"Something as Large and Foreign as Loss" :An Interview with Kate Wyer

Unsaid awarded Kate Wyer the "Joan Scott Memorial Award" and nominated her for a Pushcart. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, Moonshot, <kill author, The Collagist, PANK, Exquisite Corpse, and others. She attended the Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania on a fellowship from Fence and studied under Edward Hirsch. Wyer lives in Baltimore and works in the public mental health system of Maryland.

Her story "Land Beast" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Kate Wyer speaks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about research, memory and trauma, and what characters hide from themselves.

1. Where did “Land Beast” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

“Land Beast” began with an image. I follow a tumblr of animal pictures, like blue-tongue skinks or red-legged honeycreepers, some dogs, etc. It’s a pleasant way to spend a few minutes. So it was all the more startling when I saw the picture of the female rhino. My mind couldn’t process it for a moment—the strangeness of the animal without its distinctive feature and then the brutality of what remained of her face. The caption described her assault, the death of her calf, her rescue and subsequent rehab at a preserve. It also mentioned she was inseparable from the male rhino at the preserve—a very rare thing for solitary animals. She had a wild look in her eye.  That look wouldn’t leave me alone. 

But my way into telling her story is a little less straightforward. I already had the first stanza or paragraph—I think calling it a stanza actually works a little better. It was going to be the start of something else, but I wasn’t sure what. I knew I liked the sounds that were working within those sentences, but I didn’t know what to do with them until I realized they fit into the rhino’s experience of being out of her element, of being thrown into something as large and foreign as loss. The idea of collapse became really important to me.  Of no longer resisting a fall.  I wanted to play with how water supports you and yet it doesn’t, much like memory.

Opening myself up this way also permitted me further strangeness, like the moon door and jumping blue arcs of current.  Those things allowed me to have the rhino reach for connection.

2. As a reader, I’m enchanted by this piece’s spell of defamiliarization—the narrator, who I read as a rhinoceros, allows us to see beauty, terror, and strangeness in the familiar.  I found many passages to be haunting, especially this one:

We heard them from the air. We knew they were coming. We could smell them. We knew that there would be nowhere without them. Men want to believe there is power in our horns. And there is, there is the power they give them. We are full of the life that makes each cell push another out of the way, build and build until they push off the body. We are full of the life needed to make horns.

My question is, to what extent did this narrator surprise you?  (I’d love to hear about how/when the narrator surprised you the most.)

Seeing the photo once was enough and I wanted retain the initial strength of my reaction.  After working on the story for a few days though, I wanted to see pictures of other rhinos to further some softness in my descriptions. For example, I imagined rhinos to have huge eyelashes, like a giraffe or a horse-- they don’t.  But I found out they do have incredibly soft looking cone-shaped ears. I used The Soul of the Rhino by Mishra Ottaway to rediscover these details. It’s a book about conservation efforts in Nepal and India. I read the book several years ago. I forgot that rhinos kill people. Rereading it, I realized my rhino was going to kill someone.  That was very surprising, but in a terrible way it felt comfortable. Brutality /brutality.  I am able to write violence, even though I can’t stomach it when others do. I am very much a “close my eyes, block my ears” movie watcher.  I realized that her violence would be fed by the larger violence of habitat loss, poverty, colonialism, war.

I also have to say that I surprised myself by speaking as a rhino in the first place!

3. When we read, “It is hard to keep circling around the thing that happened and not say it. But it is also hard to say it. So, I circle some more until it tells itself. I can trust that it will,” I can’t help but think of this as a description of this piece’s meditative modular structure.  Does this passage in some way describe your writing process?  (And/or, how do you usually find the structures for your pieces?)

It does reflect my writing process.  My MFA is in poetry, but I write fiction. Or I write really long poems that look like stories.

I saw the poet Alice Oswald read in New York City a few days after Sandy. It was an incredibly raw time. She read from Memorial, which is her translation of the Iliad, except that it contains only the death scenes of the 200 soldiers killed within that story. Well, it contains their death scenes, with alternating blocks of similes. Oswald had memorized her entire reading, which was about thirty minutes long. I felt relieved, but also punched in the gut, when the similes came. They allowed a break from death, but contained such menace, beauty and loss that they didn’t relieve much intensity.

I knew that I wanted something like that for “Land Beast”. I wanted to have her firmly rooted and also in the sea; to have her pull back from the telling, but in such a way that lets the reader know just how bad things were.

I write some linear pieces, but usually I lose interest in them. I structure my pieces in a way that allows memory and trauma to surface in an organic way. I’m most interested in what characters hide from themselves. That interest is best explored out of time.

4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

I’m working on expanding “Land Beast” into a novella. The story continues by exploring captivity and how it shapes relationships.

I finished a novella titled Martin. It’s about an old man who puts himself in a dangerous and vulnerable position in order to force himself into a particular woman’s life.  The questions the characters don’t ask move the plot forward.  

5.  As we work our way to the end of winter, what knock-out writing have you been enjoying recently?  Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about? 

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco is an incredible piece of journalism. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks is major. I’m reading Gravesend by Cole Swenson. I just picked up In My Home There is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda by Rick Bass. 

I’m looking forward to Anne Carson’s Red Doc >. Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods. I heard him read from it while he was in Baltimore; it was phenomenal. Anything and everything Mud Luscious Press is releasing. And, I’m going to AWP! I’ll leave plenty of room in my suitcase for books.

"The Demands of Fictional Children": An Interview with Chloé Cooper Jones

Chloé Cooper Jones is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Find her here:chloecooperjones.com.

Her story "Parachute" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Chloé Cooper Jones speaks to interviewer David Bachmann about a young girl’s despair, a poor girl’s justice, and children finding equality.

1. This story starts with the despair of there being “little to like” for Margaret since she is denied the one condition that validates her and is thus forced to suffer in the middle of the line. How do you want the reader to feel about Margaret after the first two paragraphs? Do you want us to sympathize or merely recognize this as a machination of most children? (Do you care either way?)

I do, of course, care about how the reader feels about Margaret.

When you say, “merely recognize this as a machination of most children,” I’m not sure what you mean by “this.” Do you mean the self-centeredness of wanting to be first in line? Do you mean her need for validation? Or do you mean her unwillingness to like anything about school unless she gets her way? These are accurate descriptions of Margaret, sure, but not necessarily of all or most children. I also don’t know what you mean by “machinations of most children.” The word “machination” implies a plan or plot to do harm, which I do not believe widely applies to children. Although children can be cruel, their intentions seem to be to just want what they want and have what they want. In this way, the reader will probably see Margaret as being like most children, however her particular wants manifest themselves in her need to seen, whereas mine as a child would have manifested themselves in my seeking to be hidden.

I don’t think feeling sympathy for Margaret makes much sense, but perhaps the reader might feel a sense of recognition. We recognize these self-centered desires because we, in order to be adult members of our families and communities, spend so much time repressing or mediating them. The transition from children qua immature agents to adults qua mature agents might be best represented in the shift away from the question “What do I want?” toward “What should I want (to be)?”

2. Is the small girl’s presence in the “treasured spot in the center” of the parachute yet another form of charity for her and thus a deliberate consolation for her obvious hardships at home or was she merely selected at random? Does the story change if the latter is the case and if so, how? (Also, does her time at the center qualify as a form of justice?)

These are great questions. Thanks so much for asking them.

I think there is a navigation of justice happening from a few different angles in this story. First, there is a sort of palimpsest of adult concern that operates behind the action of the story. Margaret and the small girl recognize the other as being poor by seeing the way poverty is actualized in concrete objects belonging to the other, namely, ill-fitting clothing and wrapped squares of other people’s casseroles. These objects are delivered to these girls from well-meaning adults who are blurring the edges of pity and a belief in what is the just and moral act. Then there is the adult (presumably a gym teacher) who is in charge of choosing the small girl to be the star player of the Popcorn game. Is the adult compelled to choose the small girl out of a reaction caused by that abstract pity/justice space? Does being chosen in this way assuage the injustice of her difference or just highlight it through a pitying act? These are certainly questions asked, but not answered by the story.

What is more explicitly important to the story is the children’s interaction with and education in justice. In the Popcorn game, one child gets chosen to have all the enjoyment and none of work (gets to be lifted into the air again and again), while the rest of the children do all of the work and get none of the enjoyment (must do the lifting). Continental philosophy spends a lot of time dealing with this type of dynamic (theories about labor: the free, creative activity of the many being usurped by the few; theories about power: maybe the parachute is a sort of Panopticon of pleasure?). The acts of children can often offer up introductory instances of the same issues that dominate a type of philosophical and theoretical inquiry. I’m interested in/curious about where/when it is that we are initiated into concepts like justice. The answer seems to be: very early on in childhood. The girls in the story, Margaret and the small girl, are aware that they are poor, but it won’t be until much later that they really understand the relationship between their economic status and social and political (in)justice, so that is not the site of their education, but rather is just a source of abstract awkwardness and embarrassment. They really learn about justice when chosen or not chosen for the parachute game or, maybe, in other off-scene moments of play—not getting a turn on the swings or something. How those sorts of pangs of injustice get multiplied along with one’s expanding awareness! As adults, we know that their future holds such deeper pains.

3. When you shift to the Mushroom Cap game, you go abruptly from an intensely personal moment centered on the feelings of two girls to a simple explanation of a group activity that everyone enjoys seemingly without any thought. In this transition, is all jealousy and pity wiped away and replaced by the equality of a shared experience? (If not, what is the value of going from the deeply personal to that group mentality free of conflict?)

No, all the jealousy and pity doesn’t go away, it is just contained within one person who we, as readers, are forced suddenly to remember is just one among many. Then the reader can imagine what might be happening internally within any number of children—all of whom are having their own solipsistic dramas unfold as importantly for them as Margaret’s is for her.

The tension between the internal and the external—well, that’s everything, isn’t it? The study of justice is a study of the relationship between an individual and a community. The same statement can be applied to any number of fields of thought. Ethics, politics, moral psychology, and on and on; however, I am most interested in how this tension between the I and the They is presented in various artistic forms, narrative moves especially.

I mean, here’s what is happening to me right now as I type this: I’m sitting in a café in Brooklyn feeling any number of internal anxieties—my chair is uncomfortable, I am remembering that you asked me to send this interview to you in two weeks and that was four weeks ago, I’m avoiding a stack of papers that I should be grading, I’m feeling the constant low-level guilt that always appears when I leave my child and spouse at home so that I can work and be alone, the barista is blasting (BLASTING) Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” which is making me feel annoyed, then old, then nostalgic (I used to roller skate to this song), then super old. However, if one was able to take in the whole picture of the this coffee shop scene, I would look like just another member of a group—a peaceful and seemingly “free of conflict” group. How I behave as a part of this “café society” intimates something about my sense of justice (I don’t demand that someone move in order to give me a more comfortable seat). The way that Margaret responds to her “gymnasium society” says something about her developing sense of justice (and a type of maturity, maybe). She allows herself to be subsumed under the parachute in the Mushroom Cap game and decides to be part of the community instead of acting in reaction against it, despite her probable desire to knock the small girl off the parachute and take her place.

4. Was this piece ever longer? If so, are you willing to talk about what those other pages included in terms of narrative and/or character?

Yes, this piece was longer. Those other pages just contained boring pieces of information—the kind of information that writers put into stories when they distrust the sophistication of their readers, the kind of information that makes a piece read more satisfyingly (I think stiflingly) like a “real story,” which we’re all taught must have a readily measurable beginning, middle, and end.

5. What are you reading these days?

Edward Weston’s Daybooks.

6. What are you writing these days?

I’m finishing a novel. Aren’t we all.

"And My Mind Became a Rattle, and the Light Became Loose": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Brian Allen Carr

Brian Allen Carr lives with his wife and daughter in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

An excerpt from his novel Edie & the Low-Hung Hands appears in Issue Forty Two of The Collagist.

Here, Brian Allen Carr answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Edie & and the Low-Hung Hands.  Enjoy!

1.  What is writing like?

I shrugged and picked up the cup and threw it back in a swift swallow, and as soon as it was down my throat my whole body seemed to glow inside. My arms went warm and my tongue went soft, and I felt like a child in a blanket, or like a bit of sap softened by sunshine, and my mind became a rattle, and the light became loose.

“What do you think?” the man from the road asked, but his voice seemed stretched in several directions, or spun on an axis, or dripped from a blue cloud and then caught in a wind. And when I opened my mouth, in attempt to answer, all that came out was breath not nearly baked right, because it couldn’t push the air from the world in front of me enough to become voice, and then many colors seemed to fold down on me, mostly through my eyes. I tried to move my arms, but they seemed to be across a river from me, and then I tried to stand, but the world seemed hung from me, the dirt floor an appendage that I couldn’t lift. Then there was laughter, slow and sugary and slathered with dull colored bird feathers, that lifted the edge of everything out of the corner of my eyes. Ah. There a blackness ensued. A desert of night. Perhaps I’d been fit into a shell. 

2.  What isn’t writing like?

But in my dreams those moments often cease to be. There is music gently somewhere. Perhaps there is a party. It’s for me, and there is cake. Light, soft as lullabies, bleeds in from a window. Balloons hover. Candles are lit. People sing my name. I hold my arms above me. There is a ceiling, but my hands are far from it. There’s my mother, but her breath is just plain sweet, not Sweet- Jane sweet, and she holds me to her. Maybe she says, “You make your mother and father proud,” and maybe my father says, “You’re my favorite son,” and Welder says, “I wish I looked as much like Dad as you do,” and then perhaps Edie, the young Edie, the Edie of the first time ever I saw her, dances toward me shyly with her hands held behind her. “I brought you a present,” she tells me, “I picked it out special.” And she produces a small box, wrapped in paper with a bow, “I’ll open it later,” I tell her, “Right now we should dance.” And then the rest of them will disappear, the way dreamt things often do, and we’d be in a small space all our own, nobody in sight of us, and we’d hold each other and move with a music that would speak to our souls, and in unison, and with grace. We’d be together. 

3.  When you do it, why?

“Your mother,” I told him, “was fat and smelly. She found my arms hideous, and I found her girth disgusting, but people told us we’d be perfect for each other, because I’d be the only person in town who could hold her, who could wrap my arms around her hut-thick frame, and it was a joke they’d all say to us, carrying along with laughter in their throats and hearts, pointing at us at socials, and giving us a hard time, and once, when we were somehow alone in the evening, and I was loose with liquor, I clutched her to me, and we laid in a hay bale, thrashed around nude, the smell stills hangs about me,” I waved the remembered stench from my face, and it was natural, I wasn’t teasing, “and that is how you came to be. Me, drunk. She, fat. My long arms wrapping the expanse of her and crashing her into me with thoughts of other more suitable women running my imagination. It lasted longer than I’d hoped for. She went off first. A quick comer. And I had to think of many things, on account of my drunkenness and my company, and she dried up in the endeavor, which didn’t help matters, because she became bored with the situation, and, in the quelling of the lust, again sick with disgust at the arms that laid upon her, the same arms you’ve been cursed with, she asked me, time and again, if I was close, and every time she spoke it seemed to knock me down a mountain, but, like Sisyphus, I endured, until the task was toward completion, but, unlike he, I achieved, though at the end I did not feel glorious. I didn’t get to the top of the mountain with my rock and feel successful. Instead, shame filled every molecule of my being, and I had to drink more, swallowing much liquor, trying to kill the brain cells that contained the memory of it, but, as you can see, I was not capable of the task.”

4.  When you don’t, why?

When I was very young Welder would often find me while I played alone, and he’d throw a blanket over my head and hold me down so I could not move. I thought of this as I trailed Pahnder on my own horse. He rode with purpose, and I knew he needed away from the thoughts he’d just had. His thoughts, though, birthed thoughts in me. Welder would hold my head in the fold of a pink quilt and lean his weight on me, and keep me so I could not move, and I would thrash and claw, throwing all of my energy into each movement I made, trying to kick him off me. I’d scream, and Welder would laugh. Often this was done in front of my parents. They would see my struggle and laugh along with Welder. My father would entice him. “He’s getting loose,” my father might say, “hold him tight now.” My mother’s cackle always came through the quilt the cleanest, and, as I laid there with my head in the dark, and with the weight of my brother upon me, it was she I hoped to kill first when I escaped, but I could never thrash Welder from me. I’d always go limp, and my father would grow concerned, and he would hoist my brother off of me when he realized I might suffocate. They’d pull the blanket from my head, and my mother would look straight at me, her drunken face like a smudge of hate. “Got some growing up to do,” she’d say to me. “Your brother’s a man already,” she’d say. Then, “Come hug your mother, little boy.”

"That She Knew Such a Woman": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Jen Michalski

Jen Michalski is author of the novel The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Big Moose Prize, the short story collections, From Here and Close Encounters, and the novella collection Could You Be With Her Now. She is the founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww, a co-host of The 510 Readings and the biannual Lit Show, and interviews writers at The Nervous Breakdown. She also is the editor of the anthology City Sages: Baltimore, which Baltimore Magazine called a "Best of Baltimore" in 2010. She lives in Baltimore, MD, and tweets at @MichalskiJen. Find her at jenmichalski.com. 

An excerpt from her novel Could You Be With Her Now appears in Issue Forty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Jen Michalski answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Could You Be With Her Now.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Sometimes when Alice closed her eyes, she saw the woman in Sandra’s pictures. She kept one picture in her bag, close to her. In it Sandra was sitting under an umbrella at the beach, a cottage behind her. Southampton 1967. Her legs were tucked under, firm and tan, her hair spilled over her shoulders, and her cheeks scrunched into a smile. Alice was in love with that woman. A book was open beside her, pushing onto the sand -- Norman Mailer? Alice did not know why she thought Sandra had not already read Alice Munro and Virginia Woolf.

Alice wanted Sandra to know that she saw her, she wasn’t invisible, that when she rounded the bookshelves and saw Sandra standing there in her suit at the information desk, waiting for her, that her stomach hurt and she was thrilled and scared that she knew such a woman. She wanted to love this woman, just as she loved the woman in the photo, but Sandra was so moody, so scarred with age, bitter with memory. Alice wanted to say all those things but she said nothing. After Sandra left the bookstore, she went into the bathroom and big, stupid tears formed in her eyes. It was not pity she felt. More that something had been lost, or taken, or was never hers to begin with, even though she realized with a ferocity that she had wanted it more than anything.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Her arms, legs searched through the layers of water for something to anchor onto as the current pulled her further out to sea. Now she was beyond the boys. And they stared at her dumbly as Heather cried at her, her mouth a perfect O. Sometimes she still woke up at night with Heather’s expression burning in her mind. As if she had been the one who died. She struggled to get back, the beach, the boys, Heather disappearing as she took in water, the waterline filling above her eyes.

3. When you do it, why?

Alice wrote about relationships and heartbreak and people who were unsatisfied and disaffected but whose dissatisfaction and disaffection seemed somehow larger, more momentous than other people’s. She wrote about parents dying, lovers dying, pets dying, dreams dying, seasons dying, night dying, day dying. And sometimes children were born and sometimes dreams were born and days were born and certainly nights. Sometimes love was born. Alice wrote about all the things that everyone wrote about and she didn’t know why hers would be any better or different but she knew it didn’t matter because she could never stop. When she got home she was going to write about the bulbous and waxy grape in Sandra’s fingers. Alice would write that Sandra put it in her mouth and felt it with her tongue but did not break the skin, taste the juice. 

4. When you don’t, why?

It is time for school. Some of the kids on our block say I go to a retard school, but Mom says that they are jealous. Josh goes to the school for bigger kids. If he went to my school too he would have to learn twice. Today we are learning about adding tables and yesterday we are learning about adding tables but I don’t know about tomorrow. I know that three plus one is four and three plus two is five and three plus three is six but I don’t know after. Last night Mom was supposed to help me with my homework but we had pizza and she forgot and I forgot.

We learn about how to dial 911 on the telephone if we need help. But it has to be a really big kind of help because I asked my teacher Mrs. Rawlings if I can call 911 if I need help getting my shoe off and she said no. I asked Mrs. Rawlings can I call 911 if I didn’t do my homework and she said no. I asked her what if I hit a girl and she make-believes sleep? Mrs. Rawlings said I should call my parents or family member because someone would be home with me at all times. Mrs. Rawlings asked me if someone was home with me at all times and I said yes. I asked Mrs. Rawlings can I call 911 if Peanut gets out of the yard and she said that I had asked enough questions. Then I had one more question I said what if I get lost? And she said yes so maybe the next time I can’t find my way home I can call 911 and not have to sit in the lady’s house.

Mrs. Rawlings is a black lady and she is nice. I am not black because my parents are white. My Dad doesn’t call black people black. He calls them something else but I am not allowed to repeat it. Mom tells me never, ever to call Mrs. Rawlings that word or tell her I know of it. Mom tells me to pretend that word is pretend, but I can’t.

Sometimes when Mom tells me not to do something I feel like I’m going to blow up because I keep thinking about the thing. Like if Mom told me before school not to say the word asshole I feel like I will blow up and I will feel better if I say asshole at the top of my voice to shout it out of me but I can’t. And that’s how I got in trouble with the word Dad calls black people. We were in the mall and I said it to a black man and my mother slapped me and then I felt like I was going to blow up. But I didn’t say it again.

But sometimes I’m afraid I will say a word I don't want to. It will just come out of my mouth and I didn’t mean it. Josh told me that if I wanted to say a bad word I should just shout blue because no one can punish you for that.

Mrs. Rawlings gave us a card with 911 on it so we can call it if we’re lost. I put it in my wallet with my other card. I asked Mom why I can give strangers the card with my name on it but not tell them my name. She said not to show the card to anybody but a policeman. I showed my card to the lady yesterday. And if I call 911, I have to give them my name. But Mom says not to talk to strangers, not even Mr. Pete.

I get in trouble at school for not having my homework. I tell Mrs. Rawlings that it was pizza night but I don't tell her about California because Josh told me not to. Mrs. Rawlings says that pizza is not a reason for not having my homework done. She gives me extra homework and she also gives me a note to take home to my Mom and Dad. I have never been in trouble before.

Mrs. Rawlings tells me not to cry, that everybody gets in trouble sometimes.

Even superheroes and army men? I ask. She does not hear me.

"Ways that Involve Sleight of Hand": An Interview with W. Todd Kaneko

W. Todd Kaneko lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Lantern Review, Southeast Review, NANO Fiction, Blackbird and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop. He teaches at Grand Valley State University. Visit him online at www.toddkaneko.com.

His poems "Macho Man's Last Elbow Drop" and "Miss Elizabeth Said 'Oh Yeah'" appear in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, W. Todd Kaneko discusses the myths, opposites, relationships, and WWF with interviewer Amber L. Cook.

1. What (or should I say who?) inspired these two poems?

Immediately, the poems are elegies for two characters from the World Wrestling Federation back in the 80s and 90s. Miss Elizabeth and the Macho Man Randy Savage were two of the most popular performers of all time. Their relationship was at the heart of most storylines and feuds they were involved in. Elizabeth died after mixing drugs and alcohol back in 1993 and Savage had a heart attack while driving in 2011.

But the poems are also inspired by the mythology of wrestling. To a lot of men and women I know, watching wrestling is something to be ashamed of—something that you have to apologize for knowing anything about because it’s lowbrow or “fake.” We may have watched different wrestlers, depending on when and where we grew up, but if we can have that conversation, it often ends up being about times spent with our fathers or grandfathers back in the old days when the business tried to maintain the illusion that the matches were real contests.

So, I guess these two poems are inspired by wrestling, as well as those times that we’ve had with those people we can’t ever have back.

2. There seem to be defined roles for the man and the woman that lead "Miss Elizabeth Said 'Oh Yeah'". These two characters seem to be polar opposites, but it also seems like the man and woman feed off of each other out of necessity. Is this the way you intended for them to be read? If not, how did you want this binary to come across?

While I’m sure that Savage would have been a popular wrestler on his own, the degree of his success is due in great part to his partnership with Miss Elizabeth. When Savage proposed to Miss Elizabeth in the middle of the ring, it was after a long on-screen relationship that saw Elizabeth always bringing out the best of a wrestler that fans wanted to root for, even when he was playing the bad guy. As characters, they were polar opposites. Elizabeth was beautiful, glamorous and quiet; Savage was near-psychotic and violent—he needed Elizabeth’s calming presence to help keep him from going over the edge. Defining the binary was easy because it already existed on television. I tried to apply it to the mother and the father as well to give the Savage/Elizabeth moment more value for the speaker. 

3. This poem feels very Plathian in its ability to confess something intimate, which I truly admire. Do you often write “confessions,” whether factual or not, through characters on the page?

Thank you for that compliment. When professional wrestling is at its best, it mimics the things we desire or fear in real life, drawing on those things to make us know who to root for and who to root against; at some point, the performers make us forget that we don’t believe the violence is real. I think that a poem can work in much the same way, drawing us in and delivering something personal in ways that involve sleight of hand more than outright confession. For me, a poem nearly always confesses something intimate, even when the material of the poem is not factual—I don’t see the two as being mutually exclusive. 

4. Did you (intentionally or unintentionally) create parallels with the mother to Miss Elizabeth and the father to Macho Man?

The parallels between the mother to Miss Elizabeth and the father to Savage was intentional, and I think there also exists a parallel between the speaker and his wife even though there is less space in the poem devoted to that relationship. In my head, there was this one moment in time when Savage was proposing and a happily-ever-after ending seemed inevitable. Of course, as we all know, a happy ending is really just the moment before the next story begins. The father and mother divorced. The speaker is married and uncertain about his relationship. Elizabeth and Savage divorced (but not before Jake the Snake Roberts busted up the reception wielding a live cobra). The parallels were intentional, but I always have to write my way into intentionality. I knew I was looking for a parallel, but I didn’t necessarily know what that parallel was going to be until I got there.

5. What made you choose an epigraph from Randy Savage to start "Macho Man's Last Elbow Drop"? Why this quote? How does it inform the poem?

When I was visiting my family in Seattle one summer, there were a pair of bald eagles that were hanging out on the Evergreen Point Bridge that spans Lake Washington. One morning, we read in the newspaper that one of the eagles was struck by a truck and killed. The next day, as we crossed the bridge, there was that lone eagle sitting on top of the bridge. It perched majestic and sad, and we couldn’t imagine how it must feel, if it felt anything. It certainly wasn’t crying.

I like to use quotes from wrestlers who are good on the microphone, as there is often an image or a rhythm to their speeches that I can use in the poem. That epigraph is from an interview Savage did on the Arsenio Hall Show back in 1992 when he was WWF Champion, about to defend against the Ultimate Warrior (he lost the match but retained the title). Savage was always great on the microphone, and in that moment, he was answering the question, “Has the Macho Man ever cried?”

It turned out to be an important decision, as the quote gave me the snake and eagle images that were important to my figuring out how the poem would work. The poem is an elegy for the Macho Man, but also a poem for the father. Neither the speaker nor the father are crying men. They have to find other ways of expressing emotion.

6. I’m reading a loose connection between the family, Randy Savage, and the eagle throughout this poem. How do you make bridges between the seemingly unrelated?

If we are to believe Richard Hugo when he advises the poet to get off-topic as soon as possible (and I think we should), then it makes sense to start off-topic and see how the poem might find its way to topic. Unfortunately, there is no magic to the way I make bridges between seemingly unrelated things. For me, writing is a lot of trial and error, forcing things together to see if they fit, and then breaking them apart again if they refuse to work together. It’s cruel and sweaty and often unpleasant. That’s how metaphors work for me.

7. The two poems seem to be in conversation with one another. Do you often write poems that are able to talk to each other? How do you feel about sequence?

I am the kind of writer who thinks in projects. I look to sequence to help me figure out where the next poem comes from. I sometimes understand my own work better because I understand how it fits within a certain sequence. Once I have a poem, I will often start casting about for the poem’s siblings or cousins or evil twins. I often use one poem to figure out how to approach the other, looking at how one poem might work to answer questions that another poem has left unanswered. Sometimes, it’s challenging to write poems that are part of a sequence but not reliant on one another to function.

8. What’s something you’re reading right now that you think everyone should pick up and peruse?

When Jake Adam York passed away near the end of 2012, I started going back through his work, reading and re-reading his three books: Murder Ballads, Murmuration of Starlings and Persons Unknown. Those books should be read over and over by everyone to remind us about the serious, beautiful work a poem can do.

9. Are these poems part of a larger project?  

These two poems are a part of a sequence of poems I’m calling The Dead Wrestler Elegies. I have a sequence of about thirty of them, with several still planned. The poems form a larger narrative about the speaker and his father’s death, about learning to be a man, and about the mythology of professional wrestling. 

"(With Breaks) and Then New": An Interview with Samuel Ace and Maureen Seaton

Samuel Ace has published widely in periodicals and journals. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Normal Sex (Firebrand Books) and Home in three days. Don't wash. (Hard Press). He is a two-time finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writer's Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in poetry. He lives in Tucson, AZ and Truth or Consequences, NM.

Maureen Seaton is the author of over a dozen books, most recently, of two collaborative poetry collections: Stealth, with Samuel Ace (Chax Press, 2011), and Sinéad O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, winner of the Sentence Book Award (Firewheel, 2011), with Neil de la Flor. Her awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, an NEA fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in New Letters, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, New Republic, Ploughshares, and many other journals. She lives in Hollywood, FL and Albuquerque, NM.

Samuel Ace and Maureen Seaton's collaborative poem, "The Age of the Moon," appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Ace and Seaton speak with interviewer Amber L. Cook on ongoingness, on identities, and on crises. 

1. “The Age of the Moon” is a collaborative poem. I’m wondering: what inspired you both to participate in this poem together? Who initiated the collaboration? 

MS: “The Age of the Moon” occurred about halfway through our second collaboration (2010-2012), a project we’re calling Portals. Our first book, Stealth (Chax Press), was due out and we hadn’t written anything together in a while, so, basically, we just missed the process and the intimacy. Before Stealth, I think I was in Tucson one day visiting Sam after a lot of years and one of us said, “Let’s write a poem,” and the other jumped at the idea.

SA: Our collaboration is a meld a spring a trampoline a play a challenge a suture a prompt and so much more. It’s ongoing and generative. I’ve known Maureen for so many years now I can’t count but our beginning collaboration is ongoing. Continuous (with breaks) and then new. And again.

2. How do you each respectively see repetition working in this poem? Every time a word or phrase is repeated, does it become new again? Does it become a way to layer different meanings? Are your interpretations of repetition different? 

SA: Repeat and repeat again or not. It’s like a digging - you never know what might surface... perhaps the 5000-year-old iceman Ötzi who might be related to you, or even Laika. An arm and an arm and a leg bone. Heading out. A slow death alone. So we repeat. To remember and connect. 

MS: Repetition comforts me. I offer it like down. 

3. I question the way the parentheses are used [at the end of the poem] in all the best ways possible. How do you anticipate the parentheses being read? As asides? Addendums? Something unmentioned? 

SA: Parentheses are not an afterthought. But they are at times a whisper. But then hardly. Like thought. It’s never enough. Or finished.

MS: Ray’s Pizza flown piping hot to Albuquerque.

SA: Tuna melt vs. Puttanesca.

4. Were there any constraints or exercises that you used while generating this poem? 

MS: No constraints. We both did a fair amount of research while composing “The Age of the Moon,” though. I’ve got a thing for numbers, zero in particular, so for this piece the title came directly from the epigraph. I sent Sam the quote, and he riffed from there. (I was also reading Chomsky.) Sam’s research picked up on the moon and led him to the dogs in space.

SA: Like myrrh.

MS: Or murder.

5. There seems to be an awareness—almost self-consciousness about the I/Me character.  Did you intend for this stripped down/rawness from the speaker? 

SA: Like identity itself the wallpaper peeled back

MS:

6. Where do each of your own styles peek through throughout the poem?

SA: Would prefer not to say.

MS: The further away I get from the piece, the less sure I am of authorship. I like that.

7. What relationship exists between the “I” and “You” of this poem. To me it feels symbiotic, but how did you both wish for their relationship to be perceived? 

SA: Intimate. In language and identity. A slippery thing.

MS: (Prince singing Joni.)

8. At moments, I feel this work is language-poetry-like, resembling someone like Lyn Hejinian or Jorie Graham. Was this form a consideration of yours? 

SA: Is Jorie a language poet? Is Lyn?

MS: Language is pretty, am I right?

9. The scope of the poem seems to zoom in and out. How does this zooming help pace or progress the poem? 

SA: If we can dig then we can climb and if we can fly we can leave the earth. All that is possible. Like swimming.

MS: And zooming!

10. What was something each of you was reading while composing this poem? 

SA: I really don’t remember. Sometime in the age of crisis it was always a crisis. And a secret.

MS: Chomsky.

11. Is “The Age of the Moon” part of a larger project? 

SA: See Maureen’s note to #1.

MS: It had images too. Here’s one from Sam:

"Part Guilt, Part Longing": An Interview with Mark Jay Brewin, Jr.

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr., won the 2012 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize of the University of Utah Press for his first book manuscript, Scrap Iron. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, New Madrid, The Hollins Critic, Copper Nickel, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, North American Review, Greensboro Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA program of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. You can read more of his work at his website: www.markjaybrewinjr.com

His creative audio "Seven Places I Have Found My Grandmother in the Last Six Years" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about noises, remembering the details, and conjuring dead relatives.

1. What made you begin to write “Seven Places I Have Found My Grandmother in the Last Six Years”? (Did one particular lookalike-sighting represent the final straw that made you start writing down all the others?)

Can’t even help it. I must have dozens of penned moments where I thought I saw my dead grandmother. At first, I was attempting to keep a dream journal, random thoughts, caricatures of people I knew, but I saw that she was cropping up every other week. Already in my waking life I am constantly seeing family and friends in strangers, looking for them on purpose, so I couldn’t help but make the connection based on the frequency. How come this woman keeps appearing? Am I conjuring her? Part guilt, part longing I guess. I didn’t call her to wish her a happy birthday before she died, and now that’s opened a floodgate. Everywhere. The woman behind the Mexican food mart in Salina, Kansas. The woman with stiletto heels and a terrible fear of sidewalks in Providence, Rhode Island. She came to me, one night, to tell me that she handpicked my wife (apparently an honest to God match made in heaven) even though they’d never met in real life. Anyway, there was this one time—the scene in Taaffes Public House in Galway—where I’m listening to this traditional group playing in the corner, and a mob of old housewives comes in, smoking and ready to drink, and there she is. I register it’s just another one of these moments, but then my wife even asks if she looks like my lost relation. There have been a handful of pictures, this clipped obituary I have taped to a framed concert poster, but the fact that someone else was able to pick it out, that solidified it for me.

2. What inspired your decision to make this poem into a creative audio project?

One of the reasons I feel like I got into writing poetry is because I don’t think I have a musical bone in my body. I want to one day have that talent, that prowess. Despite the fact I am a hack with a ukulele, I still attempt to record random covers and—every once in a while—some spoken word. It happened that a friend of mine started a label, had a ton of equipment, so it worked out that we were going to go nuts with this thing. I knew this poem was the one to iron out because of the narratives it held, the settings. It seemed like a natural for sound.

3. This piece is a sequence poem in seven parts. How did you know that this piece was complete with seven sections? (You say you’ve had other sightings—how did you select the events you chose to include?)

Much like a record, I would love to publish the B-sides to this poem. I have more scenes and interactions with my grandmother than Carter’s got liver pills. When writing and revising, I tried to keep the sharpest, quirkiest moments. This poem appears in my first book, which is deeply rooted in travel and family, and—since I’m from New Jersey—it has the Garden State as its central setting. I wanted the single, best doppelgangers from all of the places I lived over those years. I needed to bookend the piece with Jersey.

4. How much invention do you allow yourself to do in writing a narrative poem such as this? Or did you try to “stick to the facts” and only describe details that you could remember from these sightings and dreams?

Usually, invention is something I thrive on, something that makes or breaks a poem for me. In the case of this one, though, I tried to stick to the facts. The people and places were strange enough as it is. Instead of pulling these particular threads out of thin air, I tried to sit down, close my eyes, and write out as many of the details as I remembered. The more I got on the page, the stronger and more specific they became.

5. I really admire how this piece takes us to several different locations—from a cemetery to an airplane to an Irish pub—in a short span of time. I imagine this must have been tricky to accomplish. Can you talk about how you achieve this level of efficiency, as well as authenticity, in creating a sense of place for the reader/listener?

I spent a couple of weeks with a field recorder taping everything I thought would work for this audio project. I had six tracks of me chopping celery, twenty minutes of ambient airplane sounds, a whole overheard conversation about pipe cleaners that I eventually scrapped. From Providence to Chicago to my hometown. Luckily, these different scenes gave me a structure, a list of images (and thus sounds) that I could work with, that I could find and capture. After I’d gotten them all down—what I thought would cover everything—I thought the tricky part would be to layer, edit and compile, but my friend with the record label was a genius when it came to making sense of what I’d done. It would have been a lot worse, a lot harder, if he wasn’t there to put it together. For me, I simply wanted to make sure that those small, real niceties cohesively finished each sequence. The dreams were what stopped me up—How do I give a soundtrack to what’s completely imagined? What’s in my head? I hope those sections were successful in evoking that trance-state. This was a first time collaboration for us, so I am hoping as we go along we can make these audio projects as pristine as possible.

6. What writing projects are you working on now?

I’ve got a ton on my plate. Besides the random that creeps up and inspires me, I am working on a series of poems about my walking the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain. For a month and a half I would walk eighteen miles a day, spend my nights in a hostel with fifty other snoring pilgrims. Crossing cow pastures, centuries old cathedrals. Brilliant. Besides that, I’m working on a few more spoken word pieces; I have this poem (probably the most original thing I’ve ever made) about my dad setting this old camper we had on fire, but I don’t want to use sound effects to just put you in that place. I want to use dissident noise, tones, strange music, to evoke image and emotion. It’s easier said than done.

7. What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?

Wow. This is a tough one. A whole damn bunch. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City. Golden Field Guide’s Birds of North America. Travis Mossotti’s About the Dead—and that is real damn good. Anything by Philip Levine, every single day of my life. And so on.

"When I Try, It Isn't Beautiful": An Interview with Jessica Alexander

Jessica Alexander studies and teaches at the University of Utah. Her fiction has been published in Blip Magazine.

Her story "The Problem" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, fiction writer Jessica Alexander speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about love, linearity, and the fetus niece. 

1. How did you begin this piece, and how did you develop it to where it is now?

I thought of love as something that bursts.  That’s where I started.  I’d been reading a lot of Caren Beilin’s and Aimee Bender’s work, two writers who so beautifully render the figural literal, who turn emotional responses into palpable conditions. (Beilin writes of grief as corpse balloons carried by the bereaved.  Bender’s grieving father wakes with a gaping hole in his stomach).  Love is urgent and impractical.  It operates in and against time.  It is impossible.  I don’t think my love makes anyone more discrete.  It bursts them, spatially and temporally.   I look for those I love and find them everywhere.  And so, I think, what began as a spatial dispersal developed into a temporal dispersal.

2. What guided the narrative time leaps, the ping-ponging between the 10-year-old self at the bus and the adult reunion with the ‘you’?  The two time-locales also seem steeped in their own particular, continuing, amended conversations (needing mothers v. fathers, wanting not evidence or anger but sobbing) – which seem to nullify or cancel out the time between this grade school morning and dining among all the “pretty person[s].  Everyone is feeding a lover, or being fed by one.”  Are these conversations, in your mind, a kind of feeding/forcing feeding?  How do these conversations align with your schema of time?

I’ve never been able to write a linear narrative.  I’ve tried.  It feels like filling my mouth with rocks, and trying to talk.  I’ve seen people do this (both rocks and linear plots) admirably.  But when I try it isn’t beautiful.  It’s clumsy.  I think it’s because that just isn’t how I experience time. I still wince with shame when I remember events that occurred on the school bus, in gym class, or locker rooms.  Mine is not a narrative of progress.  I cannot detail the moral and ethical formation of an identity, or posit my characters safely on the other side of pain, loss, and social shame.  While I do think there is a moral dimension to pain and humiliation, I don’t think it consists of overcoming such experiences.  I like that you say “force-feeding.”  I had not made that connection, but I do think most of the narratives I’ve been force-fed insist on progress as a model. 

3. I was in love with this story from its first line because it was destructive and haphazard and sad and there-was-nothing-you-could-do-about-it : What about that extraoridinary recurring image of “mothers burst into a flock of pigeons” is so attractive as a refrain, why this image as a nucleus-motif?  Is it the bursting/dispersement part, is it something about the ordinary-ness/dirtiness of a pigeon, is it the fact that “We’re supposed to get over our mothers,” but can’t?

Wow, that’s really generous.  I like your term “nucleus-motif.”  It so aptly describes an alternative to linear narrative.  A lot of wonderful non-fiction deploys a similar organizational strategy.  Judy Ruiz’s “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Shena McAuliffe’s “Endnotes to a Seizure,” and Tasha Matsumoto’s “Mathematics for Nymphomaniacs,” are organized by constellations, or associations.  In McAuliffe’s, and Ruiz’s work an inexplicable, and recurring event sits at the center of a web.  The event, it seems, has shattered the narrator’s understanding of the universe.  The story is the re-writing, re-weaving, re-organizing of a world around an unfathomable.  Each of these pieces suggest, in content and organization, that what breaks us is not discrete, not bound neatly between before and after, but bursts and disperses.  It becomes the nucleus motif of the worlds we think.  And so, I think, you’re right, a nucleus-motif is about what we’re supposed to get over, but can’t.         

4. What else are you working on?  Does it also have (or have not) a home near Freud?

I recently met a woman who teaches yoga to toddlers.  We were on an airplane.  I told her about a sonogram of my niece.  She was in down-dog (the fetus-niece, that is).  I asked when our bodies stop bending like this.  Why and when we must re-teach them.   She said school.  Of course, I thought, it has to do with molding our bodies, for hours, to desks.  But she said potty training too!  And I thought:  Ah!  The stress of socialization is so great we stiffen!  That’s one thing, amidst all Freud’s myth making, that I really appreciate:  his idea that being socialized is unbearable, the original trauma that breaks us into people.  I think that aspect of Freud’s thought is something that I very earnestly, if unconsciously write through in my stories.  But like the socialization process itself, there is so much in Freud’s work that I find tragic.  For example, the way social prescription becomes description, delimits how things, and what things can be described. 

5. What good stories/materials have you read about mothers (and or bursting and or pigeons) lately?

While there are no mothers or pigeons in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in Highschool, I appreciate the way she writes about child/parent relationships.  In the first part of the novel Janey Smith’s boyfriend starts seeing other women, and stops coming home.  Eventually, they break up.  Pretty straightforward, only her boyfriend is also her father.  Acker so succinctly demonstrates the perversity of patriarchy.  The relation to the Father is not a precursor to future relationships.  The relationship to the Father is the only relationship.  Whether we agree with Acker’s stance or not, there is much to admire in her economy.

Families are perverse and fascinating!  The ideal family instills social values. But how perverse is that?  It’s a battleground, where through a series of transgressions, children learn what is and is not permitted—and shame is one, among the many weapons, that breaks us into social beings.  I love writers like Mary Caponegro, and Jaclyn Watterson for their ability to de-familiarize the family’s fantastic perversity.  So, I guess I haven’t read too much on pigeons, but I’ve read some excellent stuff on families, and by extension mothers.

"Just to Mention the Word is a Legitimate Violence": An Interview with Nathan Blake

Nathan Blake's writing has appeared in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Word Riot, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and kill author, among others. He is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech and a managing editor of Mixed Fruit Magazine.

His story "Going Down Like Little Jesus in Sun Hole" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Nathan Blake speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about fire, first sentences, and the inclination to squirt around.

1. Did this piece start with fire, with voice, with Spunk, with Spunk running out the door?  A piece like this feels like it’s running out the door itself fast as he is : those first two bullet-quick sentence-graphs.  How did you know to start that way?

At the risk of sounding coy, I'll admit this story, like all the rest, began with the first sentence. Those words on the page had implications and avenues, a few of which I tried to exploit later on, after I'd read the first sentence over and over looking for an inroad into the real thing. But even the image of Spunk on fire was ancillary to the sentence itself and not the other way around. A good first sentence will contain all the energy the rest of the story's going to cannibalize. I felt lucky to find energy there in the opening that I could ply without having to build up to it. I was invested in crawling or, in this case, sprinting my way out toward an ending; that's how I knew the first line wasn't another throwaway. Then came the second line, the third, and so on, very smoothly. I am not subtle, nor am I capable of juggling numerous entanglements at once in writing. I am no sculptor in the vein of your great deliberating storytellers wielding mind, heart, patience, and prudence. I may, with luck, have one of those, or more likely half of one. I do know if I'm going to ask of a reader's time, to make the promise of interest, I'd better say what I need to say damn quick and well, with kick, and honestly, or else I've failed. Those first two lines were my best attempt to push the reader into the situation, hoping they'd want to see it through to the end.

2. Can we talk a little bit more about this fire motif?  Fire is such a classic/terrific image to employ for its relation to desire, demise, purification, all-consuming-ness, heat – did you choose it for its multi-faceted-ness?  (Did you ‘choose’ it at all?) How does it relate to the heart (of the character/of the piece), “which believes everything. These people to me are like so much plastic creek-mouth flotsam you hit with a match and which burns and keeps on burning down the river for hours in dead noon heat to be picked apart by snakes”?

I like the finality of fire. It does one thing but so well. I wish I could say I chose fire for all those great reasons you listed; I'd sound more intelligent than I am that way. But truthfully, I am fascinated with fire for similar reasons that some writers work a murder into every story—it raises the stakes for the reader, as so well done in Flannery O'Connor's “A Circle in the Fire.” Just to mention the word is a legitimate violence. I grew up in a very rural, Protestant crease of Virginia, so fire contains many loaded associations for me, something that was my worst nightmare as a kid—by which I mean eternal damnation. It continues bullying even now.

I don't have a very nuanced vocabulary when discussing my work or the work of others, but I suppose the speaker in this story feels things too much. His heart is too direct, and because of that he's discomfited. Fire is like that. There's no such thing as a subtle fire. We try our best to control it, to keep it hemmed, but all fire can do is consume and consume. Fire's job is to be never satisfied, even to the point of its own extinction. That's the person I like writing about and the type of stories that come to me. That's the person I am. Someone who feels life to a fault. A story that makes me feel something, anything, is worth the time to read or write it.

3. How do you get into (and maintain) an incredible voice like this – “I’m between two water oaks deeply hammocked,” “Spunk bangs out the house like he has been caught fire to,” “get him good and extinguished,” “something school paste orange fizzles out”?  Can you imagine the voice of this piece ‘regularized’ (‘I’m lying in a hammock,’ ‘I extinguish him’)?  What would die?

Getting into a voice is like method acting for me. It doesn't so much matter what I say but how I say it true to the self who's speaking. Anything interests me so long as the person telling is earnest, requiring me to find a hard grip on where the obsessions and pride of a character reside if I'm the one telling. There's something attractive about pretending you're someone else. I can remember as early as age seven walking around the grocery store with a fake limp, or speaking a crack language into the telephone, to see if I could get away with the lie—if I would, by playing my part, be accepted as true. Didn't Oscar Wilde say something like the first duty in life is to assume a pose? My stories all begin with a pose I must justify with the rest of the story. My one aim is that the lie must convince and be interesting to hear. Maintaining a voice is little more than an act of endurance, stubbornly so.

Many, too many, times, I'll have several pages when suddenly the voice falls flat. After that, there's rarely a way to invite myself back into the story. It becomes a false show. A great big voice is natural to my writing, but I sometimes wonder if, were I to strip the language down and smooth the dents, the stories would still hold similar or any merit, or be more well-received. Language and story have a symbiotic relationship in my mind. You neglect one and the other's heart will give out trying to carry the dead weight. I tend to lose all drive and interest when my writing sounds generic, and I find myself slogging through a story when I shouldn't. I might as well do something I enjoy. I don't believe I'll ever earn wide appeal, but at least I'll have fun during the short time I've been given to write.

I grew up listening to people talk, and rarely about things that mattered to me, yet I listened just the same. And why? My uncle would tell us his jokes dozens of times, even though the punchlines had become old hat. Yet we were enraptured. It was his delivery that was funnier than the actual joke, I found out, more anarchic. You never knew if he was going to rearrange the set-up or what. When the sweet anarchy of not knowing where the next word comes from dies, I'll find another hobby. 

4. Your particular brand of deadpan lyricism (I’m thinking of lines like, “I don’t know what to tell you.  It looks like somebody went up there with a ladder and put a bullet between the sky’s ears”) is stunning, memorable, electric.  Do you ever receive resistance to this voice (in the MFA workshop, elsewhere) and how do you maintain balance between the wildness of this lyric and control of the story?

I recently finished my first-ever workshop this past December, which was a very nurturing but challenging experience for me, as I'm without a formal background in English. But my classmates and Fred D'Aguiar were so gracious with their advice and encouragement all semester long. Any resistance I received was well-deserved—sentences that rang false came back to me underlined, dialogue was held up to the voice of the speaker, etc. They knew when I really believed in a sentence and when I was just squirting around. I tend to get lost in the language. Sometimes I'll write a line that sings a little bit but does nothing else, that drives no signal post into the ground of the story. Grace Paley called them lies, showing off. The brilliant faculty and writers of my program are helping me see those lies and do away with them. Literary magazines, however, have not been so kind. I have found the words “grating” and “showy” in rejections. Too much “tell”. I got one once that said the story was “fun, but to what end?”

And any success I had controlling this story was dumb luck. It came out in one shot, and I needed things to fit together, or I'd miss my deadline. Desperation provided results. An easy gauge I use to keep the story from falling off a cliff is to ask myself what every word does and might do. Every word needs to stand its ground within the sentence, the sentence within the paragraph, the paragraph within the story. A line having only flash in its favor was not enough to survive in this piece. I suppose that pulled in the reins a bit.

5. Does this story fit somewhere in a collection, or are there other projects in the works?

I don't think I'm at the point where I can pretend to have any aspirations to work on a collection or projects in general. I feel that sort of agenda might cut my inclination to squirt around, where the high adventure stays. I still have so much to learn and try. I would take less risks if I knew this piece had to play nice alongside several others. For now I'm just writing stories, trying to get enough material to look at what ideas keep bobbing the surface. Maybe that's how my thesis will be. But I have been coming back to the area referenced in this piece, Rangtang Road, which exists, but not anything like it does in the story.

6. Anything fabulous you’ve been reading fiction-wise, or writing-about-fiction-wise?

Right now I'm caught between course readings and teaching a section of composition, but I do sneak in some pleasure every few days. Recently I've been enjoying Noëlle Revaz's With the Animals, Toni Cade Bambara's Gorilla, My Love, David Ohle's Motorman, and Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex. I just finished Jean Toomer's Cane, which was assigned by Matthew Vollmer, and it does so many wonderful things with the novel.

"To Talk, Even If No One Talked Back": An Interview with Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Coffin Factory, NANO Fiction, Pank, The Yoke, SpringGun, Echo Ink Review, Mary, Ghost Ocean, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate and graduate teacher at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Her essay, "Important terms for walking on water," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.

Here, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about making lists, the grieving process, and creating our own hauntings.

How did you begin to write this essay? What inspired you to construct it in the form of titled paragraphs and lists over a more narrative format?

I think that loss wrecks narrative. It’s not just a plot twist, the entire idea that our lives follow a comprehensible narrative is shown to be false. So writing a narrative about grief seemed very false. But I am a list maker, mostly of what needs to be done. I wanted to explore that—how narrative is replaced by lists, by strings of moments and the need to remember them, how memory, which is nonlinear, but creates its own time, replaces narrative.

This piece comprises a series of concise sections, some no more than a few sentences long (e.g., "What I will not write about" and "What I keep writing about"). Did it require a lot of editing or restraint to keep them so brief, or were they this concise from the outset?

I knew that I wanted some sections to be shorter than others to create a varied rhythm and to allow pause into the piece. But the sections that ended up being shorter happened that way organically because they were the most difficult to write. That is another thing I’m interested in: what are the limits, when writing about something so personal? Where do I stop? I’ve sectioned some parts off—moments I won’t write about. I am both glad I’ve done that and I wonder why. It’s as if some moments are sacred, but that seems to go against why I write about any of it. Because I do believe the process itself is sacred. It’s a form of prayer, the only kind I do.

In the section "What I keep writing about," you include "A desire to be haunted." Do you see this desire appearing in other works of your own writing? (Does it drive your writing to some extent?)

Yes. The novel I’m finishing now is largely driven by haunting, in fact, all of the fiction I’m writing now is. I think writing is a form of haunting, because it brings our ghosts out and makes them slightly more tangible. So my desire has become real in a sense. I’m haunted by my desire, and I create my own haunts.

What advice can you offer to anyone struggling to write about a lost loved one?

Strangely, this work was not a struggle. Much of my writing is—I have to force myself to do it and it’s painful. But with this essay and others that I’ve written about my brother, it absolutely had to happen, I think so everything else could. It was the grieving process for me. But I think it was also about opening a conversation, to not letting everything be closed, to talk, even if no one talked back.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m finishing my novel, Las Moscas, which is about four young people in post-Franco Spain who leave home on a whim and get dragged bit by bit to the edges of existence. I’m also working on what I hope will be a novel that is set in a religious enclave in Depression Era Northern Wisconsin, as well as several essays.

What have you read recently that you want to tell people about?

I recently finished Arcadia by Lauren Groff. A friend pointed me to The Log of the SS Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, which is amazing. The Beginners, by Rebecca Wolff, Man’s Companions, by Joanna Ruocco. Not recently, but I think of it constantly, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Kristin Prevallet’s I, Afterlife. I’ve also been reading older works looking for narrative structures—Zola especially. I just finished The Most Human Human by Brian Christian and The Worst Hard Time by Tim Egan. I like to read a lot of varied material and then I feel I’m able to write varied material. During the semester break, I read some popular novels. I think that’s important too. But my list of what I want to read is much, much longer.