Articles

Writers Respond: An Interview with Shya Scanlon

petercole — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:18:25 -0400

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.

Writers Respond: An Interview with Ken Sparling

petercole — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:02:10 -0400

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.

KEN SPARLING: The dialogue functions as a recommendation to the reader for a way of being in the world, and it calls upon the reader to be in the world in that way while reading the book. It calls upon the reader to treat the reading of dialogue as an example of what it might mean to read well. The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt functions as a request to the reader be open to an approach that might not be something she is used to encountering in her reading, to be open to an approach that calls upon her to be active in her reading of the book in a way that turns the act of reading itself into a form of dialogue, a dialogue between the reader and the writer, rather than a form of passive reception.

The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt also functions as an opportunity to recommend a kind of talk that gets forgotten, the kind of talk kids engage in until they get to a certain age. It functions as a recommendation to resist abandoning the impulse that leads to childlike dialogue. It's a recommendation to resurrect the impulse for childlike dialogue.

The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt is a recommendation to trust. The dialogue inside the book looks outside the book for a reader who will listen to the impulse that makes the sort of talk that is happening possible, and who will embrace that impulse and respond to the book as though reading a book were itself an opportunity to participate in a dialogue that could function as a recommendation. The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt functions as a recommendation that the reader make of her reading a recommendation.

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.

Writers Respond: An Interview with Christopher Higgs

mollygaudry — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:50:53 -0500

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.

1.
The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney

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.

Sator Press

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"?

CH: I have taught creative writing courses, yes. But right now I'm teaching two sections of composition. In terms of what inspires someone to decide to take creative writing seriously, I'm sure it's different for everybody. Because of my personal history and because I am an educator by choice, I believe the inspiration for turning one's life toward the study and/or creation of literature comes, at least in part, from the encouragement of teachers.

MG: Do you ever read "an underwater ear studded with wish pennies" as "an underwater ear studded with wish penises"? Because I do, every time I see it.

CH: Haha. No. I hadn't before you mentioned it, but now that you have pointed it out I'm afraid I won't ever be able to read that phrase otherwise. For me, it's ekphrastic: when I see that phrase, I think of the image - both of which (phrase & image) should be attributed to the lovely writer Julie Reid, from whom I have borrowed them.

Bright Stupid Confetti

MG: I know you've been interviewed about this before, but tell us the answer to something nobody's ever asked you before regarding BSC.

CH: The answer to something nobody has ever asked me before re: bsc...well, nobody has ever asked me why I do it. Thinking about that question gives me pleasure. Why do I do it? I'm not getting paid, and I could be doing so many other things. Well, I do it because it feels good to go hunting for beautiful and grotesque curiosities. It feels good to assemble them. It gives me the feeling of accomplishment -- every week I create something new by assembling seemingly disparate parts, so every week I succeed at something. I'm not doing it to get ahead in life, to make contacts with anyone, to help my career, or anything utilitarian like that. I have been doing it for five or so years because it gives me real, honest, palpable pleasure. When I started I had maybe a dozen visitors. I didn't care. I never went looking for an audience, never tried to produce something I thought might appeal to any audience. I just did what I wanted, how I wanted, and felt good about it. Today I have hundreds of visitors every day, and the audience continues to grow. It's amazing. People found me. They came across something I was doing for myself and got interested. Nothing, in terms of the process, has changed. I still approach it as I always have: as something I do for myself that makes me really, really happy. My assumption is that one of the reasons why people seem to dig Bright Stupid Confetti is because they sense my disregard for the audience. They sense that they are experiencing something deeply personal. But who knows? I'm no good at trying to guess what people are thinking.

MG: For newcomers, how long have you been doing BSC?

CH: Well, I birthed BSC in December of 2005. But it took a while for it to find its form.

MG: How do you find all the material?

CH: I just go hunting. Like I said, that's half of the fun. I should also mention that I occasionally get leads on artists from friends who email me and say hey I think you'd dig this, which I always appreciate.

MG: What percentage of the material, on any given week, is contemporary art taken from "the now"?

CH: 100% At least, I think. Well, no, sometimes I include music from the 60s or videos from the 80s or something. But for the most part, all of the work I showcase is being made right now. It is a very rare occasion for me to post something by a dead artist. I seek the bleeding edge. And I know I'm at that level because I will see artists I have showcased up at other websites months after I've shown them being hailed as the new it thing. I see this in magazines I read, too. Juxtapose, for instance, seems to be forever chasing my leads. :) I'm probably diluting myself, but some months it is downright uncanny the number of artists who appear in their pages who had appeared on mine months earlier. It always gives me a big smile.

The PhD at Florida State University

MG: How's the weather down south? And the education?

CH: My friend, Hadara Bar-Nadav, wrote me yesterday asking a similar question because she had some students who were interested in applying to the PhD program here at FSU. I'll tell you pretty much what I told her: Tallahassee sucks, but the literature program at FSU kicks ass. I can't speak for the creative writing program, other than to say that the folks who are in it seem to be pleased.

MG: Who are some of your professors? Who are some writers or scholars who've graduated from FSU? Who else is down there now that we might know?

CH: Last semester I had the privilege of studying theories of modernism with S.E. Gontarski, the world's foremost Samuel Beckett scholar. Pretty awesome. One person I'm really looking forward to working with is R.M. Berry, who has been away on sabbatical since I got here. In terms of folks who've graduated from here, I'm not as up on those stats as I probably ought to be. I'd assume there's a bunch of significant creative writers coming out of here given that The Atlantic Monthly recently identified FSU as one of the top ten CW programs in the country as well as one of the top five CW PhD programs. In terms of who's down here...I have heard that Thomas Cooper (whose book Phantasmagoria was published by Keyhole) is here at FSU, but I haven't met him yet.

MG: You've mentioned in the past that you teach Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses. Care to discuss this book a bit more here?

CH: Oh yes, I love that book. I have used it in composition classes and creative writing classes. When I taught fiction writing at Ohio State I used three books: Aristotle's Poetics, Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses. I would argue that these three texts constitute the strongest possible foundation for a beginning student of creative writing. The Aristotle situates the student's understanding of convention. The Bachelard opens the possibilities for setting. And the Ackerman opens the possibilities for character. I see these three texts working together, feeding off and building off each other. Ackerman's text, in particular, challenges students to rethink an obvious but much neglected concept: we homo sapiens utilize five senses.

MG: I've heard a lot about The Poetics of Space; an artist friend of mine was reading and carrying it around recently. Another friend of mine, a writer, has been really into Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature. I feel that there's a convergence at work, that those two might have something to say, together, that they don't alone. Thoughts?

CH: Hmm. That could be an interesting study. It's been about five years since I've read that Blanchot book, but what I remember of it was about death, and about literature, about reading, about constructed worlds. Bachelard's book, on the other hand, is about life, about the phenomenological experience of living and remembering and embodying real spaces. They might be very interesting companion pieces, I'd never considered it. Hmm. Now you've got my mind grapes blooming.

MG: Back to Poetics, Poetics of Space, and Natural History of the Senses, though; it sounds like an incredible required texts list. I'd like to take that class. How long have you been teaching?

CH: Five years, at the college level. First at the University of Nebraska, then Ohio State, and now here. Before that, I did a year as a high school substitute teacher in rural Nebraska, while I was waiting to go into the Peace Corps.

MG: The Peace Corps! Did you go? Where?

CH: I did a very brief, very inglorious stint in the Peace Corps. Summer of 2003. Islamic Republic of Mauritania, West Africa. The upshot of that experience was that it inspired a novel, which I wrote, which landed me an agent, which was subsequently rejected by ~20 publishing houses. The lesson I learned from that experience was to stop trying to write what I thought other people wanted to read, and instead write what I wanted to read.

Writers Respond: An Interview with Andrew Zornoza

mollygaudry — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:02:50 -0500

Andrew Zornoza is the author of the photo-prose novel, Where I Stay. Born in Houston, Texas, his fiction and essays have appeared in magazines such as Gastronomica, Sleepingfish, Confrontation, Porcupine Literary Arts, CapGun, and Matter Magazine, among others. He has taught at The New School University, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and the ASA Institute.

The following interview was conducted using Google docs between September 17, 2009 and November 14, 2009. The photos and captions that appear here were cut from the final draft of Where I Stay, but are no less exemplary.

1.
On Book Reviews

I can't believe someone wanted $500 for this! This old Volkswagen looks filled with sheetrock and plywood, but it isn't empty. A child is sleeping inside it. There's actually a cleared space on the left-hand side floor. He left behind a box of crayons, a ratty old pillow, a rainbow colored crocheted blanket with leaves stuck in the stitches, some Power Rangers.

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Andrew. Thanks for agreeing to be a part of the Writers Respond family. Your book, Where I Stay, has earned some impressive praise. At HTMLGiant, Blake Butler calls this a "refreshing" and "unforgettable" work. Cynthia Reeser at NewPages invokes the grad-school holy trinity when she says, "The movement of people and lives; chance meetings between strangers destined never to cross paths again; moments that can never be recreated; the uncertainty of people, place, relationships—all collide across culture and class, gender, and race to form an anthem of displacement." Marc Shuster at Small Press Reviews calls it "a hybrid of textual and visual arts." And I could go on and on. Tell us, though, is there anything that the critics haven't quite nailed? Something they've missed? Anything you'd like to share about Where I Stay right off the bat?

ANDREW ZORNOZA: Yes, the reviews have been good, and I'm glad to hear it. Though (and I've been clearly and heavily advised to not say this), I wouldn't mind a bad one or two. It seems as if there is a rule in much of the new criticism: you don't give bad reviews, you just review books you like. I'm not a critic, but this seems a disservice to the literary community. Reviewers should not be promoters, that's the publisher's job. I appreciate where it's coming from; there's so little money going around, why would you want to hurt another starving writer? Critics shape and paint the literary landscape surrounding the monuments. Right now there's a lot of pastels and petunias and sunrises in that landscape, there's a lot of gushing praise and summarizing. It's usually one or the other. I can't count how many New York Times reviews I've read where I've come away thinking: the book sounded good in the beginning but now I feel no need to read it. The reviewer has rewritten it for me and I've taken the journey already. Pretentious drivel. That's how I'd like to see a review of my book start.

MG: Have you ever purchased a book as a result of reading a fantastic review? If so, did it live up to the hype?

AZ: I bought Robert Lowell's "Collected Poems" because of William Pritchard's review. It's a very large book—I use it to prop open the sliding back door. What I learned there . . . is never to buy the collected works of anybody. Those books are impossible to take around town and have covers you don't want to be seen with, even inside the house. "Collected Poems" is significantly less sexy than "Lord Weary's Castle."

MG: When it comes to book reviewers, who do you love (or love to hate)?

AZ: I liked David Itzkoff's old "Across The Universe" Column in the NY Times. I miss that very much. I try to read whatever Michael Wood puts out, he had a great essay recently on meandering, broken, interminable books. The Last Night of All The Unfinishable Work as a Genre was the title of that one. Newsweek's David Gates does what I like best, he gets to the heart of why you might read a book, what pleasure is in it. He wrote a superb piece on re-reading recently and I appreciated his pessimism with Salman Rushdie's new book (a snippet from that: And sure enough, that’s where he began to lose me. . . . ). Out on the internet, my favorite critic, by far, is Joanne McNeil of "Tomorrow Museum." And Will Schofield. He's not a critic, more of a curator, but Will's "Journey Around My Skull," is the other website I check frequently. I hope someone is archiving his work.

2.
On Labels

It may not look like it, but there's a space between the bottom second and third haystacks. Everyone should sleep on a haystack before they grow up. Or after, it doesn't matter much.

MG: How would you classify Where I Stay? I saw online that someone called it a "photo-prose novel." Do you agree with such a label, or do you resist labeling?

AZ: It's as good a label as any. I took the photographs and wrote the prose. Some of the photographs we had to pull because of copyright issues. Some of the subjects were unhappy, desperate, potentially litigious people, so I had to remove their images. Some, I couldn't muster up the courage to call on the telephone.

MG: Are you a trained photographer? Did you develop the film yourself? Why photographs?

AZ: I developed some of the film and printed most of the black and white shots. Those, on old Ilford fiber based paper that is now curling and decomposing. A few are scans from contact sheets because the negatives were lost or irreparably damaged. I am not a trained photographer. I did spend some time, long ago, with Emmet Gowin. I learned a tremendous amount from him. At his level, photography is a craft, a process, and a relationship with a very tactile (not visual) world. Capturing a moment in time is only a small part of the story he tells. There is always an element of voyeurism in photography, but Emmet was so intimately connected to the complicated relationship between chemicals and fiber, light and silver, shade and tinting, that his technical aesthetics broke through to a higher level of empathy. It's difficult to explain, but once you put a frame around something it creates a conflict—an exploitative and, ultimately, prosaic, fictive wall. Even if that frame is simply the front and back covers of a book. Emmet taught me you can fight the perils of this by just caring more than anyone else.

Gabriele Basilico and Robert Polidori, Bryan Schutmaat (who did my cover) and Gregory Crewdson are the photographers I follow. And Hiroshi Sugimoto. Sugimoto takes these large-format photos of anonymous swaths of seas and oceans. They are very moving to me. Sugimoto has said that a lo-fi aesthetic is essential to art. I don't know if there's such a thing as hi-fi writing (or lo-fi) but I understand what he's saying when I look at his photographs.

MG: Tell us about the process of writing (maybe even first just conceiving of) this book.

AZ: It took me several years to think of the book in a way that didn't make me cringe. Early on, I had scrubbed out, erased, the narrator from the story. Losing yourself, that's part of his piece in time, that's also part of the story I'm trying to create for the reader. Hitchhiking, language, imagination and reality, memory, past and present and future, heroin: all these shapes were dancing behind me in the service of dissolution of self and a certain rhythm. 1, 2 and 3. 1, 2 and 3. Sort of the old synthesis/antithesis=thesis. Or, more accurately, image/symbol=meaning. Do you know Schrödinger's cat? I just put a human being in Schrödinger's box and called the box Wyoming. But then the story was too cold, collapsed, 2-dimensional. Too unobserved. I began working with the photographs. And, mentally, it was like pulling up the top of this collapsible box, instantly it became a three dimensional space again and I was able to work with feelings, real life.

I've been obsessed for a while now, stuck . . . the question we've all been asking for quite some time is, "Who am I?" I'm not sure that the more appropriate question now isn't, "Where am I?"

MG: That's a really good question, actually. Where are you?

AZ: I'm in a basement under West 13th Street in New York City. There is a power outlet down here.

MG: Wow, I was completely unprepared for this answer. What's it like down there? Or, why are you there?

AZ: I am hiding from Ras the Destroyer.

MG: Does this mean you live in NY?

AZ: Brooklyn and Paris are where I feel the most at home. Also certain parts of Wyoming. I try to avoid venturing north of 14th street in any of those places.

MG: Do you lead a transient lifestyle?

AZ: Well, now I am in Newport News, Virginia, sitting on the seat of a discarded Soloflex. So, I suppose, yes, I do.

MG: What does travel mean to you?

AZ: The only time I don't feel that I am traveling is when I am with the ones I love. Have you read Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory? I feel the same way about travel as he thinks about hotels. . . .

3.
On Tarpaulin Sky Press

It's amazing how much Americana is leaning slightly to one side. Old bicycles, barns, coca-cola signs--they're never quite straight. Anyway, I wasn't planning on sleeping in this one at all. It's outside a very nice house in rural Virginia. My in-laws house, actually.

MG: Tell us a little about Tarpaulin Sky Press and how you came to publish this book with them. I should add that they've done an amazing job with the design, and the photographs look great. My understanding, when it comes to photographs, especially black and white, is that they are very difficult to reproduce. How did you submit this manuscript?

AZ: Yes, Christian Peet, the editor over at Tarpaulin Sky, did miraculous things to get this book in shape. He's an incredible designer and if I had a wish, I'd wish that any and all of my author friends would get a chance to work with him. I submitted the manuscript in a very similar form to what was printed, just exponentially more primitively—if you took the book now, photocopied it eight times, put some pages in the wrong way, left out some pertinent sections. . . .

MG: How long did it take to transform Where I Stay from a manuscript into the object that is available for purchase now?

AZ: About a year and a half.

MG: Why did you submit to TSP?

AZ: A friend of mine, Alex Carnevale, suggested I do so. Also, I had read Jenny Boully's work the year before. I was more than happy to share space in a catalog with her.

MG: Jenny Boully is the reason I keep working on a ms. for Essay Press. It's not much now, but maybe one day I'll be ready to send them something. What about you? What other writers have made you notice a particular press?

AZ: Matthew Derby and Back Bay Books. When I finished Super Flat Times I thought, "Who would publish this?" It was along the lines of how I wanted to work, it was broken, very matte in tone, but punctuated with very visceral ribbons of emotions, and it was a new thing. I don't know Matt, but when my book came out, I snooped around to find his address and sent him a copy. I did the same for Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, Eddie Vedder and Jim Carroll. Well, I didn't hear from the rest. But Matt wrote me a very nice blurb; I still feel very good about that, it means a lot to me.

MG: If TSP had passed, what other presses might you have tried?

AZ: I'm not sure. I took it back from a few places once TSP signed me up. I don't tend to think of the presses, more of the authors. The only press I follow loyally is Archipelago and most of their work is in translation.

4.
On Literary Influences

This is Centralia, an entire town that has caught on fire. The coal that used to run the town's economy has combusted under the surface. It's worth pulling off the main roads. Though, you have to be careful, the residents realized they had a problem when 12 year old Todd Domboski suddenly fell into a sinkhole that opened up in his backyard. The hole went down about 120 feet, but his cousin pulled Todd out just before he plummeted. Great peanut butter shakes at Brennen's Big Chill up the road.

MG: What about Sebald's influence?

AZ: Sebald is one of my favorite authors. But I've never really thought of him as an influence. Hello, My Name Is Erica Jong, by Kathy Acker, was a real influence. Also, The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard, Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Pier Pasolini's Roman Nights,. All those authors are gone now, sadly. And then there's Wittgenstein's Mistress. I guess David Markson has been hinting that he'll be gone any day now. . . .

MG: Really? Sebald, with his images and text, wasn't an influence? As I read, I kept thinking: Which came first, the photographs, the captions, or the text? It was a dizzying experience, which took me straight to Sebald.

AZ: Yes, but it wasn't in my head at all. Sometimes, as an author, I think you have to shut certain voices out. Hemingway, for example. I only read Hemingway when I'm not writing, otherwise it's like having a long-lasting flu of short declarative sentences. "Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of the Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system." That's what John Gardner said to a young Raymond Carver. I stick with motorcycle magazines and nonfiction when I'm in the middle of something.

MG: Are you at all familiar with the work of John Baldessari? One of my housemates, a video-text artist, brought him up after flipping through Where I Stay.

AZ: Wow. Well, I guess he's got the text/image thing going on. Or did have it going on. And he always seems to leave big blanks spaces for the viewer to put themselves in. He's sillier though, or silly to the point of being extremely interesting. I'm not sure I have a funny bone anywhere in here. Also, I've never been in the Whitney Biennial.

MG: What, or who, are you reading now?

AZ: I'm reading Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx. I saw Shelley Jackson reading it late one night on the F train, so the next day I went out and bought it.

MG: What? Are you serious? What other famous literary types have you spotted? And were they all reading?

AZ: I've seen Haruki Murakami in the NYC marathon, but he wasn't reading. He was jogging. There was some joker in a giant green frog costume trying to hand him some water from behind the lines.

5.
On Craft

MG: I read that you have a BA from Princeton and an MFA in Fiction from the New School. Education is clearly important to you. What would you like to say about formal education?

AZ: I was never a good student. I missed far more classes than I attended. I regret that now. I left college for a bit, but managed to graduate in three and a half years. I've been blessed and spoiled by people sticking by me despite myself. There's a scene in Billy Madison when a third grader tells Adam Sandler that he can't wait to get to high school. And Adam Sandler becomes unhinged: "Don't you say that. Don't you ever say that. Stay here. Stay here as long as you can. For the love of God, cherish it. You have to cherish it. . . ." That's how I feel about it, too.

MG: What can you tell us about the New School?

AZ: I teach some in the MFA program at Parson's—in the design and technology program. Parson's is the art and fashion division of the New School. And these kids are fantastic. There is no place I'd rather be. They are courageous, forward-thinking, open, practical. They make me wish I hadn't quit math when I was 14. The combination of living in New York and being caught between being an artist and a designer . . . it's hard to put my finger on, but the New School is very good for people who are between ideals, people mixing forms, technologies, systems of thoughts. . . .

MG: What is the best piece of craft-related advice you ever received? How often do you follow it?

AZ: "Don't let anyone tell you how to write." Cynthia Heimel told me that. She was a columnist for Playboy for seventeen years. I wouldn't want to live with her, but she's a very good advice giver.

MG: Worst craft-related advice?

AZ: "You've got to know all the rules before you can break them."

MG: How do you think you were able, in Where I Stay, to combine so many different narrative threads and make them work in one overall narrative?

AZ: I'm not so sure that I did. Or rather, if they are threads, they are sort of like a ball of yarn with the cardboard center removed. So it might be fun to play with for a bit. But if you wanted, say, to play tennis, you'd be unhappy.

MG: Are you an experimental writer? What do you think about the possible overuse of the term "innovative"?

AZ: I like the word innovative. I don't like the word experimental. To me, the word conjures up failure and the white humped backs of balding scientists. All writing is experimental if you insist on having a reader. Even Judy Blume. But I'm not experimenting. I'm not trying anything new. New has nothing to do with it. I'm just putting the words the way I want to hear them. You may be experimenting by reading it, but me, I'm just trying to make it feel right.

This must be Kansas City, but at that age I should have been living in Houston--we moved a couple times back then. This is me, though I have no way of proving it. I don't have blonde hair anymore. Diagonal shoulder stripes and matching cuffs, look at the quality of that shirt fabric. Where is this jacket now? Is it slowly molding away in New Jersey or spinning away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Is it torn at the sleeve still? Is someone else wearing it? What is he or she like? There is a science to the study of lost things, but it's impenetrable. Call your mother. That's the solution I've found. Call your mother.

Writers Respond: An Interview with Blake Butler

mollygaudry — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:40:39 -0400

Blake Butler needs no introduction, which means all I need to say here is that the following interview was conducted using Google Docs between August 10, 2009 and October 18, 2009.

1.
Scorch Atlas

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Blake. Thanks for doing this. What would you like to say, right off the bat, about Scorch Atlas?

BLAKE BUTLER: I would like to say that the first thing I wanted to do when I had the book in my hands is eat it. So I am going to. My plan is to eat one page of the book every day or thereabouts until it is all gone. Page by page, with sauces, maybe some candles. A bubble bath. When I am done maybe I will start with a second copy, if I'm still hungry. I am always very hungry. This book had been a long time coming in a way, and so now that it is here I just want it back inside me. I mean that in the best way.

MG: What would it mean to be "back inside" you, not literally?

BB: It would mean that now that it is an object and having removed itself from me it is a picture of my brain and shit and mindstate of that period, if not fully even back then controlled by me. It would mean that having seen the thing come out of me I would have as just as much relationship with it existing if I were (and am) to eat it and have it come through in my flesh, but even then it would shit right back out of me again if not quite resembling what it did the first t

ime. At least then it would be a thing I could fully wipe away. All of this said I am very happy with the object as an object and my relationship with it is the same as it would be with my bed, which is equally to me known and unknown, ruined and not ruined, soft and full of bugs.

MG: There are some videos of you actually eating your book; the first page you eat raw, and the second you drowned in ketchup. I believe you've eaten a few more, though the videos aren't up yet. So far, which pages have been the tastiest? Do you have ideas for future recipes?
BB: The tastiest was the most difficult one, which was the first. The very first page in the book is pure black on both sides, all ink. I didn't think about it when I started with that one. I didn't think about water making it easier either, so choking was involved. It was pretty good to taste that way. Since then I've gotten lazy. I've done some more but yeah, none have made it matching with that first black mass. I'd like to make one with a fruit cocktail and a tube of icing. I'd like to wrap some inside veal saltimboca and maybe one with human flesh fritters (I really do want to try human). When I get serious I'll just take a straight up bite out of the book and break my teeth.

MG: Tell us about the design. It is a beautiful book--perhaps what I consider the most beautiful book on my shelf. Usually, one wouldn't think that things of beauty should be destroyed, but in this case it makes perfect sense. Why?

BB: That's all Zach Dodson. I'm still amazed by what he did. I had high hopes for the way this object would appear when it was finished, and he far exceeded those hopes. I've really never seen another book that looks like this one, and that is a blessing I can only continue to be thankful for. Each page in the book has a unique texture to it, handmade and scanned in. I feel grateful that even if the words in the book were shit, one could still sit and stare at this book and see something in it. It's like batting with a quadrupled sized bat.

We wanted to destroy these books because they were designed to look as if they'd suffered through their contents, the rains and bugs and bloated babies and weird fire. It seems interesting that the books themselves appear destroyed in their freshly-printed state, and in going on and destroying them physically, they really take on that aura in full. If bookstores would stock books that were bloated triple sized with slick water and covered in dust and burned some and smelling of rot, they would all be like that, I imagine. I like the feeling of something that's been beat. Some of the books I most remember in my life are ones I snuck wet out of ruined houses. One year when my friend's neighbor's house burned down, there was a bag of books out on the lawn. I fished a picture book out of the pile that had a shot of a nude woman on it. I had never owned a picture of a naked body. The book was covered in bugs and mottled and made mushy. I took it home. I think I hid it underneath some junk deep in my closet, and I would take it out and look at the woman's hair and I would sweat.

MG: Without giving too much away, I love how your DIAGRAM piece functions, spatially, in this collection. This is an odd comparison, but I was reminded of the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. I'm not sure I've encountered the structuring device in many other books. What led to that decision? Or, which came first: the DIAGRAM piece or the idea for Scorch Atlas?

BB: The layering of the storms from the DIAGRAM piece actually came about as a design element, thought up by Zach. His idea was to put one of the storms before each story so that the story itself could then be designed to look as if it had suffered through that storm. Though we ended up keeping that idea contained to the paper that the storms appear on, rather than throughout the book, but the effect I think was even more provocative in how it played out as an intermediary for the mood of the whole book. Because of the nature of that piece, as a series of storms that continually worsen in breadth and horror, it really for me added a sense of continuity and gradation that brought the book together that much more as an object than if the storms had appeared as the singular story, as it was in my original manuscript. I am really lucky that I had Zach and Jonathan on this project, as it was ideas like that that really took the book as a whole to a whole new level, beyond what I'd even imagined for it during its becoming.

As for which came first, I didn't really intended to write Scorch Atlas as a book as it was going on. I simply was pounding out these stories, one after another, and only after I'd finished them all, the DIAGRAM one included, did I realize I had a full on manuscript. I think the only story written after I had assembled the book is 'Want for Wish for Nowhere,' which oddly might be my favorite in the book.

MG: I often ask writers to name their own favorite pieces, and many kindly refuse. Why is "Want for Wish for Nowhere" your favorite? And why did you write "oddly"?

BB: Yeah, having a favorite seems hard, and kind of stodgy. I probably change my opinions on how I feel about certain bits regularly, based on the way the mind changes and like if I happen to open the book and be in a bad mood and see it shitty, or find some error in how I'd phrased it, how I'd do it differently now. I kind of don't like reading things in print I've made as I always want to edit them some more, which is less a result of not having edited it fully in the first place, and more of how flesh morphs the more you eat and listen. Then there's the problem of going back and editing something you made a while back and then coming back even later and finding the edits you made ruined the original voice. I like concentrated phases of writing, concise eras: it's got more value to me than the constantly affirmed 'love labor' of writing something over years and years. Why not get a picture of yourself in a moment? You have a lot more time to get old.

I realize none of that answered your question, which points to that favorites are fucked.

MG: Do you have a least favorite from the collection? Why or why not?

BB: Everything I write is my favorite and least favorite. I don't think about it past that. Thinking too hard about one's own writing as a mantle is asking to be shit on in the hair.

MG: I think Matt Bell and I are agreed that "The Gown from Mother's Stomach" is our favorite. Have you received much feedback on this story? I'd be interested to hear some of it, if you'll share.

BB: That tends to be the one I hear the most about, which kind of confuses me, honestly. I shat that story out in a few hours. Actually, I wrote the first sentence down on a scrap while I was asleep once, and found it, and sat down and wrote the first half of the story from it in about 45 minutes. Then that sat on my hard drive for about 4 months, and I came back and added the bit about the bear, then added the second half, about another 45 minutes. Then I edited it a few times. I think people like it because it seems to me the most contained. I'm not sure what else it is about the story that people respond to any more than the others, but I am glad people like it. Maybe it also kind of comments on how sometimes the least amount of work you put into something, the quicker it comes out as it is supposed to be, the more aura it has about it, and the more immediate light, maybe. I don't hate the story, but if I had to go back to the above question, it might be my least favorite now simply because I am a contrarian.

MG: I feel compelled to share with you that I'm teaching Scorch Atlas in a sophomore-level Introduction to Literature course. I've learned that in this setting, as opposed to a creative writing workshop, it is absolutely necessary to facilitate the students' discussion. To this end, I've given them handouts on plot, character, setting, tone, style, etc., and I was really pleased to discover that your book really works alongside these sort of generic questions (e.g. Who is the protagonist? What does s/he want? How does this complicate the plot?). How do you respond to this--the idea that your writing, which I think is so stylistically brilliant, also satisfies, or fits into, these rather traditional constraints? (If the stories didn't do so, I think my students would be absolutely lost. I, and they, are grateful!)

BB: That is nice, that they respond well. I think everything has these elements. Even the most obscurist, language-oriented, symbol-laden text you could conjure would have these things in them, particularly if you are scrounging for them. Story architects itself. This is why I find it amusing when people, as authors, are so concerned about roadmapping these kinds of elements during the creation period, as if it has to be something they set up and intone, like some kind of wizard, instead of just letting it generate itself naturally, out of ideas, the way most days do, in life. I don't understand, or rather, don't buy, the notion that any one person can be so in tune and ahead of every reader that he or she must design and present these elements, however covertly, to their audience. It cheapens the fun, and you can smell it usually a hundred pages away, this kind of furtive bending, implanting. "This story has fake tits!" There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, I'm sure, but I'd rather not know about them. Let the magic be the magic.

MG: One of my academic interests is ecocriticism: the study of literature and the environment. Do you consider Scorch Atlas to have an investment in fate of the natural world? To what extent are the characters responsible for the downfall of their habitat?

BB: Honestly I've never been much of a nature person. I hide inside a lot. The dirt and air confuse me. Maybe I'm a bitch. I like clean pants. More than that, I think I am afraid of water and of mud. I am afraid of being ripped up into something. At the same time, I am fascinated by it. A lot of my natural interaction comes from dreaming: the way that water and mud is embedded in my blood.

I wouldn't say particularly that the characters in Scorch Atlas are 'responsible' for the destruction of their surroundings any more than they are responsible for the destruction of any other element in air. Rot is natural. People are rotting. It breeds itself. It's what comes. You can be as clean and progressive and protective as you want. Still. It does.

2.
The Internet and Year of the Liquidator

MG: What is your relationship to the Internet and what was your introduction to online writing?

BB: My relationship to the internet is when my house's computer started being able to talk to buildings outside of our building I began to masturbate using information that those other places would sent to our house's computer. I am from the BBS land where I would use dial up to make my mother's phoneline interact with adult servers so I could see women remove their clothes. Now the nudity on the internet is so clear you don't need to look at it anymore.

My introduction to online writing was with what I think of as the first wave of strong independent publishing personas, including Eyeshot, Pindeldyboz, Haypenny, the Glut, McSweeney's, and some other places. Part of me misses the days when that community was very small like that and yet seemed larger than it is now, as large as it is now. Without finding that, I might be still using computers to talk to other computers but they would talk about machine languages and databases. Jesus christ.

MG: Do you believe in Internet personas? Or do you think people are as they really are? Who are some of your favorite Internet presences?

BB: I do not believe in internet personas, I believe in personas. I don't think people are what they really are. I do not believe people believe in their personas. I do not believe people are personas. I believe people are a mash of things mostly shit and a little bit of tickle and some candy if they are good people and I guess a little light. My favorite internet presence is Lorf Ben Undwadsensen who lives inside a subnet of Google and delivers the mail with his teeth.

MG: From personal experience I can say that you are very generous with your time. I had stumbled upon an issue of Ninth Letter, read your story "The Gown from Mother's Stomach," loved it, pulled up your blog, sent you fan mail, and you responded! And it was your blog that introduced me to online journals. I read your stories, I stayed at those sites, I read others' stories. A world unfolded. I've always wanted to thank you for that. If not for you, there wouldn't be me. Such a strange thing to say, but I know it's true. Do you feel an obligation toward other writers? Or, why are you so nice?

BB: It's not that I am nice. I am not nice really. I just really do enjoy words, and I get such pleasure out of words that I want to see more words and I want to do what I can to extend the pleasure I receive in the form of words to other people who also have the receptors for that pleasure and who have the same want in them to make words that I do. I get a bigger kick I think out of publishing and hyping other people's work than I do spreading my own. Ultimately though it is about the reflex and the condition and I exist inside that condition more than I exist anywhere else, and so it is very natural for me to breathe and eat inside and around it, it is a thing I could not change if I wanted to. Not nice, a blood obligation. It is nice though maybe that it seems nice because that maybe means that it feels true what I am saying and I am not just a mouth.

MG: Tell us about Year of the Liquidator. I think we're all interested in the long version.

BB: I'd always wanted to start a small book press. It was a matter of inevitablility. I think I get more pleasure out of working with other people's ends than my own, outside the hemisphere of just writing. I was just waiting for the right time. When I found Kristina, I knew immediately her book had to be the beginning. Shane and I had thrown the idea of working together around for a long while, and when I sent him K's manuscript, he had the same reaction: this is the one. So we committed to it, and the commitment pressed the birth. I am really excited about the prospect, and hope that things go smoothly enough that we can do a couple of titles a year. We are approaching it very calmly, and yet with great excitement, as we want it to go exactly right, to be a small, good thing that has an aura, and in the tradition of my favorite small presses: making book objects that might not appear anywhere else.

Not sure yet what we will do after the first book is finished. We're kind of waiting to see how things go, and moving from there. Hopefully one day we can read submissions openly, but for now we're moving one nidge at a time, and there's already so much I want to do. Time is hard.

3.
The Book Deals

MG: It's no secret by now that you've landed yourself a two-book deal with Harper Perennial. How far along are you in these two manuscripts? And do publishing companies often sign deals for unfinished books?

BB: The novel is finished, other than minor tinkering and copy edits, and has been for some time. The deal was initiated around the novel, and the addition of the second book, which came up in discussing the contracts, was sold on a proposal for the idea of the book. I think
that's pretty standard, actually. I've heard of many deals where the second book was on spec. And especially for nonfiction, which is often I think sold on proposal. As for how far along the nonfiction is, I started work on it a couple of weeks ago, and it is coming very fluidly. It's a book I've had in me for a long time. I feel excited for it.

MG: You now have an agent and a major publishing company behind you, which I'm sure includes a publicity department and such--possibly even eventual tour money. Does this relieve you of any burdens? Do you feel you have more time to write?

BB: I haven't gotten too deep into feeling how it feels to be with a major house. So far it's been as good as I could ask. My editor, Cal Morgan, is wicked smart and knows what he's doing. I've felt nothing but encouraged in my vision, as surprising as it might be for such an odd book at a big house. I think Harper Perennial is really interested in pushing boundaries and getting new, interesting books out there. I feel blessed and excited to be a part of that. Still not sure about publicity matters, or touring support, etc., but that's always been a backseat concern for me. I'm just happy to have a wonderful publisher for the books, one that will surely help me get my work to a larger audience, I believe, without compromising its essence in the slightest.

As for having more time to write, I've always had a lot of time. I make it my priority, and my freelance jobs have allowed me a great deal of fluidity. I'm lucky in that regard, that I've been able to maintain such a loose schedule for moneymaking around what I really love. Everyone should look into freelance writing online: there's just so many ways to make a moderate amount of money that clears your work week enough that you can write from home. It's much easier than it seems.

MG: What, if anything, is different?

BB: Well, for one, writing a book that has been already sold feels interesting. I've certainly never done something like that before, and while at first I was afraid it might feel weird having that looming, it's actually been very freeing. I've always worked best with deadlines and schedules, and if anything it really is motivating me even more to be focused and rigorous and push myself to make something wild and good. It's been especially nice in that up until a few months ago I felt like I'd wasted a lot of this year spinning wheels and slightly off-focused. I'm getting more done on the actual work than I have all year. Things feel strong.

MG: Your non-fiction is about insomnia. Is it about your insomnia?

BB: It is about my insomnia, and insomnia in general, and also about obsession, and obsessing, which I believe has been the cause of a lot of my sleep trouble since I was very young. It is also about tunnels and masturbating and weird light and encryption and video games and film and fear.

MG: When did your insomnia begin? Is it constant or does it come and go? Any relationship to your creative output?

BB: It is a thing that has been inside me since before I was born and is still inside me now even though I sleep rather well most nights, this year. It had been unrelenting in the insomaniac form through various periods of my early childhood and especially in my midteens to late twenties, if studded in different places by errors in speech or moving or other brainwaves. It has an influence on creative output in that it is all through me at every moment and when I can control it best I am at my best, and when I can not control it it makes me feeble, but it is always in my flesh and I am always breathing it and without it I would not exist. In all of this I mean insomnia as an understanding more than simply the medical condition of not being able to sleep. I'm pretty deep in the midst of all this thinking right now as I am writing a full length text about the condition.

MG: What can you share about the fiction manuscript?

BB: It's a full length novel in segmented scenes about a family who comes to live inside a new house and finds copies of themselves already there. There is also a black box on their new neighbors' lawn that continues to grow in size. There are strangers who come to the house to visit wearing gloves. I think I thought of it as a novel in a David Lynch kind of mind while I was writing it, though it might feel totally different than that overall. It is also about consumption, young death, sleep action, tunnels, creation, weird light, haunting, disease, and death. It is a book I have been trying to get out of me for years and years now, and feels like the best thing I've ever written. I hope people like it.

4.
Who is Blake Butler?

MG: Take a look around. Describe something about where you are, right now, that you haven't really noticed before.

BB: There are patches of weird sparse hair on the skin below the knuckle of my pointer and middle fingers of both hands, but not on the other fingers or the thumbs. As much as I see my hands, I'd never seen that until you asked. I can almost count the follicles. Is it true that each hair is held into your body by little microscopic insects? Did I make that up or is that common knowledge? Those four fingers are the fingers I type most with. Maybe those insects wrote this book. If not, they should have. I'll say they did.

MG: Tell us about Blake Butler as a kid. And as an adolescent? A high schooler? College boy? And now?

BB: I think I've always been the same person. People too highly rate the idea of mental change. I feel like the melding of an 8 year old and and an 80 year old, in a body of whatever age I am at any time. If I could have changed I probably would have done so by now. I will probably spend the rest of my life saying the same thing. I will get older. I will eat more. Hopefully I will go deaf.

MG: That seems an odd thing to say. You tend to be full of odd things to say. What are some of the oddest things you've ever said? (Maybe not odd to you, but odd to anyone listening in.)

BB: What's the oddest thing I've said. I durno, man. Send me a tape recorder, I'll give you hours of what I say inside my sleep.

MG: Where do you see yourself a year from now? Five years? Twenty-five?

BB: Hopefully I will go deaf. Other than that, I don't see myself anywhere, even tomorrow. I don't mean that morbidly, I mean that I don't know and I don't want to know. If I knew where I was going to be, even if I loved where that was, I would probably do everything I could to make that not occur. Again, I am a contrarian by nature, and yet when mostly around strangers I give in to others' wills. The more I love a person the more mean I am to them often, I fear. A lot of the time I just want every day to be even more exactly the same as every other day than it already feels they are. What am I talking about? I have no idea.

MG: What are you talking about? I have no idea.

BB: Glorbbenbit pu-sis londum difdong, queebibbit andit ressmonblerrib.

MG: Do you have any pets? If not, why not? If so, what do you call them/it?

BB: I'm not good at pets, I get bored, impatient. The same reason I'll likely never have kids. My one true love as a pet is my Margot, a chihuahua, who now lives with my ex-girlfriend who gifted her to me. I miss my Margot.

MG: How about some more favorites? Favorite liquid?

BB: Urine while it's coming out. Coffee in my mouth.

MG: Favorite vowel?

BB: o

MG: Favorite consonant?

BB: b

MG: Favorite air?

BB: Whatever air is inside my mother at any minute.

MG: Favorite human shape?

BB: Pleased

MG: Favorite sound?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite hue?

BB: Black or fire engine red

MG: Favorite digestable?

BB: Money

MG: Favorite texture?

BB: Beckett

MG: Favorite shelter?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite "recipe" of "ingredients" [that make up anything]?

BB: Masturbate in the shower until you are about to come then stop. Go wet into the bedroom
and wrap yourself in a bedsheet, constricting just your arms and head. Lay down in the floor for 45 minutes.

MG: Is there a single book you've read more than any other?

BB: I used to read Donald Barthelme's Snow White once a year. So like 8 times of that, but I haven't read it the past couple years. In terms of quantitative time spent with one book in hand it might be Infinite Jest, the book that made me want to work. I have read that book through fully twice and in bits and pieces many times and certain sections of it more times than I have read Snow White in full. In my mind I've been reading the same sentence in the same book for my entire life but it's been a whole life figuring out what that sentence is and I still haven't got it right.

MG: If you could have any combination of three superpowers, what would they be, and why that particular combination?

BB: I would like to cry money; I would like to be able to turn off sound and turn on sound, and make the sound into what I want the sound to be; I would like to be able to shrink people and grow people and throw people in the air largely and touch them and make them laugh. That particularly combination because it's the sounds that just came out of my hands when I did not think at all about the question, which is my greatest respect for the question.

________________

Blake Butler lives in Atlanta and blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com. He is the author of Ever (Calamari Press) and Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books). In Winter 2010, Harper Perennial will publish his novel about young death.

Writers Respond: A Conversation with Amelia Gray

mollygaudry — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:37:19 -0400

1.
The Featherproof Tour

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Amelia, thanks for agreeing to be a part of the Writers Respond family. You might notice that instead of "interview" up there in the title, we have "conversation" instead. Essentially, the Writers Respond interviews and the Writers Respond conversations aim to serve the same purpose: to give writers a chance to talk a bit about their work. But not long ago I realized I preferred the interviews that got a little goofy, the ones that took risks in terms of what "should" or "should not" go into an interview. For instance, Shane Jones shared his favorite sexual position in his interview, and Kyle Beachy, in his interview, admitted he doesn't understand the difference between cupcakes and muffins. To differentiate the serious from the fun, I decided to start an offshoot--a conversation series. The first of the conversations was with Lily Hoang, who, like you, has ties to FC2, and we'll certainly get to that in just second. First, I want to ask you if you would define "interview" and "conversation" differently? And if so, would you rather this be an interview or a conversation?

AMELIA GRAY: Let's get silly as quickly as we can, Molly. Do you remember when you tried to pick a single flower at that gas station in Philadelphia, but you pulled out the whole plant? That was silly. I treasured that. Anyway, they say the best interviews are like conversations. I think we should aspire to do the best we can.

MG: I like how you ask if I remember--as if to imply I might have been so intoxicated (by your presence in Philly, of course) that I could have forgotten. Well, in fact, I had forgotten. Until slowly the details all began to trickle back, many with the help of the photographs in my cell, and those that popped up on the Dollar $tore Reading Tour Twitter page!

AG: The Twitter page that launched a thousand ships. Best to make a scene among friends, I think. That long walk to the cheesesteak place was good for all of us. Don't ever show me on a map how far we actually walked--I want to keep the memory that we were going for forty days and forty nights.

MG: It was more than three miles, I can tell you that much. So, tell us about the tour. What did the tour van smell like?

AG: I will tell a story from the Featherproof tour. We were in New York City, and mostly everyone had gone out to drink more after the reading. Jac and I stayed behind and slept, and I woke up at about six in the morning. Our host was house-sitting and had kindly opted for the couch, so I found myself in this bed in a very bright room with the windows open, and the entire city of New York doing construction below. I got up and stepped over everyone sleeping on the floor and went downstairs. I walked a long way and got lost. I found myself at a scary little nail salon, where I paid a man five dollars to wax my eyebrows while yelling at his wife. I walked back and everyone was still asleep. I had to wake Mary up to let me in. I felt bad about that, but the truth was I wanted to wake everyone up to tell them about the hooked plastic fingers with fake nails at the salon, the back room with a wet vac where I sat on a folding chair and put my face in the man's hands. I wanted to bring my friends coffee and pastries and do their laundry while I told them about how the man's wife showed me the open sores on her arms. Anyway, that van straight up smelled like a butt.

MG: Ha ha. A butt! Wow. (Wait a sec: your host was housesitting? So some poor people left their home in the care of someone who decided to let a bunch of butt-van travelers in?

AG: It's true. By then, though, we were so used to traveling that we didn't leave a trace. There's an efficiency involved when your home is the half-foot radius around your sleeping bag. Ask Shane Jones how fast we got up and left in Albany. It was five in the morning and we did it all in our sleep. The man barely had time to make a pot of coffee.)

MG: Tell me about the eyebrow waxing? Aren't you afraid to have that done? That some weird man will rip off your entire eyebrow?

AG: I usually do it myself, so I know how easy it is, but I ought to have been more afraid of that man. I often find myself in situations like that, where I should have apologized, said I thought that this was a public restroom, wished them a good day on my way out. I'm too stubborn. Plus I figured I'd get a good story.

MG: I love how your answers are perfect little stories within themselves. In fact, your brief recap of that experience is representative of much of your writing--you are a storyteller, and the stories you tell do not need a gazillion words to get the emotion across. I especially like the line (can I call it a line?): "I felt bad about that, but the truth was I wanted to wake everyone up to tell them about the hooked plastic fingers with fake nails at the salon, the back room with a wet vac where I sat on a folding chair and put my face in the man's hands." It's just gorgeous. It's "Amelia Gray" all over. Let me ask: Do you ever pull from real-life events and craft fictions?

AG: Sometimes little elements of real life get into the fiction, but in funny ways. There was a girl covered in seeds in AM/PM, which came from the morning my little eye pillow broke and put a couple of sesame seeds on the bed and I wondered, half-asleep, what would it be like to sleep in a vat of sesame seeds? Would that be nice? Probably it would be slippery.

MG: You know those stress relievers? One of my profs had one and one day it broke, and these tiny little silicon beads (the size of sesame seeds) exploded all over the room. They were soooo slippery. And because they were so slippery we couldn't sweep them up. Basically, for a long time we just had to be really careful how we walked in that room.

AG: How stressful!

MG: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to dive into a swimming pool filled with Jell-O? If so, what flavor?

AG: I've never wondered that. Christ, wouldn't you just sink down to the bottom, helpless? Would it be like quicksand? Maybe I'm thinking of pudding. I'd try it in cherry Jell-O but only if you tried it with me, Molly. And only if we had a crew of emergency medical technicians and lifeguards to haul us out and flush the gelatin from our lungs.

MG: One day, when we have the means to arrange such an idiotic experiment, yes, we will do this. But let's go back just a second: perhaps a few details will make their way into future fictions, but would you ever try and write your New York eyebrow-waxing adventure as a non-fiction? Or is it better to let it exist just as it was--a strange morning in a strange city populated with strange people?

AG: I made a piece of toast while I thought about this: I think I'd have a hard time writing a non-fiction that involved people I know or care about. It occurs to me that I picked one of the few tour stories where I'm walking around by myself. It seems that people like to be thought about and written about, but they don't like to seem strange or uncomfortable, and that's sort of my bread and butter. No pun intended, breakfast.

AM/PM

MG: I just realized we have the same last initial. Looking at "AG" and "MG," I thought, "Aggie and Maggie," and then "Harold and Maude," and then "Benny and Joon." What is your favorite "______ and ______" pairing?

AG: Bonnie and Clyde. I've been getting the facts on Bonnie and Clyde this week.

MG: Good answer. Can you share why you're fact-gathering?

AG: There's no purpose at the moment. I get into fact-gathering. I made the mistake of watching Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde on my computer. I couldn't get through it without researching every little question I had: Is that guy in the background drawn from real life? Did this scene really happen? Where are they buried? What book is Beyoncé reading in the empty swimming pool in the video for 'Bonnie and Clyde '03'? I can really take all the magic out of watching a movie.

MG: Tell us about the John Mayer concert T-shirt. Do you have one? (For those who do not understand this reference, would you provide a little recap?)

AG: I had an Alan Jackson concert T-shirt, which I bought at Goodwill because it looked like his head was floating on the front, and on the back it read DON'T ROCK THE JUKEBOX. It was cool. I don't know where it is now. I might have given it to my sister. It ended up becoming a John Mayer Concert Tee in AM/PM because I have more complicated feelings towards John Mayer and his merchandise: in my mind, the John Mayer Concert Tee looks like one of those Phantom of the Opera shirts kids wear at a performing arts middle school, but instead of the mask, it's John Mayer's face.

MG: What are five things (other than the T) in AM/PM that have some real-life significance for you? Or, hell, fantasy-life significance? Whichever you prefer.

AG: While writing AM/PM, 1) I was drinking a lot of flaxseed oil, 2) I went on a date with a guy whose parents had just survived a plane crash, 3) I had just moved into a place with serious squirrel nesting troubles, 4) My cats had worms, and 5) I observed a gas station setting on fire while I was waiting in line for the pump.

MG: Is there a particular character from AM/PM that you feel most connected to? If yes, who and why? If no, why not?

AG: Not really. One of my goals in writing the book was to create characters that, good or bad, were each an accurate depiction of some believable element of person-hood. In the first draft, nobody had a name. Later I decided to tie them all together under different characters.

MG: How long did it take to write AM/PM, from start to finish?

AG: The generation period was one story in the morning and one at night for two months. Then I spent about a year on and off editing it.

MG: How or why did you decide to publish it with Featherproof?

AG: I was going from of the experience of looking at their books at an AWP three or four years ago. When most of the other tables were offering peppermints and pens, the Featherproof table was giving away their mini-books, and I liked what that meant. Otherwise, I knew precious little about the publishing world when I found them. I got lucky.

MG: Can you tell us about your experience with Featherproof?

AG: Featherproof has this perfect combination of design and story interest. There's nothing finer than working with a couple of people who are sharp at what they do and care a ton about the final product. The stories I hear from people at bigger publishing houses involve editors jumping ship, a total lack of control over design, contract wars. I don't know why anyone would actively wish for something like that to happen for their first book.

MG: Here's a funny (or maybe not) story from last year's AWP: you and I crossed paths in a bar, we were both a bit tanked, we recognized one another, you said you would be at the Featherproof table the next day, and the next day I searched far and wide to find it. Finally, I gave up, returned to the Keyhole table, and asked some folks at nearby tables where in the heck that dang Featherproof table was. Someone pointed, I turned, and there you were, behind me, sitting on the floor. These many months later, was it [AWP] as good for you as it was for me?

AG: Oh, Molly! AWP was good. I got to meet all the people I've worked with for a while. One night I walked alone to the Quickies reading and sat by myself at the bar and just felt excited to be there. This is a good damn time for readers and writers in America. I'm looking forward to Denver.

MG: Tell us about Five Things.

AG: Five Things is a once every-other-monthly reading and music show I put on in Austin with my co-host Stacy Muszynski. We take five objects, images, or ideas, and task five writers with creating a five-minute piece. The idea comes from the Dollar Store Show and Quickies. We just celebrated our first anniversary with a 'Best of Austin' nod. We're thinking of doing a party around the Texas Book Festival, and a writing contest after that.

Museum of the Weird

MG: Let's discuss your forthcoming collection,Museum of the Weird. How long had you been working on the manuscript? Why did you choose to submit it to FC2? What did you do when you learned you won? Details, woman, details!

AG: The oldest story in the collection is about four years old, but I had been fussing with the more-or-less finished manuscript for about a year before I submitted it to the contest. A friend of mine who works in the FC2 office encouraged me to submit. Obviously, the submissions were all anonymous, and my friend didn't know I had even entered until she connected the winning manuscript's assigned number to my name after she got them back from the judge. So, once she found out that I had entered and also had won, she called me and left a cryptic message. I was on a flight from Tucson to Austin and got the voicemail when the plane touched down. I wasn't sure if the good news was that she was pregnant or that the manuscript had won.

MG: Oh wow, we are so at the age where all of our girlfriends call to say they're either getting married or pregnant. Oof. What say you?

AG: God bless girlfriends with babies! There's a special place in heaven reserved for girlfriends that let us say hello to the babies when they're cute and then take them away when they mess themselves. I think of having a baby from a practical standpoint and wonder at the women who write and work and do the motherhood thing at the same time. I can barely keep the litter box clean some days, you know?

MG: Why is it that caring for other living things, people included, and taking care of their excrement is so often synonymous? Anyway, back to Museum of the Weird. If you had to provide the back cover synopsis, how (or what) would it read?

AG: Oh no, I'm horrible at this, I'm an awful pitchman. Here's part of what the FC2 marketing people wrote for me: "A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—-a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning" etc.

MG: Do you have a middle name? Why not use it?

AG: Morgan. It's a good one, but if I used it I'd have to write Garden of English Roses or similar.

MG: Amelia Morgan Gray.

AG: Author of The Forbidden Locket.

MG: Okay, I won't ask what would be on the cover of the book. But if it were made into a movie, what would the be on the cover of the DVD case?

AG: Maybe a large birdcage with a man crouched inside. Should it be Adrien Brody crouched inside? Should he be naked? None of this is in the book.

MG: I just totally thought of this cover. Yes? No?

AG:This is exactly what I was thinking of, except the cage must be more ill-fitting. I want the DVD audience to say, "How did naked Adrien Brody get into that cage? He looks uncomfortable." I've got Bender on the brain. She's doing a cool thing with Madras Press.

MG: Goddamn, it seems like every time I turn around someone somewhere is doing something awesome with some press. Thanks for pointing that out! So are you done with the edits for Museum of the Weird? Are you working on anything new?

AG: I'm done! It's weird to have to let it go for a year before it's out. I'm working on a couple new things and mostly returning to old habits, which means starting small, writing a lot of handwritten notes that go nowhere, paragraphs in voice, violent little short-short stories, empty threats, and sprawling openings to novels that are immediately shelved. Nothing has emerged quite yet. I've been lucky to have some little projects, thanks to Drew Burk at Spork and others.

MG: I think this is interesting--your process of getting started. Best-case scenario, what will happen (and how) as a result of these notes and paragraphs?

AG: I'd like very much to write a novel. It is going to take a while and I'll probably end up with eight little chapbooks or a book of sonnets. We can't always get what we want! But if we try sometimes, you know, we get what we need.

Day Jobs, The Golden Girls, and Texas

MG: Do you have a day job?

AG: A couple: one writing job, mostly articles about career training; another writing job, a reading comprehension study guide for fifth graders; and a teaching job, a once-a-week comp class at a community college. None of it offers health insurance, but It's nice, because I don't have to clock in, which means I don't stress out too much when I can't sleep because the theme song to The Golden Girls is stuck in my head and every time I close my eyes it's all, "Thank you for being a friend," on loop, and I want to drive to a retirement home and drop my brain off there. Just say to it, Go, brain. Go find your personal Bea Arthur.

MG: I always thought The Golden Girls would be best watched in the company of a gay man. Not sure why I think this. Is that a weird thing to think? Go ahead, you can say.

AG: Everything's a weird thing to think when it comes to The Golden Girls. For the record, I can imagine you and a man with a nice crew cut sitting on a couch in a dark living room, watching The Golden Girls and eating cheesesteaks. During the opening credits your each reach over and clasp hands. Everyone's sexuality is unclear. Your eyes are brimming with tears. I mean, it's hard not to cry during the opening credits of The Golden Girls, if you're really listening to the lyrics. Who writes "Thank you for being a friend" on a birthday card?

MG: What's Texas like?

AG: You can buy a lot of things crafted in the shape of Texas here. Cheese shaped like Texas, cookies, little iron brands you keep near the grill so when you're grilling meat, you can brand it with the shape of Texas. We drink a beer called Lone Star. Still, I'm not from here, and sometimes I wake up and I have to convince myself I'm really in Texas. It seems like everyone should need a passport to enter or leave the state. Rick Perry is probably working on this. But the weather has been lovely this week; I've had my windows open.

MG: We're just about done with summer here on the east coast. Is it always summer in Texas? Do you have any bad summertime habits that you'll put a stop to? (Me, I'll give up paperback romance novels from the grocery store until next summer.)

AG: Oh man, paperback romance novels are old-school vice. I can't even keep those in the house anymore. It gets chilly here, but never too bad for too long. We had an ice storm in '07 that shut the city down, but that was mostly because nobody had chains for their truck tires. I don't pay for heating, so I'm snug as a bug regardless. I have a bad summertime habit of getting up at noon--that's going to need to come to an end this winter. I want to be back in early mode for spring. There's nothing finer than a spring morning.

Amelia's Picks

MG: Okay, let's have some pick-and-choose fun. Feel free to elaborate, if you like. Thongs or boy shorts?

AG: Tough economic times force honest Americans to scale back on fabric. Patriotism dictates thongs.

MG: Thongs (butt) or thongs (toes)?

AG: Toes toes toes. You can get married in flip-flops out here.

MG: Coffee or tea?

AG: Coffee these days. I've got my eye on those tea packets that bloom underwater, though.

MG: I love those. They are really pretty to watch bloom. Okay, lattes or cappuccinos?

AG: I'm embarrassed to not know the difference. One has more milk, right? I like a good americano.

MG: Cats or dogs?

AG: Either a dog that is in every way like a cat (lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency) or a cat.

MG: Wow.

AG: This is how I feel.

MG: Hardcover or paperback?

AG: Paperback! Better for the bath.

MG: Goodwill or upscale consignment shops?

AG: I'm taking a bag of stuff to Buffalo Exchange today, actually. So, downscale consignment?

MG: Scissors or shears?

AG: Scissors, unless you are pinking.

MG: Saran wrap or tinfoil?

AG: It depends where you're wearing the hat.

MG: [I think I snorted when I read your answer.] Apple juice or tomato juice?

AG: Tomato on an airplane, apple if I'm giving blood.

MG: Favorite freshly juiced-in-a-juicer juice combination? (I like apple and carrot, but the barista where I go likes to make me orange, beet, and ginger, which I guess is supposed to be good for me.)

AG: Those all sound good. I like a nice hibiscus lemonade.

MG: Bottled water or tap water?

AG: Tap, unless you live in Charleston.

MG: So You Think You Can Dance or American Idol?

AG: Ryan Seacrest eats six egg whites a day. He adds one yolk on Fridays.

MG: '80s or '90s?

AG: We went to the work of fixing the time travel machine and this is the best we can do? Let's go farther back and find out what it was like to be primordial sludge.

MG: I bet diving into a Jell-O pool would be something like that. Push pins or staples?

AG: I once knelt on the floor of a cabin during summer camp and a push pin went into my kneecap. What's weird is it didn't hurt. I stapled my finger once and that did hurt. So, pins.

MG: That is weird. I hope that push pin made it into your writing somehow. Pocket folders or manila folders?

AG: LISA FRANK TRAPPER KEEPER

MG: Wide rule or college rule?

AG: I wrote a secret admirer letter to a boy when I was in the fourth grade. Sadly, I was the only nerd who used recycled wide-rule. This was back when recycled paper looked like dirty newsprint. I was discovered.

MG: Wallpaper or paint?

AG: Paint, unless you're outfitting a cozy bar. Then, heirloom damask burgundy velvet on red flocked wallpaper.

MG: Copper or cast iron?

AG: Cast iron. Seasoned cookware is useful and charming.

MG: Cheesecake or quiche?

AG: A good quiche is better and more rare than a good cheesecake. I wonder, should the ideal form be the avatar of the object?

MG: And my favorite, cupcakes or muffins?

AG: Scones, for real. But cupcakes are a
tantalizingly close second.

MG: This is why you're fat or Look at this fucking hipster?

AG: Passive-aggressive notes.

Questions from our Facebook Friends

MG: And let's wrap things up with a few questions from our Facebook friends. (Do we need a backstory? Backstory: I updated my status to read something like, "What would you ask Amelia Gray if you could ask her anything in the whole wide world?" There were immediate responses. John Domini asks: "Based on recent experience, which would you say is cooler: Portland, OR, or Austin, TX?"

AG: It's easier to find a margarita in Austin and easier to find dessert in Portland. Otherwise, besides soil composition, the cities are exactly the same.

MG: Erika Moya wants to know: "What will you be this year for Halloween, or is that a surprise?"

AG: Zombie Vanna White? Sexy James Joyce? The possibilities are limited.

MG: Tim Kerlin says, "Remember when we were swimming at my apartment and those teenagers were making out on the picnic table? Wasn't that funny? Then you and me and Michael did synchronized swimming. That wasn't a question, I guess."

AG: This interview is over!

MG: Randy Cauthen wonders: "What's the fastest land animal?"

AG: A cheetah running inside the third car of the Shanghai Maglev train.

MG: Matt Walker wants to know: "Which room in a house is most conducive to a successful seance?"

AG: The loudest.

MG: John Domini asks another: "Italo Calvino, his SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency. Did he leave out anything? Or, is there one on which you'd care to expound?"

AG: Timeliness. Timelessness.

Amelia Gray is a writer living in Austin, TX. She is the author of AM/PM, published by Featherproof Books, and Museum of the Weird, due Fall 2010 through Fiction Collective 2. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, and Caketrain,among many others. She blogs at ameliagray.com.

Writers Respond: An Interview with Joshua Michael Stewart

mollygaudry — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:04:26 -0400

Joshua Michael Stewart, poet and editor of Big Toe Review (Where Prose Poems Go To Do Naughty Things), is the author of the chapbooks Ordinary Mysteries (White Heron Press, 2004) and Vintage Gray (Pudding House Press, 2007), as well as a full-length collection, Son of a Minor Key, which is forthcoming from BlazeVOX Books in 2010. I can’t express how grateful I am for the chance to discuss Joshua’s poems—several of which will be included here in full. In the past weeks, I’ve come to appreciate how the speakers in Joshua’s poems consistently bare profound sensitivities; post-abandonment, they ache for human connection, and many share a deep yearning for faith—spiritual, sometimes, but moreover for the kind that just plain keeps a person going in a sort of willful, hopeful trudging along. I have found, in Joshua’s poems, moments of serenity, and I’m hoping that by the end of this conversation you will too.

In Memory of the
Nearness of You

I use the heels of my palms to thrust

open a stubborn window,

causing a book to plop on its side,

slide off the shelf—washed over

by a wave of other books,

then crash into a rose-filled vase

before smacking down on the hardwood

floor. What follows is silence,

like the split second after a mother slaps

her child. But no wailing or pleading here.

We’re given only the quiet, and that inherited

fear that turns the heart to sand

slipping through an hourglass.

We watch the water search with its fingers

the valleys of the room, and allow

our eyes to blur, shards of prisms

gleaming in late afternoon.

I say we the whole time meaning I,

and I look up: eggshell walls

that give and give until I give way

to the revelation that you will not

lean in the doorway smelling of strawberries

and righteousness. The last grains

will trickle out. Pain will not enter this house.

I have all the time in the world

and my heart is a rose is a rose is a rose.

MOLLY GAUDRY: Tell me about this poem—the title, the roses, Stein’s influence, the speaker, and the “you.”

JOSHUA MICHAEL STEWART: As with many of my poems, it started out with a simple image that sets things in motion, allowing the poem to spiral out to whatever the poem wants to become. You know the old saying: the poem writes itself. Which is one of the joys of writing poetry, I’m just as surprised as the reader is. If I sat down and said, “I’m going to write about such and such,” I’d completely go blank. Many influences run through this poem, nods to Bob Hicok and folk singer Dar Williams. The title of course, is taken from the Hoagy Carmichael song, “The Nearness of You.” I often use the titles of Jazz standards for titles of my poems, again, giving a nod to those great composers while also acknowledging William Matthews, who would title many of his poems the same way. I wish I could say this poem isn’t autobiographic, but that would be like when John Berryman claimed he and Henry weren’t the same person. Essentially this poem is about my relationship with my mother, or to be fair, one aspect of it. However, I use “you” in a number of other poems in which it’s not clear who the “you” is. I love that. Depending on how the reader approaches the “you” may lead to many interpretations of the poem. In Jazz there’s this thing called “echoing,” which is when a musician is blowing through an improvised solo he’ll play a few bars of a familiar tune then jump right back into improvising. That is pretty much what I’m doing with the Stein quote, but I guess I’m also saying that despite whatever hardships I may have gone through, the beauty of art has always been something I could count on. Death doesn’t bother me, but the idea of never hearing Sinatra sing “Come Fly with Me” ever again does.

MG: What is the significance of “Come Fly with Me”? I mean, why this particular song and not some other?

JMS: It makes me smile. That song says, “Everything’s gonna be alright, Jack.” But it’s not just that song. It’s that song and every other song Sinatra sang, it’s the duets of Ella and Satchmo, Hitchcock films and the paintings of Edward Hopper. People will come and go, that’s life, but as long as I have art in my life it’s okay.

MG: In this poem, what was the image that set things in motion?

JMS: The first one with the narrator trying to open the stuck window, It’s usually a simple mundane image like that. However, it’s not always the first line. I also have a thing with objects. I’ll pick an object such as an oak leaf or an answering machine and try to see those objects in a new light. I’m a firm believer that poetry is everywhere and in everything.

MG: I’m intrigued by this idea “that poetry is everywhere and in everything.” Do you ever experience writer’s block? Can you pick up any random object and find inspiration?

JMS: I’m plagued with writer’s block. I often go months without writing anything or at least anything good. This is how my typical writing schedule works: stare at blank page. Doodle. Do this for three to five hours, four days a week, for a month. Then out of nowhere, an image or a phrase bleeds out of the pen, and once it hits the page the poem flows out almost whole. Before you ask, yes, I always start my poems with pen and paper. It needs to be organic. I need to feel it in my arm, neck and back muscles. Then once I get it rolling, first stanza, or so, I’ll switch to the computer. I do believe poetry is everywhere, but the drudgery of everyday life makes it hard to see sometimes. It takes effort, but I’m determined to put in the work.

MG: It’s interesting—I read the “you” not as mother but as girlfriend, or wife. Mother changes everything! How do you respond to “girlfriend, or wife”?

JMS: Whatever gets you to connect with the poem and gives you the desire to turn the page to read the next one works for me. Again, that’s why I love using “you” in a poem. Another example of this is my poem “When the Surrealist No Longer Remembers His Dreams.” In this poem, the narrator is walking down a country road with a corpse who is addressed as “you.” The reader may think that the corpse is a former lover or deceased relative, and will read the poem in one way, which is fine with me, but when I tell you that when I wrote it I was thinking that the narrator and corpse, the “I” and “you” were all one person, it totally means something else.

MG: That would seriously alter any person’s reading. Clearly, you enjoy the multiplicity of interpretations. Is this why you write poems and not stories? I think, maybe, that stories leave less room for interpretation—traditionally narrated stories, anyway.

JMS: Well I don’t write stories because I haven’t found the right story to write. I’ve been trying my hand at flash fiction with limited success. It’s far more challenging for me. It’s funny because I love Flash and read it almost more than straight poetry, but I just haven’t been able to break through that wall yet.

MG: Where did the tagline “Where Prose Poems Go To Do Naughty Things” come from?

JMS: My friend and artist Bret Herholz suggested that I add an online store to the site and that the store should be called The Foot Fetish. I think it came from that. I guess this would be a good time to mention that Bret and I are working on a book together. We’re planning on a graphic novel based on a few of my poems. It’s still in the early stages.

Over the River and
Through the Woods

My grandfather threw her out

of a moving car on Route 4

after a Tracy Hepburn movie.

She said this as I sat on her lap,

giddy at the wheel of the blue Nova

while she worked the pedals to K-mart.

All she wanted was a baby.

She’d cradle me, watching

her soaps. I sucked her nicotine

fingers until sleep took me.

She wanted a girl, dressed me

in a red dress, ribbons in my hair,

and snapped Polaroids my brother

dangled over my head for years.

She took in a pregnant runaway:

free room and board, medical

bills, in exchange for your baby.

The police steered the girl

to the squad car. She clamped

the baby to her chest, inhaling

the smell of his scalp. Grandma

sobbed as Bert and Ernie chirped away.

Grandma’s dying, says
the answering

machine, Emphysema.

She wants you to write her eulogy.

She showed me how to cut out snowflakes,

made the best bologna sandwiches,

could skin a squirrel in ten seconds flat.

MG: This poem is so heartfelt. I’ve loved it since I first read it, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reread it. I even taught it in a GED class this past spring. After explaining how this poem functions as the eulogy for the grandmother, that each section is a memory of her, my students began to understand. We spent about an hour on this poem, but by the end of that class I felt that they actually began to appreciate poetry—the deliberate choice of words, lines, images. What would you like to share about this poem? Is it autobiographical?

JMS: Knowing that you taught it in a class fills me with joy, and I have to say I’m honored more to have it taught in a GED class, than let’s say at a university setting. It seems to matter more. This is another autobiographical poem. For years it was my mantra to never to write anything autobiographical. The reason being is that everyone assumes all poems are autobiographical, and that assumption annoys me. It has only been the last few years that I’ve been writing from my own “experience,” which is another concept that I have issues with. What is “experience,” and how is it valued? I’m far more interested in the life of the factory worker or, more importantly, the life lived within the imagination than that of someone who swam with sharks and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro or what have you. What I like about this poem is that every word of it is true. It’s a perfect example of where truth is stranger than fiction.

MG: It wasn’t easy at first, helping them to understand how the words, the lines, were working to tell a story. It was a very literal bunch, and we spent quite a bit of time on each section. “worked the pedals” and “nicotine / fingers” posed particular problems, and trying to figure out who “Bert and Ernie” were was an experience. It was a humbling day for me, realizing that the joy I get from reading isn’t a universal experience. Did this poem actually function, then, as the eulogy? Or did you write this much later? How much distance from an event do you need to be able to write about it?

JMS: I wrote it much later. The actual eulogy was horrible and I guess I wrote this to make up for it. The problem was that I was very close to my grandmother in the first ten years of my life, but then I didn’t see or speak to her for well over ten years. Then one day I receive a phone call saying she passed away and that she requested that I write her eulogy, and oh by the way, can you have it done by tomorrow. I felt like I was writing a eulogy for a complete stranger. In general when writing about my own life, I tend to need quite a bit of distance from the event. Recently I wrote a poem about chasing a ball on a playground. That happened when I was in the second grade. With that said, I’ve been noticing that writing about the present is occurring more often.

MG: You have two chapbooks already published and a full-length on its way. When you look at each of those manuscripts, do you categorize them in terms of where you were when you wrote them, artistically speaking? Maybe another way of putting this is: What are the differences and similarities between the three books?

JMS: They’re similar because many of the poems in the chapbooks are of course in the full-length. Chapbooks are like the singles to the LP. When I sit down to write a poem I have no idea what I’m going to write. Thus, I have no idea of what the feel of my books will be until I put them together. I have a few concepts for books floating around in my head but they
haven’t made it to the page yet.

Watercolor on
Canvas

“It’s a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.”

—D.W. Winnicott

My brother painted it back in high school:

a bottle washed up on a beach. It won

a Governor’s Prize, hung in the statehouse,

all that talk of a scholarship. Everyone

assumes ocean, a crab’s view—the bottle close.

But the shore’s made up of the flat stones

we’d skip across Lake Erie. Dad taught him

how to paint the sky, but it was the shadows

Frank loved. After he lost another job,

during each stint in jail, he’d give the painting

to an uncle or a sober friend for safekeeping,

so he couldn’t hawk it for a fix. A week after

his funeral we found it in his closet. Inside

the bottle there’s a letter. If you squint

you can make out the ghost-lines of script

done in pencil, then erased.

MG: I mentioned in the intro that the speakers in your poems ache for human connection, post-abandonment. In all three of these poems, I’d say this is accurate. Do you agree?

JMS: I do agree, though I never thought of it that way, especially the post-abandonment part, but now that it’s mentioned I can recognize it in so many of my other poems. This proves that the poem knows more of what the poet want to say than the poet does. It’s that sense of discovery, for the writer as well as for the reader that makes poetry so delightful.

MG: What does the letter read?

JMS: Oh, I don’t remember. He must have painted it back in 1984, so I was only nine years old at the time. I think it was suppose to be one of those message-in-a-bottle type things, but in the end, he chose against it. After he died, it was the only thing I took. It hangs above my bed and in the back is still the tag from when it hung at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio.

O Come All Ye Faithful

Midnight Mass:

Give peace to your neighbors, commanded the priest, so I dodged down under the pew. I always ended up shaking hands with the guy who was picking his nose moments before. No one seemed to notice I was missing, but then I saw I wasn’t alone. Two pews down an old couple slithered on their bellies heading my way. We’re trying to cheat death, said the old man, who smelled of cabbage. What are you hiding from?

Snotty fingers, I replied.

Ah yes, we’ve seen a few of those in our day, said the man’s wife.

To kill time we played a few hands of poker, and by the third round I looked up from my crummy cards to see half the congregation under the pews, each with their own reason. I hope those choir ladies haven’t quit their day jobs, on man muttered. I caught an altar boy staring at my breasts, whispered a woman in a low-cut V-neck. Just then, a guy tanked up on too much eggnog began belting out Christmas carols. Soon we were all singing, face down on the floor, patting each other on the back. I didn’t even care what was on their hands, because I felt like we belonged to one big, happy family.

MG: What’s going on in this poem? When I read it, I immediately circled “slithered” and thought “snakes, sneaky, devil?” But I’m not sure that reading holds up . . .

JMS: Why wouldn’t it hold up? It’s word association at work here. On a subconscious level, did I pick that word for its associations with the things you’ve mentioned? Maybe. Honestly, when I wrote it I just picked that word because I like the word, and it best described the physical actions of the characters.

MG: Do you prefer linear or prose poems? Do you think they should function differently?

JMS: I do have a deep attraction toward the prose poem. It was love at first sight for me. With that said, I tend to write more linear poems. Same with form as with subject matter, the poem will let you know what form it wishes to take. As for functioning differently…I’m not sure. I know I approach them differently. Linear poems have an urgent, serious aura about them, while prose poems say “We’re about to have some fun here.” Now of course I’ve read serious prose poems and lighthearted linear poems, but at first glance those are my expectations.

MG: What makes an effective line break? How would you explain the difference between an excellent line break and a questionable one?

JMS: For me it’s organic. It’s important to have your lines end on the most interesting words possible. Ending on a strong verb or noun is a good rule of thumb and never ending a line with a preposition or conjunction is another good rule to follow. Of course when deciding on which word to end on you have to consider the rhythm and length of the line. Normally, it’s not a good idea to have one line stretching a mile out from your other lines just so you can end on that verb.

MG: Tell us a bit about the surrealism present here, if you would call it that?

JMS: The surrealism often found in prose poems is what made me fall in love with the form. As I stated earlier, the life lived within the imagination, subconscious, dream, or daydream is of deep interest to me.

MG: Who are some of your favorite poets?

JMS: Charles Simic and Russell Edson of course, and then there’s James Tate, Billy Collins, and William Matthews. I guess William Carlos Williams would be the patriarch of the poets I enjoy. I really love the prose poems of Louis Jenkins and Bob Hicok is just amazing. Lately, I’ve been reading many women poets: Dorianne Laux, Kim Chinquee, and Rachel Contreni Flynn.

MG: How do you feel about the man (or woman) behind the work? Do you believe the writing should stand on its own, that it should be read while keeping the writer’s life-story in mind, or do you think the writer is more interesting sometimes than the work? I ask this because, as you said earlier, most poems are assumed to be autobiographical. I wonder, then, about how surreal poems fit into this assumption . . .

JMS: The work should always stand on its own. One day my father confessed that he didn’t really care for Sinatra, and instead of expressing a disappointment in his performance, delivery, or craft, his opinion on the man’s music was based entirely on his judgment call of the man himself. Meaning he didn’t like the fact that Sinatra had Mob connections, or was a womanizer, therefore he didn’t like his music as if the two have anything to do with the other. Moral standing has nothing to do with talent, skill, or intellect, to which should be the only things used in judging a piece of art.

MG: Before, you said you haven’t had much success with flash fiction. This one reads like a flash to me. A little fleshing out, and it could be a very short story. Yes? No? What’s missing here that keeps you from calling it a fiction?

JMS: It could be called a flash piece, though I’d say it would lean more toward a prose poem. It’s not that I haven’t written any flash, just not as much as straight linear poems. One piece I’m particularly proud of is titled Squeak, which I’d say is a flash fiction story.

MG: Is there a difference between prose poetry and flash fiction?

JMS: To give it a modern analogy, the prose poem is the profile photo you post on your Facebook page, while the flash fiction is your YouTube video. Of course, there are many examples that blur the line which make this debate old and tiring. It has more to do with our excessive need to categorize the shit out of everything than anything else. As far as I’m concerned, the only question that should be asked is, did you enjoy reading it?

Caring For the Dead

A woman lived in a house of tombstones

and baby doll limbs, married a young etymologist

and gave birth to thirteen dead languages.

She couldn’t pronounce their names, nor understand

their Tiki god appearances. When swatted on their back-ends

their mouths stretched the length of their bodies

and exuded a black volcanic ooze. They were happy,

docile little tikes, but they were born dead

and didn’t live for very long. They’d lie in their cribs,

mouths gaping as always, then turn to dust,

black smudges on their small pillows.

The father performed the autopsies, grinning

with the excitement of discovery, then demand more children.

His wife would nod, then turn to face the wall,

praying every word she uttered was heard, and special
attention

given to all the words she’d leave out.

MG: Here’s another example of a not-quite-realist poem. Tell us what this one is about, and what the initial image was.

JMS: I’m quite interested in etymology, and it was thinking of etymology that gave birth to this poem. I can’t tell you what this poem is about because I have no idea. This is another example of word association at work. I write one line that leads to the next, and then to the next, not having any more of an idea of where it’s going then you do. It’s that sense of exploration that I love about poetry.

MG: Do you ever use prompts? One of my favorite poems, Richard Garcia’s “My Grandmother’s Laughter” (available online in Ploughshares) was inspired by Jim Simmerman’s Twenty Little Poetry Projects (also online). Have you ever tried anything like this, with success?

JMS: Oh, I try. I have at least fifteen of those writing-prompt books. My success with those tends to be limited. The bottom line is if it doesn’t inspire me then it’s not going to work. I wish it did.

MG: How does (or doesn’t) this fit in with the rest of your work?

JMS: Charles Simic and Russell Edson heavily influenced most of my earlier work, and this is an older poem. I’ve been moving away from the surreal as time has gone by but I think you’ll still see it here and there in my work. It fits in with the rest of my work via that sense of exploration and surprise. I have those “image” poems, those “object,” and “autobiographical” poems; and this poem would fall in the category of poems that I would call “fun” poems, poems that are strictly for entertainment. Unfortunately, this poem didn’t make it into the full-length collection.

MG: Whose call was that? Am I allowed to ask this question? Oh, I’m going for it. Was it your decision or your publisher’s? And why not include the “fun” poems?

JMS: Some of the fun poems are included in the book, many of them. O Come All Ye Faithful, which I consider a fun poem is in there as well as a poem called Saint Francis Back from Paradise. It was my mentor Ellen Doré Watson, who suggested taking it out. It simply had to do with the flow of the book and not having too many poems with the same color stuck together.

Snow Angels

Each night they stare into the sky

and wonder why even with wings

they can never get off the ground.

Good reason for their creator

to take three steps, cock his head

and disown his gift to the world.

Abandonment: a likely origin of anyone’s

lack of faith. And faith: precisely what’s needed

to soar in the deep purple abyss of winter.

We step out into our lives like sun slicing

between buildings and perform this one angelic

act that melts from our consciousness.

We go back into our houses and accomplish

something important, leaving behind

the ones that don’t know any better,

the few who see the wings as open arms,

snow as flesh, and are willing to lie back down.

MG: Well, when it comes down to personal preference, I’ve saved the best for last. This one gets me every single time. I’m sure this is where I got “abandonment” from, in fact. So tell me, what is faith?

JMS: Ah, another central theme that runs through many of my poems. I’m fascinated with “faith,” and “hope,” interchangeable as far as I’m concerned, and how much they drive us. It’s amazing how faith/hope latches on to us. No matter how defeated we become, no matter how many times life kicks us in the teeth there is always that ember of hope/faith burning inside of us. I mean if you think about it, even if you’ve come to the point where you wish your life would end, you’re still hoping for an end of suffering. So what is that thing that drives us forward? It’s far too powerful and gripping to be only a flimsy thing such as desire.

MG: I find this poem so powerful—the image, or the idea of, grounded angels, angels unable to fly, useless manmade wings just makes my heart ache. Where did this poem come from? What should we know about it?

JMS: This poem falls in the “object/image” category. I simply meditated on the image of a snow angel for a long time and in one swoop (with much revision afterwards,) the poem flowed out from somewhere deep inside. There’s that exploration thing again. Someone once stated, and I wish I could remember who, that “At some point as a writer, you finally become humbled to the fact that the poem is smarter than you are.”

MG: Will you close this interview with a particular favorite of your own?

JMS: Well since I mentioned it earlier in this interview, it only makes sense that I share the following poem:

WHEN THE SURREALIST NO LONGER REMEMBERS HIS DREAMS

Summer. We were walking

a country road before dawn,

and you were dead.

I don’t remember your dying,

but there you were, dragging your feet,

your eyes like the bottoms of glass ashtrays.

Your breath.

I said it smelled of death,

and you just groaned.

I felt like an idiot.

I never wanted this.

I never wanted it to rain.

Do you have any idea

what a soggy corpse is like

so early in the morning?

I tried to pick up the pace,

but all you could do was slosh across the road.

Eventually we came to a barn,

and hobbled inside to get dry.

Soon the sun was up. The rain had stopped,

and the insects were getting jiggy in the fields.

You slumped into an empty stall.

Sunlight beamed through slits in the boards

and the dust of your body mingled

with the dust of the barn, the outside world

and possibly me. Despite the decay,

you looked lovely disappearing like that.

And I confessed if I wasn’t such a fool

I’d love you right down to the bone.

Vultures usually do.

It was the first thing you'd said all morning.

To check out Joshua’s Chapbooks and updates for his Full-length collection, Son of a Minor Key, not to mention on where to find some of his poems online, visit him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.yolasite.com. Also, be sure to check out the online literary journal www.bigtoereview.com.

[Editor's Note: Thank you to the following journals in which these poems first appeared: "In Memory of the Nearness of You" in Mannequin Envy, "Over the River and Through the Woods" in Stickman Review, "Watercolor on Canvas," in Connecticut River Review, "O Come All Ye Faithful" in South Boston Literary Gazette, "Caring for the Dead" in Diner, "Snow Angels" in Heat City, and "When the Surrealist No Longer Remembers His Dreams" in Worcester Review.]

An Interview with Edward Mullany

gabedurham — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:39:04 -0400

I. Introduction

I lived in the same apartment building with Edward Mullany for about a year, and with his then-fiance/now-wife Anjali for double that. He and I once played pool against these two guys—a manic unfunny court jester type and a surly expatriate who, upon meeting, grew to hate each other throughout the course of the game. I’m pretty sure we won.

I got to know and love his work as I encountered it, first in readings, then in many of my favorite journals. His writing has appeared in Keyhole, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Tampa Review, Beeswax, Johnny America, Invisible Ear, and other journals.

Edward now lives in New York, where he teaches at College of Staten Island. He is an associate editor at matchbook, an online literary journal.

II. An Edward Mullany Reader

A Dozen Fictions:

A Lost Ashtray
Curtains
A Minnesota Divorce
Three Stories
Three Shorts
Three Flash Fictions

And a Poem:

The Harrowing of Hell

III. A Conversation with Edward Mullany

I was talking to my friend David the other day about how he hasn’t really begun sending out poems yet, even though he's already written quite a few good ones, because he'd like to take his time, save up, and then send them out once he has a sizable body of work—we took to calling this the “hoard and blitz” method. There's a quality control aspect to this method that really appeals to me, and it's kind of the opposite strategy of those of us who began by sending out work that either wasn’t yet ready or never would be. You waited awhile to send out your stories and poems, too, didn't you?

I'm not sure one way is preferable to the other. Maybe it's more a matter of habit, and varies from writer to writer. I didn't so much "wait" to send stuff out; it was more that I never got into a routine of sending stuff out until several years after I'd begun writing. Which was fortunate, because, in retrospect, it took me a long time to write anything that I can say I'm proud of. Not that everything I write now is good, but I'm a better critic of my own work now; I can see when the writing isn't going the way it ought to be going. Of course, it's another thing altogether to fix it.

Your poems are often narrative and your stories are sometimes as short as a few sentences, so there is often some stylistic overlap between the two, but you mentioned to me once that your poems and stories come from different places. I'm interested in that idea, that classification maybe could come less from the rules a story/poem follows but from what ignites them. Could you elaborate on that and/or correct me if I'm misrepresenting you?

That’s a really interesting question. Classification is more useful (as a tool) to critics than it is to artists, but every artist needs to be a good critic, whereas the opposite is not necessarily true. This is because art is the only human endeavor in which success cannot be entirely explained (or duplicated) by technical mastery. Think of the paintings of Jackson Pollock. People are often claiming that ‘a child’ could do what he did, but it isn’t true. A Pollock is a Pollock, and nothing imitative ever comes close.

What I’m saying is an artist must know what he’s doing; if he doesn’t know why he’s making the technical and imaginative choices he is making (and if he isn’t pulling them off), chances are the piece will have no order, and thus will not be art. That isn’t to say the process of artistic creation is an entirely conscious act (it isn’t), but rather that there must be a constant interaction between the artist’s conscious and unconscious mind.

It’s in this context that I think a discussion of genre—the difference between prose and poetry, for instance—should take place. As you alluded to, many fiction writers are experimenting with the length of the short story. The term “flash fiction” has become popular. One result of this trend is that long narrative poetry and short narrative fiction are beginning to resemble each other in a way that we may or may not have seen before. (This ignores, to a degree, the fact that form alone—verses, linebreaks, rhyme, etc.—can differentiate poetry from fiction, but the larger point remains). The suggestion, then, that we conceive of the difference between poetry and prose in terms of impulse (or, as you mentioned, “what ignites them”) is a good one.

In my own work, poetry allows me to access a voice I cannot access in fiction. The conceit is different; for some reason, in poetry, I feel both able and compelled to give expression to feelings and ideas that are of the utmost personal significance. This is not to say that fiction is not equally an expression of a writer’s personality, but that, in fiction, the writer’s orientation to the audience is qualified by an act of dramatization that is absent (or less visible) in poetry. The result is that fiction often feels staged or artificial (I do not mean this pejoratively) in a way that poetry does not. In other words, the poet is the closest to the raw materials (psychic, spiritual, emotional, etc.) that it is the job of all literary artists to mine.

I'm looking at one of your recent Keyhole poems, "A New Russia," in which a man returns on horseback from a trip to the shopping mall, and the line, "His flirtatious, lazy wife came out on the veranda." In fiction, that exposition would either be called bad writing or would nod to a fallible narrator (aka bad/good writing), but in the poem it doesn't need to justify itself. Similarly, the poem ends with the man crying out, "I pray for the motherland! I pray that we not be deceitful!" The fiction workshop voice pops up and goes, "That outburst felt a little unearned," when again, here, it works. Could that be an example of the freedom that the lack of staged-ness in poetry affords you?

Yes, the lines you refer to in that poem, and the poem itself, are good examples of what I would mean if I said that narrative poetry is not subject to the same rules of mimesis as narrative fiction. It is, of course, subject to other rules, but these rules tend to involve the continuity of rhythms and tones rather than the continuity of plot or "reality." This isn’t to say that narrative poetry can disregard plot, but rather that its conception of plot is quite fluid; it has to be because its relationship to language is so different than that of narrative fiction.

You might say that this difference in relationship to language is precisely why you can get away with things in poetry that you can’t get away with in fiction (and vice versa). Consider the different terms we use to identify the voice in each genre—speaker and narrator. The term, “speaker,” implies a directness that the term, “narrator,” does not. Perhaps this is why I feel that the channel between poet and audience is more direct than the channel between fiction writer and audience. It doesn’t make the task of artistry any easier or harder, but it does allow for the writer to access or inhabit a voice that is concerned with rawer ideas.

In any case, this difference in terminology—speaker vs. narrator—is related to the difference in relationship to language. A speaker, as Whitman might say, sings of himself, or appears to sing of himself even when he isn’t. Lyricism, rhythms and tone can carry a poem’s narrative to places it wouldn’t otherwise go. A narrator, on the other hand, may tell a story lyrically, but generally his "duty" is to the narrative itself, and his lyricism, though influential, is less influential than that of a speaker’s.

There are always exceptions, however. What is Finnegans Wake if not a work of ultimate lyricism? And who are the narrators of the stories by Carver and Hemingway (among others) if not "direct channels" to the writers themselves? As a rule of thumb you can say that poetry is unique in its ability to allow a writer access to a voice that readers sense is more immediately the writer’s own, but at the same time you can say that what readers are sensing is only the absence of the artifice that is inherent to fiction, and thus that voice is not the sole trait by which we measure a writer’s ability to convince and move.

Yeah, and it seems to me that part of why now is such a great time to be writing fiction is that so many writers and editors are happy to bend their expectations of what a narrator's duty is to—sometimes the narrative, sometimes lyricism, sometimes self-defense or building a case for an argument, but really, whatever the narrator decides his/her duty is to. Or to put it another way, the narrator gets to formulate her own agenda, which may or may not resemble the author's agenda.

Which is maybe a good opportunity to bring up your story in the New Ohio Review, "A Lost Ashtray," which takes on (or seems to take on) a more classical narrator: the 3rd person kind who feels the freedom to comment on the action as it unfolds, and whose comments the reader is invited to take at face value. And for me, the narrator's comments are the most exciting thing about the story because they're so astute and carefully sculpted. I'm talking about lines like, "But Macalister’s wife forgot as easily as anyone did that the people you loved without wanting to rarely surprised you in a good way," in which the narrator feels the freedom to both say something that this woman knows and has forgotten, and something that is simply true.

Have you always felt the freedom/authority as a writer to make bold statements like that within a story? I'm interested especially because I sometimes feel a pressure to cut direct truths for fear of coming off as moralizing or something.

You raise an important issue when you refer to the wariness or hesitance writers today apparently feel when using third-person narrators to endorse or imply bold statements, or what we might call "absolute truths." The reason for this is complicated, and involves, I think, a conflict that is inherent to the third-person narrative stance. The conflict is something like this: a storyteller cannot divest himself of his humanness because he is communicating with us in an ordinary human way (with language); at the same time, a storyteller who can move back and forth in time, and who can move among characters, and get inside characters' heads—who is, in a word, omniscient (a kind of third-person narrator)—cannot divest himself of an aspect of divinity. Thus, there is a conflict between how much the third-person narrator is God-like (and thus in a position to legitimately moralize) and how much he is human (and thus not in a position to legitimately moralize). It is the writer's job to negotiate this conflict in a way that respects the existence of both aspects of the narrator's identity.

Yet it is important to mention that even among stories told in the third-person there is a spectrum of what we might call "narrative intrusion." In Chekhov's famous story, "The Lady with the Lapdog," during a quiet scene when Gurov and Anna are contemplating the sea, the unnamed third-person narrator allows himself the following God-like declaration:

"Not a leaf stirred on the trees, the cicadas chirped, and the monotonous, hollow roar of the sea, coming up from below, spoke of rest, of eternal sleep awaiting us all. The sea had roared like that down below when there was no Yalta or Oreanda, it was roaring now, and it would go on roaring as indifferently and hollowly when we were here no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, there is perhaps hidden the guarantee of our eternal salvation, the never-ceasing movement of life on earth, the never-ceasing movement towards perfection."

Is there a more obvious way to intrude on a narrative than to not only claim eternal salvation is possible, but to describe how it is achieved? The genius of Chekhov is evident in the fact that the story continues for several more pages, and that our interest in the characters doesn't wane.

Yet, in another of his third-person stories, "Gusev," which essentially illustrates the notion that is described in the passage above, Chekhov does not allow his narrator to make his views known; instead, he simply dramatizes them. So even though a third-person narrator implies the existence of a worldview that is defined by some kind of order (moral or otherwise), that worldview can be manifested with differing degrees of directness. I don't think a writer can (or should) consciously consider how explicitly moralizing he should allow his narrators to be; a story creates its own rules, and the measure of any writer's talent is his ability to allow his story to flow according to its own impulses without surrendering it to laziness or whim. This is difficult, of course, but necessary. It isn't for no reason that history has given us the idea of the 'mad artist,' the 'vessel' through which the muses speak. For me, Flannery O'Connor articulates this idea best: she says, “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

At the risk of sounding dated, I will say that one of the few indispensable traits a writer must possess (regardless of talent) is clarity of heart.

It's interesting to be talking to you about this stuff, as my mind is currently wrapped up in an essay about Ayn Rand's fiction advice in which she addresses this too. She's at the end of the spectrum where she says that everything about your fiction must be intentional. It must serve your larger purpose, and you'd better have a larger purpose. And for that reason, she'll say things like, “The only rule is that you have to know your climax…before you start to outline the steps by which you arrive there.” (To put it in O'Connor’s terms, your beliefs damn well better be what you see or you've taken your eyes off the prize.) Which, to me, sounds awful, and explains a lot about her own fiction.

But on the other end, I guess, are those who say, "I don't want to know why I write what I do. In fact, I actively avoid it." And that sounds awful, too, like a lot of missed opportunities, pursuing style and language at the exclusion of truth. It seems to me that the writers I most like to read (as varied as they are, stylistically and philosophically, etc.) are working in O'Connor's middle ground. On this made-up spectrum I came up with just now.

I think the spectrum you refer to exists in a very real way, and that Ayn Rand represents, as you said, one end of that spectrum. But whereas Ayn Rand used art as a means by which to validate or propound the philosophy she was credited with developing (Objectivism), Flannery O'Connor never used art for anything, because she understood that a piece of art was most powerful when the meaning of that piece could not be divorced from (or articulated outside of) the piece itself without diminishing the effect.

Which is interesting because Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic, and could just as easily as Rand have allowed her work to become didactic, or to at least become a platform for the expression of her beliefs. The reason she didn't allow it (and the reason, I would say, that O'Connor was the better artist, though not necessarily the better thinker or philosopher) is that she understood the role of artist to be a vocation, and was committed to remaining true to it to the exclusion of everything else. That her beliefs are not undermined by her work as an artist, but are, in fact, illustrated by it, is evidence of the unique place art occupies among human activities, and of O'Connor's great talent. When done right, art has a way of revealing an artist's convictions even when the artist is involved in the dramatization of scenes that outwardly have nothing to do with something so abstract as convictions. When not done right, it reveals no convictions, or—equally as bad—the convictions are so obvious to the reader that the dramatization seems artificial, contrived. (The latter is what many object to in Rand's work.)

About this problem—the difficulty the artist faces in reconciling belief and craft—O'Connor speaks of in Mystery & Manners, a collection of essays and lectures. She refers to the "Catholic novelist," but I believe what she says is applicable to any artist who defines himself by beliefs that transcend art.

O'Connor said: "Whenever I think of the Catholic novelist and his problems, I always remember the legend of St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. This legend has it that St. Francis converted a wolf. I don't know whether he actually converted this wolf or whether the wolf's character didn't just greatly improve after he met St. Francis. Anyway, he calmed down a good deal. But the moral of this story, for me at least, is that the wolf, in spite of his improved character, always remained a wolf. So it is—or ought to be—with the Catholic, or let us just say with the thoroughly Christianized novelist. No matter how much his character may be improved by the Church, if he is a novelist, he has to remain true to his nature as one."

I do love how this shy and in many ways conservative woman ("If it looks funny on the page, I don't read it.") has become the spokeswoman, all these decades later, for not letting your beliefs get in the way of your art. Her funny, surprising, often violent, and non-didactic stories are something to point to as shorthand proof of the legitimacy of all these things in literature to those who doubt it.

I'm trying to think, now, of good writers who remain wolves before and after religious/philosophical conversions or major ideological changes. Anne Lamott comes to mind, though, come to think of it, I've only read stuff she wrote after she became a Christian. But those who've read it say Hard Laughter is really good.

I'm not familiar with Anne Lamott's fiction, though I have read sections of Bird by Bird, which seems to explain technique through the light of spirituality.

The greatest of O'Connor's 'wolves,' in my mind, is Jack Kerouac, who despite his apparent exclusion from academic and 'workshop' discussions is one of the most important 20th Century writers. Stylistically, he is the most poetic of American novelists, and he broke the mold for what fiction can do, or be, as much as Hemingway did a generation and a half before him.

And despite the popular conception most people have of him, he was a religious writer—the freedom he endorsed was not so much of the hedonistic variety as it was of the saintly, holy seeker variety. The origin of the word 'beat,' for instance, he understood to be 'beatific,' and he used the word to describe men and women of his generation who were so overcome by enthusiasm for life itself that they were literally worn down. Neal Cassady, of course, was the fullest manifestation of this idea, and that is why he (as Dean Moriarty) was the hero of On the Road. But despite all the 'kicks' the characters in that novel go after, what they never escape is the spiritual yearning that is manifest in the very exuberance and digressions of the language in which the novel itself is told, and that can not be satisfied through the enjoyment of 'kicks' alone. It isn't for no reason that the novel ends with the narrator imagining "Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found." A father (as in God the Father) is the most important invisible character in that book.

Kerouac, by the way, was a Catholic who was influenced by Buddhist thought. He often spoke of himself as a Bodhisattva, a being who, moved by compassion for humanity, delays his own entry into Nirvana in order to provide spiritual instruction to others.

Yeah, I'm pro-On the Road, too. I feel like a lot of the backlash against is based on a pretty surfacey reading of it—hedonistic is a good word for it. I mean, how many broken people does Moriarty leave in his wake? That book makes me want to settle down and love my family. Thousands of college freshmen may have thrown the book down after the first hundred pages to take a long weekend drive along the coast, but it doesn't diminish the book's greatness. Particularly the poetic sentences, as you say, and the loose episodic structure.

It's interesting that you said the book wants to make you settle down and love your family. I think that reaction is natural, and contains a sort of wisdom that is, oddly, antithetical to the spirit of the beats. Because old age and beatness are compatible only in the sense that one might maintain, as one ages, an enthusiastic restlessness of the mind. In other words, true beatness (at least how I conceive of it) is so inextricable from actual and persistent physical movement that it precludes the possibility of growing old. Because the body demands rest after a certain age. In this way, the title On the Road can be understood in its metaphorical and literal essence: constant movement, frenetic forward movement, the kind that forces you out of your seat and back and forth across the country until you die. It is an impossible way of life to sustain, of course, unless you are mad or holy or high, and unless you are willing to hurt people you are close to, or to not be close to anyone to begin with. Like most things that are labeled, I guess, beatness is an ideal. And it doesn't seem to coincide with having a family.

In June, you and Brian Mihok launched matchbook, a new online literary magazine for short short fiction. To me, the most distinct thing about Matchbook is that you ask contributors to offer a mini-essay of critical thoughts regarding their piece, which then appears right beside the story. The closest analogy I can come up with is the placard you'd find beside a painting in a museum. How did you and Brian develop the format and how does it appeal to you?

I think there is a tendency among writers to want to resist discussing their own work unless it is in terms of their process. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is a sort of well-intentioned professional modesty, but I think the main reason is that there's some truth to the idea that the meaning of a story or a poem (or any piece of art) is so inextricable from its original articulation that any prosaic attempts to interpret it risk pedantry.

That said, criticism is necessary to the degree that it enlarges upon what in art is a specific cultural instant. What Brian and I are interested in doing at matchbook is creating a context in which both the specific instant and the process of 'enlarging upon' can occur simultaneously, and in a modest enough frame that our readers' collective patience will not (we hope) be tried. The fact that the writers we feature are asked to enlarge upon their own work—to be both artist and critic—is unusual, I think, but not unnatural. We're inviting them to a forum rather than placing them on a platform.

It seems, also, that people stand a greater chance of saying something interesting or edifying about their writing when asked to address a specific work than their writing in general.

I agree. It's much easier to answer the question, "Why did you write such-and-such a story?" than the all-too-common, "What do you write about?"

You guys also opted for a feed-style journal in the tradition of Johnny America, Juked, and Pequin, which mete out stories one at a time. What appeals to you about that as opposed to more traditional issue-based journals?

I can't remember how much or how often Brian and I discussed this question—the feed-style journal as opposed to the traditional full issue—but I think the decision arose from the fact that we were trying to create something simple and small—hence the name, matchbook—something that would give every author the reader's undivided attention.

What have you been reading lately?

Lots of stuff, mainly poetry. For the first time I've read Sylvia Plath's poems as a whole rather than a poem here or there. I read The Colossus (her first collection) last week, and it struck me as I think it strikes many readers, as somber, beautiful, and structurally dignified, if a little relentless. Reading her poems one after the other is like being in the thrall of a mad, beneficent witch. The oppressiveness of other people, to the speakers in her poems, is only outdone by the indifferent oppressiveness of nature. Especially in her first collection, where a natural setting—a cliff, a pond, the sea, a field—is where the speaker in almost every poem discovers the futility of her own existence. Yet her poems aren't exactly dirges. Their lyricism, or language, imprints them on the brain the way a photograph imprints itself on film. The act of being a poet, to those poets who are perennially sad, is the only way suffering is given meaning.

Writers Respond: An Interview with Darrin Doyle

mollygaudry — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:36:32 -0400

Darrin Doyle and I crossed paths, very briefly, while he was finishing his PhD at the University of Cincinnati. An undergraduate at the time, I was granted permission to enroll in the graduate fiction workshop to see if graduate school was something I’d like. It is because of fellow students like Darrin that I decided to pursue a master’s degree. That workshop was a terrific experience, and it is my understanding that Darrin—by that point well into his dissertation year—had signed up for the workshop just to be in the classroom again before heading on toward professional life. In any case, perhaps now is the time to share this anecdote (not just with you, the reader, but with Darrin, as well).

After workshopping one of Darrin’s stories, our professor, Michael Griffith, stood and walked around our seminar table to hand Darrin his story. Michael never did this; no professors did; they just slid the story onto the stack and the stack made its way around the circle. But that day, Michael leaned in and said—I (over)heard because I was sitting on Darrin’s immediate left—“This is really excellent work. Just attend to the issue we discussed, then send it out. It’s publishable.”

I remember being so blown away! Publishable! Did professors actually say this? Grad school was going to be so amazing! The issue, by the way, had to do with fact-checking how long sperm could survive in a used condom; and the story, I recall, was so creepy it oozed. This, then, seems the perfect entrance for an interview with Darrin, whose first novel, Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story, earned this blurb from Christine Schutt: “A deftly made, raucous tale of love and its attendant hungers and humiliations. Darrin Doyle has conceived original characters in that ‘poor twit’ Mr. Portwit and his fleshy wife, Mary Ann, whose bodily sacrifices in the name of love—self-love and other—are, finally, heartbreaking.”

1.
Writing and Writing Programs

MOLLY GAUDRY: When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

DARRIN DOYLE: Honestly, I never gave much thought to writing until I was probably 25 years old. I was working at Kinko’s, playing in a band, and wondering what to do with myself. I loved playing music, but that life is exhausting, and it’s a terribly tough field to find consistent success in. I decided to go back to college (I’d dropped out three years prior) and complete my English degree. I took a poetry workshop. My teacher, the great William Olsen, suggested applying to the MFA program. I thought, “Sure, OK.” From a young age, I’d always enjoyed writing and reading. I’d read a lot of so-called “serious” literature on my own in junior high and high school (Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Woolf, Poe), but I never committed myself to writing until graduate school. Even after I finished the MFA, I don’t know if I ever thought, “I want to be a writer.” I just enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed talking about fiction and poetry. I loved reading other peoples’ stories. I loved waking up every morning and discovering a new thing I’d written the night before. New words on a page to play with. A character, a situation. A funny phrase. A phrase I couldn’t wait to delete. And so on.

MG: Where did you get your MFA? And what made you decide to go for the PhD? Any fun anecdotes? Workshop nightmares? Favorite moments?

DD: I got my MFA from Western Michigan University, and I studied primarily with Stuart Dybek and Jaimy Gordon, but also with poets Bill Olsen, Nancy Eimers, and Mark Halliday. It was a formative experience, I must say. There were some definitely odd and funny workshop moments, but not wanting to embarrass anyone, I’ll wait until you buy me a strong drink and my inhibitions splash to the floor in a puddle.

After the MFA, my wife and I moved to Osaka, Japan. We lived there for a year, teaching English, less for career purposes than because teaching was simply a good vehicle for living abroad. Japan was wonderful, after which we backpacked through Southeast Asia and New Zealand for three months. Then it was back to reality, back to Kalamazoo, MI. I had no job, no plan. I’d continued to write stories and had even gotten three or four published, which was cool, but I wasn’t on the academic job market or anything like that. I found a job supervising two high school kids as they serviced computers for a local school district. I did freelance writing for the Kalamazoo Gazette. I worked as a technical writer for Pharmacia-Upjohn, a huge pharmaceutical company. All of this occurred over a year’s time. The tech writing job pushed me over the edge. I missed being around other creative writers, and I certainly knew I couldn’t bear working in a cubicle for the rest of my life. I applied to PhD programs and got into the University of Cincinnati, and this will go down as one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

MG: Let's go back and talk about teaching in Japan. I find that so romantic. What were your experiences? Would you recommend it?

DD: I’d highly recommend it. Japan is a beautiful, safe country with a long and compelling history, friendly people, amazing food, and enough quirks and contradictions to keep things interesting and inspirational. In many ways, it reminded me of what the 1950s probably were like in the USA. Smoking is allowed everywhere. Job applicants are openly asked about their marital status, age, religion, etc, and there’s no law prohibiting employers from discriminating on these grounds. Women are expected to get married and raise a family, while men are expected to devote themselves entirely to their job. The man’s boss even delivers the toast at the wedding.

Having said that, you won’t find friendlier, more generous people than the Japanese. They are genuine, helpful, and very welcoming to visitors. The sushi is cheap and abundant. Plus there are all the surprises, like when a Sumo wrestler stands next to you on a train, or when a guy on a fishing show eats a live squid right out of the ocean, or when you can buy beer from a vending machine on your way home from work.

MG: The University of Cincinnati is my old stomping ground, too. Why do you say it was "one of the best decisions" you ever made?

DD: Brock Clarke and Michael Griffith, as you know, are terrific writers and teachers. They helped me in lots of ways, not only in the workshops and with my novel, but because they helped bring so many fantastic writers to UC—Judy Budnitz, Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, Percival Everett, and Heidi Julavits, to name a few.

The other graduate students, too, were a great source of camaraderie and inspiration. There’s something very special about the bond that forms when you’re going through the experiences of a grad program—it’s intensely stressful but very stimulating.

The PhD isn’t for everyone, and I know many creative writers who still insist that the MFA is (and should be) the terminal degree. But for me, I truly feel that the PhD “completed” my education. It provided me the opportunity to explore areas of literature much more expansively and rigorously, and to be more exacting and rigorous with my own writing as well.

2.
Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet

MG: Who is your favorite character from Revenge of the Teacher's Pet?

DD: God, that’s like choosing a favorite eye. I can’t do it. Maybe Mr. Portwit. I can go into detail as to why, but I’ll need more time. He’s a complicated son-of-a-bitch.

MG: Very true. Why, in your mind, is he the kind of guy who wants (or needs) to be referred to as Mr. Portwit. I mean, even his wife, Mary Ann, has to refer to him as Mr. Portwit. It's a strange character quirk.

DD: That’s exactly what it is: a quirk. To me, that’s what building a character is—giving them quirks (you might also just call them “traits”) and seeing what sticks. I don’t mean to imply that any old quirk will do, or that writers should gratuitously and randomly pile on quirks for shock value or humor or what-have-you. Ideally, the quirks will reside right alongside the character’s perceptions, ideologies, personal history, and so on, and all of these factors will operate in unison to create a whole person, and the reader will be able to put together (even unconsciously) how and why the quirks are organic to the character’s makeup.

In Portwit’s case, he has a disdain for language because he believes words are fundamentally untrustworthy due to their dependence on subjectivity. In his mind, scientific evidence is the only way to prove truth. But hovering over his head is the pesky notion that scientific knowledge is itself dependent upon language. He can’t get around it. So the only thing left to do is master language, or attempt to do so. This is why he despises adjectives while simultaneously embracing them. It’s why he takes apart his own name, figures out all of its possible meanings, and dictates precisely how he should be addressed. Who he “is” is not going to be subject to the whims of some random observer!

Of course, the joke on Portwit is that science is no more reliable than words for describing or, more accurately, ascribing causality to events, to human relationships. There’s always the X, the unknown of human motivation, to contend with, and no matter what we do, certain momentous episodes in our lives are out of our control and their causations impossible to know. This is why Portwit ultimately realizes his desperate gestures of control are “another sprig of parsley on his plate of steamed bullshit.”

MG: I fell in love with Mary Ann—her outlook, her ways of relating to those around her. Why does she write lists? Where did you get that idea?

DD: I’m glad to hear that you connected to her. I loved writing in Mary Ann’s POV. In talking to other people about the book, she seems to be the emotional center, and people are rooting for her in ways they aren’t rooting for Mr. Portwit. Still, she has flaws, which is what makes a character likeable (right?). I see the lists as one of her flaws. Over the years, she has turned a routine of documenting and ordering her life into a straitjacket, of sorts. I’ve never thought about it in this way before, but I am now, so I’m sticking with it. The list-writing begins as a response to her father’s untimely death, and it proceeds in this fashion—as a way for Mary Ann to feel some semblance of control over her daily life, to vent her frustrations, to compartmentalize the people she likes or dislikes, and so on. Unfortunately, it also freezes her into a routine and makes it so she is only thinking and not doing. Dwelling in the moment and not looking to the future, maybe. So the lists are a security blanket, too. Ultimately, I don’t think Mary Ann is fundamentally different from Mr. Portwit—they both are seeking to understand the why and how of their lives. For Mr. Portwit, it’s through the scientific method; for Mary Ann, it’s through meticulous documentation of her inner life.

Not that the lists aren’t a positive thing. She has this incredible record tracing back to her teenage years. Like a diary, but much more fun to read! As for where I got the idea? I don’t know. I make To-Do lists now and then. When I was a kid I went through a phase and wrote “Five Best Albums of All-Time” and “Five Best Jack Nicholson Movies” and things of that nature that would be embarrassing to run across. Now we have Facebook for that kind of thing.

MG: One year after the novel ends, what will Mary Ann's Facebook status be?

DD: Funny you should ask. When I was going through the process of finding a publisher, one editor (who was going to pitch Revenge to his colleagues) suggested I come up with a Top Ten list to “hook” the reader and give some indication of the “type” of novel they were in for—a foreshadowing, of sorts. The following list was written by Mary Ann some eight months after the novel ends:

Excerpted from Mary Ann Portwit’s Lists: Volume 2—For a Happier New Year

Ten Things I’ve Learned Since Marrying Dale (current mood: sarcastic)

10.    Fish deserve my profound respect
9.    Hospitals are terrible
8.    Adjectives are even worse
7.    The wordsmiths were wise when they used the root “man” to create “manic” and “maniac”
6.    A human leg may way as much as 39 lbs., 10oz
5.    Sex is a messy, delicious business
4.    Absence makes the heart choose less fatty foods
3.    Crutches are overrated
2.    Top Ten Lists—who needs ‘em?
1.    Sometimes a mercy killing is the best thing for a marriage

MG: Without giving too much away, do you consider the ending a happy ending?

DD: Absolutely. I don’t know what this view says about me vis-à-vis the possibility of happiness between two people. I think I’m terrified by, or at least nagged by, the notion that when it gets down to it, nobody can ever really know anybody else. No matter how connected we feel in fleeting moments—of love, of chemicals, of symbiosis—we’re ultimately prisoners in our own worlds, and we can never truly inhabit another person. Flannery O’Connor was comfortable with this idea—the wonder of mystery, the impossibility of comprehending human motivation—and she transformed it into an eerie sort of hope in her fiction. The Christian faith—any faith—requires the embracing of mystery, and I guess I lack such faith. I’m more like that guy in Camus’s The Stranger. OK, maybe not that bad. But in my fiction, I’ve probably unconsciously portrayed solitude and separation as positive traits as a result of this fear. In other words, I want to make myself feel better by asserting that even though I can’t ever connect with someone, I can still be content.

But I’m happy to report that many people have said the ending of Revenge is very satisfying. I’ve even heard the word “perfect” applied to it, so that makes me feel less alone.

MG: The novel's complete title is Revenge of the Teacher's Pet: A Love Story. What kind of love story is this?

DD: Hopefully an honest one. I don’t mean “real” or God-forbid, “realistic,” but honest with regard to the human experience of love in all its awkwardness and inflation, as well as its potential for giving meaning to our lives. Also, it’s a funny love story, I hope. A perverse and sexually charged one, too, though not in a conventional fashion. I’m a huge fan of pre-Cry Baby John Waters movies (the filthy ones like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble), and my novel was definitely reaching for those heights, although ultimately I restrained myself in this department for fear of never finding a publisher.

MG: Would you say you compromised any of your creative interests in the interest of "finding a publisher"?

DD: Thankfully, no. All of the impulses I reined in were reined in because they were misplaced and/or gratuitous. I learned through the process that “less is more” with regard to things like sex, bodily fluids, and profanity.

MG: This book reminds me of Jane Shapiro's The Dangerous Husband. Have you read? Would you agree or disagree?

DD: It’s amazing that you made that connection, because yes, I’ve read it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I read it as I was writing the first draft of Revenge! I loved Dangerous Husband and felt inspired by the notion that a darkly comic domestic story had been published. That book is funny as hell, and I need to read it again.

Another influence on Revenge was Joyce’s Ulysses. The wordplay, the close 3rd POV, the two alternating perspectives (not counting Molly Bloom’s), and so on. The opening line of Revenge actually mirrors (steals?) the opening sentence structure of Ulysses. Obviously, my dinky book is nowhere near the divine logorrhea of Joyce, but I was able to light a match off of his brilliant star. Ha ha, that just made me laugh. Anyway, I’ve always admired Ulysses and have almost finished it three times.

3.
The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo

MG: You have another book coming out soon, right? Can you tell us about that?

DD: It’s titled The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo, and it comes out from St. Martin’s Press in early 2010. What else would you like to know? Seriously, I need a prompt.

MG: Does she literally eat Kalamazoo? Sorry, that's the best I've got. Um, is it a novel or stories? Did you have second-book anxiety? Is there a third book in the works? Feel free to answer any or all . . .

DD: The titular girl’s name is Audrey Mapes, and she does indeed eat the city. It may surprise you, but very few people nowadays even remember the 1999-2000 devouring of Kalamazoo, MI. How quickly we forget in this day-and-age of rapid-fire news!

My book, though, is different from the numerous others that have been published about Audrey and her family. The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo is actually compiled from the personal journals of Audrey’s older sister, McKenna. As you probably know, the Mapeses have been notoriously private for the past ten years—not granting a single interview, being seen only rarely in public—but at long last we get to step inside the mysterious Mapes home and witness what went on behind those doors that might have motivated Audrey to transform herself into the “world’s most gifted eatist.”

I would categorize the book as dark, humorous, tragic, and scary. It’s quite shocking, really, to see how Audrey evolved from munching crayons as a baby to devouring refrigerators and stop signs as a young woman. But I think readers will find the Mapes family to be endearing in their peculiarity. I certainly did.

* * *

For more, including a full list of reviews, please visit Darrin’s website, http://www.darrindoyle.com

Writers Respond: Lydia Millet on My Happy Life

mollygaudry — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:13:35 -0400

Lydia Millet, winner of the PEN-USA Award for Fiction, is the author of the novels Omnivores; George Bush, Dark Prince of Love; Everyone's Pretty; Oh Pure and Radiant Heart; How the Dead Dream; and, the novel we're here to talk about today, My Happy Life. Ms. Millet was gracious enough to take time out of her busy schedule to answer the following three questions I've been dying to ask since I finished this incredible novel.

MOLLY GAUDRY: What can you tell us about the voice of this narrator? How did you find it, craft it, develop it?

LYDIA MILLET: I wanted to write in a first-person voice utterly unlike myself, so I wrote away from me. In the direction of a utopian and also half-blind personality and one I could love.

MG: Is the torture instrument real? What is it?

LM: There were various instruments, as I recall, modeled on old-fashioned torture devices and also sex toys. If you can quote me the one you mean maybe I can be more specific. Memory fades.

MG: p.61, "And soon [Mr. D.] brought a tool into the room. It was of old and strange design, sharp in places and black and very heavy. He said it was authentic and historical, and could be in a very fine museum indeed." And on p.77, "And I would gaze absently at the chair in the corner with sailboats and tillers on the upholstery where, if you looked closely at the backs of the wooden legs a few inches from the floor, you would be able to see thin, deep lines etched horizontally. These were places where wires had rubbed and dug into the wood while they were looped around my ankles."

LM: I think I pictured the tool on p.61 as a kind of mace, although I also recollect a kind of iron maiden type deal, possibly elsewhere in the book. As to p.77, unrelated tool use, I believe.

MG: In your mind, what happens to this narrator in the time and space after the novel ends?

LM: She doesn't live in my mind after the novel ends. She's the last page forever. Though I do wish I could believe in an afterlife.

For more information, please visit Lydia Millet's website. For an excerpt from My Happy Life, click here.