describing the divine by what it’s not: A Conversation with Daniel Hornsby About the Secret Geometry of Writing a Novel

Daniel Hornsby was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he received Hopwood Awards for both short fiction and the novel, and an M.T. S. from Harvard Divinity School. His stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Joyland. He is the author of the novels Via Negativa and Sucker.

On March 15, 2023, Daniel Horsnby joined The Interlochen Review editors Leo Fishman Janowitz, Abigail Conklin, and Yuanxin (Noah) Ma for a conversation about his novels Via Negativa and Sucker.

LEO FISHMAN JANOWITZ: When reading Via Negativa I was prepared for super concrete statements on religion, but at the end of the book I felt like I had more questions about spirituality or religion. A lot of Father Dan's experience was getting challenged on what he believed. Was that the desired intention? Did you want us to think more about what different cultures can add or what different spiritual systems can add?

DANIEL HORNSBY: I think in mainstream America we just live with the kind of background radiation of a certain kind of “orthodox” Christianity. But the truth is with any long tradition, there are a lot of moments where people in the margins actually have a little more power than maybe we would think–like in the 14th century. In Europe you have women writing for the first time in that part of the world, contributing all these different ideas to mainstream Christianity, and so a lot of that stuff gets washed away. I think if you have any kind of Christian education, you just learn the party line, right? Like, this is what we believe, this is what we hate, cool, you're good to go, go have some babies, get rich, and then help us build a church. But there are all these strange little moments where people on the outside actually kind of influence things. You have Marguerite Porete, or Mechthild of Magdeburg or Julian of Norwich, all these women who are writing in the vernacular, who are having direct mystical experiences, and some of them get killed for it.

But there's still part of the conversation that gets washed away and I wanted to write a narrator who also lived on the outside of those religious norms and felt marginalized within his tradition. And I think a parish priest like the narrator, he's kind of where the rubber hits the road for those ideas, right? Like, you're confronted with situations that are messy, and you have to figure out how to represent [and] embody this institution, but also be a good person, and that was interesting to me. The sex abuse crisis, which is a big part of the book, I think is that dialed up times 1000. Where people who are telling other people how to be good are confronted, if they're not perpetrating it. They're confronted with this evil in this thing they've sworn allegiance to.

NOAH MA: This question is more about the book and its relationship with religion. Via Negativa explores the concepts of religion and faith, how do you usually approach the topic of spirituality and religion in fiction?

DH: I did a Master's in Theological Studies, so it let me have a wide-ranging buffet of ideas that you can pick and choose from to learn about. And I do think it’s interesting the way people’s worldviews [are formed], whether they’re anarchic punks or nuns, the way you build a worldview from the inside out. You have these experiences, and that experience you use to let an idea in or reject it. I mean every now and then you’re given an idea, and it’s like, whoa, I’m going to change my life. But slowly, I think, we assemble our worldviews. That’s why it’s really exciting to be a young artist, because you’re taking in all this stuff and figuring out what sticks to what you’ve felt and known so far.

So I’m interested in how a person’s life story and background is in conversation with those views. Like Via Negativa, the title comes from this kind of pseudo tradition in Catholicism, it means “the negative road”, “the negative way,” and it’s really about describing the divine by what it’s not. Or, more accurately, I think it’s acknowledging the fundamental mystery of the divine, the dark core of it, and my narrator, having witnessed a lot of the trauma, the sex abuse crisis, is also in denial. He’s in denial about his own queerness, he’s in denial about his relationships with other people where he should’ve been more accountable, and he’s in denial about what he should’ve done. I like how he’s picked this worldview, picked this branch of Christianity because it lets him live, it lets him hold these paradoxes together and not explode. Even though there is a lot of tension and it does eat away at him. But that’s the equipment, that’s his little diving bell through the world.

ABIGAIL CONKLIN: What was your planning process for Via Negativa in general? Did you always want to write a novel based on the idea of this road trip, and then adding the more precise details, like a retired priest traveling with a wounded coyote? Or was this idea always permeating in the back of your head and then it just spilled out on paper like that?

DH: I went to a very conservative Catholic grade school growing up in Indiana. It was almost evangelical-ly Catholic, you know what I mean? It was pretty conservative. And my uncle was a Franciscan who quit—we also knew this parish priest who was living out of his car for a brief period—and I was thinking of all these people who get left behind after they join up with this institution, and sign away parts of their life. So that was lurking in the back of my head, and then I was studying theology, and learning about the Desert Fathers and Mothers–people from usually Roman cities going into the North of Africa and lower Egypt to live either in a community or in the desert like Saint Antony, and I thought there could be a way that someone could imagine themselves as that now.

There's a Fanny Howe poem called “Catholic,” and it's in short bursts but it's very prose-y, and I liked the tone, it kind of infected my brain. So I started writing on index cards—I’d write a little essay, or a little scene, or snippet, from the point of view of this character, and give that a little title at the top and then stick it in the back. Once I had a stack I could start shaping them, and I realized where he was going and what he was doing, and, because he’s in denial, I didn’t have to know exactly what he was doing. He’s not telling you everything very deliberately. So that slowly came together, and I realized that I could map it in such a way—I have all the index cards, I put them in the computer, I can start moving them around based on how they fit together.

Then I had to figure out how the past would fit into his life; how much would he tell you when. I thought of it as a little snail shell—you start from the outside and work your way in by laps, and then each event is outside of that shell. He passes it one time, and you kind of get the surface, he passes it again, and you get a little deeper, and then we arrive at the center where these different things converge right in the middle. It’s a weird geometrical thing, but it helped me hold it in my head and make sense of how can you keep the stories he’s telling about his past dynamic and not like, “Here’s some back-story, enjoy!” The index cards are a good trick if you’re working on a novel. You can have a pack of index cards and just jot things down, put a hair tie or a rubber band around it, and then you have a moment when you’re in the waiting room somewhere, and just get to work.

AC: You have your MFA in Fiction and fiction is your primary genre. In your book though, there’s this branching-braiding quality that’s similar to techniques used in nonfiction essays—so, how much of the plot of Via Negativa was thought of in this braiding style, with the index cards braiding those together, and how much of it was complex plot used more linearly?

DH: Yeah, my partner is an essayist, and I think nonfiction and fiction are always in conversation. Third person, as a voice, is really derived from newspapers–that's really where we get that. It goes back and forth a lot of the time–a lot of the narrative tools you use as an essayist you take from fiction writers. [Essayists] still call them scenes—I guess we’re taking that from drama, but you know what I mean. So I think the nice thing about writing with a first person narrator is there’s a certain associative quality that feels very intuitive. It’s like, “Oh, I went to the store the other day, you wouldn’t believe who I saw—actually it reminded me of this time in the seventies when I was living in San Francisco,” and you can just make those jumps and something about the sloppiness and associative quality feels real to me. Like if your uncle tells you a shaggy dog story. I try to be true to that intuitive thing, when people tell stories, that would allow for those transitions and bringing things back in. And, also, since it’s a road novel, when you’re driving there’s something really meditative, you start time traveling—minor slights that your friends pulled on you when you were younger, they bubble up, or weird conversations you had. Time just gets kind of rubbery and strange—it felt like it was true to the form.

AC: Going back to this idea of the snail shell, and how story and plot worked in your novel, you were very detail-focused in your narrative and oftentimes you would allude to one of those shorter stories several chapters before it was told, like with Paul’s green letter—it was mentioned being in the car before we actually got into the story. What was that planning process like, of embedding so many of those details in the plot before they would actually arrive. Was there a specific embedding process that happened? Or did you just add them in as you were writing, “Oh yeah! And there’s this cool detail,” and you went back and thought, “oh wait, I can use that.”

DH: I think I probably did it both ways. I think it’s really cool to hint at something before it shows up. There’s this Orson Welles thing that he talks about, there’s this character that everyone is talking about the whole time—he calls it a Mr. Wu effect, where in the first act everyone is talking about Mr. Wu and they’re like, “Oh my god, he’s amazing, you just have to meet this guy. He’s wild.” And then, someone else is like, “Oh, but he’s pretty mysterious too.” And you’re like, “Oh, I need to see this guy.” And at the end of the first act Mr. Wu just walks across the stage and that’s it. That moment is so charged that you don’t really have to act. Because, if you’re playing Mr. Wu, everyone has already done all of the work for you. I think there are ways to do that with just a novel–it’s a great trick. Where people can build up a character, or you can charge an object, right? Like maybe you just see it out of the corner of your eye, or maybe someone just looks at something and you don’t really know the full meaning, but you know that it’s going to come into play a little bit later. There’s a nice dramatic tension, there’s more of a payoff. And you can Mr. Wu-ify, in this case, the letter.

NM: In Via Negativa, most of the characters have a common trait of being “tossed out” by the world–an injured coyote, a retired priest. What inspired these character choices?

DH: I think there are some hitchhikers, there are some teens who don’t fit in. The narrator is drawn to that biblical idea where Jesus is hanging with marginalized people, so he doesn’t really want to be at the center, and he’s someone who has been the arm of institutional power for a long time, so he’s really drawn to more marginalized people. That’s what he relates to. I think that’s the irony of a lot of people, especially in Catholicism, where you take on chastity. For a long time– it’s almost a joke but it’s not a joke–a lot of queer people would become nuns, priests, and monks because it’s a way to get some authority. You get the blessing of your parents, their approval, they can brag on you, and you don’t have to be in this heteronormal function. It has died out a lot as queerness has become more accepted in some parts of the country, but I think there are still whole generations of people who have pursued that life, and are both marginalized and at the center. They’re the people who marry people, baptize people, but they’re also weirdos who have to live in a special house and wear a dress and sing in front of people. It’s an odd role that is still alive and around.

My uncle, who was a Franciscan, died a couple weeks ago. He was a social worker, he ran a soup kitchen for a while, he still felt really close to this life of simplicity and helping people who didn’t have as much as he did even after he quit. And, looking around at his funeral, there were all these other Franciscans who had shown up, and you can almost see it on them, something tired about them. I mean, they’re old, but they’re like this generation of people who bought into this thing, and they didn’t seem to radiate joy about it. I think it’s got to be strange if you signed up for that in the ‘60s and you’ve watched the world change so much, and there might’ve been another way to do what you wanted to do.

LJ: I felt like there was a philosophical aspect of Via Negativa too–it felt like Father Dan was deducing parts of his life to figure out what was important. Like the deductive way, the negative way. Is that what the story is to you, or not so much?

DH: I think it is. Just like that thing I was talking about earlier, where he's absorbed these religious ideas into his day-to-day worldview. He's interested in absence. He's interested in voids. He's drawn to that hole, that so-called bottomless pit, because for him that is maybe what God is. There's this tradition that has leaked into non-Catholic thinkers–I think Derrida writes a little bit about the “via negativa.” Simone de Beuvoir talks about it too. I think my character is interested in the aesthetics of it as well. He visits these roadside attractions like a so-called bottomless pit that is a hole to hell or he applies a bunch of paint to one of the world's largest balls of paint, which is a baseball that's been painted for decades until it's the size of an armchair [and] looks like a peeled avocado.

LJ: Obviously, road-tripping and quarantine are super different things. So some of the time aspect you were talking about applies to what we were going through during COVID. Via Negativa came out in 2020–did people ever come up to you and talk about quarantine? Do you think it changed how the book was received?

DH: That's an interesting question. I think that people definitely wanted to road trip or wanted to travel. So it might have been helpful in that way. You could escape your studio apartment and just travel that way. I wrote the book a couple of years before [the pandemic]–there's always a time lag with a book. It's not like you can just hit “send” and then people are reading it unless it's fanfiction, or you're super famous. But that's the thing you have to kind of contend with and hope that what you're working on has some more lasting quality than the immediate moment that you're thinking of it.

AC: One of the characters, Clara, at the end of the book, mentions how hard it is for Dan to open himself up to people. And, while most of the novel is told in these shorter story sections about Dan’s life we rarely get his perspective, or his direct opinions about said stories. Was this intended for the reader–to kind of sense out Dan’s character through what he was showing and less of what he was telling, to almost become characters that know him best? Or was this a happy character-building coincidence?

DH: I think when you really surrender to loving someone, whether that's someone in your family, or someone else, a friend or—it doesn’t matter who it is—[there are moments] where you let them see over your head. Because when you’re with somebody, you’re kind of aware of how you’re presenting yourself, but there's a point when you’re around each other so long that the guard is down a little more, and they start to see things about you that you might not have a lot of clarity on, and vice versa. And I think that's really vulnerable, to let someone get to know you that much, [to] trust that they’re not going to leverage that stuff against you or hurt you with it. For Father Dan, the narrator, he’s not as willing to let people see over his head like that. He doesn’t want to acknowledge the most painful parts of his life. So I thought a useful way for us to see him for real would be to see over his head sometimes and have other characters make observations about him, or for him to allow moments of real pain where we can see that he’s hurting, through someone else. It just feels more real to me. Denial is sometimes more honest than telling the truth. Not to be, like, the old guy who quotes Leonard Cohen, but he’s like, “I don’t suggest I love you the best…I don’t even think about you that often.” And then you’re like, “Oh my god, he thinks about her all the time.” That denial, you’re like, “Oh god, that’s real.” So I try to do a little bit of that.

LJ: The unreliable narrative seems like a great storytelling tool. You talked about the other characters making statements about him–was that ever hard to do from a first-person perspective?

DH: Yeah. I mean, he's kind of reporting back what they're saying to him. He's not dwelling on the moment that he's feeling it. It is hard if you have an unreliable narrator of any kind, whether they're a liar or if they're in denial–they lack some self-knowledge. It is sometimes hard to hold all of that in your head, like, what's actually going on? What are they telling us is going on? What's the tension between those two threads? That was definitely a challenge in writing the book. You can kind of lose your mind, going over those details. Especially with my new book [Sucker], because [the narrator] is a liar who's also selectively dumb. So figuring out how much he knows versus how much he's telling you, and how he's being lied to, was an order of magnitude harder than Via Negativa.

NM: As you mentioned before, your book tackles some complex issues, such as the relationship between religion and the LGBTQ+ community, and Father Dan’s dilemma when it comes to officiating Paul’s wedding. What are some of your strategies when writing fiction about complex and often controversial issues in the context of religion?

DH: Thinking about people who are victims of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, I did a lot of research and read people’s accounts and their stories and tried to hold myself to a high standard. I wasn’t going to fabricate things for drama. I wanted it [to] come from some lived experience. Not in a parasitic way, but just in a way that felt like if you were confronted with a person who had experienced this, could you look them in the eyes and say you did your due diligence, and could you tell that in a way that felt honest and not exploitative. If you’re writing about people who have, in this case, been abused by a system, can you try to be on their side and figure out what the texture of that experience is. There was a lot of reading and interviewing while I was writing the book. Every six months there would be another big reported piece on the Catholic Church and the sex abuse crisis. I mean, the irony is that many of those people became priests, too, like Dan and Paul in the book. They were at a minor seminary, and Paul was sexually abused there and eventually became a priest before he left the priesthood. That’s a thing that happened to a lot of people, that came from that kind of research. Things like that or queerness in clergy just came from reading accounts of people, people who left because they were queer. It’s very common.

AC: How long did it take you to do research for this book?

DH: I think [it helps] if you know what you don’t know, if you know the domains where you’re like, “Man, I’m flailing.” For me, there’s a certain point when you start writing and exploring and then you realize, “I don’t know anything about this, I’m going to read a book about it, read two books on it, make some notes.” And, as you’re making the notes, sometimes it will just spin out and become part of the book. I’m working on my third thing right now, because my second book will come out in July, and books, for me, I like them to have a secret geometry. Like this one is kind of about holes and absences, right? And then there's that little labyrinth that I was showing you guys, that little snail shell plot, which is part of that. The second book, Sucker, it’s a Silicon Valley satire, has vampires in it. So thinking about parasitism and how things can feed off of other things, became my guide. And then, for this new one, it’s about knots and webs, and tangles. It’s about eco-terrorists at sea, so nets and lines are how the stories are held together. Having that, I can sort of stick things to the structure as I’m researching. I know there's a shape I can aspire to even if I don’t have the plot one hundred percent worked out.

AC: So do you choose that geometry while you’re plotting and coming up with ideas and researching? Or is that something you kind of discover along the way?

DH: I think it’s something I need to discover early. I was pretty deep into this new one until I took this sailing class, because I was like, “Okay, this stuff’s at sea. At least I could learn some knots and figure out how people think.” Even though it’s just on an urban lake, on a small sailboat. Then I realized: all the knots we had to learn, all the lines, and then thinking about deep sea fishing and all the miles of the net. And then I learned that humpback whales, their songs, they call them “indices of association,” which is a kind of web or net. It all just started clicking, in a way. And then I realized there was a shape that was haunting the things I was looking at. That’s the same thing for Via Negativa, it’s this hole is the absence of any real justice or reckoning about the sex abuse crisis, but it’s also this theological tradition and it’s also denial a person like this has to have to live with themselves, or might resort to live with themselves. And then you can start sticking stuff to that.

LJ: I saw that the plot of Sucker seems very crypto, weaving webs of entrepreneurship. I couldn't not think about the Theranos case. Was that a source of inspiration?

DH: The novel is a parallel universe version of someone who needs nominal employment to get money from his billionaire parents’ trust. So he worked for a parallel universe version of Theranos. So he has a job as a creative consultant and advisor on ethics at this company. And then he slowly sees behind his back these weird vampiric machinations in the company. That's the basic plot. So Theranos is a big part of that. I read and reread Bad Blood and all the reporting on that, but also just a lot of other weird tech reporting. Every evil thing I came up with, for that book, actually, someone had done. So like, if you had to get around FDA regulations, how would you do it? And I was like, well, you could send people to a private island because you probably have billionaire investors. And people have done that. Or, oh, we'll just put chips in monkeys in an off-the-books operation. And then the monkeys die and psycho Elon Musk did that. It was scary.

LJ: I really liked the research aspect. It feels like that's something we associate with journalism. But do you have any strategies for when you want to write about something that's super important to you, but you might not have personal experiences? When you're creating an environment, how do you go about making sure that's consistent with people's experiences who've been through that similar situation?

DH: I like reading it first, just finding some books, or finding some journalism. But I really like to do interviews too, if I can find people who have some expertise because they'll give you the tactile things that don't always show up in books. So, for Sucker, I interviewed a woman who had married into and then divorced out of a billionaire family. And just like, what was the bathroom like? What do people talk about at dinner? She had a very interesting perspective, like, your rich mother-in-law setting up expensive hair appointments without your consent so you could have super rich person hair. Or a weird, long-standing passive-aggressive relationship between these people. Stuff like that. We talked for four hours. Or I read an anthropologist who trained as a wealth manager. And she embedded herself in the wealth managing class and had all these crazy stories but it was written as a work of anthropology. Stuff that's a little off-road or a little higher resolution is really helpful. And then YouTube is incredibly helpful. I watched a person who sailed across the Pacific Ocean by himself and kept a video log. And so you can be like, what's he eating? Oh, where's he now? Oh, God, he looks rough. It's like it's almost a story in and of itself, but you can get a lot of tactile details that you could never have gotten in the ‘70s or something.

LJ: It feels like the world of Sucker and the world of Silicon Valley is something people are increasingly paying attention to. How do you think the reception will go?

DH: You can never really tell. [That world] really shaped the paradigm for me since I was in high school, even in Indiana people in high school were like, I'm gonna learn to code, I'm gonna be rich. And there was the 2008 recession that bloomed and we thought [the tech] industry was going to be our saving grace. And we really doubled down on making sure it wasn't regulated. So it's been the story of my adulthood, just watching this parasitic thing creep into our lives. The Amazon maxims are like a startup ethos. They're like, don't sleep, never sleep. The super-rich tech technocrats are really fixated on never dying, the immortality quest. There's even the injection of teenage blood so you have those hormones that keep you young. That's a real fad. We're just venture capital and data collection–I have a phone on me right now. And it's tracking me all the time. It's gathering all this information about me.

LJ: I like these two contradictory worlds–the techie entrepreneurship and the contradictions of the Catholic Church and some of the parts of Christianity that don't make much sense. Were you conscious that you were [exploring] opposite ends of the spectrum?

DH: They're similar in a way–they're labyrinthine cultural institutions, and they have strangely defined architecture and power structures and wizards that move in them, and there is a lot of techno mysticism now. And people are trying to use technology to figure out things about the human soul. I don't know if they'll get there, but you can go to Epsilen on the West Coast and pay a bunch of money to meditate. There's a strange convergence. I think Via Negativa is really concerned with how to be good–I think the narrator is trying to be good. And then Sucker is really more about evil than people who aspire to be evil.

AC: In the writing world there is often this idea of, “writing to your niche.” And these two books of yours are so different but I’m getting this sense that they’re similar in process and the idea of writing with your geometry and research—so maybe that’s your niche. But, if you had to assign yourself a niche what would it be?

DH: Well I mean, I love animals, I love music, I like mysticism. So I think between those and religious studies, there’s something. Obviously, Via Negativa leans harder on my religious studies background, Sucker has a lot of punk bands in it and also animals, just because of the nature of parasitism as this idea. And we have people rewriting animal DNA, making drones and bugs that look like animals. And then this new thing that I’m working on has a lot of animals, so, yeah. I would say those are little hubs where if I’m lost I know those are worlds that I’ve spent time in and can find my way back with.

LJ: You say part of your niche is theology and religious studies–what drew you to religious studies?

DH: I had this religious background growing up, and I found myself reading stuff that I had never really seen before. Whether it's like The Cloud of Unknowing, a late medieval spiritual adviser text, or the sayings of the Desert Fathers. And every time I'd pull a string, I’d just feel like there's more and more and more, so I wanted to go deeper. So I did the theological studies route. It was cool to be around a bunch of people who have incredibly deep knowledge and get some guidance. It's still a part of how I think about things, but I'm not Catholic or anything like that. I write this from the outside.

LJ: Do you have any go-to religious fiction?

DH: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a classic because it is a model for the Midwest minister thing. Willa Cather has Death Comes for the Archbishop, that’s a good one. There's Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, which is pretty raw, pretty intense. But it's definitely like a book of vision and spirituality. Denis Johnson has a book called Angels. That has this spiritual dimension to it, even though it also has bank robbers.

LJ: Were you thinking about these books when you were deciding how you wanted to write the book?

DH: For sure. Yeah. It's nice to have some models because if you're just wandering without a map, you're like, how would this person solve this problem? And sometimes you can find your own way by combining solutions from three people. Like, how would they do it? Because they've never done it.