MM) This book is in many ways Gwen Hilton full frontal, full disclosure. In a sense, Where the Breastplate Meets the Blade is an unpacking of the hallucinatory Sent to the Silkworm House through candid romantic and sexual history and angular mnemonic stabs. Rather than charting your evolution as a stylist, I’m wondering if your instinct to open up more and become more public-facing in general has to do with stepping outside of your comfort zone,
MM) A Club for Gentlemen strikes me as a deep pandemic novel, that is, it feels to have been written largely in the bleak, interminable isolation of lockdowns, like a glimmer of a ray of hope from the deep recesses of your imagination. It is capricious, digressive, and possibly your longest book? Tell the readers how it came about and what it’s about. In your words.
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,