Eastern Michigan University alum David Kuhnlein is now the author of the science fiction/horror book Die Closer to Me, which was published on Merigold Independent in 2023. In this interview, I had a chance to get to know Kuhnlein, which you can read about below:
- What was your first encounter with storytelling? How did you know you wanted to tell
your own stories?
My first encounter with storytelling came from parents, grandparents, friends – but chiefly from
my beloved VHS tapes. As a kid, Fantasia (1940) was my favorite. It’s interesting that when I
close my eyes, even now, the pictures that my mind conjures are typically cartoons. Fantasia is a
series of animated stories, linked together since Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia
Orchestra scored the majority of them. This structure, now that I think about it, is very similar to
the structure of Die Closer to Me.
I’ve been writing since I was very young, although I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of writing
as “telling my own stories.” There’s something more willful at work. More driving and ominous.
T.S. Elliot said something like “poetry is not the expression of personality, but the escape from
it,” and, when given a choice between the two ends of that spectrum, I prefer art to be more of an
escape from my personality rather than its expression. The freedom that art allows, I think, is one
of the greatest freedoms.
Writers have been in my family for as long as we have documentation, back to the late 1800s,
when my great-great-grandmother escaped an arranged marriage in East India on a boat destined
for Trinidad. All of her descendants wrote, luckily for us, which is how we have her story. My
grandmother (who left Trinidad for Detroit) wrote gothic romance novels. It took me a while to
discover them all. Once I did, I asked her permission to edit one. The product of that project is
Olas Grandes – a murder-mystery novel set on the coast of her home country, and was published
less than two weeks before she passed away. After the two-year-long project of editing her
novel, I decided that I would like to try my hand at writing fiction.
- How did you come to write this book? Do you have a specific writing routine?
I love the blend of sci-fi and horror. I wrote this book as a challenge to myself to write genre
fiction. I was contacted early on in the writing process by a publisher (the loose anonymous
collective known as tragickal) to see if I had any book-length manuscripts. I told them that I was
working on something (which would soon become Die Closer to Me) though at the time I had no
clue how long it would be. I have them to thank for pushing me to finish the book. Even though
this book didn’t get published by them, due to unforeseen obstacles, I wrote another book with
similar themes, a (sort of) follow up. I’m happy to say that it will be released later this year on
their press. It’s called Ezra’s Head.
You probably noticed the medical jargon in the book. I exist in a unique position within the
medical world. I have a chronic illness which requires wavering modes of care, my partner is
physically disabled, and I also teach medical students physical exam techniques and
communication skills in Detroit. It’s funny, I didn’t go to graduate school (like nearly all of my
undergrad creative writing classmates) because I didn’t think that I wanted to teach. But I love
my job. Medical language is incredible, and some of that jargon weaseled its way into my book.
Although I believe in the power of medicine, it’s not perfect, and some of its failings, which me
and my partner have both experienced, are very frustrating. This book is my literary revenge on
western (and eastern) medicine.
As far as a writing routine: some days I write in the morning, other days I write in the evening
when everyone else is asleep, or if I have a busy schedule I will make time for myself at work.
No real routine, though at the very least I do a little something every day.
- In general, where does your writing come from, or what inspires you to write?
My writing comes from my love of reading. It was revelatory to me, as a kid, to find subjects
written about in books that no one was talking about in life. Even certain words fascinated me.
The strange, diverse, and extreme art that exists is a constant inspiration, a reminder of how
freeing it is to make things and to write.
Parts of Die Closer to Me are heavily distorted renditions of my own experiences, others are pure
fabrications, drawn from dreams, or scenes that have come to me in meditation. Sometimes,
when I’m feeling a bit stuck, I’ll steal a word or a phrase from the books I have stacked beside
my writing desk (I think “the smell of burnt rice cut the dark” is a riff on a line from Samuel
Delany, and “where there’s meat there’s hope” is a riff on a line from Virgilio Piñera, which is
itself a biblical riff). If I’m not at home but have access to the internet, I’ll plunder Project
Gutenberg.
- Who are some of your favorite authors?
Here are a few: Launtrémont, Susan Sontag, Reinaldo Arenas, Virgilio Piñera, Plato, Garielle
Lutz, Brian Evenson, Sean Kilpatrick, Rebecca Gransden, Cormac McCarthy, Kevin Killian,
Wyndham Lewis, Kafka, Robert Walser, Bob Flanagan, Borges, Dennis Cooper, Stephen King,
Andrea Dworkin, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Hugh Fulham-Mcquillan, William H. Gass, Samuel Beckett,
Edgar Allan Poe, Cynthia Ozick, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Philip K. Dick, Eugene
Marten, Samuel Delany…
Surely I’m forgetting some important ones. It’s a tough question.
- Do you have a favorite word, phrase, or section from your new novel?
In this section, Hall is chanting on his mala, “a tassel necklace made from one hundred and nine
shrunken heads.” Hall has hooves instead of hands, and the images in this section might be my
favorites in the book:
“Hall neared the pinnacle of his silent chant. Jaws swung open, dried lips and teeth fit the cracks
of his hoof. The heads’ enamel topography was flavored by unending screams. He knew each
shrunken face by touch. Their cries ossified the gaps between his electrons. Soon he would be
solidly alive, coalescing out of nothing like…the asteroid belt curdled to a stone halo. Between
Mars’ and Jupiter’s orbits, there was not a random smattering of meteorites, but hundreds of
thousands of skulls. Hall would not flicker between this world and the next, pleased with the
empty space between his atoms, exhibiting a cadaverous existence, like everyone else – half
solid, half specter. Hall would soon know the secrets hidden in the blood. And Jo would be the
one to tell him.”
You can click here to order David Kuhnlein’s Die Closer to Me right now!
