SEAN MICHAELS AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Sean Michaels is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. He is the founder of pioneering music blog, Said The Gramophone. His debut novel, Us Conductors, received the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His second novel, The Wagers, appeared in 2019.

His latest novel, Do You Remember Being Born? is an “innovative and deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company’s poetry AI, named Charlotte.”

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

Do You Remember Being Born? is loosely inspired by the poet, Marianne Moore. What drew you to Marianne Moore’s story? How did you navigate fictionalizing her life and work – in what ways did you approach choosing which elements to keep and what elements to play with?

In 2019, I got really lit up after I learned about the story of Marianne Moore—this respected, becaped, wise + wry American poet—and her 1955 encounter with Ford. The car company had approached her for help naming their new sedan. Instead of ignoring their inquiry, she became obsessed with it, writing numerous letters with proposed names. Ford Fabergé. Ford Silver Sword. Mongoose Civique. Pastelogram. (They rejected them all and, in the end, went with “Edsel.”) I thought there was something interesting—and telling—in the way that even a Great Artist can be tempted into the capitalist-industrial game. And I began thinking about the way such a character might interact with a near-future invitation by an AI company…

It was that dynamic—between a poet not unlike Marianne Moore, and a circumstance not unlike her interaction with Ford—that I was drawn to. So that’s the novel I wrote. Marian Ffarmer isn’t intended to be Marianne Moore (I’ve already written one book reinventing real-life characters), however it was interesting to draw inspiration from her life. There was something provocative about it, too: a comment on the way AI subsumes past art.

Why did you choose to write about a poet, as opposed to a prose writer or a visual artist?

Poetry occupies a unique role in the arts: prestigious, magical, near-to-hand…and, also, fundamentally mysterious, and occasionally unintelligible (to many). It’s a symbol for some of what is most indescribably human—and so a perfect inflection point for considering technology.

One of the most striking things about your book is the way you blend form and content – the fact that in a book about a poet co-writing with AI, you co-wrote the novel itself with AI and a custom bot trained on Marianne Moore’s poetry. What was that process like? Did it surprise you, or offer you a new way of thinking about your writing process, and of AI use in art in general?

I was spurred to write this book because, even in 2019, I was bewildered by the text produced by contemporary Large Language Models. When configured properly (and I’m not talking about ChatGPT here), contemporary AI can mimic style and occasionally even invent things that convey the illusion of extraordinary creativity. It’s astonishing. But just an illusion… right? I mean, I think so. I hope so? And then playing with these tools always made me reflect on my own work: surely my creativity isn’t an illusion. Right? Surely my inventions are never accidents? Surely, I’m nothing like this software…?

The AI-generated phrases in your book aren’t restricted only to the fictional AI’s conversations with the poet, Marian. There are phrases throughout the novel that are also generated by AI, which are flagged in the text – sometimes whole sentences, but often just a word or two.

These seem to increase in frequency and length towards the latter half of the novel. But there are also parts of the novel untouched by AI – the chapters that delve into Marian’s past seem to have no AI-generated text. How did you approach using AI-generated text in writing your book and incorporating it into the narrative?

I wanted to “infiltrate” the book with AI in places and in ways that added complexity to the book, that were “generative” in that other sense: adding more meaning to the text, rather than taking it away.

I would usually consider a book with these themes to be a near-future speculative fiction, but it’s astounding how close to our present moment it feels. How did ongoing conversations and developments with AI impact how you thought of your book?

Originally, the book’s first page had a sentence saying something like “Five years from now.” Later, that became “One year from now,” and finally, in the copyedit stage, I decided, fuck it, take it out altogether. I wondered whether, by the time of publication, it would seem to take place in the past.

Do You Remember Being Born is often about collaborations – between artists and AI, art and business, and artists and artists – and of course, in your own collaboration with AI. There’s a sense that none of these collaborations is easy. What drew you to write about these (often messy) interactions?

The fundamental question at the heart of …Being Born? isn’t about AI but about making art: art as labour, art as record, art as progeny, art as an act of solitary genius versus one of collective effort. I wanted to consider Marian’s belief that to be a great artist one must wall oneself off from contamination, from outside distraction and infiltration. I wanted to challenge it directly and ask whether the artist might in fact be enriched by throwing open the windows and letting the whole world in.

While writing with the AI, Marian wonders at “[…] the boundlessness of human beings’ capacity to interpret, to make meaning from. I could draw substance from any line I read, no matter how hollow its intention. I was so easily deceived, as all of us are.” She adds: “I wondered how much of what I had published in my life was a deception.” I thought that was such an interesting thought – what do you think of art and intention?

This thought of Marian’s was a thought I had myself, and alluded to above… Occasionally, my AI would write something beautiful and then I would wave it away, deciding that the writing itself wasn’t exceptional—it was me, the reader, who had imbued the sentence with its power, applying four decades of imagination and association. But then I would stop and wonder how much my own work benefits from that same privilege.

Humans are meaning-makers. We can’t help it. But that meaning-making has the effect of diminishing the importance of intentionality.

I really admire your work as a music critic, and your website, Said The Gramophone. Marian is not much aware of music; she says it “isn’t her field.” Was it interesting to create a character that thinks of music in perhaps a different way than you do? I loved the detail of her listening to a Cat Power song and saying, “It felt as if my whole skeleton were tingling.”

That’s so kind of kind of you! Yes, with this character, I didn’t want to allow myself to lean on the typical ways I write about music. I wanted to imagine a different kind of listener (like other listeners I have known), and then to try to describe the experience of music when it’s heard through that more equivocal set of ears.

Were there writers (or songs!) outside of Marianne Moore that you looked to for inspiration in writing Do You Remember Being Born?

I wanted to write a book that was “all white and green,” as Marian writes in the opening pages—full of air, light, short chapters like blinks of the eye. I wanted it to be funny and to move forward with a certain muscularity. So some of the influence is tonal—books by people like Ali Smith, Tove Jansson, Miriam Toews, even Michael Ondaatje—whereas at other moments it’s an approach to plot—writers such as Ben Lerner and Esther Yi, or films like The Master or Michael Clayton, where both “a lot” and “a little” happen, but the story moves with great swiftness when its author wishes it to. Musically, I was deeply inspired by “The Leanover,” a song by the late great Scottish band Life Without Buildings, which is deeply moving and alive and yet looks, from an outside eye, as if its lyrics could have been written by a random word generator. Every time I listen, I ask, what is it that makes these lines so human?

Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.