"Playing with text, space, and image in ways that run contrast to what we call realist fiction can, in many ways, mimic the grittiness and challenges of reality more faithfully and literally––if that’s what you want to capture. In many ways, experimental writing (on the page and in other mediums) marries literature and the interactivity of theater (and the gaming world). By fracturing the expected norm, you are inviting the reader to interact with his/her reading history, evaluate perceptions of life, and sometimes even to finish a story or complete an image." -Sequoia Nagamatsu, The Review Review
How does Jesse Ball use Experimental Writing?
"It can be hard to describe a Jesse Ball novel. They’re willfully strange, dark and puzzling, but the pieces aren’t always designed to fit together. Instead, each of his books, which are always written in the first person, have a tendency to take the reader into the heads of the lead characters, which is often more treacherous than the physical landscape." -Alex Dueben, The Rumpus
"Ball’s work is as spellbinding as it is daring. His 2014 novel, Silence Once Begun, about a Japanese man tricked into confessing a crime he did not commit, is presented as a series of interviews with witnesses. A Cure for Suicide, from 2015, which centers on a nameless man who has lost his memory, is told mostly through dialogue. His new novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, out in July, takes the form of the diary of a troubled teenage girl named Lucia."
"James McManus, a colleague of Ball’s in the SAIC's writing program, says: 'Of all the experimental writers, he is the most readable—he still gives you plot, suspense, and an emotional wallop. He’s our biggest draw in the program; people move to Chicago to work with him.'" -Joe Meno, Chicago Magazine
In his own words...
Examples?
Sure! Here's a few pages from A Cure for Suicide. Notice the attention to spacing and dimension, the focus on first person, and the unusual narrative structures.
Why is this important?
“Experimental writing is by definition its own adventure, a way characterized most definitely with error yet also with discovery and potential conceptual originality, which in time may well prove significant.” -Marjorie Welish,Boston Review
"The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about how language affects our thinking and perceptions, and opens us up when we know more languages, applies as well to the language of the avant-garde, and we become more than we were before when we learn to read it." -Tantra Bensko, HTMLGIANT
"Our literary landscape is informed by writers like William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville. These are writers who are taught in high school and college English classes. Their works are considered classics. But many classics were once ignored, thought to be too challenging, or dare I say experimental. Which is to say, there are certainly generational and cultural thresholds for what is or is not seen as different, and while some literary works may push the envelope of the norm for most everyone, the range of what is experimental or not lies largely with one's reading history." -Sequoia Nagamatsu, The Review Review