Other

"Little Mother" from Toasted Cheese

petercole — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:20:58 -0400

Youth can have its advantages. Take the body, for example. At twenty, it can endure a night that lasts from seven p.m. until sunrise and still survive an eight hour work day before unconsciousness hits; usually in the shower ten minutes after a microwave dinner and a Simpson's repeat. Responsibilities are few. Kids are just screamers in the grocery store, marriage is years and a few bad break-ups away and outside of putting in enough hours at work to pay the cable bill, there isn't much holding you down. Flawless skin is possible. A two-seater V-8 is possible. Anything is possible.

Little Mother is about youth, or rather the loss of it, along with a couple of meals and the control of some hormones. Hormones can be hell when you're young and so can long car rides in the afternoon. So can mothers, for that matter, and so can conversations from the passenger seat. But silence is easy and sometimes necessary to hold on to youth a little longer. Childhood is fleeting. For the lucky, it dies slowly. For those who aren't, it ends suddenly and that's pretty much what it's all about; youth or the death thereof.

I'm pretty familiar with the subject. Four years ago, plus or minus a few months and credits, I finished high school. In those four years, like every twenty something in history, I've done quite a bit. Also typical for the age, most of it isn't important and the rest probably shouldn't be mentioned for civility's sake. But that doesn't matter. That's youth and it's littered with bad decisions. What does matter is that among the late night visits to tattoo shops, impromptu flights to Key West and two p.m. mornings, some good decisions are made. Sitting down and making a serious attempt at writing was my good decision and Little Mother was my first venture into online publishing, thanks to the editors at Toasted Cheese. It was my first real success at publishing period. Getting your work out there isn't easy. That's a given. Granted, it seems easy at first - crank out a short story or two and send them off to as many big name or smaller literary magazines as possible. Five or ten rejection letters later (or a few hundred, depending on your level of patience), the brick hits the head. Or the computer screen; depends on your level of patience.

The road to publication can be hard—very hard. Traditional print journals can be tougher to breach than a military installation. Rejection letters can be plentiful. Frustration can be unbelievable. That's where online publishing steps in to bridge the gap. It's an outlet for free expression, experimentation and it's the perfect place for young or simply new writers to get started. The whole world is going virtual. Everything and everybody have a place on the web and now literature does too. There's something out there for everybody, whether deep and insightful, lust and champagne or cross-bred aliens is your thing. The web allows literature to evolve in a way that hasn't been possible until now and it makes it accessible, which is even better. All in all, technology is a pretty awesome thing. Well, mostly. If I could just learn to work a fax machine without my fists, life would be good.

List of 50 (13 of 50): LIST DURING WHICH I AM FIRED FROM MY JOB AND THEN FALL SICK INTO THE NEW YEAR

petercole — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:51:39 -0500

1. Having not slept in four days I felt myself become another person.
2. Each other day half further fumbled; my brain one slight shade darker every waking hour.
3. Changeling. Scrambled.
4. 17 hours of sleep deprivation has been shown to cause a decrease in performance equivalent to a .05% blood-alcohol level.
5. Apparently I've been getting drunk since I was 10.
6. Big brown bags under my eyes even my sister mentions, sighing.
7. Sleep deprivation has been used as a method of interrogating suspected terrorists.
8. Literally just now in the middle of writing another version of list item 8 I got called to my manager's office and was fired from my job.
9. Incidentally, I am certain, the dismissal unrelated to the fact that I spend a large portion of my time at work reading sleep research websites and writing lists in my Gmail browser rather than calling debtors and trying to make them give me money they don't have.
10. Really I'm more mad they interrupted my not-working than anything else.
11. Really I'm just tired.
12. My extremities tingling from lack of sleep.
13. Back at home now, freshly unemployed, on my TV screen in blue-green font on black: Unusable Signal.
14. A phrase I might rightly one day have tattooed on my forehead.
15. And in the next room, my bed, the mattress bent from having flown off of a truck.
16. The subsequent lump causing a sleeper to sink toward the middle.
17. No length of rest coming clean or right, exactly.
18. Voices through the thin walls, outside the window, from rooms overhead.
19. The crud and thump of trains and drunks and sirens. The soft swim of low light and the fan.
20. Exposure to noise at night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn't wake.
21. Circadian. A blob. Buried in myself.
22. A thing absorbing toxins, radiation, static.
23. A thing awake when asleep/asleep when awake.
24. Crack ya skull without penetratin ya skin.
25. My skull enormous, unable to fit in any hat, fat with blabber.
26. The rest of my body slumped and sugared, in need of something new unnamed.
27. A study done in 1998 showed that bright light shown at the backs of a human's knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock.
28. Standing in the bathroom with my pants down and some matches, wishing to hit some sort of trigger.
29. Now returning almost exactly 44 hours after having written list item 27, having spent the last two days in bed.
30. Having fainted twice well after midnight on the day of firing, my body hitting the floor as dead weight, slick with sweat, though likely related to the matches. Likely.
31. Coming to with lips of gibberish. Unable to understand where I am.
32. Unable to understand where I am most any day, it seems.
33. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.
34. My temperature so high this evening my girlfriend worried I was going to burn my brain.
35. Today the first day before the new year, 2007.
36. Some sense of shift. Some inner scrape.
37. Still feeling dumber than at any other instant. Yet within the dumber, slightly new.
38. A presence burrowed in my sickness. A number of small bumps on my head.
39. Tiny lock and key by my bathroom counter top that I have no clue as to the origin of.
40. Read while shitting in a daze: It's not so much about approaching it from the outside and thinking about how it operates, it's more about being inside the thing and trying to keep up with its demands.
41. And now, between list items 39 and 40, the advent of a new year has come and gone and today is another day.
42. The new year. Maybe if I repeat. The new year.
43. The new year in which my father doesn't recognize his picture.
44. The new year in which I still don't feel asleep when sleeping, really, or awake even now.
45. The new year with streets gummed full and no one yielding. With each breath slightly older, slightly further ruined.
46. The new year in which ducks at risk of attack by predators are able to balance the need for sleep and survival, keeping one half of the brain awake while the other slips into unconscious.
47. The new year in which the internet is still available 24 hours a day.
48. The new year arching up to scratch it back on something bigger.
49. The new year with 356 shopping days till Christmas.
50. The new year with 12 billing cycles until the new year.

THREE MEMOIRRHOIDS

petercole — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:08:35 -0500

MY NABOKOV

Now I have written a novel. I can hold the thick of a manuscript in my hand. It makes me feel full and empty at the same time. I am a writer. Am I a writer? I call it The Steps Of The Sun, a title from Blake’s Songs of Experience. These pages are a Faulknoid exploration of the time of the Robeson riots in Peekskill, New York. I think it is great. I think it is junk. I have written a whole novel. My erstwhile Prof. Baxter Hathaway likes it a lot. I am a writer, no I’m not.

Vladimir Nabokov agrees to read it. He never reads student work. Everyone is surprised. I should be more flattered than I am in my ignorance and arrogance. We have a meeting in his office. His wife, Vera, is always there. Nabokov is famous in his classes for diatribes against Dostoevsky, and singing admiration for Chekov. What will he think about my Steps Of The Sun? I knock on the door and enter the dusty office in Goldwin Smith Hall. Vera and Vladimir are almost smiling. They sink me into a dilapidated beige velour easy chair, where my butt settles to the floor. Nabokov, his body a tall, slim edifice, his narrow face grizzled, distracted, severe in expression, leans over me from a high stool. I have seen him at Taughannock State Park, nimbling through the woods with his butterfly net. He is a respected lepidopterist, a taxonomist. All novelists I think must be perhaps taxonomists. Will I ever get to be a novelist/taxonomist? Below him I feel pinned into the chair like an object of his lepidoptery. Or I’m a helpless muzhik called in to face the lord of the manor. At the end of the room Vera leans against the desk. She does all the talking. I am defenseless, miserable, as if I’m paralyzed into the chair of the tallest dentist in the world.
Vera prefaces the onslaught with what is almost a kindness. “The talent is there, but…” and then all I hear is “crude” “comic book prose” “dull repetition” “read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson…” Vladimir nods and occasionally issues a sound like air escaping from a valve. The comments are intended to be helpful, but I am not ready to accept help. Praise is what I need to hear. I want Vladimir Nabokov to help hoist me onto the first rung of the literary ladder. Once the opposition is silent I excavate myself clumsily from the chair, and retrieve the yellow carbon copies of manuscript with his scribbles on it. He even initialed them. Hardly holding back the tears that saturate my anger I stagger down the stairs away from Nabokov’s office back into the life of a non-entity, knowing I will never write again.

Young ego is resilient. I sent the manuscript to Harcourt Brace, to a competition for a fellowship they gave to first novelists. They wanted references from three people who had read the work. Nabokov was one of the three people who had read it. I used his name without first asking his permission. This was presumptuous and impudent, and Nabokov was furious. Vera screamed at me that Vladimir was an important writer, a professional. (He was writing Pnin at the time, serialized in the New Yorker.) How could I just use his name without permission? “Come on. A name is a name,” I said. I had somewhat reconstituted my cojones. “They asked for the names of three people who had read the manuscript, and you are one of the three.” How hollow that sounded. My explanation did nothing to mitigate Nabokov’s outrage.

It took several years for me to acknowledge that Nabokov was a great writer. I’d got a letter back from Harcourt Brace saying that two out of three judges so far had favored my manuscript. They wanted to know more about my writing ambitions and my philosophy. At the time I was ecstatically in love with Pat Bell (aka Jingle) and we were fumbling young into marriage. I believe a lot of the delerium got into my response to Harcourt Brace. I forgot to sign the letter, and sent a signature separately on the next day. They finally turned me down. I don’t know if I missed because my “philosophy” was goofed up by love, or because, as I suspect, Vera wrote to them to withdraw the name of her Vladimir as a reference.

THE BERRYMAN BLOT

In Verona, in Italy, I got my hands on a copy of John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. They touched me profoundly at that time. Some locked into my memory. I recited them frequently in my mind.

            Filling her compact & delicious body
            with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
            twice.

(Restaurants in Verona don’t serve chicken paprika. Not in the city of Romeo & Juliet.)

            Fainting with interest, I hungered back
            and only the fact of her husband & four other people
            kept me from springing on her

            or falling at her little feet and crying
            ‘You are the hottest one for years of night
            Henry’s dazed eyes
            have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon
            (despairing) my spumoni. – Sir Bones: is stuffed
            de world, wif feeding girls.

            -- Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
            downcast … The slob beside her    feasts … What wonders is
            she sitting on, over there?
            The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
            Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
            --Mr. Bones: there is.

Though the Dream Songs are stylized, stagy as a minstrel show, they were just what I needed to refresh my love for American idiom. We’d been living in Italy for almost three years. I understood that as a great privilege. I loved Italy, but I felt my grip on present usage in the American language slipping. We were ready to go back. My oldest son, Avrum, who was four, spoke Italian, the Leccese dialect (we’d lived in Lecce for a year) and the Veronese dialect, as well as English. I knew he risked losing that, and Nikolai, two years old, could lose his Italian smatter.

We returned to Ithaca, New York. Baxter Hathaway had arranged for me to teach at Cornell. That was a stroke of luck, and expression of his faith in me I will always cherish. I didn’t want to teach. I never really loved school, and understood the precept that “them that teach don’t do”; on the other hand, I didn’t relish the idea of hauling my family, which had swelled to three sons, back to the U.S. with no job. We arrived in Ithaca, New York, myself packing my passion for John Berryman and his quirky Dream Song project.

“God bless Henry. He lived like a rat.”

“You’ll get to appreciate the wide palette of grays of the Ithaca skies,” Baxter said. He was founder of the Cornell Creative Writing Program, founder of Epoch magazine, a brilliant man of real integrity and compassion, the avuncular mentor of young writers at Cornell. He was always ready to take a cup of coffee with his protégés at Noyes Lodge, or Willard Straight Hall. Slow of speech, and laconic, perpetually drawing on a cigarette, he would listen for hours to amateur literary talk. He bristled against the dominance of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I’d be curious to know what he’d think of the present plague of writer’s workshops in America. I can’t honestly complain, however. Because of that expansion, I was able to make a living.

As a Cornell Prof I pushed to get John Berryman into town for a reading. It worked. I was put in charge of the event. The poet arrived at the Ithaca airport in the early afternoon, and was scheduled to read in the evening. He was staying at our apartment. Jingle and I cleaned thoroughly to make it nice for the great poet. The Ithaca airport had no gates. An eminence could descend the stairs as a President would, waving at the crowd. The poet appeared at the door supported under the arms by a flight attendant and the co-pilot. He was totally sloshed, the kind of drunk you have to prop up while he takes a piss. No one had explained to me that Berryman was a hopeless alcoholic; in fact, he wrote most of a novel, Recovery, about the disease of alcoholism. On my first encounter with him, he stank. He had pissed himself in flight. His suit was soaked. The cabin of the plane must have reeked of him. Behind his disheveled graying beard, his unkempt hair, his expression was that of a frightened POW. I introduced myself, but I don’t think it registered. I could feel his panic. He babbled incoherently, this shaper of some of the most muscular lines in the American language.

            “I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son
            easy be not to see anyone,
            combers out to sea
            know they’re going somewhere but not me.
            Got a little poison, got a little gun,
            I’m scared a lonely.

Someone helped me pile him onto the bench of our VW Microbus. The car smelled of him for weeks. He slumped over on me, babbling in a kind of frothy hysteria, as I drove him home. Jingle seemed to be the tranquilizer he needed. He calmed down as soon as he saw her. He took her hand, and walked up the eight steps to our apartment under his own power. “He probably needs to sleep,” said Jingle, with basic Winnemucca wisdom. I was nearly hysterical myself, wouldn’t have come up with that idea.

We woke him an hour before the reading. He had pissed in his sleep, and the wet spot had drawn purple dye from the cushions onto the white sheet. He was used to this drill. In his suitcase, along with his poems, he carried clean underwear and a fresh suit. He washed up, and we headed for the reading, the poet grabbing Jingle’s hand on the way. He didn’t let go of it till after I introduced him and he climbed to the podium. He read pretty well, from Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, and The Dream Songs, but not with the minstrel show panache that the poems promise, that I had hoped for. We didn’t exchange more than three or four sentences. He was sequestered deep within himself. I wouldn’t suggest a drink. He wanted to sleep. The following morning he met a workshop, and several of the young women there perked him up. A later dream song is dedicated to Amy Vladeck, a student he met at the workshop. He probably never even registered my name. Berryman left on a flight before noon. He was sober. I’m sorry I didn’t get him to sign the sheet he had stained. We kept it for a long time flying on the clothesline – Henry’s banner, the flag of Mr. Bones.

            Supreme my holdings, greater yet my need,
            thoughtless I go out.    Dawn.    Have I my cig’s,
            my flaskie O,
            O crystal cock, -- my kneel has gone to seed,--
            and anybody’s blessing? (Blast the MIGs
            for making fumble so

            my tardy readying.) Yes, utter’ that,
            Anybody’s blessing? –Mr. Bones,
            you makes too much
            démand. I might be ‘fording you a hat:
            it gonna rain. –I knew a one of groans
            & greed & spite, of a crutch

            who had thought he had, a vile night, been – well – blest.
            He see someone run off. Why not Henry,
            With his grasp of desire?
            -- Hear matters hard to manage at de best,
            Mr Bones. Tween what we see, what be,
            is blinds. Them blinds’ on fire.

VONNEGUTS

It was a bright spring afternoon in Manhattan, and I was headed uptown. George Plimpton had arranged a gathering at Elaine’s with a sappy name like Convergence of Genius, or the Genius Club. It was meant to create an artistic, literary think tank. Many eminences like Joseph Heller, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe and etc. were among the geniuses. I had just published The Exagggerations of Peter Prince at Holt and doors were opening for me, though I understood little about how to use this advantage. I was invited to this gathering but was too shy and insecure to know how to maintain myself among the literary/artistic glitterati. My seat was at a table with only Kurt Vonnegut and his friend, the photographer, Jill Krementz, whom he later married.

I had almost crossed paths with Vonnegut before. He just left his teaching gig at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, when I started mine. I did meet Edie, his daughter, whom I liked a lot. She was finishing school there, an art major. Edie visited me at my apartment on Morton Street once, with her boy friend, little Geraldo Rivera. He hadn’t yet started on his way to being the media brute he is today. I could see he had little interest in what I was doing. Edie told me she’d shown my novel to her father, and he didn’t know what to make of it. I wasn’t attracted much to the writing in Cat’s Cradle, the only Vonnegut I’d read. My general social ineptitude and discomfort among geniuses conspired with those hovering opinions to make a nearly silent table. Mr. Vonnegut tried very hard to tell jokes and be jovial. Some of them must have been his ironic takes on the genius label. I might have enjoyed this under different circumstances. Jill Krementz enjoyed him immensely. I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t laugh. I could only think foolishly that we worked on different writing planets, his obviously more popular and lucrative. I didn’t have the grace to break through socially to a more congenial posture.

When I visited Dresden I thought frequently of Vonnegut, of his distress after writing Slaughterhouse Five. I was on a research trip to see all the paintings of Antonello da Messina for my novel, Antonello’s Lion. Five months earlier I had emerged from a quad bypass extravaganza, and didn’t know what my life would be like, nor how much of it was left. The train from Berlin pulled into Dresden in the morning. My God, I thought, the city is still charred. Vonnegut, the fire bombing, why hadn’t I talked to him? The old city had been completely rebuilt, stones charred charcoal grey. They had preserved the scar. I could feel it in my scars. I imagined I could smell the death by burning. I could feel Kurt Vonnegut breaking down in New York.

A slight feathery angelic blonde woman with pink tints in her hair smiled at me as I got off the train, and I followed her flutter across the bridge over the Elbe onto the broad modern square. I was booked into one of the five high-rise hotels lined up like tombstones before the old city. My mission was to see Antonello’s Saint Sebastian. The Zwinger Palace holds one of the great art museums of the world, a pride of Saxon culture. The collection had been saved, had survived the fire-bombing. Vonnegut must have known this, people died, art survived. It was a “so it goes” item. I had no luck with Saint Sebastian, because the painting was in restoration. The Italians allowed me to look at works being restored, and even the Met let me look at an Antonello in storage, but the Germans have their rules, not to be bent. I never saw the painting until after my novel was published, when it was hung in Rome at the Antonello exhibition. It was, I realized, the greatest painting of all time. In Dresden that was a small disappointment, compensated for by the Raphael Sistine Madonna, and great works by Brueghel, Rubens, Veronese. Most interesting to me, almost embarrassing, was a series of paintings by Canaletto, the great Venetian painter of cityscapes, and the Grand Canal. He lived in Dresden for several years, and painted city scenes. The stones in his paintings were the same grey, the same charcoal as the buildings today. Grey is the color of the tufa they quarried to build Dresden then and now. I would have enjoyed a conversation about that with the gracious and troubled Kurt Vonnegut.

But I sat tongue-tied in Elaine’s. All around us I could overhear geniuses engaged in easy conversation. I looked into Kurt Vonnegut’s face and thought this was, as Hart Crane described Chaplin, “a kind and Northern face.” I would have enjoyed a break-through to get to know him. I might at least have got Jill Krementz to include me in her book of portraits of authors at work. Whatever ridiculous opinion I had once about his writing, I finally came to recognize him as a humane and righteous advocate of truth and clarity. He carried his burden of fame with Twain-like wit and rumpled ambassadorial dignity. I left the geniuses, and headed back downtown in New York twilight. That was how I didn’t get to know Kurt Vonnegut. So it went.

Feeling and Fiction: A Brief Conversation Between Michael Kimball and Karen Lillis

petercole — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:25:09 -0400

Karen: I was thinking about the fact that good, emotionally-resonant experimental narrative is more rare to find than the heady or detached kind. I've been meaning to ask you, who were your prose influences when you started learning to write like you do now? I was really influenced by some European women writers a friend turned me on to—Marie Redonnet, Fleur Jaeggy, Annie Ernaux, Anna Kavan. And also, Kathy Acker and Clarice Lispector.

Michael: I especially like Annie Ernaux out of that list and she creates an interesting distinction here. The sentences are not really experimental, but her narration is; in Simple Passion, we don't get a linear narrative or a plot-driven version of the relationship, but a kind of thematic narrative of how she comes to understand the relationship. And you're right, though I've never really thought of it that way, experimental and emotional don't often go together. For me, there were parts of Faulkner, and some Richard Brautigan, also early Michael Ondaatje (up to In the Skin of a Lion, when his narration becomes much more normative), and Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster. But mostly it was processing my sensibility, my desire for feeling, through an aesthetic that was trying to write novels in different ways. What was it about those European writers that appealed to you?

Karen: I remember I was really struck by a tension in Redonnet's novellas—between some huge, deep emotions being expressed, but the narrator's voice was very controlled and even repressed. There was this struggle for voice, this struggle for the narrator to tell the story, although the writer was telling the story beautifully, because the story WAS that tension. Jaeggy and Kavan had that quality as well, that kind of dissonance. It spoke to the female upbringing for me. Ernaux was much more open-throated, I connected to her work in perhaps the opposite way, there was this pure joy of telling exactly the story she wanted to tell you. Like the adult woman getting her chance to tell the truth, finally—the truth about the very things we are encouraged to keep in the dark. And Acker certainly had voice going for her too, but she was at a whole different level. Acker amazes me—she manages to be able to write at a cerebral level at the same time that she’s conveying urgent desire and intense, large feelings. Speaking of it as text, I’d say she’s combining symbolic imagery, poetic narrative, and moments of speaking very directly to the reader—in other words text as image, text as rhythm, and text as voice. Lispector uses these three elements in her most ambitious narratives, too, but in a different emotional register for yet a different effect. But both Acker and Lispector write with an openness of heart as well as throat.

Michael: One of the common threads between the books that we're both talking about is voice, and the way that using a particular voice allows the writer to get at emotional content that they may not be able to convey in other ways. In Ernaux's Simple Passion, the story easily could have become sentimental, but it never does; she gives us this stripped down, straightforward voice, a rare simplicity that allows her to tell the reader honest things about emotional and physical need. In Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster, the character of Ellen Foster has a child's innocent voice, and an innocent understanding of events, which allows a terrible story to be told. And it's something that I put to use in The Way the Family Got Away. The child narrators are only able to tell us those extreme things the way they do because they are child narrators, because it is in first person and because the children are talking like children. They don’t understand what is happening, but they try to tell the story anyway. If the story is told another way, that feeling is lost.

Karen: Yes, “If the story is told another way, that feeling is lost”—that’s it exactly. The voice IS the story. I loved The Way The Family Got Away, and I really connected to the narration—to the child narrators. They’re telling the story in simple statements but it’s heart wrenching to read because you’ve embodied these simple—deceptively simple—words in these particular grieving children. You created this dissonance, which then creates a compassion. Adults tend to avoid grief by staying busy, but it’s hard to avoid grief when you have a very pared-down view of the world. This simple narration—it’s something I also used, in The Second Elizabeth. My narrator is not a child, but her voice regresses to a child-like one. Everything is described as if in slow motion. I had readers who thought the narrator sounded autistic. She regresses to this voice but the emotional trajectory is not downward—she needs to get very simple in language in order to tap a certain grief and then move past it. What did you think of Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life?

Michael: My Happy Life is such a great book, narrated by a woman who seems to have been abandoned in a mental institution and who only sees every terrible thing that has happened to her in the best possible terms. I'm so glad that Soft Skull is reprinting it. It is a great example of what we're talking about. There is a double narration going on in it—as there is in The Way the Family Got Away—what the narrator is telling us, that story, and then a second story, the sense that we as readers make of it. I read My Happy Life a few years ago and nobody else I knew had read it. I tried to pass it on to everybody. I don't know if you can tell that story with therapists or any other kind of narrator really. If you do, then that world, the narrator's world, is broken open and the energy somehow gets diffused.

Karen: I loved discovering the narrator's worlds in Redonnet's Hôtel Splendide, in Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline, in Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. , and yes, in Ernaux's Simple Passion. I loved these writers for finding ways to voice the stories that no one around me was telling. I needed these books. I was just hopscotching from one novella to the next, finding more words for my own life story and expression for my own emotions.

Michael: Those stories get told in different ways through the experimentation with the narration. And it does turn into a personal thing. Writing fiction, in the most basic way, can't not turn into a personal thing.

Karen: I like your phrase "my desire for feeling." Tell me more about that. What is your relationship between reading and feeling, or writing and feeling? Where do different kinds of novels figure in this for you?

Michael: My desire for feeling, it's something I've had to live with for as long as I can remember, both good and bad, but I wasn't finding anything similar in much of the fiction I was reading. Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter was a really important book to me. I can still remember the specific chair that I was sitting in, the apartment I was living in when I read that book. I read it in one sitting and I remember trying to finish it before it got dark. I didn’t want to turn the light on. I thought it might break the spell. I still have an emotional attachment to that book. In a lot of ways, it is those kinds of books that I read for and it is that kind of feeling that I am always working with in my own fiction. How Much of Us There Was was written out of a great affection and a need to resolve grief. How does feeling work its way into your fiction?

Karen: In some ways, everything I’ve written has been absolutely straight non-fiction. But the emotional POV made the elements of the stories heightened and less like what we call “everyday life.” Often when I write I’m holding a microscope up to unseen realms—literally, realms that are just out of sight—train tracks that are walled off by trees and vines, freight trains that disappear and then return, interior life we can't see, things that happen in the dark of night, lovers who are far away in time or space. When I’m working on a novel, I’m experiencing these things in my daily life as non-fiction, but as writing it comes full circle to land in the realm of imagination again. So, I guess I write literary fiction by trying hard to capture my emotional life as it coincides with exterior life.

Michael: It’s not unlike what some of my actor friends would say about working up a different role. Also, there is some interesting psychological research on memory and emotion that suggests that the same parts of the brain are activated when we experience something and when we remember experiencing that thing. I've never seen any research on it, but I have often thought that something similar is happening to writers when they are writing in their fictional worlds. We experience those feelings we are creating and they become a kind of emotional memory for us. Staying with the idea of feeling, are there stylistic things that you're doing, or not doing, to help you to convey that emotional content?

Karen: Stylistically? Let’s see, I tend to avoid college-level vocabulary. I’m careful about what I read, because I’m a sponge for the tone and cadence of other writers. (Sometimes I arrange a reading list like a hopeful recipe.) I pay attention to the words that come into my head first thing when I wake up—in that liminal space between night and day that Djuna Barnes writes of in Nightwood. I usually read my prose aloud to myself and make sure it scans well—the aural rhythm is a helpful guide for me. One shorter piece I wrote called “NY/LA Whirlwind Romance” was composed entirely of one-liners that a fellow said to me. It was a memory exercise, but an emotional one. I remembered verbatim the words that had seared their way into my infatuated heart, for better and then for worse. Not unlike the way you recalled where you were when you read Coming Through Slaughter. For me, a lot goes on in preparing to get to the page, moreso than making style choices after I get to the page. What about you? Do you sit down and try things out, like writing exercises? Or do you tend to work off of inspiration?

Michael: I've never done writing exercises and inspiration seems rare to me, though every once in a while something happens in my writing that feels like inspiration. Actually, Dear Everybody wouldn't exist if not for a rare bout of inspiration. But mostly, I work off of work. Once I have a voice, a way of speaking, everything opens up. But I don’t want that voice to be a normative way of speaking. I want it to be skewed somehow, in both thought and language. And then I let the voice tell me where to go and how to say things. The words the voice has already spoken, so to speak, will determine the words that the voice is going to say—and in that way many of the words in the English language, most of them, are eliminated from any particular piece of fiction. And I think you're onto something by avoiding college-level vocabulary. John Gardner was a big influence on me in this, the distinction he makes between the Germanic and Latinate parts of English, the Germanic being closer to feeling, the Latinate further from it.

Karen: That's really interesting—I've never heard that about Germanic vs. Latinate roots. But myself, I don't always avoid Latin. It was an early passion in my life, I starting studying it at age 12. I still see Latin roots in words and that becomes another method for playing with word choice when I'm writing. But it's not the thing that gets me to the page. Again, you got it exactly right when you said, "Once I have a voice, everything opens up." Finding writers I connect with helps me with that. I read three or four books of Redonnet's, and one day I woke up with The Second Elizabeth wanting to be told. It seems like certain stories, or emotions, are locked away inside me until I figure out which voice can bear to tell them.

Michael: In a sense, I don't think it matters how a writer approaches language as long as they do it in a strong and consistent way. It can be through the exclusion of certain words, the inclusion of a particular class of vocabulary, a particular approach of prefixes and suffixes, any number of things. I'm always trying to figure out new things to do with language that create affect. Karen: We've talked a lot about books we read a while back. Have any experimental books or writers come into your favor more recently? I think two of my last favorite prose discoveries were The Double Standard by Kathe Burkhart and Waking by Eva Figes. Michael: One very recent book of shorts, Kim Chinquee's Oh Baby, is full of invention and feeling. And there is a memoir that came out a few years ago—The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman that is innovative and heartbreaking. Also, everybody should read Will Eno's plays if anything we've said is of interest to them.