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The Speed of Writing: An Interview with Hannah Rule

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

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BY NANCY REDDY

Hannah Rule is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in first-year writing, writing and embodiment, a survey of composition studies, and the teaching of writing. I first came across her work in 2016, when I attended a panel at an academic conference of writing teachers and researchers, the Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention, where she presented research that attempted to capture the writing process through video recording her own hands on her keyboard as she worked. This video– mundane as that may sound–was fascinating, and the image of writing captured in real-time, with all its pauses and backspaces and bursts of energy, has stuck with me for years. I think of it often as I’m sitting at my own keyboard, particularly when my own hands are still. Since then, she’s published articles that examine how writers interact with their writing environment, as well as how students use freewriting, and her book, Situating Writing Processes was recently published. The open-access version is available through the WAC Clearinghouse, and the print version is forthcoming from the University Press of Colorado.

Her new book, Situating Writing Processes, calls up an idea that many of us take for granted– that writing is a process and requires brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing–and makes it new again by considering the “physical, material, and located dimensions of processes.” In other words, Rule is interested not just in how writers get from ideas in their head to a finished product, but in how the physical world enters into that process. As she puts it in her article “Writing’s Rooms,” she’s interested in “the environmental minutiae of where writing takes place—the walls, desk, objects, and tools; the bodily movements, interruptions, and sounds of keys clacking.” Given how deeply Rule has thought about how writers actually write—where and with what materials and through which distractions and at what speed—I wanted to interview her to help me think more about writing and speed and how to get unstuck.

Reddy: My background in creative writing trained me to think of freewriting as a way of accessing the unconscious – something like the kind of automatic writing that the surrealists practiced. The more contemporary version of this is Julia Cameron’s “morning pages,” which Cameron describes as “three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning.” Many of the people I know who do morning pages or who use other freewriting practices describe it as something like clearing their throat or running the rusty water out of a faucet until something drinkable comes out. I’m curious how you think about the purpose of freewriting in your own teaching? When you ask students to freewrite, what are you hoping it will do for them?

Rule: I think I’m about to take the scenic route here, but I promise I’ll get to the question of purpose! I became a Peter Elbow fan and eventual freewriting evangelist while I was working on my doctorate at Cincinnati. I was reading a lot of his work; I found his writing so alive and intellectually admirable (he has this way of thinking out loud in loopy but coherent fashion). Elbow’s own struggle with academic writing in graduate school was what led him to freewriting, as a matter of survival really – something to do when doing seems otherwise impossible. Just write and don’t stop. He also came to see freewriting as an antidote; he thought students’ language was deadened, flattened by school. Writers, he thought, should shed all outside influence, silence the noise of others, discover their thinking in their own words.    

I found freewriting enabling – in grad school I started writing emails to myself of utter freewriting nonsense about a conference or research paper I was drafting. I still do this. I “wrote” some beginnings and hard parts of my recent book in Google Docs, using the speech-to-text feature (because at times even physically typing felt too hard). I very much like having writing started (I am the living embodiment of that Dorothy Parker quote about hating writing but loving having written). My teaching mentors were always talking about and having us do freewriting too, so it became a big part of the composition classes I was teaching. I dutifully described to my students what freewriting was and what it did; I learned about directed freewriting and “center of gravity” to help students work with their freewrites.

I was always curious, though, about what my students were actually doing when I gave them freewriting instructions. I’d basically stare at them, sneak looks over their shoulders, examine their facial expressions, speak to them like a yoga teacher to urge them into a “free” state of mind. Are they really riding the waves of language or were they crafting sentences that answered my question, that satisfied my expectation? This is what lead me to my 2013 study of a freewriter and to affirm that that freewriting is far from natural, easy, or automatic. I think of it now more as an invitation, a deliberate habit. If it’s tapping the unconscious, it’s a repetitive, express, intentioned effort to do so. And we’re never free as writers, of influence or fear or others. So I find myself more actively these days trying to push writers to write on their toes, to subvert the assumptions they have for writing (especially writing in school, that it must be careful, developed, deliberate, correct). I tend to prompt freewriting-type exercises now more with pace (quickwrites) than with “freedom.”

Reddy: In your article on freewriting, “The Difficulties of Thinking Through Freewriting,” I was interested in the moments when you had to intervene to coach your student about what to write. It made me think about what we believe freewriting is doing – especially as opposed to other practices that might help us come up with or clarify ideas, like talking or doodling or visualizing, or even just thinking without committing anything to paper. Why is freewriting such a canonical part of invention, and why do you think talk is more often reserved for revision? Is this primarily about how we think about ideas, property, individual genius – or are there other things at play as well? (Perhaps there’s just not been a Peter Elbow of brainstorming chat, for example. ;)) 

Rule: Yes, more Peter Elbows! I think that part of the value of freewriting is in the volume of tries you get at articulation, the chance that you’ll discover a phrase or word that can be lifted out as a seed to continue growing in a draft.

And yes, I agree, freewriting and invention practices (like cubing or webbing) reinforce writing as a matter of words and individual brains in isolation. At the same time, many teachers of writing have stretched this idea for me – I’m thinking of Patricia Dunn’s Talking Sketching Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing, Sondra Perl’s Felt Sense: Writing with the Body, Karen LeFevre’s Invention as a Social Act. I’ve definitely made invention more social, I think, recently: with my research writing students, I do an activity where we all write a potential research question on a sheet of paper anonymously. We pass our sheets, read what’s there, and add a totally different question or reframe one already written. We repeat this passing and adding many times. I compile the sheets as a book of potential, and we return to it in various ways as students eventually commit to a project. Mostly I like how this practice prevents students from deciding their direction too soon – often freewriting and other invention practices too quickly close off possibilities and crazy (good) ideas! 

Reddy: One of the things I’m trying to figure out across this series is what we mean when we talk about productivity in writing – and speed is certainly part of that. Part of the reason why your typing video stuck with me so much, I think, is that it really resonated with something I was trying to teach myself at the time – that writing actually isn’t typing, or that it’s not just typing. I often have to move from computer to notebook or post-it note, or get up and walk around until I can think better – and sometimes that thinking better takes actual time, like months or years. And part of what’s interesting about the freewriting protocol you describe in your article is that it does actually insist on some amount of speed, or at least fluency: writers are told to not stop writing, even if they don’t have anything to say, but to instead write something like “I don’t know what to say.” So I’m curious how you think about speed and fluency in writing, perhaps especially in freewriting or invention, but also across the writing process. What does your research show about the impact of continuing to just write, even if you don’t know what to say? 

Rule: In those hands-to-keyboard recordings, I think I was trying to see some of the most basic movement of writing but also, as you say, acknowledge how terribly limited that view is. Writing isn’t just in the space between fingers moving and fingers stopping. I’ve talked about this in my research with what I’ve called “romping.” Writing isn’t contained in the mind or in the relay between mind and page; it rather romps all over – into cars, classrooms, night shifts, nurseries, showers, walks, laundry, chats, everywhere! But romping is pretty antithetical to how we tend to picture productivity – when does writing as romping tip over into procrastination or avoidance?  

There is something to that freewriting mantra, just keep writing. But I think it’s in a wider-reaching momentum. There is this great book, Understanding Writing Blocks, where the author Keith Hjortshoj talks about writing as a nonstop invitation to stop: writers can stop at any time; they can stop after a sentence or word; after a bad review or an uncomfortable blocked session, or simply in favor of doing something else. Successful writers, Hjortshoj says, are those that have figured out how to stop stopping, to make a habit of not stopping. I think that’s brilliant. The trick is to first spin the plate of writing fast, and then keep it going.

So I’ve been thinking about the virtues of sometimes “hurrying up.” In writing instruction, going fast isn’t something we value basically at all. I mean, the whole paradigm of teaching writing as a process was the recognition that writers need more time, lots of time and space to draft and develop what they want to say and how to say it. But I think sometimes hurrying up is good! When I first start a project or revision, it’s best when I hurry up and start right away, without thinking about it. Avoiding delay makes continuing to write feel much less Herculean. In my classes, now I often time writing activities: I give a question I want to start discussion with, I ask students to turn to their neighbor and see if they can name two potential answers in 30 seconds. For invention in my personal essay class, I ask students to list 10 things that bother them in 60 seconds. The point isn’t if we can meet the goal; the goal is attempting to beat the clock. Writing feels weighty and serious, but I think this no-stakes hurrying can be a good way to trick us into creativity or into saying something we wouldn’t have otherwise.

Reddy: You’ve spent years and years now researching how other people write – and of course, you’ve also been doing your own writing all that time. Could you talk about your own writing process, and perhaps how researching process and the materiality of process has shaped how you write? And since this is a series in part about getting unstuck – what do you do when you’re feeling stuck in your writing?

Rule: One of the coolest results of my research is the responses. People have confessed things to me about the weird things they do, about what they can’t write without. I love thinking about this stuff. And certainly I have considered my own ways—I am, for example, a writer who needs minimalism whereever I am. I cannot bring myself to even deal with books I’m quoting (all of my reading has to be separate and compiled into notes).

I’ve also come to appreciate, though, that what we alone do as writers, or think we do, is only a tiny sliver of what’s going on when writing is emerging. Process is about habits, arrangement, curation but it’s equally about accidents, improvisations, making do, catching a little time to jot while we’re waiting on line or at the mechanic. Processes may be more reaction than ritual or control, more a team sport than a solo performance. 

Reddy: Now that you’ve completed your first book, what’s next? What’s happening in your writing life?

Rule: I’m recharging after the book! I’m also early on in a project on annotation as writing (rather than a private record of reading). And in my teaching, I find myself worried a lot these days, about the stakes of everything: how can we move the needle on information literacy, combat fraudulent news and misinformation, undermine the impoverished ways we “debate” online and in media, resuscitate evidence and agreed-upon facts? Who will tackle these issues if not writing teachers? 

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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 Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish 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.

[INTERVIEW] Poetry is Not What We Create, But What We Can Hear: An Interview with Lev Rubinstein

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INTERVIEW BY PHILIP METRES

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Born in 1947 and one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, Lev Rubinstein is among Russia’s most well-known contemporary poets and writers. He has been called the “Postmodern Chekhov.” His poetic texts, beginning in the 1970s, are written on stacks of index cards, a non-poetic medium that he was inspired to create through his work as a librarian at the Lenin Library. His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the “unofficial” art scene of the seventies and eighties and found wide publication by the late 1980s. Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes essays and cultural criticism for the independent media. He has been a leader in the pro-democracy and anti-Putin movements in Russia for some time now. In 2004, Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein was published, about which, Ron Silliman writes: “The major work by a major poet, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, and aptly translated. There is no question that this is one of the ‘must have’ [poetry] books of 2004.” Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties was published in 2015 by Ugly Duckling Presse, and was a finalist for the AATSEEL Prize for Translation. The interview is part of a series of interviews with Russian poets, called “From Pushkin to Pussy Riot: Conversations with Russian Poets,” and was conducted in Russian, in Cleveland during Rubinstein’s visit in 2007. It was conducted and translated by Philip Metres.

PHILIP METRES: I’d like to begin at the beginning. How did you begin writing poems and in what forms?

LEV RUBENSTEIN: Well, compared to others in my generation, I began to write poetry fairly late, not at 16 years old like the rest. I was already twenty years old, studying at the university, at the very end of the 1960s. I really wanted to write poetry then, even more than I wanted to read it. I had an agonizingly drawn-out period of imitating cult figures like Mandelstam, Khlebnikov, Marina Tsvetaeva—like all the others in my generation. Completely willy-nilly, my poems closely resembled theirs, and I didn’t like that at all. So I even avoided showing them to others. Only in the mid-70s did my own voice, my own style, emerge. In 1974, I published my first note card poem, and I’ve been going ever since.

PM: What poets and artists influenced you? How did you come up with the method of the note card?

LR: Literature and poetry were not the primary influences, but different modes of art—for example, in contemporary music like John Cage, and visual arts like Pop Art, Conceptualism. And also, I believe that in a cursory and indirect way Eastern philosophy of Zen influenced me, which of course I knew only glancingly, but some ideas of Zen also were important. But why I began using the note cards is difficult to explain. From a simply external reason I worked in a library for many years, and simply the cards were always available. But that’s only the surface reason.

Why was it important to me to write poems that weren’t flat and two-dimensional, but had a third dimension? It was important because I existed in the situation of the underground, of samizdat. I wanted to create something for my own benefit. Why must I write texts that wouldn’t be published?  I’d rather write poems that would be impossible to publish. That was the mindset. I wanted to objectivize the text, create text as an object, without regard for the typical worries about the press run, about costs. I wrote almost everything by hand, not with a typewriter.

I wanted that the text could be an object, a literary object, a theatrical object—all at once. And that’s exactly how it worked out. Because often it happens that the very same text gets into a poetry anthology, a prose anthology, an art exhibit, or gets used by musicians for a performance, or gets staged as theater. The very same text.

PM: Are there other poets and artists of your generation who used similar artistic strategies, and did you know them?

LR: We got to know each other, though late enough so that we didn’t really influence each other. We were already adults. I, [Dimitri Alexandrovich] Prigov, [Vsevolod] Nekrasov—we worked in isolation for many years. So it was important, at the end of the 1970s, when we formed a literary club, where people understood what we were trying to do. Because before the formation of that group, in literary terms, I was absolutely marginal.

PM: Can you explain a bit more about your method of construction?

LR: My poetic texts are not completely and clearly one genre or another. They swim between genres, as it were. But it’s important that within each text this occurs. Within each text, the genres overflow into one another—in one moment, it looks like a lyric poem, but by the next card, it turns out not to be lyric, but a bit of prose, for example. And then another is some everyday conversation on the street, or a cynical remark. Or an empty card. A field of silence. This is borrowed straight from music, because the pause is crucial for musical works. For me, the pause is critical. The expanse and time between cards—it’s all part of the text. Because of this, I always have had a problem publishing texts in book form; there are always problems to solve and compromises to make. I always say that that version is not completely my text, it’s a reproduction. Not a copy, but a reproduction, or as I’ve written before, like a photograph of a sculpture.

In other words, it provides a representation, but not the full volume and dimensionality. Because of course, it’s crucial that reading this work is not done just with eyes or the head but with the hands.

PM: There is a wonderful photograph of you cupping your ears on stage as if trying to listen to a far-off voice in the audience. I think of it as a symbol of your creative process. Are the snatches of conversation in your works from actual conversation?

LR: Not necessarily. One of my favorite techniques is quasi-quotation. Many fragments that could be perceived as quotes or citations are not actual quotes. I’m not citing texts, I’m citing linguistic genres—it’s a quote of genre or style. When a person read it, it’s as if he’s read it or heard it or seen it somewhere before. Although, I’m also quite attracted to “readymades,” but I stylize it so that it’s as if it were real.

PM: This stance of listening, this work of quasi-citation—it’s not just an aesthetic method, but also a kind of ethical stance. It says that each person has something interesting to say.

LR: Of course.

PM: That normal people can speak poetry.

LR: Absolutely right. I have a text called “The Hero Emerges” that begins with a series of statements written in iambic tetrameter, so strongly that Russian listeners immediately recognize it from school as a classical Russian poetic meter. But the phrases are very much everyday language, so a comic effect arises. In terms of meter, it’s like [Alexander Pushkin’s] Evgeny Onegin, but the content is banal and it just keeps coming. Hence the comedy. Sadly, it’s very hard to translate that effect. But really, it’s a manifesto that we are surrounded by poetry. That our linguistic laziness, through a special kind of listening, reveals itself as poetry.

Poetry is not what we create, but what we can hear.

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from “The Hero Emerges” (1986):

53

I tried it on, it fit just right.

54

So how’s about it, one more round?

55

You better ask those other guys.

56

Thank you. It’s time for me to go.

57

And you believed it, you poor sap?

58

This guy’s been toasted since breakfast.

59

Instead, take Mitka for a walk.

60

Who is the father? Does she know?

61

Next week, it’ll be a year already.

62

Oh, really? I had no idea.

63

Are you done talking? Now listen.

…

PM: Are you writing poetry these days?

LR: Now, very rarely. I write other things—columns, articles, essays.

PM: Why?

LR: I don’t know why. I can explain to myself, perhaps, the moment I lost motivation—that happens. There was a time when I knew why I had to write poems, and then there came a time when I didn’t know why. It’s not that I couldn’t. I could do it any time I wanted, but I don’t have the feeling of obligation, that I must do it. I’m writing prose seriously, and a few of my collections of essays have now been published.

PM: What does the essay form give you?

LR: Well, between us, first and foremost it gives me…there’s a financial component. I can’t just work for money, of course. It also gives me a new experience, a new type of challenge. If in poetry I’m completely free, in prose I have some obligation to be understandable, understandable but not vulgar. That’s an intriguing but difficult aim. To be original but also understandable.

And when I began to write essay, I thought I could earn some money easily this way. I thought I could do one thing with my left hand and something else with my right hand. It turns out not to be the case. Since I still am a poet, I wrote prose exactly as I wrote poetry, taking a long time to craft every phrase.

PM: During my study of Russian poetry and its relationship to historical change after the fall of communism, I saw how poetry had fallen from its heights during the Soviet period. It appears as if poetry is the most powerful in totalitarian societies. Prose, in its horizontality, its understandability, seems more suited to capitalist societies.

LR: Poetry, as an institution in the West, has become quite marginalized, it seems to me. But in Russia, it’s completely different. It’s always been more important. It’s a completely different tradition and relationship to the word. The more archaic the society, the greater the role played by poetry. In various Eastern countries—in Georgia or Armenia for example—poetry plays a large role. Even the peasants know and recite poetry.

PM: In Russia, this is now disappearing.

LR: Yes, it’s disappearing, but the inertia still exists. Poetry during the Soviet period, during perestroika, played an important role. Though I always rejected that role. I always saw poetry as a private thing, an autonomous thing, a social but not a political thing.

Simply put, poetry always could be political, but only if it was naturally political, not just because the poet wanted to be political. It must be part of its nature. Mandelstam, one day, said to his wife, when they began to persecute him, “look how they honor poets—someone can be killed for poetry.”  They honor poetry because they are afraid of it. In that sense, yes, poetry is political.

But in my era, in my circle during the 1970s and 1980s, poetry was not a means of resistance as much as a means of personal salvation, let’s say—in other words, one’s strength, one’s seclusion, one’s home. There was no air to breathe, but the poet made a hole in the wall in order to breathe.

PM: What do you think of the translations of your work?

LR: Well, first, I am grateful that they exist. At the same time, and I don’t want to offend, but there’s the expression that poetry is that which disappears during the translation.

PM: That’s been attributed to Robert Frost, among others.

LR: Well, it’s apt.

PM: When I began translating your work, I thought it would be easier than translating more traditional poetry, but it’s actually more complex than traditional poetry.

LR: Perhaps the greatest champion challenge of my texts for translators is “Mama Washed the Window,” because there’s this deceptive impression that it’s a simple text.

…

from “Mama Washed the Window” (1987):

1

Mama washed the window.

2

Papa bought a TV set.

3

The wind was blowing.

4

Zoya was stung by a wasp.

5

Sasha Smirnov broke his leg.

6

Borya Nikitin cracked his skull on a stone.

7

It started raining.

8

Brother teased brother.

9

The milk boiled over.

10

The first word he said was “elbow.”

11

Yura Stepanov rigged up a tepee.

12

Yulia Mikhailovna was strict.

13

Vova Avdeev fought all the time.

14

Tanya Chirkova was dumb.

15

Galya Fomina’s boyfriend had one arm.

16

Sergei Alexandrovich had a phone installed.

17

The invalid burned to death in his car.

18

We took a walk in the woods.

19

Grandma had cancer.

20

Grandma died in her sleep.

21

I often dreamt of Grandma.

22

I was afraid I would die in my sleep.

23

Igor Dudkin looked like a Georgian.

24

Sergey Alexandrovich joked with Papa.

25

The Sorokins had plums, but they also had a dog named Jack.

…

This primitive style is a construction, as if a child writes in a notebook all that he is experiencing, but with the crude vocabulary and simple syntax of a child. Plus, the first line was a common and immediately recognizable first line of Russian writing practice textbooks.

PM: In the first English translation, Joanne Turnbull translated the first line as “The cat wore a hat,” trying to get close to the simple language of the original. But she loses the sense of perspective that exists in the first two cards: “Mama washed the window. Papa bought a TV.” That sense of a widening angle of view slowly accessible to the child.

LR: Well, I’d never thought of that before. In French, they translated it as “Papa smoked a pipe.” 

PM: Perhaps an allusion to Magritte! You are now an international poet, in a sense, having been translated into many languages and traveled widely. Do you get to know other poets who have been doing similar experimental work?

LR: Unfortunately, I’m a monoglot, I’m ashamed to say, so I don’t know other poetries very intimately, except perhaps the German.

PM: In the 1970s, Robert Grenier, an American experimental poet, was also writing poems on note cards, though his were principally visual in nature, whereas yours feel more aural.

LR: There is a tradition in Russian poetry, especially in the underground, of oral poetry, recited poetry. You don’t read it at all, you just listen to it. To this day, Russian poetry is highly metrical. In the West, you don’t really have that dominant metrical tradition.

PM: Yes, there’s the figure of Nadezhda Mandelstam memorizing all of Osip Mandelstam’s poems so that they wouldn’t be forgotten during the Stalinist era. And of course there’s the fact that in Russia, illiteracy led to a greater emphasis on memorization and recitation.

LR: Even until in the 1930s, only ten percent of Russians were literate.

PM: What is the state of Russian poetry today?

LR: It’s normal. There are many poets, some interesting, some not so interesting. There are institutions, schools, clubs, places where poetry exist, journals, etc. Everything. It’s not as popular as in the Sixties, and that’s good. Because in the Sixties poetry had an abnormal popularity, due to the fact that there weren’t any other social institutions. There was no rock culture, there was no club culture, no institutions of expression—

PM: —no freedom. And poetry functioned as the great 19th century novels did—

LR: Yes, in the prophetic tradition.

PM: Some critics have argued that your work is principally parodic and ironic. It seems to me that the parodic tonality, but that it’s not the main one.

LR: There are other tones. If we’re talking about irony, there are different kinds of irony as well. But irony is fundamentally distance. Distance between the author’s speech and another. Parody is citation. But the humorous effect of reading comes from the sudden collision of genres, of the serious and the unserious. In those places, there’s always humor. I relate to the serious with humor, and vice versa. The traditional in poetry is typically the serious, and my relationship to it is comic.

PM: There’s irony, there’s parody, there’s musical structure, but in the end, in a text like “Here I Am,” there’s also a meditation on death itself.

LR: In some sense, yes.

PM: To me, the genius of your work is its combination of postmodern technique and its wrestling with eternal questions.

LR: Well, that’s a good way to end!   

Done vs Good: What I’ve learned so far about getting unstuck

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

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BY NANCY REDDY

Courtney Maum’s widely praised Before and After the Book Deal includes wisdom from writers, agents, editors, and more, including this terrifying bit from novelist Rebecca Makkai: “If you are 100 percent happy with your manuscript, it’s probably a sign that it’s bad.” (That is not where I thought that sentence was going to end!) She elaborates, saying, “It takes forever to write a manuscript. So when you finally get through it, you think, ‘It’s finally done!’ It’s not done. I wouldn’t send it out until you get the feeling that it’s finally—finally—done for the third time.”

I imagine this is a good way to produce a novel that’s a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But, applied more broadly, it’s an even more excellent way to just never finish your book. To perhaps never finish an essay or even a sentence.

It’s been a month since, inspired by the dread I felt at reading everyone else’s accomplishments and regarding my own moldering pile of drafts in various stages of generation and revision, I stood in my kitchen and worked up the idea for this series. I hoped that if I dragged my own bad feelings about my writing life up to the light via the magic of a biweekly deadline I’d be able to get myself unstuck. And I thought that sharing my struggle, as well as what I learned from interviewing and reading the work of other people who’ve studied creativity and the writing process would be valuable for others, too. 

So far, I’ve written a bit about productivity and accomplishment, and what all that end of year accounting might mean, and I shared my own struggles with ambition and why my first reaction when I won a big poetry prize was shame. I’ve got good stuff lined up – an interview with writing studies scholar Hannah Rule, who talks about the value and limits of freewriting, and the way that writing “romps all over – into cars, classrooms, night shifts, nurseries, showers, walks, laundry, chats, everywhere!”, and another interview with cartoonist, author, and educator Jessica Abel, whose insistence that you pick just One Thing as your creative priority has already helped me wrap up some long-term, seemingly intractable projects. 

I’d like to spend a minute here, one month into this project, thinking about how to get the work done. Rebecca Makkai’s words struck me so profoundly because they align to much of what I was taught in graduate school: revise, revise, revise; ask for feedback and then revise some more; assume that what you’ve done is never good enough. I get where this perspective comes from–but I also think it has the potential to be profoundly silencing.

For right now, I’m embracing an alternate approach: Elizabeth Gilbert’s pronouncement, in her book Big Magic, that “Done is better than good.” Those words come in a section of the book in which Gilbert discusses realizing, after she’d finished writing a novel, that a minor character was flawed. She realized she had two options: she could tear the entire novel apart and spend perhaps a year rebuilding it, or she could just call it a day. And she decided to publish the book, flaws and all. She had other books to write. The one she’d written was good enough, and out it went into the world. 

It’s an approach that likely sounds blasphemous to those of who came to writing under the austere star of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, which urges – on page 4, in my copy! – that, when you find the weak points in your work, “you must demolish the work and start over!” Had Dillard been writing Gilbert’s book, she would have ripped out that minor character, reworked the whole novel, and emerged from a cloud of dirt and detritus a year or two later, transformed. 

One thing that I’ve realized in writing this series is how much of my own stuckness is related to that imperative to perfect the work, which can be a laudable goal–and can also be a way of never quite doing the scary, hard thing.

Here are a few ways I’m focusing on getting to done in the coming months: 

One Thing: I’ll write more about this in an upcoming interview with Jessica Abel, but her focus on committing to One Goal to Rule Them All has allowed me to clear two really hard, messy projects off my desk. Abel insists that you can really just have one priority, and then buckle down and see that project through to completion. This doesn’t mean that there’s just one thing you want to do–just that you’re really only actively working on one project at a time. The post hyperlinked above is really helpful in clarifying what One Thing you should work on first. 

One realization that has made One Thing work really well for me is that it’s not just about what you’re “working on” but what you’re actually going to complete in a given period of time. So it’s not enough to say I’m “working on” an article this week– I have to commit to a particular measure or milestone for that project. Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal does a nice job of articulating three ways of thinking about milestones in writing projects: word count, time, and content (x section of a chapter, for example). Right now I’m in a content stage, but I’ve found both word count and time to be really helpful when what I need is to put brainpower into a project to see where it’s going. 

Connecting Goals to Time: The specific language for this comes from Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s series for Inside Higher Ed on productivity for junior faculty, but it’s applicable for creative writers, too. In this particular column, Rockquemore describes a practice she calls the “Sunday meeting,” during which you write out all your tasks for the week and consider the actual amount of time they’ll require. I’m really good at a to-do list, but moving from task to time has helped me to see how big projects can take shape in time. Towards the end of last week, as I was desperate to finish a scholarly article I’ve been working on for 6 months or several years, depending on how you count it, I looked at my revision notes and figured if I worked with serious focus for three more hours, I could knock it out. And I did. 

Moving forward, I’m writing my One Thing in my planner (the Get to Work Book; I adore it, and the 2020s are on sale now, if you still need a planner for the year) and noting how much time I think it will take. Then, as I work during the week, I record, right in the planner, how long I’m working on it and check my estimate against the actual total. It’s really helpful to see writing projects as finite and completable. 

Systems for Accountability: I’m a highly organized person. I love a task list, and I love a calendar. In most spheres of my life, I am what Gretchen Rubin would call an Upholder. But one thing I’ve realized is that, for this stage of my life and for the writing I’m doing now, I need more accountability, so I’m joining one of the writing groups run by my university’s Faculty Academic Writing Network. I won’t get feedback on my work, but what I will get is a regular writing date and the accountability of telling colleagues about my goals and the progress I’ve made. (And, bonus: I’m joining digitally, so I can do it my jammies, or what my longtime work-from-home husband calls his “work pants.”)

Since I’m talking about accountability, and I hinted in the last column about big, scary projects, I’ll name my current One Thing here: I’m going to finish the proposal for my narrative nonfiction book, a mix of personal experience and research into the trap of “natural motherhood.” I’ve been working on it for two years now, and I’ve done tons of drafting and researching and brainstorming and structuring – so now it’s time to move forward with the proposal. I’m clearing the decks so that I can finish it–a draft of it, at least–this month. 

I don’t know if, at the end of the month, it will be good. But I do know that, before it can be good, it has to be done.

—

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 Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish 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.


January’s Future Friday – Charlotte Hughes

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Charlotte Hughes attends high school in Columbia, South Carolina. She has attended the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio and is an editor for Polyphony Lit. Her poetry can be found in The Louisville Review, Lunch Ticket, The Raleigh Review, and has been honored by Penn State, F(r)iction Magazine, and the University of South Carolina.

Elegy with an I-77 Truck Stop

Driving onto campus, I consider the alternatives. Sink in the swamp. High tide with no footholds. Meet the farm fence going one twenty. I am angry because there is no way to pass the time. I can’t count to twenty before falling asleep, and given the the way music tinning from the car radio numbs me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I fell asleep halfway down the highway. Turing says machines cannot give up but mine does. I am learning the names for different shades of mourning: sound of a plastic wrapper, diesel, green neon lights. I am looking for turn-tracks and loopholes. I dread this & so here is me as the whirring ICEE machine at the back of the truck stop. The whirring is my lullaby (I cry in shades of Blue Raspberry and Cola.) Please, sing me to sleep and tuck in my covers, please. Take my keys, hide them in the boxes of Honey Buns. I’ve been right all along. I don’t need to drive to campus and see you’re gone. I can just be this shrink-wrapped box of Honey Buns—see how I’m bathed in this corporeal glow? I could stay here forever.

A Girl Walks into a New Year’s Eve Party

after Raphael Soyer’s Entering the Studio

Oh baby   this time you’re catty-corner the studio door
clasping hinges   to fall off — where’s the invisible man?
Girl, he could be   in the adirondacks of the Carolina hills,
home  for his tar slush Christmas   rolling large in Vegas
feathery girls saying  try  just one more time   where’s your
twenty twenty luck? Seeing straight? Anyways  look at you
the next incarnation of you  of course  it’s not really you,
the woman with eyebrows meeting in a v   sensible house shoes
half heel  nude pantyhose  trailing up a sensible plum ankle skirt
look    he even added a daub  of grey at your widow’s
peek  after you waltz  in the door with those sickeningly
sensible shoes,  maybe he’ll call you muse. Maybe  mother.
Maybe you should just  clic-clac   clutch my wrist
into the frame. We’ll dance to radio rock   in the studio and
your shoe’ll be gessoed with  muted oil  cornflake yellows &
blues. Stomp a painting onto his mid-century  oak floors.
An   old friend told me  waiting is a death  in itself
but that’s exactly  what I love  about a new year
So later I’m poised right outside the door  at midnight, while
you’re hiccuping  and tripping over my steps  your pantyhose
already fell off   two hours ago   my silver tube top is slipping
your sensible house shoes lost   but God we’re here at least
drink   pray to that   I can’t even write what’ll happen when
we walk in ball drops (new decade) we sing  but that’s the love, isn’t it?

Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens: On Modesty, Ambition, and Shame

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

—

BY NANCY REDDY

When my mother was a girl, she wanted a sewing machine so she could make her own clothes. Each day for a year, she packed a single apple in her lunch bag and saved the coins her mother gave her until she had enough for the Singer Touch & Sew she’d wanted, with its push-up bobbin and decorative stitches. And that year, on her prim single-apple diet, she’d grown so slim that all the clothes she sewed herself were tiny. I can almost see her now, in the breakfast nook of her childhood home, pinning patterns to fabric and selecting with great satisfaction the dashed-line contours of the smallest size.

How many women’s childhoods are full of stories like those, tiny fragments where the moral is both unsaid and startlingly clear? A girl wants something, and to get it, she must make herself so small she almost falls off the page. 

When I got the email saying my first book of poetry was a finalist for a big national prize, my first thought was: oh, that’s a nice boost. I’ll never win, but it’s a good first step. The story I’d learned about the first book was a kind of hero’s journey: it took years and along the way you had to conquer the many dragons of near-misses, the finalist and semi-finalist lists, you revised and rewrote, and the heartbreak of it worked an alchemy, until finally, just as you were about to give up entirely, your manuscript became a book. I was just starting. I’d sent the manuscript out just a few places, and this was the first round in its revised form, perhaps two years out from my MFA.   

So when I won, the first thing I felt was a thick sludge of shame. I’d cut the line. I knew so many poets who hadn’t gotten their book yet, and I’d skipped ahead of them. But more than that: winning revealed the scale of my ambition. I’d wanted a big thing. I’d entered the contest and sent off my work, knowing the odds were overwhelmingly against me, but also believing I might win, believing I might deserve to win. So once I won, everyone would know that about me, that I’d dared to want something that big.  

Being a poet is, in many ways, ridiculous. The things so many of us want–a book, more books, an academic job at a living wage in a livable place–are both nearly impossible to get and also, sometimes, change little about the material circumstances of our lives if we achieve them. One of the first things I did, after my book won, was to look up previous winners–not just the big name ones who get prime spots on the prize website, who’ve gone on to win all the other big prizes, but also the ones I’d never heard of, who maybe never wrote another book after that. I don’t know quite what to say about this instant self-defeating impulse except to wonder who else shares it and where it comes from.  

One of the keywords of my childhood was ladylike. To be ladylike meant to follow the rules, speak politely, cross one’s ankles beneath the dinner table, pass the salt and pepper together, say thank you, thank you whenever anything was offered. To be ladylike was to be modest, to not call attention to one’s self or one’s accomplishments. To be ladylike was to be small. I think my mother – who raised me mostly by herself for most of my childhood, who described herself in those years as a “flaming feminist” – would be appalled to hear me say that. But the lesson – be small, be still, don’t brag – was, I’m sure, embedded in her childhood as well, her upbringing by a German Catholic mother whose view of the world and the correct ways to be a woman in it was fixed and unrelenting. Go to mass, go to confession, be pretty but not exceptional. Be smart but not audacious. 

What is the lesson of these small stories? I was a girl who was taught to be small and grew up to want very big things. When I got some of them I didn’t believe my luck. But more than that, I didn’t believe I deserved it, that my work had earned the space.

This is all, obviously, a really excellent way to get and stay profoundly stuck. 

In the last column in this series I wrote about all the end-of-decade counting up writers were doing on twitter. My favorite thing on twitter so far in this shiny new year has been, on New Year’s Day, Rachel Syme’s “shoot your shot” thread:

The thread’s full of people – largely women, by a quick scan of profile pics – naming their big and small dreams and cheering each other on. 

When I learned to whistle, my grandmother told me that “whistling girls and crowing hens always come to no good end.” It’s probably true that she genuinely disliked whistling and believed it to be unladylike. But there’s also a broader caution in that little rhyme about calling attention to yourself–being too bold, going beyond what the feminine allows. So all those women out there, declaring their ambitions on the internet for anyone to see: they’re all whistling, loudly and unapologetically. 

I believe there’s power in this whistling, this act of naming our big dreams. Though “manifest” calls up an automatic eye-roll from me, Leigh Stein’s recent newsletter, Manifest yr dreams in 2020, managed to convince me in just a few paragraphs. In the newsletter, Stein describes the “vision boards” she’s created at various points in her career, and right up top is the one she made shortly before selling her memoir, Land of Enchantment. It’s simple and bold: it’s got a big picture of Reese Witherspoon from Wild in it, along with the words “More Money” and “Power.” When I first read it, I shuddered a little at the woo-woo of it, but even more than that, at the audacity of claiming MONEY and POWER. It scared me a little. I love it. What scary big dreams do you have this year?

—

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 Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish 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.

Throwback Thursday: “Interstitial” by Ellen Devlin

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Throwback Thursday is a monthly series that re-visits work originally published in [PANK] Magazine. 

—

Since Interstitial was published in PANK, I have been working on a full- length collection of poems that considers objects that are no longer in the world. Some are animated by the person who had worked with the object, some are alive themselves. So far, the project feels like an inquiry into the many spaces ordinary things occupy and how they bind us to them. Recently, I studied at Bread Loaf ‘19 and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and I have also begun a cartooning practice. I’m following the great Lynda Barry’s direction in her new book, Making Comics, to shake up my writing and broaden my perspective.

~ Ellen Devlin

INTERSTITIAL

1

liminal
icy lake of unknowing
glace
pummeled fruit-heart
of the matter
distinct from energy
distinguished:

Latin dis– ‘apart’ + stinguere ‘put out’ (from a base meaning ‘prick’). A small sorrow, slang: penis, vulgar : a spiteful or contemptible man often having some authority. Authoring laws, restrictions of movement. I am not moved by their sorrows.

2

longing
miles of asphalt
no propellers
humid

longing                                       

3

Do you remember growing
a body with an electrical charge,
lightning, you curved and curled
into another’s hollows, left park grass singed
beneath you hiss and steam, light shining
from the spaces between your teeth?
Now, I hardly remember the sound of desire. 
It’s a pillowed hammer, soft, without insistence.

4

Who is god?
earth, man
this likeness
a beginning
everywhere
all things

a beginning, everywhere
all is infinitely perfect

distinct, and equal in all things
nature and substance

create heaven and earth by
a single act

man and woman
holy
eat blessings
eat forbidden fruit
we share
original

6

1.How do we find nourishment in the death of others?
2. It’s a trick question.

Rita at the Toy Store

Barbie Hello Dream House, 2017

-still pink
-hi tec smart house
-equipped w/floor sensors
-speech rec
-girl in the ad smiles
-at six different Barbies
-still white
-impossible bodies

8

longing
a cleaving
a small empty boat,
a rocking

Directions: go in summer
on Sunday, look again at the house
where you grew up. 
Sweep another August
into hallways
pocked with insufficient rugs. 

9

I have searched this bus and there are no sleeping children.

awake     a fissure     in your skin     admitting     without your request     raucous wound

10
-diminutive
-occupying less space
-crouched
-body openings
-as invitation
-goddess

Izanami

Sunset is still bruising at five,
swelling through the deepening
wound of days. 

When you are sent across a bridge of clouds,
to birth a fire god, you will be immolated.
All gods are arsonists, and you
are already burning. 

What do you do with a creature who bleeds and doesn’t die, grows children in her body and feeds them from hers?

Solutions:

SQL constraints: used to specify rules for data in a table. Constraints are used to limit the type of data that can go into a table. This ensures the accuracy and reliability of the data in the table. If there is any violation between the constraint and the data action, the action is aborted. 

-ritual/accidental murder, judicial murder by silence, murder by mutilation
-restrict mocement, literacy, flights into lavender, sovereignty 
-flights into lavender

11
Already desert when you find her
moth larvae braiding in her hair–ghost blossomed
in a graveyard of her own making. 
What else could she do?
Then your slow wind gentled her,
quickened her. She drank you,
your scant April rain. 

—

ELLEN DEVLIN is the author of Rita, and a forthcoming chapbook, Heavenly Bodies at The Met. Her poems have appeared in in The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Lime Hawk Review, PANK, The New Ohio Review, The Sow’s Ear and Women’s Studies Quarterly Review. “Border”, a poem from Rita, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Boat Burned: An Interview with Kelly Grace Thomas

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Yes Yes Books, 2020

Kelly Grace Thomas’s poem “There is no metaphor for my mouth” appeared in the Fall/Winter 2016 issue of [PANK] Magazine. Her debut collection, Boat Burned, was released by YesYes Books on January 7, 2020. Julia Klochinsky, author of two forthcoming collections, Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020) and 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2021), interviews her press mate Kelly Grace Thomas, to discuss the silence around women’s bodies, her relationships to Boat, and the use of metaphor in her poetry. 

—

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Boat Burned is a remarkable collection of relation, exploring what it means to be a daughter, sister, wife, and women within one’s own boat-body. I wonder if we can begin by talking about some of the relationships that guide this book. Could you help navigate us through the uncharted waters of these relationships, from familial trauma to romantic love to self-acceptance?  

Kelly Grace Thomas: Relationships are a mirror: they reflect your brightest shine and your deepest shame. This book started through an urgency to understand and eventually heal the relationship I have with myself. 

I have always had a complicated relationship with my body. From eating disorders to body dysmorphia, I felt the pressure to look and perform certain ways as a woman. However, when I really examined these expectations, and where they came from I realized they more than billboards and body types. They came from my parent’s divorce, my great grandmother’s criticism, and the abusive relationship I found myself in, at the young age of 18. The ways I have been taught to woman literally made me sick.

Throughout writing this book I started asking why I needed to uncover the root cause. I started examining all the relationships in my life, but most importantly my relationship with my body.

At first, talking directly to these parts of myself was too painful, I didn’t know how. There was so much sadness and anger, so I reached my metaphor to help me navigate these waters. To look at the body as something separate from me, to try and heal and repair. When you heal yourself, you heal others, especially your relationship with them. I don’t think I could even truly love before writing these poems. Boat Burned helped give me the strength to identify false beliefs, burn them down and build something new. 

JKD: So your own relationship to poetry is therapeutic and cathartic, yes? Is this what most often brings you to the page, the desire to heal, or are there other motivations for this book or your newer work?  

KGT: I come to the page to break the silence. Of course, there is always the hope that healing will occur but more than anything I think I need to talk about what’s hurting.  Poetry offers companionship and comfort that most other things do not, it takes you into a room of your own and holds your hand until what needs to pass passes. Or processes. 

Most of my life, every experience I’ve had has an aftertaste of loneliness, even during the happiest times, surrounded by so many friends and family, there is still this feeling of isolation. The only way to fight it is through connection: to others, to myself, to nature. Poetry gifts me that, it builds a bridge. 

Women’s bodies are a paradox of pleasure and punishment. Women are lusted after for their curves, breasts, even compassion; but when it comes to anything from menstruation to miscarriage there is this echoing silence, often cloaked shame. This past summer, I was granted a fellowship for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, while there I was sitting with a group of women writers this topic came up. I asked them how they learned about their bodies. 

Silence. 

Not one of them could point to someone who had tried to teach them how to know their body or more importantly how to love their body. 

This past year my husband and I have been dealing with infertility issues. I have never experienced something so painful in my life. To try and process I looked into counseling and support groups, but there isn’t much out there. Yet another issue about a woman’s body that is seldom discussed. 

Poetry works against the silence, to grant permission, offers companionship, and talk about all these hard and lonely things: my father leaving, my family’s bankruptcy and foreclosures, another negative pregnancy test. I make a deal with myself:  get the grief out, write the poem, put it into the world. Poetry helps me be brave. It is the easiest way for me to approach my darkness and my joy. 

JKD: Why poetry? What does poetry hold for you that other genres do not? 

KGT: A dear friend of mine and founder of Get Lit-Words Ignite, Diane Luby Lane always quotes Walt Whitman, “how quick the sun-rise would kill me / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.” Everything breaks my heart, from the wildflowers on the freeway to how a glass of Cabernet looks like crushed velvet in the sun. I feel it all so much. Poetry allows me to send the sun-rise or sadness out of me without all the rules and restrictions of other genres. 

Poems grant permission to play with the wildness of language. To chisel a complicated emotion into a  haunting image, to reach for metaphor and sketch the different shades and shapes of the self. I love the idea that you don’t need to understand a poem, you just need to feel it. I have always been drawn to the inventiveness of language, to build a vessel for a universal ache. Poetry allows me an openness to experiment in a way that other forms don’t, to connect fast and deep.

When I began writing Boat Burned, I had spent 35 years not talking about what needed to be talked about. Then suddenly through a single metaphor: woman as boat,  I was able to sit close enough to start the conversation, to not approach the hurt head-on, as one would in nonfiction, or dialogue but find another door to walk through. Poetry has built so many hallways and houses for me. 

JKD: Why did you land on boat? (Pun very much intended.) In your book, boat seems to be a metaphor for so many things, the woman’s body, yes, but also unforeseen physical and emotional violence, the family unit rocking on unsteady waters, and so much more. And to that end, if woman metamorphoses into boat, what does that make the water, which seems as central to the world of Boat Burned as the boats traversing its waves? 

KGT: My first word was boat, I had completely forgotten about this until my mother reminded me in a conversation about my book.  Boats have always been a huge part of my family, the one thing that brought us together, and also a way of saying goodbye. 

When I was young my parents separated and my father moved in with his girlfriend. While my mom and dad were no longer together, it was still important that we all spend time as a family. We would spend Tuesday and Thursday night together and all day Sunday with my mother, sister, and I. We spent almost every Sunday on the water. Once we were far enough out, my dad would turn off the engine. It was so peaceful, the wind vibrating in the sail, the water kissing the bow, my feet over the side dipped into the salt water, it felt like nothing could touch us. On the boat, we were together again, away from complications of failed relationships, weekly schedules. 

A few years later my dad’s business went bankrupt. He lost everything. The bank foreclosed his house and he decided to relocate and rebuild his life in his home state of Florida, while we stayed in New Jersey. The boat was all he had left, so to say goodbye we spent a month sailing from New Jersey to Florida. Many of the poems in Boat Burned center around this experience. In this way, our boat felt like the salve and the wound. While for that month of adventure we were together again, there was a countdown looming to when I had to say goodbye to my father. 

For me, boats represent a women’s body, but also the setting where my family came together and broke apart. They represent the heaviness of marriage and the anchor of family, both steady and sinking. There were days we had to outrun storms, a night where we almost sunk in the middle of the dark Atlantic, times where I saw the possibility of us. At the same time, there was always a feeling we were looking at the end,  the sun would set, the wind would die, and I knew. I have a line in a poem that says, “a sailboat is the slowest goodbye.” For me, boats are both distance and longing. 

Boats are also extremely gendered. For centuries women were not allowed on boats, yet boats were considered shes. You can find a number of disgusting quotes comparing women to ships and how both need a man to control them. 

But it is not about control. Water will always be stronger than boat. Stronger than gender. It is the hands that hold us, the mother than covers us, the power and grace, that allows us. In the book water acts as a reminder, to look at energy over object. Women have been taught to deny their power for so long. The role of water is both a comfort and a reminder of the force of feminity when women allow themselves access to their own strength. This also serves as a reminder to myself. The manuscript ends, “they cannot sink us, if we name ourselves sea.” 

JKD: Who are the women, writers and not, who influence you most? Maybe you could tell us a bit the way their work, their influence, seeps into yours. 

My mother, without contest, has been the biggest influence in my life. She has always taught me so much about grace, about how to stay steadfast and grateful even in the roughest seas. My mother has passed down her legacy of kindness and patience. She taught me the importance of laughter and making the best out of anything. While she is the happiest woman I’ve ever met, growing up I could still feel her sadness. Her mother’s sadness. Her mother’s sadness. All this hurt women carry, but seldom talk about. The loneliness of that silence was a huge influence on this book. 

In terms of women writers who influence me, Patricia Smith and her book, Blood Dazzler has got to be my number one influence. That book broke language wide open for me. Showed me how to straightjacket a stanza through the teeth of precise verbs and the corset of form. 

I’m a self-taught poet. Everything I know I learned from reading and reading so many amazing poets. Reading Blood Dazzler felt like getting an MFA. Patricia’s work taught me that it is how you open the door of a poem, that really gives it its own legs. You must find a new way to introduce the same love and wounds we all share, once you mine the language that makes someone say, I’ve never heard that before. Patricia’s work taught me about relentless revision. I was determined to do everything I could to have a poem that fenced electricity the same way she did. 

There are also a number of contemporary female and non-binary poets who I go to for inspiration. Shira Erlichman, Rachel McKibbens, Marty McConnel, Tiana Clark, Paige Lewis, and so many more make me astound me with their lyric and innovation. Their work makes the alphabet new. The ability to create surprise in their work keeps me coming back. There are so many talented women and non-binary writers out that the change the way I look at poetry, and what it can do, daily. They are my  permission granters, their works whispers, “Of course you can.” 

JKD: What I admire so much about your writing is your way with metaphor, the way it begins as a governing principle of your poetry and then grows beyond comparison into a way of knowing, or not knowing perhaps. In your poem, “THERE IS NO METAPHOR FOR MY MOUTH” you take us through comparison by way of negation, showing us what the mouth is by cataloging what it isn’t, ultimately arriving at knowing, “And yes, I know something / of the night, / half-eaten and thick.” Could you tell us a bit about how this poem came to be? How do you use this very particular kind of negative metaphor to arrive at knowledge? 

KGT: Confession: I am metaphor obsessed if you couldn’t already tell. I’m drawn to their electricity and world-building power. You put two things together in a new association and all of sudden you have a new gravity,  a new emotional history or life story. For metaphor is a way to personalize the work without being too heavy with first-person perspective. 

“There is No Metaphor for My Mouth” was published in 2016 in [PANK]. I was reading “Insert Boy” by Danez Smith and read Smith’s poem “I’ll Spare You Another Poem about my Mouth.” I realized I had so few poems about my mouth. 

I use metaphor as a way to uncomplicate my relationship to my body. To other in an effort to understand, to address. Many of the metaphors in my work were created to grapple with guilt and shame. However, when thinking about the parts of my body, I didn’t feel the same about my mouth. The mouth felt like power. It is how I express my sexuality, how I use my voice. It felt strong. I thought about how in the past my voice had been threatened, but I’ve never felt embarrassed about speaking my mind. 

This poem is written with my first boyfriend in mind. I dated him for too many years, without knowing what a healthy relationship looked like, eventually, I learned that I was definitely not in one. I think this piece was born out of a place to take back the strength and power. To show this part of my body will always remain strong. The poem is written as a negation to address all the ways he might argue for my weakness, to show ultimately there is power in saying no repeatedly, in naming yourself instead of what someone else calls you. 

JKD: Now that Boat Burned is out in the world, what is next for you? Are you at work on a next manuscript or projects in other genres? What can we expect next from Kelly Grace Thomas, because I know I am already anxious for more! 

KGT: That is so sweet. Thanks, Julia. For me, the next thing is always beyond terrifying and exciting for me. It’s that moment where anything and everything is possible, but I always wonder if I’ll ever write anything “good” again. Whatever “good” means.  I wonder if all artists are as neurotic as I am. Haha. I blame growing up in Jersey, but I also know that it is neurosis that drives me. 

Outside of poetry, I am working on two projects. The first is a screenplay with my sister, Kat Thomas. We like to write romantic comedies with an emphasis on comedy. There is such reward in making people laugh. And it counterbalances my poems, which are usually soaked in sadness. I will be spending much of my winter vacation working with her to break story and develop characters. My sister and I have written together before, we wrote a romantic comedy about a pyramid scheme titled Magic Little Pills that won Best Feature in the Portland Comedy Film Festival. 

I am also currently working on a dystopian YA thriller called Only 10,001. My husband, Omid, has it has been reading it and giving me amazing feedback on conflict and characterization. I’m about halfway through but have taken a long three hour hiatus because of moving, getting married, working on my poetry collection. I’m hoping to finish my first draft of my novel in the new year. 

As for poetry, I am currently working on my second collection. I have about 50 first, second and third drafts. However, it is a collection that is deeply personal, even more so than Boat Burned, and that makes it a little more difficult to see its future. 

Over the past 12 months, my husband and I have been trying to build a family. However, after a year of no success and more invasive tests than I would wish on anyone, the doctors have identified some fertility issues.

Each month is a disappointment, it cracks me open, reminds me how fragile I feel, and how badly I want to be a mother. It’s tearing me up; writing helps. 

The stigma in society around fertility makes it even worse. From the blame culture, to the silence, to the lack of knowledge about women’s bodies. We know so little and it infuriates me. While I’m nervous to publish poems around fertility struggles in fear of writing a self-fulfilling prophecy, I also think that I owe myself to break the silence and stand with women who are going through the same silent and heavy heartbreak. 

One a lighter note. I am also working on a chapbook of love poems about my husband Omid. Patricia Smith has a wonderful list of overused words in love poems. I’m writing and trying to avoid these words when I can. It’s a great challenge. 

I have also been planning lots of readings in California and across the country to celebrate the launch of Boat Burned. I hope people will visit my website to see where I’m reading next. Excited to meet new friends and chat about poetry. 

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KELLY GRACE THOMAS is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, will release with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Nashville Review, Muzzle, DIAGRAM, and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Director of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. Kelly is a three-time poetry slam championship coach and the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot), currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly has received fellowships from Tin House Winter Workshop, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers. Kelly and her sister, Kat Thomas, won Best Feature Length Screenplay at the Portland Comedy Film Festival for their romantic comedy, Magic Little Pills. Kelly lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Omid, and is currently working on her debut novel, a YA thriller, titled Only 10.001. www.kellygracethomas.com 

JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon is currently back east, working towards a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry about the Holocaust, with a special focus on atrocity in former Soviet territories. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, now available from Kent State University Press or other book retailers. Purchase her chapbook, The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014), before it goes out of print in 2020. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in March 2020. Look out for her newest collection, 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. You can find her recent poems in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband. She edits Construction and occasionally writes Other women don’t tell you, a blog about motherhood.

All That Accomplishment: An Introduction to the Up Drafts

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

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BY NANCY REDDY

At the end of 2019, it seems like all of writer-twitter was consumed with counting up the decade’s achievements. There’s a variety of approaches: the straightforward list, the list with mock-items sprinkled in, the list that ends with a kind of coy wink, but everyone, it seems, felt compelled to count. (Except Morgan Parker, who tweeted the extremely accurate assertion that “this decade I did a lot.”)

Can you hear the buzz of anxiety beneath all that accounting? It’s useful to be able to prove quantitatively what you’ve done – but I also wonder why there’s such widespread obsession with proving ourselves. Okay, I don’t actually wonder – economic anxiety and the ever-escalating precarity of journalism and literary publishing seem like obvious culprits – but I do think it’s worth interrogating all this counting. When you count your accomplishments, is there some number that is enough? 

The counting that’s stuck with me the most slightly predates the current new decade fever. In Real Simple Taffy Brodesser-Akner (of GOOP profile fame) spends a full paragraph counting up the many successes of a very good year: 90k words published in The New York Times for 12 different stories, 40k of a new novel (sold before its completion), the publication of one of the most talked-about novels of the year, Fleishman is in Trouble, as well as a number of friends and family-related activities, which I skip over every time I read it because really I re-read that paragraph to be daunted and inspired by Brodeser-Akner’s relentless hustle. When I re-read the article to write this essay, though, I realized I’d misremembered. The phrase I’d heard as central to the essay – Brodesser-Akner invoking all this accomplishment, as if she’s rubbing her hands beside the warm fire of her word count – isn’t in the essay.  Brodesser-Akner’s actual phrase is the somewhat more muted observation that, in lieu of the zen mindfulness we’re often encouraged to aspire to, “I had accomplishment, which was my own form of peace via a longer game.” (Once you’ve published nearly 100,000 widely-read words in The New York Times, I guess you don’t need to add all this to your accomplishments.)

In any case, I love invoking accomplishment as an alternative to productivity. I’ve been very productive at many moments in my life: writing a dissertation in a frenzied 18 months, during which I also conceived and birthed a second kid and went on the academic job market, for example. But thinking in terms of productivity–obsessing over word count or crossing items off a task list–can also mean substituting busyness for meaningful work. 

As we start this new year in a new decade, I, too, am full of resolution and big ideas. Lately, for every thing I can count as finished–meaning published, or at least submitted–there are at least twice as many half-starts and dead ends. When I think about writing–all the essays I’ve started, the new book I’ve written a scrappy 25k of words and a query for–my brain gets stuck in pudding. 

I’m starting this series, a bi-weekly exploration of why we get stuck and how we can unstick ourselves, in the hopes that I’m not alone and that what I’ve learned about the writing process and the trap of worshipping productivity will resonate with others out there in the writing-ether. 

It feels scary, in this moment of internet-intimacy, to be taking a stance other than victorious or beaten-down but about-to-be-triumphant. Instead, I’m saying this: I’m stuck, but I’m working on it, and in the next several weeks, we’ll explore what it means to be stuck together. I’ll share what I’ve learned about accountability and process and switching writing medium when it gets hard, and I’ll share interviews with experts who can provide insights into creativity and writing process. 

This series takes its title from a line from Anne Lamott’s widely-anthologized “Shitty First Drafts.” Lamott’s idea is that in your first draft, you’re just getting it all down, so that’s your down draft, and then you can go back and fix it up, making that your up draft. In these essays, I’ll be sharing my Up Drafts, the place where I’m working out ideas. In doing this, I’m thinking also of the joy with which my younger son creates: as I write, he’s finishing a drawing of a dinosaur (that’s me) walking a dog (we don’t have a dog) and carrying a baby dinosaur (there are no babies in our house anymore). He works on his drawings with a single-minded focus, but then he finishes them. He doesn’t obsess over color or line placement. He draws one dinosaur, then another; one joyous stick-family under a yellow sun and a heart, then another: all these accomplishments. He gives his drawings away, and then he gets back to work. In this new year, I’m trying to do that, too. 

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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 Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish 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.

HUMAN TETRIS: A conversation with Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz

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11:11 Press, 2019

INTERVIEW BY MIKE CORRAO

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I recently had the chance to sit down with Vi Khi Nao and Ali Raz to talk to them about their new book, Human Tetris (11:11 Press 2019), which repurposes the style of newspaper personals and online dating to explore the shape of desire.

 

MIKE CORRAO: I’m fascinated by the haptic nature of Human Tetris. It’s a book that you’re compelled to rotate and turn as you read. It’s something that has to exist in the physical world to fully reveal itself. Do you want the reader to recognize these qualities in the text? Do you want them to always know that they have this physical object in their hands?

VI KHI NAO: I think we want our readers to acquire the services of a chiropractor. Neck discomfort may be our thing, though only time can tell what other parts might be activated or stimulated by this text. The physicality and rotational quality are born like the game itself, where desire falls on itself and if it falls too fast and the player is unable to sort it organically, it can get entangled. Desire can be a game. Or the number 4. A book as a video game has more interactive dimensions than a book as a book. We might want the players or readers to tap into the reality of desire, its humor and its playful darkness. The book itself is very tetragonally light.

MC: The craning of the neck that you mention leads me to think of the ways that a book can afflict its readers with certain ailments. The immediate answer is weight, but there are other ways (through rotation or small typesets) that books can place strain on the reader. Is this what you would like Human Tetris to do to some extent? Would you like it to create discomfort in its reader?

ALI RAZ: Not wedded to the idea of exacting bodily violence on prospective readers; metaphysical is another thing. Which is to say that I’m not hoping to create either comfort or discomfort, and I imagine that if the latter occurs the reader, if wise, will stop reading. Nothing, I hope, would compel them to prolong their physical discomfort. There’s something to be said about choosing your own pain/pleasure, but ultimately I’m more drawn to the pleasures of reading, which are not simple, than its pains.

VKN: The discomfort only exists on a corporeal plane for the readers. Everything else shouldn’t be about pain, soreness, or psychic confusion, perturbation, or hardship. If it does produce such results, the readers aren’t on the right video game with us.

MC: The language of Human Tetris is reminiscent of the more digital and abstract spaces that we go when we seek companionship. Reading the text, I’m often reminded of forum posts or online dating – the ambiguous wall of disembodied voices. Imagery varying between the apiary, the cybernetic, the caffeinated. When assembling these iso (in search of) posts, did you picture them as coming from disparate sites across the internet or a singular location? Do they radiate out from the same point? Are there real people behind these voices? Or do you see them as strictly linguistic creatures? Or another way entirely?

VKN: I view the book as a literary video game for writers. It appears interactive, but not really. It appears as if there are two or more players, but it’s just adverbs having lucrative careers with stand-up comedy. It resembles the aftermath of programming more than anything human, sexual, or linguistic. Even desire is texture and has no narrative construct or philosophy of being.

AR: Online forums, dating apps – or a real-world bathroom wall. Disembodied voices get close to it. I can’t imagine many of the texts actually cropping up in a dating scenario, whether on- or off-line. It was, for me, very much a literary undertaking in the sense of moving through language, being animated by language: desire in the abstract rather than anything approaching the real, messy thing. Another way of putting this would be to acknowledge the text as a catalog of un-kinks and anti-love. Not only divorced from flesh-and-blood reality but negating it, violently making fun of it. Which is maybe what much of the internet does anyway, even in its mushier corners.

MC: I like this label of un-kinks. Throughout the book, there is an erotics of destruction /consumption/augmentation. There is a desire to consume or be consumed/destroy or be destroyed by your prospective lovers. “You want pasta; I eat your honeyed clit.” / “ISO women who are bad carbohydrates, carbonated lemonade…” Not sure if I’ve got a question here, but it’s a detail I’m really fascinated by if you’d like to talk more about it.

AR: There’s something to the idea of the various thresholds of consumption that run alongside daily life and speech. Biting someone’s head off, wanting to eat a cute baby: there’s not a whole lot that marks even simple linguistic boundaries between anger and love. I don’t think there’s anything new in this idea but it greys, for me, into the totally seductive manner in which so much of erotics flickers back and forth between sex and straight-up violence. Kinks and un-kinks.

There’s this, and then there’s the plain old idea of food as sex by other means. Plain, but compelling. For anyone who doesn’t know it yet, Vi is an outstanding cook.

MC: This is a collaborative book. Is it the first time that either of you has done this large scale of a collaboration? How did it come about?

AR: Definitely the first time for me. It was instructive; adapting to the presence of another in this single text. The most interesting thing that came about was moments of uncanny synchronicity: times when Vi and I, unknown to each other, would end up writing about the same things, images, the same concepts, and only realize after the fact. So there’s a text, and there are two people doing various things to it and it begins to feel like there are three of us altogether, Vi and me and a process.

VKN: I have done collaborative work with others (writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, etc.) before. They haven’t had a chance to get born or publicized or celebrated yet, so it appears as if this collaborative effort is new or first.  I was getting sick of reading boring personals that should not be personals and I asked Ali Raz if she would be interested in creating ‘fake’ ones for a book and she said yes. I mean, how does one go about creating personals that are impractical and nonfunctional? Whose existence is designed to pull a quixotic philosopher from the imagination and not from reality? How does one make love to a concept?

MC: On a similar note, I’m curious about the process itself. How did the two of you go about assembling this project? Was it the two of you working separately within the same premise and then compiling the results? Did you work as a hive mind – writing each page together one by one?

VKN: I wrote the first poem and Ali wrote the second and then we alternated. We executed the exercise over an entire month of December. We each wrote one a day and submit it to each other. We had twenty-four hours to create one. Each day is a ruler, which measures our imagination and displays such an imagination via texts. It is a game for ourselves and not against ourselves. Though I can’t entirely say that time was our opponent or adversary. Perhaps it was our supporter even.

MC: Due to the nature of the formatting, Human Tetris has a pretty fast pace. That, paired with the style of the pieces, made reading the text feel like looking over the interface of a social media site. Like each page was a thread leading to a potential encounter or comment section or reply. How fast do you expect your reader to move? Do you want them to linger on each segment?

VKN: I want the readers to not eat a bucket of ice cream after reading each segment. I want the readers to move slowly as if they have been paused in a video game. I want them to experience erotic glitches as if the book has fallen from a 50-story building and the print screen is cracked, its palimpsest reset. Even if the medium refuses to be confused by another medium.

AR: I like your observation, Mike, about the experience of reading the book being like browsing social media. It moves in the same sort of digestible chunks. That said, as Vi notes, it’s probably not a good idea to consume a lot of these ‘digestible chunks’ in one sitting. I don’t have any stake in wanting a reader to read the book one way rather than another, but I’d be intrigued to know what makes the book feel fast or slow as the case may be.

MC: Vi, you mention a desire for erotic glitches. Often a writer will do their best to place their reader in a passive position, creating a large fantasy around their heads. Human Tetris instead fixates on the mechanical qualities of the video game.

VKN: I want readers to see the mirrors of their desire and laugh at them. Our culture takes sex too seriously. The films I watch – lovers are rarely shown laughing hysterically in bed. Erotic glitches break the mirror of fantasy.

AR: Laughter as emotional overload, aka glitch.

MC: Ali, in some of your short pieces, you’ve taken an unconventional approach to artist bios. One saying, “Ali Raz is a cyborg…” another saying, “believes in synchronicity.” Do you consider these to be extensions of the work that they are attached to? Do you see yourself as diegetic to each new fiction or poem you make?

AR: Holy smokes, no! The idea of being of a piece with a text is, to be frank, kind of horrifying. I’d rather be hoping for the opposite: a total split between the thing in the bio and the thing in the text. Which is why I’m drawn to lean, opaque bios that, when they’re not completely terse, don’t really say anything either. More and more now, I’m drawn to the simple, inoffensive bio, the opposite of a cyborg declaration: something so standard and innocuous it slips through the cracks.

MC: Do you listen to music when you write? Is there a genre or artist whose music provokes or inspires you to create your work?

AR: I’m musically slow: stuck in the same loops of music for months, years. Probably everyone else on the planet has a more sophisticated relationship to music than I do.

VKN: Silence is mine.

MC: Vi, this is your eleventh published book. You’ve released work with a variety of different presses. What’s your process for deciding which publisher is the best fit for a given title?

VKN: Some presses write to request a manuscript from me. Others I seek out through a submission window or opportunity (Fish in Exile). A few from writing contests (The Old Philosopher, A Brief Alphabet of Torture). Sometimes there is no best fit, just being at the right place at the right time with a particular publisher. Sometimes the universe helps me out by preventing a particular manuscript from being born as a way of protecting me from terrible publishers. We want some of our soulmates to wear thongs in the relationship without resorting to olive oil or ancient Greece.

MC: I’m always curious to hear what kind of work authors engage with. Were you reading anything as you wrote Human Tetris? Do you tend to read a lot? Do you read more contemporary titles or older works?

 VKN: I don’t read. I try to have a vibrant, impotent, prolific sex life with as many books and films as possible. Organically.

 

 

VI KHI NAO is the author of three poetry collections, Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016), and a novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.

ALI RAZ received an MFA in Fiction from the University of Notre Dame. Her work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Occulum, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

 

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MIKE CORRAO is the author of three books, Man, Oh Man (Orson’s Publishing), Two Novels (Orson’s Publishing) and Gut Text (11:11 Press), one chapbook, Avian Funeral March (Self-Fuck), and many short films. Along with earning multiple Best of the Net nominations, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Collagist, Always Crashing, and The Portland Review. He lives in Minneapolis. Learn more at www.mikecorrao.com

Her widely trashed prose poem can be found in Wikipedia

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BY MEG HANSEN

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MEG HANSEN is a poet, trained in medicine (MBBS), and a graduate of Dartmouth College (MA). She is a Vermonter who was born in India and has lived in the UAE, Italy, and Norway. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, Flow Journal, Thinking Gender, Right Hand Pointing, Breadcrumbs Magazine, and elsewhere.