Interview | Joseph Edwin Haeger
Author of Bardo
The writing of Joseph Edwin Haeger is original, complex, successfully experimental, and psychologically astute. Haeger’s novella Bardo was published by Thirty West Publishing in September 2023. The Independent Book Review writes of Bardo, “The scope, with its multiple points of view, its timeline that skips through an entire lifetime, and its emotional depth, seems impossibly large for only 90 pages, but, somehow, Haeger packs in enough questions and considerations to leave the reader contemplating the story for hours, maybe days after reading.”
Joseph Edwin Haeger lives in the Inland Pacific Northwest. He’s the author of the experimental memoir Learn to Swim (2015) from University of Hell. Haeger writes fiction, poetry, essays, screenplays, book reviews, and literary criticism.
It was a joy to connect with Joseph virtually where we discussed experimental forms, grief’s nonlinearity, hometown cringe, and using a song to drop into writing mode.
Your epigraph is from Roberto Bolano’s Antwerp. I haven’t read it, but I read that it’s short, loose, and fragmentary. It sounds similar to your novella in some ways, and I’d love to know more about the inspiration behind Bardo?
So, I feel like kind of a fraud with this one, actually. I’d known about Bolano’s books, but I’d never read them. Then I was listening to a podcast with guest Michael Kazepis, who ran King Shot Press, my favorite small press at the time. In the interview, he very casually mentioned how his favorite book is Antwerp and how if you’ve read all the King Shot Press books, you’d notice that they were all these loose retellings of Antwerp. I love their books, so I had to read Antwerp, and I really liked the chaotic and free-flowing nature of it.
I already had the idea for Bardo bouncing around in my head, but it seemed too simple, too easy, maybe too boring. As soon as I read Antwerp, I thought, Alright, this is the blueprint. I essentially copied the structure and took this pre-existing story and retrofitted it.
That sounds like a fun project, playing with form and mimicking somebody else’s structure to create something different yet inspired by them. And maybe forcing yourself out of your own writing boxes or formulas.
I feel like I also did that with Learn to Swim to an extent. When I first started writing it, I created all these little rules, like I could never use he or him unless it was referring to one specific person. So, I would have to use physical attributes for everybody else. And these vignettes where nothing could really be tied to one another. They had to be scattershot memories. So maybe that's just my thing. I kind of did the same thing here: there are all these ellipses, and that ties the dialogue together, and you rarely get who's talking. And chunks of text. That's all coming from Antwerp — that's me taking those confines and working within them.
It's cool because it’s what we’d call experimental, but it feels like it mimics life in a somewhat better way. Life isn't linear, healing isn't linear, dialogue isn't always clear, and yet we craft these perfect stories…
As you said, life isn't linear. When I originally wrote it, I did write it in sequential order, and I think that was my plan. By the end of it, the fear of it being too simple crept into the back of my head so I printed the whole thing out. I laid it out on my floor. I stood up on my trunk and I looked down on it and just shifted things around until it felt right.
Printing it out helped because if there were any holes in the sequential stuff, I could catch those, fill them in, and then mix it up. A big part of it was trying to reflect what going through grief is like, because you don't feel grief one time and then you're good to go. It’s chaotic, numbing, coming at you from all angles, at any time. That's in part why I shuffled it up and it's nonlinear.
The names of the two men are not written in the novella. It gives them both a kind of everyman quality and gives the sense that the reader or any human could be the falsely accused or the person seeking vengeance. This is heightened by the out-of-order chapters and switch of perspectives.
Early on, I knew there were going to be two perspectives, but I don't think I realized how much weight or how heavy the convicted killer's perspective was gonna be. It felt almost like context or these opportunities for me to throw in little musings or philosophical asides. For me, the meat of the story is the father character. But I think through editing, and now through talking to people who’ve read it, I'm starting to realize that the convicted killer and the backstory is an important thread that ties everything together. Did you think the killer was innocent or guilty? While I wrote it, I never had a clear idea of whether this guy had been wronged. I wanted it to be a bit more ambiguous, and I think because of that, I didn't ever follow that thread and try to figure it out myself.
I think that's part of the power too, though. Often with the justice system, or in life, there's not a clear answer. It's hard for me not to think of all the people who have been wrongfully put to death. We make a lot of assumptions, or we need closure or vengeance. And sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's correct or not. But the father was trying to find the right person and make sure that vengeance was dealt.
If he wanted, he could have had the closure, but his own grief kept him from it because he was still devastated that his son was dead. Everybody killed his son and nobody killed his son, because he was never going to feel better about it. Looking at it through his eyes, he'll never find the guy. Violence begets violence and it's just a never-ending cycle. Throwing himself into that world just continually perpetuates his own grief; it's a constant reminder, so he can never actually find closure.
You make some astute and beautiful points about grief and humanity through the characters: putting all your energy into one child and it goes awry anyway, wanting something tangible to destroy, the unraveling of time, and the “semblance of vengeance” being better than the “truth of vengeance.” Can you say more about your driving ideas and emotions?
When I wrote this book, it was shortly after I had gone to Germany. The reason I went to Germany is because one of my childhood friends was in this horrific climbing accident. He was in the hospital for 10 months and he eventually died. My friend and I went over to help take care of him. When we came back, I was angry and confused. I'd dealt with death before that, but it was always very definitive. I felt like with my friend in Germany, Derek, it was this weird in-between time. There were times that we could celebrate, and then he would backtrack. It was a battle for the whole 10 months. I got to a point where I was just very angry, and I was experiencing grief, but I didn't know to what extent I could experience grief because of the situation. And that's really where Bardo came from: this moment of intense anger at anything. I couldn't really point to one specific thing to be mad at.
That's maybe where a lot of the confusion from the father comes from. I knew the mindset I was in when I wrote it, but I didn't realize how many other little things wormed their way in until now as I'm talking to people about it. My older son was three years old when I wrote this, so there were a lot of parental fears and the fear of raising somebody that crept in. I think at the time we were deciding if we wanted to have a second kid or not. So that whole idea of, Do I want to focus on him, or do I want him to have a friend? There's not a right answer to that, but it's something that I was confused about and trying to figure out.
The theme of this issue is Abandon Earth. (Note: this interview was originally for Abandon Journal which isn’t currently operating.) I originally thought about climate change or earth’s inhabitability, but the bardo (liminal space between death and rebirth), death row, or life on this earth being unbearable due to loss are all incredibly fitting. How would you say Bardo relates to abandoning earth?
The father has this hope that he can find the person who killed his son and that by seeking vengeance, he'll feel better. But the fact is it doesn't really ever happen or it’s not even really possible. This idea of slowly losing hope. Like you said, my mind immediately goes to climate change and earth not being inhabitable. I think for him, it's kind of similar in a way … I feel like we already know what's going to be happening with Earth. I feel like we've already abandoned it, even though there are a lot of people who really want to save it. I feel like capitalism and the powers that be have already made up their minds, and they're just unwilling to make changes that would help save Earth. So, it's essentially holding these two truths at the same time. Basically, you're hoping for what's possible or what could be, but on the other hand, you already have the reality of the situation. I have this hope that it's going to be saved, and my kids will continue on and be happy — but I don't know if I can really, truthfully say that I think that's going to be the reality. At the same time, doesn’t every generation think their generation is going to be the last one?
I'm always saying the world is always ending. You look back and there's always been a war or a plague or something terrifying. I mean, I don't have high hopes for Earth either, or there's a point where there's no turning back — but it’s not anything new to think the world is ending. I also kept thinking that if you lose all hope or destroy your own life, you've kind of abandoned the earth and all possibility of being grounded or present in your life.
That's essentially what the dad does: he throws his life away and is forsaking any sort of job or anything that would make him get up in the morning. He even talks about how his wife is going to move on, but he'll just slowly plod behind her, and he'll just always be there. Even if she doesn't want him to be — either she has to disappear in the middle of the night or she needs to divorce him. His running down this line of vengeance is almost trying to save her too, because the way he views himself is that he's ruining her life. So, by abandoning everything on his own, in a way, he's trying to save her.
Does place influence your writing? Carla Crujido (see last interview) wrote her collection about Spokane, and you live in Spokane, so we have a bit of a Spokane theme!
When I think about Spokane and writing, of course my head goes right to Jess Walter. I'm a little jealous because it seems like he's very comfortable writing about Spokane and placing stories in Spokane. The Cold Millions is distinctly set here. Or if you read some of his short fiction, there's one story where these two guys steal a wheelbarrow to take to a pawn shop to try to pawn it. And as I'm reading that story, I'm like, this is the pawn shop at the bottom of the Monroe Street hill right by the Skippers. I knew exactly what location he was talking about, and he wasn't necessarily overt about it. But if you live in Spokane, you know exactly what he's talking about, and that’s the thing about always living here. But yeah, growing up here, I don't have anything to compare it against. So I guess it's a foggy setting for me. I can think of my own childhood, because the Spokane I grew up in feels a little different than the Spokane I live in now.
Spokane has the reputation of being like Seattle's little brother, or like the trailer-trash cousin to Seattle, right? That's not kind, but that's how it feels sometimes, especially talking to people who don't live in Spokane. I had a friend in high school who went to New York, and somebody asked him, Where are you from? He said Spokane and the reply was, Ah, Meth City. There's this reputation, but beyond that, I have my own insecurities about it. So, I've always avoided it, but I have gratitude for people like Jess Walter who unabashedly write about it and set stories here. I have tried to be better; I wrote a horror novel recently, and it's not set in Spokane by name, but it’s Spokane. I think if you've lived here, you can kind of put two and two together and realize, Oh, this is just a fictional Spokane.
As far as Bardo and place, because of the capital punishment, I couldn't set it in Washington because Washington abolished it a few years ago. Then I was thinking about Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss. It's all about the criminal justice system in Texas. Very uplifting, a laugh riot. It’s just this overwhelming, depressing depiction of the penal system and the death penalty. I saw it back in college, but when I start thinking about the death penalty, my mind tends to go straight to Texas and it's partly because of that movie. That's why I set the book there. I think there's only one or two chapters where it actually gets into specifics, but I'm not an expert so I didn't want to say anything that's gonna make me look like a total dummy.
My favorite question for an art extravaganza … What film, album, or artwork best pairs with Bardo?
Shortly before I wrote Bardo, I read this book by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here. It's 100 pages and it's this breakneck speed that kicks ass and it's very simple in a way that John Wick is simple. I really adored this book. Part of what I wanted to do was write something really simple and straightforward. Once I did that, I got scared and shuffled everything up and made it confusing. Then, Lynne Ramsay adapted You Were Never Really Here into a movie with Joaquin Phoenix. I didn't really like it, but it's really artsy. She took it in this direction that’s slow-moving and brooding and focused on character. I feel like Bardo is somewhere in between the two. It's not a breakneck entertaining thrill, but I don't think it's quite as contemplative as Ramsay's movie.
At the end of Bardo, I mentioned that I wrote it while listening exclusively to “Flashlight” by The Front Bottoms. I don't know if you've done this, or if you listen to anything when you write, but I picked this one song, and it almost acted like shorthand. I’d write in the morning while listening to “Flashlight” on YouTube on my phone. When the song ended, I would replay it. Then at night, even if I was in the middle of a thought or the whole day had gone by, I could turn that song back on and it just got me right back into it.
It was great to connect with Joseph and chat about his fantastic and thought-provoking book. Check out Bardo — and check out his latest novel, Strings.