“Primacy” is the most accessible and in some ways the least irreal of the three plays. I propose to add something to this portrait of Wilson as I talk about his plays because I find in them a search for meaning and insight into the ways the means can revolt against the ends that add to my view of Wilson as a genuinely irreal writer. David Vichnar, in an essay about Wilson published at 3:AM Magazine, has this to say about bizarro fiction and Wilson’s writing in general: “ome critics have been cited as calling him ‘a genre in himself.’ That’s lazy, though, for in the best spirit of the avant-garde business, Wilson has helped to cofound and shape the movement & aesthetics of ‘bizarro fiction,’ a mélange of elements of absurdism, satire, and the grotesque, along with genre fiction staples (sci-fi, fantasy, horror) aiming to create subversive, weird, and above all entertaining works, and defined as ‘literature’s equivalent to the cult section at the video store.’ In Wilson’s hands, bizarro is a sometimes extreme, sometimes (hyper-)exaggerated, sometimes flippant, almost always blackly humorous critique of what our lives have become.” Vichnar considers Wilson’s anti-literary avant-gardist approach to writing to be a purposeful effort to undermine the fetishized nature of literature and literary writers in this stage of late capitalism. According to his bio, he is also one of the co-founders of bizarro fiction.

Ballard, and he is a professor of English at Wright State University. Wilson is the author of biographies, fiction collections, novels, and criticism, including Modern Masters of Science Fiction: J.G. I first read Wilson’s collection of Three Plays when we published “Primacy,” and I decided to re-read the plays during Our Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe. Wilson’s story “ Giraffe” was included in our print anthology, The Irreal Reader - Fiction and Essays from The Cafe Irreal (Guide Dog Books 2013), and in May of 2016, one of his plays, “ Primacy,” appeared in Issue #58.

We published his story “ Circus” in Issue #3 (which went online nineteen years ago, in February of 2000), and his work has appeared on our site five additional times since then.

Harlan Wilson has been a regular at The Cafe Irreal for a very long time.

Freud by D. Harlan Wilson