Calvin Westra is the author of Family Annihilator, Donald Goines, and now Moth Girl, all released by Expat Press. At 403 pages, Moth Girl represents his longest sustained vision in the experimental style of those earlier works—a magical realist, autofictional, metafictional, absurd, nightmarish, and sometimes surprisingly bittersweet novel of three American cities and one supernatural girlfriend. Westra spoke to me about the work from his home in Indiana, via Google Docs.

M: I’m on - I’m assuming we can both type on this at the same time. That was my whole plan. I’m not technologically very savvy.

C: Ayy neither am i

M: I laughed at that part in Moth Girl where somebody said that Mass Effect 2 was basically a choose-your-own-adventure. I appreciate when gamer humor can find its way into literature.

C: That’s funny, yeah. There are these really granular details kinda in the book. Like, I try to get little things like that right. Late 2010, XBOX 360 still moderately new and relevant, same with Mass Effect. I don’t really know a lot about anything but I know the places I’ve lived and the time that I’ve lived through, so I try to get those details right. Like, to me, I think it’s cool that Hector thinks “e-cigarettes” are this really stupid thing in 2010 but then admits that he “vapes” in 2016. I try to lightly trace the history of electronic cigarette technology through the book.

M: Is it wrong of me to still feel an aversion to e-cigarettes? Something about them just seems historically lame. It looks like you’re sucking on an electronic dildo. Also, I think we need like an “over” signal like we were using walkie-talkies. Over.

C: Yeah I always felt that way until I started vaping but to be honest I still think it’s lame and I call it my binky. I like that they all have these really child-oriented flavors plus nice, colorful, rounded shapes so they’re very appealing to my inner child. I’ve got a pineapple lime vape currently. Over.

M: I had to stop smoking because it made my arm hurt. Over.

C: My friend Jacob would always say, “You gotta smoke through that shit,” in regard to any kind of health concerns people would bring up re: smoking and I’ve always sorta carried that attitude about it but I gave up smoking too and now I just vape plus the occasional Zyn if I’m going to be stuck indoors and around people for an unreasonably long period of time (thirty minutes or more). Over.

M: At what point in the writing process of Moth Girl did you decide to tell a story only in quoted text messages? Over.

C: Before it was all text messages it was all dialogue. And I read a lot of Gaddis while figuring it out. For a long time the whole book was just sweeping conversation after conversation, none of it really making sense, but it all clicking together in my head, kinda like The Recognitions but maybe more so like that other one that I’m drawing a blank on uhhh A Frolic of His Own. And it always made sense to me but it didn’t really seem possible for a reader to follow and so it slowly evolved to being text messages only but with this sorta found footagey undercurrent. And I think it’s still difficult/impossible to fully follow. Over.

M: That’s something I noticed about the novel: it being (deliberately) difficult to put all the pieces together. It destabilizes the reader with things that don’t make sense, except within the book’s internal logic. Sometimes a word will mean something within the book that that it doesn’t mean outside the book. Like badminton, or meatloaf. It becomes a game, figuring out how words work in this universe. Over.

C: Yeah I like doing that and I plan to do it more in the future. It’s cool to really truly overhear something you aren’t invited into and have to work a little to infer meaning and your inference might not be perfect but it’s good enough and now you’re engaged with the book in a deeper way. Over.

M: The writer I always thought of next to your work was Brautigan. In Trout Fishing in America he uses a similar type of repetitious wordplay. Is he an influence? Over.

C: Nope. It’s funny, I get compared to him a fair amount (including in Blake [Butler]’s Substack review) but I actually read him for the first time like maybe a year ago. I liked him but I only discovered him recently. I spent my late teenage years trying very hard to copy Kurt Vonnegut and write novels the way he did and I never figured it out but I did end up figuring out my own way of writing. I read a lot of Haruki Murakami too and I think he helped me figure out a few things, especially regarding folding in a little magical realism without it getting too out of hand. And I think stylistically I mostly draw from Agota Kristof, Lydia Davis, and Eugene Marten. Murakami actually mentions Agota Kristof in his book on being a novelist, and says something about how they both found their way to good sentences by mentally translating them from their native languages into English, and then back into their native language before writing it down. So the writing starts to take on a brutally simple, childlike straightforwardness, which is something I’m always aiming for. Over.

M: That’s a Brautigan connection, too. It’s refreshing, the straightforwardness of your language. Over.

C: I think all the ideas I have for books are so weird and alien, even to me, that from the very beginning the main question on my mind is, “How do I create an on-ramp for a reader?” So then I’m always trying to find an excuse to remove elements or simplify things to make it as easy as possible. But of course it still ends up pretty wild and crazy. Over.

M: There’s a metafictional layer to the book where you comment on the process of figuring the book out, through the feedback Hector gets on his autofictional novel. How certain things don’t make sense. Like Harrison. That’s a kind of on-ramp for the reader, because I, too, was confused as fuck about who Harrison was, and it was a relief to know the characters were, too. Because of things like that, I trusted the authorial voice. I knew you were fucking with me, and it would either make sense eventually or it wouldn’t make sense and that would be funny. It’s hilarious how right before the end, Hector receives feedback that the ending doesn’t make any sense. Over.

C: Well lemme just say I think it’s important spiritually to the book that it doesn’t give you a nice sense of closure but instead ends with a disorienting letdown. Over.

M: In some ways, Moth Girl could be the book Hector is writing, and in other ways Moth Girl and his book don’t overlap. Is that right? The book is kind of coy about this. Over.

C: Yeah it’s maybe a little coy but only a little. I think it stands to reason that the book Hector is working on is the book you’re looking at but it’s like always possible that someone else has just made this thing using all this stuff. Which is also cool. Over.

M: It feels a like you’re also parodying autofiction a little. Because we associate that term with granular, direct realism without a filter—a revelation of the world—and he’s writing autofiction in a weird surreal universe that doesn’t always line up with our own. Over.

C: Yeah. I get that. But I also feel like I just live in a world where microwaves sometimes catch fire. Over.

M: What’s your world like? You live in Indiana, right? Do you still clean churches at night? Over.

C: Yeah I live in Indiana. And my brother and I run a cleaning operation but we’re kinda phasing it out due to being tired of being night janitors. I do clean a church still. But I drive a retired opera singer to her appointments now because she doesn’t like driving. I just do things. Over.

M: There’s something going on with church smells. Over.

C: I was actually in this one room of the church that I’m almost never in last night and I realized it smells like my elementary school, which was bulldozed for not being fire compliant in the late nineties. I really like old buildings a lot and I like having an excuse (and the necessary keys) to sneak into old asbestos-ridden parts of buildings and get down into where the black widows are all creeping around and so on. My church is really cool because it has broken down stairs and then a ladder leading up into a bell tower and it has an old boiler room that is like 200 years old. I mostly just janitor for perks like that. Over.

M: Let’s talk about the character moth girl. Not the book Moth Girl. How do you feel about spoilers? Over.

C: I mean, I published the ending of the book on Muumuu House so I feel like I don’t really believe in spoilers. It’s not really a spoilable book in my opinion because you can’t possibly rely on the information being relayed to you to such a degree that it ever forms a concrete reality. I will say, and this is really a spoiler because I’ve never said this to anyone, not even Manny or Justin, but I worked hard to make the book something that interacts with you in a way that is very similar to how moth girl interacts with Hector, so that you could enjoy a similar degree of disorientation/frustration, and sorta feel that sensation more than you even realize you’re feeling something. Sometimes you “know” something and then it stops being true. And even after you’ve read the book front to back, you actually don’t really know what happened and it’s possible for you to look back and realize that a lot of stuff you assumed was one way is totally different. Over.

M: Early in the book, moth girl seems like such a perfect girlfriend. But by the end of the book I had the sense that Moth Girl (the book) is really about a toxic relationship…a toxic girlfriend, actually. Hector has flaws, but watching his conversations with moth girl became increasingly frustrating and familiar to me as a man who has dated women. She sucks him into her vortex of lies. Over.

C: Yeah exactly. It’s really easy to get lost in it but I also like that while, yes she’s definitely an extremely toxic person, that for the most part somehow manifests in her gently teasing out these way darker sides of Hector. Which is cool to watch and is informative. Over.

M: You also perfectly capture the feeling of being a boyfriend gently gaslighting his crazy girlfriend, because that’s the only way for him to manage interactions without them blowing up. Forgetting to mention things, diminishing things. That’s something about your work that I dig—there’s this tension between surreal world and painfully real characters. Over.

C: The secret is getting almost too in the weeds. The secret is Bujalski-maxxing. Over.

M: What’s Bujalski-maxxing? Over.

C: You need to be watching Andrew Bujalski movies all the time. Specifically Computer Chess but also Funny Haha and Beeswax and maybe Support the Girls. Over.

M: What do you mean by getting “almost too in the weeds”? Over.

C: Yeah, so when I’m not writing about cassowaries in hydraulic mech suits that fight each other in an underground stadium, I’m using these trillions of screencaps I have of real text message conversations to get at these super granular little things people say. And so throughout the book, we have some weird stuff, sure, but we also have these really deep and specific and repetitive arguments that quietly evolve over time. We have obsessions that creep back up and stuff like that. So, it isn’t just broad strokes stuff. And near the end we have these, again, really in the weeds arguments between Leon and Hector about plot points from earlier in the book and about generally how to properly mythologize stuff in the world they’re in. So, while I’m always trying to simplify things to keep the book moving I’m always showcasing lots of really character-specific issues and giving the characters plenty of room to drill into their concerns, which I think is what I mean when I say “in the weeds.” I wanted, especially re: Hector/moth girl, for them to be able to have these insanely complicated (and therefore real-feeling) arguments but you could presumably follow them, as you’ve watched all the different elements of them slowly emerge. Over.

M: That comes across. I really felt like I was deep in someone else’s relationship, in a voyeuristic way. Do you think the fact that so much of their relationship is in text messages contribute to this? Over.

C: Definitely. I think that's the only reason it works actually. And it was still really difficult to figure out how to tell the whole story that way, without like cheating here and there. Which, for the record, I never did. Every "real" scene is still actually fairly clearly sourced from someone's text messages. But to answer the core of your question, yeah, I think the sorta voyeuristic feeling you get only works if you sense you can piece everything together relatively closely. And while we're on that subject, I think that's where a lot of potentially cool quote unquote experimental writing sorta fails. If the payoff seems low relative to the investment you have to put in to figure out what's going on, then eyes start to glaze over. So, the relationship (and so much of Hector's life in general) playing out through text messages earns some trust. You're seeing, if anything, more than you think you want to. Which contributes to both the voyeuristic thing you're talking about but also making sure a reader feels like they want to keep trucking along even if the story feels chaotic. Over.

M: I was curious about the process of generating a book like this. It seemed almost procedurally-generated. The weaving of the weird ideas into the narrative becomes part of the structure. Some of these odd concepts remain mysteries for most of the book. I feel like we don’t get a clear idea of what Sergio Fest is until later, and how the Herakles works never became quite clear. Over.

C: A lot of times it evolves and its purpose is to give the characters a really efficient world for them to render themselves in. I’m pretty ruthless about that. Like, I needed Will to have an insane job that Pablo could half-jokingly be interested in, mostly as an excuse to bullshit with Hector, that could then become this thing that Hector takes deadly seriously. So I get a lot of character mileage out of one thing, same with The Grape Gatsby thing. And Sergio Fest. Like, most of this stuff exists on the periphery and it has to for the book not to end up 600,000 words, but it also does a lot, in giving characters opportunity to show themselves. At one point, forty million drafts ago, the whole of the Grape Gatsby thing was that Will was going to change the word “great” to “grape” throughout his whole book, and Hector would think that was dumb, but in the book you were reading, in Moth Girl, the word “great” would always be replaced with “grape” and there’d be this really high tension, emotional scene where moth girl said something like, “I was fucking grape to you.” Over.

M: The Grape Gatsby is so dumb funny, I laugh every time I think of it. Over.

C: “Leave a few grapes for the Gatsby.” Over.

M: There was this one point in the book where I felt you were kind of calling your shot, laying out your entire aesthetic plan: Hector explains how "a book could balance on itself and tumble forward without ever touching the ground." That felt like your mission. Over.

C: Yeah. Great scene. Because we see what Hector slips back into when he’s on his own. The story is, generally, returning to these core Hector-things that it was about at the start, before moth girl. But then, in the middle of his summarized dialogue moth girl interrupts. She wants to know what he told people. What he told Pablo specifically. And so we get both characters and what they want and how they think about the world in a nice little package. And, to answer your question, it’s like we almost got a real piece of something regarding the form of the book and how it functions but alas, moth girl cuts it off to drive the conversation somewhere else. Over.

M: I think that’s a good first sally? I want to thank you for doing this man. Over.

C: Hell yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you inviting me to do this. I uhh I don’t do a lot of these (I’ve done zero until this one) and I feel like we covered a lot of cool shit. Over.

M: I’ll take this back to the workshop, edit it up, and maybe send a doc with a few follow up questions to attack at your leisure. Over and out?

C: That sounds awesome. Over and out.