"The Urge of What Might Be": An Interview-in Excerpts with Owen Egerton

Owen Egerton’s novel Everyone Says That at the End of the World is due out this April from Soft Skull Press. He’s also the author of The Book of Harold, the Illegitimate Son of God, which is currently in development as a television series with Warner Bros. Television. As a screenwriter, Egerton has written for Fox, Warner Brothers, and Disney studios. Egerton is also a regular performer with the Alamo Drafthouse’s Master Pancake Theater.

An excerpt from his novel Everyone Says That at the End of the World appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Owen Egerton answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Everyone Says That at the End of the World. Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

She turned up the volume till her ears hurt. That’s how she liked her music, just a little painful. She knew Mingus would approve. Hell, he put the pain in himself. He slammed two notes together that harmonized, but just barely, two notes that had to work at it. They weren’t a C and a G, more a C and an A-sharp. That’s how she saw her and Milton. No one would choose to put these notes together, no one but a mind like Mingus. And when Mingus did it . . . when he played or wrote or yelled, he said, “Yes, this is how it is supposed to be. These notes belong together.” He told the notes, “You can fight, you can twist, but know that you are home. This is where you are supposed to be.” And the notes listened. And the notes sang.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Deepak Chopra wearing nothing but an impressive erection.

3. When you do it, why?

He didn’t mind confusion. He was used to it. As a child the confusion would come in waves. Confusion and sadness. A home-desire sadness. Jesus-18 believed this home-desire was the primary emotion of all people. Home, he also felt, had very little to do with where one was born or raised. Home was the urge of what might be. What could and should be. Home was the kingdom rising up within the empire, the flower growing in the rock wall, the kind want emerging in the cool heart. He saw homesick souls in all he passed, no matter how foreign, how crippled, how cruel. He saw this home-desire even in the dead.

4. When you don’t, why?

So the Floaters built a hell in North Dakota. It was a nasty place.

Hell had no light. No sound. Hell was an itchy soul feeling. A restlessness coupled with a certainty that no rest exists. An aimless anger. A soul-deep ennui.

But (and this floored the Floaters) the occupants of hell all seemed incredibly content. A little research revealed that these people had experienced the itchy soul syndrome their entire lives. But now, in hell, the feeling was understood as punishment. Finally their misery had meaning. There was a point to an existence they, in their heart of hearts, felt to be pointless. The Floaters took note.

"Absurd Teenage Ambitions": An Interview with Tessa Mellas

Tessa Mellas is the 2013 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Her debut collection Lungs Full of Noise will be released from the University of Iowa Press in October of 2013. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is currently a senior lecturer at the Ohio State University.

Her story "Dye Job" appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Tessa Mellas talks to interviewer David Bachman about the work of lips, a girl’s questionable accomplishments, and the natural cruelty of teens.

1. At least twice in this piece, Ruth actually succeeds in gaining access to that for which she at one time reached, namely a grape supply and intimate proximity to Felix. How do you want the reader to view the accomplishments of this character - empowering, validating, compromising, sad, tragic, any or all or none of these?

Wow! Hard question to start with. I think that “compromising” is the best adjective you’ve chosen given that Ruth defies her own intelligence in eating fruit that she knows is “tainted” and in engaging with Felix in such a way. I do also see these actions as empowering and validating, though, albeit in misguided ways. At this point in her life, I think that Ruth needs to believe that she can do daring things that challenge her reputation as a studious innocent girl. I see Ruth as being on the cusp of great changes. This story seems to take place right before her friendship with Lily comes to an end. She is realizing that her relationship with Lily is not really a friendship, but she is using Lily’s condescension as an empowering device to become a stronger, more willful person. Though I do see these actions as sad, I also see them as evidence that Ruth will be a very different person in a few years, someone who is not so easily pushed around and someone who makes the right decisions for who she is rather than for who her friends or parents are.

2. Do you consider Lily’s treatment of Ruth especially cruel or is it just par for the course for characters of this age, who naturally have such volatile dispositions? Can you talk in general about how you designed the relationship between these two girls?

I do consider Lily’s treatment of Ruth to be especially cruel, but I also think that this treatment is extremely common for girls in both middle and high school. My own experience as a girl was very much like this. In the transition from elementary school to middle school, I found myself losing friends as they transitioned into the popular group and I got lost in a no man’s land of grouplessness. This seems to be par for the course. The girls with social power retain that power by verbally harassing girls with less social power. I taught high school for a few years and was also a counselor at summer camps, and this behavior never seems to change. I wrote Lily’s character by channeling the voices of certain students and classmates and imagined a relationship between Lily and an awkward introspective girl, who was just hanging onto that friendship, desperately, longingly, and perhaps knowing that it will soon come to an end. And when it does come to an end, perhaps it will feel like relief.

3. The first line of this story provides an image of a pair of lips sucking on fat grapes. The last scene is that of genitalia being brought to another pair of lips. Was this specific arc and resolution, if it is one, deliberate or is this how the story just unfolded? How conscious were you that the piece was beginning and ending with this oral imagery?

I don’t think that the first draft of the story was bookended with such sexual imagery, but a writer named Randy DeVita suggested it in a workshop at Bowling Green State University. Thanks, Randy! Since then, I have quite intentionally kept it in as I think it is thematically fitting.

4. What are the challenges and limitations of writing teenage characters? Or does the fact that younger people are less predictable and more capable of rash turns in behavior liberate the writer whose job it is to create them, in that anything can go and you can cast a wider net than you would with more predictable adults?

I do find it liberating to write about teenaged girls perhaps because this time in my own life seemed so traumatic and cruel. The angst of that age is so rife with possibilities for fiction. I think that you’ve nailed down many of the qualities of teenagers that make them so interesting in fiction. Also, as a teenager I remember feeling like I had so little control over my life and that helplessness produces so much angry energy that can just fuel the writing process even more than a decade after the fact.

5. Do earlier drafts of this piece offer different narrative arcs or resolutions? If so, are you interested in talking about those drafts and why you took the paths we see in the published draft?

The first draft of the story ended with Ruth (who previously had a different name) watching from Felix’s closet as another girl, the girl from band, gives Felix a blow job. Another writer Mark Baumgartner from my Bowling Green MFA group said, That’s not right. It’s gotta end with Ruth giving the blow job. At first I thought he was nuts. I thought, Ruth would never do that. But after two seconds of thought, I realize how completely right he was. Thanks, Mark! My fellow MFA writers are all such excellent writers and helped shape this and many other stories in extremely important ways. Earlier drafts also included a Greek chorus of mothers at PTA meetings in the school cafeteria, but those really weren’t working so they got the axe.

6. What are you writing these days?

I am currently working on a few creative nonfiction essays about environmentalism. Also, I am working on a novel with another teenaged protagonist. The novel is speculative and takes up environmental issues. I am hoping to get a lot of work done on it this summer. Thanks so much for asking, and thank you for your interest in my work. I was excited to see Lily and Ruth find a home in such a great journal.

"Remembering a Certain Memory an Uncertain Way": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Joseph Riippi

Joseph Riippi is author most recently of A Cloth House (Housefire Publishing, 2012) and Treesisters (Greying Ghost Press, 2012). His other books include The Orange Suitcase (2011) and Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! (2009), both from Ampersand Books. He lives with his wife in New York City. Say hello:www.josephriippi.com. 

An excerpt from A Cloth House appears in Issue Thirty-Three of the Collagist.

Here, Riippi answers questions in-the-form-of-excerpts--with further excerpts from A Cloth House.  Enjoy!

 1. What is writing like?

Scientists say a person remembers moments better when they hurt, when there is pain, because of the way the brain works, associatively. You remember not to touch
 an oven after touching it once. A dog learns not to pee 
in the house because its owner will scold and drag her outside by the collar. Harsh tones and dragging hurt. (p 80)

2. What isn’t writing like?

Something to pass the time. (p 88)

3. When you do it, why?

Our mother is dead and there are so many stories she never told. Not full, never finished. Maybe she never meant to. Whether or not she believed she had done sufficient things in life so that it could be considered worth something, for instance, I do not know for sure. 
 I would like to think she believed she had. I work at remembering her that way, if only because a mother deserves to be honored by her children, and because it might change the way others remember her. Life in death is memory only, familiar to imagination, a dead friend not wholly unlike the imaginary friends of childhood we encounter under sheets and in daydream daze. A person can do that, you see. Can work at remembering
 a certain memory an uncertain way, can mold it into something new, change history, a mother’s story. It is not like the love of our father’s god, which cannot be helped or changed or forced any more than lapping waves or crisping wind. Memory is nothing like love or ocean. (p 39)

4. When you don’t, why?

Who knows why we do what we do? Who is to judge?...Maybe all of this is just bad memories changing. Maybe you were never even born…I don’t remember quite right. (p 52, 62, 86)

"Because the Ocean Distilled": An Interview with Kendra DeColo

Kendra DeColo's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, CALYX, Muzzle Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, Split This Rock: Poems of Witness and Provocation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and residencies from the Millay Colony and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She is the founding poetry editor of Nashville Review and a Book Review Editor at Muzzle Magazine. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Her poems "The Vocalist," "I Heart Pussy," and "Blue and Green Music" appear in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Kendra DeColo speaks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about public spaces, scrawling, and decadence. 

1. Could you please discuss how you ended up writing “The Vocalist”?

“The Vocalist” is probably one of the hardest poems I have tried to write in terms of revision and content. It is more or less a narrative poem as it attempts to describe something that happened. The challenge was in understanding and coming to terms with the narrative’s angle: the speaker’s gaze. There is a lot of discomfort and ambiguity, and a lot of psychic drama in trying to occupy that space. The speaker therefore is evasive, slippery, and resistant to the very language she is trying to manipulate. However I did not intend for the poem to be self-conscious. I really just wanted to paint a portrait of this amazing singer, a trans inmate who I saw perform at a commencement ceremony at the women’s prison where I used to work. The experience of hearing them sing in this context brought up so many complicated feelings about gender, desire, witnessing. It is a poem I will keep writing.

2. In “I Heart Pussy,” you reimagine someone carving this phrase into a bench.  Why, out of all bathroom scrawls and bench carvings, did this particular one stick out (and thus seem worth writing about?)

I have always been drawn to (and repelled by) public spaces. I love the way a green park bench can trigger feelings of domesticity and transience, privacy and exposure. I associate them with paper bagged 40s and other fun things you can try to get away with in public. But really the place is a platform and signifier for what we see/hear everyday: how the female body is praised and objectified in a single gesture. I wanted to explore a premise in which these declarations are uttered in earnest and manifested in the world. Wouldn’t you want to live in a world where pussy is king?

3. Could you talk about the three-line “waterfall” stanza that you use in “I Heart Pussy” and “Blue and Green Music”? What draws you to this form on the page?

For me the 'waterfall' stanza’ evokes a sense of decadence and disintegration, like a chandelier in a flooded room. I love how the form becomes physical, exacting from the reader a kind of intimacy and dance as the eye moves along the body of the poem. It has a feel of turning (tuning), shape-shifting, and obscuring itself in the way of a sequined dress. I also see the form as a nod to poets I love such as Lynda Hull, Hopkins— lyric poets who search for grace in the ruins.

4. What could you recommend for us to read?

Lately I have been enjoying the understated sensuality and eroticism of the novelist Yasunari Kawabata. I have also been working my way through the collected journals of Tennessee Williams. (I truly believe he is my best friend). I find his descriptions of anxiety and self-loathing as a writer extremely comforting. I am excited for A. Van Jordan’s new collection, Cineaste, especially for this poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22987.

5. What can we expect from you writing-wise?

I hope to keep peeling back layers of my identity, exposing my fears and desires, and going after that shifty huckster I call my shadow-self. More than likely, you can expect more pussy-positivity, more longing, and more struggle.

"Roll for Traps": An Interview with Amorak Huey

Amorak Huey is a longtime newspaper editor and reporter who now teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Cincinnati Review, Linebreak, PANK, Subtropics, and other print and online journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak

His poem "Dungeon Master's Guide to Eighth Grade" appears in Issue Forty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Amorak Huey talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about panama jack shirts, games, and the shark tank of middle school.

1. Could you please discuss how you ended up writing “Dungeon Master's Guide to Eighth Grade”?

I wrote the first draft of this poem while completing the April poem-a-day challenge in 2012. For me, part of the appeal of that challenge is how it pushes me on subject matter. This poem appeared on April 13, when I’d pretty much run out of things in my immediate vicinity to write about (my annoyance with lingering wintry weather in Michigan, whatever I’d just seen on Facebook, what a pain it is to try to write a poem every day).

I don’t remember what brought Dungeons & Dragons to mind, but thinking about the game led to a string of memories and associations, so I retrieved my old Dungeon Master’s Guide from a mildewed box in the basement and found the epigraph. The poem developed from there.

It had been quite a while since I’d thought about Panama Jack shirts; it’s hard to overstate just how stupidly popular those were in my junior high, how must-have a part of everyone’s wardrobe. And parachute pants, good grief.

2. This poem does a really fantastic job of showing the lines drawn around a young person as the kids around them start to decide what is and is not cool. I wonder, though, why did you write this as a poem? How do you think this form fits the material?

One answer is that it’s a poem because poems are what I write. Poetry is how I interact with language and the world.

Another answer is that maybe that games and poems seek to order the world in similar ways, offering structure to make sense of the chaos.

3. Could you talk about the logic of using a game to understand the world? The speaker in this poems seems unable to decipher the world in another way. Or, perhaps, this way is just the most manageable.

Here’s how isolated I was in eighth grade: I never did find a peer group to regularly play D&D with; I had friends who played, but I wasn’t part of their game.

For a long time, I thought my eighth-grade experience was atypical, because I had been homeschooled and didn’t attend public school until that year. Talk about jumping into a shark tank: all those junior high hormones and hierarchies; I thought I was the loneliest person in the world. I found out much later that lots of people feel that way, that my precise experience might have been unusual but my emotions were far from it. The reaction I’ve gotten to my poem after it appeared in The Collagist has confirmed again that I am not alone, people telling me I had captured eighth grade as they remembered it, too.

Anyway, games have clear rules. There’s a manual. Things make sense and follow a pattern; the path to success is evident; the goal is explicit. Kill monsters, collect treasure. Junior high is the opposite of that. There are rules, but they’re not written down anywhere, and nothing makes sense, and the path is always obscured. You can’t plot your way through eighth grade social interactions on graph paper, and you have no idea what your strongest attributes are. Are you lawful neutral? Chaotic good? How would you even know?

Maybe it’s not just junior high. Maybe all of life is like that. How often would it be nice to have a Dungeon Master’s Guide to consult? I’m sounding kind of fatalist here, gloomier than I mean to. My life is great. Eighth grade wasn’t that bad, and it didn’t last very long (thank goodness).

4. Any reading recommendations?

As often as I can, I recommend Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual and Traci Brimhall’s Rookery, and Mary Ruefle’s book of lectures Madness, Rack, and Honey. Brilliance all around.

Collier Nogues’ On the Other Side, Blue and Catherine Barnett’s The Game of Boxes are two recent loves. I envy the poems in these collections.

5. What other writing projects are you working on?

Always writing the next poem. Occasionally trying to organize them into a manuscript – talk about a process for which I wish had a Dungeon Master’s Guide.