"Shimmering Like a Living Thing": An Interview with Ösel Jessica Plante

Ösel Jessica Plante's poetry, and flash fiction, has appeared or is forthcoming in the Best Small Fictions 2016 anthology, The Adroit Journal, Puerto del Sol, South Dakota Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Zone 3, and others. She was runner-up in Meridian's 2017 Poetry Contest, a finalist for the Passages North 2017 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and finalist for the 2016 Mississippi Review Prize. She earned an MFA from UNC-Greensboro and is pursuing a PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. She is associate Poetry Editor of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. More of her work can be found at oseljessicaplante.com.

Her story, "The Lick," appeared in Issue Seventy-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about office jobs, single-minded characters, and tongues.

What inspired this story?              

I can’t remember what inspired the story. I know I had been reading a lot of Gary Lutz at the time. I was also working a full-time office job. My boss was a big reader. He would sometimes give me books to take home as though grooming me to his taste. In fact, the day he’d interviewed me for the job he’d walked with me out of the conference room and into the parking lot to my car as we discussed the latest George Saunders novel, Tenth of December, which had come out the previous month. I think I got the job partly because we talked about books. The job, however, turned out to not be a great fit. I was bored within a matter of weeks and would fill empty hours by writing or with long walks through nearby neighborhoods at lunchtime. I was not a terrible employee, but I was not great either. Something about the sensory deprivation that comes from staring at pale green walls and dropped ceilings, I’m sure, led me to fantasize about what my senses were missing. That and Lutz’s keen and odd styling loosened something in me. I wrote this pretty much all at once, which is how I write most of my flash fiction. I generally write a lot of crap, and then, finally, something comes out shimmering like a living thing.

You present us with a strange character, one who licks fruit in the grocery store and tastes snakes. Yet, the beauty and joy in her observations helped me to relate to her: “Each divot in its rippling leather tasted of a chemical anger, a disappearing act, the reflection of our own fear. I could almost calculate with my taste buds how soon its next molting would occur.” How do, as a writer, engage with a character who on the outside seems difficult to relate to?

Hmm, this is a tricky question for me because I don’t often think about a characters’ relatability when I’m writing. I think I’m more tuned to whether they feel honest. Frankly, I’m not sure I would want to be this person’s friend, or even acquaintance. She seems more than slightly off balance and like social situations wouldn’t be her forte. But, what I do like about her is that she is single-minded; she is on a mission. I wanted to see how far I could push my descriptions, to see how absurd I could get but still have it seem grounded in the context of her obsessive compulsion to lick. I did waiver about whether to make the character a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or a ‘they’. But then decided her behavior was contrary to what we expect of women, so I made her female to push against the idea that women should be living pretty, manicured existences.

I also think the tongue is a really strange part of the body, highly sensual, not inner or outer but both. The tongue doesn’t just taste other things, it’s also constantly tasting itself and the body where it lives. Perhaps the ability to have a heightened sense of taste could be related to a heightened sense of self-awareness, but I doubt that’s true. I should have had her sample other creatures’ tongues. You can buy cow tongues in grocery stores, you know. 

The speaker in this story understands her world by tasting it. What’s your preferred way of exploring and understanding your world?

Definitely staring into space while alone, or lying next to someone I may or may not be in the habit of licking.

What is the last book you read and loved?

The first book that pops to mind is Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m also reading book one of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard right now, which is fabulous.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing my first manuscript of poems. It’s called Waveland. I’m also beginning to work on a novella in verse called Radio Brother, about a mother who tunes her son like a radio because she believes she is receiving messages from god. I have future plans to write a book of non-fiction, a memoir, about the time I died.

"A Place of Embarrassment": An Interview with Kaj Tanaka

Kaj Tanaka's stories have been featured in Longform, selected for Wigleaf’s Best (Very) Short Fictions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the nonfiction editor for BULL Magazine. He lives in Houston. Read more of his work at kajtanaka.com.

His story, "Understand," appeared in Issue Seventy-Six of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about MS Word, Borges, and how we relate to our readers.

Where did this story begin for you?

I read things and don’t understand them all the time, which is embarrassing to admit. I’m a very forgetful and lazy reader. I wanted to write a story about that. I think a lot of my best stories come from a place of embarrassment.

How do you compose your stories? Do you compose them in your head, like Borges and the dream man, or do you compose on a computer or paper? How do you think the medium we use to write our stories affects the form our stories take?

I do all of my writing on MS Word. My hand isn’t accustomed to writing with a pen, and my handwriting is almost completely illegible unless I concentrate. The nice thing about writing on a computer is that my stories are very malleable. I can cut, copy, splice, and delete very easily, and I use those tools all the time. It adds another dimension to the composition process. Maybe because of that I don’t plan my stories out in advance. This story, for example, was quite a bit longer at one point, and the paragraphs were in a different order.

I love that the first line, “A person can read something and not understand it at all, even something simple,” sets me up to question my reading of your story. As a writer, is it important to you that readers understand your intent, or are you open to the multiple interpretations they might bring to your work?  

I don’t usually worry about making sure readers understand what I’m trying to accomplish. I know, as a reader, I read things into stories all the time that the writers probably didn’t intend. It doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the story, and sometimes when I find out what the author was actually trying to accomplish, I’m slightly disillusioned. I think when you publish a story you give it away, in a certain sense. People take what they want from fiction, based on who they are and what kind of day they‘ve had. No writer can control for those things. The best a writer can hope to do is write interesting and robust sentences that have the power to appeal to a diversity of people.

Who are some authors that inspire or inform your writing?

I think this story was a riff on a Lydia Davis story. I’m not sure which one, but I was reading a lot her at the time, and I was really taking her into heart. I also look at Richard Brautigan, and Isaac Babel when I’m stuck. They’ve been a big influence on me. Also Borges.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m writing a novel about taekwondo kids in rural North Dakota.

"With Chest Pain but Living": An Interview with Jennifer Givhan

Jennifer Givhan is a National Endowment for the Arts & PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellow, and the author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series), & Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize). Her honors include the Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, and the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, and The Kenyon Review. She can be found at jennifergivhan.com as well as Facebook & Twitter (@JennGivhan).

Her poem, "Madhouse of Spirits," appeared in Issue Sixty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer T.m. Lawson about Allende, Auden, and borrowing.

What is your usual method for writing poems and how did you come by the inspiration for “Madhouse of Spirits”? The title is interesting and to me evoked the title of Isabel Allende’s novel, The House of Spirits, which contained themes of maternity, madness, and generational conflict within families and communities. I can’t unsee the connection!

My poem absolutely borrows from Allende’s work, which I adore. Women in Allende’s novel work from within the power structures, asserting the importance of motherwork during times of upheaval. Taking care of children—mothering—is a definite political and social act. Alba describes how the other imprisoned women care for the children of a mother with PTSD: “the fate of the children, growing up in that place with a mother who had gone mad, cared for by other, unfamiliar mothers who had not lost their voices for lullabies … would be able to return the songs and the gestures to the children and grandchildren of the women who were rocking them to sleep.” Violence begets violence, true. But love, motherlove, begets hope—the chance to rise up out of dark situations and sing. The house of spirits is literally the house of women—of mothers and mother figures who record their stories and alter history by reclaiming it for their children, and by ending the violent cycle through motherlove. My poem takes these ideas and transforms the domestic space, often seen as a peaceful realm of “womanly” import—but so often the home is a place of violence and fear for children, swept under the rug. This poem doesn’t turn away from the destruction and mental illness within, how motherlove can both hurt and heal, is a powerful force.   

I noticed that you open the poem with an epigraph of an excerpt from W.H. Auden’s poem “The Question”, which itself has been seen by critics as ‘riddle-like’, where childhood and adulthood intersect in the mode of madness. The quote “[a]nd ghosts must do again / what gives them pain” has shades of obsessive compulsion in the remembrance of trauma, which carries over directly to the first two lines depicting child abuse. You have woven throughout the poem these interesting themes of childhood fear, pain, parental madness, and the adult perception; we as adults dread and preoccupy ourselves with the past (our childhood, our parents, an echo of what is to come for us). Your term “motherloving fear” brilliantly encapsulates this; of all possible sources for an epigraph to set the tone, why this particular lesser-known piece by W.H. Auden?

Auden’s quote spoke most clearly to me of Jung’s shadow and the dark night of the soul. Through it is the healing. Through it one must go.

Another piece of syntax I loved in your poem was the line “[t]he mother eye isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”. There is definitely a preoccupation with the archetype of the Mother, specifically the more abusive type. A few lines in the poem allude to the novel Flowers for Algernon, in which the speaker relates their own experience with their parent to the protagonist Charlie Gordon, whose childlike mind could not comprehend why he was punished and abandoned until after he acquired higher intelligence and consciousness. The cycle echoes with the later comparison the speaker encounters: “How does one extract the violent bone / without mining that poor child’s spine?” To heal, one must effectively relive trauma; the ‘ghost’ “must do again / what gives [...] pain”. The speaker’s pain is very much intertwined with intelligence, the understanding of the pain, and the neurotic compulsion to dwell upon it. Does the speaker dissociate, separate, and distance themself from this memory? There is very real sense of dread in the language when the speaker meditates on the parenthood, and it seems as if the speaker is in the midst of arrested development when the next stage (the stage the initial trauma’s initiator was at) is considered on the horizon: “I’m trying not to become the kind of parent I feel bound / to”.

The speaker must relive (her) childhood through her children’s eyes. Trauma has ghosted her, but if there is to be healing, she must enter that dark night. She was the Charlie Gordon character before the experiment, and now as a parent has become Charlie at the height of his ability to comprehend—but she fears she is also now his mother. The speaker’s neurosis in the poem comes perhaps from dwelling within so many perspectives at once. Dwelling in another’s consciousness leads to empathy, yes, but so many voices at once is a heavy burden to bear. Epigeneticists now say that our DNA is wired with our ancestors’ trauma. The speaker fears this means she is also bound to the ancestors’ propensity to inflict trauma. She is a house of familial ghosts, has played the roles of both abuser and abused, has come to a crossroads and must choose. Which voice speaks loudest and longest? Love or pain?

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

I’m reading and loving Roxane Gay’s Hunger and Christa Parravani’s Her, both creative nonfiction memoirs, as I’m working on my own, currently titled Quinceañera with Baby Fever.