An Interview with Michael J. Wilson, author of A Labyrinth

By Jordan A. Rothacker

Allow me to begin with a disclaimer. Michael J. Wilson is a label-mate of mine from Stalking Horse Press, which published my short story collection, Gristle: Weird tales. While Wilson and I have never met in person, we are friends on social media and enjoy chatting there. I consider him a friend, and I am very lucky that I have friends who write brilliant books (the alternative can be awkward and embarrassing). I usually refrain from reviewing the books of my friends, but I’m making an exception. The following paragraphs describe Wilson’s book, flavored with my own subjective love of the text, followed by our conversation.

Wilson is the author of two previous poetry collections from Stalking Horse Press, A Child of Storm (2016) and If Any Gods Lived (2018). His newest book is A Labyrinth, a 2023 release from Stalking Horse Press, that at 155 pages is an engaging work of poetic narrative, a careful hybridity of history and anachronism. The focus here is the mythic ancient Greek inventor Daedalus and the years leading up and through his greatest inventions.

The story of Pasiphaë and Daedalus, which is most often regarded as just the story of Pasiphaë, although Daedalus does play a crucial role, is one of the strangest stories from ancient Greek mythology and religious storytelling, and that is saying a lot. For most idle consumers of Western culture, the name Daedalus might conjure up a childhood memory of him and his son Icarus flying to freedom from imprisonment on Crete to the Greek mainland with wings the father crafted himself. The story of the ingenious inventor and his tragically disobedient son can be a haunting cautionary tale for children. If the idle cultural consumer knows or remembers (a very Greek distinction) anything else about Daedalus, it is the fact that he designed and built the Labyrinth for King Minos on the island of Crete, an architectural marvel that would ultimately house the frightful Minotaur.

The story of Pasiphaë, and how she fits into this, is not one generally for children (although I remember reading it at a pretty young age). Wilson gives this story life and humanity. He personalizes and evokes myth in ways that stress-test the fictional borders of the myth, that challenge the impossibility and meaning-making of these stories and lay them bare for us today in our culture of judgement and critique. The best part is that Wilson does this not through making language bare and plain, but through a poetic lyricism that whisks the reader along for a ride with its own sense of mythic determination.

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Interview:

Jordan A. Rothacker: I think the most obvious first question I’ve always had for you on this book is, how was it conceived? What engendered this dazzlingly beautiful and intricate story? Why the story of Daedalus and Pasiphaë? What drew you to that very strange and complicated tale?

Michael J. Wilson: I’ve always been attracted to the Oppenheimer type, a creator whose creations bring destruction. It’s a specific kind of failure that follows from great success. Nikola Tesla was the focus of my first book. I love a perceived failure who was maybe also ahead of their time. Daedalus is said to be the “greatest” inventor in his era, yet so many of his inventions bring destruction. The mechanical cow, the labyrinth, the wings—all of these are “solutions” that fail. Despite all the tragedy around him, Daedalus survives. He outlives everyone else in the stories. He never faces judgement, and is even today talked about, if he’s talked about at all, as a great inventor who had a tragic life. But he seemed to only create for the sake of it. He built a cow suit so a bewitched woman could mate with a bull! He murdered his nephew! He knew what he was doing. In writing this book, I wanted to see what happens to a character like this if you put him in the cage of his failures without the gloss of myth, tragedy, and lore around him.

JAR: The form here is described as a lyrical novella, or prose poem. The minutiae of taxonomy and genre description can be difficult and sometimes even silly. How did the form in which you tell this tale develop? And do you have a descriptive term for what you are doing here?

MJW: In general, I think genre is useful, but it also feels like we are in an era of reforming what all of this means in a post-post-post-modern period. This is a pretentious way of saying that I don’t know that this book really fits anywhere. I initially wanted the writing to feel the way myths feel—cyclical, slightly unreliable, contradictory, repetitive. I wanted to mirror the way a story might be told by memory around a table over drinks. I wanted to write without punctuation, use white space and minimum notations to give “breath” to it. I think that calling it a “prose poem” is correct, but it’s also a novella, and a myth, and a monologue.

JAR: I know you have read some of my work that also entails the retelling of Greek myths. In a general sense, why do you think it is important for us in the twenty-first century to keep this kind of material alive?

MJW: There is a part of me that wants to say fuck these old dead white dudes. Fuck the canon. Let’s all move on. But we keep retelling these stories whether we intend to or not, so we might as well poke at the corpses and see what is still intact in there. Daedalus is basically Elon Musk. He’s a boy “genius” who mainly improves pre-existing things to varying degrees while cultivating a cult of personality around himself. Daedalus would have been into AI.

JAR: Before this book, you published two poetry collections, both also from Stalking Horse Press. This book is certainly a departure from those works. What motivated this shift?

MJW: I actually think this book follows from those first two pretty obviously. The real difference is the length and the adherence to a stronger “prose” style. I’ve always spent more time researching than writing. I’ve always ended up using a tiny fraction of that research in the writing. And I’ve always played with the narrator in my work. Who is speaking? Who is the “I” behind the story? I think I always come from a place of myth-making, of telling a story that feels outside reality just a bit. I had the idea for this book for years, and initially it was going to be a more formally classic novel, but the pandemic allowed me to finally explore the idea fully and land on this version. Lockdowns were hard on everyone, myself included. I found the researching and getting lost in this maze to be oddly grounding while being alone in a one-room apartment for months on end.

JAR: Do you consider yourself primarily a “poet,” and if so, is A Labyrinth an extension of that identity and writerly mode, or do you approach self-classification differently?

MJW: I have called myself a poet, but have never really felt comfortable calling myself a poet, if that makes sense. For a long time, I just said “writer,” though lately I’m beginning to think of myself more as a storyteller. My spiciest of takes is that I’ve always found making the distinction of “poet” to be pretentious. You might be a writer who uses poetry to do the thing, but ultimately you are telling a story to a reader. I don’t think saying “poet” makes a distinction that clarifies that goal of me trying to point at a cool thing I want you to hear about. The work speaks for itself, and I want people to receive the work on their terms, not mine.

JAR: I know you have posted on socials a playlist for this book, but specifically I am wondering what you were listening to while you were writing this?

MJW: My taste in music is all over the place. When writing I like to put on something that sets a mood that is energetic. But energetic could be sad or angry or slow-moving. It’s about tone. I don’t have specific “go to’s” when writing and I actually do my best work in a noisy cafe where the tension between white noise and concentration allows me to hyperfocus on the work. The playlist you mentioned is actually a good window into the music that I was listening to. I was revisiting Tori Amos a lot during the pandemic for some reason, maybe the heightened emotionality and anger underlying her work spoke to my mindset. I also rediscovered my love of Skunk Anansie and Meshell Ndegeocello while writing this book. I also listened to a lot of Mat Maneri’s work at this time. Jazz viola fascinates me.

JAR: What impact or influence on the reader or literary world do you hope this book has?

MJW: Oh wow. . . I dunno. I don’t think about these things all that much. I care about the audience, but I want reading to be a personal experience for myself and others. I hope that readers take away questions, that they think about the way stories are told, whose stories get to be told and why. And who gets to be a storyteller. On the broader literary world? What even is the literary world these days? I really have no clue. I’ve never really been “in” that world anyway. I sit in my house in Santa Fe and do my little books and that’s enough.

JAR: What are you working on now? Or what can your readership look for from you next?

MJW: I am working on a ton of things, I usually focus on one project, but I am finding myself wanting to do it all at once these days. I am currently working on a horror novel and a murder mystery. These are pretty straightforward novels. They definitely play with form, I’ll never fully embrace the “prose” thing, but they are very classic in their format. I also have some new poems that I’ve been working on, but it’s a project that I haven’t even figured out the ingredients for yet, so baking it is a long way off. I also have a detective novel rattling around in my head that I’d like to get out there, that one would be a collaboration with a friend of mine. Let’s see how many of these get to “finished” in the next few years, though.

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For more on Michael J. Wilson, click here, Here, and Here

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