"The Community That Death Creates": An Interview with Paul Vega

Paul Vega is a managing editor for Pacifica Literary Review and received his MFA from the University of Washington. He has been published or has work forthcoming in BULL: Men’s Fiction, The Collagist, The Portland Review, theNewerYork, Ambush Review, and elsewhere. He teaches writing in Seattle and works seasonally in Alaska.

His essay, "Whiteout," appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Paul Vega talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about flash nonfiction, devastating memories, and the inclusive "we."

Your essay “Whiteout” consists of only one paragraph. Was it always this compact, or did you have to whittle it down over multiple drafts? What did you hope to achieve by keeping the essay so concise?

The essay came to me virtually intact, which is not at all my writing style, but it was a long time percolating in the back of my mind. A few years back, I brought a forty-page “fiction” manuscript to a workshop at UW that was something of a disaster—both for me and for my fellow workshoppers. (What to do with 40 pages of a stranger’s account of his sister’s death?) Her death was still so recent, and it read like more of a reportage, almost like a journal of the events so I could better process it, but not something that had another dimension to relate to other readers. When I wrote “Whiteout,” I’d been reading a lot of prose poem type pieces in other journals and also by friends, and it struck me that by limiting myself to 500 or 600 words I might strike nearer to the heart of the matter and also free myself from the artifice of short story or memoir. I didn’t need to explain to the reader how any of us got to that hospital room (which, really, itself is inexplicable) but could instead just focus on that transcendent moment and the effect it had on the speaker and the family.

With a speaker that makes more use of “We” than “I,” the essay never explicitly reveals the nature of your relationship with Julia. How did you decide that this detail should remain ambiguous? What effect do you think that choice has on the reader?

Obviously “We” is more inclusive, and I think it was a reactive choice to the “I” in the workshop manuscript I mentioned. That piece was mostly about what happened to me, as a brother and as a person trying to make sense of my own fractured life. A big part of that story, and something I still wanted show in this essay, is that even when something devastating happens to someone you love, you have the capacity to be very self-involved. You are human, and dying (for most people) doesn’t happen at all once but over a long period of time. You are paralyzed by the dying of someone close to you, but you are still living and you both revel in that knowledge and feel guilty for it. But I also wanted to point out that everyone involved has that capacity. So “We” focuses the essay on both the shared inner lives of the family and the speaker and on the community that death creates, a community forged not just through the relationship to the person dying, and but also through the logistical elements we are forced to death with - the phone calls to family and friends, the writing of the obituary, the arrangements of the funeral, the impossibility of how to best memorialize. “We” is also a way to include the reader as someone who has or will one day have to enter into this community.

“Death of a loved one” is a topic that many students and young writers are advised against writing about, because such a universal experience can yield some generic thoughts and feelings rather than fresh takes and new insights. What do you believe your essay brought to this sensitive subject that other memoirs and stories have not?

It’s a great question. Clearly it was a problem for me when trying to write about my sister in the past. And it would be arrogant and foolish to say this essay solves the problem of creating a “fresh take” from something as universal as death. Still, I’m proud that the emotional rawness is still here without consuming the work and how I was able to use the collective “we” to bolster the speaker, develop his character, and show the solidarity in “bearing the unspeakable burden” (my dear friend Lisa’s words). It’s a humble aim, to hope personal poignancy connects with readers and makes them reflect on their own experiences. In some small way, I hope I did that.   

Was creating this essay therapeutic for you at all? Do you find writing and publishing to be helpful in changing and/or processing your feelings?

As I wrote above, it was definitely helpful in processing the feelings. I don’t know that I would say it was therapeutic, unless crying into your Americano in a public café while strangers stare at you and worry for your well-being is therapeutic. I would say it was personally significant to reflect more on Julia’s death and to have something permanent that says her life and death mattered and still does to a lot of people. At the same time, it’s devastating to re-visit the memories and put it out to there in a public forum knowing it might have the same effect on my family. My parents buried their first-born; I am already older than my sister was when she died. Who wants to be reminded of that? Ultimately, I hope the quality of the art outweighs the emotional toll of creating it, but I sometimes have my doubts. 

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a number of short stories and other prose poems, just trying to keep the tiny flame of my writer life alive and tell anyone who wants to know that I’m a person in this world they might like to read and know. More precisely, I have another short piece about my sister out there, and a couple pieces about relationships and commercial fishing in the works. You can always Google me if you get the itch, lord knows I have. I’m out there sawing away in some corner of the Internet.

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

The last four things I’ve read in order are Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere by Lucas Mann, Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson, and Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon. They are all eminently studly in their own ways. Mann if you like cerebral, non-pretentious sports writing. Watkins, if you enjoy brass balls, lyrical western stories. Henderson, if McCarthesque Montana tragedy is up your alley. Yoon if you have a pulse.

Journals are great too. I edit one so I’m always reading them. ZYZZYVA is great, Ninth Letter is great, CutBank is great, The Collagist is great. Small Portions over at UW Bothell is a gem. People should read more journals. They are great.

"You've Left No Shadow": An Interview with Megan Falley

Megan Falley is the author of two full length collections of poetry, After the Witch Hunt (2012) and Redhead and the Slaughter King (2014), both published by Write Bloody Press. She has performed her work on the popular television show “Verses and Flow”. She has represented NYC on three national poetry slam teams, and has poems published in several literary journals. In 2012 she toured the country for 100 days reading her poems everywhere. She is the creator of the online poetry course, Poems That Don’t Suck.

Her poem, "The Third Ceremony," appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about an inevitable funeral, form as a continuance of content, and the possibilities that follow the stretching of the mind beyond the limits of language.

Even though the narrator becomes reliable because the voice feels honest, the poem does not stand as a solely single-voice poem. The person who the narrator is directly addressing is molded through the images, and the reader is left with various ways to construct or imagine this person. For you, who are these two characters? What about the sentiments derived from the images can you relate to, if at all?

This poem is a part of a series of poems in which I imagine my own brother’s funeral. Growing up with an addict, his funeral always felt inevitable, and I would often imagine it—what I would do, what I would say. Throughout my adolescence I would craft potential eulogies for him in the shower, on long drives—everything always felt so around-the-corner. The two characters are my brother and I, though he exists sort of like a dream in these poems, both very real and also only of my own imagination. I can relate to all the images—the cigarette line specifically—how his loss would permeate and ruin even the most beautiful things, the scent of flowers. How every bad thing would feel like his fault—even rain.

This poem alternates between one- and two-line stanzas, and in this way, the one-line stanzas stand out in space. What guided your decisions in structuring this work?

Often when I write poems that center around two people, I tend to write in couplets. I think I probably started out writing this poem in that form, but it felt wrong. The presence of my brother in this poem is mostly defined by his absence. As much as he was there in the poem, I also felt/feel blindingly alone in that place. The speaker in the poem (a dystopian me) is, like you said, sort of “standing out in space.” I wanted how the poem looked on the page to mirror that lonesomeness and loss.

The juxtapositions embedded in the lines are surprising and captivating.  From “flowers” and “cigarettes” in the second stanza, to “fireflies” and “cruelest hands” in the fourth, each first image presented to the reader is immediately taken back and changed in the most unsettling but beautiful of ways. These shifts, though, feel natural and real. What advice would you give an aspiring writer who aims to capture such dimensional moments?

Thank you! There’s a lot of complexity of emotion in this piece—there’s obviously sadness and grief, but there’s also anger and relief, even irony, and I wanted the images in the piece to be as complicated as the feelings. I’d tell an aspiring writer to make lists of all the words and feelings and images they associate with what they’re writing about, and to go beyond simple. If they’re writing about nostalgia, maybe they’d start out with that included ‘photograph’, ‘shoebox’, ‘sepia’, and ‘memory’, but then I’d tell them to push for less tangible images and words of nostalgia—maybe ‘ferris wheel’, ‘arcade’, ‘bonfire’, ‘record player’, ‘july’, etc. I’d have them create interesting combinations with this new word bank. So, if the poem was about missing a person, or an era spent with someone long gone, maybe they’d say, “the record of your laugh set on repeat” or “the july that only exists in sepia now.” I’d tell an aspiring writer to be weirder, to play, to have fun and stretch their brain out of the limits of every day language — both our own and the one allotted to us by conventional society.

What are you currently reading?

For a novel, Haruki Murakami. Poets that really excite me right now are April Ranger, Sasha Warner-Berry, and Danez Smith.

What are you currently writing? 

A poem a day for every day of 2014. Well into the 200s by now. I am also working on a manuscript to be published with Tired Hearts Press about Lana Del Rey. It’s called “Bad Girls, Honey” and it’s the most fun I’ve had while writing ever. Everything is in bloom.

"She Is Only a Tense Now, Though It Is the Loveliest": An Interview with Matthew Jude Luzitano

Matthew Jude Luzitano received his BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington and his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Brilliant Corners and Weave. He lives in Mansfield, Massachusetts with his wife, Andrea, and his little dog, too.

His poem, "Cleopatra Recovered," appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about finding eventfulness in stanza and line, a new understanding of the word "recovered" in terms of art, and "natural" as an implication of order. 

As a writer, and for this poem specifically, what helps guide your decisions as to where lines and stanzas break?

I tend to break before surprises, not necessarily in a cheep “peek-a-boo” fashion (at least I hope it isn’t), but more to keep from lulling a reader. For example, in the third stanza “armadillos / with samples of their calcified scat—” breaks before a surprise. It helps weed out weak lines. If I go three or four lines and there’s nothing interesting to emphasize, I look to cut or lean that portion of the poem.

The two-line stanzas behave similarly; two lousy lines are caught with their pants down when you set them on their own. It keeps me honest. I also like how two-line stanzas imply duality. The poem is sort of a one-sided conversation between the speaker and the statue.

In general, what I look for in both line and stanza is what I’d call eventfulness. Am I spinning my wheels? Is one line simply reiterative of the previous? How far do I travel from one stanza to the next? Those questions are my focus.

Can you speak of the relationship between Cleopatra and her history, and the role the word “recovered” plays in the title and in this poem? 

As the poem was forming, it became clear to me that the tone was elegiac, and the word “recovered” speaks to the issues that an elegy faces: an attempt to both accept mortality while simultaneously creating a work of art that’s meant to immortalize.

In that way, the word “recovered” both means “to regain” or even “to bring back to health” but can be read as “to cover again,” a connotation you’re unlikely to find in a dictionary, but one that I hope gets illustrated in the poem. It means to question art’s ability to preserve a person’s legacy.

Cleopatra is an example of this: from Shakespeare to Elizabeth Taylor, the specifics regarding Cleopatra seem to be in tension with what we really know about her. What we truly know is she has a presence, an allure, something more than a pretty face. There is no known statue of Cleopatra—the one in the poem is fictitious. So the Cleopatra in this poem is twice removed—it’s an ekphrastic poem about a fabricated statue. It’s absurd in that way, and I suppose the poem argues that elegy is absurd and imperfect, but somehow crucial.

I am drawn to the way the museum of natural history is highlighted: “natural because history is always cracking a nose off.” The juxtaposition between natural life, action, and the stiffness (“stone-mute”-ness) that surrounds preservation in a museum is significant here. In fact, even as the poem opens, Cleopatra is not stiff in preservation, but active in the natural splitting “from crown to nape.” Cleopatra is now past tense, but this tense is the “loveliest.” Still, her “expression” is “paralyzed,” and silence falls around the tomb and around her “fractured head.” What about this scene, if anything, grows romantic through diction? Is it that “she must have smiled once”—the romantic idea of her alive, or the way she continues to live through the stillness, by separating “from her body?”

Going to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, it struck me how our human history was placed next to the history of animals, and that if we had a skeleton of Attila the Hun, for example, we’d display it just the same as a tyrannosaurus rex. Literally, a natural history museum presents nature, of which humanity is a part, but the connotation of “natural” that I’m most drawn to is the implication of order. Writing an elegy is in part an attempt to control that legacy, to pin it down, a struggle many of us also face during life. In truth, only nature, only the “natural order” has control.

Art is more dramatic and exciting than life, yet never measures up to it. A statue draws our attention in a way no human being could, yet it pales in comparison to what a human being really is.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve been reading a lot of Amy Gerstler and Dean Young. I love how complex the tone is in their poems—all that dark humor. I love Gerstler’s “Touring the Doll Hospital.” I like reading Dean Young’s Bender: New and Selected Poems because it’s organized alphabetically. You stop thinking about what’s early career and what’s later—everything’s on a level playing field. It’s easy to try to hone in on a writer’s career to find the time he or she peaked, but I think that kind of narrative is oftentimes artificial. I’ve also been reading Beth Ann Fennelly’s Open House. Some poems she attacks with such abandon that I could only dream to emulate.

What are you currently writing?

I’m trying to think of poems more in terms of dramatic monologue, meaning a lot of first-person and a lot of persona. The only real agency the speaker has in “Cleopatra Recovered” is when he/she considers asking Cleopatra to coffee. I think a lot of my recent poems have featured speakers trying to get a hold on their lives in a more desperate way.

“Giving your Life Over to History”: An Interview with Mika Taylor

Mika Taylor lives in Willimantic, Connecticut (a.k.a. Romantic Willimantic, a.k.a. Heroin Town USA, a.k.a. Thread City, a.k.a. Vulture Town) with her writer husband, PR Griffis, and Petunia von Scampers, their crime-solving dog. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Guernica, Hobart, The Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, and Diagram.

Her story, "Dolls of Our Fathers," appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Mika Taylor speaks with interviewer Thomas Calder about the inaccessible nature of historical figures, life in Willimantic, Connecticut, and knowing when to ignore research.

How did the idea come about for “Dolls of Our Fathers”?

A few years ago NPR had a prompt for one of its three-minute fiction contests. It was something like: “Write about a president.” I remember thinking that there was no way I would or could ever do that. I had no connection to the topic. But I was in the car, half listening to the segment and I kept picking at it, trying to find a way in. I guess I got this picture of Roosevelt in the basement of the White House (do they even have a basement?) using marionettes to act out affairs of state. Once I had that, it got personal and real all of a sudden. I think the problem (for me) with presidents was the inaccessibility of historical and public figures. Once I started to picture them doing odd and intimate things, I could think of them as characters and as men. I didn’t write the story up then, but a few months ago I was walking with my husband and remembered Roosevelt’s marionettes. We started talking about it and he suggested Lincoln carving dolls for his dead sons. By the time we got home, I had come up with dolls for three or four more presidents and just went from there.

What was the research like for the piece?

The research process was a strange balance of gathering as much information as possible and then ignoring most of it. With this piece I wanted to look beyond the things we know about each president and imagine an inner life that wouldn’t come through in textbooks, timelines, or encyclopedia entries. I looked at a lot of the “personal life” sections of different presidents’ Wikipedia pages, which were, for the most part, sparse and incomplete. In a sentence or two they’d summarize the deaths of infants, wives, and lovers. They’d offhandedly mention family illnesses, horrific losses, and personal tragedies that would, for most people, be the central and defining events of their lives. For these men, those huge personal events were secondary to their presidencies. That lack of detail worked really well for this story – it left me room to make up anything I wanted and add weight to different aspects of their lives.

As I got deeper into the research, I started coming across actual proof of presidential interactions with dolls. After making up so much of this piece, I found that a bit disconcerting and had trouble trying to fit in the factual information. Jefferson, for example, spent a lot of time with his grandchildren and grandnieces and nephews after his presidency. Apparently he built a scale model of Monticello that they used for a dollhouse. By the time I found that out, I was already pretty happy with the imagined Jefferson dissecting the buckskin doll, and I couldn’t give it up. On the other hand, when I learned that Ida Saxton McKinley obsessively crocheted slippers after the death of her children, I had to include that.

There’s a great range in your story. In some instances, I found myself quite moved (John Quincy Adams), while in other moments I was laughing out loud (William Howard Taft). What was your own experience in creating these profiles? Who were some of your favorite presidents to write about?

Most of these men’s personal lives seemed pretty sad. There were a lot of dead children and lost loves along the way. At one point, I had to make sure not to get too repetitive (or too depressed/depressing), though it was important to convey the deep loss that comes with giving your life over to history. I guess that’s why I pushed for absurdity where I could find it—to lighten up the story and hit some different notes.

I enjoyed writing Nixon and Millard Fillmore. I feel like both of those pushed a little further into the unbelievable and did so with authority and an overabundance of detail. That was kind of the heart of this voice for me. I was able to incorporate more of the doll research as well, which seemed important for this history. Reagan was also fun to write. My husband suggested the “somewhat older cowboy with a chimp companion,” which turned out to be one of my favorite phrases. It feels very close to my memories of Reagan’s presidency.

You live in Willimantic, Connecticut. I see from your bio that the town has been given quite the variety of names, including Heroin Town, USA. For those unfamiliar with the area, would you mind telling us more about it?  How, if at all, does living there lend itself to your writing?

Willimantic is a defunct mill town in northeastern Connecticut. It’s pretty urban compared to the agricultural areas in most of this part of the state. It’s full of huge Victorian houses, converted mill buildings, and a lot of lower income families. When the mills were still open in the early part of the last century, it was known as Thread City. We also have a very healthy population of turkey vultures and black vultures, which can be kind of ominous but also fairly cool. They circle and perch and ride the updrafts all day. My favorite piece of graffiti here is an arrow on a fencepost near the railroad tracks with the words “Turkey Vulture Petting Zoo This Way.” The local artists who run Vulturetown Press coined the name “Vulturetown” which is pretty spot on.

“Heroin Town, USA” is the title of an exposé that aired on 60 Minutes about ten years ago. They investigated the (unfortunately named) Hotel Hooker, which did have some problems with drug use and prostitution. I think that national naming was pretty rough on morale, but it also inspired a backlash of local pride. The town has done a lot since then to combat that image. They’ve shut down the Hooker and there are tons great services here for people in need. Willimantic is resilient and dimensional and profound. It’s not an obvious place to love, but that’s what makes it worthwhile.

My husband and I are both writers and we love it here. For us, one of the keys to an active writing life is affordability. The cheaper things are, the less we have to work, and the more we can write. Willimantic is remote enough that we’re not overwhelmed with outside influence. It gives us time to create.

What’s the latest project you’re working on?

I’ve been interested in psychological experiments from the 50s and 60s lately. Most of them seem to reveal more about the psychology of the doctors and the driving forces of the times than they do about the subjects being studied. I’m currently writing a story based on an experiment done in a Michigan mental institution where three schizophrenic men who all claimed to be Jesus Christ were put together and studied for two years in an attempt to help “cure” them. That one’s been slow going because the research keeps overwhelming the story I thought I would write.  

What’s on your summer reading list? 

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach
XO Orpheus ed. Kate Bernheimer
American Innovations Rivka Galchen
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth Kevin Wilson
60 Stories Donald Barthelme
Tsim Tsum Sabrina Orah Mark

"Your Victory, a Terrible Beautiful": An Interview with Kenji Liu

Kenji C. Liu is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey living in Southern California. A Pushcart Prize nominee and first runner-up finalist for the Poets & Writers 2013 California Writers Exchange Award, his writing is in or forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Barrow Street Journal, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action, The Baltimore Review, RHINO Poetry, Best American Poetry's blog, and many others. His poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. A three-time VONA alum and recipient of a Djerassi Resident Artist Program fellowship, he holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation.

His poem, "A Kung in the Philippine Jungle, 1945," appeared in Issue FIfty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about World War II, his paternal grandfather's experiences in the war, and conquest.

What role do the two-line stanzas, often comprised of lists of charged items (“no wife, no songs, no daughters”), play in this work?

While I often naturally turn to couplets to order my poems, it’s only recently that I’ve focused consciously on what they do and how they do it. On one hand, it’s a very precise, restrictive container that allows just a brief statement of no more than two or three ideas before it becomes overburdened. So it forces an economy of thought and expression. On the other hand, for me, this kind of restriction can elicit and express a type of spaciousness within a phrase or stanza. In this poem, the experience of the poem’s narrator is hinted at through specific material items, items that increasingly expand into the metaphysical—by posing a correspondence between these items and the narrator (I/me=object) over the course of nine couplet stanzas. I’ve tried to use these couplets to produce evocative oppositions and analogies.

In terms of flora and fauna, and landscape, too, what prompted/furthered the juxtaposing descriptions of clothing and undressing?

When my paternal grandfather, a soldier and colonial subject of the Empire of Japan, decided to surrender to the United States, he thought he would be killed if he presented himself dressed in uniform. So he stripped naked before he approached the US forces in the Philippines. This is a shrewd calculation that speaks to an understanding of how his own body would probably be read. The US military would not or could not make distinctions between threat/non-threat, Japanese/Taiwanese, unless he was completely stripped to his bare body—bare animal, a part of the jungle, or clothed by the jungle.

In addition, there’s a somewhat repressed erotic component to the psychology of conquest—one that is obviously visible when it comes to military sexual violence—and also in the hypermasculine narratives of conquering land, bodies-as-land, and their attached resources. The discourses of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism interweave to try to spread and impose the vestments of a nation, culture, and people. These impositions can be quite intimate as self-perceptions and everyday ways of being become colonized. This is another aspect of the poem’s landscape.

I read this piece as an identity poem, not wholly but significantly. The narrator, addressing the “conquering flora,” admits “my landscape clothed in sky, not mine,” finally involving the last line as a culmination of identities. Flora and fauna are humanized in moments, made into conquerors and the conquered. Can the identity of this narrator be a conqueror?

If by identity we mean an always-changing series of stances we take towards the world based on the history and events that shape us, then yes it’s in part an identity poem. I’m usually not a fan of poems about identity in a more static sense. 

In this context, flora and fauna might be both conqueror and conquered because the lines aren’t always clear. The jungle itself is in the Philippines, which the poem describes as “lush empty,” yet it might not be an empty island. I don’t know enough to say if the island was already populated. Did the poem’s narrator conquer the jungle because he is a soldier? Is he a conqueror of the Philippines because he is with the Japanese Imperial forces? Is he the conquered because he is a Japanese colonial subject from Taiwan? Is he conquered because he must give himself up the United States? Is the jungle the conqueror because the narrator is lost in it?

Can you speak to the historical ends of this poem, the tangible references of victory and battle—“map,” radio,” “rifle,” “flag,”—as well as the title?

These are all references to the final days of World War II, when the Japanese Empire was losing the war. Taiwan, where my paternal grandfather is from, had been occupied by Japan since 1895. By this point, colonial policy in Taiwan was to assimilate the colony as much as possible into Japanese national identity. Japan was aggressively pursuing military and cultural wars on and through the bodies of soldiers, civilians, politicians, men, women, children, everybody. All bodies are maps for battle, no matter which war we’re talking about.

What are you currently reading?

O Bon by Brandon Shimoda, Doubled Shadows by Ouyang Jiangghe, The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi, World Ball Notebook by Sesshu Foster, Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle. I’ve also been taking an online class on “Poetry and Feminist Theory” (taught by Kristina Darling), which has familiarized me with poets I’d like to read more of, like Jenny Boully and Khadijah Queen.

What are you currently writing?

While I’m waiting for my first poetry manuscript to attract a publisher, I’m working on a second one. I’m wrestling with the challenge of writing a collection based on a theme. So far it involves war and cyborgs. I also have some poems coming out in Los Angeles Review and The Pinch Journal.

"The Names of the Flowers That Deer Dislike": An Interview with Dustin Parsons

Dustin Parsons lives in western New York state with his wife and his two sons. As well as The Collagist, his work has appeared recently in The Laurel Review, Seneca Review, The Indiana Review, Fugue, New Delta Review, and others. He is an associate professor at SUNY Fredonia.

An excerpt from The Homeowner's Guide to Deer Prevention appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, Dustin Parsons talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about form, marriage, and the excitement of research.

Please describe the origins of your essay “from The Homeowner’s Guide to Deer Prevention.” What caused you to conceive the initial idea and start writing the first draft?

The germ of the essay was taking the trash out and seeing these deer, four of them, hanging out in the street like they belonged there. The next day my wife gave my son a haircut and saved the hair to scare the deer away because they’d been chewing the tops of the flowers in our garden. I love that she knows things like this. I certainly didn’t. The notion that such a simple, wispy matter like baby hair could keep deer away stuck with me for days, and some research revealed the rest of what would be the essay.

Your essay does some unconventional things with form. For example, the title suggests that the piece is an excerpt from a larger work, which does not really exist (I presume). Also, three paragraphs are italicized and offset with a wide left margin. How did you decide to play with form in these ways? What effect do you expect these techniques to have on the reader’s experience of the material?

You’re right, the book doesn’t exist, but I wish I had enough material to write a book on it. I love the names of the flowers that deer dislike. I love that at times we’ve been given advice to let our children use the back yard as a potty (we did not follow this advice). In my manuscript there are three “excerpts” from other manuscripts, and I find it haunting. Like these found objects have survived from a bigger book. The Italicized portions seemed to be in conversation with the Roman, and so I set them left to right so they might better continue that conversation. Form comes last for me when it comes to an essay or story. The physical space helps me give each piece of information a job and a home, and while I don’t always use unusual organizational strategies, I like to think that when I’m done it couldn’t be put any other way. Of course it could in the hands of other writers, but for me, at that time, I’ve found the right combination to unlock an emotion.

The italicized paragraphs include several facts about deer (e.g., “The Celts called them fairy cattle, and held them as known associates of deities” and “On the New York State Highways, an average of 20,000 deer carcasses are collected and disposed of each year.”) How much research was necessary to obtain this information? Is research a regular part of your writing process? How do you conduct research, and do you enjoy it?

If form comes last, research comes first. I jot ideas down, sketch out basic memories or scenes, but it is all just loose paper and napkins until I find out more about the territory I’m exploring. It might start with basic web searching, but pretty soon I move from a basic botany site to the East Coast Plant and Flower Field Guide to close-up fieldwork, looking at the soap bars hanging from orchard trees. I personally don’t understand how someone might not research when writing an essay. The experience one lives through is just that, an experience. Basic navel gazing. But it doesn’t have any gravity for me until there is context, and context comes from outside ourselves. When I find a piece of information I didn’t know before, I’m excited. And I think I can see when a writer is excited in their essay, when they find out something they didn’t know before. It translates.

Your website says that your wife is the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and I see that you both work at the same university. Can you tell us about your experience of having a fellow writer as your partner and a work colleague? Do the two of you ever collaborate or compete? Do you read each other’s works-in-progress? Does the relationship increase your creativity/productivity?

The question makes everything seem clinical, but a relationship is better than that. Sure, we read each other’s work at times (but not always) and we work together (but we don’t compete). But having my wife be a writer means that we understand what it takes to make time for not only writing, but for each other. I love spending time with her, reading the same book and getting a whole different reading from it. I love that she understands things about the sea that I will never understand, and that my sons both know things at 7 and 4 that I will never know about ocean creatures. I fell in love with her and everything changed about what I do and how I do it. I wouldn’t have developed as a person or a writer without her.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m currently researching the 80s oil boom and the resultant early 90s movement by a handful of western Kansas counties to secede from the rest of the state.

What reading recommendations do you have for us?

Run, do not walk, to read Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost. I’m just finishing it now, and I love it. Also read Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted and Jamaal May’s Hum.

"Relentless Rhythm Marches Through": An Interview with Wesley Rothman

Wesley Rothman's poems and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in 3 2 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Vinyl, and The White Review, among others. He serves on the board of directors of Salamander, and is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Pushcart nominee and recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center grant, Rothman teaches writing and cultural literatures throughout Boston.

His poem, "Self-Portrait as High Priestess of Soul," appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about Nina Simone, the soul as an observer and musician of time, and the performer/audience space as chapel.

Diction, sound, and repetition point to a musicality that supports the content of this work (i.e. religion in hymns, spirituality of song).“Relentless rhythm marches through history’s riot,” “slick spirit air,” “Off-tone between-tone,” are only a few examples. Did the content influence the stylistic choices, or vice versa?

A little bit of both. I think the content improvised with, collaborated with Nina Simone's soulful performance style—a holistically rhythmic and fierce experience. It's one thing to listen to her studio records, but a very different, possibly more astounding experience to listen to and watch her live performances. She, like almost nobody I've seen elsewhere, truly infiltrated her audience, plugged into them in between songs as well as through sung riffs of her own music—no two performances of the same song are very similar. She used silence and pauses and her physical presence so deliberately yet I'm sure it was unconscious, natural, her soul. So, roundaboutly, her smoothness, improvisation, deliberation, and naturalness surged me through making this poem. And I was reading a lot of Terrance Hayes at the time (still am), so a certain word/sound association fueled what came of this piece.

There is a power that grows from recycling words in the same stream of breath, ultimately twisting or diverting meanings in new directions. These twists create the foundation for a new understanding of time, more explicitly revealed in the third stanza. What relationship, for you as a writer most importantly, exists between the soul and time?

I don't know how explicitly a new understanding comes through in stanza three, but there's definitely a relationship that I think was on my mind. In this context, the relationship is a kind of natural synchronicity that arises between the soul and time (time as in pace or rhythm of music). I think Nina had and has a profound sense of rhythm, not just between her vocals and the musicians, but a sense of rhythm that overlays and connects the time when she's singing to when she's not. Even when she simply talks with an audience, she enacts a pattern, rhythm, cadence, which involves silence, that invites her audience to sway their knees, feel in time with the experience. Beyond this poem, I think the soul is an observer and musician of time. Seconds, minutes, and rhythm are silent, until the soul aligns with them to instigate a kind of harmonic action. I think this synchronicity happens for poets when they come into that existing rhythm or time of a (potential) poem.

Religion can be seen here under the broader scope and description of smoke and ash, and of the soul. What specific role did religion unravel into through this work, and how?

I suppose because this is somewhat a likeness of Nina, religion unraveled into a faithfulness to her soul, both musically and extra-musically. In my mind I think it also unraveled into a veneration of musical artists, knowing the club or theatre or performer/audience space as chapel, as holy. It reflects a faith in honest music, and a holy ceremony of internalizing such sacred sermons. Maybe it reflects a grasping for preservation of the soul, of Nina's soul and her Soul.

What are you currently reading?

I'm reading, again, Tyehimba Jess's leadbelly, Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act, Ruth Ellen Kocher's forthcoming Ending in Planes, and continually revisiting Jake Adam York's Abide and Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec. And I recently finished Junot Diaz’s Drown.

What are you currently writing?

I've been wrenching my manuscript, Subwoofer, lately, and writing some new pieces, but as long as I've got the manuscript in the shop, new pieces seem residual or revisional. My most recent draft puzzles the need for my neighbor to get in his Jetta—which must have pristine woofers—at  2:30am and blare metal or hard hip-hop whilst parked—something I usually wouldn't mind, except for the early morning/late night part.

"Less of a Victim and More of a Perpetrator": An Interview with Aubrey Hirsch

Aubrey Hirsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, and a chapbook, This Will Be His Legacy. Her work has appeared widely in journals like Third Coast, The Rumpus, American Short Fiction, PANK, Hobart, and The Pinch. She currently teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her at aubreyhirsch.com.

Her essay, "Things I've Watched Die," appears in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Aubrey Hirsch talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about death, surprise, and blurring the boundaries of genre.

Tell us about the origin of your essay, “Things I’ve Watched Die.” What sparked the initial idea for this piece?

The experience that begins the essay, of watching my grandmother die, was the launching point. I’d never seen a person die and it was such a startling, singular experience that I knew I’d have to write about it at some point. However, I’ve taught enough first-year essay writing classes to know that everyone has a story about losing a beloved grandparent. I wanted my essay to be about that, but also not about that. I wanted to give it something else to hang on.

This essay isdivided into four sections: Grandmother, Hamsters, Fish, and Bugs, Insects, Arachnids. The arrangement seems unexpected to me, beginning with human life and ending with bugs. When did you know and how did you decide that the instances of death should progress in this particular order—from biggest to smallest, or perhaps from least agency to most agency (in your involvement, that is)?

It took a while for me to know that, actually! I originally wrote this essay in the reverse order (starting with the bugs and ending with the grandmother). It seemed obvious that this arrangement would allow for the greatest build in tension. But when I finished it, the ending just fell sort of flat. It had a lot of build, but the payoff wasn’t there. After putting it away for a while, I tried it again in the reverse order. I think it’s more unexpected this way. And this ending, for me, does make the writer less of a victim and more of a perpetrator. I think it hits a more surprising note.

My cursory research of you online yielded mostly results pertaining to your fiction. What led you to write about deaths in this personal, essayistic manner rather than fictionalizing your experiences? What opportunities does nonfiction grant you as an author that fiction cannot?

I do consider myself primarily a fiction writer, but I’m becoming more and more comfortable as an essayist. When I talk about determining genre for a piece, I always give my students the same advice: if you can write it as nonfiction, you should. As a writer in both genres, I think the market for nonfiction is better. And as a reader, I think there’s something powerful about knowing that a story you’re reading is true. The label lends a bit of weight to your narrative; it turns up the volume on a piece that might otherwise seem quiet. This particular piece is an essay because it has to be. If it weren’t true, I’m not sure there’d be enough of a reason for the reader to care.

You’re also the author of a series of what you call “counterfactual biographies”—fictional stories about historical people. What appeals to you most about writing about Amelia Earhart and Al Gore in this way? (Why do you think we mythologize not only our fictional characters but also real-life people? When will an actual, factual biography simply not suffice?)

I always enjoy playing with genre and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. I’ve collected those counterfactual biographies into a chapbook (This Will be His Legacy), which was published in the spring. I think what’s so appealing about that project is being able to take an historical figure and imagine those bits of his or her life that aren’t recorded. What was the person thinking? What motivated him? How might these seemingly disparate events in a person’s public life be connected in their inner life? As I would do the research for these pieces, I was amazed at the patterns that would emerge and the ideas that would seem to reveal themselves. Fictionalizing the events of someone’s life allows me to move past the boundaries that would limit a biographer. I can look inside the person, find what might be in there, and, if I can’t find anything, I can make it up.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel. And I’m always working on shorter pieces, too. I currently write a monthly blog post on parenting for Brain, Child. You can find more of my work at aubreyhirsch.com.

What enjoyable things have you been reading this summer?

I’m currently reading Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State. I’m teaching a new class with a focus on gender studies in the fall, so I’ve been spending most of my time studying up on that.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Anne Germanacos

Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, was published by BOA Editions in 2010. Her novel, Tribute, published by Rescue Press, appears in 2014. Together with her husband, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Study Program in Greece on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco.

An excerpt from her novel, Tribute, appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, she answers questions "in the form of excerpts"—with further excerpts from Tribute. Enjoy!

What is writing like?

"An erotic inquiry? An inquiry into eros?

A bit of porn, a smidgen of philosophy."

"I go there alone, mingle with ghosts."

"Need to put things in order, take a walk on a treadmill, translate something, be translated."

"Is this a fault, a quirk, or simply a habit?"

"naked, flipping our skin off, and on again"

"(a sliver of perfection)"

What isn't writing like?

"I watch that line of ants, arduously, marchingly carry a piece of something we neglected to put in our mouths."

"A lover is naked; an artist's model poses in the nude. The writing should seem naked, but the seemingness of it makes it nudity."

When you do it, why?

"I love trading glances."

"Still eager to know the secret at the very heart of the world."

"Time to get going, time to pay attention."

"All of us attempting to fuck our way through life?"

When you don't, why?

"(You know what you need to do but can you make yourself do it?)"

"Just ride out into some sunset or other"

"(If only I could report from another world--or place, at least.)"

"Where do you wear your skin? (Do you wear it, or does it wear you?)"

"A Conglomeration of Curiosities": An Interview with Meagan Ciesla

Meagan Ciesla has an MFA from University of Wyoming and a PhD from University of Missouri. She will join the English department faculty at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington in the fall. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Long Story, Cimarron Review, and others.

Her story, "Real Live African Pygmy," appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Meagan Ciesla talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about World's Fairs, types of research, and unlikely friendship.

My research (read: Googling your name) shows that this is not your only story to include an American World’s Fair (“Incubator Baby World’s Fair, 1939” was published by The Kenyon Review). What interests you about these World’s Fairs and inspires you to make them a part of your fiction?

My interest in World’s Fairs is a conglomeration of curiosities. When I was getting my MFA at University of Wyoming I read Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love for the first time. The novel is about a family of circus freaks and I found it so compelling that I started to research circuses, sideshows, and fairs. Soon after that I went to a talk by Art Spiegelman who mentioned that his aunt and uncle (this is how I remember it at least) escaped the Holocaust because they were attending the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. I didn’t know anything about World’s Fairs until researching them, but as I learned about them they became events filled with technological possibility, competition, xenophobia, and real excitement. Huge advancements were showcased at these fairs that changed the world, and they were critical for what we now consider to be modern progress. It was so unique to have enormous international gatherings, and when so many people are thrown together you get the conflicts and misunderstandings that serve as a great foundation for fiction.

Your story begins with the inscription “in memory of Ota Benga, 1884-1916,” and although fictional, it is based on real-life events. How much research did you do in order to write this story? How large a role does research normally play in your writing process?

I did a lot of research for this story, which is not unusual for me. I found all I could online about Ota Benga and read newspaper stories about him and looked at all available pictures. For this particular story I used a lot of information about Ota Benga’s life to create Musa’s character, but there are limits to facts. I knew he’d been married and had lost his family. I also knew he was put in the zoo and the orphanage and that he ended up shooting himself after removing the caps from his teeth. That served as the scaffolding for his character, but I had no idea what he was thinking or what his experience was actually like. The physical moments of the bones cracking under his feet and of following Campbell through the jungle were just as important as the factual events I borrowed. The sensory experiences are where the fiction comes in – without those you just have a list of things that happened.

A huge amount of my writing involves research because I’m much more confident when I know the parameters of the world I’m writing in. That’s not to say I don’t use my very active imagination, but it does help me define where my imaginative leaps need to start. The novel I’m working on takes place on a dairy farm and to research I worked on a dairy farm in upstate New York for a month just to get the feel for the work and the landscape. I don’t always have the time to do research like that, but I do generally read, research on the internet, and watch relevant YouTube videos and documentaries to get a feel for what I’m writing. Once when I was writing a story about Paul Bunyan I watched several episodes of Ax Men to learn how logging works…I didn’t say research was always hard.

You write both fiction and creative nonfiction, and we’ve seen that some of your fiction is historical. When you’ve created characters based on real people, how did you decide to fictionalize their stories rather than describing them in an essay? What can short fiction do with a story like Ota Benga’s that nonfiction could not?

I briefly considered turning this into an essay, but then I realized writing an essay about Ota Benga properly would take years. I would have to do tremendous archival research and interviews with experts to understand Ota’s life in the United States. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that an essay of that scope wasn’t practical for me at the time. Plus, what interested me the most was the private relationship between Benga and Verner, and the moments I was curious about were never recorded so I had to make them up. Short fiction gave me permission to imagine what could have happened, whereas I couldn’t do that in nonfiction. With nonfiction you have to keep on digging until you find the story.

Can you describe the revision process that “Real Life African Pygmy” underwent? In what ways did it change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any tough decisions?

This story has always been the length that it currently is. I knew I wanted to keep it under three pages because I like the restraint of that page limit and I always saw it as pairing with my other World’s Fair story, which is around the same length. That said, there were huge changes made to the story—not to the events, exactly, but to the tone of the piece. When I first wrote the story the tone was incredibly sarcastic as if the speaker was shaking a finger at everyone who had wronged Musa. For example, the title read: “Real! Live! African Pygmy!” and the lines were almost Dr. Seuss sing-songy, really over-the-top. I had someone read that draft and they said something along the lines of, “This story is telling us how messed up the idea of the White Man’s Burden is, but it’s too easy to point a finger 100 years after this horrible thing has happened. What’s more interesting is what would make someone think what they were doing was necessary.” That changed the way I looked at the story tremendously. I’d read that Ota Benga and Samuel Verner were friends and that became the most interesting conflict to me, mainly because I couldn’t wrap my head around that possibility. I spent the rest of the time on the story trying to piece together how these two men – one of whom took the other to be displayed at the World’s Fair—could have developed such a close relationship. Once I figured that out the tone of the piece changed and it became a narrative of loneliness and friendship instead of a soapbox story.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m revising a novel and am finishing a collection of short stories I’ve written over the past several years. The collection will have both World’s Fair stories as well as one more about Little Egypt, a group of belly dancers at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

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

I finally got around to reading Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, which was great. I also recently loved Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall.