"It Should Stab Rather than Meditate": An Interview with Colette Arrand

Colette Arrand currently lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is a student at the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Establishment, The Atlas Review, Powder Keg, and elsewhere. She can be found online at her website, or on the blog Fear of a Ghost Planet.

Her essays, "011. Metapod" and "129. Magikarp," appeared in Issue Seventy-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Colette Arrand talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about brevity, transformation, and writing about video games.

When you begin to write one of your Pokémon essays, do you begin with a specific creature and its Pokédex entry in mind? Or do you write a draft free of that influence and then choose a Pokémon that befits it later? (Or does it vary from case to case?) What else can you tell us about the origins of these particular essays, “Metapod” and “Magikarp”?

It always starts with the Pokédex entry. I know my goal here, which is 151 Pokémon, so it’s not a matter of “Do I feel like writing about Merrill or Trubbish today?” because I’m not familiar with those Pokémon—they’re not mine. When I started writing these (and you can read the first two that I wrote at Cartridge Lit), it was after months of just talking to people about how weird Pokémon is as a world, if you think about it, and the Pokédex entries kind of confirmed it. I’ve been writing in response to them for this project. They trigger memory or emotion or both, and then I try to work through those and see where they end up.

While the balance is shifting now, I wrote a lot of the Pokémon essays that are out in journals before I came out as transgender, including Magikarp and Metapod. One of the mechanics of Pokémon being evolution—forced changes enacted upon monstrous bodies—the metaphor for the way my body had changed in childhood and would soon and is currently changing in adulthood seemed obvious, but shrouded enough that I could get away with something while debating how public I wanted to be about my gender, if I wanted to be public about it at all. That’s probably more obvious in Metapod—I think if you’ve encountered a transition narrative (which these essays are and aren’t), then you’ve probably encountered the idea of a butterfly emerging from chrysalis. Metapod’s an odd Pokémon in the game, one you have to really work with to get it to evolve to Butterfree, as it doesn’t know any attacks and can really only harden its shell to protect itself from other monsters. So that’s what I’m working with, this sense of biding time, simultaneously hardening oneself against attacks while remaining a tender, vulnerable organism. Magikarp works in a similar fashion, as it is an incredibly weak Pokémon whose only attack is the useless “flail,” but if you throw him into battle enough times he evolves into a dragon. Initially I had those two essays linked, but Gyrados wasn’t really working for me—it’s a theme I’d explored elsewhere, better. Magikarp I liked the central image of, this interaction with my dad, who is a man that I love but whom I don’t have a long record of communication with. It doesn’t take much to trigger that memory, either. Food that I ate in large quantity when I was younger. A restaurant that I walk past every day on my way to work and school. Ed Pavlić, who is an agonizingly great professor and poet at the University of Georgia, once told me that it was good that I couldn’t afford to travel much beyond Athens because it would make me more present in my environment. Magikarp (and other essays like it) is that theory in practice.

“Magikarp” consists of fewer than 500 words, “Metapod” only 200. Why do you write such concise essays? Does it require a lot of revision and/or restraint in order to achieve this economy of language?

Part of why these essays are so short is because I plan on there being 151 of them, but most are so emotionally taxing that I mentally can’t go farther than what’s on the page. I write longer essays elsewhere, but I think because I learned how to write online, where brevity is aspired to, I learned how to write a lot and then cut back some. In the case of Metapod and Magikarp, there was a lot of revision. I think the first draft of Metapod, which I wrote while proctoring student evaluations in a campus computer lab, was something like 1,200 words. But I start a new document and overwrite the old one every time I revisit an essay so I can’t really say what was or wasn’t lost except that there was a much more raw version of that essay which was explicitly about my body in a way that I don’t feel was honest. Or sometimes I’ll write an entire essay, let it sit there for a few days, and decide that it doesn’t work at all and start over again. I wrote one for Metapod’s sister cocoon Pokémon Kakuna that was also about metamorphosis, but more so about how I obsessed over transformation sequences in comic books and movies. It’s a good idea, one that deserves an essay, but the emotion of it is off. There’s a monster that’s a hard, angry looking shell with a poison stinger on it. It should stab rather than meditate, and in truth it did neither. So yeah, it’s a matter of form because they have to be short to fit together in a book and revision because I want the rhetorical point I’m driving at to be as sharp as possible, even when I’m working through some rather messy emotions.

In “Magikarp,” you tell a student that “a more impressive trick than telling me a fast-food sandwich is delicious would be to explore the reasons why.” Do you apply this type of advice to your own writing—trying to pull off the most impressive trick? How does this way of thinking manifest itself in your essays?

I wonder about that myself, because I’ve recently started freelancing and I can’t tell sometimes if the sentences I’m writing on assignment are clearly evoking an idea or if I’m noodling around with words just to show that I can. It’s a fine line, I think. That student came to me with an essay that said that we all knew why those chicken sandwiches were delicious, and as a vegetarian who grew up in Michigan all I really know about them was that Chick-fil-A had a rather miserable record of working against the civil interests of queer people, at least as far as the then-big issue of marriage was concerned. So I said it wasn’t convincing, just saying that some sandwich from some place was good. Like, when you’re telling a friend to eat somewhere you don’t just go “Oh yeah, that place is good.” You know all the reasons why. With these essays I’m trying to deal more with the why of the emotion or memory or action or conversation than the what. In truth, a lot of conversations I’ve had about my body are boring. I’m a life-long student, so most of the things I’ve done are boring, too. But there are layers and layers of thought and action that make up those things, and the trick, I think, is to access them. In the Pokémon essays initially, the trick was to unlock them and hide them simultaneously, though I don’t think that’s what I’m doing anymore. In other essays, particularly ones I’ve written about the experience of being transgender, about the early stages of transitioning, and so on, the trick is to write about it in a way where I’m not exploiting myself or other trans people while also casting it for a much larger audience. I think the difference is that I thought of these essays as very private ones, and I write for myself differently than I write for others. I’m not playing any tricks, I don’t think, but I’m using different techniques to please different masters.

In the past few years, we’ve seen writing (both literature and criticism) based on video games grow in abundance and popularity (I’ve even been guilty of such writing myself). While it’s only a small niche in the larger literary landscape, of course, video-game writing has become more visible, at least, thanks to publishers like Boss Fight Books and Cartridge Lit. What’s the appeal for you of works with video games at their center (or periphery)? Why do you think more and more people are writing and reading about video games?

Ha, the idea of being “guilty” of that kind of writing is an interesting one to me because if there’s any guilt to be had over writing about pop culture, I don’t feel it. Video games and other “low culture” items (low culture in quotes because I don’t believe in the distinction) are supposed to be taboo in literary circles, I guess, because they’re a vehicle for pure pleasure, but for me, growing up they were the only cultural objects. Television, pop music, video games, comic books, professional wrestling. That’s what I had. I read voraciously, of course, but science fiction and Star Wars novels are probably held in similar standing. If writers are coming out and writing very poignantly about video games now (and the examples you’re pointing to are proof enough that they are) then its because a lot of us have similar cultural experiences and know better than to tag things as “low” or “high” and are willing to fight for these objects as art. I know poets who stopped writing poetry and took up game design, and I know novelists and essayists who’ve taken assignments writing novelizations of the games they loved as children (Matt Bell’s Dungeons and Dragons novel, for instance) or games developed by people who realize how intertwined gaming and writing are. For me, games have always been a means of exploring identity in a safe space—playing Pokémon on a Game Boy, the only person who knew I had the Pikachu edition (you know, for girls) or that I had given my boy character a girl’s name was me. A book can deal with identity, too, of course, but unless you’re reading a gamebook, even a video game adaptation’s sense of identity is closed off and limited. The first question Pokémon asks you is your name. That’s an enormous power to give to somebody. I think in video game literature you see an appreciation for that power, as well as encouragement to explore a world, make mistakes, and figure out what it means to be a person navigating through a complex societal system whose rules and functions were dictated by people you’ve never met. That it’s possible (even encouraged) to break that system is tremendously empowering.

What other writing projects are you working on now?

Beyond this, I’m working on a few things. At Entropy I’m writing a series of essays about famous and infamous wrestling matches (SHOOT FIGHT), and at Queen Mob’s Teahouse I am writing about music videos (ADD/MTV). I’ve been writing movie reviews online for seven years through my blog, Fear of a Ghost Planet and recently started self-publishing zines. I’ve done one about the poetry of pro wrestling interviews, am working on the second issue of that, and am also working on zines or ongoing projects about queer movie villains and Star Wars fan fiction focusing on the mundane daily lives of ridiculous spacefaring superheroes. In my spare time, I’m learning how to write comic book scripts and have thought about game design as a means of storytelling, but I also need to finish my degree, so those things are likely on the backburner until I free up some time, somewhere.

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

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, Motherlover by Ginger Ko, The Bruise by Magdalena Zurawski, Binary Star by Sarah Gerard, Nevada by Imogen Binne, and A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett, as far as what I’ve read in the past three months. And zines. God. If you have a niche interest (and you do), there is a zine out there for you. The ones I’ve loved most recently are Shotgun Seamstress, The Atomic Elbow, Pro Wrestling Feelings, and Merrit Kopas’ These Were Free on My Blog.

“From the Frying Pan Into the Fire!”: An Interview with Dave Housley

Dave Housley's third collection of short fiction, If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home, was published by Dzanc Books in January 2015. He is the author of Commercial Fiction (Outpost 19) and Ryan Seacrest is Famous (Impetus Press; Dzanc Books rEprint). He is one of the founding editors of Barrelhouse magazine, and a co-founder of the Conversations and Connections writer’s conference. This story is part of what might be a new collection, Massive Cleansing Fire, in which every story ends in a massive cleansing fire. Seriously. Maybe. Sometimes he drinks boxed wine and tweets about the things on his television at @housleydave.

His story, "Those People," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interview Dana Diehl about Paula Deen, celebrities with a sense of humor, and allowing our characters to be evil.

Sara Lane is clearly influenced by Paula Deen and her racist comments back in 2013. What first inspired you to write about this?

Obviously you’re right about Paula Deen. Most of the time, for me, stories start as an idea of a person in a situation. Right around the time the whole Paula Deen thing was blowing up, I read an article written by somebody who had taken the Paula Deen Cruise (which it should be noted is a Real Thing), and I thought, I wonder what it would be like to be an African American person on that cruise. Then, what if that person won the cruise, so they weren’t even there on purpose, really. So that is the person in the situation. I thought it had some tension and the Paula Deen character, Sara Lane, was really fun to write– she’s this totally ridiculous character with a spray-on tan and silly hair and she spouts all this country down home nonsense, but she’s also smarter than all that in a really malevolent way.

There is an interesting trend right now of writers pulling celebrities into their stories. Can you tell us why you chose to transform Paula Deen into “Sara Lane”?

I don’t know why I chose to change the name, actually. I feel kind of like a wimp, now that you ask. I mean, my first book was called “Ryan Seacrest is Famous,” so I should be up for just writing a Paula Deen story. I guess probably I changed the name because Paula Deen seems litigious, and also seems like somebody who doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about herself (side note: best thing anybody ever told me about Ryan Seacrest -- “Ryan doesn’t find anything about Ryan to be remotely funny.”). I just read through the story again and it’s pretty squarely Paula Deen. I think the only thing I made up is the University of Tennessee thing, and the brother’s name, Olean, which I’m really proud of because it does sound kind of like a down-home country style name, and it’s also another name for Olestra, a fat substitute from the 90s that was known to cause explosive diarrhea and anal leakage.

I love how fully evil you allow Sara Lane to become at the end of this story. I feel that most stories choose to end in a place of mutual compassion and empathy between characters, and I found it extremely satisfying to read a story that avoided that trope. It was gratifying to learn that a person we hate was deserving of that hate. Please speak to this ending.

Thanks for that question! I really appreciate it. As I said above, I was thinking of her as this character who is really acting, and she’s got this ridiculous costume she wears around, with the hair and the spray-on tan and the accent and the southern manners, but underneath all that she’s this awful CEO villain who is just using the protagonist to try to wiggle out of the situation she’s gotten herself into. I wanted her to kind of reveal herself to him in that way, one scene at a time, so these pieces of the costume, or of her act, are falling away and in the end she’s just basically telling him how it is: she’s the one-percenter and he’s nobody and she’s going to show him, even if she has to sink the ship to do it.

I should also say I’m not that conscious of a writer, so when I was writing I was really just trying to push the protagonist further and further, and she was the obvious way to do that. I did always think of her as putting on this act, but I was not as conscious of that act falling away as I was writing.

If this story were to happen in the real world, what would the trending headline be the morning after the incident?

“From the Frying Pan Into the Fire!” 

Who is inspiring you right now (it could be a writer, musician, director, artist, or celebrity chef)?

I was interested in the Ryan Adams project where he did a song-by-song cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 album. As somebody who has written a whole book of stories based on television commercials, I’m interested in offbeat projects, and I like Ryan Adams’ music, or a good percentage of it, at least. I know he was accused of “mansplaining” the album but I really don’t think that was it, or at least I read some interviews that seemed very honest and explained his motivation in ways that sounded legit to me – he had just finished up a tour and an album and was looking for a project to work on, and he says they actually write similar songs in a way that I’m not musical enough to understand. I thought that was a cool, interesting project, and as somebody who has worked on some really offbeat projects, there’s something there that I recognize and like.

What projects are you working on these days?

Speaking of offbeat projects, I’m actually finishing up a new story collection right now and I’m hoping to start shopping it around in the new year. It’s a group of stories that all end in the same way. It’s called Massive Cleansing Fire and every story ends in a fire. It includes “Those People.” Right now I’m in the place where I’m trying to play around a little with the idea of story endings and especially ending a story in this kind of “meaningful seeming” way, with a big fire. It’s pretty fun and I have no idea if it’s a really stupid idea or not, which seems to be where I wind up with a lot of the things I do.

"Temporal Dislocation in a Changing World": An Interview with Edward Gauvin

 Anne Richter (1939 - ) is a prominent Belgian author, editor, and scholar of the fantastic. Her first collection, Le fourmi a fait le coup, was written at the age of fifteen and translated as The Blue Dog (Houghton Mifflin, 1956) by Alice B. Toklas, who praised her in the preface. She is known for her twice-reprinted international anthology of female fantastical writers, whose introductory essay she expanded into a study of the genre. She has also edited official anthologies of the fantastical work of Meyrink and de Maupassant. Her four collections have won her such Belgian honors as the Prix Franz De Wever, the Prix Félix Denayer, the Prix du Parlement, and the Prix Robert Duterme. She is a member of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Association of Belgian Writers, and PEN.

Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from PEN America, the NEA, the Fulbright program, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the French-American Foundation and Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House , Harper's, and World Literature Today. The translator of more than 200 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.

Edward Gauvin's translations of her work have appeared in The Collagist and Sisters of the Revolution, an anthology of feminist speculative fiction from PM Press.

Anne Richter's story, "The Great Pity of the Zintram Family," translated by Edward Gauvin, appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, Edward Gauvin speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about how translators are like cover bands, Poe’s “unity of effect,” and translation as a chance for reciprocal influence.

What first drew you to this story by Anne Richter?

Honestly, it was the completely loopy prayer to Fire the father offers up at dinner that sold me. I’m drawn to stories that raise conflicts and questions, then defer them in favor of forward movement. Stories that entice, even mislead, with promise; stories almost (meta)morphic, constantly on the verge of becoming a different kind of story, about something else. By the end some kind of closure is made available—sometimes poetic, often oblique—but the drama is not addressed in the lock-step storytelling fashion often preached (“character wants something,” “obstacle to wanting,” etc.).

“The Great Pity of the Zintram Family,” both tonally and content-wise, reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe’s “House of Usher.” Were there any writers/translators that you were influenced by when working on this piece?

That’s a great comparison for many reasons, both within and outside the text: the water imagery, the incest theme, a verse interlude, the pervasive sense of doom. Poe’s a definite touchstone for Francophone fantastical writers, due entirely to Baudelaire’s famous and transformative translations, and Richter, herself a scholar and editor of fantastical work, is an acutely self-conscious of these traditions. “Zintram” certainly also aspires to Poe’s “unity of effect.” I suppose to me a mark of the story’s modernity relative to Poe is its compression, which is a way to combat reader familiarity. Major events happen in a very short span of narrative time.

When I was working on Zintram, I’d spent several years steeped in 20^th century French and Belgian fantastical fiction—reading, translating, researching, writing critical sketches for Weird Fiction Review—so I was very aware of the Francophone side. While there aren’t specific writers or translators I’d single out, I was also generally conscious of addressing a tradition—or two, really, wanting to put Francophone work in the corresponding Anglophone context to spark a conversation. Every translation is a chance for exchange, for reciprocal influence, and certain traditions are more closely twinned than others, have a close and almost… incestuous? history.

What was the most challenging aspect of translating this work of fiction from French to English?

Richter has a very nimble voice—for all its watery imagery, her story never bogs down—so fleetness and fluidity were my priorities. I was careful with alliteration. A translation is a record of the translator’s comprehension (that is, explaining a text to him/herself—the first draft especially); the fantastic must never be leaden or overexplain.

Do you feel that English changes the tone of this story in any ways? If so, how?

I think the very name “Zintram” strikes a more eccentric note to French ears than to ours. It’s exotic, claptrap, nonsensical—the singsong “Lady Zintram-Zintram” mention is meant to highlight that—and this additional strangeness can get lost, for English readers, dismissed simply as foreign as anything else. In an earlier draft I actually tried switching names for the brother and sister—they became Roberta and Gilbert, old-fashioned names both—because I wanted emphasize the noble family’s almost temporal dislocation in a changing world. In French, it’s Robert and Gilberte, the latter of which led to Gilbertine.

There’s this idea, along with the translator’s invisibility, of a translation’s transparency: a pane through something once obscure magically becomes legible. I guess I think of a translation as a cover: you didn’t write it. Your band is probably different, your style is different. But you can still pay it tribute, and if you do it right and you’re lucky, own a piece of it forever. In fact, with every tiny choice you make, you’re helpless but to leave your mark on it.

What are you working on now?

Comics are my bread-and-butter, always coming and going across my desk. Two of the largest French comics publishers, Delcourt-Soleil and Dargaud-Dupuis, have recently taken the new media initiative of trying to reach American readers directly with digital offerings, the first with a selection of titles on Comixology, and the second with their own beautiful site, Europe Comics. These should really open the eyes of American readers to the glorious diversity of art style and subject matter in one of the richest comics traditions the world has to offer.

New York Review of Books also enters the graphic novel game next spring with the brand-new imprint New York Review Comics. I’m proud to have translated one of the launch titles, Blutch’s eerie and majestic toga epic Peplum, a contemporary remix of Petronius’ classic Satyricon.

Meanwhile, I’ve got four full-length prose translations coming out from now to next fall. The first, Eyes Full of Empty, is a contemporary Parisian noir featuring a Kabyle fixer, an antihero who offers a new point of view on race and class in a gripping yarn that upends a few of the usual satisfactions. Jérémie Guez, a rising star of French crime, was flown over by the Embassy and we have a few tour dates in California this week, northern and southern, courtesy of our publisher, the LA-based Unnamed Press.

The second is Serge Brussolo’s The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, a book I pitched to Melville House as “Inception directed by David Cronenberg,” though traces of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard can also be detected. Due out mid-January, with the first chapter online and an overview here.

Belgian fabulist Paul Willem’s slim autumnal collection, The Cathedral of Mist, comes out in the spring. In the last few years, Tin House has run two of the stories, including the title piece, and Subtropics another. This work of melancholy beauty is my second book with Cambridge-based curator of Euro-obscurities Wakefield Press, after Jean Ferry’s The Conductor and Other Tales.

And finally, next fall should see my next Jean-Philippe Toussaint translation, the final novel in his “Marie tetralogy,” Nue, from Dalkey Archive.

Are there any translation projects you can recommend to us?

To be honest, the past year’s staggering workload has left me little time for pleasure reading, something I hope to rectify with the holidays. I salute not only the many young small presses doing amazing work in translation, but the new openness of literary magazines, upstart and established, to work in translation, though I do wish that rights legwork didn’t always fall on the translator. I know litmags are sorely understaffed, but in our IP-centric world, rights are an issue of increasing importance, and a better understanding of them would help just about anyone in publishing.

I was recently at the American Literary Translators Association’s annual conference, and at the book fair there, I picked up the massive tome Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! from The University of Chicago Press, an anthology that unites several translators’ work on the eccentric and visionary Paul Scheerbart.

"The Profitlessness of Seeking Peace": An Interview with Nic Leigh

Nic Leigh lives in California.

Nic Leigh's story, "Will-of-the-torch," appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, Nic Leigh speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about voice as an idea, will-o’-the-wisps, and stripping sentences bare.

What first inspired you to write this story?

It’s hard to say. Though I remember a long train ride being at the genesis of this piece, I make so many changes and tweaks that hardly any of the original material—including any evidence of the initial inspiration—remains. I read an interview with Leonard Cohen recently where he said, “I don’t have ideas. I don’t really speculate on things.” I appreciated reading that because I often feel the same way, but it’s complicated to admit you don’t have ideas. You’re still stuck with considering where things come from and where they are going. If I do have ideas, they probably look more like oil slicks than laser beams. I’m more of a voice person; voice is very important to me, and is the dictator in all of my pieces. That is what I hope I have complete control over. Probably the voice is the inspiration, unless that implies that it comes first, which wouldn’t be true. More likely, the voice is the idea.

In what ways is “Will-of-the-torch” in conversation with the will-o’-the-wisp from folklore?

In many of the ways you might imagine being in conversation with a symbol of something that keeps retreating from you as you approach it. Most obviously, here, how that represents fighting to know someone you are supposed to love; the profitlessness of seeking peace, of trying to be spiritual or have expectations or make connections; and good, old-fashioned fear.

A first-person narrator slips in and out of this piece in a really interesting way. Though the narrator is mostly faceless, every so often we get an “I” or a “my.” How do you envision the relationship between the narrator and the reader in this piece?

That question interests me, because I did not consider the narrator to be “faceless,” even in those sentences which do not have a first-person pronoun. I view those sentences as being experienced by the “narrator,” and so maybe rather than being faceless (we are on the outside and can’t see in), those constructions are even more personal. I have never been able to work out the trick, which is sort of popular right now, of the nameless (faceless?) third-person character (“the man walked to the store,” “the wife picked up the phone and regarded her hand,” etc.). My stronger instinct would be to eliminate the subject there altogether in order to move closer. In general my instinct is to remove structure; I feel edgy whenever I think I can see it. For some reason, right now, first- and second-person constructions are working best for me to achieve the closeness and distance I want. Though I know all constructions eventually become wearying. As to the last part of the question, I’m not sure I envision the relationship between the narrator and the reader at all. I think they might be the same person for me, but I’m not courageous enough to confront that further here.

I love the aliveness of the language in this story: “The headache-causing detergentness of the bedspread. Fear like a spooked horse’s fear.” Is the language in this piece similar to your past writing, or is it unique to this story?

All of the sentences in this story are subjects, which gives it a weird rhythm. I like it and have been experimenting with that trick more, though I must admit not to any greater success yet. It stems from a habit of obsessively stripping things away. For example, “Do I even need objects?”! But there are other possible outcomes of that habit. For instance in this other story of mine, where I hope the effect was more of an emotional sparseness.

Who are you reading right now?

Oh, a lot of the usual kingfish—right now maybe some large doses of Guy Davenport and John Ashbery. Shout out to Tim Earley, who I think is killing it.

What projects have you been working on since “Will-of-the-torch” appeared in The Collagist?

I’m not submitting many stories right now so I can pull back and write something longer—which means a longer collection of short pieces because I am incapable of writing any one piece longer than 2000 words. I could agonize over what that says about me, but—yeah, I could definitely agonize over it.

"Presence in the Face of Absence": An Interview with Lâle Davidson

Lâle Davidson teaches fiction writing at SUNY Adirondack where she was recently promoted to Distinguished Professor. Her stories have appeared in The North American Review, Eclectica, and Gone Lawn among others. She was a finalist for the Franz Kafka Award issued by Doctor T.J. Eckleburgh Review as well as the Black Lawrence Chapbook Contest of 2015 and The Talking Writing Award for humorous writing advice. Her story “The Opal Maker” was named top fifty of 2015 very short fiction publications by Wigleaf. Her magical realist novel, The Ciphery, was a finalist for the Heekin Group Foundation James Fellowship. She is a lifestyle blogger for The Times Union. Her story, “The Intensest Rendezvous” goes live with Fickle Muse on Nov. 29. For links to her stories and essays, visit Laledavidson.com.

Her story, "The Opal Maker," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about Secret Caverns, the neo-cortex, and metaphor as a form of magic.

Where did this story begin for you?

About twenty years ago, my oldest sister underwent open-heart surgery to repair a torn valve. She is eleven years older than I am and had been a sort of surrogate mother when I was a child, but she was dealing with her own abandonment issues. When I transitioned from child to adult, our relationship fell apart. I was wounded when she refused my offer to come out to Cleveland where she was having the surgery. She felt my presence would be a drain rather than a help. Years later, we had another falling out and I wrote a poem about it that started with the image of cracking the ribs open and ended with the choking scene. I put it in a file and forgot about it. I found it again last year, and after reading Amber Spark’s short shorts, I saw how easily it could be a story. It was too one-sided, so I explored how both characters fed into the dynamic. The opal-making part was one of those inspirations that feels like a gift from beyond. Not sure where it came from. Love it when that happens.

I love the imagery in this piece: “I hadn't developed very far, my limbs flat and folded in on themselves, a plant caught under a stone, my skin opaque, ridged and pruney as a water-logged lizard.” “The bright lights in my mind went out and were replaced by pale mushrooms.” The places your metaphors take us are intimate and quiet—the damp space under stones, the mushrooms that grow in forests. Did this imagery evolve naturally or was it something you struggled for?

Thank you. I’m not sure I remember properly, but it seems to me that it came fairly easily. Not that they always do. Sometimes I have to rewrite a line and read it aloud fifteen times before it sounds right. But in this case, I had used the imagery of the plant under a stone before to describe feelings I’d had about my father not developing as a fully relational human being, and the lights in the darkness come from going the Secret Caverns in Cobleskill NY, not far from where I live. When they turn off the lights underground, you are swallowed by darkness more total than night. Vivid colors bloomed in my mind. The guide told me that when one sense is deprived, our mind puts it to work elsewhere. Put that together with what it’s like to be underwater and I figure that’s what it feels like to be in a womb. Sometimes our daily experiences are timed just right to provide us with the images we need for a particular piece. Or maybe the experience is what drives you to pick that piece back at that particular time.

On your website you talk about being drawn to stories where “reality is just a little off the beaten track.” Can you speak to how “The Opal-Maker” fits into your larger body of work? What conversations is it (or is it not) having with the other stories you’ve written?

I write often about internal realities—about how the more primitive part of our brains, the amygdala, sees things. Though we spend most of our day in our neo-cortex, I think that other part of the brain is always awake and perceiving reality in a more, instantaneous, visceral and imagistic way. This kind of writing also answers my spiritual yearnings a heightened, altered state. But I also just like metaphor. I like how metaphor helps us to see something more clearly by calling it what it’s not. It’s a form of magic. And I like how words generate a certain kind of energy when you juxtapose them in certain ways. Words in and of themselves are a kind of magic, making presence in the face of absence.

You’re also a teacher. Do you find that teaching informs your creative work?

Totally.  In college, I was a very intuitive, organic, unconscious and defensive writer. I was quite blocked, and I resented everything my creative writing teachers told me. I didn’t understand their criticisms—or maybe their criticisms weren’t very good back in the 1980’s. But as a teacher, after reviewing a lot of creative writing texts, I found that Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction text provided clear descriptions of how stories work, and that has helped me to pinpoint where my stories were going off track.

Imagine that “The Opal-Maker” had a soundtrack. Name one song that would be on that mix.

What a wonderful coincidence that you ask that question. I created a soundtrack playlist for the novel I’m currently working on. I use it to get myself back into the right mood when I’ve been away from a particular chapter too long. I’d use one of those songs for this story as well: “Le Premier Bonheur du Jour” from Pink Martini. I heard it first in a Nia dancing class, but was intrigued to find out that it was used in American Horror Story, Freakshow. Some mornings, to warm up to writing, I listen to music and draw or dance.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a semi-autobiographical magical realist novel called The Ciphery. The title is a made up word, a combination of  “cipher” and “sorcery.” It’s about a young woman who fights to reclaim her own reality and identity after it’s shattered by the spontaneous combustion of her narcissistic mother on the altiplano between Chile and Bolivia. After the combustion, Fallon grows up merged with her emotionally abusive bi-polar brother, but when he commits suicide, she sets out cross country in search of her only surviving brother. Spanning the South and North American continents, Fallon’s journey is more than a coming of age story, it’s an exploration of how the psychological, cultural and communal transactions with the physical world construct reality.

"The Engines of Repetition": An Interview with Michael Bazzett

Michael Bazzett’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, 32 Poems and Poetry Northwest. His debut collection, You Must Remember This (Milkweed Editions, 2014) won the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, and his verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, is forthcoming from Milkweed in 2016.

His poems, "The Truth," "Homeric," and "Humbleman," appeared in Issue Seventy-Three of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about numbing power of words, repetition, and the paradox of using words to dismantle illusions created by words (cool, right?).

What prompted a one-stanza piece?

It just seemed to come out whole, in a single moment & voice. The enjambment created momentum and kind of glued the poem together.

What holds the various images (cat, bee, the stone-thrower) together for you as the writer? 

I was just following the lead of the poem, which seemed preoccupied with the numbing power of words, how they can deaden and soothe. Clichés and proverbs, as a sort of fossilized wit, sometimes catch my ear sideways. I imagine the first time an observer remarked that someone was as single-minded, maniacally focused and relentlessly busy as a bee, it must have been fresh: “That dude was insecting!” The same with the wisdom of glass-house dwellers throwing stones. Where the phrase “the cat’s pajamas” came from, I have no idea.

What is the underlying truth arising out of repetition? What is the relationship between this truth and the man's announcement in the last line?

Say something 40 times and it becomes true. All ideologies have their dogma that infuse and influence us through repetition and replication, and it’s impossible to be fully awake and aware of the stories we inhabit. We would need to re-invent a new language every morning. But there’s a paradox in using words to pierce and dismantle the illusions created by words -- and at the end of the day, they’re all we have. I think the deafness to the man’s “announcement” at the end stems somewhat from the numbness that comes from living inside of the narrative equivalent of comfort food, but also from the fact that it, too, is a stock ending, something Montgomery Burns says on the Simpsons: “Release the hounds!”

What are you currently reading?

Notes on a Scandal – Zoë Heller  (Utterly delicious.)
Czelaw Milosz – New and Collected Poems
The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden  

What are you writing?

I working on my next book of poems, tentatively called untitled & invisible.

“Bright Things Still Exist”: An Interview with Jessica Lee Richardson

Jessica Lee Richardson’s first book, a short story collection called It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and is due out from FC2 this September. Her stories and poems won awards from the National Society of Arts and Letters and the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald museum and have been featured online at The Short Form, Ploughshares, and the Authonomy Sunday Shorts Series by Harper Collins. Her fictions have appeared or are forthcoming in the Atlas Review, Big Lucks, Caketrain, Hobart, Indiana Review, [PANK], Joyland, and Western Humanities Review, among other places. You can read some of these at www.jessicaleerichardson.com.

Her story, "Roebling," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.

Here, Jessica Lee Richardson talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about the marriage of half stories, to baby or not to baby, and the staggering beauty that is the first book.

There are a lot of great images in this story: an umbilical cord cut by teeth, tornadoes chasing their own tales, a baby’s survival like a whale tail breach. Was there a specific line or image that sticks out in your memory as the starting off point for this story?

This is a great question and it prompts me to tell you a secret. Originally Roebling was two separate stories. I began one of them when—not too terribly long after Hurricane Sandy—Seaside Heights and Seaside Park caught on fire. The childlike images of Funtown consumed by flames really haunted me for a couple of weeks. Somehow a baby born in a sink in the middle of a fire was born of this image haunting.

I may have been trying to work something out about disaster. How devastation, individual or collective, doesn’t so much delete beauty as correspond with it—even sometimes hold hands with it—despite itself. In emotional time, this fire was too soon after Sandy, which displaced my family, which was too soon after the Tuscaloosa tornado, which displaced me, which was too soon after someone I loved was killed in a bus accident, which.

Displaced a town’s heart. A couple of towns. Families. Mine.

This sounds really terrible and is a huge gloss, and is probably an ill-advised way to start off an interview. But the thing I was trying to work out I guess, on one level anyway, was how Funtown, imagistically speaking, is still there in the middle of all of this. Precious, vulnerable, bright things still exist. Must be attended to. You feel kind of guilty when everything has fallen apart for yourself, or worse, for others, and you still go to dance parties.

But you’ve got to still go to dance parties.

Good times and bad times, as it turns out, are at the same time, and are all the time.

Anyway, this is of course overly simplistic, after the fact thinking. In answer to your question, the images I started with were the baby in the sink and the fire, tangentially born of images like this:

 

Months later, I wrote the falling in love and the yoga scene. It was the voice of the protagonist more than her pregnancy that told me that I was writing the same woman. She was pissed about her love, about carrying it. The sound in her reminded me of the sound in the birthing woman and I retrieved the half-story and married them. There were whole other parts lost to the ages with ambulances and things. I really wanted a certain kind of pressure on the forward momentum. In disaster there is nowhere to go but forward into the next moment. Love is not so different in that sense.

There are of course metaphors about being consumed, about having your life and your fun/town consumed in the sex death continuum while it needs to stand and to celebrate that were at work in both original stories.

I really enjoyed the tonal shifts throughout the piece. Your narrator’s voice rides the spectrum of the poetic to the colloquial to the crass. These aren’t mutually exclusive of course, but within the story these shifts work really well in capturing the madness of love, as well as the distracted and chaotic nature of it. What was the process like in capturing this voice?

I had peeked ahead at the questions and so I already started talking about voice in advance. But here is another secret (you really aren’t letting me get away with anything) (I like you) the voice in this story is a voice not unlike what mine sounds like when I am in a disaster situation. Except it’s older. I think I took that—I can’t even call it a voice—just a driving pressure that I am now familiar with—a please be honest with me sound, a this is how it is now, right?,  an okay then hand me a chainsaw/what time is the dance party? kind of pressure, and I put it inside of an older woman who had to try to be responsible amidst this. And keep the kid alive.

Our whole existence is this beautiful rebellion against how the story ends and this voice is one with its fist in the air (while the other hand clings to the most precious living part of itself for dear life).

As a woman, you see the literal, external kids coming down the pike, too. Whether you decide to have them or not, to baby or not to baby takes up a lot of your existence at a certain age. My age. So there is maybe a cultural voice seeping into the main voice here too. That may be some of the texture you were hearing.

The main voice is a place I can go when necessary. A place I even want to go as long as things aren’t really being wrecked for me personally this-minute in real time, because there is great, shattering love in that lover/mother survival space. And irreverence. And bitter honesty.

Fire plays a big role in your story, functioning on levels both literal and metaphorical. Did this come about in the initial draft or was this something that evolved through the drafting process?

Initial draft, yes. Fire started the party. But I did try, in subsequent drafts, to allow form to burn content—thank you for noticing!

Fire is an onward pressure too.

It’s all saying go, basically. Go.

Your first book, a collection of short stories called It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, is coming out this month. I imagine this is a very exciting time for you. I would love to hear more about it.

It is an exciting time! Yes, my first book is coming out right now.

You probably want to hear about the book, but I want to talk about having a book come out. It’s my first time so I am giddy about it. It really brings people together to make something, and that is the overall point, I guess, of making things, and that seems really obvious and dumb, but it is a staggeringly beautiful thing to witness and engage in such intimacy with readers. And I got to make a book trailer with my best friend, and all these other friends stepped in to help. And another jumped in with the cover art. Others have thrown or secured readings for me. People from high school who I haven’t seen in a hundred years are reading it and posting about it. I feel like I’m naked in front of a crowd sometimes and I get a stomach ache, but it is still better than the greatest good I imagined having a book published would be.

The book itself is called It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides. It places fabulist stories (like being made of grandfathers) next to realist stories (like taking a ride on a concrete boat) and asks is it really so far off for a girl to feel made of grandfathers, and is it really so realistic that you can take rides on a concrete boat? The stories are interested in power, as I guess all stories are.

I am not sure I believe in agency. I guess that’s a radical thing to just throw out there toward the end of an interview. Okay, I concede—I believe it can and does exist as a life construct for some people, and it is an excellent goal to have, but I think agency is a privileged conceit. I am supposed to infuse my characters with it, and my sentences, and I see the argument, but I am not sure it is accurate cultural commentary at all. Or it’s only a reflection of a relatively small part of the culture.

Many of us are lucky to try at our best impression of winging it.

I guess I am messing with the idea of agency and the language surrounding and enforcing the idea in this book. “Controlling the uncontrollable,” as one of my colleagues at Coastal Carolina called it, is both a stylistic and thematic project.

I try to make it a fun journey, though. There are lots of jokes and hopefully rich locales. It isn’t just an exercise.

What project are you currently working on?

Oh boy. I am really scattered in the projects right now! I almost have a second story collection. I’m working on that more than anything else. Roebling is in it. Instead of placing realism and fabulism side by side, like in It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, this new book I’m working on mixes the rules in every story. It’s a bit more lyrical and less ruckus, for better or worse. The strangeness exists but is quieter:  swimming beneath airports and growing cloven hoofs and navigating musical dystopias. Nearly all of the stories take place in, on, or next to water.

I have two novels in process too. One is about emotional contagion and weather. The other is about a group of kids that think they are psychic. The first exists, it’s just messy. The second is only tiny and I shouldn’t talk about it too much or I’ll scare it.

I also have a book of prose poems and a book of poetry going.

I warned you.

I feel like a sham saying all this, though, because I am really busy and only dribbling along right now. Having a book come out is the best thing to have happen in some ways, but it’s the worst thing to have happen to a writing practice. I am going to just pick a time in the near future where I say, okay first book, I will always love you but you have to go and live your own life now. I have some writing to do.

What have you been reading lately?

I just talked about the books I’m reading for Drunken Boat and nothing has really changed except I am done with Geek Love. Finally! Not that I’m glad to be done with it, I was just embarrassingly late to the party, as I am with many books. But we all are, right? There are so many and it’s the most painfully deluxe luxury. What I loved most that I read this week was Natalie Eilbert’s poem in the New Yorker “The Limits of What We Can Do” and Ursula LeGuin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which I have read thirty-seven times because I teach it. But it struck me so powerfully this last time. Again. I love her. A new (late to the party) poetry book I started was Carrie Lorig’s The Pulp vs. The Throne. So far SO delighted.

Thank you for asking.

"Approximating Personhood": An interview with Adrian Van Young

Adrian Van Young's first book, The Man Who Noticed Everything, a collection of stories, won Black Lawrence Press' 2011 St. Lawrence Book Award for a Collection of Stories and was published in 2013. His fiction and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Lumina, Black Warrior Review, The American Reader, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, The Lineup, Slate, VICE, The Believer, and anthologized in States of Terror Volume II and Gigantic Worlds: An Anthology of Flash Science Fiction. He is a regular contributor to the website electricliterature.com. His first novel, Shadows in Summerland, is forthcoming from ChiZine in spring of 2016. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Darcy and son Sebastian. For more, visit  adrianvanyoung.com.

His story, "Ex Machina," appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about online personas, serial killers,and living in a culture of pre-digested narratives.

Could you tell us what inspired “Ex Machina”?

Sure thing, although the story has since been re-titled “In Network” pending its inclusion in an upcoming short story collection. The Alex Garland movie about AI, which I recently saw and liked well enough, was just such a hit and I didn’t want the two to be confused. Anyway, the inspiration for the story was very direct, actually. It’s based on the crimes and capture of amateur porn star and ‘Canadian psycho’ Luka Magnotta, who was convicted of killing, dismembering and cannibalizing his lover Jun Lin in 2012 in Montreal. Previous to the murder, Magnotta was also linked to a series of verboten You-Tube videos in which Magnotta (off camera) tortures and kills kittens live via various sadistic methods. Rumor has it that animal rights activists got word of the videos, traced them to Magnotta and then contacted (I kid you not) Ron Jeremy to set up a sort of sting to capture Magnotta wherein Jeremy would arrange a meeting with him to audition for a porn, but then before they could begin filming the activists would move in. Before the plan could move forward, however, Magnotta was arrested for murder in Canada. Quite a story, right? Grim and sensational. Couldn’t resist. That said, as I did some preliminary research, I found myself really drawn to the idea of Magnotta (re-named Gio Sporanga in the story) as being this sort of Lovecraftian cipher or entity that, literally, resides in the internet. In the videos he posts and stars in, and in chat-rooms—his digital footprint, let’s say—he appears to be a living, breathing person, but once you step back he’s only fragments, this malevolent force that travels by way of and, as it turns out, is part and parcel with the internet itself. Or anyway that’s how I envisioned it. Magnotta, it seems, was very much like that. Whether he was killing cats, posing for glamour shots, starring in gay porn or writhing on couches in these disturbing, self-indulgent videos he made, the guy practically lived his entire life online. Albeit less psychotic than Magnotta (I would hope), a lot of us are like that, too. The proliferation of the internet has enabled us to be more connected, sure, but it’s also scattered us further afield—fragmented us from each other and ourselves. That’s certainly something, in extremis, I was interested in looking at when I wrote the story.

This story’s form puts the reader in the position of the internet voyeur, which is simultaneously unsettling and thrilling. Is this intentional on your part? How do you hope that your reader feels while consuming this story?

Yes, that was certainly intentional—to have the process of reading the story mimic the kind of voyeurism that attracts us to social media, file-sharing sites, You Tube, gossip blogs, all the narcotic delights the internet has to offer. I’m glad I achieved it, more or less. And yes, there was an element of me wanting the reader to feel problematically complicit in what she’s witnessing—like Michael Haneke does (somewhat heavy-handedly) in the movie Funny Games, for instance, or like Brian Evenson does in much of his more violent fiction. Then again, beyond complicating things morally, I was also interested in disorienting the reader—entering her into a place of temporal dislocation. The kind of numb, scorched feeling you get when you’ve been staring at a screen for too long reading post after post, watching clip after clip, and often late at night after you’ve had a few drinks or imbibed something else. In those moments of over-saturation, you’re cloudy-headed, but you’re also very suggestible. Your defenses are down. You’re very open to becoming inhabited or possessed by something outside yourself and I’d hoped the structure of the story and how it’s narrated, with lots of fragments and repetition, might do that to a reader. Make her feel like at any moment she might be possessed by something malignant like Sporanga (i.e. Magnotta). The character named the Porn Star is meant to stand in for the reader, in some ways. He experiences Sporanga’s malevolence first-hand (so to speak) and he’ll never be able to shake it. Of course, I was also banking on the fact that since The Collagist is an online journal, a lot of people would be reading the story on their computers, thus compounding its mimetic potential.  Like the Japanese movie Ringu, you know. You see the ring and then you die. A film about a film that kills. ‘In Network’ is an online story about a killer who gets at his victims online.

Do you feel that writers are taking a risk when they venture into the dark or grotesque? In what ways might this risk be important?

Well, given that ‘the dark or grotesque’ is my preferred milieu as a writer and always has been, I feel very much at home working within its aesthetic parameters, which are broad. I find something almost comforting in it. After putting my kid to sleep, taking out the trash, grading student papers, whatever, sometimes I like to gear down at the end of the day by watching a bad movie on Netflix and those bad movies are uniformly either horror films or romantic comedies. Let’s say mostly the former, though probably the latter more than I’d like to admit. Pretty often, though, I come across people who genuinely can’t stomach the grotesque or the terrible in film, literature, anywhere, and it will hit me: believe it or not, not everyone goes in for the dark stuff! So in that sense I suppose it is a risk—especially when you’re writing about animal torture, sexual voyeurism and the like. You do risk alienating a certain kind of reader. And as a writer, I’m okay with that. In all honesty, I would say that this story is probably the most outwardly disturbing one I’ve ever written—I haven’t shown it to my parents, and I don’t think my wife has read it yet (though she does know what it’s about and will probably get around to it eventually with me wincing in a corner while she reads). By the same token, however, putting yourself in a space of discomfort as a writer and then putting your reader in that same space can yield some interesting results. For one thing, I do think it forces you to explore your relationship to the material more conscientiously than you otherwise might. As in: okay, why am I writing this? To what end? Or, as a reader: why am I reading this? Why am I reacting to it the way that I am? Why am I fascinated? Why am I disgusted? Why cannot I not look away? When you’re working inside a culture of pre-digested narratives like ours—the same story being told again and again—it’s easy to begin producing and consuming passively. I do feel that writing or reading in the vein of the dark and the grotesque can provoke a more active, engaged stance. It demands a reaction. Reactions aren’t passive. That said, in many ways I also feel like ‘In Network’ is a funny story. Or at least I intended it to be. It’s a flinching, uncomfortable humor, sure, but in my opinion that species rings truest. Humor and horror are so intertwined. When you can’t bear to look anymore, you start laughing.

Why kittens?

The real events the story draws on: kittens were Magnotta’s prey. One thing about the kittens that I’m not sure most people notice is that the Animal Rights Advocate claims in his call-to-arms spam-mail about the killings that the kitten in the videos never changes; it’s always the same kitten. As though the same killing is running on a loop with only the method of execution appearing different. So you ask me: why kittens? I ask you: why kitten? In all seriousness, though, the real-life murderer Magnotta was in the butterfly-stages of becoming a serial killer, I would hazard to say, when he was arrested. He started with cats and then moved on to humans. Tragically, with poor Jun Lin. In the story, I wanted to convey that very common pathology as it applies to Magnotta and many other killers in the initiate stages of pathology, but also to show how the entity in the story that calls itself Gio Sporanga is trying to approximate sociopathic human behavior to sort of blend, if you will, with the online persona that he’s adopted. So in many ways you could characterize his sadistic exhibitionism with the kitten as essentially childlike. He’s dipping his toes in the human condition, approximating personhood, trying on masks. Which he literally does throughout the story. And, if you want to briefly journey into symbolism, which I try to avoid at all costs writing fiction, the kitten is him in malign infancy: Cthulhu with a ball of yarn. We humans are the yarn, of course.

Who are you reading right now? Can you recommend anyone?

Mostly, I’ve been doing a lot of manuscript exchanges with distinguished friends & colleagues as I begin revising my 3^rd book of fiction, another collection of stories, provisionally titled The Woman Who Bends. To that end, I’ve hugely enjoyed re-encountering the work of Lincoln Michel, whose hilarious, poignant and uncanny debut collection Upright Beasts will be released in October on Coffee House. Someone I’m new to and have been really impressed by is Jim Ruland, who also has a wild & mordantly funny collection of interlinked short stories in the works called Catsitting in Hollywood. Otherwise, I’ve continued to devour the stories of Ottessa Mosfegh, whose novel Eileen I feel I can’t put in my eyes fast enough. I’ve also been quite enamored of the high-end, dark-as-midnight murder mysteries of Gillian Flynn. They’re just so artful, mean and grim. Also, they’ve been helpful to me as I start to write one of my own (TBD), hopefully this fall. I’ve also heard wonderful things about the work of Megan Abbot, who I’ve been meaning to get to one of these days. Mostly it’s the same old story: so many prospects with so little time. Another writer who I’m excited about from whom I’ve only read one story but loved, loved, loved is Alice Sola Kim—“Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying” from The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Here’s to looking out for whenever she publishes her debut book, which I hope will be soon.

What projects are you currently working on?

As I said, this murder mystery in some small part inspired by the works of Gillian Flynn but maybe, also, American Rust by Phillipp Meyer, The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich and, oddly, a book which I think is overrated but which has nonetheless wormed its way into my psyche: The Great Gatsby. If you could somehow imagine a swirling-together of those titles, that would be the template I’d like to be working from, roughly. It’s a novel about the black metal scene in New Orleans set in the present-day and involves the murder of a particular band’s front man and its aftermath. Truth be told, my main project at the moment is raising my 1-year-old son Sebastian, who I take care of full-time. So, on an average day, I’d say diaper changes, tickling, feeding, bathing and the like with about two hours of writing-time, if I’m lucky, are my predominant projects. But that’s not complaining. It’s a privilege to be able to spend so much time with him. And it forces me, mostly, to be more efficient. Talk about writing in the moment! A sentence while I feed him lunch, a few more as he naps it off. Before I’m aware of it, voila, a book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What writing projects are you working on now?

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

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

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