Conversation with Vincent Endwell

Vincent Endwell originally hails from unceded Onondaga territory (Central New York). Their work has been published previously in Dark Horses Magazine, Corvid Queen, and Your Body is Not Your Body, an anthology from Tenebrous Press, among others.

Vincent is the author of “The world has been this way for a long time.” from Issue 9.

Q: As a multidisciplinary artist, how do your other artistic mediums inform your writing?

It’s strange—in some ways, I feel I engage with each medium as a different persona. My music is very different even than my poetry, which is different than my writing. Having multiple outlets means that I can shunt ideas into the form that can handle what I want to express. My music carries the most autobiographical emotions and moments where it can live safely; my writing is more digested and speculative, which is what I feel it should be. Otherwise I’d write personal essays or something, which I would not enjoy and no one would like.

Q: Can you talk about your experience creating your webcomic, Fiends and Friends? Do you expect to return to it one day?

Heh—you know, I want to. I made Fiends and Friends during college and shortly after, and as is the way, I did not have the time to continue while in grad school. Which is a shame, since my art was actually decent by the end of it. A good friend of mine encouraged me to start it, and it ended up teaching me a lot about artistic discipline (and generally developed my hand). Did it take me a year plus to figure out how to get crisp scans on the library printer? Naturally. But I’m very proud of it. It was fun to make. The one where the little fox encounters the house on Ash Tree Lane is still really good. fiends-and-friends.tumblr.com/post/134394478482/your-regularly-scheduled-programming-has-been

Q: A few months ago, you shared that you were working on a zine—how is it progressing?

Honestly? Pretty well, thanks for asking. It’s been very fun for me getting into collage these past few years—it is a very different medium than anything I’ve tried before, and it’s nice to know I haven’t atrophied artistically.

This zine is more colorful than my previous one (“science art,” which is up on endwell.itch.io). I’m using a collection of items I salvaged from my grandparents’ house to illustrate a series of narrative poems about winter, home, family, and being haunted. I’m really pleased with how it’s turning out. Stay tuned.

Q: What brought you to focusing on classical-inspired piano music?

I was trained classically as a pianist. In my late teens, I determined that I hate reading music, so I learned to improvise and have been writing my own music since. They can’t make me go back! I won’t do it!

Q: “The world has been this way for a long time.” has a poetic cadence to it—was this intentional or did it come out naturally?

Naturally. Some stories I put a lot of effort into thinking about the voice; some I write on the fly and see what happens. This was one of the latter.

Q: The narrator of “The world has been this way for a long time.” reflects on living with uncertainty and trying to hold on to hope. How do you see optimism working as a theme in the story?

We live in a time in which despair has been weaponized as a rhetorical and political tool to disempower the masses. There is an entire ideological project that serves to convince people that the situation is beyond saving—that continuing the fight is a fool’s game.

I think most of us who really work to see the reality of things often have to grapple with that despair. At times, the forces of domination seem insurmountable. It is hard to look at the genocide in Palestine, for instance, without being affected by the scale of devastation, as well as the scale of propaganda and repression. However, when I look at the Palestinian resistance, I am reminded that we owe it to the people fighting to lend them our efforts in solidarity, no matter the apparent odds. This is true both because it is just and right to do so, but also because reality is changeable. We may find that when we add our weight to a struggle, others join us, our effect is multiplied, and we are capable of more than we think.

It was important to me that the main character was no one special. The best people I know in my life are no one special. They all frequently feel powerless. The main character is beset by small questions of their relationship, caring for children, navigating gender and expectations of an unjust society, while knowing that there is so much else facing them. And god knows we are all beset with the small questions of our lives. I wrote this as a reminder that while there is no need for a naïve optimism that ignores reality, that there is a genuine and essential bravery to having optimism for a better world. It is something extremely hard won.

Q: Do you find that mending and stitching fabrics helps relax you and bring forward story ideas?

I don’t know if it helps with ideas, but it definitely helps me relax. Having multiple hobbies helps maintain my ego when one of them isn’t working out so good.

Q: Do you tend to start a story with a specific image or idea in mind, or does the narrative grow as you write?

Most stories start with a setting or image. I constantly want to write stories about specific old houses, temperatures, emotions, aimless dreams I had, and have had to grudgingly learn how to write characters and plots.

This might be too revealing about my process.

The evolution of a story from a single vague image into an actual narrative is something helped by outlining—otherwise, I would simply write vignettes and give up in frustration.

Q: You’ve published a good deal of horror in addition to speculative. What do each of these genres provide for you that the other can’t?

As I was trying to answer this, I found the answer getting blurrier. Each allows me to examine some real emotion or idea in a way that is a few degrees removed from reality, in a way that lets me examine it from a new angle. I sat here for a while trying to describe what exactly is different between “The world has been this way” and my other work, and I’m honestly not sure I can pinpoint it. The floating cities are scary, terrifying even, but the conclusion the story reaches is not just sitting in that fear, but (I feel) a call to action. In my other most recent work, “Dead Things,” the fear that a loved one might resent your eulogizing of them is at the heart of the story, and by extension the ending revolves around it. So, I’m not sure – perhaps it’s whether the fear is the point, or something else is.