STORY BEHIND THE STORY
EP. 38: ISAAC FELLMAN "DEAD COLLECTIONS"


Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is Isaac Fellman. Isaac’s debut novel, The Breath of the Sun, won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. We’re talking today about his second novel, Dead Collections, which was published by Penguin Random House earlier this year. It follows Sol, who works – like Isaac – as an archivist at a queer historical society in San Francisco, and who – presumably unlike Isaac – is also a vampire. It’s a delightful story about love, grief, and the ways we hide our truest selves from the world to fit in.
Isaac Fellman, welcome to Story Behind the Story. 

Isaac Fellman (IF): Thank you so much for having me.

(CSA): Well, I'm really excited to have you here. I read this book — I guess it's been a couple months now, and just fell in love with it right away. I interviewed Calvin Kasulke earlier in the year and he gave me a big list of recommendations, and this is the first one that I picked up — which is a real testament to his taste! I wanted to start by just asking you a bit about the name of the book, Dead Collections. Where does it come from and what does it evoke for you?

(IF): The book, as with so many books does not have its original working title, which was The Donor. I love puns which is unfortunately the reason... Well, I don't know. I'm happy being an archivist. One of the many reasons I'm no longer a freelance copywriter is that I can never get people on board with my puns. Dead Collections is something that my agent came up with. I didn't really want the book to have archives in the title because I feel like it's a small thing, but archives has become a fantasy word. People tend to expect the archives to be supernatural in a way that the archives in this book are not supernatural. Even the archives in this book are totally supernatural. I wanted something that would evoke maybe something a little bit more present day and more recent, similar to the archival collections that I've typically worked with which are no more than 50 years old, I want to say. 

(CSA): I think a big part of this book is, of course, that it centers around a reluctant vampire and I think the vast majority of the vampires in this book have a kind of reluctance to them. But when we think about vampires, it's similar, right? There's this fantasy trope of vampires — like Dracula or Lestat or the Cullens — who are old money, with all the class trappings they're in; And the vampires in your book are much more working class. They struggle with things like finding work and housing and other survival basics, and integrating into society is a pipe dream for them. So I'm interested why you took that approach, and what was interesting to you about that other side, that other potential way of viewing vampires?

(IF): I am always just interested in inconvenience; I was also... Someone was interviewing me via email the other day and it made me think a lot; One of the questions that they asked about embarrassment — I'm also really interested in embarrassment as a writer. Because a moment when we blush with embarrassment is a moment when we feel something new or something we're not used to, or something we wont let ourselves get used to, that we won't let ourselves think about. I'm just always going to go for the most embarrassing thing as a writer. Not like humiliating thing, not like a cringy thing that's going to make my audience just go, 'oh, Christ!' — because that's not the guy that I am either. But I sort of see embarrassment and the struggle to get through the world, and through a world that doesn't accommodate you as two sides of the same thing because they are both just about struggling to learn to live with discomfort. I will not say that I will never write a book about wealthy people; Some of the characters in the manuscript that I'm writing right now are doing quite well, and it ends up being about an interclass romance. It's a 'C' story, so you've got to have one of those. (Clara chuckles) But I mean, it also has to do with the fact that it's important to me to write about disability and to see disability as a normal experience that anyone can have, and a lot of people do have who don't expect it. So again, it's that struggle to get your way through a life and through a world that does not put your needs first, and that has rendered you in many ways more disabled than you need to be through not accommodating your needs and caring. That's what was on my mind when I was thinking about how to play Sol in terms of class.

(CSA): I liked a couple things that you said in that, and one thing I want to dig into more is this understanding of disability as an experience that anyone can have. You know that my dad recently died because we talked about it in terms of rescheduling. He died of a disease called multiple system madrophy which essentially... Your various autonomic systems in your body shut down one by one, and so it is a disease that's very disabling. And for him as somebody who had been able-bodied his entire life until the last 7 years, was very much a surprise. And so I think for me, too, witnessing that, I think we all went from the situation where the world was basically accommodating us and accommodating him, to seeing all of the ways — one by one — the world doesn't accommodate people with disability, or with anything that doesn't quite fit the standard issue mold. I mean, I think that's really interesting and I'm curious where that comes from for you?

(IF): I'm never sure if I identified as a disabled person. I have OCD, I have mental illness... I still basically feel like the world is designed for me. Sometimes I find the world really uncomfortable and difficult, but when I have needed to seek help for my OCD, I've basically managed to receive it. And generally, I think that people understand the need for mental health care, at least in that it's something that work needs to give you time to do and that they know not to ask about. But at the same time, I've always been close to people who are in the disability community and who do academic disability studies. Once these thoughts start going into your brain, once the first person tells you the 101 truism to disability studies: It is society — not the body — that makes the person disabled. You shouldn't assume that disabled people don't fuck and don't have experiences if they want to have them. Other people do. You shouldn't assume that... Don't assume anything about a person because of a detail of their body that you can observe, or about what you think is a detail about their personality that seems to expose something about them. Everybody deserves privacy. These are really based tenants of being a nice person, but I needed to be told them because we're not educated about disability when we are young, I don't think, unless we experience it ourselves. It seemed a very natural way to think about Sol as a person who is a vampire. It seemed more natural than not to think about it in terms of chronic illness, and the grind of inconvenience. The fact that he doesn't really have a home; He lives at work which creates its own set of problems that are ultimately very disastrous for him, because in the summer time he would have to just get up at 2 in the morning and go to work, and be afraid all the time while he's traveling to work. He can only be outside in the dark. It also makes him very suited to be an archivist because archives usually have a lack of natural light, so it is a stroke (in some ways) of good fortune that he already had this existing job where he would never be expected to go outside. Because archival documents and other materials have really similar needs to vampires. They can either be exposed to very much fun or very much light. They're very fragile. It gives him a natural sympathy for the work of archiving and the materials under his care because he has a lot of the same things to be afraid of. I know that this has been kind of a rambling answer —

(CSA): (with a chuckle) It's okay!

(IF): — but it was... the things just all came together. These are all things that I'm interested in and always thinking about. 

(CSA): I hear that coming together, too — that interest in inconvenience. I also have OCD and I feel like one of the things that we learn in trying to manage OCD is that the way you do it is by going toward things that are really uncomfortable and scary, and sometimes make you feel like a horrible person. You just have to veer in the direction of those things, and so I feel like I innately understand why you would be interested in inconvenience and embarrassment — because that's so much part of the makeup. But it also is (like you said) it's intertwined with that experience of disability. Disability is constantly inconvenient because the world makes it inconvenient; it's set up for the convenience of everybody except for you, and it creates that class dichotomy, almost.

(IF): Yeah, it's interesting to think about OCD in relationship — yes, it's a class thing, but OCD in relationship to lack of accommodation because as you were saying, the thing that you're supposed to do for OCD is not accommodat it — and it's just sometimes very hard. You're supposed to deliberately think thoughts that make you uncomfortable. You're supposed to delibrately do actions that make you uncomfortable. It's a funny thing. I was a suicide hotline volunteer for a long time, and my first day I had mentioned that I had OCD during training and someone made a point of giving me materials to sterilize my desk before I sat down for my first shift. And I remember sort of politely going, 'Oh sure, thank you. I will sterilize my desk.' While also thinking, number one — I'm not that much of a sterilization guy. That is not really my brand of OCD. And also, this is maybe the one thing in the world that I don't want you to accommodate because it will not be good for my mental health. I need constant exposure. It's just all about asking what somebody needs while not making them constantly explain their condition to you in all of it's excruciating detail. 

(CSA): I think iit frequently comes from a place of a very good intent, right? Like, trying not to embarrass you or trying not to put you up against something that might cause you to freak out. And I get that, but please don't do that for me. (She says with a laugh)

(IF): Yeah.

(CSA): I think what that leads into for me is that there is a Hannah Arendt "Banality of evil"? She was writing about the Nuremberg trials, and she was writing about how there were essentially all these bureaucrats within the Nazis who carried out these sort of individual pieces of things that killed millions of Jews that were responsible for genocide and for some of the biggest horrors that we know of in our history. And I got that sense from a lot of what Sol faces in this book, that there's all these supernatural elements in [unintelligible] collections, but the big bad isn't a vampire slayer or an evil wizard — It's HR and medical medical bureaucracy. What can you tell me about that? 

(IF): This is one of the many examples of feeling like I am basically a person that the world was set up for. Certainly I am a trans person but I am in various positions of privilege. I have actually had routinely good experiences with HR; When I came out on the job at the California Historical Society I asked HR to send out a nice neutral email to the rest of the staff announcing my new name and pronouns so I didn't need to tell everybody and people I didn't know, and they sent an email that was more suitable for announcing the birth of baby boy.  [Clara laughs] They were so excited, I think, getting to use this aspect of their training. But I do also think a lot about how things can go so wrong at work, and when they do you are stuck there. You are trapped there and it is very hard to work your way out of the reality that has been imposed upon you if HR does not mean you well. And it was also very easy for me to put my mind in the mind of the HR person in this book, who I've really tried to make sympathetic. I think that she just is there to protect the company, and as they always say that is what HR is for. And once she finds out that Sol is living at work, he can't live at work anymore; And when there is a conflict between two employees, one of whom is a trans person and another whom is a cis person who is being transphobic to him but in ways that don't necessarily read from the outside because a lot of them are based in in describing her own experience as a person who has thought about her gender and decided that she's not trans — but who has prescribed that experience Sol in a way that really invalidates him and makes him feel guilty and responsible for the fact that there are people who aren't trans in the world who are made uncomfortable by his presence. I can see how, from the outside, if you're not familiar with how this kind of story goes, you really would look at it and say, 'Well you know: they said / they said. It's ambiguous and I need to negotiate between these two.' Whereas in fact it is something where Sol is human and he's valuable and he makes mistakes, and he definitely does not conduct himself (especially while at work) he is not (I would say) a great employee, but also — this conflict is between a person who is of a protected class that the other person doesn't share. It's a rough situation and I think that from the outside it looks more ambiguous than it looks from the inside, between these two. They are largely, in fact, left to themselves to deal with all of the things that are difficult between them in a way that it would actually be really helpful if someone could help mediate.

(CSA): Yeah, and I think that brings home how much this problem which is systemic in a lot of ways, which has structural roots, gets individualized. It gets boiled down to interpersonal conflict rather than being seen in that broader context. And I think another thing which that situation brings up is that as a vampire, as you said, Sol can't be exposed to light. You mentioned him having to get up at 2 a.m. during parts of the year to commute in to work, and that's not tenable. And so I think this is an experience that a lot of people in the disability community have, which is there's accommodation until you run up against something where the accommodation is genuinely inconvenient to the workplace — or not even to workplaces but to restaurants, or to any of the other public places that we spend our time in.

(IF): Right. Everyone would love to help until it costs money.

(CSA): Yeah, until it cost money or until it would slow things down, or until it means you can't proceed along the path that you've always proceeded along uninterrupted. 

(IF): Yeah.

(CSA): I was also interested — I mean, fandom plays a pretty significant role in Dead Collections, though it's worth noting that neither Sol nor Elsie (who is his love interest and archival benefactor — the donor of the original title) — Neither of them is actively engaged in fandom in the novel's present day. You've said elsewhere that fandom serves is both a way to imagine things that feel impossible like transition, and a way to avoid them or create distance between those things and ourselves. Could you expand on that? 

(IF): Sure. I suppose the thing is that there's no universal experience of fandom. There is only one's own experience of fandom. There are certainly tropes that come and go in experiences of fandom good and bad, ambiguous, neutral. My own history, I definitely know that I have served some time imagining the stories of queer men; I have definitely used that to examine it — and at the same time simultaneously not examine — my own experiences, my own desires, my own feelings about my gender. I transitioned when I was 36 and I did so fairly soon after deciding that I was going to transition, and that I wanted to. I went through therapy for a while, but so much of my therapy for trans stuff was about my therapist patiently getting me to admit — in a completely consensual way, right? — to very obvious thing that I was not talking about that I was talking around, that I was avoiding thinking about for many, many years. You know, it's a funny thing: I wrote this book at maybe the most anti-fandom phase of my life because I have been out as a trans person for about a year; I saw very clearly some of the ways that I had used my relationship with fandom to put off thinking about this, and to live it in fantasy rather than in reality. And I also... I'd had some rough experiences in fandom. I think that it has changed quite a bit recently. There used to be such an intense secrecy within fandom. Such an intense anxiety about anybody outside the fandom knowing that you participate in this. Many people still feel this way. I don't; I am back in fandom. I continue to participate in it —

(CSA): Welcome!

(IF): Yeah, thanks! It's been great! I have found a small famil fandom that has a lot of wide-ranging intellectual interests that branch off of it, and I have chosen to basically be out to everybody there about exactly who I am in real life. It's kind of been the only way to make fandom not intensely crazy-making for me, because I don't want to be worrying about that secret and I don't want that secret to make me prey to bad actors — because we all share a secret, and that's just a great way to introduce bad actors into one's life. So, I'm very curious about the relationships that my characters will have with fandom after the book is over: Will they come back to it the way that I did? Both of them are kind of out of it for different reasons. I think Sol for very similar reasons that I was out of it, and Elsie because they met and married the creator of the show that they were obsessed with, which was immensely destructive for their life and development. Even though the marriage wasn't overtly abusive, it wasn't overtly quote-unquote "bad" — It was just deeply wrong for both people involved. I's hard to think about going back to a simple experience with fandom and a joyous experience with it after that, but we'll see. They both got a lot of life to live. They're only 40-somethinhg. Sol could live for another few years or he could live another 100 years; It's unclear what his ultimate fate will be. A lot of it depends on how he can negotiate the fragility of being vampire, which is obviously quite dangerous.


:::AD BREAK:::


(CSA): If you’re just joining me, my guest today is author and archivist Isaac Fellman, whose novel Dead Collections follows a transmasculine archivist who also happens to be a vampire.

On a slightly different tack, the last few years have unleashed quite a few books, both fiction and nonfiction, involving queer awakeningings in the archives. So the other big example that springs to my mind is Jen Chaplain's, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers — I don't know if you've read that, but it's about her experience at an archive discovering all these letters from Carson McCullers and realizing that she was in fact gay, and then realizing — Jen Chaplain realizing — that SHE was in fact gay. But you're an archivist; What is it about the archives that makes them such fruitful settings for this kind of self-discovery in your opinion?

(IF): A couple of things come to mind, because — it's okay that you said this in the intro, it's fine, but the archives where Sol works is not actually queer focused in the same way that mine is queer focused. I work at a rare historical society; Sol just works at a generic archives in San Francisco that inevitably has a lot of queer stuff in it. I think that it's important to mention that that is part of his experience, because it means that finding queerness in the archives is going to itself be a discovery for him in a way that it's not at my work where it is the the background sound — I don't want to say this static, it's a much more beautiful sound — but still, the music that he can no longer hear — or that I can no longer hear, rather, because it's just been playing for so long. He gets to have the experience of realizing like, 'oh, oh my God! Herald, they're lesbians!' or what have you. I think that's how — and, I'm not a very old person, but I'm not sure who Harold as a writer [unintelligible] but I know of the name. But even if you do expect to find queerness in the archives, they are a wonderful place for queer self-discovery because you will find your experience awareness reflected in unexpected ways. I have definitely had moments as an archivist where I'll just talk about Lou Sullivan, why not? My experience with Lou Sullivan's diaries — He was a gay and trans diarist and writer and historian. I like to mention that he was an amateur historian. I have had other people complain to me about that because they feel that I am pointing out that he doesn't have bonafides; For me, what interests me about Lou as an amateur is precisely that he doesn't have bona fides! That he was doing queer history outside of the academy at a time when the academy was very unforgiving to people wanting to do queer history, and when you had this difficult choice of whether to do it with no funding, with no support, and with no expectation of credibility as a historian, or attempting to break into the academy the way, for example, Susan Stryker was doing. He chose to do it from the outside for a variety of reasons — Not all of which, I must say, were choices. By the time he became that historian, he was already ill with AIDS which would kill him at the age of 39. He had already gone through the period of one's life when it might be reasonable to go back to school, even if you were not ill. So Lous experience... My experience with working with Lou's materials at the GLBT Historical Society is often one of alienation indifference. It is very often recognizing like, Wow — They gave you a huge shot of testosterone at the time. Your experiences with and desires for medical transition are informed by a different culture of medical transition than we have today. Your your experiences as a gay trans man are really different from mine as like a complexly bisexual trans man. And certainly trying to break down medical boundaries to people who really strongly identify it as gay transitioning — Those were different to mine, but none the less, the ways that he had these experiences with doing community orgasming — [he chuckles as he repeats to himself] community orgasming [he and Clara laugh] — Although he did most of that too, god bless. [Recollecting himself—] Community organizing among trans people. You can read the newsletter of the organization that he founded: FT [unintelligible], now known as [unintelligible], and find all of the cultural conflicts that you still find among trans people, where people who aren't interested in doing some medical stuff, and people who are interested in those things are in conflict and feel invalidated by each other. You see people sharing memes. My favorite is always that there's a fish, It's a tropical fish. It's the colors of the trans flag. It naturally changes... it's sexual equipment changes and evolves over its life. I still see this fish exchanged as a trans meme, and people are talking about it in these trans newsletters from the '80s. So the thing about discovering yourself in archives as a queer person — it's in the little stuff. It's in, 'Oh God, every generation rediscovers that damn fish! [Clara laughs] Every generation fights about the same stuff. What we have called our desires changes, the way the expected course that those desires take definitely changes, so many things change! But the recognition that we feel in nature and in each other — that is a-historical. I would really go so far as to say so much of that stuff. You know, you read The Diaries of Ann Lister, and she's talking about recognizable lesbian drama in the era of Jane Austen. It is like an L Word chart in those diaries.

(CSA): Yeah, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Something like that?

(IF): Yeah, absolutely! It's all [unintelligible]. So I think that the archives, because they are focused on the petty details of people's lives far more than they are focused on the lives of the Rich and Famous — they definitely are disproportionately represented in archives. I will say the more marginalized you get, the less likely you are to show up in the archival record. That is a complicated and ambiguous thing. Sorry, not to go on for too long but I've been thinking a lot about the historian Jules Gil-Peterson, and her recent assertion that sometimes, when trans people don't show up in archives, it is a triumph because it means that those people have evaded systems of medical and legal control. So, sometimes not being in the archives means a lot of different things. 

(CSA): That makes me think of Carmen Maria Machado's discussion of queer archival silence in In the Dream Hosue — her memoir.

(IF): Oh yeah, yeah. God I wish I remembered that better because I know that she made some really thoughtful points about it. 

(CSA): Yeah, I mean I also... It's been a few years since I read it, but my memory is that a lot of it was about the sort of absence of discussions of domestic violence in queer circles, and that silence being related to the desire to fit in and to assimilate. You know, sneak under the radar of society. But yeah, I mean I think that's all really interesting. And I mean, pretty clearly working as an archivist has had an impact on your fiction — you're writing about the archives invery thoughtful ways and in ways that, like... I think one of the things I am most impressed about in Dead Collections is how you have all of these different threads of talking about archives, talking about fandom, talking about vampirism, and they all sort of weave together these same stories about getting closer to something and distancing yourself from it at that same time; That cycle of distancing and closeness. But I'm curious, too, how writing fiction and particularly fiction about archives has influenced the way that you think about archival work. 

(IF): It's interesting, yeah. People don't tend to ask me how it goes the other way. I think that it has made me aware of the extent to which archival work is about storytelling, and it has made me a little bit more careful about the stories that I tell. Sol at one point in this book writes a Finding Aid, which is a standard format archival document that's sort of an essay style catalog entry. It has multi-paragraph brief essays about who a person was, or an organization was, and what they did, and what you find in this collection to define and sum up what that work was and what has made its way into the archival record — both accidentally and deliberately. I think a lot about the Finding Aid as short story or even as a poem. It really is a form of storytelling. It's a way for the archivist to tell the researcher who might be trying to figure out whether they want to take a trip of thousands of miles, whether they want to take an international trip to come and see something; You are telling them why you think this is interesting, and what you think that it might have to offer their research. The tricky thing about it, also, is that archives have so many paths through them. They are not linear. They are very much a choose your own adventure. They are very much a pack of tarot cards. You can... Even the order in which you experience a collection profoundly influences what you perceive that collection to be about. So archivists have a lot of power that we need to admit that we have to determine these stories that historians will tell even before the historians get into the room. I think that writing fiction is very freeing way to interact with archives because it's a way to say — without that professional hat on — 'Here is what I think a story is about.' The manuscript that I'm writing now is centered on some historical letters that I reproduce in full in the book (because that's the kind of nerd that I am) [Clara laughs] and they are very much also about by narrator's experience reading the letters and thinking about what they mean. Since the letters are made up, and he is made up, I get to decide the meaning of that archive in every detail — and that's really satisfying because writing fiction has reminded me that that is something that BY NO MEANS should I do professionally [He says through a laugh as Clara joins him]  Archivists are always sort of struggling between definitely not mistaking ourselves for objective people, but also definitely not taking a really strong stance about what makes something interesting and what it's about in ways that introduce all of our terrible biases. So... yeah. In conclusion: archives are a puzzle that you cannot solve because it is impossible to hold those things in tension permanently. But definitely being a writer has made me far more aware of that tension and given me some helpful thoughts on how I personally answer those questions.

(CSA): Well, that seems like a good place for us to pause our discussion and have you read a little bit from your book. 

(IF): Sure!

(CSA): Before you do, could you just set up for us what we're going to hear? 

(IF): Yes, I decided I like the beginning of this book a lot, and I have done it before at readings, and for some reason my agent and my editor and the general public have all allowed me to begin this book with a commentary on what archives mean as it relates to the body and since I was allowed to do that. I am going to continue doing it at every possible occasion. 

(CSA): Well and I think this is very well timed, given we were just talking about the archives for 10 minutes!

(IF): So, yeah; This is just the beginning. 

[He begins to read]

When I was training to become an archivist, my mentor told me: A thing is just a slow event. The line wasn't hers, but it struck me with the needle prick of originality. A slow event. A person is that, too, and if at 70 or 80 years old, it's very complex. Hundreds of systems. Iron and nitrogen and oxygen, blood flowing into blood. The story is a mystery of sorts, although most mysteries begin with a dead body. That's a thing whose event is nearly done, within flash climaxes soon to come. The dead body is always pretty rude. It comes into your life and reminds you of the joke at the end. It ruins your appetite, ruins your day. There are no dead bodies in archives, except maybe for mine. Sometimes there are ashes and a few times bones, and there's often quite a lot of hair. But in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body. The shock outline of a life crowded all around with papers and artifacts and ephemera, but with a terribly small hollowness within. You can almost taste the closeness of the body sometimes, almost feel the glossy heat of it — but never quite. It's cold in the archives and there's nobody there. I belong in the archives. I am cold too. 

As my day began, I was soaking my hands in hot water until they got warm enough for me to shake someone else's. I jammed one and then the other into my styrofoam cup, and with the hand that wasn't soaking, I kept trying and failing to get my phone to acknowledge my fingerprint; When it's warm enough for the button to work, that's how I know it's warm enough for a handshake. Plus, I wanted to read my phone. 

I didn't see myself as being in the closet about my illness — my vampirism — but I only ever told my boss and HR. As for telling visitors, that felt too private to explain, especially early in the morning in a room where the guests aren't even allowed coffee. So I give them a mock-up of life, immersing my hands in the water until they took on it's warmth like rubber does, and putting on gloves when I handed photographs in front of visitors. Although my fingers make no prints. My coworkers also didn't know that I lived down here, and for that matter, neither did HR. There was a couch in my office where I would sometimes lie down for what passes for my sleep. There was a vivid network of bars, all night coffee shops, and wet sugary streets [unintelligible] greedy sips of fresh air at night. I do drink, you see, and I do breathe. And I can eat if I want, but only the strongest foods make any impression on my burned out of taste buds. And of course none of them nourish me. They tend to be the preserved foods: strong kimchi, pungent cheese, ultra sweet jams and jellies. I'm all about preservation. I never meant to become such a walking stereotype, but I love my work. 

Someday, I will write all this down. For now. I prefer it in my head, where it's mutable and fresh as clay. I prefer to remember the story between one bright moment to the next of an increasingly crowded life. It's not an old story yet, and I'm still figuring out what it means. 

I used to be an archivist at the historical society of Northern California. The society is in the basement of a building on Market Street — A basement whose generous toilet was always on the edge overflowing, and which had mice but not rats. The rooms were really designed to be store rooms. I had an office, by virtue of my seniority which was just off the main work room and 50 ft from the vault. The director's office was next door. She was off on maternity leave, so I was in charge. The carpet was thinly striped and maroon and beige, and clotted with dust and crud and rusty staples. The walls between the offices and the vault didn't have any tops to them. You could bung a penny or a plastic clip right over them — and I have, late at night after everyone's gone home. 

Everyday I felt the city's palpable weight. There was a 10-story building above us sealing the daylight out like a stamp, but it felt sometimes like 50 stories — 100 stories! I would come out at night almost dazed that the city was so small. In my mind it all grew to monstrous height above me, rootless and dazzling. The elevator dinged outside the archives door. Normally at that point you heard an anxious huff, the sound of somebody turning our gritty steel door knob, unsure whether the archives can even be in here — in this vinegar smelling hallway like a conduit for acid; Like a long abandoned part of the body. Elsie treated it with confidence, like staff, but when she was inside, her hands were hesitant, and she looked around the same way most people do at first: Slow and wondering, with more up in the look than usual. Our ceiling is low, but people always do look up as if they're worried about the weight of the city, too. 
It's hard to remember my first impressions of Elsie who has become so familiar to me that those memories are all worn away like stones in a watery cave. First impressions are strange things. I believe in them the way I believe in fortune telling; What then, did she portend?

[He finishes reading]

(CSA): Thank you for reading that.

(IF): You are very welcome. 

(CSA): I think I told you it had been about a month since I read through this all the way, and revisiting the beginning was interesting to me because it reminded me... I think your mentor must have been a linguist! That's my professional, my academic background, and I think "It is a low event"—

[overlapping]
(IF): [unintelligible]

(CSA): That is just the definition — just the semantic definition of a thing.

(IF): No, this is one that... the archivist who (and not the who you taught me to be an archivist)... But it is something that my boss has said that her mentor, who was a public historian, told her. So who knows what what chain of different specialties led from a slow event to me, but it's mine now. I stole it.

(CSA): Well, it's a great line. Congratulations on on your theft! 

(IF): Hell yeah! 

(CSA): I really like the way... There's a of things this opening does — obviously your love of puns is on full display: "I never meant to become such a walking stereotype but I love my work," "Preservation of food and of items and of the self."

(IF): Wah-wah.

(CSA): I think it also really does set the scene well for what with the archives looks and feels like, and how it might be different to somebody who is not just working there but living there, versus somebody who is just coming in for the first time. What's your experience of that: when you when you encounter people bringing in work to the archives for the first time, in your real life?

(IF): It's very interesting, because I am a reference librarian basicall; In addition to various other archival duties, I am the person who manages the reading room. And when visitors come to do research in the archive — who are all referred to generically as "researchers". No matter what they're researching for or if they have a project or if they don't have a project, I always try to let people know that you don't need to have a project to come in there. You just need to want to look at cool, old stuff. [Clara chuckles] I think that people generally are very apprehensive. Whether they are very familiar with archives and archival research, they will still be uncertain what our policies are like, what my personality is going to be; Because the archivist in charge of the reading room, their personality really sets the tone, and I can see how if theirs doesn't mesh well with yours — even if you are great people with wonderful personalities — It can still end up being an uncomfortable few days, because they are sitting there watching you do your work while doing their own work. Every time somebody comes into the archive, a collaboration begins. The same thing is very much true when people come into do donations (which is not primarily my job, but it is a thing that I do as well). Sometimes people are also just apprehensive because they have never worked in archives before, because they don't know what to expect. Often they expect to be gatekept quite forcefully in various ways. We try very hard not to do that, although there are some limitations on what we can and can't allow people to do. We do worry a lot about people bringing bags in, in case they steal something (which unfortunately does happen and has happened). We worry about people bringing liquids into the archives because it's very easy to (of course) destroy paper that way. So your goal as in archivist is to welcome people in while making it clear that this is a place that almost has a different physics from other places. It is a place where some things that are totally normal, like having a water bottle, are suddenly not acceptable; And by the same token, where some things that usually are, you know... I think crying is very normal, but most of the time people don't do it in public spaces — but in archives, often the emotional experience of being there is so overwhelming that people do begin to cry. It's a place where different things are normal and different things are expected from anywhere else in the outside world; and until people are oriented and they know what direction the gravity goes in, they they just are all a little bit frazzled. I often am also sometimes a little bit frazzled because that's just what my personality is like. So we find a compromise of frazzle-ment and begin to work together.

(CSA): [chuckling] That's a Good match.

(IF): Yeah.


:::AD BREAK:::


(CSA): If you’re just joining me, my guest today is author and archivist Isaac Fellman, whose novel Dead Collections follows a transmasculine archivist who also happens to be a vampire.

One thing people might not expect from the way we've talked about this book so far and from that early description is that it is, uh. It's a really sexy book. There's a lot of sex in it, and it's hot sex — most of it. Some of it's a little... There's a scene in a film projection room... ?

(IF): ...which, yah, speaking of OCD exposure therapy

(CSA): Which is —

(IF) The characters being in that dirty room just makes me break out in hives. 

(CSA): Yeah, but it is generally: it's a pretty sexy novel, which has all the trappings of horror in these supernatural elements and that it's a bit dystopian (though it's, as we've discussed, dystopian and fairly mundane ways), but a lot of it is about Sol and Elsie finding each other and falling in love. How do you balance those elements of horror and of romance and leave them together in a way that feels organic?

(IF): Oh, it's just because they're both incredibly anxiety making. Again, horror and romance were just a very natural pairing for me because Sol (like me) is... All novels predict the future because they describe undercurrents in the author's life that they may not be aware of, or they would write a personal essay instead. Although I was not in love at the time that I wrote this book, I definitely recognized that there were things about falling in love as a trans person, which I very specifically hadn't done yet, that were going to happen for the first time and that were, for that reason, going to make me intensely anxious and nervous. And that probably I was going to fall in love with another trans person who had their own anxieties about some things that we've had to experience for the first time later in life, because as trans people we didn't go through some of the standard rights of passage of sex and romance. All of which has totally happened. By the same token that love is anxiety making, I think that in the book also horror is kind of friendly. The horror in the book besides coming from HR and besides coming from one's difficult co-workers is also simply coming from a ghost who wants their life to be described in a way that they can understand and comprehend. When the ghost, when they were a living person (I've got a lot of feelings about this) [Clara laughs]. There are lots of people in this book who are struggling with whether they're trans or not, and I think that the dead person whose archival collection comes in and which precipitates the entire story, and who becomes the ghost that needs help and who was also the spouse of of Elsie. I think this was a person who absolutely was a trans man and died without ever letting themselves think about it. They took 'She' pronouns while they were alive, they probably would have taken 'He' pronouns if they transitioned. The 'They' pronoun is very mutable and it can express lots of different kinds of respect. It's kind of what I tend to devolve upon in talking about what Tracy needs after they are dead, which is to sort of have the unrealized aspects of their life seen and understood; And Sol is in a great position to see that because there are many aspects of his life that took a long time to become resolved, and that resolve (wah-wah), again, and in some ways are not yet resolved. Again, that collaboration between a living person and a dead perso: One of the many collaborations that happens at archives too.

(CSA): We talked earlier about that tension between getting closer to things that you're afraid of and pushing them away, and one of the things that I find interesting in this book is the relationship between — or, the way that narrativizing things through the archive embodies both sides of that tension. It is simultaneously allowing you to get closer to something and to push it away. And in the context of, you know, we talked about both having OCD as well, right? A lot of the things that we work with in OCD is not narrativeizing our thoughts, or narrativizing them differently. 

(IF): RIght.

(CSA): And of course, writing a novel is creating a narrative, so I'm curious if writing a novel that explores these themes about the way that narrative itself can create both this push and pull (take us closer and further away) has changed the way that you've thought about the role narrative plays in stories and in your own life?

(IF): I think that the main thing that I have learned about narrative from writing this book in particular, and from thinking about things that are in tension within it, is the tension between things that are in the narrative and the things that evade it. I think a lot about (I'm absolutely spoiling the end of this book; I believe that many things are better if you spoil them): Sol is able to exercise The Ghost and set the spirit to rest by processing the collection, which means cataloging it, putting it in an order, and writing about it. And one of the things that he does is write a note about Tracy's career (That's the person whose collection it was) that just really eliminates all references to pronouns and gender, because he doesn't know. He recognizes that something is unrealized. He has a pretty good sense of what it probably was. He has an understanding of what might have caused this person's pain, but... And also so much of the book is just about him becoming a little bit less self-absorbed because he is coming out of a period of intense grief that has made self-absorption something that he needs to do to keep going, and now he's doing a little bit better and he can pay more attention to other people's needs again. And so part of paying attention to other people's needs is recognizing that sometimes you don't know what they are, unless you ask. And when a person is gone, you simply cannot ask. So that's the thing about archives; I think about them in terms of positive space. I think about them in terms of what they can teach us, what they DO have. I feel like I don't think enough still, but this book has taught me to think more about the many... the almost inconceivable things the archives cannot tell us, that we cannot learn even from looking at the subtext in archives, or looking at what we think is their negative space — because the whole point of negative space is (at least in a context like this) that you don't even know what its scale is. It's impossible to determine its scale. It's like thinking about the scale of things in the Arctic or on the moon. Is it a humble brag if you brag about something making you more humble? That's not really what it is but I feel like I've achieved an inception of humble bragging here. [Clara laughing] It's just everything that you write makes you more aware of what you can do, and also more aware of what you can't do. It just changes the ratio. That's one of the things that fascinates me about getting to be in the immensely lucky position of experiencing the career of an artist, which is that the ratio is just changing throughout your life in ways that you cannot control, and you are continually chasing after an understanding of what you are trying to do and of your abilities and what you can't do — that continually eludes you because it's always changing. It's also a thing about doing literally anything, about pursuing any kind of career or pursuit. Every book that you write just makes you feel a little bit more insane. [Clara chuckles] There's talking about mental illness and there's talking about like quote-unquote "feeling insane," which is a very different thing from experiencing mental illness — although sometimes there's overlap. Definitely they are both major parts of my life. Thanks to collections for making me ever more baffled.

(CSA): Well, I think on the note of everything you write makes you feel a little bit more insane, now's a good time to ask: What are you working on now? 

(IF): I've got a couple of things in the hopper. I have a book on submission right now that is a family saga about an adoptive and chosen trans family, and surviving history, basically. Living in times of doubt and revolution as a trans person. The book that I am writing right now is about polar exploration, which is has been like my special little obsession for a few years. It came out of (I'm going to have to start admitting this because that they're going to ask me what the book is about when I eventually sell it): During quarantine I got really obsessed with the show The Terror, which is about the Franklin expedition (the doomed polar expedition), and what happened is that I got into the fandom for this thing, but then — then! I got into the history and I was like oh shit! I've got to write a revisionist book that's revisionist in a different way from this thing that I also love. There is room for so much revisionism that {unintelligible] through the Franklin expedition. There's room for so much revisionism in this baby! [Clara laughs] And so I am writing a self-consciously gay and self-consciously Victorian novel about a guy who finds some letters that prove what happened to these people, which in some ways is unknown. And also prove that a lot of queer stuff was going on. It is about his experience and his and his sense of what the letters are about evolving throughout his life. Both taking them as advice that he should or shouldn't do things, as explanations about what things in his life mean, and just having this very personal relationship with history and archives. I just love [unintelligible] Victorian men. I'm not sure I can go back, I just... there are so many clauses in these sentences. [Clara laughs] It's just so fun, it's so sexy.

(CSA): Well that sounds absolutely delightful, and I know we had a brief exchange about your research for this, and I do need to tell you that I wrote a book chapter on Martin Frobisher who was trying to find the Northwest passage and didn't — so I'm a big nerd about polar exploration too, and I really look forward to reading it.

(IF): Oh my God, we have so much cool stuff in common!

(CSA): I know! Look at that!

(IF): Thank you so much for having me on this. I know it's too soon to say, 'thank you for having me,' but this is —

(CSA): I was just about to say thank you for joining me, so it's not too soon!

(IF): Yeah.

(CSA): It's been delightful and really, I loved this book and I look forward to the next one. Hopefully we'll have you back for that! 

(IF): Hell yeah! 

(CSA): You can learn more about Isaac from his website, isaacfellman.com, or on Twitter and Instagram @isaac_fellman.

[Theme music up]

Catch STORY BEHIND THE STORY the first Friday of every month from 5-6pm on KSQD 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at clara@ksqd.org. 

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.