Interviews

The Lightning Room With Nuncio Casanova

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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 Nuncio Casanova, whose photo collage “Once There Was A Giraffe” appeared in our February issue. Ages later, he brings us wisdom from the old masters.

for pank

 http://www.coroflot.com/nunciatura

1. This is a wonderfully surreal collage-piece. For mixed-media work like this, what comes first, the images or the words? And how?

Both come first and then I close the eyes. They start to lick and bite each other, rumour has it. I trow thence cut-out heads, one here, two there, and whole phrases grow horns, and vice versa, when I place misspelled words. To be honest it is completely the contrary, everted, backwards, then show it to a mirror and put upside down, cut in pieces and add garlic, onion and oregano, fry in whale oil at high heat for 20 minutes and then send it to Greenland via priority airmail.

2. When it comes to creating surreal, Dada-inspired works like these, how do you select what images/phrases to use to build the story? What is the process of creation like, in a style that traditionally relies on so much experimentation, randomness, and subconscious motivation?

The entire process will be accurately described as capricious, because I say so!

3. What’s the most bizarre place from which you’ve ever cut a photograph?

Where I had glued them! That was quite more impressive… would have been, because the lights went out. Oh, if you had seen!

4. Does this piece come from a larger project?

Yes, it does. After eating the emperor, the crocodile eats almost everyone in the story, including the grandmother of Herodotus and Nuncio Casanova, and then escapes to Leningrad and eats ice cream until he explodes.

5. Can you name one of the thousands of wonders circling around the belly button of a Victorian lady? Please?

Ha! Try to get your own Victorian ladies! Be aware that they are extremely slippery at this time of the year.

6. What else have you learned from Dada?

I learned nothing and besides I have to reassure myself three times per hour that I am awake. I demand my money back!

 

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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.

The Lightning Room with Kallie Falandays

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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 Kallie Falandays. Back in our February issue, Kallie pulled us apart as she put us together. Now, she speaks:

 

1. “I Want To Tell You Yes” and “If Morning Never Comes” are both profoundly physical poems, of pulling things out and stuffing things in. Are these based on specific people?

Yes and no. Yes they are based on real people, but no because it’s not the real person but the imagined person that these poems explore. That world (of imagination) is sometimes infinitely more interesting to me.

2. What is the most uncomfortable (not physical) experience you’ve ever had.

That experience is probably buried somewhere too deep to find at this moment.

3. “I Want To Tell You Yes” reads like a demand, mixing a kind of visceral carnality with images of nature, as if subverting one of those boring nature poems. Is this poem really about innocence lost?

No, it is more about going to what is lost and wanting to undo it – not necessarily so that it becomes whole, but so it becomes again and again.

4. Tell me one soul you’d like to completely tear apart.

That’s one secret I will not reveal. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Tara Mae Mulroy

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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  Tara Mae Mulroy, whose story,“The Last Hurrah,”  from our February issue is loss itself:

 

1. The atmosphere in “The Last Hurrah” is just perfect – the unease of being abroad; exotic history and locales coupled with familiar things taking on unfamiliar dimensions (the McDonald’s, the dogs; the Greek alphabet); it heightens the sense of a couple in limbo. What brought you to Greece to write this story?

As a wedding gift, my father, who travels for a living, offered to comp our plane tickets for our honeymoon. My husband is also a manager for a hotel, so since we were footing the rest of the bill for our honeymoon, we sought out locations that would a.) be able to be flown to and b.) provide us with a hotel discount. Athens, Greece ended up being that place. Athens was far from what we expected though. As we were flying over, the economic riots started, and our first foray into the city center ended up with us in the middle of the riots, our eyes watering from tear gas.

On top of that, we couldn’t find hummus, falafels, or gyros because that’s Turkish, not really Greek, food. The city was covered with graffiti, and most of the public transportation was shut down due to the riots. We sent expensive text messages home to our families to let them know we were okay. It was a strange two weeks. When I started writing this story, I wanted to re-create that time of discomfort and exoticism. I imagined a failing marriage and the husband running out to join the rioters. It ended up as a love story. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Chris Terry

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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  Chris Terry, whose story “Graffiti” appeared in the August issue of PANK. His young adult novel, Zero Fade, is now available from Curbside Splendor.

 

1. This story is saturated with issues of identity – a biracial narrator terrified and compelled by the idea of standing out; like a public performance. How did you capture this delicate balance in your narrator?

Being a teenager is a form of public performance. “Graffiti” is an autobiographical story, so I tried to remember that teen feeling of wanting to assert my newly formed identity, but remain safe from scrutiny and suggestion. I was trying to capture that contradiction, while indulging in some blame-deflecting. I remember being in 9th grade, feeling like I had things figured out, and shutting myself off from criticism, in case it toppled the fragile house I’d built. That’s why there’s a lot of “And if this hadn’t happened” language at the beginning of the story. That’s the narrator denying any culpability.

2. Along similar lines, “Graffiti” is a story about hybridity and blurred barriers – can you talk a little about this?

I was drawing from my own experience. I’m a pale, half black, half white guy who spent the first fifteen years of his life in the Boston suburbs. I got in trouble for graffiti a couple of times in ninth grade, a time when my family was having a lot of financial problems that exacerbated my alienation in our fancy suburb. A lot happened all at once. I was forming my taste for alternative culture like skateboarding, hip-hop and punk while being forced to consider my racial identity while just starting to think of myself as black, having never thought much about race before.

I cut a section from “Graffiti” where I talk about being isolated from blackness at large in the ‘burbs, and learning to be black from pop culture. This was just after Rodney King, and police brutality was a big topic in early ‘90s hip-hop and black cinema. After watching Menace II Society and listening to Ice Cube, I expected the worst from the cops and turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Marcelina Vizcarra

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Welcome back to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with Marcelina Vizcarra, whose story “The Oldest Living American” appeared in our February, 2013 issue. The secret of immortality, below.

 

 1. “The Oldest Living American” explores, among other things, our glorification/souvenirification (which is not a word) of objects or people recovered or still present from our collective past. Why do we suppose we do this?

That’s a good question. I think these relics give us a vicarious participation in our past. Maybe if we connect to something outside of our timelines, we extend them. That’s the optimistic aspect. But there’s also a darker theme in our efforts to distinguish ourselves, a sense of ownership that I’m guilty of, to appropriate all manners of objects and people from the cabinets of history. In that respect, Harvey is a sort of living Wunderkammer that can be picked through, and his panoramic experiences can be appraised against market trends. Lately, I’ve come to view our collective past as yet another store for the modern consumer, yet another way to define ourselves by what we purchase.

2. This story presents a number of perspectives of the same, very old man; in so doing, you manage to bring up a host of issues surrounding what we do with our old; what inspired you to write this story, and to use this multi-perspective approach?

Some of my first jobs were taking care of elderly neighbors, and then the institutionalized, so these characters tend to volunteer often in my writing. I’m especially fascinated by the artificial stasis imposed upon them during their slide into dependence, along with its accompanying indignities—perhaps the most offensive being the assumption of muted emotions, or worse, naïvete. I suspect that the fear of this marginalized future is what funds our society’s contradictory stances—disdain for old age but celebration of longevity. Harvey embodies both, so I put his death under public scrutiny, harkening back to the old coroner’s juries. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Lynne Beckenstein

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In the darkest cardboard box on skid-row emerges the semicolon shooter Lynne Beckenstein. Join her as she tells how her sobriety led to the royal we (read her story in the Jan. Issue).

1) What is your nautical history? Where does your life intersect with the water?

I’m a terrible sailor – always seasick. But I have spent a lot of time with family from Staten Island, Brighton Beach, and the Jersey Shore. My mother worked for John A. Noble, the maritime artist, so I grew up in a house hung with etchings of ship graveyards like the one in “Scavengers in the Boneyards.”

2) Reading your story made me feel like I was sitting against a live oak, drinking water on a hot day after working in a soy field. Why do I feel this way?

Hard for me to say, but that is evocative! I like the image of stories as thirst-quenching. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Eiko Alexander

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Eiko Alexander dragged us through centuries of bloody warfare in “Iao’s Strays,” from our February issue. To the things we are compelled to pick up and hold:

1. Hi. I have been in nearly this exact situation. Why do you suppose some people are absolutely determined to save the most pathetic creatures?

You mean the cats, right? I think some of us are attracted to things that are falling apart; I certainly am. A few years ago I sat in the parking lot of the Iao Valley, taking pictures of those cats until people started laughing at me. I did not try to take one home, but I know people who have wanted to rescue street dogs. Often it doesn’t matter if the animal or person or whatever is actually in distress; you see an opportunity to do what seems like a good thing, and create stories about what will happen after you’re gone. Who will feed it? What if it gets sick?

I think too there’s something about feeling special, like you’re the only person who could care about that diseased and dying thing. I don’t want to admit it, but fixating on those cats at Iao was probably driven in part by my own ego, that need to differentiate from all those oblivious tourists.

2. I absolutely love the tone in this piece, how you can see all the flexes of the narrator. How do you craft these sentences? I imagine it to be a lot of reading things aloud. Who are you addressing this story to; how do you picture her in your head?

Thank you. Most of the time there’s some sort of narration going on in my head, whether it’s fiction or what I ate for lunch. I hear stories before I write them down. I’d been thinking about a story like this, and one morning I heard the narrator’s voice. I had to write as fast as she was speaking so I didn’t lose her. Funny though, I don’t read my work aloud much. I guess I don’t want my own voice to get in the way.

I picture the narrator’s girlfriend as this nice, normal, compassionate person but she’s just as complicit in the sickness in their relationship because so far, she has refused to acknowledge it. That’s where the narrator’s anger comes from. I see the girlfriend as this sort of wide-eyed pretty girl who’s smarter than she seems. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Anis Shivani

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In his expansive arm, Anis Shivani gathers you a great lament. The presence of no ftl drives. Let him take you to bed. (poem in the Jan. Issue) [Bonus Exclusive! Read the worst question he’s ever been asked and his answer.]

1) How do you feel about your older writing? Do you ever go back to try to change those pieces or do they belong to a different, younger you?

No I never try to do that. Recently I was tempted to change my book The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, which i wrote almost a decade ago, though the book has only recently been published. I changed things stylistically a bit, but left the content alone. Once something is published, I want to forget I ever wrote it, let alone go back and obsess over it. I’m fine with accepting that older pieces belong to a younger, less sophisticated me.

2) Do you start with a voice, an idea, or do you just start? 

In fiction I probably start with a character in a situation–usually a difficult situation. Then I have to build a story around that. It’s easy to visualize and create a whole world once I’ve got a grip on a single character in a concrete situation. I think the (philosophical) idea is what prompts imagining the initial character, but it’s best to forget the idea, whatever it is, as soon as the material circumstances of the story start to become apparent.

In poetry, I may have a feeling or a tone, often hard to capture precisely, which I start with and just run with, to see what happens. It’s not easy to decipher quite how things come together in poetry but the unified tone is probably the glue.  Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Lisa Nikolidakis

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Learn about danger and Bullshit from Lisa Nikolidakis (Read her How to Date a Stalker in the Jan. edition).

1) If you met a stranger who confided in you that an ex was terrorizing them by stalking, what is a question you would ask them?

I’ve had this happen. Tending bar, people tell you all the things. First: Are you in danger? If yes, get thee to the police ASAP. If not, have you made your intentions to be left alone plain as can be? Second: Do you have a therapist?

2) Was it the Safe Horizons pamphlet that inspired this list form or did you find the pamphlet while researching?

The stalker pamphlet as a part of this came from a suggestion by the friend who originally gave it to me–many drafts into this. I had the title first, and I think it inspired the list form.  Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Gregg Murray

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Crawl into the tub with Gregg Murray (poem in Jan. issue) toast each other with a glass of cool lemonade and wait for a bucket of arrogant bunnies to be tossed in with you.

1) Your poem makes me feel like restocking shelves under a droning, florescent light in a grocery store the morning after a one-night stand. Why do I feel that way?

I feel the same way when I read it back to myself. Thankless, meaningless work has never been therapeutic for me. Menial work, being under the boot, taking orders from an imbecile. It hurts me to see interested and capable and talented and spirited people shining the shoes of some arrogant bully with a horse on his shirt.

2) If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book of poetry, what book would it be and how would you use it to survive/escape?

I had to wedge a copy of Pride and Prejudice under an a.c. unit one time because it needed something there. At first I felt bad, but I know I like that book a lot and besides I meant no harm or disrespect. I’m so practical, though, with books I love. I’d take a big ole anthology or something for the island. But I love reading journals with experimental work in them.  Continue reading →