Panpocalypse Week Nine: Interview
We wanted more Panpocalypse, so FP ED Jamia Wilson sat down (virtually) with Carley Moore to talk about serialized novels, the dictation process, and getting back on the bike.
Jamia Wilson: How did Panpocalypse as a project come to you, and specifically the idea of serialization as a method?
Carley Moore: At the very beginning of the lockdown, before I had a bike, I was writing poems on Instagram and calling them “viral poems.” It was really just me walking around Manhattan and taking pictures. It was something for me to do to chronicle what felt like—and was, really—a very, very empty city or a very, very locked-down city. So I think those poems were an initial kind of seed for Panpocalypse. I’m always a person who’s chronicling things and wanting to write about contemporary moments that feel political or just feel challenging.
And then once I got the bike, I was literally off riding around. I have long wanted to think about what it’s like for me, as a person with chronic pain and disability issues—what does it mean for me to get back on the bike, and what does it mean for me to think about falling? A big part of the book is my history of disability, and a time in the past when I couldn’t really walk until I was eleven. I’ve been wanting to write a disability memoir for a long time, but it just seemed like these things suddenly fit together in the form of an autofiction book about a queer, disabled woman looking for a lost love, roaming the city.
And the serialized part—it’s not that I’m a huge Dickens fan or anything, although I do play with a couple of Dickens texts in Panpocalypse, one in particular, A Christmas Carol. But I just like the idea of giving something to the community, if the community wants it, one installment at a time.
JW: Love it. You talk a little bit about how the dictation process has influenced how you write. Has it changed how you write? Has it influenced your process as a writer, as an artist?
CM: Yeah. Some things I’ve been able to dictate, and then sometimes the technology is just too difficult, so parts of the book are dictated and parts of it I ended up typing. I will say that the thing dictation has shifted the most in terms of form is to keep things really in the present, which is something I wanted to do. Basically the whole book is in present tense because I wanted to capture this feeling of nowness and everything unfolding and movement.
The dictation, in a way, because it’s so wonky and doesn’t understand my voice—it’s funny, it keeps things moving quickly, but it also sometimes slows them down, and I’m really interested in that as a disabled writer’s practice. I just finished reading Alice Wong’s edited collection Disability Visibility, which is such a great book, and I want to recommend it to everybody. There’s a piece in there—"Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time" by Ellen Samuels—about how there’s a thing called “crip time,” which I think is really interesting, just thinking about time in different ways for people who are disabled. So I think the dictation alters time in a way, and COVID has altered our sense of time. It also helps me think about the technologies that I have not needed very often in my life, especially in my adult life, but all the kinds of technologies that disabled people need and we don't have access to, or that just don’t work right. I could have Dragon software, but it doesn't match with Mac, and that’s really the best dictation software, and it’s actually very expensive. So it’s just really interesting to play with that.
JW: We talked about this a little bit before, but a recurrent observation in Panpocalypse is that COVID has exposed how the routine of what we see as “normal society” is in fact deeply ableist. Can you speak more to this observation?
CM: I think what I have experienced firsthand is that a lot of abled people in my life, or just colleagues, or on social media—initially, especially, but even still—really freaking out about the fact that they couldn’t go outside anymore, or that their movements are limited, or that they have to adapt in ways that they’ve never had to adapt before. What I’ve seen also from social media and disability communities that I’m a part of is that I think we’re all like, “Well, yeah, this is how it is.” You know, welcome to a lot of our worlds. So many disabled people who are really restricted in their movements because they don’t have the help or care that they need, or because of exhaustion and accessibility issues or pain, end up being home far more than they would have ever imagined or would like. There’s a line in Panpocalypse, I think it was in the first week’s post, that says “We’re all disabled now.”
JW: I like the idea of like, what is the genre that this time calls for. The novel genre is what predicted this time—some novels stated, “It will be a coronavirus.”
CM: I know! Novelists are so out in front, like Station Eleven and Severance. I do love that about novelists, and I so admire the way that novelists—I guess I am one too, so I have to include myself—we end up creating this whole world for people to inhabit. And then I think it can be really uncanny when some of those things turn out to be true.
JW: Books are oracles.
CM: Yeah. Definitely.
JW: It’s scary, right? Octavia Butler totally predicted a rogue politician who rose to power with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” When I think about that, it gives me chills. Books as oracles, again.
CM: Octavia Butler—she’s just goddess of all smart, genius things.
JW: Can you talk more about the complicated love affair with bikes throughout Orpheus’s life?
CM: Orpheus has a very rare neurological disorder, and then also has depression and anxiety, and those things are very much part of my life as well, so that’s very autobiographical. In the book—and this is true for me too—it takes Orpheus two years to learn how to ride a bike, which I’ve heard about happening to other people, but I think is a very particular thing to someone who has a disability that’s a lot about balance and dopamine. For a long time before I was diagnosed, anything that disrupted my balance, like being in water, was really hard for me. Being on a bike was just, the movement, it was just like my center of gravity was completely disrupted.
But when I did learn how to ride, I think that’s the thing about riding a bicycle that everyone says—once you know, you know forever. So it was kind of a great moment of mobility for me in an early part of my life. Eventually I got much sicker, and I really didn’t ride that much until I was diagnosed. I have the bike of my high school life that my brother ended up taking from me and selling. I chronicle all my bikes. I think that they’re an interesting way of thinking about movement. And also I could imagine for someone that has different disability issues than I do, or is a wheelchair user—the different kinds of wheelchairs would also be a way to chronicle time. Like, it’s such a big deal when people get a motorized chair as opposed to having had a kind of inferior chair that they didn’t have a lot of mobility with.
JW: Due to my visual disability, I’m so afraid to ride bikes in NYC, so I always think that people like you are heroes. I can only ride them on Governors Island, or somewhere where there are no cabs.
CM: Well, I think one of the reasons I was actually able to get back on a bike and start riding at the age of forty-eight, and also not in really good physical condition in many ways, is because the streets were empty. And so I had this really bizarre New York experience of being like, Okay, I’m going to go down Broadway, and there will be no one on Broadway. Now that it’s become more crowded I’ve had to learn to negotiate traffic a little bit better, and that’s been challenging. But I totally hear you, Governors Island is the best place to ride because it’s just bikes and people walking. It’s so nice.
JW: For someone who’s really excited to read this and hasn’t gotten to yet, what few words do you have about Orpheus’s life that you want to share with them to say, “You need to put down everything and start reading this serial, now!”?
CM: I’m terrible at this! You know, Orpheus is the character for our time. She is questioning everything, she wants the world to change, and she’s not afraid to try to make that happen. I think we’re in this moment of incredible upheaval and desire for change, and Orpheus is very much a part of that. So I think this is a great book for people to pick up. I don’t like to lean too heavily on the word “hope,” but I think there’s a lot of hope in this character, and we really need that right now because things are really brutal and hard, and I want to give that to people. And it’s not a syrupy hope, it’s not just an “Oh yeah, things are going to be fine.” To me, it’s a genuine “We’re working together to make things different.”
