Ariana:

What can you tell us about evaporatus?

Christopher:

I wrote most of evaporatus in the latter months of 2013. In a way, many of the poems were the product of that year’s worth of mulling over the discrepancies, contradictions, and parallelisms between agency and device. I’ve been drawn to the representatives of a reactant, or reactor, within a context which is further complicated by the possibility of a later, other entity, capable of analyzing the original agency/device relationship for some time; an airplane’s black box was a type of system I thought a lot about, and which I tried to expound upon via really any metaphorically extensive system (film, text, record, etc) I could imagine. It was really the abandonment of a lineated form that seemed to open the gates; it allowed me access to a poetic I which might serve to carry between you and me and the unperformed other in need of our third entity to be performing that an open-ended paragraph worked well to serve.

Ariana:

You were just gifted a yacht. What do you name it? Why?

Christopher:

One chapbook and I have a yacht?! Alright! Call it us in lowercase and let us hit the sea

Ariana:

It’s Halloween and you’ve been invited to your most admired author’s party, what costume do you don and why? Who’s party is it?

Christopher:

This is seriously the hardest question ever. My impulse reaction is to dress like a cop out and say it’s an amalgamative party where we’re all the chameleons of the books we’ve read. But I know that’s not right. On the other hand, the party is everyone’s, given we’ve made a concerted effort to dress accordingly. So give me a mustache and a fedora and a trench coat and perhaps I’ll solve the screenplay well before it’s over.

Ariana:

What were your goals in writing evaporatus? Do you feel you achieved them?

Christopher:

It’s pretty much my greatest fear to claim a bit of writing as being funny only for it to not be funny. But I started evaporatus with the intent of including any line that cracked me up. And I’d wanted to write as if by concentrating the ridiculous toward the considered. If I consider the chapbook by its flights of scenario in light of a larger series of considerations, I think the book is a good step toward the type of book I’d like to continue to write. Whether or not it’s funny, though, remains to be seen…

Ariana:

What do you think most characterized your writing?

Christopher:

Ok. Fine. It’s not a funny book.

But I do like to think my work subsists in a balance between the evocatively imagistic and aurally melodic. I mean, I’m not trying to hypnotize you, but if you fall asleep and awake to a dream I’ve helped you remember…well, that’s not too pretentiously ambivalent, is it?

Ariana:

Do you feel there are concepts in evaporatus that will be new to readers? If so, what?

Christopher:

How can I say what will be new to readers except to say that I hope a great array of readers will find something new as a result of reading it? Which is to say I don’t think I’m breaking any conceptual grounds here. But I want the chapbook to be a new venture for myself, and so, one hopes, a fresh venture for the reader and read in turn.

Ariana:

What Star Wars character would you be if you could star in the upcoming Episode VII? Why?

Christopher:

I had to research this one. Long story short, I’d like to be Han Solo’s broken leg. I’d like to convalesce while the camera framed its action six feet above a hobbling only people in the know could see.

Ariana:

Listener or talker?

Christopher:

I don’t want to talk about it. See above.

Ariana:

What motivates you to write?

Christopher:

Reading. Watching. Dreaming. I can have some really crazy dreams that I like to brag about.

Ariana:

How do you think readers will react to evaporatus? What message do you hope they’ll get?

Christopher:

Obviously, I hope they like it. I hope they get a kick out of hopping around the surrealities. Hopefully they’re into made-up words. Hopefully they don’t get sick, obviously—but that would be a strange response. Rather, as a chapbook, I hope it serves more as a dinner bell for something they know they like but haven’t tasted.