"I Have Naught Come Hither to Save You": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Salvatore Pane

Salvatore Pane is the author of the novel, Last Call in the City of Bridges, and the chapbook, #KanyeWestSavedFromDrowning. His work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Hobart, The Rumpus, and American Book Review among many other venues. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis and can be reached at www.salvatore-pane.com.

An excerpt from Last Call in the City of Bridgesappears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Salvatore Pane answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Last Call in the City of Bridges.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

 

2. What isn’t writing like?

Kanye opens His mouth. He booms.

“The Kanye cometh! Ye have bequeathed your spiritual birthrights. I have naught come hither to save you. I have travelled the stars and have returned to tell you this: Ye have failed. The dearth of your anonymity astonishes. No one knows you. The world is not aware of your names. Thou art one in a crowd of billions. Because of that, thou doth not matter, thou doth not exist.”

Electricity cackles between His open hands. Then a solid yellow light. An explosion that blows everything back for miles, the endless porch decimated, the machines caved in, the rocking chairs shattered. Bodies everywhere. The dome explodes. We are blown into the emptiness of Martian space. Kanye returns to His chariot and rides toward the burning black tentacles of the zombie sun.

3. When you do it, why?

I tried to think about all the bad things, but the good times were so much more vibrant. Laughing through Terminator 2. Going to Pirates games. Dinner parties that ended with us driving through snowstorms singing unembarrassed at the tops of our lungs. Making love to Ivy and feeling led into a world of endless possibility. So many nights in the Squirrel Cage talking and feeling so safe and so loved. All those moments we shared. All of us, even Keith. Didn’t they accumulate? Weren’t they worth something even in the face of Oz’s undeniable doom? Didn’t they add up into something good, an algebraic equation of life and death tipped in favor of hope?

4. When you don’t, why?

If you’ve only casually played video games, then you can’t truly comprehend the inner depths of their joys. You don’t know what it feels like to give yourself up so completely to another you, a better version of yourself. You become the avatar. Super Mario, an Italian plumber tumbled through the looking glass. Link, the boy knight on a magical crusade to rescue Princess Zelda from the terrible Ganon. Samus Aran, the intergalactic bounty hunter tracking down alien eggs on a world ruled by Mother Brain. When you are represented by an avatar, you are no longer Michael Bishop, a skinny boy with a broken arm and sharp ribs that push against your polar bear t-shirt. You are not weak and loathsome and eternally frightened that some threat lurks around every corner existing only to dismember you.

That summer I played and played and played, and over time, this electronic world of bright colors and sprites began to feel safer, realer, better than the actual world I knew, an unpredictable place where a crazed van could send my whole being into a tailspin. In Super Mario Brothers, there was repetition and safety. The enemies always appeared in exactly the same place responding in exactly the same way. I lost myself in those games for hours at a time, refused to leave the safety of my house and instead began my descent into microchips and immateriality. I feared forests and lakes and birds and wind and most of all people.

The digital!

My first true love!

"Soon All Sound Became the Sound of Echoes": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Robert Kloss

Robert Kloss is the author of the books How the Days of Love & Diphtheria and The Alligators of Abraham, both from Mud Luscious Press. He is found online at robert-kloss.com.

An excerpt from The Alligators of Abrahamappears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Robert Kloss answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from The Alligators of Abraham.

Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Soon all sound became the sound of echoes, of wild dogs baying, of gulls shrieking and swirling, and those sounds were lost within the sounds of alligators, hissing and thrashing and devouring the meat of dead soldiers.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Remember how quiet the world was in the absence of crackling and humming.

3. When you do it, why?

“To forever hold what may not be held.”

4. When you don’t, why?

And in those days, when you were not in classes, you sat in the shadows of picture-houses watching biblical projections like The Original Sin, the sounds of static moans and the fumy black and white apparitions of a hundred positions of copulation, and Sodom and Gomorrah, the curves of women topless and women outfitted in pale diaphanous negligees, the parting of legs and those dark furs beneath, while greased men in headdresses carrying some manner of sword lingered behind stone monuments, and beneath the dialogue came the sound of meat dully slapping, the panting of viewers.

"Each Man Falling is What My Nightmares Brought": An Interview with Keith Montesano

Keith Montesano is the author of the poetry collections Ghost Lights (Dream Horse Press, 2010), and Scoring the Silent Film (Dream Horse Press, 2013). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, Blackbird, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at Binghamton University.

His poem "The Author as Man Who Stares Out His Window with the Others as John Rooney and His Men are Gunned Down in the Street in Road to Perdition" appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Keith Montesano talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about ekphrasis, movies, and sound that sneaks into one's ears. 

1. Usually when I encounter ekphrastic poetry, I find that it’s based off of some still art—a painting or sculpture—not something that already had a “voice” like a movie.  Could you talk about writing a poem around a scene from a movie?

I started writing this poem and the other ekphrastic film poems in my new book coming out next year, Scoring the Silent, from a springboard of having always wanted to include more film in my poems. I’m a cinephile and always have been, so there was a natural progression, I think, toward that inclusion over time.

There are numerous allusions to film—and poems specifically about films—in my first book, and the same goes for what I hope will eventually be my third book. So it seemed only natural, after I’d written a handful of these “The Author…” poems, to try and build them into a conceptual manuscript, even though I’d never tried anything like that before.

The first handful of poems came from specific scenes of various films that I thought would make an interesting poem from the vantage point of a fake peripheral character who’s watching something take place, but a character who could certainly be real, and, as far as the poem goes, is real. Then I started, as the project was coming to fruition, thinking about other scenes, or encountering new scenes, from various films, and sketches and notes were created about all of them.

In simple—and perhaps somewhat “too easy”—terms, considering all the films and scenes from which someone could choose: I let those scenes that needed to turn into poems come to me over time, and went from there.

2. What was the process of writing “The Author as Man Who Stares Out His Window with the Others as John Rooney and His Men are Gunned Down in the Street in Road to Perdition” like? 

This was a film I’d hoped to write about after I had maybe half of the book written. Conrad Hall’s cinematography is amazing and always has been (Road to Perdition was his last film he lensed before he died also), and once I re-watched it, I knew the slow motion scene of the gang getting gunned down would be perfect—I just needed to try and do justice to it.

The idea of watching, and in many poems as a kind of voyeurism, is central to many of the poems in Scoring the Silent Film, and this one especially was interesting for me to write because at the heart of the scene there are these men being gunned down in an alley between buildings—yet Sam Mendes and Conrad Hall don’t shy away from that. You can see curtains drawn and the blurred faces of families staring through their windows as it’s happening right before their eyes.

I wanted to try and get into the psyche of someone watching something like this, forcing the idea of ekphrasis from the scene and the entrance into that artistic world within a world that, in the moment, we take for the present in a filmic reality.

3. Sonically this poem relies heavily on the “w” sound, especially in the first half, with a line like, “What we want can be provided, if only we wait, & wait” and then the use of “watching,” “writhing,” and “wash” towards the beginning of three lines.  Do patterns of sound like this emerge in first drafts to be honed in on? Or, perhaps, are they always sneaking in the background of your ears?  Or something else?

I would have to say that those sounds you mention—and I like how you put it—snuck into the background of my ears. The poem is also a persona poem too, even though it remains only inside the speaker’s head. As someone who’s teaching poetry this semester, I try to tell my students that any semblance of luck with the success of a poem comes also with the hard work—but luck is certainly a part of it. Even if it’s as basic as a repetition working that you never really realized or intended as you were writing. That’s the magic that can happen with poetry, and I like to think also when you enter a speaker or persona’s psyche who’s describing some specific cinematic event that they’re witnessing.

4. Have any book suggestions for us?

I’ve recently started trying to find all my original, sometimes out-of-print copies of my favorites on my bookshelves: “Ghost Money” by Lynda Hull, “Tar” by C.K. Williams, “The Last Nostalgia” by Joe Bolton, “Winter Stars” by Larry Levis,” “Walt Whitman in Hell” by T.R. Hummer, “Mystery Train” by David Wojahn. There’s something about opening the original copy—not that single collection within a Selected or Collected—that can do something magical with its influence. And just as I’m a fan of natural film grain and as little DNR as possible when it comes to the reproduction of film digitally, I’m a purist, when I can be, when it comes to favorite books.

As far as newer books go: I’ve been really liking “Little Black Daydream” by Steve Kistulentz, and I’m always turning back to the recent collections “Paper Anniversary” by Bobby C. Rogers, and “Clamor” by Elyse Fenton.

So many to name, and still to read, and never enough time. 

5. What other sorts of writing are you working on right now?

I’m still shopping around my third book of poems, but thankfully I think it’s officially finished now, or at least I’m not technically writing new poems for it anymore, and that’s always a great thing after you’ve spent years on a book. I’ve also been at least attempting to generate ideas for a while now, and since I’m currently teaching the lyric essay, I have many ideas that I thought could work in poems that I now hope to turn into lyric essays of some kind (Lia Purpura has talked about the piece making itself known to her, whether it’s going to be a poem or lyric essay, and though I’m not even close to that stage, I feel like I’m learning more, as far as my intentions go, about which idea may be right for one or the other). There’s always the balance of trepidation and excitement when you begin to write something new, especially after, in my case, writing poetry for so many years in a row, so I’m excited to see what I can do with these. And also, finally, I’m hoping to start some book reviews and have that as a new outlet when the creative ideas aren’t coming to me as quickly as I’d like them to.

"That Imaginary Version of Between": An Interview with Rochelle Hurt

Rochelle Hurt lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she teaches for the Hinge Literary Center, the Carrboro ArtsCenter, and the Loft Literary Center online. Her poetry and prose can be found in recent or upcoming issues of KROnline, Crab Orchard Review, The Southeast Review, Hunger Mountain, Arts & Letters, Columbia Poetry Review, Passages North, Meridian, and Image.

Her poems "Poem In Which I Play the Runaway," "In Between, Georgia," and "In Hurt, Virginia" appear in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Rochelle Hurt talks with interviewer Amber Cook about weird town names, kinds of homes, identity, and complexity throughout her poems.

1. What made you write the three poems “In Hurt, Virginia,” “In Between, Georgia,” and “Poem in Which I Play the Runaway?” Were they all inspired by the same things, or did you have a separate impulse for each?

“In Between, Georgia” was the first of an ongoing series of poems titled after oddly-named (real) towns in the US. I can’t remember where I first read about Between, Georgia, but as soon as I did, I knew that I had to write a poem about it. Though I knew logically that the town’s name has nothing (necessarily) to do with its character, I just kept imagining a town full of people and things in a state of constant limbo, always between one place and another. That imaginary version of Between, Georgia seemed like a sad place, full of waiting—but also a little whimsical or goofy. From there, I started to seek out other weird town names for the series, finding Hurt, Virginia, among others. 

“Poem in Which I Play the Runaway” started as part of a different series of poems written in the voice of Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde). Of course, I was using Bonnie’s voice to talk about myself, so in the end I just decided to take off that mask.

2. For me, each time repetition is used, a word is altered or changes in definition, ever so slightly. Do you think that the continued repetition of “I was born” in your poem “In Hurt, Virginia” changes or transforms with each use? How does repetition work for you in your writing?

I don’t use repetition much, but when I do it’s usually as a way to establish a structure for an idea that I find initially intimidating or unwieldy—or when I am trying to transform the meaning of a word, as you say. While writing “In Hurt, Virgina,” I was playing with feelings of inferiority and difference in a way that required a certain kind of pride and frenzy. I didn’t want to write another sad poem about being an outcast or coming from a bad place. Something about repeating the phrase “I was born,” which feels so revelatory and unashamed (like “Here’s what you need to know about me”), seemed to help build momentum in a way that was transformative—a way of working up to pride. Of course, it’s also a great set-up for saying something crazy in each line.

3. The speaker in “In Hurt, Virginia” seems to attach herself to being born as small or lesser (i.e. a fleck, a stick, a kernel, a breadcrumb, etc.) Is that the way you intended for the speaker to be read?

(sort of covered in the previous question I think – also, I’m glad to hear that you got that from the poem, as it was intentional) 

4. In C.S. Giscombe’s book, “Giscome Road,” he seeks out and examines a place in Canada that he shares a surname with and assumes that he could be tied to the place, though he does not know for sure. Did you actively seek out the location Hurt, VA because of your last name? Do you have any specific attachment to Hurt? Is place something you often focus on in your poetry? 

I have never been to Hurt, Virginia, though I will probably try to go next time I’m in Virginia. I have no idea what it’s like there, and on the one hand I hope that I’m not being unfair or offensive by appropriating these towns’ names, but on the other, I don’t really believe that writers of poetry or fiction have an obligation to truth. So, yes, I chose it for our shared name. There are so many complex emotions and ideas tied to one’s surname (family legacies—good or bad, ownership, identity, authenticity), so when I discovered Hurt, Virginia in my search for more weird town names, it called out to me as a symbol of the links between identity (and all of those other things mentioned above) and place.

The intersection of place, home and identity is a theme that I am continually exploring in my poetry. I grew up in a rust belt town where there was always a strong sense of ambivalence among residents toward the town itself. Even today, I talk about that town (Youngstown, Ohio) with a mixture of deprecation and pride. All this is to say that the idea of place haunts me in a way conducive to writing poetry. I’m not familiar with Giscombe’s book, but it sounds like something I should read—especially since I just learned that we share a birthplace (Dayton, OH).  Maybe this obsession with place and identity is an Ohio thing?

5. Between, GA, like Hurt, VA, is a factual place but seems more fantastical throughout the poem with its namesake due to the things that happen there. Did you intend to mix fact and fiction, and if so, do you use that tactic often?

When writing the poems in this series, I thought it was important to use the names of real towns, even though I totally made up the contents of poems. In that way, the town names functioned simply as symbolic jumping-off points. I guess I usually mix a tiny bit of fact with a lot of fiction in my poetry. I find that the best way for me to “document” anything is through metaphor, so even those of my poems that could in some way be called historical or documentary wind up being pretty fantastical.

6. I love how “In Between, Georgia” opens with this string of beautiful lines to describe the body like “empty eyelids/ an orchard of four-fingered hands.” Is the physical body often something that you bring into your poems? 

It’s a motif that I find myself returning to, often as part of the larger theme of home—because the body is the most important and difficult kind of home, and the one that is most inseparable from identity.

7. To me as a reader, there is definitely a loss of innocence that comes after the first stanza in “Poem in Which I Play the Runaway.” The stanzas that follow seem to combine sexual undertones and violence. Did you mean for this shift to occur? How does this shift affect the speaker of the poem for you as the writer?

I think that by the end of the poem, she has relinquished any illusions about her identity—and disillusionment is a loss of innocence that is more profound than a sexual loss of innocence. Of course, the sexual and violent imagery parallels this loss as something to which the speaker grows accustomed (that is my intention, in any case). So perhaps the homelessness she refers to at the end is literal and metaphorical (self-image being yet another kind of home).

8. Formalistically, all three of your poems have distinctively different forms. Are you often varying form from one poem to the next? 

Absolutely—I work with whatever form the content seems most at home in, including prose.

9. Is there something that you read lately that you think other people should read as well? 

Yes—so many books by so many brilliant women. To name a few: Pretty by Kim Chinquee, Doll Studies: Forensics by Carol Guess, Murder Ballad by Jane Springer, Sing, Mongrel by Claire Hero, The Necropastoral by Joyelle McSweeney, Heart First Into the Forest by Stacy Gnall, All of Us by Elisabeth Frost, Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall, Small Fires (nonfiction) by Julie Marie Wade, and (fiction) Labrador by Kathryn Davis. Also, this amazing story by Kerry Ryan at the Kenyon Review (“The Cleverness of Crows”).

10. The poems feel very connected to each other because of their insistence on accepting place or rejecting place. Are they from a larger project? 

They are all part of a book-length manuscript I’ve been pulling together (which, for better or worse, appropriates some Wizard of Oz themes).  Right now, I’m calling it No Place. 

"States of Active Imagination": An Interview with Nick Francis Potter

Nick Francis Potter is a multimedia artist and writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife and two kids. He is a student in the Literary Arts MFA program at Brown University, and a recipient of The John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. His writing has appeared in Caketrain, Sleepingfish, >kill author, Untoward Magazine, and is forthcoming in the Yellow Issue of Fairy Tale Review. He curates the art and music blog, Forest Gospel, is a contributor to the literary group blog, Big Other, and publishes zines and chapbooks through his mini press, Paper Noise.

His story "Paul's Tomb: A Triumph?" appears in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Nick Francis Potter talks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about the interplay of image and text, where stories come from, and multimedia art.

1. Where did “Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph?” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

The story actually started as a review of a Frog Eyes album that goes by the same name (though, without the question mark) for a music blog that I started a few years ago. In fact, the first paragraph of the story is essentially a slightly elongated version of that “review”.  After writing the review, the idea of this Paul character who was the product of a sort of botched resurrection just really appealed to me, so I decided to replace the band (Frog Eyes) with a pathetic group of men and just let them loose on Paul.  And the whole thing sort of evolved from there.

2. One of the many things I love about this piece is the artful interaction between text and image.  For me, the images resonate with the text’s exploration of narrative possibility, the multiplicity at the playful heart of the transitions—“This happens:” and “Instead:” and “Now this:”.  Moving to drawings represents one more permutation, this time on the level of the medium.  Can you talk a little about your decision to include images?  (How else have you combined image and text, and how is what you’ve done here similar to or different from your previous approaches?)

I’ve always loved finding illustrations or images in fiction, ever since I was a little kid. In fact, long before I ever thought about writing fiction I was obsessed with drawing. So when I began writing fiction a few years back it just felt natural to be adding in illustrations. What’s been a challenge, or what I’ve found interesting and exciting about working with images, is finding ways for the images and text to interact, so that the images do more than just mimic or represent what’s happening in the text. I tried to push that even further in “Paul’s Tomb” by drawing full sections of the story in comic form. I’ve used standalone images before, as either illustrations drawn by a first-person narrator or as an absurdist metafictional element in the text, but this is the first time that I’ve introduced comics as a form of the storytelling within my prose.

3. In your bio, you mention that you’re a multimedia artist.  What have you learned from working in other art mediums that has had surprising applications in your writing?  (And/or, what have you learned from writing that has had surprising applications when you’re working in other art mediums?)

As a visual artist I’ve worked mostly in collaboration with my wife, Erin. She is really an amazing artist on so many levels and I probably would never have taken myself seriously as either an illustrator or a writer if it wasn’t for her.  One of the things we’ve always tended towards, regardless of medium—painting, mixed media, installations, screen-printing—is narrative. It’s something we’ve realized more in retrospect than anything else. We’ve rarely, if ever, invented a story as a starting point and built a piece around it. Mostly it just kind of comes together in the act of drawing or painting or whatever it is we’re doing; characters materialize and a world naturally develops around them. The same has been true for me in writing. “Paul’s Tomb” is a perfect example of a character more-or-less spontaneously arriving, and a world developing around it in the process of writing. Writing and drawing for me are both states of active imagination / ways of imagining.

4. What other writing/multimedia projects are you working on right now?

I have been writing a lot of short stories, a good portion of which use illustrations or have comic sequences, but not all of them. I also just completed the first draft of a novel this summer, which is kind of exciting and a first for me. It’s about a ten year old boy who grows a beard and finds The SS The Mrs Unguentine. Kind of an all-ages metafictional homage, of sorts, to Stanley Crawford, Donald Barthelme, and Flann O’Brien. And then a bunch of other half-ideas that aren’t worth mentioning here, but essentially a lot of writing and not enough painting or screen-printing.

5.  What knock-out writing/multimedia art have you been enjoying recently?  Are there any upcoming releases/exhibits you're excited about?

I recently saw an Os Gemeos exhibition in Boston which was really awesome and made me wish I had a little more time do some big paintings with Erin. And at some point I’d like to get out to MASS MoCa to see their Invisible Cities group show. I’ve also been watching a lot of Adventure Time with my son. I read Big Questions over the summer by Anders Nelson, which was absolutely amazing. One of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read. Also really loved Dina Kelberman’s mini-comic, Relax.  She has a couple new books coming out that I’m looking forward too. And the new Chris Ware graphic novel coming out—I’m really excited for that one. In terms of prose, recent books I’ve really liked are Lutz Bassman’s We Monks & Soldiers, Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, and Reader’s Block by Markson.  I just picked up Christopher Boucher’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, too, so I’m excited to read that. Also looking forward to Shadow Man by Gabriel Blackwell. And I’m always listening to way too much music, as my wife will tell you.

"Imperfect Topography": An Interview with Dylan Nice

Dylan Nice's debut collection Other Kinds is out this month from Hobart's Short Flight / Long Drive Books. His stories and essays have appeared in NOON, Indiana Review, MAKE, Hobart, Brevity, and Quick Fiction, among others. He lives in Iowa and is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.

His story "Flat Land" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Dylan Nice speaks with interviewer David Bachmann about beautifully tainted landscapes, characters without borders, and self-discovery.

1. The “foul-smelling mist” of “brown floodwater” and waters that run “ran orange with iron” lend a perversely wonderful substance to the places these characters inhabit. Are you shooting for such descriptors to act as flaws or as assets of the environment(s) of your piece?

I think of them as flaws and as assets. I have these vivid memories of my childhood in rural Pennsylvania, ones in which I’m alone and standing beside a bright orange river, or on top of a mound of slate, or walking far into the woods on a rail bed whose ties are piled and rotting in the weeds, and feeling a kind of privilege, nigh on elitism that I was allowed to be near something so ruined, and that the beautiful things I found there I didn’t have to share with anyone else. It was a deep and private love. I remember figuring out early, on trips to beaches or state parks, that places regarded as beautiful by other people where usually crowded and noisy, and that the people who went there were after an easy beauty. This might be a flaw of mine, but I often deny myself joy which comes easily. I find myself fighting for free gifts.

So I love the ugly places, because loving them feels like something earned.

2. How are you hoping the reader interprets a character like Jason who has fallen “in love with hardship?” (Is this admirable? How does the speaker feel about his brother’s apparent calling to live a hard life?) 

I do have an older brother who still lives back home and who is pretty accurately described in circumstances of Jason. But the sentiment of being in love with hardship is a former sentiment of mine that I ascribed to Jason. When I first left home for the Midwest, I thought a love of hardship was probably the most admirable philosophy a person could live out.  I was certain keeping yourself near the earth, close to death, in a constant state of palpable struggle, would guard you against dilution, corruption, and ultimately, cowardice.

It’s a sentiment I’ve since abandoned out of necessity. Something in the idea still excites me, still feels true, but I’m prone to zealotry. If I’m not careful, I become a little lopsided, a little grotesque with the weight of a certain truth.

The Midwest ended up being a good place in which to dismantle my zealotry. It is a landscape and culture which seems to absorb violent intent: you can lie to it or plow its grasses over, and it’s not keen to argue. Eventually, everything you have escapes into its size and it’s you who are ready to be cultivated.

3. There is something comforting, constraint-lifting, and therefore liberating, about having “nothing on the horizon, nothing farther in the distance to mark time.” There is also the potential that such is the position of someone who has given up, for whom aspiration is no longer an option. What is your take on your speaker’s having gotten used to having nothing on the horizon?

I think you described the complication well. I would say the objects formerly on the horizon—the mountains, the wilderness—in addition to being symbols of home and comfort, are also symbols of antipathy for the speaker: a battle against the limitation which once defined him. Driving out of his steep history and into the flat land, he is at once liberated and destroyed.

One caveat: I don’t think of his position as a loss of aspiration, but instead as a necessary submission to a freefall which is not yet finished.

4. The speaker states that he “left to sort out what was me and wasn't.” Do you want the reader to believe that he either successfully sorted himself out or that he will? Is it important either way?

The speaker is a little misguided in the notion that he’s going to sort himself out. What’s more important than that idea, or at least requisite to a more complete sense of self, is the realization of meaninglessness. That’s not to say I think meaninglessness is a complete construct for the way things are, but it is part of it. It might be that once the speaker confronts meaninglessness, exhausts himself against it, he and it will become better friends. He’ll learn to allow meaning—love, wholeness—to pass over him and dissipate in its own frustrating and rapturous cycles. I can say he’s not there yet, though. I think of the story as a description of the space which is not being there yet.

5. Is it impossible for the speaker to live in one place? If so, does this qualify him as a man without a country? Or is it simply that no place is willing to accommodate him?

I think the story and the collection it’s in are more concerned with the internal than the external. The narrators and characters aren’t so much as men searching for places as they are men searching for selves. You might say this lack of identity does echo out into the political in certain regards. It rules out the kind of strongly believed self-narrative needed to attach one’s self to a reassuring collective narrative. But the land and political system in which these stories take place, while not without significance, is ultimately coincidental. The problem of living in a place is preempted by the problem of living within the self.

6. What are you reading these days?

Lately, since I spend so much time on the computer, I’ve been reading almost exclusively things I come across online. A lot of stories, essays, and articles friends link to on facebook or twitter and which secure my interest in the first couple sentences. I think the internet is good for readers and reading. Instead of making time to read at night when I’m tired and impatient, I’m reading in bursts all day.

When I do sit down to read, I find myself usually reading old books: books by writers who have already had their careers. I’m comforted by history. I want things which are of a time, and I’m more relaxed if that time’s not right now. I’m working on a thick anthology of Norman Mailer’s essays, completely stunned by the breadth and aliveness of his sentences. I return to Didion’s essays weekly. I just finished David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and was dizzied by pretty much everything he’s able to do.

7. What are you writing these days?

I draft new work very rarely. I spend much more time fiddling with drafts I’ve had for years, mining them for something vital, an essential and pressing feeling that might lend me the energy and vision to finish them. Right now, I have two longer short stories I’m trying to beat the truth out of. I used to draft more often and give up on them more easily, but I think I felt more rushed then. Now, I’m more comfortable with the idea of the process taking a long, long time. 

"Dramatic Fingers Reaching from the Organs": An Interview with Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is a Kundiman Fellow and the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize and MacLeod-Grobe Poetry Prize. Her work is featured and forthcoming in Best New Poets 2012, the VONA anthology Dismantle, Volta, DIAGRAM, diode, and others. Currently, she serves as the associate editor of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry. She teaches and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her poem "[My grandmother is dying]" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Mia Ayumi Malhotra speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the the idea of body, terminal illness, and framing.

1. What was the writing process of "[My grandmother is dying]"?

It’s not often that one feels the force of a poem as it’s being written, but that’s how it felt to write “[My grandmother is dying].” I was overcome by this awful urgency, like the room had been compressed and if I was to escape I had to write my way out. I got the first draft down very quickly, almost without stopping, then refused to look at it for a week because the piece was so charged with feeling. It was as though my impressions of the Guggenheim exhibit were pushing themselves on me, demanding of me a form on the page.

2. After I looked up the exhibit mentioned at the end of the poem, I could really feel the how the “action painting” of artists in the exhibit, like Jackson Pollock, influenced the form of the poem—the fluidity of the language mimics the motions of the paint.  Could you talk about how you see your poem conversing with the exhibit?

Poets often talk about lenses and framing devices; when I received the news about my grandmother’s illness, everything was structured by my understanding of what was happening to her body. The fist-sized tumors, the unchecked, malevolent growth taking place within. I received the news as an assault to the body. To the idea of the body, that is; what it means to have a physical form and to be safe within it.

Though I didn’t walk into the Guggenheim thinking about this, when I encountered this particular painting—its dramatic reds, the violent, disrupted shapes—I was confronted with a visual representation of everything that had been turning in my mind. And because it was a work of abstract expressionism, I was made to feel the medium. Its process, its urgency. The poem is simply how I responded to this encounter.

I should also say something about the unique architecture of the Guggenheim; I was there with a friend, and rather than approaching the exhibit conventionally from the bottom floor up, we took it from the top down—which felt like tumbling, slowly and inevitably, through dozens of distinctive viewing experiences. Once we’d begun our way down the curved walkway of the museum, there was no turning back; this feeling, of course, informs the syntax and structure of the poem.

3. Why did you decide to leave this poem named as the first line?  How do you think not having a title unique from the rest of the text affects the way that the poem is read?

None of the poems I wrote during this time are titled. Much of this is because every piece is, either directly or indirectly, a continuation of the previous one. You start to feel this way, negotiating the illness of a family member. There’s a progression, but it’s not always linear, and often you feel you’re not moving clearly through time. Receiving the news of a terminal diagnosis isn’t something you’re ever prepared for. Instead, it’s an experience into which you find yourself thrown headlong: without warning, and without the benefit of any kind of organizing principle. For me, this news, like the painting at the Guggenheim, simply entered my field of consciousness. No time for a title, curator’s notes. This is precisely what struck me about the museum’s exhibit space. Though I was the one who entered each viewing space, initiating the encounter with each painting, I very quickly felt myself overtaken by the piece’s visual demands on me. I felt that the experience of the poem needed to mirror the experience of the painting—in that particular museum space—as well as the diagnosis that framed the encounter.

4. What have you read recently that’s pulled at your heartstrings?

I recently started teaching full-time, so I haven’t had much time to read poetry… but I’m slowly working through Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s Rules of the House. I’ve been savoring every poem because she has this way of leveling the reader with the slightest detail, all the while developing complex arcs that echo and extend throughout the book. I’ve been writing prosier poems these days, so I find that Dhompa’s work operates with—and directs—many of the impulses that now move me to write. I’ll also say that living in the San Francisco area has also made it possible for me to hear some fabulous poets in the past few months: Michelle Naka Pierce, Jai Arun Ravine, Cathy Park Hong, Rick Barot (in SF last month for LitQuake). There’s such a wealth of community here, and I’ve been amazed at the voices that it draws from around the country.

5. What other writings have you been working through?

I’ve had to take a break from my manuscript because of this teaching job, but I’ve been revising a collection of poems that ask questions of the body and its borderlands: adolescence, life and death, land and sea, national identities, etc. I’m excited about the manuscript, however, and looking forward to working the poems into one final, cohesive arc. Besides that, I’ve been working on a sequence of poems that move from image to text in the form of captions, something I’ve been intrigued by because it extends the conversation between visual and textual media.

"The Story Burst Forth": An Interview with Yanara Friedland

Yanara Friedland has worked as a journalist, translator, writer and teacher in both Europe and the U.S. She is currently finishing her PhD at the University of Denver and writing her first book length collection of (hi)stories. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Les Editions Maelstrom, The Herald Magazine, Nomads Magazine, Drunken Boatand Quarterly West.

Her story "The Moths" appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Yanara Friedland talks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about subtle voyeurism, being "taken over" by voice, and the PhD in Creative Writing.  Enjoy!

1. Where did “The Moths” begin for you, and how did this piece get to here? 

“The Moths” started when I was living in a small room in a quiet suburban neighborhood of Denver. The neighborhood is mostly residential and unnerving in a peaceful orderly kind of way. My room, in which I wrote, slept and stared, had large windows that overlooked the garden and my neighbor’s garden. Initially, I paid no attention to the ongoings, mostly children playing or being ushered into cars, but after a while a subtle voyeurism crept in. I started to pick up on my neighbors’ routines and rituals. It wasn’t an active watching but rather a background noise that became part of my daily awareness of the environment. Over time a subtle map developed inside of my mind. Then a burglary occurred, and there was a noticeable shift in the energetic pattern of the map. Now everyone was watching each other and within this collectively heightened state I began writing. The story was written in May and the moths were, needless to say, outrageous. The story burst forth during this daily accumulation of random observations and the armies of moths. My writing is in some way always about place, but “The Moths” was the first serious attempt to illuminate not the conclusive sentimentality of looking back at a place but cast a glance at the connective webs that are continuous and presently spun.

2. I love how the the narrator flits from topic to topic in a moth-like way—the many single-sentence paragraphs give the feeling of landing and taking off.  We sense that we’re in a “spiral flight path that gets closer and closer” to a number of “light sources.”  This passage seems to be describing the narrator’s approach: “When a moth encounters a much closer artificial light and uses it for navigation, the angle changes noticeably after only a short distance.”  Can you talk a little about the challenges and pleasures of writing in this voice, and what surprises it led to? 

The most exciting writing for me happens when I am “taken over” by a voice, not necessarily in a haunted way (although that can be potent too), but rather when the piece arrives with an undeniable vision and authority as to how it wants to be written. I did not consciously decide to write it in single line paragraphs but the writing asserted itself in such a manner. I was amazed at the connective potential and still feel that this piece could go on endlessly, that there are further layers and insertions that do not necessarily plot around a particular event but gather the world in its fragmented winded rhythm. 

3. I read in you bio that you’re finishing up your PhD at the University of Denver.  Is it a PhD in Creative Writing?  If so, how has it affected (or crystalized, or clarified) your relationship to your writing? 

Yes, it is a PhD in Creative Writing, a strange thing to wrap your head around, especially if you are from Germany, where Creative Writing departments are only now gaining some currency. Most people don’t quite understand how you can “learn” or for that matter teach Creative Writing. Yet I have benefited enormously from being part of this program. Mostly because it has allowed me to have a bunch of very sophisticated readers look at my work on a regular basis, but also because it gives the space, time and money to pursue strange investigations, read even stranger books, and then write the strangest of them all at your own pace. I am grateful for the language, material and beautiful artistic oddities I have been exposed to as part of my PhD.

4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

First and foremost I am finishing my book, a collection of short stories, re-imagined tales inspired by the Old Testament, family histories and dreams.  A kind of totemic writing for my tribe. Second in line is a translation project, work by the German poet and visual artist Unica Zürn. Eventually, this should be more than just a translation of her work and include contemplations on her struggles with mental illness, her self imposed exile and her short but deeply visionary life. The third project is too raw to talk about at this point but it looms and elbows occasionally above and into my daydreams.

5.  What knock-out writing have you been enjoying recently?  Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about? 

The most exciting release this year (or ever), for me personally, has been New Direction’s reissue of five of the major Clarice Lispector novels. A stunning collection, including the never before translated posthumous work A Breath of Life, marvelous book covers, and a diverse pool of translators shedding new light on these texts. It’s a powerful homage to one of the greatest female writers of the 20^th century, and I am deeply grateful for New Direction’s acknowledgement of Clarice Lispector’s timeless relevance.