So after reading (and loving) Paul Kwiatowski’s book And Every Day Was Overcast and then confirming that one of the people that I thought I knew from the pictures in it was in fact who I thought it was, I decided to email Paul Kwiatkowski to request an interview. I wanted to talk to him about growing up in South Florida, his creative process as well as his early literary and musical influences. He agreed to speak with me and on July 23rd we spoke over the phone.
Ariel Sheen
So, have you had any contact with people whose pictures you took in the book and if so what have been some of their responses to it?
Paul Kwiatkowski
Yeah some of the people I’m still in contact with. Most of the people I’ve talked to have dug it. As for those that I haven’t spoken with, well, I hope they like the project and know where I was coming from with it.
Ariel Sheen
Keeping in mind that I love the lyrical nature of the book, I’m wondering what your decision making process was in deciding to forego a traditional narrative arc.
Paul Kwiatkowski
A narrative arc would be disingenuous to the material considering it’s the past and memory doesn’t work narratively that way. You can’t really remember it anything other than as bemusings and flavors. To create something that would make an arc would have been too clear.
Ariel Sheen
Do you find yourself more or less alienated living in New York than you were in South Florida?
Paul Kwiatkowski
I mean, I think a lot of the alienation that I wrote about had to do with just being a teenager. Plus Florida is kind of an isolated place to grow up. Not living in close proximity to people, I never felt like there was a community there. When I read your review of my book, like, I also remember wanting to go downtown, which was really just a movie theatre, and it being like a 40 minute ride just for that. As a teenage I hated that but I feel at this point in my life you can use that to your advantage creatively and just call it solitude.
Living in New York, well, I feel that your experience of the city largely depends on what you make of it. One thing I think is funny is that so many people come here with purpose and certain expectation of what will happen with it. Once that goes away, I think it becomes less exciting. Didn’t you use to live here? What did you think?
Ariel Sheen
Yeah, I did. My experience was largely the same. But I was in grad school so there was a large number of people to socialize with had the same purpose as me. The school encouraged meetings through a number of free food/drink events. But even then there was always this temporary element to any connection we had in the back of our minds. Or at least in the back of my mind. Something like we can be friendly now, but in a year or so we’ll be in totally different places of the country doing totally different things and so will lose track of each other. When I lived in Bushwick it wasn’t like that so much.
Paul Kwiatkowski
Oh nice, I like Bushwick. I saw Genesis P-Orridge play there last week.
Ariel Sheen
Awesome. I’m a little jealous. And a lot surprised! I don’t encounter a lot of people that know who that is. When I was about 16-17 I got really into industrial music. Through my investigations into the genre I came across him and a number of other… unusual musicians via V. Vale Re/Search Publications like Industrial Culture Handbook and his book on William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle. I wasn’t always appreciative of the music, thought I did send Vale a demo I’d made, but I liked the innovative qualities of it. I mean a lot of it, like, sounds really weird.
Paul Kwiatkowski
Yeah I remember hearing them around the same time. Right about the same time I got into writing. I was mostly into Throbbing Gristle. I think it just really changed the way I go about making art. I think that’s what I got the most out of it. You know, Industrial or whatever electronic music name you want to call it just totally blew my imagination away. It definitely was inspiring and I definitely didn’t like every song to just get into the vibe of it. It was kind of a big influence. That stuff was just really. Man. Just finding out about it as a kid was inspiring. Maybe even more so than the products that the artists made. It definitely got me in tune with process and experimentation.
Ariel Sheen
So say 30-40 years from now, when there is no South Florida; How do you think you’ll respond to that?
Paul Kwiatkowski
It’ll be bitter sweet. There’s a lot of things that I love about Florida that I credit with my imagination. It seems inevitable though… Right? You should check out this book called Finding Florida. It’s just about this history of Florida and how it’s this state that’s never been able to be tamed. From the early Conquistadors that went there thinking they’d find gold. It goes from how thy not only didn’t finding gold but it was the only state that doesn’t have any rocks in the ground. Then tells about how later settlers tried to damn the waters but that storms kept flooding and destroying them. Then the elections and Bush. It’s this like, comprehensive history that this state has manipulated the people that have tried to harness it. Thus if Florida went up it’d just be fitting. It just has this entire history of kicking people back and that’d be just one more instance of it.
Ariel Sheen
I think you’re really on point about the land we call Florida not wanting the practices of white settlers. I’ve actually studied a lot Florida history and am also writing a book myself set there/here right now. Besides the North, prior to the Civil War, it was the Glades that had the largest population of runaway slaves. These were those that escaped and then acculturated themselves to the indigenous people in this land that at the time just could not be brought under the till.
Paul Kwiatkowski
Yeah, the Seminoles, right? The mix of races: free slaves and indigenous.
Ariel Sheen
Yeah, exactly! So from your 2011 Street Carnage interview I saw that you were reading a lot of literature that dealt with… unusual and extreme topics and themes. Because you and I are the same age I had this feeling that, well, in high school the setting of EDWO, at the time my group of friends was reading a lot of Poppy Z. Brite. She wrote Lost Souls and was wondering if you’d ever read it…
Paul Kwiatkowski
Haha. You know it’s funny I too was reading Poppy Z. Brite. I was a huge fan of Exquisite Corpse, which was one of my favorites.
Ariel Sheen
Yes! That book was so great!
Paul Kwiatkowski
You know it’s funny, I picked up the book again a year ago and it’s still really good. She’s kind of a kick as writer. So transgressive as well. It’s so impressive. Other than her, at the time I was also getting into Dennis Cooper and he definitely had a big influence on my approach to writing. Oh, and I started to discover Bret Easton Elis. There’s a book called Jesus Saves by Darcey Steinke.
It had a goth feel to it. I was just a voracious reader and was just really discovering literature at that time. I also remember reading In the Belly of the Beast and being really impressed by that. I worked at Borders so I had a lot of access to books. And a lot of the French Surrealists like Bataille and the Marquis se Sade. I’m glad I got that stuff out of my system as a teenager and not as an adult.
Ariel Sheen
That’s so funny. I also worked at Borders, briefly, and when I was there Mike [the guy I know in one of the photos] was one of the floor managers.
Paul Kwiatkowski
That’s really wild.
Ariel Sheen
Going back to the Street Carnage interview, you’d mentioned then that you were working on a project from your trip to the Caribbean and Mexico, are you still working on that project? Or something else?
Paul Kwiatkowski
Haha! I don’t even remember what that project was, but at the moment I am working on a new book about Minnesota. Which is a large departure from those project. I’m working with a photographer who’s from Minnesota that’s now based in Medellin in Colombia. The book is about an airplane accident that claimed his cousin and photography’s relationship to technology. So it’s kind of like a mix between an Adam Curtis documentary with… I don’t even know what you’d say it’s mixed with…
Ariel Sheen
Cool. Interesting that you say that. I showed The Power of Nightmares in my Debate Classes to help students better contextualize the rhetoric their subjected to in the news.
Anyway, last question. So I bought the paperback edition of the And Everyday was Overcast for $30 and then learned that there’s an audio component that came for free with the $6 digital edition. Think you can send me that?
Paul Kwiatkowski
Oh, I can send it to you! I think it’s on my site. The soundtrack is part of the digital edition that I had done for my published that I did with Ryan DeShawn. It was actually heavily inspired by Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle. I wanted to illustrate that Retard Radio storyline that runs through the book and, you know, in addition to going back to Florida and collecting pictures I’d go back and collect sounds. Something that always really stuck out in my memory of Florida was the sounds. It’s such an alive state. It’s constantly buzzing and grinding. It’s something that always fascinated me so I wanted to put something together as a companion piece to the book. But yeah, I’ll send you a zip file of it in a little bit.
Ariel Sheen
Cool, I’d like that.
Paul Kwiatkowski
No problem, I like that you’re interested in it. It was a cool experiment.
Ariel Sheen
Yeah. It sounds like it. And hearing you talk about it, it sounds like a friend of mine’s music production process that I just heard about on NPR that also left Florida for New York. Hopefully I can make it back there in two or three years.
Paul Kwiatkowski
Well it seems like you’re doing well over there, teaching and writing.
Ariel Sheen
That’s true, but that’s only after a long period of some personal hardships. No need to get into that, though. Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me.
Paul Kwiatkowski
My pleasure, it was good talking to you!
*
You can purchase And Every Day Was Overcast by clicking the title and learn more about Paul Kwiatkoski’s current projects by clicking here.
You can also read more interviews with the author that may or may not deal with topics of greater substance here.