Zach Rhodes
Zach's writing starts and ends with presence, seeking to ground our unmoored modern age in a myth for the here and now.
I am just a doorway:
My breath goes out-and-in
And like the humble window ledge
I end where I begin.
I am a simple doorway
An arch of stone and wood
Clothes the very emptiness
That makes my uses good.
And though I am a doorway
I have no lock or key
For you to enter in my mind,
Or soul, there is no fee
There is no long and winding road
Or complex code to solve;
There are no sins that, dragging dirt,
Your scrapings can absolve
Because I’ll lead you nowhere
You’ve not already been. If
On the middle way you wish to stay
Just knock, and enter in.S: Do you think the aim of writing is to be universal?
Zach : That's a difficult question. Some of the greatest writing emerges as a direct response to a particular historical or political moment. Writers such as Orwell or Huxley, for example, were responding to the conditions of their own time, and that specificity is part of what gives their work its power. At the same time, truly great literature often outlives the circumstances that produced it. William Blake wrote out of the political and spiritual concerns of his age, yet his work continues to resonate centuries later. Perhaps the strength of literature lies in this tension. It is rooted in a particular historical moment, yet each generation reinterprets it according to its own experiences. Great art is both historically situated and continually renewed.
S: Do you think highly subjective writing can also become universal? And if so, how does a writer deal with ego? Does writing need a direct political aim? Finally, who is your audience?
Zach: I don't think every piece of writing needs a predetermined aim. Like art more generally, it can emerge before the artist fully understands what it is trying to express. I've become increasingly interested in mindful approaches to writing. One of the poems I shared, The Doorway, grew out of the experience of sitting down to write and finding myself completely uninspired. Rather than resisting that emptiness, I discovered that it became the subject of the poem itself. Sometimes having nothing to say is itself a valuable creative state. Inspiration often arrives when you stop trying to force it. The question of ego is more complicated. On one hand, ego can obstruct creativity by trying to direct everything towards a fixed objective. On the other, it is also the medium through which experience becomes expression. The self provides the boundaries through which ideas enter the world, yet those very boundaries can reveal how interconnected self and world really are.
S: So subjectivity itself can become universal?
Zach: Ideally, yes. The most personal writing often becomes the most universal. How that transformation happens remains something of a mystery. If there were a clear formula, anyone could simply follow it and become an artist. The moments when I've produced what feels like my strongest work have been moments when I stop trying to control the process. Everything seems to converge—the circumstances around me, my own internal life—and I become less the author than a kind of conduit. I often think of it like an hourglass. The writing passes through you rather than originating entirely from you. In that sense, the ego isn't something to eliminate; it's simply the vessel through which experience becomes language.
S: And who do you imagine you're writing for?
Zach: Lately I've been thinking a great deal about the disappearance of shared myths in modern society. For much of history, cultures possessed overarching narratives that helped people understand their place in the world. In the modern West, particularly after what Nietzsche described as the "death of God," the dominant myth became that of the autonomous individual—the idea that fulfilment comes through personal success and self-determination.
I think that story is beginning to lose its persuasive power. People increasingly feel disconnected from institutions, uncertain about work, and unsure of what role they occupy in society. Developments such as artificial intelligence have only intensified that uncertainty by challenging assumptions about what it means to be uniquely human. Because of that, I'd say my audience consists of people who feel fragmented—people searching for meaning but unable to find a narrative that genuinely speaks to their experience. Ultimately, I'd like my writing to contribute to the creation of a modern myth. Not a doctrine or ideology, but a story capable of reconnecting people with a sense of presence, meaning, and belonging that emerges from lived experience rather than inherited systems of belief.
S: In the present moment, do you think people's curiosity about others is fading? It often feels as though our attention has become increasingly inward-looking. If that's true, what role can writing still play? Do you still believe writing has the power to create myths?
Zach: I think it's true that we've become more self-absorbed than ever before. Much of contemporary culture encourages us to focus on our own identity, our own psychology, and our own internal struggles. The growing mental health crisis reflects this tendency to turn inward rather than outward. Part of that is understandable. The unknown has always been unsettling, and other people inevitably represent something we can't fully control or understand. It's often easier to retreat into a stable sense of identity—to build what feels like a secure image of who we are—and observe the world from behind it. But identity is also necessary. The ego creates the distinction between self and other that allows us to function socially. The problem comes when we mistake that distinction for an absolute separation. I think the deeper task is learning to recognise that the people we experience as "other" are ultimately expressions of the same reality we ourselves belong to. Every individual is another perspective through which the universe experiences itself. Writing, at its best, can remind us of that shared condition.
S: English literature often seems preoccupied with class and the deconstruction of power. Whether it's Dickens or contemporary criticism, class appears unavoidable. How do you position yourself in relation to that tradition?
Zach: I've often been uneasy with approaches to literature that reduce every work to questions of identity or power. There is value in examining texts through those lenses, but they can become limiting when they begin to override everything else the work is trying to do. Sometimes contemporary criticism judges historical works almost exclusively according to present-day moral frameworks. While that can produce important insights, it also risks replacing the complexity of literature with our own assumptions. A character should be allowed to exist as a character, rather than functioning only as evidence for a political argument. Otherwise we risk reproducing the very categories we're attempting to dismantle. Literature deserves to be approached first as an encounter with another consciousness before it becomes an example within a theoretical framework.
S: Do you think writing, for you, is a form of escapism or confrontation?
Zach: Confrontation, without question. Writing is difficult for me. Every time I sit down to write, I'm confronted by my own ambitions, my limitations, and the ideas that have been circling inside me waiting to take shape. It demands honesty in a way that very little else does. At its best, though, writing no longer feels like a struggle. It becomes a release—a movement rather than an effort. Instead of forcing words onto the page, it feels as though something is simply flowing through me. That flow, however, only exists because there is resistance. Creation depends upon opposition. William Blake speaks about what he calls the "contraries": the idea that without opposition there can be no progression. Light and darkness, joy and suffering, self and other—these tensions don't merely interrupt life; they generate it. Without them, everything would collapse into sameness. I think writing works in much the same way. You need something to push against. Conflict isn't simply an obstacle to creativity—it is one of its conditions.
S: Throughout our conversations, I've noticed that you often return to the question of suffering. It seems to be one of the central concerns behind your writing. How has your own experience of suffering shaped your work?
Zach: I think the strongest impulse to write has almost always come during periods of suffering. When something is deeply painful, it demands expression. Writing becomes a way of allowing that experience to move through you rather than remaining trapped inside. There's probably a reason so many poets write about heartbreak. Love, loss, grief—these experiences expose something fundamental about what it means to be human. They force us to confront our dependence on others, our vulnerability, and our desire for connection. Those experiences become difficult not simply because they hurt, but because they raise questions we can't easily answer.
S: You once mentioned something a friend told you that stayed with you. Could you explain it?
Interviewee: He said, "The words behind the pain create the suffering. The pain itself is just pain." At first I didn't fully understand what he meant. Over time I realised that suffering isn't identical to pain. Pain is immediate; it's simply an experience. Suffering is the story we build around that experience. It's the narrative we repeat to ourselves—the explanations, the regrets, the imagined futures—that prevent the experience from passing. Those stories keep pain alive long after the original event has ended. When we stop identifying with the narrative, we're finally able to experience pain directly. Paradoxically, that often allows it to dissolve.
S: So writing becomes a way of examining those stories?
Zach: Exactly. Writing gives those narratives a form outside yourself. Instead of unconsciously living inside them, you can begin to observe them. Sometimes that observation transforms them. Sometimes it reveals that the story you've been telling yourself isn't actually true. The aim isn't necessarily to eliminate suffering. It's to see it clearly enough that it no longer defines your relationship to reality.