Masterpost Of Free Gothic Literature & Theory

Vulture

The Romance of Being Unreadable

In his debut novel, Ocean Vuong took pains to be illegible, then blamed the reader for reading. In his new book, he is finally ready to talk

And even second-grade Vietnamese can be abused. “In the Vietnamese context — and it might be similar to Chinese — words are like spells,” Vuong told the writer Hua Hsu in 2022, claiming English speakers have a basically primitive relationship to language compared with the peoples of the Far East. This is deeply insulting to Vuong’s much-invoked illiterate ancestors, who were apparently so in touch with the primordial metaphors that they never managed to convey basic information to one another. Of course, what can make the mother tongue seem like magic is the simple fact that one does not speak it very well. Like many children of diaspora — I include myself here — Vuong mistakes his own naïveté for insight. 

Tiles, Gustav Klimt

When I first got into writing, I found myself struggling with all these character profile sheets that asked for descriptors like favorite color or favorite tattoos. Don't get me wrong - the fun in creating these profiles is bringing them to life in your author-ly mind. But when I finally hit the pages, I realized that my characters' interiority is what made each of them so memorable to me and my readers. Here are some questions I think could be worth asking of your characters before you try writing a chapter with them:

Who do they go to when they hit a low point? If not who, then where?

How do they react when someone compliments them?

They have to do some spring cleaning. What are they tossing?

What’s their go-to spot for a date (romantic or platonic)?

How do they react when they’re slighted? Do they totally rage out, plot something for later, or move past their feelings?

Who will they cry in front of?

What do they consider to be some of the cruelest injustices in the world?

What’s the first thing they’ve ever owned?

How do they relax during their down time?

What personal misconception gets in the way of them achieving what they want?

Do they love anyone?

Do they hate anyone?

How do they comfort others?

What brings them comfort?

Do new skills come easily to them, or does it take perseverance?

Who and/or what cause are they willing to blow their lives up for?

What rumors are attached to them?

What soothes them?

Do they like to share?

What is their calling?

Hope this helps!

“As no science explains adequately how dreams work, no one can explain how a poem works. Where is a dream, sure, but where is a poem? I believe somewhat in Williams’ formulation that a poem is a machine made out of words, but, finally, the poem isn’t where the words are. The poem is somewhere between the words and the reader, or it is the words taken into the reader, who exists within the general society and its history. You enter the poem when you open to its page or remember it, having memorized it, but it is a much larger world than the page. It is transformed when you say it out loud; and it changes from reading to reading—you, the reader, change it, for one thing, as you change—or is it that it changes for you? If you are reading a poem by Catullus, you are in no way the same as an ancient Roman reading it: you are not that person—that kind of person, though it is that poem, as those words. But even if you know Latin, you don’t “speak Latin,” and you haven’t much feeling for what it was like to be a Roman. A poem, like a dream, has an odd relation to time: it is in time, like a poem by Catullus, but it is timeless, as an object made out of words. A dream lasts a moment but endures as a memory might: but it didn’t really happen. A memory can be backed-up, but no outside observer can find the particulars of a dream in time and space (evidence of REM or whatever isn’t evidence of what happened in your dream). A poem didn’t or doesn’t happen, it’s a still group of words on a page; and a story doesn’t really happen either. We say that dreams, poems, and stories occur in the imagination, or the psyche, or whatever word we’re using right now, to invent another entity that doesn’t concretely exist to put them in. But doesn’t the “real world” exist in some collective category like that? All we do is dream; we live in poems and stories we invent.”

— Alice Notley on Writing from Dreams ‹ Literary Hub

𝔬𝔫𝔩𝔶 𝔰𝔩𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔩𝔶 𝔥𝔞𝔲𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔡

Spring '25 💐

んにゃわけにゃいにゃ

Sometimes the grief really is love persevering huh

and all i loved, i loved alone

mugs by Atesartt