Interviews

Six Questions with Kristina Marie Darling of Noctuary Press

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Noctuary Press publishes three titles a year, with a particular emphasis on female writers working with prose forms. We seek to create a record of, and bring visibility to, formally innovative work by women that is underrepresented in mainstream literary publications. All titles are perfect-bound books, which are published in editions of fifty to one-hundred. Noctuary Press is based in Buffalo, New York.

1. Is your name really Darling or are you secretly a country song?

My name really is Darling. My dad’s parents are French, and apparently there’s a “Darling River” in France. That’s where my name comes from, according to family lore. But if I weren’t a poet, I’d definitely be a country singer. If I close my eyes I can see it now: cowboy boots, big hair, and me telling everyone how he done me wrong.

2. What does Noctuary mean? Does it involve vampires? Am I going to be afraid of your books?

A noctuary is a record of what passes in the night. It’s like a nighttime version of a diary. I chose the name because the press tries to give visibility to, and create a record of, women’s writing that happens across (and beyond) traditional genre categories. Noctuary Press will never, ever involve vampires, I promise. But there are still a few reasons to be afraid. Our upcoming titles include a creepy rabbit-keeping neighbor, erasures, and algebra. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With E. Kristin Anderson

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Eons ago, last September, [PANK] published two otherworldly poems by E. Kristin Anderson. Read on, for urban legends, chupacabras, and the Jersey Devil.

1. These two poems dwell on mysterious appearances and disappearances, of an unknowable natural world mixed with something else. Is this a preoccupation for you?

I wouldn’t say it’s a preoccupation. But it’s definitely something that intrigues me. I love reading about urban legends, about things that people believe despite contradictory popular opinions. It’s fascinating, not only in terms of science or culture, but also the human condition.

2. What is your favorite unexplained phenomenon (or, if explained, explained unsatisfactorily to you)?

Right now I’m really intrigued by Mexican and Latin folk legends, like chubacabras, la Llorona, and the lechuza.  A lechuza is a bruja (Spanish for witch) who is half human, half owl…or possibly a woman who turns into an owl. It’s super creepy, which probably why I love it. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Kima Jones

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In the latest queer issue, Kima Jones wrote about holiness and bodies and Harlem and memory in AD 2012. We asked her questions about all of these things:

1. Talk a little bit about spaces that we can’t traverse, or the ones we cross all too easily.

My first experience with forbidden space was, as a child, reading the story of the tower of Babel with my grandmother. Two things happened that shaped my perception of language and authority: 1. Not only did God confound language, but He scattered the people around the world. 2. When I asked my grandmother why God would do such a thing, she snapped the bible shut and told me not to question God.

That day I learned language was both powerful enough to erect a city toward the seat of God and make my grandmother turn her head away from me as if I had slapped her with my open hand.

I had enough good sense not to ask her anything further. Anything more would have corrupted that space. That day I learned how to watch my words, choose my words and grow my words upward to the Lord.

2. What makes these spaces holy?

The waiting area in language is the holy space. The space between asking and receiving. In that space things grow toward each other out of a yearning, even if they aren’t supposed to. It is the air between my lips and the lips of another when we lean in for the kiss. We may not be sure, but we need something, we are asking something of that space, and we can only get to it by going through.  Continue reading →

The Limits of Grotesque: A Conversation With Eric Raymond

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Eric Raymond’s hilarious and trenchant first novel, Confessions from a Dark Wood, is now available from Ken Baumann’s Sator Press. Over the course of a month, I spoke with Eric via email about his new novel, the nature of satire and grotesquerie, ghosts, 9/11, and the branding of America.

PANK: In CONFESSIONS FROM A DARK WOOD, you play both the part of narrator and archivist. It’s a fairly traumatizing mix of outrageous satire with what appear to me to be aspects of your own biography. Can you tell me about the genesis of this book? Any global capital brand management experience lurking in your past? How did you pick up and begin this?

Eric Raymond: There’s always tension between fiction and biography. It’s interesting how many writers fight it. It’s true that my father died in 2007, and I did spend a couple of intense years flying around for business. I started the book in November of 2009 and it seemed disingenuous to try and deny what I wanted to write about by some artful dodge of encasing it in an extended metaphor or transposing it to a different industry. I’ve always worked in and around corporate environments – mostly marketing, advertising, and branding, unfortunately. It’s a naturally absurd world, but fundamentally uninteresting. To push the book towards what I was feeling, biography was sort of insufficient. I needed a corporate grotesque. When I followed that impulse, the writing moved quickly. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Katy Gunn

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In the latest Queer issue, “The Women Worked to Find Positive Traiits in Their Madness,” by Katy Gunn. Take us there, Katy:

1. This is not the only piece about Ruth Ann, Ira, and their madness. Can you tell us a little something about their larger story?

They’re a novella. The women find that they’ve grown this thing after a while, this pest or responsibility, and they have to come to terms with what to do with it. They are pretty nice women. They try to kill it and teach it manners and take it on field trips, and they also try to keep liking each other.

2. The women seem very protective of their madness. What does this tell us about the things we initially treat as hostile or dangerous or unknown, but then eventually come to protect and cherish? 

We should probably move back two spaces. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Gabby Gabby

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Gabby Gabby (Tipping, Nov. Issue) shit-talks Phillip Roth for no reason while feeling nervous and bad at counting in a way her parents think is unchristian.

1) When you reread something you’ve just written, what are you looking for?

When I reread something I’ve just written I think the first thing that I try to catch straight away is if the sentences I wrote are objectively coherent. Unless I’m working with a specific memory, when I first sit down to write a story I have a vague idea of what I’m trying to convey through the story but I don’t really have the concrete details laid out or outlined. When I write I usually have a feeling or theme that I want to express and then I gradually try to build the concrete story around it. So, a lot of times I’ll start off with rambling incoherent sentences and then I extract the best bits and then edit those down into coherent sentences. After I have a few sentences that don’t seem shitty to me then I can think about how those sentences will dictate the narrative. That may be why my prose comes across as flat. I usually edit down my sentences to the bare-minimum of what I need them to be. I had an editor over at Spork magazine reject this story before I sent it to [PANK]. Their reasoning was that my prose was flat but not so flat that it was stylized. I don’t think I understood the criticism fully.

I don’t like to write extremely long sentences burdened with adjectives just for the sake of it but nor do I feel much interest in writing in the style that Tao Lin wrote “Richard Yates.” I worried a lot about the readability of “Tipping” especially when it got into the paragraphs explaining the types of love. To me those paragraphs seemed extremely incoherent and like how a person talks when they are standing near or on a cardboard box outside of the metro. I tried to edit those sentences down as much as possible and make the ideas more concise.

I appreciate precise word choices. I think that there is just as much beauty in how Tao Lin chose to use language in “Richard Yates,” very sparse, as there is in something with a higher word per sentence density like a Phillip Roth novel, although, I don’t care very much for Phillip Roth’s prose. But, what was I saying, I think, I was just trying to make a point about preference and choices one can make when writing.

Sometimes, vindictively maybe, I start off with Phillip Roth-esque sentences and then I cut them down until they seem non-pretentious and bearable, to me. I think my fixation on Phillip Roth stems from one of my ex-boyfriends always reading Phillip Roth novels aloud to me- especially the bits with the sex and masturbation. I distinctly remember my ex boyfriend saying, in regard to Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, “…It is written in stream-of-consciousness self-loathing Jewish-American continuous prose. What is with male writers and their cocks? I’ve never felt the urge to write about jacking off. But it is a perennial fixation for Updike and apparently Phillip Roth.” And so it was like I had two rambling and incoherent men going on, unsolicited, about their penises.
Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Emily Mae Stokes

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Emily Mae Stokes (3 poems, Nov. issue) from a tepee with relatively few demons, speaks in a clear fifth paragraph of stars about her wolves.

1) When I read your poems I feel like I’m in a tent made of buffalo skin falling asleep thinking it’s warm enough for night, while three other guys talk about making a fire. Why do I feel that way?

The creative mind is the last tepee in the desert and sometimes it’s populated with strange logic. In all seriousness, I couldn’t tell you.
2) Talk a little about the meditative state of writing poetry.

In the actual cold/hard act of writing, I have to be somewhere where there are relatively few demons (neutral territory) or at least they’re keeping quiet. Then I need the patience to focus and genuine will to create. That last one is probably the toughest and the most crucial.

Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Rachel Farrell

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A revolution of bodies, in Rachel Farrell’s “Jean-Louise Is Not Really Interested,” from our September issue.

1. Are there things you refuse to know, that you will never investigate? Tell us some.

I hate anything to do with wires. In my closet I have a giant box of wires I’m afraid to throw away but can’t bring myself to organize. I’ve been collecting the wires for some time, and most of them likely belong to electronic devices I don’t own anymore. Old VCRs and game systems. Old phones, lamps, and cameras. I should sift through this box and throw away those wires I can’t find a use for, but the job seems so depressing. In my version of hell, the Devil ushers me into a cave and says, “I’d like you to sort out my collection of mismatched AC adaptors.”

2. This is a story that spans generations. What distinguishes them? What defines this cycle?

I wouldn’t say anything distinguishes the generations. Every generation has its own taboos, I guess. But the response of humans to joy and trauma is relatively consistent. The cycle is only defined by the fact that its perpetuation is both absurd and necessary. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Caleb Kaiser

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From our September issue, swamps and storms from Caleb Kaiser.

1. These two poems both have water as a central element; tides, swamp waters, river-waves. What do you draw from the water?

Water obviously has a universal quality to it. Constantly present and always being recycled through various areas; it’s a sort of universal medium for life. More relevant to my writing, though, are bodies of water. I’ve always been drawn to creeks, rivers, tides, etc. because of the sort of eternal movement they possess. I spent a lot of time playing in the creek and the ocean when I was young(er), and the feeling of being immersed in something that is fresh and new, but still massive and old, is a recurring theme in my writing. I try to write the way I feel, which is that every moment and sensation is something vibrant and new, yet part of something older than I can completely grasp. Working with something you can’t completely see, for me, is where the magic happens in poetry.

2. Generation after generation seems to be drawn to the swamps, to shores, where they are inevitably taken over. What’s the most unusual place you’ve found a body?

My dining room. When my father passed, he had one of those sick papery hospital beds set up where our cheap dining room table had been. In a sense, I left my own body on the floor next to his. I broke into that house a few years later. No one has lived there since (it’s a rundown house in a shitty housing market), and the room was exactly the same minus his bed and body. I could smell both of us rotting there. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Aaron Burch

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In the September issue, Aaron Burch describes the “Some Nights We Play Poker.” GET FAMOUS:

1. The house in which we collectively play poker: describe its neighborhood. What kinds of cars? People? Lawns? Architecture?

One of those abandoned houses out in the country. No on lives here, we just all meet here for poker. Some of the windows are broken, there is no lawn. It’s nice because we don’t have to pick up when we leave.

2. This piece seems like it could apply across the board, to any group of acquaintances and its social ebbs and flows. Let’s throw all that vagary aside for a minute. Put some names and personals to the “he’s” and “she’s.” We’re talking ages, occupations, kids, favored sexual positions, anything.

Can is just be a room of John Malkoviches?

Continue reading →