MM) Yellow Switch Palace is a lot of things. It is somewhat grandiose science fiction. It is K-Mart realism/alt lit. It’s a collegiate bildungsroman. A kind of hallucinatory love story. What first spurred the idea, and could you unpack your process of writing and editing it? I can infer you’ve been writing it for at least as long as 2019, when Gloria Vanderbilt, who is offhandedly mentioned, was still alive.
[Author’s note: I’ve been informed that there are a small handful of spelling errors, mostly inconsequential, some serendipitous. In the spirit of Shakespearean whimsy I lay bare my faults— our faults. A testament to the Human…]
The Shakespeare authorship question has been surprisingly provocative in recent months,
It’s 3am, the night before the De Vere Ball. I’m tossing and turning in my bed, tormented by a deep philosophical question—who do I have to fuck to get Elon to tweet about Oxfordianism? I was never a party girl. In college, my social calendar was built around the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and our performances of 19th century operettas in Rhode Island’s premiere senior centers. So imagine my surprise to find myself throwing a party hotly anticipated by Dimes Square’s crème de la crème,
MM) First thing that jumped out at me was Laura and the protagonist, their back and forth, their almost twin-like dyad reminding me of Ágota Kristóf’s Notebook Trilogy but of course Laura is a girl and this creates a difference the book explores magnificently. Was that always the plan, to have Laura maybe as a proxy for the protagonist, able to go where he sometimes can’t such as the first scene — and was that first scene always conceived of like that?