Interview

Author Interview with David Scott Hay

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

ORDER THE FOUNTAIN HERE

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

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

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

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

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

DR: Oh, that’s nice. Yes, the W logo.

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

DR: [laughs] 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DR: What piece did you see that affected you?

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

DR: Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

DR: Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

DR: Sure. Could be to some. 

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

DR: And they had talent, of course. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DSH: Uh-huh. 

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

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

DR: Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Scott Hay by Mycki Manning

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

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

Interview with Christine Hume – Author of A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story

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[PANK] Team Member Emily McLaughlin sat down with [PANK] Author Christine Hume about her new essay collection, A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. Buy it HERE

We could not be more pleased to announce the April release of Christine Hume’s little book A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story, a disability-forward essay that melds memoir, neurology, chromopoetics, and literary criticism into an ecstatic embodiment of an illiterate girlhood. Shaped as an index, rather than a primary text, Hume posits the cruel optimism of reading, which promises to shape brains and lives, against the dyslexic’s subterfuge intelligence. In vignettes, meditations, lapses, guesses, and fragments, all refracted through the color red, this work questions what reading means and how we come to claim it. 

PANK: Thank you for talking to us about A Different Shade For Each Person Reading The Story. PANK is so fortunate to publish such a wonder. 

CH: I’m the fortunate one!

PANK: A Different Shade For Each Person Reading The Story does read like a bit of a mystery, like what learning to read as an avid reader and writer with dyslexia might experience? And it feels ever-growing, still alive. Does it feel like more of a poem to you? Are you able to say where it began? With which piece? With which vignette, fragment, guess? 

CH: The process of writing this chapbook was extended, evolving and shifting over seven years. I certainly didn’t set out to write it; I resisted it even as I felt compelled toward it. I had been writing a long essay about my girlhood refigured by the color red when my daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. I read a bunch of books about dyslexia and a bunch of other books about color or color theory. Both groups of books were missing a crucial sense of subjectivity and interiority. The books about color were often shallow lists of dazzling facts and stories; somehow most art historians, for instance, manage to kill the use of color in visual art by a thousand dull knives. They miss color as an experience,  bodily and aesthetic, which is, to me, the point. Most of the books I read about dyslexia were like self help books, or information-driven, which I often appreciated, but never felt connected to emotionally. Eventually, the red girlhood essay split in two, with a lot of fall out. Much of this had to do with my enlarged capacity to face my own dyslexia indirectly through my daughter’s–and reviewing my life through its lens. New memories returned involuntarily, and so did some of the research I did 20 some years ago in grad school–on John Keats and Charlotte Bronte. I also liked the homophonic relation of red to read (past tense) because reading for me has always been auditory and mistake riddled. Red itself was my lead. I didn’t know what I was writing, red was leading me somewhere. Red coalesced the shame and embarrassment as well as the libidinal thrill and material pleasures of reading. You are right, it definitely could keep growing, but I pared it back instead. Once I realized what I was doing, it was more the work of assembly and arrangement. I left shades and stories out; I made it elliptical and suggestive; I made it look like a series of prose poems, relying on white space and gestalt. If it feels like poetry, it’s because dyslexics often think in poetic modes–in images, gaps and materialities–and read best in short discrete chunks that activate our imaginations, that require readerly involvement. I was trying to make a dyslexic-friendly text, more than I was trying to write an essay or a serial poem.

PANK: This leads me into my next question about your use of chromopoetics here. Can you tell us more about it?

CH: I teach a creative writing class I call Chromopoetics. In class, we write with, about, through, and into color, a visual phenomenon that seems to elude linguistic expression. Have you ever tried to describe a color or represent it in language? It’s difficult, and that difficulty is a good place to sharpen writerly skills. It’s a class that studies the poetics of color, but it is also by necessity an exploration of queerness, excess, narcosis, superficiality, memory, alienation, and meaning itself.  We get together with the Art Theory class and trade ideas, language, and projects; we mix and complement and contrast. We follow chromatic whims, but we also look at a lot of art, fashion, photography as well as listen to music/sound art and go on color walks. I came across the term, “chromopoetics,” maybe hyphenated as “chromo-poetics,” in an interview with Brazillian artist, Cido Meireles, whose work I also teach in class. As far as I know he coined the term. In context, he uses the word to insist that we don’t reduce his work to didactic political or symbolic meanings, but that we leave ourselves open to the work’s chromopoetics, its allegiance to perception, sensitization, mystery, phantom textures, affective intimacies–complex experience!–that does not cancel out the political but augments it. Partly, he’s correcting the dogged perception that Meireles and other Latin American Conceptual artists face because of their relative political awareness and acuity (compared to most western European and North American Conceptual work). I find the term useful for thinking about a canon of literature that employs color to do both symbolic and poetic work, each extending the reach of the other. Some work I include in this canon: Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child, Han Kang’s The White Book, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red; Marie Ndiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green; Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings, Gerturde Stein’s Tender Buttons, Wayne Koestenbaum’s Pink Trance,  William Gass’s On Being Blue, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Porochista Khakpour’s Brown Album, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and shorter works such as Kevin Killian’s “Color in Darkness,” Lisa Robertson, “How to Colour” Samantha Hunt’s “The Yellow,” N. Scott Momaday “The Colors of Night,” David Foster Wallace’s “Church Not Made of Hands,” “Everything is Green,” and “Brief Interview #42” — and a lot of poetry.  I include non-contemporary works as well–like Moby Dick’s whiteness as well as Jane Eyre’s scarlet curtains–but since this is a creative writing class, we focus on more recent work. In class, we explore the ways that language colors our perceptions, the ways that color situates language, the ways that we see through language and color, the ways that color and language are similarly contexted dependent as well as context-creating–manifesting moods, structures of feeling, politics, and poetics.

PANK: And so was it difficult at all to settle on the color choices for each piece? 

CH: I did a lot of interesting and unnecessary research that helped ground my choices, often in ways that aren’t readily available. I mixed the names of reds from a variety of disciplines with my own inventions, trying to let the subjectivity of the shades guide me. I was thinking about the philosophical counterexample that David Hume poses to his own empirical theories, one that resonates with the magic trick of reading for me. He says, presented with a spectrum of blues with one shade missing, we can form an idea of this missing shade even if we have never had a prior impression of it. In other words, we can generate an idea without first being exposed to the relevant sensory experience. In this case, the system of colors forms a space in which gaps can be recognized and, if not too small, can be filled in. Color systems always leave something out as they attempt to totalize; it’s a lovely kind of desperation, like memory itself. 

PANK: Early on, in the fifth piece, you write, “Does reading take place in one person’s consciousness or out there, in a system that separates you from me?” You also refer to yourself as a closeted dyslexic. Was this as liberating to write as I assume vulnerable? You refer to yourself as a closeted dyslexic, was this book the first time you have revealed your struggles with dyslexia publicly? 

CH: Finding out in late college allowed me to grieve a little and shrug it off. I had already absorbed a toxic amount of shame and figured out ways of getting by and working around my disability. I never allowed myself to be curious about my condition. I never identified as dyslexic.  It took my daughter’s diagnosis her then tutor asking me to give a presentation to the local chapter of the Dyslexia Association to really start thinking about how my life and writing have been shaped by dyslexia. I had only told a handful of people in my life at that point. I had habitualized avoidance. Not of reading, but of exploring my relation to reading. No way was I going to reflect on a bottomless pit of pain, but then the thought of talking to reading tutors, for whom dyslexia was common and surmountable, gave me a chance to push beyond my fear. That presentation set me up to re-imagine my entire life through this new lens. I’m grateful to my daughter’s tutor, Madelon Possely, who invited me. The women in her group were incredibly supportive and curious, asked wonderful questions and offered thrilling insights. I couldn’t stop thinking about their questions and about how my own writing was (unwittingly! unbeknownst to me!) had been cryptically addressing dyslexia all along. Discovering the subtext or the true subject of some of those poems was liberating. For instance, the first poem in my second book uses a list of “comprehension questions” to imply a narrative. I wrote this remembering my habit of skipping the reading passage on standardized tests and jumping right to the questions. Often, the answers seemed loaded in the questions; they were leading questions or they pointed to their answers somehow. This was a compensation strategy; it was also a way of reading the questions as a kind of poem, where a lot of the narrative is suggested indirectly. I’m not answering your question, though, not even indirectly! A Different Shade… was definitely my first public outing. After writing it, I remember the first time I mentioned being dsylexic to students. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I dropped the word and owned it in a small graduate class. At the end of the semester, a really inspiring and dear student surprised me with a handmade card in which she thanked me for talking casually about a learning disability in class, making it seem normal and easy. I was floored. It was a kind of first for both of us, releasing us at least momentarily from the grips of useless but deeply felt impostor syndrome. 

PANK: Your profound “Maroon” vignette is hard to summarize. You tell us how your mother might call a neighbor a maroon, meaning moron. “The word “moron,” itself coined by a psychologist in the early 1900s, performs its own meaning when misread or mispronounced . . . To equate “moron” with “maroon” though implies a sonic relationship between abandonment and idiocy. To be illiterate is to feel marooned, isolated, left. It took humans two thousand years to develop literacy, and now we give a new human about two thousand days until we expect her to start reading . . . if you consider the other meaning of Maroon—an escaped slave living in the Caribbean—you see how abandonment is just what you chose to ignore, an oxymoron.” I’m botching this, but wow.  This piece seems to encapsulate what your entire book is about, the experience of reading and the experience of being misunderstood as a different type of reader? 

CH: Language is always on the move. Parents make themselves the object of scorn to their children with their outdated language, which is always linked to outdated ideas. After 1880s with the invention of factory dyes, red goes from a rare royal luxury, a symbol of wealth and power, to cheap in every sense of the word: vulgar, suspect, crass, risky. Only in the 19th century did red acquire racial connotations in the Western world via (1) the “red Indian,” (2) “Carmen,” the novella and opera from carmine the color cochineal insects produce, and (3) “maroon,” a runaway slave from the late 17th century (a word produced from marron meaning “feral” in French and/or cimarron meaning “wild place” in Spanish). Because red is one of our longest named colors in English, its history comes loaded with ideology and metaphor. It drags its dinosaur tail of meaning into the present, which creates the conditions for misunderstanding. Or understanding something unintended, other kinds of knowledge. 

PANK: And “Estrus Red” too movingly meditates on so many things. How did you settle on this title and or each title? 

CH: I meant to evoke the idea of being in “heat,” a biological cycle when the female is suddenly very visible. The blood is menstrual blood here, and I want to link reading with receptivity, fertility as well as erotic pursuit. That feeling of visceral absorption and chasing language wherever it leads; texts that get freaky with you and get you sprung but slowly–all the chemistry that marinates your body while you read. Reading is fully biological. We must change our brains, rewire our minds, in order to see marks on a page as readable text. And reading allows us to be penetrated by another mind, another biology, another rhythmic pulse. 

PANK: You tell us here, “Anyone who has ever felt bereft upon finishing a book understands this transformation, which is both temporary and, in some measure, permanent: you can’t go back, you have changed.” You seem to be summarizing your own book here. Any reader of this can never go back to thinking of dyslexia, of reading, or of the color red, in the same way again. You have changed our experience of all of these things. Was this your authorial intent or did you have intentions you were aware of when writing? 

CH: Thanks, that’s great to hear! I didn’t have that [transformation] specifically in mind, but of course what “finishing a book” there means–writing one or reading one?–is ambiguous. Maybe because reading was such an arduous activity for me early on that the effort of reading a book felt akin to writing it, or so I imagined.

PANK: Readers can experience your experience and see things in a new way with each fresh read, the way you might have learned to see words on the page. With the index of shades of red, each shade catches your eye in the periphery from another angle. To you, is there an ideal way for the way this book should be read or do you have an ideal reader in mind? That may seem counter-intuitive, is there a way you would like this book to be taught to writing students? Or, what I am trying to say here, perhaps, is in thinking of this as a rethinking of the cruel optimism of reading, is there an optimistic way you would teach this book to writing students, or a different way to teach this book to students with disabilities? 

CH: I love this question, thank you! I included the opening “Instructions” after feedback from readers at DSQ [Disabilities Studies Quarterly], who because I think it’s a mostly scholarly venue, needed some framing for the piece. (An excerpt was published there last year.) I thought their request was an opportunity to say why I didn’t want to introduce or conclude the piece. I wanted readers to have to figure out what was going on as a kind of simulation of the dyslexic experience, not an exact replication of it, but an experience that involves piecemeal figuring and patience. The “Instructions” make clear that there is no ideal way to read the work, and encourages reading as a heterogeneous activity, and not an entirely standardardized act. As much as our education system has been co-opted by capitalism and has become a kind of factory for manufacturing readers (K-3rd grade), human difference prevails. Our brains are not all wired the same way. Many of the dyslexics I know started reading well after 3rd grade! None of them ended up in prison as is the rumor about people who don’t read by 3rd grade, though I also know that prisons hold a statistically high number of people with learning disabilities. Reading itself is not a measure of intelligence, but we treat it that way. In an ideal world, I would have used the dyslexie font (weighted font that’s easier for people with dyslexia to read), perforated all the (unpaginated) pages, and included a link to the free audio book version.  

PANK: That’s next on PANK’s list. Thank you for your time, Christine. PANK loves you! 

doors! a conversation between kevin latimer, author of ZOETROPE, and emilie kneifel

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Grieveland, 2020

Latimer’s debut book of poetry, ZOETROPE, is out August 8th 2020. Emilie Kneifel sat down with him to discuss pink, the embodiment of punctuation, whether doors close, and who lets a poem be political.

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EMILIE KNEIFEL: tell me about pink.

KEVIN LATIMER: it’s my favourite colour. it’s also a betrayal of masculinity, which, as a Black and queer man, i try to subvert a lot. so pink as in queerness, and pink as in a sense of letting go of something. 

you also use it to describe the opposite of letting go, i guess? is that the body? like when “pinkness / hangs.” the strangeness of a body. i’m thinking about all the necks and knees. body parts. disembodied body parts. 

as a unit of exposure, yeah. i try to pick body parts that crack or snap. or this feeling in the real world of being heavy and stuck, in contrast with space where everything is sort of loose and free. 

right. like the space between your bones expanding. next: exclamation points. i feel like they introduce the awareness of an audience at the most basic level, the idea of reactions to what occurs in the poems. 

in a way of feeling, yes. it lets you know that this thing is serious, or this thing is something that you should pay attention to. beyond that, i just like the way it looks. it sort of looks like a body. this is a larger point towards punctation as sort of as a visual effect. it looks more concrete. using ampersand, for example, there’s something about the way it looks. it visualizes to me something actually being there. i guess that goes along with where the eye wanders. punctuation is a place where the eye stops. 

that is so exciting, because i told devin gael kelly recently that the ampersands in “vertigo” make me see people and balloons. wow. i feel like i’ve unlocked the kevin latimer experience. i’m wondering about that idea of stopping, and also velocity. there’s one poem, “swallow me, sky,” where you’re like, “say all the following, slowly.” can you talk more about that? [pulls up the poem] there’s an exclamation point too. how ideal.

i think movement was one of the most important things i focused on in the book. a lot of the poems sort of move in a way where you don’t really know where place is. the exclamation point after “the sky opens suddenly / and the sky goes to hell” is a sort of a break point, the first concrete place where you’re in a scene and you know you need to stay there. there’s a lot of places where the punctuation is wrong on purpose, and it’s a sort of jarring point. sort of a break in the rhythm and the movement. 

hm. like when someone in a play stomps their foot and it jolts you. the other really interesting use of punctuation is how you begin a line with a period. i want to know what you feel like that’s up to.

it’s a way to denote space. or denote that you’re in the specific space. when i use periods at the beginning of a line, i don’t use them at the end of a line, sort of as an opposite to stopping. i always try to give periods in each poem their own rule. i think in “last dispatch at the end of the world,” all the periods are used for scene placement or an action happening. but in other poems, they’re used as a point of starting, or a point where a character begins. 

that’s so smart. i want to know about the “is this weird?” in “moratorium on flight and fame.” you’re doing a lot of world-building in this book, but there’s also a lot of snapping back into “the world,” the world being a place where one is perceivable, and maybe how that differs from the experience of being a child. 

i think the snapping back moments disorient you from this world that is illogical by nature but that you’re starting to see as logical. there’s things that don’t make sense, or are not normal, but at this point in the book you’ve come to accept them. the “is that weird?” is telling you that you shouldn’t accept this. it’s letting you know that, one, i am unreliable and, two, the world you’re living in inside this book is unreliable. 

right. right. so even the reader isn’t safe from the pitfalls of the world. the reader can fall through as well. 

yeah. i want you to know that this is a play or that this is something that’s happening on a stage. 

i’m excited to hear that you’re thinking of it as a play. i was worried that i was just doing that because i know you write plays. but you are thinking of it as a staging of sorts?

it was intentional in that way. the spectacle is sort of there before, in that i want you to see it but you’re not forced to. by the end, in the last section of the book after the credits, i’m telling you you’re in a play. 

right, exactly, you see the light fixtures. okay. kevin. what are the necessary elements for a world?

i think intention is the most important thing. this world has to exist for a reason. before you start thinking about the characters or the situation, it’s “what is the main function of this world?” “what are the triggers that make this world function?” so, for example, i chose plays because there’s this universal “you’re on a stage” sort of thing. but then what you think isn’t possible on a stage is happening on a stage, and that doesn’t make any sense! so i think about a world that is uniquely mundane, and using very concrete things in a way that shouldn’t be possible. 

that use of what we might call absurdity, or the juxtaposition of things, is happening on multiple levels, the first of which is obviously content, deer holding guns, and the second of which is on the level of form. the repetition and the splits, if i may call them that, feel like a similar kind of twist, where you’re doing something– “on purpose” is what i want to say, even though that’s wrong. do you have thoughts anywhere around that?

the intention was to see how far the limbs in this illogical world could stretch. to find that little space where what is improbable now becomes probable, because i’m telling you so. maybe through content, or me changing how the page is moving. i wanted to try to figure out what this idea of spectacle can be stretched to, and how tactile can i make sound. 

you’re almost lifting form to the level of content by giving it this dense texture. like, rather than being the receptacle or whatever, it’s another character in the play. 

yeah. or another stage.

do you think meaning changes when something is repeated over and over again? or is something other than meaning moving through it? or do you think there is something to the incessance of repetition that requires one to stop, and for nothing to move?

i think the latter. the intention of the 137 shots in the space opera poem is to show how long it takes to reload 137 shots. i think there’s something tactile in the way the mouth moves that makes you register how long this is taking. and in terms of the “my boy is dead,” it’s just how much grief repeats itself, and becomes this single-minded thing that sort of engulfs everything else. so repetition is mostly used when i want to, one, sort of beat this into your head and, two, put you into the emotive state in which this is happening.

i feel like the “livingliving” repetition is a different kind of movement. would you agree with that? because it’s not existing in that same block of text, there’s room for something else?

in the original publication, it’s this sort of house, but i thought it would be interesting to contrast the living that’s sort of moving with the judgment that’s coming. it makes you realize that this thing is ending. then, by the time it’s over, you get these tactile things that you can’t do anymore.  

can we talk about scope and zooming in and out? i think we’ve talked about speed in a horizontal or linear sense of the word, but i’m wondering about the z axis, or access, of miniatures and giants in your poems. 

i think it just goes back to the title of zoetrope. the intention is that these are many different stories and many different characters in their own very small worlds that can, at any time, zoom out to something bigger. the way stories affect me on my physical heart level, or on a societal level. and i’m also really curious about this alternate way of telling story, the illogical nature of it. trying to take away the assumption of what is normal in this world. because nothing is, unless i state it is, or let it be that way. 

i’m thinking about the line in “a poem turned political” when you say “this poem is political because i let it.” you were just talking about letting a poem be normal, and i’m wondering if there’s almost something nonchaotic about the illogic or the absurdity of your world, that something about them is nonchaotic because we know that they are artificial. can we talk about natural disasters? i’m just thinking about the destruction of that world. 

i got really interested in God’s plagues. how they were so small and tactile. locusts are really interesting to me. and the contrast yet the sameness of natural disasters and disasters inside your own body. in terms of something falling apart but the rest staying the same. or how the body reacts to its own disasters in terms of the setting of the bigger disaster.

that’s what i love about how you use natural disaster, or just the weather– it’s always attached to the body. “i kissed the homies”’s “muddy tongues like fresh rain” or what the twister in “this tuesday in kansas” does to the bodies of the people trying to put out the fire.

the idea of a sort of threat too. what i think is really interesting is not so much fear of the disaster, but fear of what disaster will do to the body. how we use the world as a standard bearer for what’s normal. what happens when disasters are happening inside of yourself, but the world is also in a state of disaster? 

that’s good. that’s really good. and the way they crack differently, or how different things crack them.

yeah. but also they end in the same way, in terms of this thing opening up. 

the wavering door. 

that’s my favourite image in the book. 

am i allowed to ask about it?

yes, feel free.

you can pick one of these, but: where is it, or what is it made of, or is it closed now, or where is it going, or what was before it, or is there a window in it? 

the idea is that the door will always be wavering, but the real question is what’s behind it. and in this poem [“something about the pink sky”] particularly, the whole idea is this obsession, and coming to the understanding that you’re not getting what you want, but you’re getting something else. i think i really wanted to personify how love sweeps someone up like a tornado, and then trying to hold onto what is real. the mail box, for example, is this idea of grounding. and taking that away with the wavering door. it’s holding onto this image you have in your mind, but being open to what the alternate could be.  

how is that related to the wavering door in the last sentence of the postscript?

one, it answers the question of whose hand i’m brushing for. two, it makes the zoetrope come back full circle. the door never closes, because the questions that i’m asking don’t get answered, and these emotions that i’m feeling, in terms of this obsession or this idealized version, don’t go away. it just sort of circles back around, and something or someone else opens the door and walks into the room. whether that’s my mother, or God, or me, or the deer. 

it definitely feels like the door is always open, and there’s always something passing through it. it reminds me of doors in kitchens.

i like that. it’s just this sort of accepting that you don’t have an answer to the question, or that you don’t know what’s going to come through the door, just that something always will. i’ve been thinking a lot about the question of what is this book for, what i was doing when i started writing it three years ago, when i was 23, and writing it now, when i’m 26. all these experiences i think i struggled with a lot. 

the graph at the end of “the last dispatch,” where it’s like “blk boy / how do you deal / with grief? // on my knees?” i really fumbled around with the question mark. originally it didn’t have it there, but it felt like i was answering the question. this is just one way in which i just don’t know, but i’m realizing it’s not working.

what’s not working?

the way of grieving. or in the case of this poem, the way of not accepting grief. 

how do you understand those graphs? 

in terms of a speaker, me talking to God. it’s just a voice in my mind, i think. it takes over the page because it takes over like an anxious thought. me trying to figure out what is wrong and what the solution is, and me realizing in every case there’s no one answer or the answer is what i want it to be.

in the sense of self-determination, or?

less self-determination, more that the answer changes so frequently. or in terms of: this is a passing thought that seems to be correct at this moment in time.

right. right. okay. i see. whatever you put into the bubble that day is correct. 

yes. or in the rules of this world, this is how i see this being correct. like, i think the idea in the “on my knees?” part is penance, but i’m realizing that it’s not working and that denying it doesn’t make it go away.

i feel like that brings us back to our question about letting chaos exist in a constructed world. 

here we are.

we’ve landed. hello houston. i guess maybe that’s where the chaos gets let in, because you have no choice. because even in the most constructed of worlds that’s a question you don’t have an answer to. 

i guess in terms of chaos just being an accepted part of life, or learning to accept these chaoses as a part of life. because i don’t want it to be this despair thing where you can’t change it and it’s inevitably going to happen. more of a thing where how do all of these whirlwinds survive in your body.

right. right. i didn’t mean to imply despair. i’m actually thinking the opposite, which is that you are still the constructor of the world, so you get everything else. you get to decide that Black boys drive comets and that they fly. everything is available to you. but even as the constructor of the world, there are still limits to your own–

yes. exactly. yes. 

can we talk about that line?

which line?

“the poem is political because i let it.” i’m curious about the idea of you or the speaker or the constructor of these worlds’ agency over what does and does not fly — literally — in this world.

first of all, changing the idea of what a political poem can and cannot be, and doing that on a micro level in the way that it affects a Black boy’s body. how do i make you care about this thing? i think the way to do it is by opening it up and letting you know that the tactile thing it’s affecting is my body, and my mother. using that at the end of a line opens it up and sort of focuses it in a way that gives the permission that this is now a political poem. 

how old do you feel you are?

a child, indeterminate age. anywhere between eight in some places and sixteen in some places. an age where discovery is confusing.

in which physical places are you those ages?

with my mother, i am very young and very confused about the nature of her illness. her death, though that occurred when i was 23, feels like i was younger because of the confusion. there are places, like “in poem turned political,” where i am older than that. it becomes an understanding of control, so i see myself as older. there are places, like “last dispatch from my dying mouth,” in which i feel dead, in the way that i have accepted that this is happening, and i feel like all the ages, and i’m asking all the questions all at once.  

is that what being dead feels like? being all the ages all at once?

yes. 

is there milk in space?

i think there’s everything in space.

how does a deer hold a gun?

typically using its mouth.

what is your relationship to reality?

present. often confused, but always accepting. 

would you close the wavering door?

can i tear down the wavering door? i’d like to tear down the wavering door. and i guess not in a way where it doesn’t exist, but in a way where it sort of spreads so everything is wavering.

what would you do with the door after you took it down?

i think i would just leave it there. the door would just sit on the ground in perpetuity.

it just kind of sleeps there.

dust everywhere. zoom out of what’s behind it.

—

KEVIN LATIMER is a poet & playwright from Cleveland, Ohio. he is the founder & co-editor-in-chief of BARNHOUSE & co-organizer of grieveland, a poetry book project. His plays have been produced by convergence-continuum & recent poems can be found in jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Hobart, & elsewhere. he really likes Nickelback.

EMILIE KNEIFEL is a poet/critic, editor at The Puritan/Theta Wave, creator of PLAYD8s/CATCH, and also a list. find ’em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiá:ke, hopping and hoping.

Author Interview with Melissa Ragsly of We Know This Will All Disappear

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Order WE KNOW THIS WILL ALL DISAPPEAR HERE

PANK Team Member Emily McLaughlin sat down with our 2019 Fiction Contest Winner (as selected by Gabino Iglesias) and 2020 PANK Books Fiction Contest Judge Melissa Ragsly to discuss the incredible stories in her debut collection We Know This Will All Disappear.

Emily McLaughlin: A strange time to have your book come out . . . What has the book launch during a quarantine experience been like so far?

Melissa Ragsly: Honestly, I have nothing to compare it to, but it’s definitely felt restrained, happy to have it out in the world and a network of friends and writers to share it with. I don’t think it can replace some of the traditional elements of a book launch. A launch in quarantine might be less expensive, no traveling required, but I think it’s limiting in terms of who has access to a book. If you are promoting through your own social media, there is less chance of breaking through to someone new. I’ve done some virtual readings and some more are coming down the pike, but I’m also imagining next summer, I’d be able to do more in-person readings in bookstores and bars. The intimacy of what I write seems best experienced in dark rooms, not screens. Maybe it would be best if I recorded bits of stories in sound files instead of Zoom events. I’d rather you hear these stories in that context. It’s been a challenge to think creatively in any context as our lives have changed so much in the past few months. Adding to that pile by coming up with solutions to creatively market a small press book? It’s surreal.

EM: When you read “Bio Baby” for the book’s launch at AWP, does feel of another lifetime. That story is even more moving read aloud. Since then, the more time I have spent pouring over the sixteen stories here, the more I am floored by how perfectly crafted and polished each one is, how you pack so many exquisite details into short spaces, how each one performs the tricks only stories are capable of. I could bring each story into my creative writing class and hold up as an example to students: “this is how you write a short story” and then point out, and this is how much work you can expect it to be. Can you walk us through your drafting and revision process, maybe how much time you spent on revising one story versus another?

MR: I’m not one of those people that writes a whole draft through knowing I need to go back and fix everything. I like avoiding the fixing. I start a story with an idea or an image, a feeling really, so I don’t really know what it’s about or where it’s going. I write a page, print it out, edit it for voice and in doing so, usually find the next beat. Write that, repeat until I get to the conclusion. For flash, sometimes, that conclusion or the point of it is hiding in the first draft, but I still try to coax it using the same process. Drafting feels very back and forth, like playing an accordion.

EM: And how do you decide that the story is complete, ready to send to journals?

It’s difficult to write a story and think it’s perfect and it being done is not the same as being perfect. So you just have to accept it’s done when it feels done. When I put it down and pick it up again and it still feels done. It can try to fool you into thinking it’s complete, fake you out a bit, or maybe that’s something that happens to me because I’m lazy and I just desperately want it to be over. You write it and then you have to sneak up on it again after a few days. It would terrify me to write straight through and then go back to the beginning and tackle all its mistakes from the first paragraph. I need to know some of that work is done so that when I am done with it, it’s ready to go out on submission. 

EM: I love so many of your lines. This one, in “Napkin of Death Metal” is amazing: “Sometimes just sitting in a bar makes men think girls are waiting for them to come. A girl is a frozen toy mouse marking time until a paw bats them across the floor.” This seems like the kind of line a writer gets in her head and thinks, I have to put this in a story. But maybe not?

MR: That line was added on the last pass through. To go back to the earlier question, how do you know when a story is ready to send—without that line it wasn’t ready. Sometimes a line can only come out once you know better what the story is about and you can either say it straight out, or you can try to allude to it. A line like that is almost for me as much as for a reader, I’m telling us both what it’s about.

I think that the only time I came up with a line first before the story was the opening line of Bio-Baby. “On the morning of my abortion I watched a Teen Mom 2 marathon.” That was going to be a completely different story. More essayistic, more personal and it turned out the complete opposite. But I kept the line.

EM: Each story seems to do its own thing, invent its own way of how it’s going to tell the story, and compiled together, this gives the collection a sense of unpredictability, excitement. Yet there’s a feeling of stability reading them, in that you know each one is going to deliver some kind of feeling of peace. How did you assemble the stories, or envision the structure for the book?

MR: In ordering the collection, I went with intuition, all feel, but the specific feeling I tried to create was something like a wave, so in and of itself, something peaceful, yet unpredictable; delightful, yet destructive. Something whose strength can surprise you. Having both longer stories and flashes, you just want the pattern of them to make sense. You want some pieces to feel like a breath, some like an anchor. A table of contents is like this puzzle you get to play with, shuffle around the order. I did that until I felt I’d translated that feeling of tides.

EM: The majority of the collection uses first person narration versus the five stories told in third. Did you ever feel pressure to write in third for variety’s sake? Does one seem more natural to you than the other, and what do you notice changes about the story when you write about the character in third? For example, in “No One’s Watching” why did you ultimately decide to approach the character from third, not first, as opposed to a story such as “Bio Baby?”

MR: I can full-throatedly say I prefer first person. Writing it and reading it. I want the intimacy of it. When I hear criticism of it, that its navel gazing or self-indulgent, I don’t get that at all because it’s like criticism of first person seems to come from people thinking it’s someone talking to themselves in their own head when to me it’s someone talking to someone else, it’s like a one-on-one confession. It feels like the only way a writer and a reader can bond. I’m also just a very one-on-one person. Third person feels so group to me. Like no one is being honest here, it feels polite, like as if not to offend. I tend to think of third as more appropriate for longer, more traditional stories, almost as a default.  

“No One’s Watching” was very different on the first draft. The story as it is now was the flashback in a longer story, so third made it feel distant from the rest of the story. I kept that, I think, because the story itself, emotionally deals with distance that isn’t quite understood by the characters yet. It’s almost like an origin story, maybe you’ll find that character again later in a first person story dealing with the ramifications of those feeling and events in this one.

EM: All of your stories have these meditative poetic lines buried in the paragraphs, as if you or the characters are humble, trying to hide them.  Just one example, I could pull so many out as examples: “I wanted to know I had a place that I wouldn’t have to exist for anyone but myself.” Is this intentional to not draw attention to the writing? Does more self-congratulatory writing bother you?

MR: I think if you reveal something vulnerable, or a truth that you realize, you do it in a non-calculated way. Your body just opens up to the truth and it’s a portal that can slam shut quickly. Most people stumble on the truth and then can turn their backs to it without realizing it or wanting to, because it appears randomly in a moment. It makes sense to have those moments appear and then the characters move on. It’s not conscious on a writer level, but more on a character level. I think I write about the types of person that thinks this way. Like, there it is, I see it, and I’m going to blink and it might not be there when I look again.

EM: That’s a very nice way to put that. So what was the first story you wrote here?

MR: “Tattoo”. That was started probably in 2014? 2015? And then most of the longer short stories after that. In the last year, it’s been mostly flash. Flash really opened me up in a way longer stories didn’t. They feel rule-less or more freeing in their containment.

EM: Is there a story you feel closest to?

MR: It changes. At the moment, I feel a connection to “Napkin of Death Metal” and “All You’ve Heard is True.” It goes back to the idea of flash. I think there’s so much of me in both of them and if I tried to write these as longer pieces, they would feel diluted. I feel like these are four-dimensional. I like to joke my favorite is writing in the fourth person and I think this is what I mean. I think!

EM: So obviously you are writing a novel in fourth person.

MR: I am writing a novel and I have been for many years and I haven’t quite cracked how to do it. I know people have opinions on how to do it. And many people have done it, so I know it’s possible. But I haven’t yet!

EM: How do you approach keeping your character’s level of perception of her world consistent in a novel versus in a story? (to clarify: do you struggle with interiority in the form of novel versus in the story?)

MR: I actually started writing this novel in third person and it never quite worked. I switched to first but then it wasn’t working then because it was about more than one person, so I found the groove using several different POVs. And while I have not completed this one, of course I have already started formulating the next and I also am thinking of it as several different POVs. I feel comfortable with telling the story that way. Multiple POVs feels like you’re telling an oral history and I’m obsessed with them. Like reading a documentary. And yes, I do think that is also a way for me to keep handle on the character’s interiority, because I’m finding ways to use different character’s thoughts and happenings as companions and comparisons to others. In a way, it feels a little like trying to formulate that collection order. Finding ways for the story as a whole to feel like teeth on a zipper gnashing together. And again, it’s not always about interiority for me, so much as the conversation between the character/writer and the reader. The characters are not talking to themselves so it’s more like an open interiority. Like the roof’s off the room.

As far as being productive, lock-down with children has made me feel like my hands are tied. But the goal is to have it finished this year. 

EM: That’s ambitious — even for a writer not locked down with children!

I was trying to figure out how you wove such suspense into the story “Lilith,” when we already know the ending at the start – Lilith is not coming back. Can you tell me your secret? When writing this one, did you find yourself not wanting to conform to tropes about missing women? Is this why the character thinks in terms of time tables, lists of facts, even math equations here?

MR: I wanted there to be an element of logic as a way of containing your feelings. Some people don’t know how to feel. But they do anyway, so what are ways that feeling emerge? I was obsessed with thinking about those crime solving brainstorm boards. Pictures of people and places connected by strings. I wanted to play with how logic and feelings can work together.

This story came together on one of those days where I just felt depressed and like I couldn’t think and I just felt like watching Dateline which is like a once a year, falling into a depression, brain-clean. Just sit there and watch stories about murder and crime and how people figure out these puzzles. I saw one about a missing woman. She was never found. It’s a pretty famous one, although I can’t remember her name. You didn’t get the benefit of the arrest at the end. A question you don’t get the answer to. It was frustrating for me, sitting there depressed on the couch, not knowing what happened to her. How is it going to feel for someone who is actually invested. I just wanted to try to understand how that felt. I felt like there were so many questions within my family that were never answered. Or answered much later. So I also wanted to think about how sometimes you can’t have an answer, you can’t solve something and so how do you move on? Do you make up an answer and accept it or do you keep trying to solve it? Or do you just get stuck?

EM: Do you want to tell us about the book’s cover and your vision for how this melancholy image correlates to your title?

MR: The cover is a picture I took that is actually larger. You don’t get to see the whole image and the whole one is actually more hopeful. That hooded man — that’s my husband and that’s a park in our town and one of our kids was in the swing. So, the sort of gloomy hood of death is next to a kid in the swing, but turned away. So it’s actually kind of funny.

The black and white, the hunch, yes, it’s melancholy as I think my stories are, but I do think that the title also reflects an acceptance. Everything will disappear in time, but that means the bad things too. Any pain or crisis, lockdown. All that will be over at some point. The effects of all the things we live through, good or bad, remain. That’s what stories feel like—the stubborn invisible.

EM: How did you maintain confidence or stop yourself from succumbing to self-doubt when working on this project, or maybe your next project? Any special powers you tap into in order to dig your feet in?

MR: I don’t have self-doubt about my ability, but I am so lazy when it comes to time and I’m absolutely a late bloomer so it doesn’t bother me to take a long time to get a project done. I feel like if it’s worthy and meant to be in the world, I will finish it.

Any writer’s special power is reading. But I’m a bumble bee reader. Maybe because my name means “honey bee” or I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t, I have to be reading like 15 books at once. The best thing is to have a big pile of them and read 10 pages in each until you cycle thorough and start over again. It’s kind of like flipping through channels. I look for similarities and connections and see if the different books speak to each other in some way. Yesterday, 2 things I read mentioned Zeno’s Paradox. I’d never heard of it before and then twice in one day, Zeno and his philosophies come into my hands. Reading and thinking give me the confidence to write because I want to be that brain exercise for someone else. Just a link in the chain.

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Melissa Ragsly is a writer living in the Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Small Fictions, Iowa Review, Hobart, and other journals. More can be found at melissaragsly.com.