"To Pay the Dentist or Some Other Piper": An Interview with Kathleen Heil

Kathleen Heil’s poems, stories, essays and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in FENCE, Gigantic, World Literature Today, Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Guernica, BOMB, Quarterly West, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Born and raised in area New Orleans, she is a 2015–2016 Sturgis International Fellow in Berlin. More info at kathleenheil.net.

Her essay, "Three Cut Short," appeared in Issue Sixty-Nine of The Collagist. 

Here, Kathleen Heil talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Umberto Saba, brevity, and moaning writers.

Please tell us about the origins of your essay “Three Cut Short.” What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

I have my former professor Geoffrey Brock to thank for learning about Umberto Saba's work and the notion of imitation as a form of translation, which served as inspiration for my “Cut Short” pieces. Brock edited The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, which includes excerpts of Saba's Shortcuts, and led me to seek out the complete Scorciatoie in the original Italian. (They haven't been translated in full into English but Estelle Gilson's translations of The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba [Sheep Meadow, 1993] offers a nice introduction to his work).

Of course this essay is very concise—only three paragraphs, each one standing on its own to some extent, as the title implies. How do you achieve such an economy of language? Did it require a lot of revision to trim down the word count, or does this kind of brevity come naturally?

Hmm. Naturally, I guess, but I have Saba to thank, since his pieces acted as templates for my own. His Shortcuts are aphorisms insisting on the truth of what they proclaim, while at the same time undermining our faith in such statements, since they point to the dangers of making such confident proclamations with their tendency toward the absurd. It's probably helpful to contextualize the pieces in the time he was writing, the 1940s, when faith in ideological certainty had dangerous, disastrous consequences; a time, perhaps, not entirely different from our own, when you consider the dangerously absurd naïveté of young Europeans and Americans willing to embrace the hateful ideological 'certainties' promoted by ISIS.

In the second paragraph you write, “[…] when you don’t pay for something they say it has no value which is why people don’t care about literature and also maybe why writers are always moaning about something most people don’t care about because of money because there are no rock stars in literature and the ones who think they are rock stars are a bunch of weenies (name your names now). But sometimes there is joy and always there is lots of moaning. This is true of religion, literature, and rock music.” As a writer, do you find yourself moaning as described here? What are we moaning about mostly?

Ahh, good question! Most definitely, and all too often. I think writers are an easily aggrieved bunch, and I of course include myself in that statement. I think we often moan about cultural capital, i.e. prestige, as a way of avoiding talking about anxieties related to survival, safety, and love—those old chestnuts. To be fair, it is hard to live in a culture where value at-large is tied so closely to cold hard cash, which is good for rock stars and maybe for religion but not so great for writers. You can't pay the rent with a contributor's copy (and of course, neither can most journal editors, since they often work for salaries either negligible or nonexistent); instead of detailing why I think this is problematic at best, I will simply say that this model has elicited, on my part, more than one crying jag/freak out, when I've been called to pay the dentist or some other piper. That said, I don't think anyone needs to feel sorry for writers (though that, as I said, doesn't stop us from complaining, which, come to think of this response...).

Your website shows that your writing takes many forms: poetry, essays, stories, and even translations. What writing lessons have you learned from one genre that you’ve then taken into how you write in another?

Geoff Dyer's multi-genre and cross-disciplinary writing has served as inspiration for my own approach, which is to let content determine the form and to be suspicious of, as he calls them, “clichés of expectation” surrounding form. A less pretentious way of putting it would be to say that I try to follow my curiosity where it takes me. If I still haven't answered your question, it's because I think the strategies we develop as writers are only semi-conscious at best, and so though I'm confident that writing in one genre informs and enriches my work in another, I also feel somewhat ill-equipped to explain the process.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I'm translating a script from Italian, revising my poetry manuscript more like the weather, and  needing to give some revision love to a novel-in-progress entitled Whale Watch. Finally, as a Sturgis International Fellow, I'm thrilled to have recently moved to Berlin to research and write about the city's international contemporary dance scene, and extend all my thanks to the Sturgis Foundation at the University of Arkansas for their support.

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

Alejandro Zambra's Facsímil (Hueders, 2015), a novel-cum-standardized test, an excerpt of which was recently published in The New Yorker, in translation by Megan McDowell; All Night It Is Morning, poems by Andy Young (Diálogos, 2014); Gail Hareven's novel Lies, First Person, in translation by Dalya Bilu (Open Letter, 2015); and finally, it's not a recent read, but I'd like to proselytize on behalf of the Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov's wry and touching auto-fictions (I'd suggest starting with The Suitcase, in translation by Antonina W. Bouis [Counterpoint, 2011]).

"Weasels Solve Everything": An Interview with Annie Bilancini

Annie Bilancini writes and teaches in Marquette, MI. Her work has appeared most recently in journals such as The Collagist, Knee-Jerk, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is an associate editor for Passages North, helps co-edit the hybrid prose journal Threadcount, and serves as an associate editor for content at SmokeLong Quarterly.

Her story, "The House of Schiaparelli," appeared In Issue Sixty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Annie Bilancini talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about research, hybridity, and lipstick.

Please tell us about the origins of your short story, “The House of Schiaparelli.” What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

This is maybe going to sound really silly, but this story actually exists because of a misguided Sephora lipstick purchase. Or maybe that’s an awesome reason to have written a story.  Regardless, this story is a result of a bright pink lipstick from Nars called “Schiap.” I bought it on a whim because it was such a ridiculously bright pink, but I had no idea what the name meant. After a quick Google search, I discovered the lipstick was an homage to Elsa Schiaparelli, and I was instantly smitten with her and her work.

Your writing about Elsa Schiaparelli and other historical figures (such as your “Lady Tyger” story published in Smokelong Quarterly) must require a lot of research. What is the relationship between fact and fiction in your writing about real people? What are the limits of loyalty to the subject’s actual biography, and to what extent are you comfortable with inserting your own invention into their remembered lives?

The research portion of the writing process has been a blast, and working with Elsa’s story was particularly instructive because she was an artist and had a lot to say about the creative process. It helped me think about not only what to include in the piece, but how to include it. I wanted each section of the piece to represent both a moment in her life, as well as a design she had created, so crafting the prose was heavily inspired by her designs. This actually resulted in much denser prose. The sentences were more complex, more finely tuned. I felt like I was trying to write the designs. So I suppose the “facts” showed up on the page in unexpected ways.  As far as the limits of loyalty, I knew I wanted these pieces to be flash, and the kind of flash I enjoy writing often focuses on excavating moments, which nearly always results in some kind of invention on my part. The facts were there, but in order to make a piece of art, it was necessary to wrap those facts in sounds and images that very well never may have existed. Knowing what I know about Schiap’s allegiance to reality (or lack thereof), I felt a lot more comfortable taking those imaginative leaps on the page to represent her life and art.

The sections of this story seem to be arranged mostly in chronological order, beginning in childhood and ending after the war. The one notable exception that I can find is that the lines, “She is buried in this color. It is not her design,” do not come at the very end but in the penultimate section. How did you decide that the story should not end here but with another memory from her childhood? What was your goal for this story’s ending?

That was actually based on a workshop suggestion from my instructor (the amazingly fabulous Jen Howard). She felt the piece needed to build momentum toward something beyond chronology. The piece isn’t meant to be strictly biographical, so its organization couldn’t and shouldn’t be time-based. Moving toward that final image, the seeds in her mouth (which isn’t something I made up; she actually did that!) and that anticipation, that was such a wonderfully loaded moment and such a compelling image.  Ending the story with what is essentially a meaningful act of creation felt right for someone whose own creations were so important to the culture and history of fashion at the time. Jen’s feedback was integral to bringing that moment about.

Your bio says that you also co-edit Threadcount, “a journal of hybrid prose.” What is your definition of a “hybrid” in literature? Why is it important to you as an editor that the pieces you publish not be easily classified within one genre or another?

For me, the definition of hybrid prose will always be in flux. The nature of what “is and isn’t” in literature is always changing, and I think that’s what fascinated and frustrated us as the journal began to take shape. So at Threadcount, our goal is to publish prose that resists easy categorization. That’s not to say a reader couldn’t consider some of the works we publish a poem or a piece of flash fiction because many of the works we publish still have the shape or the curve of familiar forms. It just may be that some basic rules are broken; a short story’s narrative structure is abandoned in service of singular, surprising image (like this, for example).  I think we just wanted to create room at the table for all the writing out there that isn’t quite this or that, but this other thing that takes up space on the page in an unexpected way. You know, prose that walks like a duck and talks like a duck, but is actually your uncle stricken with a mind-controlling fungus. That old chestnut.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Right now I’m working on a flash series that kind of riffs on the writing of Marie de France (a medieval poet). Medieval literature is great fun because it’s a lot of “And then this happened! And then this happened!” All those rules you’re taught about narrative and character are completely dismantled. It’s deus ex machina out the wazoo, but in the best possible way. For example, in one story, two weasels show up out of nowhere at the end and save all the principle characters from harm and everyone lives happily ever after. The weasels don’t really seem to symbolize anything. They just show up, resolve all the issues that the story has built up, and then scamper back into the forest. And the lesson, of course, is that weasels solve everything.

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

I just finished Fjords Vol. 1 by Zachary Schomburg, and I loved it a lot. I’m also reading The Ant King: And Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum, and it’s teaching me a lot about how to have fun with writing.

"The Truth her Great-great and Great-great-great Grandchildren Would Not Perceive": An Interview with Jill Stukenberg

Jill Stukenberg, a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University, lives and teaches in Wausau, Wisconsin. Her stories have appeared recently in Devil's Lake and Burrow Press Review.

Her story, "The Lady," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviwer Keaton Maddox about religious inspiration, inter-generational connectivity, and fiction founded in reality.

You capture very well the plight of immigrants trying to make their way in America with little support or help (other than what they believe is helping them from the divine). What kind of research did you conduct in order to capture this difficult way of life so accurately? And once you learned the necessary history of these circumstances, how did you translate that into the formation of this piece?

Thanks. This was definitely a different story for me to write—I usually write about contemporary life. But here’s some unveiling, which will probably reduce the magic of the story: I was drawn to the material from an actual New York Times article read over my breakfast cereal one morning about the formal papal recognition of a 19^th century Virgin Mary sighting in northeastern Wisconsin near where I grew up and where my extended Belgian immigrant descendent family still lives. So there’s a lot of the story right there, which came to me through unintentional research. I was taken with the story, though, because I’d never heard of the little shrine, though once I started asking family members they all had stories, for example of crawling on their knees to the shrine, of people leaving crutches there. When I began writing, I started with the contemporary descendants reacting to the national news of a miracle connected to their own family (my first ideas are pretty imaginative, huh?) but then I became more interested in the idea of someone else living at the time and hearing the news of the vision. What would that be like—that the Queen of Heaven made a visit to your neighborhood, but not to you? I realized I’d have to do more research, which I had mixed feelings about. I wanted to keep the people I was creating at the center, but I also didn’t know anything about them or the details of the visitation. I started reading more about the sighting and that led to some reading about Belgian immigrant life at the time, mostly just on websites though. I had this idea that I wanted to be loose about it. I just wanted details that appealed to my imagination—cholera, carrying shoes to town. Even up until the end (final editing for The Collagist) I had the story set in the wrong season because I liked the images of high summer and the feeling that it would have been hot when Mary visited. But at the last minute I begged the editor (thanks again!) to let me change those details; suddenly it seemed to me that the story should be more anchored in the historical fact that it had been October. Still though, there’s some research I have never done: I’ve never been to visit the shrine. I understand there’s a large parking lot to accommodate all of the visitors now—that made me not want to go there while I was writing.

The Lady herself seems to represent a large swath of different ideas for each of your characters, even if that representation only assumes mere skepticism for some. What does she mean to you personally, and how did that vision play out in your world creation process?

I guess the fact that I had never heard of the little shrine, while my older, baby-boomer relatives had as children made pilgrimages on their knees says a lot already about the cultural and generational viewpoint from which I was writing. I was raised Catholic, though I didn’t choose to confirm, and I later chose a Jesuit university, though mostly because it meant going to a big city—for me, Milwaukee! So I’m not religious, though I have had some Catholic education and I do find religious ideas, including the idea of Mary making visitations of her own —like a First Lady on tour—interesting. And as a writer, I hope I’m not insensitive to mystery.

Your story emphasizes intergenerational connection and the importance of lineage in context. What was your goal in establishing such distinct familial pasts and futures?

Those things sprouted in the story because of my own family history. Though even my great-grandmother was born here, my mother is still a “full-blooded” Belgian, and she has nearly fifty cousins, many of whom still live around Brussels, Wisconsin. If we need an electrician, interior decorator, or city councilman we call up a cousin. One reason the notes of modern family members stayed in “The Lady,” though, is because it balances out—or perhaps illustrates the weight of—the miracle. If the Mother of God makes a visit to someone (or even someone’s neighbor), it had better toll through time, right? It should rank up there with the most outstanding events of any family history for generations to come. Another reason it’s there is because it’s the other, if more quiet, miracle of the story that any pair of settlers, like Tellie and her husband, did survive, and that what resulted from their gamble to cross an ocean and have children in a dangerous place are hundreds of people driving around in cars and reading newspapers online at their breakfast tables. By the way, by comparing that to a miracle, I don’t want to say that European colonization was unquestionably good or reflective of divine will, just that it is miracle-like in its hugeness to think of how many lives, with all of their stories, can result from one pair of humans and their one choice (plus maybe some luck, magic, grace, or what have you).

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a novel set in northern Wisconsin, though in contemporary time. There’s a mother and a teenaged daughter who live at a fishing resort, and a visiting grandmother who may have kidnapped the “grandchildren” who are with her, with a plan to lead them into the Chequamegon National Forest.

“The Lady” is also part of a collection of short stories mostly set in the upper Midwest, and I’m seeking a home for that book. So if you know anybody interested…

What are you reading?

Vacationland, by Sarah Stonich, a novel in stories set in northern Minnesota. I keep going back to it with the intention of studying it, and then just get distracted again by the characters and sentences and place. It’s really outstanding. Also, The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, which is nonfiction and yet also completely absorbing. It is also, perhaps, leading me again down that dark path of toying with fact in my fiction. How many details of climate change can my novel set in northern Wisconsin include? Can climate change itself be a force, a character, as real and unreal as the Mother of God? 

"It’s a Back Story, Way Back": An Interview with Laurie Blauner

Laurie Blauner is the author of three novels, Infinite Kindness, Somebody, and The Bohemians, all from Black Heron Press, as well as seven books of poetry.  A novella called Instructions for Living was published in 2011 from Main Street Rag.  Her most recent book of poetry, It Looks Worse than I Am, was published in 2014 as the first Open Reading Period selection from What Books Press. A poetry chapbook was published in 2013 from dancing girl press.  She has received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship as well as Seattle Arts Commission, King County Arts Commission, 4Culture, and Artist Trust grants and awards.  She was a resident at Centrum in Washington state and was in the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2007.  Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Field, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Collagist, and many other magazines. She is the winner of Leapfrog Press's Fiction Contest; they will be publishing her novel The Solace of Monsters in 2016.  She lives in Seattle, Washington.  Her web site is www.laurieblauner.com.

Her story, "The Unsaid," appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist. 

Here, Laurie Blauner talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about family, revision, and writing in multiple genres.

Please tell us about the origins of your story “The Unsaid.” What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

Family. Particularly my family. Much of the story is true or, as is often the case with fiction, it tells a deeper truth than the real events. Some of this material was covered in my first novel called Somebody. I wanted to create a similar tale with parallel or intersecting themes but in as concise a form in fiction as possible. And, with the title, I wanted to show what was unsaid between family members, the unborn and the person carrying her in her body, between drinks and the narrator, and everyone else.

To me the richest, most intriguing part of this piece is the middle section, “Before: I,” which describes a moment in time before the narrator’s birth. What inspired you to write this scene and place it outside of chronological order? How did you decide for yourself how much the unborn first-person narrator should know of this moment?

That part set up the mother and narrator’s difficult communication before and after her birth. In that sense it’s a back story, way back, and we often don’t think or remember things chronologically.

What was the revision process like for this story? How significantly did it change from the first draft to the final?

I found my handwritten, original copy of “The Unsaid” and saw that I had revised the story several times, changing words and whittling away sentences but, overall, the story didn’t change a lot. And sometimes that happens, that I don’t need to change much but, especially with my longer work, not often. This was probably because of my familiarity with the subject matter (see first question) and because I write poetry and condense everything (see next question).

You write both fiction and poetry. What lessons have you learned from writing poetry that you have then applied to your prose, or vice versa?

I like to condense everything. Both my poetry and fiction often inform each other in style, story, and themes. A phrase in poetry might find its way into my fiction. My prose is lyrical and dense and my poetry has spread out a bit, becoming more conversational. One lesson I’ve learned is that plot can be quite fluid and changing in the same way poetry can contain so many different elements.

What writing projects are you working on now?

A new book of poems, concentrating on science. And a new novel about a young couple’s stubborn, emotionally indigestible relationship told in short paragraphs.

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

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns from 1959, a realistic yet imaginative short novel with lovely language. And I just started Envy by Yuri Olesha, which is good so far, written in 1927. (I’m a little behind in my reading).

"The Brittle, Desperate, Suffocating Love": An Interview with Heather Wells Peterson

Heather Wells Peterson earned her MFA from the University of Florida in 2014. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she writes dialogue for virtual patients and recently finished writing her first novel.

Her three short-shorts, "Spit It Out," "A Ghost," and "Echolalia," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.  

Here, Heather Wells Peterson talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about family, brevity, and a narrator's tone.

Each of your three short-shorts consists of only one paragraph. Is it a challenge to reach this level of concision, or does such brevity come naturally in your writing process? How much revision was required to achieve such an economy of language?

I find this kind of concision incredibly difficult. I think for some people, this length comes naturally—they think this way, I suppose. I’ve always envied that. Most of the time, keeping a story this length is virtually impossible for me.

That said, these stories took very little revision. I was reading an excellent, excellent book called Abbott Awaits, by Chris Bachelder. It’s a novel divided into bite-size vignettes. Reading the book just put me in this very short zone. For a few weeks, stories fell out of me in bite-sized chunks. Then, the trance left as quickly as it had come. I spent some time tweaking sentences, but for the most part, this was one of those rare occasions when something leaves my brain fully formed.

In “Spit It Out,” the man does not spit it out, and we never quite learn what “it” is. The woman becomes increasingly desperate, crying “goddammit” and “Please, please,” while oblivious to the narrative ticking clock that is the tide inching ever closer to her and her son, increasing the suspense, unresolved by the story. In your mind, what are the advantages of ending this piece before the next event happens (e.g., the man spits it out, or the woman digs it up, or the man suffocates, or the ocean gets them both wet)? Why this moment and not the one that follows?

Families are fragile. I think that knowledge was most on my mind as I wrote this. The image of this poor mother almost accosting her adult son, begging him to spit out something that could choke him, while surrounded by other families who are enjoying their day at the beach is, to me, a representation of the brittle, desperate, suffocating love that can bind a family together. The encroaching tide is ominous, and it’s creeping closer, and it’s nearer to this woman and her son than it is to all of the families who are not, at least so obviously, subject to the same brittle, desperate, suffocating love. To me, this approaching darkness isn’t anything specific—any certain event, for instance—so much as it is the mother’s panic and solitude, the looming knowledge that she is alone and responsible for her son, who can’t reasonably be expected to be responsible for himself.

In “A Ghost,” you again withhold information and choose ambiguity, as seen here: “She does not know that the very piece of wood on which she sits is stained with blood. The blood is over one hundred years old. It could be from a small cut, from a birth, from a murder—this information is unavailable—nonetheless, it must be there somewhere, deep in the pitted, knotted slab of wood.” The narrator tells us something Carrie doesn’t know, so we’re not limited to her perspective, but some information is still unavailable, so the narrator must not be omniscient. What type of point of view did you imagine for this narrator? (If you weren’t consciously thinking about imposed limitations or liberties taken in the narrative perspective, what sort of tone or style did you hope to conjure with this narrator’s voice?)

In all three of these pieces, without realizing it as I wrote them, I was using a clinical tone combined with very specific, personal details to create a kind of taxonomy of living grief. In “Spit It Out,” the grief is a mother’s for her son, who is alive, but who will always depend on her, as well as for herself and the burden she has necessarily taken on, while in “A Ghost,” we are dissecting Carrie’s grief for her parents’ marriage, and by extension, her childhood. The scientific, detached tone creates a distance while, at the same time, making the narrator seem impartial, as though the voice is staring at these small tragedies under a microscope and recording every significant piece of evidence with detailed precision.

From this clinical impartiality comes the knowledge of the blood in the wood beneath Carrie. When I was small, I also worried about ghosts in the old furniture in the old house I grew up in. I knew that many people had lived there since long ago, and, therefore, had likely suffered, been ill, given birth, screamed at each other, and even bled and died in almost every room. Extrapolating from this knowledge, then, Carrie must be sitting on blood—it is just statistically probable. However, she doesn’t know that. What she knows is that her parents are fighting, and will probably split up, so she distracts herself by listening for the ghost.

In “Echolalia,” we return to the subject of disability, which we saw in a different form in the adult son of the first short-short. Also, as before, the central character here is the mother of the disabled person in question. What is it about these relationships and difficult positions that draw you to create such characters? What are the complexities of their inner and outer lives that contribute to narrative richness and interest from outsiders?

I think this relationship is, in itself, a conflict—not between the people in the relationship, but within the parent who is raising a child she knows will have a rough time of it. There is a peculiar and combustible mixture of love, devotion, guilt, and resentment there. The mother worries for her daughter, but mostly obliquely—much of her time is spent worrying about worrying (or not worrying) about her daughter. She is caught in a cycle of guilt, resentment, further guilt, further resentment, which is why she can’t exit the emotional vortex and achieve any kind of relief or peace.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I just finished a novel in January, and I’m at work on another one now. It deals with some of these themes—the fragility of families, and the consequences both of breaking those brittle bonds and of not doing so. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is on her deathbed. She has studied death all her life, and she knows what awaits her. But she is alone, so she returns to her past, reliving old failures and relationships, excavating for any source of comfort she can find. That sounds like a real downer, and sometimes it is, but it’s also about learning to accept one’s fate, and the grace that can be found in humanity’s will to continue to live despite knowing that one day we all die.

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

As I mentioned above, Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder is beyond amazing. I also just finished two great memoirs—Sally Mann’s Hold Still and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. And I’m reading Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene now because the novel I’m writing is centered around a mystery, and Greene was a master at that.

"An Ode to the Eternally Obsessive": An Interview with Ravi Mangla

Ravi Mangla is the author of the novel Understudies (Outpost19). His stories and essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, The Paris Review Daily, American Short Fiction, Tin House Online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Rochester, NY.

His story, "Face," appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Ravi Mangla speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about ambiguity, television withdrawal, and taking your time. 

At the heart of this story is a man who fears losing his identity. I’m curious about what came first for you—the concept for the story or its emotional core?

The concept came first. There are few things more frustrating than seeing a familiar face on television and not being able to place it. At least with television, you can farm out the grunt work to IMDB. No such database exists for the real world. I’ll often spend days thinking about a face, trying to remember where I’ve seen it before. I love stories where small, seemingly negligible problems metastasize and assume some deeper cosmic significance. As someone with mild OCD tendencies, I often find my attention diverted by dripping faucets and odd buzzing noises. “Face” is an ode to the eternally obsessive.

Lyle never places the man’s face. When we leave the story, he is still reaching to remember. What appealed to you about ending the story in this way?

A clean resolution is tough to pull off in short short fiction. The form, for whatever reason, lends itself better to ambiguity. Someone (please don’t ask me who) said that successful fiction begins with a small question and ends with a big one. I’m not usually one to trot out aphorisms, but this one seems especially germane.

“Face” is beautifully concise; the whole story is only a paragraph long. Tell us about the revision process that led to this final draft. Did you start with more or has the story always taken this form?

There was actually more building up than paring down. The first half of this story was written five or six years ago. Every couple of years I would pick it up again and add a handful of sentences. Therein lies my advice to fledgling writers: If you don’t know where to take your story, set it aside for several years. Or if you can’t wait several years, a day or two will probably suffice.

If you, like Lyle, had a “specialty,” what would you like it to be?

Figuring out what TV show my neighbor is watching from the muffled sounds coming through the apartment wall. (I’ve been without a television for a few months now and I’m suffering from severe withdrawal.)

What are you currently working on?

An essay on the legal and social history of jaywalking. But I hope to get started on a new novel later in the summer.

What are you reading?

There are three library books on my desk: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems by Albert Goldbarth.

"Animals and Oceans and Trees and Vertigo": An Interview with Monica Datta

Monica Datta's work has appeared in Conjunctions and The Collagist, among others. She has received grants from the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund and the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Her story, "Brotherhood," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.

Here, Monica Datta talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Aristotle, outlines, and islands.

Can you speak about the decision to begin the story with an epigraph from Aristotle’s Rhetoric? How did you choose this quote? How do you consider it to be in dialogue with your story?

The passage from Rhetoric corresponds to the longer interrogation of philia in the Nicomachean Ethics, but defines the verb form, philein, i.e., the act of loving, and therefore it’s something perhaps more profound and complicated than philia, which also includes affinities of utility – between cities or religious orders, or businesspeople and their clients – or relationships based on shared hedonism rather than a depth of caring. Aristotle outlines the emotive components of philia as a kind of fraternal love, close to friendship, but also something deeper, the integrity that binds the social contract.

In the story philia exists as a kind of multiple entendre for not-quite-love, not-quite-friendship, not-quite-brotherhood. Reiko has a lot of integrity because she has never wanted to be anything other than herself. Initially she finds the work merely icky – rather than dangerous – and the other characters unintelligent and therefore deserving of what happens to them.

Your story spans many areas of the protagonist’s life and history—her primary school preferences, her deceased half-brother, her relationship with her divorced parents, multiple jobs. In order to fit so many details into a short story, how do you keep track of these many aspects of a character’s existence? Do you create any outlines, like character studies or profiles, or do you keep it all in your head and let it come out in the writing?

I don’t normally write outlines, but Reiko was so alien to me that I had to sketch her out. After that I saw her everywhere. She’s a star athlete but has never known physical pain. She might share a taxi with friends and take up 80% of the space. She might steal a younger girl’s birthday cake because she wants it. Reiko is expressive of and realizes every desire except for the obvious, influenced perhaps by her mother’s turbulent romantic life. All this, however, allows her to take on, and ridicule, the work she does for Anna.

Her family manifests a series of island conditions: her father has returned to Japan and she’s not close to her itinerant mother and her Algerian grandparents are stranded alone in Sydney, having built and abandoned a whole life in Paris. But Reiko prefers animals and oceans and trees and vertigo. She would have done well with an older brother.

What was your revision process like for this story? How much did it change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any difficult decisions when cutting or adding?

I wrote perhaps ten drafts in four months. It was initially quite plotless; I was conflicted about how much personal growth Reiko experiences and wanted to avoid a morality tale. There was less addition and subtraction than constant refashioning, and then lots of pruning, like a bonsai.  

What writing projects are you working on now?

More alphabet stories, including an alphabet of phobias about a tennis coach with gills, and a tragicomic novel annotated by a sprightly Lacanian psychoanalyst.

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

It’s a stretch to call it reading, but I’m making my way through the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an incunabulum from the Renaissance. It’s a strikingly modern – probably the first book to consider text and layout the way we understand it now – collage of beautiful and often erotic woodcuts and many languages, and likely the product of many artists and writers though attributed to a Venetian monk. It surrounds the dreams of Poliphilo, whose name implies a love of cities and architecture, “everything,” and a lady named Polia, whom he keeps missing, very possibly in that sequence.

More contemporarily I really enjoyed Kim Thuy’s Ru, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island. 

"The Violence Closer to the Surface": An Interview with Diana George

Diana George’s recent writing has appeared in Conjunctions and 3AM Magazine. They did an MFA in creative writing at Brown University and were also the recipient of an NEA award for fiction. George lives in Seattle, where they work as a technical editor, write for the port-truckers newsletter Solidarity, and proofread for Asymptote, a magazine of literary translation.

Their story, "Keyhole," appeared in Issue Sixty-Eight of The Collagist. 

Here, Diana George talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Kafka, dead whales, and ambiguity.

Please tell us about the origins of your short story, “Keyhole.” What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

My stories usually begin with a phrase that intrigues me, rather than an idea. But this story sat in the drawer for a while, so I couldn’t say now what that phrase was.

I know where certain elements came from. The description of the cook and Ziller, of what sex is like for them, came from a sentence in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” In that story, a speaking, educated ape describes his relations with a half-tamed chimpanzee: in the Muirs’ translation, “I take comfort from her as apes do”; in German, “ich lasse es mir nach Affenart bei ihr wohlgehen.” The German sentence was the one I had in mind; it seems crueler than the English version, colder.

But sometimes it’s better not to know where a writer got an image. One day my friend was having his hair cut by a barber from Hungary, so my friend told him all about this Hungarian movie he’d just seen, Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies. The barber had never seen Tarr’s movie, but when my friend described the dead whale being borne through the countryside on a flatbed truck—(and it’s a stunning image, one that resonates with Hobbes’s Leviathan, the rotten ship of state in Eastern-bloc communism, the terrifying muteness of nature, and the death of God, though it’s reducible to none of these)—anyway, when my friend got to the part about the whale, he was expecting the barber to be suitably astonished, but the barber just nodded and said something to the effect of, “Oh, sure. Dead whale on a truck. We saw those in Hungary all the time.” (And they did; a dead whale known as “Goliath” was exhibited throughout Hungary in the early 1960s.) The whale in Werckmeister Harmonies is still a stroke of genius, but I was a little disappointed to learn that Tarr and (and his collaborators Krasznahorkai  and Hranitzky) hadn’t invented it out of whole cloth.

A good deal is left to the reader’s imagination in this piece, most notably the exact nature of Ziller’s “plans for the child.” How much of what is ambiguous or unknown to the audience is clearly known for you? Is it important for you to know all the answers to the questions that linger when writing such a story, or is it better to keep some mystery alive even for yourself?

With this story, I don’t know anything beyond what is on the page. Though if I did know something more about Ziller, perhaps it could only be something in his past. There’s a remarkable novel by Paul Griffiths called let me tell you. It’s narrated by Ophelia, the character from Hamlet, but she’s under the Oulipian constraint of a closed lexicon: Ophelia can only use the 481 words she spoke in Shakespeare’s play. In a way, the book is a transcendental investigation into the limits of what we can do or hope for in this play we find ourselves in, with this language not of our making. Griffiths gives Ophelia a backstory, but when she departs from Elsinore at the novel’s end—sorry, belated spoiler alert—what she encounters is nothing but snow; snow fills her footprints, it blurs any traces she leaves. At the far border of the page, after the end, there is only a blank.

The passage that stood out to me most from the rest is this one that appears near the end: “Let Ziller speak here, through the creature; let all such speech be Ziller’s. Let speech equal Ziller, not because Ziller alone is God, but because he is no less God than is the child. Ziller was not a judge of souls. A sage, perhaps, yes, if you insist, yes, but not a judge. The most fearsome prophet is not the one who condemns without mercy, who declares these damned and these redeemed. If anything, Ziller explained, Ziller knew himself to be this: the prophet of indifference.” This section reads differently for a few reasons—the repetition of Ziller’s name, the second-person pronoun, the switches between present and past tenses—all of which together create a more runaway, rambling tone. How did you decide to alter your prose in this way? What was the driving force behind this unusual paragraph?

I don’t think I can discuss my own prose in terms of decisions; that’s not to say there weren’t any decisions, but I don’t know that they’re available to me now.

There’s a strange movie by Nicholas Ray called Bigger Than Life; James Mason plays a man who takes a life-saving new drug, but this drug has a side-effect one can only call “patriarchal mania.” He gets weirdly into being the Dad: taking his wife and children out for a meal, being the one who orders the food and pays the bill. Later, when it all starts to go horribly wrong, he succumbs to an Abraham delusion and makes ready to sacrifice his son. But there’s already something very strange about him at the restaurant, something uncanny in the way he exults in fatherhood.

I wasn’t thinking about that movie when I wrote this story, and it’s a bit showily self-absorbed of me to make a lengthy exegesis my own brief, brief story, but that’s what we’re here for, so… I’ll put it this way: I would like it to be the case that I’ve written a story that induces a sense of unease, but a story in which in it is hard to say just where that unease issues from. Is it in the plans we don’t read about (perhaps involving a knife and Mount Moriah)? Or is it in the bizarre exaltation Ziller seems to draw from the routine exercise of fatherly powers?

I have the feeling I’m making something up when I describe my intentions here, but still, maybe a compositional principle for Ziller’s rant was that it not resolve this ambiguity.

What writing projects are you working on now?

More fiction. Stories that are different than “Keyhole.” The sense of place is less abstract; the narration is often twisted through a secondary relay of some kind. The language is more ornate, the violence closer to the surface.

And I’m writing a dissertation called “After the End.” It’s about Beckett, Blanchot, and Antoine Volodine. It wants a bit of filling out; there’s still the odd chapter or three to write. But I’ve chosen the dissertation’s epigraph already; it’s Beckett, from Malone Dies: “Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody.”

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

Walter Benjamin once wrote a book review called “Goethebücher, aber wilkommene,” which could be translated as “Even More Books on Goethe, But Ones I’m Glad About.” In a similar category for me, “Beckett Criticism, the Kind You Can Recommend in Good Conscience,” would be Herschel Farbman’s The Other Night.

Some other books that have stood out for me recently are Otessa Moshfegg’s McGlue; Joseph Libertson’s Proximity; Antoine Volodine’s Terminus radieux and the recent translation of his Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. And, also in translation, Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World; and a strange prose piece by the Brazilian visual artist Nuno Ramos, with the unsurpassable title “Ó.”

I’m very much looking forward to Berit Ellingsen’s new novel Not Dark Yet. And I think more people should know about the work of Kinton Ford, whose “Abbreviations” I was lucky enough to excerpt for an issue of Birkensnake.

"The Bizzare, the Self-Righteous, the Mundane": An Interview with Justin Bigos

Justin Bigos is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO, 2014). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared or will appear in places such as Ploughshares, New England Review, The Seattle Review, McSweeney's, and The Best American Short Stories 2015. He co-edits Waxwing and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

His essay, "Door to Door," appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist. 

Here, Justin Bigos talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about bafflement, Jehovah's Witness literature, and turning weaknesses into strengths.

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

I think the spark was the memory of the event—or events—of repeatedly breaking into my friend’s house. Over twenty-five years later, it still seems stupid. Who would do something like that? It’s criminal and silly at the same time, but under the surface I started to sense some darker stuff happening. As I moved deeper into the essay, as I remembered that time and shaped it into scenes and reflection, the essay began to explore loneliness and neglect, especially as connected between children and adults. So, the spark of memory and bafflement at memory led, I hope, to some kind of understanding.

Scattered throughout your essay are eight excerpts from articles originally published in a magazine called AWAKE! How did you choose which excerpts you would include in the essay? What kind of emotions did you intend for these excerpts to evoke in the reader?

I found the entire 1988 set of AWAKE! magazines on eBay, and I read almost all of them. I dog-eared sections that stood out, but also ones that did not. I wanted a combination of the bizarre, the self-righteous, the mundane—a range that shows the reader what this Jehovah’s Witness literature is like. I also chose some that felt particular to the late 1980s, such as the homophobic views toward HIV and AIDS. As far as an emotional reaction in the reader, I guess it depends on the excerpt and its placement in the essay. And, honestly, in general I don’t have specific aims for emotional response in my readers. That’s too tricky a thing to wish for. I do hope the excerpts deepened and layered the narrative and reflection in the essay.

The first section of your essay feels very different from what follows. It’s mysterious because we do not yet know your relationship to the man in the taxi, the speaker does not assert himself with an “I” until the third paragraph, and past events are described with the present tense—unlike in the next section, following the first magazine excerpt, beginning with the phrase, “In the summer of 1988,” setting the tone for a more grounded, traditional narrative. What made you decide that the first section should be set apart in these ways, and what is the effect you hoped to achieve?

I had shared a draft of this essay with two writer friends last summer. One of them, Nicole Walker, felt that the essay needed an intro that set the stage by introducing the father somehow. The draft had begun the story with an AWAKE! excerpt, and after chatting with Nicole I agreed that the excerpt was too jarring an intro—not “mysterious,” as you say, but mystifying, confounding, which is not a good way to begin any kind of writing, I don’t think. I know I have a thing—a weakness, maybe—for beginning my stories and essays, maybe even some of my poems, in the realm of the too-mysterious. But, maybe what we call our weaknesses can, with attention, and revision, turn into our strengths.

You are also the co-founder and co-editor of the online journal Waxwing. What lessons have you learned in your role on the other side of the Submittable page that have influenced you when you are writing and submitting to literary magazines?

That’s a tough question. I’m tempted to say nothing. I don’t really connect my editing and writing in any clear way. There is just too much variety in the poetry I see coming into Waxwing, despite the whiny assholes out there who say that most poetry is uniform and dull. It’s not. But I write what I write. There are certainly poets who I’ve found in the slush who I now keep an eye out for—Wesley Rothman comes to mind—and poets who I’ve found in other journals who I then solicited because I loved their work so much—Ladan Osman comes to mind. But how have these two particular poets, for example, altered my writing? I really couldn’t say, except they’ve enlarged my sense of what poetry can be.

In terms of sending my work out, I’d say I’m even more careful about sending cover letters that are concise and lacking typos. Other than that, I send to the journals I think are doing good work and might be responsive to my work. I have much respect for journals and their editors.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing two books: Fingerprints, a collection of stories and narrative essays; and (what I’m currently calling) Prayer After Refusing to Pray, a full-length collection of poems. I am at the moment shifting from the prose back into poetry. I can’t write them at the same time.

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

The Waves by Virginia Woolf. That’s a gorgeous book, six different perspectives all handled masterfully. Also, Steven Millhauser’s story collection Voices in the Night. I had read the title story in Best American Short Stories 2013, and it was my favorite story in the anthology. Reading it a second time, it’s one of my favorite stories ever. I’m currently diving back into Whitman, including the David Reynolds bio. High on my list for the rest of the summer: the novels A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins; and, later this year, the poetry collection Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis.

"The Unrestrained Fleet of Bone": An Interview with Joshua B. Bennett

Joshua Bennett is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University. He has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, and the Ford Foundation. Winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prize, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, New England Review, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and elsewhere. Joshua is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.  

His poems, "Clench" and "home force: presumption of death," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist. 

Here, he talks with interviewer Darby K. Price about violence & the everyday stakes of social life, putting words in the law's mouth, and poems that shake us into action.

You had two poems published in Issue Fifty-Six: “Clench” and “home force: presumption of death.” Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of these poems? 

Clench” emerged from my desire to think about my personal history of violence from an unfamiliar vantage point. I’ve been fighting since I was very young—indeed, the first time I can remember throwing a punch I was around six years old or so, and one of my classmates, Joey was his name, had chosen that morning to fill a tennis ball with a bunch of small rocks and hit me in the back of the head with it during recess. A fight ensued almost immediately. Even then I was not one to tolerate that kind of cowardly— though I can now admit also rather creative—assault on my person. The conflict was eventually broken up, and Joey and I went about our business for the rest of that school year, hating one another in a cordial sort of way.

This sort of thing was fairly common. Insults, or outright physical assaults of all kinds like what happened with Joey, were a central component of my growing up. The threat of physical violence, whether on the schoolyard or within the bounds of one’s neighborhood, was ever-present; it was something you learned to navigate, to contend with. “Clench” was my attempt to think about how my fist might feel about my choice to abstain from fighting, this social-philosophical practice that shaped so much of my thinking about the social world over the past decade, especially given that this abstention dovetailed with my matriculating at an elite private school in upstate New York in 2002; a shift that was most striking, perhaps, not only because it meant not only two hours of travel, and going to a school populated mostly by wealthy, white teenagers, but because no one there ever fought. And it’s not that this was a good thing necessarily. Only that the absence of this approach to making meaning, to resolving conflict in an impactful, absurd, dangerous, costly way, was strange to me. It represented a different way of thinking about the everyday stakes of social life: what you could say and get away with, whom you chose to harm, how.

“home force: presumption of death” emerged from a similar set of concerns. In turning “Stand Your Ground” law into an erasure, my goal was to alter the original document’s force of argument, to destroy and put it back together as a means of indicting its authors, its supporters, all those who praise the logic of private property at the expense of life itself.  

As a reader, I was immediately drawn into “Clench,” a wonderful persona poem written from the perspective of a fist. There’s a tension established between the fist and its owner—the addressee—right away, a tension that shines through in lines like, “Who held you down/ when the whole world went/ spaghetti western & you/ were six bullets short of a coffin’s kiss?” Can you talk about the tension here between the fist and its owner, between violence and peace, between “pen or pot handle” and “the unrestrained/ fleet of bone”?

I think I addressed some of what you’re getting at in the previous question, but I’ll do my best to swerve a bit here without giving too much away. The speaker, a fist—and he’s also kind of a jerk, yes?—is trying to wrestle with its sense of having been abandoned, which is also to say, the fist in this poem is wondering aloud about what it means to be obsolete, and in this sense is contemplating its own mortality. The fist critiques the person that it ostensibly belongs to, in the sense of a deep, mutual belonging, a prolonged entanglement, but it is also pleading. It is also desperately clinging to relevance, and reminding its dear friend, its partner—I prefer these terms to the term “owner,” though I certainly understand its place in your initial question—of the world he only narrowly escaped, a world he would not have survived without the fist. Now, the former beloved has given his hands over to other labors, other forms of poeisis. That letting-go is an arduous, painful process. There’s shame, and blood in it.

In “home force: presumption of death,” you erase the legalese of a Florida Statute—the infamous “Stand Your Ground” law—and craft some beautiful and heartbreaking lines out of that language (lines like “it is necessary// to prevent the body, harm/ him, sing get over it.”) What were some of your goals in working with that language? What unique challenges does a poet face with erasure? 

I’m not sure I set out with a goal in this poem other than to de-familiarize the original document while maintaining the (ostensible, unstable) position of its authors. I wanted to say what it was saying but in my way own way, on my own terms. I wanted to wrest sovereignty from the statute itself. I wanted to put words in the law’s mouth.

These two poems deal directly with violence, whether it’s an inner struggle to remain non-violent, or a codified, state-sponsored violence against people for whom “personhood does not apply”. What, in your opinion, is the role and capability of poetry in this context? In other words, how can poetry (and the poets behind it) respond to what seems like relentless violence and injustice around us?

I‘m not always sure that poetry can do what I want or need it to. I think often of Baraka’s expressed desire in “Blk Art” for “poems that breathe like wrestlers…poems that kill” and then wonder what I would want a poem, any poem, I write to make or unmake in the world if the poem had such capacity available to it, such breadth or speed or life. And maybe poems move people throughout the world every single day in ways that I can’t yet fathom. I’m almost certain that I wouldn’t be an educator right now if I had never heard a poem read aloud. The poetry of Margaret Walker and Lucille Clifton and Fred Moten and Greg Pardlo and Ai and Gerald Barrax and Robert Hayden and Thylias Moss and Gwendolyn Brooks (and the list goes on and on, spanning out into the ether) have utterly transformed the landscape of my inner life, and ultimately made me a much more thoughtful, skeptical, reckless human being. So perhaps we can respond to the injustice and violence of the world by writing poems that move people to the point that they are willing to risk death. If the poem can shake us enough that we are willing to give our very lives for one another, to risk safety and security for the sake of a more ethical set of relations, then we have done something very important though not, necessarily, exceedingly rare. I read Clifton’s “come celebrate with me” in my early 20s and I simply couldn’t go back. The same is true for Audre Lorde’s “litany for survival.” Once I reckoned with the central truths of the latter, that is, that “we were never meant to survive,” as well as those of the former—that, like Clifton, “every day something has tried to kill me and has failed”— I realized that I had to live differently. I had to give my life over to the work.  

What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?

Right now, I am reading For Malcolm: On the Life and Death of Malcolm X, an anthology of poems edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Burroughs. I am also reading Ladan Osman’s The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony. I just finished re-reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Martin Heidegger’s essay “What Are Poets For?” and Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Oh! And “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument” by Sylvia Wynter, which I am always returning to in one way or another.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I recently completed my first manuscript, The Sobbing School, which I hope to see out in the world in the near future. I’m also currently working on my dissertation, “Being Property Once Myself: In Pursuit of The Animal in 20^th Century African American Literature” which I plan to defend the coming spring. It’s a scary, beautiful time right now as it pertains to the writing. I’m trying to map out two distinct, but related intellectual projects: one that is centrally concerned with giving sustained philosophical attention to black sociality, black suffering, and black imagination that usually takes the form of poems. Then there is this whole other thing, which shares those concerns, but takes the form of a dissertation which deploys extended readings of various novels and poems towards the end of thinking about why and how black folks have historically turned toward animal figures as a means of making certain arguments about black personhood, black ways of being human. So yeah. That’s most of what I’m working on right now: honing, sharpening, putting the poems and paragraphs in an order that has a compelling rhythm to it. In the end, it’s always also about the music. Always.