We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Luke Sutherland

LS: The book spans the east and west coast, but the meat of it happens in the Olympic peninsula. All of my work plays with ecology. I’m always trying to get at the social construction of the ‘natural,’ both ecologically and morally. It’s a violent construction; we see this in everything from Zionist ecofascism (trying to make the “empty” desert bloom) to the criminalization of transition. Attempting to label certain expressions of human life as unnatural is deeply fascistic. On a practical level, the park is in Distance Sequence because that is where the events took place, but the decision to make it so central was strategic. 

AC: Themes of queer love and longing crystallize in the narrator’s relationship with B. I noticed their interactions didn’t end when B moved away, and the narrator’s feelings didn’t fade when other loves entered the picture. This portrayal of “dykelove” and “transsexual love” as a generous rather than finite resource was so refreshing to me, and I liked how it emphasized community. Would you be willing to share your influences? I’d be curious to learn about the people and/or art that informed your notions of love.

LS: I love your phrasing of love as a generous resource. The most important lessons I’ve learned have come from my friends and lovers, especially other transsexuals, and especially disabled kinksters, who know radical care better than most. To that end: the documentary BloodSisters and Davey Davis’ newsletter are both indispensable. Southern Comfort and By Hook or By Crook also come to mind. Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrillio is one of the best novels about love, period. And it’s impossible for me to talk about my influences without mentioning The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.

AC: There are several parts where the narrator describes having a visceral reaction upon recalling painful events. When it came to narrating these moments, how did you manage your proximity to the text? The book also includes pictures of what appear to be journal entries. When did you start writing about these events?

LS: I started writing the book almost immediately after the events took place. I’ve never been one to keep a diary or document my life in a straightforward way. When I got home from seeing B, though, I couldn’t stop writing about it. The incessantness is what tipped me off to the fact that I was writing a book, not a private diary. I had recently seen Minari and read an interview with Lee Isaac Chung about how the arc of the film revealed itself when he made a list of eighty memories of his childhood—really granular, sensorial stuff. I thought: can I do that? Get down eighty moments in as much detail as possible? That’s how it started. 

The most painful memories in Distance are ones my body has held onto without the permission of my consciousness. The game then, so to speak, was to try to remember something on purpose, to bleed on purpose, rather than allowing whatever alchemic equation that usually dissolves some experiences and preserves others to take over. 

AC: The book is divided into twelve sections, each one focusing on a single or series of memories. Three sections share a recurring title: Memorywork. How did the “work” of writing these sections differ from the rest of the book?

LS: The ‘Memorywork’ triptych is me speaking directly to B. There is so much art about falling in love, and yet it is easy to forget what a difficult thing it can be. It is ecstatic, but pleasure and ecstasy aren’t always synonyms. Explaining your life to a new lover is in a way an act of dialogic memoir. The ‘work’ of memorywork isn’t labor in the capitalist sense, but it is effortful. I wrote the triptych the way I wished I could tell it to B but which distance prevented me from doing. Thinking of it that way, they are probably the most intimate chapters in the book, where the writer/reader veil is stretched thinnest.

AC: I’m drawn to the images that are scattered throughout the book: handwritten notes, travel photos, maps of hiking trails, illustrations of flora… I love how they surround and “hug” the prose, positioning the text among visual mementos. What urged you to include these in the book? What was the thought process behind their arrangement?

LS: It just made sense to me! Similar to non-linearity being true to the actual experience of remembering, including images made the text feel fuller. All relationships create ephemera, a mutual archive of sorts, but much of the relationship in the book played out through ephemera; it wasn’t incidental flotsam, but a driving force. Sharing it directly captured an intimacy that my text alone couldn’t. It’s also playful. What is an image, after all? When you’re looking at a scan of a handwritten note, is that image, or is that text? The two categories eventually start collapsing. 

AC: The fluidity of your prose, your playfulness with form, was really immersive for me as a reader. Did these formal choices come naturally to you or were they the outcome of revisions? Do they stretch or sit comfortably with your practice of writing creative nonfiction?

LS: I always like fucking with form, but for this project in particular, that was the case from the beginning. I’m agnostic of genre, and the idea that creative nonfiction should ‘sit’ on the page in a certain way strikes me as very boring. Prose writers do themselves a disservice when they don’t consider the options that verse and experimental text rendering offers them. Why are we so stiff with our lines? A paragraph can be such a dull container. 

So, this wasn’t a stretch for me, but the formal influence of Camelia Berry Grass’ Hall of Waters can’t be overstated. That book changed my writing, and Camelia is one of the most interesting essayists there is. 

AC: Is this sequence finished? Do you envision your next project/s as extensions of this book, or as conversant with it?

LS: I’ve made a concerted effort to not think about whether the sequence of the book is over. When I started to feel myself dissociate from the present moment with B—thinking things like, how can I write about this later, what’s the thematic thread here?—that was my sign to back off. We have to actually experience the present if we have any hope of writing about it authentically later. 

Most of my time lately has been focused on a novel about a trans punk band who start to experience bodily mutations. The novel and Distance Sequence are connected in that I am perennially interested in unconventional narrative structure, the mutability of bodies, trans intimacy, and the illusion of a distinct natural world. But it also feels like a bit of a relief to get back to full-throated fiction—finally I can stop thinking about myself for a while.

Distance Sequence is available from Neon Hemlock Press

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Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.