An Interview with Cavar Sarah
in tandem with SSBA
What’s it been like for you these last several months? Feel free to share your publication journey, discuss the amount of labor it took in regards to your project’s editing process, the delirious nature of third drafts, or that one late night you spent staring into a glass of wine, wondering if it’d ever truly come together.
Failure to Comply ’s official publication date was in September of 2024, though I began touring/some limited distribution in August. That was the culmination of, all told, over seven years of work, between many drafts, many edits, and many queries and pitches. I remember remarking to some writer-friends on how quiet, how anticlimactic it felt, not because it wasn’t a big deal, but because the actual impact of a book’s release is…if we’re using a lake metaphor, let’s say, less a cannonball and more a skipping stone.
The book started as a short story in a now-defunct magazine. When the story refused to leave me alone (as stories often do) I realized that I had no choice but to do something with it. I started writing, sometimes specific scenes, sometimes poems, often random thoughts and lines that didn’t make a lot of sense. When I chose to commit to this novel – around 2018, after a little over a year of futzing around with it – I chose to commit to writing every day, no matter what. The variety of things that I wrote, from whole, coherent scenes to random bullshit, became my lifeline, especially as someone who at the time had no formal creative writing training: I started this story/novel when I was seventeen and a freshman in college! I was pretty virginal in my relationship to “craft.” This opened up a lot of doors for me – I did unconventional things simply because I didn’t know better.
Because Failure is fundamentally a glitchy, mixed up work – an opaque one, one that fucks with spacetime and identity and generic expectations – I was fortunate enough to be able to use a lot of these weird sentences/moments in the final cut. Many more were left behind in editing, of course, especially because the person who reviewed final edits was a twenty-five-year-old almost done with their PhD, not a teenager! Yet it was and remains important to me to keep Failure to Comply an archive of the process that I, the primary narrator of the text, and I, author, went through on their way to this moment: the first Trump administration; battling insurance (and, this time temporarily, dreams of suicide) for access to gender-affirming healthcare; COVID; moving cross-country; becoming more disabled; the rapid escalation of global fascism too few have taken seriously until far too late.
I know that this was supposed to be a question about craft, but I am struck by the shadow contemporary political forces cast on “craft” work. Palestinian poet Noor Hindi wrote a poem whose title sums up my perspective: Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying. The more events I attend, the more times I am asked to speak about Failure to Comply, the more explicitly “political” (though again, craft is always and already political) I become. No conversation about my book is complete without one on fascism, on eugenics, on genocide, on white supremacy. Not only because these are the conceptual frameworks upon which I’ve based RSCH, the medical totalitarian entity that governs “normal” life within Failure. But because these frameworks govern and work to end our lives, and I am nothing as a writer unless I demand, with every fiber of my being, that we stay alive.
Share freely any publication news you may have, and please include any links you’d like us to include.
My latest chapbook, co-written with beloved colleague/collaborator ulysses/constance bougie, will be out at the end of March.
It’s called how we sheep, and I guess I’d describe it as neuroqueer theory-erotic oulipo poetry? It’s something, that’s for sure. You can pre-order it from Ethel Press, and there’s an option to bundle it with my first chapbook through Ethel, Out of Mind & Into Body.
I also have an interview in Honey Literary with Diamond Forde, a transcription of one of my early Failure to Comply events in August, at Firestorm Books. You can order a copy of the book directly from Firestorm, and I recommend it – they’ve been pivotal in helping people secure food and supplies in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
In two sentences, would you summarize your novel for us?
Failure to Comply is an experimental science fiction novel set in a world in which language is architecture, and architecture is law. It follows a “deviant” self-hacker to the depths of medical fascism and back to regain their stolen memories, reunite with their lover, and (maybe) restore their identity.
You’ve mentioned in correspondence that mental health is featured throughout your novel. Was this something that you came into your project knowing you wanted to discuss? If so, did you set any parameters in place for yourself around how you wanted to approach this sensitive subject?
Typically, I don’t describe my work as addressing “mental health” per se –– all work does, after all, so long as it’s addressing someone’s interiority. I prefer to be specific, and typically identify my work as Mad, disabled, and/or focusing on themes of disability and Madness. I use “Mad” with a capital M to suggest a political valence to the term, connected with decades of anti-psychiatry and anti-institutionalization movements worldwide, as well as contemporary efforts to decenter psychiatric framings of “health,” “sanity,” and “personhood.” I consider Madness, for me, to be a way of thinking and knowing, and also a kind of technology, or perhaps a grammar. Madness (or what I describe in the context of myself as Madness) moves me to think in non-normative ways, at non-normative times.
This can be destructive to me, just as it can be to my Mad characters, whose relationships to their respective psyches are very central to Failure to Comply: both are deeply traumatized by systemic medical abuse and abandonment, by the carceral demands of a society in which an undesirable bodymind is punishable by death. Sound familiar? I, the primary narrator, copes with this in a variety of often-“unhealthy” ways: disordered eating, self-injury, suicide attempts, seeking out risky back-alley surgeries and poisonous foods mostly for the thrill. This stuff sounds extreme to some, whether in the text or in real life. I don’t think it is. I think that in a world in which our bodily autonomy is so constrained by the circumstances of our birth, seeking autonomy in one of the only ways we can – through self-harm, however that manifests – is a very reasonable reaction. Part of identifying with Madness is, for me, being someone and surrounding myself with others who understand the ways we treat ourselves and the thoughts that get us there not as individual pathological problems to be exorcised by doctors, but as reactions to material conditions that deprive us of agency.
I hate that I need to clarify this, but I will: this book (and this interview) is not me condoning self-harm for the sake of political, or politicized, Madness. Quite the opposite: I’d much prefer to live in a world in which our autonomy as oppressed people was without question, and we could seek out psychological and social support at any time without fear of punishment/incarceration. But that isn’t the world we live in, and it certainly isn’t the world of Failure to Comply: what these worlds share is the sense that to access a modicum of Mad freedom is to coexist with risk, danger, and harm. It means sacrificing preexisting images of health – including the much-valorized ‘mental health’! – in order to show up for oneself and others.
As for parameters (and I’ll elaborate on this in the following answer) I refuse trauma-porn and inspiration-porn. No unnecessary grotesque scenes of suffering, no cure/recovery rhetoric. I am only one Mad author, so what I can do is write Madness and Mad community formation as I know it to be, not glossing over instances of harm and pain and fear and rage and heartbreak, but also not sensationalizing or advertising these things to satisfy the rubbernecking reader. I find this especially important when discussing practices of self-harm and/or disordered eating: these can simultaneously become political acts of resistance for those that take them on, and be dangerous practices that reinforce social norms regarding who is worthy of having a body, who is worthy of taking up space. The thing about a novel is, unless you’re writing a very particular kind of novel (and probably a bad one) you’re not just there on your soapbox talking about the nuances of embodied protest. Instead, you (I’ll talk about myself here) are responsible for creating characters and worlds robust enough to withstand the danger of Mad practices, and to gain from readers enough trust that, when we come upon scenes of pain and distress, they will understand why I’ve taken them there.
Of course, there are also readers who are not interested at all in coming on this journey, right now or ever. That’s why content warnings are so important not only as courtesy but as a form of accessibility for Mad/psychiatrically disabled people. I really, really don’t tolerate clowns who claim content warnings are somehow ruining literature. Like, you think a quick head’s up before reading is going to irrevocably taint your reading experience? Now who’s the snowflake?! Anyway, I sent the good people at StoryGraph a list of “author-approved” content warnings for Failure’s listing over there, so if you as a reader are considering picking up the book, feel free to check them out.
What is something you’d like readers to take away from your work in regard to mental health advocacy, discussion, or criticism?
Last fall, the work of imagining, of getting to know characters in a landscape both very familiar and very alien, of (in my drafting stages) committing to getting something on paper every single day were suddenly no longer fully in my custody. In the same way, part of publishing a book is letting go of what I want readers to take away, and engaging with what they do take – after all, they’re now co-creators of the story!
That being said, I am hoping that Failure (and with my future books, including novel #2, which my agent and I are working hard at revising!) and books like it can open more space for depictions of Madness that are neither trauma-porn nor inspiration-porn. I don’t need to see more grotesque misery or recovery in my books; in both cases, disability and Madness have endpoints. Recovery or death. For most of us, Madness is durational. It ebbs and flows. We don’t get rid of it, and often, we don’t want to. I want to write and read more books about living into the weird and uncomfortable ways our brains work, without this imperative to “fix” fucked up characters or, alternatively, narratively punish them.
While, again, I can’t force audiences to get that (nor to perceive certain actions within the narrative in a particular way) I think there’s value in exposing people to Mad practices that simply are. Not to be fixed, not to be judged, and not even to be doomed. This is just how people live, whether we’re in a weird futuristic society or just next door.
Anything else you’d like to share or for us to share on your behalf?
Yes! I’ll be at AWP in LA this year. You can find me signing copies of Failure to Comply at 11 am on Friday the 28th at featherproof’s booth (T1147).
Friday night from 6-8, I’ll be co-hosting A Night of Trans Horror with C.D. Eskilson at Creature Comforts Brewing. RSVP here (it’s free, of course) if you’re interested!
Drop any social media or website links you’d like us to link to in the interview.
My website: www.cavar.club
IG: @cavarchives
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cavar.bsky.social
Newsletter: https://librarycard.beehiiv.com