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Thinking visual with Douglas Coupland

The latest issue of Granta has an essay by Douglas Coupland about embracing his passion for visual arts in his literary work. And not surprisingly, one of the themes is Coupland’s estrangement from the literary establishment.

I came to realize this fundamental perceptual difference in humanity rather late in the day, perhaps a decade after I began writing novels. Before writing novels I worked as a visual artist and designer, and I naively and romantically assumed that writing precluded the making of visual art. Wrong. To illustrate the result of this assumption, let me provide a generic reconstruction of an interview with me in, say, 1999, just before I figured things out:

Interviewer: So, I read your book and, uh, you’re a visual thinker, aren’t you?

Me: Uh… yes.

Interviewer: (pained silence).

Me: (pained silence).

Interviewer: Yes, your work is so (insert loaded sigh here) visual.

Me (in my head): What is it with this person?

Me (out loud): Well, isn’t everybody a visual thinker? We all have eyes and we all see. How can people not be visual thinkers?

Interviewer: (another sigh).

And there’s the gist of it. I tried for a decade to be a part of the book universe, and the harder I tried, the more I encountered that same feeling that might have been experienced, say, by a black musician walking into a Baltimore country club circa 1955, sitting down at a table and expecting to be served. This is not a very good fit, is it?