"To Both Need and Reject Order": An interview with Joshua R. Helms

Joshua R. Helms is Assistant Editor for Corium Magazine. Their work has appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, Gertrude, New England Review, Redivider, and Sonora Review, among others. Machines Like Us, Josh's first collection of poetry, will be published by Dzanc in 2015. Their photo is part of the Low Income Housing Coalition of Alabama's "Home Is..." campaign to secure dedicated revenue for the Alabama Housing Trust Fund (follow the links to learn more).

Their story, "Michael & His Brother," appeared in Issue Sixty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Joshua R. Helms talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about flash fiction, writing on the Greyhound, loss and violence.

In your story we have five sections that capture different moments in the brothers’ lives and their relationship with each other. The scenes themselves are told in chronological order. Did the writing process itself unfolded in similar fashion?

Not for these five sections, no. When I started writing “Michael & His Brother” about four years ago, I wrote several pieces/sections quickly and mostly in chronological order. Some of those were published. Then I took a long break to work on other projects (a poetry collection, a young adult novel, a hybrid project) and I wasn’t sure when/if I’d come back to “Michael & His Brother.”

After my long-term relationship ended last summer, I turned to writing (as I often do when shit goes awry). I spent some time trying to figure out which project to pick up, how to put my energy to use in a healthy way. It felt like the right time to return “Michael & His Brother,” to these characters I love dearly, to a narrative that I care so much about, and to a form—flash fiction—that (1) I greatly enjoy and (2) is good for baby steps (I really needed baby steps). I wrote a few pieces then, and a couple more in November while I was on a Greyhound headed to see friends and family.

The five flashes here were written out of order and a few years apart: I wrote Bus Stop and Pallbearer in 2011, then Explosions, Missing, and School Night in 2014. It was Gabe’s excellent editorial suggestion to present them chronologically, which I think created a really interesting mini-narrative of the brothers’ lives.

In drafting this story did you explore other moments between the brothers? If so, what was the revision process like? What were you looking for when it came to cutting out potential scenes? 

I had other moments to choose from (Christmas, Halloween, A Day at the Zoo) when putting this story together and I explored what it would be like to include those moments alongside or instead of some of the ones here. I’m an obsessive writer and I tend to write about the same emotions and experiences over and over again, so I considered, for instance, if the emotions Michael experiences in Explosions are more revealing or captivating than the emotions he experiences in Christmas, which, chronologically, happens not long after the events in Explosions. The moments were just so close and I thought Explosions was more interesting, so it stayed.

Ultimately, I picked the pieces that I felt were the strongest, the most interesting, the most revealing, the most arresting, and the most distinct from each other. I also tried to choose moments that made the most sense presented together as a story, as a sort of mini-narrative of the brothers’ lives, but also as an excerpt from something larger.

Violence and loss are present in each section. Were these issues that you wanted to explore going in or issues that arose during the writing of the story?

I knew going in that I wanted this narrative to be about Michael learning how to live and be a person without his brother, so this project chronicles his grief as he tries to move on after losing the strongest and most complex bond from his childhood and adolescence. Michael’s loss is a kind of violence itself, and is underscored by all of these individual moments of loss and violence that he and his brother experienced together. Some of my strongest memories of childhood and adolescence involve loss, violence, or both, so it felt right to explore these issues with Michael & His Brother, this narrative-in-flashes that is composed entirely of Michael’s strongest (and, often, most upsetting) memories of himself and his brother.

There were some specific issues around violence and loss that I wanted to explore with these particular pieces. Bus Stop was a way to write about the relentless and traumatizing homophobic harassment I experienced as a kid. I wrote Explosions because I was thinking about a similar car accident that happened when I was four or five. My parents often fought before they divorced, so that’s a sort of constant in the narrative. Pallbearer, School Night, and Missing all explore ways in which the brothers aren’t always able to see themselves as distinct individuals with separate experiences, which I think sometimes happens in families and relationships.

You write both fiction and poetry. Do you notice a difference in mindset when you sit down to write either form?

With poetry, I tend to write in bursts and flashes and not think too much about what’s happening early in the process. I like projects and I rarely write poems that are not directly in conversation with other poems I am writing / have written. Once I have several similar poems and/or poems with recurring characters, I consider the obsessions and concerns, then start to figure out a trajectory or goal for the project (which is not really my first mode of thinking for poetry) and write more poems to help realize that. This process was sometimes agonizing for my first collection of poetry—partly because I didn’t know how to assemble 43 poems into something that made sense and partly because the poems were so achingly personal. I eventually learned how to step outside of the project enough to arrange it into something cohesive. This process has been a bit smoother for the poetry collection I’m working on now.

With fiction, I sometimes have a trajectory or goal that I’m writing toward early on in the process. This isn’t always the case. Other times I just write and see what happens, but that can also make a confusing mess of things, which is sometimes productive, sometimes stressful, sometimes both. My writing process for fiction changed somewhat when I wrote my thesis, a young adult novel (and my first novel). When I started, I had five or six chapters full of plot conflicts and inconsistent characterizations. My super insightful advisor, Kellie Wells, suggested I outline the plot before moving forward. I was initially a bit anxious about this because outlining hadn’t really been part of my writing process before and I was worried about imposing a formula when it didn’t necessarily feel natural (I tend to both need and reject order). I got over myself and wrote the outline and it was one of the most helpful writing exercises I’ve ever done. I’ve outlined most of my fiction projects since.

What are you currently working on?

I’m writing and putting together my second collection of poetry, which includes surreal confessional poems from two projects, The New Promise and The Galaxy. Basically, each set of poems is a reimagining of the course of the same ill-fated romantic relationship. As the poems unfold, there’s a lot of thinking about how the unnamed characters’ identities are performed and changed, how their minds, bodies, and behaviors become unfamiliar, how their physical environments seem irrevocably altered and askew.

I’m also writing more pieces for Michael & His Brother. I’m looking at gaps in the narrative and working to fill them, to create moments that further detail the brothers’ fraught history, to further show the extent of Michael’s devastation. I’m trying to arrive at an ending that doesn’t feel too neat, but I’ve yet to get there.   

Who are some authors you’re reading?

Here are some writers I’m very excited about right now:

Katie Jean Shinkle’s novel, Our Prayers After the Fire, is amazing and full of gems like this: “Today we are pulling our teeth out with Father’s pliers, we want to see if we can make holes in our mouths, we want to see holes. We remember when our teeth were falling out, our teeth would be loose and our Father would tie a string around the doorknob to our bedroom and around our loose tooth and slam the door until it popped itself out.” Katie Jean’s book is breaking my heart in the best possible way. Please go buy the hell out of it.

I’m reading everything I can find by Danez Smith, like this wonderful poem included in The Collagist. And also this beautiful poem, “Tonight, in Oakland,” with lines like: “I ride my bike to a boy, when I get there / what we make will not be beautiful // or love at all, but it will be deserved. / I’ve started seeking men to wet the harvest.” His poems blow me away. I’m really excited to buy his book, [insert] Boy, when I get birthday money next month.   

Danielle Pafunda’s The Dead Girls Speak in Unison is arresting and brimming with unforgettable poems with lines like, “We’ll tell you / what a corpse is. // It’s a girl // with her shoes / on backward. // It’s a double- / jointed girl. // It’s a glass eye / in a glass jar / in the snapped jaw / of an alligator girl.” Her writing gives me chills. I’m reading her book, My Zorba, next.

Alexis Pope’s Soft Threat is excellent and there are many awesome lines like these from her poem, “Live Through This”: “To my knees I fall always / in your direction   My hands twist / into marvelous shapes   but the reaching / grows tired   Inside me there lives / an orchestra of dreams   The planets / have these other plans   I decide / to kill you so you will feel / only me forever”. I love this book a ton. Also, some of the poem titles reference Hole songs and the sections are titled with lyrics by Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson from Hole’s album, Live Through This. This is all very meaningful to me.

"To Delve into the Mania of My Quest": An Interview with Marin Heinritz

Marin Heinritz teaches journalism and creative writing at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, The Kalamazoo Gazette, and HippoCampus, as well as The Collagist and other publications.

Her essays, "Out of Body" and "Since you've been gone," appeared in Issue Sixty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Marin Heinritz talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about trauma, the second person, and retreating into contemplation.

Please tell us about the origins of your nonfiction pieces, “Out of Body” and “Since you’ve been gone.” What sparked the initial idea for each, and caused you to start writing the first drafts?

Both of these pieces are part of a memoir about coming of age with cancer. “Out of Body” was inspired by a literal out-of-body experience I had during my first chemotherapy drip to treat Hodgkin’s Lymphoma when I was 17. It was a defining moment, or maybe an inciting incident, after which nothing, particularly my relationship to my body, was the same. I had been having difficulty writing into the trauma of cancer, because it was so painful to relive, but that was a moment I needed to get down before the rest of the narrative could unfold.

“Since you’ve been gone” came out of an assignment my dear friend and colleague, Diane Seuss, gave in a poetry workshop: write whatever it is you keep out of your writing. So much of the writing in my cancer narrative was very controlled, and this was the invitation I needed to bring in a little more lyricism. And to delve into the mania of my quest for self healing. I kept it hidden because when I stepped back and looked at my behavior, it seemed like high maintenance at best and absolute madness at worst.

Can you talk about the decision to write “Out of Body” in second person? What kind of effect do you think replacing “I” with “you” might have on your audience?

On top of the challenges of writing about trauma in first person, I was feeling a bit trapped by the confines of third person in journalism and first person in personal essay, the two forms in which I’ve most frequently written. I wanted to stretch some boundaries and play with point of view in nonfiction. Second person seemed to fit the subject of this piece, something I’d rarely spoken of, and never written about. My intention was that it would recreate for the reader the duality I experienced in that irreconcilable separation of self from body. And it turned out to be the key that unlocked the door into the strange cruelties of what happened in the hospital.

“Since you’ve been gone” consists of one paragraph of only about 500 words, and yet the content of the essay spans so many areas of the globe and presumably a wide swath of time. Was it difficult to condense so much material into such a tight package? How do you accomplish this level of concision?

This was one of those pieces that just arrived, as if by some kind of divine intervention. In many ways, the precision came from the opposite of control; I simply let loose—something I have a much easier time doing on the dance floor than on the page.

On your Kalamazoo College webpage, you stated, “Today, the ability to take in information from various sources, process it critically, and then tune it out and listen to your gut is even more crucial as communication technologies pull us into a world of hyper-destructive comparison that moves at an insane pace. Stepping off the spinning top and retreating into contemplation is the practice of writing creative nonfiction, and in many ways, it’s my life’s work.” Could you elaborate on these ideas? What do you do exactly when you retreat into contemplation? And could the vantage point atop the spinning top ever be a benefit to the nonfiction writer?

Oh, certainly! One must spin to have something to write about. And we create from chaos, don’t we? But we cannot constantly live in it.

For me, retreating into contemplation means doing what I must to tune into that inner voice that gets drowned out by the noise of the world. I like the noise of the world much of the time, but sometimes I need to shut it out. I spend time off the grid in a cabin in the woods; I turn off the phone, the computer, the t.v.; I begin my days in silence and meditation. I regularly do a writing exercise in which I write for 10 minutes in the present moment. Deliberately slowing down is necessary for me to remember who I am in my own context and in the natural world. That’s the most honest place I know, and therefore the best place from which to write.

What writing projects are you working on now?

The cancer memoir has morphed under the influence of my mother’s death into a more complex story about how illness shapes identity, specifically femininity—and the limits of care despite the limitlessness of love. She cared for me when I was sick as a teenager, and I cared for her when she was sick and dying; I am weaving those two narratives together. We were the loves of each other’s lives, and I’m the one who has lived to tell the complex tale.

What have you read recently that you would like to recommend?

I loved Joe Wilkins’ The Mountain and the Fathers for its poetry and commitment to the notion that we are of the land though we do not own it. I was blown away by Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams for its profound insights and form, an elegant blend of reportage, memory, and reflection. I also was heartened recently to read Terry Tempest Williams’ An Unspoken Hunger. Her elegance and deceptive simplicity offered exactly the kind of earthy feminism I was in need of at the time.

"When Things Get Too Messy, New Life Starts to Form": An Interview with Tasha Coryell

Tasha Coryell is an MFA Candidate at the University of Alabama where she is working on a novel about murderous sorority girls. Her work has been featured in [PANK], The Collagist, Word Riot and other journals. She has work forthcoming from WhiskeyPaper, Vending Machine Press, and Rappahannock Review. You can find Tasha tweeting under @tashaaaaaaa and more work from her at tashacoryell.com.

Her story, "Things that come from inside us," appeared in Issue of Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Keaton Maddox about abjection, consumption, and sororities death pledges.

You begin with an inciting condition: the protagonist has an unexpected pregnancy. However, she never appears emotionally impacted by its introduction into her life. Rather, she moves through the mediocrity of her day as if nothing has changed. She is still successful (if you can call it that) at everything she does, and then she seems to escape the circumstance without consequence. How did you go about creating this sense of disconnect without pushing the story into numbness?

When I wrote this story I was taking a gender theory course and writing a paper about Kristeva’s idea of abjection. Abjection refers to people and places that have been cast-off or othered, but also can refer to various bodily fluids. Judith Butler has a really great line where she says:

The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-diffrentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.

In this story I wanted to create a character who embodied this notion of the abject. She’s a person who has been relegated to the outside of society, she constantly has various fluids moving in and out of her body and she is carrying around this baby that was just inside of her.  I wanted the emotion from the story to come out of the things happening to her body rather than the protagonist’s emotional state. I don’t even know how I would begin to approach the protagonist’s emotional state in this story. I also think reading it aloud completely changes how the story is perceived. I read it at a reading once and the audience was laughing the entire time, which was a surprise and also not a surprise. Physical discomfort makes people laugh a lot.

I frequently get asked about the lack of emotion in my stories and honestly when I’m writing I never think about it like that. I think maybe I’ve watched too much television so my understanding of how emotions work is flawed or maybe I was told “show don’t tell” too many times as a developing writer. I’m a very emotional person and I think, especially as a woman, emotional people have a constant awareness of how much emotion they are showing and are constantly trying to quell whatever emotions they have. I think this comes out in writing as well.

Building off the idea of consequence, the ending is so powerful because the reader never gets to experience the closure of her finally feeling something. If you had included an additional scene of her mourning, it would have been too predictable. If she still felt nothing, than she would no longer be believable. Walk me through your process for creating this finish and what that decision making process was like for you.

Finishing stories is the hardest thing to do. I find that writing a story is a very pleasurable experience. I usually write a first draft of a story, depending on the length, in a several day period and because it’s so fast, the experience is really enjoyable and fun. The end is usually dictated by how the writing of the story is going rather than by a set ending I have in my head. I never really know how I am going to end things. Things in life don’t really end like that, so often it’s difficult to end a story that way. Writing novels is easier in that sense. A novel can go on and on forever. A story though needs to be contained in a much smaller space. I always feel resistant to including a death at the end of a story. Death always seems too easy and yet in this story I wasn’t prepared to cope with the life of a child who was born in a fast food restaurant and by the end of the day has had their first club experience. If the baby dies, there doesn’t need to be that explanation of life and the story can be encapsulated in a single day.

The setting seems to take on a life of its own, even though we never have time to settle into any of the locales. The protagonist drifts in and out of them quickly and fluidly, yet they are all so vibrant. How did you go about working location into your story? What role do you believe setting plays in the constructions of narrative?

As a kid my parents never took me to fast food restaurants except once every summer when we were driving to my cabin, so as a result I’ve always been fascinated by fast food restaurants. I love the artifice of receiving a bag full of food wrapped in individual packages, there’s something that feels so satisfying about that act. Fast food restaurants are also culturally considered locations of abjection. They have drive thrus, which are sold as a convenience, but also means that people are able to eat fast food without actually ever going inside of a restaurant and facing all the smells and plastic that the experience involves. There are also a lot of strange events that take place at fast food restaurants. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant and I think Burger King restrooms were the number one location that surprise babies were born, which was where I got the idea for the opening of the story. In general I always have a lot of food in everything I write because most of my life surrounds eating. I don’t understand stories where people don’t eat or don’t use the bathroom.

I write about jobs that people I know have had a lot. My little brother worked in a gas station in high school and as a result I place a lot of stories in gas stations. I also knew someone who worked in a call center one summer and that’s how I got the idea for this story. I try to write about spaces that are foreign or uncomfortable to me. I am a very routine person. I go to the same places all the time. If I were going to write about just the places I go, everything would be really boring.

Clubs are the scariest places in the world to me, so I write about clubs a lot too. I have never really been to clubs. I think am writing about the conceptual club in my head rather than the actual club. I have always been scared of parties in a similar way. Parties and clubs are the coalescence of humanity. Everyone is intoxicated and trying to look their best, but at the end of the night no one really looks good and just wants to eat something greasy. There are all these expectations set at the beginning of the night that are never really met. People want to find love in the club and mostly they just find themselves at the 24 diner with smudged eyeliner afterwards.

What are you writing?

The biggest thing I’m working on is a novel about sorority girls who kill people as part of their pledge process. The tagline would be something like “killing is the secret that holds them together for all eternity.” In undergrad I helped found a chapter of a sorority, which started as sort of a joke and now is embedded in the history of the sorority forever. I’m worried they will retroactively kick me out after I finish this novel. I’m always interested in exploring gender construction through writing and sororities are just the strangest places regarding gender and power dynamics.

I’m also working on a series of prose poems surrounding a single character, “Marianne” who eats a lot of things and breaks a lot of babies. Eating and babies have always inexplicably been my favorite things to write about. I don’t know if it’s going to be book length or chapbook length. Initially I wanted to make a chapbook, but then it was suggested I make it a book. Probably it will just sit on my computer until I figure it out.

What are you reading?

I’ve been doing a lot of research for my book about sorority girls. I recently read Dirty Rush, which is a true-to-life novel about a sorority scandal and I am working my way through the Total Frat Move book. Sororities and fraternities are strange places because they are the convergence of so many social pressures and norms and yet they still have this guise of serving the community. Dirty Rush was a big surprise because the protagonist was a gender and women’s studies major and very invested in gay rights, but continually throughout the book she called her sorority sisters and biological sister “bitch,” and it’s these incongruities that I’m interested in looking at. Pledged was also a great read. It was written when people still used AOL instant messenger so there is a lot of Missy Elliot in AOL messenger away messages. It really made me nostalgic for away messages as a form of writing.  

I also recently read Brandi Wells This Boring Apocalypse, which I highly recommend. Brandi and I frequently talk about our food desires and I think this manifests itself in various ways in our writing. She has a really good line where she says, "It is hard to distinguish between a person who you love and a person you intend to consume" and I think this is so perfect.

"The Mystery of Sweetness from Poison": An Interview with L.M. Meyers

Poems and essays by L.M. Myers have appeared or are forthcoming in Tule Review, Shadowgraph Magazine and The Massachusetts Review. She lives in Napa, California.

Her poem, "New England Peach," appeared In Issue Sixty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with Christina Oddo about incompleteness in a poem, the wayward tug of allusion, and attending to the real world.

What guided your decision to use four-line stanzas?

‎The four-line stanzas suggest the structure of a sonnet, as does the poem's rhetoric, which proceeds as an argument of negative definition via opposites, or at least via items that stand in some kind of tension (George Herbert's devotional sonnet "Prayer I" is the primary influence).

So the poem embraces certain elements of formal order.‎

However, the poem lacks the traditional closing couplet of a sonnet. Although it sounds and feels "done" at the end, its modified form implies incompleteness,‎ a want of closure. 

(The form of a poem being one part of its dialogue—in this case, initially seeming orderly, but containing discordant and missing pieces, like a man in a crisp Italian gabardine suit and horsehide shoes with no laces.)‎

Aspiring young writers are constantly looking for ways to develop fresh, weighty, and provocative images. The diction and unique word play used in this piece exemplify innovative ways of rendering new images.  How do these images work with the title to create the overall theme of the work?

I've struggled with metaphor and wordplay in my poems—sometimes the allusions would crowd out reality. In this poem, I first established the nominal subject matter (cf. the title) and form, which established some limits. Then I let sound and rhythm be my guide into exploration of a particular feeling. When the mental Rolodex started its associative spew, it was at least churning in a somewhat more, ah, on-topic way. 

That said, the wayward tug of allusion and maybe some sonic qualities at times pulls the poem further away from real things than I would like. But I let those parts stand, because they ‎seemed emotionally in tune. 

‎(I'm not sure the balance is right—I'd likely make different choices were I writing it today. But I am comfortable with the poem's emotional integrity.‎)

References to things found in nature help develop the raw sentiment of this piece. What significance do the references to seasons and months, for example, hold for you as the writer?

Attending to the real world—be it a tree outside the window, or cracks in a sidewalk, or family or political relationships—is for me essential in steering imaginative flight‎. Nature is both a ubiquitous imposing force and a site of projection. The challenge, for me, is to be clear about the give-and-take between mind and world, of what items or forces in the world I am transforming into a figure for my own purposes.

‎When I was living in New England, the seasonal changes impressed me greatly. As a Californian, I had never experienced such brevity of spring, nor such drawn-out misery of winter (cf Boston right now!). March, for instance—it never ends! All is gray and brown and drawn, no buds to speak of. This was alien to me.

The first Boston-area fall I experienced was a glorious affair, and seemed never to end. The fall color was intense, and the warmish days lasted well into November. And the winter that followed was really quite mild and sometimes wonderful. 

This, it appears, was an anomaly. ‎

The next summer drained rapidly into a fall that was filled with difficulty for me and outright tragedy for loved ones. And the trees--those elms whose leaves had once been jewel-like in their intensity, as if celebratory in their being, were instead managing to put on only a sort of grayed-out peach--which at any other time I would have thought lovely. Instead, it only confirmed to me that the world was giving up on beauty. 

Now back in California, I feel less elegiac about the weather. I notice the passage of time less acutely—here, the seasons grade into one another more gently. I suppose my life changes have been gentler and easier, as well. But my New England friends might say that California just makes one blithely inattentive to one's mortality!

What are you currently reading? 

Because I spend the majority of my time caring for (as in, chasing around) my one-year-old son, my reading is very choppy and interrupted. ‎

‎I've just read Katherine Larson's Radial Symmetry,‎ finished my first read-through of Claudia Rankine's Citizen, and should soon begin either Morri Creech's The Sleep of Reason or Hassan Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition. I'm also hoping to get to Eula Biss's On Immunity soon. 

I've also been slowly chipping away at Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, when I can handle the subject matter. And I've been enraptured by Patrick Modiano's Suspended Sentences. I barely started Peter Brown's Through the Eye of a Needle, but might not get back to it for a while—nor to David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years.‎ 

But the one that's been leaving the deepest traces is Virginia Woolf's Writer's Diary, which is Leonard Woolf's compilation of writing-related excerpts from her diaries. V. Woolf seems to survive in the world by channeling her intense, labile emotionality and sometimes uncomfortable self-awareness into acute observation of the textures of her immediate world—physical, emotional, social. In this way, she reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop. Writing becomes the place where the whole person can belong, as perhaps it can nowhere else.‎  

What are you writing?‎

‎Right now I am struggling with a revision of a long poem about Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo's 2,000-pound painting-sculpture, "The Rose". I looked at some of George Oppen's poem, "Of Being Numerous", to figure out how to handle some stanzaic and section issues that were gumming up the pacing. But I am still working on making the poem into a place where the painting fully "speaks out" (aka "ekphrasis"). 

I also have been mulling a long sequence based on an ancient text called "The Acts of Paul and Thecla". ‎The sequence is in many voices. I hit some structural and narrative issues about five or six years ago, and haven't figured out how to proceed since. Although, I was flipping through some Anne Sexton the other day, and might now have some better thoughts about what to do next. Hard to say.

Other than that, since reading Woolf I have been making notes towards a weird essay-like-thing on one's first memory, the emergence of self-awareness, and shame. ‎

‎

"I Was Steeped in All These Ghosts": An Interview with Anna B. Sutton

Anna B. Sutton is writer and publisher from Nashville, TN. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Third Coast, The Boiler, Southeast Review, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Brevity, Phoebe, and other journals. She received her MFA from UNC Wilmington and a James Merrill fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. She is a poetry editor at Dialogist, nonfiction reader at Gigantic Sequins, co-founder of the Porch Writers' Collective, web editor at One Pause Poetry, and works for a publisher in North Carolina.

Her essay, "Ghosts," appeared in Issue Sixty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Anna B. Sutton talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about revisions, vulnerability, and Wilmington, North Carolina.

Please tell us about the origins of your essay “Ghosts.” What sparked the initial idea or caused you to start writing the first draft?

When I started this piece, I was twenty-five and just realizing what it might mean to let go of some of the things that were haunting me, what we somewhat unfairly refer to as “baggage”—old pain.

During this time, I lived in the strangest town, Wilmington, NC, which has an inescapable weight to its air, the constant sense of an other, as well as many purported hauntings. It is the city equivalent of catching a shadow moving out of the corner of your eye. Unlike Savannah or New Orleans, the eeriness in Wilmington is not laced with Southern gothic charm. It feels dangerous and quite oppressive. Although I was in a warm and productive MFA program full of wonderful people, we all felt at a constant sense of unease.

Because I was steeped in all these ghosts, I wanted to explore the idea of being haunted in different ways—an unexplainable encounter in the old building where I worked, the Seneca Guns phenomenon, the death of a friend, the loss of an organ, scar tissue…all these disparate things that clung to me.

Concision is a major part of what makes this essay so powerful. A great deal of material—people, places, events, emotions—is packed into these five brief paragraphs. How did you achieve this economy of words? Does this level of brevity come through in a first draft, or is it cultivated through revisions?

Revisions. Revisions. Revisions. Revisions. While I always lean toward concise language, that doesn’t automatically make my early drafts clear and tight.

With nonfiction especially, I tend to fall into the trap of wanting to tell the whole story. Specifically, my whole story. Unfortunately, a balloon only inflates so much before it pops. I’m learning to prioritize information, to balance between enough and too much. What is important to me as a person can sometimes be a burden to me as a writer.

What seems to work is to let myself say everything I think I need to, until the piece hits a wall or crumbles under its own weight. Then I go back and cut away what isn’t necessary. I can usually trust my gut and my ear to make that determination, even if it takes a little time. I might spend months fretting over a sentence that doesn’t feel or sound right, moving and rephrasing it, only to glance at it one day and realize it isn’t vital.

If prose writing is a subtractive process for me, poetry is usually additive. I tend to write first drafts very quickly, and they are often only the meat, no bones. Then, I have to go back and add the supporting structure.

Most of your writing is poetry, but you have also published both nonfiction and fiction. What lessons have you learned from poetry that have informed how you write prose, or vice versa?

I think the primary lesson I take with me from poetry into prose is that language is important. It needs to be handled with care and intention. When I write an essay or a story, I read it aloud to myself. I want it to sound good, to hit the ear right. If I speed up or slow down, stumble or stutter, I want it to serve a purpose. It can be exhausting, and it’s a lot tougher than when I do this with poems—by the end of a prose writing session, I usually sound like Selma Bouvier—but it makes a difference.

And then, writing prose has opened up my poetry. I have written poetry for most of my life, feel the most comfortable with it, and have the greatest understanding of my inherent voice in that genre. When I started writing prose seriously, it challenged all these habits. Poetry can also be a dangerously solitary, intimate experience. Prose, in a weird way, feels more social and has taught me how to write something that is complete not just for me but for the reader.

In an interview with Grab the Lapels, you said, “I can think of a few poets from workshops whose images are so enviable, so original, so gorgeous, and so tightly phrased, but there isn’t a connection. It’s a floating image, like a really beautiful painting of a horse. Great for Jack Donaghy’s office, but ultimately forgettable.” Can you speak about how this problem might be solved? How might a writer go from just a beautiful image to establishing that real connection?

Man, if I knew a failsafe way to do that, I would spend so much less time revising and fielding rejection letters. This is something I’ve seen in peers and definitely in myself. I used to think I needed to keep secrets from my readers because that would make the writing more sophisticated, which was the exact wrong thing to do. Sophistication comes from knowing how to use your language to tell the truth, but I was using it to hide behind.

I didn’t want to be earnest because I didn’t want to be uncool; I didn’t want to be honest because I was afraid to show my vein. Especially writing about the female experience, I worried readers would think I was crazy or inappropriate. I creatively slut-shamed myself.

The turning point came in a visiting writer workshop I took with Mary Ruefle. She is this incredible, otherworldly, spirit witch genius who can see right into your soul, and that woman knows how to cut the crap. In our one-on-one meeting, I showed her a poem that I thought she would like. Instead, she went through line by line, stanza by stanza, and kept saying, “This doesn’t make sense. What do you mean?”

Obviously, Mary Ruefle could have “interpreted” my little poem with her ears plugged and a blindfold on, but the point was to get me to tell her why I was writing the poem at all. What it was about to me and what I hoped it would reveal to a reader. When I told her, all she did was look at me and ask, “Then why didn’t you just say that?”

So, after that, I went back and addressed older pieces like “Ghosts.” I made sure I was being honest about why I was writing, and in turn, my writing became more truthful and therefore more capable of striking a nerve in a reader.

Connections aren’t made with readers unless you reach out first. I guess that’s what it is. Don’t get so enamored of your cleverness, so afraid of your vulnerability, that your writing becomes closed-off. This isn’t to say that you should cut your beautiful images and interesting language, only that they can be a scaffolding instead of the entirety of the piece.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I have been writing a short story about Wilmington since July. With poetry and nonfiction, the trajectory of the piece is somewhat laid out for me. With fiction, it’s my responsibility to direct it. I’m still learning how to do that.

Otherwise, I’m starting a second book of poems. The first one is still out there trying to find a home, but it feels done, or as done as it’ll get without an editor. I’ve been doing a lot of research about animal parenting and conservation efforts, and I’m trying to figure out how to turn this pile of new poems into a cohesive manuscript.

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

I work at a publishing house and have been busy editing a novel that I’m very excited about. We’ve also been busybusybusy with title submission season. That has left a large stack of books on my bedside table and a promise to read them soon.

These include Maria Hummel’s House and Fire, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (which everyone and their mother says is amazing).

A book that broke my heart in the last year was T.J. Jarrett’s Zion (also, please go now and read her first book Ain’t No Grave more than once because she is a woman who knows how to write without fear). And I’m hoping that if I keep rereading Binocular Vision and Bobcat, I’ll figure out how to successfully shape a short story.

"Ask Me How I’ve Saved Us": An Interview with Mai Der Vang

Mai Der Vang’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review Online, Radar, Asian American Literary Review, Weave Magazine, Apogee, among other publications. Her work has been anthologized in Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Mai Der is a Kundiman fellow and has completed residencies at Hedgebrook.

Her poem, "When the Mountains Rose Beneath Us, We Became the Valley," appeared in Issue Fifty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Mai Der Vang speaks with interviewer Darby Price about origin-making, preservation, and how poetry can take us deeper into hiding.

Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of your poem, “When the Mountains Rose Beneath Us, We Became the Valley”?

I wrote this piece in the spirit of a poem by Traci Brimhall, a poet whose work I return to quite often. If you place my poem alongside her poem, “Late Novena,” you might notice how my lines attempt to engage with hers on a structural level. As for the poem’s subject matter, I was attempting to write a piece to explore the death of my uncle who lived out of state. Upon receiving the news, my father flew immediately to be at my uncle’s hospital bedside even though he had already passed. There was something intensely sad and innocent about my father’s demeanor as he grieved over the phone. He said to me “your uncle is gone” and the sound of his voice reminded me of the purity of sadness in a child’s voice. Beyond being struck by that memory, there are also ways in which this poem attempts to leap from the effects of loss in order to explore nuances of preservation.

At its heart, this piece seems to be wrestling with questions of legacy and history—a personal history as well as a cultural history. One particularly important moment comes at the end of the poem, when the speaker says, “Ask me to build our temples/ So rooted, so stone, we won’t ever die out.” I’m really drawn in by the weight of responsibility in those lines. Can you talk about this space or role in which the speaker finds herself or himself?

I really struggled with that ending. Sometimes when I re-read that line, I feel its vastness and how the weight of the words seems so far beyond me. I am still unsure of what to make of it, to be honest. Often, as poets, we’re told to question our writing and ask ourselves whether or not we “earned” that ending or line, or whether or not what precedes has generated enough collective heft to warrant a particular ending or line. I’d like to think I earned it. But I do feel that the overt quality of this poem’s ending can jar the language a bit. On the other hand, sometimes there’s no better way to say something than simply by just saying it. I value the way in which the closing statements function like a command, are assertive and have a kind of absolute presence to them. This effect is even more important to me as a Hmong-American writer coming from a culture rooted in oral tradition without a definitive written and literary history.  How does one grapple with loss in the face of sustaining a culture that does not have a thoroughly documented history? I feel this poem wrestles with that larger question in light of personal and family history.

Throughout the poem, there’s a blend of modern-feeling, more familiar imagery (“your brother’s/Final breath on the hospital bed”) with wonderfully mythic and unfamiliar imagery (“Can a unicorn kindle the night,/ Haloed by its flame, torches jutting/ From its head”). What were some of your goals with mingling the familiar with the unfamiliar?

Ultimately, for me, I sense that blending the familiar with the unfamiliar can help me get back to what might be familiar. And by subverting my own expectation of what I think the image should be doing, I somehow move closer to realizing the many possibilities of where I can take that image. More importantly, I’m drawn to how our imagination can distort what we know and are familiar with, sometimes doing so in ways that can disturb or enlighten in a dark manner. Strangely, at times, it is a way of challenging realism as a paradoxical means to get more real, or closer to the core of the matter or emotion. Other times, it is a type of mythmaking or origin-making that comes as a result of not having a clear sense of a documented history. In the same way that there are no real answers to the questions I pose in the poem, it feels like there are no affirmative answers to the questions I have about my cultural history. Poetry has been a way for me to ask questions and attempt to formulate my own answers. I find myself pulling from a foreign imagination, in particular, because I know most of the images don’t exist. But I like thinking that including these images in a poem allows for them to be that much more possible and within reach.

Many things are hidden in this poem: a rainforest in a belly, a garden in a piece of paper, a poem hidden with “the warsick warrior”. How does this tension between what exists vs. what is unseen or unknown play into the poem’s main theme(s)?

Good question. I don’t know how to explain it, but perhaps this may go back to the poem’s constant aching over questions and answers, what is known or unknown about a cultural past, what is revealed versus what is hidden. Like other poets, I find myself naturally gravitating toward always wanting to hide things in a poem as opposed to needing to expose everything. I can’t explain it exactly, but it’s strange how intense and intimate poetry can be that it can take one deeper into hiding.

What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?

Right now, I’m reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Brynn Saito’s The Palace of Contemplating Depature, along with some older work by Vijay Seshadri.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’ve been pouring over a collection of my poems as a potential first manuscript. I’ve also been exploring the possibility of a project-based collection that will encompass the Hmong war experience. And as if that is not enough, I’m dreaming up the possibility of starting a California Central Valley-based literary journal with a few of my colleagues from the Hmong American Writers’ Circle.