Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Steve Erickson.

His most recent novel is Our Ecstatic Days.

It's published by Simon & Schuster.

He is the author as well of several other novels,

beginning with Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Arctex, Amesiascope,

The Sea Came in at Midnight. Two of his earlier novels, Days Between Stations, and Tours of the Black Clock have been republished in paperback by Simon and Schuster.

Now, whereas some novels are addressed to the head and some novels are addressed to the heart and emotions.

I think that Steve Erickson's novels are addressed to the unconscious and to our dreaming state.

And in order to have us respond from these depths, he's invented all kinds of writing techniques that help

displace the so-called intelligent mind to move into the realm of intuition first and then a kind of

deep, unconscious area. What are some of the ways in which these books move the reader into that strange and largely unexplored place?

Well, I think, Michael, that a lot of it comes out of the way I write the books.

I don't know that I consciously set out to write unconscious dream-like books, although I agree with that characterization, and I think most people do.

These are sort of the books that, for whatever reason reason come naturally to me. And I don't,

you know, I'm always careful, at least in the early writing, not to overthink it too much. I will

start with a situation or an image in my head. In the case of the new novel, you've got a single mother who's living in Los Angeles in the early 20th century.

...