A conversation with Fin Sorrel And Zach Hubbird About CARAMEL FLOODS 

A new collection of stories by Fin Sorrel coming out from PSKI PORCH PRESS 2017 

saturday, september 2nd, 2017 

ZACH HUBBIRD

What was going on in your life at the time of writing this piece? 

FIN SORREL

 good question, I have to ask my sidekick allen if its cool I answer this. Also, I'm having trouble with the cut and paste button, so just, one, memento...

 At the time I started writing the story Caramel Floods, (allen said it's cool) I lived in New Orleans, Uptown in a squat off of Adams street. Used to sing the adams family song every time we'd come back home, and it was a trashed out place, floors missing, fleas jumping everywhere, and right down the street, we had a Starbucks, with a great dumpster. I would go there to charge my phone late at night, download music, surf the web, they had plug ins there. One night My friend and I were wired to the gills on Starbucks coffee, and I asked her to give me some writing homework on a whim. I didn't think she would, but she did. And it was to write three chapter ideas. Thats where the sections for Sinatra, Fluer De Lise, and Pineapple Piaf Came from. A basic outline turned into a  year and a half later in asheville north carolina, writing up a storm.

ZACH HUBBIRD

Did you own a watch, were clocks a constant companion?

Fin Sorrel

I had no watch at the time of writing this. I had three cell phones, two of which were broken, that I constantly checked to see if anyone at all was trying to contact me. They never were. I wrote this in a little green journal and stole 12 packs every day, and sat in front of the store and drank the twelver. Then when it came time to transcribe the damn thing, Which I hate doing. I was back in Nola, and my squat was still there, so me and my partner lived back at that squat in Nola on adams street. I transcribed the journal into a computer every day at the library and drank wine at the squat and smoked cigarettes the rest of the time.

ZACH HUBBIRD 

 I heard a rumor that all your life you've been searching for a wall covered with clocks -- is this true?

Fin

A wall full of clocks will happen! It must!

hopefully at an abandoned house, or a tunnel, or maybe just on the sidewalk somewhere. 

Good questions!

ZH

you mentioned that your work has been influenced by William Gibson; are there any other influences that come to mind as far as what influenced Caramel Floods?

(or your writing in general)

Fin

There are other authors I have read along the way, Compte de lautremont  is one of the main ones, but I would say a number of my influences came out of watching Jan Svankmeyer films, and Alejandro Jordorowsky. Also some of the history courses I took back in college, but mainly I saw a lot of mainstream novels doing everything the same, and I wanted to try to expand the form into something new, of course I know now that people like Kobo Abe were doing this kind of writing in the 40's so, I definitley achieved part of my goal, which was to create something strange. Maybe surreal, but I didn't do anything new yet.

William gibson's novel NEUROMANCER did influence a lot of my earlier experiments in writing stories

Jeanette Winterson's SEXING THE CHERRY was a big influence.

Alice in wonderland By Lewis Carroll tripped me out when I was a kid.

I loved it 

For Caramel Floods, I was inspired by street buskers, one of my friends, Luke Phillips does a performance on the street with a marionette he build named Able Rogers, that is probably what influenced the puppet in the story.

ZH

That's interesting that some of your influences are outside the realm of the written word. I can certainly understand that surrealist film is among them since your writing lends itself so much to visualization of things that would be difficult to conceive on film

Fin

I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, I didn't want to go outside, believed I had no friends, or at least that's what I would say when my mom would cut off the TV and tell me I needed to go out and play with my friends. My dad watched a shit ton of violent movies, or Rated R. And I loved hanging out with him sitting there watching movies.

ZH

what is your writing process like? Do you write a rough idea or a framework or is it more free form? Do you ever rearrange things or make significant changes to your work after the initial writing?

Fin

My writing process has taken different forms over the years, when I first started, I believed what the beatniks believed that the first draft was the best, most true draft. then after college, I began to re look at some of my old writings with new eyes, as they say, and with my new eyes, my old drafts looked like big piles of @#$%, thats when I started to rework the old pieces into new pieces, and that started a whole storm of ideas rising basically out of the ashes. Or from my old self, I left clues for my new self. It was weird, it helped me to study my own writings as if they were a piece of history,  a document found from way way far in the past.

Sometimes I like to read free box books and select words from them for poems.

I really enjoyed trying to "describe the apple"

ZH

i got this book of figures of speech at a garage sale recently -- things like "six of one half dozen of the other" or "hung jury"

Fin

Awesome! that could be good source material! I love working with source material, like a DJ would sample.

ZH

your work has a few repeated ideas; the clocks, the phrase "clock cleaner", and a couple other ones that aren't coming to mind -- do you think of your work as kind of having it's own universe, like j r r tolkiens middle earth?

Fin 

It's possible that it does have it's own universe.

But I think most fiction does,

a creation of any kind takes on its own life, whether tangible to the naked eye, or ear or whatever, I think any creation begins to exist, even if its just a collection of pieces of paper with printing on it, or a hunk of metal in a field welded together to make a sculpture. Its alive on some frequency level.

It's almost like we are here as slaves to our creations.

ZH

This piece caramel floods has several distinct worlds in it -- the underwater world, the Paris world, the 1955 TV dominated rundown city world -- do you feel like each of these worlds kind of demanded to be written? They each have a very definite sort of immediacy as though you had seen these places before writing of them

Fin

That's a good question, I feel like I spent so much time with the story after the initial composure of its outline, I spent about a year after that traveling, knowing that the story needed to be written, and wanting so badly to write it, but at that time I didn't believe I could, or ever would. I just kept putting it off. Once I actually started writing the first few lines though, I recognized the world so deeply lodged in my conscious, that I was able to explore the world I had imagined with ease and casually, since I knew I wouldn't be forgetting anything of my original intentions, the ones all neatly written down in my note book. It felt right exploring that world. I would go there again.

Yeah, I sat on that outline for a year. And it was like basic instructions I had left myself. I want to try this technique again.

ZH

how much do you feel like there is crossover between your real life and the worlds you describe in your writing?

i.e. Do you ever feel like your writing influences your life rather than the other way around

Fin

In my dream life, when I'm sleeping there is more crossover between the fiction I have written. Sometimes I do see hints from my stories lying around, or tagged on walls, but I resist the temptation to interpret them, because I know myself, And I know that the meanings are most likely open ended.

My life is much different then the things I write about, I feel like they are separate worlds. This reality bores me very much, its probably why I try to create places that don't bore me.

ZH

Well that's probably good I think it would be pretty exhausting to live in a dystopian surrealist fantasy dominated by TVs -- but millions of people do it every day, somehow

Fin

ah, good point, I think this is what I am trying to get across to people in a subtle way. This reality is far too taxing, especially for animals in families considered lower than us, people considered aliens, and for those experiencing extreme abuse, and repression world wide, seems pretty clear to me that this is not a world I would ever choose to call my home.

I guess that is why I tend towards these elements in my stories, it is the only thing close enough to believable many people might relate to. I always wanted to create a form of angelic surrealism, this is something I have been thinking about a lot, and will most likely appear in my next few long pieces. The book that has influenced a great deal of my work is by Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror  It is very dark, and very surreal. I want to make something like that in an angelic manner, good luck, most will say.