LIPS the novel began as an experiment, and the experiment began with a sound. A hush—hush isn’t silence, but rather is comprised of a plethora of muted noises, the kind which envelope you alone in an old house on a sunny afternoon in late summer. Initially, I was seeking the whisper of pages turning, low breathing, perhaps a fan lazing overhead. Empty galleries in a museum of antiquities. The soft tread ascending a stairway, knowing there were unreadable clues to be found above.

Sustaining that sort of hush is a tough go in long-form fiction. Maybe easier in short fiction, vignette versus panorama—Monet’s lilies versus Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. I knew the sole thing I sought existed in lines from the books of others; paragraphs underlined or highlighted, pages bent or starred. Michael Ondaatje, Nabokov, Thomas Mann, James Salter. The problem lay in writing something like them. I’m fundamentally unskilled compared to real writers, and even attempting to capture a smidgen of their magic for myself felt entirely hubristic.

Many months were spent hammering out failed phrases and futile attempts at elegant sentences. Working online with teachers such as Rae Bryant, Angela Rydell, and Adam Prince began to show a little progress here and there. One step forward, two steps back was the menu of the day. I knew where I wanted to go, I just couldn’t figure out how to get there. Eventually, I joined the Taos Writers Circle led by Phaedra Greenwood and Scott Archer Jones. Later, I went to Sean Murphy for editing help. Finally I had a first draft. As expected, it was horrible. Nonetheless, I set out to rewrite. Everyone I knew said first pages were critical. Of course that information only made things worse. I also was aware a Call me Ishmael moment was unlikely to save me. For several years, I kept James Salter’s Collected Stories beside me as a resource, fully aware I was no Salter. Not by half. Still, I read and reread the lines.

“They walked back toward the hotel in that one dying hour which ends the day. The trees by the river were black as stone. Wozzeck was playing at the theater to be followed by The Magic Flute…She was strangely silent. They stopped once, before a restaurant with a tank of fish, great speckled trout the size of a show lazing in green water, their mouths working slowly. Her face was visible in the glass like a woman’s on a train, indifferent, alone. Her beauty was directed toward no one. She seemed not to see him, she was lost in her thoughts. Then, coldly, without a word, her eyes met his. They did not waver. In that moment he realized she was worth everything.”

The Destruction of the Goetheanum, James Salter, Paris Review

In the first pages of LIPS, I wanted old photographs, sacred objects, ghosts, memories and most of all a hint of the foreign. As it turned out, those things and a few more formed the threads which laced the narrative together. I also hoped to avoid the easy psychological tropes readers and writers have come to rely on. It’s true that trauma may cause aberrant behavior—but it doesn’t always. Sometimes aberrant behavior is fun. Sometimes people can’t easily explain themselves, their drives, obsessions, and motivations. Nowadays, it’s easy to assign one pathological affliction or another onto individuals whose work transcends the ordinary. Vincent van Gogh may have been suffering from blah, blah, blah—attempting to explain away genius. Genius may be accompanied by a lot of other conditions, but they don’t create genius, they are not the cause.

In the world of LIPS, the hush is almost always anticipatory. Something is coming just around the corner—don’t move. Don’t say a word. Under the hush lurks a kind of horror, memories suppressed (or not), words unsaid, gesture without motion because no motion, no act will lessen or absorb, or absolve the truth, the horror. Sometimes the only thing to be done is to step behind the door and observe with bated breath.