Interview with Little Book Contest Judge — Logan February

Editorial Assistant and in-house interviewer Erinn Batykefer sat down with Mannequin in the Nude Author and Little Book Contest Judge Logan February to discuss what makes a stand-out contest submission!

Erinn Batykefer: Logan, it’s a pleasure to be back here in the interview chair with you again! The last time we chatted, you were considering baby blue hair for summer. Did that experiment come to fruition?

Logan February: It’s wonderful to be talking with you again! The last time was, what, four months ago? Amazing. So much has happened since then. But the blue hair, not yet. I’ve been very busy this summer (with a lot of internal work) so I haven’t felt much need to modify my appearance. But it will probably happen at some point, still.

EB: You’re Associate Director of Dovesong Labs, which mashes up the literary and the digital in creative video experiments, lessons, a salon, etc. Does the work to curate that space come to bear on your approach to judging PANK’s Little Book Contest?

LF: You know, there’s always so much to learn from being a reader and an editor, but I didn’t realize how much of a learning experience it would be to work as an educator, as well. Curating syllabi, creating study guides; it has evolved my relationship with poetics, and literary craft in general, in a big way. Language lets us into newer, fuller understandings (and misunderstandings) of self and society. I am interested in that—in the intention and execution of language.

EB: How do you see the little book / chapbook form working differently from a full length collection?

LF: I love chapbooks because you can read them in one go, you know, there’s limited space for the work to establish its thesis and formulate its own universe. I like the idea of that concision, I think a lot of amazing things can be born within that threshold. Where I see the full-length as a musical album—where you have to spend a whole cycle creating a complete body of work—my idea of the little book or chapbook is like an EP or a mixtape. I think of them as an opportunity to try out new poetics, to experiment, to tease new work, and just generally have a little more fun.

EB: What do you hope to see in the submissions for PANK’s Little Book Contest?

LF: Well, my love for literature transcends genre, so I am hoping to see a wide range of styles and inventions. I particularly like prose poetry and fragmented essays of creative nonfiction, so I hope I get stuff like that. Or like, a chapbook-length single poem! That would be very cool, I think. Everything, really, as long as it’s excellent. One of my current favorite pamphlet-type bodies of work is Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout—in which she examines Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—so I would be thrilled to read something like that, something critical and literary. Above all, I want to be amazed.

EB: You’re a student of forms, so you know the challenge and the skill it takes to write something that feels relevant in a form that is, in some cases, hundreds of years old—is that something that catches your eye when you’re reading new work?

LF: Ah, yes, definitely. Being written in a specific form makes a poem demand, I think, to be read a little closer, with a little more attention. It becomes important, then, to reward that attention with a well crafted poem, whose formal intentions are well realized. That’s what makes such poems worth all the effort they require.

EB: Your title from PANK this year, Mannequin in the Nude, draws on your global life as a queer African poet in its interrogations of religion, death, desire, grief, identity—one that is often dangerous to live. What, if anything, would you say to a writer who is facing similar risk in their work and life?

LF: I know firsthand how tough and terrifying it can be in that place, facing risk and threat externally, and many demons internally. All I can say is: have courage. Everything that must change requires your courage. Never forget to take care of yourself, and to stay as safe as possible. Do whatever you need to feel free. And you are allowed to get tired, to lose faith, to be afraid—fear is natural but it must not paralyze us. The important thing is to keep going.

EB: We can’t wait to see what you find among the finalists! Any last advice to the writers who are submitting work to PANK now or in the future?

LF: I can’t wait to get into it! All I can say is probably: have some trust in the writing, put in the work that it demands. And try to make wise decisions!

 

BUY LOGAN’S BOOK HERE

Friday Feature: Interview with Gabino Iglesias – Reviews Editor and Contest Judge

Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK]’s very own Reviews Editor and Fiction Contest Judge Gabino Iglesias to discuss all things writing!

Gabino is the author of Coyote Songs, a novel in which ghosts and old gods guide the hands of those caught up in a violent struggle to save the soul of the American southwest. A man tasked with shuttling children over the border believes the Virgin Mary is guiding him towards final justice. A woman offers colonizer blood to the Mother of Chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father.These stories intertwine with those of a vengeful spirit and a hungry creature to paint a timely, compelling, pulpy portrait of revenge, family, and hope.

Buy Coyote Songs Here!

Erinn Batykefer: I found your novel, Coyote Songs at the library and it had one of those big HORROR stickers on the spine. Your fiction has been published in anthologies that specialize in horror and crime fiction as well. How do you see genre functioning under the broad umbrella of fiction?

Gabino Iglesias: I see it as non-functioning. The only thing genre does is give you a set of rules and expectations while simultaneously limiting your readership. I’m fine with my work being called horror or crime or bizarro or magical realism (reviewers and readers have called it all those and more), but I won’t stamp a genre on it. That’s why I made up barrio noir. It’s its own thing. I think writers should tell the story they want to tell using the elements and styles that appeal to them the most. And they should do it without thinking about genre too much. That can come later, and only if it’s needed.

EB:  You’ve also read for contests like Best of the Net and judged genre awards like the Shirley Jackson Award and this year’s Splatterpunk Awards. What excites you most when you’re reading through the slush?

GI: The gems! There are always gems. Anyone who reads through slush at any magazine will agree. You read good and bad and decent and mediocre and that’s part of it. Then, from time to time, you read something that shakes you to the core, something that blows your mind and makes you wish you wrote it. I love finding those books and stories.

EB:  What excites you about reading for [PANK]’s Big Book Contest this year?

GI: People generally don’t know me, but they know [PANK]. [PANK] is a household name. Folks know [PANK] publishes top-notch stuff. Will some writers send work that isn’t ready? Sure, there is always some of that going on, but I think writers will look at the Big Book Contest and they will work hard to send in their best. I get to see all that goodness before anyone else and than I get to give someone some great news. There is nothing about the process that doesn’t appeal to me. I love all of it.

EB: Your work– particularly Coyote Songs– uses elements of horror and suspense, magical realism, and even fantasy to pry open and make viscerally immediate narratives about the Frontera, including migration, border crossings, and colonization. Unless you’re living them, these are narratives that often get distanced and dehumanized on the news, but the experience of reading horror is the opposite: it’s spiked heart rate and
the anxious turning of pages, the satisfaction of vengeance and the squirm of terror. Do you think that immediacy is corrective?

GI: Yes, to a degree. I think horror, or almost anything else for that matter, work best in the presence of empathy. It doesn’t have to be frontera fiction. It ca be a narrative about a poor, uneducated single mother struggling to survive in this country. She can be white, brown, black, whatever. Her pain, if you have a heart, becomes your pain, her anguish and desperation affect you. If that happens, that piece of fiction is successful. It can be literary fiction or noir; it doesn’t matter because it works. What I try to do with the things my characters go through is to make it universal. Any parent in any country will do whatever they can to not have to bury their kids. If I make some folks realize that that is exactly what happens at our border from time to time maybe they’ll realize that distance doesn’t matter.

EB: What are you hoping to feel when you’re reading a winning submission for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a Big Book of fiction do?

GI: A Big Book of fiction needs to accomplish two things. First, the storytelling has to be there, and it has to be amazing. It has to make me feel things. If I smile or nod, a book has me, has my attention. It can make me cringe or laugh or clench my fists. Whatever works as long as I’m feeling something. The second thing it has to do is have style. [PANK] publishes amazing work. I want to read prose that can stand next to poetry in terms of beauty but that never falls into the trap of trying to be pretty at the sake of being meaningful. A Big Book of fiction should make me say, “Wow, this narrative is amazing! And the writing is superb!”

EB: You’ve translated work before, and your books have been published in other languages as well—what’s your take on the same story in different languages, with different nuances, connotations, and references at work? Are they the same story when all is said and done?

GI: I don’t think so. Translation is rewriting in a way. I’m fine with that. I recently wrote a piece for LitReactor about the importance of work in translation. It opens the world to you. As long as book retains its essence, translation works. I’ve read books in Spanish and English. That has made me appreciate the role of outstanding translators. Thankfully we have more or those working now than even, and they usually take the time to research, talk to authors, and offer a translated version that is almost identical to the original, but we all know that copies are never exactly the same. My first novel is about to come out in Turkey this June. I exchanged emails with the translator. We had to discuss what a ferret was…

EB: If you could encourage fiction writers to read one thing before sitting down to write their next piece– a book, a genre, a craft manual—what would you give them for homework?

GI: I wouldn’t assign them anything! Haha. Too many books come to mind: David Joy’s The Line That Held Us, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, Cynan Jones’ Cove, Laird Barron’s Black Mountain, Juliet Escoria’s Juliet The Maniac, Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brian Evenson’s Song for the Unraveling of the World…too many! They come to me because they inspired me, they made me want to write. What I would do is tell them to think about a book that matters to them, a book they enjoyed. The first one that comes to mind is the one they should go get, crack open, and start reading. Feel inspired again. Remember the power of storytelling. Remember why we do what we do. That is homework, now and forever.

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] suspects you know where to go for breakfast after an all-nighter spent reading scary stories.

GI: I love [PANK]. Share? Two things: 1. if you read anything lately that you loved, talk to me about a review. I’m always looking for more reviews. Indie books strongly encouraged. Bonus points for reviews of indie books written by minorities. Take trans people. They need to be represented and celebrated now more than ever. Give me all your trans poetry! 2. Come to Austin. I’ll make you some of the best breakfast tacos you ever had. We can read more scary stories while we eat.

 

MY JEWISH QUESTION: ON IDENTITY AND EDITING

BY ERIKA JO BROWN

 

My Jewish question is more of an answer to a question that needn’t be asked.

One of my co-editors is especially keen on soliciting and publishing poetry in translation. Another person, who presents as an ally, once told me, straight in the face, that the reason for this poetic proclivity can be explained away by the fact that said co-editor is a bleeding heart from South Africa.

This is not because of the diversity of languages regularly spoken there. Of which, by the way, there are 11, officially—Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu.

I was left to infer something about Apartheid and white guilt, I suppose, an inference that insults my co-editor’s agency over his own preferences, and emits acrid wafts of tokenism towards the works we’d accepted. It was tacitly saying that, had a different editor been chosen, with a different background, the journal would be taking other pieces, more “mainstream” or “normal” poems maybe.

Again, “normal” is to be inferred from this verbal legerdemain. As an academic in 23rd grade, I’ve been trained that “mainstream” poets are defined as those who win awards, are white males, and operate in a lyrical or narrative mode.

I’m not sure I agree with that estimate entirely, but I was left to fill the negative space, so I did the best I could. I’ve seen plenty of terrible award-winning experimental poetry by white people. In fact, I’ve seen all kinds of poetry in many permutations. My ear and presumably other body parts lead me in my own taste.

Must there be a reason for the work we choose as editors? If one doesn’t have a stated ethos, evidently one will be named for you.

Here is where I place an enormous hedge of neighborly privacy. I’m a poet, and while I devour think-pieces and all manner of nonfiction on this and others topics, I’m uncomfortable staking a claim that reflects my own preferences and that of the journal generally. Yes, I’m in the academy, which coaches students to make a claim. As a comp teacher, I coach my students to make a claim. Maybe I’m a wuss, hiding beyond the ambiguity and velocity of my poems. So be it.

But I understand that editing is a public practice. It’s an act of gatekeeping. Furthermore, it is one way to consider literary activism, not necessarily as an overt gesture, but with a stake in institutionalized power. We are experiencing tumult in this country—the indiscriminate slaying of people of color by the police, weapons essentially invited to college campuses, hijab-ophobia, reckless legislature on women’s healthcare, the astounding privilege of a so-called liberal activist referring to HRC as a “bucket of vomit” and propagating reasons to vote for you-know-who instead.

I’m not saying these will be solved by literature. But a journal can present a collective of differences. And not just the much maligned, 1980’s, culture war idea of diverse “voices.” I think the LANGUAGE vs lyric debate has tidily been put to bed by now. A journal can provide different representations of meditations, outside the clamor of social media.

I decided to embark on a thought experiment. As an editor, I prioritize diversity—aesthetically, linguistically, and culturally—and energy, and an Altmanesque overlapping of voices. If pressed to make an analogy, I would explain that I typically choose poems that sound like a stroll down a street in New York, which is where I’m from and which I consider the best city in the world. It has shaped my poetic sensibilities, through its music and sense of performance.

Compelled to dig even deeper, I hit against the root of my Judaism. My Judaism indeed, because it is a very old religion, subject to waves of diaspora, and espoused idiosyncratically—and often secularly—across the world. Many tribe members cannot read our formative texts in their original languages, and, because of that and other natural progressions, have wandered entirely from its practices and rituals.

Because we can’t read the original language, some feel disenfranchised from accessing the text. The religion seems stewarded by other people. But the culture, or the sense that I identify with it, is politically vibrant, radical, full of longing.

See saudade: Portuguese for profound nostalgia for a permanent absence; tizita: Ethiopian for a blend of memory and mourning, loss and longing, an apostrophized personification; or Sehnsucht: German for intense pining mixed with the knowledge of unattainability.

I’ve wrestled (cue Jacob and the angel) with my love for certain literary underdogs. Think Dorothy Parker, Kenneth Koch, and Grace Paley, who I didn’t know when I was reading then, but know now, identified in some way as Jewish. Parker, especially, a renowned wit, highly responsive to her time, generous in her melancholy. I was not shocked, but moved that a man named Abel Meeropol wrote the song “Strange Fruit.”

When I spent a week at the Yiddish Book Center last June, it dawned on me that that gallows’ humor, that survivor’s dirge, that balls-out, ironic twisty wistfulness might be an answer to my Jewish question.

The disclaimer hardly seems necessary: I’m not suggesting that there is a Jewish-American aesthetic. Adrienne Rich’s essay about her crypto-Jewish identity, “Split at the Root,” bears no resemblance to stand-up bits of borsht belt humor. Furthermore, there are different definitions of a Jew, which stretch from secular Israeli solders to Hassids, cultish, anachronistic, soldiers of a different order.

Nor am I saying, by negation, that goyim are locked outside of the magical wit factory for life, by pain of conversion. (A Jewish conversion seems like a particularly painfully searching experience.) Edna St. Vincent Millay’s candle burning at both ends is one of my favorite economically charming and bittersweet quatrains.

As a contemporary sanctioned poetry aesthetic, humor is in a minority position. I don’t mean the diffused third-generation New York School frenzy of the unexpected, but real wit. It is often overlooked, excluded by the canon, dismissed and mislabeled as light verse.

I’m not often made aware of my own religious minority status. Racially, I am coded within the dominant culture and I benefit from this privileged position. (Let’s revisit the hows and whys of the strong Jewish-American presence in certain literary and entertainment industries in a different essay. I’ll say briefly that the most convincing theory of Jews flocking to these particular creative industries, for me, is the idea of creating parallel universes in fantasy.)

I’m reminded of my otherness in ways that catch my breath. The almost-twee cuteness in my gut response of mazel tov in response to announcements of pregnancies, promotions, moves, and marriages. My abhorrence when U.S. presidential candidates perform their Christian faith by design, as if it’s an authentic testament to character. (See Donald Trump’s reverence to “two Corinthians,” and beyond.) I find liturgical passages at weddings boring beyond belief, and not infrequently unsettling.

On a read trip last summer, my husband and I had to stop at a filling station in northern Alabama. It was plastered with red, white, and blue bumper stickers, pro-gun and anti-Muslim, and I was triggered with a Semitic ancestral fear.

I used the bathroom, bought peanut m&m’s as deliberate compensation for this service, and tried not to talk, for fear that my Jewishness might somehow surface and endanger me. It is irrational, but so are most feelings, especially ancestral ones.

Jews are a diasporatic people but “pass.” Consequently, there is a certain self-othering that occurs, bordering at times on xenophilia or a creepy automatic affinity for other others. How much relational attachments can one be expected to feel? Are American Jews distinctly intersectional?

Aren’t I personally proud of the Jewish traditions of socialism, sexual liberties, the hundred year-odd books written in Yiddish about Buddhist theology? What sort of interventions are asked of us by Hashem?

But these questions smack of exceptionalism. There are revolutionaries in China, Muslim feminists, dark humor in Chile, the ambiguity between nation, culture, and religion in desperate places, like Kashmir and South Sudan. Furthermore, literary activism is poorly defined, somewhere closer to the armchair than a downtown protest.

Which circles back to my first scruple. The personal does not dictate reader response, nor does politics. Consider the contrasting notions of essentialist representative voice and the supposed democracy of experimental writing. I’m not saying that age, gender, geography, sexual orientation, educational background, nationality, class, etc, etc, do not bear any relevance in the engagement of literature or aesthetic affiliations. I’m saying that it seems to me to be a dystopian nightmare if there’s a one-to-one relationship, barring any empathy through imagination. The infrastructure as it stands would just spawn more of the same—and that is unacceptable.

Sitting on religious-themed panel once, Leonard Cohen let out his own barbaric yawp, exhorting people who identify as Jews to abandon empty practices and instead “break their minds on the universe.” That is the task of the editor. Not paternalism, not reciprocity or anything of the sort. Just a mind, breaking through a patch of the darkness that surrounds us.

 

Erika Jo Brown is the author of the poetry collection I’m Your Huckleberry (Brooklyn Arts Press). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’s currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Houston where she’s the reading series curator and poetry editor for Gulf Coast.