VANESSA HOLYOAK

[It’s] about the role of darkness in East Asian culture and undoing the Western hierarchy around dark and light [in order] to re-value darkness and unknowing, rather than categorizing everything according to Western Enlightenment logic. It talks a lot about the ways in which places for darkness are carved out in traditional Japanese homes. There isn’t this emphasis on light in the way there is in modern Western architecture. I got really invested in thinking about darkness from this alternative perspective, as a space of intimacy and indeterminacy, and began writing this novel based off of a quote from the book. It goes something like: “To snatch away from us the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes.” I started thinking about the ecological implications of disappearing darkness…what does deforestation mean on both an ethical and aesthetic level? What does it mean to not have that darkness in the forest, that unknown? That’s the premise for the novel; it’s lightly speculative fiction, bordering on the poetic, and very much an artist's book. There’s not a ton of strong narrative impulse. The general idea is based on a fictionalized Paris, France, where there’s this resort plan in which governments are intervening to destroy national forests and replace them with these really homogenous, very white and shiny surveillance-style resorts. People are being forcibly relocated into them from both the cities and all over the country. The premise of the book is that the protagonist’s lover was forcibly taken one year ago as part of this resort plan, and the book takes place through flashbacks over the following year. It’s about her wandering through a dystopian Paris and trying to find agency in a world without darkness, trying to see how to negotiate her relationships to other bodies now that her lover is out of the picture. And I hope I'm not giving too much away, but there is a possibly happy ending where she flees to the edge of the forest to try to find alternate ways of existing outside of these governmental structures. The actual meat of the book follows this character’s very intense philosophical ruminations and experiences of embodiment.