Monday, May 16, 2022

Blog Tour: Dark Factory Interview With Kathe Koja

 


We're happy to help Meerkat Press support the release of their latest title Dark Factory by participating in their blog tour. And if you're at all into winning free stuff, they're running a giveaway where you can potentially win a $50 book shopping spree.

Click here to enter!





Dark Factory is Kathe Koja’s new immersive novel from Meerkat Press, that brings together Kathe’s award-winning fiction and her experience producing live events, to create an experience for the reader that takes place on the page (and ebook and audio), and onsite at https://darkfactory.club/ where readers are invited to be part of the party.

Marfa Carpenter is a freelance culture journalist for Blog Out, Daisychain, Excelsior, Artfetish, and Journal of Daily Pop. She interviews various Dark Factory makers and regulars, as well as a philosophy professor, a sound designer, a tattoo artist, an editor/arts journalist, and more. Recently, she interviewed Kathe Koja.

 

Q:  Can you dance?

A: I can! I love to dance. And I’m a Detroit native, so, techno.

 

Q: How long have you been wanting, or planning, to write about the club scene?

A: I never actually plan out any of my work, what I’m going to work on next, I follow my nose, my instincts and interests; for every writer, there must be a thousand possible projects out there, waiting to exist. And since everything I write starts with someone I see in my mind’s eye, that person ends up bringing the world of that story in with them. Then I start researching, then writing.

That said, the club scene, any club, is such a rich landscape to reimagine and write about, it’s nighttime, it’s playtime, everyone is trying to present their most engaging persona while the atmosphere, the drinks and drugs and whatever, open up all the inner doors. And everyone is there hoping that something amazing will happen. The dancefloor is very much like life.

 

Q: Is an immersive novel still 100% fiction, or is it closer to a creative documentary? Or is it something else?

A: The whole concept of immersion—and I learned this making all kinds of live events, in all sorts of real-world settings, in a Victorian mansion, a historic church, in art galleries—immersion means going so deeply into the story being presented to you that it becomes your minute-to-minute reality, it is the world you’re living in. And readers have been achieving that experience forever with books. So making a novel that expands its narrative into the real world seems like something that always should have existed, and now it can.

 

Q: Then how do you define reality?

A: Reality defines us, I think.

 

Q: That’s a pretty easy answer to a pretty hard question. Elaborate, if you can.

A: Reality has been operational long before human beings arrived on the scene, and will operate long after we’re gone. Asking for our definition, my definition, of reality, is like asking a word what it thinks of the dictionary.   

 

Q: Does this story have an end, then?

A: That’s for its readers to decide.

 

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DARK FACTORY by Kathe Koja

Out May 10, 2022

Speculative Fiction | SciFi | LGBT | Literary


Welcome to Dark Factory! You may experience strobe effects, Y reality, DJ beats, love, sex, betrayal, triple shot espresso, broken bones, broken dreams, ecstasy, self-knowledge, and the void.

Dark Factory is a dance club: three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club's wild card floor manager, Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing a vision of true reality. And rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max to the edge of the ultimate experience.

Dark Factory is Kathe Koja’s wholly original new novel from Meerkat Press, that combines her award-winning writing and her skill directing immersive events, to create a story that unfolds on the page, online, and in the reader's creative mind.

Join us at DarkFactory.club. The story has already begun.

 BUY LINKS:  Meerkat Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble




ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and produces immersive fiction performances, both solo and with a rotating ensemble of artists. Her work crosses and combines genres, and her books have won awards, been multiply translated, and optioned for film and performance. She is based in Detroit and thinks globally. She can be found at kathekoja.com.

 

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