"The Thin Scrim Between Dark and Dawn": An Interview with Wendy Chin-Tanner

Wendy Chin-Tanner is the author of the poetry collection Turn (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014) which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards and co-author of the graphic novel American Terrorist (A Wave Blue World). Her poetry has been nominated for the Best of the Net Prize and the Pushcart Prize, and has been featured at a variety of venues including The Rumpus, Vinyl Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Normal School, The Huffington Post, RHINO Poetry, and The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge. She is a founding editor at Kin Poetry Journal, poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown, and staff interviewer at Lantern Review.

Her poem, "This Bed This Room," appeared in Issue Seventy-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Wendy Chin-Tanner speaks with interviewer Jason Gray about childbirth, the universality of pain, and doing things in threes.

How did you come to write this poem?

This poem was written in the first months following the birth of my second daughter during what is commonly referred to as “the fourth trimester.” I often find inspiration in the body, specifically in the juxtaposition between the world of the mind and corporeal reality. What interests me about childbirth as a subject for literary inquiry is the twinning of the creative force with the abjectness of the body. Many of the world’s spiritual traditions, both eastern and western, explore the meaning of the body in pain and the universality of pain, how physical suffering is the common denominator of being alive. Think of the Buddhist principle that life is suffering. Think of Christ on the cross. In exploring the relevance of these venerable spiritual traditions to the suffering of the female body, specifically the maternal body, I find the postpartum space to be a fruitful poetic garden. Childbirth is a liminal space and the confinement of the immediate postpartum period allows for a lingering between one world and another, where the membrane is thin. To write from that space is to enact one of the defining characteristics of poetry: the act of verbalizing the nonverbal. To write from that space also creates a feminist counternarrative to the longstanding mainstream contention that the subject of motherhood is not one of serious literary endeavor. I beg to differ.

Why did you decide on lines of three syllables each? Are syllabics a usual form for your poems to take?

The poems in my forthcoming second collection "Anyone Will Tell You” are preoccupied with an investigation of form and its subversion as an expression of the relationships between gender and identity, parent and child, self and other, the personal and the political, humanity and the environment, and the earthly and the cosmic. Within that investigation, I started out working mostly with blank verse couplets but then, in conjunction with the birth of my second daughter, I began to write primarily on my iPhone's Notes app while pacing the halls with the baby in a sling to keep her asleep. This rhythmic movement coupled with the restriction of that tiny screen led to the development of a new form consisting of three syllables per line and three lines per stanza, which I think of as trisyllabic triplets or 3x3s. Eschewing punctuation and most capitalizations, on a technical level, I discovered that 3x3s are highly fluid with a multitude of  elisions that work with and rely on the rhythm of the English language to expand the possibilities of meaning from line to line.

How does the presence of the many instances of internal rhyme (skin/thin; moon/spoon; night/flight) in concordance with or contrast to the full rhyme that exists between the two last stanzas (rest/breast) affect the poem, in your mind?

I’m interested in general in the way that internal rhyme lends itself to a quieter, less percussive, more subtle, and fluid musicality than end rhyme, which I think works well with the elisions that the 3x3 poetic form employ, and in particular, I find that internal rhyme suits the tone and narrative content of this poem. The masculine rhyme at the end of the poem serves as a kind of sonic punctuation signaling a sense of conclusion to the ear. In thinking about the natural iambic pulse of English and how it informs the comprehension and interpretation of language, I experimented with different compositional strategies for making meaning, notating, and directing the way in which the poem might sound and be read; its beats, its rests, its cadence.

What are you reading?

Meg Wolitzer’s “The Female Persuasion” and Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s “Beast Meridian.”

What are you writing?

A novel set in 1950s NYC and rural Louisiana.

"My Nonfiction Is Fictional": An Interview with Matthew Vollmer

Matthew Vollmer is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech and is the author of Future Missionaries of America, inscriptions for headstones, and Gateway to Paradise. With David Shields, he is the co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Documents, and other Fraudulent Artifacts. He also edited A Book of Common Prayer, which collects the invocations of over 60 writers. His next book, Permanent Exhibit, is forthcoming.

His essay, "Sinkhole," appeared in Issue Ninety-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Matthew Vollmer talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about juxtaposition, stream-of-consciousness writing, and turning experiences into myth.

Please tell us about the origins of your essay, “Sinkhole.” What sparked the initial idea?

I wrote “Sinkhole” during a time when I had assigned myself to produce work especially of this nature—that being a “day-driven” kind of essay, in which I paid close attention to the particular and idiosyncratic motions of a mind in search of both meaning and senselessness. In other words, I wanted to capture and reproduce, as realistically as possible, the movements of consciousness as they pertained to my present dispositions. I would begin with an idea—in this case, the notion that one should not, at the beginning of the day, turn first to one’s phone—and proceed from there, shifting as instinctually and freely as possible from one association to the next, working up a kind of rhythm that hopefully led “somewhere.”

The essay consists of one paragraph, about 1,500 words long. I think it’s fair to call the work a stream of consciousness, or at least it’s presented as one. How do you revise a piece that is supposed to replicate the natural associations made by your mind? How much did this essay change from the first draft to the final?

Honestly, I can’t remember how much it changed. I feel like this essay and the book of which it’s a part required less revision than previous books I’ve written, but saying that now from a relative distance, I can’t tell how true that is. The trick for me in producing associatively-driven work is knowing when to make explicit connections and when it’s cool to place images or perceptions side-by-side and trust the reader to connect the dots. Also, it’s not fair to say that the brain’s primary mode of motion is one of “connectedness.” A chain of associations can feel “right” in terms of its fidelity to the way one’s brain-tape unfolds, but just as frequent—if not more so—are random intrusions. Therefore, juxtaposition can become a useful tool when attempting to create any kind of analogue for consciousness. That’s part of the joy of working in a collage-like mode: the unexpected image or thought can feel like a necessary subversion.

You are a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. How has writing nonfiction made you a better fiction writer, or vice versa? What lessons learned from one genre have served you best in the other?

The longer I work and the more I write, the so-called line between my fiction and nonfiction becomes less and less distinct. Perhaps that’s because my own experience—which has always informed and guided whatever I write—has become the dominant subject matter of my writing, and because writing about that experience feels both true and false. I am trying to write what I’ve lived, to catalog the significant idiosyncrasies of that life, and I’m using language to do that, and because words are merely representational and fail to capture the radiant fullness of experience, and because I am an unreliable narrator whose memory can’t be trusted, it feels to me as if I’m working in the realm of myth. In other words, my nonfiction is fictional.

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

I recently finished the final edits on a book of essays—Permanent Exhibit, to be published by BOA Editions, Ltd in September of 2018—that are, like “Sinkhole,” collage-like in nature—each one a single paragraph unspooling. I’ve since returned to the book I was working on when those essays began to arrive: an accounting of having grown up in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina, in a loving family who counted themselves as members of a little-known American denomination whose tenants were central to our lives and gave shape—for better and worse—to my childhood.

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

Catherine Lacey’s The Answers. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Autumn and Winter. Otessa Moshfegh’s

Eileen and Homesick for Another World. Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts. Tara Wesotver’s Educated: A Memoir. Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories. Valerie Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd.

"Worms Turning and Obligation Souring": An Interview with Jaclyn Watterson

Jaclyn Watterson's first book, Ventriloquisms, won the 2016 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Willow Springs Books in October 2017. She is currently at work on her second book, a collection of nonfiction from which portions have appeared in The Spectacle, New Delta Review, Split Lip, and The Collagist.

Her essay, "Our Deportment," appeared in Issue Ninety-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Jaclyn Watterson talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about etiquette, struggling with plot, and the transformation of memories into narrative.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay, “Our Deportment”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

With this particular essay, the title actually came first. I was reading a nineteenth century book meant to instruct readers on proper etiquette for various tricky situations. There is, for example, a section on how to comport oneself at a funeral, and another on how young ladies should behave if left alone with men whom they don’t wish to marry. The book is called Our Deportment, a title which implies, to me, culpability and reciprocity. I knew I wanted to reappropriate it to explore my fraught relationship with my mother—and the habits of mind and practices I have and have not learned from her.

While I admire the position that if we behave properly and have good manners our experiences will always remain controlled and manageable—that if we just learn the rules everything will be all right—I also know this position is a beautiful, false dream. Good manners cannot, ultimately, save us from pain and disgrace, and what horrors are exposed when our behavior exceeds the confines of mannered relations?

The essay begins with one italicized paragraph, which seems to have a different speaker than what follows, as it lacks both “I” and “you” in its more lyrical language. What purpose is this unique introduction meant to serve? How do you want it to orient (or disorient) the reader?

That introduction is in keeping with the instructions or advice on etiquette, but of course rather than present foolproof advice guaranteed to create a smooth and comfortable experience for the two people in question here (my mother and myself), it acknowledges pain and ugliness, which manners so often are meant to conceal. Here, history and past interactions cannot provide a template for clean future relations, for the history is not one of good manners and social successes, but of worms turning and obligation souring. This, I think, is not so uncommon in families. The introduction orients the reader to a place and a peace beyond the trauma that follows, spelling out the inevitable ending, while suggesting that there might yet be some dignity—and even redemption—in looking squarely at that history.

In this essay, you write: “This is the way, of course, with the true stories of youth, our memories—they bloom and die and smell, and we cannot keep them. Put another way: mildew and various other deaths accumulate.” If this is true for everyone, I’m wondering how you think it may be different for a writer, if at all. If we channel such stories into writing, how might that affect the process you’re describing here? What does writing do to the blooming, dying memories: preserve them? empower them? transform them?

I think it’s right that as writers we transform and empower memories. Of course all people narrativize their experience, but writers obsessively revise and record this narrative. I have attempted, through this essay, to show my readers the bathroom where I showered in my youth. Who are my readers? People who are interested in language and narrative. For the most part, they probably do not share my particular preoccupation with lavatories. But now I have recorded that bathroom in words, which it was never made of before, and begged you all to bear witness. However you do this, the bathroom, and my own positionality and my mother’s, have been transformed and empowered—no longer merely memory, they bloom and die and accumulate with the power of words.

Although we’ve been discussing an example of your nonfiction, you are primarily a writer of fiction, according to your publication history. How has writing fiction made you a better nonfiction writer, or vice versa? What lessons learned from one genre have served you best in the other?

Yes, I trained as a fiction writer and have studied and published much more extensively in that genre. From fiction, I learned a certain openness of possibility, and a careful attention to the way sentences reflect, maintain, or close that possibility. In fiction anything can happen, but I always struggled with plot. I would ask myself, What happened?, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that more than the sentences or the mood or the structure of a piece, and people would tell me, This isn’t a story because it has no plot. I enjoy writing nonfiction because there are certain events that have happened, certain plots that have inserted themselves into my experience. But those plots are not immediately apparent to me when I begin writing. I think, How was I culpable, what part of that wall of mold was mine?, and in answering these questions, I am able to tell the story.

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

This essay is part of a larger memoir in essays, tentatively titled Other Dogs Haunted Other Recesses, which evokes the shame and elation of intimacy with other beings, both human and animal. Each piece begins with a singular image or incident—a blood-soaked sponge in sunlight, or walking through my childhood home alongside bidders on the morning of its foreclosure auction. I am exploring interpolations of the sublime and the abject, and many of the pieces, like “Our Deportment,” explore that most private of spaces in the crowded family home, the bathroom.

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

I just read an as-yet unpublished manuscript by the Buffalo-based poet Robin Lee Jordan which blew my socks off. I can’t wait for it to come into the world.

And I’m in love with Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. I’ve also been visiting and revisiting Elizabeth Gaskell and Daphne du Maurier, who both have so much to teach about transformation, empowerment, and looking squarely at history.

"A Riot Nobody Paid Attention To": An Interview Norene Cashen

Norene Cashen was a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. She's the former coordinator for Citywide Poets, Detroit's award-winning youth slam team. She also served as the contributing editor for the literary journal Dispatch Detroit. Her poetry has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Temenos, The MOCAD Journal, markszine.com, Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poets (Wayne State University Press), and thedetroiter.com. The Reverse Is Also True, her first collection of poetry, was released by Doorjamb Press in 2007.

Her poem, "Encounter with Justice," appeared in Isseu Seventy-Five of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Sarah Huener about Emily Dickinson, Black Lives Matter, and the need for beauty in a shadowy world.

The opening to this poem is incredible: it’s powerful but understated, and succinctly introduces the reader to the sequence of transformations that creates the poem’s momentum. I’m interested in your process of composition—when you wrote this poem, did you begin with this beginning? Did the gravity of the opening affect your process or your attitude toward the rest of the piece?

Thank you for the kind words. I like that term “sequence of transformations,” because that’s exactly what it is.

I did begin composing this poem with those first lines. I was thinking of Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died –“ and “Because I could not stop for Death.” I was thinking of those Dickinson poems because of gun violence and recent police shootings of young black men and black youth in the United States. There was nothing but gravity in that.

I think the poem was driven from there by profound sadness. It’s that kind of sadness has to be attached to hope. And Dickinson’s work was still echoing there, because I know ““Hope” is the thing with feathers” was running through my mind as well. People who write poems have obsessions. Flying things (bullets, birds, and flies) were an obsession of mine while writing this poem. Flying things feel out of our control, out of our reach.

I’m especially intrigued by “the night-/ blooming Jasmine…” at the heart of the poem, which brings us to an important narrative turning point of departure and return, then unrecognition, perhaps alienation. The capitalization and hard enjambment emphasize its importance, and you allot more space to this image than others. How did you come to include Jasmine, and what is its importance to the poem as a whole?

This is a real thing in nature, a rare flower that blooms at night. Maybe it’s placed in the poem that way because flowers adorn things. In this poem, it’s a reminder of the beautiful life we are given, and how the darkness hides that from us. I believe we are living in an age of blindness and shadows.

“Encounter with Justice” is made up of two-line stanzas, with relatively few—and relatively soft—enjambments. (When Jasmine appears, it’s particularly dramatic in contrast to the texture of the rest of the sentences and lines.) How did you arrive at this form?

I had to just feel it, see it, and hear it. I needed space between transformations. The Jasmine is an adornment, a sacred symbol. It gets its own space.

Is there anything you’re reading now you’re particularly excited about, or that you think is having a particular impact on your writing and thinking?

Since John Ashbery passed, I’ve been revisiting his poems, particularly the collection called Wakefulness. His work leads me back to Wallace Stevens where I look for connections. I feel a reverence for language in Ashbery’s work.

The poem “Encounter with Justice” was dedicated to Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. His work has had a profound impact on my life.

Do you have any current writing projects you’d like to share with us?

I’m working on a new poetry collection that is heavily influenced by Alan Moore. It explores relationships through the lens of magic and the paranormal.

"A Place Worth Staying": An Interview with Scott Beal

Scott Beal's first book, Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems, was published by Dzanc Books in 2014.  His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, Four Way Review, Midwestern Gothic, Glassworks, and Chattahoochee Review.  His poem "Things to Think About" which originally appeared in the January 2012 Collagist was selected for the 2014 Pushcart Prize anthology.  He lives, teaches, and co-hosts a monthly reading series called Skazat! in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

His poem, "Stegosaurus Moon," and "Birthday Poem with Tentative Divorce Agreement," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.

Here, he talks with Courtney Flerlage about imagery, a poems' turns, and the way the body guides a work.

What sparked “Stegosaurus Moon” into a poem? Where did it start?

The first two thirds of the poem is a rather literal transcription of the afternoon I signed my divorce papers. I had met my friend Gahl Liberzon at a café to write, and the first lines came out tinged with a “not with a bang but a whimper” disappointment at the mundanity of the event. At one point Gahl asked me when was the last time I challenged anyone to a duel. I accepted the question as a gift into the poem. When I was editing other bits out, I kept the duel question without really knowing why. Now it occurs to me that a ceremonial face-off between mutually respecting rivals may have been just what the day was missing. Not that I had wanted anything so adversarial; but I had imagined coming together to acknowledge the gravity of ending a long marriage, and to take a moment to honor its passing. The sadness that no such moment was available led the way into this poem.

I’m interested in the way the fantastic enters “Stegosaurus Moon” as a kind of wild volta. The poem begins with images of the everyday, the speaker ordering a coffee and “deploy[ing] my umbrella in the rain” after “signing the agreement that dissolves my life’s / biggest agreement.” Yet, later in the poem, the imagery turns to the fantastic: “I would like to say a few words about a stegosaurus. / A stegosaurus is pretty big compared to a school bus. / Thick armored plates mean it has its own back.” A surprising intrusion into the poem, the stegosaurus quickly becomes an image of encouragement that feels the right hinge of strange—an animal that could never have anything to do with “a round table with fountain pens, / our two names flourishing across a final page”—while still familiar. The stegosaurus helps us into the speaker’s mind, embodying what the speaker hopes to be while still hinting at doubt—it is, after all, extinct. What brought the stegosaurus into the poem for you?

It feels like being caught cheating to admit this, but the stegosaurus arrived arbitrarily, from a game. I’d taught a poetry workshop for kids that morning channeling André Breton and surrealist experiments with chance; I’d given each writer a set of cards with pictures on them, and told them to turn over a card every time they got stuck, and to put what they saw into their poem. When I wrote the line, “There was no need to occupy the same room,” the draft arrived at a kind of cul-de-sac which, like the afternoon itself, felt unsatisfying but offered little place to go. So I drew a card from my bag and found the stegosaurus, who offered me a ride to another neighborhood.

I appreciate hearing that the arrival of the stegosaurus feels fantastic, because the possibility of transformative magic is what I always want from a poem. And I don’t think this would be much of a poem without the stegosaurus, which provides a jolt to shake the poem into a new energy. At the same time, the image resonates for me because it’s not quite fantastic. As astonishing as it would be to find a stegosaurus downtown squaring off against a school bus, it’s not a dragon. It’s not a myth. We can have faith in a stegosaurus as a demonstrable possibility, however remote or unfamiliar it may seem. Arriving at the last two lines of the poem was my way of discovering that faith, too, in the possibility of a life after divorce. 

You play with a different sort of contrast in “Birthday Poem with Tentative Divorce Agreement.” Toward the end of the poem, after the speaker describes the last meetings with the speaker's spouse before a divorce, the speaker says, “this plume rose within me,” which was the result of realizing “that we were getting along.” Later, the speaker describes, “this plume rose / as if thousands of particles lifted / to catch the late light.”  Before the poem lingers too long in this moment of lightness, the speaker clarifies that these particles are those that would rise when “an anchor had punched a lakebed / to claim in the midst of turbulent currents / a place worth staying.” I love the way you guide us through this image—we see first the plume, then the particles, and then this heavy cause, the anchor. The sequence and turn of the image captures a sense of relief, wonder, and finality in a way that blurs their contradictions—somehow, lightness and heaviness coexist. Could you share a bit about how you crafted the imagery in this poem to achieve this kind of balance—the light and the heavy?  

One piece of craft advice that has always stuck with me is something that Patrick Rosal casually tossed off once in the midst of a Facebook comment thread. Pat wrote: “There will always be a portion of a dream that cannot be written down, cannot be transferred to tape or on an SD card. The dream that guides the conscience of the fact has to be in the body. It has to be in the body.”  Ever since reading that, I have tried to become more consciously aware, while writing, of the way the body transmits experience, and of that transmission being the source of originality.

Accordingly, I don’t remember consciously crafting the ending lines of “Birthday Poem with Tentative Divorce Agreement” with an eye toward balancing forces, but rather trying to capture the physical sensation I felt in that moment at the table, and to decipher what it was telling me. Of course I’m aware, craft-wise, of the energy to be derived from tension, so my intuitions are often tuned to steer from one pole to another. In this case, I appreciate the observation about the coexistence of lightness and heaviness because you’re right, the moment is full of contradictions which the body can hold even as the mind tries to resolve: the sinking into the lake bed, and the ascension from the impact.

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

I have most recently been devastated by a poem called “Icarus Does the Dishes” by Tommye Blount in Kenyon Review. I’m taking my time with The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. A lot of my reading during the school year is related to teaching, so along with student papers and poems I’ve been re-reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and running out of time to have all the conversations in class that that book warrants.

What project(s) are you working on at the moment?

I’ve been working on finding a publisher for my second collection, of which “Stegosaurus Moon” is the title poem, and I’m starting to pull together a third. There’s a nonfiction project I’m working up the nerve to embark on, based on my obsession with a defunct Iranian metal band. Wish me luck.