"The Detective and All These Ghosts": An Interview with Maryse Meijer

Maryse Meijer is the author of Heartbreaker. She lives in Chicago.

Her story, "Evidence," appeared in Issue Eighty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Maryse Meijer talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about violence, death, and detective stories.

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

I think I just sat down and typed “the head, where’s the head?” and went from there. When I found out I was writing about a detective I started thinking about what that might mean, but in the beginning there was just this idea of a really messed up dead body on a kitchen floor.

This story’s protagonist is a homicide detective, seemingly detached from other people, obsessed with his murder investigations. To anyone who’s seen cop stories in movies, television, and/or other media, this feels like a familiar characterization. What do you want this story to add to the conversation created by all those hard-nosed, unstable detectives of popular fiction? What was your approach to the tropes of the genre when crafting this story?

If your job is a constant encounter with death and violence—which are not really rational things—then you’re going to go crazy. I think the detective genre understands this, and it gives us all these guys (and, increasingly, women) who are disintegrating in various ways because the real disintegration—death—is so elusive, so hard to really look at. Even as the body of a murder victim is paraded before us, it disappears. So I think we try to talk about violence and death by talking about detectives. As I was writing I was trying to focus on this dead guy, but everything kept slipping back to the detective, who also couldn’t quite focus on the dead guy. Instead he’s obsessed with this woman he’s imagined is the killer, a fantasy he ends up projecting onto a stranger, and we end up in this space where it’s just the detective and all these ghosts who become more real than everything else. How can a person metabolize the endless violence of a job solving murders without losing their mind?

What frustrates me about detectives in popular narratives is how they are glamorized or fetishized, even when they’re falling apart—they always seem to come off as badasses, like Woody Harrelson in Rampart or the guys in True Detective. They’re jerks and they’re a mess but they’re played so cool. My detective is plain sad and losing it. If I couldn’t really say anything meaningful about violence, I could at least try and get at its possible effects on this one guy’s mind.

Your story ends with the protagonist on his knees, clutching a woman’s skirt and begging her to murder him (and he seems sincere, at least in my reading). What are you experiencing when you take a story to such a bleak, morbid conclusion? Do you feel such intense emotions along with your characters, or is it more of an intellectual exercise for you as the author?

If I get emotional about something that happens on the page—and I do, often—it’s not because I feel any of it is happening to me. It’s more like I’m watching something not so great happen to a friend, someone I love but can’t help. It’s never an intellectual exercise, but it’s also not strictly personal—which, if it was, I guess I’d be on my knees freaking out every other day.

Please tell us about your revision process, using this story as an example. How much did “Evidence” change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any difficult decisions along the way?

I edit like crazy. I edit for years. But the general shapes of my stories don’t usually go through radical alterations—it’s mostly line editing, and a lot of cutting. Then there’s usually a period where I bloat a story back up, explaining the story to myself by adding a bunch of unnecessary stuff, and then I cut some more. The painful part is leaving stuff out that I worked hard on, that got to something I felt was true but maybe too true to keep…you have to leave room for the reader to enter into the story, and that means cutting out the bits that say too much, go too far. But those bits are often the ones that you like the most!

The trouble with this story was getting the language right—trying to reflect the detective’s distorted state of mind while still making some kind of sense.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing up a second story collection and a book of poems, and revising a first novel.

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

Fox, Tooth, Heart is a story collection by John McManus that I think is brilliant. Vertigo by Joanna Walsh is making me very jealous, and I just finished Joyce Carol Oates’ first novel, With Shuddering Fall, which is completely crazy, in the best way.

"A Little Unmoored": An Interview with Jai Chakrabarti

Jai Chakrabarti is a 2015 A Public Space Emerging Writer’s Fellow. A graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, his work has appeared in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Coffin Factory, Union Station, and A Public Space. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

His story, "Lost Things," appeared in Issue Seventy-Four of The Collagist. 

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about the structure of time in fiction, details that slant, and revision.

Where did this story begin for you? What first inspired you to write “Lost Things”?

“Lost Things” began after an episode in a long struggle my partner and I undertook to conceive a child. While many of the elements of the piece are fictionalized, the emotional pull of it likely stemmed from the feelings I wrestled with after a failed treatment at a fertility clinic. We’ve since become parents to an exuberantly happy boy, but those years of trying shaped images in my work that were borne of loss and yearning.

The sentences in this story meander. They double-back on themselves and move non-chronologically. For me, one of the lovely results of this style is the sense that I’m in two or three places at once. Is the voice in this story characteristic of your writing? How did this sentence style come about?

I think I’m obsessed about the structure of time in fiction. Aren’t our memories always overlapping with our present complications, leaving even the most grounded of us, at least a little, unmoored? I would love to say that the form finds its partner in content and that the meandering sentences, the run-arounds with time, are the beck and call that drives the piece forward, but in my experience, this is harder to do in fiction than it is in poetry. So I felt this piece borrowed more from poetry in terms of its permission to move out of linear time, and in the slipperiness of the narrative voice.

The world of this story feels vivid and bright. It crackles with details such as “the girl with a tongue so long she could curl it around a glass of beet juice” and “the terrible pitch and thunder of the aging mango tree, as it leaned in the monsoon.” How do you choose your moments of detail?

Thank you. As a reader, the images that often startle me are the ones which slant our everyday, but remain honest. Even with stories which hang on the ropes of surrealism I want to feel embodied. An overly familiar image isn’t inviting, but neither is one that doesn’t connect to our corporeal (and yet, mysterious) world.

What was your revision process for this story? What happened between the first draft and the story we see today?

For a story with a traditional linear narrative with premise, conflict, climax, etcetera, the revision process is more well-defined for me. For this type of story, I give a lot of attention to the sound of the piece, to its rhythm. I read it out loud, and where the rhythm doesn't fit the feeling I am going for, I revise it multiple times. To get to know the feelings I was going for in this piece, I wrote out a map, tracing between sentences and the piece’s recurring motifs.

Are you reading any books you’d like to recommend?

“The Beautiful Possible” by Amy Gottlieb - a novel of mystical Judaism and love and loss.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished revisions on a novel, A Play for the End of the World, which follows the relationship of a Holocaust survivor and a woman from the American South. Set in Poland, India, and New York, it’s a love story, or, at least, a story of longing (or belonging).  

"Time Tends to Bend": An Interview with Sara Greenslit

Sara Greenslit's novel, As If a Bird Flew By Me, was published by FC2 for winning the Sukenick/ABR Innovative Fiction Award. Her first novel, The Blue of Her Body, won the Starcherone Innovative Fiction Award. She is a small animal veterinarian, from Madison, WI.

Her essay, "Vertigo Suite No. 1," appeared in Issue Eighty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Sara Greenslit talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about illness narratives, brevity, and dizziness.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay “Vertigo Suite No. 1”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

I had come down with sudden vertigo in ‘05 that appeared it wasn’t going anywhere; it got better over time, but it never vanished. I wanted to try to understand it by trying to explain it. The suite is part of a longer piece, all in short sections, about my definitions of vertigo, with snippets of how dizziness changed my veterinary career, with asides into neuroanatomy.

This suite consists of three very brief pieces, the longest of which is still under 300 words. Is it a challenge for you to write with such concision? Does it require a lot of revision and/or restraint to achieve this economy of language?

I have such a hard time writing longer pieces! I find myself getting giddy when I reach a couple thousand words. My MFA was in poetry, and I’m an introvert so maybe one is related to the other?

I do tend to trim and trim back to the bones the best I can. I write in bursts, collect them, then sort and edit. I love a good thesaurus, I love intermittent internal rhyme.

I noticed that much of your essay is in the present tense, even when it breeds odd phrases such as “When it begins eleven years ago,” and I was also aware of some vacillations between first and second person, a switch from “When I’m tired” to “as you succumb to gravity.” Can you speak about how you make artful decisions about matters of time, tense, point of view, etc. when writing quite lyrically about your own experience?

Because the dizziness is long-term, and when I have a more severe relapse, time tends to bend—present tense makes sense: am I always going to be dizzy? am I in the hole again, until I am not?

I have some trepidation of writing first person illness narratives; I get worried it becomes all too narrow. Second person gives me some space.

The decisions now seems made instinctually. I can’t say I made concrete decisions until closer to final edits.

Your novels blend fiction and nonfiction, and you also write poetry. Do you generally know the genre of a piece before you start writing it? How does your work in one genre inform the others?

That’s a tough question. Most of the time, things evolve as the writing goes on. I’ll come to a Q like: I can’t really seem to pull off writing 1st POV in a historical novel sense, so why don’t I jut over here and use the original historical documents transcribed online?, and then while filtering through these, a present day character arises and seems to have a connection to this older time period. A tendril from one, out of the other. That’s why I love research: it sparks things you didn’t know yet that will absorb you.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a collection of essays about illness and art and ecology. I wanted to push myself into longer form and into a newer genre for me. It’s hard work and a little scary.

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

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Conscious by Sy Montgomery.

"Wish for Brilliance / Blindness": An Interview with Landon Godfrey

Landon Godfrey is the author of Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review, 2011), selected by David St. John for the Cider Press Review Book Award. She co-edits, -designs, and -prints the letterpress postcard broadside journal Croquet. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she now lives in Black Mountain, NC.

Her poems, "Brief Report" and "Mooon," appeared in Issute Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer T.m. Lawson about poetic stylings, how to apply structure to the form, and how much unconscious (and conscious) effort goes into process.

I noticed that “Brief Report” has four line stanzas with a couplet as the last stanza, but the stanzas feel inequal, almost like they’re finding their “footing” in the beginning and becoming more solid in the foundation in how dense they became compared to the initial start. I’m interested in how this decision came about when the poem was formed: could you talk about that?

When the stanzas shift from closed/stopped to open/enjambed with the colon at the end of the sixth stanza, I think the poem does indeed start to get more solid, because it’s right there that the poem shifts from the theoretical into a more concrete scene with the word “now.” So the poem seems to have needed heftier stanzas, or a gesture towards heft anyway, to accommodate a more present moment. And the complication of narrative. As to how much of a decision this was, I can’t say—only through your reading do I see that now—and that “now.”

I laughed out loud when I read the title “Mooon” - it isn’t often that a title will take liberties with misspelling, or in this case, acoustically extending a word. But it did capture that innocent childhood feeling and I could hear it perfectly in my head: “Mooon.” Was that your intention? Or was it to set the poem apart from the thousand other poems called “moon” and divorce the precious sentimental feeling from the word/object?

How fabulous that you laughed out loud! I get that totally. It’s a title I like to say out loud. All that sound! It’s playful and plaintive at the same time to my ear. And the childhood feeling: yes, absolutely. I think, too, that the extension of that sound enacts the nostalgia of Calvino’s story about the moon; the ooo ladders us right up onto the mooon’s surface. That’s funny, too, about the thousand other moon poems—I hadn’t really thought about that consciously, but it’s true that I’m anxious about sentimentalizing. How to get to tenderness without slopping over into the precious sentimental keeps me up at night.

I felt that “Mooon” had a special sadness in it. The stanzas, “... all the stars / sing camp fires // right into your eyes. / Sometimes I do wish // for brilliance / blindness, that I wouldn’t see // whiteness in bathroom door silhouettes / anymore, so I’d exist perfect” have the adult shadow of tragedy behind them. The “whiteness in the bathroom door” especially was provoking for some reason, perhaps when combined with these other lines seems to suggest that this adulthood looming ahead is threatening the childhood innocence locked at the campfire under the moon. Did you mean to diffuse this heaviness with the later stanzas of “cheer up!”?

“Cheer up!” strikes that kind of gallows humor of Beckett—I hope. Like laughing because things are at their absolute worst. It’s a sort of wry spirituality that actually contains some of the ooomph (mooon!) of the Buddhist idea of smiling at one’s suffering and so is therefore genuine, without, again the anxiety, of sentimentality. I want to have my moon cake and eat it too.

The whiteness of the bathroom door silhouettes does indeed contain tragedy. The pernicious trap of white supremacy makes me see, even against my will, a form of whiteness in any color of those silhouettes. I’m seeing myself, but I wish I were seeing everyone, unfettered by my complicity in a system of domination. But the tragedy is the systematized and targeted violence perpetrated against Black people, specifically in the United States, where my eyes live most of the time, but also around the world. I will add that until the hateful “bathroom bills” have been defeated everywhere, some of those normative bathroom silhouettes need to change their clothes into gender-neutral garments.

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

Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’ve recently finished a manuscript of prose poems called “Inventory of Doubts.” So I’m reading/thinking/casting about/worrying/making mistakes/wondering towards something new. I’m also practicing calligraphy.

"To Make Sense of an Epidemic": An Interview with Anne Sanow

Anne Sanow is the author of the story collection Triple Time, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the PEN/New England Award for Fiction. Her work has been published in Dossier, the Kenyon Review, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere, and her awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers.

Her story, The House in the Woods, appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about a smallpox cemetery, the Salem witch trials, and nonconventional narratives.

This piece feels very image driven. It’s full of lovely language such as this, “Leaves spiral down gently, quilting each mound in gold and green and bronze and crimson. The house breathes, the bower pulses.” Is there a particular image or phrase that this story was born from?

There is an image—a particular place—that inspired this story: the smallpox cemetery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is difficult to find and where I really did experience that sensation of stillness in the moment with leaves falling like that. Yet I never wanted what I put on the page to serve as any kind of literal reminder, and in fictionalizing something actual I wanted to imbue the piece with something mysterious. Images were a way for me to imagine a link to the past from the present and to slow down, to listen, and see how that listening would drive the story forward. As this developed, I also began to see that there was a link between place and the characters (individually and collectively), and that specific images might take on a life of their own and become a kind of refrain.

There are religious references throughout this piece. Characters seek salvation, are abandoned by God. How does religion color your characters’ views of the world? Do their views bring more comfort or distress to their lives?

To my mind, colonial New England is one of the freakiest places or periods you can imagine.  Perhaps this has something to do with my upbringing in suburban California; even prep school in A Separate Peace (which we all had to read in high school) seemed exotic, let alone the full-on amplified crazy of the Salem witch trials. So it’s safe to say that I’m a little obsessed, historically speaking. I’m interested in that transmutation from collective religious hysteria to the formation of community; turning points and differences, and how they work to fray, expand, and contract the social fiber; order and disorder; how we grapple with change. The characters here are grasping at—or flaunting—ideas of salvation to make sense of an epidemic, and some of them find a reconnection to the land or themselves or others, but it doesn’t always work.

What thinking went into the organization of this story?

So here’s the thing: I’ve always considered myself more or less a straightforward realist writer, but I have my forays into nonconventional narrative too. I’m just less sure of them, so I need to find an organizing principle somehow. Here that was easy; the grave marker numbers correspond to victims of the epidemic, so I used these as anchors, though they aren’t necessarily sequential.  And this also allowed me to use bits of real fact (e.g., a known identity of a smallpox victim) without overworrying it—this is distinctly a fiction and not a creative nonfiction, in other words, and I want that license to imagine. I also love an opportunity to shift around in time if I can get away with it. Some kind of narrative arc had to build, however, so I used the markers not linked to specific characters grow the larger world of the story beyond the pest house itself. When that extension began to happen I started to realize that the images + marker orientation + community became its own kind of song, so to speak.

Who is inspiring you right now? Are there any authors you can recommend to us?

In terms of inspiration for the novel I’m working on, Michael Ondaatje’s work has been revelatory for me over the past year: his movement and associations in the language, the way time and history slip around, structurally, which for me makes the telling all the more felt. Patrick Modiano is a more recent discovery for me, I’m almost embarrassed to admit; as a long-time fan of W. G. Sebald, how could I have not read him before? Then there are the re-reads, some of which I’m teaching this fall to graduate fiction students: Sherwood Anderson’s fabulously weird Winesburg, Ohio (seriously, it gets weirder and better every time I read it) and John Edgar Wideman’s collection Fever (the title story being hands-down one of my favorite things ever written, for me a model of what so-called historical fiction might achieve if it dares and how language from the past and present can intertwine to symphonic effect). I’ve been pretty obsessed with Hassan Blasim’s collection The Corpse Exhibition, which I taught in a course about contemporary Middle Eastern fiction this past year and have returned to again for stories that are so daring in voice and perspective that they makes me re-think just what “daring” actually is.  And for a completely tonal change of pace—and also because I’ve just moved to the Deep South—I’ve been rediscovering Ellen Gilchrist’s stories; that acerbic wit and utter immersion combined with an almost devil-may-care approach to story structure is marvelous.

I’ve also been reading a fair amount of poetry, and can heartily recommend Todd Hearon’s No Other Gods (check out the “memorandum” poems) and Maggie Dietz’s second collection, That Kind of Happy (her title poem is deceptively straightforward but will ring in your ears for a good long while). I’m also loving Jamaal May’s Hum: talk about a way to investigate place, in this case often the urban landscape of Detroit, and Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno by Ed Pavlić: you can’t easily label this poetry or prose or criticism or autobiography, and it’s wonderful.

What are you working on currently?

My large project is a novel called The Dailies, which is set partly in Berlin’s WWII film industry and follows two German half-sisters and other characters during the war and after. This has been ongoing for several years now, evolving in terms of just about every angle of craft and plot you could imagine, and I’m aiming to nail down the final version this year. There’s a new novel idea I’ve started tinkering with too—this one will return to the Middle East, where the stories in my first collection were set, and focusing on characters whose lives are affected by the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policies during the Gulf Wars. I have various story drafts in the works as well. Most of these are longer short stories, which is the form I tend to gravitate toward, but I’m becoming keen on seeing how I might work with shorter short forms as well; revisiting this particular piece here has been inspiring in this way! I have loads of fragments in my notebooks that don’t connect to my longer pieces, but rarely am I able to bring them to fruition the way I did with “House in the Woods.” I’d like to see what I can do.