Q&A with Zac Picker
𝄞 My dirty clothes seep unendingly from the machine, ridiculed in the harsh fluorescent…
𝄢 fzzzzttt
~ ‘Score for ordinary washing machines’ by Zachary Picker
Your experimental short story ‘Score for ordinary washing machines’ is set in a not-so-ordinary laundromat, where a conversation between two young men takes a surreal and disturbing turn. What was the inspiration behind your work?
I think it’s always a little embarrassing to admit, but the story element actually came from a dream. Well, sort of - I can’t actually remember the dream, but I must have woken up and wrote in my phone notes those last few lines starting with “THESE ROBOTS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN ORDINARY WASHING MACHINES!...” Later on, I was searching for something to write as “sheet music” and although I had no recollection of what the words originally meant, this story about being overwhelmed in laundromat, in a very visceral way, sort of popped out.
I’m always a little bit hesitant to really spell out what I thought a story was ‘about’ when I was writing it, because I think often there’s a magic in the ambiguity and confusion. But I’ll say a bit anyway! For me, I guess I was drawing on the feeling of those periods of limbo between the hyperfocused windows of your day. I often find that I get so drawn into tasks for hours and hours - physics, programming, rollercoaster tycoon, etc - to the point where I literally tune out things people say directly to me. And then afterwards, I find myself struggling to tune in again and become a real human being who can like, talk to other people or do basic chores. So the story that emerged is this sort of weird, anxiety-filled laundry breaking-point. Maybe there’s something universal about that, I dont know...!
Your piece is structured as a musical score, with the interplay between the bass and treble clefs an important element of the piece. How did you go about 'composing' it?
It was sort of hard, and I almost gave up at first. I knew that I wanted to have two concurrent lines of storytelling, like some sort of poetic hypeman behind the main storyteller, offering new flavours and feelings. But I quickly found that humans (or maybe, I) just straight up can’t read/process two lines at the same time, so you end up breaking the flow of the story in a un-fun way. So I guess I then decided that ‘humans can’t do two things at once’ was maybe the thing I was actually interested in exploring, because it meshed with the sort of way my life feels sometimes. Then the idea that the second line would be elements from the outside world, or like the stuff that only sits below the level of your conscious thoughts, fell out kind of naturally. And the laundromat is such a visceral soundscape, with real deep ‘basslines’. It allowed me to use the sounds of thunking and fluorescent whirring and coin slots as a fun, gooey way to represent the subliminal and underscore the emotional turmoil of just like, having a ‘normal’ conversation when you weren’t expecting it.
Your short story published in Going Down Swinging also plays with language and form. Is experimentation an important part of your writing practice?
As part of the process of growing as a writer, I try to write one thing every week. And I don’t know about you guys, but I do not have that many good story ideas! The experimentation then is a natural consequence of that, as well as a source of inspiration for the story content itself. With the story in ‘Going Down Swinging,’ for example, it started writing itself, once I realised I was using the American/Australian pronunciation of words as a conceit to talk about immigration and growing up. Like, going to Golden Lotus with my friends or my old cat catching birds are not really good stories. But they can become interesting poetic dioramas once you find an interesting thread, in this case on a structural level, to tie them all together.
I’m probably also a bit obsessed with subverting the forms of writing outside the ‘usual’ short story, and turning them into a vessel for narration. I was just pouring through anything by Carmen Maria Machado, as well as stories like ‘17776’ by Jon Bois, and ‘Playing Metal Gear Solid V’ by Jamil Jan Kochai. Those last two sort of ‘trick’ you by being structured in the form of sports journalism or video game review respectively, but end up being surreal, intensely personal and philosophical stories. I was thinking about other kinds of mediums which would be fun as a canvas for ‘secret stories’ and started thinking about sheet music and the little instructions they give for playing pieces - like, what if they started saying increasingly weird and literary things? I love that. It’s like you’ve stumbled on a secret adventure map in the back of a library book.
Outside of astroparticle theory, what kind of books do you gravitate towards?
I gushed a little already above, but I’m obsessed with Carmen Maria Machado - I don’t know if I feel more enjoyment reading, or jealous frustration towards ‘Her Body and Other Parties.’ It’s too good.
When I was a kid, with my dad’s prompting, I used to read a lot of those Russian surrealist masterpieces like ‘Master and Margarita,’ and I think the way that they play with the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ has been endlessly fascinating and influential to me.
I actually find it a bit hard to read these days outside of physics and short fiction because those two alone can be sufficiently exhausting. But a handful of things I’ve found inspiring in recent years could include Godel Escher Bach, the Overstory, the Little Prince, Calvin and Hobbes, the Road... Right now I’m reading ‘The Yield’ by Tara June Winch and really appreciating it - I love the ‘dictionary’ as a narrative structure.
Zac Picker is a writer and PhD student, studying black holes and dark matter. He has had fiction published in Going Down Swinging (winning the 2020 microfiction prize) and the soon-to-released Curiouser magazine. Zac likes to weave surreal, dreamlike narratives into the more personal canvases of his life, science, or philosophy, especially relishing unusual structure and form in his prose.