"A Purified Lie": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi received her MFA from Brown University and currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame. She is the recipient of the John Hawkes, Frances Mason Harris, and Beth Lisa Feldman prizes in Fiction at Brown University, a Fulbright scholarship, and a research grant from the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes in Barcelona. Her work can be found in State of the Union (Wave Books), Harp & Altar, Paul Revere’s Horse, Sleepingfish, Dewclaw, Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, Xcp: A Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics, and Words without Borders. Her chapbook, Girona, was recently published by New Herring Press. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. She currently lives with her husband in Indiana. Her first novel, Fra Keeler, is available now from Dorothy, a publishing project.

An excerpt from her novel Fra Keeler appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Fra Keeler.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

It is what people do, I thought, feed themselves lies. Everything is a lie in the first instance. Then the lie is purified, smoothed out, turned into a truth, because the present is always cycling into the past, or transforming into a future moment. The notion of the present is a purified lie, because in the time it takes to say the word present the moment has already passed and you are just a fool running out of breath trying to pin down the moment to evaluate. What misery, I thought to myself, rocking back and forth on my legs. A whole system of lies, a whole system of belief.

2. What isn’t writing like?

This is how one postpones one’s death, I thought, by walking.

I sat down near the stream.

It is a green mass of death, I thought.

I grew heavy with sleep.

Then, I thought, what rot, the things in one’s head.

I caught a glimpse of the sky, blue and vast above me.

3. When you do it, why?

The yurt, I thought, and it flashed before me like lightning, silver and radiant in the rain. I took a step, one leg then the other, and walked into the yurt. I leaned over, the bottom of this, I thought, I will get to it, but then I heard a banging. I thought, I can’t handle this, a banging in addition to everything else, the distant echo of the phone, the wind sharpening, the phone ringing inside the house, but I couldn’t get up, I was lying down, flat inside the canoe with my arm out, reaching for the oar, and I thought it’s raining, it’s raining, like the end of the world, and then I felt the canoe lift up to the surface of the water and drift away.

4. When you don’t, why?

“Would you like to further discuss the issue?” she asked. Discuss what? I wondered, because I couldn’t remember having talked to her in the first place. “Sir, we could discuss your research,” she said. “Discuss my research?” I asked. She is out of her mind about my research, I thought. And then I asked, “What research?” To which she replied, “You requested our services, sir.” And I thought, how is the phone intact when surely I had shattered it. “Discuss my research,” I said. “That would be good,” I said, because I wasn’t getting anywhere without lying to her. 

"The One Who's Going Home": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Gretchen E. Henderson

Gretchen E. Henderson is the author of two novels, The House Enters the Street (Starcherone Books, 2012) and Galerie de Difformité (&NOW Books, 2011), a print book that is networked online inviting readers to participate in its (de)formation across media. Her lyric collection of criticism, On Marvellous Things Heard (Green Lantern Press, 2011), explores literary appropriations of music and silence. Gretchen is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at MIT and metaLAB fellow at Harvard.

An excerpt from her novel The House Enters the Street appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Gretchen E. Henderson answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from The House Enters the Street.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Home!  Home!  You’re going home!  Not straight away, crow dart-of-an-arrow going home, but a curvaceous, loopy, round-about, colorful waving (good-bye, hello, good-) course of going home – to Love – not by plane, train, coach or car, but by foot through labyrinthine halls and echoing galleries, vibrating as marble statues lack legs, hands, noses (breathing); floor-to-ceiling canvases, blue nudes & strung guitars (listening), head-dressed gazelles with locked horns, beaded earflaps, iron mudfish in pendant masks (murmuring).  Like a whorled conch, ringing:

Home!

You’re going home!

By following arrows.  Arabesques.  Next text.  Next.  Look! (the gallery, captions, your memory:) Where did it begin, & with whom?  (Homing: Honing: Home:)  And more: galleries don’t seem to end – one opens another, way leads to way, into way – you’ve been here often enough to know you could stay for life and not see everything (could have been yesterday, taped and braced, you were) navigating galleries, the park, sky, streets that lead to a key in the lock – you anticipate all, after being released from work early, after admitting “I give up” – after taking time (if nothing else) into your hands, to circumambulate the Met before meeting me at:

Home through the American Wing, flying past grandfather clocks, wing chairs, baseball cards, Madame X’s black V-neck, Wright’s arithmetical room & Tiffany glass lampshades before Arms and Armor.  European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.  Medieval Art.  Almost crowing, dart-of-an-arrow (yet still loopy, round-about: would you wish for this straight?), you weave, verdant waving (good-bye, hello, good-) course of going home to Love through tessellated fountains, fired tiles & calligraphed niches & woven carpets – all tangled together like vines in a jungle – as you (the one who’s going home) unravel & ravel anew.  You don’t have time to circumambulate all galleries today & must leave something to return to: another wing, another room, another skylight (like the one above Rodin’s marble chained prisoners, whose massive hands – you’re always noticing hands, opposable thumbs, driving forces behind human evolution & the creation of art, communication, technology, social organization – remind you of the French sculptor’s unfinished hands, arms, heads, legs & torsos, heaped in his studio & nicknamed “brushwood”), stopping only to glance out the window at leafage flitting (humming) among plumed petals, ocean foam, fluttering masts & hooked anchors (homing) on the other side of glass, in the park, light splintering inside clouds, as you think of:

Home!

2. What is writing not like?

A clock ticked against her hushed breath.  Terra incognita.  The mandala was on the screen, dotted by icons.  She opened a new document, positioned her headset microphone, turned on the Sphinx, and said: 

“cap Her life began with the see correct that  s-e-a period”

The sentence finished, and the microphone pulsed red.  She stayed silent, but words continued to write themselves. 

“Scratch that,” she said. 

The cursor stopped.  Webbed marks retreated into blankness.  A moment later, new words scurried across the page.

“Scratch that.  Scratch that.  Go to sleep.”  She stared at the single sentence.  Her life began with the sea.  “Wake up,” she said, “cap Waves rolled outside her window comma watery raisins scratch that horizonsperiod space space cap Her father had disappeared on a voyage intospell that t-e-r-r-a space i-n-c-o-g-n-i-t-a comma where horned no rails scratch that spell that n-a-r-w-h-a-l-e-s swam under rice correct that ice comma where music lulled into frozen flows delete that flowsno no no,” Avra stopped narrating and took a breath, which generated “the.”  The microphone pulsed and wrote “wind.”  She said, “Select flows through wind delete that flows correct that f-l-o-e-s period space space cap She began to dream of loud scratch that cloud lagoons comma lead scratch that belied spell that b-e-l-l-i-e-d sales delete that sails comma end scratch that and sirens singing into wind period space space cap The wayfaring hate scratch that trait had been inheritedperiod space space cap She decided to wonder scratch that wanderperiod Go to sleep.”  The cursor wrote, Goes leap.  “Go to sleep,” she said, louder.  Goats leap, it wrote, with the microphone pulsing.  Frustrated, she yelled, “Go to sleep!”  The microphone pulsed, as if she’d said nothing.  Exhaling a long, tense but inaudible breath, she tried to quiet something deep in herself, saying in her steadiest voice, “Go to sleep.”  The microphone stopped pulsing, turned yellow, and reclined.   

Silence settled in the hush. 

Waves rolled outside her window, watery horizons, she re-read.   Her father had disappeared on a voyage into terra incognita, where horned narwhales swam under ice, where music lulled into frozen floes.  She began to dream of cloud lagoons, bellied sails, and sirens singing into wind.  The wayfaring trait had been inherited.  She decided to wander.  Goes leap.  Goats leap.

The clock ticked, slower.

Moment by moment in that rhythm she heard, as if for the first time, what her mind hadn’t wrapped itself around, for as long as she could remember: the beat of her heart.  It was pulsing.

3. When you do it, why?

Sift your fingers through double-braced barrels of kernels of corn.  You have no trouble grasping, at this moment in time.  Gather handfuls of kernels to fill the basin in your arms.  At the village pump, swizzle the parched seeds.  Keep water flowing.  Pump and release, pump and release: the action requires repetition, muscles solidified by labor, strength you have not previously needed.  After cleaning the kernels, shuttle the basin to a lean-to with a fire kindled before dawn.  Twigs poke from a hollowed-out stone that will blister your touch, if you don’t take care.  Beside the hot rock, there’s a tarnished grinder; grit grainy paste through the shredding sieve.  The paste should hesitate, then curl before falling onto a rolling slab.  With a pestle passed down through generations, urge the pulp flat, flatter.  Gather the cohesion into a ball to shape between your palms.  Turn it forward and forward, rotate and pat, again.  Flat. Your circle is thin, but not supermarket thin, palm-sized sustenance that you place raw and imperfect (since you are learning) on the scorching stone to sizzle.  Pockets of air rise as it heats, freckles and browns.  Remove it to add to the growing pile of steaming disks wrapped in a cloth, warm.

You eat the tortillas with her, a grandmother.  You talk of lost children and wait.  As boiled milk cools, your tongue burns.  Too hot: wait, so ground cinnamon won’t stick to your lips.  The milk came from a goat across the lane, offered after it bleated and kicked and a knowing hand cradled its neck, to calm.  The hand was not yours because you are a foreigner; you do not know how to assuage a goat, or the meaning of calm.  You watch, hungry for knowledge not learned in books, imagining the wise fingers on your slender neck.  Greedy eyes, she calls you in soft laughs, as she senses you want to be generous but are learning.

You forget that sunrise is a habit because you have no blinds on your windows.  Instead of glass, wooden sockets frame a vegetable world.  Banana trees, coffee plants, and palms grow lush among deheaded cornstalks, hollowed houses, stone-littered roads.  In afternoons, thunder grumbles over the valley.  Silence defines sound because it is evasive; there is always the undermurmur of cicadas and the river.  

At night, too.  There is always the undermurmer of cicadas; the river.  Behind the buzz, breezes, bombs.  Under murmur.  Guns.  Fire.  Don’t breathe, or scream.  This happens again, as before: through wooden shutters, skeins of sunlight sketch hammocks as colored cobwebs, pinned among sleeping bats, hidden wings.  Droppings scatter a doorway, lit by dusk, an uninhabited yard: hollowed stone oven, an awning, rusted drainpipes, scuttling chickens, hole in the ground.  Under your hammock, moonlight seeps around shifting bodies.  Creaking beams.  Snoring.  Rustling.  Screeching.   Dark arcs slip out the door, flights soft as whispers.  The sky cracks, stars.  Falling on the ground, you crawl to a cracked wall to see: stars in the street, dancing; the neighboring house a flame. 

Say-ee-say-a-day…not a word. 

Cicada.   Say, cigarra –

See guerra –

Sí, sí, sí –

Through the valley, the river rims a dusty road and twists from your surrogate community, Las Vueltas (“the turns,” you learn the meaning), to villages beyond the verdant ridge, pocked hills, mountains, camps, bordering there:

A route of repatriation.  

Here, she comes behind the lean-to through the dirt yard.  It’s night.  A candlelight’s ringed glow catches her shadow as she raises her wrinkled hand to speak.  To you.  She trusts you with words: how the soldiers came and took her pregnant daughter, opened her on a rock, and made birth a double funeral.  She thinks you will protect stories like you protect your own life, no, longer.  You learn the fecundity of stories, how one gives birth to another, and cradle her words as she taught you to nurture tortillas, to rotate them, again and again.  She grasps your unblemished fingers before disappearing into darkness.

4. When you don’t, why?

You consider the idea, now that you sense progress and can stand without your head unbearably top-heavy, now that you don’t feel like you’re moving through mud and can hold a book, sit to listen to a performance, even if you can’t play piano or type on a regular keyboard without regressing, without reawakening symptoms.  Even if you can’t make music in the way you once knew, at least you can voice-activate words – trying to make a new kind of music – listening while walking through museums or to the grocers, where you find a can of Campbell’s Alphabet Soup, which you haven’t eaten in years. 

It boils in a saucepan.  Turn off the heat, and let it cool.  While you’re waiting, read and rearrange letters: B, E, A, D, G, C, F, and the rest.  Since the road to recovery isn’t straight, you can’t spell this out, write about it directly, or physically write it at all.  You think of it as happening to someone else, or a tale where a body forgets to be a body and hides its heart in a tree, or a legend where someone cannot speak and puts stones in her mouth to learn to articulate.  Or a story that stops and starts, stops and restarts, modulating, because the end keeps changing.  Like you’ve improved and deteriorated, again and again.  But because or in spite of the end or the beginning, you’ve learned to relish this moment in the middle.  And at least, you can speak.  You fall asleep, reimagining the story and how to tell it, in medias res, beginning with the young woman who wasn’t crying from sadness, beginning with her, the one saying goodbye to her old self, the one who’s going home:

"Instead, I Just Mouthed, BANG": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Michael Kimball

Michael Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls "a curatorial masterpiece") and Us (which Time Out Chicago calls “a simply gorgeous and astonishing book”). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Bomb, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated into a dozen languages—including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), a couple of documentaries, the 510 Readings, and the conceptual pseudonym Andy Devine. His new novel, Big Ray, is published by Bloomsbury USA and Bloomsbury Circus (UK).

An excerpt from Big Ray appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Michael Kimball graciously answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Big Ray.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Once, I was playing soldier with my father’s rifle in the living room. I had already sighted the lamp through the scope and then the television when I noticed my father had fallen asleep. I pointed the rifle at him and his face got huge. I centered the crosshairs between his eyes, but I didn’t slip my finger off the guard and on to the trigger. Instead, I just mouthed, Bang. 

2. What isn’t writing like?

Yo daddy’s so fat he sweats mayonnaise. 

Yo daddy’s so fat his blood type is spaghetti sauce.

Yo daddy’s so fat when he goes to the movies, he sits next to everybody. 

3. When you do it, why?

My father’s obituary lists February 2, 2005, as the official date of death even though that’s just the day my father was found dead. The obituary also notes that my father was a member of the Waverly School Board and that he enjoyed playing cards, hunting, and fishing. It is sad. Those are the most notable things about my father that could be written in an obituary.

The obituary then lists the family that preceded my father in death and the family that survived my father. I’m one of the people who survived. 

4. When you don’t, why?

The first time my father beat me, I didn’t understand what was happening to me. He palmed the side of my head like it was a ball and threw my head toward the living room floor. My body followed my head down to the rough carpet. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t. I kept trying to get up, to stand up, to find some kind of balance, but my father kept pushing me down by my head and neck. It didn’t hurt that much, but it was disorienting, the lack of control I had over my little boy body.

"Gather These Materials": An Interview with Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah's poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Passages North, Ploughshares, LA Review of Books, South Dakota Review, B O D Y Literature, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the recipient of scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Writers' Workshop, and other honors.

Her poem "1971" appears in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Tarfia Faizullah speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about violence, beauty, and bridging distances.

1. What was the process of writing “1971” like?

It began in Bangladesh, where I lived from 2010 to 2011. It was messy and difficult, and I forgot to eat sometimes. I did a lot of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, tapping out syllables on my leg with my fingers. I read about memory. I read about what else had happened around the world in 1971. I interviewed Bangladeshi women who were raped or taken as sex slaves by the Pakistani Army during the Liberation War. 

I called my mother and asked her a lot of questions, and spent a good part of those conversations with the phone cradled against my cheek. At one point, I asked my mother, “But what else do you remember?” and she responded, “Is this for a poem?” I drank tea with one hand and scribbled with the other. I drew a lot of arrows in my notebook, connecting what my mother had said to something I had read, seen, wondered. I didn’t know what the poem would look like but I knew I was collecting towards something.

Eventually I started drafting a section of “1971” each day for a week during the Grind, a group that holds one another accountable for writing a poem a day for a month. Then I spent the following year shaping and reshaping it. I just went back and looked at some of my earliest drafts of the sections, some of which are written in unlineated longhand. At some point I started breaking the text into lines, some of which remained neat while others became more and more fractured. At some point I stopped calling my mother to ask her questions. At some point I left Bangladesh and returned to the United States. At some point I wrote the last line. 

2. Your poem deals with a turbulent year in Pakistani/Bangladeshi history. Could you speak to where you think this poetry engages with these histories?

When I asked my mother, who was eight or nine at the time, what she remembered of the war, she spoke mostly about being entranced by my grandmother bathing in the pond behind their home.

Shortly after that conversation, I came across this by physiologist Benjamin Libet: “We are not conscious of the actual moment of the present. We are always a little late.” I couldn’t stop thinking about that idea or about how my mother was daily witnessing an innocent and beautiful ritual amid the daily horrors of wartime.

The realization, too, that 1971 was a tumultuous year in many other countries as well as Bangladesh became a part of the poem. I wanted to write a poem that could withstand both violence and beauty, both memory and the present moment of my life in Bangladesh, a country that dwells in nostalgia even as it continues to deliberately self-modernize. 

3. This poem does a lot of talking between distances: between both place (Texas and Bangladesh) and time (1971 and somewhere near the present).  Could you talk about your approach? How did you use the poem to bridge these distances?

I continue to be fascinated by how language can collapse time and distance, in part, I think because the notion of nostalgia is so crucial to the Bangladeshi worldview, as evidenced by the river as a site for both rupture and progress. In this way, Celan’s assertion that “everything is near and unforgotten” truly informed the way I wrote and revised “1971.”

Once the poem’s shape began to emerge, I began to make deliberate choices that could allow the speaker to be anchored in 1971 in Bangladesh watching her mother watching her grandmother bathe while simultaneously traveling temporal and geography distances. For example, the poem is in second person so that the speaker can witness all the scenes and characters in the poem, including herself, with both distance and intimacy. I love the flexibility of second person because of the way its tone can be epistolary, imperative, and self-reflexive. Similarly, I chose to place the poem in present tense except for when the mother speaks. I hope “1971” gives her the right space to do so. 

4. What did you end up reading this summer? What do you plan to read this fall?

Books currently stacked precariously on my bedside table: Bluets by Maggie Nelson, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers by George Oppen, Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova Trespasses by Lacy M. Johnson, Horse in the Dark by Vievee Francis, Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Letters to a Stranger by Thomas James, Florida by Christine Schutt, Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, The Changing Lights at Sandover by James Merrill, Made Flesh by Craig Arnold, Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz, allegiance by francine j. harris, Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral,  A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, and The Homesick Texan Cookbook. 

5. What other writing-projects are you working on?

I’m working on my second manuscript entitled The Climbing Tower, a collection of lyric essays entitled Cloud-Capped Star, and translations of Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. 

"Lining Up for Starvation": An Interview with B.J. Hollars

B.J. Hollars, is the author of two books of nonfiction, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America—the 2012 recipient of the Society of Midland Author’s Award—and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Tuscaloosa forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press in 2013. His short story collection, Sightings is forthcoming next year from Indiana University Press. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

His nonfiction pieces "The Megatherium Club" and "Leningrad" appear in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, BJ Hollars talks to interviewer David Bachmann about cannibalism, voluntary starvation, and stories worthy of preservation.

1. Part of the power of these pieces are their brevity. Were you ever tempted to make them longer or were they longer in previous drafts? Would something be compromised if you were to exploit, for example, the case of 36 self-starved men in Minnesota or the accomplishments of William Stimpson for even another paragraph?

I was very tempted to expand, and in fact, for several drafts I fell victim to the longer form.  “Leningrad” was actually spurred by a 15-page essay called “In Defense of The Donner Party,” in which I tried to defend the party’s alleged resorting to cannibalism during the winter of 1846-47.  The essay sprawled and sprawled and ultimately went nowhere.  It took me four months to write, and in the end, all I was left with was the inspiration to write “Leningrad,” which was enough. 

“The Megatherium Club” was sort of the opposite.  I’d tried desperately to expand the piece, but I just kept running into dead ends.  I researched the members (even spoke with the current president of the 21^st century version of the club), but nothing was as interesting as the men in their now famous photograph, which I reference. 

I’m not sure anything would have been “compromised” or “exploited” if the essays were longer, but I just don’t think they were meant to be.  It took me a few tries, but eventually I stumbled upon the proper length, and that meant short.

2. You end each of these pieces with an italicized question that is fairly large in scope. To what extent are these meant to instruct, provoke, resolve, or none of these?

You’re right!  I do end both with an italicized question.  How funny that I never noticed that before.  Of course, it sounds absurd to say that now, but it’s absolutely true.  I suppose I never noticed it because I never intended these essays to be together.  They were written at least a year apart from one another, and I eventually pieced them together simply because they both seemed to explore a historical moment in the form of a nonfiction short-short.  That’s about the only resonance I initially saw.  Upon reading them again, these essays suddenly seem like kindred spirits—inseparable in some way—though I promise you there was no master plan here.  I always figured my subconscious was smarter than my conscious; this just proves it.

But to answer your question, I don’t think these questions are meant to resolve a thing.  Maybe I did mean for them to provoke a bit (after all, they do sort of pivot toward the reader), but I don’t think I had any real agenda here.  If anything, as is true of most of my nonfiction—especially reportage—I want to give readers the facts in an engaging manner and allow them to draw their own conclusion.

3. In “The Megatherium Club” you seem to tow the line of indicting the club’s hedonism during a time of war and celebrating their scientific contributions. Do you think that’s a reasonable reaction to the work? Do you want the reader to form an opinion of the Megatherium Club and if so, what is it?

Yeah, I think that reading is about right, at least for most people.  I just got done saying I want readers to “draw their own conclusions” from these essays, but it turns out I may be leading readers directly down the interpretive path you just mentioned.  As I began researching the history of the Megatherium Club (which was a side story while trying to research an essay about the megatherium itself), I became fascinated by these young boys who seemed to love their world but didn’t know how they fit in it.  They could bestow most anything with a name, but a name didn’t guarantee familiarity, merely classification.

4. You make some forthright comments here, such as, “What little we actually know of these men speaks to our own failure as preservationists.” To what extent is the goal of this piece to preserve the men in this club by exhuming them?

I suppose that might be an ulterior motive as well.  However, I don’t think I’m interested in preserving them because I think they necessarily deserve it.  I mean, I think they do, but as I note in the essay, many of the members of the Megatherium Club already have natural wonders named after them—glaciers, valleys, rivers and whatnot—so what good will my measly 600 or so words do for them?  I want to preserve them for the readers’ sakes.  Yes, the natural world is mysterious, but so are the people who study it, and perhaps, so are the people who read tiny essays about the people who once studied it.  We’ve all got our own stories worthy of preservation, but for now, I’d rather preserve somebody else’s.

5. In "Leningrad" you begin with the desperation of hunger during war time and end with voluntary starvation. Although the latter was for the sake of science, there is also a sense of recreation to the act of depriving oneself sustenance, almost like how the act of taking hallucinogens erases the constraints of the tangible. How do you want the reader to react to the 36 starving Minnesotans?

I suppose I really don’t know how I want the reader to react on this one, but I know I had a very visceral reaction when I first learned about these experiments.  It seemed like such a trespass on the limits of scientific experimentation.  After all, the Nazis were performing starvation experiments on one side of the ocean, while on the other side—back in Minnesota—we were performing our own starvation experiments in or order to counteract the Nazi’s starvation experiments.  There seemed to be this perilously thin line between the morality of these very similar acts.  The major difference, I suppose, was that in the Auschwitz labs prisoners were starved against their wills, while back at the University of Minnesota, people lined up for the abuse and were called patriots.

6. Your assertion that the club’s discovery “...reaffirmed their faith that the unknown was everywhere, that America was in need of taxonomy” suggests that America was in need of repair or enlightenment that it may not have ever received. Your assertion that “...neither parent adequately defined the word starving” similarly suggests a personal and/or societal imperfection born of deprivation, a void born of ignorance. Do you want either of these works to comment on society’s glaring flaws or is that something you want to avoid?

The trick, for me, was to leave the reader with something to think about without shoving a didactic message down anyone’s throat.  I’ve recently found myself falling into the likely bad habit of leaving my essays with a final line or two of condemnation toward my subject.  I don’t do it for any kind of “holier than thou,” complex from which I may be suffering, but simply because I’m shocked that so many atrocities of the recent past are already long forgotten.  Many of us seem to have a sense that “bad things” once occurred, but we don’t seem to believe we have any obligation to think about them.  It’s as if we privilege “bad things” with mythic status simply because it’s easier than facing hard truths.  I suppose, at some level, I want to force the reader into viewing these hard truths.  I want them to see the protruding ribs on the man who ate sawdust in Leningrad.  I want them to peer deep into the bullet hole that killed a man at Gettysburg.  Maybe we can learn from these “bad things,” maybe not, but forgetting them entirely shouldn’t be an option.   Burdens are meant to be carried.  Sometimes I think I just don’t want to carry any of them alone.  

7. What are you reading these days?

Not nearly enough, of course, but most recently I’ve managed to sneak in Chad Simpson’s Tell Everyone I Said Hi, which is great.  I’m also reading all kinds of research stuff, so a lot of dusty old books about giant squids and misidentified creatures and Sasquatch, as always.  Oh, and every historical marker and museum plaque I can get my hands on.  That’s where all the best stories come from.

"When You Get Inside, the Walls Are Words": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Lydia Yuknavitch

Along with DORA: A HEADCASE, Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER: A MEMOIR and three works of short fiction. Her book REAL TO REEL was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER won the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice 2012 and the PNBA Award 2012. She teaches writing, literature, film, and Women’s Studies in Oregon.

Here, Lidia Yuknavitch answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with excerpts from her new novel DORA: A HEADCASE.  Enjoy! 

1. What is writing like?

As for my girl wall story, well, I remixed it and turned it into a bitchin’ little art installation called: “Dora: A Head Case.” You have to enter a Dora room lined with pink plastic and vag fur and Vaseline in order to experience it. When you get inside, the walls are words. There are stories about everything that’s happened to me in my dumb little life. There are lines from sex books and lines from bands and lines I collected in bathroom stalls all over the city. And letters to Francis Bacon and even advice here and there to Sig, like “Sig, you gotta decrease your douchehood next time you get a girl client.” On the ceiling of the girl room is a film with the most bitchin’ soundscape you will ever hear in your life playing in a loop. The sounds of boots on pavement and wind and rain banging the cord of a flagpole. The sound of dog breath and Lexus engines and bum pee and violin concertos all mixed together. Ave Maria’s high notes and things waitresses at Shari’s yelled at us and falling glass. The sound of water. Of a metal bar rolling on the concrete of a parking garage. Birds and electricity hum. Sound is everywhere besides in your voice.

2. What isn’t writing like?

I blow pumpkin color monkey chunks all over the side of the car. Sorry Ave Maria’s mom. Everything smells like bile and spit and girl puke. My head feels like a hard metal pinball has gotten loose… I wipe my mouth. Cold night air beats my head up outside the window of the Jag. Ave Maria is petting my neck. Obsidian has her leg crossed over mine. Like she’s trying to keep me from blowing a hole through the top of the car. Without expression, I’m a zombie girl.

3. When you do it, why?

I wonder where voice lives in a body. Is it in the throat, where the flaps pound each other to death, making us think we’ve got important fucking things to say? Or is it in the mind, where thoughts crash crazily into each other pinbally and dinging, until they slide down the chute and out the hole and into the world? Couldn’t voice come from anywhere? 

4. When you don’t, why?

Next time you talk with a female? Ask her which city her body is. Or ocean. Give her poetry books written by women. Like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and H.D. and Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson. Let her draw or paint or sing a self before. You. Say. A. Word.

"A Trace Upon the Keys": An Interview with Charlie Clark

Charlie Clark's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, The Journal, The Laurel Review, Smartish Pace, West Branch, and other journals. He studied poetry at the University of Maryland and lives in Austin, Texas.

His poem "Devil Doing Scales" appears in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Charlie Clark talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about form, the devil, and movement between lines.

1. What was the beginnings and endings of writing “Devil Doing Scales”?

This poem is part of a group of poems that explore the devil as a character, or explore a character called the devil. Most of the ideas I get for writing are born out of seeing something in another piece of art that inspires me, confuses me, or for whatever reason sticks with me. In this case, I had been reading Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. It’s just an amazing sequence. Reading it, I was thinking a lot about the sonnet (a form I often go back to), as well as mythic characters and how a sonnet sequence can provide a foundation that frees you up to look at a character or image or idea from different angles and through varying lenses. At the same time I was re-reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods, and was once again floored by how he, like Rilke, balances formal consistency with varying tone and perspective. I also had Anne Carson’s work in mind while I started these devil poems. I adore her work, Autobiography of Red in particular. In that book, Carson is playing with a mythic character, but uprooting that character into a contemporary landscape. Weirdly, I read no Milton at all while working on these poems. I kind of liked the idea of a sonnet sequence about the devil that ignores that considerable shadow.

This is all the general background of influence. The specific impetus for this poem, and the sequence of poems from which it comes, was reading Kevin Prufer’s Fallen From a Chariot, and seeing how he uses angels in some of the poems in that book. His angels are mythic creatures but also very physically present—real beings in the real world. I was fascinated by how he navigated that paradox, and, frankly, wanted to steal it. So I went for the flip side of angels: demons. And demons quickly became devils.

“Devil Doing Scales” was one of the earlier poems to come out of this experiment. I came up with the title first, which is not my usual method. Usually titles are hard-earned afterthoughts. With these poems I decided to come up with titles first, and to treat them like propositions. I would play the poem off the title to see what unexpected directions I could make the poem go in. In the case of this poem, the title came quickly, and the first line came almost immediately thereafter.

Let’s see. That’s all about beginnings. As far as endings go, I had everything but the ending finished for quite a while. I just couldn’t nail down how I wanted to exit the poem. So, in that way, writing the end of the poem was the end of my writing of the poem. That’s probably not too uncommon an experience, as good endings are incredibly hard to write. (Coincidentally, Marianne Borouch has an excellent essay on poems’ endings in the most recent New England Review. It is definitely worth reading: http://www.nereview.com/ner-33-2the-end-inside-it-by-marianne-boruch/) I tried out a number of directions for the ending of “Devil Doing Scales,” all false starts. I really wanted to create a contrast between the physicality of playing the piano (poorly)—of the devil character’s fat fingers, for instance—and the supernatural element of a character like the devil. The ethereal quality of music became the hinge from which I was able to move in a successful direction, finally. Music can have a ghostly quality in the way that it is present but not visible or concrete, as well as how, after experiencing it, it can live on so clearly in memory. The ghost that appears at the end there is just a part of the furniture of the imaginative/supernatural space I was occupying at the time. I also enjoy the idea of a ghost getting comfortable with the recent fact of its ghostness, and how that echoes back to the physical limitations of the devil while playing piano.

2. I’m curious about your choice to spread out the lines of this poem with paragraph breaks between each one.  This gives the effect of keys on a piano, along with the more obvious emphasis of each line.  Could you please talk about this choice of form?

The form is the one I decided upon for the entire sequence, so there wasn’t specific decision-making happening when it came to this particular poem. Generally, though, the idea of the monostich became a part of the generative process for these poems. Prior to writing these poems, I’d been writing a lot of poems with long, long lines, and very convoluted syntax; work that blurred the line between poetry and prose in a very deliberate way. The devil poems were in part a reaction against that. I wanted each line to have a very specific, singular life on the page, whether by containing a complete piece of information, being end-stopped, or something like that. Of course, that never works perfectly, so this poem illustrates a balance, I think, between the enjambment-heavy writing I’ve done in the past and my interest in exploring the structural integrity of the line.

When revising poems, I’ll often separate parts of lines so they have their own space on the page. This way I can focus on the music of a particular portion of the line. After I get something I’m satisfied with, I will stitch the lines back together. Here I wanted to emphasize the line to myself, and to ensure that the emphasis wasn’t diminished. I wanted each line to have its own resonance, and the monostich was a way I thought I could accomplish that.

Also, while this poem is a sonnet, it is loosely a sonnet. I thought that monostichs would help de-emphasize each poem’s sonnetness, so that readers wouldn’t get hung up worrying about the extent to which the poem does or does not satisfy the varying formal requirements of the form. When I say “readers,” I guess I really mean myself. I am often in the camp of readers who, upon discovering that a poem is 14 lines long, has to spend a lot of time tracking all the possible additional formal measures by which the poem might more completely be a sonnet. Does that make sense? I wanted to use the 14-line size of the sonnet, and play around with octets, sestets, couplets, etc., but I didn’t want to blind myself by worrying about those formal components. The monostichs provided a way to work against that, as I don’t recall Petrarch writing in monostichs.

3. You make a really bold move between the title and the first line. The speaker seems to acquiesce that the devil wouldn’t play scales or wasn’t playing scales, but instead, “Chopsticks.” The “fine” that starts the poem is so lovely too: we, as readers, are faced immediately with the poem’s annoyed tone. Could you discuss this move from title to poem, or perhaps how you see titles and poems connecting?

I came up with the titles to the poems in this sequence before I moved on to writing the poems. Sometimes the titles were general, thematic overviews, sometimes they operated like first lines. These relationships between title and poem didn’t reveal themselves until the poems were written. In the case of “Devil Doing Scales,” it turned out that there was an undercutting, contrasting effect in the relationship between the title and the poem’s opening.

The opening line came not long after the title, and appeared pretty much fully formed. I think I messed around for a few minutes with trying to describe the act of doing scales, but got bored with how obvious that would be after reading the title, so I decided to take a different tack. Also, I like the idea of the contrast: scales are practice, “Chopsticks” is fluff, a way to goof off. (I say this as a non-piano player. I could be wrong.) I enjoy the opening gambit of the “Fine,” both for its chatty tone and for how it challenges the title. I’m not sure who the speaker here is, though there is, I think, a bit of the free indirect style in the approach of that “Fine.” The devil would probably prefer to be doing scales, or Chopin, or anything more complex, but he’s limited to “Chopsticks.” So the voice here is a little bothered by what it’s admitting. I can see the devil being upset with that limitation. It’s a part of the humanized character I was interested in exploring. In stories, the devil usually shreds, right? Or can confer the ability to shred upon those who offer up their soul to him. It’s the idea of the devil as all-powerful (to an extent). So I enjoy the fact that he isn’t shredding here.

Thinking about the humanizing impulse: while I wanted this devil to exist without a real moral imperative, I didn’t want to strip him of his supernatural quality. He’s still a kind of corrupting influence.  

4. Have you been reading anything that we can cozy up with once fall fully opens up to us?

Well, I never want to let a chance go by without championing the work of David Antin. His talk pieces are amazing. There is very little in common—OK, nothing—between his work and “Devil Doing Scales,” but his influence shows on other work I’ve done. i never knew what time it was was my introduction to his work, and I’ve gone back through most of his books since then. I remain consistently impressed with the level of imaginative and intellectual rigor he displays. These pieces are essentially semi-improvised lectures that he then goes back and edits for publication. But there is always something about the movement or the connections that occur in them that have the texture of poetry. And that he’s doing this without the net of prepared text amazes and horrifies me. There are some great recordings of his work at the PennSound website: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Antin.php. I particularly recommend “War” and “How Wide Was the Frame.”

As far as recent reading goes: some years ago I happened upon a copy of Cid Corman’s translation of René Char’s wartime journal, Leaves of Hypnos. I finally got around to reading it recently. Char led a group of resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation of France. I’m not sure that the book is in print, but I highly recommend seeking it out in libraries or online. It’s an absolutely fascinating book that includes diary entries, aphorisms, sketches of natural observations, as well as some interesting thoughts on leadership during wartime. The closest example I can think of that creates art out of the dreadful tedium of underground resistance is Jean-Pierre Melville’s filmArmy of Shadows. Though Char was in the countryside almost exclusively, not in Paris, so Melville’s movie is more dynamic and sexier as an illustration of that experience.

Jorie Graham’s most recent book, Place, is an intriguing book for me. I keep going back to the poem “On the Virtue of the Dead Tree,” in particular. She channels Whitman in it in interesting and unexpected ways. She is propulsive in her cadence, and yet in order to read her you must read her slowly. That friction is very engaging. Also, she tries to enact a kind of simultaneity in her poems, where the multiplicity of conscious attention is contained at once. I’m not explaining it well. Hers is a seemingly impossible task, and one that I find engaging and enviable.

What else? I’m working my way through Geoff Dyer’s last collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. I was vaguely familiar with him prior to picking up this book, but am eager to go through his whole back catalog now. It’s a fascinating read. The book is arranged according to subject matter. The first section contains his essays on photography. I’ve been reading it for about a month and am still only in that section of the book. I keep re-reading individual sentences and essays over and over again. There’s such a great intelligence at work. It’s always such a thrill to discover a writer whose mind and way of seeing both clicks with something inside you but presents it in a way you’ve never considered or figured out in a conscious way for yourself. That’s happening all over the place in these essays. I’ll give you one quote, about the photography of Edward Burtynsky: “Burtynsky produces images whose beauty is freighted with a political/ecological purpose that is unavoidable and unobtrusive.” The pairing of “unavoidable and unobtrusive” is such a smart analysis of the political content of Burtynsky’s photography. It describes a way of addressing matters that I’d like to strive for in my own writing. Dyer’s book is absolutely littered with these kinds of observations.

I’ve also recently read several of Heidi Julavits’ novels with great enjoyment. Her most recent, The Vanishers, is wonderful. I briefly campaigned on Facebook to have Sofia Coppola buy the film rights for it. That means I annoyed a few friends about this for a couple of days, then moved on to some other distraction. Which isn’t to say that shouldn’t still totally happen. Coppola’s interest in, for lack of a better phrase, women in captivity, is right in line with what’s happening in The Vanishers. Plus, there are psychic attacks! Reading that book alongside her husband Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet is an interesting experience, given they have nominally similar speculative conceits, but explore them in very, very different ways.

5. What other writing-type projects have you been working on?

The sequence of devil poems was the last “project” that I can speak of. Those poems are starting to trickle out here and there: there are devil poems in recent issues of 32 Poems, BODY, and Front Porch. Bellingham Review and Third Coast will each have a devil poem in upcoming issues. It’s gratifying to see them making their way out in the world.

As far as new work goes, I suppose I’m kind of always writing, in fits and starts, but there is no high-concept project happening at the moment. When I go too long without writing, I get antsy; worried that I’m getting out of writing shape, so to speak. My solution is usually to try an ekphrastic descriptive exercise. Describe a piece of art, and discover something about it through the descriptive act of looking. (Geoff Dyer does this amazingly well in the essays I mentioned above.) Because I’ve been pretty busy lately with my regular, non-writing life, and it’s been hard to find time to write, most of what I’ve written has come out of such exercises. Poems that try to be the act of looking. There is an interpretive impulse present in the fact that you are rendering something visual in words, and it’s fun to move between resisting and surrendering to that impulse.

Also, occasionally, a word or phrase in the media will catch my attention. There were these apocalyptically terrible wild fires here in Texas last fall, and somewhere along the way I heard someone mention, or somewhere read about, an Indian named Buffalo Hump who had burned up portions of Texas in the late nineteenth century when the state was still being settled. Researching that name became a way into writing about the fires. Or, Emperor Diocletian, about whom I knew nothing, got some mention a few months ago. It was in relation to a tiff between Paul Krugman and Ron Paul. I knew nothing about Emperor Diocletian, so I googled him. It turns out he was Roman Emperor in the late 3^rd to early 4^th century, and famously issued something called the Edict on Maximum prices in a failed attempt to stop inflation. I don’t remember the exact context that Krugman and Ron Paul mentioned him, but it’s a salient subject given all the national and international worry about inflation and economic growth. That happens sometimes, and these random bits of information can turn into the trigger for a poem, something to try to make sense out of. Or confusion out of. The minutiae of history or political commentary can make for most engaging fodder. 

"To Draw That Slow Fountain Into Your Mouth": An Interview with Alicia Jo Rabins

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and teacher based in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, 6x6 and the Boston Review. She holds a MFA from Warren Wilson and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Rabins tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, and is currently completing her first manuscript of poems. 

Her poems, "How to Confess an Affair," "How to Be a Prophet," and "How to Make a Red Velvet Cake," appeared in Issue Forty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about whimsy, prose poems, and the form of the "how to."

Could you talk about writing these “How To” poems?  

I’m fascinated by self-help literature and also by ancient spiritual texts.  Is there a difference beyond the patina of years?  I’m not sure. I lived in Jerusalem for two years in my early twenties, immersed in Hebrew, Aramaic and sacred Jewish texts and practices.  Studying (and living) those texts, the relationship between words and spiritual practice made a strong impression on me—the texts were quite beautiful, but also legalistic, so the words lived on a level beyond the simply aesthetic, with prescriptions for actions that shaped my days.   I like working with a How To form because it frames the aesthetic and meaning-making pleasures of a poem within the power, directness and pragmaticsm of spiritual texts addressing needs in daily life.  Also, I love Julio Cortazar’s instructional manuals and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. 

I’m curious to know about your choice of form for these poems. I’ve written in this sort of mode before (the “How To”), and I always tend to revert to numbered lists. Why the prose poem or the lineation? Do you think the weight of calling them “How To” allows you more freedom with the form, since the reader has a better idea of what to expect?

I do have a couple list poems in the series, as well as some small, lineated poems, but as you’ve noted, the vast majority are prosepoems.  I don’t remember consciously making this formal decision, but I think is was my instinct because the prosepoem most closely resembles the form of the ancient texts which inspire this series.  Midrash and mishna in the Jewish tradition, as well as Buddhist and yoga sutras, come down to us in the form of a series of interlinked, brief sections without defined lineation—what we could call “prosepoems.”  This probably reflects the process of oral transmission; lineation requires literacy and access to duplication, whereas small chunks of nonlineated text are ideal for memorizing and passing on.  Another way of saying this is that a numbered list draws more on a modern technical writing model of instructional text, whereas I am drawing on the ancient spiritual mode of instructional text. 

And yes, I think (or hope) the “How To” form has the formal benefit of building a container which generates some surface tension for the series, allowing for greater experimentation and risk within the poems.

In these poems, the body is broken open and made whimsical in a devastated way (for example, the torso turned to fish bowl with the fish swimming inside in “How to Confess an Affair.”) How do you see whimsy working in these poems? Is it just the movement to metaphor often found in poetry, or something else? 

To turn your question back on you if I may, I’m curious what “whimsical” means in this context—is it the same as imagination, or something else? 

The most powerful writing class I ever took was called “Imaginative Writing,” with Kenneth Koch.  One thing I took away from that class was a delight in imagination itself—that, as the Surrealists knew, as well as the creators of Greek myth and so many other writers, there is sometimes a truth beyond the literal truth, one that can only be accessed through imagination and metaphor.  I suppose I am interested in a use of metaphor that is transformative rather than simply comparative.   I believe in symbols, and that sometimes a body is as much fish bowl as body, and a lover a goldfish, and a piece of information a hook in the fish’s lip.  Is that different from other poets?  Now I’m curious.

What should we be reading, from your perspective?

Oh, I don’t know about what people “should” be reading, but here’s what’s on my desk right now, by which I mean my bedside table: Maggie Nelson, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Claudia Rankine, Dorothea Lasky, Filip Marinovic, The Possessed by Elif Batuman, a book of accounts of westward journeys by American pioneers, and a self-help book called Mothering from Your Center (I have a toddler).  Also, a plug for Hoa Nguyen’s excellent and innovative classes—she’s based in Toronto, but offers a remote version—reading and writing through a poet’s collected works.  So I am currently immersed in the Complete Philip Whalen with Hoa’s guidance.

What else have you been writing? Do more of these “How To” poems exist in the world?

I’m currently finishing up my first full-length poetry manuscript, which includes about fifteen poems from this series.  There are lots more, and I’m also, separately, hoping to publish a chapbook of the complete How To series.  There are a couple in the current issue of Sentence Magazine, a few appeared in American Poetry Review two years ago, and one was in the New Delta Review this spring.