Interviews

The Lightning Room With Brianna Stout

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Brianna P. Stout (poem in Jan. Issue)  cautions us against chasing planes and falling into dreams. Listen to her stand on the plain earth as it moves.

1) Reading your poem makes me want a hug. Why do I feel that way?

Well, some people just like to be touched, DeWitt.  Please don’t try to hug Jacob, though – he wouldn’t like that.

2) Both flight and freedom have historically been used to represent freedom. What is their connection?

I think it boils down to a desire to feel like we have control over a situation.  No one wants to feel pinned down, like we can’t do what we want or need to do.  When we see someone fly above us, we, envious, want to join in their locomotion.  It’s kind of like those chickens owned by that Causby dude (from the United States v. Causby case).  A plane flew over the Causby farm, and the chickens were like, “Whoa! We want to do that!”  The only problem was that the chickens were in their chicken house and couldn’t really fly, so Causby claimed that the trespassing planes caused his chickens to slam themselves to death against the chicken house walls in pursuit of the plane.  All right, so this question has taken a depressing turn (I’m starting to understand your first question more now), so I’ll have another go at it.  Maybe it’s more like my cat.  Whenever he feels uncomfortable with a situation, when he feels uneasy or slightly out of control, he doesn’t go hide under the bed, he finds the highest spot possible and perches there.  By being up high, he feels like he can handle things, like his abilities are, ahem, heightened.  His own little slice of freedom.  O.K., I know that a cat answer may seem typical, but don’t you prefer it to the depressing chicken analogy? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Alice Bolin

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Alice Bolin’s “Pool” appeared in our December issue (and also made the longlist for 2012’s Wigleaf Top 50). Here, we talk about the desolation of childhood, BLACK HOLE, and abandonment.

1. This piece reads almost like a ritual to me: in the autumn, the narrator treks to the empty pool at the abandoned house at the end of the block, avoiding the boys who lurk in the abandoned lot, and, once she arrives at the pool, curls inward – it feels like something that happens again and again. What might we make of the places we are drawn to, the processes we repeat over and over?

Personal rituals are something I am extremely interested in. I was a furtive, emotional, mystically-minded child and I did many strange things out of varying ratios of boredom and anxiety. I hid my belongings outside, hoarded stones and other outside things inside, wrote things on my body, named the places and landmarks I discovered. The places and procedures of rituals like the one in “Pool” are huge in distinguishing the child world from the adult world it exists alongside.

2. The detail in “Pool” is beautifully stark, to the point where, to me, it seems almost desolate. It may be autumn in a back alley anywhere, but it feels troublingly like the end of the world. What inspired the setting of this piece?

I like that you picked up on the end-of-the world feeling, because I think that has a lot to do with the mood and setting I’m evoking in this piece. It comes from a full-length hybrid manuscript called BLACK HOLE that is very concerned with the powerlessness and emotional apocalypses of childhood. I’m pretty interested in the uncanny element of domesticity, the menace found in wholesome scenes. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Tawnysha Greene

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PANK and Tawnysha Greene – author of the short story “Daddy’s Teeth” in our December issue – talk scars.

1. This is an immensely physical piece; the casual, bodily damage it describes is almost difficult to read. Can you tell us about the experience of writing this? How did you know you’d succeeded in drawing out the most discomfort?

“Daddy’s Teeth” is actually a chapter in my novel-in-progress, A House Made of Stars, and I wanted this story to stand out as a moment of darkness and desperation in an already bleak narrative. I decided to make this chapter one of the shortest in the novel and use the starkest descriptions I could think of in narrating the scene, so that the moment almost seemed like a flashbulb memory in that while the moment is brief, small details such as the smell of the father’s breath and the blood he spits into a pot would stand out so much more than they would in a longer, more fully developed chapter. I had also hoped that the brevity of the chapter would intensify an already heightened moment and together with such stark descriptions would frighten readers as the child protagonist feels frightened and overwhelmed by what is happening in front of her.

When I wrote the story, I tried to frighten myself with the details. I strive to empathize with my characters as much as possible when writing, so I kept asking myself – what would make me uncomfortable, what would shock me, what would scare me? I didn’t realize the full extent of how the story could affect readers until it was published in PANK. So many friends and colleagues wrote that they had tried reading the story, but couldn’t get past the first few sentences, and it was then that I saw that when I scared myself, I could convey those same feelings to those reading the story.

2. This story, though written from the viewpoint of a child, is centered on the pain and slow destruction of the father. How did you decide to narrate the story from this perspective?

I decided to write from a young child’s point of view, because I felt that I could write scenes of trauma best from a child’s eyes. I find that a child’s point of view is less complicated than an adult’s and while the child in a story may not always understand what is happening to him/her, the audience, of course, does. In trusting readers with this understanding, I felt that I could write these scenes more truthfully than I could with an adult narrator. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Maggie Millner

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Here, Maggie Millner’s “Equus” – in our December issue – goes to Andalusia.

1. One on level, this poem is about longing, a longing that can only be dealt with in a visceral, sexual way. What is one emotion that belongs entirely to you? What things have you arranged inside yourself and built into horses?

It’s a fairly common coping mechanism to visualize grief as an object that might then be isolated and expelled from the griever. It’s a fairly common exercise in poetry, too: to concretize the abstract, to compare the world to a stage or fear to a handful of dust. In “Equus,” horses are the physical form of the speaker’s desire. Their departure signals a sense of loss and longing.

2. Horses appear in poems every so often as a marker of sexual strength or intensity, but here you do something different. Here, the horses seem to signify desire itself. Why pick horses?

Horses inhabit a space between domesticity and wildness – between tameness and danger – that I find compelling. They signify a kind of cowboy nostalgia. They wear shoes. Maybe horses work so well as figurative carriers of human experience because they’re also physical carriers of human cargo. In a poem that seeks to explore the defamiliarization of one’s own body, horses feel like appropriately strange, appropriately liminal figures. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Brennan Bestwick

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Brennan Bestwick speaks about his poem “Surname NASA” in the December issue – infinite love, tethering space, and the anatomy of the universe.

1. I think there is a lot to say in this poem about ancestry, about what our forebears have built and left for us. Can you explain this at all? What’s one important or valuable piece of inheritance in your life, galactic or otherwise?

I’m very blessed to have entered a world surrounded by the family I have. Both my grandparents, the subjects of the poem, and parents, built a world for me full of endless encouragement and support.  I’m from a Midwest do-all-that-you-can-to-help-anyone-who-needs-it kind of family. I’ve inherited their humor, I hope to master its way of tackling the most trying times as gracefully as they do. A nature as good as theirs has a special gravity to it. I try to spin as brightly.

2. I see this theme, of older figures (here, grandparents, but I imagine it would serve any character with accumulated age and wisdom), painted as interstellar, as mingling and one with the hugest mechanisms of the universe. Tell me about this myth.

All the things my grandparents have seen and done are too big for this world, too big for them to understand just how powerful they’ve become from it.  I’m sure they’ve built some stars up there, filled some black holes I wasn’t ready for, but they’d never tell me if they did, they wouldn’t want to worry anyone. Continue reading →

An Interview Between Max Wolf Valeria and j/j hastain

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MWV:  What is the relationship of the body to identity, and how does language intercede–or not? 

For me, body (corpuscle and feelings therein) and page (what for me is one of contemporary languages’ core impetuses) correlate in stippling-like processes, always approximating authenticity. Identity is the active and ongoing stimulation of a profoundly necessary simulation; a way to relate to (myself as) form. There is a continual need to keep in motion in order for the stippling from stifling.

MWV:   A figure appears in your forthcoming book Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology.  You write:  “The red of the queer mystic’s human flesh in response to the frigid temperature of the river was something that, from that event on, never left them.”  Tell me about the “queer mystic”?  

I love Luci. Luci loves you. The queer mystic of Luci (my book) is different than how I work with queer mysticism in praxis but I can certainly speak to both here.

The queer mystic of Luci is personage, a splattering of qualities across a span. Luci is an emergent pride system based in growing multiplicity and variance (by way of staying with difficult and painful content until one is able to morph it into emancipations by way of self-invented, intensive, creative attentions). Luci works with peripheral nerves (sites of intuition and insinuation) in order to slowly gain a (human?) center. Because I love Luci, I could go on. Instead I will ask you to keep an eye out for the book! It not only shatters many socially (Biblically) entrenched myths (Lucifer vs. Jesus, dad vs. son, inherited lineage vs. chosen family, etc.) but the methods by which the shattering takes place are rich with sound and image. Bottom line, Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology is a nice place to spend a little time. While you are in, Monet’s Camille Monet sur son lit de mort will come off of the wall of the museum, and disassemble its elegant picture of death in your lap as a way of enticing you to dance with it: movement here is included, is integral to the work.

Queer mysticism (in the context of my practices) involves attending to many realms ritually. We are queer because we are obscure, different from the average Joe. We are queer because our genders do not match forceful, binary-prescribed social relegations. We are queer because of whom we fuck. We are queer because of how we fuck whom we fuck. There are so many realms to attend to ritually: from how to most ethically greet the juncture between sleep dreaming and the dreams experienced and lived while awake, to absolute nurture of any and all aspects or elements with entheogenic and enlightening properties.

I work by deifying (and reifying). I approach the work in many ways (including asceticisms and excessiveness). An important part of attending exists in the clandestine and rogue rites that must take place (e.g.: eating capers excruciatingly slowly, one at a time all day long and with so much attention that you are convinced that your mouth will forevermore feel like this: a desert full of mustard, anal sex. In that overwhelm you are suddenly, henceforth enabled to count salty moments like mala beads).

I love the early Christian term “mystikos” (which refers to veiled or not yet known allegorical elucidations and analysis of Scriptures), so the notion of underground or underbelly or still-in-queue (or even kink) interpretations and applications (in non-dualism) resonates for me. It is also due to the above stated that writing is engagement of the dewy links, that composition is a way to acquire liberating relationships to my own DNA, that the flesh of the body is morphable, evermore able to be relieved by intentional enlivenment. In these feelings, page and body are felt as sites of infinity, as compulsory sides of an infinity.

If you are a queer mystic and want to talk with me about queer mysticism (or to practice it alongside a long time (and still learning) practitioner) feel free to contact me. I am passionately interested not only in commencements from within, but continual and artful creation of within. How else is there ever hope of us addressing so much without in wise ways? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Rebecca Nison

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In our December issue, Rebecca Nison’s “Eastward.” We talked about public performance, New York sensory experiences, and constructed environments, among other things.

1. “Eastward” is very precisely located: Manhattan, Union Square, proceeding east street by street. Yet despite such a specific setting, the story reads almost like a fable, of a woman breaking free from her bounds and returning to nature. Is this a modern myth? What does it tell us about the way we lead our lives?

I’m a fan of Chekhov’s belief that art should ask questions, not answer them.  Following that thinking, I never intend to tell anything about the way we live our lives.  I only hope that this story raises questions about the containers we put ourselves in (clothing, house, city, memories, past) and what we might uncover if we step out of them, even if just for a day, an hour, a moment.  If this can be called a modern myth, perhaps it’s one about stripping away the myths we tell ourselves.

2. This is also a story about public vulnerability, a body exposed to the eyes and attentions of innumerable strangers. You describe your narrator’s body, its past and its present, but overall, what comes across is a tremendous sense of awareness. Can you talk a little about the physicality of this piece?

The body is our first and final home.  Also our most important one.  As she separates from her former shelters and restrictions, Celia recognizes that her body remains what she’s left with – and her physical awareness awakens through this realization.  By living in her body on display, she undoes her shame and relearns herself.

While writing this, I thought a lot about Galway Kinnell’s poem “Saint Francis and the Sow,” and particularly the lines, “sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness.”  Celia – like all of us – must act as both teacher and student in reteaching her own loveliness.  Recognizing her body as the most vital shelter frees her from other constraints, allowing her to live herself more fully.  Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Changming Yuan

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Changming Yuan like a leaf, like water, like a building seven hundred children tall.  (see Changming’s Skyline in our Jan issue)

1) I thought I recognized your name and then I realized you’re one of the first people I published when I worked with the Exquisite Corpse. Reading your bio, I see you’ve been published in almost 600 publications. So I guess it’s not that much of a coincidence. How has your poetry evolved since your first publication?

Thanks so much, dear Ed. DeWitt, for this opportunity to talk about my poetic work, and I feel truly honored! To begin with, poetry seems to run in the blood of my family. When my father died in January of 2012, my mother revealed that he had always wished to be a poet, though he never got anything published during his lifetime. Growing up in an impoverished Chinese village, I fell in love with poetry and dreamed about living like Li Bai at the age of 14 when I had my first exposure to poetry of any kind. Although I did make dozens of poetry submissions in China, I never got even a rejection slip. Luckily, many years after moving to Canada as an international student, I had one of my first English poems published in the summer of 2005 and, ever since then, I have been writing and publishing much more poetry than I myself imagined – thus far, my poetry has appeared in nearly 700 literary journals/anthologies across 26 countries. Also interesting is perhaps that at the age of 15, my teenager younger son Allen Qing Yuan began to publish poetry worldwide, apparently under my influence: Every time I receive a contributor’s copy, I ‘force’ him to take a look at my work and, after much reading, he has turned out an actively publishing poet in his own right. Now we have formed a ‘father-son comraderie in poetry,’ as some editors like to call us, to publish our own newly-started literary magazine called Poetry Pacific (poetrypacific.blogspot.ca), which has been developing surprisingly well – by the way, all poetry submissions are welcome at yuans[at]shaw.ca. While my elder son George Lai Yuan, a busy senior engineer in Silicon Valley, had his first poem published early this year, my poetic work has finally begun to appear in Chinese media since last winter, but ironically only after I became an internationally widely published practitioner of the art.

2) How is your Skyline different when someone else reads it?

For me, every reading (of the same work) is a new poem. Each time my Skyline is read, it may look more like a monster’s mouth, a dream vision, a meeting line between sea and coast, or a limbo between hell and heaven, depending upon the reader’s frame of mind.

Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Kevin Tang

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Kevin Tang’s comic “An Ethnography of L.ipsum” melted (molted) faces in our December issue. HERE GOES:

1. In graphic design, Loren ipsum is the Latin placeholder text that gives the sense of how a presentation will appear visually in terms of layout and typography before it is finalized. Essentially, it’s the shape of the piece minus meaningful content. Are these placeholder humans? Are they what we should worry about becoming?

I think Lorem Ipsum was pulled from a Cicero quote involving “praising pain” or somesuch. Copywriters have great gallows humor. They love words because they’re excellent bullshit detectors, but they’re paid to write things they wouldn’t feed their own children.

I laid out a lot of lorem ipsum text at a huge ad firm, designing web pages for an electronics company. The clients’ memos always said “sleek & trendy” or “luxury minimalist” or “granular user-based brand experience,” which sounded way worse than lorem ipsum. My coworkers were smart people who knew it was a facile, rote idea of presentability that we’re supposed to sell. Whatever copy replaced lorem ipsum was always worse, and more expensive. I honestly can’t revisit an original intent for picking that name. I just kind of snatched whatever wallpaper felt right at the moment and hoped someone smarter than me can build meaning from it post hoc. But yeah, I wanted a cast of stunted, miserable people and back-end ad speak seemed the right language for that.

2. The L.ipsum exoskeleton-moulting appears here as a horrifying occasion that marks the transition into adulthood, where a member of the species is revealed for what he has been becoming all along. If this was our own species, if everything rested on this moment of revelation, how might we behave differently?

I remember my professor Alexander Chee saw the comic and immediately thought it was a satire of Asian immigrant upbringing. And I can’t entirely disagree with that. I grew up in Taiwan with a fairly slacker childhood, but the whole culture of pedagogy there (mostly enforced by nosy relatives) was obsessed with valuating a child’s talent and labor potential at the youngest age possible, and ushering them through hoops by flattering their sense of exceptionalism. I think “elite” educational industries everywhere have vested interest in overselling the idea of life in terms of stages – like you’re supposed to moult into a married senior manager at certain biological ages. I feel like I’ve changed myself drastically every three years since I left Taiwan eight years ago, so the whole moulting thing is a victory dance over the graves of all that. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Molly McArdle

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Molly McArdle’s “The Wearied Cords” appeared in our December issue. We talk about rewriting geography, the reversal of colonial power, and building out of loss.

1. Tell us a little bit about the process of building “The Wearied Cords”; where the inspiration came from, what research was involved, etc. What was the initial spark that brought this story to life?

I was born and raised in DC, and I’ve always been really passionate about city history, especially hidden or elided or forgotten or ignored histories. I had (and have) been toying around with this idea of a series of short stories that illuminate iconic – even mythic – aspects of DC history or culture or geography and look at them from an unexpected perspective. One of the first things that came to mind was the Three Sisters Islands, a tiny outcropping of rocks that lie just north of Key Bridge in the Potomac River, right beside Georgetown. I always thought there was something romantic about them growing up, because of their name, because of their size, because of the opaque and imprecise myths about their origin, which the story draws from. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I found the framework of the story on the village’s Wikipedia page, where I read about the capture of this British captain, Henry Fleet – the narrator’s father in the story. I loved this reversal of the traditional colonial power politics that our histories have recorded: unblinking domination by British forces alongside a seemingly inevitable destruction for outmatched native communities. I loved too that Fleet was forced to assimilate into this community’s language and culture, not the other way around. I ended up reading some of Henry Fleet’s memoirs, century-old essays by DC historical societies, websites written by Fleet’s descendants, lots of weird historical flotsam and jetsam. My primary concern wasn’t so much accurately representing a historical moment in time, but allowing this story exist there in a natural and believable way.

2. So much of this piece is concerned with the names of things, the variations in what we call something, whether it’s the name of a colonial force or the place where we live. How does this play into the relationship between the English and the Nacotchtank in the story?

Names are so important. Growing up in DC, I’ve seen Malcolm X Park – located in a once primarily black neighborhood – increasingly referred “Meridian Hill Park” as the area gentrified. The buildings where my family lived in that same neighborhood were once called Clifton Terrace, but are now called Wardman Court – renamed after a renovation (and one’s conversion into condos) that occurred only after money began to flood into Columbia Heights. I’ve seen the geography of my childhood rewritten before my eyes. It’s so disorienting! It’s also a profound expression of power, a way for a new group of people to claim ownership. The erosion of the name of the place I write about in the story, which here I’ll call Nacotchtank, is a testament to this effect. Even though the village was a very important trading center in its day, no firm or authoritative version of its name exists today, just various Anglicizations. But just as (re)naming is an enormously powerful tool for any kind of encroaching force, its also a potent instrument for fighting back against that encroachment. It is a way to say this is who I am; know me. Continue reading →