"The Last Days of the Neanderthals": An Interview with William VanDenBerg

William VanDenBerg is the author of Lake of Earth (Caketrain Press, 2013) and Apostle Islands (Solar Luxuriance, 2013). Recent stories have appeared at Spork, SAND, and Pear Noir. He lives with his wife in Denver.

His story, "A Source," appeared in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, William VanDenBerg talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Neanderthals, revision, and narrative ambiguity.

So where did spark that led to this story come from? What was the very first idea that led to all the others?

I watched a few things in quick succession about Neanderthals and early humans: a Nova episode called “Decoding Neanderthals,” another Nova called “Iceman Murder Mystery,” and an episode of Walking with Beasts. The last one is pretty bad, the night-vision Mammoth hunting scene in particular. I’d been wanting to write stories that weren’t set in the modern era, and the last days of the Neanderthals seemed like interesting subject matter. I enjoy narratives that gain drama through their setting (George Saunders's “93990,” most of Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn). It also gives the story a fatalist tone that I liked—the setting gives the story its trajectory.

Can you describe how this story changed throughout your drafting process? “A Source” is written mostly in simple sentences and short paragraphs. Were you writing it that way from the beginning, or did this restrained style emerge during revision?

The narrator’s voice was more complicated at first. I was trying to make it distinctive by using odd sentence constructions and avoiding simple sentences, but that didn’t work. Her voice came off like a non-southern writer trying to write a thick southern accent, all misspellings and apostrophes. It was awful. Over the next few drafts I reworked and simplified the sentences, took out most of the stylistic garbage. I used this technique I read about in a Gary Lutz interview, where you blow the text up to 26-point font, which gives the sentence this massive scale. Any dead weight becomes obvious – it can’t hide in a big block of text. That reduction technique produced the minimal, kinda stilted voice that ended up in the finished piece.

I was also working on the edits for Lake of Earth at the time, and I used some things I learned from Caketrain editors Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed. After the piece was accepted, Gabriel Blackwell had some great changes that pushed the story where it needed to go.

The protagonist is a woman who tells stories. Do you feel a sort of kinship with her for that reason?

No, not really. It’s rare that I have much of a connection to my characters, particularly this one.

On your blog, you said of this story: “One of the main ambiguities of the piece is whether or not she believes the stories she tells, or if she’s just stretching her imagination.” As the author, did you ever have to decide for yourself whether or not your protagonist believes her own stories, or does it remain ambiguous even to you? (How hard was it to maintain this ambiguity? Were you ever tempted to delve deeper into the character’s inner life and reveal her beliefs or doubts?)

I never decided whether she believes in her stories or not. I think she might be on the fence as well. She tells the story about the sun and moon without a great deal of motivation, almost by accident, then gets wrapped up in it. From early on, I thought the ambiguity provided some charge to the narrative, and I wasn’t tempted to expand on it.

Re: her inner life, I was always interested in her lack of self (or at least what modern humans define as self). Her existence is governed by survival, which is a largely repetitive act. Eat, shit, reproduce, sleep, don’t get eaten, repeat. Not a lot of time to develop an inner life.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing up a series of twenty linked pieces called MILK TEETH. One has appeared at Alice Blue Review and another at The Fanzine. I’ve also been working on a novel since January or so. It takes place over thirty years and focuses on a pair of detectives, a long dead alien creature, and a young woman who is birthed every ten years by the sea. That one will take a while.

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

Megan Martin’s Nevers is just mind-blowing. The stories in it are hilarious and terrifying and can turn on a dime. Elizabeth Mikesch’s Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me is superb as well, full of dense sentences and a fantastic, unexpected story about hockey. Those two books make a good pair. They both contain a lot of startling, innovative writing about the body. I also stumbled across Ann Quin’s Tripticks last December, and I’ve been rationing the rest of her books. She’s able to pull off these thick spirals of description that completely baffle me. I often read her sentences out loud over and over, trying to unravel them. I’ve only got Passages left to read, and I’m almost afraid to start it.

“Personal Comfort Over the Wellbeing of Strangers”: An Interview with Glenn Shaheen

Glenn Shaheen is the author of the poetry collection Predatory  (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and the flash fiction chapbook Unchecked Savagery (Ricochet Editions, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Kalamazoo where he is a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University.

His story, "Body in the Dumpster," appeared in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Glenn Shaheen talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about dismantling syntax, elaborate pranks and his second manuscript, Energy Corridor.

What got you initially thinking about and eventually writing the story, “Body in the Dumpster”?  

I’m always running horrible scenarios through my head, and one night when I was throwing out some garbage into my apartment complex’s dumpster I imagined what I’d do if there was a dead body in the dumpster. That’s an easy call, though—just get the police. Then I wondered what I’d do if there was a hurt living person in the dumpster. I’d have to jump in, obviously.

I find the logic of your narrator fascinating, especially the way in which he distances himself from responsibility and action by constantly second-guessing what he hears and sees. What was the process like in creating this character/voice and how did it change, if at all, during revision? 

Most of us in contemporary America have this voice within us. A homeless person asks us for a dollar and we imagine they’d just buy drugs or something, so we might say no. We read a story about climate change and think briefly about walking to get groceries, but then we tell ourselves it’s only a mile drive, it won’t hurt that much. We’re experts at choosing personal comfort over the wellbeing of strangers.

Near the end of this piece the narrator decides not to help. He claims: “I decided it was a joke. I wouldn't even call 911. Some kids probably laughing in one of the buildings around me. I almost fell for it, too, leaping into trash and bugs. So I just said ‘Fuck this.’ and left.” Could you speak more about the narrator’s sense of paranoia, of being the victim of some elaborate prank, and how this informed your writing of the story?

I don’t think the narrator truly believes it was a joke being played on him. He’s just constructed the exact scenario in which he wouldn’t have to even try to help, which in this case is a voice recorder placed in the dumpster by some imagined kids. Some kind of elaborate prank! Even if there was a slim chance that there actually was a dying or injured person in the dumpster, he should have still jumped in and tried to help. It’s just so easy for the human brain to talk us into doing nothing in situations in which we clearly should act.

You’ve published books of poetry and flash fiction. What does poetry provide you that flash fiction might not, and likewise how does flash fiction satisfy you as a writer in ways that poetry might not?

In flash fiction I feel more comfortable with narrative (even if it’s fragmented), or setting a piece in an actual place in the real world. I also feel more comfortable playing with/dismantling syntax in my present poems than I do in my present flash fiction. None of this will probably stay true forever for me, though. I’ve written purely narrative poems, before, and flash fiction that tries to function without standard syntax. In my poems I don’t usually like to include a central character, a first person who speaks about his injuries or suffering or victories. In my flash fiction I always want there to be a strong central voice that comes definitively from a character, even if it is filtered through the third person. I’ll write about “me” in flash, or a translation of myself at least, but that’s really not the kind of poetry I’m interesting in creating, though it does seem to be the vogue in journal pubs right now.

What are you currently working on?

I’ve got my second manuscript of poems all “ready,” if you can ever truly say a manuscript is ready. It’s called Energy Corridor, and it’s about connective and communal necessity from an interpersonal to global level, and its failure in our present moment, told through the filter of Houston, where I lived for six years.

You’ve just missed your connecting flight and will be stuck at the airport for the next eight hours. What books are you wishing you’d carried on to keep you company?

I have to take medication to fly, but I’ll pretend that I’m not a big fraidy cat and that I could actually read at an airport, ha ha. I’d love to read back through Great Guns by Farnoosh Fathi and The Year of What Now by Brian Russell for some recent poetry. The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard would kill some time, but these three books are pretty short. I just read Devil on the Cross by Ngugi wa Thiong’o which was terrific and dense, and I feel like I need/want to give it another go, too. Also I’d probably have my week’s pull list of comics, to be honest.

"A Decent Start at Owning My Thoughts": An Interview with Brenda Rankin

Brenda Rankin is a graduate of the MFA program at CSU Fresno, where she was editorial assistant and webmaster for The Normal School. She teaches English in California's Central Valley, and her work has appeared in Knee-Jerk Magazine, COBALT, The Writing Disorder, fwriction : review, and Puerto Del Sol.

Her essay, "A Sweeping Presentation of the Main Theme," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Brenda Rankin talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about epigraphs, research, and writing about her fixations.

Tell us about the genesis of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea).

As the essay’s fixation on the predicament woman in the row in front of me suggests, from the moment the incident occurred, I couldn’t get it, or her, out of my mind. I knew I’d have to write about it, even if it only turned into rambling free-writey philosophizing no one would ever see.

The essay begins with an epigraph from the film Before Sunrise. What made you decide to include this quote? How do you want it to influence the audience’s reading of the piece?

I love to love those movies, and not just because admitting a liking for them seems to be such a terrible idea in most circles. To be honest, those films have always seemed cringe-worthy to me, but in a sweet, charming way—the way it would feel, I imagine, to read back on notebooks I kept when I was seventeen (if I had kept notebooks when I was seventeen, which I did not, and wish I did). They’re a bit too earnest, maybe, a tad too concerned with their own quality of emotion and progression of thought. The actors/characters are too young to even understand what they’re saying, but decide to say it anyway, because it’s what’s on their mind. The movie, and Julie Delpy’s quote, in particular, in its likely-un-self-aware-but-sincere attempts to process life seemed like just the right white flag to put up at the start of an essay like this. Because, really, what early twenty-something has any business essaying on her preoccupations with her own lack of time left on earth? I felt deliciously self-conscious, taking that essay in to my graduate workshop, and got responses that ranged from the expected  “It’s brave, alright,” shrugs, to the classmate pounding her flattened palm down on her copy of my draft in excitement, saying, “Heck yes, you’re a twenty-something feeling all panicky about how you’re running out of time—that IS insane. Own it!” And since all epigraphs are horrible risks as it is, and my entire workshop encouraged me to lose it, I figured a stubborn refusal to eliminate Ms. Delpy from my pre-essay space was a decent start at owning my thoughts.

Interwoven throughout your personal narrative taking place in 2010 are brief sections labeled “Early November, 1893,” which describe Tchaikovsky’s declining health resulting in his death. How much research did you have to do in order to write these parts? How has the research process changed your writing of this and other essays?

I miss being a university student so much as fall approaches each year, and this question has pulled that nostalgia even closer to me. A lot of research went into this essay; once I decided that, close as my emotional connection to his music was, I couldn’t feel comfortable writing about it without spending time reading on Tchaikovsky himself, the structure and pacing of the essay seemed clearer to me. I checked out every single book on the composer and his music in my university’s library, lugged them home, and went from there. I miss access to that library, because yes, I’m a researcher by nature, whether for essays or for my own personal nerdery. I value essays for their constant glorification of research and our personal connections to what we research, and what we discover. The space between researcher and research is a magical one, and I’m thankful essays exist as a means to explore it.

On the subject of feeling the inevitability of death, you wrote about Tchaikovsky and yourself: “He sought catharsis by formatting his morose preoccupations onto sheet music, elevating them from mere mental turmoil to art to be played and shared with audiences for centuries to come. In my case, it works merely as a paralysis, this fixation of the lack of life ahead of me or the ones I love, often rendering me motionless, with nothing to do but leak its impact out my eyeballs.” Do you feel that your writing of this piece helped to counteract that paralysis? Was the essay at all cathartic for you?

I do think it helped, perhaps primarily by the act of admitting and taking ownership of these preoccupations, and allowing many who’ve read the piece to contact me saying, “Yep, me too—I thought I was alone in these ridiculous fixations.” I’ve always been one of those sad souls who seek approval from others for everything, from my clothing choices to my thoughts on death. This is easily my least attractive mental quality, but I suppose choosing to write and submit creative nonfiction for publication means learning to either eliminate those tendencies or embrace them and use them as fuel for essaying. This essay was a positive move in the direction of the latter.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Well, this interview, for starters. And this question has been a fantastic kick-in-the-pants for me, so thank you. Beyond that, I’ve been bird-by-birding it every day, which is an awesome development for me—a consistent writing practice will be my eternal white whale. I’ve been attempting to turn my essay collection (read: MFA thesis) into a decent manuscript. I also have a couple of drafts I’ve been making slow progress on—one stemming from the shattering of the Daisy Buchanan-as-feminine-model fantasy I formed in high school, and another attempting to make sense of the disturbing obsession I’ve had with following Sirius since New Year’s Eve this year. Of course, once the reincarnation of Cosmos took off, I realized that, as much as I love (and re-watch ad nauseam, much to my fiancé’s bewilderment) each episode, it also, inevitably, alters the space around the Sirius essay, and I still need to deal with that.

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

I have a couple of weeks off between the end of spring semester and the start of summer school, so I’ve been making bold (and not always successful) strides in the kitchen. Mark Bittman’s latest, Cooked, has been a fantastic partner-in-crime for me as I’ve worked at learning to cook each day.

I can’t answer this question without giving a tremendous shout-out to the recently-published The Shape of Blue: Notes on Love, Language, Motherhood, and Fear, by my friend and MFA program colleague, Liz Scheid. It taught me so much, got my gears turning, and alternately broke and rebuilt my heart.

"The Darkest Inevitable Logical Conclusion": An Interview with Ben Segal

Ben Segal is the author of 78 Stories (No Record Press) and co-editor of the anthology The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Lit Pub Books). He is also the co-author, with Feliz Lucia Molina and Brett Zehner, of the forthcoming epistolary novel The Wes Letters (Outpost19). His short fiction has been published by or is forthcoming from Tin House, Tarpaulin Sky, Gigantic, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He currently lives in California.

His story, "Yes Hog," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Ben Segal talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about mash-ups, metafiction, and blockbuster movies.

What can you tell us about the genesis of this story (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea)?

I think you guessed it a few questions down when you ask about mash-ups. I was thinking about what would happen if you made a mash-up not of the actual content of previously existing works but of their logics. To do this I needed to pick a couple of movies that work based on very clear premises. Both Yes Man and Groundhog Day rely on a specific idea, a hypothetical situation that catalyzes all of the narrative. That made them good candidates for this kind of logic mash-up. I also thought it would be pretty funny to take a pair of comedies and run them into the darkest inevitable logical conclusion I could imagine.

The story is organized into numbered sections, the first of which is not 1 but 0. This introductory section explains the conceit of the piece beginning with the phrase “In this story.” What made you decide the story should start with this Section Zero, rather than diving in medias res? In your mind, what is the advantage gained by opening the story on such a “meta” note (with the story acknowledging itself as a story)?

I probably like metafictional maneuvers too much but I really felt like it was important to lay out the cards early for this. If you don’t explain the logic of the world in the story, then it’s just this weird fucked up set of Jim Carey torture vignettes. By using a Zero section, I can set the meta stuff outside of the text proper and use it as a framing device that basically very overtly and honestly says: this is the set piece I’m working with, these are the ideas that this fiction works through. It lets the story exist as a story and as a story about a story. I like being able to bake that multiplicity into the text.  Or I’m just too old-fashioned and neurotic and feel like I need to explain the performance of writing or else it’s manipulative and dishonest and disrespectful of the reader. The answer is something like that.

Your story is a kind of “mash-up,” for the way it combines the main character of Yes Man with the cosmic joke of Groundhog Day. Do you understand any of your other writing as a process of juxtaposition? (Are you at all interested in “mash-ups” in any other media?)

I kind of addressed this earlier but yeah, totally. I was thinking about mash-ups. I was also thinking about appropriation in general, conceptual writing, etc., and how I could appropriate without taking any actual material. What’s cool about this story, to me, is that it’s a mash-up in a different medium that uses none of the physical material from its sources. It doesn’t even use scenes from the two movies. It’s a mash-up that is written from whole cloth but unmistakably still a mash-up. Or that’s the idea. And I’m realizing that it’s pretty perfect for it to appear in a magazine called the Collagist.

I think this story can also be read as part parody. I first detected the biting sense of humor with which you would treat your cinematic source material when I read the lines, “I think he also falls in love. Then the movie ends.” Was it your intention to skewer trite Hollywood storytelling? Or do you see the tone of the story as less sardonic and more playful?

The tone turns. It starts off just really honestly saying: This is the wager of the piece, these are the sources, I don’t know much about the sources though. Then the story kind of has a descent into the terrible and absurd. Then finally, I hope,  the story ends a little more thoughtfully than you’d have expected. It sort of says: Hey, here’s this trashy entertainment and let’s have fun playing with these premises but oh look they actually give us a way to think about ideas like sacrifice and eternal return.

It’s definitely not meant as an attack on Hollywood or a celebration of Hollywood either. Movies are important and pervasive narrative delivery devices and I was interested in taking these blockbuster cultural artifacts and using them for my own ends.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Right now I’m working on too many things. One thing I’m working on is trying to get people to read The Wes Letters, the collaborative epistolary novel/collective memoir thing I wrote with Feliz Lucia Molina and Brett Zehner. We’ve been giving readings and are planning to do several more this summer. Feliz and I also are working on another collaborative project, a trilogy of serial prose poem books called The Middle, The Beginning, and The End. So far we’ve only written The Middle. And then, on my own, I’m still making short stories, slowly, and even more slowly these will maybe amass into books.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

I want to recommend many things but most recently I read Insomnia and the Aunt by Tan Lin and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and both were very enjoyable in very different ways. One thing that they share is a tendency towards the understated and domestic. These are often qualities that bore me, but in these cases I enjoyed those kinds of simplicity and the way said kinds of simplicity opened subtly to their own complexities. This is so boring to write out. All I’m saying, I guess, is that I recommend these books even though I can hardly say ‘quiet domestic realism’ without sarcasm. They are good though, and more than just quiet domestic realism.

Episode 16: The Collagist Podcast - An interview with Kelly Sundberg

The Collagist's very own William Hoffacker interviews Kelly Sundberg whose essay, "It Was Once Like This Before," was featured in Issue 56.

Kelly Sundberg's nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, The Los Angeles Review, Slice Magazine, and others. She has also had an essay recognized as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2013. She currently lives in Athens, Ohio where she is a PhD Candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Ohio University.

"Attempts to Uncover What Happens in My Brain": An Interview with Jamie Iredell

Jamie Iredell is the author of, most recently, I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. His writing appears in many magazines, among them Gigantic, The Literary Review, and Copper Nickel. He lives in Atlanta and is a professor of creative writing.

His essay, "This Essay Cannot Sleep," appeared in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Jamie Iredell talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about fragments, essays as attempts, and the freedom in writing nonfiction.

Please tell us about the origins of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea).

I put this book together, in which this essay’s included, called I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. The book wasn’t always called that though. My publisher, Kevin Sampsell, came up with that title. When I read that title it sounded absolutely right for the book. It mentioned everything—or almost everything—that the book covers, and puts it in the past tense (i.e., most of those things I’m no longer dealing with). In the original draft of the book, the fact of my insomnia came up in a number of the essays, hence the reason I think why Kevin decided to include it in the title (it’s also a great word). But then Kevin emailed me and said something along the lines of “You know, there’s not really an ‘insomnia’ essay. Think you could write one?” So I did, and that was this essay.

I know I’d been thinking about writing about this for some time and couldn’t quite get the words right, but when I was forced to do it and to do it within a certain time frame it came out right. I drafted it, added to it, cut some things, edited, and it was pretty much done. I think it probably went through three or maybe four drafts before it was finished, which is rather quick for me.

The initial draft I also wrote on a night when I couldn’t sleep, so that seemed fitting. Usually what I do when I have trouble sleeping is read and write, with hope that the former might lull me to sleep, and that failing, why waste time and instead get to the latter?

Throughout your series of vignettes, some sections take on the form of lists, including books that you’ve read throughout sleepless nights and “Things I think about when I’m trying to sleep.” What appealed to you about organizing information with this format in small chunks of your essay?

Honestly, it just kind of came out that way. Like I said above, I wrote this when I was having trouble sleeping, and the way your brain works at times like those is kinda fragmentary. I’d think about something related to not sleeping, or think about specific times when I couldn’t sleep and I’d write about that, then I’d check my email or get on Facebook or something, then eventually I’d meander back to the essay draft. So I think that process had something to do with the broken vignette/list form. And, since what I mostly do when I can’t sleep is read and write it made sense to list the books I’ve read and/or written when I couldn’t sleep. Many of those books I read in single sittings because I couldn’t sleep, like No Country for Old Men.

The essay takes an interesting turn with the small section starting with “I once read that Napoleon Bonaparte was an insomniac,” followed immediately by another that begins, “According to Wikipedia, lights-out baseball refers to…” Then later another list is introduced with “People who claimed to never sleep.” I point out these three sections because they represent the largest departures from writing about your own experiences, which is what the essay had trained me to expect. How did you decide that this piece should include some researched material outside the realm of your own life?

I don’t really know how to answer this question other than to say that it gets boring writing about yourself all the time. Nonfiction’s liberating in the sense that as soon as you get bored writing in one particular style or about one particular thing, it’s fine if you change that up. I mean, I guess you’ve got to maintain the basic gist of what you set out to do—or maybe not. It’s a genre that seems completely open to me. It feels more like poetry than anything. You’re not beholden to narrative like most fiction is (and I truly mean most fiction; some of the best doesn’t rely on narrative at all), or to character development, or an expository style. You can do whatever you want, as long as it stays interesting for the reader. So, I guess that that’s what some of those departures were for me as a writer, and hopefully for readers as well: they were ways to break up the monotony of what I was writing about to keep things interesting. They have the added effect of feeling like the wandering mind of someone who’s suffering from insomnia. One minute you’re thinking about how tired you are, the next you’re thinking about how much more comfortable you’d be if you just rolled over to your right side, then you’re thinking about the class you have to teach the next day and the prep you anticipate for it, then you think about Napoleon.

In the fourth-to-last section, you write, “I’m scared. I feel about doctors the same way that I do about salespeople or auto mechanics. I’m also aware that this is completely irrational. It’s as crazy as my fear of sharks, or heights, or lightning. But I’m a fan of the definition of ‘essay’ as ‘an attempt.’ So I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I might be looking for answers, it’s okay if I don’t find any. What matters is that I tried to.” Are all your essays attempts to look for answers? How do you know when you’re finished writing “an attempt” if you haven’t found the answers yet?

Yeah, I guess they are all attempt at answers, or observations, or inquiries. There may not be an overt question. Maybe they’re all just attempts to uncover what happens in my brain, to lay that bare. Mostly I know when an essay’s done because of a similar feeling I have with poems: they simply feel done. They click closed, like the lid closes on a box for a piece of jewelry. I wish I could claim that idea as my own, but I heard somewhere from someone when I was in school, and that feels like the right way to describe what happens when I’m writing just about anything. There’s a point when the lid comes down and—SNAP—that’s it. And I get this feeling like, that’s done.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’ve finished up a novel that Spork Press will be publishing. I’m excited about that. I don’t want to say too much about it just cause I’m superstitious. Other than that I’ve worked on a couple essays and recently, after a long time away from them, have gotten back into writing short stories. In particular I’ve been interested in writing speculative fiction—sci fi and horror. These are the kinds of stories I grew up reading, and I’ve always been interested in writing it. I guess I’ve always been writing it. I got that “It’s done” feeling just last week after I completed some revision on a short story that I first drafted more than six years ago.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

I’ve been reading a lot of the literary magazines that publish the genres that I mention above. Among the magazines that I think are publishing some of the most interesting of this work are The Dark, Shimmer and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. In particular, I love the stories of Rachel Swirsky and K.M. Ferebee. But I’ve also been impressed with stories by folks who are typically labeled simply “literary” because they published their stories/novels in your typical literary magazines, yet they have a tremendous talent for unveiling the creepy or cool. I’m thinking of Shane Jones (whose novel Crystal Eaters releases from Two Dollar Radio in June), and Aaron Burch (whose new collection Backwing comes out in July from Queen’s Ferry Press). I’m featuring both these writers at Atticus Review in June and July, respectively.

Episode 15: The Collagist Podcast - Geffrey Davis

Geffrey Davis  reads "What My Father Might Say, If I Let Him Speak" from Issue 53 of The Collagist. He also discusses the inspiration of his poem and recommends the Organic Weapons! Arts spotlight in Issue 57, particularly Rachel McKibbens' poems, "Mammoth," "Giants," and "Rochester, NY" from her new chapbook, Mammoth.

Geffrey Davis holds degrees from Oregon State University and Penn State University. He is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Other awards include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, nominations for the Pushcart, and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. 

Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Green Mountains Review, The Greensboro Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Nimrod, [PANK], Sycamore Review, and elsewhere, and have been reprinted at The Feminist Wire and Verse Daily. Part of his work as a literary citizen involves promoting the work of others. To this end—a former editor and founding member—he serves on the board of directors for Toe Good Poetry. 

Davis grew up in Tacoma, WA. He joins the MFA faculty at The University of Arkansas.

"Unfolding in the Present Tense": An Interview with Lisa Van Orman Hadley

Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s stories have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Epoch, New England Review, The Collagist and Knee-Jerk. She was the recipient of the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship and a Money for Women/Barbara Deming scholarship. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her four-eyed husband, two-eyed twins and one-eyed cat. She is writing a novel-in-stories.

Her essay, "Making Sandwiches with My Father," appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Lisa Van Orman Hadley talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about concision, chronology, and writing about family.

What can you tell us about the origins of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea)?

Several years ago, as an undergrad, I read Will Baker’s essay, “My Children Explain the Big Issues.” It was the first time I had ever seen creative nonfiction written in vignettes instead of a straightforward narrative. I liked the playfulness of the form and how much work the title did. I remembered that Will Baker essay years later as I sat down to write “Making Sandwiches with My Father.” My dad had just been diagnosed with dementia (we were still a couple of years away from the official diagnosis of Alzheimer’s). An alternative to the traditional narrative seemed like a way for me to create distance from a situation that was still raw and unfolding. The title (I think I came up with the title first or, at least, very early on) provided a theme to vary on and allowed me to explore different facets of my relationship with my father without being tethered to a traditional narrative.   

How did you decide to use the present tense in these vignettes from your past? (What’s the effect you hope to achieve by choosing present over past tense?) 

My husband makes fun of me because I often confuse the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow” when I’m talking. So, for example, I’ll say, “Tomorrow I went to Walden Pond” or “Yesterday is supposed to be a beautiful day.” I like to say it’s because I’m omnipresent, but really there just seems to be a glitch in the part of my brain that processes chronology. I seem to function best in the present tense. In this particular story the present tense helped transport me back into the scenes I was writing about and get closer to the emotions I felt at the time. Obviously I wasn’t writing this story as my father and I were making sandwiches. I am not that good at multi-tasking. But I was writing it before his disease was labeled as Alzheimer’s – before I knew what the trajectory of that specific disease looks like. It still felt like I was very much in the middle of the story. The disease itself was unfolding in the present tense and, along with it, the question of what my relationship with my father would be like going forward. I hoped that the present tense would bring the reader in closer to all that as well.

Concision is an important aspect of this essay. All four sections are quite brief—the shortest contains only two paragraphs—and yet each one carries a great deal of emotional weight. How difficult was it to render so many aspects (characters, narrative, setting, dialogue, reflection, theming) in such tight spaces? In writing and revising this and other works, what strategies do you have for overcoming such a challenge?

My tendency is to write too little instead of too much. I cannot for the life of me seem to write a story that is more than ten or twenty pages long. When I can contain a story in a small space it feels much easier to tame it. Concision is actually liberating for me; fewer words are less intimidating. If I’m having a hard time figuring out what to do with a word, sentence, paragraph, I just cut it and move on. More often than not, I’ll realize that part wasn’t necessary to the story and that it was actually clutter. Clutter isn’t necessarily junk. You can have a pile of really fancy, expensive clutter but the excess makes it so you can’t appreciate each individual thing. I try not to be a hoarder in my stories. My mom used to have a saying on the fridge that said something along the lines of, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” I think the same could probably be said of a story. If it isn’t moving the story forward or isn’t truly beautiful (or, I would add, funny), maybe it doesn’t belong. On the flip side, though, sometimes I get rid of too much or have too little there to begin with. That is a problem, too. In those cases, I have to go back in and add more material to make the story more emotionally resonant. The first draft of this story was shorter than the final draft. My MFA supervisor suggested that it needed a little something more at the end so I added the part about sitting on the bus and looking at the dirt under my fingernails. The story felt more whole after that.     

In section three, you wrote: “I want to blister with tears, want to sob into my freezing cold hands for her. But I don’t. I guess my father and I are the same that way.” Your essay addresses a common theme among nonfiction writing and in our lives: the ways in which we come to resemble our parents, whether we mean to or not. Can you offer some insight into what made you want to write about this subject, as well as what it means to participate in a tradition of examining oneself through the lens of family?

I wanted to show how my family didn’t talk to each other about emotional or intimate things. I never even told my parents that I started my period. Surprise, Mom and Dad! My dad has always been a very “doing” kind of person. He doesn’t say a lot but he’s always making or fixing or cleaning something. The sandwiches became a symbol of how he would respond to (and/or avoid) situations by making something instead of talking. I guess in a way the act of writing this story was kind of a manifestation of how I’ve come to resemble my parents. Instead of talking about the dementia with my dad, I sat down and wrote an essay about it. 

To address the question about examining oneself through the lens of family: Writing about family is hard. These are people I really care about and I don’t want to hurt or upset them. At the same time though, perfect people make for kind of boring characters. Flawed people are more loveable. What I’ve found is that it’s almost impossible to write a story when I’m worrying about how my family will respond to it. It’s paralyzing. I have to try to put all that aside while I’m writing the first draft and just put it all out there. If something needs to be taken out in later drafts because it’s not worth the heartache to family or self, fine. But you can’t worry about it in the beginning. It also helps that my dad will never read this story. If he were able to read it, I hope he would be okay with the way I portrayed him. I like to think he would. 

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing up an autobiographical novel-in-stories called Irreversible Things. The title story is written in reverse chronological order. It’s about my neighbor who was murdered on the side of my house when I was seven years old. “Making Sandwiches” is also in there. Some of the stories are really short. A couple of them are only one sentence. Some are written from a child’s perspective and some are written from an adult’s perspective. Some of them are true and some of them are not-as-true.  

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

I recently finished Lydia Davis’s new book of stories, Can’t and Won’t. The stories are told in such a simple and often jokey way, but they are full of emotional weight. There’s a great story where the narrator watches a couple of cows and describes what they do day after day. It is delightfully mundane. But to be honest, I mostly read picture books these days. I’ve read the book Doctor De Soto to my two-year-old twins, Lars and Maud, four times today and it’s only one in the afternoon. One picture book I really like is Henri’s Walk to Paris. I like the way the text interacts with the pictures. I do wish adult fiction had more pictures. I just picked up a memoir by illustrator and fabric designer Heather Ross called, How to Catch a Frog and other stories of family, love, dysfunction, survival, and DIY. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s full of charming illustrations and how-tos for building things like beanpole teepees and bird nests, and making paper flowers and cream of broccoli soup. Speaking of which, I also really enjoy reading cookbooks from cover-to-cover (and looking at the pictures). Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi is my current favorite. The pan-fried couscous with tomato and onion on page 129 is delicious. Also the pasta recipe with Greek yogurt, feta peas and pine nuts on page 111 and the hummus on page 114.

"I Am Nightmared Tonight": An Interview with Molly Sutton Kiefer

Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the hybrid essay Nestuary (forthcoming, Ricochet Editions) as well as the poetry chapbooks City of Bears and The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake.  She is a member of the Caldera Poetry Collective, poetry editor at Midway Journal and runs Balancing the Tide: Motherhood and the Arts | an Interview Project.

Her poem, "Conjunct," appeared in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, she talks with interviewer Christina Oddo about sound, a poem's revision-potential, and motherhood.

What role does sound play for you as a writer, and for this specific work? (i.e. “trained tornadoes,” “my eyes peel, creak, crept,” “the endless loop of lullaby, the lop and hop and jiggle”), and how much do you rely on sound in order to find the perfect word to round out an image? (i.e. “I hear cars clasp the slick
pavement”)

I do love onomatopoeia.  (I also love that it was one of the words we tried so hard to get our daughter to say when she was first parroting things back to us—say mama, say fox, say onomatopoeia.)  I love sensual detail in poetry, so anything that can shimmy in my mouth, my ears is ideal.  I associate in things like colors and tones—certain nouns can feel a particular way—or a poem can feel like it belongs in a bathtub with wine, another might be a window slamming shut.  Poems nest and chirrup, poems settle in my stomach.  My father is a musician, my husband is a musician, and I played the violin for a good while; I think there’s something residual there.  Song caught in the ball of my throat.

I can’t help but think of this work in terms of the title. The images threaded through this piece are related through commas. I see these sentences as coordination structures connecting words and phrases together, sometimes with coordinating conjunctions. I think of “woven lashes together” as an overarching image for what the syntax is doing here with the included details. What thread holds the greatest weight for you in terms of connecting these images together?

This poem in particular comes from a collaborative chapbook manuscript called Kept Ghosts: A Choral Aubade and is written by the Caldera Poetry Collective (calderapoetry.com)  Each poet contributed poems on a rotating basis, building from the previous poems’ work—including a phrase or word, always using morning as the common thread.  At the time of writing, my own mornings weren’t of lovers parting but of comforting a fairly newly born baby; it was springtime when the tornadoes come through my part of the country, and the poems I was writing for a solo project were about motherhood and the failures of the body.  So here we have morning and all its colors and movement—with exhaustion can only come this stream of half-lit, flighted eyes.

It’s one of my habits, to build things up with commas.  It’s the way the world seems to pile up in my mind, which doesn’t always help the poem.  Conjunctions and phrases are something I’ve been told to edit down, interestingly enough, and I try, when it serves the poem.

How do you know when a poem is complete? “will hear the word go” holds so much weight, simultaneously feeling complete yet full of possibility.  

I don’t.  It’s impossible.  Generally speaking, I’m the kind of poet who is done, or nearly-done, in the first go, which is something I have really had to grapple with.  When I was in that late-beginner stage, I took so many classes and workshops on revising the poem, desperate for advice on how to move a poem forward.  I didn’t realize it was often nearly-there.  If a poem isn’t nearly-there, I don’t always revise but instead toss it, though I have been working on seeing it through more and more, now that I can have the concept of a manuscript.  I might know I need a particular poem to be there for the arc.

I think we all have our own writing processes, and mine is to hold the poem inside me and let it spurt out when I get the chance to settle at the page.  I’m learning how to scrub away the rough edges, and it helps that I have writerly partners who exchange work, either in group setting, or one-on-one, and know where I’m heading and can help steer me a bit more.  I have one friend who I’ve begun to exchange weekly poems with, and I always have her voice in my head:  “Wait, I don’t get it.  I don’t understand what’s going on.”  Then I have my first poetry professor who follows that up with, “You were there and we weren’t.”  This is often my biggest issue, aside from those pesky commas and conjunctions (and verb tenses)—making assumptions about what the reader might know. 

I like the idea of opening a poem up—of giving this particular poem a feeling of exhaustion and being trapped—in a car, in a house, with the baby and her endless needs—and then leaving the idea of away.

What are you currently reading?

So many good things!  Every day, I’m reading slush for Tinderbox Poetry Journal (tinderboxpoetry.com), and I’m absolutely loving the quality of work we’ve been getting.  I just finished The Empathy Exams and was, like so many people, blown away by how lovely and startling it is.  I’m learning more and more about the hybrid text, the lyric essay, which is something I’m finding my work coming out in more and more.  On my bedside right now is  Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein for a collaborative epistolary project a friend and I are flirting with.  And I read this one a little bit ago, but it still resonates with me, and I think every poet or poetry-enjoyer ought to read it and that is Sarah Vap’s The End of the Sentimental Journey.  So, so good.

What are you currently writing?

I’m shopping around a manuscript called Hush, which examines the intensity of early motherhood—the love, yes, but also the sheer terror.  For the first time, I’ve written love poems about my husband—poems that are observations and ruminations of him as a father, which is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my life.  (And I don’t mean that hyperbolically.)  It’s always been hard to write about him; we’re pretty laid-back, quiet people, so there isn’t often a lot of dramatic tension.  But with two little kids, anything can become drama, (Mom, he’s LOOKING at me!) (I want to take a nap with the nest GRANDMA MADE ME!) which means everything has opportunity to be turned over and held up to light, become a poem.

The manuscript I’m most generating poems toward seeks to answer the question, “What do we tell our children about death?”  Of course, there is no real answer to that, but what I hope the manuscript will do is expand the options.  There will be a sequence about gardening to show that cycle-of-life trope, there will be poems about ghost hunters and The Egyptian Book of the Dead and rituals from societies near and far—and, too, tender poems about the sickness and then passing of my father-in-law.  It feels very real to me, very present and urgent, and I’m just trying to keep up with all the flying-about ideas that want my attention.