MEMPHIS LIVING & THE MEMPHIS DEAD

an interview with Memphis, TN underground writer Morgenrede

In the movie Dead Poets Society, Ethan Hawke’s shy boarding school student is goaded by Robin Williams into launching into an impromptu poetic exposition in his classroom, told to look at a framed picture of Walt Whitman and give frenzied descriptions off the dome, no matter how nonsensical. It’s a scene intended to suggest the nascent poet inside the school kid. Hawke’s character begins by calling Whitman a “sweaty-toothed madman.”

The underground writer from Memphis, Tennessee with the eponym Morgenrede is, like Walt Whitman, another sweaty-toothed madman. Morgenrede generates manuscripts of carefully wrought yet spontaneously ebullient poetry and prose which resemble that list-section of “Song of Myself” where all the occupations and activities in Whitman’s 19th Century USA are given their beautiful due. Except in this case, the subject is the American South, specifically the “podunk, poor river city” of Memphis in the 21st Century, the Wolven Times of post-COVID national drift and decline. The listed-out sections in Morgenrede’s latest book include stories, poems, recipes (one gathers the dude has spent a high fraction of his adult years working in kitchen jobs), dirty jokes, tales of pinball heroism, generous chunks of research on subjects like art history and languages, and all kinds of miscellany that some might look at as garbage and others would see as the storehouse data of Internet treasure rooms. I have been drawn to Morgenrede’s compilations because I sensed that, like myself in teenaged years, this author had an impulse to “read everything”: a wandering eyeball taking in graffiti, fliers stapled to telephone poles, bits of garbage, menus, used DVD racks in antique stores, books in libraries, websites of low and high culture. The trick is in the collage, the assemblage as first conceived by 19th and 20th Century artists and writers, but given sardonic, scatological application in our own times by a wise-acre, gritty city dweller of deep sensitivity and high intelligence. My impression of his first book, Eyes Impaled by Spikes, was of an Alexander Calderesque mobile of carefully balanced fragments that, as it gently twisted, revealed deceptive profundity behind planes of colorful, nasty humor.

I spoke with Morgenrede (not his real name) via Google Docs and asked him about his writing, Memphis, live readings, self-publishing, and other topics. My interviewee was not stingy with the responses and gave ample amounts of time and care; the interview is about 3,500 words. Links are provided to his books and related pieces of info. Please support independent literature where you can.

The epigraph of your new book Using Your Hand to Block Out the Sun is from Victor Hugo: “Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse.” Do you think your book is about the eclipse of nations, in some way? The eclipse of America? What did you mean by using that epigraph which I thought was very profound and added to the interpretation of the text itself, as good epigraphs should do.

So that quote is from Les Miserables, which is a book I have not read, but it is absolutely a reference to the pitfalls of law and order, the evils perpetrated by nations during wartime, and the struggles of social unrest. I wanted the quote to be this warning to the reader that suggests they’re going to read about these selected dark moments of American life (in the past and present) as we move beyond the Covid19 years. The pandemic truly felt post-apocalyptic, and I still don’t think this country has recovered, especially the South. Most of this darkness festers online, and that’s also something that I wanted to focus on, but primarily I wanted to show just how fucked things are here in Tennessee and in the Mississippi Delta. I think that we have eclipsed, if not for the first time, then for a significant moment (9/11 comes to mind when I think of an eclipse). The stability of the moon and life-source energy from the sun give us what we need, but we have come to this zenith moment where politics is received with nihilism, balance is never achieved, the continued violence overseas seems endless, and our debts to society seem to be an inescapable rite of passage into adulthood. Finding a hopeful American is difficult. My generation has constantly proposed the idea of the end of the dominance of the American Empire, and it’s usually in reference to the failures of left-right politics, the greed of Wall Street and corporate finance, and violent protests, but I could not think of any other way to describe this idea other than what Victor Hugo proposed, which is that nations lose their ability to provide light just like stars. Historically, it is absolutely the case.

It seems that one angle that I get from your writing, in all your books, is a certain stylistic aesthetic thing where you are avoiding a sense of unity or coherence, or at least in a standard sense, but creating a collage effect of stories, poems, recipes (for lack of a better word), descriptions of pinball machines, research lifted from the internet, snatches of funny dialogue which seem likely drawn from things you’ve overheard in Memphis, lists of drinks, etc. It suggested to me, in a not altogether unpleasant way to my own neurodivergent reading if I can call it that, a sensibility strained through ADHD. Attention deficit is trendy in some ways but also an apt way to approach modern life, and it’s fitting that it should find expression in a literary form. What are you going for with this? Is it all planned out or is there a sort of musical improvisational quality, improv on the page…?

Weirdly enough I have never been diagnosed with ADHD. It’s usually been depression or codependency. I will say that my grandfather was a hoarder of historical items, personal belongings, and other trinkets. I think that propensity fell onto me, except I just have hundreds of tabs open on my phone, haha. I absolutely just don’t see the value in coherence with my work. My philosophy is that every moment of every day offers something new. I wake up and get on my phone and my feed shows me something new – whether it’s art, another video of people being blown up, or an ad of someone exploiting themselves for cash. Nowadays things are becoming more algorithmic, so I take it upon myself to get creative and do weird research. I take into account every sense of the human experience, including food for taste, music for sound, art for sight, and sexual experiences for touch. I’ll go to bathrooms and read the walls of graffiti, or go to thrift stores and look for oddities (something I loved doing with my mom as a kid), or I’ll go to cemeteries and read the information on gravestones that are hundreds of years old. I just think that our generation has no focused path beyond schooling into college and then being put into a 9-to-5 job. I mean, my generation was never even pressured to join the military. What is our purpose? I think that gave us this horrifying realization that we have the freedom to do anything, and when you have that freedom you get this anxiety to want to do everything perfectly and correctly. You don’t find that thing that gives you your pure purpose. You become lost among an entire population of people who are too anxious to know where to go or what to do. This can lead to drugs, mindless sex, abuse, etc. I want my writing to be this deep breath where I ignore the noise of distracting online discourse and just look around my city. My eyes and ears are my biggest allies. I take my time to listen, to overhear conversations, to look at notes written on park benches. I like that you mention musical improvisation, because even though I know jack shit about music theory and instruments, I let music and art drive and structure my work. Using Your Hand To Block Out The Sun (UYHTBOTS) was supposed to include pictures, but I ditched the idea at the last second, instead accepting that those photos inspired the words I had written down. Art and music soothe my anxiety, they’re my tools for therapeutic relaxation. I get this confidence when I listen to Black Sabbath, Daft Punk, Neon Indian, New Order, Bill Evans, or whoever. Sometimes I even head bang to hard rock and metal at coffee shops while I write, haha, I get into it. UYHTBOTS was heavily inspired by my listening sessions to The Beatles and Pantera, those are two of my biggest influences at the moment. The same can be said about Francis Bacon and his work. But yes, there is a heavy amount of improvisation to my work. I write down things as they appear and then I think about how they can work together in a symphony of lines and stanzas. The content I pick for each piece is random at the start, but the title usually brings it all together. I cut and paste different lines constantly before I feel satisfied that the noise has become a powerful collage, or a unique series of notes.

Hate to ask you “Southern writer” questions because I think it has a potential to go into corny territory but I am fascinated by your sense of place, Memphis, Tennessee. You reference the dead of Memphis quite a bit in your writing, whether it’s corpses in the Mississippi River or it’s the Civil War legacy or just your time looking around cemeteries at gravestones and reflecting at the people that used to be there. Is the South a kind of unique necropolis of history that the rest of the country can’t quite fully comprehend? Have you always lived in Memphis, which I guess is in the top five murder capitals of the USA?

Oh no, I love talking about the South! I think that since the Civil War, people don’t understand how horribly the war impoverished the South. And of course, on top of that, only a few years later, Yellow Fever came up through the Mississippi and killed so many Memphians that we lost our city charter. Whereas Nashville has thrived as an actual city with a prosperous economy, Memphis is still this podunk and poor river city. Our saving grace is the history of musicians that put Memphis on the map. Graceland is probably our biggest tourist attraction, aside from Sun Studios and Stax. You can’t listen to any rapper now without seeing the influence of Project Pat or Three 6 Mafia. I think the South is forever plagued by the Civil War, and racial relations between white folks and black folks is still not where it needs to be, especially in Memphis, and this bleeds into racial relations between the other races and ethnicities of people here too. It’s weird, my parents constantly talk about the riots after MLK was shot at the Lorraine Motel. My grandfather was blocks away when it happened. All of this history is still being felt, and I don’t know when or if it will be resolved locally. Beyond growing up in the suburbs of Memphis and moving to the Midtown area and living there for the last 6 years, I went to college in central Arkansas near Little Rock for four years and spent a semester in DC when Trump got elected in 2016. I’d grown up very sheltered and privileged in an upper middle class household, but I quickly got thrown into the world when I left home after high school. That time in DC made me hate politics. I became politically numb. I consider myself nihilistic to the entire left-right conversation. Capitol Hill is where democracy goes for crucifixion. Arkansas was a beautiful state where I found love and met some amazing people, but I went to a school that was very liberal, so it warped my thinking and made me incredibly depressed. That’s where the drugs came in and I damn near lost my mind. The south has this weird relationship with drugs alongside racial prejudice. Every class has their drug of choice, and now that I’m sober, it’s strange looking at my writing when I was constantly high. It’s also weird being a southern writer going to NYC for readings and seeing all these writers come from LA and the Midwest, but I’m confident that my work will show the South in all its good, bad, and ugly sides that need to be seen. Same with Cletus Crow, whose work does a great job being in the canon of southern living.

I read your book from cover to cover, but backwards. I find I like doing that sometimes with collections or anthologies, to sort of subvert any plan that the writer had for me to digest the work in a certain order. Or I move around and dip in and out, selecting things by chance and just soaking up the book that way. Your work seems tailor-made for this method because there is a frequency-hopping quality to the writing anyway, as we said, with an arrangement of seeming random bits put into a shape that isn’t clear, at least on the surface. I’ve read three of your books that all have this quality and it doesn’t seem like you are slowing down with that. The bits and stories and routines are just getting stronger, I think. Do you feel a growth in yourself as a writer or as a selector of these pieces of reportage? Are you becoming a more acute observer of your environment, are you seeing new places and things? And I guess to go along with that question, do you think there were situations or material that you couldn’t write about before but you can now?

I love that you read my work backwards, because I intentionally structure out my pieces in order by when I wrote them. In a way you time traveled by doing that, haha. I feel like I am both growing as a writer by improving my technical skills, but I am also moving past my initial raw style that started with Eyes Impaled by Spikes (2022). My first piece that got published by Misery Tourism (https://miserytourism.com/shit-i-need-to-write-this-down/) was this rough as hell journal-style documentation of 2020, it was just raw ramblings and musings from my NotesApp. It was the beginning of this creative spark where I knew that I had to start documenting my life. Now, I feel like I want my pieces to have an aesthetic quality, or a more formal look to them, while still retaining my observations. I would say though that over the years I have become more acute in observing my surroundings, almost to a detriment. I get so distracted that I can barely complete tasks or be around people without jotting something down. This has helped me go to new places and explore different parts of the South. The only way to improve as a writer is to take risks like that. I think there are still situations in my life that are still hard to write about, and I may never write about them, but I did get myself into situations with drugs and ex-friends that I couldn’t have written about, say 5 years ago. I forget who said it on Twitter, but somebody posted something like, “The poet doesn’t owe you shit,” and in a way I believe that, but I do want to share as much as I can about my experiences in the South.

I’ve only met you once, in Manhattan at the KGB Bar where you read with Adam Johnson and others at the Pig Roast Publishing reading, in July 2024 I think it was. It was the day of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life. It was hot as fuck in the city. Your reading style was good because it was this staccato buildup of lines with quite a bit of comedy zingers in there, which is always good for readings it seems to me. Laughter helps the audience lock in to what you’re saying, I find. It’s also a way for the reader to echolocate with where the audience is at, what the temperature is, the intelligence level, etc. Do you find that to be true? When you’re writing these books, are you thinking of the performances which very well might result, the sound versus the page? We first met virtually at Misery Loves Company zoom readings which were a great workshop for that.

I was so happy during that reading. It felt like everything had led up to that moment. So many talented writers were in that room. I was honestly surprised that I did well with the audience. Sure, alcohol helps people loosen up, and a lot of people knew who I was, but I just treated that reading as if it was just a normal Misery Loves Company. I felt comfortable, and that helped me be confident enough to deliver. I think that when you structure a reading, you need to have a mix of different styles. You don’t want carbon copy indie writers back-to-back-to-back. You need the depressed poetry, you need the humorous pieces, you need the sexy prose, you need the vile and obscene shit. You want to bring variety, but you also want to honor the time and the attention of the crowd. You can’t control the artist’s process, but when you’re presenting your work, you’ve made this social agreement with a crowd, and you have to honor it. I like to think of John Waters and his movies. He always brought his A-game to his films. You were never going to be bored watching his movies. You should never want your audience to be bored. Either offend them or humor them. It’s almost like the opposite of dating. Fuck asking the audience questions, you should be peacocking yourself and going all out with your super freaky self. When it comes to my writing, I think Misery Loves Company definitely helped me structure certain pieces with an audience in mind. It also kind of… put this competitive mindset into my writing? Like, I don’t think it’s a competition, but I also didn’t want to be the reader with the piece that got the lowest amount of attention or lowest amount of laughs. It’s a fun sense of competition, if anything. William and Rudy have no idea how powerful those readings improved my writing, both for readers and listeners. If I read a piece aloud and it sounded clean, then not only was it performance ready, it was also going to read well. Two birds, one stone. But, even though I like live readings, I want there to be pieces that are only read in private. I want some of my pieces to be intimate experiences that make you uncomfortable. It’s like reading De Sade. You feel like you’re doing something that you shouldn’t be doing, but you just can’t stop. Again, this is like watching a John Waters movie. At the end of the day, I want the loner freaks and shut-in weirdos to be rewarded.

Did I hear at some point that Adam Johnson helped you edit a book? I ask about him a lot because his poetry is sort of legendary to me and I can see how it sets a standard for people in the niche corner of the scene as it were. His later work has some of the same salmagundi “put everything in the stew” quality as your books have, that, when you read it, reveals levels of care and planning that weren’t apparent on the surface.

Yes! Adam helped me edit ABUSER before it was published at Pig Roast Publishing. I sent him a google doc of the entire manuscript and I told him to focus on sections that needed attention. He did a great job. We had a zoom call with Jeff Schneider where Adam gave me some great advice about editing poetry. Essentially, you can’t really edit poetry. So, I had to be confident and comfortable with my poetry, and this helped me narrow down the edits to just different prose sections. Adam is an absolute powerhouse in the indie lit scene. He’s inspired so many people, and I hope to see him in person again soon. Also, when Misery Tourism took a hiatus a few years ago, I was stuck looking for another press that would accept my weirdness. That’s where DON’TSUBMIT! came into the picture. Reading Adam’s work published at DON’TSUBMIT! and writing with this new surrealist/dadaist poetry style injected an entire new wave of creativity into my bloodstream. I haven’t submitted to DON’TSUBMIT! in a while, but they were crucial for me when I felt like I only needed Misery Tourism to be successful.

I personally have a lot of respect for self-publishing and I can see the artistic merits, but to some it is a dead end. To others it’s essentially all a dead end, in the sense that there’s no guarantees anybody will read any of this. Does that bother you? Are you just trying to get your books out there for purely altruistic reasons that have little to do with reaping heads of readers? I would like more people to read me but I’m learning to let go of that and try to seek an idealized relationship with my readers, where and how they exist. I wish I knew more about how to self-publish because I have some projects that I would turn into self-published things in a heartbeat.

I’ve never been bothered by the pitfalls of self-publishing. I think every person should learn how to do it. It teaches you about page numbering, how to do page breaks, how to structure a table of contents, how to make a front cover and a back cover. It’s a great way to empathize with different presses and how difficult this shit really is behind the scenes. I will say that I do have a new-found paranoia and new feelings of gut-wrenching terror when I think about how I am in control of the publishing process. I’ve had to go back and edit already published works in this neurotic desire to publish the perfect book. I really do want my readers to have the best possible copy of my work. I want my work to be art that matches my vision of what it should be in the real world. I’m not doing this for the money. I sell my books cheap so that everyone can read my work. I want to provide quality work to join the canon of indie lit. I even tried to ship my books to Croatia to try and expand my reading audience (it failed, but I’ll try again). What really sells books (to me) is just going to readings, making friends with readers, and being your own insane, true self. So many writers try to be cookie-cutter, they shill their work the same way or sell their work at ridiculous prices. Life is too short to hold onto entire manuscripts that may never be published because they “don’t make sense” or “won’t sell.” Fuck it. Put your work out, I say! If I hadn’t put out Eyes Impaled by Spikes, I would have never been seen by you or Jeff Schneider or Adam Johnson. It was a ridiculous risk that paid off. Always bet on yourself.