Were you bullied as a child? Did you sit alone at Christmas? Are you bored by movies? Do you find the way you have to look at them, so outside your own mind, so performed and separate, to be emotionally contrived? Was your favorite subject history? Were you raised Catholic? Were you taken care of by your great-grandparents? Did they cook delicious food for you? Was their furniture all covered in plastic? Did they live in San Francisco? When did they die? Are you a hopeless addict? Do you follow pleasure like watching a plane cross the horizon? Are you often too dramatic? Have you been accused of exaggerating the circumstances? Do the wheels of your mind work slowly? Does it take you a long time to process when someone dies?
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Do you believe that the truth can be a roving target? Do different family members uphold conflicting versions of your ethnic heritage? Do you remember the first time someone lied to you? Do you think silence can be violent? Is making things automatic? Did you paint with bad psychedelic aesthetics? Did you sew your own clothes? Is your memory murky but then shockingly crystal clear in places? Do you remember books years after you read them? Do the books live in your body? Does anything else make you feel more strongly? Are you changed by them? Do you love the feeling of being changed? Do you like mask-wearing, in general? Do you like both performing and being performed to? Are you hopeful you could be someone different? Do you like watching yourself change? Do you kind of get how someone could become addicted to being pregnant? How watching your body change so dramatically, watching it rearrange itself to make another human, could make you feel high, like you might not ever die? Would you do anything for money? Is that because money equals agency? Do you like living with dogs? Do you prefer silence over music? Have you slept exclusively with musicians? Do you envy their audible ephemera, the way music is there and then it’s gone? Do you like walking? Are you sure it’s better than swimming? Would you like to swim from Corsica to Sardinia? Did your grandmother once ask you to name all the colors you saw in a mountain and, when you said you only saw black, cry? Do you consider yourself loyal? Do you love your daughter? Do you want to make things that make her proud you are her mother? Is there any positive thing that could possibly happen that would equal the amount of your life you have spent writing and reading and thinking about fiction? Is fiction simply the knife that best suits you? Is it the only knife you feel you’ve ever been able to wield with any semblance of power? Does it give joy to you? Is it something you feel very confident you will do until you die?•
Join us on March 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Bullwinkel will sit down with CBC host John Freeman to discuss Headshot. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
