Novella’s experimental approach shows the world through Kid’s eyes

Harman Burns’s arresting debut, the novella Yellow Barks Spider, is an experimental trans Bildungsroman that follows the protagonist, Kid, through childhood and adolescence into adulthood.

“The book is very much intended to be a manifestation of Kid’s mind, and so everything we see is through his eyes,” she says.

Although there are connections to Burns’s life, it would be a mistake to call this a roman à clef. “I think a part of me was afraid to focus on [Kid’s inner journey],” she says, “both because I worried readers might draw too many assumptions that Kid is some kind of surrogate self-insert on my part (he is not), and also because I worried about how much Kid and I actually do share.

“I understood many parts of Kid’s journey all too well, and I think there were things I needed to personally live through before I could have the hindsight to lower the rope ladder, so to speak – to lift Kid out of the darkness behind me.”

To that end, Burns uses a number of textual experiments including the unconventional naming of the characters according to the way they relate to Kid, rather than with proper names, as well as some passages that are rendered without the standard punctuation, and vignettes that have as much in common with experimental poetry as they have with prose fiction.

“I wanted the text to draw people in, to immerse them, to make them feel, to place them behind Kid’s eyes,” Burns explains. “In order to do this, I also thought about what I called ‘connective tissue,’ meaning the subtle threads that work through the text to tie things together, to connect this to that, to create sub-resonances of meaning across the book.”

Burns’s attentiveness to process, particularly when she talks about the way she worked out the structure of Yellow Barks Spider, is notable.

“Always, the North Star that guided these revisions was the desire to communicate a story,” she says. Revisions included finding and filling in gaps, shuffling the order of segments, and eliminating redundancies.

“I wanted the book to flow as much as possible, to have as few impediments as possible. Any considerations of structure centred on that goal.”

Transness informs not only the plot of Yellow Barks Spider, but it also infuses Burns’s structure and experimental approach more generally. “I’m fascinated by the prefix itself. Trans as a state of flux, of movement, of beyondness, of not-yet-arriving-ness,” she says.

“I think this permeates the formal attitudes and tendencies of the novella: things never quite settle in one place, never quite come to a landing. They shift and shiver and fade, never lingering. The text itself tries to escape traditional formalist structure, trans-ing itself across the page: neither here nor there, not quite capital letters where they ought to be, not quite concrete poetry, et cetera.”

These were not conscious decisions on Burns’s part. “My only goal was to express the ideas and the characters in the way that they came to me as faithfully as possible,” she says. “That, I think, is the simplest expression of my task as a writer.”