wolf talk wolf

an interview with myself

This post is too long for email so view it online.

e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award and recipient of the Diverse Worlds Grant, he is the author of Glossolalia, Howl, and the space opera series The Shattered Stars. His short fiction appears in Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, Mysterion Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere.

This seems a bit self-indulgent, even for you.

My creative life seems to be one of indulgencing myself, though I’ve tried, lately, to moderate and give my readers something they may like, rather than whatever amuses myself, and myself alone. And so while this may seem like a gimmick or an indulgence, the goal, here, as always, is to give you a fleeting sense of amusement.

Do you mind if I ask you a question?

Well, sure, I guess.

Do you think we can accomplish anything through doing?

What?

Just that. I was given some terrible news recently. The kind I’m afraid to share. The kind that’s not really mine to share, honestly. But it shook me to hear this person shattering there on the phone, crying in the street, with only me as a tether to their own life.

I felt so helpless. So powerless.

I cannot find what must be done. Cannot see what to do.

Cannot even tell if something can be done through doing.

Do you know what I mean?

I do not.

Fair enough. I just—

I have this sort of fear. Existential dread, I suppose you could say. I find that I so often do things now. I am not a thinker but a doer. Often the doing gets me in trouble, but thinking never did much for me but increase my own misery. And so I have become a creature of doing rather than one of thinking.

And I wonder if, perhaps, I’ve just always been wrong, no matter which way I lean.

Have you tried being?

I think that I have tried but the only way I know to try is through doing, and I reckon that’s part of the problem, yeah?

Maybe don’t try.

It says that on Charles Bukowski’s tombstone, you know.

I know.

I think about that often. Maybe more than anyone should. It’s funny you mention Bukowski because I’ve been thinking about him seriously for the first time since I was seventeen, which is more than half my life ago. I used to be smarter back then so it’s funny to me how attached I was to Bukowski, but I was reading his poem Let it Enfold You for the first time since—I don’t even know—maybe 2006 or 2007, and I found myself falling into it, letting it, well, enfold me.

And I found a semblance of peace and happiness.

And I started writing poetry again for the first time since 2014, when I wrote three consecutive poetry collections during three consecutive migraines.

I thought I’d never write poetry again after that. Like I had spat it all out, flushed myself clean across those 500 poems.

I was kidding before about this being a bit indulgent, but—

My father used to tell me that the thinking of thoughts is thoughtless thinking. It was a kind of a joke for him. Told me it’s some German saying, but I have no way of knowing if that’s true.

You could google it.

Well, yeah. But even though it may not be a real saying and it may even be true, I do sometimes feel as if much of what I’ve done has been less than useless. Perhaps even counterproductive.

I sometimes feel my emotions so at the surface of a moment that it terrifies me. I once read a book that made me vomit and I didn’t even know that could happen. I think I had a panic attack, which is something I’ve never experienced before, and it wasn’t even from something real.

Or, I mean, it was real. Real emotions. But real emotions of imaginary people. They got inside me. So inside me, in fact, that I lost control of myself.

It’s like these emotions sweep through me all at once and I lose myself. I become nothing and no one. I suppose that’s maybe what Lao Tzu meant about being but—I don’t know. I sometimes feel like I’m lying to myself. That even these feelings I have are somehow a lie or performance, even though there’s no one who even knows about it.

I’ve been thinking about werewolves.

That sounds terribly lonely.

I don’t know. I’m not saying that as an evasion. I honestly just don’t know. I don’t know what to make of myself. Quite often my own responses to things surprise me, as if I haven’t been myself my whole life.

Some would say you haven’t.

I mean, they’re right, in a way. And not in that tired biological way where people talk about our cells replacing one another. If you think yourself resides in mitochondria, you’re too far gone, I imagine. But I do think it’s true that we are always changing and becoming new while, perversely, never really changing in any significant outward way.

What is the point of all this?

All what?

I’ve been thinking about werewolves.

This. This substack, your essays, your novels, life more broadly?

Mind if I take these one by one?

Sure.

The Final Fantasy VII Remake came out on PS+ in, I think, March of 2021, so I downloaded it, after having no prior interest in it. You see, I was never a FFVII fanboy and always considered it overrated. I was far more interested in FFIX (more on this eventually) and even FFVIII. But I picked it up and fell into it. Loved it. Played the wheels off it.

And, for the first time in half a decade, I got the idea for an essay. I wrote that essay in April of 2021 but didn’t publish it until November of 2022.

In writing that essay, I remembered how much I enjoyed the process of just talking about a single topic. A few months before that, I discovered Tim Rogers and stormed through a bunch of his work and learned through him the opportunities available to write about myself while writing about other things.

I have never enjoyed writing about myself—

Seriously?

What?

All you do is write about yourself. I’ve read that FFVII Remake essay. You spent most of that essay writing about yourself and almost none of it writing about the game.

But, don’t you see? Those are the same thing. To write about art is to write about the experience of art as much as it is to discuss the art itself.

I believe that you believe that, but I’ve read, for example, your Kanye West review and you spend almost the entire thing writing about depression.

You never liked that one.

I still don’t understand it. Then there’s the FFVI review, which begins with 1,500 words about your appendectomy in Korea. Or your review of Everything Everywhere All At Once which never even mentions the movie or anything that happens in the movie!

I’m very proud of that one.

It’s a lie! You’re lying to people and you’re doing it on purpose.

It’s not a lie. It is, perhaps, the most true thing I’ve written here.

But it’s not about a movie. It’s not about anything. It’s a piece of memoir. An indulgence.

It’s a love letter.

To yourself.

Isn’t all writing? Isn’t believing you have anything to say at all that must be heard a form of self-aggrandizement.

I’ve been thinking of werewolves again.

And what is anyone to make of your “review” of House of Dragons, Episode Eight?

That one, too, is very important to me. I think it may be the best thing I’ve yet written anywhere.

When someone clicked on that link expecting a review of an episode of a TV show, do you think they were satisfied with what you wrote? No, of course not. That was part of the point, yes? You were being so clever. Such a smart little boy. So self-satisfied and amused by your little games.

And what would your father think? What would your mother think, knowing that your eulogy to your still living father is titled House of the Dragons: Episode Eight?

Who would do such a thing?

It was, in part, to amuse myself. I think it’s funny to, as you say, lie. I thought it was funny to hide the most personal writing I’ve done inside essays ostensibly meant to be about something else.

You don’t see how gross that is?

I suppose I—

I. Always I. Always Me. Your father is a real person. He’s alive, at least for now. Perhaps have some care. And, perhaps, it’s time to stop wallowing in your histories of sorrows and heartbreaks.

When I think about werewolves, I’m reminded of dust¹ and—

So clever. Such evasions.

I’m trying to change. Trying to pull this place in a new direction. You’re right, of course. I spent so many essays writing about my sorrows, but I have been a sad person my whole life. I cannot simply shrug it off, and to write about art is to write about myself, and to write about myself—especially my relationship with art—is to write about melancholia.

Sorrow.

Failure.

Defeat.

But living anyway.

Yes, living anyway. In spite of.

Finding a reason to live. I have always been attached to that. To books and movies and even, yes, videogames where people are trapped in this horror we call life, yet they live anyway. They act and do and become themselves, despite everything.

Then write that.

I’m trying. I am. I find it difficult to write, I suppose, because it is so deeply personal. I cannot explain to someone else why I am still alive or why I didn’t kill myself, a long time ago. I can only tell you—them—that I didn’t.

That I’m still here.

This place began as a project to do something new. Maybe not something wholly new. Maybe many have done similar things. But something new for me. To use all that I’ve learned from fiction and use that in nonfiction. To write about myself by writing about the things that mean so much to me.

The things that have made me. The art that has and continues to sustain me.

And what is this thing you’re trying to achieve?

If I could explain it simply, I would not have written all these essays. The ones you hate the most, the ones you find most baffling, are the ones that most exemplify my goal. When I write about myself, I am writing about Final Fantasy VI or House of the Dragon or Kanye West. The parts that are not about the piece of art I’m reviewing are, really, the most important aspects of the essay.

The art is nothing without the self. This self is nothing without the art.

But I have tried to change. Tried to do what you say and write past the horrors of my sorrow. I think my recent essay about The Deathly Hallows is a pivot point.

Ten thousand words. You thought you were being so clever.

After spending months with the series, I found that I never got a chance to say everything that needed to be said. And so I poured it all into that final essay. And, in going through that long journey through ten thousand words, I hope I’ve shown the new direction of this place.

But, really, it was writing my series about Wong Kar Wai that led me to embrace a new turn in all this. And especially my review of In the Mood for Love & 2046, which I think of as a capstone to the first two years of this newsletter.

In a specific and very serious way, everything I’ve ever had to say about so many things is spilling out in that piece. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve written here and exemplifies what I always hoped this place could be.

15,000 words. And how many of those words are actually even about the movies? To be honest, who gives a shit about all that about Blockbuster and Ireland and heartbreak?

I cannot make you or anyone care about me or the things I love, but I hope to explain why certain moments in time, certain experiences, can change your entire life, catapulting you into a new self.

And, for me, writing that actually became such a moment in my life.

I feel different having finished it. Having published it. And part of me simply doesn’t know what to do with this newsletter any longer. I fear that I’ve said everything I’ve ever had to say.

And so, if you’re still reading this, dear reader, know that I won’t be paywalling anything else here until further notice. Where we go, we go together, even if I resent it, even if I hate you, even if I love you. And, sadly, I often feel all three for you, though never at the same time.

I’ve been thinking about werewolves and why they’ve always been with me, always so deeply a part of me.

Don’t you get tired of this performance?

Which one?

Which one indeed. This one, you absolute fool. The performance of self as demonstrated here over these hundreds of essays.

I am tired of so many things. So ghastly weary.

Then quit. Quiet.

The curse of the werewolf appeals to me because of how cruel it is. How senseless. I had my life changed by Princess Mononoke, in part because of how cruel Ashitaka’s banishment is.

But, before that, I remember the Wolfman with Lon Chaney when I was ten and my dad and brothers and I watched a man’s life twist monstrous. How a moment can change a life, and often not for the better. I think of howling. Of the moon. I have always been attached to the moon.

I didn’t used to sleep. I write this now at 4am while I wait to leave my hotel to go to a plane to take me home after not sleeping all night. But I so rarely have slept. Especially when I was a child. I positioned my bed so the window was right at my face and I would stare out the window at the moon through the night thinking the foolish, child thoughts I always had as a foolish child.

I’ve never been a fan of horror, but I have always been a fan—an obsessive—for this sort of thing. The werewolf. The curse. The brutality of fate. Of life. The importance of choice and what it means to lose your ability to choose. What a life is without choice. When we are cursed, not to choose, as Sartre said, but forsaken and disallowed to choose.

This is the fear of rape, abstracted. It is, at its core, stripping choice from another or having that choice stolen from yourself. There’s the violence, yes, of course, but I think choice is an important aspect here.

We are robbed of choice and then stained, forever, by that moment when choice was stolen.

You are now cursed as a werewolf yourself. And what does it mean to become a monster? Will you, too, do what was done to you? Will you spread your curse, or will you fight against it, even if it means destroying yourself? Even if the only option is to destroy yourself.

I’ve always been a vampire person, myself.

The dream and fetish of power. Vampires are sexy. They have all kinds of powers and abilities. They’re sort of like superheroes, except they feast on humans.

But perhaps we long to be feasted upon? Perhaps that’s why vampires are so tied to sexuality, and often homosexual desire.

The vampire is an object of desire. It is desire itself.

Werewolves are monsters. They terrify us because they are us.

Yes, they are powerful. Superhumanly strong and fast. Difficult to kill.

But what is the cost?

Humanity.

Exactly. We must lose ourselves in order to become the werewolf.

That’s true of vampires, too.

Yes, but vampires never lose control. They can choose when and whom to feast upon. The werewolf becomes a mindless beast. Devouring anyone and everyone who happens to come too close.

What does any of this have to do with the future of this place?

We run from our—

We?

I. Fine. I run from myself. From who I am. Not for the reasons you or anyone else might think. I suppose it’s like acting. Trying on new skins. I try on voices and styles, even when I’m writing about myself. Even when that self is more constructed than real.

So, yes, in a sense, it’s all a lie. I am not this person, here, that you’re reading now. None of these people are me.

So who are you?

I resent becoming a persona. A personality. I resent and hate the audience I’ve gathered here. But also I love them.

I love you.

I need you.

And the need makes me hate you.

A curse. This one self-inflicted, though. Desired.

I went looking for werewolves, begging to be bitten, and now thousands of you stare at these words on a screen.

People laugh when I say that I don’t think about anything, but it’s simply true. I carry on without a thought in my head. Which is to say: I do not know who I am.

Because I don’t think the question really matters. Who am I to say who I am?

We are not who we say we are. We are who people experience when they’re around us. And so I don’t think about me or who I am because, in a sense, I am no one but also am everyone, am dozens of people, depending on the audience, the company.

And maybe this is a peculiarity of me, but I think, if we’re honest, most of us do this all the time. Who you are on instagram is not who you are at 11pm on your couch watching Too Hot To Handle and it’s not who you were on facebook earlier that day and it’s not who your pastor sees on Sunday or your parents or children or friends see. We are, all of us, a gang of people sharing the same skin.

And, ideally, more or less the same habits, opinions, and behaviors.

Then why the werewolf?

That’s where we become singular. And that single person is out of our control. And it is who everyone will know you as. It is the experience overpowering all others.

You cannot walk back a murder or talk your way out of consuming someone or turning them into a monster, like you.

And so there is the tremendous weight of guilt.

The horror of life.

I suppose you could call it, even at my earliest, a recognition of depression and the weight of the world.

Always coming home to sorrow. You’re better than this.

Maybe I’m not, though. Maybe I cannot change or become someone better. Maybe I cannot write about myself without returning to these moments of depression that nearly swept me away.

Are you not happy?

I have never been happier. I have a life. I have the love I always dreamt of, and then some. I have a family who loves me. Friends who care about me.

And I care so deeply about all of them.

My greatest fear is that I will not be enough for them. For everyone.

You.

Even you.

Then leave this behind. Stop howling. Stop scourging yourself.

You are not the monster of your nightmares.

I want only for you to be happy. For everyone to be happy. To feel joy.

I want to fill you with joy.

And I hope I have.

Not me, but maybe those reading.

That’s who I meant, yeah.

---

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

1. In 2014, I taught a creative writing course to teenagers and the only real advice I had for them, beyond specific critiques, was to write your obsessions. Let your passions guide your fiction, and not the other way. Be curious, remain open to possibility, and let those things you hold dearest teach you what your novels and stories are about.

I'm not sure if that's good advice, and I doubt it's the advice I would give my younger self because I think it's important I found a winding broken bridge to where I am now, but it's the idea that drives what I do today. Like probably too many young writers, I thought I had to fit inside a pre-existing category. The goal was to fit in there and then make it explode.

This is a fine enough goal, but only if you already fit in there, and I never really have. I've had the same story rejected for being too commercial and too experimental, for being too surreal and for not being surreal enough. I've been asked why I wrote all those paragraphs about dust, and that's what I want to talk about.

Dust is a deep obsession and I don't know when or why it started. Wolves have been with me since memory began and ravens came soon after. Then came Death and Time and love and gods and demons and mythological structure and monsters and bears and trees and squirrels and the way wind makes you whole and finally the Ocean and the Stars and the way that this chaotic existence is systemic and structured and follows a perfect everchanging pattern. But somewhere in all of that came dust and what it means to me, and why I find it so hard to talk about, so hard to write about in a definitive and clear way.

When I was a child I used to watch the dust. Maybe our home was particularly dusty or the sunlight always came in just right, but I remember the dust so clearly, the way it hung in the air, drifting galactically. We had these big windows that faced the street and the sun filled the whole room, and dust danced across these beams of light, creating evanescent constellations. I mapped them with my eyes, lying on the floor, holding my dog. My brain left my head during those hours, staring vacantly into swirling dust and fading light. I became a ship across oceans of photons and dustmotes. They carried me beyond the human I was. They brought me to worlds that forgot to exist, to stories that somehow didn't yet exist.

But back then I never thought about dust. I honestly don't know when I started thinking about dust as something that exists, as something that's a part of my life, my world. It simply was. It still simply is. It's everywhere.

When I choose a starting point of when I really took notice of dust, it'd have to be when I moved to South Korea. I had a small studio apartment that I could not keep clean no matter how hard I tried. And I don't mean I was exceptionally messy. I mean there was always dust. Everywhere. I spent hours washing the floors, cleaning under, inside, and around everything. Sometimes this took me deep into the night and I'd finally go to sleep satisfied that the dust was gone. Invariably, I'd find my apartment coated in a fine layer of dust the next morning, just a handful of hours after I went to sleep. I was fighting a war against the dust, and that's where the first third of Ash Cinema comes from.

I lost that war. It didn't make sense. All that effort and nothing changed. The ocean of dust rolled over me. It defeated me. I gave up after a few months and just lived inside that dust, letting it coat me and everything I owned. Dust is what and who we are. Just like a mountain is a desert waiting to be released, we're creatures sloughing off dust constantly, and when we're done, we'll have unleashed an ocean of dust into existence. And that dust will coat the lives around us, and new life will sprout from it.

But I'm jumping ahead.

I used to try to write stories where nothing happened. I was chasing my childhood, I think. The way I just stared and disappeared for hours. Thoughtless, light, drifting, and only returning to my humanness when someone brought me back or the dream danced away. I was showing agency without humanity. How existence isn't by and for humanity, but is simply a place we exist. We are not the primary agents of reality. We're just the most indignant and violent. I wanted to show how existence happens without our participation. How the world and existence don't need us.

While I teenager, I invented a philosophy accidentally, which is hard to describe in words because it hit me hallucinogenically as sensations, sounds, emotions. Like waves of light and sound and touch. Dust was an important feature here, and I watched as the dust created wires between my friends and me in that room. When someone spoke, the dust pulled us towards them, and as conversation moved, the dust followed its energy. I saw a pattern, a motion, a flow. Or rather, I felt it. It revealed itself to me, and even all these years later, it drives my actions and perceptions. I called it unified chaos theory back then, and I still do. It steals from Taoism and quantum mechanics and existentialism, but, like I said, it came through sensation and not intellectually inquiry. It's not about rationalising the world or defining it.

Unified chaos theory represents a few ideas, each of which could be their own essay: Though everything appears chaotic and random, there is a grander system and pattern at work; we see the infinite reflected in the infinitesimal; we belong to existence, not the other way around; and contradictions are true. But all of that's for another day.

I changed that day, really. I became a much less serious person, a much kinder, gentler one. I no longer needed to know, to understand. Motion became a natural mental, emotional, and physical state. Life is not about pinning the world and people down. Definitions have little to do with existence. It's about the patterns we weave together. It's about connection. The patterns of our individual lives are reflected in the larger fabric of humanity, and the lifecycle of species and planets and stars.

It comforts me. There is no purpose or meaning to life beyond this pattern. And in this purposelessness, this meaninglessness, is comfort and peace. What I choose, I choose for everyone. There is no good or bad, there is no right or wrong. There is simply the behavior I wish to see replicated and reflected across my species, across existence.

If humanity is a virus or bacteria, every choice I make is a characteristic I would like to see in those around me and into the next generations. If I act brutally, I will make a more brutal world. If I act kindly, I will make a kinder world.

But what does this have to do with dust?

Everything.

Nothing.

Dust was the entrance to sight, though I didn't realise it then. When I say I changed that day, I truly mean it. I was coming out of an enormous existential and emotional crisis from reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for the fourth time that year. That novel changed the person I was, and the day I saw how life connects to life changed me. I saw the motion of energy and the beauty of this systemic chaotic world, this brief and endless life.

Dust is like the tendon grafting muscle to bone. It's the connectivity between my deepest obsessions: Time and Death. It's their handshake and why they hold hands, walk side by side. We're built of dust, and we become dust. Existence is dust. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and that's what dust feels like to me. This everpresent constant.

It's probably why dust is a mystical and mythical and surreal aspect to my novels. Dust is the door to the magic of reality. If existence is a stream of infinite flux and we're just drops of water within that, then dust is cohesion.

I can't escape it, and so I dump it into all my novels. Even when I started writing this essay, I believed Ash Cinema was the first appearance of dust in my stories, but then my memory opened and I saw years of stories and poems about dust, or dealing with dust. I've been talking about it longer than I knew, and I'll be talking about it probably forever. This morning I wrote that civilisation is dust in waiting, and I feel that's very true. Cities are built on the ruins of cities, and the future will be built on the brokenness of what we leave behind.

To me, dust is everything. It's the secret god of earth. It's right up there with light and dark and Time and Death. These impossible, unfathomable, and eternal bits of reality. It's the entrance to understanding everything about existence. But it's deeply personal to me, in an irrational way. I've never questioned why dust matters or why I keep writing about it, and so I don't really know what to say when I'm asked about it because it's not a rational part of me that's putting it in the novels and stories.

Writing, for me, isn't rational or intellectual. And probably that's why dust appears most often when I'm writing and less when I'm speaking. A novel, for me, doesn't come from thought. I don't plan or think ahead. I'm deeply in the moment, in the visions, in the echoes of imagined lives. There's nothing for me beyond the sentence I'm writing. I've described writing before as translating visions, and that's the best way I can say it. I don't think in words. I think in images, and writing is just an attempt to translate what I'm seeing, and so I type as fast as I can for as long as I can just to keep up. It's like trying to hold a ghost tightly in your arms. My brain shuts off and I'll sit there writing for five or twelve or twenty hours. I forget to eat and sleep and function like a human. I get lost in the invented worlds and get confused out here on the otherside of the keyboard.

I let my obsessions take hold, and that's when writing works best for me, when it becomes most personal, though the personal is usually miles beneath the dust I kick up to obscure myself on the page. Because it's all about me. Every character and every word is autobiography.

And dust is the cohesive substance between every aspect of my life. It teaches me how to be human, it teaches me my art, it teaches me to love life and not mourn its passing, it teaches me that the grandness of existence will swallow me always, it teaches me to find this comforting, to find this even hopeful.

So what is dust to me? Why do I keep talking about dust?

It's who and what I am.

It's as simple and impossible to describe as that.