You have used several structural devices in your novels, the diary in Petroleum Man, the domestic manual in Some Instructions to My Wife, as well as the ship’s log in Mrs. Unguentine. What makes these frameworks so appropriate to your fiction?

Two points. Sartre said something to the effect that history had stripped us of the right to assume the position of the god-like omniscient narrator hovering over the action as if he has nothing to do with it except tell the story. From this it follows that the narrator must be part of the story, which he can be telling to someone for stated or for ulterior motives, or both, or confiding to himself (or herself, in the case of Log) in order to make some sense of what has befallen herself or simply to leave a record of events. An audience, sometimes specific, sometimes shadowy or indefinite, is posited, someone other than “the reader” of conventional omniscient narration. That said, I must say that I can enjoy a well-constructed novel told by an omniscient narrator as well as anyone, and many great novels have been written this way. As a writer I may simply not have the confidence to assume such narrative certainty.

~ Stanley Crawford @ Bookslut
(via Matt Bell)

I’ve just read and enjoyed Mrs Unguentine this week, and Some Instructions and A Garlic Testament (the first I read of Crawford) are longtime favorites. What I think I like so much is his balance between the ridiculous and the realistic — both in his moves between obsessive, exaggerated fiction and earthy, agricultural nonfiction, but also within each individual work.