"Hours Glean a Dark Hive": An Interview with Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award.  The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in southern California, where she is a novice harpist. 

Her poems "Given Air" and "Happiness Machine" appear in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Karen An-hwei Lee talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about pocket sized poems, California weather, and the bees, the bees, the bees. 

1. How did you come about writing “Given Air”? 

One summer, I composed a group of poems about air.  

To do so, I compiled indoor and outdoor lists of living things breathing air, things exhaling air, and all things given air – whether breathing or not, such as moss or ball lightning.

2. “Given Air” is fantastically pocket-sized.  Personally, I always struggle with smaller poems, afraid that I should be expanding or saying more. How do you know when a pocket-sized poem is complete? 

I often think of poems as cells or organisms, self-contained entities.  I allow a poem’s space to expand, organize its innards.  When there’s not enough material, it cannot exist on its own, so I feed it a little imagery or other information. A poem achieves a certain homeostasis with time.   If there’s too much silence – or noise --  the poem explodes.  In some cases, the chaos is desirable since it yields necessary tensions in the poem, so I let it be.  There is no formula. 

3. This poem deals mostly with the natural world, from the ball lightning to the still bees. How do these images, or perhaps the science of the images, influence your writing?

The weather of California fascinates me.  

My first years in the Bay Area sent a heat wave, the rains of El Niño, and minor earthquakes.  Now I live in greater Los Angeles, where it’s common to see gardenias blooming in November, grapefruit trees heavy with globes in December, and hybrid tea roses in January – all in the midst of urban sprawl.  The natural world thrives in abundance here. I once studied biological sciences, so this field of knowledge resides with my words, too.  I love observing ways in which creative design is present in nature. 

When I moved from New England to northern California over a decade ago, I was enthralled by the long growing season, whose produce – radicchio, fennel, avocadoes, kumquats, pomegranates, figs -- spilled from local backyards.  Every day, I walked past an urban garden that alternately produced giant sunflowers, squash, and string beans in four seasons. 

In the rawness of civilization and its discontents, so to speak, a healing.

The still bees, ah.  As a girl in New England, I would wait for melting snow in late March: no bees.  The crocuses: no bees.  Then the maple trees in our yard would put out oddly green flowers with nectar, and then: the bees, the bees, the bees.  Even California bees are less active in winter, although yesterday, I did see a weary one exploring the fuchsia bougainvillea in a new year’s light.

4. What have you been reading recently? What’s really stuck with you?

I’ve enjoyed a novel by Hiromi Kawakami and am currently re-reading Making Peace by Denise Levertov.  More writers, an eclectic list:  Paul Celan, Josey Foo, Lily Hoang, Tan Wan Eng, Éireann Lorsung, Arlene Kim, Julian of Norwich, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Mary Burger, Sarah Gambito, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Arthur Sze.

5. What other writings have you been working on?

I finished a collection of poetry and prose by a Song Dynasty woman poet, Li Qingzhao, forthcoming from Tupelo Press.

"The Theatre of the Unconscious": An Interview with Benjamin Hackman

Benjamin Hackman is a poet and lyricist interested in the exploration of depth psychology through personal narrative. His writing has most recently appeared in Canadian Literature, the Literary Review of Canada, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and in Yiddish in the Yiddish Forward. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Ted Plantos Memorial Award from the Ontario Poetry Society for an excerpt from his on-going work, The Benjy Poems, for which he has received granting from the Toronto Arts Council, twice from the Ontario Arts Council, and from CUE for the adaptation of eleven Benjy Poems for the audio stage. His audio poems have appeared as sound installations in galleries across Ontario, in online journals in the USA, and will be syndicated in their entirety in Carte Blanche throughout 2013. Benjamin lives and writes in his hometown, Toronto, where he is a student of psychotherapy.

His audio poems "A Note to the Players," "Benjy's Education," and "Benjy in the Supermarket" appear in issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Benjamin Hackman talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about living with trauma, infantile egocentrism, and the blurring of past and present.

1. What inspired you to make “The Benjy Poems” into a work of creative audio with multiple performers and sound effects underlying the poetry?

Well, you have to consider it this way: The Benjy Poems is a long project; I’m moving in on my eighth year, which isn’t too impressive for a poet who hasn’t published his first book yet. I started to get antsy over the last year or two. I wanted to get my poems out, and not just to a few dinky lit journals and a reading every few months. So I set out to find alternate ways to put my poems out into the world. That was the prime inspiration.

To some extent I’d always wondered how excerpts of the piece might translate into performance, and of course, the poems themselves take place in an imaginary play, but I never gave too much serious thought to theatrical adaption until my partner came home one day and told me about CUE, this wonderfully radical organization that provides funding and mentorship to new-generation artists working in the margins here in Toronto. She told me they were looking to fund seven or so projects, so I said, “That’s great. I wonder if they’d fund The Benjy Poems.” She said, “No, they want stuff that can be exhibited.” So I said, “Well… maybe I’ll pitch an audio adaptation.” And from there I got to thinking about the project at its core, and what it is I was trying to accomplish.

You know that piece by Duchamp—“Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2?” I think that’s the biggest influence on the Benjy Poems. One genderless figure. Three versions of itself. One action. Three different perspectives of that action—in three different points of time. And all at the same time. That’s what I try to do with Benjy on the page; I try to explore the non-linear, fragmented, multi-charactered Self. And I try to do it naked—and make it beautiful. But in order for me conceptualize and execute a protagonist who exists with so many simultaneous versions of himself requires some degree of order to prevent the piece from manifesting as something entirely too surreal. I employed a number of techniques to keep things… not clear… but from becoming too confusing for a reader. So on the page, for example, the Speaker is depicted in plain, unaffected font; Benjy, in italics; the Stage Director (as I’ve come to affectionately call her), in square brackets; and everyone else, with quotations, with far too many exceptions to concretely mark this as a structural consistency. And grammar is hardly reliable. To further complicate things, every character is truly the speaker, either in perception, memory, or dream. The reason the piece is taking so long to write is because I spend forever discerning who’s speaking. I go back to poems I wrote years ago, and I still don’t know who’s speaking. My point is this: The labour is simplified in the audio because characters can speak over each other in real (and imagined) time. Visual cues don’t matter at all. And in adapting the poems for audio, that was a liberating epiphany for me, indeed.

2. You also write that through this project you are attempting “to encourage dialogue about domestic violence and child abuse.” Has your work inspired listeners to share their own personal narratives with you or to take part in the desired dialogue?

Regretfully, I can’t say it’s happened yet. But I’m hopeful. And I will say this: directing the actors and the audio engineer throughout production and rehearsal of the audio adaptation forced me to speak in much more concrete terms than I’m used to in my poetry. And that helped me find a way to connect with the actors on real issues like domestic violence and child abuse. It wasn’t group therapy or anything, but we shared. An actor can’t go about character like a poet. You can’t talk in elevated language and metaphor when you’re directing. It’s not appropriate. Actors need clear direction if a director’s going to get what he wants out of an actor. So the actors asked me questions about their characters’ motivations. They needed back stories. I provided them. From there we chatted a bit about physical discipline and dreams and about incest and rape and where those things come from and what the connections might be to our childhoods and adult lives. In summary, I guess I’ve been able to crack open more dialogue about it with myself, and that’s been good for my craft, and my life in general, which I’m grateful for.

I hope one day someone writes to me to tell me that they felt connected to a particular poem, or saw themselves in something I wrote. But these things take time.

3. In “A Note to the Players,” the “inner child” is said to occupy the spotlight, while the speaker on stage is shrouded in darkness. What went into your decision to have light for one and not the other? (Is this how you imagine setting the stage if your work were presented in a visual medium?)

That’s a great question. In The Benjy Poems, Benjy is the centre of the narrative. He’s the subject. But of course the person telling the story, the Speaker, is Benjy also. Naturally Benjy must be, figuratively, in the spotlight of his own story. But that’s the nature of early childhood, isn’t it? For our first three years we are the centre of the world. I mean, good luck convincing a two year old otherwise. You say to her or him, “Hey, what do you think you’re mummy wants to do right now?” They’re just not interested at that age—and many would argue that they physically can’t be interested. Their brains just aren’t fully formed yet. Empathy is softwired at birth, and not hardwired. The context and ways in which we’re raised are the deciding factors that enable us to start considering the feelings of others. But so many of us, due to various traumas and insecure attachments at infancy, take much longer to grow out of that narcissistic character type, and many never do. From a psychoanalytical perspective, I place Benjy in the centre of the dream stage. We can call it the theatre of the unconscious, if you’d like. If the inner child represents pure character origin, which is to compare it to a sort of introspective holy grail, where else can the inner child be but in spotlight centre stage? The Speaker is the person who discerns between Light and Dark.

As for how the play may actually be depicted on a stage, I think the concept is for the play to be rather impossible to stage in any orthodox understanding of space and time, because, as I said, it’s really the theatre of the unconscious. It works in audio. It could work probably quite well as animation, and if it needed, it could be done in film, but I’d be hesitant to stage the Benjy Poems in live action without a wormhole.

4. Also in “A Note to the Players,” the Stage Director says, “Actions of the past and present happen at the same moment.” Does this imagined play reflect how you consider the life of a person with trauma in their past? (Are you trying to capture both past and present moments at once in your other audio poems like “Benjy in the Supermarket”?)

Well, you’ve asked me a psychological question. And psychology is a lot like religion. Everyone has a take on it, and everyone makes sense of it for themselves and there will always be people who will go to war to defend their beliefs. So take my answer with a grain of salt, and with the assumption that others may have very florid rebuttals to my stance, but I’ll say with as much conviction as I can today that everyone lives with the trauma of their past, if even only the trauma of birth, and quite expectantly, much, much more. This is a fairly well accepted view in the psychodynamic tradition. I don’t imagine it’s too contended in modern times, but there other proponents of other schools of thought, and I don’t pretend to have insight into how they think and feel.  

There is not a single poem in the series that does not explicitly strive to blur the lines between time and space and past and present. In one or two, I failed to achieve it, but then… that’s inevitable, isn’t it? My goal is to show how our pasts creep into our presents and morph our futures. That’s the quick and dirty of it, really.

5. What projects are you currently working on? (Are “The Benjy Poems” complete or still in-progress?)

Right now the Benjy Poems are nearing their end. I’m hoping to begin shopping the manuscript around by the Spring. That’s my primary project, and has been for a long time. It’s hard to imagine their ending.  

The wonderfully talented musician and film composer, Craig Saltz, who produced and engineered the audio for the Benjy Poems, is collaborating with me again on an opera. I’ve been hammering out the libretto during breaks in the Benjy Poems for about a year or so, and putting words to music with Craig when we can find the time.

6. What artists would you recommend who also work in the realm of creative audio or spoken word poetry? What literary installations or performances have you seen/heard recently and really enjoyed?

Probably the most keen and committed artist I know working in audio literature right now is Jason Samilski. His work is terrific, and his range is enormous. I highly recommend that readers check out his work. 

"Breaks Apart at Every Surface": An Interview with Stephanie Cawley

Stephanie Cawley is a poet and teacher who lives in Philadelphia. She volunteers at Mighty Writers, where she helps middle-schoolers write persona poems. Her work has recently appeared in BOXCAR Poetry Review and Used Furniture Review.

Her poems "Medusa" and "In Which Our Hero Becomes a Masked Vigilante" appear in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Stephanie Cawley talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about myth and lovely language turned menacing. 

1. Could you talk about writing “Medusa”?  Why did you decide to retell this story in particular?

I have always been interested in poems and stories that retell myths or fairy tales from the perspective of a marginalized or monstrous character—Margaret Atwood's poem “The Sirens” and John Gardner's novel Grendel are two I remember loving when I was younger. “Medusa” was really the first time I attempted to do that kind of re-telling myself, though I have gone on to write a number of poems in this same mode. When I set out to write this first poem, I started thinking about some “monster” figures who I thought might have more to say than they had been afforded. I don't really know why I chose Medusa except that it struck me right away how lonely she might be, and how full of grief, and I knew I could make something from that.

2. In “Medusa,” the speaker seems to have lost most of the power that she wielded in the myths—instead of feeling empowered by her stone-turning abilities, she’s trapped by them.  Could you please talk about shifting her to such a defeated character?

Oh, it's funny to think of her as defeated in this poem, though I guess she is. I suppose I thought of her “powers” as more like a curse—I should also probably confess that I did no research for this poem, so I have no idea if that's actually true or not. And I was also interested in taking the long view, of bringing her into the present, where, I imagine, even if she had once enjoyed or felt powerful from turning people into stone, she would be tired and lonely and ready to go home. 

I think what I find interesting about re-purposing myths and fairy tales is how they can be stretched to accommodate multiple versions of the same story, the way people can contain multiple versions of themselves. I think when you speak through a mythological figure, no matter how you as author make that character, all the other versions of her are there as an echo. So Medusa is, in my poem, a little sad, almost a ghost, but the terrible, fierce version of her is there in the reader's mind, too.

3. I love the way you turn language in “In Which Our Hero Becomes a Masked Vigilante.” Phrases like, “I have been biting bullets for years” get reborn when you end with “but now I want to spit them out.”  Later, lovely things, confetti canons and diamonds, get put together into something more menacing—a sort of gun with diamond shot. Could you talk about this play of language in your poem?

First of all, thank you for such a generous reading of my poem! This was a really fun poem to write. I began writing this in response to a prompt, actually, that gave me the task of reinvigorating some clichés. So I started coming up with clichés turned a little inside out and used that language to shape and drive the poem. I was also thinking at the time about the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia, and about the Occupy movement. The Mummers Parade, if you don't know about it, has happened for more than a hundred years on New Year's Day here in Philadelphia. The Mummers are mostly working class people who spend the whole year creating these elaborate themed costumes and sets. They then perform in various configurations of string bands with lots of dancing and choreography and confetti during the parade. Both the Mummers and, I think, the spirit at least of the Occupy movement involve kind of radical transformations, and maybe a threat of disruption as well. I wanted the language and voice of the poem to enact a similar form of transformation, a re-claiming, though I don't think I was conscious of all that happening as I was writing.

4. I read in your biography that you help middle-schoolers write persona poems through a program called Mighty Writers.  How has helping these students influenced your own writing?

My students have written some amazing persona poems, poems in the voices of a lost baby bird, a hilarious version of Batman, the pea from “The Princess and the Pea,” a kidney waiting to be transplanted, and on and on. Just being around kids excited about poems is really energizing. But also, I think I am sometimes insecure that these more imaginative poems I write are “just for fun” or do less meaningful work than other kinds of poems. So when I hear students say brave, interesting, observant things in their persona poems, things they might not have said without the vessel of a persona, it affirms for me that a poem that is imaginative and transformative can also say something very true about the real world and the people in it.

5. What good things have you been reading recently?

The best thing I have been reading lately is The Gazer Within, the collected essays of  Larry Levis. The book is wonderful not only for the compelling ideas about poetry, but also for Levis' enormous humility and humanity. I also just bought the huge, new volume of collected Louise Glück poems, which is a marvel to have on my bedside table. And I've been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick novels, most recently Martian Time-Slip.

6. What else have you been writing as of late?

I have been writing some more persona poems and also a few non-persona but narrative poems exploring other mythological, fairy tale, and science fiction characters and stories. I am also working on some poems and nonfiction pieces about the small town in New Jersey where I grew up.

"The Big Story": An Interview with Amber Sparks

Amber Sparks's debut collection May We Shed These Human Bodies is out now from Curbside Splendor. Her fiction has been featured in various publications, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and elimae. Her chapbook, "A Long Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World," is included in the anthology Shut Up/Look Pretty, published by Tiny Hardcore Press. She is also a contributor at lit blogs Big Other and Vouched, and lives in Washington, D.C. with a husband and two beasts. Get more Sparks at her blog.

Her story "Birds with Teeth" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Amber Sparks talks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about getting the whole thing right.

1. Where did “Birds with Teeth” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

The story actually began a long time ago for me – I saw a documentary, years ago, about the Bone Wars (which you mention below) and I was completely intrigued. I did a bunch of research and came up with pages and pages of notes, and then I just couldn’t think of how to actually tell the story, what I wanted to do with it. So I put it aside, and then maybe a year ago I saw another special about these two guys, and I was really taken with the fact that they had been friends before they became bitter enemies, and how different their backgrounds and upbringing were. They were just polar opposites but both drawn to one another because of the same passion.  I also hadn’t known before I saw the special that Cope had this girlfriend that his father sent him over to Europe to get rid of. So there were all of my characters, right there, a sort of love triangle, and the whole story was suddenly opened up. It wasn’t about bones, it was about a passion, a love, that all-consuming desire to feel something before we leave this world.

2. I love the way that this piece engages with history, specifically “The Great Bone Rush” or “The Great Bone Wars,” a time when paleontologists rushed to collect fossils and discover new species.  The main characters are actual historical figures: Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.  It seems to me that this passage describes what you’re doing so beautifully with the material:

Cope, though, gave the monster life. He was one of the first to do so, to bring these New World fossils a stunning, vivid sense of existence.

Can you talk a little about the challenges and pleasures of tussling with history-in-fiction?  I’d love to hear what you do to make sure that historical fact enlarges the story.  (And/or what you do to avoid possible reductiveness.)

Challenges and pleasures is exactly right. It’s so hard and so rewarding to write historical fiction. It’s my favorite thing to get right – I feel like kids’ history textbooks should be written by fiction writers, honestly. Sure, you might not get the facts right, but who cares about the facts? Fiction writers get the whole thing right, what’s really important. They get the story right, and that’s what is so interesting about history. The big story. Not the little facts. Some of the facts are fascinating, and give the story truth and life – I love to sprinkle those throughout – they’re like flaxseeds on your food, they’re good for you, they anchor it. But the meat of the story, the real food there, is the big story. The overarching themes. And sometimes to get at those, I make up shit. Marsh didn’t steal Cope’s girl, at least as far as I know. And Cope’s girl wasn’t a prostitute. But it serves my story, to talk about passion, to talk about different kinds of love, different classes and backgrounds, to make these things up. I think there are certainly different schools of thought on how you do historical fiction  - I just read HHhH, which is a wonderful, amazing book, and Laurent’s doing historical fiction in this extremely factual way, which is terrific, because he makes it work by bringing in his own process, and his faith and doubts in the process, and in the facts themselves, and in the relevance of the facts – and whose facts, and how “facts” can be relative in the face of long-done history. And I think to me, that’s what gives me the license to do historical fiction the other way – to just make things up. Because no writer of history ever has one solid set of facts at his or her fingertips. You’re always guessing, you’re always interpreting and making it your own – so why not make it really your own, make it serve the meanings you’re trying to create? But I think you do have responsibility to be careful with history, of course. I mean, I’m writing about Bone Wars. Long-dead dinosaur hunters.  I don’t think I would ever write about Nazis like this. I’m paraphrasing, but in HHhH, Laurent says something like, These are Nazis. You don’t have to make anything up when it comes to the Nazis. Why would you?

3. This piece’s structure—the flipping between third person sections and italicized first person sections—creates natural tension and energy.  It also allows for delightful surprises, such as Charles Darwin’s letter.  What went into your thinking about the structure of this piece?  (Does it in some way reflect your research process?)

As soon as I knew I wanted the story to come through playing Cope and Marsh off of each other, I knew I had to switch narrators. But at first I was doing third person for both, and then I realized the story could really have power if I took a side. And the side I took was Marsh’s, because he  was the quiet one, the cranky one, the one with no friends, the odd duck. I thought, all the revelations would come from humanizing him, making him sympathetic, as opposed to the naturally sympathetic, gregarious Cope. And then suddenly the she emerged as a stronger character, sort of took over the story like a weed, and so I needed first person for her, too. I needed her to have a voice, not to just be a marginalized plot convenience. If I was going to have a woman in this story, she was going to get her say, too.

4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?
Right now I’m working on some more stories, and putting together a short story collection, and also on a novel. I don’t want to say too much about the novel, but it’s my second attempt at such a form and it’s certainly turning out a lot better than the first attempt.  

5.  What knock-out writing have you been enjoying recently?  Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about? 

Oh, man, I’m also enjoying great reading. I just recently had the pleasure of reading Matt Bell’s book, which comes out in June, and I’m very excited for that. It’s fantastic, truly fantastic. And Matt Salesses and Ethel Rohan and Laura van den Berg, some of my favorite writers, all have books coming out next year. I’m excited for the new Karen Russell short story collection, and for Anne Carson’s newest. James Salter’s new novel. Lindsay Hunter has a book coming out that’s going to kick ass. And of course, I can’t wait for the novella that I wrote with Robert Kloss, The Desert Places, that’s coming out in October from Curbside Splendor. It’s illustrated by Matt Kish, the absolutely amazing artist responsible for Tin House’s Moby Dick in Pictures. I’ve seen a few of the early illustrations and I need to tell you that it’s going to be an unbelievable thing, this book.

"Royalty as Divinity and Arbiter of Reality": An Interview with Margaret Patton Chapman

Margaret Patton Chapman teaches creative writing at Indiana University South Bend and is fiction editor at decomP magazinE. Find links to her work in Diagram, > Kill Author, and more at margaretpattonchapman.com.

Her story "The Plan" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Margaret Chapman chats with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about superhumanity, that con man Odysseus, and bending the story to one's will.

1. What first prompted you to write “The Plan”?  Have you always loved (or agonized over) the Iliad/Odyssey?

I originally wrote this piece for the Ray’s Tap Reading Series run by my friend Chris Bower in Chicago.  I’ve been reading at this series since (almost) its inception and it is probably the source, in some way or another, of almost all my short fiction.  Chris curates the shows around themes, and the particular reading this text comes from required us to use words from an alphabetical list of “feelings”.  The last five were “vengeful”, “worried,” “xenophobic” “yearning” and “zealous.” Those, somehow, lead me to Odysseus and his crew – warriors returning home, becalmed at sea, unsure of the future.   I’m not really sure why that came to mind.  I have to admit, I last read the Odyssey in high school and the Iliad as a college freshman, except for bits and pieces here and there.  I do remember being sort of blown away by Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad.  The language was so clean and brutal.

2. Odysseus seems cast afresh as kind of villainous.  Lines like “Our friends call him cunning, our enemies call him a liar and a crook.  We call him captain.  We have for years” carry this vaguely resigned yet loyal tone, suiting this re-casting as smartly as those swipes at dramatic irony (“When we were done we were just glad to be going home…. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Let's just do one thing first.’”).  Is there a kind of pleasure or a kind of sadness in re-qualifying “always changeful” Odysseus in this story, and do you see it as a reduction (from legend to man) or a rebuilding (examining keenly the sort of man you’re hesitant to trust but, can’t help it, have to)?

Odysseus is a charmer, isn’t he?  Like most charismatic leaders, he is certainly part con-man.  That’s why the Greeks loved him so much, and the Romans hated him.  The Romans thought he was a cheater.  I don’t think the Greeks believed you could cheat at war, or life.

I suppose I am trying to both reduce and rebuild Odysseus.  Because of his legend, he holds you at arms length as a character, but he seems very human to me, watching the sea, trying to decide what to do next.  He is a King, however, in the ancient sense – royalty as divinity and arbiter of reality. Jeanette Winterson, in her essay “Imagination and Reality” talks about (belief in) royalty as the ultimate act of imagination – that one, as a subject, endows royalty with superhumanity and special destiny outside of average human experience, and in return one gets to be close to a semi-divine being.  We do that now outside of the context of hereditary aristocracy – we give that power to celebrities, politicians, religious leaders.  The crew, the chorus of this story, knows that they are not as important as their leader, that is why they let themselves be subject to him and his whims, even as they wish that he returned some measure of their devotion.  And Odysseus doesn’t need to care about the fates of his men because they don’t matter.  They’re the redshirts – needed to tell his story.  In the end, it is Odysseus that becomes legend because he can bend the story to his will.  He will be the only survivor because he is the only one who needs to.  Storytelling is brutal that way.

3. Your closing paragraph is one of the most phenomenal I’ve ever read.  Not only the tragedy of conceding to the doom, moving from autonomy/victory (“We all signed up for Greece, for glory”) to depending on the disgrace (“He will plan until when I say we it will only be me”)—but the “we” also starts becoming Odysseus.  What does it mean, the oppressor as the collective?  What is your intent in these last moments, as you define and redefine what is stable and what is diminishing—a kind of moving-backwards anti-creation?  More a moment of forgiveness, this reduction?  Is it white-flagging?

Wow, thank you so much!  When you retell a well-know story I think you are engaging what it means to tell, and receive, stories, so to me the end is trying to question assumptions about how stories are transmitted and by whom and the relationship between stories and history.  I think the final paragraph is a moment of surrender for the chorus – all of their autonomy and identity has gone and their only choice is not only to die and be forgotten but also and to forgive and surrender to this fate.  Also, in giving Odysseus the group’s story in the end, even for a half a sentence, I hope to say something about his necessary understanding of, and consumption of, the stories and lives of those around him, because he is the only one who is able to tell this tale as he is the only survivor, not just in the story, but in time as well.  I think the very end moves past Odysseus, not backwards but into the future, towards the world of the reader, and perhaps past that as well. In the end, everything is gone, even Odysseus, even us, even stories, but the sea is still there.  Something has to be permanent; at least, that is what I choose to believe.  Otherwise everything is too sad. 

4. What have you been reading this winter?  The epic?  The tragic?

I’m teaching a course this semester, fittingly enough, on retelling myths and fairy tales, so I’ve been re-reading Karen Armstrong’s really wonderful A Short History of Myth, which came out as part of the Cannongate Myths series, and also Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.  I just got Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brother’s Grimm, which is somewhere between translations and retellings.  And next on my list is Lucy Corin’s short story collection The Entire Predicament because I am totally in love with her story “Eyes of Dogs” in the anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me.   That story is available online, too at, Web Conjunctions(http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/corin08.htm), and if you haven’t read it you really should.

5. What are you working on now?

I’ve been working on a book about ghosts for a while now, and I hope I’m going to finish it soon.  I’m also hoping to start putting together a collection of these strange little retellings I do.

"As If Opening (or Closing?) an Endless Clause": An Interview with Brian Henry

Brian Henry is the author of nine books of poetry, including Quarantine, Lessness, and Doppelgänger. Three of his books have appeared in separate UK editions. His work has been translated into Croatian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, and Spanish. Henry has co-edited Verse since 1995, and his criticism has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, Jacket, and Boston Review. His translation of Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008, and his translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things appeared as a Lannan Foundation selection from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award. Henry’s poetry and translations have received numerous honors, including an NEA fellowship, a Howard Foundation grant, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences grant.

His essay "Ammonia" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Brian Henry talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about poetry vs. nonfiction and the scent of memory. 

1. Could you talk about the process of writing “Ammonia”?

It’s safe to say that I would not have written “Ammonia” if I had not been translating Aleš Šteger’s prose book Berlin, which consists of similarly single-paragraph lyric prose. Aleš mentioned that his book had been influenced by Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900, so I also read that (several times, having fallen in love with it). Aleš’s Berlin is one experienced by a cosmopolitan poet who is also a flaneur, while Benjamin’s Berlin is a child’s as filtered through the perspective of an adult. I had been wanting to write about a handful of childhood experiences for a while, in prose, but had not found a suitable approach until I realized that I could use Richmond, Virginia (where I grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s) as a pressure point. I wanted to write about both my Richmond childhood and the process of memory.

2. As someone who is familiar with your poetry, I can see a lot of your poetry in your non-fiction: your diction, the tone, the density of your language.  What makes this piece distinct, to you, as non-fiction? Did you make a conscious decision to write this piece as non-fiction, or did that decision come through drafting and revising?

I definitely approached it as non-fiction, since it’s entirely true (to the best of my knowledge/recollection). And the piece seems too long (for my sensibility) to be a prose poem. I see the prose as a blend of my own instincts and my deep involvement with Šteger’s Berlin, which is full of astonishing prose.

3. The sense of smell is highlighted in your piece. When you question other moments, such as your memory of finding the finger, you are always sure of the scent involved. Why do you think this sense, above the others, became the most important to your memory?

I have an intense olfactory memory. My memory’s connection to smell often seems stronger than its connection to the other senses, so I let it govern the piece.

4. Have you read (or do you plan on reading) anything interesting this winter break?

I did. I read Jennifer Moxley’s book of essays There Are Things We Live Among, published by Flood Editions in 2012, and J.M. Coetzee’s 2009 novel Summertime. The Moxley book, in particular, was an absolute joy.

5. What else have you been working on, writing-wise? 

I have been other writing essays like “Ammonia,” mostly. Blackbird will publish my next two, and I have another three or four in various stages of completion. Having written so many poems, and having translated such a substantial book of prose, I feel like it’s time to pay attention to the sentence for a while. If a poem sneaks up on me, I won’t resist it, but I’m not beating the bushes for poems right now.

"Each Line Ending is a Little Death": An Interview with Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert is the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010) and The Self Unstable (forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2013). Her poems, prose, and collaborations have recently appeared in journals including Another Chicago Magazine, Conduit, Court Green, Notre Dame Review, Salt Hill, and Sentence. She blogs at http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com.

Her poem "After the Piano" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Elisa Gabbert speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about pianos, what Chuck Norris has to say, lineation, and vacancy.  

1. How did you begin writing “After the Piano”?

I can’t remember exactly what my point of entry was. I know that I started writing it in my head at a Perfume Genius show on Broadway in Denver. That’s the setting for the poem, insofar as it has a setting outside my head. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the minute differences in circumstance that can produce happiness one day and existential despair the next. I do really have a friend named Tina (the poet Tina Brown Celona) and she really did tell me that things change. I suppose I started writing the poem from the beginning, but bits and pieces of the lines had been gestating for a couple of weeks I think – I am obsessed with paraphrasing “You must change your life” – and the “hanging suspended”/“like a blade” metaphor is actually lifted from a poem I wrote many years ago, a persona poem told from the perspective of a rapist.

2. How do you hope your line/stanza breaks are working? In lines like “my brother loves me//but he doesn’t miss me,” for instance, do you intend for the stanza break to be a cliff, a waiting period, delusion, silence, a reckoning?

I always try to think more about lines as lines, as units, rather than focusing on the “breaks,” which makes it seem like the end of the line has some monopoly on poetic meaning. That said, I think the element of surprise, to quote Chuck Norris, can and often should play a part in the structure of a lineated poem. A line break can force you to linger a little longer on a word or phrase, slowing down the anticipatory reading we do when reading prose. If it’s too much of a cliff-hanger or bait-and-switch, it can get gimmicky; you want the break to cause some semantic blooming, some expanded resonance, but not to feel all, “See what I did there?” In any case, when lines work, it doesn’t seem like someone labored over the breaks; it feels like the lines reveal a pattern of thought, the rhythm of the thoughts. (Also, I kind of like the idea of a break as a moment of silence, like each line ending is a little death.)

3. What role does absence play in your poetry, in your titles?  A whole piano seems removed from the room in this piece, grooves in the carpet, chord held and diminishing : “hanging suspended on the chord//like a blade,” before the piece even begins.  Does absence play a different kind of white-space-role for you?  How do you hope your readers grapple with vacancy?

“A whole piano seems removed” is a beautiful way to think about writing. Mention a piano in a poem and the reader is forced to confront the absence of piano! I don’t believe in “No ideas but in things” (ideas are things!), but things in poems create things in your mind and those stand in contrast to the “actual” things outside your mind, and I like that doubling/shadowing. (Poetry makes nothing happen my ass.) I don’t think of this absence as white space. Thought space is clear and in color at the same time. Anyway, you’ve discovered something in the poem I didn’t realize was there – the poem ends up being about absence (“the difference between something and nothing,” the missing brother), but I wasn’t conscious of the way the missing piano sort of primes you to the idea of vacancy.

4. What have you been reading recently?

This weekend I read Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, a German Christmas novella, and a chapbook in manuscript form by Jeff Alessandrelli. And the January issue of Food & Wine. Before that, the last novel I read was Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and the last poetry book I read was Nervous Device by Catherine Wagner.

5. Is this piece part of a series, or have you other projects blossoming, finishing, unfurling undone?

For the past couple of years I’ve been working on a prose manuscript (maybe prose poems, maybe poetry-essay hybrids, maybe koans, IDK). In that time I’ve only written a handful of poems in lines, and this is one of them. You know what I said about lines revealing patterns of thought? I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit of thinking in lines. Instead I am thinking in sentences.

"A Photograph of Someone Who Was No Longer There": An Interview with Jess Stoner

Jess Stoner is the author of the novel I Have Blinded Myself Writing This from Hobart's Short Flight / Long Drive Books and the choose-your-own adventure poetry chapbook You're Going to Die Jess Wigent from Fact-Simile.  Her book reviews, poems, essays, and short stories have been published or are forthcoming in Necessary Fiction, The Rumpus, Two Serious Ladies, Alice Blue Review, Super Arrow and other handsome journals.  She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Denver and now lives with her linguist-of-rollerblading husband, Frank, in Austin.

Her essay "To Look Lifelike in a Photograph One Must First Pose as if Dead" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Jess Stoner talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about post-mortem photography, interactivity with inviting literature, and the ancient, urgent question of truth with a capital T.

1) What made you decide to write an essay about photographs and the people in them? Was the impetus for this piece a particular photograph or series of photos?

The essay is part of a collection of, well, I guess I’m calling it a novel of essays called Because of you I am a photograph.  The title comes from this great moment in Tod Papageorge’s Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography which comes from something Papageorge said, in accidentally bad French, when he bumped into Henri Cartier Bresson in Central Park. The impetus for the entire project is this one tiny moment from Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, this idea of a “literate projector,” which turns image into text and “enables the user to fail insignificantly / and at the same time show up / behind a vocabulary of How It Is”.  And while in her introduction to Dorn’s epic poem, Marjorie Perloff calls the literate projector the “ultimate useless technological tool,” I was entranced and found the futility inherent in that device full of endless possibilities. As for the images, they come before I write the text, or they come after or during, it really depends—in this essay, I was thinking about how I wanted to write an essay about the people who broke me in the past (to be honest, at least for some of them, in a really vengeful way), and then I had previously been obsessed with post-mortem photography, so everything came together, at least for me.  Each chapter in the novel revolves around a kind of photography—a family portrait, a mugshot, a photo album, a crime scene photo, etc. 

2) How did you choose the photographs included in this piece? Where did they come from? 

I knew if I wanted to talk about exes, to talk about people from the past, the only way to do that was to use post-mortem photos—this tradition, to me, is so fascinating and demonstrates so exquisitely the relationship to absence and presence.  It was such a heartbreaking and important tradition—the need to have a photograph of someone who was no longer there, so they would always be there.  There are beautiful books of post-mortem photographs like Stanley Burns’ Sleeping Beauty and the weird, weird, whatever they are in Wisconsin Death Trip, though I usually find the photographs I’m using by sifting through the Smithsonian’s online archive—the last photograph I used in the essay I found because the caption said “Man with Cat” and I knew I had found what I needed for something that I would eventually write.  In getting a “feel” for the photographs I need, I buy all the books that Terry recommends at Vertigo and I’ve also have spent the last two years stealing photography theory syllabi and then reading everything the professors assign. This is how I found Geoffrey Batchen, who I think is one of the most exciting and intellectually and emotionally engaging photography academics; his writings have inspired me to seek out and incorporate different kinds of images and to think around them in ways I would never have expected. 

3) In this essay you write, "Photography, some argue, captures too much information to function as memory. It obeys the rules of creative non-fiction: everything is malleable." This made me wonder: can there really be said to be any rules of creative nonfiction? How far, then, are works of creative nonfiction from the reality of events described?  

This is an ancient, urgent question.  Errol Morris’ Believing is Seeing is a revelatory exploration of how we can ever know what we see is what we’re actually seeing anyway, and it invites the question afterwards, of how is it that we can write about what we saw if we can’t even be sure what we know what we’re seeing or experiencing is what it is.  There was a nice big fight about this via Triquarterly in November, when they published a previously published essay called “The Facts of the Matter.” I wrote, let’s just call it a “scathing” response, about the author’s insistence that there is somewhere truth with a capital T and that that’s the creative non-fiction writer’s only path.   Jill Talbot’s anthology, Metawritings: Towards a Theory of Nonfiction, where the essay was previously published, has pieces from Pam Houston, Robin Hemley, Ander Monson and others which approach this complicated idea in inventive and open ways.  It’s one of those things, I think, that we circle around and circle around and come closer to but never arrive at.  Maybe I’m just a slave to ontological pluralism, maybe that makes my reasoning intellectually specious or something, but what the hell, I guess I don’t care.  That being said, I’ve been nervous about what to call these chapters/essays of mine. Included in them are a whole bunch of things that are my versions of things that happened to me, but I’m not sure about calling them non-fiction, because sometimes I know for sure they’re probably fiction, except that I want them to be engaged in theories of photography, which seems to be in the realm of nonfiction.   For the past seven years, I’ve been reading The Blue Cliff Record on and off, and one of the koans goes “When you get to this point, as to whether there is something or there isn’t anything, pick and you fail.” Whatever in the hell that means, that’s what I think, I think.

4) Your bio says you are the author of a "choose-your-own adventure poetry chapbook." What inspired you to adopt this form of children's writing for your poetry? (Do you think more literature should be interactive for the reader?)  

Interactivity is my goal, always.  And it’s always my hope, as a reader, that I’ll be invited to participate as well.  I just want to be invited.  Not necessarily challenged or goaded. Invited.  Like the book buys my next pint and inebriates me into going back to its apartment or at least participating in its meaning, which seems less than child-like (I hope).  There are so many ways of doing this: caring about characters, feeling the need to flip back and forth between the pages of a book.  This connects to my wanting to have the physical, emotional, and intellectual connection to a text.  I want it all, I want everything, and I feel like it’s fair to expect that, as a reader. 

5) What have you read recently that you want to recommend? 

I spent the last few weeks reading every piece of fiction online I could find that was published this year to write a year-end-review for Necessary Fiction.  All of them, like Justin L. Daughtery’s “What Men’s Deed’s Do” and  Anne Valente’s “Mollusk, Membrane, Human Heart” and Saeed Jones’s “Boy, a History” do something to me that made me want so badly to share them with a stranger. I’ve also been listening to Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, which the New York Times called “lionhearted” and I do not disagree.  I’ve also been plowing through Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen’s Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, which is important and makes me hysterical, like shaking in my car thinking about it hysterical. My to-be-read pile is criminal, but the beginning of this year has been chock-full of romantica (erotica/romance). Kristen Ashley self-publishes her novels and I’ve read seven of them in the first days of the new year.  This, in the romance world, is called “glomming.”

6) What writing projects are you working on now? 

I’m still working on Because of you, and am in the middle of a number of different projects, including a romance novel and a book about my year spent on an island in Wales.  I was lucky enough to watch Matt Hart do his thing in Austin a while back, and have been thinking about poetry a lot lately, because he reminded me of what I forgot it can do, although mostly, I find myself drawn to essaying as I’ve been reading supreme court oral arguments and amicus briefs and the Alabama Constitution and all the ways in which our country quietly keeps people from voting that are criminal and antithetical to democracy.  It is utterly miraculous that anything I write ever gets finished.

"Signs, Suspicion, Sideways Luck": An Interview with Leah Bailly

Leah Bailly is a Canadian fiction writer currently working on a PhD at USC in Los Angeles. Lately, her fiction has appeared in subTerrain, Pank, Hobart, Diagram and in the anthology of Las Vegas fiction Restless City. "Born Again" is from a collection of linked stories titled The Vegaboy Chronicles.

Her story "Born Again" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Leah Bailly speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about Vegas, rebirth, and the urge to move relentlessly.

1. How did you begin this particular piece from The Vegaboy Chronicles?  Where does it fall in the chronology of the other linked stories?

There are five principal characters in these chronicles: Vegaboy, his girlfriend Slots-a-Fun, Bosscat, Captain Rick, and this narrator, a nameless man I hardly knew. I started this piece thinking I would finally write the seedy back-story for Captain Rick, former military pilot and pusher of speed up on Nellis Air Force base. The original title for this story was “Captain Rick is Born Again.” But Captain Rick barely showed up…. Instead I was stuck with my protagonist, a runaway not yet ensnared by the junkie world, an outsider in a band of outsiders, and a scaredy cat. I got to know him, I guess. This story comes early in the collection; it is one of the few in which they’re not striving for a ‘handsome ransom,’ but my narrator’s in deep with this gang after this. It was kind of a cross-the-threshold moment for both of us, my narrator and me. Now I call him Jimmy.

2. Your opening paragraph feels supremely biblical, mysterious, full of pause and premonition – can you speak a little towards placement – why lead this way, departed from the story’s primary affect? 

Las Vegas is a profoundly religious place. People are praying all the time, on free cable, in front of the slots, in the thousands of churches all over. I wanted that pentecostal power to sort of seep into the text from those first words— I wanted signs, suspicion, sideways luck. Because Las Vegas gets to invent everything again (Paris, the Pyramids, etc) it reinvents religion too, in the form of casino chapels and Criss Angel shows. Jimmy wants to see stallions and flaming torrents, but really he’s just watching a cop on a horse, or melted foam dropping from the roof of the Monte Carlo. This says a lot about Las Vegas; people want Sin City to be magical, a place where God could deliver a miracle at the blackjack table. But no. Jimmy’s miracle is divined by Vegaboy of the Desert, and it comes in the form of crystal meth.

3. What are these characters’ relationships to denial/autonomy/“Mind Erasers”/inevitability?  I’m struck by the stacking of lines like “There is no magic in this.  There is nothing pastoral” and “I’m the only one who is stuck in this life…incapable of being born again as someone new.”  How much free-will-mobility do you want your characters to possess?  Even the speaker, at the end, himself seems surprised (and yet not) to realize it was his car burning in that lot, that he did it.  Are these characters – as addicts, as creatures vulnerable to the elements, to love, to themselves – helpless because they’re hapless, or is some Higher Power wielded over them?  Which interests you more?

You are so totally right about this: Junkies are vulnerable to the elements, to love, to themselves. Like the grimy trunks at the bottom of the pool, they are moved by “invisible currents pushing them around,” but the ebbs and flows are unromantic and difficult. They want drugs, money. They quest after these things, they yearn for them, they get them, they want more. Jimmy is not so jaded by the junkie life, not yet, and he wants very badly to see a higher power in the drugs, in the colors in the sunset, he wants to ride palominos with Wayne Newton. Jimmy wants to be reborn as someone better, or less hurt, than himself, but he doesn’t understand the rules: don’t get Pastoral, don’t eat the hot dogs. He makes all the right mistakes and lets his desire drive him around, from score to handsome ransom to filthy kitchenette. So yes, he’s hapless and helpless both; he wants a higher power but he’s stuck with free will. Imagine being so fucked up that you wreck your body, abandon your family, burn your car. The Mind Eraser (served at the Stakeout, a violent, delicious drink) is the perfect medicine for that kind of hurting.

4. What do you look forward to reading this New Year?

Some guaranteed winners for me in 2013 will be new novels from Jonathan Dee, Alissa Nutting, Peter Orner and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and new stories from Sam Lipsyte. Also, some of my favorite Canadian authors will have books out this year, Lisa Moore and Lynn Coady. And the art critic super giant Dave Hickey is putting some of his essential essays into anthologies. These people are all mad geniuses.

5. What else have you been working on?  How are the other Vegaboy Chronicles coming?

I feel tremendously lucky and happy to be working on a PhD in Los Angeles now, a dream city, after a few years drifting between Las Vegas, West Africa, Scotland and Vancouver. The Vegaboy Chronicles are going well; I recently won an arts grant from Canada to turn the stories into a kind of art-book/graphic novel with my tweaked out photographs from Las Vegas. My other big project is a novel about a runaway celebrity who shows up dead in West Africa; it’s big and sprawling and scary, it traverses six countries, it’s about fame and following. All of my characters move relentlessly, as a means of curing some strange restlessness I see a lot in our generation. Shockingly, I’m doing the opposite here in LA; finally, after many transient years, it will feel very good to stay in one city and work.

"A Flashlight in Purgatory": An Interview with Chad Simpson

Chad Simpson lives in Monmouth, Illinois, and teaches writing and literature classes at Knox College. His chapbook, Phantoms, was released in April by Origami Zoo Press. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion Magazine,matchbook, Wigleaf, and Crab Orchard Review.

His story "You Would've Counted Yourself Lucky" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Chad Simpson talks to interviewer David Bachmann about a boy who does more with less, the importance of sounds in the night, and the transformative power of the calf muscle.

1. I see the boy in your work as existing in a state of purgatory, put there by his age (10), by parents who are drunk and indifferent but also intolerant, by his absent sister, and by his moves being dictated by a disabled neighbor girl. Is this true or does this character have more going for him than that?

I think purgatory is a great way of describing where this boy exists in the world. He’s definitely between stations. Annie Dillard has this line in her memoir An American Childhood, and I’m going to have to paraphrase it, about how at ten years old we become conscious for the first time of the world around us, of ourselves in that world.

The boy in this story is definitely in that place where he’s becoming conscious of his place in the world, and I think that’s something he has going for him. He hasn’t figured much out yet, but by the end of the story, he’s beginning to. I also think of him as thoughtful and curious and creative, so he has those things going for him as well. Ultimately, I don’t think this boy is going to grow up to be like his parents, even if he’s a little afraid of the idea of growing up any other way.

2. The flashlight quickly becomes an important object in this story, one with which the boy develops almost an obsessive-compulsive relationship. It acts as a vehicle for his speculation on the stars and space, it gives away his presence to Rebecca, and it stops his sister in her tracks. Did you originally have grand plans for this flashlight or did its uses become apparent only during the process of writing?

This story began for me with the image of a boy out in his backyard in the dark, later at night than he should be out alone, shining his flashlight toward the stars. I didn’t know anything else about what was going on other than that, so I certainly wasn’t aware the flashlight would remain in the story as much as it does. This story was kind of all process for me. I knew almost nothing about anything until I started making sentences.

3. Your work pays close attention to the senses, particularly sound as it occurs in darkness: “The familiar crunch of car tires on the gravel in the alley,” “the boy can feel the sound the door makes in the small of his back,” “her metal braces clack and squeak,” etc. In fact, the word “sound” occurs seventeen times. Can you comment on the role of sound in this work and how the acts of listening and hearing serve the boy and this setting in general?

Wow. Seventeen times? I had no idea.

I think one reason sound became important for me while I was writing this story is that most of the piece takes place at night, in darkness. There is less for him to see, so the boy has to rely more on what he hears.

There’s also that conversation between his parents the boy overhears very early in the story, during which they talk at but not to one another. I think this boy exists in a world where there’s a lot to hear but not much listening going on. Then, when he has his encounter with Rebecca, there’s a kind of shift that occurs. He has an actual conversation with her, when in the past, she’s just been shouting at him, teasing him.

4. Did Leanne ever have a larger physical presence in this story? If so, why did you diminish it?

No, Leanne’s presence grew as the story progressed. After I began with the image of the boy out in his backyard, shining his flashlight at the sky, the idea of the absent sister followed soon after. I realized that he was actually out there kind of waiting for her, that he wasn’t just being a kid and shining his flashlight at the sky. And then I started wondering about what was going on with the sister, and I liked the idea of this boy loving his sister but thinking she’s doing something wrong—via his parents—by dating black guys. I liked the idea of him trying to reconcile these things; Leanne, his beautiful sister, with whom he used to have a meaningful relationship, was kind of a vehicle for me to put the boy in that purgatory you mentioned.

5. This work features a young woman who often makes the boy and reader uncomfortable as a result of her insistence to remain a social creature despite her condition. The boy may well be with her out of a sense of human duty. Yet, when he rubs Rebecca’s calf, “It's like his world has become small. Manageable. Perfect.” Can you talk about what you are conveying in this moment?

Rebecca is very much “other,” especially as far as the boy is concerned. She’s older and physically different from him, and she seems to have suffered some kind of brain damage from the accident she was in, as well. The boy ends up having this real moment of intimacy with her, though, despite their differences. He has a specific physical reaction to this moment of intimacy, and he has a kind of general emotional/intellectual reaction, which eventually leads him to wonder whether it would be OK for him to have a relationship with Rebecca, if he were older, despite the fact she’s different from him, since it’s wrong—according to some people, including the people who’ve raised him—for his sister to date guys who aren’t the same race as her. Essentially, I think what I’m trying to convey in that moment is something about the transformative power of human intimacy, of human connection.

6. Part of the beauty of the boy’s last plea/demand that his sister stay right where she is is that it could mean a number of things: he’s trying to stop time for his own sake, trying to save his sister from intolerant parents, etc. What is the boy trying to accomplish with his last lines? What does he actually accomplish?

I personally like the ambiguity of the final image because it conveys those things you mention as well as the idea that maybe the boy wants to stop time because he’s confused and undone by that moment of intimacy he experienced with Rebecca. I feel like he’s been truly shaken, like he’s never going to see the world in the same way again, and this terrifies him. He’ll be better for it down the road, but right then, maybe, just maybe, he can keep his flashlight’s beam trained on his sister and things will remain as they are. I’m not sure he accomplishes this, of course, but he does have his sister’s attention; she is listening to him when he speaks. He feels like something of a ghost in his own house at the beginning of the story, but here, in this final moment, unseen, he has a voice and his flashlight, and he is making himself known.

7. What are you reading these days?

This afternoon I’m going to finish reading Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions, which has been great. I’ve also been reading Autoportrait by Edouard Levé, and I have C.D. Wright’s One With Others and Michael Kimball’s Big Ray and about fifteen other books on my nightstand, just waiting for me.

8. What are you writing these days?

My writing is pretty scattered these days. My short story collection, Tell Everyone I Said Hi, was published this past October. I found out this was going to happen in early January 2012, and I spent much of the past year doing things related to that book. I also revised several stories and essays, but I didn’t work on much new stuff. So, now I’m having this problem related to that, which is basically that I have five or six things I really want to be working on. I’m mostly tinkering at this point. And I recently started a new project on tumblr: http://thewallyletters.tumblr.com/ It’s my hope that working on this project will magically lead me toward the thing I should be working on next.