Issue 3: Interview with Travis Lucas
“Greetings and welcome to WorkSim: your number one choice to experience the past. Allow us to get you closer to your best life every day.”
~ Asymptote by Travis Lucas
Your short story "Asymptote" is set in a speculative future where our protagonist is taken through a simulation of the 'historical' eight-hour work day. Where did you first get the idea for this piece?
It's hard to figure out exactly where this one came from because I was pretty far into the creation of my short story collection slash thesis when Asymptote came into being, so its exact origins are all tangled up with the other ideas and stories that were milling about in my brain all to do with critiquing the various heads of the ever-growing hydra monster that is present day global capitalism.
One thing I remember for sure: I had a notecard that said "Automation" on it posted on my desk at uni for months. A colleague and I were having a conversation about the state of the world and the degradation of the relationship between man and machine, she'd read a few of my stories by then, and she asked if I had one about automation because it seemed like a natural idea for me. I agreed, but no such story existed, so I just wrote the single word on the notecard and left it for another day.
Another thing: as many people are wont to do, I was looking through images on websites, and there were these historical flyers of campaigns to restructure the work week in the wake of rising automation and robotic technology, anywhere between the 1930s and 80s. It said something like "4 day week, 4 hours per day, no pay cuts!" and it struck me as really devastating to think about how the demands of these campaigns were more ambitious, logical, and human-centred than anything that I'd seen in my lifetime. It became very obvious that, just like the myth of linear progression for civil rights in modern history, the idea that capitalism is or will make all our lives incrementally better was also false, and the idea that robots and automation were going to alleviate the suffering and better the lives of people had gone so awry. So I projected myself further down that train of thought and wondered what the world would have to look like in the future to elicit the same kind of response in relation to our present.
So all of that kind sat in mental perimeter until I arrived at the Siri/Microsoft Sam computer voice and a world that had achieved full automation and abolished the work week but had gone just as awry as my relation to those flyers, and ended up with this sense of pining for the exhausted preoccupation that middle and working class people have now.
As well as a writer, you are also a drag queen! Do you find that any elements of your drag or performance influences your writing - or vice versa?
Indeed, I am also known as the drag queen Thermodynamics! And yes, there is are some crucial points of overlap for both my writing and my drag, and the most important one is queerness. My impetus to write came largely from the process of reformulating and re-understanding the world and my own identity in relation to my queerness, and drag is such an innately queer artform that, at its best, creates and challenges identities and gender performance so strongly.
It's definitely a symbiotic relationship between the two now. I'm a performance-focused queen, and my numbers are very often about telling a story, so I don't think it's a coincidence that I study narrative and a lot of my performances run like quick, three-act plays.
Both forms are, for me, about creating and inhabiting different mental spaces. For a story, I have to inhabit the mind of a pensioner obsessed with the price of petrol, or a housewife scrambling for a moment of tranquillity, and then for drag I'm just embodying that character's mindset after figuring out what that narrative is. There's also a strong undercurrent of humour in both forms. Like many queers, I developed a sense of humour and quick wit to cope with the bullying and sense of alienation from the world. So I understand the necessity for humour, and get to enjoy using a survival skill to make other people laugh.
It feels like they are similar exercises in imagination, just channelled in different directions. I like to say that writing is my artform and drag is just that made extroverted.
You are currently working on a short story collection. Can you tell us a bit more about this creative project?
I am, I hope, very close to finishing and putting out my first short story collection, Tipping Points.
It started as my thesis project for a Master's in Creative Writing, which began in 2018 (I think, my sense of time is rapidly evaporating in my 30s), but some of the stories and ideas popped up in my notebooks three or four years before that. I wasn't really sure what the whole thing was going to be, but by the time the first year was up, I'd figured out a few of the stories and I became really preoccupied with how much I felt, and how I might best communicate the idea, that these were deeply connected stories, even when they didn't have overlapping plot or characters.
It felt like making a puzzle; the border pieces took a really long time, but once I knew the parameters, and as my skills improved, the latter portion of stories came much smoother.
What I submitted for examination ultimately became a really small portion of the overall manuscript, because I kept writing as I felt more ideas and story worlds click into place, and now I have something that's almost three times the size, but I'm pretty confident I'm down to the last one or two stories that need to go in.
So Asymptote is the fourth individual story from the collection that's been published, and I'm increasingly excited and anxious to find a home for the whole thing and get it out into the world.
Who are some writers, poets or performers you really admire?
This is a complicated idea, because I honestly feel like in terms of literature, we are really spoiled in the current day and age for wildly talented authors.
In making this story, and the ones around it, I was really impressed and compelled by Chris Bachelder's Bear V Shark and Ben Lerner in 10:04, and I was also really excited to find out that locally, authors like Ellen Van Neervan and Rebekah Clarkson had published really esquisite collections (Heat and Light, and Barking Dogs, respectively, have terrific form and content), and I also tried to pick up on the Australian tradition of humour and absurdism that I knew, from creators like Peter Carey, Andy Griffiths, and Paul Jennings.
For poetry, I'm a bit more of an "I'll know it when I hear it, but I can't tell you exactly what "it" is" kinda gal, so my exposure's a little more limited. Performance-wise, my number one inspiration for commitment, power, and aestheticism has always been Lady Gaga, and since getting into drag, that's also come to cover pretty much every art and performance-focused queen I've had the pleasure to witness, acts like Duo Raw, Hungry, Sasha Velour and Bob the Drag Queen, just to name a few. It's hard to feel like you're across all of the plethora of artists and art forms that are available to us now, but that's my best shot.
Travis is a writer, drag queen, tutor, and triple cat parent who spends a great deal of time toying with feasible realities. He is a recent Masters graduate from the University of Adelaide with Tipping Points, a collection of Australian and politically-charged short stories.