"Looking for Communion": An Interview with Matthew Gavin Frank

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright), Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks, Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark.  He teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish liver ice cream.  It paired well with onion bagels.

His essay "The Dawning of the Blue Crab" appears in Issue Forty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Matthew Gavin Frank talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about food, unlikely connections, and grasshoppers.

1. Please tell us about how/why you began writing "The Dawning of the Blue Crab."

The essay is part of a collection-in-progress, tentatively titled, Foood: 50 States, 50 Essays, 50 Recipes. (Yes: 3 Os).  I’m trying to cobble together this weird, lyrical, avant-garde cookbook of sorts.  Each essay begins with the same line of questioning, based on the state, and the choosing of a particular food typically associated with that state: What does the blue crab mean?  What does Maryland mean?  What ancillary subjects will I have to engage in order to answer these questions?  What sorts of people will I have to find as interview subjects in order to get at these answers, or at least a little closer to them?  When I sit down to write a first draft of these, I, of course, have no idea where they’ll go.  I have no idea what the fulcrum of the essay will be, outside of state and food—the springboards.  It’s so exciting when these ancillary subjects begin attaching themselves, like burrs onto pant cuffs, to the springboards.   The Louisiana essay, for instance, is about Crawfish Etouffee and autoerotic asphyxiation.  The Rhode Island one deals with Clear Clam Chowder and the Cognitive Psychology of Transparency—how we think and react differently to things we can look through rather than look at.  Maine deals with Whoopie Pie and James Earl Jones. 

2. What made you decide to write this essay from the second person point of view? What is its intended effect on the reader who learns about “your aunt” instead of “my aunt,” for example?

Well, it’s a boring answer, really.  It’s because it’s not my uncle, not my aunt.  As I was writing this essay, as I’m doing with the other essays in the Foood book, I interviewed a bunch of folks in the state at hand.  Invariably, certain personal connections of mine wouldn’t be able to answer some of the focused questions I had, so they would direct me to friends of friends of friends, and eventually, someone would say, Oh, yeah!  My uncle’s a lobsterman who lost a finger!  Or, Oh, yeah! My uncle used to work in a bowling ball factory and is now getting through his forced retirement by obsessing on racehorse injuries!  And sometimes, I’ve been getting lucky enough to talk to the aunts and uncles themselves, and invariably, I’d be looking for connections between their lives—be it a manner of speech or another aspect of their personalities—and the lives of my own uncles, aunts.  And I’d be looking for odd connections between other nephews across the country and me.  Looking for communion.  So the uncle and aunt in The Dawning... are composite characters, of course; are UNCLE and AUNT, collective archetypes embedded within other archetypes—like MARYLAND and CRAB and JELLYFISH and ORCHID.

3. I admire the way that this essay juxtaposes historical facts and memoiristic scenes. Can you please talk about how researched information can effectively frame our memories and life experiences (or vice versa)?

As a fourth generation OCDer, I’ve long been obsessed with finding the odd connections between my life, and the lives of others, or trying to situate my life within some larger socio-cultural context.   It’s a way to avoid omphaloskepsis, of course, but it’s also a way to find out more about myself—to self-interrogate in very focused ways.  What does my belly-button have to do with all the other belly-buttons?  How would they relate when placed side-by-side?  When forced to collide?  Are there clear patterns?  If not, what sort of heavy lifting is required in order to divine a pattern?  I want to find out, for instance, what my first kiss has to do with Charles Lindbergh and grasshoppers.  That’s the wonderful thing: as writers, we have the power to manipulate connections between just about anything, no matter how seemingly dissimilar.  It just takes research, contemplation, alchemy, voodoo, the P.I.-style discovery of that perfect “bridge” ingredient.  It’s witch’s spell and police procedural; bureaucratic and incantatory, ephemeral, ponderous.  Other adjectives, even.  In a way, I had no idea what my first kiss meant until I learned that Charles Lindbergh was a grasshopper fetishist, and used to, in the Army, as a practical joke, trap scores of grasshoppers beneath the tightly-tucked bed-sheets of his fellows, restricting their, however brief, flight.  Perfect! I thought to myself.  That’s exactly how I felt after kissing Dawn Seckler in the Aptakisic Junior High School parking lot after graduation, our stupid tassled hats getting in the way—like some odd brew of Lindbergh hatching a plan, trapped grasshopper, and a guy who discovers locusts on his mattress.  And what does that mean?  By the way, did you know that grasshopper infants are called nymphs?

4. How have lessons learned from reading/writing poetry informed your work in creative nonfiction?

It’s that bridge ingredient thing.  Lately, I’ve been seeing the segmented essay as a series of stanzas. Also, there is a time for restraint in poetry, and a time when restraint should not be part of the poem’s language.  I’ve been trying to find that balance in these essays: which segment should be a bouillon cube, and which should just unfurl and unfurl.

5. What writing projects are you working on now?

Besides Foood, I’m putting some final edits on my forthcoming book, PREPARING THE GHOST: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright).  In 1874 St. John’s Newfoundland, this mad reverend and amateur naturalist, Moses Harvey, took the first-ever photograph of the giant squid, rescuing the beast from mythology and finally proving its existence, changing the ways in which we engaged the construct of the sea monster.  To take the photo, Harvey transported the squid from one bay to another, and then finally to his home where he proceeded to drape it over his bathtub's curtain rack so its full size could be displayed.  It’s a book-length segmented essay rife with those ancillary burrs—what I like to think of as essential, contextual digressions—like the various reasons we need to mythologize and then kill our myths, for instance; and ice cream.

6. What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Elena Passarello’s essay collection, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande Books), is a dazzler—so endlessly curious, voracious, informative, and just so entertaining.  Passarello and I went back and forth on the Essay Daily website with an Answerless Interview/Questionless Interview.  Check ‘em out.  We totally think we’re cooler than we likely are.

"Trampling Over a Space": An Interview with Matthew Poindexter

Matthew Poindexter's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2009 (University of Virginia Press), Another and Another (Bull City Press), and The Awl. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

His poems "SLOW / FUNERAL" appear in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Matthew Poindexter talks with interviewer Amber L. Cook about tension, rhyme, and law school.

1. What inspired you to write “Slow / Funeral”? Does the poem follow a true account of a funeral procession that you experienced?

Where I grew up in rural North Carolina, it’s common to put signs reading “SLOW / FUNERAL” in front yard of the grieving family and at the cemetery. You’re supposed to drive slowly to show respect. Those signs have stuck with me. As far as the action of the poem, I wouldn’t call it true to life, but whenever an emergency vehicle or funeral procession necessitates driving into someone’s land, I’m uncomfortable. I feel guilty if I’m trampling over a space someone obviously put a great deal of time and effort into making look nice, even if my being there isn’t by choice.

2. Couplets for me often work as units/containers that hold an image or idea together but also create really jarring enjambment. How do you see couplets functioning? What made this form a good fit for the subject of this poem?  

The risk with repeating the same stanza length over and over is the poem falling into a lull and not giving the reader something dynamic. This is especially true of couplets. If I commit to couplets, I almost need that jarring enjambment to make sure I don’t get too patterned. For me, the form functions best as a way to keep the language tight and short so that I don’t try to weave a clause on too long. On top of that, they fit with this poem because their form mirrors two-lane blacktop so well.

3. I really love lines that are conscious to sound, like when you write, “Kentucky-31 bag slumped on the stump of what/ must be/ an oak...” Do you often play with sonics in your poems? 

I believe the sonic qualities of a poem are just as important as any other technical aspect. I like rhyme, but I try to disperse it over the entirety of the poem. Putting all of that sonic play in end-line rhyme makes my writing feel uneven.  I try to punch up the sonics toward the end of the revision process, and I know a poem is getting close to being done when it starts to sound polished.

4. How did you achieve conflict between the speaker/driver in the poem and the lawn owner? 

Feeling obligated to intrude and being intruded upon is what I wanted to propel this poem. The driver has his right to the road in front of him intruded upon, and he loses his ability to feel anonymous and private in his car. The owner has his protected space violated, as well as the privilege to work as he pleases. Even the people going to the funeral are in the middle of a private and personal event that is being publicly acknowledged. The driver, the lawn owner, and the funeral party simultaneously intrude on one another, even though they would prefer not to, and that creates the tension.

5. What’s something that you’re reading right now that is worth sharing?

Right now I’m less than a month away from taking the bar exam, so it’s difficult to describe most of my reading as “worth sharing.” However, the one new book I have made time for is Delaney Nolan’s Shotgun Style: A Diagram of the Territory of New Orleans. Her stories manage to feel simultaneously alien and domestic, and logical but feverish.  They’ve made for a good respite from legal jargon.

6. Is “Slow / Funeral” part of a larger project?

“SLOW/ FUNERAL” is one section of something I’m working on, “The 500 Mile Long Poem.” That larger poem obsesses about driving and uses lines as an odometer. I’ve tinkered with it off and on for a few years, but the project’s definitely worth the time and patience.

"Landscapes of Meaning": An Interview with Sharon Wang

Sharon Wang is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis' MFA program.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pomegranate and Anti-.  She currently lives in Queens, NY.

Her poem "Lullaby" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Sharon Wang speaks with interviewer Amber Cook about dichotomies, hauntings, and David Foster Wallace.

1. Why did you decide to write this poem as a lullaby? What characteristics seem inherently lullaby-esque to you?

Actually I wrote the whole poem before tackling the title!  I am really terrible with titles.  I think I thought that “Lullaby” might match the cadence of the poem.  Previously, my working titles were “Elegy” and “Ode.”  

2. Even though the title of your poem suggests a soothing, nighttime song, the poem, especially towards the end, carries dark undertones with lines like: “A silver guillotine falls beneath the lids,” “ashes, ashes,” and “And you are here and you are gone.” I really love this pairing. What did you hope to achieve with this combination?

I don’t think I was consciously thinking about that juxtaposition as I was working.  I’d been sitting in a bookstore in Seattle reading the David Foster Wallace short story “Forever Overhead,” which was actually the first piece of fiction I’d read of his and a piece that is extremely different, in tone and in form, from the rest of the stories in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.  I had this weirdest feeling while reading it that he was “pretending.”  Not actually pretending, but showing to the reader what else he could do.  And in my strange semi-entranced semi-deluded state I felt that he was pretending to be a writer like me rather than a writer like him, only he was much better at it than I was.  

I’d resisted reading him for years for the truly terrible reason that I’d associated liking him with “being a certain kind of person,” and it turned out that I felt great solidarity with him, both in that story and in the others in that book.  So this was an intense experience.  I then went home with the cadences of that story stuck in my head, and I ended up free-writing a very preliminary draft of “Lullaby.”  Later it changed a lot (many of the lines were switched in with others from my vaster collection of notes) but the structure and the mix of the cadence and the darkness remained. 

It’s a poem about things that haunt me (existential crisis, or more precisely, “existential knowledge”) and it began as a subconscious analogical translation of DFW.  Now that I look at it, it’s kind of an unfortunate rip-off!  I stole a lot from him.  There are even small structural similarities, particularly in the dichotomy between the static formal/tonal elements and the thematic exploration of time’s relentless undercurrent, as evidenced by the repetition, which uses music to push the narrative/lyric forward while not really letting the reader move linearly.  In the DFW story, there’s a sort of central eradication enforced by moving and not moving at the same time.  There’s an odd kind of suspension that forces emphasis on the present moment but doesn’t tell you how to attribute meaning to it.  The whole thing’s very addressee-and-narrator-effacing, or perhaps human-effacing.  Time is over before the story’s even begun.  It’s difficult to be a human in that world, and yet there is a certain amount of tenderness.  But I’ve gotten away from myself by talking about that story and not my poem, which I wrote perhaps as a way to re-inhabit the feelings I had when I was reading the story.  And it’s highly possible I’m projecting things into my poem that only I can see, which would be a relief on some level!      

3. The repetition of “here” works really effectively in pacing the poem. Do you turn to repetition frequently in your work? 

I think I used to much more than I do now.  I typically pay a lot of attention to the sonic aspects of my work, maybe even relying on them as a crutch to bring a cohesion to images or leaps of logic that a reader might not initially buy as being of one piece, but I’ve recently also become more aware of how creating an overly sonically fluid piece can actually feel too “heavy” or “too much”—the way you might not want to keep eating pieces of rich chocolate cake because it begins to lose a little something.  (Although I have days when I want to.)

I’ve also always been interested in syntactical repetitions and how the building up/ breaking down of those structures creates meaning in a poem. 

4. What’s one book that you think every writer should read? 

So many!  Maybe His Dark Materials.  

5. What projects are you currently working on? Does “Lullaby” fit into any of them? 

“Lullaby” is in a manuscript I completed last fall (Practice in the Shadow Room).  I like the feeling of finishing something and getting to mentally set it aside, although that’s had weird consequences—I’ve actually tried to go back and make changes recently and found that it’s been completely blocked off and lives in a different compartment of my brain, much to my relief and dismay.

For better or for worse, I tend to think in terms of landscapes of meaning (sequences, books), rather than individual pieces, and it’s very nice (read: truly terrifying) to be discovering new territory (read: procrastinating wildly) for now.

"The Ordering of the World": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Virginia Pye

Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust, was chosen as an Indie Next Pick by the Independent Booksellers Association. Carolyn See in The Washington Post called it “intricate and fascinating;” Annie Dillard says it’s “a strong, beautiful, deep book;" and Robert Olen Butler named it “a major work by a splendid writer.” Virginia’s essays can be found in The Rumpus and forthcoming in The New York Times Opinionator blog and she’s been interviewed at The Nervous Breakdown and The Huffington Post. Please visit her at www.virginiapye.com

An excerpt from her novel River of Dust appears in Issue Forty-Six of The Collagist. 

Here, Virginia Pye answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from her novel, explained. Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Writing is the uncovering of consciousness—that brief moment when you first wake from sleeping and separate what you know from what you dreamt, what you remember from what you wish. Of course, writing is also the hard, plodding labor of getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, making your bed and pulling on your pants, one leg at a time.

In River of Dust, a passage near the end of the novel captures that dream of consciousness. Grace imagines herself in her husband’s study late at night. The Reverend is writing at his desk, unaware of her:

She followed the Reverend’s gaze across the room and was startled to see little Wesley seated on the floor in the corner….

“That’s a good boy,” she whispered. “Let your father concentrate on his work. He has much business to attend to.”

Grace rested her hand on her husband’s shoulder. The Reverend started slightly, although, like Wesley, he did not seem to see her.

“Oh, love,” he sighed.

It made Grace’s knees weak to hear his trembling voice. “Yes?” she answered.

Although he couldn’t hear her, he must have sensed a certain attentiveness surrounding him there in the shadowy study.

Writing is that attentiveness.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Now that I have defined writing as a vast notion of consciousness, there is nothing that writing isn’t. But, I’ll make a stab at it: how about if writing isn’t purely arbitrary list-making. Instead, writing is about the ordering of the world. We can’t help but define the world and that impulse and subsequent decision is writing. Because my novel is crafted and hopefully no part of it has been left untended to, it’s hard to find an example of what writing isn’t from within it. But, here’s a moment that comes close: 

…The Reverend pulled his knee close to his chest and released his leg in a mighty kick behind him. There came a crack: the furious blow had landed on something solid yet yielding, and it broke. Yes, the Reverend later explained, it was sickening satisfying—the same sensation he had felt as a boy when crushing rotten pumpkins in the fields with his boot.

Arbitrary violence should fall outside the realm of the ordered world. But then, to compare it to an innocent memory from childhood is a supreme act of naming. Even in trying to offer a moment of randomness the hand of the author (me!) is still very much present. Perhaps nothing in writing can be about not writing.

3. When you do it, why?

By it, I’m going to guess you mean the act of writing. I write because that’s how I make sense of things. I write because I have fun with it. I write because I’ve been doing it for decades and couldn’t possibly stop now. It’s how I frame my life—the chapters of my life are defined by the books I worked on at that time.

In River of Dust, both Grace and the Reverend try to keep order in their minds through religion and custom. When that starts to fail, they flounder, but the impulse to understand their world persists, even when it makes less and less sense:

One mild and moonless evening, as Grace sat by the closed window, she thought she heard bells—high, tinkling bells of the sort camel drivers tied to their beasts to keep them from becoming lost in dust storms. She cocked her head and listened and waited for the sounds of voices. She felt certain she would recognize her children because they would be brought home to her by a chorus of angels, or, given the bells, perhaps camels, or both.

Her urge to order (thank you, Wallace Stevens) is gently teased in this passage. Grace and the Reverend have little concept of how silly they become as they try to maintain dignity in a rapidly deteriorating world.

4. When you don’t, why?

When I don’t write, I’m sick, or busy, or distracted by life. When my children were young, I stopped writing longer works of fiction for close to a decade. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t stopped for that long, but in a way I couldn’t help it. I was immersed in life--up to my elbows in it. I didn’t have the proper distance to write about anything. I practiced what came to be known as “attachment parenting”—now an almost derogatory term, but a practice which suited our family just fine—and so I was pressed up against another human being pretty much day and night.

To write, you need a sense of separation, individuation, even isolation to let your imagination come forward. Still, I loved those years—the immediacy of them, the realness of being always in the moment, and the complete exhaustion and dizziness of it all. Grace’s post birth experience captures that hazy state in which she, or I, didn’t have a prayer of being able to write:

Grace’s children came to her in a swirl of dust and sunlight. Motes of light floated behind her closed eyelids, and when she opened them the sun danced low over the sill before her, bringing with it the children. She thought she heard them crying. She dozed and dreamed and woke again and heard them crying again, this time from quite close. She squinted down at the soft bundle beside her. Rose. Her Rose. Grace’s heart welled up, but her arms were too tired to life the baby to her breasts.

The birth scene in my novel, too, is close to my own experience, except that I gave birth in a Philadelphia hospital and not a Chinese village. I drank herbal potions, though not administered by anyone remotely as magical and maniacal as Mai Lin. Still, in Grace’s state, or my own in those years, writing was a distant goal and dream. Thank goodness, the fog eventually lifted and I was able to look back on that childbearing time and even create a story in which it plays a large role. River of Dust, among other things, is a mother’s own story. 

"Letting Someone, Somewhere Down": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Douglas Trevor

Douglas Trevor is the author of the recently released novel Girls I Know (SixOneSeven Books, 2013), and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space(University of Iowa Press, 2005). Thin Tear won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. Trevor's short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, The New England Review, and about a dozen other literary magazines, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

An excerpt from his book Girls I Know appears in Issue Forty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Douglas Trevor answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Girls I Know.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

[Longing, slipping away from the world, letting someone, somewhere, down.]

He kissed her back. Behind them, at the circulation terminals, students combed through electronic databases and recalled items that had been checked out by other users. Walt heard the same cart with the squeaky wheel pass behind them. He told himself that she was just a stubborn New Yorker with a dumb idea for a book, and that he was just a sentimental Vermonter who thought the world would be a better place if everyone could simply appreciate the same set of poems. Poems, incidentally, all written by white New Englanders. He told himself that the two of them were ridiculous, making out in the middle of the library. He thought of Flora. But he didn’t stop kissing Ginger. In spite of where they were and how different they were, he didn’t want this moment to end.

2. What isn’t writing like?

[Waiting for the phone to ring.]

He waited for Ginger to call him but she didn’t. She was just giving him the space he had requested, he knew that, but he couldn’t bring himself to call her, or his family, or any of his friends. He knew that these people might very well ask him if he was finally making progress on his dissertation, now that he was back on campus. And he wasn’t making any progress. He was still just reading poems, still feeling blocked as a writer. It wasn’t enough for him to tell himself that he was reinvesting in The Poetics of Yankee Peerage. The days were too long, and besides, simply working on a doctorate didn’t seem like an appropriate response to what he had witnessed in the Early Bird. But he had no idea what would.

3. When you do it, why?

[When there is a story to tell.]

“He took me to his house all the way up near Oquossoc, me screaming the whole way, pounding on the window. No one in any of the cars we passed looked over at us. When we got to his place he locked me in his basement. A couple times a day he’d give me food. There was a sink and shower down there. I’d go to the bathroom in the sink. A few weeks later he came downstairs with a mattress and another man. The man gave him money to rape me. I don’t know how much. I found out later that the guy had taken out ads in porn magazines. ‘Young Girl Who Likes Pain.’ It took me a month of getting the shit raped out of me to figure out a way out of there. I ended up knocking the door down with a section of pipe when he was gone one day.

“I didn’t feel like I could go home after that so I moved to Waterville, then Berlin, New Hampshire, then Manchester. I did tricks, worked in a convenience store for a while. I didn’t look like I was thirteen no more. I got arrested for stuff, nothing serious, mostly just cuz I had nowhere to go. Then I started doing speed and LSD and other shit guys would give me to fuck them or suck them off. I’m eighteen now. I take Concord Trailways down from Manchester Sunday afternoon and waitress and dance here through Wednesday. I can’t dance on the weekends because they say my tits aren’t big enough and I can’t afford no enlargements. So I work and buy my shit down here for the week. One of my girlfriends looks after my boy while I’m gone in exchange for speed. I had him two years ago: Jayce. I work down here so it won’t ever get back to him, how I make money.”

A guy sat down at the booth behind them and their waitress stood up, picked up her tray, and went to get his drink order. As she walked off, Ginger wrote madly. Walt didn’t say anything; he just watched her hand fly back and forth across the page.

4. When you don’t, why?

["How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world" —Hamlet]

A short time later, they climbed back into Ginger’s car. She turned the key in the ignition, but rather than immediately hit the gas, she sat there for a moment, slumped over her steering wheel, the collar of her sweatshirt drooping so that Walt could glimpse the base of her neck, the ridge of her collarbones.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She rubbed her eyes, yawning. “I haven’t slept in days. I mean days. And all the sudden, I feel a little down. Why is it always so overcast here? Honestly, I can’t believe the Puritans stayed. I can’t believe they didn’t all just go back to England and become Anglicans.”