What projects are you currently working on?

As of August 2011, I’ve just finalised the last draft and associated edits for my début short-story collection, Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories, which will be released in October through Black Rider Press, Western Australia’s newest independent publisher of experimental literary fiction and innovative poetics.

I’m compelled to concede that it’s constituted an unforeseeably protracted gestation period for my manuscript to reach publication, because my editor (the multitalented Jeremy Balius, a first-rate raconteur of villanelles and verse) and I are both so frequently invested in an assortment of creative projects — and not always at the same time! — that we’ve trained our gazes on extraneous ventures whilst we’ve waited for Black Rider Press to develop the profile it’s now gained in Australia and abroad. Perhaps revealingly, when I originally submitted the manuscript for Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories to BRP the book sprawled with the length and largesse of a William T. Vollmann prose collection – it was in excess of 400 pages — and my genuine intent was to lambast my readership with the most dense and diverse assemblage of stories that I could lever together.

This was back in 2009, when I’d just graduated from an intensive Honours research degree in Professional Writing, and I’d been inclined to invest the entirety of the previous year pouring over the legacy left by the greats of Modernist and Maximalist fiction — from Miguel de Cervantes to Geoffrey Chaucer to Wilkie Collins to William Faulkner to Mikhail Bulgakov to François Rabelais to David Foster Wallace, for the purposes of composing my thesis. My favoured literary stylistic has always been a multi-clausal, difficult, deconstructivist one — I feel this is deftly evidenced in A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953, my full-colour illustrated graphic novelette from 2007 — and having immersed myself in the supercharged phrasings of prose stylists past, I knew that Carnivalesque would represent no exception. What originally disconcerted me and excites me now, however, is that when Jeremy suggested in 2010 that I compress the contents of my short-story collection and apply a discerning oracular to retain the best fictions in the manuscript, I undertook what I believed to be an unenviable task, and yet within weeks I’d liberated a sleek manuscript of half the length from within the carnage of my original submission.

So Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories now assumes the guise of a svelte 60,000 words (comprising of fifteen rather than thirty stories!), and because (as so happens) my reading tastes have morphed over the intervening one-and-half years, I’m modeling my manuscript less on the hyper-embellished volumes of Vollmann and Foster Wallace, and now more closely on the collations of David Means and Barry Hannah, and specifically Airships (which, even today, must signify one of the most underrated intermezzos of poetic prose to have emerged from a man of flesh and mortar). Jeremy and I are both adamant that what I’ve delivered with Carnivalesque is in molten opposition to the register of fiction so often esteemed as valuable in Australia — I possess no sense of propriety or proprietary reservation when I explain that the Australian literary community is politically and aesthetically conservative beyond salvage — but our objective is to beat back the perverse nineteenth-century sentimentalism for bush poetry, genre realism and economical prose that so readily pervades the tenor of our country’s publishing lists, and welcome all those exponents of experimental literature who possess no likeminded community, and who remain scattered across the country, because they were exculpated from the sanctification ritual that made the Miles Franklin Award the determiner for what writing was worthwhile in Australia.

If I were obligated to describe the contents of Carnivalesque, I’d be convinced that the easiest encapsulation is to subscribe to the précis suggested by the book’s cover-blurb, which begins:

“The titular work of Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories is not a story at all, but a novella, and concerns the Rabelaisian exploits of one Efim Barnum Bank Zaslavsky — a Russian-Jewish carnival exhibitionist — and his anachronistic, wandering gypsy caravan as they pursue a potentially non-existent wolf, and peddle the wares of their particular breed of sideshow throughout contemporary Japan.”

I’ve already received a beguiling, immediately legitimating clamour of praise and plaudits for the collection from a small constellation of important writers — refer to the Black Rider Press website for details — and it’s so gratifying to see that everyone who has responded to the book are experiencing similar reactions and identifying the same intertextual references.

Insofar as alternative creative ventures are concerned, I’ve just had my first standalone novella — a 45,000-word exploration of Scottish cryptozoology entitled, The Signatory — accepted for publication by Skylight Press, an independent U.K.-based publisher specialising in literary fiction, drama, poetry and esoteric studies.

The Signatory is one of those projects that I fleetingly referred to above, inasmuch that I composed the manuscript during the latter half of 2010 whilst negotiating edits for Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories with Jeremy (for his part, he spent the same fistful of months penning a chapbook of epistolary poetics entitled, Adrift, which will be released by Fremantle Press in 2012), and I can’t maintain that I ever harboured a conviction that I would locate a publisher for The Signatory because such a notion was insupportable whilst I was writing the book: I wanted to test the parameters of the novella, as a form, and finagle a narrative that defied the conventional mechanics of causality whilst remaining coherent. To date, this has proven the most acrobatic work of fiction it’s been my satisfaction to produce, and I’m extremely appreciative of how supportive Skylight Press has been in championing the merits of The Signatory (they’re the publishers of award-winning literary svengali, like Will Alexander and Hugh Fox), which will be released internationally in January.

Once again, I’m predisposed to propose that it’s best to define the contents of The Signatory by referring to the original cover-blurb I devised for the book:

“In The Signatory, Sebastian Sackworth, an emotionally-depleted English anthropologist, and Adolfo Cavaggio, a lusty Italian ornithologist, leave the bread and circuses of bustling Britain to court a rare red swan — while revelling in a week of debauch, dilettantism and country living in the serene lowlands of Scotland.”

As you yourself know, David, in being a creative contributor to the cross-cultural anthology that I curate — Red Leaves, the English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal — I’m also in the process of deploying the finishing touches (with my Tokyo-based co-editor, Yasuhiro Horiuchi) to issue #002.

This is an exciting time, because Red Leaves #001 (which was released in May, 2010) emerged as a full-colour anthology of 360 pages, and complied very closely to my prior knowledge of independent print publishing. Inversely, Red Leaves #002 is proving to signify an alluring learning curve for both Yasuhiro and myself, because this time round the journal manifests itself as a full-length audio anthology, comprising of twenty-six “spoken-word” tracks, and an accompanying album-leaf of translated poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and subtitled artwork. Issue #002 is set to be released this forthcoming November, and will feature original bi-lingual contributions from the likes of Sean M. Whelan, Josephine Rowe, Graham Nunn, A.S. Patric, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Karen Tei Yamashita, Roland Kelts, Goro Takano, Kenji Siratori, Asami Nishimura, Hirofumi Sugimoto, Mandy Ord and Kuniharu Shimizu.

Because of the intensive process of professional bi-lingual translation and cross-cultural correspondence which Yasuhiro and I undertake in preparing each successive edition of Red Leaves, we suffer from long lead-through periods (all things considered, an issue of the journal generally demands twelve months of editorial toil outside of mine and Yasuhiro’s work/life responsibilities, and none of this effort is paid), which is why we won’t solicit to wrangle creative content for our next print edition, Red Leaves #003, until the end of 2012. In the interim, next year will see me unveiling Night Discourse (http://www.nightdiscourse.com/), the forthcoming free online interactive interdisciplinary fiction. I won’t disclose too much about Night Discourse just yet, as it’s still very much a pipedream, but whereas the curatorial focus for Red Leaves is in promoting discrete literary forms of creative expression (and, by the very reinforcement of cultural capital which ghettoises particular artforms, because it excludes individuals who don’t engage actively in the proliferation of literature), Night Discourse seeks to cater to all creative practitioners (and most closely shares blood ties with publications such as British Columbia’s Memewar — http://www.memewaronline.com/ — insofar that my objective is to facilitate a dialogue between disciplines, rather than pitch to a specific readership). At this point, I can’t confirm the month during 2012 when Night Discourse will be unveiled (probably in the first half of the year), but irrespective of the launch date, the objective is to catch one and all asunder with the editorial scope of the project: it won’t go live for public access until I’m confident that the content developed for the website correlates with the core ethos of the project, which is to problematise — if not collapse — the illegitimate parameters of regulation and unified authorship previously assigned to digital content production. The point, herein, is to emphasise the fact that art is a visual mode of socialisation, and it therefore doesn’t have to exist as an exclusionary preoccupation. Everyone possesses the capacity to shape the way that creative content is expressed, and Night Discourse is an open gate.

Furthermore — after a hiatus in 2011 due to personal obligations involving my part-time work in the Marketing & Communications department of Oxfam (Australia) and full-time post-graduate study, in addition to teaching English and Media (Film & T.V. Studies) for three months of the year — I’ll also be able to finally resume composing my début novel manuscript, Reinventing Coffee, throughout 2012. This is a contemporary fictional bildungsroman concerning a Sydney-flung chartered accountant who communes with the Apocalypse. I set my sights on finishing the draft manuscript for the book next year. In sum: If my partner and I aren’t sharing a Tokyo Christmas with you, David, come December next year, and I’m still manacled to the keyboard in my Melbourne apartment, I’m probably masochistic. All the same, I feel like the forthcoming months will yield for me the best of times.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Your question is an earnest one, David, and there’s an imperative for a new author in want of cultivating a public profile such as myself to answer it, but it’s also probably the proverbial Rosetta Stone of art journalism, the interrogative MacGuffin, because people like to perceive creative influences as definitive and synchronous diodes that they can refer to when orienting the dark geography of a new artist’s work – it’s easiest and least riskspawned for an individual (such as a reader) to apprehend an unknown quantity (such as a new writer) by way of measuring devices or signposts, and of course this only makes sense because there’s such an unnavigable tumult of creative stimulus striving to locate our attention on a daily basis, that any sort of familiar frequency discerned amidst this white noise is like a beacon to nightblinded bats.

However, I’m also wary of the naff and dangerous limitations of defining an artist by identifying one or two touchstones which have underpinned their work. More than any other year in my life, and without resorting to inciting or aggravating the harassed spectre of Jacques Derrida, I’ve realised in 2011 that there are more creative practitioners, texts, mythologies, philosophies, people, places, lives and emotions I haven’t found the opportunity to engage with directly which cumulatively trump any object or event I have personally experienced in determining the way I write. I think any honest writer – any creative practitioner – would be obligated to confess the same. It’s the world unexplored – in its multimodal swarm of intersections and intertextualities – that shapes, winnows and distorts what a writer produces, it has to be, otherwise there would be no narrative frontier to forge into, there would be no story to embrace or defy that is new and therefore necessary to emerge with.

You have to continuously and ceaselessly allow yourself to be engulfed by the newness of the world to produce a new comment on it. So like anyone, I’m influenced by everything that I love or hate; and so like everyone, I’m forever discovering new pleasures and dispassions. But rather than permit myself to assume the role of the poor guest and thwart the transparency of your question, I’ll proceed to name those foremost individuals who come to mind that might offer readers a false and haphazard coda for my own fiction:

Barry Hannah, César Aira, Charles Portis, Donald Barthelme, Kenneth Patchen, Alfred Jarry, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kurt Vonnegut, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, Saul Bellow, Bruno Schultz, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Mervyn Peake, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Franzen, David Mitchell, J.P. Donleavy, DBC Pierre, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Jasper Fforde, China Miéville, Percival Everett, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, Milan Kundera, Günter Grass, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Joshua Cohen, Steve Erickson, Junot Díaz, Roberto Bolaño, Karen Tei Yamashita, Chris Ware, Sherman Alexie, Etgar Keret, Salvador Plascencia, Mark Z. Danielewski, Patrick Holland, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Emmett Stinson, Jonathan Swift, Tennessee Williams, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, François Rabelais, William Gaddis, Wilkie Collins, John Brandon, Wells Tower, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Homi K. Bhabha, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, David Attenborough, David Simon, David Milch, Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, Joel and Ethan Coen, P.T. Anderson, Wes Anderson, Martin McDonagh, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick and Terry Gilliam, amongst others.

Do you have a specific writing style?

My fiction is primarily fascinated with words, imagery, characterisation, interior emotion, social or physical disfigurement, heartbreak, the arbitrary parameters of insanity, causal subversion, hyperreality, absurdism, frame-narratives, intertextuality and metatextuality, popular culture, questions of authorship, humour, environmentalism, multiculturalism, the tenets of Modernism, and the ecosystem of human experience. I generally write my supercharged prose in an aleatory mode, in which the story, though meticulous and immersive in its machinery, is not the subject but the object of my method – this is something you’ll find common to all sorts of writers, from Barry Hannah through to César Aira – and pretty much the entirety of the past decade has seen me penning fiction in which I’ve slowly but irrevocably devised an unshakeable aesthetic manifesto, whereby consonantal cadence is king. If a sentence doesn’t smack of an ekphrastic music, of an inevitable assonance, then it shouldn’t be invested with artistic value because it warrants effacing or replacing – every sentence crafted by human hand is a political commitment on behalf of the author to assign a nominal importance to what has been written, over what was not. You best ensure that the words you’ve chosen to prioritise, in a sentence-by-sentence dimension, constitute an equal importance with the content you’ve chosen to express.

During an in-conversation event at the 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Wells Tower reframed the sentiments of the late Andre Dubus II by claiming that a scribe of fiction will obtain greater satisfaction by writing “vertically” rather than “horizontally”, and I tend to agree – administering one’s utmost attention to the cast and craft of every word, until each perfect phrase accumulates substance to collapse in on itself, forming a singularity at the sentence level which allows the writer to burrow to the heart of what each sentence signifies. Because story resides like a vein in the turbulent quiet of every ellipsis, paragraph, page.

As a scrivener who strives to devise stories which simulate a sort of literary acceleration for my readers, I think my most significant realisation was coming to understand that it’s okay – it’s only respectful to your discipline – to take time to accomplish writing of actual value. Not every short-story a person writes will be invested with mastery, nor even a suite of salvageable one-liners, let alone evidence to suggest that the story’s original concept was worth pursuing. But the more you seek to identify the emotions that undergird your sentences, the easier it is to reveal the narrative that resides beneath the surface. Okay, so theoretically there are probably some problematic quasi-Structuralist implications which result from the thesis that the material for a compelling narrative is waiting to be emancipated from within a static phrase, as if all stories were birthed in egg-form and simply required the mothering of a patient writer to permit it to burst asunder from its confines like Monkey Magic. And yet there’s truth contained in every myth, and I would be neither the first nor the last writer to attest to the fact that so often rhyme presides over reason, text determines matter, a precise phrase will yield a new premise or phase.

It’s called creative research through praxis, and once you take ownership of its possibilities there isn’t a world that words won’t disclose nor a woman they won’t wrangle to unclothe. I composed the entirety of The Signatory this way, using each sentence as a hinge to the next, and the plot constructed itself from the inside out like the set of a Michel Gondry film, prefabricated cardboard walls that emerged to compile a kingdom, or something akin to the minor note of a major chord, a seemingly displaced keynote culminating in a performance of awesome sonic power. I’m writing the manuscript for Reinventing Coffee this way, and the great benefit of this approach has been in discovering new directions for the novel which I couldn’t have determined in advance, because the impetus for each new event derives from the very pedestal of the sentence. I remember reading that Haruki Murakami was loath to spend two years of his life grappling with a new book, if he knew what was going to eventuate from the outset. I understand this sentiment, but I’m quick to ally myself to its opposing axis: I can know with a voracious favour what I’m writing when I start out and who the central characters are that populate my book, but the very act of subordinating plot to language necessitates that from the beginning my story will morph to justify itself at the sentence level. It becomes my responsibility to ensure that this transformative process remains unimpeded throughout the entirety of the manuscript. It’s like being front-row when the metamorphosis results in some beguiling monster. A writer can be no more generous than by regularly surprising themselves on a daily basis. If he can achieve this much, he’s already charmed one reader on his side.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

On occasions, I’m obliged to confess to behaving like a human moth when confronted with a new concept or an unimprisoned vision, and this particular question is invested too sweetly with the promise of fire to disregard. So I’m sufficiently bewitched to pilot myself right at it: Genre is less a matter of categorisation or stratification of story, than it is a language of narrative that invites individuals with sensitive tongues to try their best at being understood. Though a writer may not be natively fluent in a specific genre does not discredit his capacity to parrot the patois in a convincing fashion. I see “genre” as the cultural arbitrator for what content or aesthetic should be manifest in a work of fiction – a false guideline, reminiscent of a mother threatening to sabotage a child’s estimation in the eyes of Father Christmas if the kid were to continue to misbehave. The act of betraying convention or common expectation is immediately linked to an imagined sanction, one whereby the writer fears being discredited as a valuable contributor to culture because he has defied the standards of easy categorisation.

This is why I see “genre” as the equivalent of a literary bogeyman, because as a writer you’re compelled to simultaneously recognise its existence whilst disregarding its imagined power. I’m convinced that any worthy artist can explode the internal circuitry of a specific genre to reveal its artificiality, but the best writers can also demonstrate how such exclusively-automated narrative apparatus can be reconfigured to create something that doesn’t yet bear a name. As a statement of intent, this is what I strive to accomplish with my own fiction; it doesn’t always work, of course, and I’m not so transfixed by my own rectum to contend otherwise, but I feel that Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories and The Signatory are testament to my attempts to challenge the readymade parameters of an established “genre”, in order to produce a text which is stylistically or thematically recognisable but at a remove from any one favoured model of narrative. My favourite writers – Barry Hannah, César Aira, Charles Portis, China Miéville, ad infinitum – do this all the time.

I cannot write if not to defamiliarise the everyday, and strive to make new again narrative forms that were once adventurous and which have since fallen into a cycle of manufacture. Obviously, it’s always sensible to have a snappy philosophy up your sleeve or an incontrovertible saint-of-letters you can quote if forced to interact with detractors, and Brecht’s notion of verfremdung is therefore probably the most impressive principle or platitude to invoke to explain my motivation to write. “Take a common recurrent universally-practiced operation and try to draw attention to it by illuminating its peculiarity”. Reality is so ungovernably strange and life is so invested by particularity that it just smacks of a lack of consciousness to convey an experience of the world as though it could assume a uniform meaning. This is why the argument for “genre” is, at heart, a fallacy: if any incentive exists for a story to reflect or engage with human experience in any capacity, it must deviate from the rule. Not only is no individual experience identical; all strange experiences are relative. To produce fiction which attempts to deemphasise the value of this insight by hewing to an explicit formula is a sure way to exhaust your commitment to literature by repeating yourself. An opinionated friend of mine is convinced that any writer who continuously moves between genres, attempting to own/disown each one, is also an artistic egotist. That may well be the case, but I nevertheless can’t see myself writing novellas about freakshow gypsy carnivals and studies of Scottish cryptozoology too far into the future.

Jess C. Scott

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on the last story for a non-pornographic BDSM-themed anthology. I have a couple of projects to get to after that (an incubus/succubus-themed anthology, and a trilogy featuring cyberpunk elves). On the whole, jessINK (my indie publishing platform) is the biggest project I’m constantly working on!

When and why did you begin writing?

I’ve always been writing. I think I’ve just always enjoyed being able to channel my thoughts and imagination into a creative/analytical pursuit, which happens to be the written word. If it wasn’t writing, it’d be via music or visual art, or maybe photography, or fashion design, or…

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When I was fifteen going on sixteen, and wrote a poem titled “Disillusioned…Misguided.” A couple of friends read it and wondered if I was suicidal. I’d achieved embodying the role of “a suitably depressed poet,” which a core part of me considered an accomplishment.

What inspired you to write your first book?

My first book (EyeLeash) was a realistic teenage sexting novel, written entirely in a blog/IM format. I guess I wanted it to be an antithesis to the mass media’s portrayal of sex as a commodity. I also wanted to give people a real and genuine glimpse at the inner workings of a non-trivial relationship (where there’s more than how “physically desirable” one is/appears to be, on the surface).

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Everything and everybody I’ve ever seen, heard, imagined, or come into contact with. Music is a particularly heavy influence–I listen to everything from classical, rock, electronica, Korean Pop. It’s all in the vibes and whatever moves the soul and colors the mind.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

I grew up in cosmopolitan Singapore and came over to rural Maine when I turned 21. My writing has always been a curiously quite-balanced blend of fact and fiction. International settings and a spirit of self-discovery are elements that feature quite frequently in my work.

Do you have a specific writing style?

I will borrow the words of a reader/customer, who says it better than I ever could:

“[Jess's writing is] raw sometimes and a little rough around the edges, but it’s full of brio. It’s very contemporary. It has personality and energy. It deals with modern issues in a very modern way.” — Joseph Grinton, “Don’t Run Away From Sex”

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

I write in a range of different genres (creative non-fiction, erotic fiction, experimental fiction, alternative paranormal romance, poetry, urban fantasy, cyberpunk). I like what each genre has to offer, though I’m usually more concerned with the storyline and characters.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

The basic message is always the same: to be unafraid to be one’s true self.

What book are you reading now?

Skin Deep, by Dr. Ted Grossbart. It’s a psychodermatological book. I’ve been battling acne for the past three years (my skin was relatively clear throughout my teenage life!), and I’ve gotten tired of products and treatments that claim to work, but don’t (in the long run). His book focuses on the internal state of the individual (which the skin “reflects”)–his book is absolute goodness, and is available as an eBook on his website. I got a print copy because I like perusing my reading material old-school style…

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Vixen Phillips, Tommy Jonq–anyone that has a unique perspective on society and/or culture, who’s using independent publishing to get their voices heard.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

That my (erotic) fiction is literary smut devoid of any artistic and/or social value. The lack of differentiation between erotica (as an art form) and pornography (as a commodity) was so great, that I ended up writing an online disclaimer on my website (to share my views with readers/customers/site visitors). I also wrote the disclaimer to avoid being arrested on obscenity charges.

Any memories of particular works: the writing of, feedback, the thought behind…etc.

Jack in the Box (one of my erotic/literary novelettes branded as “factual fiction”) is close to 100% factual.

Which brings to mind an Oscar Wilde quote: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.”

Steve Finbow

Well, let’s hope you’ve not been snatched away by a randy eagle before I get to answer. The texty thighs, taut and shining with extra-virgin olive oil, throb with an infant excitement about what goes on in the world, how we cope with things, how we cope with ‘things’, & how we represent the separation between experience & language. How do you feel about putting a word onto the screen & knowing that, not only is it inadequate in revealing what you want it to signify, but that it will add to that separation? The stories are attempts to understand themselves.

“Der Fuhrer had squab for dinner and his nocturnal emissions are totally malodorous.” What’s a reader to make of this sentence? Hitler baby night spooge is well and good, but squab? What the fig you thinkin’, Finbow?

Hitler’s doctors enforced his vegetarianism because of severe and chronic constipation. Stuffed squab was one of Hitler’s favourite meals. I wanted to reinvent the myths around this man, how people reacted to him as a human being, how insecure he was, how controlled his surroundings. I wanted to re-imagine him living today, listening to the Ramones, lusting over Sheryl Lee, to mash up history & the clichéd view of historical figures, squab being a good word – squab: squib, squabble, scribe. Do you use historical figures in your work? I think I got it from Robert Coover.

I remember when I was eleven telling my mom I wanted to write books about going back in time to the American Revolution but with modern weapons. I liked the idea of fighter jets massacring Redcoats, of massive modern power obliterating the past. Robert Coover had little to do with it. Preadolescent formication preferred the future.
     “Army ants, like a delta of cherry liquorice, tickle the inscribed thoroughfares of the bark. Red colobus monkeys scurry to the topmost branches, panting and chattering.”
     What’s honed mean to you? How much perception transference is enough? How much is too much? What about Salter, Brothers Grimm, BEE — the dudes who wrote the lines you pulled for your epigrams — are they models?

Yeah, I used to create huge battlefields with all kinds of historical mash-ups – Romans versus the Eighth Army, Confederates versus Robin Hood, French Resistance versus Arab Tribesman – all Airfix 1/72 scale. Honed I like. Heft I like. I like the physicality of the words. The grate & teeth-aching act of honing. I suppose I am an impressionist when it comes to writing – describing (however impossible it is to do so) something that I imagine. I don’t think similes or metaphors are a sign of weakness as long as they are used sparingly. I use research & my imagination in equal measure to form an impression of a topography I have never experienced. That’s where the fun is in writing – to world build or world manipulate. I stood on the banks of the Limpopo – I smelled the air, I watched mongooses tackle a snake – but I have a phobia about chimpanzees – seed, man, seed. James Salter – definitely an influence – rigour, precision, sexy as hell. The Grimm Bros – part of the “unthought known” that bubbles away at the back of the mind. BEE – again, yes, American Psycho (just re-read & realized how like Amis’s Money it is – and funny; Glamorama – best sex writing I’ve read.) I’m open with my influences – I’m not afraid to say I enjoy reading Martin Amis, Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos. I could just keep saying, ‘Oh, yes, Thomas Bernhard, Jacques Roubaud, Pierre Guyotat – all of whom I do like – but, you know, wank, wank, wank, wank… What about you? Is it a case of the anxiety of influence or the influence of anxiety?

Writing and reading are my anti-anxiety medication. Maybe if you read enough you wind up realizing you’ve gotta write like yourself because it’s too tough to sort out the influences?
     Not to imply that you don’t write like yourself – you do, that’s clear after a story or two – but what are you trying to do to a reader when you drop this playful Pynchonism: “The rabbit’s ears of my outstretched fingers cast no shadow bunnies, they are inverted Vs, victory signs, and my face resembles the rubber mask it would become for bank robbers, did my head always look too big for my body, superimposed, hydrocephalic, my suits always that shiny, have I always worn the demeanour of a robot-bulldog puppy locked in a telepod transportation with an ageing dance-class gigolo of an orang-utan driving trucks, riding bicycles, on a trail through Laos and Cambodia, while under their noses and over our heads the frowning moustachioed silhouettes of the B52s – Stratosfortresses – shed their eyelashes that grow and grow until they became chess pieces become canoes become bombs carpeting the forests, the roads, and the towns with piles of twisted metal, limbs, minds – from arc light to whispering death to rolling thunder, and I open the bottomless pit; and there arises a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air are darkened by reason.”

Don’t you think that all writing is a kind of time travel? We enter a text, we close the door, we press the buttons & are transported to another time and place, always ALWAYS slightly different from what we know. All writing is uncanny. If I broke this down, it’s simple: it’s Richard Nixon, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the Book of Revelations – three views of horror in the changing world of 1968. I want the reader to be zipped along with me, wiping bugs from their face while enjoying the speed and the thrill. Don’t you enjoy the rush of reading? Do you read to relax or to rave?

I think I read at this point because it’s what I do. I once tried to read things other than fiction but realized I need to read fiction or else there’s a negative affect effect. The closest I come to raving is reading at a bar at happy hour after work, something I think we both do, since you sometimes upload to Facebook pics of what you’re reading and the beer you’re drinking. In “Spook City Double” the narrator reads Less Than Zero over a beer at a bar. What tasty beery concoction would you pair your collection with? I’d say something a bit hoppy, dark, maybe with a hint of licorice or something sweet in the center of it? Not a high-APV porter, not a session beer, not a creamy good-natured low-cal/APV stout. There’s some effervescence but it’s not as crisp/golden as a Stella Artois. Definitely something served in an 8 oz. goblet, a bit costlier, worth savoring, not so easy to see through?

My favourite time to read and drink – after work in a good pub or bar, always contemplating the next pint. Yes… Maybe a Belgian beer. A Maredsous 8, a Scotch de Silly, or – my favourite – a Delirium Norcturnum. Can you think of anything more pleasurable (as a solo, fully clothed, non-sexual pursuit) than reading with a good glass of beer close to hand? Do you drink alcohol while you write? Or use any other kind of drug? I can’t. A good cup of English tea and a bacon sandwich is about as rock ‘n’ roll as I get.

I never drink and write because I tend to write in the morning before work. Not the best time for anything more than tons of coffee.
     Did you write “firstmarshsecondmarsh” on a bit of cush or deeze? It’s presented in a seriously uncompromising patois. Which is really hard to pull off because it’s almost totally impossible for the language not to get in the way of the story, the images, the characters, the creation of a world etc etc etc. Fun to write, sure, but hard to read. Agree?

Agree. But not fun to write. I wanted to push myself language-wise, to outdo Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths, William T. Vollmann… I’ve been trying to write a story in Cockney dialect for some years without succeeding. This voice is based on someone I knew when I was young, and the geography is from my pre-teen years. My dreams are set in a post-war world – I have no idea why – where things are reverting to the rural, the city a distant mirage. I wanted a pre-experiential language, a sort of perception = thought = description – not sure if I pulled it off but the effort I thought worth showing for what it is. I haven’t been near cush or deeze since it was called marijuana. I can’t smoke it. Asthmatic. But I have had some memorable experiences eating hashish brownies. I was more into cocaine, speed – black and whites, blues… Don’t you think all novels, stories, poems are iterations of small failures, the state you would like to achieve on drugs, alcohol, adrenaline, but never quite get there?

Insert Beckett quote re: improved failure, followed by stock conversation re: reality not living up to ideals.
     When you encounter Genghis Khan as the father of a son familiar with Gnarls Barkley and the adjective “rad,” you expect familiar father-son stuff to come off in a semi-unfamiliar way, but what else might happen? How much do you plan in advance — ie, set yourself restrictions/parameters/fences — and how much are things produced sans overt pre-compositional intention?

I suppose it’s a variation on the lines, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, those who do expect…” I start with a line, a vision, an overheard conversation, a wrestling match between two opposed and contradictory forces, in “Empire” – Genghis Khan & skate culture – and run with it. Sometimes it’s serious, other times – I hope – humorous. I rarely plan short stories in advance, they come out and carry on and then stop. I might see a symmetry, or a paragraph structure early on and stick to that to shape the fiction; I sometimes set myself rigorous word counts in paragraphs and work within that – 250 words per para. I never EVER set restrictions on content but I am anal about form. How about you? Your stories flow like lubed honey but might be as tightly laced as an extreme bondage queen’s bodice.

Thanks. I really just to try to find some time to write, that’s the first priority. After which I try to clearly see through my pen, get out of the way, make a mess, and remember that I’ll revise forever after. Otherwise, I try not to think about this sort of thing too much. Maybe pretty thoughts about writing dissolve when you’re deeply imaging what you’re writing?
     London, Japan, even a mention of Steve David Finbow. Autobiographical content approximates what percentage exactly of each? Many stories focus on a dude named “He.” Granted, one story also involves Babel and repeatedly reveals his middle name. But how personal would you say these stories are, and does it matter? Is the dark figure waving at the end something like your shadow?

Difficult. I fall between two camps. One – that all autobiography is fictional. Two – that all fiction is autobiographical. London is the city I enjoy writing about the most, my hometown – I love walking and talking it; exploring the unknown places and enjoying the known. I love going to London pubs with a few mates and chatting over pints of Stella. Japan is my second home and a place that intrigues me – it is an alien culture in every way no matter how long one lives here. The “he” is, I suppose, all the Steve Finbows that I am not. In the introduction to my biography of Allen Ginsberg, I state that Roland Barthes was really fucking wrong about the death of the author – that was a neat con trick to make us not think about ‘being’, but to think of the waste product of being, the trickle of watery shit on the page that someone’s sat over and squeezed out, eyes bulging, sphincter bursting – I love Barthes when he’s writing about his mum, haircuts, love, Balzac (who seemed very much alive in the analysis in S/Z) but I believe the author – and the author’s autobiography – is bound up in the writing. Even extreme writers like Céline, Acker, Genet, Stein, Guyotat, Ballard, Quin, Burroughs, Kavan included elements of their individual life stories in their fiction. The portion of “Spook City Double” set in the ‘80s in Liverpool is a true story, the title story is based on an actual event in my life, as are “The Boy at the Beau Rivage,” “Mosquito,” and some of “Soho Spleen” – the rest are mostly imagination sprinkled with memories. I reject the maxim “Write what you know” – how can you write what you don’t know? Sometimes, when I read through a story after finishing it and leaving it for a month or so – I can’t remember writing it. It’s like “Woah! Where did that come from? Who wrote that? Was that me?” So, yeah, that dark figure is my writerly double, the one always disappearing around the corner or slipping off to the toilet when it’s his round. Is there a third that walks beside you?

The figure that walks behind us is death. Luckily, your book makes even the grimiest of Grim Reapers as fresh and as clean as a soap commercial whistle. The manta ray-ish shadow that’s always hovered above me, after reading your book, I now use as a domesticated dish towel. Not bad. Thanks! You have some other books coming out soon, too – right? – just in case the dish towel revolts?

I love manta rays, and glyptodons, and jaguarundis. Thanks for asking. Yes, I have a critical biography of Allen Ginsberg coming out soon as part of Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives Series. And I have a cultural history of necrophilia focusing on the 19th century necrophile Sergeant Bertrand – including everything from Herodotus to Deleuze to Death metal to True Blood and back to Homer – which I’m planning to finish while I’m in London (I can fact check at the British Library), and then it’s off to James Williamson at Creation Books. What about you? After you’ve wrassled the manta-ray dish towel to the floor, where does your magic pen travel next? Do you realize it’s seven years since we’ve cyber-connected? Jeez…

If someone gets caught trying to have sex with Ginsberg’s remains, you and your publishers will really be in luck! Anyway, excellent news about the books. I have nothing to report other than regular reading and writing. Seven years . . . . Jeez oh man indeed. Let’s get a Delirium Norcturnum before seven more years go by!

Lee Klein is sometimes all things Eyeshot.

Steve Finbow’s Tougher Than Anything in The Animal Kingdom is available now from Grievous Jones Press.

What projects are you currently working on?

Aside from cirrhosis of the liver, and indoor assault courses for housebound cats and kittens, I’m working on a novel, called the Jago. It’s set in the East End of London in the early Edwardian era. As a genuine Eastender I felt it only right that the definitive East End novel should be written by a true Cockney, and not by some over educated cunt from Oxbridge or wherever. Also, aside from the slim volume, Into the Abyss, by an American called Jack London, there is absolutely no working class literature from this period. Aside for this, my latest novel, The Buddha Bar, will be out on Blackheath Books, sometime later this year.

When and why did you begin writing?

I saw a gap in the market, a massive fucking gap, e.g 99.9 percent of published writers were completely fucking shit. I figured I’d steam in and let them know what was what…you know liven things up a little.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I do not consider myself a writer, no man or woman can consider themselves to be a writer unless they are able to earn a living by it, and that goes for all the shit poets in the world. The wannabe writer has to ask themselves the question. What pays the rent? If the answer is their parents, the monthly check from their employer, or some government grant. Then they stack shelves in a supermarket, or are on welfare, or are subsidized by the taxpayer, e.g all students and public sector workers. I rest my case.

What inspired you to write your first book?

All the terrible books on the bookshelves, by shit writers connected or unconnected, but still controlled by the corporate mainstream publishing industry. (Actually it’s always referred to as an industry, but in reality our cultural literary heritage, past and present, is in the hands of a few incredibly wealthy freaks who, if they’re not related by blood, are all fucking each other and fucking over everyone else.) Think about it, you’re about to go on holiday and you need to buy a book at the airport, in fact you are desperate for a good read, but what choice are you presented with, fuck all choice!

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Alcohol

Any writers?

John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Jack Kerouac, Marquis de Sade, Terry Southern, Jack London, Bukowski, Celine, Blaise Cendrars, Henry Lawson, Jean Rhys, Patrick Hamilton and Richard Brautigan.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

Inestimably. I’m a Cockney, we are free spirits and non conformists. In fact I don’t think Cockney’s can be referred to as English or British, they have somehow evolved into a sub-species, with their own language, mannerisms and culture. This sort of upbringing is incredibly creative. From a very young age we are taught how to lie, cheat, thieve, and fight the system at all times, manna from heaven for any would be writer.

Do you have a specific writing style?

Cosmic realism, which I invented. This is the ability to tell a story so far-fetched and bizarre and obviously not based in any sort of reality, but which the reader willingly accepts as the gospel truth. Try it, it’s not easy.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

Cigarette break

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

A message I try to convey to readers of my work, is one of peace love and harmony. You know, at the time of writing, my readership is composed of a select band of visionaries. I treat each and every one of them like an extended family. They are all my children.

What book are you reading now?

A Canvey Island of the Mind by Ford Dagenham – required reading for all underground lit fiends and heads.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Hosho McCreesh US poet, Jenni Fagan Scottish writer, whose debut novel, The Panoptican will be the next big thing.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

That I’m not the greatest writer of my generation. I am, and if anyone disagrees, they misunderstand the times I write in

Any memories of particular works: the writing of, feedback, the thought behind…etc.

I wrote my debut novel, Last Days of the Cross, in under three weeks. When I tell people this they often criticize, e.g, saying I must have rushed it. I disagree. It was the only way that book could’ve been written. All I can say is get hold of a copy of the book and see or make a judgment for yourselves. As far as I’m concerned, some writers take their time, others just do it. I did it.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Don’t bother. Do something constructive with your life, become a politician, a lawyer, a brain surgeon, or an international financier. Go make some money hammerhead.

Peter Grandbois

What projects are you currently working on?

I find that I work best when I have multiple projects at various stages of development. The reason is simple. Having things to work on drives away the terror and despair that seem so much a part of the writing life to me. And working on a new project you are passionate about goes a long way toward soothing the rejection bruises that are inevitable when shopping a manuscript around. The other reason I work on multiple projects is because it allows me to take a break from one project, to get distance from it without falling into the aforementioned terror and despair because I have nothing to do! So, I finish a draft of one project. Let it sit for 6 months or a year while I work on a draft of another project. Then back to the first and so on. At this time, I have one complete project I’m shopping around called “Domestic Disturbances.” It’s a collection of surreal flash fiction pieces in a contemporary, suburban setting. The second project is in its fifth draft and will probably have to go through a couple more rewrites. It’s a novel about the Ojibwe in Minnesota in the 19th century, and I’ve been working on it for the last 4 years. As you might expect, it’s research intensive. That said, it is not a historical novel. The novel moves in and out of 3 different time frames that eventually start blending into each other. I consider it a magical realist novel closer in feel to my first two novels than to the flash collection. That novel is entitled “X.” The third project is a novella (possibly a novel) based off a short story I published in Boulevard back in 2007. That short story was 12 pages. The current incarnation is 50 pages, and I’m thinking of expanding it to 100 plus. It’s called Wait Your Turn and is told from the perspective of the Creature from the Black Lagoon as he takes on family life in L.A. of the 1950’s. Finally, I’m about half way through a collection of essays on writing the irreal called Exploring the Cracks. All of my work (with the possible exception of Arsenic Lobster) falls into the irreal. I’m fascinated with how non-realist works allow us a fuller access to human experience. I turn to the essay collection whenever I want a break from writing fiction.

When and why did you begin writing?

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. But I remember thinking I wanted to be a writer in high school—after reading Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Irving’s The World According to Garp. I’ve always been a reader and a writer, but for some reason those two books gave me permission to actually think about writing as a way of life. That said, the idea of taking a creative writing class in college was completely foreign to me. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of 12 people sitting around a table taking themselves seriously as artists. The permission I got from those books didn’t extend that far yet. Then, after having a few poems rejected by the University of Colorado student literary magazine, I figured I didn’t have what it took and devoted my life to the sport of fencing instead. I started writing again 11 years later when I lived in Spain but thankfully all of those horribly sentimental and self-absorbed stories were lost when my hard disk crashed. The following year I returned to Colorado where my younger brother, Daniel, encouraged me to start writing again. I’d encouraged him back in college, and he’d never stopped. So, in 1998, after the birth of my oldest daughter, I started getting up at 5am and writing for 2 hours every day before work. I’ve been writing ever since—though thankfully I don’t have to get up at 5 am anymore.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever considered myself a writer. That’s probably why I teach! Maugham and Irving gave me permission to write, but to be a writer. That still feels very uncomfortable to me. It may have to do with my working class, Midwestern upbringing, but I can’t help agreeing with Rick Moody when he says: “If you want to be a writer rather than simply to write, then you are doomed.” I get nervous around writers who seem more interested in marketing their books than in the writing of them. It’s a sad truth that if you want to be read today, you have to do your own marketing. But I’m always reluctant to do it—much to my wife’s dismay. I still feel like a beginner every time I sit down to write. I think this is a good thing. Because I teach creative writing, it helps me understand what my students go through. The terror of the blank page. They ask me if it get’s easier, and I tell them no. That’s a bit of a lie, but it’s true enough. Though you gain a bit of confidence with each book, you also gain knowledge. Knowledge of your habits. Knowledge of your crutches. Knowledge of your weaknesses. Knowledge of what good writing is—and how far away from it you sometimes seem to be—especially in those early drafts. The kind of knowledge that comes with experience counterbalances the confidence so that you always end feeling like you’re writing for the first time. But again, this is the healthiest way for a writer to think.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

This is always such a difficult question but also a great one. I think writers are only half-aware of who their true influences are—and I think that’s important. If a writer was ever fully conscious of all the work that influenced his writing, it would probably paralyze him. Think Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence multiplied ad infinitum. That said, I read voraciously. I read all the time. I read so much my wife and children roll their eyes whenever I’ve disappeared because they know I’m closeted away in the bathroom or the car or the basement trying to sneak in a few pages. And all of it—even the bad stuff—shapes you. Which is why you have to be careful of what you read, watch, etc. I can barely sit through a movie any more—even the ones that are supposed to be good. But books. The list of writers would go on and on, but it would start early in my reading career with Tolkien, Bradbury, LeGuin, Orwell, Huxley, Asimov, and Clarke, then move on to Maugham, John Irving, John Gardner, Faulkner, Hemingway, Carver, Coetzee, Okri, Beckett, Quin, Lowry, Ondaatje, Kafka, Klima, LeClezio, Goytisolo, Süskind, Sebald, Grass, Calvino, Abe, Oe, Murakami, Schulz, Milosz, Lem, Swir, Müeller, Saramago, Pessoa, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Javier Marias, Ambrose Bierce, Melville, Whitman, Sherwood Anderson, Hawthorne, O’Connor, Paul Bowles, William Goyen, Baldwin, Coover, Maxwell, Kinnell, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, Aleksander Hemon, Steven Millhauser, and of course the Latin Americans, who have probably exerted the profoundest influence on me: Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, García Márquex, Donoso, Fuentes, Mistral, Neruda, Huidobro, Puig, etc.The list goes on and on…I’m sure I’m leaving many out. It’s impossible to quantify that influence. Whatever I am as a writer is due in large part to who I’ve read as a reader. I should also take this opportunity to say that my brother Daniel has probably been the greatest influence—both because he is the one responsible for pushing me back into writing but also because I look to him as the consummate wordsmith.

Has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

We can’t escape our past. I think for most people a lot of energy goes into trying to escape their upbringing, their family, their parents, and childhood friends. How else can you remake yourself as an adult? Like Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, I think artists have an anxiety of upbringing. They’re always dealing with their past, even if unconsciously. My typical middle-class suburban childhood was chronicled in my memoir, The Arsenic Lobster, as was my own drive to escape that past. Each piece in the current collection of flash pieces I’m shopping around, Domestic Disturbances, is set in a middle class, suburban setting. The characters in each of the pieces are inevitably trying to escape that setting or being substantially transformed by that setting, usually for the worse. I rail against TV now as an adult, but as a child I watched hours and hours of mindless TV like Hogan’s Heroes, Gilligan’s Island, or Bewitched. I played hooky from school to watch old Errol Flynn movies or the B monster movies. And I think my imagination absorbed all of those thousands of hours of TV and ground them up so that they come out now in my writing in some pretty bizarre ways, like the above-mentioned collection or the novella about the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Same for the place I was raised in. I grew up in a suburb of Denver called Aurora. At the time, we were on the edge of civilization. There was nothing around us but fields and dirt roads. Now of course it’s completely developed. But when I was young (and when I wasn’t watching TV) I was out running around in the fields, getting in trouble, having bottle rocket wars, or skateboarding in the spillway of the reservoir, or towing my friends on sleds tied to the backs of cars, . . . All of which is to say that those fields represented another limitless horizon for the imagination. We were latchkey kids. We could do anything. And we did. That kind of upbringing can’t be reproduced today. Those empty fields where we hunted lizards and snakes opened my imagination to wonder. I think those fields more than anything else led me to the irreal because only in the irreal can you capture both the banality of the suburbs and the rapture.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

When I first started writing, I tried to write narrative realism. I even published a few stories in that “genre.” And notice I do call it a genre. Narrative realism is really what we’re talking about when we talk about “literary” fiction and it has its own set of codes that are no less arbitrary than those of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or mystery, for example. I read everything Hemingway wrote. Same with Carver. But I always felt like I was banging my head against a wall trying to color within the lines. Reading Paul Bowles was my first experience with a different vision. His iconoclastic stories opened up a whole new world. Then came the Latin Americans, and my head blew off. I simply didn’t know you could write like that. Literature in this country is so narrowly defined. In terms of reading and watching movies we are by far the most insular country in the world. No other civilized country publishes fewer translations or screens fewer foreign films. I think that hurts us tremendously not just as writers and artists but as a people. But I’m getting sidetracked. All of my writing with the possible exception of my memoir The Arsenic Lobster plays with the “irreal.” I use “irreal” as an umbrella term encompassing a range of writing from magical realism to new wave fabulism and surrealism. I would classify my first two novels as magical realist. Same for the one I’m currently working on. The collection of short stories and the new novella are very much floating between fabulism and surrealism. What all these “isms” give me is a way of talking about my experience of life. For me, life doesn’t play out as we see in narrative realism. That genre seems incredibly artificial to me. The simultaneity of time I experience can best be expressed in the irreal. Same with the disruption of space and identity that seems to be so much a part of my life at least. Narrative Realism spends 300 pages preparing the reader for a subtle but supposedly profound change in an otherwise consistent character. I think identity is MUCH more fluid than that. “Literary” fiction as practiced in this country has far more to do with our cultural values than it does with how accurately it represents reality. I’m more concerned with playing with first person plural narrators as a way of expressing a communal narrator than I am doing another, tired first person singular narration that seems so typical of the culture of “I” we have in the U.S. today.

Are there any new authors who have grasped your interest?

I’m so glad you asked that question because I review a lot of books and am always on the lookout for an interesting writer. I believe very strongly in partaking of the literary community. Everyone wants to write and have others read their books, but few people seem eager to read the work of others and most importantly talk about it! Here are a few whose books have blown me away in the past year or so. Alta Ifand’s Death in a Box, Craig Morgan Teicher’s Cradle Book, and Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls are each wondrously subversive if you want to venture into the irreal. For books that are formally interesting yet still pack a political punch, Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames, or David Toscana’s The Last Reader. The best realist work I’ve read recently has been Tim Z. Hernandez’ Breathing, In Dust. Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water is an amazing memoir. I should also add the short stories of Jane Delury, whose work you can find in various literary magazines. She hasn’t published a book yet, but when she does, she’s going to make a big mark.

Raphael Kadushin: What I am is the acquisitions editor. I am responsible for finding manuscripts that I think are a good fit for us, signing them. Signing the authors and then working on sort of developing the manuscripts if I feel they need some work. Then there is another editor; they are called manuscript editors, who are in charge of line editing. I don’t do any of that. They are in charge of line editing, copyediting. Then there is a production editor, who is obviously in charge of production and layout. So there’s a lot of different editors here.

KK: I recently had the opportunity to read Paola Corso’s Catina’s Haircut, and noticed it’s published through an imprint of the press called Terrace Books. Could you talk about how that works?

RK: We use Terrace Books as an imprint when it’s a trade book. When it’s fiction or a memoir, and we want to attract a large kind of mainstream trade market. Sometimes if you have a university imprint on a book, it scares people off, or they think it’s an academic book. Most publishers have different imprints under the umbrella of the publisher, but we use Terrace Books mostly for our trade books.

KK: In 2008 you did an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal where you mentioned it’s “a great time to be in university publishing because [they are] really the last publishers who can sign a book based on its quality and not just based on the market.” Do you still feel that way? Why is that?

RK: It’s a very simple answer. The reason we have a little more liberty than a commercial press is because we are nonprofit. A commercial press really has to make money off of books to stay afloat. We essentially just aim to break even on a book, and that gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of signing books that might not sell thousands and thousands of copies, but that we feel are really good books. That was always the mission of the university presses to publish the kind of work that a commercial press would not publish because it’s valuable in its own right and it might not necessarily have the widest or largest market, but [laughs]…I’ll let you continue, and I’ll add my little speech at the end.

KK: Paola Corso’s Giovanna’s 86 Circles is a book of short stories, whereas her more recent work, Catina’s Haircut is a novel in stories. Is that a result of meager sales books of short stories tend to have?

RK: Not really. That’s sort of the conventional wisdom, but actually some short story collections sell okay. It’s just that in this case, the stories already were really connected. It seemed sort of silly not to just connect them in a more clear way. We just thought that would make more of a fluid narrative. That’s why we suggested that the author link them up.

KK: I noticed the UW press had a booth at the AWP conference this year. How else are you involved with the larger publishing world?

RK: You can’t really have a trade list without being involved in the larger publishing world. We do at least two New York media calls each year where we meet with all the book reviewers from the New York Times and so on. To be honest about 80% of my trade authors, except for the regional ones, are probably in New York or California. You have to be a part of the larger literary world to even do books of fiction. We are involved as much as we can. We work in major conferences. The AWP is great because we always have our authors reading there, signing books. We do a lot of collaborative readings and events with other publishers, and that is really crucial.

KK: The UW Press web site mentions a board made up of UW faculty that the books have to go through before publication. How involved with the press is the university?

RK: Not as much as you would think, but there is a press committee. It’s nine professors who represent the university, and we basically can’t offer a contract to any author until the press committee has voted to approve that book. The press committee meets with us usually once a month, and we present the books that we want to sign that have gone through review that month. They see sample chapters from the book. We make our verbal statement about the book. We have to get two outside peer reviews on each title. They see the reviews, a sample chapter from the book, and then they vote whether to approve the book or not. So in that sense, the university is very involved in the final acquisitions of the title.

KK: Are the professors from all different departments?

RK: Yeah. We try to get professors that correspond to some of our lists, but they are not necessarily all corresponding. We try to get as great a variety as possible.

KK: UW Press has a Facebook page. How important is it for a press to be involved in social media, particularly a university press?

RK: Every press, everybody, anyone selling anything has to be involved in social media. The question is how much of an impact it really has, and that’s hard to gage. Every book we do now, we do as an e-book, an electronic book. You know, most of our books are available on Kindle, so on so forth. You can’t avoid that. That’s just the future. What I will say, and what I was going to editorialize about [laughs] is that I think that the internet monopoly, and the way Google and their friends and Amazon, have just desponded world literature is just the worst thing that has happened to publishers and authors, particularly, in the last hundred years. What Google, Amazon, Kindle, and the whole gang, the whole monopoly does is essentially they price products so low. They devalue the products so much that authors will never see real royalties on their books ever again, and publishers will be lucky to break even. So essentially they are doing none of the work, they have absolutely no commitment to the books or the authors, and they are the ones who are essentially making the money.

KK: Do you think there’s any way to combat that, or is it inevitable?

RK: I think publishers are just blindsided. I think publishers and authors need to come together, and really fight this, really protect their own copyrights, and really protect fair pricing. Because the books are devalued when they are sold on the internet as they are for some ridiculously low price. Essentially, people feel they should be free. We are left with is a lot of really bad blogs in the end. I really feel strongly, and I don’t think people are talking enough about what the monopoly means for the future of literacy in the world. I think that’s crucial. That for me in terms of publishing books, literacy, serious writing is really going to determine the future of everything.

KK: Do you have anything to say about a rise of interest in MFA creative writing programs, but seemingly a lesser amount of people reading?

RK: It’s funny, a lot of what I see in a lot of books, a lot of projects, a lot manuscripts, people want to write a book, but have never read a book. I think there’s a real interest in writing, but there’s no interest in reading. I think that’s just an offshoot of people really seeing books as a form of exhibitionism. It’s just a longer blog, and that’s not what books are. I’m really impatient with that. I think there a lot of people going into it for the wrong reason.

About the author:

Kari Kamin is an undergraduate student at Columbia College in Fiction Writing. Her work has previously appeared in the Yahara Journal.

Doug Rice

His work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Discourse, Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Gargoyle, Zyzzyva, Kiss the Sky, Alice Redux, Fiction International, Journal of Experimental Literature and Plazm.

He has just been awarded an arts residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. He teaches literary and film theory and history and creative writing at Sacramento State University.

What projects are you currently working on?

I am writing a new novel, a traditional novel. My old teacher John Gardner will finally be proud of me. These are stories from the streets and steel mills of Pittsburgh, my home, my flesh. I am writing this book because one day I simply saw an image of two men standing on my grandmother’s porch, drinking beer and talking. A nervous woman pacing around in the house. And a child, a missing child. So I am writing this novel in order to find out what happened to that child. And each characters’ voice is filled with so much history, so much Pittsburgh. I am writing this book in Pittsburgh, not English.

And I am working on a grammar handbook for rivers. I am trying to understand something about time (fueled by the Sufi philosophies and the flow of the South Fork of the American River) and the sentence as written in water. So I am playing with the grammar and syntax of rivers.

And desire. Longing and stillness. My partner and I are working on this through photography and texts. She is cutting into time with her camera. We are mingling our perceptions. I am not sure where this may go.

When and why did you begin writing?

You mean putting a pen on a piece of paper or do you mean listening? I mean really listening the way a child tends to his playing. I listened to my maternal grandma ever since I was a young boy. Her stories fascinated me because they just wandered around, ignoring all sense of the sentence and of stopping. That beautiful woman taught me more about exploding sentences and narratives than Faulkner did. She just did it in the telling. So I guess I started remembering when she started telling me these stories and that started me writing. And I just kept getting them all wrong. So I started young because I was painfully bored by what capitalism offered up by ways of storytelling and my grandma could tell a story in ways that fascinated me.

Later, Kathy Acker and I used to talk about why we started telling stories and it always came down to the simple desire to entertain ourselves.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I never considered myself a writer and I do not consider myself a writer. That is a noun, a finished persona. I write. So when I am writing a sentence, I guess I am a writer. This may sound silly but it matters to me. There are bunches walking around with all kinds of certificates and degrees that certify they are writers. They go to universities and someone bestows the label “writer” on them. Maybe instead of diplomas that say they are writers, we should give them tattoos when they complete their programming. That way any time they are in a coffeehouse they can always roll up their sleeves (if they know how to do this) and say: “See, I’m a writer.” Remember that scene in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch when William Lee is crossing the border and the border patrol asks him his profession and he says: “I’m a writer.” And he reaches in his pocket and pulls out a pen and says: “See. I have a writing utensil.” They ask him to prove it. “Write something.” That makes sense to me.

What inspired you to write your first book?

Confusion. Uncertainty. Unknowing. Fear. More than anything what inspires me to write anything is the fear that if I do not write these stories they will not be written, they will simply disappear. People will be erased. Springsteen discusses this when he talks about writing all those stories about people from Jersey. All those working class people. When I submitted my writing to my undergraduate creative writing teachers, I was told: “Why are you writing about these kinds of people? No one cares about them.” I told my teachers I cared and that that was enough. Back then I was writing the stories that would form the heart of Blood of Mugwump. There were stories of gender confusion and sexualities that were more complex than the categories we have available. So I was exploring bodies and characters with desires that unnerved language and narrative. It was in part out of my own confusion about sexual identity and memory. The relationship between memory and body.

But also think of this notion of being inspired. I work so I really do not have time to be inspired in some sort of Romantic way.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

What doesn’t? Who doesn’t? Growing up storytelling on the very local level—in the family. I think the dinner table is where most writers are deeply influenced in terms of narrative structure and rhythms. So much has influenced me that this list would be long, very long. Those influences that are most central to my writing I am unaware of. Others have pointed them out to me and once they are pointed out I think oh, I see that now but I did not see or experience the influence while I was writing. Still whatever we put into ourselves is bound to influence. Certainly Faulkner, Irigaray, Cixous, Wideman, Springsteen, Derrida, Toufic, Godard, Sally Potter, Derek Jarman, Francesca Woodman, Lorna Simpson, Nancy Spero, Cha, Djuna Barnes, Maso, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Deleuze, Severo Sarduy

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

I am Pittsburgh. Translators have commented on that because of the difficulty of translating the syntax and the diction. So the city and people of Pittsburgh are all through my writing. I think I suffer from this intense longing to be home and Pittsburgh is always home. You carry that city with you. And rivers. One of the reasons I thought I could move to Sacramento was because Sacramento, like Pittsburgh, has rivers around it. Different rivers and these rivers here, especially the south fork of the American River, has influenced the rhythms of my sentences. In Pittsburgh I rode buses everywhere because I did not have a license to drive. I only started driving a few years ago. So the shape and movement of my sentences were different when I was mostly a bus rider and a city streetwalker. Now I drive and I hike. Different movements. Different breath. From Benjamin’s/Baudelaire’s modernist flaneur to some sort of Muir/Lopez hiker.

Do you have a specific writing style?

As Deleuze has said, style emerges from the writing. And as Gass says there are no experimental writers, only writers pushed to some edge, to some precipice or up against a wall and given the alternative to be silent or to find a way to speak. So I do not have an intentional style. Everyone says I am Faulknerian but that is to simplify it and to not see Irigaray’s deep influence. So stylistically my sentences are governed by breath and sound not by grammar. I am more of a poet than a prose writer.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

I find genres despicable in many ways—every genre from historical romance to the genre of MFA induced writing to what passes as experimental writing or hybrid writing. Any writing with that kind of intention from the outset bores me. I write with an intensity, not an intention. Joyce told Proust he writes writing. So maybe that is what I do. I know I am a prose writer. Pound told me that. I mean I do write to the margin, so I’m no poet.

My two newest books coming out soon are examples of this. Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist is being published by copilot press. In large part I did not even know it was a book. And it is not really being published, it is being collaborated. The publisher and designer, Stephanie Sauer, has infused this book with more layers of meaning by her page design. So I feel she “collaborated” the book, not published it. The book itself has words, mostly written into sentences, and photographs, mostly of dreams. None of the photographs are real. All of them reveal secrets that hide other secrets. And each sentence is a disturbance on the page. A mark. A trace. Forgotten. The writing unnerves itself. The writing wonders, wanders. Letters become litters after all. But the narrative desires to tell this true story.

The other book, Between Appear and Disappear, being published by Jaded Ibis, is not a book. It never was nor was meant to be. It is a gift. I simply started writing a gift. I did not see it as something that would be published so much as simply something that would be given as a forgetting. (I had turned and continue to turn away from publishing because of all that is going on in publishing….) But finding a publisher and a designer such as Debra Di Blasi changed that because again I see this more as a collaboration not a publication. The intimacy that Debra and Stephanie bring to my work, because I know their hands are touching my writing, I trust them. Because as much as anything else, books should be caressed while being read. Because the night…this moment of intimate perception and touch. A book should do that while whispering. Skin. Saliva. Lips. The strong tongue moving. Wanting. If a book becomes longing. I feel Debra and Stephanie make such books into desires.

So a book is a physical object in our hands and we should feel this, experience the book. Words have weight. Weigh on our tongues. A book should be experienced in more than one way and the reading experience should be visceral.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

You tell me. I mean my work speaks back to me, sometimes against me. I listen. I follow. The following is writing. (And all that that tries to mean.) But I do not so much know the meaning of my work. I am only seeing when I write. So readers need to learn how to see. Why do we, as a culture, think that seeing is natural, that we all know how to see? And I think my writing forces readers to slow down and learn patience. Perhaps my writing is a secret about a secret. Writers, artists, see things that others often overlook. If you see what I mean. If there is any message it is to find new ways of perception.

What book are you reading now?

I just finished re-reading Junot Diaz and some of John Gardner. Carole Maso’s Aureole and looking at Patti Smith’s photos and books of Ana Mendieta. And Gertrude Stein’s How to Write.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Peter Grandbois. His new book Nahoonkara is wonderful. I just read Rachel Gontijo Araujo’s Pornapocalipse vol. 1 and was astonished by the language, the shapes of the sentences. Renee Gladman (ok, I know she may not be new but every time I read her she is new.) Anna Joy Springer just kicks my ass. Jalal Toufic (but again probably not so much new).

Any memories of particular works: the writing of, feedback, the thought behind…etc.

I remember seeing Bunuel’s Belle de Jour and thinking he knows things the rest of us cannot even dream. I remember throwing a copy of Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury against the wall of my basement because I was too young to know that each sentence takes patience. I remember John Gardner pointing to a sentence in a story I had written and saying: “That must have been an easy sentence to write.” I remember reading Anne Carson’s Nox and thinking, thank you. I remember once (maybe twice) in the middle of writing a sentence thinking there must be some way out of here. I remember once listening to a David Lynch film (I can’t remember which one, they all appear to sound the same) then writing a poem that only a few could understand. (I was not among the few.) I remember a nun taking a special interest in me. I remember my last conversation with Kathy Acker and both of us agreeing to write happy books because we wanted to put an end once and for all to trauma. I remember one of my college creative writing professors telling me to do anything with my life but promise not to write poetry. I remember this one book that I cannot read. I remember Ron Sukenick saying to me that I could not start a novel that way. I remember thinking, “Well, that changes everything,” but I can’t remember what book I was reading, what film I was watching, what song I was listening to, or what sentence I was writing. I remember standing beside Raymond Federman in his backyard in Buffalo in the snow, stoned and pissing, and Federman saying: “This is the end of the I.” And so it goes. Take it or leave it.

Larry Smith

A graduate of Mingo Central High School, Muskingum College, and Kent State University, he is the author of eight books of poetry, a book of memoirs, four books of fiction, two literary biographies, a life biography, and two books of translations from the Chinese. He recently completed a photo history of his hometown with high school classmate Guy Mason. He is the director of the Firelands Writing Center and Editor-in-Chief of Bottom Dog Press, Inc. Smith is also the father of three adult children, and is married to Ann Smith a professor emerita of Nursing at the Medical College of Ohio. The author is a requested speaker on creative writing, the American Transcendental writers, Zen Buddhist writings, and working-class literature. Recently retired, he may be reached at BGSU Firelands College where he still teaches writing, literature, and film.

What projects are you currently working on?

Right now, I’m working on revisions to a second novel set in Southern Ohio around Ohio University in 1970. It deals with a working-class couple that moves out to a commune and finds a new path. It’s sort of a sequel to my The Long River Home novel set in the same area, same family.

When and why did you begin writing?

Actually, the novel includes a scene from the seventh grade English class where our English teacher passes out poetry booklets and asks us to write our own poem. That’s when it all began, by someone believing that such things mattered in a working-class town. It did.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Well, I wrote from then on, but I guess it was with early publication in a magazine that I could relax and say “Okay, you’re a writer, now just write.”

What inspired you to write your first book?

I’ve written so much about my early years in the Ohio Valley, and that was my first inspiration, to capture that life and hopefully reveal it to others.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

I was a junior in high school when I heard that this guy from Martins Ferry, Ohio, down river, had won a national award for writing poetry. It was James Wright, and I guess he opened the possibility. I’ve read everything he’s ever written, did a docudrama of him in 1988…”James Wright’s Ohio” which is now available as a DVD from Bottom Dog Press. Kenneth Patchen was the next big influence on my writing and vision. Gary Snyder’s writing drew me as well.

Do you have a specific writing style?

My style has changed as I have grown older…and I guess I’m more of a bare bones Zen writer now. Instead of getting longer with age, I’ve gotten shorter and do less flourishes…just straight stuff, all that can be implied by silences.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

I alternate fiction and poetry as I feel moved.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

This is a dangerous area for a writer… where you don’t want to let the message pull you too hard, but when I read back over what I’ve written I do see themes of sense of place, compassion, a sense of wonder in people and Nature.

What book are you reading now?

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Prodigal Summer, a full rich story of Appalachia. I’m teaching a course in Appalachian Literature and Film and really enjoying it.

Can you tell us about Bottom Dog Press?

Back in 1985, I came home from months of researching the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance with a strong sense of what can be done with small presses. I’d had a few books published by those who didn’t follow through on getting the work out there, so step by step I learned how to edit and publish books. We’re up to 135 books and 3 DVDs now. The films are on James Wright, Kenneth Patchen, and Cleveland’s Beat poet d.a.levy. We do what might be termed underserved literature…on working-class, Appalachia, writing with heart.

Our Come Together: Imagine Peace anthology has been our best seller, so there the message is strong, yet so is the writing. When it comes together, we see a book and do it.

Roxanne Carter

What book are you currently reading?

Today I am reading a book about Madame Blavatsky. I thought it would be a biography but it is more like a history of the occult in America. The author obviously doesn’t like Blavatsky much, but the dislike can’t temper Blavatsky’s outlandish personality. In the book it says that she “claimed to have ridden bareback in a circus, toured Serbia as a concert pianist, opened an ink factory in Odessa, traded as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris, and worked as an interior decorator to the Empress Eugénie.” She also founded the Theosophical Society that runs Krotona, a place in Ojai, California I visited frequently with my friends during high school. Mostly because it was quiet there and we could wander, taking photographs of each other without anyone bothering us. I always imagined that Madame Blavatsky lived at Krotona because her name is on buildings up there and they have many of her books in the library, but according to the book I’m reading she never even went to California. Still. Her name is fun to say. Madame Blavatsky. And I would love to ride bareback in a circus, it sounds like fun.

Krotona is this lovely white palace built on top of a hill, encircled by chaparral. It has a hedge maze, lush gardens with enormous aloe and a fountain in the center of a pentacle. I’ve been thinking about Krotona a lot lately because I started reading tarot and I’ve been investigating haunted houses (particularly through Catherine Crowe’s Night Side of Nature, a compendium of hauntings published in 1848). I’m led back to California; Blavatsky was involved with the spiritualism movement in the 19th century and Krotona has an occult library. Anyhow, reading tarot has been pretty amazing for my writing practice. I keep a diary of cards I pull, writing associative sentences from the images on the card that most draw me. Later I restructure my tarot readings into a fictional project I’m working on, Beyond This Point Are Monsters. It’s a novel about two women who live in a house on a hill by the sea. The text also draws on the soap opera Dark Shadows that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. There were 1,245 episodes. I’ve seen a lot of them but not every single one, yet. My novel is like Dark Shadows fan fiction except it isn’t “canon.” I’m more interested in recording my own impressions. Documenting the shots and cuts and how mistakes that occurred during filming create a second, invisible narrative. So I’m writing a text that isn’t there–a text that haunts the original. A bad copy, maybe. Blurred, a ghost. All of this stems from my habit of not being able to sit still without doing something. I can knit. I journal obsessively. I particularly like doing two things at once. Riding bareback in the circus and importing ostrich feathers. I started blogging in 1998. Formally, the diary is really thrilling. It’s so nebulous, changeable. Narrative gets dismantled. My diary is a mirror of my activities. Waiting, watching, reading. My first book comes out this fall (Glamorous Freak, Jaded Ibis Press). I wanted to find a way to allow the diary to venture as far, as wildly as it could, but I also wanted to find a method of linking moments in the diary without always referring to myself. At the time, I was on an Andy Warhol binge. I was also really fascinated with Prince. I’m still fascinated with Prince–his 1986 film Under the Cherry Moon is killer. Prince and Andy Warhol have a lot in common. An obsession with looking and becoming. I mean, I was watching Andy Warhol’s films. I’d go to a dark room and sit on the floor with my notebook in my lap. I wrote down things that people said and did in Andy Warhol’s films. I was also implicated in that, since his films are so much about the experience of watching them. Being there. Those texts, my “Film Studies,” make up the bulk of Glamorous Freak. They embody the instant of being there during the flicker of the image on the screen as well as stand as instants themselves–an insistence on the moment, on the encounter with the word. The texts are paired with photographs, self portraits mostly. When we went and took pictures of each other at Krotona, we’d use disposable cameras. I have one photo that my friend Cassandra took where I’m standing in front of a lurid purple bougainvillea in a black velvet opera cape my mom made, and black lipstick. I got my first digital camera in 1998, the same time I started blogging. It’s hard for me to go places or do things without some kind of documentation. I love to collect things. Gloves, dresses, pine cones. Especially things that don’t take up much space. Words and images. I watched these films and I became enamored with the things Warhol paid attention to. Cats, scissors, shoulder grazing earrings. I made images, I recorded the event. A documentation of something is a kind of gift. Events that can be repeated, and shared, and yet they’ll never be the same. That’s what I mean by insistence.

Today I pulled a card. I shuffle the cards with my left hand. Selah Saterstrom taught me to read tarot last fall. We sat in her apartment in Denver and the rain crept over the ivy clinging to her windows, and candles on the dining room table warbled, reflected in the glass protecting the faces of her ancestors on the walls. Knight of Swords. An intense need to attempt one thing after another.

Peter Cassidy

Please check out this radio interview about the book and its background.

Buy the book from Amazon：A Mole Named Cole and a Whole Lot of Hole

What projects are you currently working on?

I have just finished writing the sequel to Cole the Mole and a Whole Lot of Hole as well as the third in the trilogy. The second finds Cole exploring a Town (Timmins) and the focus of this story is directions, occupations, modes of transportation, and the buildings one finds around town. Each stop (nine in total) has language associated with different places around the town. The third finds Cole checking out different pieces of equipment in a playground and there are children playing all over the playground. This third story again has a focus on prepositions, phrasal verbs of motion, as well as words associated with playing at the playground.

When and why did you begin writing?

I began writing short stories when I was very young (grade five) and as a young adult entered a few writing contests put on by my local newspaper The Timmins Daily Press. I also enjoy writing poetry when something inspires me and I will attach a few of the poems that show my style. I began writing because it was a way to put ideas to paper and perhaps entertain my friends.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I guess I finally considered myself a writer when my thesis received a pass in October of 2010. All joking aside, I guess I first considered myself to be a writer when I found success in writing contests. I once won a car starter for a short story about the “worst road trip ever” and of course small monetary prizes through writing contests hosted by my hometown newspaper The Timmins Daily Press. One of my favorite genres is free verse poetry and I feel that anyone who writes and allows others to read their work should consider themselves a writer.

What inspired you to write your first book?

I have been writing teaching materials for years. This first book came from one of those projects. In this case, Cole the Mole began as a section in my “Pedagogical Grammar” portfolio while I was a student at Columbia University Teachers College (Tokyo campus). I had created mini-chants to accompany a series of pictures that saw Cole leaving his hole and doing a variety of things in his short journey. This had as its focus prepositions and phrasal verbs of motion. The book was inspired by my daughter and it began as a present for her second birthday (January 13th / 2011). She is so outgoing and adventurous, I thought that she and Cole could be mirrored. The second section of the book remains mini-chants, but now there is an accompanying section of a fun story featuring intrinsic motivation to explore and expand one’s horizons. My daughter epitomizes these qualities and I felt her story should be told.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

My grandfather wrote two books and this fact influenced my motivation to never give up in a sometimes lonely and difficult craft. The rhythm of well-placed words and how these words sound when read aloud has always influenced me to continue experimenting with language and edit continuously.

How has your environment colored your writing?

The fact that my environment places me in a very specific category as a children’s teacher allows me to really keep the audience of my writing in mind.

Do you have a specific writing style?

My favorite writing style is free verse poetry. With my children’s stories, I try to write with a rhythmic pattern that is enjoyable for young learners. This sometimes involves the use of a lot of rhyming (AABB / ABAB) unlike that of writing poetry that doesn’t rely on the end rhyme, but rather the line flow. Still, this works well with children’s books.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

I feel most comfortable writing free verse poetry.

Old Teacher
     by Peter Cassidy

Impudent sneers strangle words with such ease.
Hollow stares asphyxiate sermons.

For she teaches these pupils,
Most so estranged-
That her tribute to history,
And even her breath,
Insinuates death…

And any commotions confirms they’re alive.

     -originally published in Tokyo Chapzine

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

I think that besides the grammar target lesson involved in the mini-chants section of the book, I want the story to inspire children to persevere and never give up on their goals. I am hoping that adventurous children will see themselves in Cole and that those children who are less adventurous will be inspired to expand their horizons through Cole’s example.

What book are you reading now?

I am reading the workbook Everything you need to know about math homework by Anne Zeman and Kate Kelly.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

I studied Beckett during my undergrad, so I would have to say that your book Burn Your Belongings was the most intriguing / interesting to read in a long time. Your Waiting for Godot character is fun and strange at the same time. Your protagonist is an interesting character and the fact that things are from his perspective throughout makes the story flow within its avant-garde style.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

My writing style doesn’t leave too many question marks.

What scene from a book you’ve read has had a lasting impact on you?

The funniest character development scene in a book that I have ever read is found in A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. The scene when the three children are playing the game of hide and seek has never made me laugh harder while reading a book. John Irving’s vivid and plausible description of Owen and his quirkiness has always stuck in my memory.

What projects are you currently working on?

I am still hip-deep in the multimedia project centered around my new short story collection, Songs of Vagabonds, Misfits, and Sinners. Each of the stories are set in New York City where I live and I wanted to find a way to bring across that cacophony of sights, sounds, and people.

The collection is really focused on the concept of New York City as a place that is constantly in flux. The neighborhoods in New York are never static – it’s not just the buildings that get thrown up or torn down, it is the population shifts and the changes in the economy. In the past decade, things have changed so rapidly that people who have lived their entire lives in a 12-block radius now suddenly find themselves out of place and among strangers.

While the stories in the book stand on their own, when I was writing them I always heard music, a mini-soundtrack on a loop in my head. Each story had its own theme, some of it pegged to movie scores I always loved, such as Neil Young’s soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or Iggy Pop’s title theme for Repo Man. I wound up creating an EP of soundtrack music with one main theme for each story (you can listen to all the songs here: http://kenwohlrob.com/music/). The music gives the mood and feel of the story, but in certain cases, it also allowed me to bring out a different side that the reader might not pick up on at first, feelings that were more subtle in the text. You can hear different sides in the themes for “Claimus Flees Manhattan” and “Job in Williamsburg”, a sense of urgency and tension that underlies both stories, but is more subtle when read.

In addition, I started taking photographs of the neighborhoods where the stories are set (Hell’s Kitchen, Carroll Gardens, Washington Heights, Williamsburg, the East and West Village) as a way of letting people get a sense of the geography. So many stories set in New York City are pegged to a specific radius of blocks. If you’ve never visited this place, no matter how good the writer is at painting the picture, you’re still not getting a full vision. It’s the same with Paris or London – it helps to see the actual blood coursing through the veins of those streets. Plus, like the music, the photographs add an extra element, a little bonus to give the reader a better feel for the story. (You can view the photographs here.)

Finally, I’m just finishing up the podcast version of the book. I’ve always liked hearing authors reading their own work as you pick up on nuances that would be left out just in the reading. Like with Shakespeare, sometimes it’s the delivery that makes a line memorable, more so than the text itself.

When and why did you begin writing?

I’m a bit of a late bloomer. I wasn’t the kid who kept a journal in high school. If I read anything, it was usually comic books and Stephen King novels. To be honest, I was more of a music junkie. Even with that, I was a metalhead, so not a very sophisticated listener. I didn’t really start reading actual literature until I was out of college. But having an addictive personality helped and I quickly caught up with people who had a decade or so head start on me.

In the late 90s, I co-founded and ran an online magazine called Bully. After six years, I grew fed up with being nothing but a critic. Sounds cliché I know, but really I wanted to start creating things rather than commenting on them. So I didn’t really start writing seriously until 2005 or so, well into my mid-30s. Because I had no formal training, I really based my style on writers whose sense of character and storytelling appealed to me – Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, and Sinclair Lewis. I always felt they prized storytelling over prose. And there was a darkness to their styles that I connected with having grown up in America, that thread of suppressed human suffering just beneath the surface. And yet, they all had a great humor in their writing. It was a sign of their humanity. They understood everyone had their downfall and you had to laugh at it or go mad.

From the start, that was what I was shooting for – dark gritty tales with a macabre, black sense of humor. That right mixture of making people feel uncomfortable while still feeling compelled to read onward.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Not until I put out my first collection of stories, The Love Book. I think it comes with holding the finished product in your hands, so you have something tangible that makes you say, “this is the thing!” Also, that was the first time I had complete strangers discovering my work and reacting to it – in both good and bad ways – which I think is very important. We all operate under the delusion that we are writing for ourselves, that the final product is solely for our personal gratification. Any writer, I don’t care who you are, wants that reaction from other people. You are creating to get a response out of someone. Otherwise, why bother releasing it at all?

What inspired you to write your first book?

It really was the dismal failure of a bad idea for a book that I had after scuttling Bully Magazine. It was meant to be a humor book called God Sex Politics America, kind of a jumping off point from what I was doing with the magazine at the time. But it was a train wreck of bad ideas jumbled together into an incoherent mess that didn’t really work thematically. I should’ve come up with something clever like cat photos with humorous word bubbles. Now that’s publishing gold.

So I started from scratch trying to write short stories more in the vein of the writers I admired. I kept it simple – straightforward prose, a focus on the story rather than literary gymnastics, and solid characters you could sink your teeth into. The mantra I had was to think of it as crafting a good punk song – two minutes and out. Then I also discovered Yukio Mishima and Alain Robbe-Grillet who added these new elements to my style, completely different and unique ways of telling a story. Most likely because I had no formal training and didn’t really have a clue as to how to even go about writing stories, I wound up creating a style that was less solipsistic than my peers. I didn’t care to write stories based on my life; I focused more on telling interesting yarns.

I actually didn’t plan on publishing my first book. I had five long short stories that I felt were pretty strong, but all had been rejected by various lit magazines (so what the hell did I know). I had tried submitting the stories as a collection to a couple of small presses, but as anyone who has tried will tell you, short story collections are a tough sell. At that time in 2007, people had started podcasting their work, which to me at least seemed a more economical way of getting people interested in my writing than self-publishing. I wound up releasing the podcast on iTunes and through Podiobooks. Then, I got that instant reaction that inspires you to keep going. So I wound up publishing the collection through Bully Press.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

In addition to all the writers I’ve already mentioned – O’Connor, Vonnegut, Bukowski, Fante, Lewis, Mishima, and Robbe-Grillet — there are also some key writers such as Mavis Gallant whose short-story writing really taught me quite a bit. Evelyn Waugh and Mark Twain taught me how to create a dark sense of humor with balance. And honorable mentions go to Georges Simenon, Ray Bradbury, Balzac, and Albert Camus.

I also can’t give enough credit to Japanese writers like Kōbō Abe, Shusaku Endo, Kenzaburō Ōe, and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, who have had a big impact on my writing over the past several years. Being that I had already developed a somewhat simpler writing style, their ability to craft prose that is boiled down to its simplest essence, not a single word wasted, really hit home with me. Those guys are masters. I wish more MFA writers read people like Abe or Ōe.

Music has also been very important to my writing style. I often craft stories as if they’re songs and think about the plot in terms of timing and impact. I’ll usually write to music and in certain cases have a particular song that fits a story. I considered the last story in The Love Book, “Taking the Happy Bus on Home,” the “When the Levee Breaks” of the collection – that final epic track.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was greatly influenced by painters. Often, the spark of an idea for a story comes from a painting I’ve seen. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch Bauer I at the Neue Gallery in New York City gave me the inspiration for “Job in Williamsburg” in Songs of Vagabonds, Misfits, and Sinners. Odd Nerdrum’s The Dying Couple gave me the macabre idea of old folks committing suicide for “Taking the Happy Bus on Home” and I also worked Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” into that story. For me, certain painters are great storytellers, better than most writers. It is the power of suggestion in their work, the bits and pieces left up to your own brain that try to make sense of what is transpiring in the image. I just saw an amazing exhibit by Gottfried Helnwein that did that as well.

Ken Wohlrob

I think because I grew up in a working-class New Jersey family and didn’t get an English degree or an MFA, I view writing more as work, a craft that requires hours of labor and practice. I probably would have made a good blacksmith or cobbler. So I have more of a labor-intensive approach to it, putting my time in, especially when it comes to creating some of the multimedia facets to the new book. And I tend to be very project-focused rather than working on tons of different things at one time. I look at it more as doing one project at a time and making everything involved one cohesive artistic effort. That’s probably why I like designing my covers and interiors, or creating podcast versions of the book, or creating music to go with the stories. It is almost a punk DIY thing, but I take a certain pride in the spit and polish as well.

Also, because I don’t have any formal training, I learned to write simply, to avoid overwriting solely to try to impress. I picked it up from working-class writers who didn’t have the training of writers with greater technical skill, but also from the great Japanese writers of the 20th century who wrote in spare prose that still hit with a greater impact.

Do you have a specific writing style?

I prefer to keep my prose tight and focused, to not waste any words and get to the heart of the matter. At the same time, I like stories with grit and darkness to them. It’s rare you’ll see a happy ending from me, mostly because it’s rare in life that anyone gets a true happy ending (unless you pay for it at a massage parlor). There are always compromises and sacrifices that come with any reward. But in a weird way, I also think there’s a certain black humor to that, a sense of “ah shit” because it never goes quite as planned. And I’m a firm believer that you need to be cruel to your characters. You can’t romanticize them or you’re going to be too kind when showing their flaws.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

I think what I’m most trying to get across to people are the gray areas in life. The idea that one man’s hero is another man’s villain. I love presenting to readers a character they should dislike or despise and convincing them to actually understand and even like that miserable wretch. I think my best stories have that element to them.

What book are you reading now?

I am reading Independent People by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. I went to Iceland for the New Year and wanted to read something that fit the geography. It turned out to be a great choice. I had a better grasp of the Icelandic mindset just by reading the interactions between Laxness’s characters.

In a case of weird synchronicity, I was reading the book in a coffee shop in Reykjavík one morning, surrounded by old Icelanders who were debating the news of the day, using these long, drawn out “Já”s to indicate their approval of a statement by one of their colleagues. At that very moment in the text, Laxness had a group of sheepherders at a wedding, debating the various afflictions affecting their flock, with one man being declared a genius with diarrhea. The dialogue from the book had the same rhythm and pacing as what I was hearing in the coffee shop. Then, I came upon the line in the story where Laxness had written, “It was then time to think of coffee.”

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

I’m lucky enough to have become friends with an inspiring group of fellow writers who are all working outside the boundaries of mainstream publishing and carving their own ways, continuing to put out interesting work by any means necessary. I think Tim Hall, Caleb Ross, Karen Lillis, Mike Faloon, Ben Tanzer, and Kristin Fouquet all tell great stories and have their own bent that you couldn’t match to anyone else.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

I often get accused of being heavy-handed in my writing. In my own defense, I chalk that more up to writers (and writing) having become too solipsistic in the past decade. I think we’ve had a complete overload of navel-gazing by writers from my generation. I’d rather tell an interesting story with characters that have actual blood in their veins (rather than being stand-ins for my relatives or ex-girlfriends). A lot of contemporary writers tend to be self-focused. But because readers have become so used to those types of stories, I think sometimes, they are caught off guard by my writing. The stories I tell are very rooted in the real world and those moral gray areas that confront us all. Some readers mistakenly think I have a strong message that I want to convey by writing in that manner. I’m really trying to drag the readers back into the thick of it, making them more actively involved in the story, forcing them to take sides as opposed to just sitting there as an unfeeling bystander. I don’t have an agenda in my stories, I just want you to be actively involved and think about the characters and their eventual outcome.

What projects are you currently working on?

I just finished a new prose-poetry book / collection called Variations of a Brother War and am now starting into a new piece that I refer to as Kill Yourself, though that may or may not be the final title. It is a book of 500 word fictions about an old man named Leonard, a boy who is in love with him, and the mice invading Leonard’s farmhouse. It may be about some others elements too, down the line, I’m not sure yet. I tend to let books happen, rather than planning (forcing) them.

When and why did you begin writing?

I started writing in 2005, though there was no specific impetus. I love to read. Then one day I was writing. Since then, it has gone on.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When people ask me what I do, I say that I’m a teacher (I teach high school Language Arts / Theater / Film). It might take a few more of my own books in my hands or a steady paycheck from writing before I consider myself a writer anywhere outside of my own head.

What inspired you to write your first book?

The first book I wrote to see what would happen if I kept writing a single piece instead of writing short stories here and there. That first book was trash. I have only one handwritten copy of it in a thick moleskin somewhere. The second book I wrote was a pseudo-biography that was contracted by Ghost Road Press but then later dropped when they folded their publishing efforts. The third book I wrote, Inconceivable Wilson (Scrambler Books, 2009) was inspired by a mad-libs conversation I overheard where ‘inconceivable’ was put before the name ‘Wilson’ and I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would mean to be inconceivable. From there it grew into a project where I wanted to capture a person being devoured by other people while he was still conscious, still existing. The book became then.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

My influences are two-fold: first, the indie writers out there who I read and love. Most of all Peter Markus, Blake Butler, James Chapman, Ken Sparling, and Shane Jones. Their books have brought me to a new understanding of words. There are other writers too who I read and re-read, looking to see how they shape their sentences, but those are five of the most important for me right now. Secondarily, I am definitely influenced by my day to day experiences. When it is fall I write fall. Winter, winter. When my first child was born I wrote about babies, about wombs and birthing. And now that my son has aged I find myself writing more about growth and branching out and change. Evolution. If I see a car wreck I write about a car wreck. If mice get into my house I write about mice. This is either an influence or an obsession, I’m not sure which.

Do you have a specific writing style?

What I love most about literature is when it holds itself back, forces you to put together pieces, not in the sense of mystery or suspense writing but in the narrative itself, in the characters and how they work. I like to withhold in my language. I write short sentences with the least information possible or long ones that loop and repeat. I take out words that say too much and I leave in words that color but do not define. I enjoy writing and then wrecking its structure and its tone until it is something else entirely.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

For me, regardless of a fiction or poetry label, I love writing very short pieces that come together to form a larger picture when they are all holding hands inside of a final manuscript.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

What I want is for readers to feel washed over by the words, inundated and overwhelmed and broken and held. I want readers to have a whole-body experience but not have the narrative pinned to their chest, proudly pushed forward, claiming what a character did or didn’t do, felt or didn’t feel.

What book are you reading now?

I always read 4-5 books at once. Currently, I am reading Ken Sparling’s Book, Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Unsaid 4, and Jamie Iredell’s unpublished The Lake. These are all tremendous books, writers doing phenomenal acts with words.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Gregory Sherl is brilliant. His book The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail (forthcoming from Mud Luscious Press, 2012) is utterly fantastic. I’m reading his winning chapbook from Dark Sky Books now too, and it is equally glory-full. Robert Kloss is another writer who is quickly coming up in the ranks and makes alligators and burned down houses mean more than I have ever previously understood. I need to mention Ryan Ridge here too as a writer I cannot stop reading. Find his American Homes pieces around various corners of the internet – they are all worth tracking down.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

Some people see the brevity of my works (the longest of my forthcoming books is 30K words) as a narrative shortfall or as if I am writing something less than a book. The density of my words is where I focus most attention, so I am perfectly content finishing a book at 15K words when I know that it is just as ripe and substantial and evocative as any 150K word tome.

Janice Lee

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a novel about our uncanny relationship with God and the consciousness of God. It’s about God and religion and the history of religion and the Bible, but it’s also about cyborgs and the technological singularity and the brain and religious experiences of the brain and the God experience. And then among other things, it’s also about confessions and spiders and daughters and the Antichrist.

I’m also trying to finish a sort of memoir-ish piece about my family. My mother passed away last month and I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable, but also more inclined, to go back to it. I’m sort of waiting.

And then I’m working on a collaborative text with Laura Vena, a book about time travel and something called the chronovisor. And a science fiction novel with my brother Eugene.

When and why did you begin writing?

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. And why? Because I feel I have to.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I don’t think this happened at any particular moment. It’s sort of a strange label, really. I write, so I guess that makes me a writer. I draw and make art too, so I guess I’m also an artist. Though really I feel like there’s too many labels we have to carry around: writer, artist, editor, curator, poet, novelist, teacher, professor, etc. Like little Cub Scout badges we can show off. Not sure why there can’t be a simpler term to encompass all of this, for someone who just contributes to the literary community at large, and does all of these things collaboratively and simultaneously, not in separation. Or really, no term at all. I feel like being a writer is really more a way of being in the world, than an occupation.

What inspired you to write your first book?

Technically speaking, my first book was KEROTAKIS, and it was my thesis at CalArts. Many things got me pointed in that direction. I had been reading a lot of neuroscience and consciousness studies and alchemy, and especially Julian Jaynes (whose book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind affected me greatly then).

The first book I really wrote, though, was this chaotic graphic text I wrote in undergrad at UCSD. Anna Joy Springer, a phenomenal teacher, influenced and helped and guided me a lot in my early years of writing. Though I’ve grown and changed a lot since then, I still give her a lot of credit. I worked on this angry and sort of crass book, about everything from God to war to race politics, Gramsci was a character, and there were all these crazy doodles and drawings. It’s easy to see the Kathy Acker influence in it.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

I’ve been influenced greatly by what I read. And I read a lot. Though unlike most writers I know, I don’t read a lot of fiction or poetry. I read a lot of scientific texts, like Antonio Damasio or V.S. Ramachandran or Paul Churchland. I read as many books as I can about the brain, about neuroscience, about psychology, and human memory. Knowledge is sort of an obsession for me. I follow many science journals, especially those concerning cognitive science or consciousness. I read anthropology, theology, alchemy, philosophy. Lately I’ve been studying the Bible and different translations and its history. All of this really feeds into my writing, and the writing reflects that, I think. Everything I’ve ever read has influenced me in some way. If I have to list some specifics off the top of my head: Julian Jaynes, Gramsci, Chomsky, Camus, Kierkegaard, George Lakoff, Nietzsche (the first time I read him I was in fourth grade), Kafka, e.e. cummings, Badiou, and an infinite number of others.

And I’ve been lucky to have had some really amazing teachers and mentors and friends. Anna Joy Springer: I might not be writing now if not for her. Jon Wagner: Phenomenal instructor and person. Laura Vena: Besides collaborating, we also workshop work regularly, give each other deadlines. Our relationship absolutely feeds into my writing productivity. Joe Milazzo: One of the best readers of my work. And he’s the one who inspired me to really become interested in the novel as a form again.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

When I was 8, my mother dropped The Holy Bible onto my desk in front of me and told me to read it and make up my own mind.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

I really despise having to categorize my writing by what genre it is, though I often have to. I care much more about what the work is about and its concepts, than if it is really a poem or short story or hybrid work (I despise this term more) or something else. When I wrote KEROTAKIS, poets would tell me that it was a long poem. And fiction writers would tell me it was a novel. Sometimes I’m purposeful, like the project I’m working on now, I’m adamant in calling it a novel. But really the category is more a matter of convenience. Generally, I don’t think genre categorizations really accomplish much, and seem sort of outdated at this point.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

Message, no, but there is something I’m writing towards. And the objective is really more or less something impossible to obtain, but for me, absolutely necessary to work towards. I think failure is inevitable in my line of work, though I don’t think failure is necessary a negative. Though there are different kinds of failures, and for me, one kind of failure might be okay, while another, not really.

What really interests me is what happens when someone reads a text, and not just any text, but one that really affects them, changes them somehow. I’m interested in these changes, both conceptually speaking, but also physically, how these changes get manifested neurologically. I’m interested in introspection and the construction of a phenomenological self-model during reading, and in narrativization versus narrative.

I’m very interested in what Badiou terms the “event,” as a “rupture in ontology, a being-in-itself ­– through which the subject finds his or her realization and reconciliation with ‘truth.” Or even what Derrida termed the “blind spot,” or de Man’s point of literary disruption. I think these are talking about the same thing, that literature can potentially offer an alternate reality which actually creates a space for chances to be made in the conceptual system that structures this one.

In my opinion, the goal of experimental narrative should be, not to continue a futile anti-narrative aesthetic that ignores the inherent and necessary quality of narrativization for human understanding, but to push a narrative aesthetic that allows and inspires readers “to view their ideological embeddedness with fresh eyes.” (This quote I borrow from Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. writing about science fiction.)

What is needed then, is a reinvestigation of the writing event through the metaphor most suited to it: narrative. Writing is thus neither inherently narrative or anti-narrative, but the cognitive processes that dictate it, the understanding of it (there since truth is understanding, the “truth” of the matter), are. This isn’t anything new. Writers and thinkers have always known that truth is based on understanding. But I think recent discoveries in neuroscience are showing more and more that philosophical questions we’ve been tackling can be manifested physically too. Science is showing more and more that we are indeed physically wired to narrativize the world, and so it is becoming increasingly crucial to reconsider narrative in terms of mediating between the philosophical questions of truth and subjectivity in writing, and the biological/neurological mechanisms of science. I really do believe all the great disciplines have been asking the same big questions all along, and that the big questions do have answers. I also believe that writers, working uniquely and intimately with language and conceptual systems and narrative, have real power to do something about all this, to push people to really think about things.

I’ve said a little more about this before, concerning KEROTAKIS, here.

What book are you reading now?

Too many to count. I’m constantly cycling through books and might be reading anywhere between 6 and 20 books at a time. Though I will mention a book I read recently that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat, I reread it a couple times, something I almost never do. I won’t say much about it, just that it was phenomenal.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

I’m not sure how new “new” should be to. But I will say that I think one of the most important writers writing right now is Vanessa Place. I’m convinced that Notes On Conceptualisms (co-authored with Rob Fitterman) and La Medusa should be canonical texts. And her recent project Statement of Facts is even more interesting and supremely (though really productively) problematic.

Others writers who I think are amazing and some maybe not out there yet but when they are will blow your mind: Joe Milazzo, Ian McCarty, Maxi Kim, Laura Vena, Jared Woodland, Nancy Romero, Saehee Cho, Harold Abramowitz.

John Dermot Woods

What projects are you currently working on?

As always, too many. I’m always chipping away at twelve things at once, which is why I finish very little. I’ve been trying to focus on a primary project at any given time, with hopes of completing that first. Right now I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of a book I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, called The Baltimore Atrocities. The prose is largely an adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s work, and I’m also doing a set of 100 or so drawings to accompany the pieces. The drawing load has become a beast, but I’m making progress.

I just finished putting together my next book, a collaborative image-text novel I did with J. A. Tyler, called No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear, which will be coming out from Jaded Ibis in the spring. (As you know, Debra Di Blasi makes really beautiful books.) And I’m compiling a short collection of my published comics for a book that Adam Robinson will be putting out on Publishing Genius’s Awesome Machine imprint. I’m working on a few more comics for the Genius Child Orchestra project that Johannes Goransson and I work on irregularly, and I’ve got a mess of other comics and stories I’m trying to finish up.

When and why did you begin writing?

Can’t really remember not writing. It took me a while to get to fiction. As a kid, though, I’d write these long picaresques, often with illustrations. Most of those were Berenstein Bears rip-offs, so I guess it was hack work. In college I wanted to be a journalist. Living in DC will do that to you. I got over that the day I graduated. All along, I think I really wanted to use drawings, but the models weren’t set up to allow that, unless you did proper comics (which I do now, I guess). When I got my MFA, we were split into silos – fiction, poetry, nonfiction – which really prevented me from exploring that. But my advisor, Stephen Dixon, liked to draw pictures too – ballpoint drawings usually. He would often include them with his stories (ridiculously, though, no one published them). I think that gave me a certain license to create in a way I felt comfortable and not in a way that would make Joyce Carol Oates comfortable at her writing table. Oddly enough, it was when I entered an English doctoral program that I really felt free to draw again. To write and draw and combine those two things in any way I liked, without worrying about market or genre restriction. I think it was the influence of my unhinged poet friends in Athens, Georgia.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I’m still not sure that I do. There’s something too settled in that term. Luca Dipierro talks about writers that draw, and that seems to fit me. I don’t feel like a writer or an artist. But I do feel like a writer who draws, and it’s in the place that I’ve found my creative comfort. Luca, Edward Mullany, and Gary Sullivan all seem like people who have a similar instinct.

What inspired you to write your first book?

Probably geography. Geography and memory. The first few episodes from The Complete Collection of people, places & things were written in Athens, but it became a book when I moved to Tokyo. The language shook something loose, but the images, the commercial backdrop to Tokyo life, tapped into something familiar: the background noise of growing up on suburban Long Island. I began to think more about my own mythologies, that of Snake Eyes, Wolverine, and Optimus Prime, rather than the classical systems which enter our lives much less organically in this day and age. So I used the unanchored understanding of English that I developed living in Japan to make those stories new again. And the static of images seem only appropriate for this project, so that’s why I added the drawings, as another level of interference.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

I could go on way too long about this. But, I think that when I write and draw the influences that are bearing down on me are the things I’ve read. And the conversations I’ve had. Most commonly the work of Flann O’Brien, Donald Barthelme, and Chris Ware. And Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes has really left its mark on me. Other work I think about a lot are the stories of Thomas Bernhard, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, and Dash Shaw recently. And criticism – Kenneth Burke, Frederic Jameson, Viktor Shklovsky, and Slavoj Zizek all mean a good deal to me. Frank Santoro’s blog posts over the past few years have demanded me to pay a different kind of attention to the comics page. And Thomas Merton’s writings have really influenced the way I approach the practice of creation.

My friends’ ideas mean a lot to me. I have a regular writing group, and another drawing group, and I run ideas by my wife and daughter at the dinner table. They really help to shape my work.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

A lot of what I said about writing my first books explains my relationship to environment. One specific thing I think about growing up is that my dad (who was a criminal lawyer) always left reams of off-white, textured legal letterhead for me to draw on. I spent several years as a kid sitting at the dining room table and drawing on those textured sheets without structure or purpose. I can kind of feel that time when I’m comfortable creating these days.

My current environment is Brooklyn which is a great place to make art, because there are so many other people excited about art around you. I think I would have been overwhelmed living and creating here right out of college, but coming back and being older, the community is pretty amazing. We’re able to do cool things like The Soda Series (a writers-in-conversation series that I run with Greg Gerke) with little effort. There is a palpable connection between the work and the artist that you experience regularly living here. (I had a similar feeling in Tokyo. But that city was so damn big, that the effort to bring people together was sometimes overwhelming.)

Do you have a specific writing style?

No. I don’t think so. I basically teach myself how to write and draw again every time I start a new project. Art Spiegelman discussed his method, and explained that he studied cubism for a year before attempting one of his 1970′s formal experiments. I could relate to that (although my diligence is nowhere near as severe). It reflects in his work. You can’t simply look at a Spiegelman page and say, “That’s Spiegelman!” (as opposed to an artist like Chris Ware or CF). I think that this is maybe the reason that Spiegelman is regarded more as a cultural figure and thinker than as an artist; it’s difficult to develop a vocabulary with which to discuss his oeuvre. I also lack consistency when I’m making things. It’s difficult for me to locate a style or an essence in my own work. (Of course, maybe everyone thinks that about his or her own work.)

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

The very idea of genre was a specific anxiety for me a few years ago. Do I draw comics? Do I write fiction? Are these things prose poems or stories? Once I learned to stop asking, I felt a lot more comfortable. I also think that has something to do with audiences expecting less specificity from form, not expecting it to be defined. That’s a natural progression in a hypermediated culture.

That said, I do feel that my works that have the most unity or that give me a feeling of “wholeness” are my comics. There is a feeling of completeness in making them. I heard Ben Katchor speak once and his idea is that there is actually a proper harmony to the marrying of graphic and written language in the comic from, supported by history, and that our modern assumption of divorcing the two (or that marrying the two is somehow a new idea) is a recent phenomenon created by the unnatural dichotomies that resulted from the Age of Reason and the rise of science in the nineteenth century. This seems right to me.

What book are you reading now?

Quite a few. Too many to finish. I’m really enjoying The Lost Boys by Daniel Groves. The precision and classical language play offer me a similar peace to reading meditations that I enjoy. Good autumn book. I’m reading a manuscript of my friend Janice Shapiro’s next short story collection. I haven’t enjoyed narrative this much in a while. Her first book, Bummer and Other Stories, is coming out from Soft Skull next month and is definitely worth reading. I just finished Dave Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp – worth the wait, believe the hype.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

I’ve mentioned a few already, but I’ll add some more (there are no shortage of new writers I’m discovering – it’s a good time to be reading). I have a couple of friends, both of whom live in Georgia, whose prose is amazing me these days. One is Jamie Iredell. Despite the respect he gets in the indie lit community, I’d say he’s still underrated. His stories are spare, smart, simple, and devastating. The other is Kristen Iskandrian, who has now published quite a few stories. Her work is tight as a drum (something I don’t usually appreciate in other writers), but these layers of volatility vibrate under each sentence. I love the threat of her stories. She never tears the cover off of the horror, and that’s what’s so beautiful about her work.

I’m really enjoying the comics that Blaise Larmee is drawing, and the Comets Comets blog that he runs with Jason Overby and a few others is some of the best critical reading on the Internet today (kind of like Comics Comics was a couple of years ago). Oh, and the few snatches of comics that Conor O’Keefe has published in Mome are some of the most beautiful moments of the past few years.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

The idea that my drawings are illustrations. I think my work frustrates some people because they are looking for the The New Yorker paradigm of words and pictures that function redundantly. I use drawings to destabilize and complicate – not illustrate.

Also, being friends with so many writers, the idea of drawing is a mystery to some of them. It’s labor-intensive and slow. Editors also have this problem; they don’t understand that making an “edit” to a drawing means re-drawing it.

Richard Thomas

EXCHANGE NAMES

PV: Richard, I understand you tell a little story about your name—on the way your mother handled phone calls?

RT: Oh God, that? Okay, so I’m named after my father. He is Richard Gordon Thomas, Jr. and I’m Richard Gordon Thomas III. When I was little they called me Dickie. I was too young to do anything about it, until I finally got to high school. It seemed too big a leap to go from Dickie to Richard or Rick or Rich, so I just changed my name to Dick. I didn’t think much about it, my dad went by Dick, and of course I knew it was a phallic reference.

Well, whenever a girl would call over to the house to ask for me, if my mom answered the call she’d say, “Big Dick or Little Dick?”

I can only imagine the horror and confusion of the girls that called. And for me it was a lose/lose situation. If they said, “OH, big dick!” and my dad answered the call, they’d hang up and run away (hopefully). If they said, timidly, “Um…little dick?” and I answered the call, well…I was doomed from the start.

My mom…the first cock blocker in my life.

PV: Ha. That cracks me up.

RT: Did you have a nickname growing up?

PV: Well, when I was six I changed my name to Chrissy, a la Three’s Company. And it makes perfect sense that I was watching that show at that age, by the way. Perfect sense.

Transubstantiate

EXCHANGE PLEASANTRIES

PV: So, how are you? What’s new?

RT: I’m doing pretty well, for being borderline schizophrenic. Transubstantiate is doing well. I’m really thrilled about the whole Shivers VI thing, being published next to Stephen King and Peter Straub, I’m still pretty pumped up from that news. It’s kind of a dream come true.

PV: I’m excited on your behalf. Appearing beside King and Straub. That’s awesome.

RT: Thanks, PV. Your support and generosity really contributes to my confidence, my storytelling, my desire to put my work out there. And you’re a great writer. I love reading your work, I loved the Black Widow series.

PV: Thank you.

RT: How about you, what’s new and interesting for you?

NOW GET GRAPHIC

PV: Hmm. Very little new or interesting about me, but interesting for me? I’ve discovered the slot machine of insanity that is the Google image search! Keeps me entranced for unspeakable amounts of time. Simple searches like shame, weird, no or damn. Then my favorite, vulva. And there’s vajazzle, argyria, pareidolia, Meet Mr Happy, penile bifurcation, blue waffle (don’t!) and on and on. The subjects are exponential.

RT: Ha. Wow. I mean, I can guess why you were doing those image searches, but jeez, you must have an iron stomach.

PV: It’s not easy being a curious person. I don’t enjoy gross or disturbing stuff, I just have this intense need to check out everything once. When I’ve seen and learned what I needed, I move on.

RT: I feel the same way. But I’m not searching blue waffle, no way. Okay, I just did. HOLY CRAP.

PV: Ah! I’m so sorry! I feel bad now that I made you see that. Now search sorry. That’s from me.

INDULGE A LITTLE GOSSIP

PV: I love hearing certain people—namely those who can verbalize what fiction does for them—talk about various authors’ work.

What do you like specifically about the work of, say, Nik Korpon?

RT: Nik is one of my few neo-noir brothers. He’s not afraid to go dark, to be rich with the tone, the setting, the mood. He will pack a punch with his prose, and startle you, shock you with what happens, and then, he’ll back off of it, and make you tear up, the emotions, the humanity. Can’t wait to see Stay God come out. I nominated one of his stories over at the Cult, for the Palahniuk anthology contest, and of course if made the final five, has a shot at getting in. He’s just that good. He’s fearless. His voice is one that is close to my own, so of course I’m drawn to it.

PV: Caleb J Ross?

RT: Caleb is really smart, he brings a certain intelligence to his work, you have to pay attention. And he surprises me. I don’t think of him as being dark or strange in his writing but there were moments in I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin that I was floored. Same with Stranger Will. He doesn’t use gimmicks, he’s just a strong writer. I know his stories, his work, will always be captivating.

PV: Will Christopher Baer?

RT: Baer, yes…he’s probably the strongest voice, the largest influence on my work of anyone I’ve ever read. There’s something special about Kiss Me Judas, like you’ve said before, it’s the mix of love and pain, the s/m quality of it, the torture and the worship. You don’t see as much of his influence in my book Transubstantiate, but it’s certainly there in Disintegration. I’m just so mad that I missed his class at the Cult. And he’s so private, I’d really love to meet him. He is a voice, a tone, a perspective that really moves me. I wish he’d put out more work.

PV: Stephen Graham Jones?

RT: I’m glad you mentioned him. He has also been a huge influence on me, his work, the ability he has to straddle the lit-genre fence. He is so prolific, so talented, so incredibly smart. And humble. I’ve met him twice, at two AWPs, and he’s just so down to earth, always defending Stephen King, and the books and films he loves, always supportive of my work. He also blurbed Transubstantiate. Really, his is the life I want. To publish like he does, short and long form, to teach, to talk at panels, to be a part of it all. My favorite of his is All the Beautiful Sinners, and the opening to that book will haunt me forever.

PV: Craig Clevenger?

RT: Craig. Where to start. Craig is brilliant. The authority he brings to his work, it blows me away. I studied with him, twice, at the Cult. The story “Stillness”, he pushed me, said send it out, it’s perfect, and that blew me away. Compared my work to Steve Erickson, an idol of his. And that story will publish next to King & Straub, as I’ve mentioned. So, he knows what he’s doing. His work is original, inventive, rich, and also in the neo-noir family, although I think he’s moving away from that tone. The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria are two fantastic books, and we need more of his work out there. He’s so hard on himself. But he gets great results. I re-read those books often. He’s been a great supporter of my work, blurbed my novel, really a shining example of talent and generosity.

RELATE AN ANECDOTE

PV: I’ve studied with him a little as well. In fact, not long afterward I was there in San Francisco on a night he was participating in a reading. I brought my husband, and in the bar I was approached by a man with wiry long gray hair, shredded jeans, sandals and a guitar, and he said to me, “Hey! How ya doin? You look good.” I chatted with him, because I believed he was Craig. I thought, What a sly one, posting photos online of himself thirty years younger. But then he said something peculiar. Minutes before the show would start, while my husband stood beside me perfectly dumbfounded, he said to me, “So, you wanna get outta here?” Turns out he was a homeless guy, sort of a loner, not even there for the reading. It was a confusing night for me. And I still haven’t talked to Craig in person.

RT: Hahahahhahaah, that is hilarious…love it. Good thing you’re married and not the type to sleep with authors to further your writing career. . .

PV: Ha. Exactly.

DISCUSS “THE CRAFT”

PV: What is it you like to accomplish with your writing?

RT: I like to push buttons, that’s what I shoot for. I want to make you angry, get your heart beating, turn you on, scare you, make you awestruck with wonder, just run you through it all, leaving you in a quivering pile of raw emotion. Not sure if I do that all the time, but I think there are moments in all of my work where I get close.

PV: I believe so. You’ve told me you don’t plot. Why not?

RT: When I know where it’s going, I get bored, I feel like I have to write to that direction, and force characters to a certain decision, and it doesn’t feel right. I have more fun with an idea, a philosophy, and putting characters in situations where they have to reveal themselves.

I had a very clear idea of the Narrator in Disintegration, and where that story would start, that apartment, a place I used to live when I was in Wicker Park, a place I disintegrated in a bit myself, falling down, losing my mind, drunk all the time, drugs, cutting myself, suicidal, really just falling apart.

PV: You use your own experiences often in your work?

RT: Well, what’s interesting, I remember workshopping a novel (The Fool, my memoir) and I was trying to sell it as fiction and people were like “no way did he have a threesome, no way did that guy die, I just don’t buy it” and yet, it was all true.

Part of the problem with writing from past experiences is that sometimes you are so committed to the memory that you lose sight of the drama in the scene, and you aren’t willing to cut things, or build on a moment—if the scene doesn’t work it doesn’t work, whether it happened or not

ADDRESS PERSONALITY DISORDERS

PV: You’ve called yourself bi-polar, what does that look like for you?

RT: I say bi-polar, but I’m not on medication or anything, just that I tend to go to extremes, one day on top of the world, a gifted writer, the next day thinking I’m wasting my time, deluding myself. Really, I’m very humble, consider myself very lucky, and a product of my surroundings. BUT, you also have to have a lot of confidence to write, to sell yourself like I do.

You may not answer this question, PV, but why the dual identities? Why not just put your stamp on your work, and put it out there, have confidence in what you do, and tell the world to fuck off? I know that some of my work, the sex and violence, oh…it does give me pause. It does when I think “Oh shit, is my MOM going to read this?” It’s tough. And I know you’re often writing about sex and violence as well. Own it, sister.

PV: That’s a really good question. My answer wouldn’t be as good. Although, I would have used the word pussy—in addressing the potential lexicon of an alternate persona in contrast to that of someone’s mother. You didn’t say pussy.

RT: Ha. True. Here’s a tough question. Honestly how do you feel when you see people succeeding around you? Does it crush you a little bit?

PV: Are you kidding, I love it. Climb that ladder. Show me your coattails, I’ll show you mine.

Seriously, I love it when those I like get due affection and recognition. I have fantastic taste in people.

EXPLORE GENDER IDENTIFICATION

PV: Have you ever worn makeup, excluding stage?

RT: Sure, I’ve worn it. Not so much eyeliner and lipstick, but I’ve dressed up in drag for Halloween. Hard to find size 12 women’s shoes. I have nice legs, so I’ve been told. I did go through a phase where I wore nail polish, usually black, but also dark blue, and even this cat-eye thing I did for awhile, black with a red stripe. This was during my own disintegration phase. Let’s just say that certain ladies really liked it. I had a look for sure, a certain arrogance, a who cares mindset, because, I didn’t care, about myself, about anything. Some women find that attractive.

Have you ever dressed up in drag, like a man?

PV: In seventh grade I was an old man for Halloween, gray wig and all, and nobody recognized me. I hated it. Years later we had some old film developed and found this awful, haunting photo of a lonely old man. It was another couple years before someone realized it was me in my ill-conceived costume. I’ve learned—you never wanna go full drag. You gotta hold a little back.

Are you an emotional guy? What makes you cry?

RT: It wouldn’t take much to make me cry, seriously. I keep my emotions bubbling right on the surface. Easier to access them that way. I cry over stupid shows like Top Chef or Lost or anything that feels real, human emotions, real risk and fear and hope. Do you cry easily?

PV: No. And using a one-word answer for that question.
I do, however, come apart at the sight of Mickey Mouse in a parade. No joke, he comes around the corner with Minnie and I’m finished. Ceremonious processions of any kind can destroy me.

EXPLORE SELF PERCEPTION

PV: Which actor would play you in your biopic?

RT: Let me think. I’ve been told I look like a lot of people. I’ve gotten Matthew Broderick, Harry Connick Jr., even JFK Jr. Don’t laugh! I had a waitress approach me once and ask if I was Broderick. And my nickname in college was Ferris. I think it’s because the sorority girls didn’t like yelling out DICK to get my attention. I could see Broderick now, playing me at this age. When I was younger though, in my prime? Boy, that’s tough. Maybe a young Christian Bale? He’d have to have thick, curvy hair. Maybe Gordon Levitt, Jared Leto? Shia LeBouf is growing into a look. I don’t know.

Who’d play you? I see a combination of Sherilyn Fenn, Jennifer Connelly, and Dita Von Teese.

PV: Those are fine. If Courtney Cox could take some ludes, maybe her. I move slow like Connelly but she’s a little blank for me. Amanda Peet? Ideally it’d be someone who easily slides from contemplative to playful and from sultry to maternal. It’s seems I get quickly pinned as a singular thing but it’s not so; I go from shrewd to slightly retarded really goddamn quickly.

DISCUSS CURRENT PROJECTS

PV: How’s Write Club going for you?

RT: Write Club is such a great place, this is my fourth year, I think, and I could never see myself leaving the group, they’re such a great support system, so smart, so encouraging,

PV: Agreed. I should confess that I predicted you wouldn’t apply more than a tenth of the suggestions you receive on your current project, Disintegration. You think that’s a valid guess?

RT: I think I’ll apply a lot more than 10%, but that’s funny that you think I’ll basically ignore the group.

PV: Yeah? Well, you’re always visibly grateful for the input, and I really wouldn’t fault you for going your own way; you know what you like, you produce consistent work, and I think that’s been a huge factor in your success so far. I envy your certainty. The end result is always sharp with you.

RT: Thanks. I do consider every comment and edit that is given to me, at Write Club, and beyond. I usually feel like I’ve gotten things right the first time, because the scene speaks to me, it pours out of me, it’s just a matter of nailing it down. I have to follow my guts, my instincts, but I’m always open to suggestion. When you’ve written as much as I have (four novels, 25 stories) you get a sense of when it is working and when it isn’t. BUT if you can convince me of something, I’ll do it.

But yes, I’ll maybe take half of the advice. That rape scene won’t go any father. That was a weird moment, I remember thinking “Well, Richard, are you going to do it? Is this your Requiem for a Dream moment?” I actually thought of you, Pela, and could hear you telling me to push it, take it as far as I could. And that’s what I got. I learned something about the Narrator. And myself. You’d like me to take it farther, right?

PV: I would in that scene, that’s true. It’s pretty bold to let your protagonist rape a woman. I felt like you were onto something unique there in exemplifying the disintegration of a good man.

RT: If there was one thing you’d love me to add or change in Disintegration, what would it be?

PV: I don’t have any one change for that book. I pointed out a thing here and there, but I saw your vision and I am genuinely really into it.

SHOW PROPER AFFECTION

PV: Richard, you write such intense prose. The style, the melody of your voice lends itself perfectly to a character-driven noir tale. This is where I like you best. You know I’m crazy about Disintegration. I can’t wait to see that one on my shelf.

RT: Thanks, PV. I look forward to your new work, too, always compelling and entertaining, with a bit of heat. What I like most about your work, and your personality, is that you have a unique perspective. You aren’t afraid to put taboo subject matter on the page. You tell it how it is, and I think your writing is very intense, it always gets a strong reaction out of me. And you constantly shock me. You have a curiosity about you that is captivating.

PV: Thanks.

LEAVE THEM DISTURBED

PV: This was fun, Richard. Thanks.

RT: Thank you, PV. You’re a very smart, very funny woman, with a powerful appeal, and one hell of a writer too. These conversations are fun.

PV: You know, when I did a conversation-interview like this with Caleb J Ross, by some unexplained mystery—my brain crossing wires—in one of the single most nonsexual associations ever, there was like a six month period where nearly every orgasm I had was briefly interrupted by the image of Caleb’s blog popping into my head.

RT: I’m not even sure how to comment on that.

PV: Not the man, remember, just his blog. He’s a family man and I’m very happily married.

RT: I have to run tell Caleb this.

PV: Don’t. I guarantee you he’ll stop returning my emails. This is between me, my husband and a blog.

RT: Ha.

PV: On that note.

Thanks, Richard, for taking the time to talk to me. I always enjoy your company.

RT: Thank you, Pela. The pleasure’s been mine.

Pela Via

Pela Via is the fiction editor for Outsider Writers Collective and a member of Write Club 2010. Her limited short work has appeared at Red Fez, Troubadour 21 and Nefarious Muse. Her story “Burning Hot Girls” is nominated for the 2009 Best of the Net Anthology. Pela was a panelist for the Velvet Podcast on sex and violence in fiction. She can be found at pelavia.com.

The first thing you need to know about where Adam Gnade lives is not about him. It’s about the former tenant. On the lam up from Albuquerque the man brought his extended family to Kansas after killing four men. By all accounts a good, kind man with a temper, the young Mexican went to town one night after living in the Kansas farmhouse for a year, got drunk at one of the local saloons, and shot and killed a man. On his way back to the farmhouse the police caught up with him and took him in. The house, now called the Hard 50 Farm, is named in tribute to the man’s sentence—a hard 50 years, no chance of parole. After a rain you can find 9mm shells in the yard. A running joke among Gnade and his housemates is speculating where bodies are buried.

To get there you take the 70 east toward Kansas City. From Highway 7 it’s a few miles of cornfields, a farm supply superstore, a Sonic, a Waffle House, the sign for a Buffalo Soldier Monument, then a left on the gravel road of Gilman. The next few miles are hard driving, rutted sand and dirt road, a horse ranch to the left, the landfill, hills rolling with pasture grass and corn, Virgil Johnson’s cattle ranch to the right, and then another left, on another dirt road, and follow that up past two more cattle ranches to the crossroads of Wolcott and Stranger.

Gnade’s place is on the far eastern edge of town. Sitting to the south of the old apple orchard turned cow pasture on Stranger, it’s a small, white, clapboard home near the road with a long, forked gravel driveway with a beat-up 4×4 Jeep parked at the end of it, windows down, doors unlocked, rifle on the passenger seat. There are tall oaks, one of which boasts a rope swing with a wooden swing. The house—two stories, four bedrooms, unused basement—sits on the sharp end of an isosceles triangle of land, three sprawling grassland acres. Near that tip is the house itself and a barn converted into a garage, then converted back to a barn. Between house and barn is a double paddock made from horse fence and t-posts with two young lambs, Bohdi and Billy the Kid, and three pygmy goats, Jefferson, Jackson, and Dixie, all under two months of age. Next to the parked Jeep is the propane tank half covered in weeds, then a view of the land.

From the window of Gnade’s yellow and baby blue wood-paneled solarium you can look out on rolling green fields stretching down the hill-land into the distance. Beyond that is a blue shimmer of lake on the cattleman Ward’s acres and a thick line of deep woods that lead first to the catfish pond of the Lost 80 Park, then the trailerparks outside Leavenworth and then to the small, prosperous town of Lansing. It’s a view of what the land looked like a hundred and fifty years into the past—frontier land, the hills of prairie grass, agate blue sky, scattered wildflowers blown by breeze, cows pulling up grass beneath trees older than anything else around. It’s a rugged, heavily wooded land thick with life—coyotes prowling in packs at night, deer stepping quietly through the fields, snakes and snapping turtles on the roads up from the ponds, wild turkey in the clearings.

In front of the house, facing the road, which is really the back of the house, as used by the tenants, is a square patch of crop rows—tomatoes, kale, potatoes, green onions, leeks, sweet red peppers, green bell peppers, beans, cucumbers, and rosemary, basil, and mint.

The house is wood-floored and simple. Starkovski crystal prisms hang from fishing line in a few windows, casting refracted squares of rainbow light across the walls. The kitchen is large and clean, incense burning in one window sill next to a mason jar of purple field flowers and a colorful row of paper seed packets. The bedrooms are bare to the point of monastic. The front room is empty and window lined and has one bookcase filled with a small number of books, two of them Gnade’s novel, Hymn California, and his novella, The Darkness to the West. Today Gnade’s three housemates are gone, one rehearsing for a play in town, and two on the road headed to the deep South, gone adventuring until next month. Now it’s quiet. Nothing but wind in the trees surrounding the house and the distant sound of cattle baying. Later the cicadas will drone and crickets will fiddle and the frog choirs will start. It’s 1p.m., the time that Gnade begins writing work for the day. His schedule is free, but regimented. Farm work, book work, farm work, then dinner, after that nothing planned. When he leaves the house it’s to go sit beside the Missouri River along the Louis and Clark trail and read. Trips to town are to buy hay, booze, and the groceries he can’t grow for himself. The only bar he likes is a half hour away in the old boom town of Weston, RJ’s Saloon.

Gnade’s bedroom was his writing room until the heat came and now he sits outside the open door of the barn on an old metal blue folding chair with a short brown plastic table in front of him piled up in notebooks and source material and sharpened pencils and an ancient laptop computer that looks almost like a typewriter. Behind him is the square mouth of the barn. It’s clean and well-ordered—small tools and coils of wire on nails along one wall, farm chemicals and livestock mineral on a shelf, a row of pitchforks, shovels, and brooms up against the rear wall, and along the northeast facing wall two bales of local brome hay on a short wooden stand, a vertical standing coil of 6′ x 35′ wire fence, and an American flag, hanging stripes facing down to the cement floor, nailed up next to the hay.

Gnade, just done with the morning’s farm chores, wears the clothes you wear when you work in hot, dusty, conditions like this—tall boots thick enough to keep him safe from the many copperhead snakes on the land, slimfit gray jeans, and a plaid checked western shirt, pearl snaps, torn along the back of the arm, open low at the neck, and thin to the point of see-through from hours spent drying on the clothesline after a hand washing. In the corner propped up against the wall is a shotgun. His face is sunburned and his dark hair hangs over his forehead and covers one eye when the wind blows it. Next to him on the gravel and grass is a beaten yellow straw cowboy hat and when the sun moves overhead and rests above in the space between the trees, he puts it on. This conversation took place in the summer of 2010.

Do you find pleasure in the act of writing?

I do. Once you know your message and your story and how you want to say it, it’s about the best thing you can do. (If you stay excited.) Soon as the farm work is done I sit down and that’s the best part of the day. It took a while to get there. Hymn California was my first book published but I’ve written five or six of them before that. None of ‘em worth a damn or worth publishing. I needed the practice though. Needed to work things out for myself before it was any good.

You seem to be able to avoid the problem a lot of freelancers and work-from-home types have with distractions, namely the internet and domestic tasks. How are you able to do that?

Out here I live a very simple life that doesn’t require a lot of money. I don’t watch TV at home or a lot of movies or own a cellphone. Where I live it’s very pared down. There are farm chores but I need those to write. I need to be physical before I can get in my head. As far as the internet goes I don’t have it at my house and there isn’t much I want from it. There aren’t a lot of websites I like to look at and I don’t care for things like Facebook or emailing much—though all of it is a tool and I use it for what I need. Also I’m more or less in complete social exile. My latest philosophy is less friends, better friends. I don’t hang out, in the regular sense. But when I am finally around friends it’s better than it used to be when I was around people all the time. I love people—I just don’t need to be around them all the time. I need to be alone. As much as possible. Even when I’m not writing.

Your work focuses as much on place as it does anything else. What is it about places that attracts you so much?

We are not us without the place we were born, the places we’ve visited, and the places we want to go. Place is everything. We’re all just reflections of our environment.

Right now you’re living in Kansas. How is it different than Portland or Virginia or San Diego? What are you finding out about life there? Does living in the center of America symbolically or otherwise appeal to your sensibilities as an American writer?

It’s quiet and it’s pretty and I can think. Here I’m writing about California and this is such a world removed that it makes it easier. Where I live I look out the window of the solarium that I write in and I see oak trees hundreds of years old, cattle in the fields, goats and sheep in their pen, green as far as you can see. The sounds are all cicada, frog, cricket, wind in the trees. But I can close my eyes and see palm trees, the ocean, sand, freeways and I can see them clearly. Portland I’ve nearly forgotten about; it never made sense to me. Good for some people. Not for me. Virginia is like Kansas with the ocean. I miss it, but I feel more balanced here. The wide open spaces and all the land let me slow down and process.

It never gets too quiet?

It does—it did when I first got here. I’d hear something in the night after silence for hours and go to the window with the rifle, my blood pumping. You figure out the sounds pretty quick. That crash in the brush on the far side of the wire is not the previous tenant’s tweaker friends coming back to take their stash of money and drugs from the attic—it’s a night-roaming cow. The car slowing down as it passes the drive is not slowing down for you. Clear your head. Shake off the paranoia. You learn fast.

So you’re writing about San Diego, right? Can you talk about the new book a little bit?

The new book is one long linear story, unlike Hymn California, which was pretty experimental and fragmented and strung across a changing timeline. It’s about people in San Diego and Tijuana. It’s a border book in that sense, the characters crossing over, crossing back. I think it’ll be a scary book to some people in that it’s very violent—in a human sense, nothing action movie-style of course—and it’s very druggy and mean and dark, but at the center of it is a very gentle, goodhearted, realistic love story. I like the idea of all this meanness going on and then something good and sweet sailing down the middle of it all, unaffected by the darkness, trying its best to stay pure (but not always succeeding. In that sense it’s a very happy book. Even the worst, meanest people in the book are happy. Happy in a joyous, fighting, struggling, hard-living, life-enjoying sense. As dark as it is it’s not a downer. It’s more a long, ongoing battle. It’s also very detailed—very, very detailed and geared toward the senses. I read somewhere that to write well you need to be a sensualist. I really like reading Garcia Marquez in that regard. For this one I wanted to make something very rich and evocative of its place, a whole sea of details and color and senses. I want people to see and smell and taste everything. It needs to spring right off the page or plunk you down in its landscape. San Diego is one of the main characters. I want to tell that place and its weather and people in its entirety—in the entirety I know, anyway. I like regional writers—people who tell their places and tell them expansively, like a big wide-spanning panoramic western movie.

Hymn California was a book of movement, of travel, of escape. You seem to be in a different mode at the moment. Is this growing up, or something else? Another experiment in ways to live?

One of the big things about coming out here was to live a better, smarter life. And by that I mean financially. Living in the city during this recession I was fighting to make rent every month, fighting to pay bills. The move out here was about living closer to the land but it was also about cutting the amount of money I need so I could travel more.

You’ve talked about Hemingway and Steinbeck as benchmarks in the past. Don’t you think they’re a little old-fashioned for today’s readers? Norman Mailer said he didn’t trust a young, male writer that wasn’t influenced by Hemingway, but he was also from an older generation. Is their type of traditional writing still relevant?

For me they’re good but they’re too slow for most readers. Not for writers who are readers who look for different things in a book, but you wouldn’t want an audience built up of writers; you’d never make a living. At some point we were told that literature and genre fiction don’t mix, but there’s a lot to learn from genre fiction. The action, sex, the violence, adventure. I don’t want to write like John Grisham but I’d like to write a book that pushes you forward while still giving you bigger ideas and truth. Just the same I don’t like to read a lot of contemporary, faster male writers because they write feminine. They’re not men. They’re very self conscious and they’re very clever and sometimes they’re funny but at some point someone cut their balls off and I’d rather read the work of a bull than a steer.

How do you approach the idea of tradition and influence? What do you make of Cormac McCarthy’s statement that all books are made from other books?

I love McCarthy’s writing and he’s a very smart guy, but I think that’s old thinking, an idea we can and should move beyond. Books being from other books… it’s true… it’s true in that writers are too caught up with being writers—the holiness of the pursuit—and writing about writers and writing characters who are as well-read as they are. It’s a show-off. Hymn California was about a writer and it was about writing, so was The Darkness to the West. This next book isn’t. My main character is not a writer. He’s not concerned with myth and history and he’s not well-read or interested in the referential. His experience doesn’t reflect back to what he’s read and it’s not based on the Odyssey or Joyce or the Bible or anything like that. It’s a human life. We have so many books written from the first person perspective of writers it’s killing our audience. Where are the books written about people? Are all our readers writers? No. That’s why people turn away from hard literature and look to things like fantasy writing. They can’t relate. For this one my characters are just normal folks and I think I owe it to the readers to do that.

What do you think it takes to be a successful American writer? What qualities must one possess?

The perspective enough not to judge. Not to demonize or lionize. To write about the country without taking a political or moral stance. If you want to write well about this country it’s a big responsibility. You need to look at the people and the times and the land without editorializing too much. What I want from American writers is characters as real as they can be—no good guys, no bad guys. I want an engaging story that doesn’t waste my time and I want the writer to back off from saying this is right and this is wrong and tell the story. A good work of American fiction should be more camera lens than opinion page.

That’s a very American approach to writing about your country. To take the politics out of it. Writers, big, important writers from all over the world except America, often the Nobel Prize for Literature winners, try to portray the current climate of government in their work. Why do you think American writers avoid that? Are we too concerned with identity? With domestic problems? Is it possible that our government is too unobtrusive or mercurial to accurately characterize? Or have we just been indoctrinated to keep the politics out of our writing?

American novels tend to be apolitical and, yeah, that’s one of the reasons foreign critics write American authors off as unimportant or socially irrelevant. I think one reason that might be is we’ve had a more or less static government since the beginning, two revolutions aside. Overseas it’s countries changing names and assassinations and regular revolution and a healthy protest and overthrow system. Here we don’t even have people protesting this current war (to a substantial degree). Americans aren’t so worried about the life and death side of politics and revolution. And I think for good or ill the books reflect that. We’re concerned with love, work, and money. And death. It’s a very selfish set of concerns but I’m not going to pretend I’m holier than thou in that respect. The way we’re apathetic about politics is unhealthy, sure, but I’m not writing manifestos. I’m writing about how I see people, how I see them living, and I’m not going to bend the truth to add political agenda. Still I think that’s going to change as our empire continues to die. Things might get interesting in that respect. And maybe the books will reflect that. Me, I’m writing about love, work, money, death. I’m writing within the sphere of my selfish and myopic experience. But I don’t think we should let that invalidate what we’re doing. Fiction can be history—you can look at what people wrote in fiction about how they were living and find truth about how it was to live in that place, in that time. It’s our duty to future generations to tell how it was to live in the time we lived and how we saw it. That’s an important thing.

About the author:

Bart Schaneman is an American writer living in South Korea. He recently finished a memoir called Take the Ride. Find him on tumblr here: www.bartschaneman.tumblr.com.

And yes, I’ve come to know him well. We chat a lot. He knows my daily dark secrets and I know his. We talk about petty things—like him shoveling his sidewalks in Schenectady or my dog sitting on my feet and to keep warm in Colorado. Though he had to quit using alcohol in ’94 or seize up and die an ugly death, he relies on the use of Ambien to still his hyperactive brain late into the night, yet occasionally writes to me just as it kicks in. And in one email, typos and a string of aaaaaaaa’s cross the page, like he’s lost his grip, then these words:

“Like the image of latter dya saints dressed as street jesuses in Disney Wrold –a a a a a a a a a aaaaaaaaaaaaa sure to gte escorted off the scene sand thrown in the slammmer for thier efforts to educate aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”

Even when he’s nearly knocked out, I’m thinking: If this dude’s words were racquetballs, I’d be a bloody wreck. When my Ambien hits, I’m done. But nothing shuts down Catlin’s word-feed. When he published his 2008 Self-Portrait As the Artist Afraid of His Self-Portrait, I wrote, (he’s a) “ringmaster conducting a circus of macabre freaks in (Diane) Arbus-like impeccably paced rumors of profound intrigue.” It’s his uncanny side that leads me into dreams, often surreal or bizarre dreams, and draws me closest to his work. Like this bit from one of his Self Portrait pieces:

“…sheep roam / free where servants once walked / fulfilling the needs of the chosen / reduced, now, to their most basic / animal states, devoid of reasoning, / logic, the will to escape invisible / bonds, self-constraints bordering / on madness, selected rooms become / locked-in wards, the cruel face of / the creator reflected in every smooth / surface, a sheltering silence letting go / each person the dread angel touches, / the ones who survive unsaved. /// “

So here’s a colleague I’m entirely comfortable testing my darkest work with, knowing I’ll never receive a judgmental throwback. Not the Catlin who is my brother on this ride—a kind man, a respectful man (when he and I are not “catting” about certain poets, poetry and/or critics we share a dislike for—don’t ask, those are some of our darkest secrets). We find we’ve commonly tripped the same journeys, though he seized the ship of tell decades before it ever entered my mind.

~

Spiel: Long before you and I became knuckle-bumping bubbuhs, I was drawn to a long prose piece you wrote for Happy magazine. It had no subject! Whoa, Katz, that was a mysterious ride I could not dismount. That’s the piece of your head that still thrills me most—a piece of you I believe has not been well explored. Dig? Like that crazy-ass portrait I made of you. So I wanna lay down a dozen or so “Big Sky” questions for you, ya know, kind of “out there” stuff, hoping you’ll rip into em—just let that out-there Catlin beam. Wanna go there with me?

Catlin: Let’s go for it, man.

Spiel: Are you alone?

Catlin: Shit, yeah. Man, I was the son of a fucking schizophrenic. Spent my formative years on an island with her in the middle of a nervous breakdown, fifteen-hundred-miles from home. Then after we got into the suburban nightmare of home, weekends visiting her in the nuthatch where the drugs didn’t necessarily work all the time and the grounds of the hospital were as cold and as silent as a thousand suppressed screams and the electroshocked zombie people watched movies in the recreation room, believing, I mean really believing that “Francis the Talking Mule” was communicating with Them, on a personal level, and mother believing it more than most. I actually remember that shit, and drowning, though that was on St Croix, not in Pilgrim State. That was fun too, falling into the deep end of a freaking pool, sinking down and down into the chlorinated water, seeing the sun reflected above, watching the rush of the pumped water, feeling the water and the pain of it stinging and then relaxing and thinking, you know, drowning isn’t so bad once you get used to it, and then being rescued.

I didn’t drown, they tell me.

Yeah I am alone, how can you be any more fucking alone that that?

Spiel: What’s yer space, Katz?

Catlin: Space. Right now it feels like a movie. Or maybe even like that picture Dorothea Lange took in the movie theater, the audience. Observing them while they are lost in the moving picture show. That’s what bartending was like: one long fucking psycho drama with a cast of thousands it’s your job as director to figure out what roles everyone is going to play. Writing is like that. Right now I am in a “Rear Window” state of mind. Looking out the window across the alley at the people in their rooms making up stories about their lives. Sometimes plain hysterical. Like a kick in the teeth. Had that a few times and you know its overrated. Other days I feel like The Pawnbroker with all his Tenants of Moonbloom creeping into my life, like insects formicating your skin. Good word formicating, eh. Mostly what I like about “Rear Window” is the idea that Grace Kelly could somehow appear in one of those gorgeous outfits without a hair disturbed and do something nasty with you. Oh the dirty stories you used to hear about Grace. Even now that she’s gone to an even better place than Monaco.

Spiel: What’s the Big Race?

Catlin: The race is an extraterrestrial thing: The horses represent species of a superior, perhaps diving race, on another planet resembling this one, and the winners must be separated from the losers through divine codes and interpretations and she used to bet on the outcome at OTB. Every day. Stacks of racing forms in her room after she died All annotated. I didn’t have the time or inclination or heart to examine them. Probably the key to the universe in there somewhere and I missed it. All I know is she used to select her horses in the races of life with the help of reference works like The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. The Wall Street Journal. Time Magazine. It’s a bitch when the race isn’t won but it has been said, and I mean this, life is a bitch.

The subway is a good place for races too but the horses won’t go there.

Spiel: Whaddaya wanna prove, Katz?

Catlin: Planet X is equal to Planet Y. All this stuff can be found in mother’s writings. She was like Blake on one of his less lucid days but even though she was certifiably crazy I wouldn’t say she wasn’t interesting. Or original. Maybe not original as a schizophrenic thinker per se but in terms of poetry, yeah, she had the images and the words and the world view and all kinds of good shit, though on the downside to get to it and really take advantage of what her vision was, you had to literally go there. As in crazy-fucking-nutso. And that, man, sometimes meant a one-way ticket to hell. What was it Dylan said that made so much sense, “Sometimes you have to pay to get out of doing the same thing twice.” Well, I paid all right. I was drunk for three-and-a-half- years and that would near kill just about anyone, man, but almost doesn’t count. Except maybe in analysis and atomic bombs. Oh yeah, and the proof involving Planet X and Planet Y. There is no death because we are already dead and life on this planet is actually life in death so when we don’t die but expire, we arrive on Planet Y, which resembles this one, but what life is like there is Unknown. The Y factor I guess. If they are equal, we and she’s right, we are in deep shit, man. Though what she had to say about X makes more and more sense to me the older I get and the more I think about it. Hints: her favorite opera was “Faust;” her favorite book was The Inferno.

Spiel: Did she read it aloud to you when you were a baby? Is that how you turned out so weird?

Catlin: She used to read to me from Treasure Island. Scared the living shit out of me. I think that had more to do with the crazy shit that came down on the islands, when we lived there, than the book.

Spiel: When’re your words wrong Katz? You ever get them wrong?

Catlin: Wrong words—you know how it is with words? They’re recalcitrant. Unbending. Obdurate. So you have to fuck with them. Bend them, twist them around, torture the shit out of them.

Spiel: Mmmm…now yer talkin language!

Catlin: Sometimes that means strapping them to the wall. In shackles. Bringing out the whips and chains. Pour acid in their eyes. Cross the fucking t’s. Heat the iron prods. Make them go- brother-go. And when they’re really wrong you have to pull a “Wild One” and go wild in some littlehowtown streets, terrorize the natives, play chicken like “A Rebel Without a Cause.” Take the dead man’s curve and hope you make the turn, man. And if that doesn’t work, you have to burn the paper and start again.

Spiel: So…when’re you done?

Catlin: Done has always felt like the end of a Saturday night in the bar, crammed full of teenagers, working alone except for some chickenshit stoner cook who spends his shift hiding in the alley between buildings and a waitress who disappeared just as the rush started and isn’t seen again until Thursday when the pay envelopes come out, if she’s smart, the air conditioner’s on full bore cranking out stale heat, the smoke eater’s making noise, cracking the smoke and freaking out like an electroshock machine gone wild, which pleases the druggies, the mushroom eaters, line cutters, hash inhalers, even the Apprentice Alcoholics of America drinking their buck-three-ninety Long Island Ice Teas and puking all over the back room or falling in the room of broken glass, their screams muffled beneath the general roar of the jukebox, the din of the crowd, the clock-heads dead-still at one thirty, the smoke so thick you can’t breathe, you against the world, no help, no relief, not even a telephone to connect you to the outside world, the one you have to use in case of an emergency impossibly far away, and a pay phone at that, so you’d better be prepared like a latter day jesus christ to walk on the heads of the unwashed multitudes with a pocket full of quarters to call for foreign aid, that is, unless someone hangs you up, which happens more than once in the consumptive night of a thousand knife fights, and when it’s over, a room full of debris, a beer tap leaking, two hours of glass-washing to do and a pint of Bass Ale to chug down after the triple shot of Scotch. Just living through that, a blessed relief, and a kind of accomplishment too.

And that’s not an analogy; that’s how it was done in 1980 in The Tavern Albany New York.

Spiel: Holy shit! No wonder you ended up a drunk. Miracle to me is how you turned out to be such a thoughtful man. Geesh bubbuh, you’ve pulled me through a few real meltdowns over the years. Your previous experience in dealing with mental disorders has been a real plus for me. I think most of the first conversations we ever had were about our mutually dysfunctional mothers after I’d read some of your early mother poems. And you’ve never been unkind when my own mind slips out of gear. Dude, you have no idea what a gift that is to me. Such compassion. So few comprehend the involuntary chaos of mental illness. You hang in there when I can’t get it together. But…well…maybe that’s just the old long-suffering bartender in you—helluva a good listener. That…and your just plain human decency. Consistently, I see it in you through and through. Decency. And forthrightness. Man, do I appreciate that trait! Lemme tell you, I’m bloody grateful to you.

OK Katz, that’s your big box of chocolates and dozen long-stemmed roses from me—one short guy with a gut to another. I’ll get off my knees now.

Are you ready for the next Big Question? Are you ambitious?

Catlin: Ambitious? Ambition always felt like a dirty word. Still does. The kind of stuff all those greedheads were into that hung at the so-called “nice” places I’ve worked. The my-shit-doesn’t-stink-business men and head-up-their-asses new-age-whack-jobs. Those people. With agendas. Like the songs: “It’s such a drag to see you……” “It’s a drag getting old…..” Used to look out at the rich stiffs stepping out on their wives on a Friday night in casual clothes and then on Saturday all dressed up for a night on the town with the wife, paying you not to remember seeing them the night before with the mistress…

Spiel: You picked up bread for that? Hush money?

Catlin: Good money, man, serious cash. And you know, I thought, I really don’t give a shit what these assholes do. I wasn’t going to rat them out anyway but if they want to pay me not to rat them out, I wasn’t above taking it either. If this is what success is all about, if this is getting ahead, well…”It ain’t me babe.”

As for the poetry gig, I do that because I have to do it, because I love to do it and I’m not going to be an asshole about elbowing other people out of the way. If that’s what it’s all about, it isn’t all about me.

Spiel: The elbowing?

Catlin: Elbowing, one-upmanship, stepping on people to get ahead, whatever you want to call it, just not me, Spiel.

Spiel: What is Spirit? Big “S,” Big Sky, a way out there question.

Catlin: The unknowable, the indefinable, the unseen essence. Something like that, the jazz notes in an improv session of truly together hepcats, a Zen master’s brush stroke, a visionary moment successfully transcribed…..

Spiel: Are you moralistic?

Catlin: I guess so, the way satirists are moralistic. You could call H Bosch a satirist in a way, certainly Johnny Swift. Man, working 25 years in an Irish bar and after a couple of St Patrick’s Days, sort of like working Mardi Gras in hell, you begin to wonder if his solution to the Irish problem didn’t have some merit. And then you remember that half the people are only pretend Irish which is somehow much worse than the real thing. Or back in the night club days doing a John Cheever gig with all the pretty people and the seven couples it took you six months to figure out who was actually married to whom after seeing them every single Saturday night all that time, and somehow, when you saw the women in the stores doing their grocery shopping, they didn’t look the same, were invisible women you couldn’t recognize, even if you wanted to, as at least one of those husbands was a big time cop on the most corrupt police force this side of Illinois, and it all felt weird and wrong, like an affectation rather than an actually committed life- style thing, though I came to rather like the two couples who didn’t switch. Speculation was they took the pictures. But it was only speculation.

Spiel: Wait, uhhh…I was actually thinking, you know, I meant, do you mean to teach a lesson in your poetry? That kind of moralistic. Maybe I’m not using the right word. Is that what your answer meant?

Catlin: That there really are certain basic values: common decency, thou-shalt-nots, you know, like murder people, bomb defenseless people, shit in your neighbor’s backyard, take stuff just because you feel like it or because you can. Stuff like that. And if you lack these basic moral traits/ violate these basic rules, whatever happens to you is your own fault.

Spiel: What’s the Big Secret, Katz? Another big “S.”

Catlin: It’s all a lie. Writing is a lie. Civilization is a lie. Politics is a lie. Religion is the biggest lie of all as it is politics condoned by a higher power. Whatever that is. Basically we live in a pagan society: Think Creationists, Scientologists, Catholics…..that stuff just doesn’t make any sense.

Spiel: OK, then what’s the Big Answer? Capital “A.”

Catlin: Don’t sweat the lies. Live as good and as just a life as you can, man. Be cool. Just think if the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the process of what happens after death and what that will mean for a society such as ours, based on materialism and greed and self-righteous, self-serving hypocritical immoralists. A guy like George W Bush is really going to suffer for deeds done in this life. As he should.

Spiel: Dude, I’ll give you a big stinky shoe filled with hard-set concrete if you’ll tell me who you’d most like to throw it at.

Catlin: Richard Nixon.

Spiel: What’s yer plan for your next life?

Catlin: I’d like a shot to start over without having to deal with all the extraneous bullshit like being five-years-old fifteen-hundred-miles from home with a mother who was out cruising the night club for the sailors after the owner rejected her, of not being scared shitless by the strange sounds, the incredible storms, memories of walking the streets looking for mother during torrential rainstorms, of her sitting motionless for hours (days?) at a time staring out a window smoking cigarettes, of her bringing men home. Shit like that. And of the breakdown itself, twenty hours on an airplane with a hysterical woman, two years after, spending weekends visiting her in the nuthouse. Of never having had to spend a minute at that nuthouse instead of never being able to totally leave it in your dreams. Shit like that.

Impossible dreams, Spiel, impossible dreams.

Spiel: Impossible dreams, isn’t THAT the big secret?

Catlin: The dreams. Man, that’s all we have.

About the author:

The Poet Spiel is a tight-wired maverick painting naked word portraits of humankind, thin-layering its hirsute beastiness and occasionally revealing its humanity in scores of international independent press publications. His most recent book, “barely breathing,” a ten year anthology of his work, published by March Street Press, is available at www.thepoetspiel.name

Lily Hoang

What projects are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished a novel about a fat serial killer, based on a true story about a woman who systematically rolls over her four children to kill them over a span of five years. It’s an absolutely brutal manuscript, one that’s crushed me, pun intended.

When and why did you begin writing?

I started writing when I was 18, a freshman in college, because my roommate was a poet and I thought she was cool. I still think she’s cool.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Honestly? Maybe a few months ago, around the same time my third book came out. There’s a lot tied to the identity of “writer,” one that I both fear and romanticize. Up until recently, I’ve had the occupation of professor to shield me from questioning looks when someone asked me what I do. But then I quit my job, so when someone asked me what I do, I’d laugh, awkwardly, and say I’m unemployed. Then, as if ashamed, I’d say, “But actually, I’m a writer. I’m working on a novel.” Almost inevitably, the questioner would respond by telling me about the novel he/she has always wanted to write or is currently working on. So, we’re all writers here!

What inspired you to write your first book?

My first book was my thesis from my MFA program. That seems like cheating somehow.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Everything I read and experience influences me, though I don’t think that’s what you’re asking. I love the “classics,” sure, Proust, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf, etc. They taught me what a narrative can do.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

It’s funny how often I actually think about this. I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and whereas San Antonio is a city, a real city if population counts, it’s quite provincial. As in, it’s a small town with small town sensibilities. I often imagine how different of a writer and person I would be if I were raised in New York or San Francisco or Paris.

But I wasn’t.

I was raised in a fairly closed diasporic community, fully bilingual. When I started school, I immediately felt ostracized, in part because I didn’t know I was bilingual, thought everyone spoke what I spoke because in my limited experience, everyone did, but in part also because I was an awkward little kid.

I’ve looked for that community, in many ways, through writing.

Do you have a specific writing style?

No, if anything, my style vacillates wildly from book to book. I’d like to believe it had less to do with my “not having a voice” and more to do with my desire for growth and flexibility of influences.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

If asked, I will tell you—I will insist, in fact—that I write fiction, though regularly, my books are called poetry.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

Yes, absolutely. I believe books ought to have a point. Otherwise, they are simply prettily juxtaposed words.

What book are you reading now?

Too many to note right now.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Though hardly new, I’m a big fan of Kate Bernheimer, Joshua Cohen, and Selah Saterstrom. I have an anthology coming out in Feb 2011 with Starcherone Books, co-edited with Blake Butler, called 30 under 30, where we display thirty very exciting new voices under thirty. Look for it!

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

One of the most common questions I get about Changing has to do with my use of ampersands instead of the word “and.” If that’s the big question, I’d argue the book has been misunderstood.

Davis Schneiderman (Photo courtesy of Karen Larson)

What projects are you currently working on?

First, I’ve been promoting my new novel Drain from Northwestern University Press, released in June, with a series of bookstore and gallery readings in the Midwest—Live from Prairie Lights in Iowa City, for instance—and appearances in the next months at places including the University of Notre Dame, Central Michigan University, the University of Buffalo, and the New School, among others. I’m thrilled to find so many welcoming locales for this very unconventional novel.

The book is about a near-future where Lake Michigan empties of water and a group of disenfranchised people move in—an end-of-times cult that worships a giant worm—and then, after some years, a planned community corporation, with towns not unlike Disney’s Celebration, Florida, tries to bulldoze the cultists out of the lakebed. Drain is about the conflict between the two groups, with alternating chapters that follow 1) a corporate employee called Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui and 2) the leader of a paramilitary gang raised in the planned communities but set on revolt, called Dial-Up Networking.

Second, related to this, is work for my next novel, blank: a novel from Jaded Ibis (Feb 2011), which is just that, a 200-page blank novel. There are 18 chapter titles, though, and the book arrives in three forms: 1) as an e-book (have fun scrolling down through blank fields before arriving at the next chapter, 2) a commercial edition, and 3) an art-book edition, encased in plaster, which must be broken to reach the work.

Third, I’ve been working on a series of videos for my new but as yet-unannounced “Busted Books” YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/bustedbooks

This project grew out of several video projects over the last few years, including the students in my postmodernism course producing a video of me sawing in half Stephen Colbert’s I am America (and So Can You) and then, shortly after, boiling Raymond Federman’s novel Double of Nothing in noodles (along with my co-authored novel Abecedarium and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Liberty’s Excess).

This summer finally found the right time and support team to make additional videos, including a trailer for Drain and one for Blank, along with several other shorts—including a sloshing of a first-edition of Moby Dick into Lake Michigan. Look for these in the coming months. At some point I tired of simply discussing deconstruction and decided to do it.

When and why did you begin writing?

When? Just last week. It’s been a whirlwind.

Why? That’s more complicated. Have you ever felt an almost uncontrollable calling to do something in particular—something your friends and lovers and parents, hell, your mail carrier, all think is crazy—something so risky that the entire course of your life might be altered in the mere contemplation of the activity?

Just thinking about this astounding yet improbable possibility before you could transform, nay, transmogrify the mundane world thick with broken, feckless sycophants that surround you at work and get first dibs on the fresh coffee and the promotions into a shining city on the hill, as our Puritan forefathers believed, a shining beacon of civility in which you, the Bodhisattva of sorts, emerge each morning from your bed fresh and sharp like a dew-covered blade of spring grass, and so use your newly attained state of grace to help others see that their concerns are petty, trivial, transient, and that the true beauty of the human spirit lies in the contemplation of that which is beyond our daily, quotidian morass.

Well, David, that’s how I thought about becoming an astro-nought: Note, this is not an astronaut, but an “astro-nought.” I would convince NASA or perhaps a private space agency to let me undergo the rigorous training in extreme gravitational environments. I would perform advance calculus in a gyroscope and in doing so, prepare for the most fantastic space mission ever: my deliberate suicide rocket to Saturn’s moon of Titan. Why suicide, David? Well, I don’t think of it that way.

Let me back track: this planet is dying, David, and the sun is burning into nothing. Liberal estimates suggest that we have somewhere on the order of millions of years left before the sun goes nova and explodes. Conservative estimates, to which I subscribe, suggest that the entropic end of this planet’s 4.5 billion year lifespan may come as early as this November.

My mission, David, would be to race toward Titan, a possible terraforming candidate for future human habitation (although I envision humans eventually developing space gills of some sort. After all, did fish drag an aquarium onto land?). At the moment where I approach the celestial body, I fantastically crash my spacecraft into its surface with a billion-megaton payload of seedpods, organic soil, and various oxidizing chemicals. Thus becoming in my terrible disappearance an “astro-naught”—sacrificing myself to the idea of the future survival of our species or its successor creatures. Sure, we could let a computer steer the terraform football into the surface of Titan, but really David, do we want to create a second world for humans, or one for robots?

It was thus—in pursuit of this noble goal—that I was asked if Titan would also be destroyed during the explosion of the sun? I had to admit to my questioner, a local newspaper reporter, that I had not fully considered this possibility, and really in shock at the potential (and let’s leave it at that for now) miscalculation of my dream, David, the dream that would change the very course of my life and perhaps that of the evolutionary accident we call homo sapiens, I picked up a pen on the counter and began doodling a sort of asemic scribble: a characterless character that might allow me to express in glyph form some quintessence of the questions now consuming my life’s work.

That was the moment—last week as it were—that I began to write.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Well, I started writing last Wednesday, so, let me see….I have it: last Wednesday. Oh wait, no, that’s not right either, and that stuff above is just a put on. Here’s the real story:

It’s actually been many hundreds of years since the bibliomania captured the imagination of my clan, nomadic, left-handed European Jews that we were. Between Pogroms, my ancestors would drop their smithy work and instead scrawl overstuffed avant-garde novels that could really skewer their landed overlords, for instance.

When my more recent ancestors—my great-grandfather Fischel Schneiderman, arrived at Ellis Island in 1913 and settled in a tenement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, his first thoughts were not focused on such base desires as food and clothing, but on poetry, and avant-poetry, damnit. When my grandfather, his son, left school at 12 to support his sisters and mother after Fischel’s untimely passing, he sold poems on the street—the family chewed on leftover news pulp—and in doing so, endeared himself to a ragtag world of art lovers.

I guess you might say this writer thing was passed down to me like a family heirloom—or a genetic disease like the clap.

What inspired you to write your first book?

I’m not sure you may call “inspiration” the really noxious prodding of my college friends to write once I began. That’s all I heard: why don’t you stop dreaming of getting an MBA and working on Wall Street as a Hedge Fund manager and start getting serious about your future. Go to graduate school kid, they would say, and spend 5 years with your nose in a book breaking language down into syllabic nothings and try, for once, to produce a text work that can insert itself into the materialist dialectic in a manner productive for the liberation of the enslaved working classes whose subject position has been eroded by the sharp lines of third-stage capital like the end of an eraser pressed fast upon a strip of sandpaper.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Who? Vincent Price as the voice at the close of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” That is some scary shit.

What? Books, piles of unread books, all asking, nay begging, David, to be dismantled with a chainsaw.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

I once held a leprechaun hostage over a difficult passage in one of my manuscripts. They do not have green blood at all let me tell you. That’s a damn lie. Racism, against the Irish! There, I said it.

Do you have a specific writing style?

Very specific. I try to always use real words or words I make up in or grammatical either formulations agrammatical.

What genre are you most comfortable writing?
Comic interview. Dear John Letter. Self-Eulogy.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

Yes, I want them to reach out onto the page and put their hand through my books, like ripping out the heart of a lesser creature put up for human sacrifice, or as a ninja type character breaking not so much a block of wood but the entire root-tree system of knowledge logos Cuisinarts Cortes etc. with their violent, discordant reach.

What book are you reading now?

I just finished the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics on Comedy, and also the really fantastic Keyhole Factory by William Gillespie at Spineless Books. I am also reading a lost Chicago novel, The Common Lot by Robert Herrick (not the old poet), that Lake Forest College Press, which I direct, is considering reprinting in an expanded edition.

This comes on the heels of our debut publication, Beyond Burnham, and the work I do as Director of &NOW Books.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Yet, one that particularly comes to mind is the winner of Lake Forest College’s 2nd Annual Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize–Gretchen E. Henderson. I am at work editing her really wonderful deformative study of (dis)ability and the malleability of text, _Galerie de Difformité, which &NOW Books will publish during fall 2011. Check out some of her work on the project here: http://difformite.wordpress.com/

&NOW Books will also soon release, in October, the winner of the 1st Plonsker Prize, Jessica Savitz. Her Hunting is Painting is an exquisite, strange, and haunting poetry collection: http://campus.lakeforest.edu/press/&now/hunting.html

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

Just because I’ve published in my scholarly guise on William S. Burroughs doesn’t mean my novels are all Burroughsian. Damn Mugwumps.

Any memories of particular works: the writing of, feedback, the thought behind…etc.

I remember writing much of Drain over many consecutive summer mornings. I’d sit down with a pot of tea around 8:00 a.m. and start by transcribing audio dream notes from the previous night into a 1951 Remington. Invariably, over this period of weeks, I would become overwhelmingly drowsy after an hour or so, and collapse on this wooden couch with funky paisley cushions. I would then dream the next sections of Drain, and proceed to wake and write, etc.

Taylor Mignon. Photo by John Mancuso.

What projects are you currently working on?

Vou Visual Poetry Anthology, with Karl Young of Light and Dust Books
Iam afraid i have really slowed down this project. I wanted to finish my own book first, and next is a book of translations from the modernist Torii Shozo, disciple of Kitasono Katue, who was also a Vou Club poet. Thats coming out next year, 2011. But the visual poets are dying so i can’t flake out on this. Its been hard working with an editor overseas, tho he is the editor, archivist, publisher, poet, essayist supreme, and i am lucky to be working with him, Karl Young.

Creative & Expository Writing Text
Ive been publishing articles and giving presentations on Avant-garde and traditional writing forms in a great, open forum, the association and Journal of Engaged Pedagogy (whose founding mother is Barbara Summerhawk) and the Japan Writers Conference. Using the Exquisite Corpse and Yamamura Bocho’s poem Geigo as ideas for inspiring the short story; Fluxus performances for written text/scores; and English versions of Basho’s frog haiku for the comparative/contrastive essay and beyond.

The Beats & Japan: am still waiting for the publisher to get her/his whip out on this one, but the Visual Poetry book has priority.

What inspired you to write your first book?

My first book was one i edited with Hillel Wright, Poesie Yaponesia, a bilingual book of poetry, mostly. It was named after Shimao Toshio’s idea of the Japanese islands being more a part of greater Pacific island culture, rather than the Yamato of Japan per se. Unlike that idea, it wasn’t a great anthology, because it wasn’t fully bilingual, and some of the inclusions weren’t consistent, but iam proud of it because it was the first anthology which contained poetry originally written in Japanese or English, then translated, so you had Japanese and foreign poets under the same cover. It also helped to spur the revival of publishing activities of Printed Matter, filling a void that was left by Edgar Henry after he passed on.

My next book, Japlish Whiplash, a book of original poems, is dedicated to my father. Actually it was mostly already written, but my dad making his move last Fall really made me want to publish it after crying wolf for long enough. The inspiration comes from, uh, life, interacting in it or not; inspiration was and is usually received slowly, iam not a machine who can just crank out a book a day. Inspiration doesnt hit like a bullet. But lots of decompression and compression. I think iam a slowly blooming bloomer.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

I think that we are vessels who more and more are force-fed messages whether it be from TV, politics, adverts, techology, didactic elders, music and so on. There are very few writers who can pull off plying messages while not being pandering. Allen Ginsberg, Nanao Sakaki, Antler, and Kenneth Patchen are some who can. If there was a message I would like to give, it might be Stop Making Sense. Poetry should be free from these everyday mundane, rationalistic worldly affairs. It should be purely artistic, rather than trying to fulfill an agenda, or just a forum of self-expression, though of course theres nothing wrong with getting stuff off your chest, i dont think poetry is the best avenue for that, perhaps investing in a therapist is better.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

My Homage section in Japlish Whiplash makes that all clear. Never hide your influences or sources of inspiration — give them due credit. Without the dancers, visual and lexical artists, painters, conductors, photographers, musicians, journalists, Japanophiles, translators and independent scholars, life would be unbearable. So hence my poems dedicated to Chris and Cosey, Shpongle, Ohno Kazuo, Shiraishi Kazuko, Takahashi Shohachiro, Cid Corman, Tsuji Tetsuko, Robert Whiting and so on. Then there’s the collabs in one way or another with Ira Cohen, Ray Craig, and John Solt.

OKAZAKI KATSUHIKO

chaotician your chaos pubic beast & bathing body
the nitty gritty meeting of the ugly outside its antonym
a mermaid rub a dub dub goshi goshi scrub
you are what your partner eats
in your pretty puke 7
electric ghosts vie for tube time
& #8 kodak a black kojak
lesbos amour waterproof diashock jewels
butt beautiful faces bull’s eye bum mug
sky dark tree silhouette sprouts rect um
angular her trunk body fetus dig
under your gaia geographic skin

SLOW LORIS SEX
with John Solt

flexing voidic muscles they found dried food under a cardboard box
damp & smelling of spring, bonito bits fake paralyzed poses
coffee ocean returns across the history of slow loris sex
youality strutted the “to to totem con plate” swathingly with
all the logic it could muster at the gate of doom and gloom
ala chihauhau chimichanga, beezlebub bathes in lava lamps
genuflecting at her altar with candle drop tears and tea
spoons lovingly fed to the head’s federal bureau of indigestion
who is good at sports, barbeques, and the art of killing
inspired cerebrum shooting for best canvas splash in future olympics
blinked to nine painted Buddhas facing outwards on her fingernails
pointing to clouds of winter ptarmigan praying not to be preyed
what was never real continues the floor spinning olive green
psychic camouflage reflects into sky bumping off truant rainbows
jiggled the coup in her crotch flamboyantly flag color waving
groin butterflies flit the embers of ball clitzpah chiascuro
moonlit stars reflect ceiling in water of contingency flutes
eating a tulip while walking on hell kokopelli & lovely vomit
a sheet of glass placed between his feet and consciousness
espresso at noon drug at 12:15 1200:00: free floating ass peace in
the trenches sacred carbohydrate slop between their frog legs
uncle sam prostrate, in chorus they articulate this meatloaf sucks
nuts and bolts undoing the magnet affixed to the humanimal skull
duggery buggering off its own groan to imperfect friendly pyre
on the other side of conditioning the blood of egg yolkism
fading in rhaita by joujouka at the lunar feast of aid el kabir
atop a horse-headed camel rode across the starlit jellyfish sky
while heavy metal ants ramble off into the underground mudbow
ransacking for plastic mice and lines of ancient poetry
the moon-goddess slammed the word through the sun-god’s forehead
grey clouds of wrinkled dough stretch into a highway of rainbows
she comes in colors even to the Ibiza club w/a dj in the bathroom
head on the bowl, struck nostalgic for anyone else’s childhood
mamallian manna spurts out the ultra pacifier of substitute mama
in the rain he slips by a boat and uncle jelloes his brain
while his heart on a sleeve turned into a honey monkey piggy-backed
in front of giant speakers the music slowly bled his ears
“slap my face isn’t that antonin artaud? cocteau? oh pixies”
“you’re a sick paranormal puppy,” she said, wet as a kappa
“gnaw, just a chameleon in slippery drag” anti-esthetic hit taken
the team required a wind-up sardine to nibble at her salmon
kite flying in a mistbow of fins and whiskers winking akimbo
each line an airstair through which they fell unknowingly
as alabaster bastard gnomes in slowmo impromptu ballet prepare
to admit sheepishly, “we’ve shot houses and cars up our arms”
shotgun wedding: jack’s jacked up jaguar gets low-jacked
the ocean on toes reminded her of the lobster in his mouth
the macaroni beast split diddlely and the souffle splat squat
they were forever on the prowl for found words
doing the hokey pokey full fathom five, afro-leftism

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

My name, my birth, our house/gallery/library. I was named after the subject of my old man’s Phd thesis, the Puritan, pioneer, poet priest, Edward Taylor [Tho it often seems iam more of his anti-thesis!], & i was conceived in celebration after my father’s proposal to write on Ralph Waldo Emerson essays was accepted by Cliff Notes. So it seems i am nearly literally conceived out of poetic sense. Tho the old man went out of his way to say how tedious ET scholarship was! Never did i feel pushed into poesie. My revolt was looking into Po Mo and the Avant-garde, going to Japan, finding other teachers.

Another definite shade was that of the Floating World and J. modernism at our home. We have a virtual gallery of artwork on our walls. Ukiyoe and the portrait of Hagiwara Sakutaro by Onchi Koshiro in its menacing misanthropism was definitely a dark, yet elegant coloring. I picked up a book out of our library (converted from a garage), Mishima Yukio’s The Sound of Waves, and i was hooked on Japan since then, tho i dont go gaga over Mishima anymore. So perhaps when i made my getaway from Lincoln, Nebraska to Japan, i was somehow following my dad’s great appreciation for its culture, an extension of his esthetical love affair with Japan. He created his own woodblock prints. I pursue the love affair in my own way.

Another shading was that of the poets who i heard when i was younger coming in through the English Department at UNL such as the Polish poet Piotr Sommer and the Russian Yevgeny Yevtushenko. It was exotic to hear their poetry in their mother tongues. We had a kegger for Yevtushenko at our house! Then there were the punk bands at The Brickyard, the skateboarding scene and my friends in high school who were into New Wave.

Do you have a specific writing style?

No, specific styles get old quickly. Very few can keep longevity pursuing a singular style. Cid Corman, arguably the finest poet in the syllabic meter form, would be an exception, but even then, the adjective-less dipping into the bottomless void can drag. Or as Torii Shozo wrote in a poem:

A traveler abandons
sweet adjectives
and flips through a catalog of silence.

Experimenting with all styles: Homage, i write syllabic verse, have written sonnets and pantoums, alphabet poems, free writes formed into poems, and formalist techniques which i invent — based on the “Geigo” for example. I have a certain knack for rhyming and playing with words. So it may be interesting that I can be avant-garde and traditional in method too. I don’t try to force rhyme and rhythm it just comes naturally to me. To generalize then, from formalistic to free form.

What book are you reading now?

The Satires of Juvenal and Three Girls: A Twenty-First Century Tale by Faruk Abdullah (Carl Bloom). Am reading Juvenal as background for an intro of sorts for my translations of surrealist poet Torii Shozo.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Well, i recently discovered him, so new enough for me: H. D. Moe. Until reading him, i didn’t think anyone could write to such a whacky, playful degree as i do. H. D. Moe has this wonderful ability with words, playing with the sounds of them, giving them a real stretch, verbal free form Yoga perhaps. He made me think that i am not so crazy after all and that i have a poetic brother out there and that i should have stronger faith in myself as a poet. Sawako Nakayasu’s and Jane Joritz Nakagawa’s work appeals to me as well.

*Note we have chosen to present Taylor Mignon’s unique spelling and grammatical style unedited.

Daniel Duffy: In a great interview with Angela Stubs of Bookslut back in 2007, you said “I do believe publishing is in transition, the center is collapsing, you have a vibrant and increasingly literate cyberspace, and the inmates are taking over the ground floor of the asylum, with the asylum bosses trapped upstairs.” How is life on the ground floor treating you nowadays? It’s getting a little crowded, I’m sure, but everyone seems to be getting along well enough, right? Are the bosses still upstairs? Is there still running water? Has anyone been shanked?

Steve Erickson: The water seems to be rationed out, and I think the bosses are hiding—I don’t hear much through the vents. It doesn’t matter anyway. The trend pretty much is irrevocable—it’s generational. Cyberpublishing is what the next wave of writers and editors understands, in a way I can’t pretend to. The larger question is whether this is just a new delivery system for the same old literature or whether it opens up as well the creative possibilities that mainstream publishing has squelched over the last quarter century as it’s become more like the movie business, with a taste (if that’s the word) for blockbusters and an incomprehension of anything else.

DD: Your editorial statement says that Black Clock “revels in the kind of constructive anarchy that follows from allowing writers the chance to publish free of editorial impositions.” What does that mean, exactly? What is the editorial process at Black Clock, and what impositions do you, as the editor of the magazine, strive to avoid?

SE: I realize my “statement” runs the risk of sounding grandiose. Actually, for six years I’ve tried to avoid “mission [or] editorial statements,” to the despair of both my staff and those who put up the money for the magazine and place stock in such things. Black Clock‘s editorial process is either serendipitous or ad hoc, depending on what pejorative you want to use, except for the fact that from the beginning the plan has been to build the magazine around writers.

DD: You consistently publish work from some really heavy hitters—in the past you’ve featured work from Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Samuel Delany, Joanna Scott, Miranda July, Aimee Bender, Brian Evenson, Michael Ventura…the list goes on and on. How many authors do you solicit per issue? Is there a certain criteria involved with you soliciting an author, or is it just a matter of personal taste?

SE: I approach about fifteen writers per issue, maybe more, allowing for a few who will decline for one reason or another. It kind of astonishes me how many say yes, given that we pay virtually nothing and the circulation isn’t huge—that speaks to some regard for the magazine, I think, as well as just the natural generosity of so many of these people. In Issue 11, for instance, there’s Richard Powers, who I assume has opportunities to publish elsewhere. I operate on the assumption that I don’t know everything and that I don’t even necessarily have to love everything the magazine publishes (we might not publish much if I did), and that sometimes it’s enough if I’m convinced there are smart readers with interesting taste who will love it. If there’s a piece that the rest of the staff loves that I don’t, I’m open to the possibility I might just not be getting it and should publish it anyway. On the other hand, if there’s something I love that the rest of the staff doesn’t, I’m still going to publish it.

DD: Black Clock publishes a lot of experimental fiction—your editorial statement describes the work featured as “audacious rather than safe, visceral rather than academic, intellectually engaging rather than antiseptically cerebral, and not above fun.” A lot of editors say that they can tell they are going to publish a story from simply reading the first line, but that’s got to be a lot harder with more experimental work. Still, I just flipped through several issues of Black Clock, reading only first lines, and they were all pretty solid. Are you a first line guy? Have you ever had any specific instances where you’ve accepted or rejected a story after reading the first line?

SE: You know, I hear the word “experimental”—which has been used about my own work now and then—and I reach for my revolver. To me, experimental work is about the experiment—it’s by definition about the form—and that’s not interesting to me. I’m enough of a traditionalist to believe that the form, however radical it may be, still must serve the old verities (as that old experimentalist, Faulkner, called them) of character and story. So I hope that’s what I was saying, or trying to, in my dreaded Editorial Statement. I don’t know that I’ve ever known a story was going to work from the first sentence, but if I’m reading a new writer, it’s usually true that from, say, the first paragraph, I can tell whether someone has a voice or a vision.

DD: I imagine that emerging writers submitting to Black Clock have usually done their research, and that you don’t get many lackluster, first-person narratives about “my stupid ex-boyfriend” or “my parent’s divorce” or “my life is so horrible because I’m eighteen and I’m living in a dorm room.” Still, as an editor of a literary magazine, I’m sure you have some story themes that instantly turn you off. What are some examples of stories that you never want to see again?

SE: Well, the plight of living in a dorm room does sound like a non-starter. But I would like to think I’m still open to a really brilliant stupid-ex-boyfriend story. I mean, Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby are basically stupid-ex-girlfriend stories, right?

DD: You are a prolific novelist, essayist, and critic, as well as a columnist and a teacher at the CalArts. Black Clock is obviously very important to you, as you have so much more going on, and yet you still find the time for it. How do you balance the workload of the magazine, a project that doesn’t draw income, with the rest of your life? What is an average day in the life of Steve Erickson like? Do you still find time to write a little every day, even when school is in session?

SE: It’s hard and not getting easier, and you haven’t even mentioned parenthood, which sucks the oxygen out of the schedule like nothing else. Thirty minutes out of bed, I’m literally behind in my day, and the disheartening thing is that it’s the writing—or the writing I care most about, anyway—that gets pushed aside, because it isn’t something I can just squeeze in a half hour here and a half hour there.

DD: A recurring theme in several of your books is the underestimated artist striving for recognition. Was this a prime motivation in your getting involved with Black Clock? Do you revel in the opportunity that you have as an editor to find some underestimated emerging writer and give him his first chance to see his work printed in a national publication?

SE: Oh sure. If we’re not discovering new writers, then the magazine is a failure as far as I’m concerned. Purely tactically, we started with lots of famous “star” writers and are generally evolving to more and more newly-discovered voices. Now we seem to publish every issue at least one or two things that come to us unsolicited—I think about a third of the writers in the new issue haven’t published anywhere else to speak of. I suppose I’ve become sensitive to charges that we’re some sort of elitist cabal dismissive of outsiders. In the beginning, when there literally were four of us putting out the magazine, it was strictly a manpower/workload issue.

DD: In an interview with the Los Angeles Times regarding Black Clock back in 2004, you said: “As the publishing business gets more like Hollywood, I want more good writers to have a place to go.” In today’s recessionary Hollywood, studio executives are becoming increasingly hesitant to cast actors who will demand upward of $15 million and a hefty portion of the film’s revenue to appear in a movie. Instead, they’re favoring big concepts with low-paid actors. Does that translate in some way to the publishing business? In other words, do you foresee a time in the future when some of the emerging writers whose work you’ve featured in Black Clock will be offered deals from the big publishing houses who simply can’t afford the J.K. Rowling and the Dan Browns of the world anymore? Is the recession going to make publishing houses take more chances on emerging writers?

SE: Well, the interesting thing about Hollywood is that at some point it began to view a $25 million movie as more of a risk than an $250 million movie, and that’s what’s happened with publishing. A $25,000 advance is considered riskier than a book getting a $250,000 advance, because publishers feel they know how to market the second and have no idea how to market the first. The result is that, unlike a couple of decades ago when my first novels were being published, not even the best and savviest and most powerful editors have the autonomy to buy a book. The paperback department has to sign off on it, the marketing department has to sign off on it, the publicity department. The system now is constructed to give itself as many chances as possible to say no, because no is always safer than yes. I don’t know whether any of the new writers we’ve published will command such advances or not. I should add that, while I’m not a big fan of the Harry Potter books—my kid wound up a bit bored by them—I don’t begrudge Rowling her advances. Her books earn them in sales and she got a whole new generation to read, so more power to her.

DD: You studied film at U.C.L.A. and have written about film for Los Angeles magazine since 2001. How fun was it for you to devote Issue 10 of Black Clock to the topic of noir? Was that your idea? And do you get to pick the topic of each issue of the magazine, or is it a more democratic process, shared amongst the editorial staff?

SE: When Black Clock started, I vowed to avoid themes, as such, and you still never see one announced on the cover of the magazine, unless the illustration—such as in the case of the issue you’re talking about—somehow conveys it. The new issue barely has a theme at all, and when we do have one, as much as anything it’s just because it provides an organizing principle editorially. The noir issue is a good example of how things sometimes happen with this magazine. Robert Polito had submitted a piece for the previous issue (9) about politics and the election, and it didn’t seem to me to have as much to do with politics as Robert thought it did. And I might well have published it anyway, because it might have been one of those examples of publishing something that was only very tangentially connected to whatever our unstated theme was, except that in his story there was a line about “the birth of noir,” or something like that, and there and then in my head the noir issue was born. Like I said before: serendipitous or ad hoc. Usually the ideas are mine but not always. The underlying theme of issue 8, travel, was editor-at-large Anthony Miller’s idea. The twelfth issue, sports, is the brainstorm of our senior editor, Bruce Bauman, with a lot of help from our other editor-at-large, David Ulin. Sometimes I have to be mindful of how things might look. A couple years ago I wanted to do an issue about movies but I had a novel about the movies coming out around that time and I didn’t want my decisions about the magazine to look self-promotional. So I put off a movie issue. Maybe in another year.

DD: Fifteen works that were first published in Black Clock have gone on to win awards. Probably more by now. Additionally, you yourself have won fifteen awards or so for your own writing, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. I don’t really have a question here, I guess I’m just saying congratulations. It’s really refreshing and encouraging to see someone who has always been devoted to a sort of cutting edge experimental freedom in writing getting so much recognition.

SE: You know, here’s the thing about awards: It’s nice to get them and you accept them graciously when you do and make the most of them—but you don’t get too hung up on the “validation” that they offer or don’t. Most of the time, awards go to everyone’s second choice, because the first choices cancel each other out. Except on the rare occasion that someone gives me one, of course. Then it’s a bold gesture of uncommon perception.

DD: The tenth issue of Black Clock was the first one I laid my hands on, and I instantly felt like I was showing up late to a really great party. Did I show up at ten o’clock to a party that’s only going until midnight, or is this thing going to be raging until dawn, and maybe even into the following day? As we approach 2010, what do you foresee in the future for your magazine?

SE: Well, I hope the party goes on all weekend, of course, not just into tomorrow. But I accept, maybe more than anyone else working for the magazine, that this thing is existential and probably will end sometime. For the California Institute of the Arts that publishes Black Clock and, more to the point, invests in it, the payoff is unquantifiable—the magazine certainly isn’t earning its way in terms of hard dollars and cents. But I don’t think there’s too much question that Black Clock has raised the profile of the institute and its writing program, and the publishers must see it that way too, at least so far. I think I’ve been clear from the beginning that at the point they believe the magazine is no longer worth it, that’s their call and I’ll understand and accept it whether I agree with it or not.

DD: Any final thoughts or advice for emerging writers looking to submit not only to Black Clock, but to any other literary journal, magazine, or press out there right now?

SE: I don’t think my advice to any writer interested in Black Clock is different from that to any other aspiring writer, which is that you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. It took me years to get published, and since then it’s taken me years to get to this point—whatever or wherever this point is. Write write write, submit submit submit, get-rejected get-rejected get-rejected. Tenacity will make its own luck. Plan on conquering the world one reader at a time.

TW: Much of the work is directed to someone or something else a disembodied “you”. When you are writing are these yous a particular character or person or is it more metaphysical than that?

PS: Ah, when I speak to that “you”, I’m speaking to the great other which takes on different forms at different times. God, the feminine spirit of poetry, my father, my past, but maybe most importantly, my self, my innermost reservoir.

TW: The voices in this collection seem to modulate from the put upon to the empowered, but always up against something. Sometimes beaten by it and other times overcoming it. What is the unseen pressure bearing down on your work?

PS: This collection took me a few years to write. During that time I spent most of my time in my room. I had no real (meaning not just online or voice) relationships and sunk into the loneliness that comes from being that alone. There’s also the fact that I’m a bit haunted (see: ‘ABCs of loss’) but the truth is that my astronaut training program is simply not complete. You were right, sometimes I am beaten, but I think ultimately I will overcome this shit.

TW: Who are the poets you most often turn to when you’re writing? What do they do for you?

PS: No one and nothing.

TW: You’ve had a lot of success on the performance side of writing and have a huge reading tour planned for this summer. What’s the trick to successfully pulling off reading?

PS: I’m an attention whore and have boundary issues as far as the performance arty side to what I do (last time I read I stripped down to my boxers and read in a yoga position, but you know that sun, you were there). I also have Asperger’s Symptom so the flood of adrenaline I feel when I’m up in front of people is pretty intense. My solution is to take all those butterflies and expel them outwards by reading in a loud, emotion-rich voice.

TW: What’s are the pros and cons of reading in front of a crowd in your underpants?

PS: The pro is that once you’re in your underpants you no longer have to worry about commitment, you’re already over the line and free to do anything. I read ABCs of loss in my underpants because it’s about family abuse so I wanted to emphasize the intimacy of me telling those stories. Cons? I can’t think of any. Although the manager did say, “Wow, you have balls to do that. Literally, I saw them.” I suppose that could be a con to some.

TW: Do you enjoy these shows? Do you ever write with performance in mind?

PS: Reading poetry or non-fiction is literally my favorite thing to do in the entire world. I’d choose reading at a packed venue in some hip bar or bookstore over hanging out with a big-breasted girl with skunk weed who was on the pill which sounds stupid even to me but there it is. Or maybe not. I get to express my deepest self in public which I guess makes me a spiritual exhibitionist and that’s just cool. And no, I don’t really write with performance in mind. Funny you ask that though, because I haven’t written any poetry lately and I think it’s because the reader Peter has caught up with the writer Peter and now I am tempted to start writing more for maximum audience reaction. But I’m not really sure how I feel about that. I absolutely respect people who write this way and are skilled at working crowds but there seems something almost swanky about it too. I write from my cave and bring the result out to folks and I think they really dig that genuine otherness they get with me. When I feel like the material in ‘Old Men, Girls, and Monsters’ doesn’t give me that emotional charge I need to really deliver them with power, I may just have to go back into my cave to make another batch. I don’t know.

TW: In your piece “Letters to Air” published in the nervous breakdown you bring up a lot moments in your life where you’ve been wronged. Did writing that give you any closure? Like, would you be cool with the Clown that pretended to rip your underwear out of your pants during that birthday party? Or would you issue a beat down?

PS: Writing those letters definitely gave me some closure. I’ve written poetry, fiction, non-fiction and honestly, these were the most fun I’ve ever had writing. As for that clown, I’m thinking maybe you’ve contacted my mother and found pictures of him and are arranging some kind of reunion and that you are now very, very surprised that I have figured out your little plot. Seriously though, I think I’d just like that clown to read my letter to him (and any others if he wants) while he is not in his clown make-up so that I can see his facial expressions.

TW: What do you have coming up, publishing wise? Readings? Anything??

PS: My poem ‘flood control’ will be in the next issue of Sententia. I have a photography show here in Maine in January. Other than that, I think it’s time to go play monk for a while. Thanks.

Photo courtesy Women and Children First Bookstore

Daniel Duffy: Congratulations on your thirtieth anniversary at Women and Children First. How has the original vision for the bookstore changed over those thirty years?

Linda Bubon: My original vision at twenty-eight years old was that perhaps there would be a niche in the market for a bookstore like ours for five years or so. I remember being unable to think beyond doing this for five or six years. I really thought we were going to change the world pretty quickly. There were feminist bookstores springing up all over the place and I thought “In the next five to ten years general bookstores will have incorporated all this material that we’re featuring, and bookstores won’t be sexist and dominated by male writers and subject areas that predominantly men are in interested in.” I thought a bookstore like us would be an anachronism in a post-feminist society. (laughs)

DD: That didn’t really happen.

LB: Not like that. There have been enormous changes for women in the last thirty years. But it seems pretty clear to me that my original vision of getting more women writers into the mainstream and having more space for women in the world is still an unfinished vision. The need for bookstores like ours to exist in the marketplace seems to be still necessary. It just turns out to be a much bigger, longer job to change the world.

DD: Well, you’re definitely working at it. You’re open seven days a week, and you’re hosting readings and feminist book groups several times a month. For a woman who has been at this for three decades, it seems like you’re staying pretty busy.

LB: I certainly had hoped that at this point in my life there would be a slowing down of my activities, and that the bookstore would gradually be run by younger, more energetic individuals, more in touch with the younger generation.

DD: What has kept that from happening?

LB: The economic and political forces have had so much more to do with my work than I ever thought they would. They come right down to my level: the banking collapse means Women and Children First is paying higher credit card fees than we ever have, and it means that publishers are calling in their invoices in an ever-tightening way. There’s an inability to borrow, where as six years ago we were able to consolidate our debt, take out a loan from our independent and local bank, and proceed to pay that off. If we needed that loan today, I don’t think that money would be available.

DD: And it makes it hard to hire a full-time staff to help you out under those conditions.

LB: All these brilliant women I have worked with over the years have contributed so much and have helped keep me motivated to continue to do what I do. They may only work two or three years before moving on to something else, but those two or three years that they’re part of Women and Children First, they change it. They keep it relevant and they keep it interesting and they keep their young friends coming in. But most of them come to me right after college or graduate school, and then they get out of school and what happens? Student loans. In my day, college was affordable even to a working-class kid like myself, and you could take a low-paying job for a while because you didn’t have a debt. But my full-time girls the last three years are both a year out of graduate school now, and their student loans are due. They can’t afford to work at a bookstore full-time.

DD: Does the lack of healthcare factor into your inability to hire a full-time staff, as well?

LB: Five years ago, I had a full-time business partner and three full-time employees, and all five of us got health benefits. We were able to pay one hundred percent of the healthcare for ourselves and three other people. But three and a half years ago, after a very tough year, my business partner and I made the decision that she would take on another full-time job. We couldn’t afford both of our salaries and health care. Now, three years later, I have one full-time person, plus myself.

DD: Do you have a part-time staff to help out?

LB: I have increased the number of part-time people we have, but when you’re part-time, you’ve got papers to write, you’ve got another job to attend, or you’re a parent with a couple of small children, and your focus just cannot be on your part-time bookstore job. Part-time people are wonderful—they’re smart, they’re energetic, and at staff meetings they contribute good ideas. But that doesn’t lighten the pressure on me. And I’ll be fifty-nine in June. That’s a lot to carry around.

DD: How do the ridiculously low prices for books sold on the internet and at places like Walmart reflect on your book sales at Women and Children First?

LB: I lost twenty percent of my sales to the internet and big box stores. Whether it’s Amazon or Half.com, internet sales leach business from me at every level. People buy brand new books that come out in advance. They can do that through me, but they don’t think of it in the same way. Textbooks were also once a really good supplement. In the late nineties we developed textbook sales, and I’d take the textbooks right into the classrooms and sell them off the teachers’ desks. It would get me into the classroom to talk to students, tell them about Women and Children First and our programs, and sell eight hundred dollars worth of books in fifteen minutes. But textbook business has been decimated by the internet. Decimated. I have to now assume that if it’s a forty or fifty dollar textbook that I’m bringing to a classroom that maybe half the students will buy it. (laughs) I went into a classroom last month at DePaul and two girls next to me were on the internet comparing my prices to what they could get online.

DD: They were doing it right in front of you? That’s brutal. What have you done to offset the loss of those textbook sales?

LB: Fortunately, five and a half years ago we came up with the idea of having an Author Project Fund take care of all our programming expenses.

DD: How does that work?

LB: We use the fund to pay for all of the marketing and promotion for programs that would normally be paid for by our regular budget. We have grants and then individual donations. So that’s been one way to relieve some of the pressure.

DD: But you still have to sell books.

LB: Exactly. And all of us independents put together have such a shrinking market share that the publishers aren’t publishing for us anymore. In 1991 there were one hundred and ten feminist bookstores in the U.S. and Canada. Publishers published for us, we had a real market share. I mean a publisher could say to herself, “This will sell in the feminist bookstores.” Now there are eight of us. (laughs) Nobody’s thinking, “I better publish this book because the feminist bookstores will take it and run with it.” So one of the toughest things for me is that there are fewer really good feminist and women’s studies books being published for the trade. When they are published, they are like sixty dollars, and clearly designed for a library market or textbook market. You think, “Wow, this is an important new book by Judith Butler, and—it’s $49.95!” And then there are the proprietary products that only Amazon sells. I can’t sell a Kindle. I can’t.

DD: With developments like the Kindle and the iPad, and people publishing stories through Twitter, how will independent bookstores stay relevant in the twenty-first century?

LB: That’s a huge question. One of the things we’re doing is selling e-books on our website. The e-books work on Sony readers and a couple of other readers. And Google is coming out with a new sort of product that will allow people to play the e-books they buy on a variety of vehicles, in a variety of locations. So, when that happens, I think the Kindle will lose some of its cache, and more friendly products like e-books will grow. We can certainly sell e-books.

DD: It seems so absurd to me that a bookstore owner who has been as successful as you have has to sell e-books. It seems sort of like you’re compromising your integrity in order to sell e-books. Does it ever seem like that you?

LB: It does. But for thirty years, I have fought the stereotypical image of an independent bookstore being this doughty, dusty little place that wasn’t with the times. I mean, I still have my lawn chair, and there are still certain activities I’ve enjoyed since the sixties. But I really try to stay current. The digital versions of books kind of surfaced in the early nineties and I thought it was stupid and ridiculous and it kind of went away, and I felt very justified (laughs). But there’s a new level now. They went back to the drawing board and they have a terrific product. I’ve handled a Kindle, and it won’t replace a book for me, but I understand why people find them attractive. I have a friend who travels three weeks out of four and she’s a very heavy reader, and she’s getting older. She doesn’t want to cart books around with her, so it totally works for her. On the other hand, she still has to come in my store and buy the novels that she loves to read on vacation.

DD: And it’s those alternative novels that will keep people buying books from you, right?

LB: There are the alternative presses, and I have a really thriving zine section. There are all these cool magazines out there that offer important and fresh news and cultural information, and those can’t be replaced. They are a very hip, current thing, and you’re not reading them on your Kindle.

DD: But those sales can’t possibly replace the sales of the $49.95 Judith Butler books. Is that why it’s still a struggle?

LB: Well, of course you’re talking to me in the first week of March, and March is one of the worst months of the year, every year. A lot of the people who are coming in during the day right now are coming in because they’re unemployed. They’ve lost jobs. They are stay-at-home parents with one parent working, and so they come in and spend time reading books with their kids or their nanny is in here reading books with kids. It’s kind of like we’re a library or a public space, rather than someplace you go and actually buy things.

DD: Do you sometimes find yourself focusing more on serving the community than on selling books, and then you have to step back and say, “Wait, we have to make money somehow so we can keep this up”?

LB: Actually, I think stepping back and figuring out ways to create more community events is the smartest thing we can do. Maybe they’re not going to be paid for through book sales, but we do have this not-for-profit arm (the Author Project Fund), and we pass the hat at readings. And we’ve received some small discretionary grants. And it seems to me, if I’m not just looking with rose-colored glasses, but really paying attention, that while people are buying fewer books, they are attending events in greater numbers. I mean, we used to have one book club. Now we have five.

DD: Do those book clubs and readings get more new customers in the door?

LB: We used to get fifteen kids at every story time. Now I get anywhere from twenty to fifty. There were sixty people here last Sunday to see a local author—a brilliant woman in her eighties who’s a scientist, and who has written an autobiography. And we had slam poet Stacy Ann Chin in on a Friday—you and I know who she is, and a certain generation of hip-hoppers and people who follow slam poetry—but there were one hundred people there. We sold forty books.

DD: So what is your role as an independent bookstore in the twenty-first century?

LB: We don’t have much public space, and if the bookstore can function as this public space where people meet and gather and discuss ideas, I think we’re going to continue to attract the kind of people who like books, who like to read, who buy magazines, and who want human connection. I think that while we cocoon and we have our media centers and our laptops and spend a lot of time alone, there is an even greater urge to go and be with people. To the extent that the bookstore can provide a rich environment where you can meet and share interests and argue with other people—I think we’ll figure out a way to continue to be that space. Whether book sales are the main part of it or a secondary part of it—that’s not as important to me as keeping this space.

Aaron Burch

TW: The design of ” seems almost part of the storytelling, can you tell me about the look of the book and its relationship to the content?

AB: The design and look of the book is totally Pank’s awesomeness, though i am obviously very, very happy with it. I love books that are well-designed (and that match the look to the feel of the text inside) and it is one of my favorite aspects of doing Hobart, working on cover designs and playing a little with interior layout. From the get-go, the Pank editors (Roxane Gay and Matt Seigel) had the idea of using images from an old medical and anatomy texts, what with the “language’s close attention to bodies, anatomy. Precision. Dissection. Diagraming. Exposing.” (Matt’s words)

We went through a handful of different images and configurations until we were all happy with it, and the collaboration and dialogue, I think, really helped pushed it to where it ended up.

TW: How did this manner of storytelling occur to you?

AB: I think, initially, I was purposefully trying to write something for elimae. I don’t really think of myself as much of a “language” writer, but I wanted to see what I could do with limited word count — how could I still get those childhood memories and reminiscing that I so often seem to fall into, into more clinical-sounding prose and without the length to give much context or really tell a full story. I wrote one or two and they seemed to come pretty easy and be really fun; then ACM was working on a bestiary issue and I had no ideas so i spent a few days reading online medieval bestiaries and remembered the ease and fun I’d had with the couple of “How To” shorts I’d written, so that’s when the last third of the book happened.

TW: Many of these “How To’s” deal with physical alterations that, when taken literally, seem quite painful; yet there is often a sentiment that things will work out, or this is all for the best. Could you talk about growth and change and how they function in the context of your book? The results?

AB: Well. As I kind of hinted at above, I think a tip toward sentiment is my default when writing. And part of what became interesting to me while writing these shorts was how to balance the literal pain of dissection, pain, etc. with both a happy look back the past and also an optimistic look ahead.

Funny side story that kind of but maybe not really relates to your question: I just recently went back and reread the very first story I ever had published (on eyeshot), and couldn’t believe when I found the line, “showing them how he could take himself apart and put him back together.”

I don’t know. I think one of the interesting things of having been writing stories for a good handful of years now is looking back at stuff and seeing what recurs and finding those fascinations that you weren’t really aware of. I guess I could say something like I believe, often, you have to be taken apart, by yourself or something else, and then be put back together to really grow/change/etc., and so I guess that was kind of what the book became about, though that’s the answer I put together just now for this interview; I’ve certainly never thought of it that prescriptively before, nor was it an intention when working the book.

TW: What books should “How To Take Yourself Apart…” be sitting amongst in the bookstore?

AB: Well, it’s a chapbook, so if it is in a bookstore at all, that’s a win, I think. On a “staff rec” shelf would be rad. I like the idea of people thinking it might be a self-help book or something and picking it up. I also kind of like the idea of it being among poetry books, mostly just because I in no way think of myself as a poet, and so I find that possibility amusing. I’m happy with it being among any books, really. Wherever people will pick it up, hopefully.

Kevin Kane: Being a small press out of Vermont, how does Tarpaulin Sky Press approach marketing for its books?

Christian Peet: We don’t have a set amount of money—but we try to be as smart as possible with the little money we have. I try not to buy ads at all, if I can help it. The returns are too low, especially compared with the “free advertising” we can get online and in print via reviews and awards and (bless them) SPD [Small Press Distribution], etc. Exchange ads are also cost effective; we try to swap ads with as many lit journals as we can.

Another way to look at it: when’s the last time you bought a book because you saw a quarter-page ad in The Chronicle or in Poets & Writers?

Speaking for myself: never. An ad that size runs around $750 in Poets &Writers—just for example—and for that same amount of money we might send out 150-200 review copies to reviewers, bloggers, teachers, etc., and still leave copies for various promotions and freebies. Not to say that a classified ad listing an open reading period isn’t a solid investment. I’ve found this to be more effective, and part of the reason has to do with target audience. I think the majority of people who read the above magazines do so because they want to get published, not because their looking to buy books. On the other hand, reviewers, bloggers, teachers, and the like, are actually interested in writers other than themselves.

KK: The Press started originally as a place to publish books by contributors to Tarpaulin Sky Journal. Why switch it to its present form of submission periods and how has it evolved to accepting open submissions? How does that affect the editing process?

CP: I wanted to expand the reach of the press beyond the journal. Otherwise it might have become a closed-circuit, or incestuous, or something like that. It also makes financial sense—again, returning to questions of motivation, many people will spend $20 to send out their manuscript but won’t spend $12 or $14 to buy a book. That’s not the case with everyone, of course–or even the majority—the best manuscripts we receive are from people who are very familiar with the press. The selection process for the journal is completely different than it is for our books. The journal is presently edited by a large group of people. The book manuscripts, one and all, are read by yours truly. Once I have a group of manuscripts that I’m in love with, I often ask other writer-friends and editors for their input.

KK: What is the editing process like at Tarpaulin Sky? Do the editors work closely with authors on multiple drafts or do many of the books arrive ready to print?

CP: I can’t imagine working on multiple drafts. That’s what I do as a teacher! As a publisher, I want just the opposite. I want the book to cry out, “I’m ready. I’ve never been so ready, Christian. Publish me, now!” Preferably, it comes with finished InDesign files as well.

I’m kidding about the InDesign files—but Kim Gek Lin Short’s manuscript for The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits came pretty close, though. The layout was even set for 5″x7″, like many of our books. Did it sway my decision to publish it? Maybe. I know I didn’t need to ask Kim to change a word, that much is sure. Gordon Massman’s book, on the other hand, is a distillation of his life-long project, The Numbers, now at some 3,000 pages or something. So, turning such a project into a 200+ page “selected works” did take some editing on my part—a couple years’ worth. I didn’t need to edit the poems, just choose my personal favorites, I guess.

KK: Some of Joanna Ruocco’s stories appeared in the Tarpaulin Sky Journal #15, what was the process for accepting the manuscript for her story collection Man’s Companions? What caught the attention of you and the other Tarpaulin Sky editors?

CP: I think I called Joanna and accepted her book before I’d even finished reading the whole collection. It was just a blinking neon sign: “Perfect!” And it made me laugh in a way I hadn’t laughed, reading a manuscript, since reading Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life (another neon sign). So, to answer your question, there was no process involved with Joanna’s book. I sought no second opinion. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d already had a long conversation with Joanna’s lovely mother, just by the by—can’t remember why—before I even mentioned the book to anyone else at Tarpaulin Sky Press.

Regarding its excerpts in the journal—that actually happened after the fact. I couldn’t wait for the book to come out, so I just had to put some in journal in the meantime.

KK: Tarpaulin Sky Press obviously has no problem putting out story collections even as many voices in publishing decry the fiscal possibility of short stories. How does Tarpaulin Sky combat this and have you noticed any changes? And how do you feel about the possibilities of story collections in the future?

CP: Short stories vs. poetry, I’m not sure which one is a bigger financial loser. We just put out books that we (or I) like. The rest is a matter of hope. And occasional despair. Truth is, though, one of our better sellers is a collection of short stories—or, at least, it often gets presented as such—Attempts at a Life. The thing is, few of our titles are what they seem, anyway, so that’s part of the appeal, I think. That’s our niche. Some of our short stories are more like prose poems. Some of our collections of prose poems work as novellas. Another novella is a genre mystery that cannot be solved (perhaps because it is written by poet Joyelle McSweeney).

“There’s no market for this” is just not a phrase we use around here! The “no market” market is our market, and we’re doing just fine, thanks to said market. Granted, we’re not looking for the next blockbuster piece of crap, either, so all things are relative; but while other presses, big and small—but in particular “big” —are collapsing all around us, we’re growing. Part of this is a secret recipe, but part of it is simple: our books aren’t like “everyone else’s.” Heck, most of the time they’re not even like each other.

KK: What is the approval process for new manuscripts?

CP: Once a manuscript is picked, I usually call the author. I do this for a couple reasons. I like to hear how happy they are because it helps to offset the bum feelings I have about “rejecting” hundreds of manuscripts for every one that we publish. Also, I like to see what kind of vibe I get from the author—because one just never knows—will they be easy to work with, or do they seem a bit uptight? Are they flakey? Do they sound like they’re on a lot of medication? These are good things to know. In the last couple years, I’ve taken to calling and saying that we’re “really interested” in their manuscript, but I don’t say that we want to publish it until we’ve chatted a bit. If I get a good vibe or, at least, if the author doesn’t frighten me, then I give them the good news. So far, I haven’t had any regrets. Gordon Massman, of course, was the most difficult phone call. We’d emailed for years, off and on, since Tarpaulin Sky Journal published him in Fall 2003, but I still wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t a serial killer. I’m still not convinced, actually, but Gordon’s very nice on the phone. And having spent some time with him at events, now, too, I can verify that he’s also quite lovely in person. I’ve certainly never seen him kill anyone.

Once such matters are cleared up, Tarpaulin Sky Press and the author sign a pretty standard contract.

KK: I’m curious as to what prompted you to start the Press? Did it involve feedback from the journal? What was the process like to get it running?

CP: I just wanted to be able to publish books by journal contributors who were sitting on manuscripts. I asked Jenny [Boully] and Max [Winter], first, for their manuscripts. They sent them. Tarpaulin Sky Press was born. Getting up and running was a wild experience. It happened in a day. I’d lived in the country, in very small towns, until I moved to Brooklyn, NY. After living there about three years, I was feeling pretty adjusted to leaving my apartment, so I took the subway to Borough Hall early one morning, went to the courthouse and got a business license. It took about 10 minutes. Except for having to walk across the street to get the paperwork notarized. You can’t do that in the courthouse. You have to go to the newsstand on the corner of Court and Montague. The newsstand guy is also a notary public for all of Kings County. Go figure.

I had no money to speak of, being an adjunct at Brooklyn College and at Hunter College, but I took what money I had and sunk it into the press. It was a big risk, but I guess I’ve made some decent decisions along the way, because Tarpaulin Sky Press has only grown. We didn’t even have design software in the beginning. The interior for our first book, Jenny [Boully]‘s book, was designed entirely in Word, if you can imagine such a thing. It takes forever, of course, but it can be done! Now we have high-end software and stuff. We even have a handful of different designers doing our books now—Cristiana Baik and Kristen Nelson did two of four Spring/Summer 2010 tittles, and they and other new designers on staff will be doing some of our forthcoming books as well.

KK: How do your roles as writer, poet and professor interact with your role as founder and editor of the Tarpaulin Sky Press and Journal? I’m interested in how these inform your various processes besides obviously the need for spectacular time management.

CP: Tarpaulin Sky has received the better part of my every day, and 16-hour work days are par for the course. That said, I think Tarpaulin Sky has influenced my roles as writer and professor, rather than the other way around. I used to read all the submissions to the journal, along with the other editors, and I still read all the book manuscripts, so this has certainly influenced my own work as well as the work I teach. As a writer, I get to see what’s happening, right now, in poetry and prose, before it’s even public. And that’s exciting. And inspiring. And it can be cautionary as well: I know that my work doesn’t need to reference Derrida, for example, because he’s pretty well covered at the moment.

As a teacher, I’ve been really lucky in that I’ve never had to teach Comp, but, instead, have had a steady schedule of various Literature and Creative Writing courses—and, moreover, my most excellent department chairs usually allow me to teach whatever I want. So, with a few exceptions here and there, I’ve taken the opportunity to teach work by living authors. It creeps me out (and it probably shouldn’t) to make my students purchase Tarpaulin Sky Press titles, so I avoid that, but I do occasionally *lease* our books to my students, with the option to buy. My classes draw on books and journals from indie and university presses all over the country. When we discuss Whitman, for example, it’s via Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everything with Lungs. Stein via Heidi Lynn Staples. Woolf via Danielle Dutton. That kind of thing.

Things are a little different than they have been, however—I’m teaching less, and I’m working less for Tarpaulin Sky. I’m doing more freelance to book and web design (more money, less time) than I am teaching. Also, Colie Collen has replaced me as Tarpaulin Sky’s Editor-in-Chief, and she is now overseeing a ridiculously huge staff, while I’m limiting myself to the role of publisher only (it’s not the most exciting position, but it’s the only one for which I’ve yet to find my replacement). My primary focus, this year, is finishing up a book about my nephew, who, at seventeen years old, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for crimes he did not commit. To anyone reading this interview, I beg you, check out the new website established to follow his case: JeremyBarney.org

KK: What are some of the joys and rewards of running a press?

CP: The joys and rewards are many, but I’ll pick two. The first is personal: no matter how down I may feel about my own work, at any given time, I can point to a shelf full of Tarpaulin Sky Press titles to show for my time on the planet. That’s a warm and fuzzy feeling. Here’s another, and the most obvious: getting great work out in the world, and seeing the various connections and communities it creates. Whether it’s our authors or any of the 300 + people we’ve published in the journal, work by these people shares roots, has a home under the Tarpaulin Sky banner. New writers whose work is outside the mainstream—or between camps, or whatever—can find precedents and inspiration in what we’ve collectively assembled; writers who’ve been at it a while already know they have a place to send their work, and they also have a place to direct others, students, etc.

Also, I’m a total sap, so I tend to like the whole “human part” the best. I know the work we’re publishing is good, so I don’t think much about it; I tend to worry more about making sure that our authors are happy with the presentation of their work, and then, beyond that, I like to make sure that we’re doing everything we else we can for them. The rare times I leave my little hideout here in Vermont, and actually get to hang out with our authors, that’s the absolute cake. Our authors feel like family. If Danielle [Dutton] & her hubby, Martin, didn’t live so far away, we’d be barbequing all the time. Comparing potato salad recipes. Playing horseshoes. I’m sure of it. Andrew (Zornoza) sends Elena & I pasta handmade by his dad. And his fresh mozzarella. Even mailed us eggs from his dad’s farm—our authors generally being slightly insane, too, just like family.

KK: Still in its early years, what sort of goals do you have for the press? How have these changed since first starting up? Does your interaction with other small presses as a writer and publisher affect these goals?

CP: My interaction with other small presses, as a writer, hasn’t affected anything with Tarpaulin Sky, far as I can tell. It’s two different mindsets. I don’t send out a lot of work. Odd as it may be, given that I’m a publisher, I don’t feel the need to publish left and right. I think of most of my work as sketching. Occasionally I send something out. Not because I think it’s great, but just because I’m in the mood. Usually only when solicited, and even then, most the time I don’t send. Part of that is because of this book about my nephew, which is nonfiction, completely “straight” in its approach, and thus not what people think of, when they think of my own books—Big American Trip or The Nines—or Tarpaulin Sky’s books.

Interacting with other small presses as a fellow publisher, however, is a whole other thing. I can’t even think of every press that inspires Tarpaulin Sky, and with whom we conspire. Rebecca Wolff at Fence Magazine was one of my earliest heroes, and remains so. Ditto Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop at Burning Deck—but of course, Black Ocean and Octopus and Tarpaulin Sky grew up together. Where to stop? FC2, Kelsey Street, Leon Works, Palm Press, Slope Editions, Switchback Books, Ugly Ducking Press. Friends, idols, both.

I can’t say what the future holds. No huge goals, just at the moment. Just more and more books. And some big Tarpaulin Sky event in Vermont, one of these days, just so I don’t have to spend a lot to get there, or take a plane. We had a campout in upstate New York, way back in our infancy. It was pretty great. I think maybe 10 people were there. A contributor met an editor and they ended up getting married, so it was pretty historic for them, even if the rest of us spent more time playing Frisbee than being writerly. I’d like to do something like that again, but with a few hundred people this time, maybe running around some ski lodge. We’ll see . . .

What’re you working on?

I’m making a graphic novel called In An Egg. It’s barely in the sketch phase. It’s about the effect of my mother’s death on me, plus Buddhism, the secular sacred, and nondiscursive epistemology. It’s about faking the divine on purpose. Sort of like writing. I’m also supposed to be working on an old book, something I’m coming back to called Thieves with Tiny Eyes – it’s an aviary for punk girls, and it’s a sort of ode to Helene Cixous. I am having a hard time getting back into the lyricism of the book, after not being in it for several years – so I’m thinking of turning the whole thing into a rebus.

When did you start writing and why?

I made little stories with drawings ever since I was a kid. Playing Barbies is a kind of writing. I didn’t have any siblings, so I wrote and drew when there was nothing on TV. I started writing for other people more seriously after Kathy Acker died so young. Before that I did readings and stuff in San Francisco, at the Chameleon at the open mic hosted by Bucky Sinister and with Sister Spit – but I think it took me a long time to understand that writing is something I’m making for somebody else. I mean, it’s for me too, but ultimately the difference between thinking and creating is the fact of the presence of an unknowable subjectivity entering the mix – and I’d like to show it a good time. “Good time” so to speak.

What inspired you to write your first book?

Thalia Field told me a story I was working on was probably a novel. I said, “Fuck. Really?”

Who or what has influence your writing?

Virtual Reality has influenced my writing – Virtual Reality like the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland where you are in this ship and you find yourself sailing over London, which is tiny and sparkly beneath you – I saw that once when I was a kid and I thought, “Somebody made this. I want to make this.” And then, lots and lots of television shows and advertisements, the blur and hum of background narrative always making things relate, and then authors that deal in the grotesque – Mishima, Dostoyevski, Bruno Schulz, Kathy Acker, Claudia Rankine, Rikki DuCornet, Helene Cixous. Punk and Riot Grrl Fanzines, punk songs, 20th c. composers, opera, 1930′s cartoons, big Depression-era dance numbers. Jean Genet, Captain Caveman, and Ms. Magazine. Then of course writing by people in Sister Spit and around SF in the 90′s and much of the experimental scene in LA now.

How has your environment/ upbringing colored your writing?

There’s the operatic aspect of punk rock, the melodrama and spectacle of it, the suspicion of television “realism” and of master narratives, there’s the queerness, also operatic, but the wound here is deadly, historical, whereas with punk it’s also historical, but not as ingrained in basic “givens” like gender – and I also grew up pretty poor, so without a lot of art and culture, but without the middle-class fear/loathing/courtship with the upper class, so without a healthy respect for high-culture as separate and “theirs.” I grew up in a culture of divorced singe moms who smoked pot and did diet pills and valiums, moms who danced at the disco and got legal abortions. These were exhausted and sometimes brilliantly twisted women. Mine was.

What are you reading now?

I’m reading Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor and I’m reading a whole bunch of student essays and experimental writing finals. Mostly I read student work, which is the big irony, as you might know, of being an artist in literary academia – all the reading I loved to do has to take a back seat to reading the work of new writers, or not even new writers, but the work of students in writing classes. The batch now is a bunch of essays on comics – visual acoustics and such. My backseat is filled with weird sculptures with writing on them – I forgot to give this class a size limitation on their final projects. I’m also diving into Irving Singer’s History of Love series.

Writers who hold my interest right now, some with books and some not yet – Miranda Mellis, Tisa Bryant, Vanessa Place, Janice Lee, Nancy Romero, Leon Baham, Robin Coste-Lewis, Amra Brooks, and Teresa Carmody. And I’m chewing off my arm waiting for Eileen Myles’ new novel. I’m dying to read Kate Zambreno’s book too.

Is there a message I want readers to grasp?

Yes, in The Vicious Red Relic, Love, which is coming out on Jaded Ibis Press sometime next year I want people to notice that the novel itself is designed as a metaforest, not an orchard and definitely not a city. It is not an efficient or efficiency machine. It tries in performance to prove what it postulates – that ease of reading reproduces belief in certainty. There is no certainty through narrative ease in this book, and that is the hopeful part. Hopeful, but not nice. One is supposed to be annoyed by the interruptions, invasions, and repetitions. The desire to remain comfortable or non-irritated is, within the book’s philosophy, a main basis of violent aggression. Seeking certainty is really a desire to seek final rest. Living death. What stories with one line of logic do is recapitulate that such rest is possible and even desirable. Which is not to say that it is not a particular metaforest, with particular markings as guides. English language is one such guide, as are the captions and the dates. There is a difference between violence to maintain certainty and violence to undermine it – there is importance in intention. There are different kinds of fear – fear that wants to be resolved by comfort and fear that wants to be explored and witnessed.

Justin: It seems to me like rootlessness is necessarily self-conscious. Rootedness, staying put, can be the result of deliberate action, or else it can just sort of occur passively. But movement is always self-directed, and as such can only ever be self-aware, must wonder at its own motives, attempt to plot its next move and—perhaps—its endgame, because truly satisfied rootlessness is very rare. Most people—certainly most of my characters—are looking for somewhere to take root, and simply not finding it. Or anyway that’s probably how they would see it. Maybe they are really the ones casting themselves out of the various gardens of their lives.

I’ve been in New York since 2005, when I came here for graduate school, though now there’s the city itself to move around. Changing neighborhoods in New York is like moving to a new city, and changing boroughs is like changing states, so in a way it’s more of the same, but I’ve lived in my current apartment in Bushwick for going on three years, and on this block for nearly four years. So to try and put this in terms of your question, I guess there are horizontal and vertical elements of my experience of life. Movement feels very linear—“I go here, I go there”, to paraphrase O’Hara, since you mentioned him. But now the time is just piling up in this apartment, a great big stack of time, and that’s fine too. I take great joy in the pastoral, and in small towns, but to me the countryside or whatever is a place you visit, or escape to. My real life is here, and I’m not sure whether that will always be the case, but I don’t see it changing soon. Among the many incentives to stay here, a big one is that I hate driving. Well, I used to. I’ve sort of come around to it, but I still don’t want to own a car or operate one very often. I don’t want the responsibility, or the expense. I like riding on trains—let a union man earning a decent wage take care of getting people where they need to go. I’m gonna read the New Yorker.

Mike: Many reviewers have talked about your book’s fearlessness toward sex/sexual themes, which some categorize as “uncontemporary” or “unusual for right now.” Kevin Killian talks about “murky” bisexuality in your work. What is your opinion on sex in a narrative sense? Sex in the literary landscape? Sex on a lawn?

Justin: I am interested in the way we conceive of desire, and how we go about pursuing the ostensible subject(s) of that desire. I like exploring this territory, and I wouldn’t want to do it in some flowery, abstract, allusive way—that feels morally derelict to me. I am not interested in promoting the lie of a world where sex is odorless and perpetually out of focus, and all relations between people are self-contained and definitive. If I wanted to be sold that bill of goods, I would turn my TV on and watch Nick at Nite. The contemporary, really-existing world is a murky place, and if you want to know anything about it, starting with what it feels like, you’re going to need to get your hands dirty. But I have to say that I’m surprised to hear this characterization of my work—who said this about me? I mean, they’re entitled to their position, but I think I’ve been criticized much more for being too contemporary, of this moment, or whatever. But neither charge is one I can answer. My work is born out of my understanding of and interest in the world around me, in all its complications and indeterminacy and rare moments of clarity, only some which prove to be welcome. It comes from that understanding and it is an attempt to enhance, complicate, or otherwise develop that understanding. Anyway, “fearless” is a compliment I’ll gladly accept.

Mike: Your new novel is going to be about punks in South Florida, right? I remember one night at your house with Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen when we were listening to Against Me! and throwing shit around and breaking shit, but definitely in a more buttondown way than any of us might have thrown/broken shit “once upon a time” or “in the starry cascading throbs of our youthen days.” A related point: I am only a few years younger than you, and I am from the other coast, but when I was growing up, Against Me! was already acquiring a reputation as “sell-outs” and, perhaps, plummeting on the “punk scale” of “punk authenticity.” That is fast erosion, and rather sad to think about. Can you talk about your new novel, breaking shit, and “the scale of punk,” if such a thing means anything to you?

Justin: I don’t remember what we broke, but it couldn’t have been very important, which I think is part of the point of breaking shit—to remind yourself that shit is just shit, and fuck that shit. Which is probably why I don’t remember what was broken; I just remember FUN. I’ve talked a lot about my feelings about Against Me! elsewhere, but suffice perhaps to say that they were a local band when I moved to Gainesville, and were very well-loved, and every time they met with any incrementally larger measure of success, everybody held it against them. Look, if Mike Young in Northern California is going to hear about these guys and be able to get into their music, then that’s pretty much gonna mean they’re not a local Gainesville band anymore. But from the band’s perspective, breaking out is kind of the whole point. Very few artists cultivate obscurity, irrelevance, and a lack of financial success. I think we have a lot of the same problems in our own literary community. A scene will nurture you, but it is more interested in keeping you part of it than in preparing you to move forward to the next thing—colleges love their alumni, but scenes, cliques and movements have very little use for them.

But about the novel. The novel is called The Gospel of Anarchy and it is set in Gainesville, just before the turn of the millennium, in a great sloppy punk rock house of the kind I love very much—and used to live in—but it is emphatically not autobiographical in any straightforward sense, and it is not offered as some kind of paean to being young and dissolute. There’s nothing sentimental about it, no rose-colored take on the halcyon radicalism of youth. Also no recriminations of the values once held and lives once lived, as in for example the (fantastic, hilarious) flashback scenes in Sam Lipsyte’s (brutal, brilliant) The Ask. I don’t know why I feel obliged to describe my book in terms of what it’s not, but those are some of the things that it’s not. In any case, the novel is really more about religion than politics—or it’s about the intersection of religion and politics, the blurring of those lines. I tried to treat my anarchists with the full attention and severity that Flannery O’Connor gives to her Protestants.

Mike: Though I don’t see it as often in your stories as I do in your nonfiction work, you have a palpable, emotional engagement with large-scale political “issues” that often seems as personal and aesthetic as many of our peers’ engagements with the feeling stuff of blow-by-blow life. Not to rehash any old E.L. Doctorow essays here, but do you feel like writers have a “duty” to emotionally engage with political “issues?”

Justin: I don’t think writers have a duty to do anything other than write, and perhaps to help ensure the general health and rigor of the larger literary community—if they choose to see themselves as part of such a thing. My response to some of the outrages perpetrated by an outrageous government in outrageous times is a palpable, emotional sense of, well, outrage. For me, political awareness is part of social and cultural awareness. I don’t see these categories as distinct—or as categories at all, is what I guess I really mean to say. It’s not about obligation; it’s about interest and—again—desire. I have a desire to see a better, saner, more just world than the one I currently see. Why not say so?

Mike: On that note: James Woods says write novels about people who feel things. Have you read either Mr. or Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell? What do you think of this “novels about how the world works” versus “novels about how people feel” dichotomy? Which do you like more: feeling things, or Erector sets?

Justin: No, I haven’t read any Evan S. Connell—or much James Woods, for that matter. I’ll read him if he turns up in a magazine, but I wouldn’t give him a book’s worth of my time. I think dichotomies are useful—albeit of limited use, and potentially pernicious—for critics, historians, and other people whose work is made easier for them (and/or more intelligible to us) by employment of a filing system. Underworld is a novel about how the world works, but it would be insane to say that nobody in it feels anything. Similarly, Virginia Woolf’s best novels are all uniquely concerned with the interior lives and feelings of individuals, but you wouldn’t dream of saying that those books lack reference to how the world works. To the Lighthouse is riven by the first World War; The Waves is at some level the story of the whole English empire in decline. There are literally a million examples out there; I just picked a few off the top of my head. But I feel like I’m telling you something you already know. To describe feelings is already to be part of the world and its workings. But I didn’t grow up with Erector sets. I was a Legos kid.

***

Justin Taylor is the author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial, 2010) and More Perfect Depictions of Noise (X-ing Books, 2008). He is also the editor of The Apocalypse Reader (Thunder’s Mouth, 2007), and Come Back, Donald Barthelme (McSweeney’s 2007). With Jeremy Schmall he co-edits The Agriculture Reader, a limited-edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn and writes for HTMLGIANT: http://www.justindtaylor.net/

Mike Young is the author of the poetry collection We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (PGP 2010), the story collection Look! Look! Feathers (Word Riot Press 2010), and the chapbook MC Oroville’s Answering Machine (Transmission Press 2009). He co-edits NOÖ Journal and Magic Helicopter Press. Visit him online at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com.

William: I decided I wanted to be a writer when I read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in the ninth grade. I read it because I saw all the eleventh graders reading it for eleventh grade English and I thought I would be cool if I read what the eleventh graders were reading.

Anderson called his characters grotesques—even the young handsome ones. I always hit on a character’s pathology when I’m writing, and I see that what I’m writing are transparent little pathologies.

So someone like Ghandi—great guy, for sure—but he was pathological. No other word for it. In my story he’s reincarnated and finds work in public relations and then, inexorably, in politics.

Timmy: I found that many of these stories have surreal elements to them, but you never take these stories into the impossible. Stories such as “The Margaret Atwoods”, “Footboy”, and “Diagnosis: Mustache” seem to stand out. Could you talk about this type of writing and what draws you to this kind of hyper reality?

William: I like the story-ness of stories. Fiction shouldn’t try to be too realistic. Fiction is portrait and fiction is landscape, but fiction is not real. Stories should be an examination or dramatization of an idea or a feeling. A story should also bring a reader to know something or feel something new.

So “The Margaret Atwoods” is about three men and one woman who share the same name. Two of the men have a direct conflict about their identity. The third man’s conflict with his name is internal. And the woman named Margaret Atwood dies in childbirth. The story is about the meaning of identity, of namesaking. I want the reader to feel the frustration of identity and the acceptance of identity.

Timmy: There is an excellent tonal transition, from story to story, in Pathologies. Were you conscious of this while putting the book together?

William: A few readers have said that the stories work together as a whole, which makes me really happy. I put this together quickly. Peter Cole at Keyhole suggested that we do something for AWP in Denver since my collection with Keyhole (Ampersand, Mass.) was re-scheduled for early 2011. They’re all meant to be fun. They are pathological and deadly, but ultimately they’re jokes. A few old stories that I wasn’t including in the collection and a few new stories that I finished quickly.

George Plimpton: Could you say something of the writing process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule? *

William: I have zero time to write, so what I do is write stuff in a notebook as it occurs to me and then when I get a chance to type it I type it into a really long Word document that I keep. I pull stuff from that Word document into stories and as soon as I see something coming into shape I will focus on it.

My process is to make a story out of my notes as soon as I see a structure. Once I have a structure, I know I can finish a story. I’ll make an outline once I have most of the writing done. The outline tells me what more I need to write to make the story work—those are usually transitional elements and those passages are always a struggle for me. How can I retain the voice and tone of a story when I have to compose functional text? It’s easy to lose the flavor of what you’re writing when you’re writing connective prose, bridging exposition and action, transitioning from descriptive setting to dialogue.

I try to write a little in the morning and a little at the end of the day. I can usually work a little when I’m at the job in the afternoon.

Timmy: I know a woman named Bunny Yeager and I showed her your story “Bunny”. She was a little put off by the character that shared her name. Do you have anything to say to those people out there that have the same name as the characters you’ve created and came away feeling slighted?

William: Is this Bunny Yeager the pinup photographer? If so, I’m sorry to put her off. I never write about myself or anybody that I know to avoid such issues. But now I’ve done it with people I don’t know—Bunny Yeager and Margaret Atwood and, over at The Kenyon Review Blog, Stephen King. I should stop.

Timmy: This is a different Bunny, all together. There is some interesting use of repetition in this collection, how is this serving your stories? What kind of effect do you think it has on your readers?

William: I guess it’s a trick of poets—litany—and I’m stealing it. I’ve been doing repetition a lot lately with a novel I’m working on. It’s really effective, I think. It’s a good way to get a bunch of ideas down. You can forego stylizing your sentences if you yield to repetition. I think readers like to see pattern in what they read and a pattern of repetition is always fun (in short doses).

Timmy: The more I think about it, the more I enjoy “This Laptop Kills Fascists”. Have you started making stickers yet? Are you prepared for this story to be the mantra of independent literary press types everywhere?

William: That would make a good sticker for laptops. It’s a substitution exercise. I took the U.S. Marine Corps’ “Rifleman’s Creed”, which a lot of people know from Full Metal Jacket, and I substituted laptop in place of rifle. And then I subbed editor for enemy (naturally). Badges, posters, sticker, t-shirts—I like it.

Timmy: If you could put this collection in to the hands of anybody, living or dead, who would it be? What do you hope they would say about it?

William: I’ve got a few copies that I haven’t given away, and I suppose I could send one to Steve Martin. I’ve enjoyed his recent short novels and his memoir from a few years ago. When I was in junior high, we used to play his albums on the bus and actually read aloud from his book Cruel Shoes. I would hope he would say the stories are funny. Maybe he’d buy me lunch, teach me how to play banjo.

*(From Plimpton and Hemingway’s Paris Review interview)

DA: I read Back Roads after it was chosen as an Oprah Book Club selection, and I loved it. But I connected more with Coal Run because of the topic of homecoming and acceptance of blue-collar roots. When did you begin using the landscape of western Pennsylvania coal mining towns as the setting for your stories?

TO: With Back Roads I had finally begun to set my work back home. Before that I had been writing books—books that didn’t get published, by the way—that were set anywhere other than Pennsylvania because I didn’t think anyone would want to read about the place where I grew up. I was violating the cardinal rule of writing, which is to write what you know. I was completely avoiding that. I was trying to write what I thought would get published.

DA: How many manuscripts did you write that didn’t get published?

TO: I wrote four unpublished novels, and I’d begun a fifth that I abandoned before I decided to start Back Roads. And when I finally started writing about Pennsylvania and the area where I grew up, that’s when my books finally had that magic—and made me, then, want to come back home as well. It was a way of resolving my own personal feelings for home. Not so much in Back Roads, but in Coal Run with Ivan’s journey—I was sort of going through that myself.

DA: You lived in Chicago for many years. I also lived in Chicago for a little while—and it was just too flat for me. How did you feel living in that landscape versus living in other places?

TO: It was depressing. “Happy Valley” is a beautiful, beautiful area of the state. It took me a long time to realize that part of my depression when I was living in the Midwest was, in fact, tied to the flat landscape. When I would drive home for a visit and get to the eastern edge of Ohio, I would cross that certain point—now I can’t remember the exit, but I used to know it—where all of a sudden you start to see the hills, and it would be a great uplifting feeling. I used to think it was because I was going home to visit my family and the comfort of all that, but I came to realize over time that it was definitely tied to the land as well. When you grow up in an area with mountains and hills, and then you go live somewhere else—it’s no different than for people who grow up next to the sea, and then end up going somewhere landlocked. They always have that longing where they miss the water. It happened to me over and over again, until I finally understood it was really part of the reason I was depressed all the time. I just hated it—the physical fact of it—it was too flat. I was in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and it was just so incredibly ugly—all development and malls. There were no forests, no hills, no wide-open spaces. And that really depressed me—especially the absence of hills. I know that’s one of the reasons why it’s so dominant in my work. I was removed from it, and that made me appreciate it more. The hills are kind of a shelter, a little fortress around us.

DA: Back Roads and Coal Run were published within a four-year span. Does that seem fast to you?

TO: I wrote Back Roads in four months, in a sort of stream of consciousness. I just kind of spewed it out. Coal Run took me about four years of working off and on, and I wrote four separate drafts of that novel—entire novels. Coal Run was a real struggle for me to find the actual story. And I think a big part of it was that I was going through this same process myself, so it was a very personal thing. I was going through the process of deciding to return to my roots, just as the character Ivan did. I wrote one draft entirely from Jolene’s perspective. There was a draft of the novel where Ivan was motherless instead of fatherless—his father had survived the explosion and his mother had died in an accident when he was young. It didn’t come to me as the other books have. For instance, with Back Roads and with the book I’m writing now, I’m having no problems. It’s flowing so easily.

DA: Was it only the last draft that was written as Ivan’s point of view?

TO: Well, no. Only one of the versions was Jolene’s—and that was just disastrous (laughs), an entire 400-page manuscript—but I had to do it because that was the way I got to know Jolene.

DA: Jolene is a very rich, complex character. How did you avoid making her the clichéd beauty queen?

TO: That’s one of the challenges in writing about the topics I choose because my work could easily fall into stereotypes. With Coal Run especially—there’s the football star, the beauty queen. Reading the book jacket description you can easily expect that. But to me, part of the challenge is to write believable working-class people because they are so often stereotyped. Normally, thank goodness, I don’t have to write an entire novel from every character’s perspective. But for some reason, Jolene was really tough for me to get. When I first started writing her, she was coming across as too ditzy, too much of a stereotypical ex-beauty queen. But I knew she that she was smart and strong and a survivor, and that she had a carefree attitude about her beauty. So, to get to know her, and especially to know her relationship with Ivan, I had to write a whole manuscript, and it was a really long tortuous writing exercise that was necessary.

DA: That’s actually reassuring to me. Sometimes when we’re writing it can feel like we’re so lost trying to find the story, or that maybe we’ve taken a wrong turn and we’re not sure exactly where to find the right turn yet. So you see revision as part of the discovery?

TO: It’s a difficult process. When I first started writing novels, I was under the impression—as many people are who love to read—that great novelists just sit down and write a novel in one draft and it just flows out of them without any mistakes, and they should be enjoying themselves and having a wonderful time. For a long time I had that image in my head. So, when I would have to rework something, I thought that meant I wasn’t any good at it. I’d get a hundred pages into a book and then realize the story was really turning out to be about what happened in three paragraphs on page twelve, and then I’d have to go in that direction and lose whole sections to backstory—all those complicated things that go into the process of writing a novel. Not until I finally got published and people began to pay attention to my writing did I begin to realize well no, it’s just really difficult. It’s work.

DA: But there are moments—

TO: There are euphoric moments. It’s kind of like being a parent. Your kids are the source of your greatest joy, and also of your greatest nightmares and your biggest worries. It’s the same thing. Even with what I’m working on now, everything’s going well, but that’s after three weeks of it coming slow and painful trying to get to that.

DA: Tell me more about the book you’re working on now.

TO: It’s one more coal miner book.

DA: It’s the third in a trilogy?

TO: Actually, it’s funny you said that, because I am feeling that this is a trilogy, and it’s not going to go any further. I’ve sort of made my own fictional county, like Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha. I have Laurel County.

DA: How far are you along with the new one?

TO: I’m halfway, and of course the first half is always torture and the second half goes really fast—usually, for me. So I’m hoping to have this done in about a month or so.

DA: And this is your first run through it?

TO: Yes. This one is very complicated. It has five main characters—and this is the first of my published books where I’m not telling it in first person. I’m pretty confident with it. I don’t think it’s going to take a lot of reworking at all (laughs). It’s certainly not going to be like Coal Run. There’ll be basic editorial concerns.

DA: Have you been working with the same editor?

TO: Yes, for both books I’ve had the same editor. She’s great. I have a really great relationship with her. Her name’s Molly Stern. We’ve also become good friends. The way Molly always works with me is that she can sense that something isn’t working but she can never tell me exactly what it is. She says that I’m the only one who can figure out what it is, and that I’m the only one who can figure out how to fix it. And when something isn’t ringing true with her—inevitably it turns out that I knew exactly what was wrong, but I was being lazy. It’s always about laziness.

DA: Do you mean you knew something was wrong even before she saw it?

TO: It’s all about laziness and just trying to sneak something past. And then it’s: ‘Oh, Okay, you caught that (laughs)? I really have to explain more about the continuous miner? Nobody’s going to know what that is? Can’t we just assume that everyone reading this book has been in a coal mine in the last ten years?’ Molly was great for me because she really understood my work very well, and when she would point out something, she was dead on, and it was something that needed to be fixed to make the book as good as it could be. But by the end of writing a novel, you’re so sick of it, and you’re so tired, and you just want to end. Even though it’s not realistic, and you know it, there’s that part of you that’s saying: And this will need no changes. This is perfect. No changes. Nothing. Not even any punctuation problems. It’s just the perfect ending. You type THE END, and you’re done. And of course it can never be that perfect.

DA: Will your third book also be published by Viking?

TO: I had a two-book deal with Viking, but I’m not sure if my third book will be with them.

DA: This one’s not under contract?

TO: No, this one’s not under contract. I’m a free agent again. And I thought that would terrify me, but it doesn’t. It’s almost a good feeling. It’s freedom. Not that having the two-book deal was a bad thing. That was a great thing. That meant that my second book had a house, so I didn’t have to worry about that. But with this one, I’m just writing like I used to write before I was ever published. There’s no guarantee. I have no advance on the horizon. I’m sure we’ll find a publisher for it. And it may turn out to be Viking. But I’m just writing for myself again in a way, and of course my readers. Now I have readers. Which can sometimes be a problem—some readers are very demanding of your time.

DA: In what way?

TO: I get calls. I made the mistake of not getting an unlisted phone number when we moved here because it was so chaotic—we moved two days before school started. So we’re moving in from Illinois, we’re remodeling the house and the kids are starting school, and it was just very chaotic, and at that point I was still working on Coal Run. I was in author-mode and I wasn’t even thinking.

DA: In a sense you’ve already been in people’s living rooms. Do you think people feel more connected to you because of the publicity from Oprah?

TO: People seem to have intimate feelings towards these books. They’ve had a dad who was a miner, or an uncle who was killed in a steel mill accident—so people have a really personal connection to the book, and therefore they feel they have a really personal connection to me. And in a sense they do. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t have a private life. And it also doesn’t mean that I don’t have a financial concern. People may think that if you’re an Oprah pick and you have the word “bestseller” in front of your name, well then you’re just rolling in dough. No. Coal Run wasn’t a bestseller at all. It did okay, but nothing like Back Roads, which made it all the way to number two.

DA: Is the success of the book worth the invasion of privacy?

TO: You have to look at that, and ask yourself what you are really hoping to accomplish as an author. Do you want to be rich and famous? Is that really why you’re writing? No, that’s not why you’re writing. And the being rich and famous thing is not all it’s cracked up to be. Having a little bit of money is nice for the security aspect. But for me, that’s really all it is. It’s security. Now your kids can go to college, and when you get so old that you can’t write anymore you won’t have to live in boxes. I’m not an extravagant person.

DA: I think readers come to a second book with the expectation that it can’t be as good as the first one. Did you fear that from a writer’s perspective?

TO: Part of the reason Coal Run took so long for me to finish was because of the pressure of following-up that first book and knowing from the beginning that Coal Run couldn’t possibly have the same sales as Back Roads because it wasn’t going to have the Oprah push. Yet, at the same time you think, well why not? Why can’t all the people who knew about Back Roads buy Coal Run? Well, because Oprah says buy this book and eleven million people hear her. Viking puts a book on a couple of bookshelves and sends you out to a few cities to do events, and ten thousand people hear about the book. It’s just different, and you have to build an audience. They tell you from the very beginning when you’ve been an Oprah pick and you’re going into the next novel: The people who bought your first book were Oprah’s audience. And you have to deal with it.

DA: Are you still doing publicity for Coal Run?

TO: I have a couple of events coming up that are Coal Run related—the paperback will be out in June. I just talked to a book club last week, and it was so funny because all of a sudden before I went off to talk to them I realized I didn’t remember anything about Coal Run. I couldn’t remember anything about it. I’m deep into the next book. So I had go back, kind of leaf through it and try to remember. And Back Roads of course was ancient history. And then when I was there, we began to talk about Coal Run because that was the book they’d read, and before I knew it, we were talking on and on about the book I’m writing now. As soon as a book is done, you move on, you know. For my readers, Coal Run is the book that’s out now. It’s the one they’re discovering and the one I’m getting the emails and the letters about, and everyone wants a sequel. And I just have to write back and say I’ve moved on. But I do understand, as a reader, that when you’re really in love with characters in a book, you want them to continue on.

DA: Domestic violence has been a topic in both of your published books. The reader becomes a witness to the whole dynamic of denial and excuses about domestic violence within the family. How the definition of punishment for children varies widely within communities—and sometimes crosses the line, was shown with all its complications and conflicting emotions. Back Roads does an especially good job of showing how the children are witnesses to that violent cycle, and are its ultimate victims. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

TO: I witnessed it, not within my own family, thank goodness, but with kids that I grew up with, and it was always really heartbreaking because you couldn’t do anything about it. You were helpless. That was back in a time when even teachers didn’t do anything to intervene. If someone was knocking his kid around, that was his business. And chances were, if you went to his house and told him to stop doing it, he was going to knock you around, too. It just was not dealt with. There are still some school systems where, even to this day, it’s still that way. Not that Pennsylvania’s the only place with these problems.

DA: Will there be a similar theme in the third book?

TO: In the book I’m writing now, there’s a character who has gone away and is making these sorts of realizations and value judgments. It’s very much about the displacement of blue collar America, for both men and women. It’s about where their place in life is and what their purpose is, and how to maintain any sense of pride when everything has been taken away. Including the question of how do you get your kids to respect you, when you can’t respect yourself?

DA: You’ve managed to attain what many writers never get, the ability to support yourself solely by your writing. How does it feel to achieve that?

TO: It’s difficult to make a living at your art because your writing is an incredibly intimate thing. It’s extremely personal, and it’s done out of love. And when somebody pays you for it, there’s a part of you that feels like you shouldn’t get money for it. It taints it. Yet at the same time, why shouldn’t you be making a living doing what you’re good at instead of making a living teaching school or being a dentist or working at Wal-Mart—and then having to do your writing at night when you’re exhausted and the kids are asleep after you’ve just worked an eight hour shift. You should be able to make a living at it, yet at the same time once that money comes into play—money and marketing and having to promote your books and travel and do events—and you mix that all in with the act of just creating a work of art, it’s a bad mix. It takes some adjustment time to be able to deal with it and come to a point where you can take that commercial aspect of your writing career and put it aside so you can get back to your writing. For me, Coal Run was that transition book. So, it’s been an immense relief for me that it turned out as well as it did. The reviews were phenomenal. People who’ve read it seem to love it and feel a tie to Coal Run. I think it’s a better book, and I want it to be a better book. I want Firedamp to be better than Coal Run. I want every book to be an improvement.

DA: When you’re writing, what do you read?

TO: I can read foreign or suspense fiction, and definitely nonfiction. I read a lot of biographies. Now I’m reading some Sherlock Holmes. But I can’t read anything that’s even slightly similar to what I’m writing about family or community. I was just in Paris a couple of weeks ago with Bernard, and on the flight I read an entire novel just during my travel time—and that, for some reason, doesn’t interfere. I guess it’s because I read it all at once, and it’s not that going back-and-forth of reading two chapters one night, then working on writing a chapter of my book, then going back to the book I’m reading. It’s just too confusing when you’re already playing with these characters you’re making up.

DA: You’re already living two lives as it is—your own real life and the life of your characters in the book you’re writing.

TO: Yeah, it just gets to be too much. I’ve always loved to read. I’ve always loved language. That’s why I love so many southern writers. They have such a way with language. I started writing when I was a little kid. I was only about six or seven when I started writing my first short stories. My mom has kept everything I’ve ever written. She always used to joke that she’d saving it until I’m a famous author so she can sell it. And wasn’t she surprised when I actually became a famous writer.

DA: You haven’t seen her auctioning anything on E-Bay?

TO: No, not yet—but we joke about it all the time with her. She says, “I’m just waiting for you to become really, really famous.”

DA: Are you fluent in other languages?

TO: No, I’m not. It’s terrible because Bernard is fluent in eight languages, and he does literary translations in French, Spanish, Russian, and English. He’s such a whiz at that—and even with all the trips I’ve made to France—Bernard’s French, though he’s living in Spain right now, but all of his family lives in France, so I’m around these French people all the time. My books, by the way, are huge in France. When Coal Run came out last fall I was there promoting it, and I had several reviews where they actually compared me to Emile Zola! One French reviewer called Coal Run an “American Germinal.” So I was really blown away by that. But I have yet to pick up anything more than ‘bonjour.’ We spend our summers in Spain with Bernard, and my Spanish is just—I just don’t have a knack for it. Now, my daughter is doing very well. She’s in middle school and she’s doing so well in Spanish that she actually goes to the high school to take a high school level Spanish class. One of the big mistakes we make in America—we don’t start our kids when they’re little. Even middle school is too late.

DA: I’m not hearing a strong regional accent in your speech. Why?

TO: I made a real effort to lose it when I went to school in Chicago at Northwestern. Because of growing up in a little coal mining community, I always felt that I didn’t fit in. I wanted to get out. I wanted to live in a city. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted more than most of the kids I went to school with, who were going to go into the mines—or what was left of them, or into other blue-collar jobs. If they were going to college, it was probably going to be IUP (Indiana University of Pennsylvania). Of course there was always that little group of people that would go to Penn State—and that was really going off. There were only three of us that went to college out of state. So, when I left and went to Northwestern, I thought that I was going to get out there and people were going to embrace me. Coming out of this little town I thought, oh I’m so smart and so sophisticated. Well I get out there, and it turns out that everyone I met labeled me as a redneck. And I thought—wait, you don’t understand—when I’m back in Indiana, PA, I’m very sophisticated, and I’ve even been to Pittsburgh (laughs). I didn’t realize it was a much bigger pool—and I mean a huge pond, with rich kids. I went to school on grants and loans and scholarships. Not that we were destitute—my dad’s a banker. But suddenly I was with kids whose daddy just writes them a check, and they’re driving expensive cars, and it was a real eye opener. One of the things that I had never realized was that I had an accent. I never had the really bad western PA accent—for instance, my grandma “worshes” the dishes, and she “reads up” the room.

DA: But does she “pick up” the room?

TO: Yes, she does “pick up” the room, but she “reads up” more (laughs). It’s so funny though, because you don’t even realize things like that until you leave. What’s weird about picking up a room? I can still remember the first time I referred to a stroller as a baby buggy. That was always what my grandma called it, and therefore what my mom called it. People from western Pennsylvania all know that—even if they don’t use it now, they’ve heard an aunt or a grandma of someone use that term. So I got out there and people would ask, “Where are you from?” And I actually had people ask, “Are you from West Virginia or Kentucky?” And I’d get all huffy and say, “NO! West Virginia? I’m from Pennsylvania.” That regional rage would kick in—How can you think I’m from Kentucky? PLEASE. So I became really conscious of that, and I made a real effort to not talk that way. Then I’d come home for breaks and everyone back home would tell me I’d developed a Chicago accent.

DA: Your degree is in journalism. Did you ever work as a journalist?

TO: Briefly, at some small newspapers. One in Florida, one in Massachusetts, and of course I worked for my hometown paper, The Indiana Gazette, when I’d come home summers from college.

DA: Why didn’t you pursue it as a career?

TO: I was not cut out for journalism, though. I’m a creative writer, and journalism is night and day from making up your own stuff. There’s the whole journalist personality that you need to have. You need to be able to ferret out your stories, and you have to be able to talk to people who don’t want to talk to you, and so much of what you do is research and interviewing. And I don’t want to deal with that. I just wanted to make up stories and write stories—once again, that whole love of language and creativity. With journalism you can’t be using lyrical language. You have to tell your facts. I was very unhappy doing that. But, my degree was in journalism, so there I was facing what to do for a job. At that point I started writing my novels, in hopes that I could get them published, and then I started having kids. And since I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, that worked okay. My husband at the time was making enough money that I could stay at home with the kids, and of course all that time I was working on my writing. That’s the thing about being a writer. It took me eleven years—well, really a lifetime. But from the time I wrote my first novel, it took me eleven years, and five unpublished novels, to get to Back Roads.

DA: That’s a lot of hard work.

TO: There are certain people who will look at you and say, “Then you did nothing for eleven years.” No—that was eleven years of working to the point where I could do Back Roads. So the fact that Back Roads became a bestseller and made me a substantial amount of money—the way I look at that is you can take that money and break it down over eleven years, and I earned that money. I had paid my dues. I had been through plenty of rejections. I didn’t feel guilty about the success, although it still was very overwhelming. Sometimes I still wonder if it was the best thing in the world because it’s still really hard. I guess now I can look at it in hindsight and say everything worked out fine.

DA: What’s your writing day like?

TO: I get up a little before 7:00—that’s when my kids start to get up for school. I go straight to the computer and they get themselves ready and go off to school. Then I work straight through until they come home at 3:00. A lot of times, if I’m writing well, I only get up from the computer to make a sandwich, and sometimes I just work straight through. When I’m finishing up a book, when I’m on the home stretch, there are times when I’m working that I am so unconscious of my surroundings that the kids will come in at some point and turn on a light because I’m writing in pitch darkness and haven’t even realized it got dark. They’re at an age now where it’s not like having little ones, so once they get home I still work but the dynamics change. I make myself be available to them if they need me. But I’m still working. I’m conditioned at this point—I can work through just about anything, if I’m really into the book and I’m at a good place. Otherwise, anything can distract me. If I’m not in the flow and I’m having problems with it, then yeah—all of a sudden grocery shopping becomes something I have to do. Then, of course, when I’m at the other extreme, days will go by and the kids will be asking, “Mom, can we get some food?” I just forget everything. It’s a lot of extremes. For instance, when I’m not writing the kids get a lot of my attention because I feel that when I’m not working I have to be supermom. Yet at the same time they don’t like me as much when I’m like that because even though they might be getting all of Mom’s attention, Mom’s in a really bad mood (laughs). They can sense that sort of restrained hysteria—you know, that I’m not writing, I’m not writing. It’s something I have to be doing to feel productive and to be myself. If I’m not writing, I don’t feel right. But, they’ve been living with this their whole lives, so they’re pretty used to it at this point.

DA: Do you teach at all?

TO: No. I do get invited to speak at different places, at universities and libraries. Both my books are being taught at a lot of universities. Right now Back Roads is being taught in two classes here at Penn State, and Coal Run is being taught in two classes, and not just in English classes. Coal Run is being taught in a sociology class that studies Appalachian poor and Back Roads is being taught in psychology courses. But, no, I don’t teach. And so far, I’m okay financially. But if I ever get to where I need, as my family calls it, a “real” job—if I ever do that (laughs)—yeah, teaching would probably be the only thing I could do. I’m not a novelist just for any old reason. It’s what I do best, and it’s about the only thing that I can do.

DA: I understand that your grandfather was a big influence on your writing.

TO: He was a great storyteller. Being a novelist is a combination of the art of writing and the craft of storytelling. You can’t just be a good writer. You have to have the ability to tell a good story. My grandfather was one of those great oral storytellers. He was the head cashier at a little bank in a town outside Indiana—this was back in the day when there were still lots of little country banks—and the country banker was a man who would even lend money out of his own pocket, if he was that kind of a man, which my grandfather was. Everyone in the community knew him. His name was Harold Burkett, but everyone just knew him as Burkett. Everyone he dealt with was a coal miner, or as time went on, an unemployed coal miner. Even after someone was out of the mines and working for a different type of company, they’d still be considered to be an unemployed coal miner. There’s such a culture and pride attached to that profession that, even after they’re not doing it anymore, it’s still how they define themselves. My grandfather used to joke that being an unemployed coal miner was a profession in itself. They would never let go of hope that the mines would come back, that the mines would be reopened, even though it was an awful, awful job. So, I got a lot of insight into these families through my grandfather. I also went to school with a lot of kids whose fathers worked in the mines, but for my generation a lot of the mines were already closed by then. When my mom grew up, every kid she went to school with was a coal miner’s kid. She was the banker’s daughter, and the rest of her friends were coal miners’ kids. Within my own family, there are no coal miners, but I grew up in that community.

DA: It sounds like your grandfather felt a strong kinship with the miners. Did they feel the same way about him?

TO: I can remember having Sunday suppers with the whole family at my grandparents’, and some guy would come clomping up on the porch and knock on the door, and my grandfather would go out to talk to him. It would be some guy having problems, so he came to my grandfather. He was more than just the banker behind the desk. He was a big part of the community. Almost like a patriarch, in a sense.

DA: Similar to the characters of Zo, and Dr. Ed, and the sheriff in Coal Run?

TO: Yes. The caretakers of the town—that was very much my grandfather. He was a very important person in my life. I dedicated Coal Run to him and to my grandma. That book is very much about a love for Pennsylvania and a love for your roots and your place in life—and I got that from them.

DA: Are they still alive?

TO: My grandma is. She just had her 90^th birthday last week. We buried my grandfather the day I found out I was pregnant with Tirzah—one life over, and one life begun. He didn’t get to see any of my work published, which is a shame because he was a huge reader—everyone in my family is. He had a big admiration for authors, and he knew I wrote and wanted to be a writer, so we would always talk about books. It would have meant a lot to him.

DA: Is there any Ukrainian/Russian background in your family, similar to that of the Ivan character?

TO: The Ukrainian thing comes from my ex-father-in-law. My ex-husband’s father is Ukrainian, and he spent four years in Auschwitz. He was a political prisoner. So that was where I got that insight. Also, there are a lot of Ukrainian/Polish/Slovak miners in western PA, and as mill workers in Pittsburgh. That was important to the story because Ivan was always struggling with his identity and trying to find his place, and with his father being from another country, he had this other side that he was trying to figure out.

DA: I was listening to Steve Earle’s “An American Boy” CD on the drive up and thinking about the coal mines and the character Val, and how the poorer working class are the ones to go off to war – partly because they don’t have many options open to them, and that sometimes seems like a way out, when instead it can be another route to displacement or alienation. Was there anyone in particular the Val character was based on?

TO: Yeah. There’s a guy who lives across the road from my grandma, an old friend of the family. He’s a Vietnam veteran—he was a ranger. When he’s out there mowing, shirtless, on his tractor mower, you can see he has five bullet wound scars. His story—he was a young kid, he had just been married, his wife was pregnant, he gets called off to war. While he was over there, his wife divorced him, then remarried and they wouldn’t let him see his daughter. He comes back totally screwed up He got into major drug problems, became a biker. Still to this day—he’s close to 60 now—he still rides his Harley, has the do-rag and the tattoos and everything. But anyway, my grandma knew his parents, and his dad was a coal miner who died in a cave-in that killed several miners. He was just a teenager at the time his dad died, then he got drafted and went off to Vietnam and had all that happen with his wife and his daughter, and then his mom died of cancer. All these bad things happened to him, and my grandmother just took him under her wing. She owned the house across the road from her, which was empty after my aunt moved out, so she got him to move in there–of course he pays rent and everything. And he has become my grandma’s caretaker at this point in life since my grandpap’s gone. He’s one of the scariest guys you could meet, but at the same time he is one of the most honest and decent people you’ll ever know. There was just something about this guy, his life, his character, that always tugged at my heart. I was always fascinated by him. And of course he’s not the only one—so many of those guys came back just totally messed up, and now we have another generation doing it all over again. It’s so prevalent in these blue-collar towns—because those are the guys. That was another big difference I noticed when I went away to college. Nobody at college had any family who were soldiers or knew anybody who had been in Vietnam. Back home everybody had an uncle, or a brother, or a good friend who’d gone to war. It’s the same with what’s going on in Iraq now—you drive through a little town, and you see pictures and flags on the front porches, and you know a son or husband is in the war. It’s because they don’t have other options. And Val, making the decision to go to war rather than back to the coal mines—those were the only choices possible.

DA: The only choices possible?

TO: The other chance to get out is through football, if you can get a scholarship for football as your ticket to college. Otherwise, you go into the military, or you do something blue collar—but now all the blue-collar jobs are all gone, so what do these guys do? That’s a real crisis for them. Not everyone is meant to go to college and get their MBA. My sister, who just finished nursing school, had three ex-coalminers in her nursing class. Well, good for them, but all three of them would rather be in a coal mine. They had a sense of pride mining that I don’t think they ever feel doing anything else. But, that’s gone now. They have no identity. This is very much the topic I’m writing about now in this new book, so my head is just crammed full of this feeling of what these guys are going through. But, as I said, this is a trilogy. I already have the idea for my next book, and there’s nary a coal miner to be seen, although it’s still going to be set in Pennsylvania.

DA: Well, you’ve always featured female characters, but the narrators have always been male. Will this book also have a male narrator?

TO: It’s going to be told from a woman’s point of view. I’m a little bit leery of writing this book from a female perspective because I’m so comfortable writing from a male perspective, and it’s very natural for me. My next book is definitely a female character’s story and it is going to be from her perspective, but at the same time I think, gee, I hope I can pull it off. Then I tell myself: You are a woman, Tawni—you should be able to write as a woman.

DA: One last thing I want to talk about is the imagery of the mine burning under the town of Coal Run. That was such a wonderful description that was woven throughout, with this thing just smoldering under the whole story, until the earth opened up in their backyard—talk about hell rising. Where did that come from?

TO: That’s based on Centralia [Pennsylvania]. I went there with my cousin, Kenny, for the first time when I was a freshman in college. I made a road trip to Centralia just to see this place, and it blew my mind. Part of it was because I was already a writer—it’s the kind of place where you think: Wow, I’ve got to put this in a story someday. I was 18 or 19, and I hadn’t even written a novel at that point, but I knew it was something I was going to use someday. It took me thirteen years or more until I got around to setting my work back home and getting back to my roots, but I always thought it perfectly summarized the whole Pennsylvania mining experience. What’s under this ground? It was the lifeblood of this community, gave them jobs and prosperity—and now it’s poisoned the place to a point where people can’t even live there anymore. It’s an extreme example of what other communities went through. And it went farther than being about evil mine operators and rich coal barons taking advantage of poor coal miners. It’s about the land. It’s the actual ground on fire. And it’s still burning, and it’s spreading. More and more of the area is being pulled down. And it’s just like I described in the book, a really fascinating place. I’ve been back there two times. As a matter of fact, I was just thinking recently that I want to go back again to see what it’s like now and see if the things I remember are still there. I can still vividly see all the little details—the swing set, the tricycle, and the lawnmower. Are they still there? It’s a ghost town. Not a Wild West ghost town, but a coal mining ghost town. And it smells like sulfur. The image of that town always stuck with me. And the name, Coal Run. There’s a town of Coal Run very close to Indiana, PA. Even as a kid, I loved that name. I always thought, that’s the name of a town I’ll put in a story someday. So, I filed all these things away, thinking—someday I’ll put that in a story.

Note: Since the time of this interview, the title of O’Dell’s third novel has changed from “Fire Damp” to “Sister Mine.” In early 2006 it sold to Random House’s Shaye Arehart imprint in a two-book deal and was published in 2007. O’Dell’s latest novel, FRAGILE BEASTS, has just been released (spring 2010).

This interview was originally published in the Fall 2005 issue of Paper Street.

About the interviewer:

Visit Dory Adams’ blog.

What projects are you currently working on?

Last year I put out two collections of flash fiction – “Oof it, Boof it, Boff” and “Kinetic Meditation”. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a new collection that I’ve been writing over the last 6 months. Hopefully it will be ready to take to the printers next week. Still working on a front cover. Struggling to create a suitable image for it.

When and why did you begin writing?

I went through a phase of writing some really bad poetry between the age of 16 and 20. A long long time ago. Hormonal ennui was probably the driving force that got me into writing then. I came back to writing about five years ago after a gap of 15 years in which most of my time was taken up with visual arts, mainly photography. I have really enjoyed the process of getting back into writing. I think it’s just the way my brain works. It’s a wordy brain. Always liked playing with words so writing feels natural. I also like the solitude that comes with writing. I’m a sociable person, but I do like to have plenty of time to myself. Probably why I liked photography so much. Being a photographer means putting yourself in the position of being an outsider looking in. That seems to be quite a natural position me.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I never dare to consider myself a writer. I’ve got this fear of jinxing myself if I use those words about myself. I’m a person who enjoys writing. If other people want to call me a writer I feel highly honoured. An old friend called me a writer when he introduced me to someone recently and I became really embarrassed. But then, for the next few days I was beaming.

What inspired you to write your first book?

I write poetry and flash fiction and usually over a period of six months I build up a body of work that I feel comfortable putting out as a collection. The first collection I put out was called “iNK”. I made 50 copies and gave them all away to friends and friends of friends. That was four years ago, when I called myself THE FUG (THE FUG was the name I gave my spoken word persona originally). I thought that first chap book I made was great at the time but find it hard to read without cringing now. I suppose that is a good sign; it suggests progression. Not sure what inspired me to do it. Just that sense of wanting to communicate something about the way I see and understand the world around me. I think it’s as simple as that.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Old people. The older and madder the better. When I return to my home town in the north of England I spend a lot of time standing around in charity shops, listening to old people talking about hip operations, cataracts and mad stuff like someone they know who got CJD from eating squirrel brains. They have these fantastically dark and at the same time very humorous conversations as they rummage through large boxes of second hand underpants. It’s truly surreal and utterly engrossing. A lot of my writing is an extension of overheard dialogue. People often say that they can imagine my work being spoken in a northern English accent. I think the darkness of northern English humour is definitely evident in my writing.

Has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

Absolutely. As I was saying in the previous answer, the part of northern England I’m from is a big influence on my writing. I love the humour of the north. It’s quite abstract. I came from a small town in the north and there isn’t much going on culturally but the people are real odd and interesting characters. When I go back to visit family I find myself spending a lot of time people watching. I also find that recently I’ve been writing a lot of personal experience into my work. Especially in the prose.

Do you have a specific writing style?

I think I have a particular style, though I find it hard to describe. I suppose it’s very character based and the prose and the poetry often read as monologues or dialogues. I tend to write about specific moments rather than constructing narrative. Maybe it’s something to do with the years of photography. My prose is always very short and it often reads as vignettes; snapshots of everyday moments from a rather peculiar angle. These vignettes are often fun to turn into spoken word performance pieces. I do quite a lot of spoken word.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

I think that there are certain themes in my work that reappear in different guises. I can’t define a particular message but I do explore ideas such as the loss (and questioning) of notions of spirituality, the complexities of self image and reflections on sexual experience in contemporary society. I’m not sure what I want the reader to know about my view of these things. I think I just want to shake up peoples way of thinking about the human experience; make them think about things from a wholly new angle.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

Me. Most people when they first meet me find it difficult to associate me with my writing.

The Insurgent.

Tim Nogaj: All of your books have been published by small publishers. Compared to what is considered ‘mainstream’ you are almost non-existent as a writer. You have cited Sartre as an influence, who claimed that he wrote to change the world. Why do you write?

Noah Cicero: I don’t write to change the world. Sartre is much different than me. Sartre grew up bourgeoisie and went to a good school in France. I grew up blue collar and have stumbled around in life and finally go to a small state university. The sentence, “I want to change the world” has never occurred to me once in life. I’m not sure if I care about the world. I’ve done some volunteer work and plan on working for a non-profit organization after I’m done with college. But I have never thought about changing the world. I mean seriously I work at Red Lobster, what am I supposed to do?

TN: Vasily and Chang both feel alienated and marginalized by society. What is the relationship between these characters psychological perspectives and your own?

NC: I wrote the book three years ago. I felt a lot more alienated then. I’m not so psychological now. I’m probably more sociological or political currently. I still do feel alienated, often when class room discussions I say things that have nothing to do with the other students’ points of view. I still realize that I am different from most people. I don’t really feel like I have much to do with other people. Most people seem concerned with flat screens, talking about their big money futures, about being libertarian or vegan, their new cell phones, and I don’t really feel it.

TN: In The Insurgent, you describe Youngstown as a small third world country located inside America, and say that, “There are no movements for poor people in America.” What do you think is at the root of these conditions and what will happen as they continue to proliferate across the country?

NC: There are no movements for poor people in America because capitalism is now the dominating worldview of the American people, rich and poor. When Marx wrote capitalism wasn’t a worldview, it was an economic system that was just starting. But now, capitalism is like a religion we are raised with and we can’t even see it anymore. The capitalistic worldview is that we are alone trying to get by. We go to work and fight for raises and promotions. We believe in corporations the way we used to believe in religions and our clan or tribal heritage. Most people don’t even know what capitalism is. They think it is “just money.” But it is a system that forces humans to fight endlessly against for their whole lives for raises, promotions and jobs. Americans do not believe in unity or team work of any sort. The don’t even play sports to be part of a team, they play sports to showcase their talents to get paid more or to get more advertizing money. I don’t think this is Adam Smith’s fault. Capitalism has its good points, capitalism brought a better standard of living, capitalism taught that money and standard of living is more important than racism. If learn about other countries and about the south’s history, you will learn that humans will actually consider being racist more important than progress. Which capitalism negates. Capitalism makes money the number one priority and not race, religion or language which is good.

If more places become third world around America because of this depression you won’t see socialism taking hold. You will find people bitching about taxes. Americans have this crazy notion in their head that the government doesn’t matter. But what matters most is the government. We are tied directly to the government. The government provides the roads, sewage, electricity, and water. It is the government that protects us and runs the zoning boards that attract outside business. Most people in America don’t comprehend that.

TN: Wars, global warming and peak oil are discussed amongst the characters in the same tone as getting laid or having an abortion. Vasily watches youtube videos of mass suffering around the world for entertainment. How have these things become so trivialized and what effect does it have on a person to have such an abstract relationship with violence?

NC: People watch movies all fucking day where shit gets blown up and the world ends. Nobody cares peak oil or climate change because everyone just thinks its a movie. It is all one big stupid movie. They also don’t care because they want to believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them. People also want to believe that the economic crisis was caused purely by Human Hands because if only humans did it, then it can be fixed. No one wants to admit that when the economy started crashing oil was like 4 dollars a gallon for a whole summer and no one could spend money on stupid shit. No one wants to admit that people had to pay their medical bills and they couldn’t pay their mortgages. People just want to blame Bush and the bankers and now they are blaming Obama. We have a very big problem concerning oil, the price of gas is sucking up money and we are in two wars to secure the location of the oil. We aren’t exactly in the middle east for THAT oil, but we are there to secure THAT oil makes it to market so the price of the oil on the stock market remains lower.

TN: Vasily has a talk with his sister, Sasha about how people escape from freedom and build artificial cages for themselves. She says that life for most people is made up of a series of escapes. Why are people so scared of freedom, what makes reality so unbearable?

NC: It isn’t that reality is unbearable. It is that Being is unbearable. We are Being in Time to use Heidegger. We project our Beings into the future. When we are unsure where our Being will end up we get anxiety. People don’t like anxiety. They want their lives to be predominately fixed. Humans up until the American experiment or up until John Locke’s Second Treatise never considered freedom important. They considered ‘freedom from’ important sometimes. But people generally just did what their parents did. They lived out the cultural norms and traditions without question. People now have to CHOOSE their fates. They can pick when to have kids, what to major in college, if they want to go to college or not go, they choose who they will marry, they choose where to live. These things that seem normal to us aren’t normal at all in terms of history. Our lives aren’t fixed anymore. Our lives are even less fixed than they were 50 years ago. Young people in America have more freedom than other humans that have ever lived in the history of mankind. We can choose it all. This is terrifying to us. This is why On the Road is so important and still read by so many young americans. It tells the story of people ‘that don’t know what to do.’ They don’t know where to live, they don’t know what job to have, they can’t pick a woman to marry, they can’t just settle down and start their lives. And now that has come true, we aren’t having the same job all our lives like our grandparents, we aren’t living in the same place all our lives, we are moving around, always looking for something better.

TN: Chang says “Society needs people like me to look down on; they need me so that there is always a definition of what crazy is. Without me there would be no sane. I am paid to keep a line between insanity and what is called sane. My insanity… allows people who think that buying a hummer will make them happy, to convince themselves that they’re sane.” What would happen if this line disappeared? How far would Americans go to protect their privilege at the expense of others?

NC: Americans are willing to take over two countries in the name of privilege. America has gone to war with Iraq and Afghanistan not because of the U.S. Constitution and the dream of freedom and democracy. World War 2 and the Civil War those were fought for the Ideals of The U.S. Constitution. But these two wars could be called Standard of Living Wars. We are there to maintain our standard of living. It is great that we freed them from their shitty governments. I personally think that is wonderful on an emotional level. But we had to kill for it, we had to drop bombs on our fellow humans for it, and we did for our Standard of Living or privilege.

TN: Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, is talked about. When something like the VT massacre occurs, the media portrays it as an isolated incident. The person or persons who committed the act must be insane. Vasily and Chang live an abject existence that would probably not be alien to Cho or Ted Kaczynski or Timothy Mcveigh or the Columbine shooters or Joe Stack. What is the relation between the “crazy” murderers and the “innocent” victims?

NC: The strangest thing is that the crazy person sees themselves as innocent. The crazy person considers themselves a victim. But they misdirect and take revenge upon those they consider their victimizers. One Man killers are a symptom of capitalism. They can’t relate to other people because they have been alienated by the economic structure that has been turned into a religion and a social structure. Since there is no REAL alternate voice for the alienated, they end up being alone. When they are alone they start thinking strange thoughts and because they have no friends their thoughts get stranger and stranger. One of the reasons humans talk to each other is to see if our thoughts are strange. Or one of the reasons say Christians or racists only talk to each other is to make sure that their thoughts aren’t interrupted. But the crazy murderer is left alone, with their thoughts getting weirder and weirder. They can’t join a group because groups aren’t really allowed in America so they start to blame all of humanity. They don’t care who they kill because everyone is against them. They consider themselves one man guerilla armies fighting the social contract that keeps them alienated. But Cho killed himself knowing that his battle was useless, he could never destroy the social contract, it was too big and too strong.

TN: If Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama read The Insurgent and discussed it with each other, what would they say?

NC: I think they would understand it. Being a president is a lonely thing. You are the most Powerful human alive with the most choice and possibilities granted to any man alive at that time in history. A president must order people to people other people for the sake other people. They sign in legislation that will affect people greatly. I can’t imagine the existential anguish that must have tortured Clinton and Bush and now tortures Obama. I think they would read it differently than say we would as young people who don’t have great power. We see the characters as people who are figuring out what to do with their lives and the consequences of bad and good choices. A president would see it as perhaps what it feels like to be isolated and how difficult it is to make a choice. I think they would see the mother in the second half like they would see legislation, that a person could make a choice and it could turn out very badly. And how they would love to confess it to the world, “I’ve made a bad choice.” They wait for years until they are in a room with a confident that would never tell anyone else and perhaps confess to them their feelings about past decisions.

But at the same time those three men are men of achievement. They would probably look at Chang and Vasily and think they were lazy and ask why they couldn’t get it together and perhaps think of the characters as bad Americans.

TN: When a copy of The Insurgent is found under a heap of rubble in 150 years, what will be said about it?

NC: They will probably think, “Man, these people were crazy.” I don’t know.

TN: Vasily says, “we are totally moral, godless and moral…” How can someone like Vasily and Chang live a ‘moral’ life in the modern world? What does it mean to be ‘moral’ when you are surrounded by automatons who cannot deal with freedom?

NC: This will sound strange, but I’m going to go with Christianity here. Even though most people are predominately automatons. They do make personal choices, they have their own stories to tell and personal experiences. They like to have a good time, they want a job that offers raises without crazy bosses, they want their governments to work. They want justice and a good court system. So we all have the basic things in common. And people should go with that. You have to forgive people. I personally want people to forgive me for being so weird and people usually do. I get called weird and crazy all the time but people are still polite to me and I try to be polite to them. The most important thing you can do for another person, is if they are stressed out or crying or whatever is say, “Hey, what do you need?” Sometimes all they need is something little, sometimes all they need is for you to listen to their crazy shit.

Here I am going with John Rawls: We are sharing this world, which means that we are sharing the roads, sewer systems, electrical lines, telephone lines, local, state, and federal governments. We are all paying taxes to the same institutions. I’m not talking about the environment or something big and crazy like that. But we are all sharing Taco Bell, the mall, and even the internet. We are in constant state of sharing. And because we are sharing these certain things we should be respectful of each other. We are condemned, fated, doomed to a life of sharing things and to make the whole process easier it is better if you do it as politely as possible.

Christopher Higgs is the author of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, a novel from Sator Press. My interview with Higgs was birthed from an interview with Higgs and Michael Kimball at The Faster Times, wherein Higgs claimed his novel was heavily influenced by certain films of Jean-Luc Godard.

Borgstrom: You’ve said the thirteen films made by Jean-Luc Godard between 1961-1967 were the most significant inspiration for Mooney. Were you studying these films specifically for the creation of your novel?

Higgs: No. I got on the Godard kick because at the same time I was working on Mooney I was studying the French New Wave with Judith Mayne at Ohio State. Before working with her, I wasn’t particularly fond of Godard. As a film school student a decade earlier, I’d watched a few of his films but never got why people thought he was such an important filmmaker. Then, when Judith screened for us Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962), my mind changed instantly. I was mesmerized. I did a bunch of research on it, wrote a paper on it, and then Judith screened for us Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), a film that was at the time unavailable in the US. It blew me away. I’d seen nothing comparable. It dawned on me that I must have been too young to appreciate what Godard was doing. So I set myself the task of watching all of the films he made after À bout de soufflé (1960) up until he went full tilt Maoist in 1969.

Borgstrom: Do any of these films have a greater impact on your novel than others?

Higgs: No, I think the impact came from the accumulation. They all made a huge impact individually and as a group.

Borgstrom: You translated Godard’s disharmonious juxtaposition of image and sound into emotion and information. Why these? Were there other possibilities?

Higgs: Oh sure. I’m positive I utilized other of Godard’s techniques in other ways, some I may not even be aware of. Why emotion and information…well, it was the easiest translation. In film school they taught us that images convey 70% information and 30% emotion, while sound conveys 70% emotion and 30% information. I’ve always found that insight fascinating; so when it came time to form Mooney, I experimented with disjoining emotion and information the way Godard does image/sound.

Borgstrom: A line from Weekend: “What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people?” A line from Une Femme est une femme: “Is this a comedy or a tragedy? Either way it’s a masterpiece?” Was it lines such as these that inspired you to include criticism and praise for your novel within your novel?

Higgs: Those are great lines, and they are certainly of the same spirit, but the reason I opened Mooney with those critical responses is that I wanted to get all the objections out of the way so the reader could cathartically expel the negative reactions I anticipated them having. I spent five and a half years in graduate writing workshops and many of those criticisms in the book are directly from responses I received from my peers. See, I’m fairly aware of what people dislike about my writing, and so I thought, well, what if I just write what I know critics are thinking…this book is so fucking cloyingly pretentious, this author is such a jackass showoff, it’s all style and no substance, etcetera.

Borgstrom: Is the metafiction within Mooney representative of Godard’s breaking the fourth wall?

Higgs: There is certainly an influence from Godard on the particular way I approached metafiction in the book. Godard maneuvers multiple levels of metafiction, to name a few: there’s the overt meta-commentary you mentioned in the previous question, then there’s the camerawork that implies meta-cognition, then there’s the interspersion of title cards, the mixing of mediums that calls attention to the film-ness of the film, then there’s the sly wink or the quick glance Anna K. periodically gives the camera in various of the films, then there’s the tension that’s created when characters *don’t* break the fourth wall, like in the opening of Masculin feminine: Jean-Pierre Léaud reads words off of something; he hardly ever looks up from his notes, and when he does he won’t look into the camera. Then Chantal Goya walks in and sits down and checks herself using her compact; someone recognizes her and a phone keeps ringing from somewhere off screen. She, too, will not look into the camera. She fiddles with her hair. It feels like they should be looking at us, but neither of them will. It is beautiful and irritating at the same time. I like that.

Borgstrom: You’ve listed a series of elements culled from Godard’s films–smash-cut editing, randomness and the non sequitur, disharmonious juxtaposition, embracing singularity. Not to lessen the work that is Mooney, but have you found any texts that are particularly effective in employing one or more of these elements?

Higgs: Well, the first name that comes to mind is David Markson—here I’m thinking specifically of Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, This is Not A Novel, The Last Novel, *not* Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which is the one everybody reads and likes to talk about because David Foster Wallace endorsed it and because it’s more narrative than the Novelist Quartet. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is not revolutionarily innovative in the same way as the Novelist Quartet, it is much more of a standard modernist big sister to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. People who bring up Wittgenstein’s Mistress when discussing Markson remind me of people who bring up À bout de soufflé when discussing Godard.

Borgstrom: Which of the13 films would you recommend to someone who hadn’t seen any and would only see one?

Higgs: Maybe Masculin feminine (1966)? But I don’t know. I just wrote that. I could’ve easily written Pierrot Le Fou (1965) instead, or…or…. I really love them all. I just went and looked at the list of titles to see which of them I liked least, but I couldn’t choose one. They are all totally freaking badass. So long as you don’t go past 1968, you can’t go wrong.

Borgstrom: Are there any other directors that have had an impact on your writing?

Higgs: Michel Gondry and Jean-Pierre Jeunet are probably the two other biggest individual influences that come to mind. American avant-garde filmmakers, especially Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, have also greatly impacted my thinking and by extension my writing.

Borgstrom: In La Chinoise, Guillaume says, “I don’t understand how you can listen to music and write at the same time.” Veronique responds, “To understand you had to do it. Music and language. To struggle on two fronts.” Who do you agree with, and if Veronique, what did you listen to while composing Mooney?

Higgs: I’m with Veronique. It’s hard to say what all I was listening to when composing Mooney because it was written over a three year period and I listen to A LOT of music, but there are a few albums/artists I remember repeatedly listened to: Miles Davis (Bitches Brew), Erik Satie (Gymnopedies & Gnossiennes), Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Blockhead (Music by Cavelight), Craig Burk (History/Decency, Codes), John Lennon & Yoko Ono (Unfinished Music 1 & 2, Wedding Album), a lot of krautrock, musique concrete, minimalism, noise, and other craziness.

Borgstrom: Have Godard’s films affected anything besides your writing?

Higgs: That’s a really interesting question. Yes, I’m certain they have, but it’s hard to say what and how…I mean, they introduced me to narrative techniques I had never previously considered, so they have enlarged my creative playing field. They have encouraged me to really pay attention to what’s on the edge of the frame (or in the case of literature, what is on the edge of what’s being written, what is on the periphery of the sentence). Like in La Chinoise there’s that exchange early in the film: –”What’s a word?” –”A Word is what’s unsaid.” But here I am talking about writing again.

About Christopher Higgs:

Christopher Higgs curates the online art gallery Bright Stupid Confetti. He is also a regular contributor to htmlgiant: the internet literature magazine blog of the future. Other of his belletristic prose can be found in past/present/future issues of many well-regarded literary organs, including: AGNI, Diagram, Quarterly West, Conduit, Salt Hill, Post Road, No Colony, and Action Yes.

About Andrew Borgstrom:

Andrew Borgstrom’s chapbooks are available or forthcoming from Gold Wake, Pear Noir!, Publishing Genius, The Cupboard, & Greying Ghost. He edits for Pindeldyboz and can be found in the Matted Welcome Desert.

Karen Lillis. Photo credit: Jessica Fenlon

Karen Lillis is the author of the books i, scorpion: foul belly-crawler of the desert (Words Like Kudzu, 2000), Magenta’s Adventures Underground (Words Like Kudzu/New York Nights, 2004); and The Second Elizabeth (Six Gallery Press, 2009).

David Hoenigman: When and why did you begin writing?

Karen Lillis: I identified as a visual artist from a very young age until age 25, when I lost a year’s worth of black and white negatives (50 rolls of film) in a tragic accident on a discount busline: The bus left Baltimore and my luggage didn’t. I started writing as my primary art medium because it seemed more immediate, I didn’t have to wait several stages to see even the first proof. Of course, I went into writing at that moment because I was overwhelmed with feelings that didn’t have anyplace to go. That feeling of losing my method of expression was the worst. I felt like I’d lost my ability to be loved. My first writings for a few years were about loss.

David Hoenigman: When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Karen Lillis: At age 13 my journal starts, “I want to be a Writer.” In high school I was a journalism student and proud editor of the school newspaper. In college I was a bitchy humor/advice columnist aiming to be Anka Radakovich or Dan Savage. But I had long identified as a visual artist before all else. It was when photography broke my heart that I turned fully to the written word. I spent 2 years in a class that was aimed at teaching writing to artists. I was in New York then and had been around multi-discipline artists for a while, so shifting over seemed very natural. “Whatever medium you can express yourself in” was the ethos.

David Hoenigman: What inspired you to write your first book?

Karen Lillis: On one level, quitting an office job and working 20 hours a week in a bookstore freed up an enormous amount of energy inside me and I started writing a novel. On another level, I was madly in love with someone across an ocean, and in lust with someone closer to home (but still unavailable) and the conflict was something I literally couldn’t contain inside me, so I had to contain it in a book.

I often begin a book with longing or loss–trying to possess things made unattainable by distance or chronology.

David Hoenigman: Who or what has influenced your writing?

Karen Lillis: Who: Kathy Acker, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, the Beats, Helene Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Audre Lorde, Frank O’Connor, Luke Sutherland, Sparrow, Stanislavski.

What: jobs, sex, loss, identity, daughterhood, gentrification. Cities, Giuliani, Bush, Catholicism, Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, moving from place to place. I have been most influenced by things that surround me and I can’t get away from, or things that cause a friction–having to write out that which can’t be reconciled, including loss or change.

I love the narrative structures of Oz and Wonderland, I derive a sort of lesson there that you (a protagonist) move through life, and things may or may not affect you. Sometimes the obstacles in your path change you, sometimes they alter your path (which is different), and sometimes you dodge flying monkeys. This is a different storytelling philosophy than strictly psychological novels.

David Hoenigman: How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

Karen Lillis: I grew up in an Irish American household where we talked all the time but couldn’t talk about emotional/relationship topics. I think this is the perfect set up for becoming a writer, actually. It ensures I have to write through all the taboos, and that I have the gab necessary to say it all. We all kissed the Blarney Stone. (Actually, it’s only partly true: I didn’t talk in public until age 15. But I haven’t shut up since.)

David Hoenigman: Do you have a specific writing style?

Karen Lillis: Mostly, no, I have had a different style for every book so far. One book was serialized and it practically has a different style for every chapter. I have written narrative poems, poetic prose, erotic/experimental prose, fictional monologues, a story made of aphorisms, poems comprised completely from cliches, short prose made of spoken one-liners, oral history, drawing stories, traditional short stories, a story made of 50-word stories.

Maybe my style is that I’m a compulsive writer and I like making books. Almost all writing I start, I conceive of as a book, a chapbook, a pamphlet–something to be handed to a reader. Book-making was something I did as an artist, and that transitioned very well into the DIY, zine-filled 90s. I know that if I ever have trouble publishing a book, I will just make it myself.

David Hoenigman: What genre are you most comfortable writing?

Karen Lillis: The next one.

David Hoenigman: Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

Karen Lillis: I’d like to convey what it is to be a human walking through the world. To convey what the definition of human is once you strip away all the distractions: your Facebook profile, your Starbucks to-go cup, your resume, your hipster pose, your business casual, the things you do to please or impress everyone else. What’s on the inside looking out? Then again, sometimes I like writing about our costumes, the “drag” we put on everyday or on special days. The mask that either hides or draws out what’s real.

David Hoenigman: What book are you reading now?

Karen Lillis: The Other Side of Paradise, a memoir by slam poet Staceyann Chin. It’s an amazing story of one girl walking through a difficult childhood in Jamaica. The world around her is troubled, and some of it impacts her, but her narrative voice is very clear.

David Hoenigman: Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Karen Lillis: Mostly, Scott McClanahan. I can’t understand why he doesn’t have a 2-book deal from Grove Press yet. If you’re an agent reading this interview, please call Scott McClanahan in Beckley, West Virginia. Now.

David Hoenigman: What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

Karen Lillis: The first person voice. My writing is always something other than everyday reality, and my writing is always personal. That doesn’t change much whether I use the first person, second person, or third person, but when I use the first person it seems to push certain people’s buttons. They can’t separate the author from the narrator from the writing.

On the other hand, I would count myself lucky: For each book, I have found an enthusiastic readership who totally “gets it.”

Todd: For 9 years I’ve run Opium on a brand of pennilessness that shames Poe. But a month ago, after an excruciating wait, Opium for the Arts was born — and we were officially a 501c3 nonprofit. While our reputation is intact, and we try to give every reason to subscribe, I wanted to do something in the spirit of Opium to convince people to donate and support us: something bold, a little bit lunatic, and exhausting to us and superfun for others. And the LDM tour was born.

Timmy: Why did you pursue nonprofit status for Opium Magazine? What are the benefits to running it as/with a 501(c)3 nonprofit?

Todd: Opium couldn’t have survived otherwise. With nonprofit status we can live forever, if people subscribe and donate. I think they will, I think they should, and I hope they do. People have no idea how much $25 means to us. It adds up so fast and we turn it into, I think, literary gold.

Timmy: You’re only hosting 11 of the 13 events, why so?

Todd: Logistically, I’m still only capable of being in one place at one time. And the LDM is like a big literary crowdsourcing experiment gone right. So it made sense that I wouldn’t e hosting in SF or NYC, two places where the LDM is established and well known. I like leaning on the people I have in those cities — Elissa Bassist in SF who’s a worldbeater and a team of literary agent Erin Hosier, improv master Carter Edwards, artist James J. Williams III and newcomer/genius/future co-host Ann Heatherington in NYC.

Timmy: What are your fears and concerns regarding this LDM tour?

Todd: That a plane will crash or I’ll get a monster cold. But I’m getting better at wearing myself out and not paying the long term price. So we’ll see. And also, I’m as madly in love as I’ve ever been, so heartsickness is a concern. The one thing I’m not afraid of is the success of the events. They’re not failproof — nothing is — but there’s so much talent that I’m tapping into (50 writers! 35 judges!) it’s just overwhelmingly flattering that they’re participating and just plain cool that its happening.

Timmy: What are your hopes and dreams for the tour?

Todd: That 100 people subscribe. That we raise $10,000. That people have such a great time they sort of giggle before going to sleep the night they see the show. That the writers involved all find new audiences. That people aid our hunt to turn this into a TV show. That people fall in love with people they meet at the events and look back thirty years from now and think: I love that we were there, that we saw that, that we took a chance, that faraway night.

Timmy: Tell me about some of your travel logistics. I think people will be interested in know how something this massive gets accomplished?

Todd: Oh, man. I can reel off my itinerary in a hot second. It’s freaky. And I always love when people ask where I’m going and their eyes glaze over when I get halfway through the list. And then I think: ha! I actually have to TRAVEL to all those places. But the trick is: buy tickets way early and rely on the air mattresses of strangers.

Timmy: Who are some of the folks that make these Literary Death Matches happen? How’d they get involved?

Todd: I listed SF and NYC people above, but that’s a sliver of who helps. Sara Ortiz of the Writer’s League of Texas in Austin has been fantastic, Zach Dodson of featherproof books was essential to Chicago happening, Andre Perry in Iowa City is a god amongst literary men/women, and San Diego would never have happened without Shauna McKenna. Then there’s Sam Barsanti, my right hand man for LDM — he’s officially an intern, but his true title is “the glue.”

That’s what I love about the LDM, is that I’ve always called it my Fight Club, and it’s truer every day.

The other twist is that many LDM’s happen because I get a Twitter note or an email or whatnot that says, “Bring it to our city!” and I think there’s only one or two where I haven’t immediately put a plan into motion to get there and do it.

So, the mix of those involved ranges from longtime friends I trust, to people in the lit world, to those I’ve yet to meet. Pretty wild, when I think about it. Here’s a perfect example: driving from Iowa City to Minneapolis I called Steve Marsh, who was co-hosting with me. I couldn’t remember who had put us in touch weeks before. And near the end of our conversation I told him, “I’m excited you’ll be a part of the event.” “Why,” he said, “you’ve never met me.” my response: “Exactly!”

Subscribe to Opium Magazine: http://www.opiummagazine.com/

Attend a literary Death Match: http://www.literarydeathmatch.com/

Mark Kuhar

His work has appeared in the anthologies “An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11” (Regent Press); America Zen (Bottom Dog Press); “Action Poetry” (a LitKicks publication); “Cleveland in Prose & Poetry,” (League Press); ArtCrimes #21; Trim: A Mannequin Envy Anthology; Infinite Tide (Studio Eight Books); as well as in “The Long March of Cleveland,” “Ornamental Iron,” “Mac’s turns a New Trick” and “Anthologese the Next,” among others published by Green Panda Press. He was a featured poet in the book Cleveland Poetry Scenes.

He has read his work on WCPN, National Public Radio’s Cleveland affiliate, and he is the founder of the deep cleveland poetry hour, a live monthly spoken-word event. he is also the proprietor of deep cleveland llc, www.deepcleveland.com, which includes deep cleveland press, a small-press publishing company, and deep cleveland junkmail oracle, a literary e-zine dedicated to the spirit of legendary cleveland outlaw poet, artist & underground publisher d.a levy.

He holds a BA in English, with a specialization in Creative Writing (1980) from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.

David F. Hoenigman: What projects are you currently working on?

Mark S. Kuhar: I am currently revising a new book of poems entitled “mercury in retrograde,” working on two long poems: “a cleveland obituary,” and an auiobiographical piece entitled “1552 skyland.” In addition, I hope to edit and publish a 10-year retrospective covering the best deep cleveland junkmail oracle “poem o’ the week” poems that have appeared on www.deepcleveland.com over the past decade.

David F. Hoenigman: Can you tell us a bit about deepcleveland.com?

Mark S. Kuhar: deep cleveland is my online literary enterprise, consisting of deep cleveland junkmail oracle, an online literary site; deep cleveland books, deep cleveland press, and the d.a. levy center for progressive poetics, among other things. It’s a popular stopping place in cyberspace for those interested in poetry about cleveland. Believe it or not, many people are.

David F. Hoenigman: When and why did you begin writing?

Mark S. Kuhar: I wrote my first poem in the second grade and never really stopped. It was and is a primal urge. I pretended for a decade or more while in my 20s that I was a playwright, scriptwriter, novelist and short story writer, but then i came to my senses and returned to my true identity as a poet.

David F. Hoenigman: When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Mark S. Kuhar: I first considered myself a writer when in college, my creative writing professors gave me positive feedback on my work. it was a sort of validation that what i was doing had merit and appeal. before that i hid all my work away in a box and refused to feed or water it.

David F. Hoenigman: What inspire