Exilian Interviews: Matthew James Jones

[Jubal]

A Conversation With: Matthew James Jones

Your Interviewer: Jubal

Hi all and welcome back to our irregular series of Exilian interviews! This time we've got a two-section piece sitting down with Matthew James Jones – poet, war veteran, and author of Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures, a visceral fantasy-realism view of the war in Afghanistan – starting with a review by Jubal and then a Q&A with the author.

If you want to skip down the page to the interview itself, you can click here – if not, here goes!

The Review

Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures is a hell of a book, which I mean in at least two of the possible ways you can read that phrase. It's a book that you shouldn't steel yourself before reading, because there isn't any plausible amount of steel that can withstand a book that at times drops its turns on you with a written force borrowed from one of its titular drone strikes. You should read it when you're in the right place to read it, nonetheless: it's probably the book I've read this year that will stick hardest in the back of my mind, in a way that's a testament both to the writing and to how psychologically tricky the subject matter is.

To give the synopsis: this is a fantasy book about the war in Afghanistan, told from the perspective of a drone pilot - an experience that the author, Matthew James Jones, is writing from directly. The base Jones' fictional self lives on has a mix of real, fantastical, and luridly somewhere-between issues: but this is not a puzzle, or a setup for adventure, or even really a horror story. It doesn't want to comfort you with the structure of a genre tale: it is a story about the stories that people tell to make thin veneers between themselves and the hands they place on a computer keyboard in front of them, and a story about the breakdown of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are or ought to be.
 
To give the synopsis another way: this is a vivid walkthrough of someone's PTSD. Its core subject matter is the mental dissonance of war. Whilst I've never been to war, my brain locked onto enough of it that it hit me hard in the resonances.

To give the synopsis a third way: there are wars, and people hurt people and love and die and things smell and blood is sticky on your hands even if you never touched it directly, and some people out there are still desperate for good toilet roll. There's also a sasquatch. It doesn't go well for the sasquatch, either.

So to say I enjoyed, or loved, this work would feel almost wrong given how bleak its subject matter is: instead I was compelled by it. The book placed me at the next remove from the book's drone operators who watch humans being blown to bits on a screen: watching weirdly coldly as the characters, there in my little wood pulp entertainment medium with its ink words twitching along like supply trucks, took themselves onto the next page and then the next. My brain often wanted to turn it into a tale: one of those things where things will be resolved with, if not a victory, then a lesson, or a bittersweet hope. The testament to the book's power is that it held me in a space with none of those things, with no lock or key, and yet I could not leave it.

The thing with the way the book is written is not that that it's a book that is unrelentingly doom-laden, or depressing: people die, people joke, people live, in a suspension of doom, a veneer that is so fragile as to be transparent, and yet is clung to like some latter-day mental aegis. Nor, though, is it inherently hopeful: survival is not a victory, it is just survival. If there is to be hope, it has to come from something you do with the survival afterwards, after the last page has been closed, and that's entirely up to you. The writing neither allows the proper anaesthetic of nihilism to dull its sense of pain, nor the balm of hope to heal it. Those are high thoughts, and our protagonist is busy sneaking food to a sasquatch, exacting petty revenge on someone who deserves it, or hoping to take a slightly more comfortable dump. Or giving orders relating to blowing very real, human people to bloodstained pieces. That piece of comedically jarring dissonance is orchestrated throughout the book in continual, discordant flurries of notes and motion, giving you little chance to settle your mind and attempt something so futile as wrapping your head around what that situation might do to a brain.

I cried on page seventy-three: but that partly says something about the efforts my mind was taking to not fall into the midst of a book situation that I, unlike the title character and the author, to be frank probably would have ended up in worse shape from. It also says something about my particular feelings regarding owlbears. Given a character I have written a lot of and hold very close to my own heart as a writer is a gentle, curious, childish owlbear in particular, the impact of seeing a character likened to one amidst the pressures and terrors of drone warfare had an impact on me that was visceral enough that it's many weeks since I read that page and it's still sitting with me.

Another brutal cleverness in Jones' writing is in ripping the bandage off. Not ripping the bandage off to show the reader the sanitisation of war – we modern readers have known those lines rehearsed for a hundred years by now – but instead in ripping the bandage off the dehumanisation of its villains. As humans, we want the lines to be drawn well between our good guys and our bad guys, between our normal and abnormal: and when those lines are crossed by fictional villains, they are crossed in ways that are tempting, where we are shown the danger of using the ends to justify the means or the fantasy of doing a bad thing for justice or some other good cause. In Jones' book, he has people doing genuinely disgusting things, and then pushes you, face first, into the fact that those people are human, not as a cautionary tale, not as a setup for some grand revelation, just that people are out there, getting twisted up by the world, their minds not so many logic points away from your own. The horror is not the fear of being that person, but simply that you can understand them, simply that evil is human and that the horror becomes banal. The carpet is rolled up, what was swept under it lies bare, and oftentimes there will be nobody with the will or power or both to stop it.

And yet, the book did not leave me wallowing in depression either. There's sometimes a certain deathly pompous grandiosity to depressive feelings incited by books, and it can be easy for stories so rooted in the horror of war to disappear into a vast moral gulf lurking in the heart of a soul. This is not a book like that: it's a book of people who cope. It's often very funny, with side-boxes providing laconic humour or perspectives from other characters and with a very heavy sense of physicality throughout – there's a sense almost of slapstick at times, until it's again and again revealed that the theatre of war is not hosting a performance and the violations of the characters' humanity were real all along. The characters live around their absurdities, their pattered jargons and human quirks, and they duck behind them as cover only momentarily before the next day comes, and then the day after it. It eventually breaks most of them, in different ways, but coping can often, if not always, be done by a broken person: it's not a high bar to set, it's just a bar you get on with clearing.

I think I'll be processing this book for a long time to come – not until I've finished doing so, because I don't think I will, but until I come better to peace with the fact that I can't. What Matthew Jones has written is a spanner in the engines of a mind, an unprocessable, honest, painful fantasy that refuses to be dislodged, finessed, or rounded off.

There's a power in being stopped like that, caught in mental flight and brought tumbling to vivid, colourful, murderous, stinking and irrepressibly human earth: and this book has exactly that power.

Who knows? One day, a force like that might even stop a drone.


The Interview

Jubal: There is a horrifying video-game element to the way that war is fought in your book (and indeed in the actual drone warfare it represents). Is that detachment from the immediacy of death – which, even with a heightened awareness of drone use, probably isn't how people imagine combat – something that ought to be discussed more in public thinking about war?

Matt: Absolutely. Concern about the dehumanization of drone war is one of the major motors of the book. When I first got back from Afghanistan, I developed online training for junior officers on the ethics of drone war, still obligatory. About the necessity to say no to an unlawful order. About how, when you "strike" a villager, you lose the whole village. About generals who ordered the strike then refused to watch the mothers collect what remained of their sons in baskets.
 
Simple enough to find drone-porn on YouTube if one is so inclined. Perhaps you can even catch the banter of the drone operators, bloated with racial slurs and pre-judgement, rationalizing an unjust strike against a wedding convoy. Pause – the groom waves a white veil frantically as a flag of peace, his parents slaughtered.

Trigger warning? Who said that? Stop trying to stuff the world in a bottle – get better at feelings.

Y'all need to know how easy killing has gotten. Now they're delegating the hard parts to AI, like a kid who doesn't want to write his papers. But it was language they killed first, with their sanitized combat chat, which cancers through my novel, growing in strength, until human beings open their mouths, and the war speaks.

Jubal: Besides wanting to process your own experiences, what brought you to write this book in this particular way? Was it an instinctive approach for you, or did you do a lot of planning out how you were going to approach it?

Matt: Oh, my dude – don't get it twisted. Years of polishing my mask and cape have allowed me to appear like a fun, spontaneous person – this is a carefully cultivated illusion. Beneath the constant flow of crass jokes that I call charm, I'm mostly cyborg. One who leaks radiator fluid and calls it tears.

Which is my way of saying that "Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures" began as a spreadsheet, a systematic breakdown of scenes/character/foreshadowing/point of view, but then the characters came to life and burnt the script. There's six or seven moving threads here that comprise the sweater: love story; detective story; war story; mythic story; ghost story; and so forth. I wrote it for everyone. 
The expository boxes emerged naturally, rendered as flash fiction. Because the civilians in my writing group got so swamped by the foreignness of the warzone, they stumbled over the jargon and slipped into the poo pond. After I got the grant from the Canadian Council for the Arts, I could afford to throw cheddar at the best editors I knew. So the text was folded and refolded, katana-steel.

Jubal: Did you have any pushback to the fantasy parts of the book? Did anyone think it was wrong in some way to add those fictitious elements into a recent, real war?

Matt: At one point, Random House was seriously considering the text, and they said, "Not so sure we can sell the Bigfoot – can you write this more like 'The Yellow Birds?'" For those who haven't read it, that's a pretty straightforward war/PTSD story, not so much play in form. I was more inspired by the time travelling in Slaughterhouse V. There is, actually, a precedent for fantasy and war stories blurring. Catch 22 does it well, frenetic. Those who've been to war understand how reality-bending it is, how surreal. How the mind crafts little escapes.

Q: A student, forced to buy the book: "Is the sasquatch real?"

A: Matt, in his crusty prof costume: "You know I made up all the characters, right? That characters in stories are just word-puppets?"

Wise editors understood: without the Sasquatch, it's a grisly drone story, painstakingly wrought, a too-tall glass of pain. Pretty sure you're gonna ask me later about hope, because everybody does, and part of that answer is here. Hope is a function of the imagination; I kept my book pure, and weird, because I believed in it.

We can call it artistic integrity, or we can call it stupidity, but only time will tell if I'm playing the long game well, or dying in obscurity.

Jubal: It's hard to explain "Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures" to people without the term 'magical realism' – which it isn't in the strict sense, in that there's a particular post-colonial element to that genre. Still, there's a similar sense of fantasy as psychological fracture under the pressures of a system here. Was magical realism a genre you were explicitly drawing on?

Matt: Afghanistan was a particularly bizarre moment for post-colonialism. We knocked the Taliban out of power in the first year, launching their guerilla endurance campaign. But my book takes place in year ten, when coalition forces had spent a decade building roads and infrastructure, propping up the world's most corrupt government under Karzai, training the army and police. The rhetoric was: if we leave now, the Taliban will take back control, so we stayed.

Until we left. Now the Taliban are back whipping women's feet in the marketplace.

The rhetoric was also: we fight for women, which was pure self-delusion, comforting. 

So for twenty years confused soldiers found themselves drawn into an unwanted act of post-colonial nation-building. We needed shovels, not rifles. You can't build with a Reaper, just destroy. In our rich-world hubris, we imposed democracy on a tribal society with a different background and values. So they bled us, and we bled them.

I think writers do turn to magic when they aren't allowed to tell the truth. I was always inspired by Salman Rushdie, his anti-colonialism, anti-fanaticism – the way he not only wrote stories, but lived them. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" comes to mind: the ghost arrives, beyond metaphor, to embody the haunting of ancestral wounds, unchained. 

The world is boring, and broken, and unfair; writers use magic to topple structures of power to inspire people to make change. I can't actually throttle billionaires no matter how my fingers twitch. But watch, in text, how I can drag a Musk through word-tar, then douse him in feathers.

Magic is inherently democratic, James. No one can claim to own it; we are only fleeting conduits. 

Jubal: Your book is written in the first person, where you as the author are also the narrating character, quite explicitly – but there's also that gap, or at least that sense of fantasy, where the story departs from "lived experience". I can't think of many other authors who've done that, except possibly Dante. How did that sense of the relationship between you and you develop, and was the book like that throughout drafting?

Matt: Fortunately, I have the world's most banal name. Maybe John Smith competes. As a writer, the common name has been a bane – making me hard to find and follow. Sure, I could have chosen a nom de plume but then I started paying for a website (www.matthewjamesjones.com) and the ship had sailed. So began my quest to redeem the name, or at least find its use.

Indeed, it isn't my name at all. It's everyone's name, the everyman. The question becomes: how can I play with the invisibility it offers? A whole legion of Joneses, marching in step with our identical uniforms? JONES emblazoned proudly on our chests?

At one point Jones says something to the Sasquatch like, "Use my uniform – the name will help you hide." Later, Jones is confronted by the Taser Rapist, wearing Jones's stolen uniform, and the security of his (our) common name: "Now we are brothers, look." The name Jones is also incorporated into one of the narrator's grief-poems, rhyming with drones, how on theme! So in these and other ways I integrated the name into the story itself.

Let's cut the armadillo. Books are always about the writer; characters are just shadows pulled from the unconscious, forced to dance. What seems like innovation here is just honesty, a unique flavour among illusions.

Jubal: Poetry is clearly important to you, both as the book protagonist and outside it. Do you find processing things through poetry functionally different, or used for different kinds of emotions, than you use for prose, or are they quite interchangeable systems for you?

Matt: Writing has been a lifeline through all of Dante's hells – but it's no substitute for therapy and professional help. Fortunately, my treatment was sponsored by the state. The problem with being a professional maze-maker is falling into your own traps. Substituting the realworld for an artificial reality where you're already king – no need to get your hands dirty with gritwork. For every writer and poet I've met who is well adjusted and hardworking, there are ten neurotic bastards out there, foaming at the mouth and snarling for scraps.

When I teach creative writing (either at universities in Paris, or through my monthly writing workshop) therapy emerges – it's not propaganda. Just a little sleight of hand where we pretend we're talking about your character's neurosis, how they got all tangled up from their childhood wounds, how they were ignored all the time as a kid so now they gotta shout at the top of their lungs – people aren't that complicated. Just wound-machines acting out our programming. So if you truly deepdive into writing character, you might just figure out your own armadillo by accident.

In terms of prose, call me unfaithful. The idea was always: start with poetry, and become a master of the line. Move to short stories and learn to rock a paragraph. Upgrade to novels and your unit of measurement becomes the chapter. It was always one path, no matter the divergence.

And now, post-book, I'm tinkering with even more diverse media, with all the enthusiasm of a soldier, post-deployment, splashing into Tinder. Somehow I find myself teaching Digital Narratives at a video-game school. Learning basic code and how to create choose-your-own-adventure stories that can run in a simple browser window, or on your phone.

It's not actually a question of medium; it's a question of audience. What are the migratory patterns of owlbears? Do they hibernate in the winter, or huddle penguin-like? Can they fly, or does the ground pull at them the same as us, capping their aerial forays to the summit of a fearsome jump? And where do I meet the bears like me, feathered?

Jubal: To move on a bit to the fantasy parts of it – you build up quite a lot of mythos of the sasquatches in particular. It would have been easier to write that character as an hallucinatory entity, but you're careful to make him embodied, physical to the narrative, existing with his own reality. Did you have any particular process or inspirations for how not only that character but also his surrounding culture came together?

Matt: I see this as a question of restraints. The sasquatch, with his limited education and vocabulary, can't waffle and riff, or fall into pits of reverie or cynicism like a Jones. It's always gotta be singsongy. It's always gotta be from the body. I wanted my most unreal nonreal character to be the most real: with pain, hunger, history, fleas.

Also catering to historic pairings like Don Quixote and Sancho, where one is rooted in a tower of the mind, and the other rutting in the stables, or dreaming of the next bottle of wine. Or, if you prefer, Asterix and Obelix. My French students at the Parisian Military Academy loved when I destroyed their favourite childhood heroes through the critic's lens. Asterix is only strong when he drinks the magic potion. Obelix, on the other hand, is a human juggernaut. On a whim, he destroys armies, sinks armadas, gets armadillofaced. The external world represents no threat to them: only a runaway Obelix can tank the story, so it becomes the fate of long-suffering Asterix to moderate his giant friend, and that's the struggle.

I tell my students that trying to live as pure intellectuals is like trying to win the marathon hopping on one foot. Alas, our bodies are stuck in these putrefying meatsacks, housing our emotional apparatus. That's why I started the Log Gym, which began with hoisting logs in the forest, just a few PTSD-riddled veterans, and expanded into a larger group of friends.

Let me point to the larger concerns of the body in the book (the strong body; the weak body; the beautiful body; the ugly body; the male body; the female body; the whole body; the dismembered body) like ripples in a pond, spreading.

Most important: those mythic sections, all about the Sasquatch gods and heroes, were hella fun to write. Somehow that mythic Sasquatch voice became one of the most powerful and important voices in the story. It's a voice that embodies home, and things lost. It's the voice of a humiliated god, forced to gnaw frogs in a bug-infested crawlspace. Voice of a lost wisdom, discarded traditions. Excavate the layers of the pyramid of suffering until you locate the base – the natural world.

Jubal: I have to ask about the owlbear (which I think you only mention in description). Was that a creature you particularly had a history with? Was there something particular to you about picking it over other beasts for that specific analogy and scene?

Matt: I always thought, once I'd shaken off the war trauma and the other stories bursting out of me, I'd write high fantasy: even ran a blog for a while, on my website, and the last post was "on imagination" featuring a furious owlbear, enhanced by moon-magic, and defending her chick-cubs.

So perhaps I have a strong association with the owlbear as a fierce protective mother, in the way of bears. Naturally a bear is not a monster, just an overgrown kitten. But fuse the bear with the long-seeing owl; throw in some brightly hued feathers, and now you have a proper force.
 
It was the Major, I think. The one whose "loneliness monster" was an owl-headed bear, shrieking behind a canary-cage. Because the more a creature loves its freedom, the tighter we cage it. And because the Major dreamed of being a mother, just not the kind of mother we might expect.

Like I said before, we told ourselves the war was to free women, but that was just a feel-good lie. Yet the Major fights for women, truly.

Jubal: There's a lot that's important and a lot that's darkly funny, but not a lot that's in any sense hopeful in "Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures," and indeed it might be jarring if there was – it feels more about remembrance and acknowledging, in its own way, what happened to the soldiers and victims of war. But how do you see the relationship between this and what does keep you going – what gives you hope?

Matt: Call it a tragicomedy, if it helps. Perhaps the book doesn't seem hopeful because the war was such a profound waste. But the love was real, that scene with the monsoon – "I felt one once." There was even a spark of love in that hellhole; did you see it? And true camaraderie, even among opposites, and the incongruous gentleness of one monster cleaning another's wounds. 
 
Let's continue our theme of honesty – I am a veteran who served and saw terrible things. I got a big ol' list of friends who aren't around anymore, who fed themselves bullets. And still I poured myself into this book, both the light and the shadow, hoping I could catalyse a change. That I could push the rudder of culture the tiniest fraction of a millimetre, and get humans to think about drone war in a new way. Move culture first, then policy wonks implement protocols to curb the abuses of this still-emerging weapon.

I left home; I moved to France, descending into the writers' bohemia, to live a life of craft and words. And I hoped that people would read my work, not because I was famous, but because the writing was worthy.

There is always a hope-question and it always makes me feel misunderstood. In terms of hope, I'm the village idiot, staring at the cloudless sky with open mouth, wishing for a drop of rain.

Jubal: Finally, where can people get the book, and where can they find out more about your work?

Matt: Thanks for reading, James, and for caring enough to line up this Q&A. The best way to get a copy of the text is to find it on Amazon. Bezos is a vampire but it all started with an efficient book-distribution system.

To stay in touch, get news, and receive my sweet sweet freebies, join the mailing list. That's where I'll share my upcoming "choose-your-own-adventure" digital narrative, "Matt's Guide for Collapsed Men" which will take us to the pit and back. That one is free, pure clickbait, a reader magnet.

December's mailing-list spam, "The Fart that Ruined Christmas," is outrageous, written from the body. But what's that? You're a crackhead for images? Then Instagram's the best choice.

All owlbears welcome. All sasquatches and gnomes and gnolls and trolls and pangolins. I swing the doors open; follow my trail of breadcrumbs, all you creatures, and feast.