FANZINE: Comfort & Critique features your most literary finale to date. The end ostensibly ties things together. It feels germinal and even elegiac. When it drops, you suddenly realize the dates have been going backwards and here's your opportunity to look again at the book from end to start...

PS: The structure is for me. I'm not playing a game whereby the reader may or may not get the information at hand. I'm not including a surprise or something that may be obscure. The template runs that way because I deal with that material constantly. I understood what was happening with the way I read and keep and consider all that material. It was the way I thought of the people turned down into flat material and my suspicions and tastes were born out in the text. I see the way these people change and mold but I'm unconvinced that they acknowledge it. Not in the sense that it defies the incredible trauma that they've suffered but instead that they might be reverting to type. There's also an element of where you're allowed to dip into the middle of their lives and work backwards from the public associations and shaky philosophies.

FANZINE: Speaking of which, why have you included the following quotes? "I do not want to fuck the child. Let that be the theme that glues everything together," "I've always imagined myself fully clothed with these children," and "the fantasy has to be built around children because the impossibility and all the lesser excuses wouldn't be possible any other way." Is it an attempt to complicate the notion of memoir?

PS: I don't put myself in someone else's mind. If a public wants to see me as torturing someone then they can understand that the work is in the field of words on paper. I don't pretend that there aren't complications and responsibilities. Intention and satisfaction and complicity and tristesse; there are many that seek to tangibly superimpose these concepts onto the meta-physical. I understand, I hope, the limitations and incredible frustrations of language. I desperately try to break that down. There's that part at the beginning of Comfort & Critique where I address the issue of police releasing carefully cropped sections of child porn in efforts to locate missing and endangered children. The way those in glory hole situations or anonymous sex backrooms try to connect to larger comfort and acceptance drives. The whole of Predicate, which is about Thomas Hamilton, is a personal history of just photos.

FANZINE: Sara Payne is presented as repetition. You also talk of your own repetitions: "Stop repeating yourself. Stop masturbating onto just photos and pretending it's better than what the rest of the slime don't even do," "I'm not that hard to figure out. Especially when I'm repeating myself." Can you imagine ever writing different sorts of books than the ones you have and are writing?

PS: I don't write just to have a book with my name on it. I write because I'm compelled by the intensity, as well as the lack, in the material at hand. I think there's a huge difference in the way I write now and what I'm better known for writing, but I see absolutely no reason to look for a subject to write about or find something I can somehow turn into a book or whatnot. I don't look for new projects or ways to impress or surprise others. I'm not interested in craft. If I'm told I write well, I know that it comes from a passion with the subject. The subject propels the writing and the constant thought. I don't have a need to create something. I have a need to create this.

You can purchase Comfort & Critique from Void Books.