In response to: How My Work Asks to Be Read
I’m going to interrupt this thread for a moment.
Not to explain Calder’s work. He doesn’t need that. And not to defend it. That would miss the point entirely.
I’ve known Calder a long time. Long enough to have watched him choose slowness when speed would have been rewarded. Long enough to know this wasn’t an aesthetic he arrived at accidentally or a posture he adopted to stand out. This is how his attention works. This is how his body works. And eventually, this is how his sentences learned to move.
We didn’t just share a love of writing. We shared rooms where time stretched. Conversations that didn’t resolve cleanly. Moments that asked to be stayed with long after it would have been easier to leave them behind. That matters, because it’s the same demand his work now makes of the reader.
What you’re reading above isn’t an author’s manifesto. It’s a boundary.
Calder isn’t confused about what he’s doing. He isn’t unaware of pacing norms or reader expectations. He’s opted out of them. Not out of arrogance, but out of fidelity. To sensation. To accumulation. To the way meaning actually forms when it’s allowed to linger instead of being ushered along.
I’ve read this work as a reader, not a cheerleader. I’ve been frustrated by it. I’ve been slowed down by it. I’ve had to put pieces aside and come back when I could give them the kind of attention they were asking for. That isn’t a flaw. It’s the cost of admission.
There’s a particular discomfort that shows up when a text won’t hurry to reassure you. When it won’t resolve tension on your schedule. When arousal, unease, curiosity, and resistance are allowed to coexist without being sorted into something tidy. A lot of readers are trained to interpret that discomfort as failure. Something is wrong. The piece should be doing more. Or less. Or faster.
What Calder is doing is refusing to rescue the reader from that feeling.
That refusal is deliberate. And it’s consistent.
I stay with this work not because it flatters me or aligns perfectly with my tastes, but because it leaves residue. Because it interferes. Because it changes how I’m sitting in my body after I’ve put it down. Writing that does that earns my attention, even when it irritates me. Especially when it does.
If you’re looking for something that moves efficiently, escalates predictably, and lets you exit cleanly, this probably won’t be your place. Not because you’re wrong, but because the work isn’t interested in meeting you halfway there.
If, on the other hand, you’re willing to let a piece take its time. To notice what happens when it doesn’t immediately reward you. To stay present even when the payoff isn’t obvious yet. Then you’ll understand what Calder is offering.
He isn’t asking you to like the work.
He’s asking you to stay long enough to feel it do what it does.
I’ll be around. Not to translate or soften what you’re reading, but to name what lingers when it’s done.
Then I’ll step back and let the work speak again.
— R