The Lightning Room With Michelle Bailat-Jones

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

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Grab a couple of ridiculous flashlights and journey into the scars of the Earth and the cut of humanity with Michelle Bailat-Jones’ “Mining” from our infamous March issue; then seek the danger below, should you dare.

1. Did you start writing “Mining” with a rhythm in mind or did you begin with a story and find the rhythm after? or some other way?

“Mining” came about because I’ve been writing a novel about a woman who discovers a naturally-occurring nuclear reactor. There is a lot of science in that manuscript and I found myself getting really bogged down in re-reading all these old radiation protection handbooks and articles I’d translated for my day job. I really needed to get away from the facts of that story and all that radiation physics and find the music of the character somehow. So I wanted to write something that was very image and rhythm based-and also something that was baldly emotional. I wanted to focus on what these people were feeling more than what they were thinking. So yes, in that sense, Mining was about rhythm (and image) first and then I found its (tiny) story when that got moving along.

2. Have you ever been in a mine? I’ve been in caves but not mines, is there a difference in feeling between the man-carved and nature hollowed rock?

I think both elicit a real feeling of awe, but nature-hollowed rock, like all natural phenomena, is perhaps a simpler thing to admire. Man-carved rock is such a testament to human effort and science, and because of that it is very impressive. But the words we use to describe these places-gashes, wounds, scars-is very telling. A mine is just a massive example of a kind of destruction and hollowing-out and removal. I’ve never been inside of a mine, only at the edges, but I’m quite drawn to images of abandoned mines (and ghost towns in general). I’m interested in the places where humans have attempted something large-scale against the natural world and then had to give it up. The machinery we leave lying around after those attempts is always very sad, often big and complex, and then it sits there doing nothing and getting rusty.

3. When you share your life with someone you love, how much and what part is that?

I like that “Mining” generated this kind of question because the woman in the story has a real problem with sharing, doesn’t she? She’s invited this person to come with her into a very intimate and dangerous place, but she’s not willing to take it much further than that. It’s an old story, really-the ways that people are daring with their emotions when things get scary, how certain situations can create a kind of false intimacy. And how people seek out those moments instead of the quieter ones.

4. Most of the things we do that feel important to us have been done before. Why is it still important or isn’t it?

Perhaps it depends on the day. Some days all the questions that have been asked a million times before seem just as vital-or maybe it’s that we feel *we* are still vital-to the world, to those questions, to each other. Which is good, I think, that we feel this way from time to time. Because other days, it’s all about feeling small and redundant.

5. Close your eyes for five seconds. What do you see?

Since I’ve been re-working that last sentence of “Mining” for question number 6 in between writing these other answers, that is all that I see-the long hallway of the abandoned mine tunnel, the narrow train tracks, these two lonely figures with their ridiculous flashlights and the way their bravado has got them walking differently than they usually would, and closer to each other.

6. Write one sentence of this story/poem if it were told from the man’s perspective (3rd person limited or 1st person).

They tiptoe over rickety boards to the opening yawn of the old mining pit, shout down into it to hear their voices tremble through the rock, and this is when he really hears her, hears the riddle of her voice that even the most practiced geologist cannot yet solve, and this secret voice of hers is softer than he’d imagined, softer even in its yelling and its menace and its echo, and so he is standing now, hands on the wire cage meant to keep them from falling into the old pit, he is gripping the metal and looking down into the blackness, and it hits him then, that all this holding on, these clenched fingers and careful steadying, this power in his arms and body, it hits him then that none of this will be able to hold the ground as steady as he needs it, that no, no part of him will be able to stop the crumble and the falling when this mine is finally ready to cave in.

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DeWitt Brinson is a poet. That guy, he does it all.