Since we’d never met in person, I had to picture Richard taking notes, making observations as he walked around Brooklyn’s Cortelyou Road or maybe further south, on Foster Avenue, perhaps on his way to the train at Newkirk Plaza, the pedestrian-only open-air arcade floating above the rolling B/Q line, not too far from where we first might have seen each other, each seeing the other without the knowledge of being seen. I picture Richard like I picture myself, taking notes with our eyes before graphing the observations onto paper later. Each of us drapes images and sounds onto the narrative track, employing a methodology of eavesdropping, moving toward an aesthetics of reassembly.
My own notes app is a portable body of water: rolling, osmotic, choppy. To make books, it is necessary that I go swimming in the deep end. Whenever a feeling or finding occurs to me I write it down for later (always for later), so that I can look at it again, and look at it differently. So that the aura of simultaneity that is life can be revived, or fabricated. To turn asynchronous narration into a continuous present and stage the discrepancy as a “story,” denaturalization exposing the reality of fiction.
Like many writers living and writing in vast urban landscapes, disconnected by ill-conceived subway lines and lagging transit and the rush of the city, Richard and I met on the internet. We eventually wrote together, beginning a correspondence in the virtual hospitality of a Google Doc in the weeks leading up to the launch of my nonfiction book, north by north/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025).
I read Richard’s book, The Long Hallway (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), on subway stations and trains and the hiatus between floors, on crowded elevators. I read on the way to work and between classes, and while waiting for the bus that would take me to my car, where my reading paused. I wrote, while driving, in the delay. Across the Hudson, where I moved from the city, time is different. I no longer read and write under the indeterminate signal of the F train but the stuttering cadence of Route 17 traffic. Cruise control periodically curtailed by gridlock: stealing lines in the break or brake of movement.
While reading The Long Hallway, I thought about movies. Not necessarily Halloween, the movie Richard draws from in his book, but about watching movies, or more specifically, the general act of watching them. For at least the first year of being a new parent, and perhaps longer, I stopped watching movies altogether. A motion picture purist, I thought it sacrilege to cut the studied experience of watching into unintended segments, viewing the story at different hours and across several days. As if the film was not a film at all but a TV show. At some point it occurred to me that I had to learn to watch another way or I’d never watch another movie again. I had to learn to string things together out of order in the midst of parental stupor, drowsiness, and a scanty ration of free time. Temporal slips became the norm, occasioned by a lot of rewinding and rewatching, restarting from a point of view that was always on the move. Watching, like writing, is like that. To alter an experience of time, all it might take is a reorientation of one’s gaze, the consent of waiting, the intimacy of surrender; I mean our bodies’ capacity for being held, our bodies’ capacity for folding.
I thought about all these things as I read Richard’s book, long after we’d first seen each other in Brooklyn, returning, like the current of the ocean or a stream of thought, as we wrote letters to one another in the copresence of our Google doc, and afterward, in the now that is still unfolding, considering both the necessity and impossibility of restoring the uncollected artifacts of a week or longer of not looking, wondering if I could write an introduction to our correspondence as an iteration of a very recent history. Remembering that any stream invites us to jump into its flowing channels from any point.
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CC: There’s this immediate movement in your work toward the body and its moving parts–palms wiping the sweat from muscled torsos, fingers moving beneath mesh shorts, the flexed arms of children desperate to show themselves as men–a kind of rhythmic montage or image reel that overlays the power relations of intimacy. There is a twinning of sex and violence, a playing field where girls are potential “victims” and boys need to develop into bigger, stronger men, to be “the one in charge.” When revisiting your memoir’s opening pages, I’m taken back to my shame of getting off on being the one that comes from behind–a feeling I liken in north by north/west to a history of domination. To see without being seen. In your work there’s also the violence–risk, danger, threat–of one’s interiority leaking out. The Long Hallway rotates on this axis, slippages or discrepancies between the inside and outside; the performance, more generally, of being human, and the second skins queer people don, more specifically, in order to survive.
RSL: I think the body is always the place to start when it comes to personal storytelling, because to me the body is always a narrative, or at least the inevitable starting point of one. What the body both conceals and reveals sets a story in motion, by which I mean the sequence of revelations that limit the scope of what might be possible in the future, the autobiographical equivalent to the decisions a novelist must make that automatically erode the potentiality of how a plot might unfold. The body–and, more explicitly, desire–is the engine of futurity because of how uncompromising and relentless it is. You can either give in or spend a lifetime resisting, but the body establishes the playing field and the rules of the game, and you can tell from the start of my book that mine was an obstacle that defined my journey into adulthood. I like what you say here about physical orientation as well, a body in relation to another body, and how positionality generates power and either the presence or loss of control. I’m wondering if you would also extend that to the ways in which the body is made political, especially in regard to how you write about the legibility of a body that has crossed some kind of border.
CC: I love what you say here–about positioning, which is also a frame, which is also a border, through which we advance, retreat, jostle, disappear, try to establish our playing field, as you say, our field of vision. At one point in north by north/west, I wonder whether the book I’m writing isn’t anything more than “a series of alternating glances,” understanding that my task is to re-create what the eye sees at certain angles; at certain intervals. You recognize, in the lens of the camera, at least how it is positioned in Halloween, the eye of the voyeur, a scenario in which the film is a mirror and the viewer is alternatively haunted and hunter—the escape narrative that sets into motion the horror story and the story that would become, was beginning to become, your life, or vice versa; you writing your life onto the film and into the folds of narrative. Underneath the life writing act, I think, is this desire to be seen, to be witnessed, but on terms that you, as author-subject, can control. Your childhood fantasy of being invisible, of being able to turn off and turn on, or be turned on, activated by another. Plus the fact of not being invited, of trespassing, as interloper, a subject position, I sometimes tell my students, that I find especially useful for a writer. To write within the thing without feeling a part of it. To be both the life and its study; to be both author and subject and spectator then, or none of them; to be the reader, bottoming out on the thrill of discovery and encounter: emptied but already wanting, again, to be filled.
The plot, if there is a plot in north by north/west, rotates on the paranoia and deception of its source material: spy games, body doubles, duplicates or fakes, the narrator’s insistence that his “special skill [is] to feel out/of place anywhere.” Your own mantra: You should see your face, which becomes both a benediction and a curse, an invitation and warning. You are an extraordinarily perceptive writer, a capacious recorder—readers of The Long Hallway can trace that sensitivity for observation and imaginative playback to your childhood. I often think that if we hadn’t grown up without an always-on network at our fingertips, cast or compelled into hypervisibility, we would have never figured out the technique of pretending, a dissimulation urged by a combination of boredom, curiosity, solitude, and survival, the secret place we go to hide, which is ourselves.
“The body is always a narrative,
or at least the inevitable
starting point of one.”
RSL: I love this note you end on here about the secret place we go to hide being in some very real sense ourselves, because I think the act of life writing also provides that hiding place, if we understand self-disclosure as simultaneously a form of concealment with regards to what’s left out (that desire to be witnessed but only on terms that have been pre-established). In north by north/west I was struck by how much you elide traditional modes of self-revelation, or the arrangement of personal events into a recognizable narrative shape, and instead rely on association to build and aggregate meaning. There’s a distrust of conventional autobiography embedded in the text, or at least an avoidance of linearity and causality, in the form of your doubles and duplicates and ongoing recursion, and instead you pursue intimacy through juxtaposition. The book ultimately forges an intellectual rather than confessional sense of trust with the reader, and this is seductive because it’s an invitation to participate, which brings us back to that idea of positionality and control over the zone where the text resides.
I think in The Long Hallway I wanted to do to the page something similar to what Michael Myers does to his hometown of Haddonfield in Halloween, destabilizing the familiar and reversing the dichotomy between safety and danger. When I watched the film as a closeted kid, I found the violent horror elements to be comforting because I generally understood how they would play out, whereas the small town setting being made increasingly sinister by Michael’s presence was always upsetting because it reflected my own experience much more directly. I understood myself as an interloper in the otherwise banal environment that I inhabited as a child, and I wanted my text to reenact that sense of trespass into the world of Halloween, infecting familiar cultural iconography with new meaning that it couldn’t have had without my own subject position as a guide. And I think this is also what you accomplish so well in north by north/west, tunneling into ideas that orbit and refract and thus unsettle a reader who was hoping or expecting a more straightforward experience. It’s the form rather than the content that destabilizes. Hitchcock’s narrative of mistaken identity becomes a lens to frame your own slipstream approach to genre.
CC: Eliding “the arrangement of personal events into a recognizable narrative shape” is such a useful way of describing this, and I want to hold onto that. Have you ever seen the film Cameraperson? I happened across it a few nights ago on Criterion, and I’m completely enthralled; I can’t wait to watch it again. The movie is a memoir but wholly compiled of the spare footage from other films the director had worked on, as either director or cinematographer. We hear Kirsten Johnson’s voice having conversations with her subjects or talking “off camera” to other crew members and local guides about the shot, the lighting, the suspicious looks of military police in Yemen, et cetera, but we only see her face once—when her mom, whom she’s been interviewing about her memories and her general ability to recollect—she has late stage Alzheimer’s—holds the camera for her so that she can brush her hair, brushing it as she did when she was a child. It’s an incredibly touching moment and probably the only scene of what folks might expect from “autobiography” in the whole film, but it can only occur through inverting the frame, so that the writer-director becomes the subject, and the subject, which is to say the text, takes over, however briefly. I’ve always been interested in this kind of autoproduction, a self-producing text that decenters its author in favor of coincidences, intervals, proximity, and, as you say, association, advancing through the choreography of a list and the list’s only rule, which is to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.
I’ve also tried, especially in north by north/west, to make a book by careful excision—not just to cut into each paragraph and collect the scraps, but as I say in the book’s preface, “to make a book of scraps to replace the text proper.” As a teenager, I came across the David Byrne and Brian Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and was immediately sort of turned on by this idea that you might be able to create a whole album out of samples. I feel like I’ve been driven by that idea, that aspiration, for a while now, beginning, at least, in 2017, when I started writing A and B and Also Nothing, which is a memoir that translates Henry James and Gertrude Stein by cross-cutting footage of my daily life with scenes from The American and The Making of Americans. Extracting, dubbing, looping. In that book I mention that in order to tell you about myself I have to tell you about the people—real or imagined—who are passing through me. It reminds me of how Kirsten Johnson—I’m looking her up now and she teaches, like you, at NYU—prefaces Cameraperson, in which she kind of explains the film in a short note that talks about how she’s worked for the last twenty-five years as a documentary cinematographer and that the following footage comes from all those other films, but here, she writes, I ask you to see it as my memoir. These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still. And I love this idea of the images that mark us, which you might be invited to read in a few different ways. What are the things that give us (back) to ourselves, or the things that give us away? Some of my favorite moments of The Long Hallway are when you shift, all within the same paragraph, from the past to the past subjunctive to the present tense of the camera, the POV of the camera that always bears intensity, immediacy. This tendency to picture things as if they are a movie until what is being recounted can only be expressed in the language of film, the ontology of the screen. It’s thrilling, I always think, to feel like you aren’t quite sure if you’re living the thing or (only) watching it happen. And even better to admit that there’s no real difference.
RSL: I’m so glad you brought up Cameraperson, because collage is emerging for me as a really “true” approach to life writing (or art from life) in the sense that it acknowledges the constructiveness of conventional narrative shapes and seeks something more accurate to the experience of being alive. The abrupt shift from the montaged scenes of her cinematography work abroad to the more directly personal mode, in the form of the introduction of her mother as a primary subject, is potentially jarring until you remember her framing of the film as memoir. This collage mode is especially relevant in the context of Alzheimer’s and the inevitable disappearance of the self even while presently engaged in the act of documentation. The collage doesn’t try to explain the connective tissue between the scraps. I’m grappling with this idea of intentional framing of genre right now as I finish another text that questions the value and purpose of the autobiographical form and explores the impulse to pursue self-storytelling through a more theoretical lens. I’m thinking directly about what it means to explain ourselves on the page and then enacting a self-conscious version of what that might look like.
“ghost station” by Matthias Rhomberg is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
I said earlier that you forge an intellectual rather than confessional relationship with the reader by privileging form over content. Or maybe by reassigning the value of content or plot by relegating it to a position as a building block of form rather than the thing itself. You say this directly with your metaphor of scraps replacing the text. The audience becomes a detective trying to produce meaning from a curated body of evidence, which is a concession of the authorial control we discussed earlier, but only in part, because you’ve still created the context that allows the scraps to cohere. Like Johnson says, the things we’ve seen are also part of our memoirs, and I wanted to position Halloween in such a foregrounded way to avoid the expectation that my own story would amount to some singular revelation. Instead I hoped to show the reader that form is the point, diverting some of those narrative expectations back to my representation of the film, side-stepping any responsibility to provide catharsis or resolution. I’m stealing the feelings of terror and dread associated with the figure of Michael Myers and collaging them over my own life in the same way that you co-opt the jittery vibe of Hitchcock’s film and use it as a way into discussions of dislocation and migration, genre hybridity, etc. I’m obsessed with a line that you linger on: “I don’t write books anymore. I write combinations.”
CC: I love this idea of the audience/reader/viewer becoming a detective. And the detective genre is not so different from the genre of spy that north by north/west assumes as its aesthetic consciousness; in both cases, the plot largely pivots on the question of whether somebody will discover something or be discovered for who they really are. I think a lot of my work generates “meaning” through innuendo; it’s not just plot that is displaced, but as you observe here, the generic expectations of autobiography, through which people want to know—to insist upon knowing—what happened. And I don’t want to satiate that craving but excite another. I want them to piece together a possible happening. I want them to construct their own truth.
“Memory is also a copy whose unreliability opens up so many opportunities for translation.”
I can’t help but marvel, in the course of this correspondence, that you and I were often orbiting each other, though we had never actually met. So all of our encounters, or non-encounters, began and ended with a gaze that was, in a sense, secret. I spotted you hurrying through the turnstiles at the 7th Ave Q station while I was exiting, each of us late, heading in opposite directions. You spotted me (sleep)walking around Ditmas Park, acclimating myself to city life with a stroller. It’s almost as if we were private eyes, gathering clues on the move to trace a plausible itinerary of the other. And we know from reading your memoir that you’ve always had a talent for looking; to see things that other people couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see. Since there is a choice, I want to remember to say, in how we choose to look, and what we ultimately see. I’m thinking, too, of your notion of “building blocks” and want to ask about the impetus or origin of what you’re working on now. I began writing north by north/west because I wanted to continue a book that had already “ended” in publication, and so I felt I had to write another book, if only to speak to that earlier one, not to begin where A and B and Also Nothing left off but to continue to glance at it, to annotate the text, to test it out, to remark on it or maybe to remake it, the way the narrator of north by north/west aspires, at least at the outset, to remake Hitchcock’s 1959 film. Although I feel at odds with plot, I am an enthusiastic supporter of narrative framing, and I feel like another thing that marks much of my work across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction is this desire to exercise translation, to exploit the conditions of fidelity and the normative relationship between originals and their copies. It’s almost as if I need to stage the conditions in which to write my story; that I can only begin writing my story in the guise of another’s.
RSL: The city-dweller as a private eye is one of my favorite metaphors, embodied famously by the wheelchair-bound James Stewart in Rear Window, another Hitchcock film that traffics in paranoia and suspicion as well as the voyeurism that you talk about here: the act of looking without being seen, or at least believing oneself to be unseen while looking. As a child I was always looking over and under and through the thing itself. Rear Window is structured in a similar way as you describe your own work here, in terms of the reader being asked to piece together “a possible happening” on their own with the clues they’ve been given. I remember seeing what I knew was a familiar face that day you describe at the station, and then later I definitely recognized you walking near my building in Ditmas Park. And now between your last note here and this one from me, we’ve actually met for the first time and had a version of the same conversation that we’re enacting in this space. In a way, this written conversation began as an original but perhaps now, beginning with this entry, is a copy of the one that has taken place off the page as I try to remember things I said to you at the bar. Memory is of course also a copy whose unreliability opens up so many opportunities for translation.
“What comes first, the image or the imagination that conjures possibility into being?” you write in north by north/west before continuing, “If it is not also true that in order to become what I am I’ve first had to copy out my life into words, to return the text to the body.” And I love this idea of becoming through language, through text(s), and also that it can happen over and over again, the body being a container for each reenactment and retelling. Each remake. My new book uses the impulses and decisions that contributed to my approach in the previous one as evidence for this lack of surety in personal narrative and life writing, one thesis being that when you look at something again, and then even again, you’ll see something altogether different each time until it’s impossible to tell which representation was the original and which of the myriad others are the copies. I want to interrogate the unreliability of autobiography through the lens of motive.
CC: The body as a container; a distortion that deepens. I’m very fond of the self-reflexive and processual approach you are taking with your new work, and this broader technique of optical iteration as a means of inquiry, as if, like Marty McFly, you’re eavesdropping on yourself in the past from the future. In this scenario, maybe blinking provides the jump cuts through which we always seem to awaken somewhere else. Though I like the hiatus before we land, the gap created by the cut, the conditions or permission to open up, maybe in a way that you couldn’t have before. I remember at one point while writing north by north/west, I refer to the book’s genre as “a mobility,” another moment of composition staged or retained within the narrative. And I think maybe this is why we both write from a place of looking away and looking back, by which I also mean looking again. We want to go, to be, always somewhere new, displaced by any detail’s ability to transform a single image into several sequences, each carrying their own narrative, their own history.
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Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. His research connecting migration and media studies has been awarded the Calder Prize and a Mellon Foundation fellowship, and his writing has received the Pushcart Prize, International Latino Book Award, and Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Fence, American Poetry Review, and Latin American Literature Today. Recent books include the novel VHS (CLASH Books, 2025), a notebook titled A and B and Also Nothing (Unbound Edition, 2023), the poetry collection Windows 85 (Roof Books, 2024), a monograph on migrant subjectivity and works of art born in translation called Drift Net (Lever Press, 2025), and north by north/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025), which Electric Lit calls “a new kind of origin story.” [IG: @chrispup; Bsky: @chriscampanioni.bsky.social]
Richard Scott Larson was born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, and he earned his MFA from New York University. He has received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Paragraph Workspace for Writers, and the Willa Cather Foundation. His writing has also been recognized as notable twice by The Best American Essays. His creative and critical work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books, Harvard Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, Slant Magazine, and many other journals and anthologies, including It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press). He also recently edited the inaugural issue of Write or Die Magazine focused on personal essays about the horror genre. He is the author of the memoir The Long Hallway (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024) and an active member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn. [IG: @crazyforvincent; Bsky: @richardscottlarson.com]
Cover image “Pigeons at Newkirk Plaza #pigeons #newkirkplaza #ditmas #brooklyn #inbrooklyn #newyork #newyorkcity #bnw #blackandwhite #bandw” by Steve Soblick is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
