An Interview-in-Excerpts with Joe Milazzo

Joe Milazzo is a writer, editor, educator, and designer. He is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Jaded Ibis Press) and The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books; forthcoming, 2015), a volume of poetry. His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Fruita Pulp, Tammy, and elsewhere. He co-edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing], is a Contributing Editor at Entropy, and is also the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.slowstudies.net/jmilazzo/.

An excerpt of his novel, Crepuscule W/ Nellie, appeared in Issue Sixty-Five of The Collagist. 

Here, he answers questions in the form of excerpts from Crepuscule W/ Nellie.

What is writing like?

John opened his mouth. Instead of any sound, a bubble split his lips. The effluvium’s skin was a pink glisten, and it enclosed a goldfish that wiggled its tail in time to Herman’s opus. The bubble drifted up and away from John. He was too far outside his dream now to think that Herman was going to flub it. With a tweet, the bubble popped. The goldfish cannonballed to the floor. John heard it splash, a bronchitis sound, but he had lost track of his stare. He was ready to surrender, to begin another song. Bubble after bubble streamed out of his mouth. Nothing further broke. But what if they did? John envisioned them gulping in a pile, a lava of dorsals, gills and flat eyes. John clapped both hands over his mouth, yet Mrs. Williams’ inventions knew no end. Maybe he could get them to the toilet if he scooped with both hands. Herman traded fours with himself, treble, bass. Both hands. The bubbles made nice, like society. John told himself that, even if he could not stop spewing, he would make it. But first he had to stop Herman’s repeating.

What isn’t writing like?

— You have to look after your mother, Neenah. You do. You know, I can tell you what Mr. Monk would tell you about your situation. And isn’t that something you would like to hear?

— I would, Mrs. Monk, more than anything in the world.

— Well, Neenah, Mr. Monk, he would walk you down the hall of this very building here, and he would take you to your door, and he would open that door for you. Open it in a very gentlemanly fashion.

— Go on, Mrs. Monk, go on.

— And he would take your hand and bring you inside. And he would ask you to turn around and look at your apartment as if it weren’t just the same old dusty, dingy place where you sit and sigh and say to yourself, “Oh, how I’d rather be anyplace else than this.”

— Really look at it? Really?

— Really, Neenah, and by really I mean this: look hard.

— I am. And would he say anything? Anything else?

— He would, Neenah.

— What, what, Mrs. Monk? What more?

— He would tell you this, Neenah. Look where he’s pointing, look hard now.

— I’m looking, Mrs. Monk, I know it looks like my eyes are closed, but I am looking hard.

— You see where Mr. Monk, Mr. Thelonious Sphere Monk, is pointing? See, Neenah? Now, he is going to tell you something. And that something is this. “Don’t go thinking things into any of this that you can’t think out of it.” That’s what we would tell you.

— He would?

— Neenah, follow his hand. See how he has.

When you do it, why?

“Nellie.” I’m calling myself. Times my mind won’t unplug itself, Monk, and all I can smell in this empty bedroom is the bleach from my own hands, not a sniff anywhere of your shaving soap or disagreeability at all. I try and wish you in through that window. Flying in with tales to tell about it, they could sound as untrue as Mother Goose. Monk, you wouldn’t ever, never have to admit to me what you really endured. What’s committed in the pages of the book of life, no, it hardly happens to the likes of us, or happens so uncommonly it can only say, “Surprise.” Pop pop, pop in. I could follow the facts swooping without one swoon, the snakes and ladders of your ongoing goings-on. Is this my drift? But most of the time I just want the other boys in the band, the ones I have in that murky picture I have in my head, I want them to scram, Monk, I want them to walk out of their posing for good. They would leave, and leave you alone, and I’d be able to make my way to you at the end of that alley. Just like you should have let me. Why won’t you let me see you live? Oh, this is the worst gas. Where are my stockings? Is it that you don’t want me to know you’ve got an arrow stuck in your heel? I’m coming back out Monk. But first I should lie back down. Lord knows I’d prefer it. Just like I’d like to believe the blacked-out long walk of that downtown alley is just the same dark I see as with my eyes closed. I’d like to. Ice cream. Why do we still even have ice cream in this house? You could keep your head down, Monk. We will have found each other all the same.

When you don’t, why?

I know what I want, dear diary, yet I know it will not hold stationary, I know I want it a tiny bit less at the point of its resolve, I know that when it lapses uncollected, that then is when I want it so much more than it can endure. suffer, that is the synonym you’d have me accept, isn’t it, dear diary? it is no comfort, a day, days whose rhythms have been drained by thorough enthusiasm. I am the one who thinks, not about I, but about you, all through the day. mania is depression, but all the more acute. I mean, dear diary, mania catalyzes depression, and it carries on, nattering through pack after pack and cup after magnum after cask, unaffected, untempered, a singular chord held for a very long time indeed. and, no, dear diary, you do not proffer any sincere consolation with your psychiatric endearments. I don’t want to be told that my desire is the normal state of desire: my faith, for don’t I observe it, dear diary, and faith is in the mobilization, not the intent, my faith in unknowing what desire or desire’s object actually might be. that they might be separate entities at all. dear diary, no, you’re much too masculine to be able to stomach that porridge, dear diary, or agree that it is a dessert. so what if insights are read out of a book, or even several books. in fact, dear diary, why don’t you ever share your doubts with me? instead, you make them apparent. I never thought you so plain, so squat, dear diary. desire is a well-established expert opinion, it has the salty savor of the vetted truth. and one is to place it in one’s mouth, even though one dare not speak it. let me go on, dear diary, let me articulate my inarticulateness. let me take a letter.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Kristina Marie Darling

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, 2014).  Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation.  She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

An excerpt from her book, "The Arctic Circle," appeared in Issue Sixty-Five of The Collagist. 

Here, she answers questions in the form of excerpts from The Artic Circle. 

What is writing like?

I hold out the smallest parcel, show him its frozen worlds. 

What isn’t writing like?

His last wife.

When you do it, why?

I did it because he told me not to.

When you don’t, why?

I have trouble controlling the shaking in both my hands.    

"As If I Fasted": An Interview with Jen DeGregorio

Jen DeGregorio is a poet and prose writer whose work has appeared most recently at Convergence, MadHat Lit, PANK, and Salon.com. In March, she was named a semi-finalist for YesYes Books' 2015 Pamet River Prize for a first or second book by a female poet. Jen is also founder of Cross Poetry, an online poetry journal and reading series in Jersey City, NJ (www.crosspoetry.com). She teaches writing to undergraduates in New Jersey and New York.

Her poem, "Broke," appeared in Issue Sixty-Nine of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about the odd similarity between shopping and Catholic worship, deviation from form, and the dual role of time in the poem and beyond.

Each stanza is three lines except for the second to last. What pushed this deviation of form?

I write a lot in tercets and, if I have an extra line that can absolutely not be cut, I will often let it stand alone after the final tercet. But in this case I thought it would be better to use a couplet, as you point out, in the penultimate stanza because I thought the missing line of the expected tercet might signify what has been lost by the speaker: "whole days,” among other things.

There is a prominent religious undertone, stemming from the opening image. What helps carry this theme throughout the following, seemingly unrelated images?

The speaker here is a lapsed Catholic. But, as those who are raised in any religion know, doctrine’s specter haunts forever. For this speaker, that specter is the guilt she feels for taking pleasure in a frivolous activity (shopping) and for committing sin (greed, pride, envy... maybe even lust). 
And yet the speaker senses the odd similarity between shopping and Catholic worship: Ritualized entrance into a specialized space, one filled with beautiful, fetishized objects. The search for what seems elusive. Faith that what is sought will be found. Hope that this discovery will lead to transcendence or solace. 

The images in this poem therefore do double work: The ATM becomes an altar. The accessories – the heels, pearls and ring—might be religious accoutrements, such as rosary beads, the communion cup and wafer. The dressing rooms are confessionals. The “slip of white” is a baptismal or wedding gown.

I was deliberate in choosing these particular images, though I hope they don't circumscribe the poem. I believe there are some unanswered questions here: Does the speaker find what she is looking for? What are the similarities and differences between religion and consumerism? What, ultimately, does this speaker need to make her happy? 

Continuing with the religious undertone, what roles do time and memory play in the overall execution of this work, if they play any roles at all?

The speaker here lives in the present world of the poem – the shops in which she is hunting for that “Perfect gown”—but her experience is colored by the past, in this case her childhood raised in the Catholic faith. Her memory of a Catholic girlhood creates the lens through which she views this particular experience, and all her experiences for that matter. Time is double in that sense in the poem. But isn’t it always?

What are you reading?

Bianca Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, which I’m re-reading for the third time (It’s so great!). Mark Strand’s Collected Poems. And I just finished reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

What are you currently writing?

I just finished a poem this week that considers the Amtrak train crash in Philadelphia; the speaker of the poem is grappling with that event and its relationship to empathy and the possibility for selfless love.

"All Those Feathers Falling": An Interview with Laura Maher

Laura Maher holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Third Coast, and Cutbank Online. She lives, teaches, and writes in Tucson, Arizona.

Her poem, "Awnings," appeared in Issue Sixty-Eight of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about focusing the scene while using the energy of the line, mystery, and the strangeness of birds.

Towards the end of this work, what compelled the deviation from four-line stanzas? What about the use of irregular spacing within lines throughout the piece?

There is a lot of movement in this poem, through both image and structure. To balance this, I wanted consistency in voice and stanza. Even as the four-line stanza deviates, as you say, the structure remains consistent through four one-line stanzas. This breakdown is related to the spacing in the poem, too. I wanted the extra spaces in the poem to visually mark caesura. Caesura is a device of movement, and so I used spaces to interrupt the line, just as the thoughts, marked by the parentheses, interrupt the images.

How did voice, narrative, and image interwork for you, especially during the drafting process?

The poem began on its own with the image of a hawk eating a pigeon. In fact, the scene at the beginning of the poem is fairly factual: I was stopped by this gruesome yet strangely beautiful scene of a Cooper’s Hawk devouring a pigeon one evening while I was taking part in the All Souls Procession in Tucson, Arizona. I was really dressed as a bird—a phoenix rising, in fact—and I was surrounded by the color, imagery, and movement of 90,000 people simultaneously celebrating life and honoring the dead. It is a powerful experience to be among so many people collectively mourning individual losses. This is why the triggering image of the hawk becomes a consistent thread in the poem; it is also why I am able to rely on a voice that is less embodied in a personal narrative. The rest of the drafting process was quite natural—focusing the scene while using the energy of the line and sentence working together to propel the poem forward.

The word you use, “interwork,” interests me because I think poetry will often exploit the tension created when elements are not always working together. Such collisions always add layers of mystery—and I love a bit of mystery in a poem.

What prompted the use of the bird as the foundation for other prominent and colorful images like night, movement, and body?

Birds have a way of working themselves into my poems, particularly when I’m writing about the body. I think this is because of their strangeness: birds are light and flexible, the opposite of human bodies—heavy and rooted. Of course, these aren’t new observations—which is another part of the magic, that people have always watched birds to observe their strangeness and similarity—but I am particularly interested in how birds move in the world, and how those movements have changed in order to adapt to human habitats. The hawk and the pigeon, associated respectively with wildness and city-life, inhabit that place of intersection. Structurally, I just love the work repetition can do; I think it is meditative and oppressive in the most pleasant way.

What are you currently reading?

My reading habits are informed equally by suggestions from friends and wandering through my local used bookstore. (A college town always has some great used books for sale in January and June.) I’ve been reading some essays, most recently The Informed Air, by Muriel Spark, and revisiting the poems of Frank Stafford since his Collected came out.

What are you writing?

More bird poems, probably. But really, I’m working on a collection of poems that uses a repetitive lyric structure to examine the experience of illness. I’m also writing plenty of letters and postcards to friends, which I enjoy, and which conveniently helps me be a better writer.

"Don't You See?": An Interview with Carrie Addington

Carrie Addington’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, American Literary Review, Margie, Gargoyle, JMWW and are forthcoming in Waxwing. She is the recipient of the Virginia Downs Poetry Award, the American Literary Review Poetry Award, and a Pushcart nominee. She received a Master of Fine Arts, Poetry degree from George Mason University and currently resides in Northern Virginia where she works as a Business Consultant in the fashion/beauty industry and teaches creative writing at NVCC.

Her poem, "Ode to the Cortex," appeared in Issue Sixty-Nine of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviewer Allison Jarrett miscommunication, extended metaphor, and the ways in which language and meaning rub up against one another.

Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of your poem, “Ode to the Cortex”?

I don’t recall exactly when or how it came about, though I do remember this poem trying to become a Sapphic Ode at one point and failing miserably. I also remember someone telling me they think I hide behind my hair and that stuck with me. There’s an intersection of these two concepts that are so absurdly different, hair and the dissolution of a relationship, but really they’re no more absurd than the notion of two different people trying to communicate and mucking it all up because of the differences in their individual contexts.

This poem is interested in the ways in which we consistently “miss” in our communication efforts. It really began as an examination of conversational patterns and the ways in which language and meaning rub up against one another and the friction that exists. I’m fascinated by our ability as people to set the intention to communicate clearly, even at times arrive at a common understanding, and how greatly we can miss the opportunity for real connection. We can be conversing about two separate things and never bridge the meaning gap. Using extended metaphor allowed me to elevate this tension to the forefront of the poem.

“Cortex” operates through extended metaphor: the cortex of the hair seems to represent something fragile or transitory about the relationship between the speaker and the person being addressed. One aspect of the connective tissue of the metaphor is voiced subtly towards the poem’s close with “any bond / can be broken.” What was your process like in developing the metaphor? Which came first, your idea for the metaphor, or the desire to express that which the metaphor represents?

Using the language of my experience as a consultant in the beauty industry allowed for me to interrogate the subject matter at a distance, using something superficial to describe something absolutely wretched in its broken-down-ness. When we talk about hair, we often are trying to disguise whatever damage exists in the inner most layers, the cortex, and we are dressing up the external layers to look “beautiful.” I was interested in using the hair as representative of that internal layer where the fragility and integrity of  something is compromised and the ways in which we disguise it, even the ways in which we talk around its destruction.

I enjoy the friction and tension of these two things rubbing against each other, getting gritty in their opposition all at an attempt at arriving at a common understanding that is never truly realized. In this case, the ways in which a fragile, transitory moment in a relationship between the speaker and the “you” is broken down at the core, yet looks normal and functional on the outside. Additionally I’m interested in the ways in which we talk around things, even when our intention is to be pure, crisp, and direct. There’s a limitation that exists in our ability to communicate clearly, even effectively, and I wanted to interrogate that.

I’m not sure either the idea for the metaphor or that which it expresses came first, they happened quite simultaneously for this poem. I was wanting to explore this disconnect that occurs but hair and the integrity of the hair’s strength and health was front and center as I began writing. Ironically, it was a happy union of the two describing the inevitable breakdown of something else. The metaphor here is layered and continues to build much like the tension between the speaker and the “you,” so resolution is more abstract than the intention of the poem wants it to be. What I enjoy most in writing in extended metaphor, which happens in a lot of my work, is the ability to explain things clearly and complicate it, sometimes simultaneously.

This poem has the feeling of a dramatic monologue in which the speaker is struggling to make the “you” of the poem understand something. The poem ends with a repeated question: “Don’t you see / what I’m saying? Don’t you see?” How successful is the speaker? How much does the addressee understand at the end of the poem?

I don’t think the speaker is successful at all, and I was surprised by that as the poem came to life. I think this speaker is a master of having lengthy conversations to clear misunderstandings while only creating more confusion. The repetition at the close of the poem exhibits the speaker’s understanding of that fact. This speaker is tormented by the confusion that occurs and the questions at the end of the poem serve as a verbal shaking of the “you,” because the speaker has ended up exactly where she began with a conversation stalled, a disconnect, a permanent severing of a thing.

The speaker uses terminology and references to hair – a world familiar only to the speaker – to communicate with someone else and herein lies the breakdown. There is a consistent miscommunication happening in terms of what is said by the speaker and the correlations drawn by the “you.” I wanted to toe the line between mystery and implication, and I think this poem does that. Mystery is not poetry to me but implication does a great deal of good work. I wanted there to be a contextual shift with each unraveling of meaning, with each “as in” phrasing that occurred.

What are you currently reading?

The books that are constantly put in my bag to read in between appointments are Denise Duhamel’s Blowout and Matthew Siegel’s Blood Work. The books on my nightstand are Carl Phillip’s Art of Daring, Brian Russell’s The Year of What Now, and Jillian Weise’s The Book of Goodbyes. The books sharing the bed with me and hogging the covers are Terrance Hayes’ Hip Logic and Mark Strand’s Selected Poems. The Lives of Distinguished Shoe Makers and People StyleWatch are in my car for heavy traffic days.

What writing projects are you working on?

I’m in the throes of revision on a collection of poems that is exploring the understanding of the fashion and beauty industry.  As New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham states, “fashion serves as the armor to survive the reality of the everyday” and I’m interested in investigating our subscription to that mindset, our ritualistic behaviors in this arena. I’m also finishing my first manuscript that is dealing largely with mortality and illness, specifically, the afterlife of a “new” body, a “new” heart that despite all loss is tuned to a new frequency to love and exist differently.

"If the Game Is Wrong, Then Everything Is Wrong": An Interview with Simon Jacobs

Simon Jacobs is the author of SATURN, a collection of David Bowie stories, out now from Spork Press.

His story, "The Inventory of Marcus, Level 16," appeared in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist. 

Here, he speaks with interviewer Keaton Maddox about world creation, glitches, and archetypal authenticity. 

Traditional Role-Playing Games (RPG), like Dungeons and Dragons, rely on a system of constricted mutual storytelling in order to create a vivid and richly character driven world. Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), on the other hand, provide users with a more concrete world from the get go, only really giving them the capability to define their place within it, rather than allowing them to build the society as a whole. Demon Keep functions as an MMORPG in your story, both literally and metaphorically, yet you, as the writer, made the world from scratch, more in the vein of a more traditional RPG. What was your process for creating the reciprocal realities of online and real life we see in your story without the constraints of a more formal meaning-making system being provided to you, as would have been the case were you actually playing an RPG? 

Demon Keep is totally a Diablo II clone, all the way down to how many items you can equip at once, so I had this framework and vocabulary very explicitly in mind for the game’s mechanics/interface/level design/etc. I wanted to give my invented game a legacy, too, to root it in the same space as the older Diablo games et al, as those RPGs that still have people roaming the universe 10 or 15 years after the fact. It’s an old, weird, buggy game (Marcus and Nikki wouldn’t bond over something that’s contemporarily popular), and I wanted the game itself to be a kind of aesthetic throwback in a story that is full of aesthetic throwbacks.

And as a probably 300 hour-strong player of Morrowind and other games like that, I was more than familiar with the ways that a few smallish bugs in the software could fuck you over (items/enemies not generating where they were supposed to, the game’s logistics not tripping in their designated spots, etc) - the glitches are part of what make the games what they are! So I wanted to create a game whose very reasonable gamesy problems became translatable/mappable on the story in ‘real time.’

When I came up with the title “Demon Keep” I was amazed it wasn’t a game already. I think I settled on one of the few combinations of “supernatural entity + gloomy/arcane noun” that hasn’t been scooped yet.

Nikki in this role should be a cliché, which is something the narrator even directly acknowledges. Yet, despite her archetypal positioning, I never questioned her authenticity. She becomes this convoluted vessel for Marcus’ sovereignty, claiming he is absolutely autonomous, while guiding him into her own solidarity. How did you balance her function in the story as Marcus’ conduit for self-actualization with her need to be an independent freely thinking character? How did you reconcile Marcus’ becoming more like Nikki as a means of establishing his own individuality?

I just tried to let Nikki be Nikki—clearly Marcus is messily enamored with her and wants to be educated in all of her counter-cultural ways, but I feel like part of his development in the story is realizing that he’s not 100% built for it, that their relationship isn’t some perfect magical fit, and maybe no one is exactly what they seem. He might get as much from the game as he does from Nikki. At its core, it’s just a story about suburban high school alienation and the ways you variously make sense of a world that doesn’t really make sense (or maybe brutally does make sense).

My favorite addition to Nikki’s character, personally, was the dog tags—like, that’s something you’d get stamped at a birthday party. It is something you found cool in exactly that one moment.

The keyboard symbol images at the beginning of each section are a beguiling addition to the piece. They contribute to the stories uniqueness and memorability without ever feeling like a gimmick or a parlor trick. What was your process like for creating and including them in your story?

Very painstaking experimentation with the Courier font, basically—there was no special engineering to it. I had sketches for each item as I was writing up drafts of the story, and they helped to serve as sort of thematic anchors as I pieced things together. I also wanted to give readers a visual sense of the relative size of each item and how they would all together fill the “squares” and “armor parts” of a typical Diablo-style RPG inventory—conveniently, they also help to visually break up what is kind of a long and rambly story, and ultimately work as a reality-crossing mechanism to integrate ‘the game’ with “real life.” The illustrations are really kind of an anachronism, too, because there’s no way an in-game object would look this shitty/basic in a genuine, popular RPG from the late 90s/early 2000s.

What are you reading right now?

A bunch of things! Here are few of them:

Unspeakable Things (Bloomsbury) - Laurie Penny on gender, class, and uprisings; no one can come up with an indignant metaphor like Laurie Penny.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (Verso) - Gabriella Coleman’s analysis of the Anonymous movement. It’s really juicy.

Videogames for Humans (Instar Books) - a collection of annotated Twine games by various creators, all brought together by Merritt Kopas. Of course I’m reading it!

What projects are you currently in the process of writing?

I just finished a novel, which is exciting. It’s called PALACES—I’m writing the title here so I can’t change it again. It’s also kind of games-y, in that it involves procedurally-generated landscapes and respawning. I am really eager to get it out there.

I also write a monthly series for the Paper Darts newsletter called “Masterworks,” which is about reenactments of famous works of art. You can sign up for that here.

"Cracks Where Faith Drips Through": An Interview with Patrick Crerand

Patrick Crerand lives in Florida with his wife and three kids.  His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and is forthcoming in North American Review and Midway.

His essay, "Still Life With Chainsaw," appeared in Issue Sixty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Patrick Crerand talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about interesting jobs, religion, and submitting to magazines.

Please tell us about the origins of your essay “Still Life with Chainsaw.” What made this experience worth writing about?

When I moved to Florida, the newspaper here, The St. Pete (now Tampa Bay) Times, used to do this column called Sunday Journal where local people could write about their lives in short essay form. It was great. A colleague of mine connected with the enterprise editor of the paper, and we organized a contest for the column on the subject of work. So I was doing preliminary judging, reading all these submissions about people working, and sometime later I started writing one myself. But really, I have always loved reading about people working. Whenever I read biographical notes of authors, it seems to be a point of pride—how many bad jobs or just interesting jobs they have had. I never think of myself as someone who has had interesting jobs, but this one stuck out to me, even though it was just for a night.

I always struggle with knowing what’s worth writing about, and sometimes I just don’t know if what I’m writing has value or not. I have the proverbial Irish memory by which I mean I have a vault in my head that files away all the times I have been slighted, shamed, and/or humiliated by others or myself. Not being able to start the chainsaw was one such moment. But sometimes when I dig through those memories, I feel like Geraldo opening up Al Capone’s vault, except I can’t grow a good moustache.

Your essay begins and ends in the “horror house” where you are a seventeen-year-old volunteer. We also learn about your father and your childhood, in a middle section that begins and ends at a “haunted school bus” ten years earlier. What made you decide that this bookend-ing technique (or, if you prefer, framing-within-framing device, or even hourglass-shaped narrative structure) was the best way to tell this story?

I didn’t have a plan for the essay. When it started, it was just going to be about the job at the haunted house. I think Carver has a line like, “Get in, get out, and don’t linger.” So I thought that would be the shape, something fast. But then I skipped a few lines and started writing about that other haunted school bus. At some point, I realized this was the only other haunted house I had ever been to, and that the essay might go in a different direction that allowed me to talk a bit about fear and faith and the unknown and eventually my father. I kept rearranging scenes and weaving them back and forth, and it just wasn’t working. In the meantime, I was teaching narrative writing to an intro composition class. One day we were reading framed essays, and I was going on and on about how it’s a useful strategy sometimes. So after about a year, I finally took my own advice.

In the midst of describing your father’s morbid sense of humor and his “sixth sense,” you write, “What complicated it even more is that he was a devout Catholic and an ordained deacon.  Every Sunday he stood on the altar and professed faith in a communion of dead saints and a mysterious Holy Ghost who controlled all that was seen and unseen.” How did Catholicism find its way into this essay that begins with brains in a jar and how to start a chainsaw? Can you speak about the potential for religion to enrich and complicate our narratives?

Like I said above, the shape was influenced by the memories of these two haunted houses, and once I started thinking about those connections, I felt like should say something about my father’s role in taking me to the first haunted school bus and that led me to why my father would do that in the first place.

I’m a rational person, as are my parents. Of course, religion is irrational. And yet, my parents are religious. They’re not fanatical at all but, like I said, devout. Me, I’m somewhere on the line, trying to make sense of it all when I know that’s not going (or even supposed) to happen. Maybe if I grew up in a Calvinist-based church, I’d have started that chainsaw. I don’t know. But for me, I can sum up a typical Catholic outlook toward divine intervention as, “Don’t get your hopes up, but you never know, so keep trying, but don’t get your hopes up because you’re not that special, but you never know.” The amount of contradictions is staggering to me sometimes. I guess in my own life, I’m very skeptical, yet there are cracks where faith drips through, and that internal conflict can create good tension in a narrative. The religious tension is the same as the tension in the haunted house. Intellectually, there’s no reason you should be afraid. There are all sorts of paratextual signs outside letting you know this house is all a ruse and no harm will come to you. And yet, there you are afraid.

That bit about “seen and unseen” is a partial quote from the Nicene Creed which gets recited every time at mass. They just changed the words though a few years back, so it’s no longer “seen and unseen” but “visible and invisible.” At first I didn’t like the change because it sounds fussier, but I think it’s more precise and strangely more inclusive. Unseen is someone who tries to see but overlooks some detail and misses it. Invisible includes the former plus someone who is looking for it (maybe even someone who’s really good at looking for it) but still can’t see because it’s just not able to be seen. It kind of levels the field, which is nice.

You are also the editor of your own literary magazine, Lightning Key Review. As someone who must read a lot of submissions and cover letters, what have you learned about what to do (and what not to do) when submitting your own work?

Before I submit, I read the magazine (which is much easier now that there are great magazines on-line and print magazines with on-line content) and try to get a sense of the aesthetic. I write a short, simple cover letter that doesn’t get in the way of what I’ve written. (As a younger writer, I think there’s a need or a desire to reveal one’s personality in that cover letter instead of letting the work stand for itself.) Then I keep good records on a spreadsheet. I know Submittable and some other services will do it for you now, but I still keep a file updated so I know what’s out and where. I always tell my students not to take rejection personally, but I always feel bad since it makes me seem like some sort of Zen master who feels no pain. I guess better advice would be to refuse to allow rejection to stop your momentum, which sounds fascist, but better.

In terms of the work itself, I’m always on the lookout for engaging narrative and strong images regardless of the genre.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel about Jesus. It’s a good way to scare people into not asking any follow up questions. But I’ll pretend like you did. It’s a series of gnostic gospels in which Jesus gets clonked on the head during a stoning, subsequently forgets to die, and slips through time into our current era with the help of a video game designing prophet named Woz the Resistor. Once here, he soon finds himself incorporated and mass-marketed by a fast food company. Broke and somewhat limited in skills, he must earn money to buy enough shares in his company to own himself again before the IPO launches in December. However, his journey from rags to riches gets derailed when another religious leader tracks him down to kill him to bring about the apocalypse and the second coming.

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

I’m working my way through Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering and it’s great. Eduardo Galleano’s Soccer in Shadow and Sun is a fun one as well. It’s a history of soccer, which sounds boring, but it’s told in these short poetic sections that are wild and surprising. I also finally finished James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, which I’ve started three or four times but could never get into until this past spring. It’s a good one for Mother’s Day if you want to break your mom’s heart.

“Like Finding a Great Sweater in a Thrift Store”: An Interview with Angela Woodward

Angela Woodward’s collection Origins and Other Stories won The Collagist 2014 prose chapbook competition, and will be out from Dzanc in 2016. Her novel Natural Wonders, also forthcoming in 2016, was the winner of the 2015 Fiction Collective Two Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She is also author of the collection The Human Mind and the novel End of the Fire Cult.

Her story, "Clarity," appeared in Issue Sixty-Eight of The Collagist. 

Here, Angela Woodward talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about the Incas, plundering and machine fairy tales.

How did this story begin? Was it always a back-and-forth, or did that decision come about later in the process?

I use a lot of source material in my fiction, and sometimes it’s like finding a great sweater in the thrift store, the thrill of stumbling on some piece of writing that I can remake. That happened for me as I was casting my eyes over an article in a professional journal for English teachers about the Incan writer Guaman Poma’s “struggle for legitimacy.” You can’t imagine how dull such an article is. It has to be, to fit into that kind of college English journal. It wasn’t like I was reading for any professional reason, either. Just passing the time with what happened to be in front of me. It had these wonderful quotes, poor Guaman Poma, who of course I’d never heard of, asserting his “skill and knowledge.” I got a tingle right away with this article. I was almost sweating in my intense need to twist it to my own ends. It was probably years and years of someone’s research into rhetoric and imperialism, and I plundered it for my own purposes. It seemed immediately that I could dramatize the “struggle for legitimacy” by doing the comments on the monkey’s paper. That idea was there from the beginning.

Early on I found the teacher’s sections to be grounding—something that helped me find my footing in between Guaman’s own retellings. Then of course, as Guaman’s story continued, I found myself horrified by the teacher’s callousness. What was the process like in shaping this narrative and deciding when and where to have the teacher’s comments come in?

I could have had a straight up beautiful and terrible story if I had left the teacher out of it. Guaman’s parts have an intense lyricism, the spider web interpreters, the crickets, the dress of thistle down. It was really tempting to go with that, and do some kind of condensed, poetic piece about captivity and bloodshed, something. The voice of the teacher really wrecks the poetry, but it’s exactly that wreckage that I was getting at. I had to let that have its way. I had to let the teacher be banal and a little clumsy in his phrasing. And those comments are all that shape Guaman’s narrative. Guaman doesn’t introduce his artifact, and he doesn’t bring anything to a close. The teacher’s voice is the only thing that holds his story onto the page. Sadly, the teacher also has to throttle Guaman’s voice at the end. But I don’t think we can get the one voice without the other. They clarify each other.

Even amid the bloodshed and horror, I found myself amused by these two characters’ interactions. I loved Guaman’s resistance. His story seems out of his control, in that he’s simply trying to keep up with and find the words for the flood of memory that is pouring out of him. His narrative is beyond instruction. For the teacher, it’s all instruction. So much so that the beauty and sadness of Guaman’s accounts are lost. In this way there is a lot of commentary and criticism on the teaching of writing. Do you teach? If not, what is your relationship to the world of teaching and did that help inform your story?

I do teach, several classes of basic composition—the pre-college writing courses at my college—and I tutor writing the rest of the time. Early in my teaching career, I had students who wrote incredible stories about family violence, racism, crazy things they’d seen. I don’t get much of that now, probably because I have much tamer, younger students. If the lab monkey took my class, I would totally honor his narrative. I would not mess with it. He wouldn’t need to introduce the artifact. But I wanted the teacher in “Clarity” to be bound by the same horrible system that wiped out the Incas. He’s doing his best, but he’s responding as his system allows him to respond, that is, critically. You said the teacher was callous, but I find him mostly hapless. He’s trying to do his job.

Teachers try to be fair, positive, supportive, to act like a peer, “it’s just a suggestion,” right? But it’s impossible to get away from the power differential. So the monkey is saying through his plagiarized story of the Incas, look what you did, you destroyed my civilization, you slaughtered my ancestors. And the teacher is saying, look what you did, you messed up my grading scale. They’re not equivalent calamities.

What current project are you working on?

I’m just beginning to work on something that seems like an interconnected collection of machine fairy tales. I have a shred of one story so far, and I think there are more like it. I’ve also been doing a longer narrative, very slowly, about a woman living alone in a city where people and things suddenly vanish. She’s a member of a sect that forbids reading. She’s trying to learn more about the dissolutions, while resisting the onslaught of text in her environment—billboards, name tags, signs, addresses. The tension is her struggle to remain illiterate. I wanted to write this in a month, just for a lark. Instead it’s taken on a meditative aspect, as the woman is deeply in tune with her environment and its signals. I have to listen and feel so intensely to get into her experience that I can only write a few sentences at a time.

What’s been your favorite read of 2015, so far?

I came across a novel from the 1980s called Reindeer Moon, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. I believe she was an anthropologist, and this is her single work of fiction. It’s about a woman in a Stone Age tribe, and also all the animal spirits she inhabits. It’s like nothing else. Totally singular, unclassifiable, great.