Fiction reader Carina Imbornone talks with NER 45.3 author Lindsay Hill about poetic fiction, co-creating with the reader, and open ambiguity in his novel Tidal Lock.
Carina Imbornone: Excerpts from your book Tidal Lock—which just released on November 8—appeared in NER 45.3. When did you first conceive of this novel?
Lindsay Hill: The book is 160-odd pages and the manuscript was 1,500 pages. I didn’t have a conception of what the title was going to be, or even a subject. I’m a very inefficient writer.
The process was born out of my original artistic vocation, as a poet. The best poems emerge. I have a very emergent relationship with writing—I guess some would call it poetic fiction.
CI: Would you consider this relationship with writing to be painful?
LH: It’s blissful. It’s not painful at all. If it starts to hurt, I stop. It’s an exploration. And, you know, I’m always interested to see what, if anything, will emerge. I have hundreds of notebooks that will never see the light of day, and I’m fine with that.
CI: You give yourself permission to use the razor. Your narrator, Olana, moves as if she is visiting the underworld or is otherwise in an elemental space. Given that the work is composed of short sections, I started to think about it as a religious text, or a poem such as The Inferno. Is this something you were thinking about when you wrote about the underworld?
LH: Yeah, I’m not sure that I think about it in a religious context exactly. Olana, named after Frederic Church’s Moorish mansion on the Hudson, finds herself in a displaced, disoriented city and only over time does she “try it on,” as she says, that this might be the underworld. So, it’s a framing of her dissociated or disoriented experience. And then she decides that she has to find her way out of this place.
CI: You’re writing a character that might be read as unreliable to reality, to language itself. Were you thinking a lot about breaking language when you wrote this book?
LH: I spent a lot of time in my poetic work breaking language because I had started out writing fairly traditional poetry, and I realized I needed to break that structure in order to express things that were more complex and interesting. Olana is not simply unreliable. Almost everything that she asserts is in fact the case. It’s just asserted in a symbolic, allegorical way. If this book can be successful to readers, which is an open question, Olana is not simply unreliable, and she’s not simply crazy. That’s part of the ambiguity that I hope the reader will come in contact with.
CI: It’s a project for the reader that requires some faith.
LH: For sure. There’s no question that I write the kind of work that I also enjoy reading. So I like being challenged by leaps that I have to make. It does put a good deal of responsibility on the shoulders of a reader. Not all good readers are interested in that kind of project, but I think some readers are.
CI: You’re co-creating with the reader.
LH: Exactly. And once again, I think that comes from my background in poetry, where readers are traditionally asked to make a lot of leaps. In linear fiction, there’s a lot more guidance. And to some degree—maybe it’s presumptuous to say—a lot less risk.
CI: I’m sure you have countless influences, but you are reminding me of Ronald Johnson and ARK.
LH: I love ARK. And I had the opportunity, not long before he died, to meet Ronald Johnson at a reading. Like ARK, Tidal Lock has three architectural “levels”: a ground-level, a basement, and an attic. Each of these contains a world, and these worlds converge in Olana’s meaning-making process.
The work of Michael Palmer is also very interesting. I think the work of Kate Greenstreet is very, very interesting and engaging. She wrote four books that are something of a series, and they carry with them a kind of open-text inquisitiveness that really engages the reader in exploration. That is the kind of poetry that I migrate toward. I’m really glad that you mentioned ARK. Even though it has obtained some notoriety, it’s still a vastly underread and underestimated work.
CI: I agree. With ARK, it’s the translation of a real physical space into a real physical poem—both with different types of physicality according to their forms: the form of poetry and the form of sculpture. It’s the kind of text you can reread many times without feeling funneled to any conclusions. To me, this resonates with your blissful, expansive writing process. You don’t need to judge your own experience in order to record its structure. I don’t know if that feels right or not to your work.
LH: I think you’re spot on. After I reach a certain point, all of a sudden, the energy just completely switches and I become a fierce editor. I start chucking sections by the hundreds. And that’s also a blissful experience, but I don’t conduct those two activities in the same space.
CI: I was struck by the following line as a sort of turning point, a volta, for the selection: “At least when you’re stomping at other people’s fires, you’re not thinking about yourself.” And then I started to think of every section as equivalent to a line of a poem, a sort of expanded sonnet. Poetry is so occupied with producing images and fiction can be too. Your fiction is particularly occupied with this expanded sense of image. How do you feel about what it means to make an image in fiction versus poetry?
LH: I think that the main difference is scale, you know, the spaciousness within which to develop, and invite, imagistic reverberations. And the other aspect would be having a narrative anchor, however obscured, such as the through-line of character development in Olana.
CI: Comparing ARK with this collage of passages from Tidal Lock, there is a similar multi-directionality to the writing. You can rearrange the text and it’s still coherent. I see that happen more in visual art languages. But in narrative art, it’s very hard to land yourself in a place where you’re allowed to do those things.
In this excerpt, there’s the subject of “the friend,” who the narrator clearly hates. Towards the middle of the excerpt, things shift back to the narrator. And then all of a sudden the friend becomes immaterial, disappears. To ask a straightforward question, does this friend even exist?
LH: That is such a great question. In fact, it is not for sure that this friend even exists. To what degree is Olana speaking of her relationship with herself and to what degree is she speaking about an actual friend is left as an open ambiguity within the text.
CI: There’s subjectivity between the narrator and the friend. It’s almost like this relationship with the friend reflects the relationship the reader might have with the book.
LH: My hope is that readers will find lots of different ways to interact with it, including reflecting on narrative. It’s profoundly hoped on my part that the reader’s initial perception of Olana’s unreliability is gradually and deeply displaced by her fundamental sanity in how she deals with trauma and how she operates to liberate herself.
Lindsay Hill is a graduate of Bard College. Since 1974, he has published six books of poetry, including Contango (Singing Horse Press, 2006) and The Empty Quarter (Singing Horse Press, 2010). His work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals. His first novel, Sea of Hooks (McPherson & Company, 2013), won the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award, the 2015 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction, and the 2016 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award. His second novel, Tidal Lock, was published by McPherson in November 2024. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Carina Imbornone is a writer from Massachusetts living in New York.
Photo of Lindsay Hill courtesy of Kelly Guan