Haunted Books: Mike Corrao and Logan Berry on Text as Living Material, Design as Possession

LB: Your style is singular, and I’d be able to spot a Corrao on a bookshelf in an instant. I’m curious how your process varies from project to project. For example, I know from past conversations that Dance of Utter Darkness was written rapidly, in a frenzy, at an airport after a flight got cancelled. You’ve mentioned trancelike states and blasting noisy music or chaotic YouTube videos in the background. How did the composition process for Being Towards Death compare? What was similar, and what felt different?


MC: It feels like the process for every book is different in whatever minor way. Often there’s a certain tension at the beginning. I’ll start a new book with the methods I was using to write the previous one. And when that inevitably doesn’t work, when it feels off and distracting, I have to awkwardly rummage around until something sticks. Being Towards Death was written almost entirely to the song “Baby” by Donnie and Joe Emerson on repeat. That song has this dreamy quality that never quite fully forms. It kind of hovers in the background and then in sudden brief fits you’ll get to see this fully realized fragment. I think that kind of music is very enticing to me. You can move in and out of it unconsciously while you’re working. That track clicked into place kind of at the same time that the book itself did. I had written / designed something like 80 pages of the book, but something felt off. It didn’t look quite right, it didn’t sound quite right. There was something inside that stack that was reaching towards what I wanted to do, but it hadn’t fully surfaced yet. So I started a new document and began pulling out strands from the original, distilling things down, making adjustments, scrapping large parts of the design and this final book began to emerge. Recently I’ve found myself making these large gestures--writing large chunks of a book, creating images, sketching layouts only to realize in that process that I’m moving in the wrong direction and need to go back, adjust, rework everything. It feels like, maybe since I’m designing the book as I write it, that there’s this way you have to create the wrong book first so you can go back and make the right one. It leads to a lot of material getting cut, but that feels more meaningful to me--like I’ve tested every approach and landed on something robust. When I first started publishing, a lot of my books would kind of spontaneously surface. I would write and cut and write and cut and move in this eternally forward motion without ever stepping too far back and I think that led to works that ended up always being about self-discovery--since the book had to discover what it was about as it progressed. The reader was kind of witnessing the process in real-time. Here, I feel that I’ve made something, curated all of its parts, and now get to show it to people. Do you find yourself doing something similar in your work? In some ways I think we work very similarly, but in others it’s inevitably very different. I’ve been really curious about the way that you approach writing, not only in the general sense, but in writing towards a book. We’ve worked together (you as the writer, and I as the designer) on many of the books you’ve released over the past few years, most recently Doom is the House Without a Door. When you originally sent me Doom it looked much more straightforward than your previous books. It was sparse, jumping between prose blocks and short stanzas. In Casket Flare for example, I remember these elaborate text frames and mock-ups of orbiting globules. What’s changed in your process? Do you feel that change is particular with Doom?


LB: I love the song “Baby” and never in a million years would have guessed you were listening to it while working on Being Towards Death 🤣–incredible behind the scenes lore, thank you.

And I think you’re right that there are similarities in the way we work. Your description of your early books as a process of “eternally forward motion” and “self-discovery,” where the reader experiences the process in real-time, definitely resonates with my first couple of books. Lately, I’ve been thinking about Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake and Casket Flare, the first books I wrote and you designed, as “juvenile” works–not pejoratively, but literally, in that they came from a younger person. We both started publishing books at a pretty young age, and though I definitely don’t think either of us has settled into a certain format or lost the vital impulses that push us into writing, maybe we’re both more confident contending with the mysterious, chaotic, and unknown as we work. With Doom, I didn’t feel as much pressure to imagine how precisely it would look on the page because I trusted our collaboration; feeling out the vibes and character was enough to execute the text and collect the materials for design.

I want to dive deeper into your philosophy of writing and design. Your bio used to say that your work oftentimes “explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object.” You’ve written extensively about “surfaces” in contemporary writing and even put together a book about it. Throughout all of it, there’s an insistence on the materiality of the text. You’re not asking the reader to imagine another realm (like most narrative fiction does) or to take in a tale; rather, you seem to want to activate the reader into awareness of the reading act itself and how all the elements of the page affect their body and mind. Does that make sense? I think I get it, Mike, but I have to also add: a big reason why I find such richness in your books is because it actually *does* stir my imagination; there’s a dynamic,  specific constellation your books conjure for me. When I read Being Towards Death, I don’t experience the peculiar shapes and layout as “purely” of the page; there’s another mythical, artificial zone that expands. I suspect this is why many of your fans who “don’t like to read” gravitate towards your books. What do you think? Am I committing heresy here?

MC: I really like this idea of the “juvenile works” (maybe a new way to name someone’s collected early works??). It feels very representative of a more spontaneous, uncertain, yet driven mode. Which feels very accurate to the time for me as well.

Although it’s no longer a part of the author bio, I do still think that these three ideas are important to my work. I’m very drawn to the qualities and capabilities of the text as an interface. It might not have the dynamic movement / variability / interactivity that digital media does, but I do think it’s still able to put the reader in that same kind of active position. Not passively reading the text, but fully engaging with the unique pathways through a page’s composition, or ambiguous hierarchies, semi-illegible materials. I’m very drawn to creating a space where the reader has to almost investigate the page. To look at the spread first as this full landscape, before zooming into one point-of-interest or another. Early on, that ‘self-discovery’ approach felt like a great way of doing this. The text would slowly discover itself through these fits of experimentation. It would converse with the reader, try on different shapes and arrangements, and then land somewhere that represented some kind of fully-formed state--some kind of self-actualization. The text feels equally unsure of itself, not because it isn’t confident, but because its being has yet to solidify. More recently, I’ve found myself wanting to explore certain approaches or forms more thoroughly. Modes that have a very robust foundation that they can occasionally branch out from. A text that is not amorphous, but that is still highly flexible and mutative. Being Towards Death is rooted in the uncanny metallic structures that intrude upon the page. There is a style that guides the design, but the actual shape varies greatly. And from that base, the work expands out. We watch how the text navigates these intrusions in all of its different ways. At times still other modes interact with or even interrupt this general structure, but it’s something the book always returns to. It’s at the core. It is as much a part of the book as the writing itself, and that I feel is something very important. I do not want my work to feel like a text with images in it--the text central, the images supplementary. My hope is for the book to be a cohesive thing that no part could be cut from. And I think that non-heirarchical mode is what might lead to the mythical / artificial zones you mention. I think by allowing the design, image, text to take up equal importance, it allows them to meld and inform another in very interesting ways. The demonic, otherworldly structures of the setting are rarely described, but their oppressive architecture is ever-present. Placing the reader within that architecture places us/them in a different mindset. It lures us deeper into the text and makes the wounds inflicted by the book's villainous landlord/setting wounds inflicted on us. The book, through it’s design, feels like its not of our world, but of the book's world. A diegetic object somehow transplanted into our hands. And maybe that makes the horrors and absurdities of the work feel more real. Because they are happening to us. I think the cohesion of that form really does a lot to lure us into its trap, to push us into these headspaces where our reality does not feel as relevant as that of the book. But maybe this is a romantic way of thinking about books. Sometimes I worry that my thoughts around writing or making books are not grounded. I have gotten too inside myself about it haha. Do you feel this too? About your approach to writing?

When you’re working in the style that we do, it feels like things are quick to become abstract or at least detached from reality. The book becomes this isolated space that, although it’s inevitably informed by the world, is not part of it. I often find that I have to stop myself from going completely into this void. There’s a certain balance between the real and irreal I feel I have to hit for an idea / concept / project to work how I want it to. I know Doom for example is this mystical, otherworldly book, but it’s also about fatherhood and the anxieties of fatherhood. Do you find yourself approaching that same tension in your work?


LB:  To me, the abstraction in your work is welcoming. There are palpable stakes. Whether it’s the feeling of a conjuring unfolding (Rituals Performed in the Absense of Ganymede), exploring a strange terrain (The Persimmon Is an Event, Leopold's Labyrinth)  ambient dread or danger (Stealth Anxiety Megamix, Being Towards Death) the modalities your work take have an immediacy that entrains me to their rhythms. They’re not some cold, academic experiments; they’re propulsive and fun. Perhaps your fear of getting too hermetic keeps your work alive.

I do feel there’s tension between reality and unreality in my books. In Doom it’s pretty explicit because the narrator is losing his mind. I’ve told people that Doom is written and designed “in character.” We talked for several hours on the phone about who this guy is, the heinous context of his book’s creation, how he might design it. Have you ever worked that way before? Is there a certain narrator or persona you hear in your head when you’re writing?


MC: We’ve talked a lot in the past about wanting to create ‘books that hurt’ (more as a dramatic way of saying books that require a certain amount of effort or discomfort to engage with) but at the same time propulsive and fun are very much the goal. In a sense there’s not a very rigid set of constraints or guidelines that go into these books, the attempt to fuse those design and text elements together is very vibe-based, and maybe that keeps the work alive as well--that willingness to feel out what works and not hold too closely to any strict forms.

In Doom the book is almost possessed by its protagonist. As you said, we spoke a lot about how to make this project feel as if he had been the one who made it (through the use of handwriting, lo-res images, odd or conventionally ugly, chaotic layouts). There’s a way those elements fuse with what you wrote to really make the book feel like this haunted object. The epistolary nature of the entries as well gives this sense that he’s speaking to you through the book, as if you’ve ended up on the other line of this accursed communique. Almost like a ouija board. I think this may be an interesting point of distinction between our work. Often I feel your work is doing this kind of channeling, where the narrator consumes the text and takes the book on as their new body. I feel in my own work that I tend to instead assemble the voice out of the book itself. In my early (juvenile) work, like Gut Text or Ganymede, this was a very literal thing. The narrator is the book itself. Gut Text for example is centered around these four textual entities that are attempting to grow beyond the constraints of the book. In Being Towards Death, the narrator is more vague. It’s less the book itself and more something book-like. An object, a place. Some fusion of the building that you’ve been forced to inhabit and the very sinister core of capitalism. There’s certainly a persona that forms from that foundation, but I never really find myself working toward, or even starting with, a human narrator. So maybe better put: I feel that I’m often attempting to create a character out of the book whereas you seem to be imbuing the book with character. We’re approaching a central point but from opposite directions. And I find your approach very interesting. It gives the ‘writer’ of Doom this very sinister quality. It adds this additional weight to what he says. It gives him a certain power. It feels as if there’s no author to keep him in check.


LB: That’s an excellent distinction. I came to literature from theatre directing and playwriting, so I’ve always been interested in the performative aspects of book writing: the dramatic context, the relationship between the narrator and audience, and characters who write out of pure passion or compulsion.

One of my favorite books that embodies this is Cryptic Michigan: Woodland Revelations. I bought it at a rural gas station in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The cashier told me, “It’s a shame you didn’t come by sooner; the author hangs around here all the time, almost every day.” The book is full of apocryphal, often plagiarized (I think?) folklore about occult phenomena experienced throughout the state. Reading it, I can’t help but wonder about the author. Why and how did he compose this? Are the happenings fully fabricated or drawn from actual testimonies? I feel completely activated by it as a reader, in that there are a ton of ways it can be read. Another book that does this, in a completely different way, is Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities. It’s baroque, mutating prose applied to a super simple story you can sum up in a couple of sentences. Melville was attempting a commercially viable “sentimental domestic” novel after Moby Dick crashed and burned, but he can’t seem to bring himself to do it. That tension is foregrounded; you can really feel his frustration with the genre and with himself, as well as what he loves about writing, all at once. It’s every genre, and can be read in a million ways. Maybe that’s what I mean by “performative;” the act of reading and the act of writing become indelibly entwined. There’s a symbiotic presence between the reader and the writer, and the book facilitates their enmeshment, like a ritual circle or stage.

With Doom, the narrator is aware of his context. The book eventually reveals itself as an atrocity manifesto.  The dramatic situation for writing such things is mimetic. There’s a sick tradition for it. There are predecessors you’re in conversation with and places online where you’ll be debated, condemned, and venerated. Doom’s narrator is aware of this, and he addresses the different subcultures, authorities, and LLM’s he imagines will judge it. He’s also a solipsistic narcissist, who believes much of existence is an illusion. The gaps in his thinking provide latitude for readers to approach the text in different ways. I’ve been surprised by how often audiences find it funny. What’s your experience translating your books to a live setting? Do you find it challenging to do, given how ingrained the design and text are?


MC: I do! For a long time, I didn’t really imagine my books being read out loud. Not even something like Smut-Maker which is a play. I could envision and think of how these pieces of a spread would connect, how they could be spoken aloud, but all of that felt hypothetical. I was very averse to reading for the first few books. I remember at the release of my first book, I wanted not to read at all, but of course I had to. And at the second we had set up this elaborate video using early text-to-speech to read the work. Partially because it made sense, partially because I was so desperate not to read it myself. I think it had to do with insecurity and stage fright, but also with how the books were designed. It felt incomplete to read them. The reader is missing out on all of this design, movement, interconnectivity. I joked for a bit about treating my work like a children’s book where I would read a spread and then turn it around to show the audience, but that feels a bit patronizing. Only in the last few projects (BTD and the unpublished works on either side of it chronologically) have I thought about how these books sound aloud, how they might be read to an audience. And that adds a whole new dynamic to creating the work, or at least in how I think about the text as I’m editing. I’ve found myself working in a different kind of fragmentary style, where I’m wanting these disparate sections to exist as their own islands, but to have more flow between them, not just in the assumed order, but letting these fragments be open in such a way that they could connect in a number of places. But still with the visual nature of these projects, it does feel like almost a different, sibling work when read aloud. I think about Douglas Kearney talking about his performance of a set of visual / concrete / armor poems that he had written and about how he had to create a separate document for himself to perform these pieces. The live performance is an adaptation of the text. For me this adaptation is somewhat straightforward--a reading of the text, moving in a certain order, although not always the order that seems intuitive on the page, playing at the glitched punctuation, mutating or circumnavigating it. Your performances are much more involved and much more distinct. In the same way the text feels possessed by its narrator, you feel possessed by the text when you read. And each book seems to have its own very unique voice. I remember when you read from Casket Flare it included this kind of gregorian chanting or that often religiously-imbued sing-speech. Doom alternatively is a rapid fire series of these almost boastful ramblings. The former feels like you’re witnessing an exorcism, the latter like you’ve found yourself trapped in a one-sided conversation with a psychopath. They’re so impactful and artful to watch. In both instances there’s this sense that you are channeling the text through you--evoking a rotted muse. Although it is inevitably an adaptation of the work in the same way mine is, what you’re doing feels like an embodiment of the form, rather than a projected navigation through it.


LB: I relate to those struggles. The books have to be systematically adapted for readings. Runoff Sugar Crystal Lake gave me the most trouble. The text collages a bunch of voices and perspectives embedded in elaborate design, and it took a couple failed attempts in front of audiences to realize it needed to take a completely different shape in the live setting. I ended up putting together a soundscape to capture the book’s vibe. I’d read along with it, lip syncing and reciting lines, karaoke style.

That’s really cool to read your impressions of the other readings. Channelling and “evoking a rotted muse” are wonderful ways of putting it. I take some time before readings to zero in on particular energies and headspaces to invoke the book and do it justice. I’m definitely not perfect at it, and it can sometimes feel excessive for the usually intimate, lowkey ambience of a literary reading. I’ve had to accept that the books demand it.

Changing subjects: I wanna hear about Cloak.wtf, the press you run. How have things been going? What can we expect from Cloak in the future (if you’re at liberty to say)?


MC: Cloak is a small press I run that publishes work focused on visibility, concealment, and surveillance. The books often have very unconventional design and presentation. In part it's a playground to explore different ways to frame a text, how that text can interact with the book that houses it, the page the text sits on. I've been lucky to publish a wide range of really incredible writers like Grant Maierhofer, Thom Eichelberger-Young, and Rachel Zavecz. The project is often explicitly political as well. Joe Hall's People Finder, Buffalo documents, names, addresses those responsible for the local injustices taking place in Buffalo, NY communities. Eichelberger-Young's Ointment Weather contemplates poetry in the context of our country's increased surveillance, right-wing political violence, and the ongoing genocide. I feel that experimental--at least formally experimental--work is often apolitical or political in highly obscured, detached ways. I've become increasingly interested in works that combine this formal weirdness with explicitly political content. There's a way that this more fluid form I think can better depict or express the unrest, violence, surreality of the current political moment. The weirding of the work reveals the weirdness of our reality. Of course this doesn't need to be the case for every single book, and it isn't the case for every single Cloak book. But my hope is that each entry in the catalog is doing something interesting, and through this mix of design and text, is challenging the reader to think about how they engage with text and the world. I don't want to spoil the next release, but I will say that it's coming very soon and is our largest book to date. I'm very excited for its release.


LB: I think I know the book you’re teasing, and if I’m right, it’s one of my most anticipated releases of the year. An all-timer.

I’m a Cloak subscriber, so each new release arrives on my doorstep, which is always a thrill. I really like this subscription model for a press because it makes me feel connected to the larger endeavor. How’s it been from your end?

Last thing I want to ask: you mentioned wanting to explore modes and approaches more thoroughly. Could you say a little more about what that might look like? What can we expect from your writing in the future?


MC: The subscription model has been great for the most part. It creates a very transparent financial model where the subscription pays for the overhead of the press and individual sales go directly to the author. I’m not sure it’s a model that would work well on a large scale, but at the size Cloak is right now, it’s been good. I’ve debated changing or modifying it, but for now I think it’ll stick around for a bit. The only caveat is that it only seems to be sustainable for POD printing, which limits what each title can do. After seeing the physical copy of Being Towards Death, I’m very tempted to switch to offset, but if that happens, it’ll be a few titles from now--budget depending.

What the future might hold for my own writing I can never be sure! But I’ve been moving towards more focused, in-depth approaches to the dynamics between text and design. In my early (juvenile) works, this exploration was about breadth--seeing how many different ways a page could behave in a given book. With Being Towards Death, and the book (and a half) I’ve worked on since, I’ve been wanting to focus on more confined, but still dynamic and mutative structures. Sometimes this looks dramatic and tangled like in BTD, but other times it looks much more restrained, spartan. Another unpublished book you were an early reader on we joked about being my ‘most experimental book yet’ since it didn’t have any overt images in it haha. The project I’m working on now has imagery, but with textures I’ve never really used in my past works, and often integrated into the lines themselves (rather than as a composition the lines are always navigating around). So maybe this upcoming phase of my work is about exploring more consistent architectures on the page. Creating that large, cohesive structure for the reader to move through, rather than a field of objects.