When I think about the difference between an afterlife and a haunting I think about an inheritance.
Allow me to introduce Candace R. Nunag, a literary prose writer who just released her debut book, A Solar Flare, with The Fiction Collective 2. Nunag’s work is unruly, a hybrid of short essays, research fragments, poems, flash fiction, and images that pull on the threads of our present polycrises: grief, surveillance, hauntings, and technology’s remains meet here to ask how we mediate the remains of our own lives. The inception point of the book is the 1859 Carrington Event, a solar flare that wiped out telegraphic systems worldwide and that, if it were to occur today, could destroy anything on the planet with an electrical circuit. Nunag explores this moment of crisis in one of our earliest forms of electronic communication technology to explore the ephemerality and illegibility of our contemporary networks while also tracing her own encounters with technology’s commemorative functions (or lack thereof). Her prose is incisive and sharp, tripping artfully between fragments and photographs before arriving suddenly at a ghost story that catches the reader in a moment of haunting in media res.
I spoke with Candace on the eve of her book release to ask her about the process of writing A Solar Flare: how she moves between research and fiction, how she understands her own archival and documentary practices, and mourning as a methodology.
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MH: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who you are, what you do, etc.?
CN: My name is Candice Nunag, and I am officially an author. A Solar Flare, which came out on January 15th is my first publication. I am currently finishing coursework in a PhD of literary art at the University of Denver and I hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Colorado Boulder. I have also flossed my teeth every night for seven years and change, and that is probably my greatest accomplishment thus far.
MH: I believe it! I wanted to start by asking you about the central event in A Solar Flare, the 1859 Carrington event that organizes your broader discussion of technology and preservation. Can you tell us a little bit about what this event was? In a book that is so often preoccupied with your own life and contemporary technology, why return to the nineteenth century?
CN: The 1859 Carrington solar flare came right on the heels of the establishment of global telegraph lines and machines, or what is sometimes referred to as the “Victorian internet.” A solar flare happens when our sun (or any star) has storms on its surface – sometimes those storms fling charged particles across space and time and it just so happened that, as electric telegraphy was rapidly spreading across the globe, the Earth was in the trajectory of one of these flares. The sky became illuminated so much that birds started chirping, thinking it was daylight, and aurora borealis were visible as close to the equator as Columbia. This new communication system of telegraph lines was torched. In some cases the pieces of paper in the machines caught fire and burned up. I read about it a long time ago and I thought: imagine all of our information technology just being burnt to a crisp overnight. It turns out that solar flares aren’t really that anomalous, and that contemporary solar physicists have said we’re overdue for a solar flare of Carrington proportions. And storms like this have happened since, but in Earth’s orbit of the sun we haven’t caught the brunt of it the way that we did in 1859. Some researchers think that if we were to experience a solar flare of 1859 proportions, it could take us a decade to return to the digital and electric lives that we have now.
MH: It strikes me that you’re describing a flare of this proportion as imminent – this idea that we are overdue, almost that the event is late? It feels very Y2K.
CN: It is very much a Y2K anxiety. For me it’s a kind of existential concern: a natural disaster that affected communication technology in its infancy that many people don’t know is a sort of global concern. I write things by hand a lot for this reason.
MH: This idea that things are done “by hand” threads through the book – you create graphite rubbings, describe the act of writing, follow your digital “handprint” on social media. There is a sort of self-archiving happening here.
CN: I mean, this work is autobiographical in the sense that, within months of me starting my first Facebook page, I lost my brother to overdose. Thinking about it 16, 17 years later, it seems such a strange thing to initiate this new kind of monumentality to create a digital life or persona – I want to call it an ego prosthesis – in the same moment of my life where I lost my only sibling, who never had the opportunity to enter into a digital world. So…standing in the doorway of my digital social life, in a very analog sort of way I lost a part of my childhood. I think that’s where the preoccupation comes from. To live with the loss and to live with the change that is having to be two people, my analog self and my digital self.
MH: You return to this split self often: analog and digital, past and future, Eastern and Western. In one of my favorite quotes in the book you write that “the worst part of being half Western and half Eastern is that you have two pantheons of horrible creatures that haunt your childhood or await you in death.” There seems to be a real difference in the way you write grief and afterlives and the way that you write about haunting.
CN: I start the book suggesting that it’s an articulation of a history of biracial subjectivity. For me, what that meant was I have two ways and I’ve always had two ways of thinking about matters of the spirit, matters of the supernatural, matters of an afterlife. I grew up knowing that a mumu and a boogeyman lived simultaneously under my bed. When I think about the difference between an afterlife and a haunting I think about an inheritance – a haunting is something that emanates from a past, something of the Gothic tradition, where contemplating an afterlife is imagining something that exists in the future – something after. The backward-thinking of haunting and the forward-thinking of afterlife are pushing and pulling at the same time in my mind.
MH: It reminds me of the moment in the book where you talk about “long-termism,” this sense of obligation towards a future we know nothing about.
CN: Long-termism is a school of thought that suggests that our only real existential concern as a species is to keep going, ignoring the social and political and cultural problems of today to suggest that if we just keep going we’re doing it right. I feel like it’s almost cruel – this idea is coming from people that are really powerful and really wealthy, and I think it’s much easier for those populations to say that we merely owe the future of our species survival, when clearly none of us want to just survive. There’s no mention of thriving, no mention of sustainability. There’s no mention of compassion, the only obligation we have is to just keep on going. It feels hollow to the point of cruelty, that this would be in any way a goal for people who clearly need so much more than living and breathing.
MH: Can you talk about how that comes out in the visual objects in your book – particularly the graphite rubbings that you made? It strikes me that you are trying to tease out the difference between the documentary practices that leave this human trace and those that sort of evacuate our presence.
CN: I started by making graphite rubbings of telephone poles – they have decades of tacks and staples in them from messages that were once very real but the only thing that is left is the staple. I wanted to know what happens when we compare those material embodied remnants with those of our digital lives. A colleague suggested that I make a rubbing of a phone screen…I remember I was grocery shopping and someone had printed a lost dog sign and taped it to a light post. I took a picture of it and did a rubbing of my phone with the picture on it. I remember doing the rubbing and the screen kept moving because it could detect my hand running across it over and over again. I had to keep scrolling back and centering the image to finish the rubbing. This is the ephemerality of our digital lives, reflecting back to the Carrington event itself, how those remains could be gone in an instant.
MH: You quote an art teacher who wouldn’t let you look at the page when you drew: they told you “the information you’re looking for is not on the page.” The message is lost in both the telephone pole and the phone rubbing, but the former seems to hold on to more of its history, some trace of what was there.
CN: There’s an aspect of biomimicry to the form here: the book pulls from treatments for major depressive disorder, especially EMDR, to implicitly induce a left brain and a right brain engagement. I go from the Carrington event to personal reflection or fiction to stage a mimicry of eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy, stimulating both sides of the brain to re-enter memories and reprocess them from a safe temporal distance with a different set of skills, maybe even a different self to look into one’s own past and make sense of it anew. A lot of the book is about the aftermath of loss, not just grief and mourning, but an aberration of mourning that is the form of depression. In that sense, the text is both – in its form and content – an attempt at healing.
MH: This book is so much about process and about processing – now that you’ve moved through it, what is the question you’re asking next?
CN: I think it’s adjacent to the questions I ask in A Solar Flare. This book is about loss, like tracing the finger of your mind over a person-shaped hole in your heart. I should add, I’m 33 weeks pregnant right now, and I did not expect to be when this book came out. So far, so much of my life has been characterized by loss and grief and mourning, and I’m on the vanguard of something that is entirely the opposite. I have a little human inside of me that’s kicking me in the ribs right now, and I’m just thinking about what it means to carry on in an intergenerational way. That feels like the next question: what does it mean to be nursing – nursing a wound of loss, but to keep on living anyways. I’m writing about strings and cords and ropes. What’s the information that comes through a rope? I’m growing this umbilical cord inside of me that’s not quite an organ, but it’s attached to the placenta, which is an organ. I’ve been thinking about the beginning of life at the end of a rope and the end of life at the end of a rope.
Candace R. Nunag holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a literary prose writer whose work is centered on biracial subjectivity and identity; specifically, her work engages with multicultural practices of grief and mourning while also exploring topics like technology, addiction, suicide, and survivorship.
Martha Henzy holds a PhD from the University of Michigan where she researches violence and witness in contemporary literature and visual culture.
Allow Me to Introduce is our recurring feature that makes space for authors to elevate, punctuate, and nuance our reception of the work of artists, writers, and scholars that are worthy of our attention but otherwise underdiscussed. Authors might introduce readers to new works or forthcoming publications, lesser noted themes across an artist’s body of work, or work that emerges form niche and sub-cultural fields that might otherwise escape our attention. This feature can take the form of either an essay about the artist/work or an interview with the artist/writer.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Thumbnail photo by israel palacio on Unsplash