Author Interview with David Scott Hay

Damien Roos, an incredible part of our PANK family, sat down to talk to David Scott Hay about his novel, The Fountain.

ORDER THE FOUNTAIN HERE

Intro: In David Scott Hay’s new novel, The Fountain, a water fountain at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago magically grants drinkers the ability to create exactly one masterpiece of their own, a gift that carries dire consequences. The Fountain is a mad dash, meta and epic and loud. Hay shreds fine art culture and all its pretensions, sounding the call for true artists to do the very thing they were born to do: Create.

His small press debut, The Fountain is scheduled for winter release by Whisk(e)y Tit, a publisher proudly “committed to restoring degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts”. It will also be translated and released in Russia in 2022. Order now at The Fountain | Whisk(e)y Tit (whiskeytit.com).

In this interview, we cover a range of topics such as authenticity in art, drugs as a creative crutch and Ted Lasso. Also, we drink.

Damien Roos: I decided on Yuengling Black & Tan for this interview. It’s sort of a November go-to for me. I assume you’re drinking the patented Old Fashioned you mention in your author bio? 

David Scott Hay: Yes, with less of the simple syrup in this batch. I’m actually drinking it out of a Whiskey Tit glass. Swag from the publisher. Can you see the logo? 

DR: Oh, that’s nice. Yes, the W logo.

DSH: When I pitched Miette, the editor of Whiskey Tit, my first line was, “If we end up working together, I’m going to get a tattoo of your logo.” And then I flew out to AWP (Association of Writers and Writers Programs) to meet her. This was just a year and a half ago, right before everything got locked down. And Miette was like, “Where’s the tattoo?” and I was like, “Where’s the book?”   

DR: [laughs] 

DSH: I haven’t gotten the tattoo because the book hasn’t come out yet.

DR: Well, as a read, The Fountain is the sort of book in which you can really sense the author’s glee. It seemed like you had a lot of fun writing it.

DSH: It’s funny that you say that. Lauren Groff was one of my thesis readers. She said the book felt like it was written with half-repressed glee, or something to that effect. 

Yes, the book was joyfully written. I wrote it in secret, so I didn’t have any outside pressure, or whatever. At that time, I was building furniture, and Bob Bellio (the real-life protagonist in The Fountain) was across the hall creating sculptures. If I had an idea, I would write a chapter here and there, just exploring different characters. I would go 6 months without looking at the manuscript. Then I’d check out a show or something, or have an inspiring conversation, and I would go back and revisit. I’ve done a number of screenplays and plays and books, but the process always seems to be a little different every time and I think that’s what keeps me from feeling like I’m just hammering out something. Which is different than building furniture, where there’s a very linear process. You design it, you go get the wood, you bring it back, you do your rough cuts, you sand, you put it together, stain it, lacquer it, and do the final touches or whatever. 

With a book, especially one that’s very scattershot, it’s like, “Okay, now I need to start connecting the dots and putting stuff together.” I finally gave some chapters to a good friend of mine and he was like, “Yeah, this is good, keep going.” And I got to a point where I realized it would take me another 10 years to finish the book. So I was like, “Oh, let’s go to grad school. I’ll already have the jump on things.” And then I went to work.  Smoothed it out to where everything worked craft-wise, solved head-hopping issues and what not.

But in the initial stages, I just wrote freely. Whatever amused me and made me laugh, I wrote. There are so many inside jokes with friends of mine and snippets of song lyrics in that book. Some of my favorite opening lines from books are even buried in there. I won’t say which ones but…it just made me happy. My thesis advisor got through it and was like, “I know there are a lot of coded references in here. The ones I caught were amazing.” It really elevated the joy of it. 

DR: And did you set out to do a takedown of art culture and commodification, or did the narrative just take on that message? 

DSH: Narrative on this one. I was at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I swear to God, this is what happened. We’re walking along, checking out contemporary pieces. I mean, you talk about the old masters and stuff like that, “I got no beef.” But with contemporary art, I’m like, “Well, that is a big red cube, I can do that. My kid has done that…is it art?” So, it gets controversial. My whole litmus test is this: “If I can do it, it’s not art.” So, I’m looking at the red cube and going, “Well, that’s not art,” But then sometimes you get some stuff that really affects you. I saw one particular piece at the MCA, and that was kind of the inspiration for Tabitha’s piece in the book. 

DR: What piece did you see that affected you?

DSH: It was a Lee Bontecou retrospective. I can’t remember a specific piece, but I know it was a combination of her mobiles and sculptural work. I don’t think I glanced at her ink work.  But her mobiles… “Oh, this is actually crafted and it’s doing something and I’m physically drawn towards it. Her work was not easily dismissed.” And we continued along and came upon a water fountain with a little bubble man on it and the little dots going up for the water. You know, like the generic bubble people they use on restroom signs? 

DR: Yes. 

DSH: It was one of those inspirational moments. I’ve only had a handful of those, a lot of times it’s just craft and curiosity, hoping for discovery. But every now and then I get an idea that’s like, “Okay, so, what if people took a drink of water from this fountain and became these brilliant artists?” And then they had the Kiddie Art Exhibit area at the MCA too. Same thing. I saw it and was like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if somebody actually created something in the Kiddie Art Exhibit area that rivaled whatever? What would that look like?” I couldn’t shake the idea.

DR: I want to talk about the water fountain. Like, the device itself. As the story goes, a drink from it grants a person the ability to create exactly one masterpiece, and then they die soon after. I read it as basically symbolic of the often destructive nature of artistic creation, the “staring into the abyss” aspect that sometimes manifests as addiction, depression, or dysfunctional living. Is my analysis on track?

DSH: Perhaps in hindsight. It was really as simple as just going off the premise. So, literally, it’s not so deep– the inspiration, after all, was the little bubble man drinking the water and a question of “What if?”. Write for story and cut for theme.

That said, it’s really a matter of authenticity. Ross Robert, who starts as a minor character and becomes a main one by the end, has a problem with being authentic with himself. And the dilemma with the water helps him realize that. His wife is like, “No, there’s no instant anything to successful art. Art has to be self-expression and it has to be authentic.” So, there’s a little bit of that whole “just add water” adage, right? Literally, just add water, Damien, and you can have an artistic masterpiece, and fame and fortune. But no, for him art is therapy and he’s working out something. He’s exploring something. And that’s what I did with The Fountain. It started off as a joke, like “What would happen?” It’s the high concept pitch, right? And then I have to argue every side; for, against, and their temptations and rationalizations. 

DR: I believe one of the characters states that some artists use heroin, some are heavy drinkers etc. There’s that element of self-destruction. 

DSH: All those junkies and drinkers. Yes, yes, yes. That’s the thing that makes me happy, getting to explore all these different sides of the argument. Tabby, the character you mention, came from the Midwest, never had an artistic bone in her body, drinks from the fountain, suddenly gets all this attention. Right? 

DR: Yes. 

DSH: This younger art critic is suddenly like her little boy toy and she’s got these art students worshipping her. She justifies it like, “Why is this any different than doing heroin or taking LSD or doing anything else? It unlocked my potential.” That’s her argument and, as a reader, you’re going to be like, “Well, yes, The Doors, I’m sure did a little of something and Johnny Cash sure did something too.” Her argument is that everybody needs a little help. 

DR: Yes. I think it’s a compelling one, too. Maybe I took that thread and really ran with it in a way that you may have not even intended as an author. But that might also be because numerous pop cultural references you cite in the work would fall into that category. 

DSH: And what does that say about a successful artist? They all had access. There’s no leg up. I mean, what if the Beatles hadn’t discovered drugs? And thank God Fentanyl wasn’t popular in the ’60s.

But that’s also the time, right? Hendrix was doing drugs. Everybody was doing drugs. The Stones were doing drugs. The Beatles were doing drugs. The Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen. The Rolling Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs. It is what it is.

I mean I’ve written sober, I’ve written stoned, I’ve written drunk, I’ve written however. I’ve written while feeling sick, I’ve written sober. The difference in output is negligible. As long as I’m not assholing my way from point A to point B.  But yes, you could argue it’s like a creative crutch. Right? 

DR: Sure. Could be to some. 

DSH: Of course, the water fountain is the ultimate crutch. The Beatles still have to sit together writing songs and they still have to figure out musical problems, even when they’re drinking or high or whatever… 

DR: And they had talent, of course. 

DSH: Tabby gives that as an excuse. But at the end of the day, she’s not drinking alcohol, she’s not getting high. She has no talent. No sense of craft. She took a drink of water and she made this thing. Suddenly, her whole life has changed. 

And then she was unable to replicate it. It’s the Sophomore Slump at age 70. There’s that panic with her, like, “I need another drink of water.” Because in her mind, that’s what did it. She’s craving the drug for success and I guess digging deeper into the idea that some artists use drugs or stimulants or whatever as part of their process. That her rationale.

DR: I guess I’m trying to even go a little deeper into the rabbit hole with this question. But it’s not even necessarily, like, the performance enhancement aspect. That’s not even what interests me as much.

There’s the quote from Nietzsche about gazing into the abyss, and how the abyss eventually gazes back. I feel like for artists, writers and musicians, their work may take a toll mentally, spiritually, whatever, that people feel they have to alleviate chemically or something. 

DSH: Are you talking about in terms of part of their process, or part of the recharge? 

DR: I would say the recharge. But I guess it can spill into either category. I think for some people, like the musicians in that era that you were just discussing, it was a lifestyle thing, too.

DSH: I think for the people we referenced from the 60s drugs were certainly a part of their lifestyle. But they were still working their craft.

If you want to talk about the Eagles, or Jackson Browne, or the Laurel Canyon scene, or whatever, those guys were building a network. They were jamming with friends. They were learning. They were listening to records, trying to figure out how the fuck they did certain things. 

For those guys, I think it was part of the lifestyle, maybe. Creatively, it was a baseline  throughout. But those guys talked to one another, they hung out with one another, they showed each other chord progressions, they sang campfire songs. They were really in a culture that fostered creativity and sharing. And yes, I’m sure there was mutual recharging as well. There’s a lot of pressure on every level.

DR: And everyone approaches their craft differently, of course. Writers, for example, prioritize different aspects of storytelling.

DSH: Yup. People in Hollywood and MFA programs talk about, “Raise the conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict.” And for me it’s, “No, establish the connection. Bolster the connection. Conflict doesn’t matter if there’s no connection. Don’t bother upping the stakes if there’s no connection.”

Sometimes the level of conflict I want is Ted Lasso or Peppa Pig. Which if you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t know Peppa Pig. It’s a show for very young grade schoolers featuring pigs with English accents. It’s all polite misunderstandings or things being misplaced. Sometimes that’s the level of conflict I want. 

It’s a little “All right, let’s figure it out. Hey, we’re going to sing the song. Figure things out,” That’s what I want. Marvel’s like, “The known universe is going to be destroyed.” But with The Fountain it’s like, “Oh, it comes down to personal choice and whatever. I say that knowing it has apocalyptic undertones.” Do you watch Ted Lasso? 

DR: Everyone’s asking that. I guess I need to get around to it.

DSH: It’s very fun. It’s very heartfelt. But the conflict is very low. It’s just navigating relationships, hurt feelings and all that. If you have the connection, you can have that low-level conflict seem big. Then any conflict, whether it’s a misunderstanding or somebody’s ignoring somebody, it gets heightened emotionally. 

DR: Let’s go ahead and move to Bill Hicks, who you mention in this book. He was railing against over commodification and “brand culture” back in the 90s, when the idea of selling out was an actual problem that artists considered. This might be why I ultimately read your work as precisely the dystopian nightmare that Hicks seems to be warning us about. 

DSH: I think in retrospect, that works. I don’t know.  Consciously, I wasn’t trying to do it. Again, it was this kind of exploration of the premise.

DR: Retrospect would be fine. I mean, it’s a very dystopian novel for anyone who’s involved in the arts. It’s kind of frightening, right? 

DSH: Well, there is the commodification of the water, of course. And the curator of the MCA doesn’t know how it works. He doesn’t even care how it works. He knows you can only get one masterpiece out of each person who drinks. He’s not curious. That’s a big Ted Lasso thing, being curious. And the curator is not. He just knows this is good for the museum and good for his pockets. And later while the character of B is presented with a great financial opportunity, any sense of selling out is completely flooded away by the freedom the windfall would provide. He’s done with his war.

In regards to Bill Hicks, I always liked his joke about Willie Nelson selling out, and he’s like, “That’s okay. He owes the IRS a $100 million. He can cash in. Willie is given a free pass because he’s Willie fucking Nelson.” I love it.

DR: So, let’s get some insight into how you craft your characters. I notice for example that the antagonist critic Duckworth shares the same affinity for antique typewriters that you express in your bio. Likewise, the loveable badass Jawbone apparently suffered a similar miter saw accident as yourself. Do you believe there are pieces of writers in all the characters they create? 

DSH: Yeah. Part of it is laziness, I guess. Part of it is also that I’m a big fan of The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. It’s such a great book. Michael Ondaatje, a not-too-shabby writer, interviews Walter Murch a few times over. It’s one of the few books I have. It’s dog-eared. I got Post-it notes everywhere in it. 

A lot of writers are like, “Oh, I can’t read your book right now because I’m writing and I don’t want it to influence me.” I adopted that for a while. Walter Murch was like, “No, no, no. These are spark points.” His dad was a painter and would lay out canvas in their New York apartment hallway. So, all these people would actually step and then walk on his canvas and then he would pick up the canvas and he would paint but he would still have the footprints of people on it. He talked about spark points and was like, “When I’m editing, I watch everything, I listen to the radio. If I hear a jingle that’s got a weird rhythm, I’ll try that in the editing.” He allows his outside world to influence him in terms of art at that moment. For me, that was really freeing. 

So, I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to give Jawbone my finger thing.”  Because I lost the tip of my finger in a chop saw accident, right? I’m going to give her that because that’s something that happened to me. I can certainly describe how it happened. Same with the chicken fried rice incident. But the old saying is “just because it happened to you doesn’t mean it’s interesting.” So how do I make that interesting and serve my story?

So, in The Fountain, every character has something that happened to me and/or a feature I thought was interesting or I had done a deep-dive into. 

DR: Well, tell me this, while we’re still on the topic of characters. I’m curious to know: Ross Robards’ character is inspired by Bob Ross, I assume? 

DSH: Uh-huh. 

DR: Yes. Okay. And how did that idea come about? 

DSH: Twenty years ago, I saw a stand-up comic who did a bit about Bob Ross being a Vietnam Veteran with PTSD. And he did a little 3-minute bit. It wasn’t super funny. My dad’s a Vietnam Vet. But the way he did it stuck with me for so long and every time I saw Bob Ross I was waiting for him to go off his tit. And 20 years later I needed an example of a commercially successful artist for my novel. I need somebody who has done the work and been successful. Right? 

DR: Yes. 

DSH: And Bob Ross seemed to be the most generic successful artist. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make him Bob Ross. It’s going to be Ross Robards. I’ll change the name into something less obvious.” Which I never did.

DR: So, you basically stuck one of those disguises on him with the glasses and the fake nose thinking we wouldn’t know the difference.  

DSH: Yes, I Grouched him. So, it’s also, “Okay, that’s my character, what’s his reaction of the things that are going on? What’s his backstory? What’s his point of view?” And Ross is the commercially successful artist and fuck him for having had success. But in writing him I realized he probably has the strongest artistic point of view of anybody in there. Jawbone kind of equivocates about the water and Ross is like, “No. Art is about what comes from within, it’s about working out whatever problems you have, and it is an outlet.” I mean, he is a stronger point of view character. He doesn’t compromise his point of view about art. He digs his heels in and, actually, his point of view becomes stronger. So, that pleased me because he wasn’t becoming a joke character. 

DR: Probably my favorite question The Fountain presented concerned the value of the artistic end versus the inherent worth of the artistic process. And I know it’s something that you’ve talked a little bit about. And so, basically, a drink from the fountain is like the ultimate hack for hacks, allowing anyone to produce one masterpiece before the water kills them. I’m kind of curious to hear your direct thoughts about that question too. Process versus pure end result. Can’t beauty maybe just sometimes be easy?

DSH: Yes. Beauty can be easy. Like a dandelion or rose or nature. It can stimulate afterward. But we also know that’s evolution, the green fuse, that it takes time to get to that particular point. Writing The Fountain was a process. I came up with a premise and I explored it. And I’d gone through an MFA program and bolstered my craft and really focused on how to fold the story back in so it became coherent and cohesive. Connections, right?

But, sure, art can be effortless too. I can’t imagine that Jackson Pollock towards the end of his life was really stressing over those last paintings. I mean, somebody did a Red Cube at the MCA. Not a lot of talent is involved. Still, it’s kind of under the shield of art. Right?  Everything is art. It can be art. And it’s like, “Well, come on.” To me, art always needs to have a little bit of craft behind it. Even if we’re talking about a rose or a dandelion. There’s a line in Rian Hughes’ XX that gob smacked me. This SOB nailed it in one sentence: “In short, she saw that there was an art to Art, and that it was not something magical or transcendent, but a craft, and good art – the type that could really move you, that you felt with your diaphragm rather than your intellect – was simply the endgame of being very good at your craft.”

DR: I figure this is probably a good one to end on. I found it funny how Jawbone and B so often express the ultimate anxiety of any artist, the worry that they are frauds, doubting their own authenticity as artists. I wonder if this is something that you’ve felt yourself and if it’s a feeling that haunted you while writing the book. 

DSH: No, no, no. Well, maybe sometimes a fraud. I did Chicago Theater and I know so many actors and playwrights I talked to had that feeling of, “I’m a fraud and they’re going to find me out because I’m not Edward Albee.” Look, there’s only one Edward Albee, there’s only one Shakespeare. And there’s only one Jackson Pollock, and there’s only one whomever, right? I’m not competing with Tom Wolfe. I’m not competing with the Met. I think some people with talent and a dollop of self-awareness have a tendency to think, “If I’m not as good as the greats, then what I have to say doesn’t have value.” Again, I’ve never had that feeling where I’ve felt like a fraud. But I’ve had that moment where people have taken me seriously and I feel a certain responsibility to seem like I know what I’m talking about. To have answers and to present them in a coherent manner. 

The closest to feeling like a fraud vibe comes from working on a first draft and that a little voice telling me it’s not as strong as my last polished work. Of course, it isn’t. But that’s my biggest creative fear, I guess, or obstacle. I don’t trust the process. I’m very suspicious of it, for whatever reason.  But when I do it’s a very joyful process.

I think for some reason writers, and I’m projecting of course, with any kind of self-reflection or self-awareness feel like frauds because they feel like, as I said, if I can do it, it’s not art, right? Well, I wrote a book. I spent a lot of time on it, crafting it, making myself laugh. If people react well to it and connect with it, then there’s something of merit to it. I have to believe that whatever I’m working on has something of merit that people might connect with, maybe become a spark point.

David Scott Hay by Mycki Manning

David Scott Hay is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and novelist who once lost the tip of a finger to a chop-saw in Chicago. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son, dog, chickens and a dozen typewriters. Find him on DavidScottHay.com.

Damien Roos is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School, a former editorial fellow at Guernica Magazine and a reader for PANK. His work has appeared in such outlets as New South Journal, The Master’s Review and Gravel. He lives in New York City with his wife and bluenose pit bull. damienroos.com

“When is a Body Not a Body?”: an interview with Rone Shavers

(Clash Books, 2020)

INTERVIEW BY NAYA CLARK

Silverfish, by Rone Shavers is an experimental novel that details a slice of life in the dystopian Incorporated States of America: a country much like our own, but one in which the corporatization of culture results in the commodification of human bodies. The central characters are Angel, a code-switching, artificial intelligence robot, and Clayton, a human “combat associate” whose job is to hunt, kill, and capitalize on “primitives,” those unaccounted-for humans who live outside of the advanced technological realm. Together they use each other’s knowledge, consciousness, language, coding, and lack thereof to achieve liberation.

Rone Shavers writes in multiple genres. His fiction has appeared in various journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Big Other, Black Warrior Review, PANK, and The Operating System. Shavers’ non-fiction essays and essay-length reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as American Book Review, BOMB, Electronic Book Review, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is fiction and hybrid genre editor at Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and he teaches courses in creative writing and contemporary literature at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.

In this interview, we discuss code-switching, experiential writing, language, euphemisms, and Afrofuturism.

Naya Clark: One of the most recognizable elements of Afrofuturism within Silverfish is code-switching. Angel would often quote renowned Black figures and mention of African deities are made throughout the book. Why were those added?

Rone Shavers: Well, if I had to describe myself, that’s what I am: a code-switcher. I’m constantly code-switching—you might hear me do it at some point during this conversation. I do that, and at other times I do what a friend of mine, Vershawn Young, calls “code-meshing”, which is blending different kinds of language styles together, rather than switching from one style to another…

NC: For people that code-switch, like you and I, it’s effortless in conversation. It just happens. When placed in an experimental novel, how did you decide when to implement code-switching, so that it translates accurately?

RS: One reason was sort of pragmatic, and the other was a bit more abstract. I’ll speak about the pragmatic one first. First off, if I’m writing from the Angel’s consciousness, from the Angel’s point of view, and the Angel has access to all this information, then of course, that information is going to come out in a very particular sort of way, such as in its original form. It doesn’t have to be mediated through the use of a standardized, proper English. If it’s all just part of an archive of knowledge, then the Angel can simply access it as is. That said, the more abstract reason I wrote in the way I did is that I didn’t necessarily want to filter or translate those things that didn’t necessarily need to be translated. Code-switching normally happens when you recognize a situation in which a thing can’t be said in any other way because of the context in which you say it. And because code-switching is so contextual, if you don’t get it, you won’t get it. Not unless you take the time to figure out what it means. All to say that I want the reader to have to do a little bit of work. That’s part of what makes the book experimental.

NC: I do appreciate that you didn’t over-contextualize those moments. Code-switching happens randomly. It’s not something that can be necessarily timed or described or monitored. It just happens.

RS: Yeah, you can also say that it’s highly referential. In fact, I’d say that in order to code-switch, you have to first be aware of the codes. Admittedly, it’s a little cheesy of me to put it that way but well, it’s true. 

NC: On the opposite end of the spectrum, Silverfish is very technically written and matter-of-fact. Some people have compared it to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and My Ishmael, because they both provoke the reader to go back and re-digest a cut and dry, objective point of view of the human experience. Was that intentional?

RS: Part of my intention in the book was to create these layers of references. I really enjoy the sorts of texts that you can read, re-read, go back to and read again. And where each time you read them, some new fact or tidbit comes out of it. What I am interested in is the idea of networks, networks of reference and communication, and inserting Silverfish into that network. Do you remember Willy Wonka’s everlasting gobstoppers? Sometimes what popped up in my head while writing was that I was making an everlasting gobstopper…

NC: …Layers and layers…

RS: And each one, a different flavor.

NC: I consider Silverfish a philosophical text, as it touches on many layers of consciousness, and the concept of freedom, and the “I”.  Also, as an Afrofuturistic text, how do you think Black identity and the “Black body” ties into this subject?

RS: Blackness, Black, and the Black body are three different things. What is Blackness? Ask 10 different people and you’re going to have 10 different definitions. And as for the black body, well… Wait, can you tell me the connection you made? What you saw in the book?

NC: Well, Silverfish exists in a dystopia where a fleshly human body has a price and is a resource. I think a good example of this is the [Colin] Kaepernick situation. When he, as a body, was an athlete, he’s useful and makes money. But when he, as a Black person, has a statement to make, then he’s no longer valuable.

RS: Yes, absolutely. But when is a body not a body? It’s when the body becomes a substitute for a bigger idea. In Kaepernick’s case, the bigger idea is police brutality against BIPOC. When he knelt in protest against police brutality–and how ironic his kneeling now seems, given what happened to George Floyd!–the reaction against him was so visceral because he gave the fact of racial inequality a physical form. He made an abstract concept concrete. And as we all know, up until his protests, his value as a gifted athlete was his cultural value. So, you’re right. He was just another body who was supposed to, as race-baiting television host Laura Ingram infamously said about Lebron James, “Shut up and dribble”, even though the sport is somewhat different… Really, that’s one of the ways the book leans into Afrofuturism. In America, the black body has repeatedly been used as a money-making resource. In fact, the black body is still commodified. I mean, if you want to consider Kaepernick’s case, then let’s be totally clear about it. It’s not that he’s no longer valuable, it’s that he now carries a negative value. It’s the fear that he will cost the NFL money that keeps him blacklisted. To the owner of a professional sports team, the athlete is basically just a positive or negative revenue asset. That’s what commodity capitalism’s all about.

NC: This reminds me of when Clayton and the other combat associates were assigned tasks that involved thinking, using clues, and human critical thinking abilities. It was associated with a certain paygrade.

RS: You can see echoes of that same idea in the Angel. Basically, as long as you are functioning like a machine or doing a job in which a machine can one day replace you, then everybody’s calm and everything is copacetic. But the minute you begin to question that way of being, it’s assumed that you must be malfunctioning somehow. That you’re wrong, off, out of your lane…

NC: In Silverfish humanity is described very objectively, similar to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Why do you feel that’s the most effective way of describing the human experience?

RS: I don’t really write from an emotional state. Emotions are so fleeting and spongy… I’m not big on evoking an emotional response out of a reader because I don’t know who my reader is going to be. Instead, I like to give space for the reader to have his or her or their own emotional response. They might read the work as funny. They might read it as tragedy. They might read it as horror. I don’t know. Unless they tell me, I’ll never know… I’m always going to be more excited and drawn to ideas, even if it’s dime store philosophy, than I am attracted to emotions. I’m just not that sort of writer. Emotions are fashionable, meaning that they wax and wane according to particular moments in time. But still, I don’t hate emotional fiction. I just think that there are tons of other writers who can evoke emotional responses so much better than me.

NC: It seems that you trust the reader to be intelligent enough to have their own perspective. Another thing about the language is the fact that in this world, they use the word ‘primitive’ with a negative connotation, almost to describe an enemy or an unwanted way of life. Why did you choose ‘primitive’ specifically?

RS: I remember being taken aback the first time I heard somebody use ‘savage’ in slang. I was floored by all the connotations. So yeah, there’s a definite emphasis in the book on euphemisms and how we use them. Also, I really wanted to highlight how dependent the language of commodity capitalism is upon using euphemisms. The two are so incredibly intertwined. For example, you really start to see it if you specifically look at the language of start-up tech companies. They all make mention of ‘angel’ investors, someone who’ll come in and prop the company up by giving them millions of dollars… There are all these little euphemisms that pepper the different characters’ speech throughout the book. For instance, the soldiers are called ‘combat associates’, and they often talk in euphemisms and don’t even realize that they’re doing it… But I think I’m getting slightly off-topic. I chose ‘primitive’ because it’s the mirror opposite of ‘civilized’, which is the other word often mentioned throughout the book. And of course, civilized is a word that carries its own fraught, connotative weight. It’s a euphemism that’s used in really classist and racist ways. 

NC: Speaking of angels, I wanted to understand why that was used for the AI as well. Can you elaborate on the reason why you decided to call this form of AI an angel?

RS: It’s the irony of it. This thing is going around killing everything in sight! It goes back to my previous statements. Calling a cyborg that kills in the name of capitalism an “angel” is, in itself, an ironic euphemism. There’s that, and there’s also the fact that “angel” is one of the most overused terms in the English language. We’re always running around, using the word willy-nilly: ‘Oh, you’re such an angel for doing that’, ‘You sleep like an angel’, angel face, angel eyes, angel dust, angel hair pasta, etc. I could go on, but if you haven’t guessed already, I’m sort of into playing with all of the different ideas that swirl around language, the philosophy and uses of language and stuff. Those are the kinds of things that really interest me.

NC: Another component I noticed in Silverfish is the theme of getting AI to trust humans, as opposed to the other way around. The idea that AI feeds on what you feed it, and what you feed it is what you get back in return. Was that intended?

RS: In Silverfish, the Angel tells Clayton, “You’ll have to think differently,” but she doesn’t exactly or explicitly tell him how or what to think. What the Angel says is basically something to the effect of, ‘I will give you the tools to rebel, to think outside of the box, but you’ll have to do it by yourself.’ I framed it that way because it’s about what one can do with the concept of language. And for Clayton, at least, he decides he can use language to communicate. But language is fallible, you can make mistakes with language. Language is not a perfect way of communication. One of these very common fantasies is that, somehow, we’ll stumble upon an ideal means of communication, where we can be understood without the use of language. That’s why there’s such an attractive strength in concepts like empathy, which avoids language altogether and substitutes direct feelings instead. I mean, we all know that language is an incredibly invaluable tool, something that won’t let us down, but still, people are always going to be able to lie. They’re always going to be able to fudge things. The whole fantasy is that we can somehow have a pure form of communication. We’ll never get there.

NC: In terms of Afrofuturism, I think that’s another reason ‘primitiveness’ maybe applies, because for a long time, people were seen as primitive for those sorts of miscommunications. But it is also futuristic to be able to communicate without language.

RS: I don’t really see it as communicating without language. Because again, that’s a fantasy. I see it more as using language against itself in a very clever way. What I mean by that is… Well, in any society in which you are not a part of the dominant culture, in which you’re a member of a marginalized group, you’re often forced to learn how to speak the dominant culture’s language just as the dominant culture speaks it. But then something really interesting often happens. While still speaking the dominant culture’s language, the marginalized begin to strategize alternate ways of verbal communication that rely upon the use of dominant culture language, but actually makes the language say something entirely different. In other words, they begin to invert and subvert certain sounds, words, and meanings, so that the words they use convey something else. In the Western hemisphere you can see this all over the place. Particularly among Black and Brown people, who have had to devise various language strategies in order to overturn essentialist dominant culture tropes. Basically, BIPOC have had to learn how to remix language in a way that works to ensure not only their agency and culture, but also their very survival. Now, in terms of Afrofuturism, maybe it’s correct to say that BIPOC culture turning language against itself is Afrofuturistic, maybe it’s not. In either case, I agree with you that there’s nothing primitive about it.

NC: Thanks for working with me on that. Was there anything that I didn’t ask or bring up that you want to clarify or mention? Or you want readers to know?

RS: Maybe just the obligatory word about creative writing. A really good piece of writing advice I got when I was in school that I still cling to is to assume that the reader is as smart as you are. Let them come to the conclusion that they need to come to. You have to have enough trust in the reader to be able to come up with some of the answers to things themselves.

“Opportunities for curiosity and generosity”: an interview with Peter Ramos

(Routledge, 2019)

Naya Clark discusses with Peter Ramos his book Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge. In Remarkable Bridge Ramos delves into what goes into poetic translations, referencing poets such as James Wright and César Vallejo; Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes; Luis Palés Matos and William Carlos Williams; Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz, and more.

In this interview, Ramos answers questions regarding how language and place literally and figuratively cross boundaries and connect poets to one another’s works. He also uncovers how references impact their own origins, and the difference in academic and poetic writing in his writing processes.

Naya Clark: In what other ways do you think language overcomes and infiltrates socio-political blockages for people? 

Peter Ramos: That’s a good and tricky question. Or maybe the answer is tricky. There is, on the one hand, the undeniable fact that there are plenty of words and cultural items that find their way into U.S. culture. Let’s take the most basic example: food. I’m sure there are plenty of people in the States who enjoy Mexican food, tequila, etc. And I’m equally convinced that some portion of these people are vocally opposed to Mexican immigrants.  So, there’s that. But even with food, I think (and Anthony Bourdain made this point over and over again in his shows) once you get invested in the people who make the food and you do so with generosity and respect, I think you’re making a bridge toward another group of people and culture outside those of and in the U.S. I guess what’s necessary are these opportunities for curiosity and generosity; these fight xenophobia; these lend themselves to thinking beyond our borders. Here’s an example, though I don’t bring this into my book: In 1992, I bought 100 Poems from the Chinese, all translated by Kenneth Rexroth. My knowledge of Chinese culture before this was limited to Chinese-American food and a small amount of basic knowledge of China’s economic ties to the U.S. But even though I didn’t speak or read Chinese, this book opened a door to another culture that I wanted to explore. The same was true for me when I read translations of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. I’d never been to their homelands, but I felt a human connection to these poets and their worlds. Maybe this is patronizing, but I don’t think it is. Literature (and art and music), as much as if not more than scientific, technological advances, has always represented the height of any civilization’s achievements, so reading translations of poets from around the world often (always?) shows us what is most noble, least downtrodden, about the cultures and people whom these literary writers create. And this, at its best, leads or should lead to geopolitical breakthroughs, generosity, respect.

NC: Within Remarkable Bridge, you discuss the connections poets are able to make with one another through translation. In your opinion, what would be the most defining sort of connection/understanding between poets from translating each other’s work?

PR: As I try to explain in [Remarkable Bridge], the poet who translates a work from another language has to do the work of lifting up her own language (or stretching it, moving it beyond the recognizable terms) in order to accommodate the translation of that which is in the other language always beyond mere transmission of the words into the new language.  I’m paraphrasing Walter Benjamin here, and I use his extensive parts of his essay “The Task of the Translator ” (itself in translation in my copy) in the book. This way of finding new phrases and metaphors to accommodate and do justice to the poetry in translations offers the translator-poet new opportunities—in terms of language and form—for her “own” poetry. I also allude to and rely on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of obligation to an “other” who both cannot be fully understood yet obliges the poet translator (in this case) to respond to that “other” with care. Or, as I write in the book’s introduction,

In his “The Ego and the Totality,” Levinas makes the following argument about the self and its ethical relationship to the other, a relationship of mutual obligation based on the fact that the other, who is equally a free subject, cannot be completely known to the self. And yet we are also obligated to the other because meaning, which is essentially social, can only come about in a relationship with the other: “To show respect is to bow down, not before the law, but before a being who commands a work from me. But for this command to not involve humiliation…the command I receive must also be a command to command him who commands me” (43).

Translation in poetry takes a similar form, an obligation to an original work (an other) that is always in excess of any single translation of it. The original is always beyond a translator’s rendering of it, yet that surplus, precisely—which accounts as well for the necessary strangeness that a translator can capture in her translation—must be respected; it thus compels the translator to be responsible to and for it.

NC: As a poet, how has focusing on Remarkable Bridge as a scholarly, analytical text impacted your way of writing poetry?

PR: When I write literary criticism, I’m trying to make a certain kind of point or argument. When I write poetry, I’m not trying to make a point in the same way. When I write poetry, I’m trying to invite more mystery and atmosphere or mood. For me, there’s something more rational involved in teaching and writing criticism than in writing poetry.

NC: One of the notable points that recurs throughout Remarkable Bridge is that translations and references impact their origins just as much as they’re informed by them. Do you have contemporary examples of this?

In [Remarkable Bridge] I discuss, in some depth, two contemporary poet-translators: Roberto Tejada and Rosa Alcalá. They’re both U.S. citizens, and I believe that the translations they have rendered bring more attention to the work of the original poets besides informing the original work of these poet-translators, themselves.  In the case of Tejada’s work, he has helped bring more visibility to the Cuban poet, José Lezama Lima. The same is true about the artist Alcalá translates, Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. This idea (that poet-translators impact the work of the poets they translate) seems to come— however indirectly— from T.S. Eliot’s often-quoted lines in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the new (the really new) work of art among them. (Selected Prose 38)

NC: In reference to Clayton mentioning that Vallejo’s poetry should be read in context with where he wrote them (Peru, Paris, etc.), how important is place when writing poetry versus making translations?

PR: I’ve never rendered poetry from another language into English. In my own poetry, place plays a significant part (as well as the people I meet and befriend and get to know in a specific place). I grew up in Maryland until I was 30. And I’m sure the rural areas I had easy access to back then helped me fall in love with the writings of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Sherwood Anderson and others. And I believe these writers had a great influence on my poetry back then. In 1999, I moved to Buffalo for graduate school. And that area—with its elegant, worn down post-industrial rust-belt environment, in many ways like Baltimore, the city I knew so intimately, as well as the fellow grad student I got to know, and still speak to—all of that changed my writings and my life, my sense of the world, in ways that are incalculable. There’s a terrific book of essays called Buffalo Trace: A Three-Fold Vibration by Mary Cappello, James Morrison, and Jean Walton, each one of whom is an author in her/his own right, but these are their reflections on moving to this city to enter University at Buffalo’s PhD program in the 1970s and 80s. It’s an amazing book, and each writer captures the essence of that city in that time and of getting to know other graduate students and how all of this affected them deeply. It’s also worth mentioning that Robert Tejada sent me this book and that he, Rosa Alcalá and I all met as PhD students at University at Buffalo at the same time. These two, as well as other graduate students and some of the professors, made my time as a graduate student in Buffalo so rich, intellectually and in many other ways. 

NC: Remarkable Bridge discusses how language has the ability to change writers’ writing style and personal politics. For instance, Langston Hughes’ travels to South America and Cuba. On a personal level, has travel affected you as a writer and scholar, or people you know?

It has. And this is probably more true for people like Roberto Tejada (who lived in Mexico City for a decade or more) and my brother, Stephen Ramos, who besides the traveling he did with our family, went to Spain and then Nicaragua for more than three years. I know this kind of travel (and what are the right words here, temporary expatriation?) deeply influenced their intellectual, political, aesthetic and cultural values. And obviously these experiences made them even more fluent in Spanish. To learn another language is to double your world. For my part, I would travel with my family to Valencia, Venezuela on most Christmases until I was 21. My father was a Venezuelan citizen, and his mother and brother (and extended cousins, aunts and uncles) all lived there, even after my father arrived in the U.S. in 1964. For reasons I think I understand, my father didn’t speak to us in any language other than English, though he could speak five. I believe he thought our being bi-lingual would interfere with our assimilation. I’m sad he didn’t teach us Spanish, but I understand. Therefore, when we went to Venezuela, our cousins and my brother and I would speak “Spang-lish,” and this was an introduction into speaking another language. Also, of course, just experiencing the culture, the landscape, the people of a country like Venezuela deeply affected me. It wouldn’t be until a few years after I went there last that I would bring my senses and recollections of the place—the Indigenous and metropolitan cultures, the music, the food, even their version of Catholicism (so different from that of the Catholic churches we attended in those days that were made up of the descendants of Irish, German, Italian, and Polish immigrants) and the people—into my own poetry at some point.     

NC: Some of the most complex forms of translation in Remarkable Bridge are William’s Translations of Palés Matos poetry, which makes reference to specific words and phrases within afro-Caribbean dialects, surrounding the complexities of race. You discuss what Walter Benjamin describes as “pure language”, stating that a translation needs to be transparent. What is your personal perspective of how transparency can be maintained across language barriers? 

PR: I’m not sure I would say that Benjamin’s “pure language” is the same thing as or an example of transparency. In my chapter on William Carlos Williams, my argument is that Williams generates an English version of Palés Matos’s poem that involves a fraught (and in some ways problematic) version of minstrelsy in which Williams is trying to approximate an Afro-Caribbean tone in his translation without merely “copying” or finding each exact word in English. The translation has to honor the original without being a mere translation of it; in some senses it has to be a different poem.  

NC: When you refer to a poem’s afterlife, is this after translations, references, or interpretations have been made? What is the defining moment of a poem having an after life?

And to continue my answer from the previous question here, my arguments threading the book together involve the way in which the work of honorifically and artistically translating a poem from another language often shows up in a poet’s “own” poetry. So, for example, Williams’s sense of the New World, with all of its Indigenous, colonial, racial hybridity (often fraught, obviously) that he picks up from the Palés Matos poem that he translated will ultimately show up in Williams’s own poetry and its appearance there, maybe more than in the translation, should be noted as an afterlife of the Palés Matos poem. Williams’s mother was Puerto Rican (like Palés Matos), but it’s also important to remember that Williams never thought of himself as other than White. Such encounters in the New World—between lighter skinned Latin Americans and those that have more visibly African features— have a history of explosive violence, oppression, injustice, as is hopefully obvious to most people, and Williams is himself guilty of blind spots to race and class. But he also suspected that Latin American poetry (as well as the poetry from Spain) could offer more opportunities to poet-translators in terms of their own work. He understood that such encounters were also rich, worthy of celebration.     

NC: What is the major impact/takeaway you’d like for readers to get from Remarkable Bridge?

PR: I quote from the last paragraph of my book, which I hope will interest and inspire poet-translators, critics, poetry lovers and others:

Within the world of arts and letters, especially, canon formation is a way of establishing political hierarchies, a way of centering cultural politics. Asserting the need to reexamine the ways in which poetry canons across the Americas have far more connections than has been assumed or critically assessed is ultimately to exalt both U.S. and Latin American/Caribbean poetry. Such a (re)vision would also avoid a paternalistic or condescending approach to the latter, even as it acknowledges the aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic debt so many U.S. poets owe to those who lived and wrote below our border. In the name of national self-interest [at least], we should look upon translations into English as an important means of keeping our own language vital, rejuvenated, refreshed. This book examines such intersections as they have occurred throughout the Americas, and I am hopeful that others will take up this kind of critical approach and apply it to cultures and countries around the globe.

NC: What would you recommend for those interested in reading or conducting translations?

Wow! There are so many, I feel overwhelmed by the question. How to translate poetry is not something I’ve done yet, but those interested in translations should pick the poets they are interested in and see if any of them have translated poems into English. One might also look into a country that he/she is interested in and find out which poets from that country have made it to the U.S. (or English-speaking countries) through translation and then begin there. It’s a long road and it takes some digging, but it’s also filled with delights. The “new” is always a promise, and the world is still much bigger than we imagine.

Naya Clark is an Atlanta-based writer from New Jersey. Clark enjoys the challenges of writing articles, reviews, poetry, and interviewing other writers and artists. She is an Assistant Editor at Urban Ivy and an interdisciplinary freelance writer. In her spare time, she is underlining good sentences and organizing local art events. More of her work can be found at NayaClark.com.

Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared in New World Writing, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online), elimae, Mandorla and other journals.  Nominated several times for a PushcartPrize, Peter is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections. Lord Baltimore, his forthcoming book of poetry, will be available in January, 2021 on Ravenna Press.  An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. 

“Instead of closing venues, we wanted to open up new windows”: An Interview with Tommaso Cartia and Daniela Pavan, co-founders of Creative Pois-on

INTERVIEW BY HAYDEN BERGMAN

#CreativityWillSaveUs is the latest project from the New York-based storytelling platform Creative Pois-On, bringing together artists from around the world to reflect on art and creative practice during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Among the contributors are actors, musicians, visual artists, songwriters, dancers, digital artists, and more. The project is manifested in social media, podcasts, and video form, the last of which is a particularly affecting anthology series in which artists reflect, encourage, and offer performances in their various disciplines.

Hayden Bergman (HB): Marco Calvani made an interesting point in Episode 2 about how the pandemic seemed to force us all to be more aware of our (the) present, and unable or unwilling to imagine the future or our future selves. To what extent did your experience of pandemic-time figure into this project?

Tommaso Cartia (TC): When the pandemic hit, we at Creative Pois-On, were working on a series of our Podcast Show entitled “On Stage,” exploring the performing arts through interviews with actors, writers, directors, and producers, like for example, actress and singer Kayla Davion who plays Tina Turner in “Tina: The Musical” on Broadway. During that month the theaters shut down completely because the COVID-19 started becoming a realistic threat. So we thought that we should have done something concrete for the global community of artists who all of a sudden saw their shows cancelled and their livelihoods in danger. Instead of closing venues, we wanted to open up new windows, even though just virtual ones, to these artists and human beings, thinking that these people truly are always significant thermometers of the times we are living in. Our mission as a storytelling platform and multimedia productions boutique is to make the powers of creativity and imagination available to all of us once again, through the enchanting channel of storytelling. And so we thought to explore how creativity can actually help us navigate these very challenging times by asking prominent figures from the world of art, culture, and entertainment to join their voice in support of our global community of artists who are seeing all of their venues temporarily shutting down to face the pandemic emergency. All together they raise a voice that could break through these walls of isolation sending everybody a positive message that #CreativityWillSaveUs and #TheShowWillGoOn, and that we can spend this time making the most out of our creative powers.

Daniela Pavan (DP): The pandemic emergency generated an unprecedented scenario that forced all of us to stop for a while and reflect. This stop generated many changes in our lives that were completely unexpected and that left many of us disoriented about the future. #CreativityWillSaveUs at the beginning was thought and designed to give voice to artists who work in the theater industry, to share their talent as well as vision in a time where they had to stop working and had no ideas about how their future would have looked like. We received so many contributions that we decided to open up to artists from different disciplines. Listening to their contributions, I believe that I personally was inspired by all the artists who have been part of the project, mainly by two traits that I believe we should all think about: resilience and adaptability. These two traits appear to be very natural to many creative minds, and I believe are also the main traits that will help us all go through the post-pandemic time.

Tommaso Cartia

HB: COVID-19 caused much unrest and debate in the U.S. and abroad, and the murder of George Floyd even more so. Im curious, what role does the idea of the nation play in this project? Im thinking specifically of the phrase imagine nations” that appears at the beginning of each episode, followed by, imagine nations coming together.”

TC: We start from the central concept that art and creativity unify all people, genders, and nations. Also, we are both from Italian origins, living in a country, the U.S., a dream which we chased, believed in, and are still believing in. The states in America should be “united” by definition, and I know that in a way they still are despite any divisions. In our project #CreativityWillSaveUs as well as in all of our productions, we promote unity and togetherness always and we give voice to these feelings. We had the chance to unite in one format creatives from all over the world, Americans, Europeans, Italians, and their sentiment is a global one. When something as profoundly disruptive as a pandemic hits, we can’t help but think, even more strongly, that we are one single organism and we should work and live in unison to really navigate this situation as we should do in every circumstance in our life. #CreativityWillSaveUs brings imaginations and nations together. I want also to say thank you to our Editor, Author, Playwright, and contributor at Creative Pois-On, David James Parr, who came up with the clever tagline “Imagine nations, Imaginations.”

DP: In a moment where the whole world had to stop and where travel has been forbidden for a while, where governments asked people to stay home and to keep social distancing, #CreativityWillSaveUs shows how important the role of Creativity is in our lives, as a bridge-builder among nations and cultures. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what background you have, creativity connects people and opens up minds to explore ideas together. This to say that in a moment that is politically very complicated worldwide, in the U.S. in particular, considering also the elections next November, creativity can be a driver to connect people and to help our society evolve, following the examples of artists and their ability to adapt also to difficult times and unprecedented scenarios…this is also the meaning of the theory of evolution by Darwin, after all…it’s not the strongest or the quickest one who survives. It is the one who can adapt to change.

HB: The anthology came to mind when watching each episode — how did you come to choose these pieces from each contributor, and what factors did you consider when putting them together?

TC + DP: When we were brainstorming about the artists that we wanted to include in the project, we started from the ones that we’ve already had the chance to interview both on our Podcast Show and Storytelier – our editorial project. Our first reach contemplated NYC’s performing artists but then we soon felt that we wanted to enlarge our reach and circle the world with our episodes and explore all different types of creative disciplines. We wanted each episode to represent this diversity as much as possible, from the different nations or states where the artists were sheltering to the different disciplines, including visual arts, digital and media arts, dancers, singers, musicians, even make-up artists. This diversity was also one of the factors that grabbed the attention of the United Nations that contacted us to be part of their SDG Impact Awards – The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are a call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people live in a culture of peace and economic prosperity. Our artists as mentors are natural drivers who can help us redesign the world of tomorrow by letting us discover how powerful our creativity and imaginations are. To vote for us this is the link: https://www.sdgimpactawards.org/projects/creativitywillsaveus/?fbclid=IwAR0ccwBCVlI4ZDt5miRGpaeKIq-es2BkLGUIeNGz7rGmTwPZcxEJkrugiOs

HB: As Daniela mentioned, the artists in each episode exhibit incredible adaptability. In what ways have you seen their creative processes change, and what impact do you think those changes have on the creative product?

DP: Even though the quarantine has had a very strong impact on many of us, the majority of the artists who contributed to our project let their creative juices flow no matter what. All of them were worried about the future of live performances, but no matter what, they shared their talents and thoughts with us. Quarantine gave them time to think and to create, a great opportunity to find new ways to express themselves and new stories and perspectives. A big lesson for all of us. A lot of people found themselves suddenly unemployed during the past months or saw their income drop because of the COVID-19, and many of them reacted by watching TV all day and just feeling depressed. The difference is in the attitude you have while facing difficulties. Artists didn’t give up their creativity, they kept believing in it and in their creative sparks and gave it the chance to flow through their artworks. This has been the same for painters and actors, for musicians and dancers, for writers and illustrators. This is a huge lesson about resilience and I believe that we will have a lot of artistic output to explore soon.

Daniela Pavan

HB: What’s your plan for the project as we all come out of quarantine? 

TC: We just published Episode 10 of #CreativityWillSaveUS. That’s amazing thinking that at the beginning of this journey we thought we had material for just a couple of episodes. We really want to thank all of the artists who believed in this project and trusted us to be the recipient of their emotions during this harsh lockdown. That’s why we decided to pay tribute to all of them in the coda of Episode 10 with a special slideshow dedicated to their contribution. Also, being that June is Pride Month, we are preparing a special episode featuring all LGBTQ+ artists.

Now we wish to take our series to the next level proposing it to big networks and possibly TVs on-demand in the docuseries format. We really want this material to be a testimony to this epochal historical moment, looking at the COVID-19 emergency through the eyes of the creatives of our time. These 10 episodes are what we symbolically call the “Phase 1” of this project, and we are developing now the so-called “Phase 2”. During Phase 2 we will continue to explore how people are utilizing the power of their creativity to rebuild new cultural, social, and business models, and so we want to dive in also to understanding how professionals who are not necessarily artists are envisioning the world of tomorrow. And we will touch base again with our artists, through some Instagram/Facebook live interviews to see how are they doing as we slowly reemerge out of the pandemic.

HB: What else would you like to share with [PANK] readers?

DP:  I would love to add a couple of words about Creative Pois-On and the team behind #CreativityWillSaveUs. We are a storytelling platform and multimedia productions boutique with the mission to connect people (individual pois (polka dots in French) in this big world, on an emotional level, through stories. We do this through podcasting: we also have our own podcast show, the Creative Pois-On podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, i-Heart Radio, Spreaker, and Stitcher, among other platforms, and we do podcasting consulting, production and postproduction for brands as well as for cultural institutions. And we have our editorial project, Storytelier, that has the goal to share stories (fictional and non) to explore powerful narratives to emotionalize information. 

TC: 
First of all I would love to thank [PANK] magazine and the editor Chris Campanioni for their interest in our project, and the journalist Hayden Bergman for his very thoughtful questions! Thank you for helping us share our mission to inspire the people out there to feel empowered by the thought that we are all co-creators of this world and of our collective future. And please follow our journey through creativity on our official channels. And, as we love to say, Ready, Set, Imagine!


Website www.creativepoisn.com 

Official Youtube (#CreativityWillSaveUs series ): https://bit.ly/CreativityWillSaveUsSeries-Playlist

Facebook: @CreativePoison

Instagram: @Creativepois_on

Hayden Bergman is a poet and translator. His work has appeared in Gravel, the story collection What Doesn’t Kill You and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review. He serves as the Books Editor at The Literary Review. You can reach him at hayden@theliteraryreview.org.

An Interview with Elvira Basevich, author of HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD

Pank Books, 2020

Set just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is at once a condemnation of the world, a daydream of America, and an unsent love letter—written and rewritten over the course of ten years—to a dead family. A meditation on intergenerational trauma, resilience, and hope, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is written in the tradition of epic poetry and follows the author as she retraces her mother’s journey to New York City in the summer of ‘89.

PANK: One line from the poem “A Universal Map of the Womb” stuck with me—there’s a moment where the speaker and her mother are waiting in line for a fast-food lunch in Brooklyn. As she pays for their cheeseburgers, she says, “Now, let’s be like normal people.” What’s the normal that these two figures are reaching for in this book?

ELVIRA BASEVICH (EB): That is a verbatim quote. My mom would often say it when I was a kid. I thought I understood what she meant, but the more I tried to do “normal” things with her and express “normal” feelings, the more I felt like we were drifting away from other families, as I was trying to understand how to build intimacy with someone so traumatized by their past. Is it normal to write a long goodbye to a loved one in the form of a book of poetry? It is for me, I don’t know about other people.

I do know that the most normal thing is also often the most extraordinary if we really take the time to understand what motivates us. To love someone fully—in the light of the specificity of their character and yours, of their past and yours—is the most demanding project that you can ask of yourself, one that can require extraordinary creativity and grit. And if each person faithfully applies themselves to the project of loving (and living) fully, I am not sure how much convergence there will be to recast our collective conception of normalcy.

It can be liberating to let go of conventional ideas. In that sense, quoting my mother was meant ironically in that we would never accomplish normalcy, at least not according to external standards, even if we also eat at McDonald’s, watch sitcoms, and I send her flowers on her birthday. We would never be or think or act like other people. And that’s OK too. Often being different for us felt like a sign of failure or weakness. It is gratifying and sometimes simply necessary to let external standards go. Individuality can then flourish.

PANK: How has Nabokov influenced your work? I found myself struck by references and lines throughout the How to Love the World that called to mind Speak, Memory— the opening poem, for instance, declares ‘I am your baby girl, Mnemosyne’– and the text fluidly incorporates Russian epigraphs and phrases. 

EB: You are an extremely careful reader of the book! I had finished Nabokov’s Speak, Memory just a year or two before completing How to Love the World and was referencing it in the opening poem, “Invocation of the Muses.” Nabokov is a genius.

This project, as well as my next poetry book, is in conversation with Soviet and modern pre-Soviet Russian literature, art, and culture, particularly Pushkin and the poets of the Silver Age popular before the Bolshevik Revolution. I am also consciously situating my work among writers of the Jewish diaspora, both living and dead. This is the context where I feel most at home—my literary imagination lights up. I still have so much I want to say, even as I keep returning to the same themes of family, exile, memory, religion, and loss.

I should add that what particularly resonates with me about Russian modern literature that I admire is the robust role of ancient Greek and Roman poetry. I have been fascinated by the idea of “updating” the genre of epic poetry for the contemporary world, told from the point of view of the most powerless and underrepresented voices, such as refugee women and girls, rather than blood-hungry, violent male “heroes” who through the passage of historical time still seem to have a pantheon of pagan gods on their side.

I remember that when I was a freshman at Hunter College, CUNY, I took an introductory class on Greek and Roman mythology. My brilliant professor said, almost in passing, that there have not been any women who have written epic poetry. I took it as a call to action. I decided then and there as a seventeen-year-old that I will be that woman. It is extremely gratifying to know that I kept that promise to myself.

PANK: How to Love the World builds a picture of American experience that’s filtered through refugee and first-generation lenses–arguably the most American identity out there. What’s the most American day you can remember having? Where did you go / who did you see / what did you eat? Who would you invite to re-enact it with you if you could?

My partner recently hosted a Super Bowl party. He is from Hudson, Ohio, and is a huge sports fan, which I find really endearing. I told him that I’d never been to a Super Bowl party before and had always wanted to go! He asked me what I expected it to be like. In response, I said jokingly that I always imagined orange food. And so, he bought Cheetos, cheddar crackers, and cheese dips. Nothing quite makes you feel American like eating orange food while watching the Super Bowl. It was amazing.

I have started writing my next poetry book. It is tentatively titled Cars. In it, I play with the juxtaposition of Soviet and American highways, manufacturing processes and labor rights, the funny names for car parts and types and models, and the values associated with the commodities that define the ideals of a people and a place. For “research,” I have been talking to my partner about that a recent trip he took with his dad to see the Daytona 500 NASCAR race in Daytona Beach, Florida. It’s been really fun—a very different writing process, compared to my first book! I feel like somehow the writing is bringing me closer to America, even as I continue to think about the idea of “cars” in the Soviet Union.

PANK: How to Love the World functions as something of a palimpsest: personal history overwritten with family history, refugee experience, the long slog through trauma, a fraught relationship with a mother. The book is even broken into Book I and Book II– there’s a distinct before & after that placed the emotional journey of reading as a mirror to the physical journey of the emigre. There is a lot of narrative meat here. Why poetry? What did poetry allow you to accomplish with this book that, say, memoir could not?

I will eventually write a memoir, I know, as well as a historical novel loosely based on the life of my paternal grandmother. But save for Angela Davis and maybe Greta Thunberg, I cannot imagine a memoir written by a twenty-something-year-old having much value. I knew I had to undertake the project about my family and my past—I could not wait that long. My writing of How to Love the World was urgent, even though it took me a decade to write it. I have found that poetry is the most effective way to communicate—and transcend—one’s own experiences. And for that, I will always be grateful to poetry.

I am a voracious reader of novels and it reflects in my poetry. I also love poetry books that tell a story with a complex narrative structure. Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is an excellent recent example.

PANK: This book took ten years to write. What would you say to someone embarking on a similar course with a project? Any advice for the journey?

EB: Just. Keep. Writing. There is no other special trick to pull the white rabbit out of the top hat.

And have faith in your voice.

Know that you will finish the project and it will feel wonderful when you do. On a more practical level, as the project moves along, it is helpful to have a blueprint of where you are going and how you plan to get there in the literary execution. For example, which styles would you like to experiment with, whose voices would you like to engage and incorporate, what time of day is best for creative writing?

PANK: If you could upload one text into the brains of your readers Matrix-style before they opened your book, what would it be?

History: A Novel by Elsa Morante.

PANK: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about How to Love the World? [PANK] loves you!

Thank you for giving my first poetry book such a warm literary family—

ELVIRA BASEVICH is a poet and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Her poems have recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poached Hare, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, and Blackbird.

Ask the author: Shira Dentz of SISYPHUSINA

[PANK] Books, 2020

A new interview with Shira Dentz, author of SISYPHUSINA, as she elaborates on what poetry is and the intense collaborative process at work in her new book, available from [PANK] Books.

PANK: Your book opens with a letter to your readers about your formal
approach to these poems, including concerns like text weight, placement on the page, etc. One thing that jumped out to me was your note that “form is sculptural.” Do you approach your writing practice like visual art-making, with text standing in for a medium?

SHIRA DENTZ (SD): I do regard text as a visual stimulus that impacts one’s reading experience, whether or not this stimulus is foregrounded, though I don’t approach it as a stand-in for a medium; part of its medium is its visual nature. Along with referential meanings, written language has shapes and a surface that it’s shaped on. Before children learn to read, for instance, they respond to letter forms as characters or moods. Of course, as we grow and keep learning, we filter what we attend to, and for good reason, as we’d be overloaded otherwise. I understand, too, that one cannot look and read at the same time, just as one can’t see the “crone” and the “young beautiful woman” simultaneously in the famous optical illusion. So I know that I am playing with a multiplicity when I forefront the visual in writing, and also implicating the reading process.

As a writer, I like to be able to draw from all the elements of my medium—language—and this approach embodies my aesthetic commitment to give space to possibly overlooked details—both in the handed-down handling of my medium and subjects of focus. Also, as every language has a limited vocabulary with which to express the range of human experiences, I try to challenge “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein), and experiment with the visual components of my medium in an effort to make language where there is none. All this being said, I am a visual artist too and am sure this is partly responsible for my attention to the visual nature of written language.

[PANK] I’m curious about hybrid forms and how authors define their work when it doesn’t fit perfectly in jars like “poetry” or “prose.” SISYPHUSINA has sections that look like “traditional” lyric poetry, blocks of text that look like prose, marks, and lines like a drawing, sampled text like a collage. Do you define what you write one way or another?

SD: That’s a great question, thank you! This reminds me of the ongoing debate about how to define “prose poetry”—there are many ideas, and for the most part, I think we agree that it’s a generative question in its elusiveness. So I suppose this could apply here. I do feel that I’m mostly a poet, but my aesthetic involves questioning received forms of doing things—what is poetry—I think most writers are engaged with their own “what is poetry” or “what is a novel” or “what is a short story” etc etc. But clearly I’m interested in juxtaposition, both in stillness and movement. I could define it as hybrid or cross-genre. Maybe it’s a genre-in-progress, possibly in the spirit of Lyn Hejinian’s “Against Closure.”

[PANK] Throughout SISYPHUSINA, there are bodies– female bodies that are “imperfect” by some measure, and exhortations or examples of body/appearance modification. In ‘redshift’ an italicized line urges us to “try liposuction!”; earlier in the manuscript, there’s an extensive exploration of how ancient Egyptians shaved, dyed, and styled their hair to change their appearance and achieve an aesthetic ideal; the speaker repeatedly notes trying to lose weight; in “Units & Increments”, the speaker repeatedly states “I’m thinking of eating again.” Text throughout the book is recycled or referenced, making the world of these poems feel claustrophobic in a way that is distinctly female. Is this a moment when art imitates life?

SD: Wow, I guess so, though I hope cumulatively it resolves artistically and doesn’t fall into that caveat of “showing boredom by being boring.” Something that I undertake in this book too is juxtaposing a singular, autobiographical narrative with other narratives as they’ve been constructed both historically and in the present, in a range of realms including science, advertising, and the artistic (including literary) canon, along with collaborations with several female artists in different media. The thread of singularity that your question points to I suppose evokes a beating pulse.

There is something that I keep circling back to, a definitive point that is aging, and for women that includes fertility issues. The recurrences in text are a coming back to the origin point that I’m regarding from different angles. How to open up a new narrative

[PANK] If you could ask a reader to do a little homework before reading your new book, what would your reading list look like?

SD: Part of such a reading list like might look like—

Selected visual art and writing by visual artists Louise Bourgeois, Glenn Ligon, Cy Twombly, Robert Smithson, Jenny Holzer, Kay Rosen, and Erica Baum

Selected poems and texts by Stéphane Mallarmé, ee cummings, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Walser, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Weiner, Kathleen Fraser, Alice Notley, and from The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry

Formally experimental collections by Barbara Guest,  Jen Bervin, M. NourbeSe Philip, Francis Ponge, Charles Olson (Maximus), Susan Howe, Douglas Kearney, Renee Gladman, Jenny Boully, Eleni Sikelianos, and Diana Khoi Nguyen

Liminal prose by Clarice Lispector, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rosmarie Waldrop

Journals/diaries by Anais Nin and May Sarton

Short films by Maya Deren And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

[PANK] I want to return to the collage-like aspect of SISYPHUSINA and consider your process. How did this manuscript come together for you? Did you collect visuals or text samples as you went? Create them as needed?

SD: I began it as a project proposal for which I was extremely fortunate to receive a fellowship from the Tanner Center for the Humanities that enabled me to devote a bunch of time to it in its initial stage. This stage included researching literature centered on female aging in the life, physical, and social sciences, humanities, as well as its artistic expression, past and present, and in pop culture and in the news media. I took notes, but for the most part the pieces that I wrote during this time developed directly from the snippets of discoveries I was making through my research. Some of these snippets incubated in my mind for years before surfacing in a creative piece. In my conversations, while working on this project, I found that many younger women were very, very interested in reading about and giving voice to this aspect of their life. At the same time, I took up the challenge of writing about aging within the context of my own life. I gave myself freedom to use all types of media, and to play with the nuances of typography as part of my writing process. I worked for many years as a typesetter before working as a graphic artist before returning to school and teaching and brought my experience with the minute shades of type to bear in my expressive relationship to classical notions of beauty and prevailing structures of social hierarchy.

Besides what I culled from research and my personal life, I drew from encounters with art and literature that I had stored in my mind over time. The first “Sisyphusina” poem was born from a constraint experiment given to me by a fiction writer friend when I felt blocked. My initial aspiration was to make a plan for this book’s architecture, but this isn’t my natural way of working, and eventually I let it go—I’m interested in the evolution of structure rather than imposing it prematurely, though I value the generative potential of constraints.

The manuscript’s working title was Rose Secoming—I had already identified that the rose would be a central image in the book, since it’s been associated with ideals of feminine beauty in literature from early on, as in “Roman de la Rose” from the Middle Ages in which the beloved female is, in fact, a rose. I chose “secoming” as a blend of becoming and succumbing. In earlier work, I had begun experimenting with making new words where none existed to articulate female experiences (for instance, there are no female equivalents of emasculation and castration, yet sexual violation of females leaves equivalent scarring).

I continued working on the manuscript beyond the time of this fellowship, naturally, and pieces continued to grow organically from my encounters with others, myself, and the rest of my environment. In 2016, an excerpt of SISYPHUSINA was published as an e-chap, FLOUNDERS in Essay Press’ GROUNDLOOP Series, which “seeks to bring together authors exploring diverse subjects through loud, innovative architectures.”

As I continued to work on what was to become SISYPHUSINA, I moved around for jobs, and during my first year teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I was drawn to expanding what I knew about new media, having always been interested in being artistically responsive to the current zeitgeist and the emerging new. While looking for artistic camaraderie in my new environs, I met musical composer Pauline Oliveros and visual artist Kathy High, who also taught at RPI, and eventually invited each of them to collaborate with me on extensions to this book. By now I regarded this project as an ongoing one, and for parts of it to spread outside the physical space of my book’s pages seemed “right.” I like the “skin” of video as an element in juxtaposition with my text within the context of this project. Around the same time, YEW, a journal of innovative writing & images, accepted several new pieces and asked if I wanted to collaborate with an artist on images to be published along with them. I asked my friend, visual artist and writer Kathline Carr if she might be interested in creating images in response to my text, and she drew many more interesting images than could be included. When I finally decided to call it a day and to say the book was Ended!, I thought back to these images that Kate had drawn and again, it felt “right” to me to expand the collaborative dimension of this book, its “skin,” so to speak, and asked her for permission to include some of them. I also asked Pauline whether I could include the piece she had improvised for a piece that extended from this project, “Aging Music” with this book’s publication. She had recorded it while performing it in 2015 in a building that she wrote “became activated by the wind and the banging doors and windows became an engaging percussive part of the musical dialogue. The building as an instrument played by the wind seemed expressive too of aging.”

This past year I learned about QR codes and realized using one would be a seamless way to integrate “Aging Music” with the physical definition of the book. A video-poem, “Saidst,” that I collaborated on with Kathy High is accessible via a URL published in the book and online at my website, PANK’s website, and Kathy High’s Vimeo page. Poet and designer Aimee Harrison, with whom I worked on adapting the manuscript’s proportions to the printed book’s dimensions and designed the book’s exterior and its table of contents, was my last but not least collaborator.

In other words, assembling this book was a continuous process and developed along with encounters with new technologies, locations, people, and signs of time. One of the final touches was my choice for the cover art, a painting that I did many years ago, in which I wanted to capture the active dynamic of visible light and crumpled up a piece of foil to use as my model. The result looks impressionistically like a heart, aorta included, or a female sprite clapping, and now, years later, it was decided that this painting would be “Sisyphusina.”

[PANK] Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] loves you!

SD: Thank you so much for reading this, and I hope it spurs you to check the book out and to more conversation! And a shout-out of thanks to [PANK] and to you, reader, member of our writing and reading communities, for your support of newly published books during this challenging time. I’d like to share, too, my wishes for everyone’s wellness.

PANK’s note: You can read a selection of Shira’s work from Sisyphusina as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series here.


SHIRA DENTZ is the author of five books, including black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), a cross-genre memoir, how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), a National Poetry Series finalist, and the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink/Diálogos). She’s also the author of two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman) and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her poetry, visual writing, and prose appear in many venues including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Denver Quarterly, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org), and National Public Radio, and interviews with her appear in journals such as Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, and The Rumpus. Shira is a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize. Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize, and Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award. Before returning to school to pursue graduate studies, she worked as a graphic artist in the music industry in NYC. A graduate of Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is currently Tarpaulin Sky’s Special Features Editor and lives and teaches in upstate New York. More about her writing can be found at shiradentz.com.

You’ve Got Something Coming: An Interview with Jonathan Starke

Black Heron Press, 2020

INTERVIEW BY GINA WILLIAMS

Jonathan Starke, a former boxer and bodybuilder, is the editor of Palooka Magazine and author of the forthcoming novel, You’ve Got Something Coming, winner of the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction (Black Heron Press, April 2020). His poem “Between Them” was featured in the June 2012 issue of [PANK]. Everything I’ve ever read of Starke’s kicks me in the gut with emotion and orbits around in my brain forever—complete with images—like mind-blowing, devastating cinema. His breakthrough novel about an aging boxer and his young daughter is no different. I reached out recently to talk with him about process, plot, and pain.

GINA WILLIAMS: Publishers Weekly recently reviewed You’ve Got Something Coming, saying “Starke’s bruising, brooding book is a real heartbreaker.” Another reviewer, Peter Stenson, author of Fiend and Thirty-Seven, comments, “You will be hard pressed to find a novel that is simultaneously gut-wrenching and brimming with the beauty of inextinguishable hope. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a better novel published this year.”

That’s incredible advance praise. Describe your creative process in the sense of how you went about developing the characters and plot so strongly that readers can’t help but react as if it’s their own fight.

JONATHAN STARKE: The novel is written in a tight window of time and narrative lens. There’s nothing but closeness to the two main characters—Trucks, an aging boxer, and Claudia, his young daughter battling deafness—who live on the fringes of society. I think what moves people about the read is the unusual portrait of a single father raising a daughter while they hitch across the country, Trucks trying to make the most of his limited skill set and impart hope to his little girl in a seemingly hopeless world.

GW: Your deeply emotional style of writing must take a toll. Did the writing process impact you physically and mentally? What did you do to release yourself from that grip or did it happen naturally when you finished the book?

JS: Everything I’ve written has taken something from me. When writing from a place of deep emotional truth or pain, this is bound to happen. I’ve never felt a point of “release” after completing a piece of writing, but there is a slight feeling of relief that it’s done, that it’s been written about, and that hopefully others will connect to it and feel a shared experience or understanding.

GW: Do you have any quirky writing rituals and/or habits?

JS: I’m not someone who writes often. I’ll go months without writing. My mind is always “taking notes,” and whenever the next piece is ready, it flows out of me entirely. It’s always been this way. The novel was no different. To go out and live and do interesting things and pay attention to the world, that’s gathering the material and “mentally writing.” The act of writing comes later, sometimes months or years, in a raging river of typing.

GW: Who was the most difficult character to write? And why do you think that’s the case?

JS: The hardest character to write is the one who’s absent, the one hardly spoken about, the one that may have existed for a time but is forever gone now—through separation, through distance, through time, through death. But this is the character who often has the most effect on the others, their present lives, and it’s this effect I find so haunting and difficult to render.

GW: Your writing is powerful in the sense that it doesn’t just ache, but yanks the reader out of the bar, hauls them into the back alley, and knocks them out. How do you harness that kind of pain and rage without giving up story and language—or hope?

JS: The rage has to be stored and used infrequently—only when it’s necessary to create change or show how utterly desperate life has become. The pain works as a slow drip—a reader can see it throughout, but I find it best when it’s mostly unspoken and instead shown in how the characters behave and move and the choices they do or do not make. Wounded people are practiced at how to step into pain. Without at least a splinter of hope, I’m not sure there’s a point.

GW: How did this novel begin? What was the first seed?

JS: I saw this aging boxer, early forties, with his back to this brick wall outside in the dead of winter. I understood he was in Wisconsin. He looked miserable. He was cold. In a state of desperation. He was clutching used hearing aids, and I thought, What the hell’s he doing with those? Soon I realized he was outside of a children’s home. He was breaking in to get his little girl back.

GW: Where did you draw inspiration for Trucks, Claudia, and your novel’s other characters?

JS: I care about people on the fringes. I’ve known many people who have little or nothing. For a lot of my life, I’ve had little. I used to box. When something’s in your blood, you think about it every day. I can’t remember a day I haven’t thought about boxing. It’s a tough thing to step away from. Once you’ve done it, it’s hard not to want to go back. You try to just pretend it away, but when it’s in you, it’s got hold. That’s what Trucks is facing every day, but he’s also got Claudia to think about. But with someone like him, when it’s in his blood so deep, how does he navigate their life in a way that he can protect her best interests but also pursue this passion that begs for him?

GW: You’re well-known for creative nonfiction and short stories. What inspired you to write a novel? Was it difficult to make the transition?

JS: Once I saw this story in front of me, I knew it was going to be a long project. I can’t write a novel in a typical or conventional sense. I know that’s not in me. This is a linear piece, and it takes place over a few weeks. I knew I needed to limit the time and the chapters. It’s a linear novel in vignettes.

GW: What is your proudest achievement outside of writing?

JS: It’s not an achievement of mine, but I want to say my father. He raised two boys by himself and worked his ass off and sacrificed to get us beyond scraping by and to give us a good life. I admire him so much for carving his own path and getting educated and believing in himself when nobody else did. He’s an inspiring and giving and loving and incredible person. This novel being about a single father, I think it’s important I say this about my own father and to also acknowledge all the other single fathers out there who are working hard and giving love and doing their damnedest.

JONATHAN STARKE is a former bodybuilder and boxer. He’s harvested seaweed in Ireland, given free hugs in Spain, and flipped pancakes in Denmark. He loves riding trains and wondering about the lives unfolding outside the window. His biggest passions are learning and travel, and he’s ventured to sixty countries via hitching, couch surfing, and working exchanges. He plays piano and thrives on diverse workouts, organic food, artwork, street markets, and anything related to helping others, especially in the arts. He’s the founding editor of Palooka.

GINA WILLIAMS is a journalist, photographer, former firefighter, and gardener. She’s a Pacific Northwest native and can often be found rambling in the Oregon Outback, volunteering at the community garden, or on assignment in a far-flung location. She lives and creates near Portland, Oregon. Her writing and visual art have been featured by River TeethOkey-PankyMoss, CarveThe Sun, and Fugue, among others. She’s the author of An Unwavering Horizon, a full-length collection of poetry published by Finishing Line Press. It’s now available for preorder and will be distributed in May 2020.  GinaMarieWilliams.com

“We are interested in people being able to decolonize their own stories and tell their own stories”: an interview with Chris Talbot-Heindl

INTERVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

Chris Talbot-Heindl is a leader in the movement to ensure LGBTIQA2+ rights and to promote those interests in the marginalized, as well as, the mainstream, art and literary communities. Editor and publisher of the zine, The Bitchin’ Kitsch [The B’K], and, recently settled in Colorado, their Twitter profile states, “…just another trans, nonbinary, pansexual, mixed-race, separated-Indigenous (probably Huron-Wendat), artist, & comics creator”— and, I would add, educator, advocate, activist, graphic novelist, and chapbook contest sponsor. Talbot-Heindl acknowledges that they produce  polarizing, political commentary and art so, in 2010, with their husband, Dana, Talbot-Heindl “brainstormed” about possible projects that would highlight their creative energies, and serve as an outlet for their beliefs and values. “The zine started out as a joke idea – a late night brainstorm that ended with, ‘…and we could totally call it, The Bitchin’ Kitsch—like, it’s totally rad junk!’ The next morning, when the idea didn’t sound half bad, we decided to ‘go’ with it. We wanted to focus on people who normally didn’t get to have their work out there – pieces with a little grit, things that were slightly subversive, or had a level of kitschiness or silliness that ‘traditional’ publications would reject.” They planned to emphasize creativity, inclusivity, diversity, & respectful discourse. The B’K, then, is an extension of Talbot-Heindl’s long-standing concern for justice, their personality, and their self-presentation, and this interview, conducted via email and barely edited, reflects that interdependence. As a personal disclosure, I have published poems and reviews in The B’K several times and won the zine’s chapbook competitions in 2015 & 2017. My motivation for choosing them as an interview subject, however, was based on their commitment to LGBTIQA+ issues and the ways in which they balance and integrate identity, work, life, beliefs, attitudes, opinions, values, and community. Most important, perhaps, I find Talbot-Heindl to be a generous and pragmatic social commentator who makes a lot of sense, and I want to share their “voice” with others.

Chris Talbot-Heindl

Clara B. Jones: Imagine that you are having a dinner party and that you’ve invited three people. Who would these three persons be, why did you choose them, what would you cook for dinner, and what would you talk about?

Chris Talbot-Heindl: The first person is going to sound hokey, but it has to be Dana, my spouse. We’re ridiculously co-dependent and introverted, so there’s no way I could get through a dinner party without his assistance. The other two would be incredibly hard to pick and would likely change day to day. But if I had to choose two living individuals based on today’s mood, I would choose Indya Moore and Lilah Sturges. Both of these individuals work hard in their respective fields to make the world a better, more loving place for trans people (Indya Moore is a trans nonbinary person starring in the television series, “Pose,” who speaks their truth on social media; Lilah Sturges is a writer who hosts Trans Pizza, where she makes sure that trans people are fed!); both focus on intersectionality, and both have beautiful, eloquent, affirming things to say on Twitter daily.

I would likely serve nori rolls and loaded miso since it’s the only dinner-party style food I can really do any justice to (I am not a very good cook, truth be told). I would hope we could talk about trans inclusion issues, brainstorm solutions, and talk about using art as a medium to raise awareness. But honestly, I’d be up for talking about pretty much anything with either of them! I have a feeling that any topic they wanted to talk about would be interesting and informative.

CBJ: What is your earliest memory, and is it still significant to you in any way?

C T-H: I have a problem with memory, honestly. Most of my childhood is a blank, and the memories I do have may be genuine or may be creative fictional amalgamations of stories I’ve heard about my childhood mixed with legitimate memories. Of those possible amalgamations, the earliest one I can think of isn’t super significant other than as an example of my sense of justice and my stubborn insistence of it. Picture this: my family and I are at a martial arts tournament – I think it was the Diamond Nationals in Minneapolis – and I’m “little Chris,” seven or eight years old, trying to sleep at the hotel after the first night. My sister, Michelle, is crying because she can’t sleep. The adults in the next room are partying pretty hard and are too loud. So, I march into the hall to the next room in my pajamas, knock on the door, and, when my instructor opens it, I put my hands on my hips, give him a stern look and tell him he was being rude and to keep it down. Apparently I also told him he was a bad man (for other reasons), but I’m not sure if this was the same night or a different one. I have tons of story-memories like this – me insisting there was a moral imperative to behave a certain way and demanding it be so as a child. Most of them involved hands on hips, stern looks, and demands. I was, apparently, a bossy child.


CBJ: I gather from one of your online interviews that you scan every submission to The B’K for “racist, sexist, or homophobic,” as well as, triggering content. However, your new submission form asks each artist, including, writers, to answer a long and broad range of questions—many of which would be considered illegal in other contexts [e.g., on employment or educational applications]. Can you describe this submission form in detail, discuss its rationale, and tell us what prompted your creating it and using it as a criterion to publish in The B’K? How do you use the information, and what are the most disqualifying answers?

C T-H: Our submission form gets a lot of pushback, but all its rules and questions have been informed from 10 years’ experience in what we don’t want to receive and/or publish. Every time we add something, it’s because we’ve gotten dozens of submissions that included it [e.g., the undesirable topic, practice, or appropriation], and we feel we need to explicitly tell people not to. We once got an angry email from someone who was offended that we included so many guidelines because she didn’t want to “read an essay” just to submit, and she stated all the things included were minimum requirements for a decent submission. She was floored when I told her everything prohibited was something we’ve received many times over.

Our form asks people to self-identify their intersections, including race, gender, sexuality, ability, and religion, but makes it clear in the submission guidelines and the submission form itself (because we’ve found most people don’t read the guidelines) that this is for our information (to see whose voices we might be missing) and won’t be used to evaluate the work unless someone’s identity makes their submission inappropriate or constitutes appropriation. We further explain that “appropriation” means writing about what it’s like to be part of a historically marginalized community you don’t belong to rather than just including people from marginalized communities. We go even further and have podcasts for people who find these rules and terms confusing. Really, we’re trying so hard to help – we may have gone overboard and made it all too cumbersome.

For some people, being asked to self-identify is really upsetting. We get a mix of angry emails each month calling us “fascists” or saying that white cisgender heterosexual abled men aren’t going to submit anymore. But for us, these questions are about equity and “who” should tell a story. We want people from marginalized communities to speak to that experience; we want all people to include people from marginalized communities in their work. Too often, we get someone who’s well-meaning but writes a micro-aggressing interpretation of what it’s like to be someone from a different background; and, too often, we see other publications publish these stories. We are interested in people being able to decolonize their own stories and tell their own stories.

And truth be told, even with these rules, the majority of our submitters and accepted submissions are white cisgender heterosexual abled men, so there’s nothing to fear in answering the questions. No identity is disqualifying, but your piece may be rejected if your identity makes your piece problematic.

CBJ: Besides publishing the zine, The B’K, you hold a yearly chapbook competition, as well as, produce a Podcast Series and an educational series, Chrissplains Comics—both of these latter initiatives are about gender & race. In the current, Winter Issue, 11.1, you present the  Chrissplains Nonbinary Advocacy to Cisgender People comic—“Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is a FART Myth” [FART= Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobes] that “attempts to show why the rhetoric, advanced by FARTs, of ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’ is harmful and explains to parents and therapists why it isn’t a ‘thing’ to worry about.” What feedback have you been receiving about your podcasts and comic series? Can radical Art, including, literature, change society, or is it influential only at the individual and subjective levels?

CT-H: The feedback I’ve received from The B’K Submitters’ Guide Podcast and Chrissplains Nonbinary Advocacy to Cisgender People have been mixed (and very telling), according to identity. In general, the people advocated for in the podcasts have appreciated them, thanked me for making them and for centering equity and affirming representation, and have sometimes provided me with information I didn’t know (which I then update people with on the next podcast). Allies have thanked me for telling them something they may not have known. But I’ve also gotten angry people sliding into my emails to tell me that I’m being ridiculous and taking PC culture too far. I don’t really sweat that feedback because in my mind that means I’m doing something right. These tend to be the same people that I’ll get an email about informing me that they’ve published elsewhere a story about trans identity being a mental illness and supporting a trans artist or writer means you’re fueling their mental illness (yup, really happened!). If people aren’t willing to learn better and, then, do better, I’m not interested in their listenership or their continued presence in The B’K. We’re on a journey to do better together, and they’re not ready to join us.

For Chrissplains, it’s been nearly the same – nonbinary and trans people have thanked me or provided me more information from their perspective, allies have thanked me, and FARTs have harassed me. I also had someone, who claimed to be an ally, clamoring against one of my comics and telling me what was best for me, which was interesting. I tried to explain that nonbinary and trans people will let people know how to best advocate for them; we don’t need to be told by cisgender people what is best for us. But she wasn’t ready to hear it.

I believe that radical art is one of the only things that influences certain types of learners. I originally made all of it – the zines, the comics, and the graphic novel I’m working on—to help my family and friends understand me better. That’s it. I didn’t have some grand scheme for it. But in the process, I’ve had many nonbinary and trans people tell me that it helped them understand things they didn’t have words for, educate their family and friends, and made them feel seen. And that’s amazing! On top of that, the LGBT Center for Excellence at Denver Health is using a partial chapter from my graphic novel about nonbinary life to help people understand the importance of LGBTIQA2+ affirming care. You never know who will be touched by your art and who will be swayed by your art. But, it does provide an avenue for education and change to people who are visual learners.

CBJ: Off and on for many years, I have been absorbed by reading literary interviews in Paris Review—most of the subjects might be described as members of the literary “canon,” so to speak [Eliot, Didion, Hemingway, Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, etc.]. Perhaps, I am reading too much in; however, I am drawn to the details of houses and apartments—books, paintings, magazines, rugs, “kitschy” things with historical import, etc.—many of these objects seeming to have a sense of permanence with an intimate story, a detailed provenance attached to each belonging. I have often been reminded of something Paul Fry [Yale] said in his online literary theory course,—that “preservation” is a purpose of great literature, which I interpreted as saying preservation of Western Civilization or, perhaps, bourgeois culture. Is this a project that you would oppose? Is your mission intended to disrupt or intervene in or mediate the neo-capitalist, Western project—or are you about something else? In other words, what are you trying to achieve as a change agent?

CT-H: When we started The B’K, our one goal was to provide an outlet for those creators who are generally overlooked. When we started 10 years ago, there weren’t a ton of online publications with completely open and free submissions, and the ones that were set up like that did seem homogenized to me. I don’t fault them; I think that for the most part, we are trained to believe that the Western style of writing or art and subjects that center white Western ideas are the “greats.” I remember when I was briefly an English major in college, I enrolled in a Masters of Literature class and quickly dropped it when I saw the syllabus and realized it was entirely comprised of works from Western white men. We are trained to think of this ideal as “normal,” and to think of marginalized works to be “specialty” things that we box away in specific courses like “Introduction to Ethnic Literature” – also a class I took despite its micro-aggressing title, and one I truly enjoyed. Sometimes, after we realize that we aren’t going to get validation, acknowledgment, or publication from white institutions that have built an aesthetic—either purposefully or by accident – that leads to our exclusion, we have to decide to build something for ourselves that is built around inclusion and equity.

In my mind, I thought I was writing coded language for those excluded, but I was also happy to provide an opportunity for the white cisgender heterosexual men who submitted. I was happy to publish the weird kitschy stuff, the subject matter that seemed taboo, as well as the marginalized people I was originally hoping to amplify. Now that we’re farther into the publication’s life, I find myself wanting to pointedly say, “This publication is meant to provide inclusion and equity to people who have been shut out from traditional publications, because traditional publications have deemed their voice and their stories to be unimportant, ‘specialty,’ or not to their Western aesthetics, because that’s where I would prefer my free labor to go toward.” But, maybe, that isn’t as needed as it once was, seeing all the new, marginalized-population focused publications out there!

CBJ: The Harvard poetry critic and Formalist, Helen Vendler, once said of Adrienne Rich’s poetry—after Rich came out as a lesbian—that Rich was writing “Sociology,” also stating that Rich’s early, lyrical poetry showed promise—implying that the radical feminist poet surrendered good poetry to politics. Given that the Formalist criterion is that content [e.g., politics] is subordinate to form [e.g., lyric, music, color, rhythmn], do you have any reaction to Vendler’s point of view about political and, perhaps, radical, Art, including, writing—that it is “Sociology,” not, Art?

CT-H: I had this same critique in my senior art thesis project, although not worded quite as nicely. One of my professors critiqued my thesis project as “political propaganda,” “low-brow,” and not to the level of fine or academic art. My art used traditional printmaking methods as well as animation to show the atrocities committed by each US President during their time, and it was interactive. Was it impeccably made? No. The printmaking was done well, the rest of it was…honestly, what I could afford to make at that point in my life. But, that wasn’t what he was critiquing. In his mind, the idea that it was political art was what made it not academic, fine, or high-brow art. I think that’s crap, honestly.

First, claiming that something that involves a different identity than your own becomes “sociology” is to fully center your own identity as normal and create an “other.” If you decide that poetry from the lens of a lesbian makes their writing “sociology” rather than poetry, then you’ve decided that poetry from the lens of a heterosexual person is normal, and poetry from a non-heterosexual lens is specialized or politicized. That’s a personal failing of the reader, in my opinion. Yes, our society in the US does cater and normalize white, cisgender, heterosexual, abled identities and stories; but art, and what is considered art, should be more nuanced than that.

I prefer the César Cruz quote: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Art has multiple purposes, including, providing a comfort and catharsis to those suffering under a white, cisgender, heterosexual, abled-centered society, and there’s value in disrupting the beneficiaries of that society a bit so they can see something beyond what is immediately visible through their lenses.

CBJ: At least in the modern and contemporary period, small and alternative presses have been venues for experimental or oppositional or political or other non-traditional or radical or alternative artists, including, writers, of course, to publish successfully or to bypass the mainstream literary community and its institutions. What are the major challenges associated with small-press publishing? Is it a viable alternative to publishing in the mainstream? Can work published in small or alternative presses stand the tests of time?

CT-H: I can’t really speak as a submitter, as I’ve only submitted a handful of things to a handful of publications; but, from an editor’s point of view, the major challenges with small-press publishing are finding the audience you want and finding money and time to make it happen. We had a hard time filling The B’K when we first started, and often resorted to begging our friends to send us their artwork and writing and padding the publication with our own work. There were issues we had to cancel because we didn’t have enough pages filled.

Money has always been an issue. People seem to think there’s big money in this sort of thing and get shocked that we don’t offer payment to our submitters. While we would love to, the publication loses money every year. We don’t charge for submissions, we don’t have angel investors or grants, The B’K  is free to read online, we offer the printed copies at what it costs to us to our submitters, and very few people buy copies beyond submitters because the zine is free to read online. Our goal is to put pieces and creators out there, not necessarily to have a thriving business.

I think it’s a viable alternative – I hope so; I hope people find value in it and enjoy both submitting their pieces in print and reading people’s work in our publication. As far as the work standing the test of time, I know it won’t have as long of a shelf-life or as big of a readership as publications on actual shelves at the library or in museums, but I hope ours has some longevity. All the issues are available in the archive section of our website, and in Stevens Point, Wisconsin (where we originally published), I know that an archivist from the city’s preservation society has been squirreling old issues from the local coffee shop that houses our community copies since the beginning. Back issues are, of course, available to read at the Denver Zine Library. While it isn’t the same, it has its own value and audience, I think.

CBJ: Have you received any negative reactions, or have you been ostracized by any members of the artistic, especially, literary, community because of your gender identification or your mission?

CT-H: Whew! I have absolutely had pushback. I think you will if you make art or amplify subjects that push boundaries. I was banned for life from a local small town Wisconsin Art Board because I proposed a show that included photographs of a (fully clothed) gay couple. They took the benevolent stance that it was for my own safety and well-being. An art curator for a museum once told me that I needed to start using my intelligence and gifts for “good rather than evil” after I gave her a rather scathing review of an art show she put on that was incredibly racist in nature. I’ve also gotten a lot of dismissal, from people saying that I shouldn’t make affirming artwork for LGBTIQA2+ people and amplify it when I am an LGBTIQA2+ person who will directly benefit, which is…certainly words in an order. I’ve not understood that stance personally – who better to talk about being a thing than a person who is?

I’ve been somewhat surprised and pleased that – especially when I was in a small town in central Wisconsin – all the pushback and burned bridges happened in relation to things I was doing rather than who I was (although when you get critiqued for queer art, it can feel like it is about who you are). But regardless, I’ve never let that stop me. I actually got that same show that the Board banned me from, at the Board’s standard show locale, by reaching out to the owner (who was a personal friend), instead. Whenever there is a white, cisgender, heterosexual-led institution saying “no,” there’s a person of color or LGBTIQA2+ person who got tired of hearing “no” who has made an avenue of opportunity for themselves and others. You just have to find it.

CBJ: Are there any emerging writers that you would recommend to readers? Are any of them bringing something new to the table?

CT-H: So, so many! I want to shout out many of The B’K writers, but I don’t want to play favorites; so, instead, I want to talk about three amazing authors. Tommy Orange, Mason Deaver, Mariama J. Lockington are three novelists I would highly recommend. They bring themselves to the table and write from a perspective all their own, and that’s what I value so much with their writing. Orange’s novel, “There There,” shows different Indigenous people as they prepare for a powwow for different reasons. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and created all kinds of characters with different attachments to their own Indigeneity, including Indigenous folks who are finding their way back to their roots through the powwow after being separated generations ago – which is my situation and which spoke to me. Deaver’s debut novel, “I Wish You All the Best,” introduces a nonbinary individual who is thrown out of their home when they come out. It’s heart-wrenching and provides a snapshot into the nuance of living that identity while still a minor – something I can’t even imagine. And Lockington’s novel, “For Black Girls Like Me,” tells the story of Makeda, a Black girl adopted by a white family, and what navigating that world is like for her.

In all three cases, the authors belong to the identity they are writing about and can provide real-to-life perspectives for. They aren’t imagining from a place of privilege; these are real stories with real nuance, despite being fiction.

CBJ: Expand on a topic such as whether trans activism constitutes a movement; or whether trans writers & editors & publishers should attempt to enter the mainstream literary community; or what “allies” can do to facilitate success in visual and literary practice & publishing, including, small press publishing, by trans artists; or maybe you could discuss the merits of political art as it pertains to trans artists & writers.

CT-H: I feel like too many cisgender people believe that there’s some sort of organized trans agenda that trans activists are fighting towards that would demand people give up their personal identities and assume some sort of gender fluidity. But all that trans activists are asking for is the right to live their lives in peace as the gender they identify—without experiencing job discrimination, housing discrimination, humiliation in public restrooms, and hate crimes. That’s it; that’s the grand trans agenda. There was this great Tweet thread going around about how the TERF version of a martyr is someone getting kicked out of a gay bar for wearing a hate group’s shirt and spouting transphobic slogans while trans people are busy sending each other the same $20 for fundraisers necessitated from lost jobs, housing discrimination fallout, and non-trans-inclusive health insurance. Trans people are just trying to live.

Trans writers, editors, and publishers are attempting to enter the mainstream literary community – to have increased visibility and reach beyond the “choir” – but we don’t really have a lot of control as to whether or not the mainstream community will have us, which is why we often have to make our own spaces. Eventually, we get chastised for having our own space at all – from the mainstream communityclaiming we are being exclusionary—and from our allies claiming that we’re separating ourselves and causing an “elite,” secret collection of knowledge.

It reminds me of that Alex Norris webcomic ( https://tmblr.co/ZJf5Lg2irxa_D). The first cell shows a grouping of gray blobs approaching three pink blobs saying “You do not fit in here.” The second cell shows pink blobs in a smaller enclosed space saying “Okay, we will make our own place.” In the third cell, gray blobs approach the smaller space saying, “Why are you excluding us,” and the pink blobs respond “Oh no.”

Often cisgender writers will be published telling trans stories, and they’ll be heralded as brave and insightful, heaped with praise. When transgender writers try to publish and tell our own stories, we’re told there isn’t an audience for our stories. You see this play out time and again in Hollywood for movies as well.

But, trans artists and activists continue to do the work, because we need to. It’s necessary to tell our stories and demystify our existence, for our survival, when the opposing viewpoint is that we shouldn’t exist and that our existence is dangerous. We make our own publications, zines, chapbooks; we self-publish and attend zine fests and spread that information as much as we can without the acceptance or help of the mainstream literary community.

The good news is that I’ve seen a bit of a shift with the smaller mainstream publishers. There seems to be more of an effort to pay attention to who is telling the story and more of an effort to bring in creators from historically marginalized communities in general. I think the biggest things that allies could do is ask for those stories and encourage that change; show there’s a market; prioritize and amplify stories written about trans people by trans people. If our allies show there’s a market demand and that those who tell the stories matter to them as readers, free-market capitalism says that those in decision-making positions in the literary community will have to supply.

CBJ: Thanks for sharing your vision and mission with us, Chris. You, your peers, and your allies are changing narratives about LGBTIQA2+ realities, having the potential to change society, including Formalist aesthetics and the literary establishment.

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other writings, she is author of /feminine nature/ [Gauss PDF, 2017]. Clara, also, conducts research on experimental literature, Surrealism, radical publishing, as well as, art & technology.

The Magic of One Thing: What I Learned from Talking with Jessica Abel

The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

BY NANCY REDDY

I love a list. I love the buzzy hum I get from crossing through the items I’ve completed, and I’ve even been known to start my list-making by jotting down the things I’ve already done, just to get a little jump start of completionist satisfaction. So it seemed to make good sense that I could apply this same idea to get my writing done: make a big list of all the writing projects I’m cooking up, then let all the energy of those combined good ideas propel me toward the finish line. At various points in the last year, I’ve made lists of essay ideas, lists of magazines where I’d like to publish, lists of research projects, lists that start with the triumphant all-caps HERE ARE MY GOOD IDEAS. 

So why is it that, for a long time, I wasn’t actually taking those good ideas all the way through finished drafts? 

Talking with Jessica Abel, a Philadelphia-based cartoonist, author, and educator, whom I interviewed via Zoom, helped illuminate a major error I’d made. Though I’d named lots of goals, I hadn’t actually made any of them a priority. Abel, who coaches creative folks working on a wide range of projects, insists that you can only really have one priority at a time. And I’m a convert: since adopting her maxim that you need One Goal to Rule Them All, I’ve been able to start ticking items off that big list.  

I like to think of it as The Magic of One Thing. 

Abel explains it like this: when you have two or three or four (or a whole huge ambitious list) projects you want to work on, but you split your time between those projects, it’s hard to make any serious headway on any particular project. Your time is fractured, and so is your attention and your energy. In contrast, she argues, once you have just One Thing:

If you’re spending chunks of time all week on the same thing, your brain is going to be working overtime on it. When you’re in the shower: brainstorm. When you’re in the car: things are clicking together. Have your notebook or voice notes app handy. You will have ideas. I guarantee it.

The magic of One Thing, in other words, isn’t just the power of hour after accumulated hour on a project; it’s that each hour of work is actually multiplied by the way the project takes up residence in your brain – when you’re seriously working on a project, your brain keeps at it, even when you’re not focused on your computer screen or notebook, on adding words to the project.

I’ve also found, counterintuitively, that One Thing feels more urgent than several. When I write down four projects I’m going to work on during a week, I can poke at each one for a bit, probably make a bit of progress on each, and end the week without any real clarity about the outcome of that intermittent work. But if I name just one or two things–projects with clear milestones attached–I feel more accountable to myself.

And completing projects creates its own kind of propulsive energy. When I spoke with Abel, she called this the “dopamine hit” of finishing a project. That’s certainly something I’ve experienced in the last few months. When I pitched this column at the beginning of the year, I could feel the sticky goo of all my good unfinished projects following me around and weighing me down. (I don’t think I’m the only one! Abel told me that she’s seen people get stuck in two different ways. While perfectionism and fear of failure can be obstacles at the early stage of a creative career, people who’ve had some success and are getting offers to work on lots of projects often end up being overcommitted and not being able to make headway with any particular thing.)

Abel also had some advice about how to choose your One Thing. Her article on One Goal outlines the key principles, and Her What’s Stopping You checklist is a great place to get started in thinking about your creative life more broadly. 

If you’re really having a hard time choosing where to start, Abel suggests choosing “something that feeds your future self”–and letting go of projects that will lead you in a direction you don’t want to go. Many of us have half-finished projects we’re carrying around with us, and the time we’ve put into them can feel like an obligation to take them to completion; Abel calls that Idea Debt, and encourages the people she works with to focus their energy instead on completing the projects that will be most meaningful for them now and in the future, rather than the ones in which they’ve already invested a lot of time. 

For longer projects, One Thing often requires identifying milestones – carrying out X research, creating an outline, drafting the proposal, writing a chapter, and so on. Breaking up a project like this allows people to still have a sense of momentum and completion. 

Talking with Abel also helped me in my ongoing struggle to rethink the relationship between creativity and productivity. When I asked her how she thinks about productivity, Abel responded that most of the time when we talk about productivity, “it’s about literally producing stuff without any regard to what the stuff is. And to be more productive means to take the same amount of time and put more things in there.” While there are parts of our life where this might make sense – fold more laundry, answer more emails, and so on – Abel argues that creative work actually requires more blank space. Abel suggests the “really crucial reframe” of productivity culture and insists that we instead think about “creating margin, not about doing more stuff.” 

I wrote a bit about ways of tracking time and quantifying progress in an earlier column, and here, too, Abel had insight. She said that, if you’re invested in measuring your work, it’s preferable to think in terms of time, rather than word count. Abel says that “my experience shows that counting words tends to be not helpful. Because what’s the quality of the words?” Instead, she says she’s seen that just putting time back into the project can be enormously helpful. Even if you only have 15 minutes a day, she says that can be “a way to get yourself unstuck and get back in touch with your project.” (I’ll come back to measurement in a few weeks because this link between creative work and the capitalist language of outcomes and products is a current obsession of mine!) 

If you’re interested in learning more about Jessica Abel’s creative work, or her work with coaching folks who have gotten stuck in their creative lives, her website is full of helpful resources. I completed the Creative Compass Minicourse, and she frequently offers both free webinars and the paid Creative Focus Workshop. Even getting her email blasts functions for me as a kind of regular “hey you! What are you working on?” which is the kind of no-nonsense nudge I really thrive on. 

As Abel puts it, her work is less about creative productivity and more about “building a resilient and sustainable creative life.”

So what’s your One Thing? What project can you invest 15 minutes in today?

NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg ReviewPleiadesBlackbirdColorado ReviewThe Iowa ReviewSmartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.

An Interview with Kathleen Graber from Prismatics

Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry (Diode Editions, 2020) is a collection of the full-length transcriptions of the extended interviews Gregory Donovan and Michele Poulos conducted with a group of America’s most notable poets—including two U.S. Poet Laureates—in making the documentary film A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet. These discussions cover not only their relationships with Levis and his poetry, but also more wide-ranging commentaries on a broad spectrum of American literary life.

Here, they sit down with Kathleen Graber, author of new poetry collection The River Twice (Princeton University Press), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize.

Michele Poulos: Tony Hoagland, in his essay “Flight and Arrival,” discusses Levis’s various muses: oblivion, self-annihilation, extinction of the self, the end of his life, and perhaps—I’m not quoting precisely—the wish to be both present and yet always elsewhere, a longing to be nothing, which I think is provocative. Then you have what might be the other extreme, which is somebody like David St. John who says in his essay in A Condition of the Spirit, “What I see happening is a real love of the world.” So, those are distinctions that I’d like to talk about in depth.

Kathleen Graber: When I was reading several essays, I was struck by a desire, on various critics’ parts, to make an either/or claim: you’re either nihilistic or you’re visionary in a sort of spiritual way. You’re in love with the world, or you’re in love with your own death. What I like about Levis, which makes him unique, is that it’s always both; there’s such a complexity and simultaneity of existing in those states. I’ve read essays where that has been described as sort of ping-pong, that he’s always oscillating between wanting an annihilation of the self and wanting a sort of visionary, Whitmanesque embrace of the world. He believes in the political reality—and that the political reality matters to him, as an heir to Philip Levine—or that he doesn’t at all, and he’s a surrealist at heart and an image-maker and that he’s much more interested in his interiority than he is in any kind of exteriority, and that the most you could say is that he somehow is constantly penduluming back and forth between those two impulses. It was interesting to read about that, because I certainly see all of that in his work.

But for me, it’s all stew. [Laughter.] It’s not “and then carrots, and then potatoes, then meat.” It’s sort of like, “No, it’s all in there, together, at the same time,” and it doesn’t feel like a contradiction, because poetry isn’t about putting forth a philosophical program or a metaphysics. He’s not obligated to choose; he’s merely obligated to be honest about what it feels like to be human, and I think that that is what it feels like to be human. I think that we do realize that people actually really do suffer. There actually really is pain and political reality and oppression, war, violence in the world, and that at the same time we have an inner life that can be, at times, completely disconnected from that, and that we can be preoccupied with our own interiority given the extremity of our own personal life at the same time that we are aware of what’s going on in the world around us—those aren’t mutually exclusive psychic states, for me anyway. 

So that’s one way of breaking out of a fractious interpretation of his work.

There’s been a fascination with saying he’s a nihilistic poet or a morbid poet, and it gave me a lot of pause because I had to stop and think, “Well, what do people mean when they say something like that, when they use a world like ‘nihilism,’ which is a sort of slippery term. And I wonder whether some spiritual people will simply say, “If you have no faith, you’re nihilistic,” or, “If you don’t believe in an afterlife, that’s a kind of nihilism,” or, “You don’t believe the world has an objective meaning other than whatever meaning we ascribe to it, and that’s nihilism.” I think that in Levis’s work, there’s always a sense of another world beyond this one. I don’t think he believes in an afterlife per se, but I think he feels a profound, ineffable––and that’s a term that comes up in more than one poem––something, something that is beyond our capacity to articulate it, that infuses the world with what feels to me like tremendous . . . tenderness. So I don’t see the poems as nihilistic; I see them as heartbreaking and sad, and there is a loneliness, but I think that all of those emotions come out of this tremendous sense of being unable to fully connect in a communion with the world. And I think that’s the human condition; I think we all feel it. I think if his poems are moving and popular, it’s partly because he, more than any contemporary poet, captures that longing, that sense of being haunted by an elusive otherness to which we belong and don’t belong.

I don’t know if that’s going to translate or make any sense, but I was just reading one of his own essays, and he spoke a lot about animals in poems. Horses are so essential. Horses and stars are probably the two most important images—or among the most important, recurring images—in his poems. And so I stopped when I read that, because I’m always so moved by his horses. And what he says about horses is that the horse is the poet, the horse stands in for the muteness of the poet, for what the poet can’t say but wants to express, that that’s the function of animals—their languagelessness. On the other hand, there’s also a sense that they have access to another realm—and whether these two things are related, whether they’re corollary conditions—that because they have no language, they have managed to retain and have access to a sort of instinctive understanding that we have now lost—because one of the barriers for us might be intellectualization; it might be consciousness; it might be language, which might be the byproduct of consciousness.

And so we look at them, and we are filled with a kind of envy for their ability to simply be, that they’re mortal beings that have, as far as we know, no preoccupation with their own mortality. They have no ambition––and there’s another thought connected to this––perhaps beyond being what they are, and so they don’t struggle with a sense of self-identity. You know, a horse is a horse. Having said that, a horse is a particularly fascinating animal to have chosen as your avatar, because there are very few purely wild horses left in the world. Horses are essentially domestic, broken, corralled beings. So in that way, they are the absolute threshold between realms—maybe dogs would be another example of these beings, or cows, but cows don’t have the grace of a horse; a horse retains more of its wildness than a cow or a dog, yet it’s a domestic animal; it’s more powerful in some way and has a lot of really primitive associations attached to it—so, the horse is a threshold between a human world and a purely animal world.

And so, I’d hate to use “unconscious” or “subconscious,” but at the level of metaphor, the level of image-making, it’s not by chance that this is the animal to which he’s most attracted and in which he finds a corollary. Some of the horses are workhorses, farm horses; some of the horses are racehorses. And it’s hard not to think of the racehorse as a metaphor for the poem, or for the poet, right? It’s a thing that wants to transcend itself, that runs as fast as it can to the point of self-destruction, not because it’s pursuing self-destruction. If it destroys itself it’s a byproduct of simply running really, really fast to doing the thing that is most in its essential nature to do. It has been put here to do that, and in the process of doing that, it inadvertently injures itself because it has no sense of its own limitation. So if people are going to ask about the connection between creativity and self-destruction, I don’t believe that people set out courting self-destruction; I feel that they may have an obliviousness to their own limitations that then, in the pursuit of a kind of creative transcendence, leads them to fall into a pattern of self-destruction.

MP: Would you mind, for the sake of the movie, revisiting that idea about limitations? I know that there was a complete overarching idea, and maybe we could try to encapsulate it for the film.

KG: I’ll try. I’ll have to go back to horses. Is that okay?

MP: Sure, yes.

KG: So, I can refer to “There are Two Worlds.” It’s not a poem that’s actually anthologized out of Winter Stars. It wasn’t in the Selected, and I can understand why. It’s not a poem without flaws, but it’s a poem of so many achievements—and there’s a recurring metaphor. First of all, the poem starts with the line, “Perhaps the ankle of a horse is holy,” which, when I read that for the first time, I just had to stop. That was as far as I got. I closed the book and said, “Okay, I’m just going to think about that one for a while.” I can’t articulate why I find that to be such a moving line. I think some of it is personal. My father loved the horse races, so that a big bond that I had with my father was about horse racing, the history of horse racing. There was a great horse, War Admiral, and he actually was cut stumbling out of the gate but won the race anyway.  He was there in the winner’s circle, bleeding out from his ankle, in fact. And then for a long time––we don’t have it now––we had a picture of my father as a bystander, because it was during World War II, and there weren’t many spectators at horse races in the middle of the war, and so for the few spectators who were there, you could get onto the track and you could get very close to the horses and to the action. So, my father was in the winner’s circle with War Admiral. Then minutes later, the horse was taken away covered in blood.

Now, as soon as I say that, I question it. I’m like, “Is it War Admiral?” I’m out of practice. Is it a different horse? I want to say, “Could it have been Count Fleet?” Then I think it was Whirlaway. But, maybe I’ve gotten it wrong. This is where I would have to Google it. Anyway, “Perhaps the ankle of a horse is holy” moves me deeply, and it’s simply because so much power rests on such a tiny, fragile joint. And so the poem goes through a lot of moves in a very quick space there, and it gets to a point where it says—it repeats itself— “If the ankle of a horse is holy, & if it fails / In the stretch & the horse goes down, & / The jockey in the bright shout of his silks / Is pitched headlong onto / The track, & maimed, & if later, the horse is / Destroyed, & all that is holy // Is also destroyed: hundreds of bones and muscles that / Tried their best to be pure flight, a lyric / Made flesh, then // I would like to go home, please.” And I have always read that as a metaphor for the work of the poet, that the poet is a lyric made flesh. It wants to be transported. It wants to become the poem in some way. And so a poet who, in the act of writing, has that rare experience of being carried away by the process is very much like a horse wanting only to fly, running as fast as it can down the track. And in some way we might say that one part of our being is the horse; there’s another part of our being that is “the jockey in the bright shout of his silks.” And as a byproduct of the horse’s exuberant desire for flight, the jockey is maimed. That is the most articulate expression that I can think of to explain why sometimes creative people suffer tremendously, seemingly at their own hands. I always tell my students, “You don’t need to look for sorrow; you don’t need to look for heartache if you think that that’s where great creativity comes from. Just wait. You don’t have to go looking; it will find you. That’s part of being human.” But I think there is a mythology that that is a conscious courting of the darkness, and to me, I don’t think it is. I think it is this other thing, where something out of control happens, an unconsciousness of the limitation of the being.

MP: Do you remember being first introduced to his work? 

KG: For someone as old as I am, I came to poetry late in my life, and the consequence of that is that by the time I first read Larry Levis’s poems, he was already deceased, and I think it may have been Mark Doty who said to me, “Here’s a poet you’ll really like. Go see if you can find it.” And there was a really fabulous independent bookstore on the campus, or what came to be called a campus, on Washington Square Park. It’s now a bodega. But they were going out of business, and that was where I bought Winter Stars. It was the only Levis book left on the shelf, and that was the first one that I bought, and it was a really transformative moment for me. Now if anyone were to ask me, “Who are your essential poets?” I would say, “Levis and Gilbert and Charles Wright.” And up until that point, I would have said, “Charles Wright.” So I came to Levis and Gilbert later than I came to Charles Wright, and I think that anyone can see the similarities between Wright and Levis. When I read Charles Wright, I thought, “Oh, I’m in the presence of a mind that works like my mind works, how that moves: it’s fluid, it’s moving, it’s shifting, anything can be in the poem, it goes from topic to topic.” I called it “juggling.” And the things that are being juggled are not always similar. I think that Levis is a more extravagant juggler than Charles Wright is. Charles Wright has got his act much more under control, and I think Levis is juggling chainsaws and flaming batons, simultaneously, and then with a bowling ball and a bowling pin—so, things of very dissimilar weight, size, gravity. I feel like with Charles Wright, it’s much more orchestrated. Levis sometimes feels out of control, but that’s the exhilaration of it, right? If there’s not a churning chainsaw [laughter], you lose something. Three bowling pins are not as exciting.

MP: In an interview with J.D. McClatchy, Wright was asked about some of the religious motifs in his poems, and McClatchy basically suggests that Wright’s argument is “the absence of belief.” And I asked him if he would agree with that, and he said, “Oh, I absolutely agree with that.” Then I asked him about Larry’s argument, and I guess I’ll ask you the same thing, if that’s something that you’re comfortable talking about. What is the argument Larry makes?

KG: I don’t think it’s about the absence of faith. I think Charles Wright has less faith than Larry Levis has. Charles Wright has a tremendous fascination with faith and with spirituality, and he, I believe, wants very, very much to believe, wishes he believed, but it doesn’t work that way. Unfortunately, you can’t make yourself believe. So if the horse is recurring and stars are recurring in Levis’s, wind might stand in in Charles Wright’s work for the divine or some sense of something bigger than we are that moves through us. It’s invisible; we can feel it, but we can’t capture it. If we hold it, if we still it, it’s lost. So, it’s not completely true that there isn’t a presence, or there aren’t hints in Wright of some wavering of his atheism. You can ask him if he feels that. I feel like sometimes he thinks, “Well, maybe I’m not as certain as I used to be,” or maybe, “Today I’m not as certain as I was yesterday. Tomorrow I can be certain again. But right now, I don’t know. Something feels different.” And with Levis I feel like there’s always a sense of, “I have no faith in an afterlife or a god or a design or a plan or anything like that. That’s not what I feel; I just feel a sort of faith that it matters in some way––that we don’t suffer without reason, or that it doesn’t matter if we could make the world a better place, or we could alleviate our own sorrow or someone else’s sorrow––that those things do matter profoundly. They don’t matter because there’s another world in which we’ll be rewarded or not be rewarded; they matter profoundly because people shouldn’t suffer in their lives. And if we can make someone’s life better or our own life better, we should do it. And if we can find a way into consolation or a way into feeling like a part of the universe, then wow, let me try as much as I can; let me chase it as far as I can and see if I can’t pin it down. But part, of course, of its beauty is that it resists us, that feeling of belonging.” But I believe he believes that it’s out there, and it’s worth pursuing. And that seems like a kind of faith to me.

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Gregory Donovan, the film’s producer, is the author of the poetry collections Torn From the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015), long-listed for the Julie Suk Award, and Calling His Children Home (University of Missouri Press), which won the Devins Award for Poetry. His poetry, essays, and translations have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (University of Virginia Press). Among other awards for his writing, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award from New England Writers as well as grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Donovan has served as a visiting writer and guest faculty for a number of summer conferences and low-residency programs, such as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Center, and the University of Tampa MFA program. Donovan is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he helped establish its MFA program, and he is a founding editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. 

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Poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker Michele Poulos directed and produced A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet. Poulos is the author of the poetry collectionBlack Laurel(Iris Press, 2016) and the chapbook A Disturbance in the Air, which won the 2012 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Her screenplay, Mule Bone Blues, about Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, won the 2010 Virginia Screenwriting Competition and was a second round finalist in the 2017 Sundance Screenwriters Lab competition. Her poetry and fiction have been published in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Smartish Pace, Crab Orchard Review, and many other journals. She has won fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the David Baldacci Foundation. Poulos has taught creative writing courses at Virginia Commonwealth University and Arizona State University, and has been invited for readings and as a guest lecturer at the College of William & Mary, University of Utah, Drew University, Columbus College of Art & Design, and the O Miami Poetry Festival, among other universities and writing conferences. She is currently at work on a feature-length documentary about women’s participation in Mardi Gras.