By Sophia Spears
Daniel Uncapher is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah with an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was a Nicholas Sparks fellow. A queer and disabled Mississippian, his work appears in The Sun, Georgia Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Tin House and others.
West Branch: Your essay “People Stuff” begins with the narrator saying, “I want to see how far I could go […] without the people stuff; nonsense.” Then it explores various subjects like breaking bread, contemplating the need to be violent, and articulating how human beings love to wonder. What do you define as the subject matter of “People Stuff?”
Daniel Uncapher: The concept of “people stuff” itself isn’t really the subject of the essay as much as a starting point for my own sense of awe. It comes from me trying to explain social behaviors and human interaction, especially relatively banal ones, to my dog, and coming up empty: “That’s just people stuff,” I tell him. “You don’t have to understand it.” Of course, as the essay demonstrates, I don’t really understand it either. It’s a sort of wonder for all the unique things we humans do, things that I don’t always feel a part of—things I feel left out of. So that was the background material, carrying forward this soft sense of estrangement. But the real subject, of course, is my father, and his relationship to personhood—which culminated in suicide several years ago. And so there’s sort of a little bit more nuanced relationship that both admires people stuff, and the danger of people stuff, and how people stuff affected my father. And its sort of this question: is something like suicide something people do? ls that people stuff? How do you explain that to a dog? Or is that just something my father did? Is that a human condition? Or is that just certain individuals? And how do we relate to that?
WB: “’People Stuff’ is entirely composed of quotes from past literary works. Who or what inspired you to play with this kind of writing.”
DU: I’ve always been a collage artist, cutting up magazines and books since I was a boy. Then at Notre Dame I received a fellowship funded by Nicholas Sparks designed to write something book-like. After learning more about Nicholas Sparks’ political views, however, I devoted my time to writing queer visual collage poetry, this weird, hybrid stuff that I really love, but that doesn’t lend itself to publishing. Then during the pandemic I split up with a long-term partner and thought, “Okay, I would like to write something beautiful enough to win this person’s affections back. In order to do that, I want every single sentence to be beautiful. So I’ll just go through the whole history of the English language and find all of the most beautiful sentences. Then I’ll know I’ve gotten it right.”
I did write that novel, and it sort of failed. Part of the failure was coming to understand that “beautiful sentences” aren’t necessarily where meaning coheres in a story, or where the real emotions behind a piece always lie. Meaning often hides between sentences, just like relationships with other people—it’s a process, a movement. Meaning isn’t linear, and you don’t necessarily get there by just stacking meaningful language units one on top of the other. What even is a “beautiful sentence?” Even worse, when I shared a draft with my father, he couldn’t finish it—it was too experimental, too inaccessible. “This is interesting, but it’s simply too hard to read,” he said. So I thought, “Okay, I get that, it’s a hard form. How do I make it so my dad can read it?” He died before he could finish it, which was a frustration for me; I wish I had written something he could have read, when he was still around to do it. Something fundamentally accessible, that you don’t need a PhD to appreciate.
So that’s where I am now, more interested in the movement and flow between clauses and phrases than I am the structure of specific sentences.
WB: Was the project successful? Were you able to win back your partner?
DU: Ultimately, no! That’s not how it works, anyway, of course; it was a twentieth-century fantasy of how relationships work and how art is supposed to pull on the heartstrings, all wrong. But that’s why I did it. I needed to buckle down and figure out how to write confidently, and write about love—and the way I could figure out how to do so was through other people’s words.
WB: “People Stuff,” did you formulate the voice first, and then add in sentences that match the voice? Or do you have an index, or maybe a glossary of sentences that you stitch together first and then try to find the voice? Which comes first, the sentences, the language, or the story?
DU: Sometimes I will architect a section in advance—write it out in my own words, and then try to match that up with public domain collage—but that’s actually quite rare, and goes against the motivating interest I have in this method. I much prefer to let the source material guide me, and “think it out” as I go. I often don’t quite know what I’m trying to say until I start stringing the right material together, or even several variations at once until I get to the end of the right sentence. I think this often allows a truly novel voice to come through. It’s like when The Mamas and The Papas would record—the four vocalists would harmonize and create a fifth voice, an overtone, that they called Harvey. The historical nature of the public domain contributed to the content itself as well, finding examples of “people stuff” that persist through time. Breaking bread, for example, is definitely people stuff, because biblically speaking, in ancient epics, and in the present, food and discussions of food are always present. I explored that and let that guide me, rather than, for example, write a first draft that said specifically, “these are things people do and I want to investigate them in this order.”
WB: I feel like I’m asking a magician to reveal his tricks! When you’re going through all of these different sources in the public domain, are you reading through all of the sources that you’ve referenced, or are you using “Ctrl+F” to find certain words? What is your process for finding sources, and then for picking out certain sentences? How do you find these sources, and do you read through them to find your sentences?
DU: The reality is not quite as romantic as sitting in a library for days on end reading books, I’m afraid, but that’s definitely a big part of it. You pretty much nailed it, pointing out the two polar ends of the process. On the one end, you have me sitting down and reading books start to finish, looking for sentences that move me and pulling them out, sometimes directly for a story, sometimes just to put into a big list for future use. This is how my earlier drafts were written, and they were considerably more disjointed, strange, and difficult to read. On the other end of the spectrum would be something like targeted searches, which means going through databases like Google Books or Project Gutenberg and finding specific phrases or sentences that I need. Targeted searches are less romantic, but also very fun, because that’s where algorithms come into play, introducing non-sequiturs and contradictions that otherwise might never come up. Let’s say you need a character to leave a room. You might search something like “She walked out of…” and browse the examples—1, 10, 100s—of that phrase in the public domain, and see where they go; you choose the branching paths you like based on where the texts are offering to take you. This latter process is something that you couldn’t do at any other point in history, and it’s what makes it possible to write these collages in weeks or months instead of years or decades. And part of my move towards accessibility has been embracing the “Ctrl+F” side of things, because it allows me to smooth out and naturalize my grammar in a way that organic reading simply can’t manage.
WB: One thing I really appreciated about “People Stuff” was that, if the footnotes weren’t there, it all made sense. There was still a voice that was coming through. What effect are you hoping to have on your reader, and what kind of questions do you want your reader to walk away with?
DU: Despite my struggle relating to and understanding people stuff, I still love and live in wonder of it. So that’s part of it—employing some Shklovtsky-like defamiliarization in order to refamiliarize ourselves with what’s happening around us. Maybe if this is something that is part of your life, you should enjoy it and appreciate it. And if it’s not, maybe you should try to find ways to make it part of your life. Maybe you should break bread with people. That’s not ironic, you know. It’s not cynical. Though my language can be ironic, my motives are very sincere. The essay does believe breaking bread is a meaningful experience, and encourages us to partake in people’s stuff. But then, because my father becomes more of a thread to this piece, it’s also a bit of a warning: be careful with people stuff, because it’s not clear how it always goes in the end. Especially if suicide is a part of the same continuum as breaking bread—which, I don’t know if it is, but neither exactly does “People Stuff.”
WB: What writers have been influential for your work? You said that you’re a collage artist. So, why writing?
DU: It’s definitely going be a lot of other writers, of course. And a lot of them aren’t necessarily writers that I am sourcing in my own collage, or even collagists themselves. But they’re writers who I admire and emulate. Ishmael Reed, Victor LaValle, Thalia Field. Stuff that it’s hard to read without wanting to jump and start writing yourself. It’s also a way for me to understand both myself and other people better, working out our collective mysteries in the same way I talk through them to my dog on our walks. And while writing is definitely work, I am trying to think of it more as a form of play—play with language, play with stories, play with audiences. This is very much true of collage, where you become a treasure-hunter, an explorer, a child all at once, digging in the shelves for something exciting and then mixing it all up again.
WB: I love how you keep talking about your dog, and going out into the world.
DU: I’m very much that kind of writer right now—in my apartment writing and walking my dog all day. Very by-the-book.
WB: What kind of things do you enjoy reading? Is there a particular genre or form you are drawn to?
DU: On the one hand, between the public domain and my own PhD program, I’ve been reading a lot of historical material: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, etc. But it’s hard not to read anything in the public domain without trying to steal sentences from it (especially when it comes to Mary Shelley and George Eliot!). So on the other hand, I’ve been reading a lot more contemporary material and stay in touch with the broader marketplace. And at this point that means keeping up with my friends’ and colleagues’ work, like Joseph Earl Thomas, Alyssa Quinn, Lindsey Drager, Diana Clarke, and Lindsey Webb, who all have recent books out!
WB: Before we close, would you like to share anything more about your writing process?
DU: I wanted to mention your name!
When you are trying to collage a story, you need certain things to stay constant, at least you do for accessibility and legibility. Like names, right? So nomenclature becomes pretty important. Some (most) names are difficult to use because they hardly appear in the canon, while others, like “John” and “Mary,” are very easy. Sophia is a relatively easy name, especially because it has variants: if you have Sophia, you also had Sophie. You can use those two interchangeably without confusing your reader. You also have Sophia, as in Latin for “wisdom.” Then, from that, you have references to the Hagia Sophia. So Sophia is a name I often come back to—in fact, it’s the name of the character in my novel!
But that made me think about how the time I spend doing this, the more time I spend tracking down individual names and ideas—a Sophia to open a door, a Sophia to laugh, etc. The writer becomes a sort of detective, searching for something that takes on an identity of its own, a singular Sophia lurking in the English canon. You get a sense that there’s really someone out there, real people, real characters moving like ghosts through thousands of years of literature. You get a sense that there is someone out there, there are these people, these characters moving through the whole 2,000 years of English Canon. And that’s been almost one of the more mysterious phenomena to me. You hear writers talk about how they didn’t write a character and the character wrote themselves, right? That happens her, and these names become a kind of character based on the patterns of behavior throughout centuries of experience.
WB: It makes me think of the movie Wreck-It Ralph. In this case, I think of this character, for example Sophia, and how they’ve traveled throughout the entire English canon. It makes it feel like this character actually exists and they’ve just been playing around within these different people’s minds, and then Sophia comes up on a page!
DU: That’s it exactly! You can search for traces and presences of any concept (like fatherhood) or person (like individual fathers) through a text, or through all texts. Sophia is an easy name. You can get away with it in a short piece like “People Stuff” —you can drop a name or two and move on. But when you’re having to actually tell a story you get some pretty pragmatic naming difficulties. Daniel is an easy name, although I don’t actually use it that much. I’ve used the name Drag before—I like names that are also nouns, because it gives you that much more optionality!
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.