David Mar

I was given a detention in secondary school one steamy spring afternoon because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the field outside the classroom and wasn’t paying no attention to the book we were studying in class. Oh no. A paradoxical start as a writer, but I think the frolicker in me made me write in the first place. But when I delivered the poetry assignment back to my teacher—the subject of which was “spring and what it inspires in you”— she told me I had plagiarized it. I hadn’t. I vehemently protested until I was threatened with another detention. So that the idea trotted through my head that I might be doing something right that was fun but could get me into trouble if I didn’t learn how to pretend. Injustice was at the core of it. It’s not until later, when I actually began studying literature that I found out that writing was a curse and a blessing.

Writing for a paper was my first experience earning money with my writing and it gave me a sense of worth. I was paid by the line. I will never forget how the editor in chief used to taunt me because I wrote profusely about the most insignificant events to boost my earnings. He would slash my articles in half, telling me I was a nuisance. And I was. But he kept calling me back for papers. In between those two life-changing milestones in my life, I became homeless at 14. During my fruitful vagrancy, I read books and I associated reading books with warmth and protection. Being, living, breathing inside a story written by a stranger, man; that feeling stayed with me as a symptom that something greater than myself was stirring inside. Books have always been atavistic objects for me. Books are alive and beating in your hands when you read them.

In my student flat, during my Master’s, I had what you might call an epiphany. A brutal one too. I was ejected from my seat by an unknown force while I was composing my first short stories. I can’t remember why but it was physical. An unknown force was pushing me back. It seemed I had unknowingly probed some deep secret in my soul that didn’t want to be touched. A secret. I took it as an invitation to probe further. I was in fact touching upon what I now call my archetypal self. This is what happens when you write in a quasi-state of trance. You confront archetypes you didn’t know existed. You touch upon the collective unconscious even as you explore the vast expanses of the unknown. This being that you are in writing with is a volcano that might irrupt at any moment. I don’t really own it. Even if you try to avoid the urge to write because it is dangerous and frightening, its dangerous appeal comes back to haunt you. I once thought “live first, write later”. Now, I have lived enough and experienced enough pleasure and pain and whatever is in between so that I can write with confidence. I feel mature as a writer.

Looking back on the matter of literature, which is life in art, I have found that life is about people around you, the faceless denizens that are waiting to change your life. I drowned once. I was saved by a stranger whose face I never saw. In my characters, I find solace and love, and thankfulness. I wished I remembered that Samaritan’s face for a long time. On the other hand, it’s best if I can’t remember what he looked like. All I know is that I always feel my life is hanging by a thread when I’m writing. Genres are a practical way of selling wares of course, but they should never be closeted. There are biographical elements in a fiction novel. To the same token, if a murder happens because of a psycho-social event, a crime novel can also become dystopian. Reality is made of matter as much as imagination is made of residues of that matter. I see genres as an author sees them, not as a literary agent or a publisher needs to see them. What matters is the feel, the tone of what I’m writing. If it fits in a genre, fine. If not, you might get lucky and be recognized for creating your own. That’s what drives me. Take poetry for example, it is a haven that remains untouched by considerations of genres, but only style. I sometimes take refuge in poetry when I am hurt from the harsh tyranny of genres. Poetry is a sacred place that even the greediest monsters of success can’t soil with their putrid saliva. Prose can also be a mytho-poetic country where there are no borders, no closet. This is why I often use poetry in my novels. Poetry is the torch that leads you in and out. It opens your eyes on your connection with real people. I think in “Wereshewolves”, a novel to be published towards the end of 2024, I have found the sweet spot between magical realism and horror. It’s just an example. In “The Everblue”, there is romance as well as spiritual awakenings and horror. So what category does that fall into? I abhor categories. I also mix true stories with fiction. My voice is the only constant in my work, the rest is adventure.

Since French is my first language and I lived in France as a child, I bow respectfully to the French masters, from the classical geniuses to the modernists. Molière, for satire and theatrical inspiration, to the poètes maudits, through to Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, my favorite; a monster with a big heart, that’s who Victor Hugo was to me. Among English writers, Faulkner made a big impression as well as Paul Auster and Stephen King, among others such Steinbeck and Ezra Pound. On this side of the pond, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Larkin, the so-called war poets, whom I find just amazing. Imagine writing poetry in the trenches! Generally, I love writers who create great human characters. But I also grew up with Marvel characters and whatever I could lay my hands on. That does include encyclopedias, political pamphlets, cook books and whatever.

Poetry is a prophetic art. But that doesn’t mean poetry can’t kick ass too. Poetry is like taking a dip in a lake without any care of the consequences, while novel writing is about building a boat. My satirical poetry is furiously modern and contrarian. It may sound like a cliché but rimes are my staff. I am currently working on haikus to find silence outside of the framework of time and consciousness. The difference with poetry—pardon my French, as they say in English—is that fiction is reality in the making, while poetry is reality in the being.

I was beside myself at the time of writing that bizarre poetry. I had the vision of a tree smiling to me. The sun and mythological folklore of Greece and Crete got to my head literally. Crete is the heart of Hellenic culture. That’s also where St John, and Paul, the biblical prophet stayed for a while on their way to and from Egypt. That particular work is also prophetic in the way identified stereotypes are sometimes decomposed in rather humanoid terms by so-called psychologists, and perceived as such through history. It seems nowadays, it’s not about survival so much as it is about surviving oneself. Poetry is also for taking stock of that inner journey in the fluidity of sex and what it means as destiny. During the writing of “The smiling tree” series, I rented a three-bedroom apartment for myself hoping to enjoy my holidays, and maybe even find trouble in paradise, but I ended up sleeping in the kitchen because the music from the rave parties by the pool was too loud. I was still hurting back then. I didn’t realize I had been sleeping in a creative grave until the Cretan sun woke me up. Even if I enjoyed the beach and the food, I was looking for a way out of a bout of depressive creativity. And I found a totem in a smiling tree.

The times we live in, hey? Have you ever wondered why children think they should change sex? I think it’s nature taking revenge after centuries of abuse. My theory behind sex change phenomena is naturalistic. Humanity is looking for the original two-spirit identity in humanity too but it doesn’t know how or why. But I have yet to see research on sexual identity in existential terms. It is bound to surface in my writing because I care about those issues as a parent. The dystopian genre comes from this surrealist world where the grand ideals of the past are turned into weapons against common sense. Deconstructive ideas have taken over because of globalization and the influence of other cultures where Western ideals are thrown back at us. Take “Hollow Man”, an auto-fiction describing how psychotic and psychic energies can be investigated through reason (or not), for example. Beyond the character’s existential role play, there is a desire to see into death. While in our current societies, identity is singled out to be made into something supernatural, no answer is being given on the afterlife beliefs of our ancestors, which I think is the key to how a man or a woman define themselves. In the novel, circumstances demand from a psychotic character that he literally leaves his shell, that he becomes hollow to become pregnant with a new world, as yet beyond his understanding. But the sex theme is not what “Hollow Man” is all about. Without revealing the ending, “Hollow Man” is more than a mystery; it’s a conundrum of a case involving spirits of the kind you can’t drink. It is humorous, but also cracks many mysteries, some historical, some spiritual, some existential. But it’s also about a man who feels pregnant with the Holy Spirit and who becomes a man of God only to find his life is a hiatus without gender.

The main character is spiritually drawn to horrible acts of violence. I used the epistolary style to make believe it was a true story, which enabled me to do whatever I wanted. Treu stories are always more powerful. I know most people give first person tales wide birth. It was a gamble. But what’s wrong with playing solo against the world in a novel? After all, the ‘I’ point of view is the basis of that mind space where the sensory world begins to turn into matter. It can be claustrophobic but that’s what I wanted to achieve. So that the narrative may unravel as a hallucinatory struggle in the beginning, a crisis of faith in the middle and a second part where truth emerges. Spirituality is the universal key out of the conundrum that is death. That’s a given. There is spiritual longing because life is finite. It’s a no brainer really. Most people avoid thinking about death as a genetically programmed sentence by taking refuge in the imaginary. By spirituality, I mean the unknown. Historically, we have spent so much time thinking about life after death that we have created mind prisons where the only escape is a fake concept of paradise. But to be able to find a way out of that mindfuck, my character in “Hollow Man” finds his calling as a time-machine explorer. He leads a double life as a crime solver and a man of God. At first, he is receptive to the afterlife and solves crimes where normal means have not enabled your average sleuth to make a dent. Mac Closkey beats the police to the post because he has managed to find “hollowness” of purpose. He’s a vagrant in space and time, which makes him a religious animal or a spiritual beast. The choice is the reader’s.

I don’t know if “The Everblue” is a gothlit novel. Then again, it’s too modern to tell. But as a modern dystopian fairy tale, politics make an incursion into fantasy. It’s plain to see that some politicians are often ectoplasmic creatures who embody the fears of sheepish nations. The Media always look for role models to destroy. This battle is typically modern and it freaks most people out knowing there aren’t any good or bad role models. This explains the complete aloofness most people feel with events in the world. It's become cliché to feel, to emphasize. The news Media is an empathy business. Nonetheless, among the mytho-poetic search for love and lost beauty that drives the main character, Dr. Deadstone, there is a real political and diplomatic reality that impacts his future and that of his protégé, his luscious and attractive niece, Beatrice. I worked as a liner and even in journalism, imagination is worth its weight in gold and tinsels. Nothing is entirely understandable in logical terms so that fantasy and reality need each other to make sense. Look at what filters through your newscast and you’ll see that something is missing most of the times: the truth, as it happens. Of course, you have the usual false debates and closed questions you are presented with in the news. But if we believe our mediatic vision of the world is reduced to that thicket journos deign filter for us, we begin to think that we can’t see the wood for the trees. While everyone who watches the news knows that the truth is not what we are told. You may believe the weather report but they are rarely right about where you live. Truth is a convention. It’s not even a version of the truth but a truth that has been decided by others that the new Media present us with. Examples are plenty. The more exposure a political person has, whether good of bad, keeps them in the imagination of the common man. That’s down to the editorial line of most papers. Propaganda can take many forms, including in modern democracies. This mind-control machine should force us to imagine the truth that is beyond acceptable boundaries. With dystopia, this is possible. Look at the brilliant work done by Charlton Brooker with Black Mirror, and particularly the National Anthem. A Prime example. That’s how the human brain works too by the way. There’s always a common story that is not being told. The mind focusses on the connections between events, even if there aren’t any. What really scares us is suppressed nevertheless. In my upcoming novel “Wereshewolves”, published in Canada, the Covid pandemic is the result of a bio war experiment in Africa. Is it true? Would it be broadcasted on the news if it were? No, because the responsibility of such a horrible act would have to be blamed on others. It would distilled through alembics and cushioned as another one-off. What would happen if the news was told as it is? And what happened at the beginning of the pandemic when politics suppressed the extent of the pandemic? When Donald Trump flippantly tweeted about his disinfectant recipes. Speculation is what fiction offers. Let’s not spoil the ending though. Truth is not the end of all things.

Word for word, I breathe in and out the truth about my emotions. I always set out to squeeze out every drop of love out my Self. I use two words here. Moments spent with my beloved daughter are little gems. She’s the otherness that shows me real love. Every second, every grain of that love must he cherished and shared. But as soon as you look out from your own little cubicle of love, you see nations at war. Straight after the pandemic, war resumed. Why? Humanity was so intelligent in defeating death! Because every single chance to share love is missed, shrewdly kept enslaved and not given away as it should be. News tell us that that love which feeds peoples and nations is what can also destroy them. It exposes you in your vulnerability. But in our nature as human beings, there is also wilderness, and what we find unacceptable from one generation to another that is purely conventional. I may try and scare the reader with my fictional art out of the tangibility of that love so as to enhance its value. There’s knowledge and love enough for everyone. But imagine if you told an infant that spiders eat their young? That seems unacceptable and yet, little by little, your child will learn about it whether you want it or not. They might even find out that humans love destroying other humans while pretending they’re doing it for a good cause. There will be doubts. The only certainty is that nature has a plan for you. When you see your toddler dare hair-raising stunts on a larger-than-life slide for example, you understand that children aren’t scared of anything because they know they need to learn. And this knowledge is greatly helpful when building a narrative. It’s real love and an unsurpassable hunger for knowledge that drives the human heart. The brain needs to catch up …

My own research into the world of plants reveals the true beautiful nature of life as a resource. It is plants that enable me to breathe after all. Without their oxygen by-product, I could not live. This humbles me. Confidence in the cycles of life is also essential to get your ducks in a row when facing a crisis. The pressure to be entertaining is often the predicament a writer faces. By patiently discovering new forms of life or even the powers hidden behind nature, your realize you need to give yourself some time because there is a life growing around you that vibrates and holds your future in its leafy hands. The plant observer learns to allow for his or her own story to develop its roots in their brain, for characters or traits to emerge from the soil of that not-so-distant matter. Life is really the only alma mater. The meiosis and germinating before the act of writing is essential because our roots as humans are in the subconscious. Communication in nature is versatile, just like interpersonal communication use all your senses by the way. Have you ever read “Leaves of grass” where the miniature vegetal self mirrors the poet’s own existence? Listening to that poetic self, it means waiting for an idea to sprout. It’s the vegetal self feeding from the oxygen of self-knowledge. Nature is also a patient healer. Isn’t that what reading is also about? Learning and healing? It works both ways. You need light and a prismatic envelope to write. A blank page is sometimes green. That’s how I see myself, a leaf who respirates according to the vagaries of my sunny soul.

Basically no. Routines are a pain. I would say discipline is more important. You also need a sense of purpose. ‘Enjoyment is the key to your will’ once said a French psychologist. Without an idea or emotions to trigger the need for writing or telling, there is no book worth striving for, because there is no drive. However, sometimes, it is imposed on you. As Shakespeare said: ‘Some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them’. I remember visiting Manila once. I stayed over in the capital of the Philippines on my way to Australia. I witnessed the barest form of poverty, saw a hobo literally wiping his ass on the street. I saw children in rags begging for food. It brought me back to the reality of my humble and free childhood. I thought I had a miserable one. It connected me to the anger I felt when my family fell on hard times. That anger I felt then forced me to write a book set in that lovely country. All of these emotions are in “Wereshewolves”, soon to be published among other tableaus.

Those themes of dystopia and sexual identity are a project I hold as a bearing because I feel they might enable me to highlight boundaries created in my mind by others. And as I said, I feel that nature is telling us something when our children want to change sex or explore their sexuality beyond their biological existence. Extracting meaning from whatever knowledge is already there, presenting it in a light that makes sense and makes it worthwhile should be easy. But exploring the very essence of a human being in a novel is the real work. I am neither a guru nor a fraud, but I hope that my narratives will enhance that perception of the finer details that promote understanding of the world we live in, beyond what is tangible and what isn’t seen as such. The palette of emotions I use may also reflect my favorite themes: grief, pain, love, passion, jealousy. To entertain my readers, catharsis engineered by extraordinary characters, when they are pushed to extremes, also brings about a new deal. Catharsis is a great means to expunge some of the hurt that people may experience in themselves but can’t project out in the world. I aim to be entertaining with supernatural phenomena that I observed or may have been susurrated by a world we know little of, with a different language: plants speak to us for example. The psychologist Yung spent hours of his time drawing art deco flowers. I use humor and the full range of literary techniques to tell the story of those paper characters to explore their suffering and joy, and how they come out stronger. Overall, I’d say I try and instill some spiritual knowledge in my novels. Reading is a human experience even if writing can be inhumane or non-human at times.

Yep. In “Wereshewolves”, I explore a lesbian character’s transformation into a ruthless carnivorous monster. And next after that, there is ‘Body hijack’ where I go all out on a new theme, the disappearance of the XY chromosome. There’s also a poetry folio written in haikus as well as a novel about a sixth century witch set in Scotland. Can’t tell you more, it already is a scientific fact that the XY chromosome is weakening, but don’t quote a fiction writer on the truth.

I think you guys are great. You have managed to build a community with little means and a passion for individuality. I am impressed by your care and your devotion to the selfless promotion of authors. You deserve all the credit for your design work too. Those banners are very handy and creatively fun. I love using them. Keep up the good work. I’ll be seeing y’all shortly.