The CounterText interview : John Kinsella

Abstract

IC & JC: This interview is occasioned by the publication of your major new work, Hotel Impossible, but it seems inevitable that we should begin by situating this discussion ‘in the time of Covid-19’ (to use the currently ubiquitous Gabriel García Márquez-inspired formulation). For many, the effect of the pandemic and the global response to it seem to have laid bare in a shockingly stark way the inherent vulnerability and unsustainability of social organisation based upon economically and environmentally rapacious capitalism. Given your own longstanding and very vocal activism in this regard, and notwithstanding the terrible suffering Covid-19 has caused, do you feel at all vindicated? Is there, to put it another way, reason for new hope amidst the ruins? And, on a more personal level, how has the pandemic affected you, particularly as a writer? Perhaps you could also reflect on The Fever Chart, which, published in CounterText 6: 1 and written before the pandemic, now seems uncannily prescient.