“The Ninety-Sixth Day” by Kate Folk was a part of the May Issue.

1. Who would you kidnap? Why would you kidnap them?

I would not kidnap anyone. Look, I’ve seen “Fargo.” I know stuff would keep escalating, and next thing you know someone would be feeding me into a wood chipper.

2. Where did this story come from?

The story came out of every account I’ve read of people held captive in basements. I wanted to toy with the expectations of a kidnapping narrative. The characters share these expectations, so when they’re kidnapped, they anticipate being tortured, or at least held for ransom. But instead, nothing happens. They aren’t starved, beaten, or otherwise abused. Once they’ve been in the basement awhile the suspense fades and is replaced by boredom and acceptance of their new lives, which is the part I found most interesting.

3. How would you bind someone to a chair?

I like the idea of using those huge rubber bands they have at gyms. Ok, I googled them, they’re called “resistance bands,” which is perfect. Continue reading →

We questioned Eliza Smith about “Little Beast,” published the June Issue. Ghost stories, hauntings, fear in writing, racing pulses.

1. Why are you fascinated with ghost stories?

Because everyone has one. My dad, who is one of the most level, rational people I know, has a story about a dark presence he met as a child in the closet of an antebellum home in Montgomery, AL. On the other end of the spectrum, I saw a self-proclaimed psychic acupuncturist for a while who frequently went on spirit journeys to commune with the spirits that haunted her home. Because everyone’s got one, it kind of makes you wonder: are they real or not? And in that sense, the line between the fictional and the nonfictional, between rationality and irrationality gets blurred. And that’s where the potential to write becomes the ripest.

2. Who would you possess? What would you haunt?

I’m less into demonology than I am into ghost lore, so I’m not down with possessions. But in terms of haunting, I would love to haunt places that should be haunted that aren’t. I grew up in Los Angeles, and would go to Disneyland every chance I got. Of course my favorite ride was the Haunted Mansion. Even though the illusions are marvelous and some of them still give me the chills, I wish there were actual ghosts there. So I would haunt the whole place. I would also haunt the Magic Castle, an amazing magic club in Hollywood. It’s this converted, rambling Victorian mansion-turned-magic palace, complete with theaters, bars, a restaurant, and a seance room. All the effects in that room simulate ghostly activity, but I wish there was an actual ghost in there. That’s where I would come in.

3. How do you use fear when writing?

I scare very easily. I like to feel fear in the moment of watching a scary movie or reading a scary story, or even listening to a spooky radio program, there’s something really addictive and delicious about that feeling. But afterwards I’m a total wreck. I have trouble sleeping and I psych myself out constantly. I use writing as a space to discuss and minimize my fears. If I discuss them, massage, them, they shrink and shrink until they barely exist. For example, I wrote Little Beast when I was working at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. It’s a very old building on the northwestern tip of the city that looks out onto the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. They filmed some of Vertigo there- it’s really atmospheric, all foggy and grey and quiet. While I was working there, I learned a lot about the history of the building. I found out that hundreds of years ago, the site was a pauper-s cemetery. Poor people’s corpses would be interred there, without any headstones or markers. When they remodeled the museum a few years ago, they found tons of skeletons in the foundation. I always felt a bit strange walking in those hallways, and I felt compelled to get that fear out, get it on the page, talk about the history and the lore, and make a manageable story out of it. And after I was done with Little Beast, I felt more confident walking those hallways alone. Continue reading →

Two Poems and this interview from Suzanne Richardson. Prepare yourself.

1. Who would you curse? How would you do it?

I’m really not into cursing anyone. I’m not interested in focusing bad energy on anyone. I’m interested in exploring deep seeded anger (which growing up in the south was very taboo for a woman to have) but that’s the core emotion behind the act or desire of “cursing” someone. If I were interpreting this question more loosely I would say I’m interested in cursing at Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan, and I’d probably be really pedestrian about it and use the “F” word.

2. Where did these poems come from?

I think at the time of writing them I felt really betrayed which had caused a lot of anger I didn’t know how to deal with. They came out pretty quickly, as a pair. It was important to me to acknowledge both sides of the coin, both someone that is cursed and someone that is cursing someone else. There are real consequences to wishing someone harm even if you don’t believe in curses per say. I’ve certainly had moments where it feels like everything is working against me, and there’s no seeming rhyme or reason. I’ve always had a fascination with the occult. There is something comforting about occult narratives that explain pain or misfortune, often because there are clear rituals to break the bonds of misery. My French Canadian grandmother was rumored to be psychic or highly intuitive. The 7th daughter of the 7th daughter bla bla bla. She was told by her mother not to speak up about what she knew/saw and over the years repressed it, but there are still stories about her “knowing.” I’ve been reading a really old book called “The Occult” by Colin Wilson. There’s a chapter that suggests poets have a close relationship with the occult. Wilson talks with poet Robert Graves about the idea. Wilson claims Graves said, “all poems are written in the fifth dimension.” Wilson also calls what poets have an amplified “Faculty X” which is an enhanced perception, at once creative and occult. There are really fundamental connections between poetry and the occult. Poetry is a language ritual and so is a spell and both are used to summon things, evoke things.The creative process often requires deep concentration, going into trance-like states, and many people with occult gifts speak of the same. Both the occultist and the poet reach into a world not accessed by most and pull things out for people to examine. I like playing with the connection.

3. How has nonfiction writing influenced your work?

Nonfiction is great because it can be really literal. I write poems about things or emotions I can’t be literal about. I feel like it’s pretty widely regarded that poetry attempts to articulate everything that prose can’t. I was talking with a friend that it seems like poetry is having a very literal moment, but I really like poetry that transports me. Writing nonfiction helps me process a different way to tell something. Nonfiction feels like it’s about duration and revelation…stick with it, and you’ll find something, know something. Poetry is an assault on the senses pointing to something more. Continue reading →

Laura Kochman wrote Five Poems, which we published in the May Issue. Now Laura will discuss the science of beaches and women in the woods.

1. Why did you choose to form these poems in the shape of prose?

The beach feels to me like a space in between the land and the sea, belonging to both but also belonging to neither, and I wanted a form that was also in between two things. So prose poetry! The speaker is also way too unhinged to write with line breaks.

2. If you had a LiveJournal, what would be your username? What would be on it?

I didn’t have a LiveJournal during my teenage years, but I did have a Xanga. My username was innerblonde[some numbers], and it was full of veiled messages and angst and Dashboard Confessional lyrics. If I had a LiveJournal right now, it would be split 50/50 between pictures of my cat and pictures of food.

3. Who is the woman in the woods?

Well, she might exist or she might not exist. She might be receiving these letters, or they might not ever get sent. She might live in a house in the woods on chicken feet, or she might live by the sea. She might be a man. She might be a folk tale. She’s, like, totally cooler than your average grandma. Continue reading →

These Three Poems were published in the June Issue.

1. Why can’t a king ever marry a king?

Absolutely can. But that’s not how it happened in the world I am writing about, and I try to stay honest in writing about the lived realities of those social spaces. On the other hand, if the kingdom retains itself as a kingdom, while a king marries a king, I would be more interested in writing about lives within that kingdom with an eye towards dismantling it, rather than rejoicing over the fact that a king has married/can marry another king. In these poems, I am merely chronicling life within one kingdom as I have seen it.

2. What can’t you hide from your parents?

I have lived in a different country than my parents for the last ten years, so much of my life, for very obvious reasons, is opaque to my parents.

But if we are talking about the poems I have written, the persona and voice through which I chose to write them, those poems were written during a moment in my life when I was keen on examining the power-structures that reside within the crevices of the family. A very specific kind of family- Bengali, middle-class, post-partition, existing in the space between nuclear and extended, rejuvenating itself in the shadows of a failed political upheaval (Naxalbari). I am interested in writing about what happens when familial authority/ power is expressed in the name of love, protection and wellbeing.

There are very specific political issues in my poems, especially in “Memory.” For example, when I write “vernal archive of thunderous roars”, I am playing with a Bengali coinage- basanter bajra nirghosh- literally, thunderous roar of spring, a reference to the way the Naxalbari activists of the 1960s saw themselves and their political project.

The poems take place in a post-Naxalbari world- a post-1968 world- within the mundane realms of the domesticity. But the domestic world I write about, is one continuously shaped by politics and history in a very direct kind of a way. To the extent that the mother-allegory has dominated the Indian/Bengali anti-colonial, national, postcolonial, and even leftist imaginations, writing about mother-child relationships as a Bengali woman is political in a way it is not for writers for certain other parts of the world. Although I also believe that anything ever written, filmed, photographed, painted, or sketched in the world is political. But how things are political, differs.

When I write the dimensions of power in mother-daughter relationships in a Bengali middle-class family, the ways in which mothers commit violences upon their daughters in the name of love and well-being, police them- consciously and unconsciously- I give the mothers of my poem lots of agency. The kind of agency they do not have in the national allegories of nation-as-mother. Yes, it’s negative agency. But still, agency, a capacity to act- a very specific form of agency that lies in the interstices between gender, class, political imaginations, social status quo. To come back to the original question, there is no hiding from parents, because there is no hiding from history.

Just as one cannot really “hide” from the state, but has to confront it, there is no hiding from the parents for the persona of my poems. She confronts them by narrativizing them. Continue reading →

Writing and bodybuilding, that’s a combination we can get sweaty over. Below Jonathan Starke responds to questions about his piece “Between Them,” published in the June Issue.

1. What was your finishing combination when you were a boxer?

I liked to start slow and then flip the switch and pressure the other guy into the ropes. He’d cover, and I’d start throwing body shots, and when he’d go down to block those or move, I’d switch to hooks and uppercuts to the head. It’s not very easy to withstand a flurry of shots to so many different parts of the body at so many different angles.

2. Why are men always struggling to escape the shadows of their fathers?

In my case it’s men. In my writing it’s men. But I wouldn’t say it’s just men. We’re all struggling to get out from underneath something. The difficulty isn’t that my father is a tough man or a hard man or a confusing man. He is a great man, and I don’t know how to follow that.

3. How has boxing and bodybuilding influenced your writing?

I’ve only written one piece on bodybuilding, strangely. I have references to boxing in almost every story, poem, play, or essay I write. Kind of like how my father or a father figure happens to show up in all my work. These topics have both hurt me and created some kind of love. I’d like to write more about bodybuilding because things I’ve been through and seen in that world are rarely heard of or known. There’s a male intimacy that I miss so much and I’ll never have it again. Men at an incredible physical peak who offer vulnerability so rarely in public, but when you get to see it in private, public, at all, it’s shocking to know that they’re human, they’re not the supermen they appear to be, and this makes their story so fascinating. I suppose that relates 100% to boxing as well. Continue reading →

We brought you Caleb Curtiss’s “A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us” in June. Below, Caleb discusses poetry’s fascination with death and time, amongst other topics.

1. Your essay begins very poem-like but then transitions into an essay. Why did you structure “A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us” in this manner?

Perhaps obviously enough, “A Taxonomy…” started off as a poem. I didn’t have any aspirations for it to be anything more than that, but then, after sitting with it for a while, I decided to annotate it as more of an exercise than anything. Pretty soon thereafter, I realized that I needed to get out of the way and let it become an essay, which it apparently did.

2. Why is poetry so fascinated with death and time?

I don’t know, although I suspect it has to do with how poetry, perhaps more than any other literary form, deals with documenting the moment and its passing. That’s obviously a bit reductive, but it seems to me that most memorable poetry asks its reader to step outside of time as she or he experiences it and into the order of its aesthetic. By its very nature, poetry examines the relationship between language and meaning, which is absolutely a question of order. It makes sense, then that the space opened up by the temporal schemes we see in aesthetically successful, and therefore highly influential work (think Dickinson, Stevens, Moore, or more contemporarily, Carl Phillips), should examine not only the possibilities of the moment, but the logical outcome of what gives the moment its meaning. Or maybe talking about death just makes poets feel more important. Which is silly, because ultimately, they’re all going to die anyway.

3. Whose grave would you dance on? What music would you use?

I don’t know, man. I’m not sure that I could dance on anyone’s grave. Maybe Ke$ha’s, assuming she met an untimely demise (which I certainly don’t wish upon her). If that were the case, I’d probably ask the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to do an a capella rendition of Tik Tok. She’d want it that way. Continue reading →