WHERE AM I AND HOW DO I GET THERE?
An interview with Alex Tretbar about his new book, Dogsmind, available now from Dead Mall Press
On September 22nd, we announced the arrival of Alex Tretbar’s Dogsmind, a “poem-novella ouroboros without ending or beginning.” And today, we’re happy to share a conversation with Alex about this book. Whether you read this before or after absorbing Dogsmind, and whether you are here for its kinship with Joyce’s Ulysses or with the video game Dark Souls, I’m sure you’ll find this as fascinating a read as I did.
The book will begin shipping in October. For a taste of the actual writing, you can read an excerpt in Mercury Firs, another in Grotto, one in Capgras, and yet one more in Peel Lit. And here is the cover:
Also, every sale will help us raise $3 for the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio. This org provides much-needed aid to the Haitian immigrant community in that city (the press’s Dayton home) which has been cruelly impacted by the recent Supreme Court decision to rescind Temporary Protected Status. Help us add to the $238 we raised for the HSC last summer!
And without further ado, let’s get to the interview…
Dead Mall Press: Hey, Alex! So we’re here to talk about Dogsmind, but for those who may be unfamiliar, could you first tell us a bit about yourself and your path as a writer?
Alex Tretbar: Hello! Sure, happy to. My name's Alex Tretbar, and I was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas. As a kid I wanted to be a novelist, and I wrote and illustrated little booklets about the Titanic, a leprechaun in possession of a mysterious shrinking/enlarging potion, and a porcine superhero, among others. During college I developed an opioid addiction that eventually led to prison, which itself led to a renewed and deepened interest in literature, especially poetry. I also had the chance to tutor fellow prisoners, and since getting out I've tried to continue teaching in prisons whenever I can.
DMP: Maybe the first thing an astute reader will discover about Dogsmind is its relationship with the Stephen Dedalus story in Ulysses. While one doesn’t need to have read Ulysses to fully enjoy Dogsmind, there are nevertheless copious links between the books. You also take up—and intensify into a new register—the heavily compounded, portmanteau phrasing that Joyce was known for. Can you tell us about how these books stand in relation, and maybe how your reading of Joyce sparked your writing here?
AT: During graduate school I took a class on Ulysses taught by the great Joyce and Beckett scholar Dr. Stephen Dilks, and I immediately became fascinated with Joyce's sentences, his paragraphs, his syntax. The Dedalus episodes were especially striking, including of course the opening Martello tower sequence which served as the rough model for Dogsmind. To me, Stephen's interiority is claustrophobically intimate, and there's a kind of vertigo that I experience at the end of so many of the paragraphs that track his intense cognition, as though the reader is being stranded somewhere at the end of a train of thought, someplace they couldn't possibly have anticipated. There's a wildness to the way Joyce's paragraphs travel and mutate that I just wanted to experiment with myself, and that's how Dogsmind initially came about.
During that class I also looked ahead to Finnegans Wake and was shocked by what I found. I was already playing around with the Joycean portmanteau and closed-compound word in my poetry, but the Wake just exploded language into something else entirely. I was especially startled by the visual/graphic quality of the text. It looked like some kind of magma on the page, the language flowing and ebbing and stratifying, moving between various states of matter right there for the eye to see. Joyce's little pileups of language are so satisfying to me, and I think of words like "smackwarm" and "warmhosed" as something verging on visual music, chords in which multiple words chime at once for the eye. The portmanteau and closed-compound word seemed like very useful tools for capturing a consciousness that can't quite keep up with itself or the world around it (or is in fact outpacing itself and the world around it), whether because of drugs, sickness, technology, terror, joy, or all of the above and more.
DMP: Another thing a reader confronts here is that the book runs in a loop, without strict beginning or end. This is partly a nod to Finnegans Wake, but it seems to exert a much more disorienting effect in Dogsmind. Here, the plot (such as it is) gets jolted out of place when a reader first encounters this return to start, and it can shatter some preconceptions about what has been going on in the story. How did you think about plot here? And to what extent is it even possible to construct an “accurate” reading of this book?
AT: Though I plotted out Dogsmind ahead of time, and never stopped thinking of it as a work of fiction while writing it, I knew from the beginning that the character tasked with telling the story was more of a "speaker of the poem" than a narrator, in the sense that they maintain a stubbornly lyric relationship to the past and present and future. This is why so much of what seems to have happened before or after the events of the story still manages to leak into the narrative, as though everything is occurring simultaneously and none of it is ever resolved. The Spokesperson is telling us, over and over and over again, about a specific evening in time and space, an evening that they appear to be trapped in, and/or an evening that they cannot stop narrating (it is told mostly in the past tense, after all). At a macro level, my sense of the story is that it transpires within the amount of time it takes for a signal to flash across a synapse, like the unpleasant memory of something you deeply regret, something you are haunted by, a shadow passing over the mind, more atmosphere and affect than a coherent causal chain. It begins and ends and loops back into itself as quickly as it takes for a corrupted .exe file to crash.
I always come back to Solmaz Sharif's belief that "failure in activism is often a deficiency of lyricism—an inability to collapse time and distance." The Spokesperson's lyric orientation collapses time and distance, which allows their imagination to exert extreme pressure on both the presences and absences of the story. It is possible that this lyric sensibility is another component of the Spokesperson's "difficult education," and it is possible that part of the reason for the chaotic and glitchy rendering of the story is that the Spokesperson is still learning how to wield and control that lyric sensibility.
I did painstakingly work to make nearly all of the plot "make sense," at least to me, but I admit that there are deliberate aporias that even I didn't have full access to. I wanted there to be glitches or aberrations that the story kind of warps around. I think we sometimes assume that fiction writers need to have a deep understanding of all their characters, especially the characters that are most important to a given story. But because I wanted certain characters to exert a spectral influence on the text, I decided to keep certain aspects of them hidden even from me. I believe that there is a certain epistemic component to the state of being haunted, a gap, a kind of nagging dark spot at the center of our conception of what it is that haunts us.
DMP: In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is a sort of displaced/effaced yet central figure in the opening chapters of the book. In Dogsmind, the parallel to Dedalus is The Spokesperson/“I,” who is very much the “speaker” but also someone almost consumed and vacated by speech itself. It is also implied that the Spokesperson is failing in his destiny to speak at all, especially to speak up for another character, Patches (who, without giving too much away, is a pitiable figure in this story). I wonder if you could tell us a bit about how all this came together for you.
AT: I think both the "displaced/effaced" Stephen of Ulysses as well as Proust's conspicuously absent narrator were influences in the development of the Spokesperson. To me both the Spokesperson and Patches almost feel more like computer programs or operating systems than full-blooded characters. I wanted them both to be ciphers: androgynous, blurred figures that the reader might be able to fill in with whatever baggage they care to bring with them. The alternately tender and antagonistic relationship between Stephen and Buck Mulligan was also at work here. There is a magnetism and vitality to Mulligan that feels like the driving force of the opening pages of Ulysses, especially when compared with Stephen's doom and gloom, and I tried to infuse Ripjohn with some of that.
You noted earlier in our correspondence that "the world of Dogsmind is a world of boys, it seems," and I would agree with that, despite the blankness and androgyny of the Spokesperson and Patches, as one of the other traditions that the book is playing with is that of the hypermasculine road novel, the aimless Kerouacian quest. Dogsmind is very much a story about friendship, its euphorias and its perils, and my hope is that even though the friendships in the book are bizarre and idiosyncratic, readers will be able to detect patterns and echoes that they recognize from their own lives.
I see the Spokesperson as a kind of vehicle or mech that anyone can step inside of, a pullstring toy operated by the reader (or by Ripjohn, History, and even Ibid). A spokesperson for whom, ironically, other people speak. The Spokesperson's name is both a joke and an aspiration, for even though the character seems to rarely be able to speak up for themselves (let alone others), they also clearly suffer from something like glossomania or logophilia.
Patches is multiple, a stand-in for all other Patches—even their name is plural. But they are also literally made up of multiple patches, "patched (up)" in both the medical and digital sense. They have died and respawned so many times that by this point they are more bandage than body, more update than original code.
I picture the story degrading a bit every time it's told or remembered by the Spokesperson, and the present state the reader finds the story in is its billionth-or-so iteration. It has eroded with use and occupancy, as with each new pass the Spokesperson attempts to "patch" or "patch up" what's buggy or broken or injured, only to make the story even more incomprehensible and disjointed. So Patches is also a kind of literalization of this problem of storytelling, of self-narration, of memory. It's clear that if the Spokesperson is ever to escape this loop, they will just need to start over and tell the whole thing from scratch, from memory, cleanly and clearheadedly. The actual events of the story are very simple, but they have been buried under the noise of re-vision.
DMP: The Requestor is an ambiguous figure in the book, seemingly a dealer or a fence, but he also seems to be more in control or powerful than any of the other characters here. Interestingly, he is also listed as “The Reader of the Poem.” While I have my own guesses about what this means, I wonder if you could share a bit about how you see The Requestor in the book.
AT: I intended the Requestor as a loose stand-in for Haines of Ulysses. He is coded variously as a drug dealer, a loan shark, a fence, a patron of the arts, a crooked art collector, an anthropologist, and a recreational/dilettante-ish mad scientist. He represents the kind of person who participates in street life fetishistically, interfacing with it from a safe distance, playing the same game as the Spokesperson but without the same stakes, for the Requestor has virtually unlimited resources (one might even say that he possesses certain prohibitively expensive "cheat codes" for accessing a less hostile form of reality). He is also eventually revealed to be "the reader of the poem," the entity to whom the Spokesperson ("the speaker of the poem") and company are eternally drawn, the patron for whom they endlessly perform, the future that influences and determines the present. I see the Requestor as the book's material/concrete "villain," an institutional and structural threat that is a personification of insatiable colonial/imperial/capitalist/technofeudalist greed, whereas History is a more abstract, theoretical, slippery, atmospheric force of cruelty and violence. The Spokesperson and Ripjohn are of course far from clean in all of this—they countenance or directly participate in many of the Requestor's and History's respective dealings.
DMP: So let’s talk about the title. On one level, again, we have a play on the Joycean “dogsbody,” but we also have a literal dog in this book, Ibid. He also happens to belong to the Requestor, whom you identify as the book’s villain. When The Spokesperson encounters Ibid in the bathroom of the Requestor’s apartment, it marks a critical point in the book, and a crucial moment in The Spokesperson’s “difficult education.” And yet all of this plays out under hallucinatory conditions. What can you tell us about this moment, and about Ibid’s significance here?
AT: One of the things that might be happening in the Requestor's bathroom is that the Spokesperson ("poor dogsmind," as Ripjohn calls them, implying that the narrator has been tasked not just with the drudgery of narration but of cognition) is talking/thinking to themself in the mirror. They may have hallucinated the Requestor's previous quip about Ibid. They might also just be so high on money that a vision is visiting them. But it is also true that Ibid is a real dog who is emblematic of unseen labor, specifically unseen nonhuman labor.
I was picturing the Requestor's apartment as a kind of data center, a place where data, post-harvest, is received, processed, annotated, organized, stored, recalled, etc. We might think of both the Spokesperson and the story they tell as data, as well as the wares that the Spokesperson and Ripjohn are hired by the Requestor to secure. The illusion of "artificial" intelligence is also at play here, as AI very much relies on both the natural intelligence of the human creations that it plagiarizes, and the natural intelligence of the ecosystems that ultimately power it.
What the Spokesperson learns in the bathroom is that even their own petty enterprises—the errands they run for the Requestor, for example—can be linked directly to the immiseration of other beings. Ibid has been molded against his will into a kind of oracle or prophet—I see him as livestock fused with interface. The Requestor's thing with the potato chips is a kind of forced offering or "negative medicine." The potato chips are not sustenance, they are simply inputs/prompts for the oracular interface that Ibid has been shaped into. I was thinking about how in industrialized cattle production, food for the animals is not designed to be tasty or satisfying but rather simply to bulk up the animals and sustain their lives just long enough to be sent to slaughter and then packaged into a commodity.
When the Spokesperson melodramatically takes their stand against the Requestor in re his treatment of Ibid, they are at their most courageous and heroic, but ultimately this is a hollow gesture, in the same way that Ripjohn's eventual ejection of History from the car is hollow. If the Spokesperson really stood by their words, they would give back the money that the Requestor had just transmitted to them in the previous scene, they would want nothing to do with the Requestor's activities. Instead, they huff off into the night, presumably to score more ur-ash, leaving Ibid to continue freezing and starving in the bathroom. The power/labor relations remain unchanged. When the story loops back into itself, the Spokesperson—having learned nothing, uncritical of Ripjohn's suggestion—will begin driving the stolen police cruiser toward the Hammer all over again. The only thing that has really transpired as the Spokesperson leaves the Requestor's apartment is that they temporarily feel slightly better about themself and their complicity in Ibid's immiseration. Ibid is a caution sign that the Spokesperson registers but only briefly and shallowly.
DMP: In addition to Ulysses, you have mentioned that the video game Dark Souls was an important influence here. Can you tell us a bit about that?
AT: I won't waste time describing the game in great detail, but I'll just say that it is notorious for being a punishing game that involves a lot of dying, over and over and over again. Repetition is central to the gameplay, as are the unsettling gothic worlds of hostile, interconnected environments that the player navigates. One of the things most striking to me about Dark Souls is the way you encounter different landmarks in parallax: you explore a belltower at one point in the game, and then later you see that same belltower from a different and distant vantage point, and this moment of recognition is both awe-inspiring and somehow eerie/uncanny/unsettling. The sublime vastness and interconnectivity of the world impress themselves upon you. There are moments in Ulysses like this (though they are less "eerie"), when Stephen or Bloom or other characters are glimpsed from different perspectives as they go about their day. I wanted to create this parallax effect for the reader who starts Dogsmind back over after finishing it.
Return is important to both Dark Souls and Dogsmind. The player begins Dark Souls in a prison cell, but as soon as they finish the game they find themselves back in that very prison cell, set to repeat the entire story in what is referred to as "New Game Plus." The enemies and bosses are slightly more difficult, but the story is exactly the same. Of course, you have the option to just turn the game off or create a new character to play from scratch. But you can also choose to continue with your reborn character, carrying with you all the items and experience retained from the previous playthrough. I like the idea of starting a book over like that.
I think the Dark Souls influence shows up mostly atmospherically/affectively, in that reading Dogsmind involves some measure of tedium. Progress from scene to scene is excruciatingly slow, and we are never provided with any rules or instructions (perhaps with the exception of the dramatis personae). As soon as you learn how to navigate one environment, you are thrown into the next bewildering environment. I know I'm not the only person to have detected in Dark Souls certain patterns that resonate with life lived under addiction, how so much of it—and recovery—involves ritual, repetition, degradation, humiliation, confusion, and a form of faith that sometimes feels less like a spiritual endeavor and more like meaningless brute force.
DMP: A few months back, Tilted House published your chapbook toofarwandered, which you have spoken of as a prequel to Dogsmind. Can you fill us in a bit more on the connection, and are you thinking about returning to or expanding this universe in the future?
Aside from the similarities in diction and tone between toofarwandered and Dogsmind (and the unexplained cameos of Ripjohn in the former), while writing them I didn’t really see the two projects as occupying the same universe. Retrospectively, though, I have begun to think of toofarwandered as the source code for the voice/character of the Spokesperson—it's the narrator booting up. toofarwandered seems to be describing, elliptically and in miniature, the larger mythos of Dogsmind. Somewhere in there are the "armory years," the multiple prison sentences, the deaths and regenerations, the abject poverties of wallet and spirit. There is also a third project that I began working on at basically the exact same time as those two, a novel or novel-in-stories that feels now like the third installment in a trilogy. I'm hoping to use its cooler and more measured voices to shade in some of the weird gaps and contradictions of the previous two books.
Alex Tretbar is a Midwestern writer and educator. He is the author of the chapbooks toofarwandered (Tilted House, 2026), According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025), and Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). Recent poems, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Annulet, Cleveland Review of Books, Fence, Grotto, Hearsay, [light study], P-QUEUE, Seam Allowance, and others. Alongside students, alumni, and faculty from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he teaches creative writing at Chillicothe Correctional Center, a women’s prison in Missouri.
