Keyhole Magazine

Born in Dover, New Jersey, Ben Loory now lives in Los Angeles. His short fables and tales have appeared online and in print in journals and magazines of all shapes and sizes, and a collection of them, entitled Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, is coming next summer from Penguin Books. A longer story of his, "The TV," recently appeared in the April 5, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. He can be found on Facebook, or at http://www.benloory.com.

MG: Tell us about The New Yorker and that whole experience . . . 

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Shya, thanks so much for taking part in this interview. Tell us, where did the seven-line constraint come from?

SHYA SCANLON: Thin air! I'd been writing various things of shorter and shorter length--this was four years ago or so--and found that a number of them had turned out to be roughly the same length. That is, it felt like a kind of rhythm was occurring organically. An internal pattern that "signaled" to me when something was finished. Once I realized this, I began to look for it, and to fiddle with the format, which fiddling resulted in the exaggerated margins (1.5") and fully justified text. These prose blocks seemed interesting to me, both theoretically and visually. I felt like I could put them together and build something.

MG: As much as this project offers your audience the pleasures of reading text, it also invites the audience to participate with it interactively by reading (and/or recording) aloud and by listening and watching the many YouTube videos that have surfaced on the Internet. Below, we'll include the original texts alongside their YouTube videos. Would you care to comment on the writer/reader or reader/listener/watcher relationships before we dig in?

SS: This has turned out to be a really rewarding process. It began--I'm not afraid to admit--as a kind of gimmick: get people to read them and then other people will watch the videos and buy the book. What I've discovered is that 1) there's nothing you can do to make a book of poetry sell beyond what it would sell naturally, and 2) the interaction between myself, the poems, and the readers/performers enabled through these recordings and/or visualizations, rather than being peripheral to the primary poetic event, actually gets at something very central to what I feel writing is all about (dialogue).

"Look out, blimp" 

read by Tan-ya Gerrodett

I felt like someone else, only different. I felt stronger. I'm feeling great, 
I said. Or exclaimed. I emphasized weird. Or ratherly. As some do. 
Then? Oh, I blacked out, or, someone blacked out who looked like me.
I only caught a glimpse, and froze. I pitched that glimpse through the
glass, and, dodging shards or charging, in a fever of meat became my
own desperate infinity. It was a releash. It was a catering event. It was
something I attended, quiet, small, not "wed" to any specific hunger.

MG: I'm interested in the title of this piece. How does it help the reader/listener? 

SS: I'm glad you brought up the title. The titles in this book do not function in a traditional way. Most titles fall into a few basic categories. Some serve a descriptive function, like, say, "The Rime of The Ancient Mariner," where Coleridge is simply introducing some basic information about the poem. Others are a line or refrain from the poem itself, like Thomas's "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." Another standard is to pull out a central theme and "tag" it, like "The Road Not Taken," where Frost is giving us something to look for. A way to read the poem.

The poems of In This Alone Impulse, however--at least most of them--use the titles as another opportunity to add texture, dimension or tension to the work. The titles are more essentially part of the poem, as I see it. So they engage in poetic, rather than naming, conventions. Many are paratactic in nature: introducing an image or mood which can enrich, but not explain, the poem that follows. Many titles in the book actually came before the poem, acting as springboard, or juxtaposition.

In this case, "Look out, blimp" does a few things, I think. First of all, the word blimp adds some humor to everything that follows. But it's also ambiguous. Are we being warned of some imminent blimp collision? Or is someone being called a blimp? Is then the "blimp" narrating the poem? The title adds a sense of elevation and perspective to the poem, and introduces tension. I particularly like the strange continuity between "blimp" and "catering event." There's an image taking shape that's both comedic and tragic.

MG: Three-part question: there are lovely sounds at play here (just as there are in all of the pieces). What are some of your favorites? I particularly love the short I's in "glimpse" and "pitch" and the S's and Z sounds in "glimpse," "froze," "glass," "shards," and the AR in "shards" and "charging" and the long E in "fever" and "meat." To what extent did sound control the creation? To what extent did story?

SS: In the charged moment of creation, distinctions between sound and story become a little meaningless. Within one line, from word to word, I might grope for language based on any number of impulses, and what fits, what becomes the poem, is right for a number of reasons. Of course, after it's done, reading becomes an interpretive act even for the author--one which I enjoy and am happy to do, of course, but which does not necessarily present itself as authoritative. I know that I was very sensitive to voice with these poems, meaning I heard them loudly in my head, and saw them as mini monologues. That's not to say they always cooperated, however. A great many of them in fact rejected, rebelled, this auditory dimension and strained to undermine and interrupt flow. But I put down that rebellion on the page nonetheless, as artifact. Battle spoils. Evidence.

"Skeleton clock" 

read by BL Pawelek

I went into outer space this morning. Why fight it? It's the only place left
where I can get anything done. And by done I mean cut into small pieces.
And by small pieces I mean a smile just before it sinks into skin. Space
wasn't as cold as I thought it would be. But it was a lot brighter. I dug
holes in the back of my hands and captured some of that light. Beautiful.
When I get back I'll give it to you. You can't see it on earth, of course,
but you'll hear gulls riding above the broken waves as you watch me age.

MG: Killer last line. How or why did you come up with it?

SS: There's a healthy dose of melodrama in this poem. It's a poem about writing poetry, about forcing the world into words, and what is lost during the hermeneuitic process. And of course it's about how none of that matters, because of the things that connects us despite the failures of language. This last line tries for an unearned wistfulness, or a wary one.

MG: Is "outer space" literal or metaphorical or both? 

SS: Well, "outer space" is kind of a funny phrase, isn't it? Two words that are generally applicable, yet when put together connote something pretty specific. If by literal, you mean that I'm literally talking about a character in the poem going to space, I'd say yes. But of course that's still metaphor. So I suppose both.

MG: An interesting play here is how the text redefines itself: "by done I mean cut into small pieces. And by small pieces I mean a smile . . . " Can you speak on this?

SS: Interesting you bring this section up. This poem was actually published in Opium Magazine a few issues ago. Issue 5? 6? Anyway, they wanted to cut that line, and I let them. Clearly, I have no integrity. I think they thought it robbed the piece of something, of seriousness, maybe. Or emotion.  But I think they may have just missed the central metaphor (as I kind of spoke to it above), or rather, they were unable to find a way into the poem the way I wrote it. That's fine. I don't feel overly controlling with regard to these pieces. I don't feel a lot of ownership, somehow. Maybe I should. Maybe I should be pissed about that. Maybe I should hunt Todd Zuniga down (he now lives in Paris) and make him repeat the line he cut over and over until even Tao Lin thinks it's annoying.

"Hansom"

read by AD Jameson

My dog is so small! He's a pit bull and he's a golden lab and he's such
a tiny little eensy weensy little guy you can barely see him. Be careful! I 
took him on a walk this morning and the sunlight missed him. He was 
shivering and the summer was closing around him like cupped hands
but he floated right there in the middle like a tiny leaf on the surface of
water. Poor little man! I want to send you a picture of him but it's no
use. You'll just have to try and picture a dog almost too small for words.

MG: In this piece, I'm interested in the psychology of the speaker/narrator and his/her relationship with "you." To what extent does the narrator's relationship or view of the dog reveal anything about his/her relationship to "you"?

SS: As I read this poem, it's really just straight-up addressing the reader. There isn't a fictional "you" within the poem. Unless the whole system of address is itself a fiction. I don't know how this works in poetry. In this poem, the dog in question, Hansom, was a dog my girlfriend and I fostered for a couple months while the shelter looked for a permanent family. It really did have a limp. He was the sweetest thing. So sweet he made us talk like babies all the time. Animals are powerful.

MG: If anyone reading this isn't totally endeared to Shya now: shame, shame on you. Okay, so I love the images and sentiments in this sentence: "He was shivering and the summer was closing around him like cupped hands but he floated right there in the middle like a tiny leaf on the surface of water." Why lineate and break the sentence into parts?

SS: I think I may have answered this indirectly in an earlier question, but these poems are not really lineated. They are fixed between larger-than-average margins, and fully justified. So it wasn't purely a "natural" break (I don't remember who it was, but someone pointed out recently that even fiction writers deal with line breaks--they just inherit them from a word processor), but it wasn't purely artificial either. Anyway, yeah, the sentiments of the poem . . . . This is really sentimental. As sentimental as "Skeleton clock" is melodramatic. I really love working with sentiment and melodrama, and think it's a shame that so many good writers try to avoid these modes at all cost. It's like having two really fun, amazing tools and deciding to throw them away because other people have misused them.

"Killing, riding" 

read by Ariel Basom

This like we, likely, is this is, undo. Take this out not far but take it
widely, so it sits beside us. It should serve as something undid, or else,
dust. I hurry to touch it. I hurry to peel me up, and finger, and hurry 
to hand it over as something, something over more than, breaks from
over what, from that broken smoothness. This sums us up. This is that
knuckle we said would carry things into a broad, clear brightness, and
bend and watch them burn.

MG: Would you agree or disagree that this piece is more engaged with language than the previous three? 

SS: Engaged? I don't know. Engaged with means involved with. It would be a difficult position to defend that one sentence is more or less involved with language than another. Maybe put into gear, like when Captain Picard says, "Engage!" Is this poem more in gear with language? In a language gear? Gears, when operating together, are said to be "in transmission." That's kind of interesting. Transmitting force, or energy. Meaning? When someone says a piece of writing is "about language" they usually mean it's less concerned with communication, or with meaning. Maybe so. Maybe I'm not "in transmission" with this poem. But I think there's matter to it, and feeling. There's a departure to it, for me. There's an attempt at organization, and a failure, and a celebration of that failure. And that's something I experience often, and want to share.

MG: What can you say about the opening sentences?

SS: Do you mean all of the opening sentences? Or these five? Or did you just mean that one up there from "Killing, riding"?

MG: I think I meant: "What can you say about the opening sentence?" To clarify: it's a sentence that demands a lot of work from the reader. Hell, looking over it now, maybe I did mean "opening sentences." Fuck it: What can you say about all of the sentences in this poem?

SS: Well, short of diagramming them--which I think would probably "break the machine"--I can say that these sentences are trying to enact or illustrate an experience of alienation. Alienation defines as un. It is an apartness that is paradoxically in constant reference to that from which it is apart. But really what I like about these sentences is the rhythm. There is a speeding up that occurs in the second sentence until the word "widely" slows it back down. The sentence doing the most work here, though, is "I hurry to peel me up, and finger, and hurry to hand it over as something, something over more than, breaks from over what, from that broken smoothness." Man, I love this sentence. It seems to be handing its own weight along its length, like passing a bag of sand, as the repetition shifts from "hurry" to "something" to "over" until "break" appears as an adjective, as though the verb itself broke like an egg, spilling its guts across the smoothness. Or maybe the smoothness is itself the guts. It's a very active, almost flamboyant line. If it had to seek employment, it would join the circus.

"Go beside, and speak" 

read by Ryan W. Bradley

I am from I have been thinking. I am from it feels like. I am from seeing
through something. I am from what could be farther along than, more
beside than, from something I can see through. There is this much to
say. There is something else, but I am not from it. It is a shortening type
of experience. I cannot feel me there. It is not something I can talk much
about. It is not something much, to feel, to be from. It is not something
to see more than, always more than, a lip not there for kissing.

MG: I absolutely love this one (it's dog-eared in my copy)! What would you like to say about it to prepare me for the questions I'll ask next?

SS: No direct objects! I like these verbs hanging there, some with prepositions, some without. The first half of this poem feels like it's reaching forward, groping. And then the second half seems like an apology. A down slope. There is a real uphill/downhill motion here. Or maybe an ebb and flow. It feels cyclical, maybe. I think it takes a certain boldness to write a poem. And that boldness can extinguish itself in the writing. Halfway through, and you feel almost embarrassed for having thought you had something worth saying, or a someone to say something in the first place. This poem, like many others in the book, are getting at this elemental impulse, this craving that can't be quite satisfied. It's about owning failure and flaw.

Shya Scanlon's poetry collection, In This Alone Impulse, was published by Noemi Press in January, 2010. His novel, Forecast, will be published by Flatmancrooked in the fall. If anyone is interested in reading and making a video, contact Shya for a free copy of the book! Visit him online at www.shyascanlon.com.

Ken Sparling is the author of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers, Untitled: A Novel, and Book. His recently rereleased novel Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt is what we're here to talk about today, and you should check out stinkypoobutt.com to find out about buying the book, and to see some reviews and interviews. Sparling's writing has regularly appeared in New York Tyrant over the past few years, and his new book, Book, just came out with Pedlar Press and is available at indigo.ca. Additionally, Mud Luscious Press has contracted to re-issue Dad Says He Saw You At the Mall, probably in 2012. In the meantime, Sparling has a new story coming in the online journal JMWW. Look for it! 

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Ken, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions about your recently re-released novel Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt. Let's dive right in. What can you share about your use of dialogue and how it functions here.

MG: Would you call this a semi-autobiographical novel?

KS: The idea of autobiography, as I understand it, is that something happens in a person's life and then it happens again in a book. For me, the creation of a book can never be the representation of something that has already happened. The creation of the book is itself the thing that is happening. I make my life happen when I write, in the same way I make my life happen when I read a book, or walk to the corner, or have a conversation with my wife or kids, or eat a taco. I understand the notion that a page of words can somehow represent past events, but I don't think I want to participate in that notion.

MG: Will you offer a few thoughts about the difference between the way you released this book the first time--out of your home, bound with duct tape inside retired library books, with cover illustrations drawn by your children--and its re-release form? 

KS: I remember that I was very excited about the idea of making things by hand around the time I decided to make Hush Up myself. I was buying all kinds of used books from the used book store at the library, especially children’s picture books. And there was a place down in the basement of the Toronto Reference Library (where I had just been relocated) where they had a couple of huge recycling bins that were used by the Friends of the Library, who run the bookstore, to dispose of books and magazines they couldn't sell, and there were often a lot of magazines in these bins, like National Geographic, or fine art magazines. I wasn’t a very happy guy right after I got relocated and, wanting to get away from my desk and the crappy work I didn’t want to do, I would go down and fish around in the recycle bins and get magazines with pictures I liked. I’d cut the pictures out, or tear them out, and glue stick them into the children’s picture books, usually covering up the words.

At first, my intention had been to cover up all the words in the books and put my own stories into these picture books. I even took one of the altered books to a reading and did a kind of variation on the story programs they do at the library for kids, where I read a page of my story and then held up the picture book so people could see these pictures that actually had nothing to do with my story. In the end, I didn’t do very many books where I put my own story in. I ended up mostly just obliterating the stories that were there, so that the books were all pictures – the pictures the children’s book illustrator did, and the magazine pictures I’d ripped out and glued over the words in the book.

I’m not sure what the impulse was here. I would spend an awful lot of time at work gluing pictures into books. It might have just been that I didn’t want to do my real job. It might have been that I hated words at the time and wanted to find a way to obliterate them, to shut people up… I’m not sure. Around the same time, I was trying to figure out how to make Hush Up into a book without simply handing it over to someone, like I'd handed Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall over to Knopf, and I was talking a lot about this problem with Derek McCormack – my writer friend who wrote the brilliant intro for the Artistically Declined version of Hush Up. I remember asking Derek about what it would cost to get the book printed, and at the same time I was working on defacing these children’s books, and at some point I realized I could buy old hardback novels from the used bookstore and rip the guts out and put my book in. I figured I could create the inside of the book myself using a photocopier and a sewing machine and duct tape, and stuff the book inside the covers of these old, used library books. So the difference between the experience of making the book myself and publishing it with Artistically Declined is vast. When you get a book published by a company -- even the greatest publishing company in the world -- all you really do is hand it to the publisher and wait. At the time that Ryan asked if he could publish Hush Up, I hadn’t handmade any copies in a while and I thought, sure. It was kind of weird, because I had no idea who this guy was, he just emailed and asked for copies of some of my books, then a little while later emailed to ask if he could publish something by me, maybe Hush Up, which he'd calculated I started making ten years ago. Somehow I thought he’d read the book before he asked for it, but then he asked for a handmade copy, so I knew he couldn't have read it.

MG: How has your experience been with Artistically Declined Press?

KS: Great. Ryan Bradley, who initially contacted me, has been amazingly enthusiastic and industrious about getting the book into print, about making a great cover, and about promoting the book. He made a website called stinkypoobutt.com dedicated entirely to the book and trying to get it out there into people’s hands.

And the other half of Artistically Declined, Paula Bomer, had me and my son, Mark, staying at her house in Brooklyn for four nights last weekend while I was in New York for a couple of readings, one of which Paula orgainzed and hosted at KGB.  

You know, in the end, I think it really comes down to the people you deal with in the projects you decide to engage in and the people I've had a chance to work with because of my association with ADP have been incredible, they have such an amazing work ethic and are completely dedicated to creating beautiful things.  

When I first started hand making Hush Up by myself, I guess I didn’t want to have anyone else involved. I wanted to go solo. Again, I don’t know if it was that I hated having to rely on other people, or I hated what happened when you just signed up for some experience and then waited around for other people to decide what was going to happen next. This was a hard thing for me to get over, this waiting for other people to take care of things. My first attempt to stop handing my life over to other people was to just wrench the whole thing away and do it all alone. This satisfied me at the time, but it made me kind of cranky, and I’m trying to get over that, and it's taking some time.

With ADP, I’m really revelling in the opportunity to get to know and work with a bunch of wonderful people. The trip to New York was great because I met so many great people and great writers and participated with many of them in readings – Sasha Fletcher, Shya Scanlon, John Madera, Giancarlo from New York Tyrant, Jennifer Knox, and I got to see Greg Gerke and read with him again (we read together in Toronto a few months back) – but most especially it was great because I got to stay with Paula and her partner Nick and their two kids, Hal and Jack, and they are such a great family. A lot of what I think I’m about, and what Hush Up is about, is the problem of doing good family. So this was cool, to see this amazing family working together, dealing with conflicts, sorting things out, getting meals taken care of, and to be a little part of that for a few days.

Also, Paula put me and Mark in her basement, which is a big room with massive bookshelves on a couple walls, and these bookshelves are loaded with incredible books and journals. When I wasn’t out with Mark at the jazz shows he took me to, I was in Paula’s basement reading. Some of the stuff I read was stories by Paula, which are beautiful, heartbreaking stories. She’s such a great writer, with this unbelievable ability to write utterly convincingly from the male perspective, and I didn’t know this until I found myself in her basement and read a few of her stories in journals she’s got down there. She’s got a book of stories coming out in the fall and I’m really looking forward to it.

Honestly, from my perspective, the experience of working with ADP hasn't had as much to do with the project of making an object called Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt as it has with working out together ways of making me and the book and ADP more visible, sort of leveraging the strengths and positioning of a bunch of people to create something that swirls with life.

MG: What are you working on now? What's next?

KS: I've been taking passages that I cut from other pieces of writing, writing that I did years ago, or passages that I've transplanted wholesale, passages that I've saved over the years, handwritten notes I wrote ten, twenty, even thirty years ago and put in a drawer and forgot about, passages in old computer files on computers that still have floppy drives, and I've been bringing all these passages together in a single document, and then going through the document looking for a way to unite the material in a manner that makes it seem as though I intended for these bits and pieces to be together all along, but without losing the sense of discontinuity I reach for when I bring together a bunch of bits and pieces and toss them into a single document. The process of working through the material to develop a kind of unexpected unity, or unity through a common call among the pieces to be unexpected, often transforms the original bits to the point where they have no relation to what they were when I started out with them. But I want to believe that where they started, as bits forgotten in drawers, somehow informs what they become. So far, how that happens is a mystery to me.

This way of working happened accidentally, much as the process for Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall happened accidentally as I worked with Gordon Lish to try to figure out how to make a book out of all the little bits of writing I was producing back then.

The evolution to this more recent process, where I mix bits of old writing together into a single document and then work through the material again and again, re-encountering, rearranging, stirring, moving, culling and recreating, began when I decided to try to straighten out my mess a bit. My wife, Mary, finds it very frustrating living in amongst the mess I leave behind wherever I go. So I thought if I could clean out old files, condense things a little, I might be able to get some things off my desk, and off my bedside table, and off the floor beside my bed, and at least get a bunch of stuff hidden away in drawers. I was just trying to tidy up. I took files full of old handwritten stories, and notes, and little inspirations I'd had over the years while riding my bike or travelling to meetings for work on the subway, and I sat out in the backyard and read through these files looking for bits worth saving, bits I could use -- although what I was going to use them for was never clear. I was just listening to the sound of what I'd written echo in my head, trying to hear if any of it was musical. So I might tear the bottom off a sheet of paper that had a sentence or two that struck me as worth saving, and recycle the rest of the sheet. At some point, this changed, and I started inputting everything I came across into a single document -- without passing judgement on anything I'd written -- until I had enough words for a book. When I had enough words for a book, I started going through the document, trying to make something happen with any of the stuff where it felt to me like nothing seemed really to be happening. This process was accelerated when I got a laptop for the first time, and I could take it out to the backyard, and I no longer had to save up scraps of paper with bits of writing on them, and then take these bits of writing into the house later to input them into the computer. I'm at the stage now where I try not to be judgemental about anything I encounter when I'm first putting a document together. I try to trust that, even if the writing seems off, the impulse is good and it's a matter of staying with the material and being patient enough to wait until the impulse uncovers itself through my working and reworking the material.

MG: Why do you write? How long have you been at it? When did you decide to write books and why?

KS: I write because it excites me. It excites me to read certain combinations of words in a way that no combination of words should be able to excite anyone, and I want to figure out how it is that a bunch of symbols that are meant to function as pointers to more substantial bits of the world can come to excite me in this way. A good way to explore these symbols is to produce my own combinations. Certain other writers have created combinations of words that compel me in ways I don't understand. I write partly to try to demystify this process, but more and more these days I write to participate in the mystery.

I've been writing since grade school, which is when I first decided I was going to be a writer. Over the years since I made the decision to become a writer, even though a lot of times during those years I wasn't actually doing any real writing, I was always working on the plan in one way or another, exploring strategies to make it happen, acting like I was a writer, even when I didn't feel like I was a writer, waiting for a time when it wouldn't feel like I was acting anymore, when I would feel like I was really a writer.

MG: What advice do you have for young writers?

KS: The only way I've ever felt at all comfortable giving advice to another writer was by marking up a manuscript of their writing, and I haven't always felt entirely comfortable doing that. I always felt most comfortable marking up a manuscript that I already found compelling, where the marks I made seemed inevitable, in the sense that the work itself yearned to find the sort of release that was possible through the deletion or rearrangement or re-visitation or reconsideration of certain words in the work. Any advice I give would have to come in the form of a recommendation, and the only way to recommend something to another writer is through writing, either by writing something yourself that stands as a recommendation for a way of writing, something that attempts to make visible an approach; or by marking up the other person's writing, in which case the act of marking up stands as a recommendation for a certain approach to engaging an existing combination of words, a recommendation that would stand as an example of excision, recombination, resurrection, reconsideration... In other words, a recommendation to practice a certain approach to writing that involves a particular manner of editing.

Christopher Higgs curates Bright Stupid Confetti. He is the humble author of an amazing chapbook titled Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (Publishing Genius, 2009), and other of his belletristic prose exists in past/present/future editions of many esteemed literary organs, including, but not limited to:AGNI, Conduit, Post Road, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, No Colony, and Action Yes.  Currently, he is pursuing a doctorate in literature and critical theory at Florida State University, where his primary research involves theorizing a rhizomatic approach to understanding transnational and transhistorical avant-garde / experimental literature.  The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press, 2010) is his first novel. 

MOLLY GAUDRY: Tell us about The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. 

CHRISTOPHER HIGGS:  I have attempted to answer this question at least eleven different ways without success.  I’ve written whole paragraphs that take a funny tone, an intellectual tone, a straightforward tone, a cryptic tone, a poetic tone, you name it.  Maybe the fact that I can’t seem to figure out the best way to answer this question is, in and of itself, the answer.  Attempts, mistakes, beginnings without endings, starts followed by stops, erasure, indecision, a collection of work by an imaginary writer who has disappeared, the product of three years of work, assemblage, collage, novelty, playfulness, messiness, theoretical, musical, cinematic, oblique, funny, shallow, frisky, backhanded, heartbreaking.  I want to claim that this book is unlike anything anyone has ever read before (i.e. extremely unfamiliar), which I believe to be accurate, but I realize that claim sounds both pompous and irritating.  Obviously it has antecedents (i.e. is familiar), in some ways, I guess.  I don't know.  I do know that I always fear I sound like an asshole in interviews.  I write experimental stuff.  This book is experimental.  I use that word (experimental) knowing full well that it tends to turn people off.  I don’t want people to dislike me or my writing because it is experimental.  I want, and this book wants, people to change their mind about literature.  I want, and this book wants, people to care less about plot, character, setting and theme.  We want to change you, to expand what you think of when you think of the novel.  We want to challenge you, tickle you, get you talking, get you thinking, and ultimately we want to move you to produce your own unique material.  We want to build a snowman and then blow it up, clear a pathway and then clutter it up, open possibilities and then scramble them, suggest new alternatives to old problems and then throw away the key.  

MG: The term "experimental" does, as you say, tend to turn some off. But in the sciences, experiments are both valid and valuable. If a neuroscientist said, "I'm experimenting with new technologies that will be able to repair a person

39;s damaged nervous system," no one would bat an eye. What's the difference, do you think? Does this difference say anything about the sciences? Humanities? Literature? About the future of any or all of these things?

CH:  I think some folks feel uncomfortable with the label "experimental" when it comes to literature because the word lacks a commonly accepted definition.  We all understand what is meant when someone says they are conducting scientific experiments.  When someone says they are writing experimental literature, on the other hand, it is not so easy to understand what is meant.  Personally, I am proud to label myself an experimental writer.  I don't want to be mistaken for a writer of verisimilitude.  I am not interested in writing "good stories" with "believable characters."  Those things bore the living shit out of me.  I know I am in the extreme minority.  But my hope is that in the future my way of thinking will become the orthodoxy, and the school of conventional realism will become the minority.  This is very unlikely to happen.  But a guy can dream.  

MG: Who is Marvin K. Mooney?

CH: That's the question I hope to raise.

MG: Were you a Seuss fan? Or is this a Nixon reference? Or am I missing the point entirely?

CH: Haha: the Nixon thing.  No, no Nixon connection.  In fact, I was completely unaware of that whole analogy until very recently.  As far as being a Seuss fan, yes I suppose I was/am but not excessively.  When I was a little boy my favorite Dr. Seuss book was Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, in fact it's really the only one I remember reading.  I wasn't much of a reader as a kid. 

MG: Do you know what the chanting's all about?

CH: I made those two chanting videos.  They're my students reading page 243 of the novel.

MG: What? Really! Oh my God. That's so funny. Did they like it? Details!

CH: Groupe 3c was my morning class and Groupe 1b was my mid-morning class.  One day I finished class early and told them they were free to go, but if they would like to stay and help me make a promotional video for my forthcoming book I could use their help.  In both classes I think all but one or two students participated.  I think they thought it was weird, but they were willing to go along with it because I have a pretty good rapport with my students.

MG: Who's the girl reading in this video? 

CH: That's my wife!  Caitlin Newcomer.  Who is, besides being my favorite person on earth, an amazing writer herself.  Check out her crazy prose piece about Bluebeard.  

MG: So, how'd you meet? (And as today is Valentine's Day, what are your plans?)

CH: We met in the MFA program at Ohio State.  For Valentine's Day, we're going to prepare a meal we've never attempted, drink wine, listen to records, and work on our photo album/scrapbook -- this is something we've been doing since we first started dating: collecting pictures, drawings, ticket stubs, whatever important little memorabilia, and then assembling them in these albums for keepsakes.  It's pretty cool. 

MG: All right, so tell me more about the "advertising campaign" behind Marvin. Why adopt the persona and go around claiming to be a mysterious person named Marvin K. Mooney? Or was that Ken?

CH: The death of the author in the digital age.  The unknown.  Like everything else about this book, our marketing plan was/is an experiment -- we're hardly finished.  How will people react to anonymity?  What is the difference between real persona and virtual persona?  Which is stronger: curiosity or cynicism?  Which is easier: dismissal or consideration?  The results have been extremely interesting so far.  I intend to write an essay about it. 

MG: How did you get hooked up with Ken Baumann?

CH: Blake Butler knew I'd finished a novel, knew I was sending it out to places, looking for a publisher, and so he asked if he could read the manuscript.  I obliged.  Unbeknownst to me, Ken had been hatching a plan to start publishing.  I think Blake told him about my book.  Ken asked me if he could read the manuscript, to consider it for his new press, so I sent it to him.  Very shortly thereafter he asked me if he could publish it as the first Sator Press title.  I was flattered but had to think about it, given that I'd just sent the manuscript to a half dozen well established places.  After asking a few trusted confidants for advice, and after discussing with Ken his vision for Sator, I was convinced it was the right move.  I could not be happier about my decision.  I had/am having such a great time working with Ken to bring this thing to life. *Note: I have just rewritten this sentence a dozen times trying to include all of the great things I'd say about Ken, but since I can't get it right I have decided to go with this sentence in which I tell you (and the readers) that I was trying to write a sentence that could contain my admiration for Ken but failed because the words and my thoughts are too vast and overflowing.  Here's the condensed version: Dude is dynamite.

MG: Tell us more about the hesitation to give it to a new press after having submitted it to more established places. I think that's something a lot of readers would be interested in. 

CH: Well, there are many dimensions to this question.  First, I have to think about certain things other people might not have to think about because I live in this strange world called academia.  In academia, it is extremely difficult to get a tenure track job teaching creative writing without having a book published by a well respected publishing house.  Luckily, I'm not particularly interested in teaching creative writing for a living.  But saying that or thinking that is one thing; actually pulling my manuscript from consideration at various publishing houses that would've qualified me for one of those jobs is a whole other thing.  Second, going with a new press means you don't have the kind of built in audience or built in name recognition that more well established places have earned.  Third, going with a new press means that it's very likely that the operator is learning the ins and outs as they go along.  For me it was especially important to make the right decision because, as I mentioned, this book represents three years worth of work.  I didn't simply bust this thing out over one Adderall-fueled week in July -- had that been the case, then hell I wouldn't have thought twice about it.  So I had to be absolutely sure it was in my best interest, and in the book's best interest, to go with a new press.     

MG: What's something else we should know about Sator Press and Marvin?

CH: Well one thing might be the different formats we've created for the novel: besides the traditional book object, we're also offereing it as an e-book for your nook or kindle or whatever, and also an audio book, which I think is the first of its kind -- not aware of any other indie publisher who has put out a full audio book, and also, more interestingly and importantly, the form of the audio book is one of a kind in that it's not simply a recording of me reading the text, it's a wild sound collage incorporating all kinds of location recordings, sound effects, robotic interfacing, found sounds, landscape background ambient layerings -- it's pretty neat, I'm pretty proud of it.      

MG: How long have you been writing and publishing? How did you get started, and why?

CH: I started writing creatively in high school because I had a teacher named Diane Panozzo who encouraged me.  So, I guess I've been writing for 17 years.  After high school I went to film school, so prose writing was something I did on the side.  To make a very long story very short, I began to take creative writing seriously and started publishing prose work about six years ago, or so.    MG: Do you teach creative writing? What do you think inspires that moment -- the moment when dabblers decide "to take creative writing seriously"?