Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m Marion Apollo Deal, a 19-year-old poet, performance artist, and psycholinguist. I act in a Renaissance Faire, invade high-line capitalist spaces like Chicago’s Merchandise Mart as a gas-mask-clad avatar of the “American Dream” and a blood-spattered Caesar, and chase my research on emergent systems and the use of language in revolution and ritual from monasteries to Jim Morrison’s grave. I’m the author of the poetry chapbook Cool Talks, Dead I Guess, published in 2020 by rad punk publisher Bone & Ink Press. My poetry chapbook Oracle is available as a disappearing publication on Really Serious Literature’s Instagram account, @rlysrslit, for the duration of COVID’s disruption. I’m also the author of the poetry chapbook The Messiah’s Customary Diner Booth, forthcoming in February 2021 from Unsolicited Press.
My work has been nationally recognized by organizations like YoungArts, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and the Young Poets Network, but I’m most proud of my interdisciplinary performance collaborations. I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with Italian director Margherita Scalise on a bilingual poetic duet as the featured performers at Milan’s 2019 Salumeria Poetry Slam, serve as a proud poetry whore at Paris’ Le Bordel de la Poésie, and combine kung fu and a jazz quartet performing music especially composed for the occasion at 2019’s National YoungArts Week… among other misadventures in performance art.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The name of my latest book, forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2021, is The Messiah’s Customary Diner Booth. It’s a paean to freaks and outcasts; I wrote it in high school, one of the most alienated and alienating times of everyone’s life. I didn’t get along with the people at my school — I was two years younger than everyone else in my grade, and being on the autism spectrum meant that interacting the way that seemed to come so easily to others was difficult. The people I found the most solace in were dead Russian revolutionaries and French poets, characters in the vast amounts of science fiction and creature features I consumed, and the late-nite denizens of the Chicago diners to which I’d sneak off for the writing of poetry. I couldn’t help but write about these friends and the liminal spaces they occupy.
In The Messiah’s Customary Diner Booth, you’ll find enfants terribles, Beat drifters transported to Sumerian cities and Greek myths, prophets making mobiles from Richard Nixon’s bones, and the devil coming back to visit his suburban hometown. Caught in a rich web of cultural and mythological referents from 70s Californian poetry to Icelandic eddas, Messiah is a dramatis personae of friends to freaks and an ode to liminality, thriving on the moment of connection between seemingly disparate entities, places, and ideas.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I like writing in liminal spaces — liminality is where my character build gets bonuses to all its ability scores, if you’ll bear with my nerdy RPG metaphor. Perched with my notebook on the same kitchen counter as my friend is kneading dough for gnocchi on? In the passenger seat of a car hurtling down Lake Shore Drive, blaring LA Woman? While I’m carting a cavalry sword through the Paris Métro? You got it.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
How to begin? Arthur Rimbaud’s determination to shatter the known and become a visionary through a “long, boundless, and rational derangement of all the senses” has always been a touchstone for me. As someone who struggles with intense mental illness, Rimbaud’s determination to transmute suffering, madness, and a feeling of overstimulating horror at all the world into art is an artifact of immense hope. If I can take every experience — the loneliness and alienation, the long nights spent battling suicidality, the latest instability in food and housing — and transmute it into art, then there is a reason to stay alive even in the darkest of times. I am not in the business of fetishizing mental illness as a necessity for an ill-omened “creative genius,” but if I can use the worst pain of neurodivergence in order to create, then it becomes that much easier to deal with this thing in my head that wants to kill me.
I have also been heavily influenced by the work of Gabriel García Márquez. Reading Love in the Time of Cholera was what first made me want to write a novel — I started my first (struggling, baby giraffe) novel a few days after I finished it. García Márquez’s attention to the details of his exquisite worldbuilding and his ability to animate the rhythms and mournfulness of everyday life with a pervasive magic is of immense comfort and inspiration to me. I want to be able to create worlds and sentences as warm, rich, and complex as his.
What are you working on now?
Between translating French anarchist Louise Michel’s memoir into English, pursuing my research at the University of Rochester, and working on several longform novels, novellas, and creative nonfiction pieces, I’m awash in words. The longform project I’m most excited about right now is a surrealist novel set in a Paris of the Dead. It delves into legacy, history, and perceptions of Greatness through prose, poetry, and maps, documents, and security footage of this fictional world. Another fantastical novel exploring what it means to be coming of age during a time of revolution is in the works. I’m always rambling down the road of writing and assembling poems into chapbooks and multidisciplinary longform books.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I’m grateful to have a supportive artistic community ranging from my fellow actors at the Bristol Renaissance Faire to a set of poets in Paris. I promote through my social media accounts — there’s a lot of great people and artists in the indie lit scene who have a presence on Instagram, and being able to connect with them and their goodness of spirit is not only professionally positive, but personally fantastic. Having a central website — as I do, www.mariondeal.com — is also a fabulous place to refer people after readings, via business cards, or after other associated artistic events like performance art.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write. Writewritewrite. Write despite all the people who say your work is stupid. Write despite all the rejections you get. Learn from your mistakes; listen to the people who criticize your work. Don’t close yourself entirely to the outside — there’s a lot to be learned from other people’s perceptions. But make it a semi-permeable membrane. Never let anything anyone says stop you from writing altogether. Make yourself into a bullet train that is forever reacting and adapting to the environment around it, but never ceasing its tremendous forward motion.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Don’t look to the outside for reasons and affirmations for your art. (Ironic, given the fact that I’m doing an interview right now, but this outside interaction isn’t the real reason I’m creating.) If you want to create art, or if you need to create art — examine that want; examine that need. Developing and inhabiting a rich inner world, and then attempting to articulate it onto the page, is the most important thing. A community of fellow artists and writers who can challenge you and your work is also vital. But having the internal conviction, joy, and vision for what you do will increase the efficacy of the honing and disruptive forces of artistic comrades, because they’ll have good material to work with.
What are you reading now?
What aren’t I reading right now? Looking at my nightstand, I see Alberto Giacometti’s “Notes Sur Les Copies” — a set of journal excerpts and interviews about the artist’s views of creative exploration and growth through copying the work of others. I also see a children’s edition of Die Beliebtesten Märchen der Gebrüder Grimm with which I’m practicing my German, and a copy of Taliessin Through Logres, a fabulous set of Arthurian epic poems by C.S. Lewis’ friend Charles Williams.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I’m hoping to find homes for some of my longform work (if you, dear reader, know anyone who’d be interested in surrealist exquisite corpses of prose, poetry, and historical record of a fantastical otherworld, or a memoir comprised of a constructed language (created by me), prose-poems, and Buddhist philosophy, send them my way!). I’m also continually growing and maturing as a poet. I’ve been exploring new styles and trying to create portals into immersive worlds where each poem reveals and maps a new part of the intellectual landscape. I’m always experimenting with the idea of epics and kennings (poetic references which compress a large amount of cultural, symbolic, or metaphorical context into a few words, found in Old English and Old Norse Poetry) translated to the modern age: what do ancient poetic forms look like when applied to 21st century culture and context?
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Seven Pillars of Wisdom — T.E. Lawrence
The Lords and the New Creatures — Jim Morrison
The Outsider — Colin Wilson
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