The Ark and the Whale follows a man moving through dream states who is searching for identity while living with existential dread. What inspired the setup of your story?

I’ll start with the existential dread and the search for identity that normally accompanies it. In Sartre’s memoir, “The Words”, he introduces the idea of a train’s ticket inspector (Chapter 12) walking down the aisles, asking the riders for their tickets, or, in other words, asking for the existential justification for their presence on the train.

Ever since the second grade, after the passing of my grandfather, I have been firmly convinced that I do not belong or deserve to be on the train. To paint it with broad strokes, I was my grandfather’s favorite out of the twenty-something cousins that I had at the time. I was resented for it, and my flaws were often highlighted by my cousins when my grandfather was still alive. When he died, all that I had were the judgments passed on me and the new conviction that I did not deserve his love to begin with. In the end, his favoring of me made these new dark thoughts unbearable, and I have spent the 28 years following, almost entirely, developing this line of thought. My identity has been fixed since then.

Concerning the dream states, I understood, even from such an early age, without hearing or learning about the subconscious, that my dreams were rooted in who I was as a person. I knew that no matter how terrible or extreme my dreams were, their seed was in me. Because of this, I have never viewed my dreams or subconscious as being alien to me, or outside the boundaries of my world and its significance to me.

There is a Gestalt psychologist that I reference, too subtly, in my second chapter 6, entitled Human. The long and short of his theory: all people live in a sort of snow globe that has been tailor-made to fit them, and their unique blend of sensory faculties, either by evolution or God or both. This idea is connected to the ark motif in my story, as well as the subconscious which forms a sort of context to our conscious thoughts.

The writing in your story is very artful and creative. Was it a conscious effort to create a story in this fashion or is this style of writing reflective of your writing style in general?

This is the first story that I have written since the second grade. I have made a point not to develop my written rhetorical skills since middle school because of my firm belief that rhetoric is only good for making the weaker argument stronger. I’ve always wanted my ideas to speak for themselves. I began writing this book as an experiment. Its working title for the first 8 years or so was “For a Lark”. I did not expect anything to come of it. When I started writing, I was in an environment that was alienating and did allow me to express myself. As a result, my first draft wrote itself. The characters and ideas were bubbling out of me, which is the only reason I considered writing in the first place. The first draft took about two years. The next ten years or so I spent editing. I was not born to be a writer. The artfulness I learned over those ten years.

Finally, I am by nature a wrestler, mentally and physically. Those ten years were, essentially, spent wrestling Proteus.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Self-consciousness. It was a moment of true self-consciousness that was the precursor to the chapter 0 in my life. I have spent my life since then wondering how exactly to share that experience.

Existentialist thought. All of my favorite authors are existentialists, all the way back to Sophocles and Homer.

Gestalt psychology and the umwelt. The subconscious I consider to be a part of that.

The nature of God and God’s love. Despite how solipsistic I and the main character are, it’s a big world and so is God and God’s love.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’m a middle school math teacher. I chose to teach partially so I could spend more time with my kids. Considering it took me 12 years to write my first book, it will be some time. I’ve been thinking about my second book to some extent for about 8 years. I’ve got the meat of it already in my head. It will be an Odyssey as well, although the nature of it is very different. It will, once again, require me to learn a new sort of artfulness.

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2024 StoryTrade winner for Literary Fiction
2024 StoryTrade finalist for Urban Fantasy
2023 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Finalist for Southern Gothic fiction.
2024 Literary Titan Silver Book Award

Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2024/09/14/existentialist-thought/