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Read John Smolens’ “Possession(s)” in our February 2014 issue, and when you can’t get it out of your head, see below:
Interview by Diana Clarke
1. The structure of “Possession(s)”—block text that is both a story and a how-to for surviving personal pain (the death of the narrator’s wife, in this case)—reminded me a lot of Jamaica Kincaid’s story “Girl.” In “Girl,” Kincaid uses the same kind of overwhelming text-block to convey the constraining and contradictory messages her young narrator receives about being a girl and growing into a woman. Do you see yourself writing into (or around, through, etc) cultural messages about mourning (i.e. what’s acceptable, how we should do it) and/or masculinity? How?
“Girl” is a brilliant story. Of course I can’t speak for Jamaica Kincaid, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that story didn’t just come to her all of a piece. What’s important is the story feels that way. That’s how it was for me while writing “Possession(s)”: it’s as though the story has always been there and you’re just fortunate to be tuned in to the right wave-length to pick it up. Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” has similar attributes.
Mourning is a good word. It rolls out softly; I even like the way it’s spelled, containing its own urn. What is mourning? It’s not just keening; it’s not just visible and audible responses to death. The great irony of Albert Camus’ The Stranger is that Meursault, when put on trial for murder, is found guilty largely because he did not sufficiently display remorse over his mother’s death. To not appear to mourn properly can be perceived as a most egregious cultural slight, not just an error in deportment but an insult, because it suggests a lack of respect, not just for the dead, but for those who have felt compelled to mourn in what society considers the proper, acceptable fashion.
2. I loved the line “Your clothes don’t count—they aren’t you, but just neglected shirts, pants, and jackets.” I read this as saying something about how we construct identity as a culture around clothing and gender. Women being defined by their clothing, while men utilize clothes as objects. Has that been true in your experience?
Though “Possession(s)” is not purely autobiographical, it was written in response to my wife Patricia’s death in the spring of 2011, after a brutal eight-month bout with a form of cancer known as glioblastoma, which causes malignant brain tumors. There have been moments when I have encountered the reality of her death in ways that seem to resonate in odd, unfathomable, but seemingly true fashion. What to do with her clothes was such an instance. She had garments that she hadn’t worn in decades; a dress, a pair of jeans meant something to her, reminded her of who she was at various points in her life. I simply don’t feel the same attachment to my clothes. If this is a gender distinction, I don’t know—I’m reluctant to generalize. Fiction—my fiction, anyway—is better served when it arises from the particular. It’s the reader’s prerogative to formulate a generalization.
3. This story begins with full, grammatical sentences and unspools into lists and sonorous poetics, almost a litany—”You would have solitude. You would not be alone. You would have the stones.” Was this a form you consciously chose? How did it evolve?
Very little about this story, while it was being written, was “conscious”; there was no “conscious choice,” other than choosing the words that seemed to best serve the purpose of the story. I like your use of the word litany in this question, for in some ways it felt as though that’s what I was writing, a litany (which often is associated with the making of lists, of taking stock, etc.). Lists can be a form of poetry: spare, direct, sublimely utilitarian. They’re open to wide interpretation. (My wife was, by the way, an avid list-maker, and she often used short-hand, which I always found beautiful even though I couldn’t read it.) The language—certainly the sentence structure—does change as the story progresses. There’s a sense of things breaking down into smaller pieces. This, for me, is the result of a movement toward what is most elemental.
I wasn’t sure how (or if) I could conclude this story. Sometimes the answer to the ending is so close you don’t see it immediately. As stated in the piece, there are baskets of rocks distributed about our house: beach stones she’d gathered from various places we’d visited. When I got to the stones I realized that this was where I could ease the story down to its conclusion. Few things are more “real,” more of this world than a stone. “Possession(s)” is part of a collection of stories I’m finishing, the title of which is Water and Stone, because the stories are, for me, elemental. The elemental is a strong antidote to chaos.
4. Although you never mention contemporary technology, it’s clear from the narrator’s language and cultural references (plus “Black Bean Chili 3/14/10”) that the story is set in a more-or-less present day, and that the narrator is fixated on his dead wife’s physical possessions. What place and significance do objects have for us when we can live digitally? When this interview is being conducted and posted on the Internet?
To live “digitally,” this has come to mind since [PANK] offered to publish this story. This is the first time I’ve published something in an online magazine. I’m part of that transitional generation of writers who started out thinking only of publication in paper print form, because that’s all there was, and being witness to the dramatic changes that are now occurring in publishing can be disorienting. When [PANK] published the piece in February, I didn’t know what to expect. Within hours I began to get emails, mostly from people I didn’t know. The speed of this response was quite impressive, and perhaps even alarming. I responded to everyone who contacted me, and some wrote back, which was truly gratifying. Why? There are so many complaints about the rapid changes in publishing, I wouldn’t know where to begin. But one constant about writing is that it’s a uniquely solitary experience. And when you do publish something, in the old-fashioned manner, considerable periods of time pass between getting a response from an editor, having a book reviewed, possibly hearing from readers who wish to respond to what you’ve written. In many instances, we’re talking years. But here, readers responded within a day or two, and it was a remarkable experience for this writer, gratifying, fleeting, and truly appreciated.
So the question is: Can we—can writers—live digitally? The answer (he wrote for an interview to be posted on the internet) is that we have no choice. These changes are here, and they’ll keep coming, probably with ever increasing speed. I will always love a book, the smell, the feel of a book, and I sincerely hope things don’t get to the point where books (and magazines) are little more than artifacts. But a new means of disseminating information and, more specifically, literature has been introduced and, no matter how much Jonathan Franzen rails against such things, there ain’t no turning back.
5. “Possession(s)” references major artists—Spielberg and Woolf—as well as name-dropping Gourmet and Bon Appetit, and making allusions to capitalist jargon like “Everything Must Go” with equal weight. How do you see capitalism and literature/art intersecting?
My father was a World War II GI who supported his family as a salesman, so Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s Glengary Glen Ross have been important reference points for me. Jack Smolens may not have read the plays but he lived them. (He may have seen the version of Death of a Salesman that starred Lee J. Cobb, which was televised in 1966.) The fact that Cobb’s Willy Loman is so different from Dustin Hoffman’s testifies to the brilliance of Miller’s portrayal of the main character. An American cutthroat tension inhabits both plays, and this is the world my father came home from every night. There is a short story by the poet Delmore Schwartz which has one of my favorite titles: “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Something inherent in that phrase touches the intersection of capitalism and literature/art. The brilliance of that title is that dreams and responsibilities, which are often considered to be antithetical, are, in fact, linked in a symbiotic fashion.
As for Steven Spielberg, like millions of moviegoers, I’ve admired many of his films, particularly Schindler’s List. And when I first saw Poltergeist years ago, I found it entertaining. It’s one of those films that’s designed to appeal to the 12-year-old in all of us. It works all the buttons regarding death: ghosts, evils spirits, floating skeletons, and the scariest damned closet any kid ever imagined. But the outburst in “Possession(s)” (“Fuck you, Steven Spielberg, death has no special effects”) is not just against Spielberg and his movie, but in response to all the nonsense that people come up with about death. When you lose someone close to you it’s easy to tire of this stuff. If you want to buy into ghouls and ghosts and angels and voices from the other side, fine, but it’s just distracting you from a hard, simple reality: we don’t know anything about the dead. My mantra for months after my wife died was: When you’re dead you’re dead. I’ve become weary of art, such as the film Poltergeist, that wants to dress death up to make it cute or cuddly or whatever, that wants to Disneyfy mortality. This is done for a price, whether they’re selling you a séance or a theater ticket. Art/literature and commerce, that’s a most difficult intersection to negotiate.
On the other hand, I do believe in spirits. I believe the spirit of my wife lives on in those who knew her. I believe Virginia Woolf’s spirit lives on in her work. Frankly, I admire her for using stones to commit suicide. One of the other stories in my collection, “The End of the World,” deals with suicide, both successful and averted, and Woolf’s use of stones comes into play. Water and stone may be the definition of a symbiotic relationship.
6. Maybe this is an unfair question, but I don’t think I’m the only reader to wonder, especially when reading a piece that’s in first person and that feels like stream-of-consciousness, about the connection between authorial voice and authorial psyche. How does the writing on the page relate to your own interior monologue or sensibility?
It’s a fair question, one that anyone who writes fiction wrestles with. At the time I was writing “Possession(s)” my psyche was disturbed by the things I associated with my wife, clothes, books, music, beach stones. Rather than being haunted by a goblin or a ghost, I suggest that a closet full of clothes is far more distressing and downright spooky. The story is called “Possession(s)” because the words possession and possessions have very different connotations. While writing the piece I was undecided as to which word would make the most appropriate title—and I actually titled rough drafts “Possession(s)” and eventually I realized I didn’t have to decide between the two words, that I had the title the story needed. (I admit to a fondness for parenthesis.) I was greatly relieved by that realization as this was not an easy story to write. If you want to talk about voice and psyche—this story came from a very deep place. Not an easy place at all, but this is why we do this, isn’t it?
7. What will you do when this interview is over?
As this is intended for the internet, I’m tempted to write “LOL!” (something I’ve never written before, though I do laugh out loud frequently). But as I’m currently sitting less than a hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico, I think I’ll go swimming. Water, but no stones.