Interviews

The Lightning Room With Emma Smith-Stevens

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Emma Smith-Stevens, author of Anthem, threatened in a field of shitty tattoos makes you a mix-tape of New York.

1. Have you ever had a nickname?

I had a totally dorky, self-inflicted nickname in high school. While the banks and the Internet survived Y2K, thankfully my nickname did not.

2. I grew up in a town where most building heights were survivable to fall from. All these archetypes are known to me, but I doubt I would have written this anthem. What is it about growing up in NY that made you write Anthem?

Probably like 1990s teenagers all over the country, I remember constantly trading mixtapes with my friends. They were about the music, obviously, but they were also about identity and affiliation. I wanted to write a story about New York City teenagers that’s like a mixtape. I tried to sample fragments of my memories of the kids I grew up with, went to school with, saw at the park, on the train, and so on.
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The Lightning Room with Danielle Pafunda

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From the June Issue, Danielle Pafunda’s startling “from The Book of Scab.” We love this interview.

1. When have you ever lost your taste for beauty?

I never lose my taste for beauty, but often lose my taste for Beauty, which I gorged on in my youth.

2. How do you push yourself into enough darkness to write something like “from The Book of Scab”?

When I feel like making trouble, I make writing. No push needed. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Taryn Bowe

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The pain of separation in Taryn Bowe’s “Surrogate Needs,” from our July issue. Scars follow:

1. Many parts of this story deal with transference- of memory, guilt, Gracie; from person to person, from person to memory, etc. Is this a typical means of coping?

I don’t think it is an entirely functional mechanism for coping. That’s for sure. I think it sets folks up for some pretty serious disappointments when they finally come to terms with the fact that the people or objects they’ve invested all this guilt, angst, and love in have very little connection to the strong emotions they inspire.

In terms of whether or not transference is a typical means of coping, I can only really comment on my own experience, which has been to engage in pretty shameless transference in instances when I’m out of sorts and in need of genuine human connection. For example, at times in my life when I’ve moved to a new place or left behind old good friends, when I’ve had to start over from scratch, I’ve tried to find aspects of lost people in new people, and often this leads to the mistaken sensation of knowing a stranger very well when in fact you are just projecting a whole catalogue of longed for connections and characteristics onto them.

Regarding transference in fiction, there’s a fantastic Mary Gaitskill story, “Dentist,” in which a woman becomes obsessed with her middle-aged dentist because he extends a small act of kindness during a time in her life when she is totally down and out.

2. The idea of transformation as a means of escape sneaks into this story, particularly in Mindy’s character. How much can we change before we’re completely removed from where we started?

Often, I wonder if we can really change all that much. Sometimes I think the act of trying to change, at least physically, is really just a way of avoiding difficult truths and trying to train our minds to obsess about something other than the thing we are really obsessing about.

For instance, in “Surrogate Needs”, Mindy focuses much of her time and energy on whittling away her body through diet and exercise. In a lot of ways, this is extremely convenient. All that time when she is thinking about the next five miles she’ll run or studying her weird pokey bones in the mirror or trying not to eat a brownie, she is relieved from the even harder task of thinking about Carter and her shattered future with him.

I don’t think people can escape feelings. At least not while sober. Feelings have to be worked through and waited out. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With David Romanda

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David Romanda talks from 13 hours in the future about the combo of pickles, gin, and speed in “My Wife & William.”

1. Do a lot of people eat pickles with gin? Is this a common thing?

Pickles with gin? Yes, please.

2. Have you decided whether the wife is cheating or this is some agreeable cuckold situation?

I figure she’s cheating.
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The Lightning Room With Farren Stanley

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Farren Stanley’s “Rawness of Remembering” collapses time within our July issue. Watch this one bloom, watch it boil down to essence:

1. The structure of this story seems to lend itself to self-consumption. Why did you choose to build it this way?

Is this how you characterize it? Do you mean that the story consumes its structure, or that the structure reflects an agenda of self-consumption? Or maybe what you mean is that the essay reduces, reduces, reduces until it disappears? Meaning is a complex construction (most obvious thing anyone has ever said)- when I think about the meaning of the concepts “family” or “partnership,” there are a constellation of seemingly-unrelated- or perhaps obviously-related, I’m not real big on nuance-experiences continually orbiting these great massive signifiers that hijack my psychic spaces. Family. Love. Abandonment. Ownership. What do I mean when I say “Father”, exactly? What does it mean to belong to another person? Maybe the more I meddle, the more the entire premise of the question collapses. Maybe that’s what you’re sensing.

2. How much of this story is “true”?

I fully expect the surviving members of the family Nyles Rudean Vinzant went on to have after he left my mother and me to contact me if they ever find this essay. Or hide from me. That is also an entirely reasonable reaction.

Also, my ex-boyfriend is pretty pissed about it.

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The Lightning Room with Ali Shapiro

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In our July issue, six scintillating poems by Ali Shapiro. Read on, for bursts.

1. When I read “If I Leave You Then Maybe I Won’t Have To Miss You So Much,” I think of it being read to an audience who cheers at every burn. What’s your process like? How did you put all of these pieces together?

I wrote that poem start to finish during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I’d spent most of the residency writing quiet, cozy nature poems in my quiet, cozy writing studio, which felt good, at first; it was certainly a welcome respite from what I’d been doing before the residency, which was boomeranging around New England in my station wagon, blasting country radio and burning bridges with various exes and accumulating speeding tickets.

But after a few weeks of quiet coziness, I started to get restless, impatient. I wanted to blast country radio, but that would’ve disturbed the other residents. I wanted to leave, but that would’ve been a waste of a residency. So being stuck in that quiet, cozy studio forced me to focus that restless, impatient energy into a poem instead of another angsty road trip. And I allowed myself to just jam those pieces together more recklessly than I usually do, because what I wanted to capture wasn’t a crafted, calculated feeling- it was that restless stuck-ness, the engine revving in neutral, the exhilarated-exhausted assertive-uncertain top-volume feeling of wanting very badly to simultaneously leave and stay.

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The Lightning Room with Jaclyn Watterson

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Once upon a time it was the month of May and we published “We Act” from Jaclyn Watterson. Now Jaclyn answers some questions.

1. In the 2008 election cycle, how would have your gang of girls helped Hilary Clinton secure the Democratic nomination? In this current election cycle, what would they do to Paul Ryan?

For Hilary, my band of girls would clear the sidewalks. My girls would like to take over Paul Ryan’s body. Before he gets to ours. The band is very, very afraid that Mitt is even a candidate. We must act.

2. Who would you kill? Why?

Mostly I try to avoid killing. I’m a vegetarian. But maybe a silverfish running toward me in my bathroom at four o’clock in the morning has it coming.

3. What have you acted on lately?

I’m a teacher, and I consider that one kind of activism. If I can get students to ask questions, and really think about and look for answers lots of us- lots of different kinds of us- can live through, then I feel like I’m doing something. And when my students get me to ask questions, then I’m happy.

4. Who don’t you want on your sidewalks or eating your pie?

Plenty of people, but especially the ones who don’t appreciate Roseanne Barr. Really, go back and watch Roseanne. The show asks so many questions about gender and class and sexuality, challenging the dominant discourse in revolutionary ways. Roseanne’s running for president now too.

5. What is your favorite weapon?

Language. I’m fond of household objects as well.

6. Are boys that easily suckered?

Are they?

Ask The Author: Zoe Etkin

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“Gods” was a poem in our July issue by Zoe Etkin. I talked to her, very carefully.

1. Your god-formula seems fairly sound, but I prefer marble, eggshell, clock. Where’s the spiritual content in the gods you produce?

Maybe everyone’s god has a different formula. I mean the one we all make for ourselves. Spirituality is complicated for me. I’m Jewish, culturally, but mostly I make up my own rules. I think I choose natural things and bodily things to make this god with because I find my spirituality in nature and the body. I like when things happen the way they aren’t supposed to in real life. You might call me a spiritual surrealist.

2. Which other parts of the body can be used for god-producing?

I think wombs can be god producing. What about the gallbladder? That would make a more wily god, one with more “gnashing of teeth.”

3. This poem is sparse in a really intimidating way. How much do you pare down a poem before it’s done? Is the process anything like carving the man you need? 

Not to continue to intimidate but this piece in particular came out almost as it appears in [PANK]. Sometimes that happens for me. It’s why I aspire to call myself an ecstatic poet in the intimidating/beautiful legacy of Emily Dickinson. I get bursts and the poems come out. Other times I really have to wrangle a poem. Either way, I tend to edit as I go. It’s a type of carving, yes. I pare down poems rather than expand them. I think the poem is usually there, it just needs to be dug out.

4. This god you can make, what does he look like?

In this Gods poem, I have two, he looks like my father. Tall, bearded, wearing black and smelling of mineral spirits. But in this version of him he does exactly what I need him to. Also, this god represents all I need in a man. It’s a tenuous line between father-loving and man-worshiping. It speaks to a relationship with men that isn’t exactly healthy…

5. What else is never given to you, besides the men?

In my god factory I can make a god for anything I need, now that I’ve figured out how the factory works. I can make things for myself. I need the men most, I guess. But I need other things. Things for letting go. Maybe I’ll make a god for that.

6. What kind of paintings does this father make with his paint knife? Or doesn’t he use it for art?

My father is an artist. He primarily uses oil paint. He uses brushes, but he creates bold bands of color with paint knives. He’s the master of the paint knife. His work is beautiful.

Ask the Author: Laura Ender

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Laura Ender’s terrific story “Some Animals Have Funerals” appeared in our July issue. Learn where to put the ashes, below.

1. You make something that would usually seem so transgressive and wrong- stealing ashes from people’s remains- feel so intimate and touching. Does your writing always have this much love?

I have to love my characters. I don’t mean they have to be lovable or that they need to be a hero- almost every one of my protagonists does terrible things and has major emotional issues that would make them difficult to deal with as people, and I don’t know if I could describe any of them as noble. To love my characters I have to see inside them, understand them, and want them to be happy. I’ve written stories where I don’t love my characters and it always feels condescending–it turns into a sort of commentary on people I don’t like. I try not to go there anymore.

2. What do you collect?

I think I have a collector’s spirit but I lack focus. I collect things that make me feel a certain way- nostalgic I guess. I’m starting to get quite a stack of vintage cookbooks.

3. This story has so much yearning for what we can never recover or replace. What inspired it?

I was in a strange place when I wrote this story. I was in graduate school, living part-time in one city and part-time in another because the school was here and my husband’s job there. When I was at school, I longed for my husband; I often skipped social events because I wanted to see him, even though I also longed to be part of my classmates’ community. I was so lucky I could drive the hour and a half home, but the morbid part of my brain wondered what it would be like if I couldn’t. If he were gone. Continue reading →

Ask The Author: Rachelle Cruz

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Two Poems from Rachelle Cruz, here, and J. Bradley’s final Interview, below.

1. How does it feel to be my final interview before my post as PANK’s Interviews Editor ends?

Dang, I wish I brought fireworks and glittery churros and Shamu.

I feel humbled. I love the dialogue you’ve engaged with the writers of [PANK] over the years, J. Bradley. Your questions always circle back to the writing process, and they also act as prompts for re-imagining the work itself. Some of my favorite questions you’ve asked: How can a city flood into a room? How does one summon the whore within? What question are you the most afraid to answer?

What gorgeous questions. I might just steal them to use for my own devices…

2. With your radio show, The Blood-Jet Writing Hour, you interview each poet you have on. How do you prepare your interviews?

I read the guest-poet’s work several times, most often times aloud, and take notes. I handwrite the poems that stick with me. Sometimes, I riff on certain lines. I also Google the poet and search for interviews they’ve done in the past, so I can make sure to not to ask the same, stale questions (although I’m sometimes guilty of this; I’m genuinely interested in how people come to poetry or writing in the first place! I love hearing origins stories, especially ones about literary first loves.). On the day of the show, I drink a few cups of coffee and a glass of water. I pee then sweat profusely as I wait for the poet to call into the show. I treat the “interview” as a conversation more than anything else.

I learn so much about writing and process from the generous writers I have on the show. I’m grateful to have access to resources that help promote the work of writers that readers/listeners might not have previously known about.

3. How do you fight back?

With words. But they often feel inadequate because they are. I’m still learning. Continue reading →