"A Vanity That Thrives Within Her": An Interview with Chelsea Bieker

Chelsea Bieker received an MFA in fiction from Portland State University, where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her work is forthcoming in The Normal School Literary Magazine and Gold Man Review. She is currently at work on a collection of stories.

Her story "" appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Chelsea Bieker speaks to interviewer David Bachmann about losing beauty, the fierceness of loyalty, and refusing to check in with reality.

1. The characters’ life situations in these pages are unfortunately plausible. Where did you get these situations and where did this story begin? (Was this born of observation, or was it purely imagined, or neither, or both?)

I think it was a bit of both. The story began in my head with the image of this faceless former beauty queen. This sort of freak attack (sulphuric acid thrown on the face) has happened to at least two women that I have read about, and it has been widely covered in the news. I guess I always tend to think of what lies on the other side of that news feature. Who are they, really? There is usually an optimism in their interviews that I find interesting and admirable, but as people, we are of course so fluid, and I wondered what might be lurking in the darker corners of an experience like that, after the news cameras leave. So that was the ground I began on, but the characters that came forth and their particular situation were purely imagined. I have been long intrigued by the desperate mother-daughter relationship, and Daisy and Florin display these very strange and intimate practices in their day-to-day lives, that exhibit physical closeness, but emotionally, very little. A fierce loyalty at times, but a quickness to betray. I think many times in my stories I play with the mother role, either with her absence, or her damaging presence. This interview could quickly turn into a counseling session if I’m not careful, so I will stop there, but as for their actual situation—essentially forcing her daughter into underage prostitution—that came possibly from thinking about the problem of sex trafficking in the city I live in, and how it might look if I took away the images we see so often in the media of the traditional pimp, and girls on street corners dressed a certain way, and a certain clientele…what if it was in a small farming town and it was very quiet, and there were no drugs involved, and no leather knee-highs? And that life becomes Florin’s normal very quickly, because she is so young and has watched her beautiful mother do it, and seemingly been very “successful” at it.

I also thought a lot about the role of beauty, and how it plays out in women’s lives, and for Daisy, beauty is her God and it is all that matters and it has dictated her entire life. It is her trade. I’m interested in what happens when people lose their “thing” so to speak. And her thing is her beauty and the way she measures everything.

2. Perhaps because I was so invested in each character and where they would go next, this piece seemed to move quickly through time. As a writer, how do you think about pace?

As I was writing this piece, I remember feeling like the real-time story didn’t actually start until about five pages in, which for me felt like a long while to get the clock rolling. Florin gives us a long bit of backstory, detailing her mother’s attack, and setting up place before the first scene begins in the AM/PM with Quince. From there it moves quickly. I wrestled with that structure, but I went with it. I tried moving things around a bit, and eventually kept it that order. I think getting Florin on the page and painting their town and describing the accident, was important to me. I don’t think pace was really on my mind writing the story, but certainly something that I noticed later. This story felt different structurally than some other things I have written. I think I had more of a mind for sound in this piece. I like to think, ‘would I read this story after reading the first paragraph?’ On this one, I think I would. I want to know what kind of town this is! Ha.

3. I’d love it if you commented on what previous drafts of this work looked like. Did any drafts include drastic departures from what we read now?  (For example, did you ever have Daisy delivering on her promise to end her life?)

The original draft was very similar to this version, aside from the end. The first ending involved Quince—the girls walking together up Olive Avenue and Florin realizing that Quince doesn’t accept her label as “town slut”, is totally unaware of it, and it illuminates her own denial over who she is and what she is doing. Later I rewrote it to include a final scene with Florin, Daisy, and Osbourne because it felt true. I knew in draft one I was avoiding that last interaction by separating Florin and Quince, and I think relied on the easier ending. But easy isn’t true, so I rewrote it with Daisy.

Also, one of my mentors, Leni Zumas, read the original draft and advised me to not over-tell it. To just immerse the reader in that world and resist explaining everything through Florin’s narration. This draft is cut down a bit from the first, on a sentence level.

Daisy never delivered on the promise to end her life in any draft. I imagine that people have three parts—body, spirit, and mind—and within those, many other things are going on as well, but generally it’s good to have all three rocking and rolling. To me Daisy doesn’t have all three. All three of hers have dwindled, been tarnished, are perhaps totally gone. She’s floating around, she’s lost her body, the trauma has caused her to lose her mind, and her spirit was tied to her beauty, which to her, has been lost. It’s a recipe for disaster, and suicide could be an option for her, but there is still a vanity that thrives within her. To me her threat was more about power and control over Florin. Making her fearful, making her want to preserve her mother. Daisy is also very dramatic. Many of her lines are so regal and absolute that (to me at least) it’s almost comical.

4. Florin’s voice seems like it should be one of desperation given her circumstances, and yet it feels very matter-of-fact, almost empowered, perhaps because she has been trained to so readily accept facts by her mother. Is this how you would expect the reader to interpret her character?

I like to write about people who are down and out, but refuse to check in to reality. There are moments when Florin feels sorrow and desperation, and the story revolves around this idea that she might move to LA to escape, but overall, she clings to her role as the expert on her trade. She may not have a traditional education, but she was schooled by Daisy, who is very prideful, and she can tell you all about it with assuredness. I also didn’t want to make her whiney. I don’t like to read whiney characters. Her situation is terrible, but I wanted her to be pushing against the urge to roll over and cry about it in some way.

As for how I expect her to be read, I don’t think much about that as I’m writing. I do think about psychology and the various ways we adapt to our surroundings to survive. Children will adapt and defend the parent even in dire situations. To me, Florin has adapted. It’s all relative. This is what she knows. But there is of course deep pain in that, which I do hope comes through as well.

5. Is there such a thing as actual love between any of the characters in this work? (Is there supposed to be?)

Great question. I think about love in fiction a lot. To me as a person, I have come to understand love as an action word, but in my fiction, I think most of my characters are not capable of that, and they cling to ideas of love as a mode of desperation and control. Actual love exists in a form here, maybe, but mostly it is shown as means of avoiding aloneness and escaping fear. I think Florin loves her mother and wants to please her. But you can love someone and despise what they do at the same time. We are just that complex, and it’s fascinating. I wrote a story with a psychologically disturbed/sociopathic narrator, and she tries to explain this difficulty getting feelings to go from the head to the heart. To go from cognitive awareness, to a felt thing. And she can’t do it, though she wishes she could. On some level, Daisy falls into that a bit, too. Her obsession with self renders her incapable of caring for another truly and with abandon.

6. What are you reading these days? When you read something compelling, do you ever think I want to write like this, and do you ever find yourself writing like the writer you are reading, even if you don’t intend to? If so, what is your reaction to discovering this trend?

I just finished Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins. I can’t say enough good things about it. They are amazing stories, so rich and so multi-layered. I am in awe.

Reading amazing work makes me want to write. I don’t know that I intentionally mimic the writer I am reading, but I know if affects me. Reading opens up new alleyways in my mind for writing, like oh! Look what they did! Now I want to! Reading the Watkins has reinforced my urge to incorporate many different narratives in one story. She does it so well, and it is worth studying. I remember reading Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty, and it affected the way I was writing voice in a big way. Reading during a difficult writing time is usually a good massage for my brain. I can come back to the work refreshed. I want to go read now.

7. What are you working on these days? Work of length? More short stories? Both?

I am pretty rooted in stories at this stage in my life, though I hope to write a longer work at some point. I am working on a collection where the stories take place in the Central Valley of California. I grew up mostly in Fresno, and as a teenager hated it, but once I moved away and got some distance, I was able to examine it through a new lens. I am trying to dig deep into the rich landscapes there. There is so much history. I am also so inspired by my family history as well. My dad and older sister have stories that just trigger my writing bone. I am trying to mix some of that in, too. It all feels very legend-like. And you can’t make up some of the names he throws out there! In Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor, she talks about taking advantage of what’s yours, and I am trying to tap into that in this collection. Life can be tragic, or it can be fodder for great stories, and I’m trying to do the latter. 

"Oddly Romantic Visions": An Interview with Nancy Reddy

Nancy Reddy’s work has recently appeared in Anti-, Memorious, The Journal, Boxcar Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Selected for by poet D.A. Powell for Best New Poets 2011 and nominated for a Pushcart, her work has also been included in the Best of the Net 2011. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is currently a doctoral student in composition and rhetoric.

Her poem “Lucy in Chrysalis" appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Nancy Reddy speaks to interviewer Amber L. Cook about backyard grocery stores, collectedness, innuendos, and transformations. 

1. Is there a backstory to “Lucy in Chrysalis?” What inspired you to write this poem?

I did used to go worm-hunting on the playground at recess, and I did as a child have oddly romantic visions of running a grocery store. (I was – and still am – a serious indoor kid and was often puzzled about what exactly to do when my mom sent me outside “to play.” But I do remember having a richly imagined grocery store in the backyard. I stocked the shelves with canned goods and counted change for phantom customers.) Other than that, the poem is mostly word play and foolishness.  

2. You really cleverly combine sexual undertones and womanhood through the speaker of the poem, which is echoed nicely in the title. Are there formal elements that helped you to achieve these threads? Enjambment? Pace? Repetition? 

I’m fascinated by moments of transition – hence the image of the Chrysalis, of the girls in town all getting breasts & their periods at the same time. I like the idea of that as a shared experience, though I have no idea if that’s what my perception of that time actually was. So in part this poem uses the imagined, somewhat idealized small town with its gazebo & its corner store as a way of thinking about the intensity of early adolescence.

In terms of how I did that, I was mostly conscious of idiom and line breaks as I was writing. I love the way line breaks can double meaning and create innuendo. I was raised by women with a great belief in speaking politely, so growing up there were many words I wasn’t allowed to say and whole swaths of experience that could be talked about only with particular language and at the appropriate time. So I like poems that play with that, that hide sexuality or spite behind idiom and metaphor and wordplay.

I’m not sure that I’d say there’s anything inherently sexual in this poem, though. For me, it’s more about the relationships between girls and how complex and sometimes dark they are, particularly just before sex enters the picture in a real way.

3. When read aloud, “Lucy in Chrysalis” is so concentrated on sound quality. I especially envy the lines: “In the lunchroom the other girls purse/ their glossed lips & clear the table. Now/ it’s your birthday. The sliced cake sweats grease/ in the backyard. Soda fizzles in Dixie cup rows.” Are you often this conscious of sound? 

I really admire poets whose work is more sound-driven, but that’s not necessarily an immediate strength of mine. (Ask my elementary school music teacher, or anyone who’s ever seen me dance.) Music is something I’ve had to really intentionally work at. I work in meter from time to time, and I’ve also become a collector of sonically appealing phrases and idioms. I have stack of index cards with snippets I’m hoping to find a home for. 

4. Towards the end of the poem, you set up a series of almost lackluster desires of the speaker wanting to be something else: “you’d rather be a hayfield or a hatpin…a grocer or an acrobat.” How do these desires relate to the speaker of the poem/ What kind of speaker were you hoping to portray? 

Oh, I don’t think those desires are lackluster at all. Really, I think it’s about the habit of looking forward and imagining a different life, in which you’ll be a different version of yourself. Or maybe it’s the desire to imagine yourself transformed.

There was a long while, in elementary school, where I wanted to be a hairdresser. It seemed like an impossibly glamorous job, though I’m sure I would have been terrible at it. After that I wanted to be the president. I think that when you’re young, any number of implausible futures seem equally likely, and equally lovely.

5. Is there something out there that you’ve read lately to give you inspiration?

I’m revising and restructuring the manuscript I wrote in my MFA, so I’m reading lots of collections with an eye towards structure. I’m fascinated by books with lots of little short sections, like Sabrina Orah Marks’s Tsim Tsum, as well as books that just sprawl with no breaks at all, like my friend Rebecca Hazelton’s stunning book Vow, which is forthcoming from Cleveland State. And Catherine Pierce’s The Girls of Peculiar, which has has the most elegantly structured first section.

I also just bought Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay, and I’m working my way slowly through that. And I’m really looking forward to reading Anne Carson’s new translation/adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone, Antigonick. 

6. What other projects and poems are you currently working on?

Revising – endlessly – the manuscript I mentioned above. And I’m perhaps halfway into another manuscript, though I’m always way too superstitious to talk in any detail about anything I’m writing until it’s pretty well finished. In my other life, I’m a PhD student in a composition/rhetoric program, and I’m starting to read for my exams, so I’ve been spending my days in the Historical Society reading room awash in Plato and Derrida and histories of 19^th century writing instruction.

"Something of the Other Worldliness": An Interview with Keith Taylor

Keith Taylor published two books in 2011: Marginalia for a Natural History, a chapbook of poems with Black Lawrence Press, and Ghost Writers, an anthology of contemporary Michigan ghost stories, co-edited with Laura Kasischke and published by Wayne State University Press. That title was selected as a Michigan Notable Book of the Year for 2012 by the Library of Michigan, and won a Silver Medal in the IPPY Awards.

His poems "A New Language" and "After She Was Sick" appear in Issue Thirty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, in an interview with Amber L. Cook, Keith Taylor peruses such topics as process, perspective, and place.

1. How did you first approach “A New Language” and “After She Was Sick?” Did these poems change much in revision?

“A New Language” was around for quite a long time. I have this reoccurring image in my mind whenever I try to work with a language I don’t know or don’t know well. This clean place behind a door that is not often opened. It certainly feels like a metaphor, and I’ve worried that it felt too much like one. Still, I’ve tried to write it often. This got closest. And even this was a fairly radical revision of its first attempt. I cut out almost half the words.

“After She Was Sick” is one of a series of poems that tried to capture moments of my daughter’s travels. She would tell me of these adventures, either in e-mail or on Skype, and I would worry about them. And then I would find certain images from her stories sticking in my mind. They became vivid and very personal. More mine than hers. This poem, too, shrank in revision.

2. Particularly in “After She Was Sick,” you have a knack for capturing a moment or scene with brevity, which I truly enjoyed. For me, this process is very much reminiscent of the imagist movement. How does this snapshot constraint inform what you write?

Sometimes. I have always been drawn to poems that present the world and leave the understanding of it to the reader. There are many other fine poems that redirect the reader onto the process of the poet’s meditation. I have enjoyed those poems, too, and have even tried to write some. But I like to think that if I find the right image, the moment will have its resonance. Pound said, rather famously, that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” I agree.

3. Through the enjambment in “A New Language,” you do a nice job of pacing the reader by revealing a new image in every line. I especially enjoy: “There’s a faint scent/ of lily-of-the-valley in the air/ or, perhaps of lilac.” Is this how you intend for the reader to experience the poem? What for you is achieved through this pacing?

I’m glad you see this. Yes, that was all very intentional in this poem. And in the stanzas too. You see, I’d recently finished a bunch of very formal poems, with exact line lengths governed by syllable count. I wanted to structure a couple of poems where the lines would each reflect precise moments, and where the stanzas would reflect slight movement or change of perspective. I found that it did slow things down, and got something of the other-worldliness I was hoping for in this poem.

4. Who are a few writers that you’ve recently read and envied?

I am always reading people who make me envious! I just read the Tracy Smith book that won the Pulitzer, “Life on Mars.” She did an amazing job combining so many different kinds of things, but doing it all to write an elegy for her father. She uses the whole range of emotions and a world of reference. I also just finished a rereading of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel “Once Upon A River.” She has taken a very specific, often overlooked part of the world and has invested it with myth. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment.

5. Are these poems part of a collection? Is there anything else you’re currently working on?

I’m thinking about a little chapbook right now about the idea of home, what it means to live in particular place or visit a place where you don’t belong. Of finding animals and birds that belong or don’t, are disappearing or reappearing. It’s a little book that mixes prose and poetry and will be called, I think, “The Sickness that Comes from the Longing for Home.” It’s another step along the way of writing the big book I want to write that combines a serious exploration of the natural sciences with the kind of image we associate with poetry. This chapbook will be 25 pages or so. We’ll see.

"Nothing Will Be Recorded, Nothing Lasts, Everything Is Pointless, Etc., Etc.": An Interview with Alice Bolin

Alice Bolin holds her MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Linebreak, Quarterly West, and Octopus. You can find her on Twitter: @alicebolin.

Her story "To Whom It May Concern" appears in Issue Thirty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Alice Bolin talks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about campy horror moves, the juxtaposed, and brochures on death.

1. So many lines of this piece read to me as solemn fortunes : “Inside the box, what becomes of a body,” “You are pure inclination now,” “What resistance?”  Where did you find yourself begin such a story?  At what point did it transform into a kind of letter or announcement (“To Whom It May Concern”)? 

The piece sprung from reading Joy Williams’ novel The Quick and the Dead, which is where the epigraph is taken from. The novel is organized into three books, each of which begins with sort of a strange brochure-sounding section, written in the second person, advertising or introducing a version of death. These sections emphasize the mysteries or paradoxes inherent in the afterlife (“What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?”) in a tone that is at the same time authoritative, spooky, witty, and sad. I got this voice in my head and wanted to go somewhere with it, to write my own version. The piece started out very short—just a paragraph—but I kept adding to it, eventually finding a way to bring in a narrative and shape it into a story.

2. Is this what you image death is like, the ‘after-you,’ where “what depletes you sustains you, you are not nothing, you are not gone, you are ringing through the cosmos”?  It seems the ‘you’ starts to slip away, vanish, wanting to become more like the mirror and less like the reflection, long before death.

I sure don’t know what death is like. My main goal when characterizing the experience of being dead in this story was to make it essentially inconceivable—a state of being that is so painful because it is necessarily the opposite of being bodied, conscious, breathing, alive.

I think you’re right that a lot of the story is about investigating the “you” in life, not in death. In some ways I think my characterization of the afterlife, as being outside of everything, is a metaphor for the loneliness of childhood. Kids are described as being “in their own world,” but that can be the flip side of being lost in a real world that is very separate from them—it’s a world made for and by adults, where kids have almost no control over their environment. It’s boring being a kid. Adults don’t understand kid’s inner lives, and kids often don’t know themselves very well, so there’s not much they can do but observe, to watch and wait.

3. I love how you shove “your punk rock babysitter” right up against “the air so sharp that you thought you never knew anything so raw as your body,” burying out of boredom against a kind of deliverance.  What draws you towards juxtaposition, and do you have a favorite moment of juxtaposition elsewhere in literature (the greatest smashing-together of opposites ever)?

That sort of juxtaposition, the use of multiple dictions and kinds of vocabulary, is the thing I am the most drawn to in any kind of writing and absolutely one of the things I always aim for in my own work. I have found that a writer can get a way with a lot more ambiguity or rhapsody or philosophy if it is counterbalanced with an interjection of the colloquial, or the steadfastly contemporary, commercial, or mundane. I also think it makes the language shine more sharply and vividly. This is a hallmark of my favorite prose and poetry, as in John Ashbery, Muriel Spark, Nathanael West, and, especially, Joy Williams. One specific example I can think of is from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” where the speaker is discussing her father who has Alzheimer’s: “As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object/existing in space on its own shadow./I wish I could carry this clarity with me//into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce./I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy./These are my two wishes.” 

4. To “save” and be “sacred” are deliberately defined as “to save it, which isn’t to say deliver it” and “sacred—that is, appropriate.”  Are we deliberately side-stepping something Higher, Forever, Ultimate?  “Forget prayer,” the speaker tells us near the end, “you are as a shriek in the night…You are so unspeakably heavy… You are dead, you are dead, what sacrifice could save or deliver you, now you belong to us.”  Who is the ominous us?

I am trying to reject an explanation of the afterlife that would include a sacred, merciful, or at least all-powerful answer—I think it’s scarier that way. The afterlife being a sort of spiritual anarchy where you are not gone but also not in existence in any way you could have previously understood, where you are neither yourself nor anything else, is terrifying to me.

The “us” I think might be a little over-the-top. Stories in the second person where it’s unclear who the narrator is or why they’re addressing the “you,” where it’s purely a rhetorical trick, can be frustrating to me. I wanted to sort of spin the camera around and show that it wasn’t just a melodramatic narrator addressing the “you,” but actually the force or forces that are holding the “you” captive—something of a campy horror movie move.

5. Does writing outlive the body, or is one’s work also “an insistent backward motion, a gravity aching you toward solidity, toward the slow and bleary world of the living”?

To answer purely from the ethic of the story: no, I don’t think so. Or I should say our writing might outlive us, but, due to ontological limitations, it would be very difficult to benefit from that. Nothing will be recorded, nothing lasts, everything is pointless, etc., etc.

6. What are you writing tomorrow, now, yesterday?

Been writing some new poems, trying to come up with new essay projects, and working on some original songs… I’ve got a story I’ve been trying to muster the enthusiasm to finish since June. Mostly I try to cast as wide a creative net as possible to allay sadness/boredom.

7. And what’s the best thing you’ve read this summer?  Can you offer us a nugget?

I can’t speak for certain about the best, but I just finished Marguerite Duras’s novel The Lover and Karen’s Rigby’s collection Chinoiserie, which has a poem in it in homage to Duras that I think I like better than the novel—“The girl returned/root-bound/to the bachelor’s room,/her body betraying its grammar,/bone rose, notched zero.”

"The Anxious Compass of Something Yet to Be Averted": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Gina Apostol

Gina Apostol won the Philippine National Book Award for her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She lives in New York City.

An excerpt from her novel Gun Dealers' Daughter appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Gina Apostol answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from Gun Dealers' Daughter.

1. What is writing like?

Mucking through this part of the story discourages me, but I might as well go through with it. I’ve been told Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death is only a bodily malfunction, a glandular lack. Maybe this throb of incompleteness is the same. In my mind, the anxious compass of something yet to be averted—a sordid, unsatisfying suspension. I keep pushing it down, stomping on it, this heft of my expectancy, my wish to resurrect him, again.

2. What isn’t writing like?

When he wrapped me up, in that windy Oxford pontoon, prissily wiping off the splashing water from my summer calves; when he fussed over my Spanish mantilla before the march of the Feast of Fallas, one spring in Valencia, tightening the corset and smoothing the lace on my springtime chest; when he patted me on the head like a puppy, danced with me like a Gypsy, or put me to bed like my dad—odd sensations of replenishment, of completion, of being loved with the absolute devotion of someone who would always be loved back, no matter what she did.

3. When you do it, why?

I discovered that our books of history were invariably in the voice of the colonist, the one who misrecognized us. Filipinos were inscrutable apes engaging in implausible insurrections against gun-wielding epic heroes who disdained our culture but wanted our land. The simplicity and rapacity of those books’ reductions were consistent and provided the ballast for my tardy revolt.

4. When you don’t, why?

I should beat my breast, retreat into an ashram, join the crucifers of Pampanga and lash my body against a bloody cross, at the mere sound of my name. Because I do not have the imagination to possess affection. To be honest, I have never been able to envision society as a creature with genuine warmth or pumping heart. I act by impulse, by the inarticulate suggestions of my errant sensations. I have a cadaverous soul. In short, I am a member of the damned burgis—the Filipino bourgeoisie, with links to feudal lords. Whenever I think of my work, source of privilege and horror, I believe it is with conflicting purposes and incoherent intentions, when, in fact, I should never speak of it at all.

"Shifting, Second-to-Second Demands of the Improvised Moment": An Interview with Aaron Gilbreath

Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Kenyon Review, Tin House, Oxford American, Black Warrior Review, Brick, Hotel Amerika, Paris Review and Yeti. He works at Smith Tea in Portland, Oregon and blogs about music, food and miscellany here: 'http://aarongilbreath.wordpress.com/

His essay "Searching for Literary Sasquatch, the Elusive Narrative Voice" appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Aaron Gilbreath speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the recipe and taste of narrative voice.

1. How did you come to write an essay on narrative voice?

In my graduate writing program, students had to deliver a final lecture –write ten or so pages on a topic, enough to read for twenty-five to thirty minutes. The subject could be about writing, a book, an author, whatever, as long as it focused on the literary and was well-researched. During my early years writing narrative nonfiction, any assignment would have felt smothering – I just wanted to write whatever I wanted to write about. This assignment was open-ended, though. Rather than feel confined creatively, or take this lecture as an intrusive waste of my “real” writing time (a feeling I often have about certain elements of regular Earthly life, such as shaving and shopping for shirts), I decided to think of this not as a lecture but as a creative opportunity, a chance to do something different. When I changed my perspective, I gave my mind free reign to tackle subjects that I knew in practice but never thought of as material.

I write narrative, often first-person essays involving music, food, people and places. I like writing about books and authors, but I never wanted to write about writing. I’m glad I tried to here, though. If an essay is often the process of a writer working through something – the search for answers, an attempt at understanding – then a school paper can provide a chance to make sense of a topic more scholarly than you’d usually assay about. One of my MO’s as a nonfiction writer is: follow my obsessions. Whenever I find myself fixated on some new thing– learning about Korea’s herbal tea tradition, for instance, or getting to know the origins of Tropicália – that thing is something I should look into writing about. At this point in grad school, I was taken with the idea of narrative voice: what was it? Why was it always coming up? When I recognized that, I also found my lecture topic. What was particularly beneficial for me was that the assignment forced me to abandon my preferred first-person format and to write a piece that didn’t allow me to weave myself in. Sometimes you get stuck in a rut. This and a previous essay broke me of the habit by forcing me out of my comfort zone. It was a watershed moment for me, after which I felt confident writing more probing, topical pieces that weren’t narrative. For the second time in my writing life, I felt what Sven Birkerts, essayist and director of my grad program, later expressed when he said, “Assigned essays can be a God-send. And nothing illuminates the mind’s mysterious workings as persuasively as seeing how an assignment, or even a prompt, charges particles and then gathers them to itself. Quite amazing. I can be in what feels like a creative void, a Gobi, but if the directive were given: write an essay on old batteries—I would.”

And then, some two years after finishing the essay, I sent Collagist editor Matt Bell the wrong draft and only realized it when I read his editorial comments: “Again, this references outside the essay/our experience.” Oops.

2. Could you talk more about your decision to create a list of ingredients in order to break down the large topic of narrative voice?

In my attempt to figure out what this thing called voice is, I used numerous microscopes to analyze it. I tried to capture its essence with the butterfly net of metaphors. I tried exposition to clearly articulate a definition. I used examples, hoping to point to cases in lieu of a definition. I’m horrible at math and rarely think in terms of formulae, but my mind can wrap around the lists and simple measurements in a recipe. The recipe is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It’s just me tasting a dish and saying, “I think there’s salt, garlic, chili and lime in here.” Here’s how I phrased it:

“If there could be gleaned some sort of essential recipe, it might be something like this: voice is word choice plus favored sentence structures plus rhythm plus ratio of sentence complexity to simplicity plus some personalized sonic fingerprint that impresses itself onto the sound of one’s words in some unquantifiable way.”

One problem is, when trying to describe what elements you taste in tea, coffee and wine, everyone picks up different things: hints of apricot here, a little melon note there. Voice seems the same way. I work for a tea company. When people come in to our tasting room and smell our teas, one person might smell hints of grass and earth in a particular varietal, while another picks up strong hints of sticky rice. When I say, “I taste salt, garlic, chili and lime in here,” I’m probably missing a few key ingredients. Aside from sense variations, a list of ingredients doesn’t add up to a definition. It gives a serviceable, broad impression of a thing, but it doesn’t capture its complete character.

3. If picking up on the different parts of narrative voice gives "a serviceable, broad impression of a thing, but it doesn’t capture its complete character," then what do you believe we can garner from actively digesting the voice in this manner?

Just because you can’t completely answer a question doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to. That’s the entire basis for assaying. Digesting it in this way is as much a reflection of how my mind works as it is the elusive nature of voice. Clearly I’m no Einstein, but Einstein said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” If my incomplete portrait of narrative voice can provide some insight for fellow writers and readers, then it’s worthwhile. In journalism, a profile can be said to work similarly: as detailed as a profile can be, is one ever a complete portrait of a human being? We’re too vast and complex. But a good profile can give us a clear sense of someone’s character and all its complexities.

4. What have you been reading in the past few months?

Always too many things at once, which is just how I like it. Recently I devoured Tom Bissell’s excellent essay collection Magic Hours. Nearly every piece in there is a knockout. Even his Author’s Note is engaging. I’m always reading literary magazines. These past months it’s been The Normal School, Slake, Black Warrior Review and Granta. Also, the new Lucky Peachmagazine is stellar.

Like many people, I love The New Yorker. I especially love reading it on Sunday at a certain bakery with a certain someone whose name I won’t specify, but it rhymes with Rebekah. Recently I got a free subscription to The Economist, so I’ve been waving that around in public so strangers think I’m sophisticated. I also used a page of it to jot the opening lines of a new essay, which I’m grateful for.

In addition to pleasure reading, I’m always researching things for various works-in-progress. I recently read parts of Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and Marc Reisner’s A Dangerous Place: California’s Unsettling Fate for some LA-related pieces.

5. What other writing projects have you been tackling?

Because I’m too restless to sit around relaxing, I’m usually working on a few things at once: some short, some long, some topical, some personal.

This summer I finished a short essay about death and California’s infamous Grapevine Grade, a scenic, dangerous section of highway north of Los Angeles. That’s slated for The Threepenny Review. Now I’m writing a long personal essay based on the sale of my childhood Star Wars toys, but I don’t entirely know what it’s about yet. I have what Vivian Gornick calls “the situation,” and I’m pawing through the gravels of experience for what she calls “the story.” I’m in that exciting spelunking phase where you’re delving below the subject’s surface to see what it all really means. I think the essay’s about what the toys and their loss reveal about the nature of childhood, my own life and parental relationships, maybe also something to do with the pain of passing time and nature of mingled fates, maybe a bit about the way the human mind remembers childhood as a series of sense impressions, colors and images as much as specific experiences. But again, I don’t totally know yet. I just know that, as a kid, my Star Wars toys were my favorite possessions, that at age twenty-four I sold them all to a vintage toy store and used the money to buy a thousand dollar mountain bike that I barely rode for the next ten years. Based on the feelings those toys and that short anecdote evoke in me, I think there’s something more revealing and interesting waiting to be extracted, so I’m looking for it. This phase of writing is both frustrating and fun: your mind makes connections and finds meaning, symbolic resonance, metaphors and so on. (Note: there are fewer Chewbacca metaphors than you’d think. Chewbacca puns, thankfully, are plentiful.)

Another ongoing project is a series of interviews I did with homeless and transient people here in Portland, Oregon. In the summer of 2011, I talked with people I encountered on the street, and I transcribed our conversations. The first of the ten appears here in The Collagist. The awesome Jacob Knabb and Victor Giron are going to publish a number of them at Curbside Splendor. I’m circulating others now so that people will be able to read the interviews, and to give the homeless a voice that they don’t always have on their own. In the process, one magazine editor mentioned Studs Turkel to me after reading the interview I sent him, so I tracked down one of Turkel’s books. Man, was I clueless. I didn’t know anything about Turkel’s oral history work. I only knew that his astute, funny quotations seemed to be everywhere. Glad to be coming out of the dark on this one.

I’m also working on book of first-person narrative travel writing set in Canada, so I’ve been taking in Canada books like a baleen whale takes in krill: Will Ferguson’s Beauty Tips from Moosejaw, Roy MacGregor Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People, and Bill Gaston’s wild hockey memoir, Midnight Hockey: All About Beer, the Boys, and the Real Canadian Game. One thing I’ve learned: Canada makes their books out of paper, just like we do. As kid in Arizona, I imagined they’d be chiseled from glacial ice or bone scrimshaw. These books also appear mostly in English, which makes reading easier for me.

"Many Kinds of Deterioration": An Interview with Dara Barnat

Dara Barnat’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in diode, Poet Lore, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, The Collagist,and elsewhere. She has been a poetry work-study scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Dara’s chapbook, Headwind Migration, was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Dara’s PhD is from Tel Aviv University, where she teaches poetry and creative writing in the faculty of English and American Studies. 

Her poems “Highway” and “Grief’s Language” appear in Issue Thirty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Dara Barnat talks with interviewer Amber L. Cook through topics of intuition, memory, and instability. 

1. What made you sit down and write both “Highway” and “Grief’s Language?”

My motivation to write these poems was at first intuitive, unarticulated. However, I’ve come to realize that there was a strong urgency behind them (and other poems), to confront, personally and poetically, my father’s illness and death. For a long time I wasn’t ready to talk, let alone write, about these painful experiences. In retrospect, I believe “Highway” and “Grief’s Language” were important breakthroughs in finally examining and somehow writing through the fear, anger, and sadness. I hadn’t expected other types of sentiments to accompany this reckoning, such as joy, grace, and empathy. Lucky me, I found those, too.

2. I sense that the speaker’s father in “Highway” perhaps had a disease like Alzheimer’s that affected his memory. Does the form of this poem (couplets) help you to write to this subject?

That is a very discerning reading of “Highway.” Certainly I had in mind that the father displays signs of mental illness, although not specifically Alzheimer’s. I do think that in terms of form, the couplets create white space, which can represent gaps in memory. I was actually more conscious of using enjambments to echo the instability of the father’s mind, as well as the destabilizing effect of the father’s condition on the speaker, like in the line: “I know / this, because someone told me / they saw my father on / I-84…” That said, while the poem autobiographically relates to mental illness, my hope is that it also speaks to experiences beyond my own. For instance, I heard someone explain it as about old age. Walking “to nowhere” might be read as a metaphor for many kinds of deterioration.

3. In “Grief’s Language” we see a shift from a speaker trying to do anything to avoid grief to one who eventually accepts it as almost a friend. One line that I’m especially drawn to is: “I’ve started speaking to grief in every language possible.” How does the speaker earn this shift? Do the indents help the speaker to reconcile with this change?

That’s an interesting way to explain the shift. I’m not totally sure (in my own reading of the poem) whether the speaker earns the shift in attitude toward grief, as much as she (or he) is forced to accept it. My idea is that grief follows you, no matter how far you run to escape it (even, as in my case, as far as the US to Tel Aviv). I think the indents represent the speaker’s transition from resisting, to accepting, and then, as you suggest, almostcelebrating grief.

4. What’s something you’ve read lately that you got lost in?

For several years I mostly read poetry that was connected to my dissertation, Walt Whitman and Jewish American Poetry. I spent a lot of time in the library with every edition of Leaves of Grass, and work by Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Muriel Rukeyser, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy, Gerald Stern, and C. K. Williams, among others. When the dissertation was finished, I entered a phase where I read a lot of memoirs, short stories, and the occasional chick lit novel. After a while I started to miss poetry. One beautiful book I recently read (and reviewed) is A Messenger Comes, by Rachel Tzvia Back. It is an elegiac collection, filled with stunning, prayer-like poems. I also just ordered several new books of contemporary poetry, though I like to forget what I ordered and be happily surprised when they show up.

5. These poems to me feel very connected; are they part of the same project? Is there anything else you’ve been working on lately?

Yes, absolutely, these poems are part of the same collection, which has a title I’m still keeping to myself. The poems in the collection arise from the life circumstances I’ve described, and grief that is confronted after a period of being delayed, deferred, or repressed, because of fear, shame, and/or stigma. The writing process – truthfully my way of mourning my father – has been simultaneously devastating and uplifting. I’ve been keeping a sort of journal about the writing process at a blog: mybookandi.wordpress.com. Writing a post every few weeks has made me more accountable to myself, in terms of getting the book done, and tracking its (very non-linear) progress.

"Meta Waters and Real Waters": An Interview with Nate Pritts

Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing.  His poetry & prose have been published widely, both online and in print and on barns, at places like Forklift, Ohio, Court Green, Untoward, and PopMatters, as well as Rain Taxi and Boston Review where he frequently contributes reviews. He is the founder and principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal and small press.

His story "The Translation" appears in Issue Thirty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Nate Pritts speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about enthusiasm, endings, and his poems painted on barns. 

1. Right away we’re struck with meta, at the end of your opening paragraph: “Insert here a few sentences, straightforward in style, about his life that allows transition to—but downplays—the moment of crisis.”  The narrator coaches, “Elicit resounding waves of emotion.”  What is your relation to meta?  Do you ever find it obnoxious?  Do you tread meta waters carefully?

I tread everything carefully – meta waters & real waters, the path under my feet & even the clouds in the sky, the real things in my real life, as well as the things made out of letters on pages that I type.

Which I suppose is my way of saying that everything (meta included) gets worn out, gets used up, becomes a meme.  I don’t find meta any more annoying than I find narrative annoying, or lyric, or language, or the air that I breathe.  These are all things that exist – my annoyance, or my labeling them as obnoxious, doesn’t change that. People fall into styles, or boxes, all the time.  To me, the most interesting part of any trap is trying to figure out how to escape.

2. What is the best metafiction you have ever encountered?  (My money’s on Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

I’ve never read that.  I’ve never encountered it.  Does that mean I win?  My favorite novel is The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, a book that is mostly about how to tell a story (the saddest story).  When I wrote “The Translation,” I had been reading some novels by Philippe Sollers (friend of Lacan & Barthes).  His novels (originally in French – hence my narrator’s/my desire to learn the language) are written in an incredibly abstracted stream of self-consciousness.  It’s amazing that they proceed from page to page at all since they’re so cripplingly self-aware.  There is not much action in the traditional sense, & everything (characters & setting) are transmitted in a fairly vague manner, an almost impenetrable subjectivity. 

3. You write, “At times, he feels as if his own language has failed him… Or rather, […] the enthusiasm has dulled.”  Do you find yourself feeling this way, ever, as a writer, as a poet/prosette?  How do they inform one another, and do you find yourself genre-leaping when ‘the enthusiasm’ for one ‘dulls’?

I don’t often genre leap.  But the situation you describe is the current state of my dis/union.  The answer to your question about enthusiasm, then, is both YES & NO.

My poetry has often been constructed out of a series of moments, very intentionally MADE.  Lately, my poetry has come to me through a process of uncovering – clearing away the noise to discover what’s really present, stripping experiences down to recover the initial impulses, whatever threads are resident already (rather than building some new house).  So one way to think of it (the way I think of it) is that my process has gone from generating intentional utterances to now attempting to step back, trying to approach a more gestural utterance. 

But I’m a writer. And so I found I still had all this intentional energy, this drive to create something – to be ACTIVE instead of just ATTUNED.  I needed something to do where I could still write in terms of building, in terms of directing something to happen.

My enthusiasm for poetry is all I know.  It hasn’t dulled.  But it has started engaging with my intellect & my soul in different ways, & this led to new paths, new options.  New challenges.

4. You’ve had work published on barns?  What words?  Could they be read from the road?

I’ve never driven by to see them, though I would like to soon.  The painter Bill Dunlap is at work on an ever-growing series of public art reclamations.  He paints barns & sometimes he includes snippets of poems.  You can read more about the project that involved my poem “Spring Psalter” (from my third book of poems, The Wonderfull Yeare) here, along with some images of Bill’s terrific work.

5. What are endings meant to do?  And yours in particular: do you seek a lilt uplifting, a reckoning, a glad-sad?  “He seeks a new project undeterred by the mess he’s made which is really all the mess there is.”

Endings are a trick.  We all know that, because we’re people – people alive & seeking every day for some shape to our narrative, some arc to our struggle.  And it’s not really there: no resolution.  Thank God. 

Endings in writing, then, have a chance to be the only kinds of endings we know.  They should reveal / revisit the tensions that have arisen throughout the course of the work (the poem, the story, the whatever).  I like my endings to FEEL final, even if they aren’t – which, for me, means that they sometimes come across as abrupt, or seem to veer from the direction they appeared to be going.  

Maybe most of all, an ending should remind you that there are beginnings.

In “The Translation,” the arc I was interested in had to do with this character losing himself on purpose.  It seems to me now that I wanted a reader to question whether or not this was viable – to lose oneself, to forget oneself, to live both inside your own head as well as somehow separate from it.

6. What’s next in your writing life?

As a result of what I said earlier (Q#3), I’m working mostly on fiction right now.  By which I mean I am dividing my time between writing & staring out the window trying to think through how everything might fall into place.  I started a new piece this morning (after a few days of staring out the window) but I think it’s going to be easier for me if I storyboard the whole thing first, so I’m sharpening my pencils.

7. And reading life?

I have three or four books going at any one time, & I cycle through them pretty quickly – finishing one & then picking up something new in one motion.  Though I sometimes get on kicks (of theme or topic or author that I stick with & explore) mostly my reading is loose & varied. 

The stack next to me looks like this: poetry (Mary Wroth & Shelley & Matt Hart), fiction (Carson McCullers, Sarah Orne Jewett, & a friend just recommended another French novelist, Michel Houellebecq), non-fiction (Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, which reminds me that furious energy can be maintained, & Many Subtle Channels, which is a little too pleased with itself) & comic books (a collection of METAL MEN issues as well as a new Jack Kirby KAMANDI collection that I’ll be writing about for Rain Taxi).

"There Are Probably Many Ways a Song Could Destroy a City": An Interview with Mark Walters

Mark Walters lives in Omaha. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in elimae, Dinosaur Bees, and NAP. 

His story "Three Songs" appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Mark Walters speaks to interviewer David Bachmann about turning songs into stories, saving the reader from boredom, and well-known imaginary cities.

1. Where did this story begin? Were you prompted by the flash of a specific idea, or was it a larger motif that you were attempting to articulate, which you then cultivated inside this work as you wrote?

I wrote a bunch of these story-songs over the course of a few months. Generating ideas for songs and then turning the ideas into stories allowed me to use imagination in my fiction in ways I hadn’t thought about before. Eventually, I wanted to put a bigger chunk of these pieces together, so I came up with these three.

2. The fullness and wide-ranging movement of this work makes me wonder what previous drafts looked like. Can you comment on how you arrived at this draft? (Was there much fluctuation here? Where did this go before settling into what it is now?)

There wasn’t much fluctuation. The stories were written in the order presented. The hardest bit was the end of the final story. The piece sat around for a few weeks, going nowhere, until I tweaked the ending of the first song. That seemed to help me with the ending of the last one, somehow. It opened things up. Matt Bell helped me with some changes after it was accepted at The Collagist.

3. You begin with a ballad about a "particular village in a particular region of the country," an abstraction that I find compelling in the way it invites me to place these images anywhere I want to. The second song moves away from the abstract in its use of a specific city, Kansas City. What, if any, is the significance, not necessarily of Kansas City, but of your decision to move away from the abstract in the first song? Is that something you want the reader to take note of? Was this something the story asked for without any particular rationale?

I think I picked Kansas City because it’s the closest big city to Omaha, where I live. It may have been Baltimore at first. KC seemed a better fit. I wanted the shift from the abstract to the specific to ground the entire piece. Mixing the nameless city with a well-known city made the nameless city seem more real. Less abstract. Even though it’s still imaginary. It’s all imaginary. Does that make sense?

4. The populations of the Misinterpreters and Listeners are beautiful to me in their lunacy. Are these populations supposed to represent something more than what they are in this story? (Do you think a writer has an obligation to makes his/her characters and/or landscapes representative of something outside the work they live in, or does the writer have an obligation to avoid such symbolism? Or is neither an obligation?)

All they represent for me is two opposing responses to a particular imaginary song. Everything else is left up to the reader. If they represent other things for other readers, that's cool. If a reader wants to bring a meaning or interpretation to a piece of fiction I write, I am 100% down with that. I don’t think a writer of fiction has any obligation beyond the primary one: keeping a reader interested. Keeping the reader from being bored.

5. I find your depiction of hysteria in the second song strange and wonderful, a cataclysm without death. Can you talk about how you decided upon and/or developed this brand of hysteria?

The hysteria was dictated by the destruction. I was thinking about how people listen to songs over and over again. I was also thinking about a song that could level a city. There are probably many ways a song could destroy a city. This is just the one I picked.

Do you know that song, "Precision Auto" by Superchunk? Just listen to that song ten times in a row. That's the real answer. 

6. The third song's final image suggests peace in the form of sleep as an end to insomnia, brought on by the painstakingly-achieved sound of the musicians. Do you view this as a resolution? (Do you think resolution is important in this or in any of your other works?)

I do see the sleeping as a resolution, though maybe it’s a bit of a cop out, almost too easy. It always had to end there though.

7. What are you reading these days? Do you ever read something and think, "I wish I'd written this" or "I want to write like this," or are you able to avoid this sort of envy? 

I've been reading a lot of poetry from Matthew Rohrer and Heather Christle. Also Mary Ruefle's Selected Poems. I just finished Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Just started Jane Eyre--usually, this kind of novel is not my thing, but I’m loving it so far. I get the “I wish I’d written this” thing all the time, but I see it as inspiration, not envy. It’s more like “I want to write something as good as this.”

8. What are you writing these days? Do you have plans to embark on a large work?

I’m still working on song-stories, and I hope to put a bunch of them together into a book. 

"Magical Keys Found so Often in Folk Tales": An Interview with Gregory Howard

Gregory Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Maine. His work can be found in Harp & Altar, Birkensnake, and Tarpaulin Sky among other journals and magazines.

 His essay "The Object is Always Magic: Narrative as Collection" appears in Issue Thirty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Gregory Howard speaks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about obsession, collection, and negotiation.  

1. How did you go about writing your essay? Did you collect pieces of it over time (much like the collections that you write about)?

The essay came out of several different attentions and over a long period of time. I’ll do my best to compress it as much as possible. During the last year or years of my time at the University of Denver, I was working on a book that was going to be my dissertation (which eventually became two different things: a short novel and long story) and I was working with the ideas of hospitals and trauma and thinking about memory and narrative. And I’d already been thinking a lot about the uncanny, which was an idea I previously obsessed over and still do.  For the dissertation I had to write a critical afterward and it was in that context, of having to write and think about the writing I had done, about the fiction I had worked on, which was much more intuitive and bound up in all these images and thoughts and impressions, that I remembered my trip to the British museum and the Henry Wellcome collection and that was the kind of catalyst for the whole thing—a way in. But that version was a bit more academic, a bit more airless, than what the essay eventually became. The final version owes its existence to the privilege of teaching the MFA students at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, for which I had to present a forty-five minute talk/lecture, something that totally terrified me. So I looked back to the critical afterward for some grounding and found that parts of it still resonated while others just fell away. I had just taught a class on fairy tales and had also been reading and responding to fiction that used gaps in the way I talk about in the essay—stuff like Amina Cain’s —and I felt like all of this was tied together in some way, so I began again with a new focus: obsession, collection, and narrative. And as I rewrote the essay the personal material began to crop up. I began to talk about my own obsessions and relationships to obsession and think about my relationship to writing and the essay became more of a thinking-through than the argument/declamation it had been. So, the essay ended up being a kind of summing up and processing of all the things I had been interested in and internalizing over the last four or five years as well as a way to begin to understand my own relationship to writing and the idea of being a writer. It was a long and convoluted process for sure and maybe this is a long way of saying “yes” to the question. But this, I’ve found and much to my sometime chagrin, is how my writing process seems to work . It’s often like I’m in a big dark room with only a flashlight, or maybe even something smaller, a penlight, to illuminate my surroundings, and each movement of the light reveals something odd and disparate, a room full of baubles and gewgaws, a long revealing. After I’ve spent a lot of time seeing these things, seeing each thing, wandering the whole room, I finally find the light switch on the wall and turn it on and it’s like, “oh: I see everything now and how it all relates.”

2. Mid-essay, you write, “In other words, writing is a way of dealing with obsessions that might otherwise isolate and ruin us.” This line really nicely sums up what you’ve been building upon in the first half of the essay.  However, it makes me wonder: what happens if we (as writers) aren’t obsessed? What if we are dedicated but not voracious? I like the idea that writing gives us a way to build cages around these things that we could not otherwise grapple with; however, this mindset also indicates that we will need these harmful obsessions us in order to write at all, which seems to me to not be totally true.

I think you’re right—that it’s not totally true. It’s kind of a blanket statement and one that could lend itself to  . . . dramatic readings. I don’t want to suggest that writers need to be obsessed in the haunted/tormented genius/chewed fingernails kind of way and that if they’re not, then they aren’t “real writers.”  However, I do think that there are different kinds of obsession/fascination and that writers are all driven by it in some basic way. Writing takes intense focus and concentration and hours and hours of time and if your writing isn’t driven by obsession with subject matter or image or thought or emotion, it’s likely driven by obsession with language and form, with innovation, with the nuts and bolts of fiction, with literature itself. I think here of Italo Calvino. Is there a seemingly sunnier/lighter presence in world literature than Calvino?  When you think of Calvino you don't necessarily think of obsession. At least I don’t. Yet, in his essay on Quickness in Six Memos, Calvino offers, as a way of describing what he means by the value of quickness in literature, offers the anecdote of the artist, asked by a king to draw the perfect crab. The artist asks for five years, a country estate and a bunch of servants. At the end of the five years the artist comes back only to ask for five more years. Then at the end of all this returns to the king once more and, in one stroke, draws the crab, the perfect crab. That’sobsession with craft.  Or thinking about it another way and to paraphrase (and probably distort) Gilbert Sorrentino: writers don’t really know what they want to say until they say it, until they do the work. The knowing comes through the writing itself. The thing that drives us to the writing, to spend a lot of time thinking and reading and pacing and drinking coffee—whatever it is—is something that can only come out via fiction. So we write to understand what it is we want to know or be or make. And knowing in this sense is a long haul, often. Knowing as unfolding and shaping and fine-tuning. There’s something obsessive in that, right? But in a nourishing way, I think. In the way that Jean Rhys talks about when she describes writing as “feeding the lake of literature.” In a way that plugs into a network of other knowing, doing, making. So writing, in this sense, keeps us engaged in the conversations that can nourish us.

3. As a reader, I wonder about how to deal with encountering stories that utilize collections.  While, as you mentioned early in your essay, I am constantly being bombarded by information (Facebook posts, news stories, e-mails, every blog ever), I also feel as if I’m being bombarded by literature, with the literary magazines that I receive in the mail piling up on my bedside table, the list of online literary magazines that I should probably read getting many issues behind my reading of them.  This is not even including the piles of chapbooks, books, and anthologies. How do you think the reader can go about collecting stories, crafting a body of work that causes them to “[unlock] the door to a wondrous and terrible parallel world that is somehow strangely like our own”?

It seems like the crux of this question is how, as active readers, to negotiate all the work out there and that’s a tough one. With access to so much, it can be easy to take it all in like you’re sunbathing or just close your eyes and pretend none of is happening at all. It’s also easy to find the things that generally give you a charge and just live there—hang out in the same old joints, as it were. I must say: I’m not sure I have an answer. I always feel like I’m behind on the things everyone is reading and that I don’t have the time to read the things I should. As a reader, “unlocking the door” for me mostly means being as open to surprise as possible, to actively work against my tendencies/tastes and try to read widely. There are so many literary pleasures to be had/experienced, so many things to discover and rediscover. Also, I try not to be anxious and to be nice to myself about not getting to more things.

4. What’s worth reading these days?

Holy shit! What a question! So much, so much.

I’ve been reading around, as I begin a new project, so the stuff I’m most familiar with right now is some older things I’m investigating/reengaging with as I try to solve some problems and work with some models. So maybe I’ll mention a few of those, each of which are incredible and about which I could write pages and pages.

Elio Vittorini’s Conversation in Sicily

Alisdair Gray’s 1982, Janine

Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust

Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus

Lia Yiwu The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories China from the Bottom Up

Other than that I’ve recently loved Christopher Narozny’s Jonah Man, which is a taught kaleidoscope of thwarted ambition and desire. Renee Gladman’s two Ravickia books are pretty mesmerizing/distorting/magical. Suzanne Scanlon has a book coming out in the fall called Promising Young Women, which I’ve read chunks of, and said chunks forecast a pretty incredible whole. I recently read Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, which I had missed out on when it first came out and which I find absolutely stunning in its simplicity, honesty, and depth. I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of others.

5. What else have you been writing recently?

I’ve just started working on a longer project/novel. It involves radio, retirement homes for rich old people, a missing modernist home, and Germany. So far.