"By Years and Circumstance": An Interview with Kate Petersen

Kate Petersen lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Epoch, Paris Review Daily, LitHub, and elsewhere. A former recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford and a Pushcart Prize, she currently serves as coordinator for the Center of Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.

Her story, "Homework 3 (Spring 2016)," appeared in Issue Eighty-Four of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about finding narrative in surprising places, how our writing changes over time, and landscape.

I love how the form frames the narrative in “Homework 3 (Spring 2016).” How did writing this as a homework assignment change the way you approached the story?

Samuel Beckett said of Joyce, “form is content, content is form.” And Walter Benjamin put it this way: “the veil and what is veiled [the wrap and what is wrapped], are the same.” There are a million great formulations of this argument, and though wary of drumming up undue grandeur or pretense via fancy quotation, perhaps I can lean lightly on the syllogism they propose: this wasn’t even a story until I understood it as a problem set.

I need to give credit to my terrific intro to fiction students at Stanford. The spring that I was writing this, they were doing p-sets every minute they weren’t writing and revising their stories—in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer engineering. I realized they were eating, breathing, sleeping this form I had never really lived myself (non-engineer that I was). So I asked them to bring some in, just so I could see what a p-set was. And what I discovered—what we discovered—were these totally rich, torqued narratives made of very specific, poetic lexicons that we could repurpose and bend to our own extracurricular aims.

As I familiarized myself with these strange language systems—in which naïve estimator or coupling parameter doesn’t mean naïve or coupling as I’d ever understood those words, systems in which one must follow a very logical but byzantine path toward a correct answer—I realized I’d found a sound receptacle for this overspill of feeling I wanted to write about. The inherent doubleness and constraints were welcome, and necessary.

The Collagist published “Homework 3 (Spring 2016)” in July 2016. Has your writing changed since then? If so, how?

Oh god. Well, I have a puppy, and I know she’s getting taller, but I can’t really see it because I’m with her every day. I think it might be the same with my writing: I hope it’s changed, by which I mean I hope it bears the mark of more time spent with the world, but I’m too close to know. One’s compulsions change over time and with them, perhaps, goes style. But I’ve also aged and been aged since 2016, by years and circumstance, and so I suspect my writing is a little closer to death. Though, if the poets are any indication, maybe that’s a net gain.

This story has a strong sense of place. Is the desert a familiar setting for you? Why was it important this story take place where it does?

Yes, I grew up in the Sonoran Desert and have deep affection for it. But here I was interested in the way that a stranger or beloved defamiliarizes a landscape. This desert is not a place the narrator knows, with this man beside her. Even so, the mutual recognition comes quick, so that by morning the mountains know her well enough to chide her, and she knows them well enough to reply.

What is something you are loving right now? It could be a book, a game, a TV show, a food, etc.

Loving poetry and journalism: Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas. Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem. Joanna Klink’s Circadian. Amy Gerstler’s Crown of Weeds. And High Country News. Please read and subscribe to their great work on climate change and the American West. Important, place-based journalism.

What are three words that describe one of your WIPs?

Twentieth-century science. I’m finishing a project on science during the cold war, though not the science of weaponry that’s been popularized in film and elsewhere. Even quieter science had a real claim to progress then, and though still political and politicized, it tracked with a public hope—hope that was sometimes misguided or mislaid, but was abundant. Founded.

We’re doing science in such a different paradigm now; I think there’s a good chance American science from these years will be marked only by its ability to pull us back from the brink of a warming climate, or not, and the unequal distribution of its benefits through a profit-based health care system.

"To Raise Dead Things": An Interview with Jared Daniel Fagen

Jared Daniel Fagen is a writer living in Brooklyn and Arkville, NY. His prose and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, PLINTH, Numéro Cinq, Entropy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 3:AM Magazine, The Quarterly Conversation, Hyperion, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Black Sun Lit and a PhD student in Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

His story, "Delight/Equal Dread," appeared in Issue Eighty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about winter, giving up, and letting infringements into our writing.

What sparked your story, “Delight/Equal Dread”? Where did this story begin for you?

I suppose D/ED had begun from something dim instead. I actually remember this period of my writing fondly and distinctly. No, not distinctly, I remember it vividly, that is, then was about uncertain images. Perhaps it began from a kind of exhaustion, on a bench, at the burning end of a cigarette. Or rather from rest. I had just been walking or not yet able to set about. In any case I was not any more than a quarter mile away from my home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn (hi DN-S), knowing I would have to start again somehow. All my favorite writers were walkers. I was bearing new discomforts in my body and in many ways recently done with “stories.” The writing of D/ED came from a freedom or easiness that follows forfeit. It was a December-January. A bench loses its charm in low temperatures. A bench can be strangely comforting in the cold. I walk out of some insensate habit frenzied, methodical, with my eyes pointed downward, nowhere to go and to go next. My prose had been up to that time traffic. Traffic is only bothersome when there is somewhere you’re expected to be or a destination ahead you desire to reach, passing the familiar landmarks. What I wanted was an end, yes, but one which would come at the eradication of mapped routes. Not too long ago I saw a friend post a photo that made me think of Valéry, who said prose was like walking and poetry like dancing. But I was becoming more interested in the meander in winter at weekday noontide when the sky is overcast and everything is hued gray by the residue of salts used to melt snow. You know, when everything looks scorched. So rest in the sense of unencumbered movement, as well as in what remains. They say life flashes before your eyes when you meet the end. I wanted to write the disorientation, the distortion, the memories that would flood and weren’t premeditated, forced, or fixed but isolated until instinctively (or neglectfully)—in their conjuring by means of the narrative performance of the writing—moved on from when I needed them most. Now I’m remembering a line I believe I have written. I’m looking back now. “Endings were satisfied quicker by surrender, by silence.” Oddly enough, this is from a story I had written not long before this one. To end is the possibility to recommence. So I suppose D/ED rose out of me from a wake.

This story has a very distinct voice. Is the voice in this piece similar to or different from the stories you typically write? How so?

D/ED was one (fragmented) text of several that I had composed during this time (c. 2015–16?) of relinquishment, stasis, and debility, in the faint winter of my writing. I don’t recall where it fits amongst the others in the series (I think five in total), but my guess is it was one of those texts written earlier on. There is a kind of exhilaration in D/ED, demonstrated by its paratactic restlessness, which is not as urgent in some of the other fragments. Most of my prose up to this point, in retrospect, had been too conscious of itself, that is, too tied to and labored by arrivals, keeping things, no matter how derelict or desperate I liked them to be, too aggressively intact, in the proper places I had in advance governed for them with agonizing effort. The voice in this work, I think, had been too controlled, commanding, deliberate, maybe more manipulative than suggestive. Yet nothing was really grounded, in the Heideggerian sense. The writing was already of ruinous things. While the nature of my writing as a whole—the impetus, the stirrings, the weariness where it comes from—has always been (and is) the same, D/ED and the aforementioned rest represent a narrative voice more interested in its process, in building and deprivation, in dwelling poetically, rather than combing or dredging an expressive textual site of recovery organized by literary tropes. The voice at the end of “stories” had to be equally as collapsing. It had to make visible not just the wreckage of a memory or image strewn about the page, but also the operation of their atrophy. It had to raise dead things at the meager end of their life. Life at the threshold of annihilation is both trepidatious and tranquil, the event of extreme limits. Things are more precious then, at their detriment. The voice became a thread and threadbare.

The Collagist published “Delight/Equal Dread” in June 2016. How has your writing or the focus of your writing changed since then?

D/ED marked a significant turning point in my writing. There is less interference from passersby, from pomeranians (hi M), from reality. Everything since then is just as feverish, which is to say as natural. The writing grows, it spirals, it sieves, and I’ve become meagerly its vessel, a colander. I am practicing temper turbulently. Many learn to inhabit writing, maybe for healing. But writing still inhabits me, maybe it’s my mania, the obsessions just as intense. I still begin the work when I find myself fraught with words, when a certain phrase pummels me. The unpublished work following D/ED and its counterparts is more tidal, does more violence to language. Perhaps now there is more stuttering, corruption, cosmic sorrow, a harder time letting go. I find myself concentrating more on committing offences, creating disagreements between parts of speech, and letting these infringements propel the narrative motion, rather than plot. The writing’s become mostly about rhythm, departure, spontaneity, association, correspondence, using language to erase myself, to complicate the determination of the voice. I’m writing further inflictions, last sips of air.

What is the latest story you read and loved? 

“Finished Being” by Diane Williams, in New York Tyrant. Read it, it’s short. The story tells of a woman who “looked with respect” at a square of cement and “asked herself why she had to do that.” It’s only a sentence. Fiction can be so small, inconsequential, incipient. “Inconsequential” is an abundant modifier: it can mean unimportant, with little or no consequence (or aftermath), or, my favorite, neither here nor there. But back to the “story,” which, despite being only 30 words, is in all attributes still a story: it is an account of a character (she who looked) and event (the square of cement being looked at), real or imaginary, that is interrelated and sequential (the character looked, her eyes fell on the square of “cement-hued cement,” she noticed “a narrow frame of black tar” surrounding the square of cement, she reflected). It’s in the past. The adjectives “tar” and “cement-hued” are superfluous, almost comical, but they are there, serving no other function than appearance. What is the “story” about? Who is she? What kind of cement? Is it concrete? The kind used to make roads? Or prisons? What is “finished?” The story is simple, maybe: it’s about a way of seeing (hi André) “with respect.” Back again to words. The preposition “with” is used here in relation to something, defined as: “affected by (a particular fact or condition),” “indicating the cause of an action or condition,” and “because of (something) and as it happens.” Now “respect,” as in “a particular aspect, point, or detail,” due regard, or admiration. I think Williams is showing us that the best art, or the most meaningful—in the sense of what is indirectly expressed—is that which is stumbled upon, encountered by accident. Art is an imprint, hardening under the sun. It instills. It colors itself, exists only for itself. Art is an impurity. Art demands to be finished by its witness. But what is Williams actually describing? She isn’t. Words are insufficient instruments for essences, when they are merely glossed over for the benefit of fiction. Art has no reason or utility. Art invites. Like tar and cement, it preserves and perseveres. It is both monumental and elemental, a labor and an impartial luxury, a testament. To what? I don’t know. There’s a strange warmth in not knowing, in unknowing. Is the character who was looking at the block of cement the one who framed it with tar? Was she responsible for her own… remorse? Yes and no, I think. The indefinite article in “a solid square” and “a narrow frame” instead of the determiner certainly complicates things. Art is the experience of to be separated from and to submit to. For me, really, the question is, Can things just be? More importantly, What is being?

What is something you are working on now (writing or otherwise) that you are excited about? 

For a little over a year now I’ve been at work on a novel, for lack of better words, which I endearingly refer to as “the thing” and have tentatively titled Nevertheless. It’s an exercise in hunger, love, and language, about treadmills and grammar and being orphaned. Writing itself. I see no end in sight, that is, it seems to still have a little life left in it. As a rule I write painfully slow. I didn’t know I would be writing a book. Usually I write without knowing I’m writing, and once realized until I become famished. With “the thing” words have a habit of returning out of nothing long since I’ve believed them perished. There is what’s written and yet what to write. I know where I want to go with it—or, there are images and memories still left to forsake, words still left to mutilate—but not where it’ll end up, and that’s all well and good. If anything the longevity’s been a new writing experience, though I think “the thing” is maybe more faithful to the torrent of D/ED than some of the others that have come after. I’ve collected some of the work from around and since the D/ED sequences into a chapbook, which to my mind sounds nice, but at the moment I’m not so concerned with sending work out. What a relief! Demoralizing myself in the writing is more productive. I’d like to get back to capturing the cursory impulses again, though, to hastier suffocations, after the long thing has ceased in me.

"One of Me Wonders": An Interview with Mike Puican

Mike Puican has had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Bloomsbury Review, Cortland Review, and New England Review, among others. His poetry reviews have appeared in TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and MAKE Magazine. He won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for his chapbook, 30 Seconds. Mike was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team and for the past ten years has been president of the board of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago.

His poem, "The Current," appeared in Issue of Eighty-One of The Collagist. 

Here he speaks with interviewer Victoria DiMartino about the reinvention of oneself, being a disrupter in writing, and looking at oneself from the outside.

Where did you find the inspiration to begin this poem? As a reader, I felt that this poem’s grounding is in reality rather than a poetic fantasy. Did the inspiration for this poem spark out of a memory that you may or may not have included in here?

All the images are from my past. I am someone who has reinvented himself a few times in my life—athlete, anti-establishment radical, capitalist businessman, poet, activist for incarcerated writers, and others. With each reinvention, my inclination has been to pretend that anything that doesn’t fit my current persona didn’t exist. I’m now trying to understand this bundle of disparate directions and how it all originated from the same source.

The poem lists experiences from these different times with no interest in providing a narrative explanation. It’s a collage of disparate scenes joined only by the voice of the poet who is trying to understand how this can be explained. The closest the speaker can come is to attribute it to some unknown fire in his heart.

During the first two stanzas of the poem, the narrator starts all the lines with either “One of me” or just “One.” It seems though that as the narrator progresses through the poem they start to refer to themselves as a singular “He.” Would you like to speak to the reason behind this decision? Is it that the narrator is starting to become a singular form of themselves again, or that they may be starting to take claim for their actions?

I start out repeating “One of me” in each sentence to make sure the reader understands the perspective of the poem—the speaker is observing his life and acknowledges he’s had different identities along the way. Once that is established, I short-hand it by simply using “One.” With the shift to “He,” the speaker distances himself a little more and takes more of the perspective of an outside observer. This is the stance I wanted for the entire poem. I wanted the reader to think that these observations are being reported dispassionately despite the fact that I am clearly talking about myself.

At the end of every stanza, we are left to visualize an image. In the first three stanzas, we are left with images reflective of nature, but in the last stanza we visualize a woman in an unnamed color. In a frame of structure, do you prefer a more rigid format for your poetry, whether it be following a visual structure such as stanzas with the same number of lines, or in a thematic structure where a recurring theme is laced throughout the poem, but in the same place in every stanza?

As a writer (and in some ways as a person) I am a disrupter. I love to interrupt expectations in unexpected ways. For that to work in a poem, you need to create a frame or a pattern that you then disrupt. It works best when the disruption occurs at a turning point of the poem, as I have tried to do here.

The observations in this poem are mostly from an exterior viewpoint, as though someone on the outside could have reported it. Then, in the end, the poem shifts from exterior observation to internal emotions. My intention was to reveal a deeper emotional investment, one that, despite this looking back on my life, is still occurring.  One that I’m still trying to understand.

Have you read anything lately that you think everyone should take the time out to read?

The best book I’ve read in the past two years is Olio by Tyehimba Jess. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It presents the voices of extraordinary first-generation freed slaves who performed in minstrel shows. The depth of creativity and description of human experience is astonishing. It uncomfortably draws a straight line from those days to now.

I was knocked out by the recent memoir Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot—a Native American’s story of growing up in frightfully dysfunctional situations, some of which continue outside and inside her. It’s a fascinating account of her struggles for sanity and dignity as a woman, a mother, and a writer in a country where indigenous people are perceived of as “other.”

Do you have any upcoming writing projects that you’d like to share?

I’ve been working on a memoir for the past year or so. In the spirit of “The Current,” it tries to come to terms with the many directions my life has taken. It explores this through two opposing lenses: the desire to uncover some unifying guiding force in my life; and the acknowledgment that my goal has never been unity. To impose some idea of unity is likely to diminish the experiences I’m trying to write about. It’s still very much a work in progress.

"You Have to Pause": An Interview with Heather Nagami

Heather Nagami is a Kundiman fellow and the author of Hostile (Chax Press). Her poems have recently appeared in Zocalo Magazine and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She was a finalist for the 2015 Rita Dove Poetry Prize.

Her poems, "For What It's Worth" and "Courtesy of Strangers," appeared in Issue Eighty-One of The Collagist. 

In this interview, she speaks with interviewer Victoria DiMartino about the challenge of revision, the importance of wildlife and nature’s current state as inspiration, and stopping to pauce and reflect on the moment.

This poem is centered in a very specific place. From the details we can gather, the narrator is out west in a desert state. How did you write this poem? Did you find inspiration from the setting first or did the poem stem out of an experience similar to the one mentioned in the poem?

I began by writing about a situation I experienced, but as I developed the poem, I came to understand that its greater meaning stemmed from living in the Arizona desert, which offered the privilege of continual interactions with wildlife yet also made me increasingly worried for the situation of the local animals and plants.

The line “You have to pause, lift / your foot off the gas, stare / as she stares back, waiting” really caught my attention. This is one example of how the language is not only crisp and clear, but well thought out. Would you like to speak to the way you created this particular scene in the poem and how you developed the language that went into it?

The words themselves came pretty quickly; however, I went through many revisions of the line breaks and stanza breaks. With that second stanza in particular, I wanted to slow down the pace to mimic the poem’s plot—when the driver’s eyes meet the coyote’s eyes, that moment of negotiation between human and wildlife—and also to create a moment of reflection for the reader. Placing line breaks after each verb seemed most appropriate to reflect this pause, this feeling of holding one’s breath. I’d hoped the slower pace would signify the importance of the next lines, a look into a future that sends the driver on her merry way as the coyote focuses on her family’s survival.

Your poem conveys simplicity; not much occurs except an exchange between strangers. The piece is short and dense even with the crisp language I spoke of before. How did you go about developing a piece that was very centered in the present moment while still be conscious of all the other elements that are surrounding that moment?

Revising this poem was quite a challenge because I didn’t have a clear vision of the big picture at first. With most of my poems, I begin with an idea, and then the writing is all about finding the appropriate framework in which to house it. This poem, however, originated from that present moment you mention, and my initial revisions (e.g. splitting the poem into five stanzas for visual symmetry, adding superfluous details) seem haphazard when I look back on them now because they did not reflect the epicenter of the poem’s tension: my own anxiety about the state of Arizona’s wildlife and my feelings of guilt for living in an area that encroached upon the space of countless creatures who had resided there long before I had ever moved in. Once I understood the impetus for this poem, I was able to cut unnecessary lines and split stanzas in a way that enhanced the underlying meaning.

Is there a book that you’ve read more than once that you read when you need inspiration or comfort?

Yes. I read Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights.

Have you written anything lately that you’d like to share?

I recently finished writing a poem whose ideas had plagued my mind for over twenty years. After finally discovering the appropriate framework for them, I spent about five years writing the poem and revising it. It’s a serial poem that employs the language of standardized tests, grammar rules, and literary concepts to analyze the psychological impact of sexual assault and rape culture. It was a healing experience to write it, and I hope fellow survivors will find it healing to read. It’s called “Easy Grammar,” and it was published in Berkeley Poetry Review, Issue 48. It can be found online here: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bpr/48th-issue/.