Author Interview: Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
Tell us a little bit about yourself as an artist/writer:
I’m from Indianapolis, Indiana but I’ve lived in Glasgow, Scotland for over two decades. I’ve struggled to write from a sense of place, which is crucial for me. I’m cut off from my roots and also not rooted from birth in the place I dwell. However, the last two stories I wrote were given to me by local nonhumans in Glasgow. Inchworms and ponds respectively. I asked for the second after I received the first and was granted my request. I’m asking for more. Without demand, with an open heart, and an awareness of tricksters and monkeys’ paws—and that our planet’s stories are not centered on me, or on the species of which I am a member.
What effect has folklore had on the way you see the world?
Folklore is one of a number of arts that provoke me look at the world slant. (Or maybe it just reminds me of the way so many of us already look at the world.) The strange places, events, and beings of folklore tend to make me see space itself as ontologically open, permeable, shifting, a little bit treacherous and a little bit wondrous. The feel of what’s round about—of my body contiguous with and within the panoply of other bodies that make up the world—becomes layered and not a little uncanny from the influence of folklore. You don’t always know when you’re crossing a line into some interstitial or superimposed zone. Sometimes you do know, perhaps, and you proceed anyway. Also, the way folklore thrives across centuries and millennia unhoods time too as a vast unwieldy thing that has teeth in me from long before and long after my individual lifespan.
What was your favourite story growing up?
Being read Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are by my mother is foundational for me. But another story my mother read to me many times was The Three Billy Goats Gruff and it too made an indelible impact. From my grandfather’s homeland of Norway, this folk tale of two wily goats outsmarting a troll under a bridge in order to let the third and largest goat best the troll in combat thrilled me in a way similar to Max encountering monsters on the island of Wild Things. A boy brave enough to dance with monsters and a goat tough enough to battle a monster were sources of awe and delight for me as a kid. These days I wonder more about the troll and his story (the Wild Things too). Why is he so hungry and living under a bridge? Is he evil at his core? Are there benevolent, or just neutral, trolls? I’ve been lucky enough to have some brief visits to Norway and it is very much a landscape that grows trolls. Surely they are numinous harbingers of the land’s animacy and agency as much as any creature more safe for travelers. I realize now that little me loved the monsters every bit as much as the protagonists, human and otherwise, that bested and/or befriended those monsters. Really what the tales meant to me were that monsters are simply a part of existence and there are various strategies for navigating them. (It might be worth mentioning that the very first fictions I read for myself were those of C. S. Lewis and Edgar Allen Poe. So the otherworldly and the grotesque—fantasy and horror—also stamped me from an early age and accented those same qualities already present in folklore.)
What stories help you understand your surroundings and inform the way you interact with the world?
I’m not from Indigenous people myself, but reading both the ‘long ago stories’ and contemporary stories of Native American peoples such as the Cherokee, Kiowa, and Diné (Navajo) help orient my imagination around more-than-human kinship and mystery. In these cycles of stories, humans are enfolded by relatives of all ontological sorts and many of them are strange kin indeed. The web of this kinship, though maternally woven in a certain sense, is also mysterious and complicated. So, while Grandmother Spider in Diné and other Southwestern stories, for example, wills the world into being, Coyote and other tricksters navigate its threads with hilarity, foolery, and craftiness. There is danger, fun, horror, collaboration, and joy in the Kiowa story of trees rescuing sisters from their wear-bear brother and the constellations receiving them into stellar kinship. There is more-than-human pathos in the Cherokee creation story of Water Beetle holding her breath in a deep dive to retrieve a ball of mud from which humans and nonhumans built a habitable world together. Stories such as these remind me that humans are not the only players and the stage itself is alive. We are preceded, surrounded, pervaded, and survived by what is not us and by that which hosts us as long as we last.
Do you see folklore as resistance, and if so, to what?
Yes, today at least, it is resistance to the disenchantment and (thereby) defanging of the world. It (re)imagines our imbrication within the All Things. It evokes humanity as swallowed alive into the variegated mystery. Folklore is complicated, however. For example, it both resists and aids the digitalization of our imaginations. Folklore constantly emphasizes spaces outside our human habitations and that our abodes and cultures subsist within what are wildernesses of evolution in the long run. Yet folklore can be summoned as a powerful energy within the cybernetic, algorithmed, automated, predictive, streaming world of online hyperreality. Here, the global array of local folk stories can be flattened into ‘hero’s journey’ templates that keep us plugged into the virtual pap, getting our hit of formulaic narrative meaning from template to template. Or (especially when made by those outside the cultural hegemony) they can nudge, inspire, and instigate us beyond electronic webs. Folklore can jolt us into looking outward to the biosocial webs that persist even under the weight of the ravenous infrastructures that prop up the digital veneer we’re projecting over the planet’s surface. (The TV show Reservation Dogs is a great example.) Given its polyvalence, folklore must be constantly told, retold, recontextualized, and invented in order to be resistance. (Hence, publications like Folkloric navigate the digital veneer to inhabit and provoke resistance to its smoothing and soothing tendencies.)
What are popular stories lacking today?
Stories of ‘today’—past hundred years or two?—can sometimes lack an ontological adventurousness. (And more recently, the willingness to just go ahead and try using unwieldy phrases like ‘ontological adventurousness’.) Stories often aim at grad school seamlessness and therefore lack the grammatical or conceptual pitfalls that can pitch one into an unexpected crevasse that tunnels into an alien language beneath the syntax. Or they lack the rougher cadences that snag one’s tongue on upcurling roots peopled with beings of another order than the way we think. There’s an understandable aversion to potential clunkiness of prose in our autocorrected, algorithmed, collective imagination, because once your writing has these holes and snarls in it, the narrative becomes susceptible to the same. Characters become unwieldy, situations refuse closure—even that closure we name ‘epiphany’. It’s not that the clunk- susceptible stories go nowhere in their sequence, but that they go unexpected places, ‘unreal’ places, ‘impossible’ places. What really matters, however, is not whether the stories take self- conscious syntactical or narrative risks but whether the sentences and the narratives writhe with soul-energy (from any kind of soul: human or otherwise, biotic or otherwise). Wherever such a story takes you by the end, you were already there in the writing itself.
If you were a cryptid or folkloric creature, which one would you be and why?
Maybe I’d be a Brownie. Except I’m not great at chores. So aside from some halfhearted chopping of wood (which I enjoy until I get bored), I’d leave little poems carved into bark around the place that reflect on the household’s everyday lives. Not as useful as chores, but hopefully humans would find these meaningful and leave me a bowl of ice cream (instead of a bowl of cream).
What do you hope the readers get from your piece?
It’s a humble piece and can only be expected to do so much. I hope readers will be stirred to see something around them they hadn’t robustly perceived before. Perhaps they’ll be touched by something almost impossible to name, which they nevertheless feel in their bones.
What are the themes you are exploring?
I am intuitively exploring precarity—personal, social, and environmental. And the weird magic such precarity opens up, the strange beings that inhabit that unstable material condition. When economic and cultural goods and groundings can’t be relied upon, other ways of being may become foregrounded and sometimes even opted for unconsciously. Then more and more consciously. Systemic inequality and suffering can grow strange fruit that may become part of the undoing of such systems. Some casualties and sacrifices are likely inevitable. Or rather, the casualties and sacrifices that many of us already are may merge into the trajectories of better worlds.
How does your work sit within the wider canon of folklore?
The beings and phenomena of place are ubiquitous in folklore: the kelpies of the lochs and the selkies of the sea and the brownies of rural households to name a few from Scottish lore. What if the big cities too are populated with such beings? In this case, manifesting in the nonhuman presence that persists even in densely built environments. Do they have a message for us? Do they supplant us? Or even plant us?
Read Daniel's story There Will Be a Place For You in our first issue, available now on our website www.folkloricmag.com
You can also follow Daniel on Instagram @danielottojackpetersen
[originally posted to Patreon on 17/9/25]
