"What Makes the Dream a Nightmare": An Interview with Martha Grover

Martha Grover is an author, poet, artist and writing coach living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of One More for the People (Perfect Day Publishing) and The End of My Career (Perfect Day Publishing). The End of My Career was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards in creative nonfiction in 2017. Her work has also appeared in The Collagist, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and The Portland Mercury, among others. She has been publishing her zine, Somnambulist, since 2003. Martha is currently at work on a book of prose poems and essays about Catastrophe, Myth, and being a sick person in the 21st century. When she is not writing, Martha is making zines, coaching her writing clients, making art, and selling Real Estate.

Her essay, "The Math Class," appeared in Issue Ninety-Five of The Collagist.

 Here, Martha Grover talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about recurring dreams, recalling high school, and creating zines. 

Please tell us about the origins of your essay “The Math Class.” What inspired you to start writing the first draft?

I had been having some version of the dream described in the essay for years and years. Several years ago, I thought I had “won” the dream, meaning I’d confronted the situation in the dream and I stopped having it. I didn’t have the nightmare for over a year and then it came back again. When I had the dream again, I started thinking: what does this dream represent? Why do I keep having it over and over?

Part of what makes the dream a nightmare is the fact that, not only am I forced to go back to high school, but I have to go back to take a math class. Math has always been a very challenging subject for me. In comparison, everything else is a breeze. I’m lucky in that getting good grades has always been incredibly easy for me, except when it came to math.

Your essay describes a recurring dream that you must have been dreaming for many years now. Have you done any journaling of your dreams prior to writing this essay? Did you rely on any such documentation when composing this piece, or did you work from memory of the dreaming? More generally, what has been the relationship between your dreams and your creative work?

I have always been interested in dreams, in what they mean, how they relate to our waking lives. Once, I was taking a prescription drug that gave me very vivid dreams and I actually made a little dream journal zine during that period and gave it to friends. But when I wrote this piece, I had been having this particular dream for so long that I didn’t have to refer to any old writing. Also, embarrassingly, I’d seen status updates referring to the dream come up in my “Facebook Memories” around the same time that I started having the dream again. So in a way, Facebook memories acted like a dream journal to jog my memory.

Another dream I often have, always involves some very particular harm or disfigurement/ dismemberment to my body. I should probably write a sister piece to “The Math Class” to explore that recurring dream. I think it’s fascinating how our brains return to the same scenario, with slightly different details, over and over. It’s like a riddle our unconscious is trying to solve.

Amid the narrative of this dream, you recall many details that evoke your experience of high school, one after the other, some in sentence fragments, like a catalog of images. Can you describe the process of selecting and arranging these particular details? Of course there must be so much more to that setting that had to be left out of this picture, so how did you choose what to include? Are all of these details somehow associated with iterations of the dream, or do they fit some other criteria or goal that you had in mind?

One of the things I had to ask myself in the course of writing this essay, is why would it be not only awful to return to high school as an adult, but why would it be awful to return to my particular high school? To answer this question I obviously focused on the more negative details of my high school years and the environment there—in rural Oregon. Of course, I have many positive memories of high school but that wasn’t the point I was trying to get across. And those positive memories are mostly surrounding having fun with my friends. When you are out of public school for a while, at least this has been my experience, you get a better perspective on the institution as a whole. You see the drudgery, the pettiness, the lack of professionalism and going back there, especially for a math class, begins to look more and more dreadful. I really wanted to convey the feeling of dread and hopelessness that came along with the dream.

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

Right now I am slowly writing my third book, which is a collection of traditional essays. I’m also simultaneously writing a fourth book of essays that are a bit more like “The Math Class” – shorter, more lyrical, more experimental. (I’m looking for an agent!)

I’m also in the beginning of turning part of my first book into a play. In 2008, I was forced to move back in with my parents. At that time, there were several other siblings living with them. Every Sunday morning my parents forced us to have a family meeting. So I took the “minutes” and posted them on my blog, and then eventually compiled them into a zine. And then those eventually got published in my first book. And now I am working with a playwright to translate “The Grover Family Meeting Minutes” into a play. It’s very exciting!

In addition to being a writer, I’m also an illustrator and fund my work through my Patreon page. This keeps me busy producing podcasts, artwork and zines. You can look me up at: patreon.com/marthagrover

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

I really loved Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters. I’m also reading Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot and it’s breathtaking.

“We’re Coming for You”: An Interview with Colleen Kolba

Colleen Kolba is a writer and cartoonist. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, and Entropy, among others. Currently, she is a Digital Teaching Fellow at the University of South Florida.

Her story, “Womb,” appeared in Issue Ninety-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Andrew Farkas about repetition, patriarchal masculinity, and the use of “non-normal” elements in fiction.   

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

Over a year ago, the image of a little boy preoccupied with building papier-mâché

wombs got stuck in my head. I wrote a few stories about him I wasn’t satisfied with, trying to figure out exactly what was going on. Then, last fall, I was invited by the Humanities Institute at USF to participate in an ekphrastic reading. It turned out the visual constraints I was given to work with for the reading were enough to finally write the first draft of “Womb” and feel like his story was being told.

I’m really interested in Elliot. At first, he just seems like a crazy kid who found out where babies come from (wombs) and now wants to experience that genesis the only way he knows how (art projects). But as the story goes on, Elliot starts to feel a bit like Anthony Fremont, the boy with godlike powers in the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone. Is this how Elliot developed for you (from just a kid who needs a babysitter to someone or something far more powerful), or did you always plan for him to sneak up on us? And why did you decide to give Elliot, a child, the dreamlike powers he has? In other words, how do you see Elliot working in this story?

For me, Elliot became a way to grapple with concepts of “patriarchal masculinity” (to borrow bell hooks’ term). I’m fascinated by who young boys are before they’ve totally bought into the narratives our culture sends them about masculinity (which most boys get/conform to very early on). I wanted to interrogate what that turning point is (from boyhood to a more traditional masculine role) and what it means to push against the narratives we’re given so early it seems like we’re born into them. Elliot is able to escape it, at least by the end of the story, which to me seems almost like a godlike power—through his art projects he’s able to create something else, but even this space there’s still a great discomfort and the end products of his children are still this haunting masculine force that’s trying to conceptualize something different and better than what our culture offers men.

This story begins simply enough: the narrator becomes a nanny because jobs are scarce and she has to take what she can get. Even when the little boy she works with (or maybe for, as we learn in the story) says that he makes wombs, being a child, we think, “Oh, what a crazy kid.” From there, the story accretes more and more eerie, unsettling moments, but by the time they feel odd, we (the readers) are already onboard. Did you actively intend to pull the reader in by making everything seem “normal” at first, or were you pulled into the story in the same way the reader is? Why do you think the subject matter lends itself to this sort of technique?     

As a reader, I enjoy and admire writers who can include “non-normal” elements without explaining too much and get the reader to buy in. I think one technique for achieving this is exactly what you describe—things start normal enough, we get a little invested in the characters, and then slowly, we start to go, “Hmm that’s a little odd.” I hope to achieve this in a way that doesn’t feel like a cheap trick—I always start with character, so if my writing is operating how I’d like it to, the reader is invested in the characters. Everything else is just a revolving piece around the humanity in the story.

There’s a good deal of wonderful repetition in this piece (the little boy building the wombs and sending them upriver, the husband constantly saying “what,” the failed missions to Mars, the narrator’s repeated assertion that she doesn’t want a baby). Coupled with the repetition, though, is the fact that everything seems to be breaking down (the constant heat, those failed missions to Mars, the pollution). Consequently, it feels like nothing new can happen, that there will only be repetition until the world burns out. But the end feels startlingly new (what with the men birthed from the wombs and Elliot’s children). So, how do you see the repetition working in this story? And does the end signal a break from the repetition, an escape from the old failures?   

I’ve had a preoccupation with the way repetition works in storytelling and why it works or doesn’t feel boringly redundant to the reader and I think it’s because that’s how humans operate—we function within patterns, and repetition offers many of us some degree of comfort. I set up a bunch of patterns and storytelling is what happens at the movement towards, away, against, sideways of these patterns. In the context of “Womb,” the characters are operating in a world where they’re trapped in the narratives they’ve been fed and Elliot and the narrator are the ones who deviate from this, but not without some conflict. I see the end as a movement in a new direction from the repetition of gender-based narratives. It’s meant to be a hopeful ending.

What have you been reading recently that you might recommend?

I’ve been returning to Eleanor Davis’ How to Be Happy, a collection of short comics that’s beautifully illustrated and fills me with a sad kind of hope (I don’t know if that makes sense). I’ve found myself seeking an antidote to the news I’m constantly consuming with the non-journalistic reading I do to achieve some kind of healthy stasis in my day-to-day. I’ve also been reading There is No Long Distance Now, Naomi Shihab Nye’s flash fiction collection to inspire my own work and to share with the high school writers I’m currently teaching at UVA’s Young Writers Workshop.

What are you writing these days? 

I’m currently working on a novel-in-flash-chapters and a graphic novel. Both are about the narratives of young women, which is about as generous as I can be in my descriptions of these projects. I’ve found in the past that if I talk too much about my writing while it’s still in its early phases, I lose energy towards creating it.

"Grief Was a Stone in My Gut": An Interview with Debra Di Blasi

Debra Di Blasi is the author of seven books, including, Prayers of An Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press), The Jiri Chronicles (University of Alabama Press/FC2), and Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), which won the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. Her newest collection of hybrid shorts, TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER: An Oral History of the New America: #AlternativeFictions, is forthcoming August 2018 from Black Scat Books. Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past, was a finalist in Four Way Books Larry Levis Poetry Award and semifinalist in the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Award. Her writing has appeared in Boulevard, Chelsea, The Iowa Review, Kestrel, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, New South Fiction, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, Triquarterly, Wigleaf, Wayne Literary Review, among many others, and in notable anthologies of innovative writing. She is a former publisher, educator, and art columnist. Learn more at www.debradiblasi.com.

Her essay, "Turncoats," appears in Issue Ninety-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Debra Di Blasi talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about digressions, forgiveness, and researching comments on social media.

Please tell us about the origins of your essay “Turncoats.” What inspired you to start writing the first draft?

I was living far, far away in Hong Kong when my father began to die of Parkinson’s, and the family farm was sold by a sibling without my knowledge. Grief was a stone in my gut, weighing me down so fiercely that I wanted to take to my bed and sleep without waking. Instead, I took to my words. “Turncoats” is part of Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past. Part lyric essay, part poetic memoir, the ‘descants’ attempt to create a four-dimensional literary cartography describing the farm where I grew up and how my family and I — and perhaps my childhood friend — were shaped by those extraordinarily beautiful acres, for better and for worse; thus, the reference to “the remembrance of farm and creek” in the essay. Recalling specific places on the farm triggered specific memories. The book would not be honest or complete without including this beloved friend who was indeed the only friend who often visited the farm when we were children, because she loved it, all of it, from creek to fields, wild to tame animals, stifling hot, overcrowded house to outhouse. And I loved her for loving it as I did. I still do. And she still does.

On my first reading, I read the essay from start to finish as presented. The second time, I skipped around, reading only the left-justified sections, then only the paragraphs in the innermost brackets, etc. Did you intend to encourage this sort of exploration when you arranged the text into unconventional spaces? How did you arrive at this piece’s form?

You read correctly, perfectly! Thank you. The structure of multiple indentations reflects digressions while recalling moments from distant or recent past, editing myself, revising my Self for all to see. Without deliberately indicting other memoirists, my view of the genre in general is that it is full of lies and omissions. For me, those initial lies and omissions often reveal a deeper truth for the writer and, one certainly hopes, the reader, about the creatures (oneself and others, bipedal and not) that we create out of language. The intent is not only to illuminate the many facets of remembering but also to reflect the process of writing and revising one’s recollections, exposing the fallibility of memory and the intrusion of self-aggrandizement. Most of the 100+ essays in the book are similarly structured.

The essay contains descriptions of friend and farm from your childhood, memories so affecting that you say that you may “choose to recall” them on your deathbed. In the end, though, you also write that you hope that your friend, who once betrayed you, has “no need to remember anything but did she leave a light on somewhere behind her.” Is this a kind wish, an indication of forgiveness, hoping that your old friend carries no lingering guilt? Or do you mean to deny her the memories that you’ve heretofore recalled in such vivid detail? Are memories such as those described in this essay something to be desired, or are they a burden? (Or both, neither?)

That light she left on behind her? It’s our friendship, what keeps the darkness away even now. And this essay, when all’s said and done, is my wish that her life now is so bursting with love, kindness and beauty that it overwhelms even the “opulence” we shared on the farm. Ours was/is one of the great friendships of my life — as childhood friendships can be for lucky people. She and I remained close friends for decades. We shared our terrible secrets. And though geographical distance may have invaded our closeness, I think of her often and miss long conversations with a person who knew me since we were four years old. By the way, Selling the Farm contains another essay about her, fondly recalling the night we camped out in a “disappearing nightscape under the gegenschein belt.” For me, as writer and reader, a worthy memoir is not about blame or revenge but rather forgiveness. About, in fact, leaving a light on behind you.

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

In addition to publishing excerpts from Selling the Farm (which I consider complete and have begun submitting the manuscript to publishers), I simultaneously completed a collection of very short intentionally provocative fiction, TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER: An Oral History of the New American: #AlternativeFictions. Black Scat Books snatched it up pretty quickly and, because of the time-sensitive content, is bringing it out in August, before the fall 2018 US elections.

This book is in many ways the polar opposite of Selling the Farm. Selling the Farm is about grief and attempting to bring back the dead; TODAY is about rage and attempting to expose the nasty, suppurating socio-cultural-political pimples under the country’s skin. I spent two years researching comments on social media (Facebook, Twitter, CNN, Fox News, YouTube channels of Alex Jones Info Wars, Rush Limbaugh Show, comedians Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, reality TV, intimate conversations, surreptitious eavesdropping, ad nauseam). The research focused acutely on how language was used, misused, and abused; the way we lie to ourselves and each other; the out-of-control self-promotion — of which I have been and still am guilty — where we reflect not the assholes we sometimes (or often, depending on who “we” is) are at our core but rather a media-acceptable persona not much different from those projected by The Kardashians. 

To quote from the book’s Preface:

We speak shit. Be shit. See our shit selves through Selfie eyes… Culture of manufactured colors, scents, emotions, algorithms. We live here now, inside this narrowing. Dissolution of language, civility, morality and veracity. The foothold’s crumbling. Each shitty death’s on its way. So what! We shrug. What now? Now this. This is the day that will matter. This day. The only one.

The voices range from monstrous politicians based on public figures to hideous bigots to sympathetic or empathetic. There are also dialogs, a Jesus-is-a-white-woman “Cantata for Three Voices,” flickers of few words, tiny images with expansive subtext that must be dredged by the reader. Some of the stories are tender and kind, juxtapositions against those that decry the shits we’ve become. It’s interesting that most of the pretty ones occur in Portugal, where I live now. I’m meeting with theatre director Suresh Nampuri to discuss a staged public performance in Lisbon, which has a surprisingly vital theatre scene of works performed in English. (The Portuguese are remarkably fluent in English; it’s the English and Americans here who have a difficult time with Portuguese language.)

Finally, I’m working on an illustrated children’s book, Let Us Save the Only Only. I want to make children cry for all the right reasons.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Michel Houellebecq is one of my favorite living contemporary writers. He provokes, he offends, he enlightens, he makes me laugh, and the core issues of his writing are always critical to the times we live in (or will live in, as some of his books have proved prescient). I just finished Submission, wherein the narrator is a mediocre Parisian academic (Houellebecq has never taught at university, by the way) at the moment The Muslim Brotherhood easily takes over France’s political — and therefore academic — system.  The emotional and philosophical complexity of this book thrill me; that, and the narrator’s hilarious digressive musings on food and sex at critical socio-political moments. 

I also finally started reading smart-smart Martha Gellhorn’s travel memoir-reportage, Travels With Myself and Another. (You can guess who “Another” is.) This woman who grew up in staid St. Louis, Missouri, was bleeding fearless — or rather, she may have been afraid but she moved through her fear to get to and at and sometimes in the story. She reported from all over the world, in difficult, dangerous places. She caught tropical diseases, roughed it with some strange, dubious characters, met Chiang Kai-shek and so many other important political players. As someone who has traveled much of my life, and sometimes into dangerous situations, sometimes with questionable people, the book is a breath of fresh air from the past, when webs were made of real-time/real-space humans from around the globe who continually crossed paths, in the strangest places. It’s why I now live in Portugal.