Douglas W. Milliken’s Enclosure Architect is boldly told novel of personal creativity and universal civil unrest.
Meghan Gilliss wrote of the book:
“Fascinating, strange, and buoyed by a narrative voice that is both somehow floating above the action yet thoroughly grounded in detail . . . there are moments of absolute poetry.”
In his own words, here is Douglas W. Milliken’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Enclosure Architect:
So much of Enclosure Architect was born out of a pervasive ache for my friends (a longing that would only grow more acute just months after the fifth and “final” draft was completed when COVID descended to teach us all new depths of loneliness). I grew up in a very rural place where, as a survival mechanism against the overwhelming proto-MAGA culture, nearly all aspects of my true personality had to be either suppressed or cloaked in furious bravado. As a result, mine was a pretty friendless adolescence, but that began to change when I attended Alfred University, where I fell in with a group of kids (mostly art students) just as gonzo as me and who kinda insisted that we were friends whether I liked it or not. It was strange and startling and more than a little dizzying to suddenly have a community, close-knit and wild with creative energy. My people had found me, held me close in their embrace. Yet time progresses, degrees are attained and folks drift apart. Some get married and some get disappeared and some get dead yet their memory—their emotional imprint—persists. Later I moved to an arts-centric coastal city and made more weirdo artist friends, found myself once again gradually absorbed into a strange and caring community. Yet still, again, the cycle repeats, continues to repeat. Nothing is unusual about this. But that doesn’t make it any easier, to love and be loved by somebody then watch them fade away. After a year marked by multiple significant losses to disease and suicide, Enclosure Architect was my unapologetic deep-dive into that feeling of community, how it’s cherished and how it’s lost. This playlist, in various ways, likewise reflects that experience.
Joan of Arc – “Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor?”
This song could easily be the soundtrack to my entire junior year of college. When my friends and I roved as a pack between the arts building and two off-campus rentals that acted as our unspoken clubhouses. When it was always snowing and I skidded goofy everywhere on the sheer black ice until the sole of my right boot wore down to nothing just in time for spring’s soaking deluge and muck. When everyone was giddy with sleeplessness from working transfixed through the night in the print studio or the glass hot shop or the electronic-arts lab or their bedroom recording sad songs on a Tascam four-track or glitchy computer. When unheated apartments grew warm with bodies gathered close, the sound of laughter pealing from another room. When everything was art and everything was absurd. This is not a party song but what I see is a party, muted and unfurling in a montage of faces, eyes bright and mouths purple with cheap red wine as we packed ourselves into grimy rooms to celebrate whatever. It’s a sense of togetherness that I wanted the characters in my novel to share. I wanted them all to feel this same insular love before time and circumstance wrenched them apart.
Califone – “Michigan Girls”
I lived for five years in a valley town that surely must have had some sunny days, but what I remember is a place defined by wet. Deep snow or weeks of drizzle. The same creek muttering behind three of the four buildings I inhabited, its throaty night-songs percolating through my dreams while the rain etched an ad hoc network of tiny river systems sluicing down the hillsides. Eaves dripping like the plink of violin strings while the weather obscured everything, nothing and no one known for sure until they arrived mist-sheened right before you.
Serengeti – “Karate”
How many foggy car windows and bus windows and train windows have I tipped my brow against, toward or away from some cherished company while a restless form of sleep comes and goes, the world seeming to slow to a half-speed quaver so that what I see and what I dream and what I remember blur into a Super 8 home movie where every face is unfamiliar yet I’m certain it’s some tragic version of my chosen family flickering between the frames?
Ben Trickey – “I’m Losing”
Ben was a graduate electronic-arts student when I was an undergrad. We both executed different versions of brooding darkness in our twenties, but the truth is we’re both silly cat-loving suckers who cry when songs are too pretty. Like this one, which he wrote back in our youthful cigarettes-and-coffee college days, and more than twenty years later, it still wrecks me, how he so succinctly captures feeling alone when someone you love is right there in the same room. I don’t miss the feeling. It’s the lonesome company I miss.
Busdriver – “Worlds to Run” (feat. milo and Anderson .Paak)
Regan Farquhar (Busdriver) and Rory Ferreira (milo/Scallops Hotel/R.A.P. Ferreira/etc.) have long topped my list of favorite weirdo hip-hop guys, and when they work together, all of their individual strengths uniquely amplify. Each armed with a singular linguistic bombast, their raps can swing from gasping hilarity to devastating reality-checks from one line to the next. Yet it’s the mental space examined in “Worlds to Run” that the narrator of Enclosure Architect often finds herself in, simultaneously feeling capable yet destined for failure regardless of her endeavor. Like a couple of former wunderkind aware of their age while running out of the basic necessities of clean clothes and toilet paper.
Agustín Lara – “Noche de Ronda”
I first learned of Agustín Lara—whose voice plays a crucial role in the novel—while in a low-key sort of brothel where my friend Carmina (who I met while we were both artists-in-residence at the I-Park Foundation) took me on my last night visiting her in Mexico City. In the upstairs barroom—red-walled and dim—men would pay women for a slow dance or two on a spot-lit swath of parquet, then later retire to a room out back. There was something oddly sweet about the adolescent nervousness embedded in the transaction. While we sat and drank and watched the couples dance, I noticed a face stenciled in black on one wall, sorrowful and handsome with a scar extending the line of his mouth in a swoop across his left cheek. This, Carmina explained, was Agustín Lara, in many ways the voice of a certain era in Mexico. I do not recall there being any other faces stenciled on the walls, no artistic flourishes at all. Just this one lovelorn face outlined in black. In a moment Carmina rose and at the jukebox, cued up one of his songs. The dance floor was empty as we had our valedictory slow dance the night before I returned home to the States, silly and sweet while the eyes of others watched from the dark surrounding, Agustín Lara crooning ardently about something I’ll never understand.
Owls – “Everyone is My Friend”
While most of the songs on this playlist touch in some way on the sorrow of being far removed from certain loved ones, “Everyone is My Friend” strikes a rare note of child-like jubilance tie-dyed with anxiety. Like the moment you realize that everything you’ve worried over is out of your hands and always has been, leaving you no other recourse but to rejoice in the futility of ever attempting control, messy and unselfconscious in an overflow of love and absurdity, voice whinging out of key as you dance like a broken marionette.
Brandon Schmitt – “One More Sad Song”
There’s a moment of (very) dark comedy in the novel wherein someone gives the narrator “a black canvas sack with a naked baby doll inside, wrapped in chains with its eyes X’d out.” This was an actual Christmas “gift” I one time received, horribly inappropriate yet—with my long hair, black trench coat, edge-lord posture, and perpetual scowl-verging-on-a-snarl—not completely off-the-mark. Brandon Schmitt was the gift-giver, seeing clearly through (and consequently commenting upon) my macho veneer. Just another big baby playing dress-up as a baddie. It was likely this moment of revelatory absurdity when I realized that he and I were friends.
Lungfish – “Shed the World”
The novel opens with a summation of days defined by ecstasy and squalor, when every act was an act of freedom because all vestments of regular life—employment, schedules, responsibilities, permanent address—had been shed to near completion. The liberty of dispossession was never meant to last. But that’s okay. Its loss just one more thing to shed.
Bill Callahan – “Too Many Birds”
For those familiar with this song, you know that commentary is beyond pointless. For those unfamiliar: I don’t know if any songwriter has more effectively captured the feeling of being pushed to the outside, of there being no room to join in. Everyone gathered together one last time before imminent migration. Everyone but you allowed into the glowing warmth at their center.
Hemlock Ernst – “Less Unsettled”
And thus we circle back to the original impetus for the novel. Specific memories of people who no longer exist. All laughter tinged by a degree of trauma. Everything good blurred a little at the edges with time and misuse. Even the worst days something to fiercely yearn for.
Douglas W. Milliken is a Maine composer, artist, and writer who, drawing from personal experience, examines intersecting themes of addiction, mental health, sexual ambiguity/fluidity, poverty, and trauma. The author of two novels—To Sleep as Animals and Our Shadows’ Voice—and the collection Blue of the World, he is also a founding member of the post-jazz chamber septet The Plaster Cramp, as well as the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and honors from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Glimmer Train, and RA & Pin Drop Studios, among others.