Books: "The Taste of Rain In Buenos Aires"

 

The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires

By Will Dowd

Etruscan Press; paperback; $18.00

Will Dowd is a poet, essayist, and visual artist based outside Boston. His debut book, Areas of Fog, was named a Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read." He has received fellowships from several leading arts foundations, and its an editorial columnist at The Boston Globe, a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine, and the author of the popular newsletter "The Lunar Dispatch." His work interweaves writing, illustration, and multimedia experiments to explore perception, imagination, and the surprising connections between art and science. Dowd's writing and artwork have also appeared in The Washington Post, NPR, Writer's Digest, Literary Hub, and Poets & Writers.

The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires is Dowd's new book, the product one of the most creative processes ever, and the result is pretty incredible, capturing a wide range of emotions.

Nearly twenty years ago, Dowd suffered from a medical condition that left him visually impaired and exiled him from the world of books as he had known them. Dowd could only leave his home for medical visits, and it also meant, that he could no longer read a page, crushing for a lifelong compulsive reader.

Dowd found his way back into literature through his dreams. For a year, he fell asleep each night wearing Dormio, an experimental dream-incubation device developed at the MIT Media Lab. At the precise moment he crossed into sleep, the device would play archival readings of dead poets, from Anne Sexton and James Merrill to Audre Lorde, drawn from the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. 

The effect was to seed Dowd's dreams with their voices, and a gong would pull him back to the surface minutes later. He would try to capture what he had seen, and mumble into a recorder before his dream dissolved.

What came out of it was twenty stories that are surreal, funny, and unexpectedly moving, harvested from the hypnagogic borderland between waking and sleep. Some of the stories include a service dog navigating grief after his owner's death; a time-travel tour guide misplaces tourists across the centuries; and and alien researcher falls in love with Earth despite himself. 

This is the first work of fiction ever created this way, and in a very poignant sense, the author will only ever experience it through someone else's voice.

Q&A With Will Dowd (Provided by Etruscan Press):

The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires grew out of an experiment where you tried to hack your own dreams using Dormio, a device developed at the MIT Media Lab to track, influence, and record the content of dreams in a half-waking state. Can you describe what a typical night looked like? If you donned night vision goggles, you would have seen a man lying in an old recliner in a dark room with a very strange, futuristic-looking glove on his hand. From a nearby laptop, you would have heard the voice of a dead poet emerging at the precise moment the man entered that twilight zone between waking and sleep. Dormio, the dream incubation device developed by Adam Haar Horowitz and the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab, tracks biosignals at sleep onset (muscle tone, heart rate, skin conductance), and the instant you begin to slip under, it plays back the audio cue you've preloaded. Mine were recordings from Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room - an archive of over 7,000 recordings of poets reading their own work.

After the audio cue was triggered, Dormio would go silent, allowing my dream to take shape in that fertile in-between zone called hypnagogic, when the mind starts coming apart. Dormio would nudge me back to waking with the sound of a gong and then automatically begin recording. Still half-asleep, I would deliver my dream report in a groggy mumble just loud enough for the speakers to pick up. I did this for a year. I came to think of it as a form of night-fishing.

Before you fell asleep you read poems you wished to engage while drifting off. How did you decide which poems to use for this literary experiment? How did your dreams change because of this literary seeding? A small correction first: I wouldn't have read them, given my unfortunate vision disorder, which is one reason the Woodberry archive is such a treasure to me - a way back into literature through the ear. I also avoided any poems that I already knew. I wanted my dreams to be shaped by evocative first or last lines - Dormio seeds must be concise - and I feared a familiar poem may be too prescriptive, the resulting dream too predetermined.

However, I did have important selection criteria. I chose voices more than poems. James Merrill, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde - these poets had beautiful, lulling speaking voices, the kind that wouldn't rouse you as you were drifting into sleep. Other fine poets never became dream seeds for me. Not because their poems lacked the requisite condensed power, but because when it came to public readings, they were shouters!

As for how the dreams changed overall: they were tangentially impacted by the lines of poetry. Their influence was always apparent. For example, James Merrill's line about a "glassen surface" led to a dream centered on a fish tank, while his line about a teacup became a dream in which I scooped up a baby bird in a cup. However, the dreams always veered off in their own directions. They were always glancing blows.

The book ended up as a collection of surreal short fiction rather than poetry, which surprised you. At what point did you realize your dreams were pushing you toward fiction? Early, and with some initial disappointment. I'd assumed my dreams, since they were watered by the aquifers of poetry, would hand me material in the form of sonnets. Instead they were handing me plots. My dreaming mind, it turns out, is an inveterate storyteller. Within a few weeks, I stopped fighting this tendency and let the dreams be what they were: stories I could never have imagined in a million years while awake.

The material for this collection emerged from a mind at its most unguarded, each story intimate, strange, and deeply human. When you say down to write this collection, did you feel torn between staying faithful to the dream you had and shaping it into something a reader could connect with? How did you navigate that? Constantly - and I came down on the side of the reader. But as we all know, listening to someone else's dream over breakfast is spectacularly boring. So I had to find a way to split the difference, to maintain the integrity of the dream without making the reader want to faceplant into their cereal. Here's where I landed: I decided to respect the dream's own logic, no matter how through-the-looking glass, but I would report the dream in my own voice, relating the tales with the same writerly skill I would employ if I were telling you about something that had truly happened to me. If a reader feels what I felt at three in the morning, the translation worked.

How does a writer who can't read write and revise a whole book? By ear, entirely. I learned to write using Apple's Voiceover program, which allows me to listen to my own text in a synthetic voice while staring at what is essentially a blank screen. At first it felt like throwing words down a well. Over years I grew more comfortable with the process. I even partnered with the technology company VocaliD to test a custom text-to-speech voice based on my own recordings, so I could have the option of having my own bespoke artificial voice reading my sentences back to me. Revising, for me, is listening, not looking. I catch a wrong word the way you'd catch a wrong note. It's slow, but the ear turns out to be a ruthless editor.

Did any effects of the experiment outlast the experiment itself? Did hacking your dreams change how you write, dream, or think about your own mind, even after you stopped? Yes, though not in the way I expected. After each session, I had the feeling of returning from an expedition - not from the world, but from a world. These hypnagogic flights broke my sense of confinement. This became the paradox at the center of the whole project: the lasting feeling was one of escape, a jailbreak from the body, all from going inward rather than outward. I've also become more appreciative and attentive to my dreams. We spend a third of our lives paralyzed and hallucinating, and then we brush it off like dandruff. Just like that ancient Chinese butterfly, who's to say your dream life is not your real life?

Finally, one idea the experience left me, an idea I can't shake, is that we're the authors of our dreams the way we're the authors of our lives - coauthors at best. There's a "me" that I've never met. That conviction that we are not alone in our own head, that there's a room we are not allowed into, and that our most creative ideas might come to us from that room, written on letters slid under the door - that conviciton has stayed with me.