There is a great interview over at 3:AM Magazine between Daniel Davis Wood and Jared Pappas-Kelley about his new book Stalking America:
Jared Pappas-Kelley’s Stalking America is one of those rare beasts, a truly unclassifiable novel: a text of a kind so mercurial that it seems to want to shrug off even that label. On its simplest, most rudimentary level, it follows the doings of a reasonably nondescript young man—and yet even in saying as little as that, the word “follows” becomes conspicuous, overloaded with meaning. That’s because the protagonist develops an interest in a reality TV series called Stalking America, which itself follows a woman who in turn follows, and films, other people. But then, just as you’re maybe thinking that the novel sets itself up to make something of the reverberations between these two characters, it does something different. It splits itself apart, cordoning off various sections of its narrative, slicing viewpoints into pieces, creating boundaries around and gaps between different ways of looking at (following?) events as they unfold. The result is something restless, a little insidious, equal parts frustrating and compelling, and made up of many more fascinating elements than a summary can capture.
Read the interview here.
3:AM also ran an excerpt from the book titled What you call clouds - I call smoke here.
And check out the interview with Jonathan Mayhew over at the Rumpus here.
There is also a new curatorial essay by Chelsea Werner-Jatzke for the anthology Good Symptom from the 3rd Thing Press that includes Jared Pappas-Kelley’s Transmission 3. Transmission 3 is an experimental video piece working with a text from Stalking America.
“TO TRY / POST-TRUTH / TO LOOK FORWARD / NOTHING IS ETERNAL” a Good Symptom curatorial essay by Chelsea Werner-Jatzke
Transmissions are a way of crossing the void—
I was working with memories that don’t seem to fit into the larger narrative of my life as visual work and installation before they made it into my book, Stalking America, and then became these Transmissions. I’m exploring these elements and the way they are combined and recombined, creating a new composition of who I am, what my experiences are, and hopefully something a bit more. I am intrigued by handing over these foundational elements to others so they can have their own experience of the material. For me, it’s important to approach it from an experience level. When I’m writing a book, the assumption is to take me as the authority. Whereas, when I’m making a video it’s more about giving you this element and that element and you putting it together—which is a bit more like life and experience in a way.
With memory certain bits are always highlighted. It’s not an objective truth. When you go back to it, some things become prioritized or drift away. I am interested in exploring this against a landscape of post-truth. There are so many relative truths. Some are more objectively true and some are less, but they might still be accurate in a sense. We are always trying to navigate this new landscape of what’s true and real—what’s authentic. ~ Jared Pappas-Kelley
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