An Interview with James Reich
By Jordan A. Rothacker
This is the second time I’ve interviewed James Reich, and it is good to catch up with him after the publication of his newest novel, The Moth for the Star, released in late 2023 from 7.13 Books. This haunting and masterful novel takes the reader right into the heart of “dark Modernism,” a territory very familiar to Reich as his 2016 work from Anti-Oedipus Press, Mistah Kurtz, was staged as a prequel to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The Moth for the Star is a mystery spanning the 1920s and ’30s, across geographies of New York City, Venice, and Cairo, while the protagonists, Varnas and Campbell, are locked in a metaphysical struggle of guilt and deliverance. Reich’s magical prose twists, tricks, and lures the reader into a world that is at once terrifying and oh so seductive.
Jordan A. Rothacker: Your new novel was published by 7.13 Books. As our audience might know, you yourself are a publisher and run Stalking Horse Press, a wonderful small press that has done some really great books. And so my question is: why not just publish yourself? This is your third novel since you started Stalking Horse, so it’s obviously not a random situation. There are several notable presses who publish their own staff.
James Reich: The critical distance is important, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have people who want to publish my work. I just haven’t had to, except that I chose to have Stalking Horse publish my limited-edition poetry collection, The Holly King. That was more a question of time and controlling the print run—and it was of a moment, something almost commemorative that didn’t need to be tied up in submissions for years. Traditional, “big house” publishing is self-immolating, purging itself. So, self-publishing is going to be the dominant mode at some point, but it will be horribly consolidated through Amazon. By then AI will have utterly destroyed culture, and then we’ll be hanging at the rim of extinction. So, there’s that. . .
JAR: What impact, if any, does your recent graduate work in ecopsychology have on your work as a novelist?
JR: It was the other way around, actually. It was more that my interests aligned with ecopsychology, rather than it being any kind of Damascene revelation. I’d like to write a book on ecopsychology, actually. I’d like to strip it back and present it as a more secular, more rigorous set of ideas.
JAR: Do you consider yourself a modernist?
JR: I’ve said that, yes. But I’m also aligned with Romanticism. The artists I admire are generally closer to those in attitude and aesthetic. When I was studying literature in the early ’90s, Marxist postmodern theory was ubiquitous because, sure, we lived in postmodern conditions. But postmodernism has been a dead horse since about 1995. Like the laziness of the “multiverse” these days, people keep flogging it, hoping for signs of life. I’m not sure I believe postmodernism ever really “lived,” anymore. It was both so relativist and so orthodox. It was more of a critical bureaucracy than anything else. Let it die.
JAR: What drew you to the time period of this novel?
JR: Maybe I’m a modernist? Really, The Moth for the Star is a tragic romance of a certain kind, of certain psychic spaces, of people who no longer exist. There’s no place in my writing for smart phones, the Internet, text messaging, no AI, none of the squalid things that have made life so dull and left all of us so inarticulate. Even in my science fiction, I want to escape those things. I haven’t written a novel in the immediate present. That said, I’m working on one, but it has none of those things in it. I look for places for characters to be alone, because that’s when they can be themselves.
JAR: What was your research like for this book in regard to time period (decades) and theme?
JR: It’s mood, truth be told. An ambience precedes any of the writing, always. What kind of person exists within that ambience? Whether it’s Varnas and Campbell in Moth, or HAM the astronaut chimpanzee in The Song My Enemies Sing, or Kurtz in my Heart of Darkness prelude, I feel tender toward their vulnerabilities. That is the start of anything I write. What is the ache that determines their experience? The research isn’t laborious at all. It comes with the psyches of the characters.
JAR: Do you listen to music thematically when you write? And if so, what was the score for composition here?
JR: It’s not so much thematic as it is a matter of sensibility. If I listen to music when I’m writing, it has to be by someone who is a visionary, eccentric, stylish, someone who can’t be replicated; so that’ll be Morrissey or David Bowie, Kate Bush, elder statespersons of the craft. I can always write to/with them. There’s a lot of music I love that I can’t write to. But usually, I’ll fix on an artist and listen to almost nothing else for the duration of a novel; either that, or for weeks of writing at a time.
JAR: I’ve read all of your oeuvre, and I find it very impressive. Is there an overall project at work here or do you just approach each new book as the ideas come?
JR: Thank you. It seems that I write tragedies. I seem to be engaged with questions of melancholy and cruelty, with condemned outsiders. I know that every person has something in them that could have them exorcised from polite society. I write about people for whom there is something intolerable about a bad faith existence.
JAR: What are you working on now? Or, what can we expect next from you?
JR: My “academic” book Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers will be out soon. That is being published by Punctum’s Brainstorm imprint, and after that you should see my second science fiction novel with Anti-Oedipus Press, Skinship. I don’t know the exact publication date, but it’ll be the next fiction you see from me. It’s finished, except for the edits I’m looking at right now. It’s a book that could have a sequel one day, but first I have to alienate people with this one. I’m working on a novel, as I’ve said, set in the present. It’s partly a take on academia and becoming a persona non grata, but mostly it’s about the solace of cinema and the sea.
