"Telephones, Kitchens, and Moms": An Interview with Erinrose Mager

Erinrose Mager’s fiction appears or will appear in The Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, Hyphen, Passages North, New South, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Lit Pub Books) and Creative Writing/Literature PhD candidate at the University of Denver. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Her story, "Before Bedtime with Kate," appeared in Issue Seventy-Eight of The Collagist.
 

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about what we do while we talk on the phone, cat-inspiration, and corking up our stories.

How did this story, “Before Bedtime with Kate,” begin for you?

I guess the short answer is: I’ve always liked telephones and kitchens and moms. The longer answer is: at the time of this story’s conception my friend and MFA cohort-mate Edward Herring was writing a book called Answering Machine. He calls it a “novel out loud.” He and I talked a lot about phones and recorded voice—about what it’s like to speak with/to/about someone via telephone and what that communication over distance or absence of physical presence might look like in prose—how and to what extent those conversations might speak to longing and/[f]or memory. Also, I enjoy thinking about the simultaneity of domestic activity that takes place while two people are on the phone with each other and likewise puttering around their homes, touching objects or pacing or cleaning or drawing or hanging out with cats. It’s a weird intimacy, the phone call. I recognize that this isn’t a revelation.

You start the story by dropping us into a phone conversation between Kate and her mother. Why did you choose to bottle the story into this moment? Was there ever a draft of this story that stretched beyond the edges of the phone call?

To use your word: I like bottling; cork it up, I say! I began “Before Bedtime with Kate” as it stands now, more or less. I often start a piece knowing more about what I want to elide than what I want to foreground. So “Before Bedtime” was always a little story, even at its onset. I think I wanted it to stay little because the scene is little and the exchange is little and it’s important to honor smallness, especially in prose.

If someone were to overhear a phone call between you and a family member, what would that phone call reveal?

An overheard call might reveal that my mom is wicked funny and wicked worried about me all the time i.e. she’s a great mom. Also, I often clean my toilet when I talk to my mom on weekends, and perhaps she takes offense to this, but it’s actually a high honor—maybe the highest. She says, “You’re cleaning the toilet again,” I say yes, and we both laugh. So I guess the call might also reveal my mild anal retentiveness, though my fiction might reveal that aspect of my personhood anyway.

What is inspiring your work these days?

Recently I read The Week by Joanna Ruocco; her asymmetrical, stilted realities are livening. Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat is brimming and discomfiting and prismatic; I revisited it a few months ago and I’m grateful that I did. I also read, finally, Pamela: A Novel by Pamela Lu as part of a workshop with Selah Saterstrom; Lu takes these wide, sentence-level berths away from a phrase’s subject only to circle back, consecutionally, and lines later. That clausal movement astounds me. I rarely read an entire poetry collection in one sitting, but I read Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed without stopping, struck by its pivots and fractures. As for non-books: I haven’t been that inspired by television lately (and I love television) so any recommendations are appreciated. My cat inspires me all the time because he’s so particular and serious about everything.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m trying to write a novel, but it (the novel, the trying) is going poorly. PhD school has slowed my writing process considerably, and I’m resigned. I’m also trying to make sense of a story collection, which feels unwieldy and uneven right now. To use a former professor’s term: I’m trying to find/mute all the ‘bad echoes' in the collection. With two friends (Hannah Waters and Marta Evans) I am editing a collaborative anthology that melds scientific research and speculative fiction, but we’re still figuring out preliminary logistics, and this work involves much trial and error and email.

"We Drive in Circuitous Routes": An Interview with Eddie Kim

Eddie Kim received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is a Kundiman fellow from Seattle who served as the inaugural Pacific Northwest Kundiman Regional Chair. He spent two summers as poetry faculty at UVA's Young Writers Workshop and was invited as a poetry guest speaker for the Robinson School for Young Scholars. He is currently experiencing major life changes.

His poem, "In Search of Aliens," appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with inteviewer Courtney Flerlage about balance, brontosaurs, and landscape.

How did “In Search of Aliens” get started for you?

My friend and I were on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York, by way of the South. Some of the images formed from observations as we drove out of California. I often find ideas for poems as a passenger, whether in a car or on a bus. There’s something about the rhythm of the road and the freedom to let your mind wander that I find generative. Sometimes it turns into something, sometimes it doesn’t.

I’m interested in the way imagery generates a conversation between wonder and reality in “In Search of Aliens.” As the speaker describes driving through “The corridor East from Los Angeles,” they see, for example, “golden / brontosaurs, but brontosaurs are not real anymore, / demoted by way of Pluto.” Later, the speaker summarizes the drive as “nothing but curiosity and semis accompanying heat,” a line I read as exemplifying the speaker’s relationship to the landscape—driven by a thirst for the spectacular, met with the daunting reminders of reality.  Yet in the final lines of the poem, it is the speaker’s search, itself, that becomes spectacular; the speaker shares, “I’ve been using sesame oil for sunscreen / and now my arms are the color of Mars.” The speaker finds themselves promoted to a planet-like status as the speaker drives on in “circuitous routes.” This wonder that drives the poem remains urgent and real, even as the images of the poem—dinosaurs, “Mech Warriors,” planets—are fantastic. Could you share a bit about this balance—how do you craft images of wonder in such a measured way?  

My father had also recently passed away, and this was the first time I’d driven cross-country. I wanted to do something that made me feel alive and wild, perhaps even reckless or self-destructive. I was completely out of balance in my life, and I wanted to do something that pushed the thought of loss out of my mind. Which, I imagine, is quite common. But even when we do these things, I think things are always there to remind us of reality. Sometimes it’s a semi passing by; sometimes it’s unbearable heat. At the time, I wanted to get lost in wonder and possibility, but something would always bring me back, be it fear, insecurity, or uncertainty. I don’t think I was conscious of it while writing the poem, but it was an internal struggle that I was dealing with, a conversation I was certainly having within: a need for balance, a desire to be wild/self-destructive, and questioning everything in-between. I couldn’t say I was cognizant of the balance you point out in the poem as I was writing it, but I was certainly craving it on some level. Everything felt out of whack and this poem was perhaps one place I could begin to find that balance. Even a poem can crave some semblance of balance. If the images are only fantastical, it can lose its humanity. If the images are too grounded, it can lose its sense of exploration and wonder.  A poem is a place where reality and wonder can reside together, where they can become interchangeable. We were driving through Roswell as I was working on the poem, which seemed very appropriate. The ostensibly fantastical notion of aliens surrounded by a town seemingly built on the commercialization of that possibility.

In the last line of the second stanza, after mentioning Pluto as having been “demoted,” the speaker concludes, “All facts / from my childhood are suspect.” This declaration resonates against the stanza that follows, in which the speaker remembers a teacher’s trick for spelling the word “deserts” with “one less S” because “It’s not something you want more of.” I find this moment both clarifying and complicating: the same “errors” of the speaker’s landscape—those brontosaurs, for instance—that inspire the speaker to doubt certainty also call into question—by way of juxtaposition—this assumption that the speaker’s landscape is undesirable. The logic feels wonderfully paradoxical, an expression of the complications of caring for—and questioning—a familiar landscape. At what point in your process did this memory enter the poem? Has the poem ever existed without it? 

Thank you so much, that is very kind of you to say. Yes, the initial draft of the poem did not include the memory of the teacher. The memory occurred to me after a sort of amalgamation of thoughts as I was going over the poem. At that point, I’d mostly lived closer to coast or somewhat coastal areas, be it Seattle or Kotzebue. When I lived in Fairbanks, it was the most land-locked I had been, and I regularly craved for ocean smells and seagulls. I was used to being near water, so I’d never thought of a desert as someplace I’d find connection with or even want to visit necessarily. So, in thinking about this, and then going over the poem, the brontosaurs and desert we were driving through brought back that memory. I was questioning all those things we learn and take on as our own knowledge, as simple facts that make up who we are and often neglect to question. Brontosaurs were very real to me as a kid, and if they cease to be, everything is open for questioning, myself included, as well as how I see the world and my place in it.

What are you reading right now that you’d recommend?

Most recently, I’ve been reading poems by Jane Wong, Michelle Peñaloza, and Dan Lau. I am inspired by their work.

What project(s) do you have in the works?

I am currently working on a poetry manuscript that explores the wonders and myths we create for ourselves and miss on a daily basis. They span various experiences from childhood to present, which sounds kind of lame when I word it like that, but I more and more like the notion of time being a figment, of past, present, and future happening simultaneously. In which case, one might argue that the stories that make up our lives and feel the need to share, regardless of when they happened, are always relevant because they’re happening now. At the very least, they’re certainly happening in my head.

"Aroused then Ashamed": An Interview with Patrick Dundon

Patrick Dundon is a graduate of the MFA program at Syracuse University where he served as Editor-in-Chief for Salt Hill Journal. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BOAAT, Sixth Finch, The Adroit Journal, Birdfeast, DIAGRAM, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He currently lives, writes, and teaches preschool in Portland, OR.

His poems, "Dream with a Piece of Cake," "Dream with Explanations" and "Dream with a Potted Plant," appeared in Issue Ninety-Two of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about broken relationships, allegorical violence, and writing & repeating.

What really caught me about this work was the contrasting images, presented line-by-line. The first line, “[w]e are in your garden,” creates illusion of a peaceful continuation to follow. Yet the second line, “slaughtering rabbits,” immediately disturbs this. And so the work goes. What kind of advice can you give to new or aspiring writers who are looking to create stark images like this?

When I wrote this poem, I was in the midst of a sexually ambiguous relationship that was driving me crazy. It was a mixture of tenderness, alienation, fantasy, spastic sexual energy, confusion, hope, and lots of miscommunication. I’d tried writing about it, but everything I wrote felt too forced or cliché, filled with contrived anger or longing. Then one morning I gave up whatever emotional agenda I thought I had, closed my eyes, and imagined us together. Where were we? What were we doing? And there we were, in that garden, killing little bunnies. At first I was alarmed—Why so violent? What did it mean? I had no idea, but it felt like the beginning of a movie I definitely wanted to watch. The rest of the writing process felt less like writing and more like watching that movie play out to its natural conclusion. I hate it when writers say “the poem wrote itself” because it’s the kind of advice that is 100% unhelpful, but some poems really feel that way, and this was one of them. I wrote it quickly, in one sitting. But I’d already spent weeks obsessing about this relationship: writing bad poems, texting friends, crying while listening to the Cranberries, having strange dreams, screaming in my car, soothing myself with frosties at Wendy’s. That was all an essential part of the writing process—the path that led to this particular garden.

I know I’ve hit a good image when I can’t quite parse it, when it’s emotionally impactful but there’s no way to summarize that impact except with the image itself. Before I ever started writing poetry, I obsessively recorded my dreams. I like how the right dream image can be emotionally rich, psychologically ambiguous, and gesture toward many meanings without landing on one. It’s so difficult to offer advice about image-making, because the best images, for me, arise suddenly like waking dreams but feel as real and familiar as my own hands. They are a relief to unearth, not a thrill to invent.

There is also a disconnect between the human-touch and violence. “[S]laughtering,” “knife,” and “blood,” conflict with “lean in” and “kiss.” And then in the second-to-last line, the “fuck you” disrupts anything pleasant already presented, much like “slaughtering rabbits” in the second line. What does this disconnect mean to you, and what were you hoping to convey to readers?

Right after I wrote this poem, I texted it to a friend, expecting her response to be something like, “are you okay?” I set out to write a love poem, and ended up with a pile of carcasses. I was aware of the disconnect you mentioned, between human touch and violence but wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I’m still not. What interests me most about love isn’t its achievement, but instead the gulf that exists between our fantasies and the messiness of reality. It’s in that gap where the imagination can go wild. It’s the moment in the poem when the speaker sees a piece of cake in a bloodstain. This is a reason I like to write about dreams: they are a space where we reconcile our fantasies, where those fantasies cross-pollinate with our subconscious baggage.

I think it’s important that this poem is, in fact, a dream. There are no real rabbits, no actual fucking. That casts the violence in a different light, one that’s consciously more allegorical. My friend just broke up with her boyfriend and told me she has recurrent dreams that she’s strangling him. The dreams are less about killing him and more about silencing him. My favorite dreams are the ones that resist a single interpretation, that gesture toward a complicated psychological state. Here it’s a mixture of desire, daydream, violence, shame, lust, and working toward a common goal. I don’t like having too tight an analysis on what my poems mean. If I knew exactly what I were trying to say, I’d write an essay. Which isn’t to say that the poem lacks intent. I wanted to show what it felt like to cry to that Cranberries song.

What are you working on currently?

I wake up, drink coffee, stare, write, repeat. Some days, there’s a good line or image. Most days, there isn’t. I can’t seem to get away from writing about love, desire, heartbreak, and alienation. I used to feel a certain pressure to write about other things, but when I forced myself into different subject matters, it never seemed to work. Desire and heartbreak is my particular burrow, my tunnel into the self.

I tend to write the most when I’m emotionally jostled, when I have excess energy I need to transmute with language. My most creative state is probably that moment when I’m waiting for a text from someone I have a crush on. It’s awful. It always yields a poem.

I’ve been writing more prose recently. There’s something about alleviating the pressure to create “a poem” that can free me up to say what I really mean. What results is often a poem without lines. I’ll take it.

What have you read recently?

I recently read “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman and really loved it. I pretty much always have a copy of “The Incognito Lounge” by Denis Johnson with me. My friend Abbey Numedahl just sent me a story she wrote that was stunningly beautiful and made me cry. Oh, and sometimes I re-read texts and emails from former lovers.  Which I don’t recommend, but I just can’t help myself.