Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is writer Calvin Kasulke. Last year, his debut novel, Several People are Typing, became a breakout hit, which Max Berry called a “​​laugh-out-loud funny slice of unglued genius about the triumphs and tyranny of the online workplace,” and Hilary Leichter described as “a Greek chorus of modern strife.” In addition to his achievements as a novelist, Calvin is the recipient of a Lambda Literary fellowship in playwriting, and his writing and reporting have been published in VICE, MEL Magazine, and DC Comics, among others.


Calvin Kasulke, we’re delighted to have you here. Welcome to Story Behind the Story!

Calvin Kasulke (CK):  Thank you so much for having me!


(CSA): I feel we should at least acknowledge the fact that 2 minutes before we turned this on, we were talking about what weird energy we're going to have in this episode today, and I think that's totally appropriate for this book.


(CK): Yeah, I think so. We've both had kind of slightly weird and unexpected evenings so far, so I think that's the right way to go into this — is both being slightly on tilt, and just a little weird. I think it's going to totally match what it seems like the book has done to a handful of people, so that'll be good. That'll be perfect/


(CSA): Yeah, so let's talk about that. The premise of Several People Are Typing is that an employee at an ad agency, Gerald, gets stuck in Slack — literally. Where did that idea come from for you? 


(CK): I had had early drafts — like bad, sort of experimental blog posts about a guy getting stuck in the internet, and it was a thing between him and his roommate; But the internet writ large was too large — (Clara laughs) — Like, it was too big a thing to tackle. Brandon Taylor's actually written a really great essay called, “I Read Your Little Internet Novels,” about how novels punitively about the internet are only about one particular slice of the internet, or one kind of person which is usually… The author can only really write about the internet that they're familiar with. And he talks about how he does not have the kind of angst about Twitter that you might see in [No One] Is Talking About This, which is not Patricia Lockwood catching strays or anything, but just they have two different experiences of it. So when the idea for the Slack thing kind of… the penny dropped for that because I, myself, was an employee at a PR agency. That seemed like it was a more contained way to tell this story that I've been fumbling with and had put away years ago. An idiot sort of limiting the scope of the digital to just Slack — like, that restriction actually opened up a lot about the story for me. 


(CSA): And I think it's important for us to note that you actually wrote this book in, what — Spring 2019? Even though it came out last year, and obviously we can see why that would be a big thing for people last year.
 
(CK): (both laugh) Yeah, yeah: I wrote it in the Winter/Spring of 2019 and I sent it around to some places, didn't get a lot of traction with it, and I was okay. And then I still edited it. You know, I’d put it away, then I edit it a little bit the next Winter-ish, and then 2020 happened. I was like, ‘I wonder if —’ I mean this was a couple months into it when I was like, ‘Oh, okay this is going to be a while, huh? I wonder if anybody has downloaded Slack since maybe this all started…


(CSA): (with a chuckle) I wonder…  


(CK): …and it turned out some people had. I've been trying to avoid it. There's only so much you can do in terms of being, like, ‘It's not a pandemic novel!’ But also the only reason anybody seems to have wanted to publish it is because of the pandemic; So it is interesting. It is a double-edged sword. But I did write it before. I promise.


(CSA): Well, I think there's something wild about a wild interaction between that bit of marketing related rationale, and the fact that you are (in a lot of ways) primarily a playwright and journalist. And this is a book that is very play-like, but is published as a novel. Can you talk about that?
 
(CK): (He sighs) It is a really long script, isn't it? My background is mostly in script writing and play writing and dialogue-heavy pieces of all forms. I guess journalism is also mostly just listening to people talk, and then turning that into… going in and being like, ‘Hey, I don't know enough about this, do you?’ And then listening to people who are smarter than me about something talk, and then transmogrifying their quotes into a piece; all of that is very dialogue intensive, so the idea of putting it in Slack allowed me to play to what I feel but my strengths are, which are how people talk — whether that be verbally, aloud (I'm doing hand gestures for for mouths that people can't see), or how they talk to each other online. Man, it's just so much fun, is the thing! I've got nothing against prose — Prose is great. I'm writing other stuff in prose, but it is such a blast to play out conversations between people and to be able to do some set pieces in text form, if that makes sense. To be able to still use the space of Slack the way that you would use the space of a stage or the space on a screen. And to think about blocking on the page and how the rhythms look — It lets you really dial in on what is on the page, because what is also where all the drama is taking place in a very literal way, and that's a lot of fun. 


(CSA): We're going to talk a lot a lot more about the playwriting qualities of this after I have a chance to play a clip; Before we move on from this entirely, I'm curious — I love that you said that writing dialogue is fun, and I'm curious why that's something that captures your interest so much. Why conversations are such a big fascination point for you?


(CK): I think you can do a lot with them. I’m tentative to do a high-falutin answer right now, but really it is… Once I have a sense of the characters, it is very very easy to set them… to just let those conversations fly. Like, once I know what somebody's voice is, it is very easy to put them all in a room and just play out what that's going to be. I tend to, when I'm outlining scenes I tend to wind up writing snippets of dialogue as part of the outline because I can already — even just thinking about what is literally going to happen — you can start hearing the chatter going and trying to capture it. I would love to give you an answer about all of the subtext and the exchanges and the emotional, you know — you can obviously do a lot in dialogue that is all of the showing and none of the telling, even though it's people doing the telling with each other. But in truth it's just the thing that comes most naturally to me, and it is the thing that I find myself trying to capture. When I can hear everybody talking it's really how I know that a piece is ready to go from the outlining stage into the like, ‘Okay we got to get this out of here cuz these people are getting loud!’ 


(CSA): (laughing) Yeah, you got to get the voices out of your head at a certain point, right?


(CK): It's an exorcism. It goes from an idea to an exorcism very very quickly. 


(CSA): Well I want to talk a little bit about office novels in general because there's so many of them. As I was prepping for this interview I started rereading Bartleby the Scrivener because I was I just — I can't think about this and not go there, but of course right? The stories that we tell about work — and this one very much included — they tend to have these surreal elements. Even Bartleby which is an 1850s, novel right? Pre-surrealism in almost every sense of the term, has a surreal quality, just by virtue of how strange Bartleby's boss finds his (what he describes as) passivity. So I'm kind of curious why you think that happens in novels about work, in the way that we talk about work. Why do we approach work with the surreal lens so much of the time?


(CK): I think humans are very, very adaptable for better and for worse. I think the thing about going to the same place 8 hours a day — and if we want to talk about physical, literal offices: you are suddenly restricting yourself to one main space, and then you are restricting yourself to a handful of people, and all of it becomes very, very magnified. I think when you are… you just become subjected to the whims of whoever your boss or bosses are and that can be very distorting. I mean, that can be enough for most workplaces to set everything on a tilt. But I just think when you reduce the amount of space a person has and the amount of the possible interlocutors — none of which you've really chosen, right? You maybe opted for the job depending on your level of desperation and your level of choice, but you haven't picked your co-workers. You haven't picked your boss in many cases. And so now everything is just amplified. I mean you are a hamster in a little hamster cage for however many hours a day you are called upon to be at that job — and I think that is just going to result in weird stuff! Because you are just focusing on the same stuff too much. I mean if you look at a tile floor in a bathroom for too long, you will start to hallucinate. There is a reason that the solitary confinement is considered a war crime. It is a crime against humanity. You can't leave people in the same space without —


(CSA): And with the same people


(CK): (Indistinguishable) — for too long. And with the same people for too long. So it’s odd to compare an office to solitary confinement, but it's to say that people get weird when their space is reduced and when the amount of people they speak to is reduced, and there is something about… One of my North Stars in writing this book was just the sense of this might as well happen…


(CSA): Yeah.


(CK): And I think that is really the vibe that after you've been in a job for long enough, you just start to accept that like… ‘Well, okay. What now?’ There's just an element of “What fresh hell is this?” But there's also… you have to deal with it. You can't go anywhere. You're a hamster in your little hamster cage until 6 o'clock or whatever.


(CSA): That actually makes me think — Before I reread Bartleby, I was rereading Station 11 cuz I just saw the TV show, and that's what you do if you're into books: You reread the book after you watch the TV show. (Calvin laughs) And she has this line pretty early on where she's talking about the traveling symphony and it's it's something… it feels very Tolstoy because she says, the problem with the traveling symphony was the same problem as with any group of people, basically, and starts laying out — one-by-one in these intersecting ways — all of the conflicts between each individual. Like, this person hates this person who doesn't hate that person as much as they hate this person. I think there's a… I mean that is a workplace too. I mean it's more than just a workplace in that book, but I think there's an element of that. Of just: people get weird when they're forced to interact with other people and they don't get to make those choices.


(CK): Yeah, I mean, it is the conceit of talking about plays, and it’s the conceit of No Exit — It's not that anybody in No Exit is Mussolini. It's just that it's three people who all kind of grind against each other and they're stuck in this room forever, and that's enough. That is just enough. It's just two other people whom you didn't pick, and everybody hates one person more than the other and kind of wants to fuck one person, or doesn't hate the other person as much. And that's enough! That's enough to drive you insane. That's enough to be hell, it's enough to be eternal torture. And I mean that can be sufficient for many workplace. I think the thing that we're talking about in these reduced spaces and the limitations of that is also really, really amplified by the Slack —


(CSA): Yeah…yeah!


(CK): From the form, everything becomes so much louder because you only have the words on the screen, so —


(CSA): And the Emojis! Don't forget the Emojis.


(CK): And the Emojis. And the Emojis, which are rendered in words, so you only get colors and textures and sounds when other people describe them. We are left with a very limited prop list and set list because there's only so many objects that get spoken about, and only so many textures and colors. So the motifs are right there — it's hard to miss them because there's only so… because it's, you know, it's a 27,000 word book — and change! If you think your average novels in the 50 to 60,000 word range, in literary fiction at least. You've got half the words! So, everything… The volume gets cranked up on all of it, and I think that is the same in terms of words and motifs, as it is with character personalities. Yeah, human beings were not meant to be around the same 20 people every day. We tend to try to make our communities bigger than that for a lot of practical and social, and I think just sort of…


(CSA): Sanity related?


(CK): Health reasons. And yeah — sanity and health-related reasons, exactly. 


(CSA): Well, let's go. Let's talk about the characters a little bit because I had read that you created a style guide for each character's dialogue in the book and I would love to hear more about that. What's different about writing dialogue for Slack versus spoken dialogue, and what kind of things did you observe as you were trying to create these different patterns of Slack conversations about how people try to distinguish themselves in a closed online space like this?


(CK): I mean in terms of Slack versus dialogue, I tend to write scripts where I joke that nobody gets to finish a sentence, so at least in Slack everybody got to mostly finish their thoughts, right? Nobody can really interrupt you all the way if you're determined to finish what you're saying. Yeah, dialogue... It had to be different on the page. It couldn't be, from a practical perspective, it can't be a dozen characters who all type exactly the same, but also: if you're in a four-person group chat, probably your friends have different styles of typing. Lord knows at work people have different styles of communication which is partially age, power — right? You have to find a way to communicate all of these dynamics very quickly. So, how do people in different positions of power decide to either emphasize that or not. Like, Doug has never met a period in his life — He’s the boss of everything, right? He barely capitalizes anything, ever. He doesn't have to — he cuts everybody's paychecks. That is a way to display power, and it is also a way that, presumably he is busier. He is on the go! And he's not trying to do it as a flex necessarily — I mean, you don't know this. It's just what's on the page. Whereas other characters are much more formal, which might be a suck-up thing. It might just be a professional thing, it could just be the way that they are. Some people just like to have everything just So in their texts, right? Ever get a text from your aunt and it reads an email?


(CSA): Oh yeah there all the time.


(CK): It starts with like ‘Hello “Name” “Comma”’ and then it goes, and then she’ll still sign it herself at the bottom. It’s like, you didn't have to do this like this, but okay…. Which again, but that is the thing: the way that people type, also, is such a way to convey tone. And again, when you have those limitations, you need to have these different textures and you need to find ways to communicate meaning and intonation — Which means you're limited to line breaks and commas, and do you change how you type when you're typing to your boss versus somebody who's more on your collegial hierarchical level? I mean, I know I do that. And if you are a person who has Slack at work, or Teams, or whatever, maybe there's a workplace that uses Discord — I don't know. I don't know why that's the “fun” one now, but you probably see these dynamics play out in those ways. So, again, it is a limitation but it's also fun. But also it has to look different on the page cuz you're not going to read the same character. Eventually your eyes are going to start skimming over character names, and you're just going to want to be like, ‘Oh, this person talks like this; yeah this is Lydia because it's eighteen exclamation points per sentence.’


(CSA): Actually that's something that I find really interesting in the audiobook (which we’ll hear a clip from later) Is that at the beginning of each chapter in the audiobook, each person's first first bit of dialogue is introduced with their name, and after that you're just off to the races and you have to keep up, and that's very much I think, like you said, the way that people are going to read something this.


(CK): Yeah, which I mean you're not in control of that. The audiobook presented some unique... challenges in as much as it's the whole cast. I mean it's basically a radio play, but yeah — it also has some of those weird text hang-ups, where you have to memorize every, you know… get to know different character’s tones of voice and everything.


(CSA): You were talking about the power dynamics of a lot of the ways people communicate in a workplace environment and I was thinking that; I work in the tech industry for a company that makes software for other tech companies — not Slack, but we use Slack. And I both think about that in terms of what I observe online in Slack communications — including what I do — and just in the ways that we make our tech and the way … the similarities between a lot of these workplace technologies that are coming up now. There is this push to make… to drive workplaces toward less formality. But it's very… it's fake, right? For lack of a better way to say it. The lack of formality doesn't erase the power structures. It seems more about performing lack of hierarchy, which is very, very much what the tech industry does in general.


(CK): Right, it is a utopian ideal without any structural or systemic changes behind it. It is a move towards this idealized version of what a workplace should be. But it’s not like there's a nationwide movement of flattening hierarchies and worker Co-Ops. It’s not like suddenly everybody's been… it's not 1917/1918 in the Soviet Union and suddenly we don't all partially own the workplaces that we're at. Even places that are unionized are unionizing because of the hierarchy, and to try and make some of that imbalance less pronounced. So yeah, there's something really interesting about the artificiality of the cavalierness of communication, and who does that serve? And what does that obfuscate? And also what does that facilitate — because Lord knows it might be easier to unionize if you're a bunch of remote workers in 30 different states but you can all talk on Slack, or you can all at least exchange Signal numbers on Slack to start a chat or something, you know? So I don't want to lead this totally towards ‘it's all a surveillance State’ kind of thing…


(CSA): But it is…


(CK): It is, but there are very few tools that are not in some way double-edged.


(CSA): And, to go back to your novel since that is ostensibly the point of this conversation, I think you see a lot of that — Not necessarily just in the communication, but the weirdnesses that come up in your novels seem very designed to emphasize that. Like the weirdness of the Bjark dog food campaign, the weirdness of… is it Lydia who hears wolves?


(CK): The howling.


(CSA): Right, the howling.


(CK): She hears howling all the time, yep.


(CSA): All these weird elements seem to come in in ways where people are almost ignoring them, right? That's a huge part of what makes it surreal; Is not just Gerald got sucked into Slack or Lydia's hearing howling — it's everyone around them is just kind of, ‘eh whatever.’


(CK): Right. Here's the thing: If you had a co-worker who is going on about how they're stuck in their computer, or how they are hearing howling all the time, what are you going to do about it? 


(CSA): I would like to think that I would go check on their body in their apartment.


(CK): If they ask, right? But I don't know where my colleagues live generally. I am not personally equipped to extract someone whose consciousness has been uploaded to the cloud from the cloud. I would have to call you or somebody I knew who worked in tech in some way. (He chuckles)


(CSA): And also, it's above your pay grade. I think that's an interesting part of it, too, is part of the reasons that we have all these weirdnesses in our workplaces with people who we haven't chosen is because when they start to get weird, I don't want to confront them. I just want to get away from there. I just want to get out of that conversation.


(CK): You’re trying to go home! You've got dinner plans!


(CSA): Exactly.


(CK): You've got stuff to do. You're trying to watch a movie! I don't have time to also get involved in whatever this is. My favorite conflicts are ones that are, or, my favorite character weaknesses are ones that are super understandable and also, it is the intersection of no one could blame you for not doing this, but you will blame you if you don't do this. (Clara laughs) — Which is maybe outing myself as raised in a very, very white-bred Protestant kind of way, but that's neither here nor there. So I think, yeah: it's above your pay grade. It's not something you necessarily want to do, and, again: you didn't choose these people, so going out of your way to help them out of something that sounds impossible — and even if it is possible, you don't know how to fix it. There's an enormous active act of grace going on there. And also to your point about the hierarchical thing — You mentioned the thing about writing a style guide earlier, and along with the tonal style guide for how everybody was going to type and who is going to use capitals and who is going to use periods (which is just proof that I'm a maniac when I'm outlining), I also had a susceptibility-to-weirdness scale that also went along with every character. So, like, who is impervious to it? Who does not have these kind of engagements, or if they do, if they are made to face something this weird, it means that the weirdness is enormously powerful and unavoidable, and then, who cannot put on their sneakers before they leave the house during the day without their shoelaces turning into eels or something; Who just, every single thing, there's just super crazy — and the answer is Rob. Rob is extraordinarily cursed, Lydia’s obviously got some stuff going on, and so I had a little scale also of who do things happen to most often? Who will see it and be like, ‘Do I have to do something about this?’ And who is like, ‘I don't know what that is. I pretend I do not see it, or I actually do not see it,’ and if they are actually made to confront anything weird, it means that it has possibly taken over the city of New York. It's a full “end of Ghostbusters” situation.


(CSA): I like that.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you’re just joining me, my guest today is author and playwright Calvin Kasulke, whose debut novel, Several People Are Typing, takes place entirely in Slack.


So another thing that I came across while I was prepping for this interview was: you have a column in Catapult where you write fictional author interviews, and as an interviewer of real authors, I have to ask you about it. I'm curious what those interviews are about for you, what are they doing?


(CK): There's one so far because I am so behind on my deadline for the second one. It's a [sic] imaginary profile, basically, with DB Cooper who is the famous skyjacker who was never caught — and who I think probably died on the jump out of the plane that he skyjacked, but that's neither here nor there. I also think the art of the podcast interview is distinct from the art of the profile, because the profile is very like, you go into their home or, like, ‘I got a burger with Jimmy Butler’ (I’m just listing my favorite basketball player), and the whole thing becomes about how does their physical form in the setting we're in contrast or emphasize the narrative about them, and how is my profile going to further or subvert the cultural — or establish! — the cultural narrative about this person? And I just think there’s… it's this magnificent choose-your-own -adventure, but there's very few of them that I have read that really transcend what the form is, and I like them as tools as characterization, and I think that you can do one without the person actually being involved. I think the best profiles become essays that happen to use quotes from one person and a description of one person as the backbone of whatever the thesis that the reporter has. It becomes a piece of cultural criticism that bounces off of one person's existence in it in whatever form it is. They're narrative, they're legend, their vibe, their current impact/ future impact / rejected impact / former impact; and I think you can do that with figures that have already had that impact even if the figures aren't talking to you. Why did that jump out to you? I mean if you're doing all of this googling, I'm curious to hear… There's a lot of Internet detritus that I have put out there, so I'm curious as to why the Catapult one struck you?


(CSA): The real answer is just that it's weird, and I think I'm a weird person so it spoke to me. (They share a laugh) But I think, as you were talking, one thing that struck me is I think there's something similar about podcast interviews, and this is for a radio show, but I come from a podcasting background and I think I kind of bring that energy to a lot of my interviews. Anyway! One thing that I think is really similar is that both that kind of profile and the podcast interview — they're in service of parasocial relationships in a lot of ways. And for the profile, a lot of it is cuz they're so typically written in the first person; is like, ‘Let me give you the insider view to my slightly more accessible relationship to this person so that you can feel you have access to their deep dark secrets as well.’ It’s sort of from a different angle, but they both have that, and something that's really interesting to me about choosing to do that in a fictionalized way is: that is the exposed belly of the parasocial relationship. It's saying this thing that is about the ways that we understand access and what we think we know about celebrities and our desire to constantly know more… Well here's the thing: we don't actually need them to do that. We're making it all up on our own so why not just actually make it up?


(CK): and make it up about people who are anonymous, who have chosen to never be identified / Interviewed / profiled. People who have made it a point, for one reason or another, whether they're dead or have been in hiding for a while ...


(CSA): Salinger.


(CK): (He chuckles) Yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah, exactly. Dead, in hiding, never revealed themselves, completely unknown — and what does it mean? The parasocial relationship thing is a super interesting point, and it's intimacy right? You're saying ‘I had the chance to have a kind of intimacy with a person that people have limited ability to have intimacy with, and here’s what it might be like.’ Yeah, there's a lot of ways to go about it for you. The writer to the first person thing becomes the audience surrogate, right? Nominally and again, I think sometimes it is in service of making a seemingly untouchable person vulnerable, and sometimes I think is in service of making a heretofore very regular person seem more untouchable and more special and more God-like.


(CSA): It kind of goes back to what we were talking about around Slack communication and the ways that all of these new office technologies are pretending at informality and that everybody's the same. These are all techniques for pretending at power; either pretending at power that you don't have, or pretending that you don't have power that you do.


(CK): It's a really interesting form. As a part-time journalist, I like to play at doing things a little bit ahead of my speed, but it’s easier to do that in fiction in some ways. To test that out or to use journalism… I don't want to say ‘chops’ but let's say ‘experience,’ to, you know, ‘let me try this in this different form then!’ And then just blend them. Blend them until I come up with something. I don't know. Catapult is great and my editor Adelaide is great! And if you are listening, Matt: I'm sorry. I really owe you the next essay. That's super late, but I will get it to you.


(CSA): Well, I think now's a good point for us to listen to a little bit of the audio book of your book so people can get a sense of it. Before we do, can I ask you to set up what we're going to hear?


(CK): It's a one-off scene actually. It's delightful. It’s just a couple of the characters — the graphic designer and a couple of the other characters are on a call with a client, I believe, and they're discussing their raison d’etre. It's a thesis statement about what these characters think their jobs are.


(CSA): All right.
 
[Audiobook plays]
[COMPUTER VOICE] Private chat. NIKKI, PRADEEP, LOUIS C
[Female Voice] NIKKI
Why do we have these calls? What is he even saying?


[Male Voice with Indian accent] PRADEEP
I have no idea
I tune out whenever this dude talks
What's his role over there again?


[COMPUTER VOICE] LOUIS C
He’s their comms director.


[not said: PRADEEP; names are omitted from audio book going forward]
If they have a comms director then why did they hire us?


LOUIS C
Because he isn’t a very good comms director.


NIKKI
You’re both missing my point. I mean, *what is he actually saying*? It sounds like he's taking this call from the bottom of a well.


PRADEEP
if he’s been stuck in a well for a while, that might explain his grasp of, like, the entire internet


LOUIS C
I believe their offices are located in the greater Tampa area.


NIKKI
Is this what Tampa sounds like?


PRADEEP
please tell me this dude didn’t just say “myspace”
please tell me I did not just hear him say that


LOUIS C
Yes. This is what Tampa sounds like.
[Audiobook excerpt ends]


(CK): I just love Louis. I've just read this book so much, and now all the minor characters are my favorite. I just love them so much. Please go on.


(CSA): (she chuckles) There's something that you mentioned earlier when you were talking about writing this… Your process in the way that: you kind of start with dialogue; When you start to hear the voices in your head that's when it's time to sit down and write something. And I was thinking about that; It seems there's a real immediacy in this book in general. It's not just that it's dialogue, it's that you feel like you're in that moment as it's happening all the time. I was curious to hear your thoughts on that: Is that part of what you're looking for there — is that immediacy and that—


(CK): I think when I set out to write, I set out to… A lot of my favorite books are books that gave me — I mean, this is probably not specific to me — but they're books that gave me a big feeling, and I think the feeling I seek in books, or one of the ones I enjoy the most in the feeling is: what the Ffff just happened? What just happened to ME as a person in reading this? I think of a great way to take somebody on that ride is — I mean, it’s cheap stuff, right? Like present tense. You've got this limited toolbox, and I think it’s things like that immediacy, but also it's such a unique form. It is a book that teaches — I mean, if it works right, If I have done well — it teaches people the rules and then it breaks them, just in time for you to have gotten the hang of it. It starts to just break everything down, and I want people to feel in on it. I want people to feel in on the joke. I want people to feel like they are choosing to be taken for this ride, not that they are being yanked around, and so you need to develop that familiarity and that intimacy and that presence with these characters before that happens; So it feels even if the book is something that happens to you, you as the reader feel like you know what's going on and you're not being pranked or surprised or, like… the joke isn't on you. The joke is on these people who you've been hanging out with this whole time.


(CSA): To that end, “access is intimacy.” Like, sharing is intimacy.


(CK): Exactly! You get access to this intimacy which is a way for you to get to know these characters; whether you like them or not — that's up to you, but you have to be with these people so you can go for the ride of this very weird month to 6 weeks and change with them.


(CSA): I think it's so interesting because we talked about (we could talk forever about) the fact that this is entirely written in Slack, but I don't even think that it's right, it's not just that it's all dialogue, right? It's also that by setting it in Slack, it really is a really closed space. It eliminates everything else. I think it's easy to skip over when I say it's written entirely in Slack; the entirely part: that there are no other descriptions. There's no stage directions like you might have in a play, and I think the only real interiority we get with any character is the Just Doug Things channel —


(CK): [unintelligible]


(CSA): —Right! Where the boss character keeps these notes, and it's just everything from picking up his dry cleaning to, ‘got to think about firing this person.’ 


(CK): Yeah, you get his stream of consciousness. He’s like, ‘I got to buy pears, and also how do I deal with this office communication?’ He’s sort of typing it out to himself to truly think through it on the page, as it were. But it's in the #JustDougThings channel.


(CSA): But I think… I'm really interested to hear you talk about that too. This is a book where, really, everything is super immediate. You don't have — other than that one little #JustDougThings — you really don't have a lot of glimpses into interior thought process. You only see it externally in the ways that characters are interacting. How did that impact the storytelling for you? And how did it change the ways that you thought about characterization in particular?


(CK): It is a limitation, but it's also something that most of us — and I think most readers that pick up the book, even if they're not used to Slack — I always say you don't have to know Slack; If you've ever been in a chat room, in a group chat, if you've ever DM’d someone, you understand how to read this. If you've ever read a play — right? You understand how to read this thing and in any kind of digital communication, most of us (including our great aunts who send us text messages that read like emails) still understand tone over text, and how that can be difficult to read sometimes. And even with…you know, I beef’d a joke; One of my best friends sent me a text with a joke in it yesterday, and I totally misinterpreted it and I was like, ‘oh, I'm so sorry that happened!’ And he was like, ‘no no no no no — that was a joke!” And so even intimacy doesn't always make the communication flawless, but I think a lot of us know that we button things up a little bit when we are talking if we have to text our boss or DM our boss for some reason. And I think a lot of us are familiar with texting through gritted teeth, or sending an email where you are sending a lot of exclamation points and apologizing, but what you're saying is ‘You're the jerk and I have to clean up YOUR mess.’ I mean, a lot of us know what those things sound like. There's countless memes out there about using office communication as a shield and what it means; It is a different dialect functionally. It is never a way to communicate. All of this is to say: people know how we text each other. People know how they text each other and they know what can be packed into a text message. If you send somebody a response through text that says, ‘k.’ that means, you know, that is always…that is a cursed thing! And everybody kind of understands what that means. K, no period — different than: K, period. K with the period is like, we are getting a divorce. On the one-handed is a limitation, on the other hand, it's limiting yourself to a really, really common mode of communication that people understand the subtlety of, and the nuances of. It doesn't feel too limiting cuz it lets you do a lot, and it also gives the audience something to… readers to feel smart. People like to feel smart, and you like getting… because of that presence that you talked about, you get to interpret that with the other characters in real time, or watch the other characters misinterpret it and fuck up in real time. 


(CSA): I like what you said about people wanting to feel smart, cuz I think it's so interesting. One of the things that really struck me as I was reading this and as I was thinking about the fact that there's no description, there's really just dialogue in this kind of limited way — there is no interiority — is, oh my God:It turns out you don't need it. The novel as a form is, I think, largely built around the fact that you can get that interiority and into and intimacy in different ways, but what's compelling about your book is that it really exposes how much of that is just our own interpretation anyway.


(CK): This is how we get to know each other, right? It's texting. It's DMing, it’s talking to people and unfortunately as much as you would, many of us — as me. I’ll speak for myself. As much as I sometimes want to be like, ‘Hey, I don't know what's happening in your head, so can you just also narrate everything that just happened in this conversation? But like, can I get your inner monologue actually? Cuz I actually want to know all that. As much as you would love to tap into somebody's head like that, we can't. So we fumble around with this which is the best that we can do, which is how we speak to each other. Yeah, look: novels are great. I have written a very weird one. I like a lot of [unintelligible] are not shaped like mine. But it's a way that we know how to communicate with each other; It's a way that a lot of people are already familiar with, so why not leverage that? Also people understand how stories work, and so as much as it seems like, “ooooh it’s got this gimmicky premise.” But it’s like, yeah, but people know how a story works. People know what they're getting into. Most people aren't getting lost with what's happening, because we know how to follow these threads because over the last 20 years this has become a dominant mode of communication coming up.


(CSA): I know that you really own the term “gimmick” — the label “gimmick” on this. (He chuckles) I've seen enough interviews with you where people try to dance around that and you're like, “no, it's a gimmick!” to know that you do totally own it, but I think there's something interesting — when you were talking about the impetus for writing this, a lot of it was a tweet that assumed that it was just a gimmick, and you were like, ‘All right. What if we take the gimmick and we make it not just a gimmick? What if we make it something real?’


(CK): So part of the impetus for this and the Slack for — (which, this is me finally answering your first question) — was, seeing a tweet that said something to the effect of — and now I am not able to find the tweet and it dogs me. It will dog me to my grave! Maybe… I don't think I dreamt it, but maybe. Who knows? But it was a tweet that was like, ‘The great millennial novel will be set entirely in Slack.’ And I do not think this is the great millennial novel; I actually think Tony Tulathimutte (who was a friend and sometimes mentor and also took my author photo) wrote that. I think his book — it maybe has that title. But my knee-jerk reaction to seeing that tweet was, ‘oh God, that would suck. I would hate that book.’ And then it was — ‘no, wait. What if it didn't suck? What if it was awesome? What would that look like?’ And not just thinking ‘Okay, what would this be?’ but then taking it one step further and going: Not just how would it be fun or how would you do it, but how would you do it in a way that maybe nobody would ever want to do it again? Maybe people would be like, ‘Oh this is this is done.’ There's a great podcast called Cocaine and Rhinestones and the second season is all about this country singer, George Jones. One of great bits that the narrator says about: There was a thing about George Jones that people didn't like to cover his songs, like his original songs. So even though country music was so much with so much made up of people covering each other's songs, and it was like, well: when George Jones sings a song, it stays sung. I don't think that this is the only Slack novel, or the only novel that can be in this form. This is not even the first internet-based or digital-based novel; It will certainly not be the last. I don't think I've done it that successfully, but I wanted to… I wanted to…


(CSA): Take it seriously.


(CK): Take it seriously, and go a little over the top with it. 


[They giggle]
(CSA): Well I think you succeeded in a great way. 




***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you’re just joining me, my guest today is author and playwright Calvin Kasulke, whose debut novel, Several People Are Typing, takes place entirely in Slack.


We were talking earlier about how there's not a lot of interiority in this book; you're interpreting it, you’re forced to interpret it. And of course that made me want to talk about the one place that is one of my favorite moments in the book, where I think you do start to get something that is at least… sensual? Not in the… sensual like, in the literal sense of it; it involves the senses — which is the moment when Slackbot takes Gerald into a gif of a sunset. So tell me about that. What are you trying to do in that scene?


(CK): It's a set piece, and it's the one flashy stage moment. It's my costume moment. It's my chandelier breaking in the Phantom of the Opera, right? The chandelier falling and [makes crashing sound]. This is the way that I could do that. I've got a rule when I'm drafting or when I'm thinking about a work, where if I have a thought and it makes me laugh, it has to go in. It has to at least go in the first draft. I can cut it later, but if I laughed out loud thinking about it, it has to go in. The sunset scene was one of those, where I blurt laughed thinking of it. I was like, ah that's so goofy, and this I was like actually, the rules. I gotta put that in here. I just keep calling it the inception noise page [He makes inception noise] — (This is great radio) — where it's just a bunch of.. I mean, what it actually is is I wrote a bunch of different titles for sunset gifs and then ran them through a bunch of different corrupter tools until it's this mess. But if you want to sit and read through them, it's like, ' sunset dot gif' 'beach sunset dot gif' 'tropical sunset dot gif' 'Jimmy Buffet sunset dot sunset' 'sunset and palm tree dot gif' — Just, endlessly. Thinking of a bajillion of them. Which again, you're limited to what people describe to each other and what they say to each other, and here is a moment where the book is trying to make you feel or see or experience what Gerald is feeling or seeing or experiencing. And it looks wild on the page, and it sounds wild in the audiobook. Again, I like books that… personally, I really enjoy books that make me be like, ‘What is happening. What's going on? I'm kind of confused. I'm kind of psyched because I'm confused.’ I’m like… ‘Yeah, okay! I don't know what's happening anymore!”
Cuz this is a little bit my attempt to do something like that. 


(CSA): Yeah, and it's experiential. You do experience it as he's experiencing it, with all the confusion that comes with it. And without spoiling too much, he does describe the experience later, but it is in a way where you can tell how much it kind of defies description and how weird it is, and terrifying, and also… joyous, I guess.


(CK): It is, I think, transcendent in the sort of big sense of the word.


(CSA): That's a good word! You're a writer. [both laugh]


(CK): Right? But not in the way that people... I think that word has almost a purely positive connotation, and I don't think the idea of… I mean, I think this book is a lot about how transcending your standard senses is maybe not all it's cracked up to be. 


(CSA): Yeah. Well the other thing that I loved that that touches on is the way that this book explores relationships that we have with our bodies, and the ways that technology mediates those relationships. Cuz of course Gerald is forced to think about his body in new ways — in some ways, for the first time. Once he's separated from it, I think he really comes to appreciate what it means to care for his body a lot as a result of not having it and having somebody else do that caring for him. So, yeah. Talk to me about the body of it all.


(CK): Sure. Yeah, he really misses his legs. My half joking, I guess, description of this book is: it's about how the only thing worse than having a body is not having a body; and I am a Trans person and I started writing that early those early terrible blog posts that would become the backbone of this book right around when I was first coming out. Well, not ever first coming out; first starting testosterone, specifically, which is really first inhabiting my body on purpose, specifically. And having a lot of changes happening to it, and being hungry, and having more energy and being invigorated and being excited to be in my body for the first time; But also a little bit mourning no longer having this superpower of being super checked out of my body and that lets you pull all-nighters differently. It lets you… I did a bunch of taekwondo when I was younger, right? And I had a very high pain tolerance for reasons that are sort of obvious now. It is not preferential to how I am now; In my experience, I really love having this goofy body, and I love eating and I love just working out and being physical, right? This mortal coil — some upsides! Meatball subs. A lot of meatball sub talk in the book. Great reason to stay — to be on planet Earth — is to be able to experience those. I mean that sincerely. But, there was also a little bit of mourning some of the unique parts of being pretty checked out of having a body, and so that was a way I was grappling with that early on. I'm really glad that I didn't return to it until years later, until I was a bit more settled and had, frankly, just more distance and wasn't writing from such a raw place. But that I had all of this very raw material, I think every significant (by which I mean length-wise or shape-wise) work will get its pound of flesh from you. It was really nice to have that pound of flesh sort of pre-carved for a later version of me to pick up and be, ‘Oh how nice! How nice that this is already here and I can work with it a little bit more and finesse it and put it into the shape of this book.’ So yeah, it comes a little bit from being a trans person, but I don't think trans people have the corner on having weird relationships with our bodies. I think there's a whole bunch of people — possibly the most of us — who have really weird relationships to our bodies, or even just people who would prefer to not have them fail one day and die. We all have to do that, and that sucks. So, as much as we were talking about the lack of lowercase ‘f’ freedom that yeah workplaces offer us, there is a little bit of the capital ‘F’ Freedom that we can never quite escape our physical forms, and this book posits: even if we did, it would suck.


(CSA): It’s interesting hearing you talk about this and talk about your own relationship with your body and how it's evolved, and going back to some of the stuff (and, you know, feel free to tell me to shut up if I'm imposing a narrative—) but some of the stuff about... so much of your writing does have that immediacy and that experiential quality, and it is in a lot of ways very embodied — even when it's taking place in Slack.


(CK): Yeah, you want to be with them, and again part of why I'm glad to have written it, like, 5 years after some of the initial stuff was out there — and really, there's some stuff from those early blog posts that I keep making fun of that made it in almost word for word into this. There's a lot of it that got finessed and changed up, but I am glad to have been able to have a bit more distance, and to also be a person who knows that you might miss your legs if you did not have legs! For a long period of time, you might be like, ‘I don't know why specifically THAT, but I do miss them.’ And that a meatball sub is a great reason to be alive at a sunset. Again, I was joking earlier about there only being so many tools to tell a story, and there are a lot of pleasures on this Earth, but I think the categories of pleasures that are available to us are all pretty… is actually a pretty short list, and many of them are pretty simple.


(CSA): Two final questions, cuz we're low on time. First one: I feel like, in some ways it's a boring question generally, but I'm very interested to hear your answer to it with respect to this book: what were your influences here?


(CK): If anybody has read any Caryl Churchill, they will maybe clock immediately that there is a lot of Blue Kettle in this. Her play Blue Kettle, which is incredible, and Caryl Churchill is an incredible playwright. I don't even know where to start with recommendations; I guess the collection of plays Blue Heart in which Blue Kettle is, is a great one. That's a really, really direct influence. Goodness! I'm trying to think of some other ones… Italio Calvino: If On a Winters Night a Traveller, huge. You know, love some postmodernism, love a gimmick — which, again, if it's elegant enough it doesn't get called one, but they are what they are. I think those are the big ones. Every once in a while, I will get a Pale Fire comparison, and that I feel I have to make the sign of the cross or something — which is not anything I've ever done in my life — that I’m like, please don't actually compare me to Nabokov. I feel that will put some kind of a hex on my life, but I do really LIKE Pale Fire. I think those are the big ones though. I think I had really recently experienced Blue Kettle and If On a Winters Night a Traveller, and, also I will just say: weirdos on the internet, frankly. Just weird people on the internet who do weird internet stuff. Just people on Twitter who will just post snippets of a work in progress or something; I am so inspired by users with handles like “Space Twinks.” Sincerely: weirdos on the internet. There is no rabbit hole I will not dig all the way down to to get that weirdness. Gerald talks about a lot of going down weird Facebook rabbit holes or something, or winding up on parts of the internet he had no business being on; I think it would be dishonest for me to say that's not a big part of my process.


(CSA): And so the other question I want to ask is: What's next for you? What are you working on these days?


(CK): Throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, but the next book-shaped thing I'm working on (in lieu of wanting to give too much away) is, I've been describing it to people as: What if David Cronenberg directed Airbud?


(CSA): [Clara Cackles] Very good.


(CK): So that's... Look out for that one. [Clara laughs] It’s about sports! It's about sports, and also bodies and stuff. That's what I got. 


(CSA): Calvin Kasulke, Thank you so much for joining me today!


(CK): Thank you so much for having me. 


(CSA): You can learn more about Calvin from his website, calvinkasulke.com, or on Twitter and Instagram @cjkasulke.


Catch Story Behind the Story the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. 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.