It was the middle of the night when writer Jedediah Berry first heard the voices.  “A chorus really,” he says, speaking in the rambling house he shares with his partner, Emily Houk, and a host of other Amherst, Massachusetts, artists and musicians. “It feels lucky when something comes out of nowhere like that.”

So lucky, in fact, that Berry forced himself to get out of bed and start writing. He didn’t reach for his computer, or even a notebook, but instead grabbed a stack of index cards. “I think I wrote five or six of them that night,” he recalls. Each card contained its own small story, told by a different voice.

Berry is well tuned to the reception of midnight voices. The protagonist of his first novel, The Manual of Detection (The Penguin Press, 2009), is a detective to whom clues appear in dreams. The book, which won the 2009 Hammett Prize for crime fiction, was hailed by the New Yorker as “the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka.” Berry had once envisioned The Manual of Detection as a type of Choose Your Own Adventure story, although he ultimately wrote it with only one ending. But after the novel’s completion, Berry’s interest in multiple versions of a story remained, which might explain his attention to those voices and their sometimes-contradictory tales.

The Family Arcana is → composed of 52 stark prose-poem narratives that tell a shifting story.

Those voices, Berry quickly surmised, were a pack of siblings with some dark tales to tell. Think disappearing and reappearing children; think bankers hidden under floorboards. Berry crafted these dictations into The Family Arcana, a haunting narrative of a family’s fight to keep their decrepit farmhouse from foreclosure and their buried secrets from the light of day. But here’s where it gets (more) interesting: The Family Arcana, in keeping with its index card origins, is not a book. It’s a deck of playing cards that can be shuffled, cut, and read in any order, creating a nearly infinite number of possible outcomes. Printed by the United States Playing Card Company, The Family Arcana is composed of 52 stark prose-poem narratives, any one of which can be the story’s first line or its last. “Taken as a whole, it tells a story,” Berry explains. “It’s just a shifting one.”

This narrative feat is made possible by Berry’s careful attention to voice and pacing in each card. First lines cast either a wide and suggestive net (“How it goes is this.”) or are compellingly specific (“Father buries himself in his sleep again.”). Each last line contains both closure and possibility, like a flower that blooms or wilts depending on the time of day (“And then we will need more words, and heavier boots, and a song like a lantern to make us brave through the night.”). It takes a reading of only a few cards to realize that Berry is a master of the subtle cues and linguistic evocations necessary to make these individual cards come together as a story.

“The appeal is the mutability,” says Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and cofounder of Small Beer Press, where Berry is an editor. “It’s quite a feat to pull off a story that thrives on being rearranged.”

When I first met Berry, I recognized him as the adult version of the clever and quiet friends my brother once brought home—the ones who arrived bearing velvet drawstring bags of 20-sided dice and armfuls of Dungeons & Dragons manuals. Perhaps it’s because Berry’s appearance is rather boyish: he is slight and wears dark glasses and, on the day we met, a scally cap. Or maybe I sensed the resemblance because Berry has created every gamer’s dream: a complex and malleable narrative whose outcome you can determine with your own hands.

Berry and Houk’s centuries-old Amherst house hides behind a thick hedgerow, and when I arrived for our interview, I had trouble finding the front door. The yard is expansive for a house so close to the center of town. Grass and gravel paths lead to overgrown and shadowy edges that suggest Berry didn’t look far for the setting of The Family Arcana.

The couple greeted me in the charmingly cluttered kitchen and led me up a narrow staircase to their second-floor office. The low-ceilinged room was filled with antique furniture and two large desks, a string of Tibetan prayer flags hanging over both of them. Through the open window I heard the faint sounds of guitar music. It was Matt Lorenz of the one-man band The Suitcase Junket, who also lives in the house. Lorenz makes his own musical instruments and, Berry told me, ferments homemade wine in the basement.

Berry offered me a glass of water before we got started, and when I reached to put it down, Houk warned me of a hole in the side table. I ran my hand over it, and sure enough, there was a drinking glass–size hole, invisible under the faded tablecloth. I was beginning to get the sense that things in this house are not exactly as they seem, and that this makes Berry and Houk—and their gargoyle-like chihuahua, Milton—quite content.

Author Jedediah Berry (left) conceived of The Family Arcana in the centuries-old Amherst, Massachusetts, house he shares with his artist partner, Emily Houk | Photo by Joanna Chapman

“This is an area with a lot of ghosts,” Berry says about the New England inspirations for The Family Arcana. “I try to keep their company.” Keeping company with ghosts is something Berry has done for most of his life. He grew up in the Hudson River Valley, where his grandparents owned a rambling and (Berry says) haunted house on a ridge above the town of Catskill, New York. He is rather matter-of-fact about the haunted bit. “There were definitely rooms you didn’t go into alone,” he remembers.

And while that Catskill farmhouse is the original model for The Family Arcana’s farmhouse, Berry was also influenced by Massachusetts farmhouses where he and Houk have lived, including the one they inhabit now.

“I think something that hangs over the history of this entire place is that there’s no way to completely put out of one’s mind the [deaths from] the conflicts with the natives,” he says. “Part of what I liked about writing this family was that their identity was so slippery. I could let their voices speak for the living and the dead, and not just the ancestors of the settlers, but all the ancestors before.”

This sense of history is part of what makes The Family Arcana more than a deck of dark tales. Many of the cards suggest a history of losses and dangers far deeper than the family’s present concerns. One narrator speaks of a spreading black square on the kitchen floor: “When Grandmother sees it, she says, ‘Oh, that old thing. Your grandfather caught it in the war.’ Caught like an animal? Or caught like an illness? Grandmother just shakes her head. We see the square in our dreams sometimes. If we talk about it, it only gets bigger.”

While The Family Arcana began as a solitary endeavor, after a few months of writing, Berry started bringing mocked-up Family Arcana cards to public readings, where he would have an audience member shuffle and cut the deck. “It was a bit of showmanship,” Houk says. “And people loved it.” Not only were the stories well received, but these public readings also allowed Berry to test his cards and discern what elements of the story were missing from that evening’s shuffle.

At one of these readings—held in Berry and Houk’s current residence—artist Eben Kling asked if Berry was looking for an illustrator. Berry knew Kling’s work and was excited at the offer. Kling did the art for the card backs, the two jokers (a banker and a brother, the latter of whom has been pickled in a jar), and additional illustrations for the deck’s two extra cards. (Berry’s design adheres to the United States Playing Card Company design; in a traditional deck, the two extra cards are advertisements or rules for a card game.)

Other writers approached Berry at the readings, sharing their ideas for similar projects. Houk and Berry began to see The Family Arcana as the first of a series, a larger project involving other authors. “We thought we could publish stories in strange shapes,” Berry says. They decided to start Ninepin Press, and they took their idea to Kickstarter with the hope of raising a few thousand dollars—enough to print The Family Arcana. Their project quickly became a staff pick, and by the time the campaign ended, they had nearly 1,500 donors and a total of $32,000 in pledged support.

Berry attributes this success to the larger culture’s desire for projects like The Family Arcana. “Right now, it’s an interesting moment for objects of this kind, especially with so much happening digitally. This gives us an opportunity to rethink the book as object—what we can do to make this an interesting and compelling creation of its own. And I think people are hungry for that. You see it in music with the resurgence of vinyl. People want an object to hold.”

Artist Eben Kling illustrated the card backs, the two jokers, and the deck’s two extra cards.

Berry is thrilled with the result of the Kickstarter campaign, but he’s clear that that approach was very project-specific. He doesn’t plan to publish more of his own work with Ninepin Press or with an online fundraiser. “What I am excited about is publishing more fiction and poetry by other people interested in experimenting with form and taking exciting risks with language and narrative structure,” he says.

But when I asked him if he plans to return to the world of commercial publishing, Berry was quick to question the term. “I don’t really think of there being two worlds in publishing. It’s more of a multiverse at this point. And while it can be hard to survive as a writer, I am encouraged by the range of possibilities open to those who are willing to play around with different models.”

Berry and Houk are getting multiple opportunities to do just that. They are at work recording The Family Arcana audiobook, with a different reader for each of the deck’s 52 cards. Lorenz is composing and recording a Family Arcana soundtrack. And Berry has designed The Family Arcana Card Game, a classic trick-taking game in the style of spades or hearts, with some twists, of course. (The discard pile is called Poughkeepsie.)  In addition, Ninepin Press has published a few smaller card sets to complement The Family Arcana. The first is Cosmogram, a set of 12 horoscopes written by authors such as Mira Bartók and Alexander Chee. The second is a set of recipe and curiosities cards, which were created by Houk along with Michael Gundlach, a Pioneer Valley artist and chef. These cards include recipes for Mother’s Cornbread and Berry Shrub, a traditional colonial vinegar and fruit cocktail.

Berry is excited about these cards. “There are a lot of bad ideas in The Family Arcana,” he says. “I like to think that these recipes are a nod to the good ideas. The recipes say, ‘We have our gardens, we have our ways of preserving food, of living in a way that honors these patches of earth we live on.’”

“The recipes are about pickling food, not people,” adds Houk.

Berry has come to see The Family Arcana as a form of preservation. “I can’t brew beer, and I’m not a musician like Matt who can build his own instruments, but we can create this lasting object. We can preserve these stories. I want to sell The Family Arcana at our local co-op, right there with all the other homegrown offerings.”

While The Family Arcana may have arrived in Berry’s head without warning, it also arrived at just the right time for him. “I moved to Amherst 12 years ago and was happy to find this community of writers and small presses and people engaged in all these interesting projects,” he says. “I knew I would eventually want to do something that came from our place. The Family Arcana is a way to contribute to this community. In the last decade I’ve realized I am, in fact, a local—not a visitor—and I needed to write my way into this place. This story is very much a bridge from one river valley to another.”

The post Haunted House of Cards appeared first on Take Magazine.

A series of sketches by the artist Eben Kling depicts scenes from the TV western Gunsmoke: James Arness, the rugged actor who starred as Marshal Matt Dillon, roughing up a boy; a gunman peering from behind a lookout who is either sweating profusely or sobbing; a cowboy grimacing while getting gut punched by an attacker whose torso twists in slow motion.

Drawn against minimal backgrounds in colorful pencil and crayon, these pictures are both dramatic and cartoonish—ironic in an N. C. Wyeth-meets-National Lampoon way.

“My father was kind of a tough guy,” Kling says. “He would watch Gunsmoke, and I would sit on the floor drawing. The images are sort of redacted and edited through my hand. I was picking at the machismo.”

Botched Response 2015 | 61×50 Acrylic and Pencil on Canvas

Unlike the Gunsmoke sketches, Kling’s paintings lean more abstract. From party scenes to protests, they are trippy narratives composed of often contorted or fragmentary figures with meaty hands and feet, mouths agape, angular sunglasses, baseball caps with foam-like brims, fat cigarettes, beer cans, and pizza boxes. There’s a dash of R. Crumb and a pinch of Terry Gilliam in Kling’s style, humor, and social commentary. But they’re blended into an already-rich batter of latchkey-kid angst, visionary talent, and screw-it-all experimentation.

“A lot of those images were made as I was sitting in public, drawing,” he says. “I was feeling confused about what I was looking at.”

Over the past six years, the 28-year-old has created an impressive body of work—painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, illustration, and commercial art—featured in dozens of shows. His master of fine arts show at UMass Amherst in May attracted 200 people. Artspace, a New Haven, Connecticut, gallery and nonprofit for emerging contemporary artists, chose Kling as its 2015–2016 artist-in-residence.

The works in Kling’s MFA show evolved out of “chance strategies—a very John Cage thing,” he says. For example, he created compositions of random digital images using Photoshop’s auto-align feature, then “flattened and rendered them in [his] own hand” as brightly colored paintings.

Kling likes portraying, and employing, the mundane stuff of everyday life. He’ll build a cheeky collage around a strategically placed piece of Day-Glo card stock. His sculpture is just as irreverent; his preferred media are trash and cardboard. He once collaborated on a show, Odd Job, in the office of an abandoned tech company, making sculpture in which he personified casually assembled piles of office detritus by giving them limbs and heads.

“It looked like [the company] left in the middle of a Christmas party,” Kling says. “There was a strange, purgatorial feel to it.”

Floating Cluster Fuck 2015 |48×48 Acrylic and Pencil on Canvas

Another sculpture series consists of figures partially cut out of cardboard. They lie on the floor, their limbs flopping about in tortuous positions. Or, Kling will fasten a cardboard figure to a wall, adding objects like a pair of tighty-whities and a pistol, with a pile of papier-mȃché beer cans and pink dismembered limbs littering the floor below. It’s like stop-motion animation come to life.

I talked to Kling about his work and life just after he and his girlfriend, artist and Royal Frog Ballet performer Chelsea Granger, moved into his late father’s house in the Connecticut shore town of Branford, near New Haven. He’s the fourth generation of Kling to live there.

“I feel like a steward. The house functions as a vibrating museum of my family’s history,” he says. The statement sounds like a platitude, but, as usual, it is “redacted and edited” through the artist’s hand. A series of photos on Kling’s Tumblr feed is simply captioned: “Images made from my late father’s pornography and his landscape photography.”

LC: Your dad died a couple of years ago. The Gunsmoke drawings are connected to him?

I didn’t want to be sentimental about our relationship, but I felt compelled to make work about my father’s death. James Arness is a catalyst to talk about my own relationship with my father— through power struggles, machismo, complicated male-type things. But it’s tempered with absurdity and a sense of humor.

LC: Moving to New Haven was sort of mission for you, huh? You must have been psyched to get the artist-in-residence gig at Artspace.

Yeah. [Artspace] is a cultural mothership of creative people in New Haven, and it’s part of a block of low-income housing. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to integrate back into New Haven. I’m committed to being here. I was born in New Haven. I moved out at a young age—my parents divorced when I was four. But I gravitated back to it.

Before I was 18, I lived in 18 different apartments. It was kind of funny—a lot of times, the new apartment was just literally down the street, or upstairs. [Having grown] up in southern Connecticut, [I find] there’s something alluring about New Haven. It’s a city. I went to Amity High School in Woodbridge, but I was also commuting to New Haven every day to go to an arts magnet school.

I wasn’t very good in [traditional] school. I spent a lot of time drawing during my classes and was always scolded for it.

Eben Kling | Photo by Paul Teeling

I had a very influential teacher, Brian Flynn, in high school. We’re still in close contact. He was a very encouraging guy, and he liked to challenge me. He inflated my ego when I needed it. He was the one who convinced me to keep doing art. I don’t think my mother ever wanted me to go into the arts. My father really tried to talk me out of it. It wasn’t until college that he came around.

LC: You went to an arts college?

My first year was at Hartford Art School with 15,000 other students. I was an arrogant person. I thought I had some chops; I thought I was going to be an artist. My professors knocked me down a few pegs. I didn’t connect with the city. I went to HAS because my girlfriend went there. Then my girlfriend left me, and my car got stolen. That’s when I transferred to Montserrat [College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts]. It was a nice change of speed. At the time, I needed that sort of intimacy.

I started off in illustration. While I was at Montserrat, I was getting a lot of work as an illustrator. I worked for an after-school science program in Cape Ann. It was steady work that paid me well, but it was a funny job. I made incredibly convoluted images. There would be a historical
anecdote, like one about the development of hydraulic electrical motors just after World War II. In that illustration, there were figures in the foreground—desperate people making a radio out of an old washing machine—and a war scene in the background. [The program managers] would assign me five images in two days. It was probably the most unprofessional experience I could have had out of the gate.

I switched my major to printmaking. Peers of mine who were inspiring to me happened to be in that department. I was doing lithography, acid etching, wood prints. It was like a big survey. Everybody had to work around each other—it was a shop. There’s something very colorful and enthusiastic about being in a laboratory together.

LC: What did you do after you graduated?

I moved down to the Pioneer Valley right after Montserrat. There were close to 12 Montserrat alumni living there. But many of my friends and peers were going to New York and California. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed recent art grads. I didn’t want to move to a large metropolis.

LC: What made you decide to go back to school and get an MFA?

I was walking up the stairs of the restaurant I was working in as a prep cook, and I was carrying a 15-pound sack of potatoes. I hurt my back. I was tired, working long hours in the service industry. I decided I wanted to go back to school.

I always had a suspicion I wanted to teach—the most inspiring people in my life have been teachers. At UMass, that suspicion was validated. Maybe not teaching in the most conventional sense . . . more like collaboration. Teasing out ideas with other human beings. I’m more interested in that than being some sort of famous artist.

LC: Really? You might not have much choice in the matter. You’re prolific. Let’s talk about your work. You do collages, and you also do paintings that look like collages.

I did a small series of images that were a mix of painting, found objects, and cut material. I thought, “How can I make an image that is familiar to me without paint?” I was sick of painting.

I had spent a lot of time going through my father’s house. He was a hoarder. I was feeling the burden of being the only son; the burden of his belongings, his trash. That’s when I began experimenting with sculpture. I think about Claes Oldenburg’s The Store. He rented a bodega and made objects that he sold. I started doing similar things. I made symbols for beer cans out of ventilated foam. My studio started to look like my father’s garage.

Even some of my paintings have a sort of stitched-together quality. Certain images might be . . . I haven’t figured out what they are. Dissociative forms, people’s behavior, motivations. I was feeling cynical, blank, looking through people’s actions and their objects. I was intentionally using divergence tactics . . . not being able to see where something ended.

Up All Night for Late Night 2015 | 48×48 Acrylic and Pencil on Canvas

LC: Beer cans and cigarettes are a motif in your work.

They’re symbols of debauchery. I smoke cigarettes and drink a lot of beer. I go to bars and socialize in that way. It’s part of my life. I hark back to one of my favorite painters, Philip Guston. [The motifs are] a wink to him. When I go back and think about those paintings more, there’s a sort of condemnation of debauchery.

In graduate school, I would sit in the studio and listen to Democracy Now!, then go out into the zoo of UMass. Or I would sit in a mall and draw people going up and down on an escalator for about an hour. Time-lapsed images of faces. Everybody’s on their cell phone, eating a giant hot dog, drinking sodas, and buying sneakers. There’s a lot of consumerist angst [in those images]. I felt like I was holding a mirror up. But I would also implicate myself at the same time.

LC: What about your influences? You’ve mentioned R. Crumb and Philip Guston. I get hints of Terry Gilliam in your work.

Everything is derivative. The responsibility of an artist is not to avoid that lineage but insert [oneself] into it, modernize it. I love [Gilliam’s] films. He’s in the soup stock. A lot of my influence comes from television and cartoons. I was a latchkey kid—free to watch as much TV as I wanted. I still watch cartoons all the time. There’s something about the expressiveness and plasticity of cartoons that is an established tool for exaggeration. It’s a really good strategy to make your point and push it over the edge.

I think about when I started making cardboard cutout images. They were kind of pathetic. They had no structural integrity. They would bend in ways that were eerily reminiscent of human joints—figures collapsing over themselves. Some of my peers refer to them as Transformers. It’s as if they went through a time machine and came through the other side compromised.

LC: One cool project you’ve worked on recently is Jedediah Berry’s The Family Arcana, which the project’s website describes as “a story about a haunted family, published as a poker deck and written to be read an infinite number of ways.”

I’m doing the illustrations for it. It’s a story and a functional deck of cards. Jed and I used to live together in Amherst. I’ve also dabbled in tattoo artistry for a friend who has his own tattoo shop.

Now that school is over, I’m kind of let off the leash. I feel like a real boy again.

Eben Kling | Photo by Paul Teeling

Kling’s Artspace residency culminates in a solo show. Humanoids, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Eben Kling opens Oct 7, 2016 – Nov 10, 2016.

Artspace
50 Orange St.
New Haven, CT 06510
203.772.2709
info@artspacenh.org

Images courtesy of the artist

The post I Was Confused About What I Was Looking At appeared first on Take Magazine.