Sunday
Feb172013

"Part Guilt, Part Longing": An Interview with Mark Jay Brewin, Jr.

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr., won the 2012 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize of the University of Utah Press for his first book manuscript, Scrap Iron. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, New Madrid, The Hollins Critic, Copper Nickel, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, North American Review, Greensboro Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA program of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. You can read more of his work at his website: www.markjaybrewinjr.com

His creative audio "Seven Places I Have Found My Grandmother in the Last Six Years" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about noises, remembering the details, and conjuring dead relatives.

1. What made you begin to write “Seven Places I Have Found My Grandmother in the Last Six Years”? (Did one particular lookalike-sighting represent the final straw that made you start writing down all the others?)

Can’t even help it. I must have dozens of penned moments where I thought I saw my dead grandmother. At first, I was attempting to keep a dream journal, random thoughts, caricatures of people I knew, but I saw that she was cropping up every other week. Already in my waking life I am constantly seeing family and friends in strangers, looking for them on purpose, so I couldn’t help but make the connection based on the frequency. How come this woman keeps appearing? Am I conjuring her? Part guilt, part longing I guess. I didn’t call her to wish her a happy birthday before she died, and now that’s opened a floodgate. Everywhere. The woman behind the Mexican food mart in Salina, Kansas. The woman with stiletto heels and a terrible fear of sidewalks in Providence, Rhode Island. She came to me, one night, to tell me that she handpicked my wife (apparently an honest to God match made in heaven) even though they’d never met in real life. Anyway, there was this one time—the scene in Taaffes Public House in Galway—where I’m listening to this traditional group playing in the corner, and a mob of old housewives comes in, smoking and ready to drink, and there she is. I register it’s just another one of these moments, but then my wife even asks if she looks like my lost relation. There have been a handful of pictures, this clipped obituary I have taped to a framed concert poster, but the fact that someone else was able to pick it out, that solidified it for me.

2. What inspired your decision to make this poem into a creative audio project?

One of the reasons I feel like I got into writing poetry is because I don’t think I have a musical bone in my body. I want to one day have that talent, that prowess. Despite the fact I am a hack with a ukulele, I still attempt to record random covers and—every once in a while—some spoken word. It happened that a friend of mine started a label, had a ton of equipment, so it worked out that we were going to go nuts with this thing. I knew this poem was the one to iron out because of the narratives it held, the settings. It seemed like a natural for sound.

3. This piece is a sequence poem in seven parts. How did you know that this piece was complete with seven sections? (You say you’ve had other sightings—how did you select the events you chose to include?)

Much like a record, I would love to publish the B-sides to this poem. I have more scenes and interactions with my grandmother than Carter’s got liver pills. When writing and revising, I tried to keep the sharpest, quirkiest moments. This poem appears in my first book, which is deeply rooted in travel and family, and—since I’m from New Jersey—it has the Garden State as its central setting. I wanted the single, best doppelgangers from all of the places I lived over those years. I needed to bookend the piece with Jersey.

4. How much invention do you allow yourself to do in writing a narrative poem such as this? Or did you try to “stick to the facts” and only describe details that you could remember from these sightings and dreams?

Usually, invention is something I thrive on, something that makes or breaks a poem for me. In the case of this one, though, I tried to stick to the facts. The people and places were strange enough as it is. Instead of pulling these particular threads out of thin air, I tried to sit down, close my eyes, and write out as many of the details as I remembered. The more I got on the page, the stronger and more specific they became.

5. I really admire how this piece takes us to several different locations—from a cemetery to an airplane to an Irish pub—in a short span of time. I imagine this must have been tricky to accomplish. Can you talk about how you achieve this level of efficiency, as well as authenticity, in creating a sense of place for the reader/listener?

I spent a couple of weeks with a field recorder taping everything I thought would work for this audio project. I had six tracks of me chopping celery, twenty minutes of ambient airplane sounds, a whole overheard conversation about pipe cleaners that I eventually scrapped. From Providence to Chicago to my hometown. Luckily, these different scenes gave me a structure, a list of images (and thus sounds) that I could work with, that I could find and capture. After I’d gotten them all down—what I thought would cover everything—I thought the tricky part would be to layer, edit and compile, but my friend with the record label was a genius when it came to making sense of what I’d done. It would have been a lot worse, a lot harder, if he wasn’t there to put it together. For me, I simply wanted to make sure that those small, real niceties cohesively finished each sequence. The dreams were what stopped me up—How do I give a soundtrack to what’s completely imagined? What’s in my head? I hope those sections were successful in evoking that trance-state. This was a first time collaboration for us, so I am hoping as we go along we can make these audio projects as pristine as possible.

6. What writing projects are you working on now?

I’ve got a ton on my plate. Besides the random that creeps up and inspires me, I am working on a series of poems about my walking the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain. For a month and a half I would walk eighteen miles a day, spend my nights in a hostel with fifty other snoring pilgrims. Crossing cow pastures, centuries old cathedrals. Brilliant. Besides that, I’m working on a few more spoken word pieces; I have this poem (probably the most original thing I’ve ever made) about my dad setting this old camper we had on fire, but I don’t want to use sound effects to just put you in that place. I want to use dissident noise, tones, strange music, to evoke image and emotion. It’s easier said than done.

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

Wow. This is a tough one. A whole damn bunch. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City. Golden Field Guide’s Birds of North America. Travis Mossotti’s About the Dead—and that is real damn good. Anything by Philip Levine, every single day of my life. And so on.

Saturday
Feb162013

"When I Try, It Isn't Beautiful": An Interview with Jessica Alexander

Jessica Alexander studies and teaches at the University of Utah. Her fiction has been published in Blip Magazine.

Her story "The Problem" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, fiction writer Jessica Alexander speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about love, linearity, and the fetus niece. 

1. How did you begin this piece, and how did you develop it to where it is now?

I thought of love as something that bursts.  That’s where I started.  I’d been reading a lot of Caren Beilin’s and Aimee Bender’s work, two writers who so beautifully render the figural literal, who turn emotional responses into palpable conditions. (Beilin writes of grief as corpse balloons carried by the bereaved.  Bender’s grieving father wakes with a gaping hole in his stomach).  Love is urgent and impractical.  It operates in and against time.  It is impossible.  I don’t think my love makes anyone more discrete.  It bursts them, spatially and temporally.   I look for those I love and find them everywhere.  And so, I think, what began as a spatial dispersal developed into a temporal dispersal.

2. What guided the narrative time leaps, the ping-ponging between the 10-year-old self at the bus and the adult reunion with the ‘you’?  The two time-locales also seem steeped in their own particular, continuing, amended conversations (needing mothers v. fathers, wanting not evidence or anger but sobbing) – which seem to nullify or cancel out the time between this grade school morning and dining among all the “pretty person[s].  Everyone is feeding a lover, or being fed by one.”  Are these conversations, in your mind, a kind of feeding/forcing feeding?  How do these conversations align with your schema of time?

I’ve never been able to write a linear narrative.  I’ve tried.  It feels like filling my mouth with rocks, and trying to talk.  I’ve seen people do this (both rocks and linear plots) admirably.  But when I try it isn’t beautiful.  It’s clumsy.  I think it’s because that just isn’t how I experience time. I still wince with shame when I remember events that occurred on the school bus, in gym class, or locker rooms.  Mine is not a narrative of progress.  I cannot detail the moral and ethical formation of an identity, or posit my characters safely on the other side of pain, loss, and social shame.  While I do think there is a moral dimension to pain and humiliation, I don’t think it consists of overcoming such experiences.  I like that you say “force-feeding.”  I had not made that connection, but I do think most of the narratives I’ve been force-fed insist on progress as a model. 

3. I was in love with this story from its first line because it was destructive and haphazard and sad and there-was-nothing-you-could-do-about-it : What about that extraoridinary recurring image of “mothers burst into a flock of pigeons” is so attractive as a refrain, why this image as a nucleus-motif?  Is it the bursting/dispersement part, is it something about the ordinary-ness/dirtiness of a pigeon, is it the fact that “We’re supposed to get over our mothers,” but can’t?

Wow, that’s really generous.  I like your term “nucleus-motif.”  It so aptly describes an alternative to linear narrative.  A lot of wonderful non-fiction deploys a similar organizational strategy.  Judy Ruiz’s “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Shena McAuliffe’s “Endnotes to a Seizure,” and Tasha Matsumoto’s “Mathematics for Nymphomaniacs,” are organized by constellations, or associations.  In McAuliffe’s, and Ruiz’s work an inexplicable, and recurring event sits at the center of a web.  The event, it seems, has shattered the narrator’s understanding of the universe.  The story is the re-writing, re-weaving, re-organizing of a world around an unfathomable.  Each of these pieces suggest, in content and organization, that what breaks us is not discrete, not bound neatly between before and after, but bursts and disperses.  It becomes the nucleus motif of the worlds we think.  And so, I think, you’re right, a nucleus-motif is about what we’re supposed to get over, but can’t.         

4. What else are you working on?  Does it also have (or have not) a home near Freud?

I recently met a woman who teaches yoga to toddlers.  We were on an airplane.  I told her about a sonogram of my niece.  She was in down-dog (the fetus-niece, that is).  I asked when our bodies stop bending like this.  Why and when we must re-teach them.   She said school.  Of course, I thought, it has to do with molding our bodies, for hours, to desks.  But she said potty training too!  And I thought:  Ah!  The stress of socialization is so great we stiffen!  That’s one thing, amidst all Freud’s myth making, that I really appreciate:  his idea that being socialized is unbearable, the original trauma that breaks us into people.  I think that aspect of Freud’s thought is something that I very earnestly, if unconsciously write through in my stories.  But like the socialization process itself, there is so much in Freud’s work that I find tragic.  For example, the way social prescription becomes description, delimits how things, and what things can be described. 

5. What good stories/materials have you read about mothers (and or bursting and or pigeons) lately?

While there are no mothers or pigeons in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in Highschool, I appreciate the way she writes about child/parent relationships.  In the first part of the novel Janey Smith’s boyfriend starts seeing other women, and stops coming home.  Eventually, they break up.  Pretty straightforward, only her boyfriend is also her father.  Acker so succinctly demonstrates the perversity of patriarchy.  The relation to the Father is not a precursor to future relationships.  The relationship to the Father is the only relationship.  Whether we agree with Acker’s stance or not, there is much to admire in her economy.

Families are perverse and fascinating!  The ideal family instills social values. But how perverse is that?  It’s a battleground, where through a series of transgressions, children learn what is and is not permitted—and shame is one, among the many weapons, that breaks us into social beings.  I love writers like Mary Caponegro, and Jaclyn Watterson for their ability to de-familiarize the family’s fantastic perversity.  So, I guess I haven’t read too much on pigeons, but I’ve read some excellent stuff on families, and by extension mothers.

Tuesday
Feb052013

"Just to Mention the Word is a Legitimate Violence": An Interview with Nathan Blake

Nathan Blake's writing has appeared in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Word RiotThe Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and kill author, among others. He is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech and a managing editor of Mixed Fruit Magazine.

His story "Going Down Like Little Jesus in Sun Hole" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Nathan Blake speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about fire, first sentences, and the inclination to squirt around.

1. Did this piece start with fire, with voice, with Spunk, with Spunk running out the door?  A piece like this feels like it’s running out the door itself fast as he is : those first two bullet-quick sentence-graphs.  How did you know to start that way?

At the risk of sounding coy, I'll admit this story, like all the rest, began with the first sentence. Those words on the page had implications and avenues, a few of which I tried to exploit later on, after I'd read the first sentence over and over looking for an inroad into the real thing. But even the image of Spunk on fire was ancillary to the sentence itself and not the other way around. A good first sentence will contain all the energy the rest of the story's going to cannibalize. I felt lucky to find energy there in the opening that I could ply without having to build up to it. I was invested in crawling or, in this case, sprinting my way out toward an ending; that's how I knew the first line wasn't another throwaway. Then came the second line, the third, and so on, very smoothly. I am not subtle, nor am I capable of juggling numerous entanglements at once in writing. I am no sculptor in the vein of your great deliberating storytellers wielding mind, heart, patience, and prudence. I may, with luck, have one of those, or more likely half of one. I do know if I'm going to ask of a reader's time, to make the promise of interest, I'd better say what I need to say damn quick and well, with kick, and honestly, or else I've failed. Those first two lines were my best attempt to push the reader into the situation, hoping they'd want to see it through to the end.

2. Can we talk a little bit more about this fire motif?  Fire is such a classic/terrific image to employ for its relation to desire, demise, purification, all-consuming-ness, heat – did you choose it for its multi-faceted-ness?  (Did you ‘choose’ it at all?) How does it relate to the heart (of the character/of the piece), “which believes everything. These people to me are like so much plastic creek-mouth flotsam you hit with a match and which burns and keeps on burning down the river for hours in dead noon heat to be picked apart by snakes”?

I like the finality of fire. It does one thing but so well. I wish I could say I chose fire for all those great reasons you listed; I'd sound more intelligent than I am that way. But truthfully, I am fascinated with fire for similar reasons that some writers work a murder into every story—it raises the stakes for the reader, as so well done in Flannery O'Connor's “A Circle in the Fire.” Just to mention the word is a legitimate violence. I grew up in a very rural, Protestant crease of Virginia, so fire contains many loaded associations for me, something that was my worst nightmare as a kid—by which I mean eternal damnation. It continues bullying even now.

I don't have a very nuanced vocabulary when discussing my work or the work of others, but I suppose the speaker in this story feels things too much. His heart is too direct, and because of that he's discomfited. Fire is like that. There's no such thing as a subtle fire. We try our best to control it, to keep it hemmed, but all fire can do is consume and consume. Fire's job is to be never satisfied, even to the point of its own extinction. That's the person I like writing about and the type of stories that come to me. That's the person I am. Someone who feels life to a fault. A story that makes me feel something, anything, is worth the time to read or write it.

3. How do you get into (and maintain) an incredible voice like this – “I’m between two water oaks deeply hammocked,” “Spunk bangs out the house like he has been caught fire to,” “get him good and extinguished,” “something school paste orange fizzles out”?  Can you imagine the voice of this piece ‘regularized’ (‘I’m lying in a hammock,’ ‘I extinguish him’)?  What would die?

Getting into a voice is like method acting for me. It doesn't so much matter what I say but how I say it true to the self who's speaking. Anything interests me so long as the person telling is earnest, requiring me to find a hard grip on where the obsessions and pride of a character reside if I'm the one telling. There's something attractive about pretending you're someone else. I can remember as early as age seven walking around the grocery store with a fake limp, or speaking a crack language into the telephone, to see if I could get away with the lie—if I would, by playing my part, be accepted as true. Didn't Oscar Wilde say something like the first duty in life is to assume a pose? My stories all begin with a pose I must justify with the rest of the story. My one aim is that the lie must convince and be interesting to hear. Maintaining a voice is little more than an act of endurance, stubbornly so.

Many, too many, times, I'll have several pages when suddenly the voice falls flat. After that, there's rarely a way to invite myself back into the story. It becomes a false show. A great big voice is natural to my writing, but I sometimes wonder if, were I to strip the language down and smooth the dents, the stories would still hold similar or any merit, or be more well-received. Language and story have a symbiotic relationship in my mind. You neglect one and the other's heart will give out trying to carry the dead weight. I tend to lose all drive and interest when my writing sounds generic, and I find myself slogging through a story when I shouldn't. I might as well do something I enjoy. I don't believe I'll ever earn wide appeal, but at least I'll have fun during the short time I've been given to write.

I grew up listening to people talk, and rarely about things that mattered to me, yet I listened just the same. And why? My uncle would tell us his jokes dozens of times, even though the punchlines had become old hat. Yet we were enraptured. It was his delivery that was funnier than the actual joke, I found out, more anarchic. You never knew if he was going to rearrange the set-up or what. When the sweet anarchy of not knowing where the next word comes from dies, I'll find another hobby. 

4. Your particular brand of deadpan lyricism (I’m thinking of lines like, “I don’t know what to tell you.  It looks like somebody went up there with a ladder and put a bullet between the sky’s ears”) is stunning, memorable, electric.  Do you ever receive resistance to this voice (in the MFA workshop, elsewhere) and how do you maintain balance between the wildness of this lyric and control of the story?

I recently finished my first-ever workshop this past December, which was a very nurturing but challenging experience for me, as I'm without a formal background in English. But my classmates and Fred D'Aguiar were so gracious with their advice and encouragement all semester long. Any resistance I received was well-deserved—sentences that rang false came back to me underlined, dialogue was held up to the voice of the speaker, etc. They knew when I really believed in a sentence and when I was just squirting around. I tend to get lost in the language. Sometimes I'll write a line that sings a little bit but does nothing else, that drives no signal post into the ground of the story. Grace Paley called them lies, showing off. The brilliant faculty and writers of my program are helping me see those lies and do away with them. Literary magazines, however, have not been so kind. I have found the words “grating” and “showy” in rejections. Too much “tell”. I got one once that said the story was “fun, but to what end?”

And any success I had controlling this story was dumb luck. It came out in one shot, and I needed things to fit together, or I'd miss my deadline. Desperation provided results. An easy gauge I use to keep the story from falling off a cliff is to ask myself what every word does and might do. Every word needs to stand its ground within the sentence, the sentence within the paragraph, the paragraph within the story. A line having only flash in its favor was not enough to survive in this piece. I suppose that pulled in the reins a bit.

5. Does this story fit somewhere in a collection, or are there other projects in the works?

I don't think I'm at the point where I can pretend to have any aspirations to work on a collection or projects in general. I feel that sort of agenda might cut my inclination to squirt around, where the high adventure stays. I still have so much to learn and try. I would take less risks if I knew this piece had to play nice alongside several others. For now I'm just writing stories, trying to get enough material to look at what ideas keep bobbing the surface. Maybe that's how my thesis will be. But I have been coming back to the area referenced in this piece, Rangtang Road, which exists, but not anything like it does in the story.

6. Anything fabulous you’ve been reading fiction-wise, or writing-about-fiction-wise?

Right now I'm caught between course readings and teaching a section of composition, but I do sneak in some pleasure every few days. Recently I've been enjoying Noëlle Revaz's With the Animals, Toni Cade Bambara's Gorilla, My Love, David Ohle's Motorman, and Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex. I just finished Jean Toomer's Cane, which was assigned by Matthew Vollmer, and it does so many wonderful things with the novel.

Sunday
Feb032013

"To Talk, Even If No One Talked Back": An Interview with Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Coffin Factory, NANO Fiction, Pank, The Yoke, SpringGun, Echo Ink Review, Mary, Ghost Ocean, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate and graduate teacher at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Her essay, "Important terms for walking on water," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.

Here, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about making lists, the grieving process, and creating our own hauntings.

How did you begin to write this essay? What inspired you to construct it in the form of titled paragraphs and lists over a more narrative format?

I think that loss wrecks narrative. It’s not just a plot twist, the entire idea that our lives follow a comprehensible narrative is shown to be false. So writing a narrative about grief seemed very false. But I am a list maker, mostly of what needs to be done. I wanted to explore that—how narrative is replaced by lists, by strings of moments and the need to remember them, how memory, which is nonlinear, but creates its own time, replaces narrative.

This piece comprises a series of concise sections, some no more than a few sentences long (e.g., "What I will not write about" and "What I keep writing about"). Did it require a lot of editing or restraint to keep them so brief, or were they this concise from the outset?

I knew that I wanted some sections to be shorter than others to create a varied rhythm and to allow pause into the piece. But the sections that ended up being shorter happened that way organically because they were the most difficult to write. That is another thing I’m interested in: what are the limits, when writing about something so personal? Where do I stop? I’ve sectioned some parts off—moments I won’t write about. I am both glad I’ve done that and I wonder why. It’s as if some moments are sacred, but that seems to go against why I write about any of it. Because I do believe the process itself is sacred. It’s a form of prayer, the only kind I do.

In the section "What I keep writing about," you include "A desire to be haunted." Do you see this desire appearing in other works of your own writing? (Does it drive your writing to some extent?)

Yes. The novel I’m finishing now is largely driven by haunting, in fact, all of the fiction I’m writing now is. I think writing is a form of haunting, because it brings our ghosts out and makes them slightly more tangible. So my desire has become real in a sense. I’m haunted by my desire, and I create my own haunts.

What advice can you offer to anyone struggling to write about a lost loved one?

Strangely, this work was not a struggle. Much of my writing is—I have to force myself to do it and it’s painful. But with this essay and others that I’ve written about my brother, it absolutely had to happen, I think so everything else could. It was the grieving process for me. But I think it was also about opening a conversation, to not letting everything be closed, to talk, even if no one talked back.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m finishing my novel, Las Moscas, which is about four young people in post-Franco Spain who leave home on a whim and get dragged bit by bit to the edges of existence. I’m also working on what I hope will be a novel that is set in a religious enclave in Depression Era Northern Wisconsin, as well as several essays.

What have you read recently that you want to tell people about?

I recently finished Arcadia by Lauren Groff. A friend pointed me to The Log of the SS Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, which is amazing. The Beginners, by Rebecca Wolff, Man’s Companions, by Joanna Ruocco. Not recently, but I think of it constantly, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Kristin Prevallet’s I, Afterlife. I’ve also been reading older works looking for narrative structures—Zola especially. I just finished The Most Human Human by Brian Christian and The Worst Hard Time by Tim Egan. I like to read a lot of varied material and then I feel I’m able to write varied material. During the semester break, I read some popular novels. I think that’s important too. But my list of what I want to read is much, much longer.

Thursday
Jan242013

"Hours Glean a Dark Hive": An Interview with Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award.  The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in southern California, where she is a novice harpist. 

Her poems "Given Air" and "Happiness Machine" appear in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Karen An-hwei Lee talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about pocket sized poems, California weather, and the bees, the bees, the bees. 

1. How did you come about writing “Given Air”? 

One summer, I composed a group of poems about air.  

To do so, I compiled indoor and outdoor lists of living things breathing air, things exhaling air, and all things given air – whether breathing or not, such as moss or ball lightning.

2. “Given Air” is fantastically pocket-sized.  Personally, I always struggle with smaller poems, afraid that I should be expanding or saying more. How do you know when a pocket-sized poem is complete? 

I often think of poems as cells or organisms, self-contained entities.  I allow a poem’s space to expand, organize its innards.  When there’s not enough material, it cannot exist on its own, so I feed it a little imagery or other information. A poem achieves a certain homeostasis with time.   If there’s too much silence – or noise --  the poem explodes.  In some cases, the chaos is desirable since it yields necessary tensions in the poem, so I let it be.  There is no formula. 

3. This poem deals mostly with the natural world, from the ball lightning to the still bees. How do these images, or perhaps the science of the images, influence your writing?

The weather of California fascinates me.  

My first years in the Bay Area sent a heat wave, the rains of El Niño, and minor earthquakes.  Now I live in greater Los Angeles, where it’s common to see gardenias blooming in November, grapefruit trees heavy with globes in December, and hybrid tea roses in January – all in the midst of urban sprawl.  The natural world thrives in abundance here. I once studied biological sciences, so this field of knowledge resides with my words, too.  I love observing ways in which creative design is present in nature. 

When I moved from New England to northern California over a decade ago, I was enthralled by the long growing season, whose produce – radicchio, fennel, avocadoes, kumquats, pomegranates, figs -- spilled from local backyards.  Every day, I walked past an urban garden that alternately produced giant sunflowers, squash, and string beans in four seasons. 

In the rawness of civilization and its discontents, so to speak, a healing.

The still bees, ah.  As a girl in New England, I would wait for melting snow in late March: no bees.  The crocuses: no bees.  Then the maple trees in our yard would put out oddly green flowers with nectar, and then: the bees, the bees, the bees.  Even California bees are less active in winter, although yesterday, I did see a weary one exploring the fuchsia bougainvillea in a new year’s light.

4. What have you been reading recently? What’s really stuck with you?

I’ve enjoyed a novel by Hiromi Kawakami and am currently re-reading Making Peace by Denise Levertov.  More writers, an eclectic list:  Paul Celan, Josey Foo, Lily Hoang, Tan Wan Eng, Éireann Lorsung, Arlene Kim, Julian of Norwich, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Mary Burger, Sarah Gambito, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Arthur Sze.

5. What other writings have you been working on?

I finished a collection of poetry and prose by a Song Dynasty woman poet, Li Qingzhao, forthcoming from Tupelo Press.

Wednesday
Jan232013

"The Theatre of the Unconscious": An Interview with Benjamin Hackman

Benjamin Hackman is a poet and lyricist interested in the exploration of depth psychology through personal narrative. His writing has most recently appeared in Canadian Literature, the Literary Review of Canada, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and in Yiddish in the Yiddish Forward. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Ted Plantos Memorial Award from the Ontario Poetry Society for an excerpt from his on-going work, The Benjy Poems, for which he has received granting from the Toronto Arts Council, twice from the Ontario Arts Council, and from CUE for the adaptation of eleven Benjy Poems for the audio stage. His audio poems have appeared as sound installations in galleries across Ontario, in online journals in the USA, and will be syndicated in their entirety in Carte Blanche throughout 2013. Benjamin lives and writes in his hometown, Toronto, where he is a student of psychotherapy.

His audio poems "A Note to the Players," "Benjy's Education," and "Benjy in the Supermarket" appear in issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Benjamin Hackman talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about living with trauma, infantile egocentrism, and the blurring of past and present.

1. What inspired you to make “The Benjy Poems” into a work of creative audio with multiple performers and sound effects underlying the poetry?

Well, you have to consider it this way: The Benjy Poems is a long project; I’m moving in on my eighth year, which isn’t too impressive for a poet who hasn’t published his first book yet. I started to get antsy over the last year or two. I wanted to get my poems out, and not just to a few dinky lit journals and a reading every few months. So I set out to find alternate ways to put my poems out into the world. That was the prime inspiration.

To some extent I’d always wondered how excerpts of the piece might translate into performance, and of course, the poems themselves take place in an imaginary play, but I never gave too much serious thought to theatrical adaption until my partner came home one day and told me about CUE, this wonderfully radical organization that provides funding and mentorship to new-generation artists working in the margins here in Toronto. She told me they were looking to fund seven or so projects, so I said, “That’s great. I wonder if they’d fund The Benjy Poems.” She said, “No, they want stuff that can be exhibited.” So I said, “Well… maybe I’ll pitch an audio adaptation.” And from there I got to thinking about the project at its core, and what it is I was trying to accomplish.

You know that piece by Duchamp—“Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2?” I think that’s the biggest influence on the Benjy Poems. One genderless figure. Three versions of itself. One action. Three different perspectives of that action—in three different points of time. And all at the same time. That’s what I try to do with Benjy on the page; I try to explore the non-linear, fragmented, multi-charactered Self. And I try to do it naked—and make it beautiful. But in order for me conceptualize and execute a protagonist who exists with so many simultaneous versions of himself requires some degree of order to prevent the piece from manifesting as something entirely too surreal. I employed a number of techniques to keep things… not clear… but from becoming too confusing for a reader. So on the page, for example, the Speaker is depicted in plain, unaffected font; Benjy, in italics; the Stage Director (as I’ve come to affectionately call her), in square brackets; and everyone else, with quotations, with far too many exceptions to concretely mark this as a structural consistency. And grammar is hardly reliable. To further complicate things, every character is truly the speaker, either in perception, memory, or dream. The reason the piece is taking so long to write is because I spend forever discerning who’s speaking. I go back to poems I wrote years ago, and I still don’t know who’s speaking. My point is this: The labour is simplified in the audio because characters can speak over each other in real (and imagined) time. Visual cues don’t matter at all. And in adapting the poems for audio, that was a liberating epiphany for me, indeed.

2. You also write that through this project you are attempting “to encourage dialogue about domestic violence and child abuse.” Has your work inspired listeners to share their own personal narratives with you or to take part in the desired dialogue?

Regretfully, I can’t say it’s happened yet. But I’m hopeful. And I will say this: directing the actors and the audio engineer throughout production and rehearsal of the audio adaptation forced me to speak in much more concrete terms than I’m used to in my poetry. And that helped me find a way to connect with the actors on real issues like domestic violence and child abuse. It wasn’t group therapy or anything, but we shared. An actor can’t go about character like a poet. You can’t talk in elevated language and metaphor when you’re directing. It’s not appropriate. Actors need clear direction if a director’s going to get what he wants out of an actor. So the actors asked me questions about their characters’ motivations. They needed back stories. I provided them. From there we chatted a bit about physical discipline and dreams and about incest and rape and where those things come from and what the connections might be to our childhoods and adult lives. In summary, I guess I’ve been able to crack open more dialogue about it with myself, and that’s been good for my craft, and my life in general, which I’m grateful for.

I hope one day someone writes to me to tell me that they felt connected to a particular poem, or saw themselves in something I wrote. But these things take time.

3. In “A Note to the Players,” the “inner child” is said to occupy the spotlight, while the speaker on stage is shrouded in darkness. What went into your decision to have light for one and not the other? (Is this how you imagine setting the stage if your work were presented in a visual medium?)

That’s a great question. In The Benjy Poems, Benjy is the centre of the narrative. He’s the subject. But of course the person telling the story, the Speaker, is Benjy also. Naturally Benjy must be, figuratively, in the spotlight of his own story. But that’s the nature of early childhood, isn’t it? For our first three years we are the centre of the world. I mean, good luck convincing a two year old otherwise. You say to her or him, “Hey, what do you think you’re mummy wants to do right now?” They’re just not interested at that age—and many would argue that they physically can’t be interested. Their brains just aren’t fully formed yet. Empathy is softwired at birth, and not hardwired. The context and ways in which we’re raised are the deciding factors that enable us to start considering the feelings of others. But so many of us, due to various traumas and insecure attachments at infancy, take much longer to grow out of that narcissistic character type, and many never do. From a psychoanalytical perspective, I place Benjy in the centre of the dream stage. We can call it the theatre of the unconscious, if you’d like. If the inner child represents pure character origin, which is to compare it to a sort of introspective holy grail, where else can the inner child be but in spotlight centre stage? The Speaker is the person who discerns between Light and Dark.

As for how the play may actually be depicted on a stage, I think the concept is for the play to be rather impossible to stage in any orthodox understanding of space and time, because, as I said, it’s really the theatre of the unconscious. It works in audio. It could work probably quite well as animation, and if it needed, it could be done in film, but I’d be hesitant to stage the Benjy Poems in live action without a wormhole.

4. Also in “A Note to the Players,” the Stage Director says, “Actions of the past and present happen at the same moment.” Does this imagined play reflect how you consider the life of a person with trauma in their past? (Are you trying to capture both past and present moments at once in your other audio poems like “Benjy in the Supermarket”?)

Well, you’ve asked me a psychological question. And psychology is a lot like religion. Everyone has a take on it, and everyone makes sense of it for themselves and there will always be people who will go to war to defend their beliefs. So take my answer with a grain of salt, and with the assumption that others may have very florid rebuttals to my stance, but I’ll say with as much conviction as I can today that everyone lives with the trauma of their past, if even only the trauma of birth, and quite expectantly, much, much more. This is a fairly well accepted view in the psychodynamic tradition. I don’t imagine it’s too contended in modern times, but there other proponents of other schools of thought, and I don’t pretend to have insight into how they think and feel.  

There is not a single poem in the series that does not explicitly strive to blur the lines between time and space and past and present. In one or two, I failed to achieve it, but then… that’s inevitable, isn’t it? My goal is to show how our pasts creep into our presents and morph our futures. That’s the quick and dirty of it, really.

5. What projects are you currently working on? (Are “The Benjy Poems” complete or still in-progress?)

Right now the Benjy Poems are nearing their end. I’m hoping to begin shopping the manuscript around by the Spring. That’s my primary project, and has been for a long time. It’s hard to imagine their ending.  

The wonderfully talented musician and film composer, Craig Saltz, who produced and engineered the audio for the Benjy Poems, is collaborating with me again on an opera. I’ve been hammering out the libretto during breaks in the Benjy Poems for about a year or so, and putting words to music with Craig when we can find the time.

6. What artists would you recommend who also work in the realm of creative audio or spoken word poetry? What literary installations or performances have you seen/heard recently and really enjoyed?

Probably the most keen and committed artist I know working in audio literature right now is Jason Samilski. His work is terrific, and his range is enormous. I highly recommend that readers check out his work. 

Tuesday
Jan222013

"Breaks Apart at Every Surface": An Interview with Stephanie Cawley

Stephanie Cawley is a poet and teacher who lives in Philadelphia. She volunteers at Mighty Writers, where she helps middle-schoolers write persona poems. Her work has recently appeared in BOXCAR Poetry Review and Used Furniture Review.

Her poems "Medusa" and "In Which Our Hero Becomes a Masked Vigilante" appear in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Stephanie Cawley talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about myth and lovely language turned menacing. 

1. Could you talk about writing “Medusa”?  Why did you decide to retell this story in particular?

I have always been interested in poems and stories that retell myths or fairy tales from the perspective of a marginalized or monstrous character—Margaret Atwood's poem “The Sirens” and John Gardner's novel Grendel are two I remember loving when I was younger. “Medusa” was really the first time I attempted to do that kind of re-telling myself, though I have gone on to write a number of poems in this same mode. When I set out to write this first poem, I started thinking about some “monster” figures who I thought might have more to say than they had been afforded. I don't really know why I chose Medusa except that it struck me right away how lonely she might be, and how full of grief, and I knew I could make something from that.

2. In “Medusa,” the speaker seems to have lost most of the power that she wielded in the myths—instead of feeling empowered by her stone-turning abilities, she’s trapped by them.  Could you please talk about shifting her to such a defeated character?

Oh, it's funny to think of her as defeated in this poem, though I guess she is. I suppose I thought of her “powers” as more like a curse—I should also probably confess that I did no research for this poem, so I have no idea if that's actually true or not. And I was also interested in taking the long view, of bringing her into the present, where, I imagine, even if she had once enjoyed or felt powerful from turning people into stone, she would be tired and lonely and ready to go home. 

I think what I find interesting about re-purposing myths and fairy tales is how they can be stretched to accommodate multiple versions of the same story, the way people can contain multiple versions of themselves. I think when you speak through a mythological figure, no matter how you as author make that character, all the other versions of her are there as an echo. So Medusa is, in my poem, a little sad, almost a ghost, but the terrible, fierce version of her is there in the reader's mind, too.

3. I love the way you turn language in “In Which Our Hero Becomes a Masked Vigilante.” Phrases like, “I have been biting bullets for years” get reborn when you end with “but now I want to spit them out.”  Later, lovely things, confetti canons and diamonds, get put together into something more menacing—a sort of gun with diamond shot. Could you talk about this play of language in your poem?

First of all, thank you for such a generous reading of my poem! This was a really fun poem to write. I began writing this in response to a prompt, actually, that gave me the task of reinvigorating some clichés. So I started coming up with clichés turned a little inside out and used that language to shape and drive the poem. I was also thinking at the time about the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia, and about the Occupy movement. The Mummers Parade, if you don't know about it, has happened for more than a hundred years on New Year's Day here in Philadelphia. The Mummers are mostly working class people who spend the whole year creating these elaborate themed costumes and sets. They then perform in various configurations of string bands with lots of dancing and choreography and confetti during the parade. Both the Mummers and, I think, the spirit at least of the Occupy movement involve kind of radical transformations, and maybe a threat of disruption as well. I wanted the language and voice of the poem to enact a similar form of transformation, a re-claiming, though I don't think I was conscious of all that happening as I was writing.

4. I read in your biography that you help middle-schoolers write persona poems through a program called Mighty Writers.  How has helping these students influenced your own writing?

My students have written some amazing persona poems, poems in the voices of a lost baby bird, a hilarious version of Batman, the pea from “The Princess and the Pea,” a kidney waiting to be transplanted, and on and on. Just being around kids excited about poems is really energizing. But also, I think I am sometimes insecure that these more imaginative poems I write are “just for fun” or do less meaningful work than other kinds of poems. So when I hear students say brave, interesting, observant things in their persona poems, things they might not have said without the vessel of a persona, it affirms for me that a poem that is imaginative and transformative can also say something very true about the real world and the people in it.

5. What good things have you been reading recently?

The best thing I have been reading lately is The Gazer Within, the collected essays of  Larry Levis. The book is wonderful not only for the compelling ideas about poetry, but also for Levis' enormous humility and humanity. I also just bought the huge, new volume of collected Louise Glück poems, which is a marvel to have on my bedside table. And I've been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick novels, most recently Martian Time-Slip.

6. What else have you been writing as of late?

I have been writing some more persona poems and also a few non-persona but narrative poems exploring other mythological, fairy tale, and science fiction characters and stories. I am also working on some poems and nonfiction pieces about the small town in New Jersey where I grew up.

Saturday
Jan192013

"The Big Story": An Interview with Amber Sparks

Amber Sparks's debut collection May We Shed These Human Bodies is out now from Curbside Splendor. Her fiction has been featured in various publications, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and elimae. Her chapbook, "A Long Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World," is included in the anthology Shut Up/Look Pretty, published by Tiny Hardcore Press. She is also a contributor at lit blogs Big Other and Vouched, and lives in Washington, D.C. with a husband and two beasts. Get more Sparks at her blog.

Her story "Birds with Teeth" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Amber Sparks talks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about getting the whole thing right.

1. Where did “Birds with Teeth” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

The story actually began a long time ago for me – I saw a documentary, years ago, about the Bone Wars (which you mention below) and I was completely intrigued. I did a bunch of research and came up with pages and pages of notes, and then I just couldn’t think of how to actually tell the story, what I wanted to do with it. So I put it aside, and then maybe a year ago I saw another special about these two guys, and I was really taken with the fact that they had been friends before they became bitter enemies, and how different their backgrounds and upbringing were. They were just polar opposites but both drawn to one another because of the same passion.  I also hadn’t known before I saw the special that Cope had this girlfriend that his father sent him over to Europe to get rid of. So there were all of my characters, right there, a sort of love triangle, and the whole story was suddenly opened up. It wasn’t about bones, it was about a passion, a love, that all-consuming desire to feel something before we leave this world.

2. I love the way that this piece engages with history, specifically “The Great Bone Rush” or “The Great Bone Wars,” a time when paleontologists rushed to collect fossils and discover new species.  The main characters are actual historical figures: Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.  It seems to me that this passage describes what you’re doing so beautifully with the material:

Cope, though, gave the monster life. He was one of the first to do so, to bring these New World fossils a stunning, vivid sense of existence.

Can you talk a little about the challenges and pleasures of tussling with history-in-fiction?  I’d love to hear what you do to make sure that historical fact enlarges the story.  (And/or what you do to avoid possible reductiveness.)

Challenges and pleasures is exactly right. It’s so hard and so rewarding to write historical fiction. It’s my favorite thing to get right – I feel like kids’ history textbooks should be written by fiction writers, honestly. Sure, you might not get the facts right, but who cares about the facts? Fiction writers get the whole thing right, what’s really important. They get the story right, and that’s what is so interesting about history. The big story. Not the little facts. Some of the facts are fascinating, and give the story truth and life – I love to sprinkle those throughout – they’re like flaxseeds on your food, they’re good for you, they anchor it. But the meat of the story, the real food there, is the big story. The overarching themes. And sometimes to get at those, I make up shit. Marsh didn’t steal Cope’s girl, at least as far as I know. And Cope’s girl wasn’t a prostitute. But it serves my story, to talk about passion, to talk about different kinds of love, different classes and backgrounds, to make these things up. I think there are certainly different schools of thought on how you do historical fiction  - I just read HHhH, which is a wonderful, amazing book, and Laurent’s doing historical fiction in this extremely factual way, which is terrific, because he makes it work by bringing in his own process, and his faith and doubts in the process, and in the facts themselves, and in the relevance of the facts – and whose facts, and how “facts” can be relative in the face of long-done history. And I think to me, that’s what gives me the license to do historical fiction the other way – to just make things up. Because no writer of history ever has one solid set of facts at his or her fingertips. You’re always guessing, you’re always interpreting and making it your own – so why not make it really your own, make it serve the meanings you’re trying to create? But I think you do have responsibility to be careful with history, of course. I mean, I’m writing about Bone Wars. Long-dead dinosaur hunters.  I don’t think I would ever write about Nazis like this. I’m paraphrasing, but in HHhH, Laurent says something like, These are Nazis. You don’t have to make anything up when it comes to the Nazis. Why would you?

3. This piece’s structure—the flipping between third person sections and italicized first person sections—creates natural tension and energy.  It also allows for delightful surprises, such as Charles Darwin’s letter.  What went into your thinking about the structure of this piece?  (Does it in some way reflect your research process?)

As soon as I knew I wanted the story to come through playing Cope and Marsh off of each other, I knew I had to switch narrators. But at first I was doing third person for both, and then I realized the story could really have power if I took a side. And the side I took was Marsh’s, because he  was the quiet one, the cranky one, the one with no friends, the odd duck. I thought, all the revelations would come from humanizing him, making him sympathetic, as opposed to the naturally sympathetic, gregarious Cope. And then suddenly the she emerged as a stronger character, sort of took over the story like a weed, and so I needed first person for her, too. I needed her to have a voice, not to just be a marginalized plot convenience. If I was going to have a woman in this story, she was going to get her say, too.

4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?
Right now I’m working on some more stories, and putting together a short story collection, and also on a novel. I don’t want to say too much about the novel, but it’s my second attempt at such a form and it’s certainly turning out a lot better than the first attempt.  

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

Oh, man, I’m also enjoying great reading. I just recently had the pleasure of reading Matt Bell’s book, which comes out in June, and I’m very excited for that. It’s fantastic, truly fantastic. And Matt Salesses and Ethel Rohan and Laura van den Berg, some of my favorite writers, all have books coming out next year. I’m excited for the new Karen Russell short story collection, and for Anne Carson’s newest. James Salter’s new novel. Lindsay Hunter has a book coming out that’s going to kick ass. And of course, I can’t wait for the novella that I wrote with Robert Kloss, The Desert Places, that’s coming out in October from Curbside Splendor. It’s illustrated by Matt Kish, the absolutely amazing artist responsible for Tin House’s Moby Dick in Pictures. I’ve seen a few of the early illustrations and I need to tell you that it’s going to be an unbelievable thing, this book.

Friday
Jan182013

"Royalty as Divinity and Arbiter of Reality": An Interview with Margaret Patton Chapman

Margaret Patton Chapman teaches creative writing at Indiana University South Bend and is fiction editor at decomP magazinE. Find links to her work in Diagram, > Kill Author, and more at margaretpattonchapman.com.

Her story "The Plan" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Margaret Chapman chats with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about superhumanity, that con man Odysseus, and bending the story to one's will.

1. What first prompted you to write “The Plan”?  Have you always loved (or agonized over) the Iliad/Odyssey?

I originally wrote this piece for the Ray’s Tap Reading Series run by my friend Chris Bower in Chicago.  I’ve been reading at this series since (almost) its inception and it is probably the source, in some way or another, of almost all my short fiction.  Chris curates the shows around themes, and the particular reading this text comes from required us to use words from an alphabetical list of “feelings”.  The last five were “vengeful”, “worried,” “xenophobic” “yearning” and “zealous.” Those, somehow, lead me to Odysseus and his crew – warriors returning home, becalmed at sea, unsure of the future.   I’m not really sure why that came to mind.  I have to admit, I last read the Odyssey in high school and the Iliad as a college freshman, except for bits and pieces here and there.  I do remember being sort of blown away by Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad.  The language was so clean and brutal.

2. Odysseus seems cast afresh as kind of villainous.  Lines like “Our friends call him cunning, our enemies call him a liar and a crook.  We call him captain.  We have for years” carry this vaguely resigned yet loyal tone, suiting this re-casting as smartly as those swipes at dramatic irony (“When we were done we were just glad to be going home…. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Let's just do one thing first.’”).  Is there a kind of pleasure or a kind of sadness in re-qualifying “always changeful” Odysseus in this story, and do you see it as a reduction (from legend to man) or a rebuilding (examining keenly the sort of man you’re hesitant to trust but, can’t help it, have to)?

Odysseus is a charmer, isn’t he?  Like most charismatic leaders, he is certainly part con-man.  That’s why the Greeks loved him so much, and the Romans hated him.  The Romans thought he was a cheater.  I don’t think the Greeks believed you could cheat at war, or life.

I suppose I am trying to both reduce and rebuild Odysseus.  Because of his legend, he holds you at arms length as a character, but he seems very human to me, watching the sea, trying to decide what to do next.  He is a King, however, in the ancient sense – royalty as divinity and arbiter of reality. Jeanette Winterson, in her essay “Imagination and Reality” talks about (belief in) royalty as the ultimate act of imagination – that one, as a subject, endows royalty with superhumanity and special destiny outside of average human experience, and in return one gets to be close to a semi-divine being.  We do that now outside of the context of hereditary aristocracy – we give that power to celebrities, politicians, religious leaders.  The crew, the chorus of this story, knows that they are not as important as their leader, that is why they let themselves be subject to him and his whims, even as they wish that he returned some measure of their devotion.  And Odysseus doesn’t need to care about the fates of his men because they don’t matter.  They’re the redshirts – needed to tell his story.  In the end, it is Odysseus that becomes legend because he can bend the story to his will.  He will be the only survivor because he is the only one who needs to.  Storytelling is brutal that way.

3. Your closing paragraph is one of the most phenomenal I’ve ever read.  Not only the tragedy of conceding to the doom, moving from autonomy/victory (“We all signed up for Greece, for glory”) to depending on the disgrace (“He will plan until when I say we it will only be me”)—but the “we” also starts becoming Odysseus.  What does it mean, the oppressor as the collective?  What is your intent in these last moments, as you define and redefine what is stable and what is diminishing—a kind of moving-backwards anti-creation?  More a moment of forgiveness, this reduction?  Is it white-flagging?

Wow, thank you so much!  When you retell a well-know story I think you are engaging what it means to tell, and receive, stories, so to me the end is trying to question assumptions about how stories are transmitted and by whom and the relationship between stories and history.  I think the final paragraph is a moment of surrender for the chorus – all of their autonomy and identity has gone and their only choice is not only to die and be forgotten but also and to forgive and surrender to this fate.  Also, in giving Odysseus the group’s story in the end, even for a half a sentence, I hope to say something about his necessary understanding of, and consumption of, the stories and lives of those around him, because he is the only one who is able to tell this tale as he is the only survivor, not just in the story, but in time as well.  I think the very end moves past Odysseus, not backwards but into the future, towards the world of the reader, and perhaps past that as well. In the end, everything is gone, even Odysseus, even us, even stories, but the sea is still there.  Something has to be permanent; at least, that is what I choose to believe.  Otherwise everything is too sad. 

4. What have you been reading this winter?  The epic?  The tragic?

I’m teaching a course this semester, fittingly enough, on retelling myths and fairy tales, so I’ve been re-reading Karen Armstrong’s really wonderful A Short History of Myth, which came out as part of the Cannongate Myths series, and also Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.  I just got Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brother’s Grimm, which is somewhere between translations and retellings.  And next on my list is Lucy Corin’s short story collection The Entire Predicament because I am totally in love with her story “Eyes of Dogs” in the anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me.   That story is available online, too at, Web Conjunctions(http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/corin08.htm), and if you haven’t read it you really should.

5. What are you working on now?

I’ve been working on a book about ghosts for a while now, and I hope I’m going to finish it soon.  I’m also hoping to start putting together a collection of these strange little retellings I do.

Wednesday
Jan162013

"As If Opening (or Closing?) an Endless Clause": An Interview with Brian Henry

Brian Henry is the author of nine books of poetry, including QuarantineLessness, and Doppelgänger. Three of his books have appeared in separate UK editions. His work has been translated into Croatian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, and Spanish. Henry has co-edited Verse since 1995, and his criticism has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, Jacket, and Boston Review. His translation of Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008, and his translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things appeared as a Lannan Foundation selection from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award. Henry’s poetry and translations have received numerous honors, including an NEA fellowship, a Howard Foundation grant, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences grant.

His essay "Ammonia" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Brian Henry talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about poetry vs. nonfiction and the scent of memory. 

1. Could you talk about the process of writing “Ammonia”?

It’s safe to say that I would not have written “Ammonia” if I had not been translating Aleš Šteger’s prose book Berlin, which consists of similarly single-paragraph lyric prose. Aleš mentioned that his book had been influenced by Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900, so I also read that (several times, having fallen in love with it). Aleš’s Berlin is one experienced by a cosmopolitan poet who is also a flaneur, while Benjamin’s Berlin is a child’s as filtered through the perspective of an adult. I had been wanting to write about a handful of childhood experiences for a while, in prose, but had not found a suitable approach until I realized that I could use Richmond, Virginia (where I grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s) as a pressure point. I wanted to write about both my Richmond childhood and the process of memory.

2. As someone who is familiar with your poetry, I can see a lot of your poetry in your non-fiction: your diction, the tone, the density of your language.  What makes this piece distinct, to you, as non-fiction? Did you make a conscious decision to write this piece as non-fiction, or did that decision come through drafting and revising?

I definitely approached it as non-fiction, since it’s entirely true (to the best of my knowledge/recollection). And the piece seems too long (for my sensibility) to be a prose poem. I see the prose as a blend of my own instincts and my deep involvement with Šteger’s Berlin, which is full of astonishing prose.

3. The sense of smell is highlighted in your piece. When you question other moments, such as your memory of finding the finger, you are always sure of the scent involved. Why do you think this sense, above the others, became the most important to your memory?

I have an intense olfactory memory. My memory’s connection to smell often seems stronger than its connection to the other senses, so I let it govern the piece.

4. Have you read (or do you plan on reading) anything interesting this winter break?

I did. I read Jennifer Moxley’s book of essays There Are Things We Live Among, published by Flood Editions in 2012, and J.M. Coetzee’s 2009 novel Summertime. The Moxley book, in particular, was an absolute joy.

5. What else have you been working on, writing-wise? 

I have been other writing essays like “Ammonia,” mostly. Blackbird will publish my next two, and I have another three or four in various stages of completion. Having written so many poems, and having translated such a substantial book of prose, I feel like it’s time to pay attention to the sentence for a while. If a poem sneaks up on me, I won’t resist it, but I’m not beating the bushes for poems right now.