BY G CONNOR SALTER

Dr. Gregory Coles (PhD, Penn State) wonders what it means to fit in when the usual categories don’t fit. Born in New York, he moved to Indonesia with his missionary parents and grew up on the island of Java. After moving to America for college, he became a church worship leader and published two memoirs. Single, Gay, Christian explored the Christian theology of sex and celibacy, but was equally about language’s limitations for creating labels for sexuality. No Longer Strangers explored some of those questions further but also delved into cultural labels, like what it means to be an American raised in Asia and now living in America. What do we do when we exist between the words?

His academic work has explored some of these same questions. His PhD thesis, “Advantageous Incapacities: Reading the Margins with Kenneth Burke,” considered how marginalized groups use language, how labels’ meanings vary and evolve. His essays in Rhetorica, College English, and a co-authored article with Cheryl Glenn on silence (included in Qualitative Studies of Silence edited by Amy Jo Murray and Kevin Durrheim) explore other ways in which people on the margins use (or don’t use) language to describe their stories.

Recently, Coles has published fiction that considers language through a speculative lens. His first novel, The Limits of My World, imagines two worlds. The underworld is populated by people who consider themselves human but rely on exoskeletons and complex machines for everything. Kanan and Tei have lived in the underworld as long as they can remember and have no words to describe any outside world. However, surprising events lead them to learn about the overworld, populated by beings who don’t need machines to survive. Kanan and Tei realize their vocabulary is growing as they explore their new knowledge… but will the new knowledge mean learning things about their world that are best kept secret?

Coles was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Interview Questions

First of all, congratulations on your first novel. How does it feel to have reached this milestone?

Thanks! Releasing this novel feels a bit like returning to a childhood home after years abroad. Fiction was my first love. In my younger years, I mercilessly mocked nonfiction, declaring the vast majority of it too dull or preachy to be worth reading. While I’ve grown to appreciate what memoir, exposition, and academic writing can accomplish—or, at least, what I hope they can accomplish, given my work along these lines in the last decade—I never abandoned the hope that I’d eventually publish a novel. Perhaps I’m a bit like a literary prodigal child, stumbling back to my roots after a long sojourn, ignominiously barefoot and dust-covered, with no promise of how long I’ll stay. Even so, it’s good to be home!

When did you start writing fiction?

At nine years old, I read Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques and found myself deeply dissatisfied by the ending. Naturally, I started writing a fanfiction sequel that would “fix” the errant conclusion. Three years and ten chapters later, I decided that, if I was going to pour my heart into writing an entire book, I should own the intellectual property to what I was writing so I could attempt to publish it. (I was apparently very pragmatic at the ripe old age of twelve.) That was the end of my fanfiction career, and the beginning of everything that followed.

Your first memoir mentioned your love of C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle. How have they influenced your work or your writing?

Lewis and L’Engle each get partial credit for persuading me that storytelling is often the best way to communicate spiritual truth. Of course, both authors also wrote wonderful theological nonfiction; L’Engle’s Walking on Water is one of my all-time favorite explorations of Christian art. But far more significant for my life of faith were books like Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and L’Engle’s The Arm of the Starfish—books that brought narrative life to some of my biggest spiritual questions. Instead of offering mere answers, these books portrayed a faith that could only be properly thought of by being lived. They invited me into story-shaped encounters with a storytelling God. (Perhaps it’s no surprise that Jesus favored parables over straightforward answers, much to the chagrin of his question-asking contemporaries.)

I used to joke with friends that my reason for getting a PhD in English was to become as much like C.S. Lewis as possible. I am, to be sure, nowhere near Lewis’s or L’Engle’s level as a storyteller. But I hope I write stories that join the same river as theirs, caught up in the same current, gently tugging those who read them toward a Truth as massive and inevitable as the ocean.

Outside of those two authors, are there any fantasy or sci-fi authors who have especially influenced you?

One of my earliest dystopian reads was Lois Lowry’s Newberry Medal winner The Giver. I was only vaguely aware of Lowry’s influence as I wrote The Limits of My World, but it’s easy in retrospect to see deep resonances between the two. Both stories are concerned with how society’s well-intentioned forgetfulness can rewrite our conceptions of good and evil, how the seeming inherency of our chosen limitations can slowly alienate us from our own humanity.

Beyond Lowry, there are plenty of others who deserve mention as well: Mary Doria Russell, for her patient entanglement of speculative fiction and faith; Robert Heinlein, for scientific creativity and imaginative breadth; Octavia Butler, for proof that social commentary need not be didactic; Michael Chabon, for sheer syntactic brilliance. The list could go on!

I know you’ve published short fiction—in fact, you were one of five contest winners who contributed their Dark Crystal prequel stories to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal Author Quest. How did it feel making the shift from writing short stories to a novel?

I love how much space a novel allows for layering multiple themes and stories together into one coherent whole. In short stories, there’s rarely room to develop more than one set of characters or themes or events. That narrow range is part of the charm of short stories, to be sure; they’re thin and pointy and cut like knives! But novels have the elbow room to explore multiple dimensions, adding width and breadth. I wanted The Limits of My World to have that elbow room so it wouldn’t settle for a merely sympathetic or merely horrific vision of Kanan and Tei’s (and Lily’s) world. Their world, like ours, is a messy mélange of wisdom and foolishness, cruelty and kindness. The size of the novel increased the danger of losing my way mid-project, but it also expanded the story’s capacity for honest complexity.

You mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign for The Limits of My World that one reason you chose an independent publisher was that “it’s not a book that follows all the usual rules of speculative fiction.” What are some usual rules you found you had to break?

Two “rules” in particular come to mind.

First, because speculative fiction often takes place in settings unfamiliar to readers, world-building is supposed to happen quickly and precisely, with concrete visual details, to make it easy for readers to enter into the story. In The Limits of My World, though, I wanted readers to experience the characters’ world through those characters’ eyes, which meant using characters’ definitions of words even if these definitions contradicted the words’ current English definitions. As far as Kanan and Tei are concerned, they are blue-skinned humans living in a universe with carbon walls and thousands of yellow suns, a universe small enough that fully grown humans can run around it in seventeen minutes. Explaining their world this way doesn’t necessarily tell the reader immediately what this world actually looks like, or how it actually relates to the world they’re familiar with. Until you know what’s going on, it’s a disorienting experience; and that disorientation is part of the point of the story.

Second, Steven James’s kind endorsement of The Limits of My World describes the novel as “genre-defying,” and I hope he’s right. Today’s sci-fi (and other genre fiction) rarely gets philosophical; it’s mostly designed to thrill us and keep us flipping pages. Readers who want to read beautiful sentences and think deep thoughts typically turn to literary fiction, or to sci-fi published decades ago. I like to think The Limits of My World is a gripping, plot-twisting page-turner—and I certainly hope readers don’t find it preachy or didactic!—but there’s no denying that the story explores big questions in ways more typically associated with literary fiction or classic sci-fi.

Back in 2019, I had the privilege to hear your agent, Mike Nappa, give a talk in Grand Rapids where he mentioned his struggle to get his first novel Sinner published because he had established himself as a Christian nonfiction author. Were you concerned about making that transition after writing two Christian memoirs?

Mike is fantastic, isn’t he? I’m so grateful for his wisdom and experience as I wrestled through the challenges (and opportunities) of a shift from Christian nonfiction to general market fiction. I certainly had some concerns about that transition; I would have been naïve (or willfully Pollyannaish) not to. And perhaps, if my primary concern were book sales or writerly acclaim, time would tell that my choice to genre-hop was the wrong decision. Perhaps the 21st-century obligation of audience-building requires “successful” authors to pick a single lane and stay in it until death do us part.

Happily, I’ve never been one to measure authorial success along purely market-driven lines. I’m much more interested in trying to write and publish the things Jesus seems to be asking me to write and publish, even when those things don’t fit a predetermined formula for maximizing book sales. I do what I can to promote my books and get them in front of readers—I daresay I owe my publishers that much!—but I’m simply too reliant on the Spirit’s inspiration to be entirely strategic in what I write. Every time I publish a book, I ask myself, “Will I be content with this decision even if it’s the last book I ever get to publish?” So far, the answer to that question has always been “yes.”

The Limits of My World delves into language and meaning, something you’ve also explored in your essays and memoirs. How does your process change when you use storytelling to explore those ideas?

Aristotle’s Rhetoric talks about a kind of argument called “enthymeme.” Enthymemes are related to syllogisms—logical arguments that reach a conclusion by combining premises—but an enthymeme leaves some part of the syllogism’s argument unstated. The name “enthymeme” comes from thumos, a Greek word meaning something like English’s “spirit” or “passion” or even “anger.” An enthymeme shifts arguments out of the purely rational realm and “en-spirits” them by inviting readers or listeners to fill in the blanks and feel ideas in their own bodies. For Aristotle, enthymemes are at the heart of persuasion. Syllogistic reasoning, spelling out each step along the way, is good and useful—but the most persuasive communication is the communication that empowers an audience to participate in the process of meaning-making and take ownership of its own conclusions.

One of the reasons I love storytelling is that, if it’s done well, it can only ever be enthymematic. Good stories don’t preach at us; instead, they invite us to notice something true about humanity and how the world works. When a story explores language, the very words that make up that story become part of the enthymeme readers are invited into. I hope readers find themselves asking questions like, “Does the evolution of language in this novel ring true? If so, what does that truth say about how language itself works? And if that’s how language works, what do I wish these characters had done about it, and what should I do about it?” Granted, there are as many ways of answering these questions as there are readers asking them; but even before they are answered (or even if they never are), the questions themselves have value. “The point is,” Rainer Maria Rilke tells a young poet, “to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

You’ve written about struggling to fit expected categories. Speaking as a second-generation Missionary Kid, I know that’s not a fun journey. However, I’ve also found, in my life and when talking to others from multicultural backgrounds, that the in-betweenness can lead to surprising opportunities. Have you found that to be true in your journey?

One of my favorite multicultural moments in The Limits of My World comes in a conversation between Kanan and an overworlder named Tiqvah. Tiqvah explains what it’s like to exist on the margin between two worlds, saying, “There are gifts in the in-between-ness.” Kanan, who is beginning to experience the pain of being in-between, asks, “What if I don’t want those gifts?” And Tiqvah responds, “Who ever said the gifts were for you?”

I’m not saying the entire novel is autobiographical, but this moment undeniably is. Having my feet in multiple cultures, multiple languages, and multiple ways of thinking about the world has been a source of significant grief in my life. At the same time, it has also given me opportunities to offer perspectives that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, opportunities to bridge chasms that might otherwise have gone untraversed. I don’t have it within me to wish for a different life. Being in-between has been full of gifts—even if, to my intermittent consternation, those gifts haven’t always been for me.

Has your experience not fitting everyone’s categories informed your passion for writing academic works about language and marginalization?

I stumbled into my academic work because it combined underexplored questions in existing scholarship with themes that interested me. Only once I’d landed at this intersection did it occur to me that my interests had deeply personal origins. In fact, here’s what I wrote in the preface to my PhD dissertation, as I looked back on the project I had just completed:

There exists a platitude about the inescapably autobiographical nature of dissertations. Although this dissertation has, I hope, far exceeded its autobiographical raison d’être, there is no denying that the platitude holds a bit of explanatory power for narrating the genesis of this project. What I had longed for, even from a fairly young age, was a means of understanding why the language of identity could offer me so much in the way of self-understanding and social engagement, and yet always seem to fall short of telling the whole truth. The words around me—their accuracy or falsehood in describing my own experiences, their utility or ineffectiveness in communicating those experiences to others—seemed to change so quickly, caught up in the maelstrom of my chaotic world. Yet even as they shifted before my eyes, these transformed words also seemed to carry their linguistic histories with them, soaking up meanings and retaining them the way succulent plants soak up water.

Advantageous Incapacities: Reading the Margins with Kenneth Burke

In short, I suppose I’m confessing to being something of a cliché. I’ve been vexed by the same problems since 1993, and I’ve spent three decades (and even more genres) trying to make sense of those problems. I count myself tremendously lucky to have done my grappling in the company of so many gracious fellow readers, writers, and scholars.

Reading about The Limits of My World, I was struck by how much it reminded me of a friend of C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and especially Barfield’s novella Night Operation. He was very interested in how language changes (what he called the evolution of consciousness), and Night Operation uses a dystopia to consider how language can devolve or become limiting. Were you familiar with his work at all?

I’ve been hearing for years that I need to read Barfield! Alas, to my undeniable embarrassment, I haven’t done so yet. (Perhaps yours will be the recommendation that finally drives me to action?)

Are there any upcoming projects you can share?

I wish I could offer you a single tidy book pitch to whet your appetite for what might be coming next! The truth is, I’ve got four or five projects in varying states of disarray, with the jury still out on which (if any) of them will come to fruition as published books. There’s a little something in there for everyone: Another novel? An academic project on language evolution? A coauthored exploration of historical and theological depictions of celibacy? A meditation on the nature of delight? I plan to keep prodding all of them in turns until (at least) one of them starts breathing like it’s alive.

More information about The Limits of My World can be found on Coles’ website.