Re: Karl Jirgens’ The Razor’s Edge (The Porcupine’s Quill Press, 2022)
& Steven Ross Smith’s Glimmer: Short Fictions (Radiant Press, 2022)
STEVEN ROSS SMITH:
Karl, your stories seem to like disjunction. For example, early in your first story “Cinderella Pecadilla” both your narrator and his phone caller (Sarah) introduce disruption into the narrative. During a recollection of a dream, a former home, a vision of Jesus, and a phone call interrupts the narrator’s reverie, and the story’s logical continuance. I’m interested in narrative interruption or disjunction too. Why do you use this technique?
KARL JIRGENS:
I disjoin the narrative as a parallel to psychic rupture. The story is broken up in way that I hope will illustrate the distracted mind-state of the narrator as well as the other characters. It seems to me that disruption is a contemporary condition of being, and that actuality for most people is discontinuous, so representing that actuality within a literary form invites rupture as a pre-existing condition that pervades the actual as well as the mind.
SRS:
You blend into the fiction moments of non-fiction (it seems). There are several such drifts into history, mythology, geography, etc. It’s a fascinating trip. You create this kind of genre hybridization in all the stories—where’s truth, where’s fiction? Which is the there?
