GB: Alexis André pointed out to me that my work is mentioned in the Oulipo Compendium, and if one is allowed to be proud I am proud of that. I have always been fond of working with potential literature or whatever you call it. I think that Victor Coleman and I have been doing hat for decades. My novel, Harry's Fragments, for example. In the year 1985 I was overseas a lot, travelling Australia, then being writer in residence for a month in Rome, then teaching for a semester in Berlin. While I was travelling I wrote a novel. It is a translation of the Fragments of Heraclitus. Every evening I would take the next fragment and translate it into a chapter of my ongoing novel. The site of action for the novel also had to be where i was that day, the Vatican, for example. It is a spy novel, and it involves Thai restaurants and a transgendered East German athlete. When you restrict your production this way you can
come up with some wonderful moments. Spy novels in the 80s liked to take place in Berlin with the wall and all. It so happened that I made my first crossover to East Berlin on the day that I had to translate Heraclitus's famous statement that "The way up is the way down." I found out that day that while there were three ways to get into East Berlin, you were compelled to come back the same way you had gone there.

DM: Where do you think the writer is located in “potential
literature”? Does the writer only act as a kind of portal for its
entry into the world, essentially a witness to it as the eventual
reader will be? I mean, does the ego (or spirit) of the writer
inhabit that kind of work the way it does in lyrics and other
writing?