[This interview was conducted by email, one question at a time, between 8 January 2002 and 16 March 2002].
 

LU: Jennifer, I want to hear about and possibly discuss your professional relationship, and friendship, with Alaric Sumner. I want to get as full a picture of him as possible, not for any kind of autobiographical analysis of his work, though I am sure that we can only illuminate what he has left by such talk; but because I think he is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. I want to retrieve some sense of what has been lost by Alaric's death.

Let's go right back to the beginning. How and when did you first make contact with each other?

JL: I first met Alaric in the autumn of 1998. I was in the last stages of putting together the editors issue of Perihelion, and had asked my assistant editor, Barbara Fletcher, to co-ordinate any submissions that came in from a call for works that I’d put out on John Kinsella's PoetryEtc listserv. When we were a few weeks away from our release, with all manner of last minute crises erupting around us, I got a letter from Barbara that one of the poets had sent a real audio file in Mac format that was wreaking havoc with her hard drive. It was huge, it crashed her computer every time she tried to open it, and she was going nuts trying to work things out with the poet who had sent it.

It shouldn’t surprise you, Lawrence, knowing what a perfectionist Alaric could be with his work, that this was his file. Real audio at that point was still very new. We were all still using baud, many of us at 28.8, so attaching sound files to email meant you sat there for ten minutes waiting for the file to download. Alaric kept sending new versions of the file to Barbara, and I think she was getting a bit -- frustrated, to put it kindly.

So, as Barbara’s husband worked to get the file into a size that all of us could live with, I took over the job of making sure that Alaric was comfortable. I found out right away, as I stepped into that delicate place where editors walk when trying to work with exacting authors, that contrary to what I had heard about him, trading email with Alaric was a great deal of fun ... he was playful, charming, intelligent ... and his resume included place names that took me back to my first trip to Europe in the mid-70’s: St. Ives, Devon, Cornwall. Before long I found myself arranging for him to read his work in NY at a little bar some of us frequented in the Village. I'd say we’d already exchanged twenty or more emails by this point, talking about everything from poetry, to Samuel Delaney (whose writing we both adored) to the situation of women in Afghanistan (Alaric was sending out petitions before most people in the world knew, or cared, who the Taliban were).

I'll never forget that first day we all had together, as Brigid McCleer, who was at Dartington at that time, was also in NY, and he brought her along to read (something that speaks to the essence of Alaricness ... how quick he was to share his stage time with a friend). I had been thinking about who else I would ask to guest edit Perihelion -- as I was very interested in making sure that the young e-lit world didn’t just represent American writers. Before the reading started, I mentioned to Alaric that perhaps we could do an issue devoted to some of the poets he knew in England. I wish I had a video tape of his reaction, the way his face lit up as he half hugged himself, actually hopped in the air and said "Oh could we ???!!"

LU: I know the perfectionism; though, of course, he was very interested in and willing to accept the outcome of mistakes and chance, or what seems like chance. 

Would you tell me about the real audio file, once you could hear it? What was it? How did you respond to it? Was it a "This is it!" response or a "Something going on here" response, or something between them.

JL: The real audio file was "Written While Watching a Rehearsal of Shallal Dance Theatre" -- and my reaction was "Aha, now I understand what's going on" because he hadn't just recorded the poem like everyone else who submitted real audio for that issue. The track was a layered tapestry of sound, Alaric's voice and recordings of the dance group's rehearsals.

Alaric also told me that they were "a group of largely untrained people in Cornwall who create improvised dance events. ... mixed ages, abilities / disabilities ..." which said a lot to me about who Alaric was -- a poet who got out into the world in which he lived and wrote within that world, not at one remove.

This was very exciting to me -- as again, real audio was quite new at that point, and most poets were using it merely to record their readings, rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to push their poetics into new territory. Also, as performance poetry in the US had for some time meant Slam Poetry, it was very interesting to me to encounter performance oriented works from the UK which reminded me of the kind of performance art we had created in the States in the late 70's and early 80's, before Jesse Helms got a hold of the NEA and so many artists decided their work had to have a sexual subtext so that they could comment on censorship. I had felt that the tail was wagging that dog for much too long, so it was really refreshing to encounter Alaric's work.

LU: Before moving on, I'd like to pick up on your comments on Alaric and Shallal...

It seems to me that, while you are right about Alaric getting into the world, it isn't just getting into the world, but being ethically and politically responsible when one is in it. I think he saw people as important regardless of, for want of a better term - and I wish there was one - their difference. I'm sure that we all would say that; but Alaric lived it. I think that is both part of and complementary to his consciousness of himself as a gay writer. I don't know the circumstances of his contact with Shallal, but I imagine that he would have been attracted by its possibilities. What do you think?

JL: I think that's quite true. Well said !!

LU: You've spoken of making contact with Alaric in the context of Perihelion. Now I don't want to go unproductively into old news; but, for the benefit of those, many, I hope, who come to all this for the first time, how did you two end up working together on Riding the Meridian?

JL: Riding the Meridian is the magazine I created when I ended my association with Web Del Sol and left Perihelion with them in early 1999. Alaric came with me when that happened, as did the other guest editor I had lined up for a future issue. This was a very exciting time for all of us. Advances in JavaScript and DHTML were allowing hypertext writers to do many new things within the context of "poetry", and it became very important to Alaric and I that we show that work within the rich and varied context which we believed had, in part, influenced its development. For us that included work by people like Bob Cobbing, Charles Amirkhanian, Michael Basinski, John Cayley, and your own, Lawrence. You might ask what in heaven's name work like Michael Basinski’s has in common with a hypertext poem, but you have to look under the surface of the technology and consider the way elements in both a stand-alone piece like Basinski’s with strong pictorial and text elements and a hypermedia work using text, gifs and jpegs, functions for the reader.

It also may be hard for someone who is just starting to look at work on the internet, someone who encounters Flash on a daily basis, to appreciate how radical it was for us to be able to show work like Cayley’s on the Web at that time. Hypertext already had a rich history, but it had been distributed on stand alone cd/roms or viewed within specific computer software such as Hypercard (which Cayley had previously used); 99 saw an incredible proliferation of what Christy Sheffield Sanford has called "web-specific" literature because the technology had advanced enough for this to happen.

Alaric, Christy and I used that fall 99 issue of Meridian to show the wide variety of work that now fell under the rubric of "poetry" and "literature". Alaric was extremely well suited to this kind of inquiry, as his sense of history was so profound and his scholarship so exacting, at the same time that he was not really wedded to one form of tech over another in order to achieve poetic goals. One of the really distressing things about much new Web literature is its tendency to position itself and its technology as the Second Coming, with all previous forms of literary pursuit relegated to the role of false god. Alaric and I both felt very strongly that there was room on the Web for many forms of literature, that hypertext and hypermedia needed to acknowledge its roots, that a continued dialogue between practitioners of both new technology and old had much to learn from each other, and that the audience for online literature had much to gain from seeing the work in this context.

LU: But what was it like having a co-editor so far away? Were you able to work by email satisfactorily?

JL: Absolutely. The beauty of the net for writers is that it is the perfect medium in which to collaborate. Email is often instantaneous, and Alaric and I often emailed back and forth as we were writing or coding specific portions of the magazine with the frequency most people reserve for chat programs. I found with him, as I have with many people I've collaborated with editorially, that after one ‘flesh-time’ meeting, I had enough of an idea who he was and what facial expressions and body language might accompany specific language that being in the same geographic space became superfluous.

We did, as we would have if we’d been in the same room, have times when we miscommunicated, often with hilarious results, usually over something technical. With browsers never seeing html exactly the same way, varied personal font preferences and platform issues, net collaboration for two exacting perfectionists (and in Alaric I met my match, if not my truly better half) is always a challenge. But Alaric and I always found a way to make this more fun than not -- I remember how our Macs took your PC file names and somehow rendered them unusable Lawrence; it took us a day and a half to sort that out, but sort it we did.

When it came to exchanging theoretical ideas, things were always a lot smoother. I think we realized very early on that we came to our work with some of the same assumptions; and we both had a lot of respect for each other’s point of view, even when we disagreed.

Frankly, sitting here to answer these questions is really quite difficult; my words are such a pale approximation of what our collaboration and our friendship entailed. It transcended literature but it was always grounded in our love for literature, and our love of experimentation, and also in a sense of loyalty to each other and the work we did. And we were looking forward to so much future we didn't know we wouldn't have.

LU: I remember that Mac / PC confusion! There was much more to it than you may know; and I didn't find it fun; I got quite ratty with him. He dealt with that too and we both apologised. I think he was shocked when I lost my temper, but he remained amiable and also wanted to investigate my response! Where others might turn away.

OK. Let's see. You've met. You've built a personal and professional relationship and you're corresponding by email. You've given some sense of how he struck you. Batch of questions now:

How many times did you meet? & what were the circumstances of the other meetings.

Did your impression of him change through time or just deepen? Impressions, interpretations anything. Silly stories...

JL: Alaric and I actually only met in the flesh one more time ... when he came to NY for the rehearsal reading of a play he wrote, with plans that it would debut later that year off-Broadway. I think our friendship really typifies what is possible at times online -- we were able to forge a very strong affinity the few times we met in person because we had spent so much time exchanging emails about literary issues that concerned us, from issues relating to his work to our editorial collaborations. We seemed to complement each other extremely well -- for me, Alaric, his work and the work he most admired filled in the gaps I had witnessed here in the States when performance art seemed to lose its course in the late 80's and 90's. Alaric was also a great supporter of poets who fused artistic inquiry with text, like Wendy Kramer and Michael Basinski. With my roots in the plastic arts -- our editorial affinities seemed to mesh incredibly well. 

At the time Alaric died, we were planning the next issue of Meridian and planning to get together again.  I was doing a presentation at SUNY-Buffalo, and urging him to come and present his work with me.  We were in a chat together to celebrate the women’s issue of Meridian, an issue he helped me with extensively while refusing to take any credit, or as he put it, “any credit or blame” he didn’t deserve !!

About two weeks before leaving for Buffalo, I received my last letter from Alaric.  It said: 
 

got poisoned by cheese..

very weak

will take a fortnight to recover...

will email when able.

You and I and Alaric’s friends and associates know he had food allergies.  He could also be a bit of a hypochondriac and I remember reading that letter and thinking ? that goose, now  what is he doing eating cheese?  He died 4 days later.

At Buffalo, I played Alaric’s Shallal audio at the end of my performance.  I had not noticed before how haunting the sound layering was, how the whoops and shrieks sounded so mournful.  As the last bits of Alaric’s voice floated away, it was very quiet in that room.  I think we all began to realize at that moment the enormity of what we had lost.

At present, I find myself at a turning point with Meridian and online/elit publishing. As I ponder what should happen to my magazine, I find myself thinking of Alaric and how different things would have been if he was still alive. In some ways ... I don't know that I've ever recovered from losing him. For a time after his death, I was able to find intellectual and creative companionship among many people in the hypermedia community, but no one has filled the unique place Alaric occupied ? he was never just a work associate , Alaric was my friend. We didn't just talk about literature, we didn't just talk about poetry. I don't know if people realize how funny he could be, how witty, and how boundless his curiosity and enthusiasm was for a very wide range of work and life experiences.

You and I know that Alaric was possibly on the cusp of getting the recognition he deserved for his then current body of work-- through the net he was finally meeting people who had inspired him, and for whom he had high regard. This was not his time to go ... it just wasn't ... he had so much to give ... not least an ability to cut through the crap to what mattered about the work, and the people making it. Alaric never forgot that people made the work, not the other way around.