"Carving the Story Very Close to the Bone": An Interview with Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation and the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer. She’s been on the faculty in the M.F.A. programs at University of Michigan and Warren Wilson. Beginning in 2016, she will be an assistant professor at Princeton University.

Her story, "Flight," appeared in Issue Seventy-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Kirstin Valdez Quade talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about siblings, humor, and chickens.

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

This story had its seed in a detail a friend told me about frozen chickens being used to test plane engines. The image delighted me; I loved the absurdity of a naked, pocky, raw chicken having any place in the high stakes world of aviation engineering,

I also couldn’t help thinking about the horror of live birds being sucked into engines—and the more appalling horror of a bird possibly taking the plane down. I’m sitting on a plane as I write this, so actually I might just stop right there.

Your sense of humor shines through in this story, from the central image of frozen birds chucked into a plane engine to the mother’s statements such as “There’s physics involved.” How do you balance levity with serious subjects like family tensions and alcoholism? What’s the importance of humor in a story like this?

In my experience, humor and pathos go hand in hand. Even in the darkest periods of our lives—maybe especially in those dark periods—there are moments of absurdity and humor. In this story, the mother’s hope is misplaced, and absurd, maybe, but it’s also an expression of her love for her son, which I have to admire.

My favorite writers are very funny about incredibly painful material: Lorrie Moore, Antonya Nelson, and George Saunders come to mind. Flannery O’Connor keeps you laughing until the moment everything turns and your heart snaps in two.

Despite its richness of detail and insight into the characters’ histories, the entire story contains fewer than 500 words. How do you achieve this economy of language? Does it require a lot of revision and/or restraint to write with such brevity?

I tend to write long stories, to delve into backstory and follow digressions, so this piece was a challenge for me. I always intended the story to be a short-short, and from the beginning I treated it as an exercise in compression. My initial draft was maybe a couple hundred words longer. I enjoyed the process of carving the story very close to the bone, of cutting out any language that was limp or extraneous.

In the final paragraph, the narrator is approaching her/his brother, and the story ends before they make contact. How did you decide that the story should end in this moment on the cusp of an event? Why does the reader never get to see the narrator interact with the brother whom s/he says so much about?

If the story were longer, I would certainly be interested in seeing how these adult siblings interact. I imagine their relationship is strained by judgments and resentments and jealousies—and that there’s a lot of love between them, too. I imagine these tensions lie just under the surface and that they have to constantly navigate them as they speak to each other.

This particular story, however, isn’t about their relationship, not really. Rather, the story is about how the sister thinks and speaks about her brother, who is, on some level, lost to her. She judges him, yes, but she misses him, too, which is why she imagines him so closely. Imagining him a year down the road in his coveralls, sticking with his classes, getting his license—it’s an expression of hope that he’ll get his life together.

It occurs to me now that the title doesn’t just refer to the flight of the chickens and planes, or of her brother’s aspirations, but also to the speaker’s own flight of imagination.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m at work on a novel, which also deals with tensions between siblings. I’m superstitious about talking about work in progress, but it centers on a family in New Mexico

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

I just finished Tessa Hadley’s The Past. It’s a gorgeous book—Hadley is so incredibly observant of her characters. Her prose is sharp, patient, and darkly funny. As I read, I kept experiencing that exhilarating cocktail of envy and admiration. I want to write like that.

"On the Way from Kidhood to Independence": An Interview with Henry Hoke

Henry Hoke wrote The Book of Endless Sleepovers (out in October from Civil Coping Mechanisms) and Genevieves (winner of the Subito Press prose contest, forthcoming 2017). Some of his stories appear in The Fanzine, Entropy, Gigantic and PANK. He co-created and directs Enter>text, a living literary journal in Los Angeles. His website is henry-hoke.com, and his twitter is @ennuiperkins.

His story, "Surprise Island," appeared in Issue Seventy-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Henry Hoke talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about setting, family dynamics, and turning memory into fiction.

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

The origin was a real night with my brother and cousins on our dock in Alabama, back in the day. It was a very potent moment, on the way from kidhood to independence. A lot of the dialogue is pulled from that evening, though the story is fiction. When I freed myself from the memories and mapped out how the plot would go, the actual writing started.

The four central characters of this story have nicknames only—Older Bro, Cuz, Weeza, and Little Bro. Why was it important to you that the narrator not use their real names? Did you think of them more as archetypes or as individuals when you were writing them?

They’re definitely individuals, but I tend to avoid real names in my stories. I’m more interested in how characters are positioned in relation to one another, the dynamics, family or otherwise, that their titles represent. It keeps things a little more open and elusive, allows me to shift their shapes.

The first paragraph stands out from the rest of the story, italicized and using a second-person voice that does not reappear. How did you decide this outlier was a necessary part of the story? What effect did you intend it to have on the reader?

This is one of the nine stories in my forthcoming book Genevieves, and each begins with an italicized intro, often in a distinct voice.

The first paragraph in “Surprise Island” is the voice of the parents, a voice that is likely echoing in the heads of the characters. The voice of the parents is the voice of expectation and history, so it’s something for the kids to butt up against. The intro also functions as a kind of aerial shot that we zoom in from, both spatially and chronologically.

Setting plays a crucial role in this story. The kids belong so much to the lake, the dock, the disappearing island, they almost feel like a result or an extension of the place. How do you describe a place in such a way that it seems recognizable yet unique? How do you make setting into an essential, living part of the story?

I’m into the idea of the perpetual quality of short fiction, how it preserves characters in a place and moment, so I love the idea of the kids as extension of their surroundings.

I think the family’s idiosyncratic signifiers for various elements of the lake, titles and tales that get passed down into myth, gives an odd fictional quality to the broader reference points of dock, woods, house, water. I wanted to make the world the cousins inhabit alive with potential, each area around them activated with story or danger, because I think this plays such a huge role in how we order the world in childhood. Many elements of the setting are taken directly from life and could’ve evolved into plot points. Surprise Island, as my family has called it for a long time, became the center because it connects to all the kids’ impulses (the boys’ competitive scheming and Weeza’s desire for mystery).

This setting’s been at the heart of a lot of almost-stories over the past couple years, a screenplay, even. I finally had to jump in. Since I’ve been there in life, I just go back in my head.

What writing projects are you working on now?

My first two short story collections are due out in the next year, so come spring and summer I’ll get down to business with the publishers. Between now and then I’m writing my first novel, although to overcome the daunt I’m trying to think of it more like a sprawling prose-poetry collection, and approach the writing that way. It’s about immortal film students.

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

Last year I chiefly purchased new work by friends and acquaintances, and it was a fantastic year of reading. The poetry debuts I was most anticipating were Ansel Elkins’ Blue Yodel and Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus, and both were revelations. Essential. For fiction, Katherine Faw Morris’ Young God wrecked me, and for memoir Janice Lee’s Reconsolidation wields critical vitality and creation in the face of real-life wreckage. The most fun I had was probably with Sawako Nakayasu’s The Ants. I have a big new bedside stack of stuff to devour now and it makes me happy. I spent a sleepless night last week reading Saeed Jones’ phenomenal Prelude to Bruise. The longer prose piece “History, According to Boy” near the end is an absolute supernova.

"Misshapen, Distorted, Imperfect, Flawed": An Interview with Kathryn Scanlan

Kathryn Scanlan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in NOON, Fence, American Short Fiction, Tin House, Two Serious Ladies, Caketrain, and The Iowa Review, among other places. She lives in Los Angeles.

Her story, "A Deformity Story," appeared in Issue Seventy-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Kathryn Scanlan talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about first-person narrators, deformity, and wanting to tell an inappropriate story.

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

The story began in a way similar to how it begins—a conversation I was marginally involved in whilst thinking of other things. I had a story I wanted to tell but it was unwieldy and without any kind of punch or pithiness to it, not something that would go over well in that particular situation. I stopped listening to the others and tried to figure out how to shape the story in a succinct and interesting way. Then the conversation changed topics and my window closed, but I was still thinking of my untold story, still trying to construct it, and after work (for this happened at work), I started a draft.

The reader learns very little about the first-person narrator’s biographical information (i.e., gender, age, occupation, etc.). As the author, do you need to know these details before you can create the character’s voice? How much information about this character’s life have you invented that the reader is not privy to?

No, definitely not. I’ve not invented anything the reader is not privy to, and in general I’d say I’m pretty wary of the idea of “inventing a character”—that has always felt fairly false to me. I like to narrate in the first person because it feels simultaneously intimate and secretive. And the “I” can be so all-encompassing—a roving, wild sort of thing that can go anywhere, be anyone.

The opening paragraph has a hook that really worked on me: “At lunch we were talking of hand deformities and I had a story I wanted to tell. I had half an ear on the conversation but mostly was thinking of how I would enter it.” I could relate to this feeling so much that I immediately sympathized with the narrator. Why did you decide to frame the story of the narrator’s encounter with the deformed cashier as a tale that s/he wants to tell his/her friends? How do you think that decision affects how the reader receives the story?

I became interested in the idea of a story that seems somehow wrong or inappropriate or not worth sharing in a social situation, and of how this is sort of the crux of writing fiction, at least for me. I wanted to write a story about wanting to tell a story. I wanted the telling of the story to fail in the fictional world yet still reach the reader more or less intact.

So let’s talk about deformity. Why do you think this group of friends is discussing hand deformities in the first place? What makes physical deformity seem like the type of subject worthy of not only our attention but also the sort of competitive storytelling that these friends are engaged in?

Deformity became an idea for me that could inform not only the subject of the story, but also—in a broader, more general sense—describe its shape and intention, and the intentions of its narrator. Deformed as in misshapen, distorted, imperfect, flawed.

What writing (and/or art) projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a collection of stories and another book called Aug 9—Fog.

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

I’m reading A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. It is very grim and I am enjoying it! I also just bought Diane Williams’s Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine which I am grateful for, because her work revives me, always.

"Deadpan and Nervous at Once": An Interview with Eric G. Wilson

Eric G. Wilson's most recent book, a hybrid of memoir and literary biography, is How To Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats.  He has also published three other works of creative nonfiction: Keep It Fake, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, and Against Happiness. His essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Oxford American, The New York Times, The LA Times, Paris Review Daily, The Chronicle Review, and Salon, and he has recently placed fiction in Cafe Irreal and Posit.  He teaches at Wake Forest University. Check out his website and Twitter.

His story, "Sworn," appeared in Issue Seventy-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Eric Wilson talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Poe, unreliable narrators, and moving from nonfiction to fiction.

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

A confluence of two factors. First, in my nonfiction writing, I was exploring possibilities for expanding my essayistic persona, the “I” of the essay. I had been reading Geoff Dyer’s Zona, in which his speaker comes across as a character in a Bernhard novel as much as an actual historical being. This is also true of the speaker in Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage. I thought, I’d like to experiment with that technique, imagine my “I” as a character in a fiction. I’d already done this to some extent in my last nonfiction book, Keep It Fake. 

While this idea was circulating in my head, I was preparing to teach Poe’s “William Wilson,” a story with an unreliable narrator who seems not to know he’s unreliable. In other words, he reveals information to readers that he doesn’t seem to know he’s revealing. This is true of many of Poe’s narrators, usually nameless obsessives.

Dyer and Poe merged in my head, and I thought—I’ll write a first person fiction in which an obsessive and possibly guilty character is describing an event to an interlocutor. The character, a nameless “I,” reveals more than he knows. Indeed, he reveals exactly what he’s trying to hide.

In your story, there is a first-person narrator and someone he is directly addressing whose voice we never hear. Because the unseen addressee has control over when the narrator speaks, it seems like he is talking to an authority figure, perhaps an officer of the law, but of this we can’t be certain. Why did you choose to tell the story in this unusual way? How did you decide what information the reader would and would not be privy to?

I imagined my narrator in some sort of interrogation chamber. He might be in a prison, he might be in an asylum. I imagined that his interrogator would not be present, but in some sort of observation booth, asking questions through a speaker. 

I got the idea for this technique from Brian Evenson’s story “The Third Factor,” in his collection Fugue State. In the story, the narrator monitors the behaviors of the man who commits suicide. My interrogator whose voice we never hear could be this man. 

I should add that Evenson is probably more of an inspiration for this story than Dyer or Poe. He read from Fugue State at my campus last spring. I thought, I’d like to try to develop a voice like Evenson does in some of his tales, deadpan and nervous at once, lucid on the surface, but obviously obfuscating, prone to pedantic qualification as a kind of defense mechanism. We see this voice especially in Evenson’s “Desire, with Digressions.”

The narrator speaks in a peculiar voice, often clarifying precisely what he means by simple words like “know” and using lengthy phrases like “the place of the room where I sleep.” What did you have in mind when you designed this character’s voice? What did you do to inhabit his unique linguistic style?

In creating a highly self-conscious kind of diction, I wanted to manipulate a tension in the narrator. He is extremely careful, aware of what he knows and what his interrogator might know, but also careless, unknowingly revealing darker truths about himself. The vague diction, such as “the place of the room where I sleep,” also is a defense mechanism, an example of the narrator being afraid to speak directly about the terrible thing he seems to have done. 

Your bio indicates you are primarily a writer of nonfiction. How does your process differ between the genres that you work in? What lessons have you learned from nonfiction that inform the way you write fiction, or vice versa?

While writing Keep It Fake, I discovered the joy of imagining my autobiographical “I” as a character in novel. Even though I was writing about things that “really” happened, I did so from a particular mood, the kind of mood a fictional character might have, and in a particular voice, one voice among many. The process was exhilarating, liberating. From that kind of writing, the move to writing first-person fiction was quite logical. 

Given the kind of nonfiction and fiction I’m currently writing—first-person and voice-driven—writing in both genres feels very similar. I will say that since I’ve turned to fiction seriously, which occurred about a year ago, my nonfiction has become more playful, more literary.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I am working on a collection of weird tales, in the tradition of Evenson and Ligotti (and Lovecraft and Borges), of which “Sworn” is a part. Other parts of the collection have recently been published in Café Irreal and Eclectica. 

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

Fugue State, obviously, by Evenson, and also his Immobility. A wonderfully strange, lyrical book by my colleague Joanna Ruocco, called Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych. Knausgaard’s My Struggle, vols 1 and 2. Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.  Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man from Another Place.

"They Go For a Walk": An Interview with Matt Dojny

Matt Dojny’s debut novel, The Festival of Earthly Delights, was published by Dzanc Books in June 2012 and is now available in paperback. Dojny’s work has recently appeared in Electric Literature, A Public Space, The Collagist, Better Magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Visit him at mattdojny.com, or at hiphopisthefuture.com, where he (sometimes) posts a drawing a day.

His story, "Introduction of Tongue," appeared in Issue of Sixty-One The Collagist.

Here he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about demon-cats, spoilers, and Raymonds.

What first inspired you to write “Introduction of Tongue”?

Well, it was a while ago, I—it’s hard to say how a story, you know, gestates. […] I guess it was somewhat inspired by, do you know that scene in Anna Karenina ... there’s some guy, some kind of shy scholar type, and there’s this girl he likes. They go for a walk—I think they’re mushroom hunting, or truffles?—I read the book so long ago, this is literally the only part I remember of it. Apart from when she throws herself onto the train tracks—spoiler alert. Anyways, so, this shy guy goes for a walk with this girl, and they both clearly like each other, and it becomes obvious that he’s going to propose to her. And she’s into it. And it’s building up, building up, and then—he just can’t bring himself to say the words. The moment passes, and they both relax, and start speaking of normal boring things, knowing now it’s never going to happen, that was the one chance. I’m not describing it well, but it’s a great little scene, and always stuck with me. I think that moment of, um, inarticulateness, or muteness, was the germ of “Tongue.” I guess the story is about being afraid to speak, or ... not having anything to say.

I’m interested in the language of this story. It’s at times formal and old-fashioned; I think this is the first story I’ve read that uses the word “milquetoast” (a word that I love, by the way). How characteristic is this story of your writing style? 

Basically totally uncharacteristic. One of the things that I enjoy about writing short stories is that, for me, they’re a place to mess around, experiment, do weird stuff. My novel—The Festival of Earthly Delights, if I can plug myself—was much more traditional. Or, at least, its weirdness resided more in its content, not in its style or approach. With the stories I’ve been writing, each one is a, I guess an opportunity to flex a new muscle. With “Tongue,” I started writing it in a standard contemporary style, it was about a woman who had a crush on some mysterious quiet coworker—oh, actually, if I can go back to your first question, now I remember the other inspiration for this story. The real inspiration. One day I was sitting on a bench at a playground with my wife, and she was talking to me about something, I was kind of zoning out a bit. And when she was done speaking, she was waiting for me to respond, and I had this very distinct sensation of not only having nothing whatsoever to say, but of being actually physically unable to speak. And as she was looking at me, waiting for me to say something, I had a sort of vision: the clear sky filled with dark clouds, and there was this skinny black cat perched on my shoulder, a sort of demon-cat, and—as I’m saying this, I realize this sounds ridiculous. But the cat was holding my squirming tongue in its mouth. Like a little writhing fish. And I opened my mouth to speak, and there was just a dark gaping hole where my tongue should be. I mean, this was all in my imagination, just a quick split-second fantasy that my brain coughed up. So, in the original version of the story, it was about this woman who liked this cute quiet guy in her office, and they go on a date one afternoon, and the story ends with her trying to get him to talk and then the sky goes dark and the cat appears on his shoulder holding his tongue, et cetera. But the story wasn’t really working, the cat-got-your-tongue thing was too on-the-nose, and my contemporary-young-woman voice was lame, with, you know, a lot of up-speak and that kind of thing. […] I’m not sure what made me—I think, I was reading Portrait of a Lady, that was it—a book I never quite finished reading—and that seemed like it might be a fun kind of style to do the story in. I enjoy that kind of stuff, Henry James, Jane Austen. I think I have a strong affinity for primness, and, like... milquetoast-ness... it just feels natural to channel that voice. […] In terms of the language—I usually don’t use the Thesaurus, I know it’s frowned upon, but with this story I did cheat and use it to try to find fun old-timey ways of saying things. I kind of love my Thesaurus. It’s shameful, I know.

This story’s speaker gives us frequent warnings that her story ends badly (spoiler alert!). For example she says, “I wish I could say that what followed was merely a delirious nightmare: but, if that were truly the case, then it is a nightmare I have yet to awake from.” Why did these warnings, or foreshadowings, feel important for this story?

That’s a good question. And I’m afraid I might not have an answer. I don’t know if it was—I think, a few years ago, I read some scientific study ... I’m sorry, I have a terrible brain in terms of retaining information. The gist of it was, is that they did this study where they had people read a Chekhov story and then rate how much they liked it... and then they had a second group of people read the same story, but before the second group read the book, they were told how it ended. Now, the natural assumption was that the group that knew the ending would enjoy the story less, but it turned out that it actually heightened the reader’s enjoyment. I forget the scientific reasoning, but ... I just thought that was so interesting, because my instinct is to always withhold information from the reader, you know, keep them in the dark. It made me think that maybe it’s better to give them some spoilers, to whet their appetite. I don’t honestly remember if I was consciously trying to do that when writing this particular story—but, let’s just say that I was.

I read that in addition to being a writer, you are an illustrator. Can you speak to the relationship between writing and your other artistic ventures?

I’m not sure if there is a relationship, necessarily. I made art for many years, trying to show in galleries, all of that, but I got pretty sick of that whole hustle. My apartment was overcrowded with large, unsold paintings, and I got the idea to make a book about the time I spent living in Southeast Asia—in part, I think I liked the idea because a book can be hidden in your computer, so if it doesn’t work out, at least it’s not taking up a lot of physical space. I originally conceived of it as being sort of an art book, mostly images, with a little bit of text. In the end, it mutated into a more traditional novel that had a little bit of art in it. It was nice having the illustrations, because if I ever had trouble describing something, I could just draw it. For instance, I was trying to describe the convoluted layout of this apartment complex, and spent way too much time attempt to use words, and in the end I just drew a map of the place. So much easier. With the new book I’m writing, it doesn’t make conceptual sense to have any illustrations in it, and I miss having that crutch. Now I just have to describe everything, and description is probably my least favorite part of writing. Describing a place, a room, a building, it feels like pulling teeth. Pulling my own teeth.

Are there any writers (or illustrators), you’d recommend?

All the regular people, I suppose. I like Raymond Chandler ... Raymond Carver. The usual Raymonds. I feel like lately I haven’t been able to finish reading a book. The books I’m currently enjoying and not finishing are Blood Meridian, and also The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson... and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, which is a great history of hip-hop in America. I’m stuck in the middle of all three of those books. And I just started that novel by the mysterious Italian woman, the book with the really homely cover, I’m totally blanking on the name... My Little Friend? That’s not it, I know. [My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante. —Ed.] It seems very good—maybe that’s the one that I’ll read the whole thing of. In terms of illustrators, I’m a fan of... all right, this was not intentional, but it’s another Raymond, Raymond Pettibon. For a few years I had a tumblr called HIPHOP IS THE FUTURE where I posted a drawing a day. They were sort of poor man’s Pettibons. And, I know you didn’t ask, but I’d also like to shout out to a great, little-seen television show called Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s a hidden gem.

What projects can we anticipate from you in the future?

I have a lot of projects in the pipeline that I think will enjoy tremendous posthumous success. I’ve written a couple of screenplays that I was hoping to make some quick bucks on—Hollywood, if you’re reading this, please get in touch. I have a collection of short stories that is almost ready to be put out to pasture. No, that doesn’t sound good. Put out ... put out into the ecosystem. Into the ether. And, I have a second novel that I’m slowly but surely plugging away on, which is called [title redacted]. Or, maybe you shouldn’t print the title, I wouldn’t want someone to steal it—it’s a good title, right? The book is pretty good too, I think. I predict that the people are going to really like it. I should be finished with it sometime in the year 2525.

“Only the Hush Settling Over the Houses”: An Interview with Matt Morton

Matt Morton has poetry appearing in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, he is also the recipient of the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the John Hollander Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He serves as associate editor for 32 Poems and is a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas.

His poem, “What’s That You Said?,” appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, he talks with interviewer Darby Price about collage and discourse, the value of quiet moments, and how the act of writing should be fun.

Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of your poem, “What’s That You Said?”

I wrote “What’s That You Said?” in early February 2013, and it’s one of the few poems that I can vividly remember writing. I was an MFA student at Johns Hopkins at the time, and I had just finished teaching for the day—I think my introductory creative writing class had been discussing the roles of myth and magical realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.” The class had gone well, my students had been particularly engaged and insightful, and as a result I left feeling energized. Walking across the quad, the two and a half lines which would eventually open “What’s That You Said?” popped into my head, as cliché as that sounds. I realized I wanted to write a kind of “image list” poem, based around the idea of miscommunication. As soon as I got home, I sat down on my couch with my laptop and quickly wrote the poem from start to finish. I had been in a writing rut that winter, and the hour or so I spent working on the poem was a reminder that the act of writing should be fun, something that brings you in-the-moment delight.

Sound is an important sense throughout the poem—from “The brook / babbles beside the trail,” to “the freeway all blare / and whoosh.” On the other hand, the poem ends with silence, “which signifies absolutely / nothing, and makes what little difference there is.” Can you talk about the structure of this poem, and why you ended where you did?

When I attempt to write poems like “What’s That You Said?,” I start by listing disparate images and statements that are organized under a general umbrella heading or thesis of sorts—in this case, the problem of communicating or connecting with other people in a world oversaturated with sounds and stimuli. With these poems, my hope is that my mind during the process of writing will eventually take the poem in a direction I wasn’t expecting, moving beyond a mere list or collage toward something of greater psychological or emotional importance. Whether or not this happens during a first draft usually determines whether the poem ends up being interesting to me, and whether or not I spend any more time working on it.

In the case of “What’s That You Said?,” I began by using sound devices, particularly assonance and internal rhyme, to generate one sentence after another. This is especially evident in moments like “It was snowing, and it was going” and “. . . gobbledygook. The brook . . .” About halfway through the poem, around “You were sure / you understood what all this was about,” the poem spring-boarded from the list of images and situations into what feels to me, at least, like a more logical, linear discourse. Writing the second half of the poem was one of those exciting experiences when, just as you’re finishing writing a sentence, the next sentence seems to materialize effortlessly. As far as ending the poem where I did, it was in a sense purely intuitive—something about the syntax and near-iambic pentameter just felt conclusive. But the content of that final sentence also seemed appropriate, with its affirmation of the value of quiet moments—quietness in the sense of both one’s physical environment and, more importantly, one’s psychological state. Those moments are essential if we are to experience the world clearly, and they are increasingly difficult to achieve.

It’s always interesting to look at poems you’ve written in the past and realize how your outlook has changed over time. Does quietness and a sense of calm make merely a “little difference”? Is the importance of mental clarity the only thing that affects the quality of one’s life? Right now, that level of bleakness seems slightly overstated to me, although I’m still happy with how the poem moves in terms of its rhetoric and syntax.

Interwoven throughout the poem are several moments of confusion, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation, from the title itself to the speaker’s statement that “the sky is blue, but I can never remember why, / just as the bull elk that defines the meadow / communicates something it can’t understand.” How do you see the speaker’s role in this poem, particularly as they relate to those moments?

It’s always interesting for me to think about the speaker’s role in a poem that moves via associative logic, a poem that isn’t confined to a single moment in time or a given physical space. In “What’s That You Said?,” the speaker doesn’t explicitly enter until the lines that you mention, which occur about two-thirds of the way through the poem. Still, whether or not there is an “I” in the text of a poem or not, it seems like there is always an implicit speaker (or speakers); when a poem that employs lots of leaps or elements of collage succeeds, it is because each of the images—no matter how unrelated they may seem on a logical level—intuitively seems to belong. I think that this sense of unity is a result of the composite or associative poem being the product of an individual consciousness, one that presents a specific series of thoughts that occurred to the writer on a particular occasion. Maybe that’s why revising composite poems is so difficult—you’re no longer in the same psychological place that you were while writing the original draft, so any new images, aphorisms, or declarations tend to feel grafted-on and overly self-conscious.

As for the speaker’s role when he explicitly enters “What’s That You Said?,” I was hoping to raise the stakes of the poem by making the speaker more vulnerable, by acknowledging, “Hey, this happens to me too.” Re-reading the poem now, it still strikes me as a moment when something genuine (if not especially profound) is revealed, and in the context of “What’s That You Said?” I think it makes sense for the speaker to lament the fact that, a lot of the time, he doesn’t really know what’s going on.

On a somewhat related note, over the past couple years I began to realize that self-deprecation was becoming a kind of twitch for me, like I felt as if I needed to apologize for assuming I was allowed to write anything in the first place. Tony Hoagland has written intelligently about this tendency; in one of the essays from Twenty Poems That Could Save America, while discussing what he calls “the hapless, distracted poems of the moment,” he argues that “Not being able to find the truth, or feeling capable of such a quest, not feeling qualified to possess or enunciate it, is another kind of neurotic tragedy.” Of course, as humans, sometimes we do feel confused, overwhelmed, or at the mercy of external forces, and there certainly is a place for expressing those thoughts and feelings in poetry. But I don’t think anyone is obligated to admit to a false sense of powerlessness—or to feel embarrassed for putting their thoughts on a piece of paper—as a prerequisite for writing and maybe publishing something that other people may or may not read.

What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?

Generally speaking, 2015 for me was the Year of A. R. Ammons. I had never been exposed to any of his work in a classroom and rarely had heard anyone even mention him. Discovering his work through a friend—the collections Glare, Coast of Trees, and Garbage, in particular—has had an enormous impact on my own writing. Ammons’ voice somehow manages to combine a disarmingly conversational demotic register with high rhetoric and profound philosophical observations. He is humble but never servile. His poems are extremely “personal” (in the sense that they explicitly reveal a lot about Ammons’ psychology) while also being incredibly inviting to the reader.

More recently, I have been reading and re-reading Incarnadine by Mary Szybist, Reconnaissance by Carl Phillips, and Richie Hofmann’s wonderful debut collection, Second Empire. As far as non-poetry reading, last month I read George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and just last week hopped on the Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle bandwagon—I’m hooked on those books, although I’m still having trouble articulating to people why I find Knausgaard so captivating.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently revising what I hope will be the final poems to be included in my first full-length manuscript, which I plan to begin submitting to contests and publishers next fall. I have been putting off this process as long as possible because it seems like every time I have enough poems to make up a manuscript, I make what feels like a new step forward in my writing and have to scrap five or six older poems that no longer seem good enough! As far as the manuscript’s organization, I’m still thinking about what order would best serve the poems and the manuscript as a whole, but my goal is ultimately to have a collection that is initiated by, but moves beyond, poems sparked by disillusionment—disillusionment with the nuclear family, with the limitations of romantic love, with one’s own mortality—and poses possible answers to the questions, “How should we live?” and “What does it mean to have a good life?”

"The Fool's Recipe to Perfection": An Interview Greg Gerke

Greg Gerke’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Kenyon Review Online, Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, LIT, Film Quarterly, and others.

His story, "Such a Sweet Meat," appeared in issue Sixty-Three of The Collagsit.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Gary Josh Garrison about NYC construction/deconstruction, babydom, and the pleasures of Henry James.

This is a highly digressive story (in the best way) that tangents through a life and (what feels like) a moment almost unnervingly. How did you first come to this piece?

Since I wrote the two and a half years ago, I'm not so sure exactly how I came to this story, though I am sure it was through a feeling, probably a disjunctive one. Something wasn't sitting right with me and I wrote to flush it out, as despair and worry can be bile to my mind. Since it was summer, the booming noises of New York were in full flare/flair. There must have been construction going on. It's gotten progressively worse with the city allowing developers to do just about anything in ridiculous pose of “helping the economy” and “creating jobs”—utter bullshit. The only aim is more wealth and using cheap labor and lax safety to satiate that awesome hunger. The construction noise led to a deconstruction of a character's life, so perhaps I should thank the construction crews who pay no heed to regulations about time, safety, and other circumstance—thank Christ I could forge something from their pollution.

At one point Freud and his theories are casually dismissed by Bella, but even before that moment it's hard not to think of him while reading this story. How much did Freud influence you during the writing of this piece?

To my discredit, I haven't read Freud seriously. I err on the side of Jung.

For such an intimate and intrusive story that delves into the psyche of George, I think one of the most exciting aspects is the way the narration is unafraid to venture into the perspective of Bella. How do you see these shifts working?

I feel the shifts as the most natural way the narrative could unfold, which is probably a foolish statement, since I'm the author. And for another monstrosity, but in all honesty, I'll add that I was just doing what the muse directed me to do. Suddenly, the psyche of George lost its avoirdupois, and the narrative needed another figure to play off of and imbue with metaphor. A screen character, as they say, to view the overall through. I don't know how other people write or read, but I think I respond to things that have little to do with the sense of the story and have more in common with voice and sound. A few days ago I gave a reading and I could only really listen to the sound of the voice of the other readers—that's all I wanted. I didn't want to follow the story, I just wanted to be read to—to have quiet in this day and age and to have the only sound being a voice. One could say I wanted to return to the pre-language days of babydom. All the other readers were women, and they all had a very specific way of vocalizing, of tossing the sound through the air. Maybe it's an attempt to erase the intellect from the experience. I don't want to judge what I hear, I only want to feel it's reverberations.

What are you reading at the moment?

At the moment, I'm reading a few things. I've tentatively started William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I'm reading with a distant friend. I'm not sure how far I'll get. It's on one hand sprightly, but also highly digressive, which has to be some sort of plus. I thought it might be fun to read his brother Henry James at the same time, and so I've started The Spoils of Poynton. It might be another year of reading Henry James, so I plan to read novels and tales between 1897-1901, the period of his taking fiction beyond the heavy realist mode after his failure as a playwright, as well as when he started to dictate his novels to a secretary, which is claimed to have happened in the middle of “writing”What Maisie Knew. It seems so many of my generation and the few before me are not reading him, so I feel obliged to take upon the weight of reading him for them. But I don't experience James as a hair shirt—there's a singular pleasure in his prose, though it can be like playing Rafael Nadal on a clay court. But such an experience can only make you better. I don't mean a better person, but a better seer. It shows you the vastness of the world by examining the worlds in every person. Whether you are a writer or not—there's something James touches, the uncanny and something beyond infinite (like Kubrick's 2001, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut), that can expand one's inner vision.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, there is the obligatory novel, which can even be called the obligatory set-in-New-York (Manhattan/Brooklyn) novel. I read a segment at a launch for a book of stories that just came out, My Brooklyn Writer Friend (pieces of which were also in The Collagist), and the crowd seemed to like it, including a number of writers whose approbations are important to me. I don't know how it will end, but I had Henry James's “International novels”in mind, thinking one of the character's would go to Europe for the obligatory “finding of oneself.”Yet now, I'm beginning to think that parts of the United States have enough of their own myth and manners and so a character might just take a jaunt to California to throw a wrench into his or her life that New York can't provide.

“Every Line is Some Salvation”: An Interview with Henry W. Leung

Henry Wei Leung is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of Paradise Hunger (2012), which won the Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest. He earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, and has been the recipient of Fulbright, Soros, and other fellowships. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, The Offing, and ZYZZYVA. He is currently working toward a PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Leung’s poem, “Creed,” appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Darby Price about snail mail, musical octaves, and how language is nothing and everything all at once.

As a reader, I’m drawn in by the emphasis on the speaker’s relationship to the written word, “this game // of symbols drawn from some desire’s shore,” and what I read as the conflation of that love with the speaker’s connection to others. Can you talk about the role of language throughout the poem—as concept, as bridge, as identity, and/or as a method of connecting and disconnecting?

Language is everything. I’m answering your questions out of order because this one will be the key to the rest (and suddenly I’m remembering a Cornelius Eady line: “that the key to any heaven is language”). I mean “everything” in a folded sense: language is actually nothing, it’s immaterial, it’s misprision, it’s decay, it’s the codification of a living thought into a textual object; it’s nothing because it’s not a thing—and yet it’s all we have. It’s the musical notation of our consciousness. So it becomes everything.

This poem is a long, final letter to all those I’ve exchanged snail mail with, and as much as I wanted it to be a poem about the promise of closeness and the intimacy of language, I think in the end that it’s really about the failure of closeness. To love is to reach for the Other, and there’s no meaningful way to do this except through language. Is it possible for the language of the Other to become so intimate that it lives in you, another’s voice running almost seamlessly through your voice? (A geek moment: I’m thinking of the ending to that beautiful but short-lived sci-fi show Dollhouse, in which someone is brought back to life by having his consciousness implanted into the body of the one he loves, alongside her consciousness. Is such a schizophrenia the real consummation of love?) But look at the poem. It’s part of my larger project of exploring the second-person address, to make the poem about “you” – both “you the reader” and something like a “lyric you” – and yet at the end it’s still all about “I.” You can achieve a seamlessness of voice, or something close, like a weave, but what you arrive at isn’t the Other; you only arrive back at yourself, at your own borders.

Throughout this poem, the speaker’s voice is interwoven with the voices of others, most of whom speak in direct quotes, sometimes parenthetically. What effect did you want to create with this back-and-forth structure?

Someone else asked me if I had “researched” the poem, i.e., did I dig up letters to find those lines and quotations? The poem was written feverishly, and all those quoted lines have been living in my consciousness for so long—whether as talismans against despair or as haunting shadows—that they were already at my fingertips as I wrote. That’s the point. That’s the closeness and the loneliness of writing letters, I think: you end up with these objects of paper which are always speaking at a volume corresponding to your own longing. But the speaking is an illusion; you’re actually hearing your own voice reading those words in your mind; you’re actually reading a page in silence.

When I read the poem, its movement is not on the formal level which switches between the speaker’s voice and the quoted voices; the effect is not mere clamor. The movement, rather, is in the wavering between affirmation and dissipation. You can’t affirm “I believe” without signaling uncertainty in the same instant. You can’t cite closeness without signaling loneliness. And I’m not describing opposites here; I’m describing edges. Think of the musical octave: if your tonic note is A, the farthest from it you can get is G#, which because of its distance is so tense and uncomfortable. But you just go one semitone further, and where do you end up? A on the next octave. (You can compare this to martial art degrees in the most traditional models: you start with a white belt and aspire to the black belt, but after that the subsequent stage of mastery is another white belt.) The poem is dealing with the Self-Other divide and the boundaries between people. But it’s not people standing on opposite ends of the room. They’re standing with their backs together: so close, and so far.

Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of your poem, “Creed”?

Meg Kearney’s poem of the same title (from An Unkindness of Ravens) was the first to truly move me. It was from that poem that I got my start as a poet. I still talk about it a lot, and I’ve written semi-critically about it, and I used to write a Creed every year, starting from 2003. Some of my friends, too. I have a collection on my computer of the ones they’ve sent me, these beautiful things that never get published (and are never sent out for publication as far as I know), these poem-shaped belief systems composed of the most profound and the most mundane words.

I stopped after this one because something had changed. I recognized that it had become a poem of its own, different and necessary in its own way, no longer hanging solely from the structure of Meg’s poem (but still very much in homage to it). It was also a kind of goodbye poem, a goodbye to all those years and all those letters, the desperate earnestness of it all. I don’t fully understand what happened yet. But I haven’t written letters since the poem, either.

What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?

Carolyn Forche’s anthology, Against Forgetting. I’m teaching excerpts from it for the first two weeks of my Poetry & Activism class. Diary of Use by J. Vera Lee came across my desk recently, and the poems in it are just marvelous. And I’m always reading—always, constantly, perpetually, for my sanity—Simone Weil and Rumi.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I just came back from a year in Hong Kong on a Fulbright. I was overly concerned with the Umbrella protests that broke out just after I arrived last fall, and I was finishing a manuscript of poems while out there on the streets. The manuscript ended up being a book about Hong Kong, which I’m shopping around now. I’m not convinced anyone cares. I’m actually trying to leave that fall behind me and stop writing about it, in spite of myself. I’m trying to find my way back into fiction, to finish a novel of the martial arts, which I’ve been sitting on for too long. And I keep thinking I might write some kind of neurotic Christopher Smart poem. When my partner and I leave for the day, our cat sits by the door to wait; but I’m convinced that space and time are the same thing for her. So what does this mean in the passage of daylight, and how does she decide when to stop waiting? Ha!

"Whale as Witness": An Interview with Gregory Lee Sullivan

Gregory Lee Sullivan's stories appear or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Permafrost, Barely South Review, Buffalo Almanack, The Nervous Breakdown, and other literary journals. Before turning to fiction, Greg worked as a newspaper reporter in Georgia and Tennessee. Read more of his work at his website or find him on Twitter at @SullivanGL.

His story, "The Allatoona Whale," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about lake culture, Balderdash, and animals in unexpected places.

Why write about the Allatoona Whale? What draws you to it as a subject?

I worked at a marina on Lake Allatoona during the latter part of my time in high school and when I’d come home from college the first couple summers while I was a college student at the University of Georgia. The lake culture always kind of fascinated me. This isn’t a period of my life that I think back to all the time, but it was that time between childhood and adulthood and independence, so every once in a while it comes to me (I’m 31 now, so not very old but just old enough, I believe, to feel genuine nostalgia about anything). A lot of people where I’m from spent a good amount of their time on the lake to the extent where it was central to a lot of peoples’ family traditions. We never had a boat growing up, but I was always drawn to the water, so I think working there helped my imagination. I got to drive the boats around all the time too, even if they were mostly shitty rental boats. It was quite a crowd down there. You’d have all the rednecks from where I’m from doing their thing, and then you mix that with all of the upper middle-class Cobb County people (Atlanta’s long-established northern suburbs) doing their thing with the nice boats that they owned, and then on weekends you’d get Atlanta people and international tourists coming up to rent from us. It was a shit show, but shit shows are good for writers.

As a side note, I’ve always wanted to write something about some of the almost-encounters I had there and turn them into real encounters, especially how it’d almost get weird all the time when European tourists would think the men’s restrooms were locker rooms and they’d be standing around in the restrooms completely naked and hairy when a local group would stumble in off a beat-up bass boat with a dip in their mouth, having never left the county before and with their five-year-old son in tow. The truth of the matter is, somehow I never saw a fight, or even a yelling match, break out over that kind of thing. Man, what a potential explosion, though! The lesson there is to never assume you’ve got the local people figured out.

But I should get to the whales. Whales live a really long time apparently. And there have been real shit shows for a really long time (sometimes funny shit shows, sometimes very sad and depressing ones), so I wanted to bring the whale in as sort of a witness to all of the shit shows of this place that I still find endlessly fascinating and that I’m usually very proud to call more-or-less my place of birth.

This piece takes the form of a scientific profile, which suggests (for me at least) that stories can be found in unexpected places. What do you think makes a story? At what point does a text become a story?

The piece plays with the reader’s assumptions of the scientific profile, so that’s a good point that you’re making. Like a traditional story, the storytelling is revealed a little at a time within the form it’s delivered. The revelation of the story within the less-traditional form made this a fun one to write for me. Have you ever played the Balderdash board game? I think all writers have probably played that game. Writing the first draft of “Allatoona Whale” was like playing that board game except I was by myself when I wrote the story.

That last part of what you’ve said is a great question, and it’s not an easy one to answer. Most of my stories probably have what people would say is some degree of weirdness to them, but most of them don’t tend to employ non-traditional forms like “Allatoona Whale.” The decision to use the form was an unconscious one. Looking back, I think doing so allowed me a window to gaze at what I know very, very intimately and play with the idea that I might could still be objective with the source material.

As far as what I think makes a story, I think it’s healthy for writers and readers to debate the issue from time to time. I don’t feel entirely comfortable declaring what a story is. I prefer to weasel out of doing so by quoting Supreme Court Justice Stewart from the sixties, who was the guy whose famous legal threshold for obscenity was that we know it when we see it. But since this is a story about lakes, I’ll instead sidestep by referring readers to the form of abductive reasoning most of us know as the Duck test: “If it looks like a duck,” etc.

This story alternates between the believable and the fantastical, between literal language and metaphor. I love the surprise in this detail:

“Some Allatoonas have what are essentially pink tattoos carved into their skin, indicating the many different cultural eras an adult whale has lived through. Scientists use these tattoos as dendrologists do tree rings, to determine the age of the Allatoona […]When left unaltered by man, an Allatoona's skin is as smooth as a slippery snake boot.”

Can you speak to the experience of switching between two forms in one piece?

I love you right now for quoting my story.

I like Karen Russell, and she does this switching I think you’re talking about pretty well. Karen was a guest instructor when I was doing my MFA at Rutgers-Camden. How she pulls off what she does, I think, is she excels at establishing a ratio between the real and the strange. When the ratio is established, the idea most of the time is to keep the ratio consistent through the piece.

A lot of my stories are centered on either metaphor or “story,” but I think you’re right that this one does concern both.

By the way, in retrospect, I really like the phrase that you quoted has “snake boot.” It makes me think of two possibilities looking back. First, a boot made of snakeskin, which are fashionable in some places I guess, or, even better, it makes me nostalgic (yet again) for those rubber wading boots that allow the rural child to walk through creeks and streams without worry of being bit by those poisonous water moccasins that are so dangerous to us. As a child growing up in nowhere Georgia, once I finally got hold of some of those rubber boots, I felt invincible. The devil couldn’t harm me anymore. I would go all over the place, capturing small aquatic animals and placing them in jars.

What other animals (real or fantastical) should we absolutely know about?

I think the word has been getting out for some time, but there are some pretty crazy wild hogs in North Georgia. I have written about them a little in my story collection. I guess we’d be talking about them as metaphor again there, too. I also have a story about wooly mammoths on the Tennessee-Arkansas border, but I don’t want to give away to people who haven’t seen the story yet, whether they’re real or not or too many details about them, if so. And while I do write about animals a good bit, my favorite animals to write about are people. In real life, I also find myself really drawn to pit bulls.

I should share that once I worked for a small newspaper in Georgia somewhere, and I did this one story about this family that kept seeing this panther in the woods by their home. This was in Central Georgia, so nowhere near the Florida panther of South Florida. This is something that really happened. I would link to it if the paper’s online archive was functioning. The family was happy to be interviewed about it, whether they were just looking for attention, genuinely wanting to get the word out, or playing an elaborate prank. The local agriculture extension agent from the university was not happy about me writing the story because he saw it as me using my official capacity as a newspaper reporter to lend credibility to what he thought, with his expertise, was a bunch of bullshit (my words, not his), and potentially creating a mass hysteria. That extension agent, God help him, had no idea what it was like to write for twelve months out of the year for a small newspaper. Everything I wrote about was, in a sense, writing about something where we would be lending the subject or issue more weight than it was worth, especially looking back. You could argue that, anyway. But I guess all of these things depend on perspective.

Are you working on any projects right now? If so, please tell us about them!

Well, I’ve finished this collection of stories, of which “Allatoona Whale” is a key one. I should say thanks again, by the way, to your brilliant fiction editor Gabriel Blackwell for his work with the story. About half of the stories from the collection have been published individually or are forthcoming now, so I’m beginning the process of sending out the collection in its entirety to agents and publishers and still trying to place the last few newer stories. Like everyone, I also have a novel that I’m working on. It’s set in Alabama, and its main character is a king who is opinionated but most of the time finds he is powerless. It is in no way whatsoever informed by reality, or I guess you could say it is completely. 

"It’s Always Surprising How Much Isn’t Necessary": An Interview with Kelly Miller

Kelly Miller enjoys life in the most eclectic town in Iowa. A small town filled with people from all cultures and walks of life. Writers, artists and musicians can be found everywhere. She writes flash fiction and nonfiction. And works part time with the elderly and autistic children.

Her essay, "Exploiting the Connection," appeared in Issue Seventy-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Kelly Miller talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about brevity, Doritos, and her New Year's resolution.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay, “Exploiting the Connection”? What sparked the initial idea and led you to write the first draft? 

The tree actually fell shortly after my mother’s funeral. So there I was on my back on top of a picnic table at a park in the middle of winter and a mixture of feelings and scenes and a knowingness started free-falling through my mind and body. I dug a pad and pen from my backpack and started trying to record it all.

The entire essay is less than 200 words, yet it contains a wide breadth of emotions and circumstances. How did you achieve such an economy of language? Did it require a lot of revision or restraint to be so concise?

The original essay after first edit was about a thousand words. Cutting down is always my favorite part. Also painful when you have to discard your darlings. But with each edit I grit my teeth and ask, Is this line, image, word, really necessary? It’s always surprising how much isn’t necessary. Only when the piece is down to the barest of bones that still pack a punch do I call it finished.

I must ask about your piece’s title, “Exploiting the Connection.” It seems like quite a “meta” title to me, framing the essay in such a light that it’s not so much about the events observed, or even how you observe the events, but about how you use those events to your advantage as a writer and/or as a person grieving a loved one. What does the title mean to you? Did you mean to imply that you’re exploiting a connection as the author of this essay, or during a moment you lived that’s described in this essay (e.g., when you saw the tree fall)? (Both? Neither?)

I almost hate to comment on my idea of what the title means. It’s often people’s favorite part and they all have different theories. I will say you are right about me using observed events let’s say as fodder for my writing. I once wrote an essay about cleaning my mother’s dentures just before she died and how I was thinking about writing the essay even as I was standing in the hospital bathroom rinsing her teeth. Not really proud of it, but for me it’s how life works. Teeth and death and love and Doritos all up against each other. And of course trees falling in the woods. Seen or unseen.

Your bio says that you work “with the elderly, and children with autism.” How has this type of work affected your life as a writer? Do you write about these subjects? Has the work taught you any lessons (about empathy, or patience, or anything) that have influenced the way you write about people?

Working with the elderly and autistic kids has taught me so much. But mostly about silence. Not the kind of silence that is easy to find when you are lone. But the kind that’s hard to honor when you want so badly to do or say something to make everything okay. I have learned to sit. Take a hand. Look into eyes. Breathe.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’ve been trying to write about and honor a relationship that was hugely transformative in my life. I’ve tried memoir. I’ve tried fiction. My New Year’s resolution is to just get it written from my point of view as if no one else will ever read it. I’m hoping this will shut down the critics in my head.

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

Patti Smith’s “M Train.” Even if you aren’t a fan, pick up a copy. The language, subtle but powerful emotion, and sense of place are all delicious.