Interviews

The Lightning Room With Michelle Bailat-Jones

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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

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Grab a couple of ridiculous flashlights and journey into the scars of the Earth and the cut of humanity with Michelle Bailat-Jones’ “Mining” from our infamous March issue; then seek the danger below, should you dare.

1. Did you start writing “Mining” with a rhythm in mind or did you begin with a story and find the rhythm after? or some other way?

“Mining” came about because I’ve been writing a novel about a woman who discovers a naturally-occurring nuclear reactor. There is a lot of science in that manuscript and I found myself getting really bogged down in re-reading all these old radiation protection handbooks and articles I’d translated for my day job. I really needed to get away from the facts of that story and all that radiation physics and find the music of the character somehow. So I wanted to write something that was very image and rhythm based-and also something that was baldly emotional. I wanted to focus on what these people were feeling more than what they were thinking. So yes, in that sense, Mining was about rhythm (and image) first and then I found its (tiny) story when that got moving along.

2. Have you ever been in a mine? I’ve been in caves but not mines, is there a difference in feeling between the man-carved and nature hollowed rock? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Sara Backer

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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

***

I direct you to Three Poems by Sara Backer in our March issue. Now join us, won’t you? As we discuss the new toll system for traveling to poets, Buddha bunnies, and the dark stairwell we drink from.

1. These poems made me hungry. How do you see the intersection of poetry and food?

Obviously, both are basic necessities. Beyond that, food is the vehicle of the most tangible imagery there is. Is that cheating? (p.s. I do make a fabulous devil’s food cake from scratch.)

2. After digesting Crocodiles in Real Life, what poem by Vallejo should be ingested?

To me, Vallejo is a city in California you drive through on I-80 and pay toll to cross the Carquinez Bridge from which you can see the lighted Domino sign fill up with neon sugar. (I’ll mail back my graduate degree tomorrow.) But since that’s your only question about Crocodiles in Real Life, I’ll ramble. The story line is totally factual; I experienced this in 1981with substantial apprehension and relief. I didn’t write about it until decades later when I perceived a political metaphor. I live in New Hampshire, a State that has been targeted by the Free Stater movement that is blatantly out to destroy our government in the vague name of “freedom” (i.e. freedom from democracy, freedom from social responsibility).  Most people regard the Free Staters as harmless whackos, but the movement is funded by billionaires. It’s naive and dangerous to think they are safely contained. Little bits of them add up to one big predator, a predator who has no qualms about eating us alive.  Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Christopher Perez

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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

Read Christopher Perez’s Poems from “The Story of the Pocho” in our March issue, then read about why he empties drunk sound into a family of languages beverage to console the useless patrons of earth and Pepsi Cola.

1. What do you hear when you hear Spanish and English spoken together?

I hear aggressiveness among the languages, heterogeneity not only spurted from the voice but constructed as a self. Code-switching offers possibilities for thinking twice as fast or twice as slow or at least for presenting two selves, one doubled over the other. In my hometown and its surrounding area, which is the Rio Grande Valley, I hear both languages interchangeably and for me this develops my sense of placefulness even if ultimately I feel errant and more natural without everything heavy that pretends to house itself in the heart. I think Spanish is the most beautiful of the imposed languages and then English second. In Ramallah a Chilean-Palestinian friend and I code-switch between these languages and we are like secrets when walking down busy streets though we both ask ourselves why we can’t speak Arabic. People often think I’m Arab here because of the way I look. When I’m at a checkpoint and a soldier asks, I respond in English knowing I’m entering an international world that all but allows for errantry. How nice it would be to interject in Spanish and become amorphous and opaque or to even one day speak Arabic and fully assume the typified Other in this context. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Jessica Alexander

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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Jessica Alexander’s piece “Daughter” appeared in our April issue – below, she and Simon talk condition narratives, desperation, and volatility.

1. This piece is written as a series of twelve steps along the disappearance of a daughter. What is this the path to? Acceptance? Annihilation?

At the time, I’d coined this phrase “condition narrative” – and I was very proud of it – as in a physical or mental condition. I thought I was finished with events. Done too with characters and settings. I’d just write condition narratives. I’m no longer sure what that meant. I remember thinking a condition is a pattern, not a plot; a repetition, an obsession, or a personal discordance with public time or progress.

2. A sense of abject, frantic loss runs through this piece. I can imagine that things that disappear without explanation are much worse than those you watch vanish before your eyes (or perhaps it’s the other way around) – is this, do you suppose, a universal reaction to this kind of grief?

I have no idea. At the time, I was reading Bataille’s Visions of Excess and I was really struck by the violence of substitution. To me it seemed like he kept situating animals, planets, body parts in a space of impossible longing. So what interested me was not so much the disappearance of a thing, though that’s significant, but that space of impossible longing where objects are almost mythical. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Katie Schmid

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Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.  Below, Simon and Katie Schmid talk about roots and brutal youth and hunger and “The Boys of the Midwest 1 through 5,” which appeared in the April issue.

 

1. When you write about the Boys of the Midwest, it’s always as a collective. Is this a generational thing?

In my mind, children go through a pack-like stage. At least, that was true for me. Especially around the ages of 8-11, I was a part of a neighborhood gang of girls in my mostly rental/apartment living neighborhood in Evanston, IL. There was a kind of rangey lazy quality to our movements – I don’t ever recall us making decisions about what to do, we just found ourselves in the midst of activities: playing in someone’s tree house, informing each other of the edible plants we could find in the grass (I remember eating crabgrass and onion grass, though we were not underfed). It’s a weird time. We didn’t live in an especially great neighborhood, but there was the sense that there was strength in numbers, and we were allowed to be on our own sometimes. Left to yourself, you construct a whole kid world that adults have no bearing on. Or at least, the wisdom of adults gets filtered down to the group through kid logic and becomes beautifully warped.

When my family tells me stories about their childhoods, it seems to confirm that lots of kids, given the opportunity, form their own little feral packs at that age, with their own rules and rituals and heartbreaks. It can be brutal and intense and emotional. They force each other to eat bugs, they tell each other wild insane lies and deliver these as gospel truth. Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, has that fierce little protagonist, Mick Kelly, and she’s simultaneously a leader-parent in her gang of neighborhood children and a child herself, given to all the whims and large, unbearable emotions of childhood. I am fascinated by that time, in my own life and in others’. Looming over all of that feral, emotional child closeness is the specter of the “right” world in the form of your parents, the true gods of your life, whose emotions are even more inscrutable and terrifying than your own. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Russel Swensen

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Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Here, Simon asks Russel Swensen a series of increasingly terse questions about his magnificent poems in the April issue.

 

1. “TOURISM IS IMPORTANT” has such a restless quality to it, as if built of frantically-stacked images. I ask this a lot, but how did you construct this poem? Did you know right from the beginning it would be a series in this manner?

Ah, intention my old friend I have to come to pretend I believe in you again. But not so much really. I knew I wanted this to be sort of camera-friendly so in that sense yes, I had some idea of what it would look like [it’s like those really bad rap videos from artists who well never made it like at all but DID make a video: this is MY hood, this is my weird fucked up ice cream parlor, this is the park that makes me unspeakably sad, this is THE WEATHER except it’s personal, it was incredibly cold that day because of me, because of my friend, the cripple, etc.]. And I mean, I say this with nothing but love for those videos – series of vignettes basically that are genuinely tender because the vignettes are all there is, there’s no career, no real light: I get that. I mean, I’m a complete zero as a poet so showing a few shops in my inner city really isn’t that much of a stretch. I hope this doesn’t sound like fucking painfully white. I just have a built-in love for travelogues that are essentially testimonials – this, exactly, is where I’ve been and maybe I don’t get a chance to say it again so I’m a say it loud.

[paragraph deleted that details the writer’s difficulties with prose of which there are many, typical lines being, “I think the basic Ikea-ness of this has more to do with that” and “a stubborn refusal to give up like in a relationship, cf. “I can make this right,” “ok but like “it’s so cold in the d” you see what I’m getting at here” sic for what’s it’s worth] Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Russell Jaffe

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Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Russell Jaffe’s sly, watery end of all things, “Doritos,” appeared in our April issue. He and Simon chat, below.

 

1. Hi Russell. If this is “after Cassandra Gillig,” can I ask what came before? Or after, assuming that the world was re-populated?

It’s after her because she suggested the idea for it! I do love the idea of a post-Cassandra-Gillig-world (PCGW).

Never assume anything about repopulation.

2. This piece is basically two people floating on a boat in the middle of watery nothingness, where all entertainment and civilization have been utterly wiped out. If you’re in love with the last viable person on earth, how do you deal with rejection?

I think that’s what real rejection feels like, at least in my life, be it romantic or job-related. Let me tell you, I once dreamed of working for the WWE as a creative writer. And I had an interview with them to be a content writer for the website! And I gave them some rad ideas and they had me sign a form that just because I had given them any ideas did NOT mean I could keep them or copyright them or that they hadn’t come up with them themselves. Then they USED ALL MY IDEAS ON THE WEBSITE, right down to a series about specific wacky pro wrestler gimmicks of the past and more interactive Facebook-page-like wrestler profile pages. And they told me they had just let 5 people go, which was true. The economy had just tanked. I felt like I was basically the last man in a barren landscape. I cried sitting on my car in Stamford, Connecticut, by a big thing of water and all these big white houses. It was like I had slept and this flood had killed everyone and devastated everything. Dealing with rejection is every step you take and breath you inhale and exhale. You just do it by continuing. Next thing you know, you’re like, fuck, I would have hated that job. I would have hated that relationship.

3. “Doritos” basically reads as optimism: crushed. Is it hard to be cheery when the (your) world is ending?

It’s not because I love the end of the world so much that it’s usually a positive thing for me. It’s a beautiful finale, and this poem is a particularly memorable part of the episodic series we’re all gifted by the universe whose narrative we kind of scrape together and determine day to day, maybe second to second. I can’t write anything if I feel sad, even brutally sad stuff. I feel like the sicker and sadder my poetry is, the happier I am IRL. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Lena Bertone

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Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

 

“Self Portrait,” by Lena Bertone – a story written in mirrorings – showed up in our April issue. To celebrate, Simon and Lena discuss narcissism.

1. What is the most narcissistic piece of artwork you’ve ever seen?

I love that Frida Kahlo’s relentless self-portraits feel so self-indulgent, yet they’re so vibrant and full of pain and story. I love her painting of her sitting next to herself, holding hands with herself, both of her hearts exposed.

2. “Self Portrait” has a marvelous, reflective quality to it – what was the first image or line that struck you to begin writing it?

The first line was the first line—I liked the idea that Leo’s wife would be disturbed that he painted himself as a woman. He promises he hasn’t done it before, but he doesn’t promise that he won’t do it again. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Dawn Sperber

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Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

 “Our Master of Psalmody,” by Dawn Sperber, appeared in our February issue. Below, Simon talks with Dawn mutable pronouns and religious ecstasy.

 

1. I’m really curious about the origins of this piece – what possessed you to write it, or what was the first image or phrase that struck you and had to be written down?

I actually wrote the first draft of this story when I was 20, almost half my life ago. I’d picked a handful of words from the dictionary to write about (neuter, psalmody, saffron, glissando), and as a result, this weird story pushed out of me. I loved it back then, but it was more like a story seed. A couple years ago, I opened a box of old writing and found it inside. I still felt the story, so I decided to refine what had inspired me.

I’ve always felt that the sacred parts of life don’t stay in cordoned-off areas, and the idea that God disapproves of sexuality sounds like a set-up for self-deceit. Instead of trying to control our passions out of existence, it seems only natural to look for balance with who we really are and find the divine in every aspect of life. This is one of the reasons established religions make me nervous. If we’re going to find balance in our crazy selves, shouldn’t we start out being as honest as possible? To me, Lee embodies a lot of the messy sacred richness that doesn’t fit in prescribed boxes.

2. I love the casual shift between Lee’s gender pronouns in this story. It creates an indeterminate yet mythic figure, with this mysterious yet subversive power. Who is your favorite person to hear singing?

Mm, it changes. I get song crushes and haunt certain songs for weeks, knowing I shouldn’t fixate, that it’ll weaken a song to hear it too often, but I love being in love. Those song crushes end up fueling a lot of my stories. Some recent ones were sung by The Civil Wars, Anais Mitchell, and Jeff Buckley. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Jenny Sadre-Orafai

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Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

Today, Simon talks with  Jenny Sadre-Orafai, who brought two poems to our February issue earlier this year, about burning young things.

 

1. “Biography of Teenagers” seems to explore, in part, the fumblings of adolescence as a substitute for later, averted maturity, a desire to concretize things before they happen. What do you think drives our desire for the past over the present?

Perhaps we spend so much time with the past because it’s what is known. We have been there. We know how it all happens. We lived it. We can’t know what will happen this second. There’s a sense of control, ironically, in the past.

2. Both “Biography of Teenagers” and “Treasure in Timber” explore burned-out or elided history, post-dated moments: can you share another moment of deleted history?

I visited Seattle and British Columbia when I was seventeen with my parents and sister. I remember feeling like we would never get back home. I was an anxious teenager who missed her boyfriend and listened to a cassette he made over and over again. Before leaving the Seattle Airport, the news reported that a body had been found in Kurt Cobain’s home. That’s what I remember most from the trip and not how much I was missing by just being there. I would go back to Seattle eighteen years later. I wore flat shoes and walked everywhere. I watched giant seagulls strut and the water shine around them. I didn’t waste it the second time. Continue reading →