easy rapport on the floor, and it turned out we were both creatives, whaddya know. I bought a couple of his prints, and some time later, with his permission, I selected one of those for the cover of I, No Other. Over time, that image and my text have merged in my consciousness, indistinguishable from each other—it expresses the plasmic id of that book so exquisitely—and so it was only natural for me to crave his particular expressive genius for the cover of Divine In Essence.

This time, the artwork is bespoke to the collection. I wanted an image of the Tree of Life with a ’tude (but an ambivalent one, not readily characterized) and requested particular elements to be included—the aggressively personified tree, pot-bellied and jovial, as well as the baby budding from the branch on the back cover—and he really went to TOWN on it! He soared above and beyond my expectations, adding surprising details that both sharpen the expression and deepen the mystery. Like the Baba Yaga house and the millipede and that blue blanket on his lap…it’s all great stuff!

Why did I want the Tree of Life on the cover? I modeled the Table of Contents on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and so it was a no-brainer to reflect this structure in the artwork. I wanted to reinforce the theme of a perverse divine immanance nurturing human consciousness.

Owen: Tell me something about your working method. Do you need special conditions to write or does your writing create conditions? Are you the sort who will stay up throughout the night to get something worked out, or do you have certain zones and rituals that help?

Yarrow: When I was young, in my most prolific period, I often stayed up all night writing and loved it, but I wouldn’t call that a routine, just youthful exuberance coupled with opportunity born of a carefree existence. As an adult, especially in the last decade or so working for the Post Office (50-60 hour weeks), most of my life energy has been absorbed in work and survival. Some people call that maturity; I call it depression.

I’m actually working on methods of reinvigorating some of those spent energies. I’ve been playing with a typewriter recently, for example, we’ll see how that goes…my attempt to evade device-based distractions…also hoping to stimulate heretofore dormant brain regions. Modern life is an endless struggle against the Tech Demon. I’m not sure whether I’m lucky or unfortunate to be old enough to remember what life was like before the Internet Invasion.

Owen: Who are some writers these days whom you love reading, and which writers would you say endure as influences?

Yarrow: I wrote shitty Horror/Fantasy fiction inspired by my childhood favorites until, in college, I drank down A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud. The door to my prison cell swung open, and I ventured out.

I mentioned some authors in the first answer: I’m a longstanding Nabokovian, and you’ll certainly catch his scents throughout my work. Wherever my words manage to gain lift and velocity, it is under his tutelage. I’ve also been alarmingly Pynchon-obsessed for more than a few years now. Gravity’s Rainbow is monumental, of course, but I love his later books even more, especially Inherent Vice and Against the Day, and I’m VERY excited about Shadow Ticket, coming soon!

I love anything oneiric or uncanny or absurd: some people who jump to mind are Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz, Djuna Barnes, Thomas Ligotti, Steve Erickson, Michael Cisco.

I have a special fondness for the Chômu/Snuggly crew (who published one of my chapbooks): Brendan Connell, Justin Isis, and Quentin S. Crisp, brilliant writers, all. They were calling themselves Neo-Decadents for a while there, although now they might be Occultists? I’m not really sure, but whenever I check in, I enjoy what I find.

I’ve been getting into Alan Moore recently (as well as comics in general—an incredibly stimulating storytelling medium I’d mostly ignored heretofore). I loved From Hell and Providence, in particular, but I have a ways to go with him, so I’m sure some new favorites will emerge. Incredibly prolific guy. He’s a magician, too, and performs real Magic in his writing. Coincidentally enough, I did a little Magic of my own in Divine In Essence. Another coincidence: I live in Northampton, Massachusetts, and he lives in Northampton, England. It’s like we’re the SAME.

Another graphic novel I enjoyed was My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris, very phantasmagoric and poignant, presented as the diary/artist’s notebook of a young girl in 60’s-era Chicago; she is obsessed with monster magazines, rendering herself as a Lon Chaney-style werewolf. There are two thick volumes of that so far, and the art is gorgeous. Hopefully, there will be more!

I read an amazing novel called Solenoid recently, by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, a Romanian writer. Talk about oneiric! Some of the most effective dream writing you’ll ever come across—I loved it. It was recommended to me by a fellow Whiskey Tit author, David Leo Rice, who released a terrific dream-like novel of his own last year called The Berlin Wall. I had a great time with that one!

Ah, and I’ve been making my way through the Library of America box set of Philip K. Dick novels. He was one of my favorite Science Fiction writers back when I was a kid, but I didn’t realize he was actually doing Philosophy, or maybe Theology. (Science certainly had nothing to do with it, ha ha!)

Owen: How might you surprise us, looking forward from now? Are there projects that want you to talk about them?

Yarrow: I’ll defer to Rimbaud here:

…in the sweet-smelling twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.