"One of the Most Base, Robotic Sections of Capitalism": An Interview with Michael Keenan Gutierrez

Michael Keenan Gutierrez is the author of The Trench Angel and earned degrees from UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of New Hampshire. His work has been published in Scarab, The Pisgah Review, Untoward, The Boiler, and Crossborder. His screenplay, The Granite State, was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival, and he has received fellowships from The University of Houston and the New York Public Library.  He lives with his wife in Chapel Hill where he teaches writing at the University of North Carolina. His website is michaelkeenangutierrez.com.

His essay, "Click, Tally, Reset," appeared in Issue Seventy-Two of The Collagist. 

Here, Michael Keenan Gutierrez talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about odd jobs, temp agencies, and learning from poets.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay “Click, Tally, Reset”? What sparked the initial idea and/or caused you to start writing the first draft?

It was of all things, a call for submissions, something I don’t often do. The prompt asked for stories about your worst job, or something along those lines. “Click” was one of my go-to barroom stories for years and the first job that came to mind, though I’ve had other jobs that were worse (cruel supervisors, sexual harassment, data entry). It seemed that it also fit into a larger metaphor of where my life was during my early 20s. I’d gotten a degree, had some success as a journalist and then everything fell apart—partly because I was a fuck-up at 21 and partly because the newspaper industry collapsed in 2000 when I got out of college—and I found myself doing a job I could have handled when I was eight. It was a low point, but I was also relieved for the money and that seemed like a good conflict to build off of.

The essay begins with a few short lines where you are being addressed by some unknown speaker, starting with the sentence, “Here is your clipboard and here is your pen.” Why start the essay in another person’s voice? Why distinguish these five opening sentences from the rest of the essay, which is written in traditional first person?

Working as a temp feels like one of the most base, robotic sections of capitalism. We’re entirely interchangeable and temp agencies generally treat you that way. You get a call at 7am and you can take the job or leave it. You don’t get to call in sick. They’ll just replace you with another man or woman who has your skills, which are usually the ability to type and work Excel (or at least that was the case 15 years ago.) There are no benefits. There is no security. And I think—though I was never a temp at an actual temp agency—that the people who worked at these agencies had to keep some sort of emotional distance from the people they were hiring out, people who were broke, often desperate for work, and really counted on getting any sort of job that week to make rent. So I started with a sort of robotic voice talking to me. That was the main idea.

The other reason is that while I remember the conversation vividly, I couldn’t quite recall who was actually talking to me so many years later. There was a man who worked there and there were two women—a blond and a brunette—but I can’t remember which one gave me the job that day. I think it was the blond but if I’m not positive I won’t include it an essay, so I found a workaround.

Although this essay is mainly about your job tallying people, you mention a number of other odd jobs that you briefly held during this time. What’s the present-day importance of these jobs that you worked for a matter of only days or weeks? Why look back on them and include them as parts of your life’s narrative?

It seems like such a strange part of my life, one where I am sort of wandering aimlessly, one where I started out cocky, only to be quickly humbled again and again. Or, let me put it another way, for the past 12 years, I’ve either been in graduate school or teaching at a university, but there was that three year period before grad school when I wandered the country, working odd jobs—like the one in “Click”—just trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life and how I was going to survive. It’s the point when I grew up, when I figured out what I did not want to become. I was drinking a lot, smoking a lot of pot, and blowing off my responsibilities, mostly because I was scared to think about my future or to consider that my dreams might be hard to achieve, so I instead focused only on the moment I was living in, and most of the time, during those moments, I didn’t want to do any work. Eventually I went back to school, discovered I loved to teach and that I was good at it (which is almost as important) and moved on with my life, but those three years stick with me.

Your bio says that you are also the author of a screenplay, The Granite State. What lessons have you learned from screenwriting that you have applied to your writing of fiction and essays, or vice versa?

I’ve co-written a handful of screenplays with the poet Brian Wilkins, who I met in my MFA program. We started out thinking it would just be fun to collaborate on something, because both prose and poetry are usually lonely endeavors, while it’s common to collaborate on screenplays. I don’t know what I’ve learned by actually writing screenplays, but I have learned a ton by working with a poet. He forces me to push on every line, to make sure it’s not just a good image, but also the right one. In a screenplay you still have to work on imagery, even though it might seem like the director would handle that aspect. Your audience—the people reading the script—need to imagine what it will look like on the screen, and Brian has shown me a number of ways to convey emotion this way. Poets are an odd species and I have a lot to learn from them.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on my second book, a historical novel about a female-owned bar in New York City beginning in the 19^th century through the 21^st century. My first book, another historical novel called The Trench Angel, comes out in October so I’ve been doing a lot of work on the galleys.

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

I went back to E.L. Doctorow last week, after he died. The March is one of the best books about war I’ve ever read and it also has a lot to say about our current north/south divide. Billy Bathgate is my favorite coming of age novel. If you get a chance, look over that first page, that first line. It’s the opening metaphor I keep coming back to when I need help on my own book.

"A Slow March toward Becoming": An Interview with Andrew R. Touhy

Andrew R. Touhy, a recipient of the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award and Fourteen Hills’ Bambi Holmes Fiction Prize, is also a nominee for inclusion in Best New American Voices. His work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Colorado Review, Eleven Eleven, and other literary journals. He teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco and Berkeley, and lives in Oakland with his wife and child.

His story, "Lame Head," appeared in Issue Sixty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Andrew R. Touhy talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about names, time, and dreams.

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

If I recall correctly, the outline of the piece came to me in a dream. The next morning I set to work getting what I could down in sketch form. I had something like ten written pages of moments or “Lame Head” scenes that hung rather loosely together. So the story began in vignettes and pretty much stayed so, although over time, draft by draft, I tried to flesh them out and build up more of a traditional narrative arc, scant as that may be.

I was unemployed at the time, I should say, biking around Berkeley with a handlebar basket for groceries and such. Laid off, like Lame Head and the plastic rental plants, when the first dotcom bubble burst. And I was thinking a lot about “positions” we hold in our daily lives. Identity is always on the table when I put a character together. Who am I today? Who was I before? Who will I be/allow myself to be tomorrow? There are all these markers out there, designators of who and what we are and should be—should want to be. But how do we really know who we are, come to own who we really are, contradictions, competing desires, lucky breaks and warts and all? To this day I struggle with what I can only call this condition. Back then, with no job, no income, and no place I needed to be from one hour to the next (with the exception of a donation-based yoga class), I was certainly feeling rudderless, although I was working hard at becoming a writer. That was one identity I knew I wanted to adopt or . . . better yet, absorb to the point of second nature.

So I guess you could say I was divided up psychologically. And I found I somehow needed to express this, to give it form in the materials of the material. I didn’t think this through, though. It was an instinctive, even playful choice. Hence the answer to your next question.

The protagonist of this story is known to the audience by three different names (Lame Head, Editorial Assistant, and Plain Me), and which one the narrator uses in a given moment seems to depend on the character’s circumstances and/or mood. How did you come to the decision to refer to your character only by these nicknames and never a more conventional name?

Lame Head was Lame Head’s name from the get-go. He pretty much thinks of himself rather lamely as Lame Head, so I ran with it. I’m sure I thought it was a funny name to use, initially. Meaning, it sounds absurd, like a dumb thing to hang on a character, a kind of pronouncement, but at the same time it is also a pointed attempt to deflate his big-headed self-consciousness. There’s a lot going on in his head, not much of note exactly, but a lot of chatter and static and worry and judgment and fear, etc. He’s pretty self-absorbed and aware of that fact, so it could easily be a name he saddles himself with, as we all do. Oh, you Bone Head you and so on. But in Lame Head’s case, the label has swallowed him a bit like Jonah’s whale. Lame Head is the way—whatever his real, given name is—the character moves through the world now.

So, yes, you could say that his name encapsulates his mood in the story, or his emotional state. His mental state too. He clearly feels and acts—and is—out of sorts, cut adrift, searching, although not very effectively, for something to either anchor or activate him. For me the story is a slow march toward becoming. Or more accurately: a slow march toward understanding that a becoming is possible. Part of that possible becoming is simply realizing that it is okay to be him, that he’s not as bad as he makes himself out to be. At least I hope that’s in there. He’s been selling himself short for a long time, in other words. But it’s not too late.

The other titles, if you will, came about during revision. They handle those moments when Lame Head is feeling more confident or delusional, or simply balanced/penitent/earnest or “normal.” They are a bit more specific and prescriptive and effective than “Big Head” and “Little Head” (or “Small Head’), don’t you agree?

In the first paragraph Lame Head wakes to the sounds of construction that is anticipated to continue “until the intersection of Woolsey and King was left to look like nothing had happened,” but after that the reader never learns what kind of something really did occur at that intersection. Also, the story gives us references to someone named Allie, when the protagonist writes to her and when he recalls one of her “dark-cloud tirades,” but we’re never told with clarity just what his history and relationship with Allie is/was exactly. How much of Lame Head’s backstory did you dream up and/or plot out, and how much did you leave up to even your own imagination? And how do you figure out where to draw the line between what the reader should be privy to and what we have to fill in ourselves?

Well, I imagine the intersection healed. Or—right now, today—it’s under construction again. You know how this works, one day they’re digging up the streets of your neighborhood, the next the big trucks and smelly stuff and yapping men are gone and you can’t remember the holes and rubble. I was, I think, evoking (invoking even) time. Its fast slowness; its slow fastness. Its seamless and frequently insufferable movement one way or the other. As well as setting up Lame Head’s mood time by way of this immediate material world: what’s out his window. Today? Yesterday? Tomorrow? I don’t think much about backstory, except to maybe take it away when I feel I’m being too informational. Stories aren’t explanations, as Tim O’Brien has said. We all forget this, or can’t control ourselves enough in the rewriting. At my best I mete out connective tissue as needed, as little as possible at that. Otherwise I ruin my stories with deadwood. Allie, I think we can imagine, is a significant other. She suffers Lame Head’s mooty dramatics because she can see the angels of his better nature. They go on I’m sure to get married and argue little and reproduce a whip smart baby-blond boy named after a poet. But that’s not part of the story yet—no more a part of it than the night they met and why, specifically, they’re wounded in love.

So it—forestory, as well as backstory—stays on the cutting room floor in service of the moment-in-time crisis. The midstory. Lame Head’s got some blind spots.

In a story full of strange scenes, one of the weirdest is Lame Head’s dream near the end—a scene that combines Tom Waits, a video arcade, and references to Ghostbusters. Besides the obvious sources from pop culture, what inspired the creation of this dream sequence? What do you consider to be its function in the story?

It’s not a dream sequence but rather a dream, right? Lame Head is actually dreaming, and we, lucky us, are privy to that. I’m sure—like many of the things in the story—I had this same dream. I know I’ve always wanted to meet Tom Waits. I’ve never really considered its function in the story, though. In fact, I was leery of including it in the piece—no dreams and all that in fiction, as they are one removed from reality and we’re already straining a reader’s suspension of disbelief. But I think the dream is odd and funny, that’s the most important part. And when I look at it now, and analyze it some, I realize that it’s there to express how low Lame Head is emotionally, psychologically. Dreams are supposed to be good or sweet or happy. Or, if they’re nightmares, scary, foreboding, etc. Here Lame Head has a pretty middling dream. It is full of impotence, zero gratification, frustration. He has no agency in the dream, and this mirrors his feeling of his own life at the moment. He can’t muster enough imagination to dream up a good nightmare, or enjoy a simple satisfying cup of coffee with a childhood hero.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Trying to write new stories. Always. Sending my collection manuscript (“Brother from San Francisco”) out to contests and presses. I’ve just finished a story about wearing a beard. It’s a pastiche piece, told in close-cropped vignettes that barely hang together to form a whole. Like my own facial hair.

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

Reading Charles Baxter’s A Relative Stranger, along with his collection of essays on the art of subtext. Wonderful stories, wonderful essays. I’m reading Richard Bausch’s collected stories—the big red hardcover one (672 pages) from Harper. Will be reading The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter when I get a week or weekend free from my life. It’s summertime. There’s hope.

"He Showed Me His Other Mouth. He Wanted Me to Kiss Him There.": An Interview with Jacques Debrot

Jacques Debrot has a PhD from Harvard University and chairs the department of Literature and Language at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee's Cumberland Mountains. His short fiction appears recently in Pear Noir!, 101 Fiction, and Wigleaf.  In 2013, two of his stories were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

His story, "I Am Jerzy Kosinski," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Keaton Maddox about literary celebrity, forcing fiction into biography, and dissatisfaction with the realist illusion of traditional narrative.

This piece works as an extensive character study without the protagonist ever being able to speak for himself. Your time line fluctuates order without abandon (with all “interviews” taking place various lengths after Jerzy Kosinski’s suicide) and the setting constantly shifts location as well. What was your thought process for forming the narrative in this way, bit by bit after the fact?

My model for the interviews were the short monologues at the heart of Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives.  What appealed to me—in addition to the mimicry the different voices required—was the idea of playing with at least three different chronologies: the timeline of the events in Kosinski’s life, the order of their appearance in the narrative, and the dates at which the interviews occurred. There wasn’t anything to stop me from having an interview conducted in 2012, say, precede another in the story, transpiring in 1991.  Or to place one interview at a Bahamas resort immediately next to another in a New York cancer hospital, or at the Stonewall Inn.  I hoped this would call attention to the story’s constructedness.  I didn’t want to hide the seams.  I wanted the reader to see the raw edges.  But also, I suppose I’m not interested in the kind of effort required to retain the realist illusion. I don’t see the payoff.  I mean, in order to tell the story of somebody’s life in twenty pages, which is one of the things I was trying to do in “Kosinski”, you have to leave out so much.  And if you attempt to accomplish it in a more or less conventional manner you inevitably get caught in the trap of having to account for your elisions, of having to explain and justify them, etc. The aim is to lull the reader into a passive, dreamlike state.  But there are more interesting possibilities for fiction.    

Let’s talk about the second mouth. My first time reading through the story, this was the most confounding part for me. Obviously, Jerzy Kosinski was a real Polish novelist who was confronted with plagiarism allegations and killed himself in 1991. Yet, having all the responding voices reference his second mouth (which was not real), forces the reader to acknowledge this piece as fiction. What was your aim for this inclusion?

In the first drafts of the story, there was no second mouth.  “Kosinski” was pretty much straightforwardly Kosinski. I wanted to merge the different genres of fiction and reportage and biography—or whatever—but I felt I was leaning too hard on the “facts” of Kosinski’s life. The traditional way to write yourself out of this problem is to retain the facts, but give your protagonist the kind of deeply imagined interior life that biographers aren’t permitted to invent.  But I just wasn’t interested in going that route.  And I didn’t want to abandon the facts of Kosinski’s life either because they were precisely what fascinated me.  So I put the story away for a year.  And then one day I picked up Charles Burns’ graphic novel, Black Hole. In the book there’s a type of STD that results in bodily mutations, one of which is growing a second mouth.  And as soon as I read that I immediately knew it’s what I would give Kosinski.  It just seemed to me to be a suggestive metaphor for his being bereft of his original language, Polish—his second mouth—as well as for everything else that he repressed about his life.  It took me a day, I think, to make the revisions.   

What was it about Jerzy Kosinski that led you to want to fictionalize a comprehensive understanding of his life in the wake of his death? How did this play into the title of the piece where a narrator claims himself as the protagonist without ever speaking within the story itself?

An argument could be made that Kosinski was one of the major literary figures of the 1970s.  He won the National Book Award, served two terms as president of PEN, and sold as many books as practically anyone else who was writing serious novels back then. But he seemed just as interested in becoming a celebrity.  And he worked very hard at cultivating an image of someone living on the edge.  He visited sex clubs, he skied and played polo with the super-rich, and he was constantly dropping hints about being a CIA agent, or working for SAVAK, or Israeli intelligence, or the KGB.  It became a part he played on Dick Cavett and the Tonight Show (where he appeared twelve times). And now he’s forgotten.  I don’t think he’s read at all by young writers.  That was one of my anxieties about the story.  I was worried that readers wouldn’t know who he was.  Of course if you become famous for your prose style and it turns out you’re not actually writing a lot of your own work, your books aren’t going to last.  But it also says something more generally true about the half-life of literary reputations.  In the long run everyone will be forgotten.  Anyway, in the original version of my story, the narrators were Kosinski’s ghostwriters.  He had dozens of them, apparently.  So they really could say, “I am Jerzy Kosinski.” But after I went in another direction, I decided not to change the title.  Now, however, it wasn’t an assertion anymore, but a question.  What I heard was, “Am I Jerzy Kosinski?” An identity that never possessed an interiority, in any case.  But was always—even more so, or at least more self-consciously so, than other people’s identities—a fiction.

What are you writing?

Among other things, I’m writing two more absurdist interventions in the lives of real authors.  I think about them and “Kosinski” as a kind of triptych.  The second, recently finished, follows D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, to Lake Chalupa in Mexico.  The third, almost complete, is about William Burroughs. 

What are you reading?

 I’ve been on a Javier Marias kick recently and have just finished The Infatuations and Tomorrow in the Battle Think of Me.  Edouard Leve is a writer I’ve just discovered: Suicide and Autoportrait are both very powerful and strange. I think I’ll take up the challenge of Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers. Also I’m reading Michael Gorra’s book about Henry James, Portrait of a Novel, and Ben Jeffery’s take on Michel Houellebecq in Anti-Matter.

"Trying to Chip Away at Universal Truths": An Interview with Erica Trabold

Erica Trabold (@ericatrabold) is a writer of family and memory. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, Weave Magazine, Penumbra, and others. She writes and teaches in Oregon, where she is pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction.

Her essay, "Canyoneering," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.

Here, Erica Trabold talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about family stories, universality, and mythic inspiration.

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

Two years ago, my husband and I took a roadtrip from Nebraska, where we lived at the time, through the deserts of the American southwest. One of our first stops was Roswell. We were interested in the place for a variety of reasons, namely the UFO conspiracies and kitschy roadside attractions, but I also approached the place with a kind of reverence. It’s the city where my biological grandfather lived for most of his adult life. Because my dad was adopted as a child, I never knew my grandfather—all I had was this story he would tell about taking me to New Mexico when I was a baby. Being in Roswell again felt a bit unreal. When I walked into Carlsbad Caverns, I realized I was reliving a moment I’d been imagining my whole life.

In the first section, amid telling the story of a trip taken when you were a year old, you wrote of your parents that “they have told me about our trip and my behavior dozens of times. I don’t ask for careful explanation. I assume I have always been attracted to the mysterious, adopting family stories as part of my own. In my memory, they are solidified.” When you are crafting personal essays and your own history through tales like this trip, how much investigation do you do into your family’s stories? If indeed you are willing to “assume” that you’ve always been a certain way, to what extent can you permit yourself to fill in the gaps of the unremembered past with your own solidifying?

Nothing ignites my curiosity more than hearing a story about myself I can’t remember. My dad is always telling these beautiful little vignettes. He tells stories so well and so often that they just become part of my repertoire, and I consider my retellings nonfiction. Words like “assume” teach the reader what to expect from my work—assumptions, gaps, second-hand information. In this essay, I’m much more interested in how we remember and interpret experience than I am in fact-checking my dad. Instead, I’m attempting to mirror the ways I know what I know in the essay’s language and form. Telling our family history any other way wouldn’t be true. There’s so much we just don’t know.

Perhaps the most riveting descriptions in this essay appear in the section where rocks growl and boulders become bears, culminating in this unforgettable line: “Ten thousand ghosts created the sand beneath your feet.” In this essay you’re combining science and your own experiences of caves and canyons to create something that sounds like a creation myth. What is the relationship between mythology and your writing? Can you speak about how a work of nonfiction can be in dialogue with, or become an example of, myth-making?

Stories passed down through generations often take on this quality because they sound a lot like myths. They explain our origins. They give us history. They tell us who we are. They offer a reason why. I have found it impossible to write family history without mythic inspiration, and I think it’s somewhat our responsibility as writers to continue the tradition by creating our own.

Your essay takes an interesting turn in its final paragraph. Here’s an excerpt of what I’m talking about: “Now imagine a hole the size of your heart. Not a giant thing, but miles deep and grand in its own way. You fall in. You’re loving it.” Up until this point the essay has not contained any direct address. What made you decide that the essay’s final move should be a switch to second person and this invitation to the reader (unless, of course, you had someone else in mind for the essay’s use of “you”)?

The conclusion of the essay does feel like an invitation. I think this is because, as a genre, nonfiction is always trying to chip away at universal truths. It’s always asking the reader to consider the myriad ways a single experience contains significance and meaning. A lot of times, the essayist’s nod to universality is a whisper, but because of this essay’s fragmented nature, I felt I needed to make its universality louder. Though the final lines are certainly open to interpretation, my hope is that each reader can cling to something that accords with the way they’ve experienced the world.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m still essaying about water—lakes, oceans, droughts—and I’m always going to be writing about my family. They are the most interesting people I know.

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

Lately, I’ve found myself gravitating toward short story collections, which is a genre I’ve had little to no experience reading. I’m right in the middle of Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t, which has been a treat so far, and I just finished Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn. Both women have inspired me in a way I wasn’t expecting would influence my approach to nonfiction. I’m grateful.