[INTERVIEW] Poetry is Not What We Create, But What We Can Hear: An Interview with Lev Rubinstein

Posted on February 6, 2020 by admin

INTERVIEW BY PHILIP METRES

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Born in 1947 and one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, Lev Rubinstein is among Russia’s most well-known contemporary poets and writers. He has been called the “Postmodern Chekhov.” His poetic texts, beginning in the 1970s, are written on stacks of index cards, a non-poetic medium that he was inspired to create through his work as a librarian at the Lenin Library. His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the “unofficial” art scene of the seventies and eighties and found wide publication by the late 1980s. Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes essays and cultural criticism for the independent media. He has been a leader in the pro-democracy and anti-Putin movements in Russia for some time now. In 2004, Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein was published, about which, Ron Silliman writes: “The major work by a major poet, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, and aptly translated. There is no question that this is one of the ‘must have’ [poetry] books of 2004.” Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties was published in 2015 by Ugly Duckling Presse, and was a finalist for the AATSEEL Prize for Translation. The interview is part of a series of interviews with Russian poets, called “From Pushkin to Pussy Riot: Conversations with Russian Poets,” and was conducted in Russian, in Cleveland during Rubinstein’s visit in 2007. It was conducted and translated by Philip Metres.

PHILIP METRES: I’d like to begin at the beginning. How did you begin writing poems and in what forms?

LEV RUBENSTEIN: Well, compared to others in my generation, I began to write poetry fairly late, not at 16 years old like the rest. I was already twenty years old, studying at the university, at the very end of the 1960s. I really wanted to write poetry then, even more than I wanted to read it. I had an agonizingly drawn-out period of imitating cult figures like Mandelstam, Khlebnikov, Marina Tsvetaeva—like all the others in my generation. Completely willy-nilly, my poems closely resembled theirs, and I didn’t like that at all. So I even avoided showing them to others. Only in the mid-70s did my own voice, my own style, emerge. In 1974, I published my first note card poem, and I’ve been going ever since.

PM: What poets and artists influenced you? How did you come up with the method of the note card?

LR: Literature and poetry were not the primary influences, but different modes of art—for example, in contemporary music like John Cage, and visual arts like Pop Art, Conceptualism. And also, I believe that in a cursory and indirect way Eastern philosophy of Zen influenced me, which of course I knew only glancingly, but some ideas of Zen also were important. But why I began using the note cards is difficult to explain. From a simply external reason I worked in a library for many years, and simply the cards were always available. But that’s only the surface reason.

Why was it important to me to write poems that weren’t flat and two-dimensional, but had a third dimension? It was important because I existed in the situation of the underground, of samizdat. I wanted to create something for my own benefit. Why must I write texts that wouldn’t be published? I’d rather write poems that would be impossible to publish. That was the mindset. I wanted to objectivize the text, create text as an object, without regard for the typical worries about the press run, about costs. I wrote almost everything by hand, not with a typewriter.

I wanted that the text could be an object, a literary object, a theatrical object—all at once. And that’s exactly how it worked out. Because often it happens that the very same text gets into a poetry anthology, a prose anthology, an art exhibit, or gets used by musicians for a performance, or gets staged as theater. The very same text.

PM: Are there other poets and artists of your generation who used similar artistic strategies, and did you know them?

LR: We got to know each other, though late enough so that we didn’t really influence each other. We were already adults. I, [Dimitri Alexandrovich] Prigov, [Vsevolod] Nekrasov—we worked in isolation for many years. So it was important, at the end of the 1970s, when we formed a literary club, where people understood what we were trying to do. Because before the formation of that group, in literary terms, I was absolutely marginal.

PM: Can you explain a bit more about your method of construction?

LR: My poetic texts are not completely and clearly one genre or another. They swim between genres, as it were. But it’s important that within each text this occurs. Within each text, the genres overflow into one another—in one moment, it looks like a lyric poem, but by the next card, it turns out not to be lyric, but a bit of prose, for example. And then another is some everyday conversation on the street, or a cynical remark. Or an empty card. A field of silence. This is borrowed straight from music, because the pause is crucial for musical works. For me, the pause is critical. The expanse and time between cards—it’s all part of the text. Because of this, I always have had a problem publishing texts in book form; there are always problems to solve and compromises to make. I always say that that version is not completely my text, it’s a reproduction. Not a copy, but a reproduction, or as I’ve written before, like a photograph of a sculpture.

In other words, it provides a representation, but not the full volume and dimensionality. Because of course, it’s crucial that reading this work is not done just with eyes or the head but with the hands.

PM: There is a wonderful photograph of you cupping your ears on stage as if trying to listen to a far-off voice in the audience. I think of it as a symbol of your creative process. Are the snatches of conversation in your works from actual conversation?

LR: Not necessarily. One of my favorite techniques is quasi-quotation. Many fragments that could be perceived as quotes or citations are not actual quotes. I’m not citing texts, I’m citing linguistic genres—it’s a quote of genre or style. When a person read it, it’s as if he’s read it or heard it or seen it somewhere before. Although, I’m also quite attracted to “readymades,” but I stylize it so that it’s as if it were real.

PM: This stance of listening, this work of quasi-citation—it’s not just an aesthetic method, but also a kind of ethical stance. It says that each person has something interesting to say.

LR: Of course.

PM: That normal people can speak poetry.

LR: Absolutely right. I have a text called “The Hero Emerges” that begins with a series of statements written in iambic tetrameter, so strongly that Russian listeners immediately recognize it from school as a classical Russian poetic meter. But the phrases are very much everyday language, so a comic effect arises. In terms of meter, it’s like [Alexander Pushkin’s] Evgeny Onegin, but the content is banal and it just keeps coming. Hence the comedy. Sadly, it’s very hard to translate that effect. But really, it’s a manifesto that we are surrounded by poetry. That our linguistic laziness, through a special kind of listening, reveals itself as poetry.

Poetry is not what we create, but what we can hear.

…

from “The Hero Emerges” (1986):

I tried it on, it fit just right.

So how’s about it, one more round?

You better ask those other guys.

Thank you. It’s time for me to go.

And you believed it, you poor sap?

This guy’s been toasted since breakfast.

Instead, take Mitka for a walk.

Who is the father? Does she know?

Next week, it’ll be a year already.

Oh, really? I had no idea.

Are you done talking? Now listen.

…

PM: Are you writing poetry these days?

LR: Now, very rarely. I write other things—columns, articles, essays.

PM: Why?

LR: I don’t know why. I can explain to myself, perhaps, the moment I lost motivation—that happens. There was a time when I knew why I had to write poems, and then there came a time when I didn’t know why. It’s not that I couldn’t. I could do it any time I wanted, but I don’t have the feeling of obligation, that I must do it. I’m writing prose seriously, and a few of my collections of essays have now been published.

PM: What does the essay form give you?

LR: Well, between us, first and foremost it gives me…there’s a financial component. I can’t just work for money, of course. It also gives me a new experience, a new type of challenge. If in poetry I’m completely free, in prose I have some obligation to be understandable, understandable but not vulgar. That’s an intriguing but difficult aim. To be original but also understandable.

And when I began to write essay, I thought I could earn some money easily this way. I thought I could do one thing with my left hand and something else with my right hand. It turns out not to be the case. Since I still am a poet, I wrote prose exactly as I wrote poetry, taking a long time to craft every phrase.

PM: During my study of Russian poetry and its relationship to historical change after the fall of communism, I saw how poetry had fallen from its heights during the Soviet period. It appears as if poetry is the most powerful in totalitarian societies. Prose, in its horizontality, its understandability, seems more suited to capitalist societies.

LR: Poetry, as an institution in the West, has become quite marginalized, it seems to me. But in Russia, it’s completely different. It’s always been more important. It’s a completely different tradition and relationship to the word. The more archaic the society, the greater the role played by poetry. In various Eastern countries—in Georgia or Armenia for example—poetry plays a large role. Even the peasants know and recite poetry.

PM: In Russia, this is now disappearing.

LR: Yes, it’s disappearing, but the inertia still exists. Poetry during the Soviet period, during perestroika, played an important role. Though I always rejected that role. I always saw poetry as a private thing, an autonomous thing, a social but not a political thing.

Simply put, poetry always could be political, but only if it was naturally political, not just because the poet wanted to be political. It must be part of its nature. Mandelstam, one day, said to his wife, when they began to persecute him, “look how they honor poets—someone can be killed for poetry.” They honor poetry because they are afraid of it. In that sense, yes, poetry is political.

But in my era, in my circle during the 1970s and 1980s, poetry was not a means of resistance as much as a means of personal salvation, let’s say—in other words, one’s strength, one’s seclusion, one’s home. There was no air to breathe, but the poet made a hole in the wall in order to breathe.

PM: What do you think of the translations of your work?

LR: Well, first, I am grateful that they exist. At the same time, and I don’t want to offend, but there’s the expression that poetry is that which disappears during the translation.

PM: That’s been attributed to Robert Frost, among others.

LR: Well, it’s apt.

PM: When I began translating your work, I thought it would be easier than translating more traditional poetry, but it’s actually more complex than traditional poetry.

LR: Perhaps the greatest champion challenge of my texts for translators is “Mama Washed the Window,” because there’s this deceptive impression that it’s a simple text.

…

from “Mama Washed the Window” (1987):

Mama washed the window.

Papa bought a TV set.

The wind was blowing.

Zoya was stung by a wasp.

Sasha Smirnov broke his leg.

Borya Nikitin cracked his skull on a stone.

It started raining.

Brother teased brother.

The milk boiled over.

The first word he said was “elbow.”

Yura Stepanov rigged up a tepee.

Yulia Mikhailovna was strict.

Vova Avdeev fought all the time.

Tanya Chirkova was dumb.

Galya Fomina’s boyfriend had one arm.

Sergei Alexandrovich had a phone installed.

The invalid burned to death in his car.

We took a walk in the woods.

Grandma had cancer.

Grandma died in her sleep.

I often dreamt of Grandma.

I was afraid I would die in my sleep.

Igor Dudkin looked like a Georgian.

Sergey Alexandrovich joked with Papa.

The Sorokins had plums, but they also had a dog named Jack.

…

This primitive style is a construction, as if a child writes in a notebook all that he is experiencing, but with the crude vocabulary and simple syntax of a child. Plus, the first line was a common and immediately recognizable first line of Russian writing practice textbooks.

PM: In the first English translation, Joanne Turnbull translated the first line as “The cat wore a hat,” trying to get close to the simple language of the original. But she loses the sense of perspective that exists in the first two cards: “Mama washed the window. Papa bought a TV.” That sense of a widening angle of view slowly accessible to the child.

LR: Well, I’d never thought of that before. In French, they translated it as “Papa smoked a pipe.”

PM: Perhaps an allusion to Magritte! You are now an international poet, in a sense, having been translated into many languages and traveled widely. Do you get to know other poets who have been doing similar experimental work?

LR: Unfortunately, I’m a monoglot, I’m ashamed to say, so I don’t know other poetries very intimately, except perhaps the German.

PM: In the 1970s, Robert Grenier, an American experimental poet, was also writing poems on note cards, though his were principally visual in nature, whereas yours feel more aural.

LR: There is a tradition in Russian poetry, especially in the underground, of oral poetry, recited poetry. You don’t read it at all, you just listen to it. To this day, Russian poetry is highly metrical. In the West, you don’t really have that dominant metrical tradition.

PM: Yes, there’s the figure of Nadezhda Mandelstam memorizing all of Osip Mandelstam’s poems so that they wouldn’t be forgotten during the Stalinist era. And of course there’s the fact that in Russia, illiteracy led to a greater emphasis on memorization and recitation.

LR: Even until in the 1930s, only ten percent of Russians were literate.

PM: What is the state of Russian poetry today?

LR: It’s normal. There are many poets, some interesting, some not so interesting. There are institutions, schools, clubs, places where poetry exist, journals, etc. Everything. It’s not as popular as in the Sixties, and that’s good. Because in the Sixties poetry had an abnormal popularity, due to the fact that there weren’t any other social institutions. There was no rock culture, there was no club culture, no institutions of expression—

PM: —no freedom. And poetry functioned as the great 19^th century novels did—

LR: Yes, in the prophetic tradition.

PM: Some critics have argued that your work is principally parodic and ironic. It seems to me that the parodic tonality, but that it’s not the main one.

LR: There are other tones. If we’re talking about irony, there are different kinds of irony as well. But irony is fundamentally distance. Distance between the author’s speech and another. Parody is citation. But the humorous effect of reading comes from the sudden collision of genres, of the serious and the unserious. In those places, there’s always humor. I relate to the serious with humor, and vice versa. The traditional in poetry is typically the serious, and my relationship to it is comic.

PM: There’s irony, there’s parody, there’s musical structure, but in the end, in a text like “Here I Am,” there’s also a meditation on death itself.

LR: In some sense, yes.

PM: To me, the genius of your work is its combination of postmodern technique and its wrestling with eternal questions.

LR: Well, that’s a good way to end!

Ask the Author: Monica Prince, of HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN

Posted on January 30, 2020 by admin

[PANK] Web Editor, Erinn Batykefer sat down with Monica Prince to talk about her new choreopoem, HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN coming out from PANK Books, spring 2020.

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For the readers who might not know what a choreopoem is, can you tell us about how you first learned about it and how you approach the form? What does it let you do that you can’t accomplish with another form?

In 2008, my sister called to tell me she’d just read the most incredible thing and I needed to stop what I was doing and go to the bookstore immediately and buy a book. “It’s called For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. N-T-O-Z-A-K-E S-H-A-N-G-E. Now. Go right now.” It was like 10:00pm on a Monday, but I wrote down what she told me and the next day I went to two bookstores looking for it. (RIP Borders.)

For colored girls… is a choreopoem. That’s what Shange called it. This one was published in 1975 to critical acclaim. I read it in one sitting in my mother’s living room, out loud. I cried the whole time. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever read. I had been reading/watching/writing performance poetry for a few years at that point, and I was a dancer. This choreopoem combined performance poetry, dance, music, song, and art in a way I’d never seen, never dreamed was possible. I thought poetry had limits. I was wrong.

The official definition of a choreopoem, according to me and the thousands of sources I’ve read to become an expert on this genre, is a choreographed series of poems performed on stage with dance, music, live art, and occasionally parkour if you do it my way. The structure takes on at least three forms: a collage, a narrative, or a hybrid where the narrative isn’t the dominant structure but provides a thread to follow from beginning to end. For colored girls… is a collage choreopoem: several characters perform poems with various speakers, transitions are done through dialogue or dance, and they end where they started: “And this is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.” (That’s in the first poem and the last.) There are about twenty poems in that show.

My latest choreopoem Roadmap is a narrative choreopoem. There are characters who change, they only speak in their own essences, and the audience can follow the narrative through dialogue, a chorus, and a guide (her name is Rachel, and she’s terrifying). How to Exterminate the Black Woman is a hybrid of both the narrative and collage form.

Though I do write “literary” poetry, what I can accomplish with the choreopoem is a captive audience. People attend the show to see what all the hubbub is about. They want to know why it’s called that and not just a play. They want to know why people are singing or painting on stage or dancing or doing backflips. They want to be immersed in something they’ve never experienced before. They want to ask questions about people they don’t always engage with, lives they never interrogate, experiences they’ve never had. I can’t do that with a poem in a book. I can’t do that with just a play. I can’t do that with an essay (well, I can, but not as effectively).

Ntozake Shange passed away in October of 2018. She likely never knew about the work I’ve been doing, how I have done all this in her honor, for her legacy. I hope she’s proud of me.

HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN functions a bit like a beehive, a single organism made of many. I’m thinking specifically of the sections that are also poems from other books and manuscripts. I’m curious about how you approach writing your choreopoems. Are they like writing a play? Ordering a manuscript and filling in? Something else?

So, writing a choreopoem is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done, and I can’t stop doing it. How to Exterminate the Black Woman is my fourth choreopoem, but only the third to be produced, and the first to be published (yay!). I wish I could say it is the same every time, but it’s not.

My undergraduate honors thesis will tell you that writing a choreopoem requires choosing a subject, researching that subject through interviews and literature reviews, choosing characters, and then writing a million poems until you get “enough.” Which is why some of the poems come from other books and manuscripts. As I write poems, some of them are just fabulous on their own so I submit them to journals or they become part of other collections. But sometimes, as I pull poems together based on the subject, I end up pulling from sources that have already been published. To be honest, I never believed choreopoems could be published as literary works. They are frequently published as plays (Samuel French, for example, owns the rights to For colored girls…) or self-published on Amazon or produced and never repeated (like the 1982 For black boys who have considered homicide when the streets are too much by Keith Antar Manson). But really, the choreography of creating a choreopoem is different every time.

When I started How to Exterminate the Black Woman, six words came to me in a dream that my dog startled me awake from in the middle of the night (RIP Otis the Pug). I wrote a feverish sestina using those words: fear, expectation, fury, loss, silence, and new. Then I went back to sleep. In the morning, I reread the sestina (titled “When Asked About Power, I’ll Tell Them–“), changed some stuff, and then wrote an outline for the show. I had no plan. But I knew I wanted the show to respond to Beyoncé’s Lemonade (specifically in “Freedom” when she says, “I’mma keep runnin’ cuz a winner don’t quit on themselves”) and I wanted to give a tribute to my closest friends from college, five women who kept me sane my last two years at Knox. But most importantly: it was the summer of 2016. I didn’t know what was going to happen with the election. I was in love with a Black man who I couldn’t keep safe. I was teaching Black children in a summer literacy camp, and Philando Castille and Alton Sterling had just been murdered. I looked around and I couldn’t breathe. I just kept writing poems about Black lives being disposable, about the tragedy of loving someone “who will leave, be taken from you”, about fiercely and unapologetically identifying as a Black woman.

Then one of my best friends from college got pregnant.

We’ve handled this so it’s okay to talk about. I was the first person to ask her if she wanted to keep the baby. I asked if this was what she really wanted, with her partner (of ten years at the time), with her life. I tell my students all the time that any decision you make you can unmake. Except having a whole child. That decision cannot be unmade as cleanly as moving to the wrong city or taking the wrong job. Humans have consequences. Surprise surprise we fought about it. But the reason I asked was because DT was dangerously about to become President. Black bodies were dropping like flies and no one seemed to care or want to do anything about it.

How do you raise a child in a country that wants to kill them, that wants to kill you?

After that, the show came easily. I had a focus. I had a direction. I knew I wanted the show to answer that question. I was (still am) obsessed with sestinas, so I wrote like twelve more with different subjects, and the whole show was focused around the number 6. Did you know 6 is a perfect number? In the show, there are 6 sestinas and 18 poems, 6 main characters/emotions, and each of them recites at least two sestinas. The moment the show stopped being a collage and turned into a hybrid was when I realized that the show was all about my insecurities about growing up: society tells you to have a baby, to get married, to buy a house and get a steady job and retire at 65 with grandchildren to spoil. But I’m polyamorous, terrified of getting pregnant, and wildly uncomfortable sharing my personal space. How am I supposed to be the person society wants me to be when I defy those norms by “bein alive and bein a woman and bein colored” (that’s Ntozake Shange right there)?

The narrative began when I introduced Angela and made the six emotions/characters fractured identities she holds. (Angela is my mother’s middle name, and it has six letters, and it means “messenger of God,” which is who Angela strives to be by the end of the show.) Then the show just asked for cohesion, for breath and grace. Using 6 as a guide, it fell together easily.

You’ve had the chance to see HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN performed on stage, and to direct it, too. If you could hand-pick a dream cast, for the “parts of a Black woman” who would you put in each role?

Dream cast? Oh wow. I have never thought about that! I love this question.

Angela: Janelle James. I know she’s a comedian, but her energy is so on point for a character like Angela.

Fear: Lupita Nyong’o. I think she’s could do the “Closed Borders” poem justice, which has been difficult to get someone to do. Not to mention she has the talent to handle a character that experiences depression the way Black girls are “supposed” to experience it (read: we’re not supposed to get depressed).

Loss: Kimberly Elise. If you’ve seen the For Colored Girls movie, you know WHY.

Expectation: My best friend Kristyn Bridges. I wrote this part for her.

Silence: Mandi Madsen. She is this stellar actress in NY who is also one of my sister’s best friends. She has RANGE.

Fury: Kerry Washington. I watch Scandal when I run on the treadmill because nothing gets you fired up like watching Olivia Pope handle anything. Plus, have you seen Kerry Washington scream? It’s haunting.

New: Liz Morgan. She was “Binette” in my choreopoem Testify produced by the CutOut Theatre (directed by Thea Wigglesworth) in 2015, and she astounded me. If I could be in her light one more time or get her perform in one of my shows again, I would cry uncontrollably.

This book is comprised of sestinas, a form that functions on subtle and nuanced obsession as it repeats 6 line endings throughout. Are forms your jam, or was the sestina the right vessel for this choreopoem?

Sestina had to be this choreopoem’s vessel. I do not ask the muses questions when they give me gifts, and when they gave me the six characters for the show, I knew the sestina was the best way to format the show. I love forms, but I only developed a real respect for them last semester when I taught Forms of Poetry. There aren’t a lot of forms developed by writers of color, or at least we like to think so, and I appreciated how the sestina challenged me to tell a story cyclically. I can say Black bodies are disposable in a different form or a free verse piece, but the sestina requires you hear it over and over again in new ways, forcing you to really pay attention.

If you could ask a reader to do a little homework before reading your new book, what would your reading list look like?

Ooo! Homework? Yes. Not all of these are books, but choreopoems aren’t really books either, are they?

For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange (choreopoem)

Made to Dance in Burning Buildings by Ayva Pearson (choreopoem)

Let Me Down Easy by Anna Deavere Smith (one-woman show)

Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni (poetry collection)

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (poetry collection)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (memoir)

Dream with a Glass Chamber by Aricka Foreman (poetry chapbook)

Ferrous Wheel by Natalie Sharp (poetry chapbook)

The Dozen by Casey Rocheteau (poetry collection)

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (speech/nonfiction essay)

Lemonade by Beyonce (visual album)

Warshan Shire (poet featured in Lemonade)

Ebony Stewart (performance poet)

Citizen by Claudia Rankine (poetry collection/essay collection)

“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton (poem, but also read everything by Lucille Clifton)

I read/watched/experienced all these texts and people leading up to completing my choreopoem. There are way more, but these are the ones that pop up the heaviest for me.

Color is important in this text. There are 6 voices or “parts of a black woman” that come alive on the page / stage & each is associated with a color– a literal scarf that an actor wears. Is this a nod to Ntozake Shange?

This is partially a nod to Shange. I’ve become obsessed with ancestry and legacy. I don’t mean family trees; I mean artist ancestors, people who pass down their gifts to us so we may use them in a new life. Shange’s For colored girls… uses color directly: her characters are named lady in blue, lady in orange, lady in purple, etc. My characters use color to nod to her, but also because the spell at the end of the show doesn’t work without the right colors.

In 2017, right before I officially finished the show and started submitting it to playhouses and festivals, I met a witch named Ellen Ercolini at Practical Magic Live, a live event I host with Makenna Held and Andréa Renée Johnson (now called Your Leadership Recipe, come see us in France in April!). Ellen told me about frequencies, and when she read mine she looked me deep in the eyes and said, “So much water. You need time, space, and money to write, or you will never be happy.” That was terrifying since I was working five jobs and was definitely not writing. She also told me blue (royal blue, specifically) was my power color and if I wanted to channel energy into something, I needed to use that color. Twenty-four hours later, my best friend Kristyn gave birth to her son, Royal.

I believe in witches. I believe in muses and spirits and angels and energies and frequencies and miracles and God. I do not believe in coincidences (Rule 39, if you watch NCIS). But I do believe that when a witch tells you something, you have to believe it.

I wrote a spell as the penultimate poem of the show, “Battle Stations.” The colors came from that spell. Before, the characters/emotions were just named. I knew if I wanted something powerful to happen, if I wanted Angela to cease being fractured and return to herself, the spell had to have not only my power color, but the power colors of the women who saved my life in college: purple, silver, yellow, red, green, and of course, blue. Angela wears a black scarf at the end because when you mix all the power colors together, you get black. Get it? Like the Black woman fractured at the beginning of the show?

Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about this exciting new title? [PANK] loves you!

How to Exterminate the Black Woman is not just about the struggle to remain whole in a world that blatantly wants to erase you. It’s not just about the collective memory of Black women navigating relationships with themselves and others. It’s about legacy, about how no matter how often white supremacy, misogynoir, fire, nooses, and bullets try to exterminate us, they have failed. They have failed. They will fail. Every other choreopoem I’ve written was based on interviews and research. This is the first show based entirely around surviving where you will never belong.

If you want to perform the show, get at [PANK]! They would love to send you copies and a rights agreement!

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MONICA PRINCE, a Black performance poet raised by Guyanese parents, teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in central Pennsylvania, where she writes choreopoems and performance poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Instructions for Temporary Survival (2019), won the Discovery Award for an outstanding first collection by the publisher, Red Mountain Press. She is the managing editor of the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly and the author of the chapbook Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). Her creative work is featured in MadCap Review, The Texas Review, TRACK//FOUR, and elsewhere.

An Interview with Troy James Weaver

Posted on January 28, 2020 by admin

(Apocalypse Party, 2020)

INTERVIEW BY KELBY LOSACK

—

Troy James Weaver is the author of Witchita Stories, Visions, Temporal, and Marigold. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and dogs. I’ve been hooked on the kid’s writing since seeing his first reading ever in Norman, Oklahoma, where his words and his voice had a smoky bar full of tweakers using their handlebar mustaches to wipe tears from their faces. Weaver’s writing is refreshingly human, finding the beautiful within the ugly and vice versa. His characters are reflections. Though he writes with the experience and insight of a 700-year-old Buddhist monk, I refer to him as “the kid” because—in spite of the loss and heartache spilling from his pen—Weaver writes with a level of empathy only an unjaded child could muster. And that blend of honesty with compassion is hard to find in an increasingly nihilistic, cynical landscape. I reached out one night to discuss with the kid his most recent book, Selected Stories, and after our conversation, I ascended to the highest plane of enlightenment.

Blood doesn’t come out of a puncture much more than a dot. You could run a sharpened dowel through somebody and yank it out and you’d barely see a drop or two. I don’t even know why they bother with the cotton swab after a shot. Just roll your sleeve down and move on. That’s how my brother does it. Sometimes there might be a smear of bleed-through, but it’s rare that you’ll see it. Dark-colored shirts, an expert. He doesn’t bother rolling them down for me, though. He knows I know what he does.
~Troy James Weaver, Selected Stories, 2020 [30]

KELBY LOSACK: The common thread through this collection seems to be this clinging to memories of a lost life, a lamenting of literal death, or what could have been, or of a lifestyle being reshaped around sudden changes. How often was death on your mind while penning these stories?

TROY JAMES WEAVER: All the time. I lost my dad and my father-in-law a year apart from each other. Most of these stories were written during that time, with a couple of exceptions. In choosing the stories, too, I wanted the tone to be consistent.

Experiencing death changes you.

I think my characters are working through the same state of confusion I was working through at the time, though I didn’t realize it then.

KL: There is a strange relationship that’s hard to navigate after a close one passes, right? The way you wrote about characters mourning in “Construction” and in “Instructions for Mourning,” for example—like, sometimes you find yourself mourning in very bizarre ways. Or you try to find ways to communicate with the spirit or memory of that person, in a totem such as an unearthed alien plush toy or one of those lifelike sex dolls. In a way, those are no different than an RIP tattoo, right? What are your thoughts on how we commemorate and communicate with our loved ones post-mortem?

TJW: Yes, it’s very strange. I don’t know that grief goes away and that’s why it’s confusing. Objects become sacred to you because the person who owned the object was sacred to you. I think I communicate through art. Sometimes it feels like an exorcism. In a way, it immortalizes not only them, but us, writer and subject, together.

I have a hard time articulating what I mean, because these immense losses still affect me every day. I’m still trying to figure it all out.

KL: I feel you on that, big time, and I think art is a great way to articulate what can’t easily be expressed. The tone of nearly every part of Selected Stories carries that sense of trying to maintain remnants of the past in a rapidly shifting present.

I remember you mentioning somewhere that this would be your last book for a while. Is this still the case and what made you decide that?

TJW: I’m just tired of publishing shit. I’m going to be writing, for sure. I’m just not going to send it anywhere. Just tired of giving a fuck. I don’t like all the shit you have to do. Like all the posting and the trying to sell yourself shit you have to do.

KL: Yeah, fuck being a brand, fuck selling shit. It’s almost like people turn their noses up, too, when you talk about just caring about the art and they’re like, “yeah, but I gotta put food on the table and blah blah blah,” like okay cool, get a job maybe?

I just dig art that comes from a genuine place that isn’t trying to pander to anything. Art that communicates something beyond “I really wanted a book deal so here’s this algorithmic bullshit.”

I’m of the mind artists should probably never live off of their art. There’s something lost in the voice of someone who’s not putting in some kind of daily grind separate from their art. And maybe that separation of monetary pursuit and creative expression is the key to making honest art? Just feels like a lot of shit is materialistic, lacking soul. How do you think having a regular job affects your voice as a writer?

TJW: Exactly. I just want to feel the pureness of it again. And I do. I think I got lost in the idea that anybody gave a shit. And that’s fine. But I realized I don’t care if anybody else gives a shit. I give a shit. Having a regular job makes the stories happen. Living a regular life makes the stories happen. I’ve never understood these Ivy League, Big Five writers, trying to write about shit they clearly don’t understand. And also, I find their books to be suspect in almost every way and just straight up fucking dull half the time. There are a few exceptions, but most of it is dishonest bullshit. If I see Rhodes Scholar on the jacket copy, I’m passing. That’s all I’m saying.

KL: I fuck with everything you said 100%. What is the remedy to the situation, do you think? Self-publishing, zines, keeping it all to yourself? Something else?

TJW: I don’t know. I mean, I’ll publish again, just not soon. And as for the Ivy-leaguers, they’ll always be there. I think small presses and indie lit and whatnot are fighting the good fight, I just think we should be slinging more molotovs at the establishment. Make them notice. Get in some shit. Sling mud. Talk shit. Burn it down. Don’t be nice just because you think it will help your “career.” You won’t have a career, or it’ll be a mediocre one, if you don’t say what the fuck is on your mind and mean it.

KL: You’re speaking my language, man. I love the attitude. You’ve had a good streak of small press relationships, speaking of… Disorder, Broken River, King Shot, Future Tense… what made you link up with Apocalypse Party for this collection, and whose awesome decision was it to start a love story on page 69?

TJW: Apocalypse Party is just a cool new press. I think [Benjamin DeVos] is a great writer and I love working with people who are truly enthusiastic about what you do. He’s like that. So that’s how that worked out. I half-jokingly tweeted about putting out a collection and he and a handful of other presses hit me up and I already liked Ben and knew what he was about, so I immediately sent him what I had.

As for that story on that page, that must’ve been the genius that is Ben. Or pure coincidence. I’m not telling.

KL: Hell yeah, Ben is good people. Dude’s got good taste in music, too. What have you been listening to lately? I remember thinking of your last novel, Temporal, as like a shoegaze album in literary form. Selected Stories feels like the blues. Like raw, deep south, hole-in-your-gut blues.

TJW: Sparklehorse’s first three records, mostly the first one. That song “Spirit Ditch” is my jam. (Sandy) Alex G. Lewis’ L’Amour. Polvo. Slint. JPEGMAFIA. Nick Cave. Rapeman. Elliott Smith. 100 Gecs. Robert Johnson. Blind Willie McTell. Skip James. Boredoms. Hasil Adkins.

KL: So I wasn’t too far off, got some Blind Willie in there. JPEGMAFIA is my favorite artist of the moment. And I’ve been going back and listening to Two Nuns and a Pack Mule since you turned me on to Rapeman a while back. I think noise music is the perfect soundtrack to our current era.

TJW: For sure. The insanity is a mirror.

—

KELBY LOSACK is the author of The Way We Came In and Heathenish, both published by Broken River Books. He lives with his wife in Gulf Coast Texas, where he builds custom furniture and hangs out with rappers.

Boat Burned: An Interview with Kelly Grace Thomas

Posted on January 9, 2020 by admin

Yes Yes Books, 2020

Kelly Grace Thomas’s poem “There is no metaphor for my mouth” appeared in the Fall/Winter 2016 issue of [PANK] Magazine. Her debut collection, Boat Burned, was released by YesYes Books on January 7, 2020. Julia Klochinsky, author of two forthcoming collections, Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020) and 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2021), interviews her press mate Kelly Grace Thomas, to discuss the silence around women’s bodies, her relationships to Boat, and the use of metaphor in her poetry.

—

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Boat Burned is a remarkable collection of relation, exploring what it means to be a daughter, sister, wife, and women within one’s own boat-body. I wonder if we can begin by talking about some of the relationships that guide this book. Could you help navigate us through the uncharted waters of these relationships, from familial trauma to romantic love to self-acceptance?

Kelly Grace Thomas: Relationships are a mirror: they reflect your brightest shine and your deepest shame. This book started through an urgency to understand and eventually heal the relationship I have with myself.

I have always had a complicated relationship with my body. From eating disorders to body dysmorphia, I felt the pressure to look and perform certain ways as a woman. However, when I really examined these expectations, and where they came from I realized they more than billboards and body types. They came from my parent’s divorce, my great grandmother’s criticism, and the abusive relationship I found myself in, at the young age of 18. The ways I have been taught to woman literally made me sick.

Throughout writing this book I started asking why I needed to uncover the root cause. I started examining all the relationships in my life, but most importantly my relationship with my body.

At first, talking directly to these parts of myself was too painful, I didn’t know how. There was so much sadness and anger, so I reached my metaphor to help me navigate these waters. To look at the body as something separate from me, to try and heal and repair. When you heal yourself, you heal others, especially your relationship with them. I don’t think I could even truly love before writing these poems. Boat Burned helped give me the strength to identify false beliefs, burn them down and build something new.

JKD: So your own relationship to poetry is therapeutic and cathartic, yes? Is this what most often brings you to the page, the desire to heal, or are there other motivations for this book or your newer work?

KGT: I come to the page to break the silence. Of course, there is always the hope that healing will occur but more than anything I think I need to talk about what’s hurting. Poetry offers companionship and comfort that most other things do not, it takes you into a room of your own and holds your hand until what needs to pass passes. Or processes.

Most of my life, every experience I’ve had has an aftertaste of loneliness, even during the happiest times, surrounded by so many friends and family, there is still this feeling of isolation. The only way to fight it is through connection: to others, to myself, to nature. Poetry gifts me that, it builds a bridge.

Women’s bodies are a paradox of pleasure and punishment. Women are lusted after for their curves, breasts, even compassion; but when it comes to anything from menstruation to miscarriage there is this echoing silence, often cloaked shame. This past summer, I was granted a fellowship for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, while there I was sitting with a group of women writers this topic came up. I asked them how they learned about their bodies.

Silence.

Not one of them could point to someone who had tried to teach them how to know their body or more importantly how to love their body.

This past year my husband and I have been dealing with infertility issues. I have never experienced something so painful in my life. To try and process I looked into counseling and support groups, but there isn’t much out there. Yet another issue about a woman’s body that is seldom discussed.

Poetry works against the silence, to grant permission, offers companionship, and talk about all these hard and lonely things: my father leaving, my family’s bankruptcy and foreclosures, another negative pregnancy test. I make a deal with myself: get the grief out, write the poem, put it into the world. Poetry helps me be brave. It is the easiest way for me to approach my darkness and my joy.

JKD: Why poetry? What does poetry hold for you that other genres do not?

KGT: A dear friend of mine and founder of Get Lit-Words Ignite, Diane Luby Lane always quotes Walt Whitman, “how quick the sun-rise would kill me / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.” Everything breaks my heart, from the wildflowers on the freeway to how a glass of Cabernet looks like crushed velvet in the sun. I feel it all so much. Poetry allows me to send the sun-rise or sadness out of me without all the rules and restrictions of other genres.

Poems grant permission to play with the wildness of language. To chisel a complicated emotion into a haunting image, to reach for metaphor and sketch the different shades and shapes of the self. I love the idea that you don’t need to understand a poem, you just need to feel it. I have always been drawn to the inventiveness of language, to build a vessel for a universal ache. Poetry allows me an openness to experiment in a way that other forms don’t, to connect fast and deep.

When I began writing Boat Burned, I had spent 35 years not talking about what needed to be talked about. Then suddenly through a single metaphor: woman as boat, I was able to sit close enough to start the conversation, to not approach the hurt head-on, as one would in nonfiction, or dialogue but find another door to walk through. Poetry has built so many hallways and houses for me.

JKD: Why did you land on boat? (Pun very much intended.) In your book, boat seems to be a metaphor for so many things, the woman’s body, yes, but also unforeseen physical and emotional violence, the family unit rocking on unsteady waters, and so much more. And to that end, if woman metamorphoses into boat, what does that make the water, which seems as central to the world of Boat Burned as the boats traversing its waves?

KGT: My first word was boat, I had completely forgotten about this until my mother reminded me in a conversation about my book. Boats have always been a huge part of my family, the one thing that brought us together, and also a way of saying goodbye.

When I was young my parents separated and my father moved in with his girlfriend. While my mom and dad were no longer together, it was still important that we all spend time as a family. We would spend Tuesday and Thursday night together and all day Sunday with my mother, sister, and I. We spent almost every Sunday on the water. Once we were far enough out, my dad would turn off the engine. It was so peaceful, the wind vibrating in the sail, the water kissing the bow, my feet over the side dipped into the salt water, it felt like nothing could touch us. On the boat, we were together again, away from complications of failed relationships, weekly schedules.

A few years later my dad’s business went bankrupt. He lost everything. The bank foreclosed his house and he decided to relocate and rebuild his life in his home state of Florida, while we stayed in New Jersey. The boat was all he had left, so to say goodbye we spent a month sailing from New Jersey to Florida. Many of the poems in Boat Burned center around this experience. In this way, our boat felt like the salve and the wound. While for that month of adventure we were together again, there was a countdown looming to when I had to say goodbye to my father.

For me, boats represent a women’s body, but also the setting where my family came together and broke apart. They represent the heaviness of marriage and the anchor of family, both steady and sinking. There were days we had to outrun storms, a night where we almost sunk in the middle of the dark Atlantic, times where I saw the possibility of us. At the same time, there was always a feeling we were looking at the end, the sun would set, the wind would die, and I knew. I have a line in a poem that says, “a sailboat is the slowest goodbye.” For me, boats are both distance and longing.

Boats are also extremely gendered. For centuries women were not allowed on boats, yet boats were considered shes. You can find a number of disgusting quotes comparing women to ships and how both need a man to control them.

But it is not about control. Water will always be stronger than boat. Stronger than gender. It is the hands that hold us, the mother than covers us, the power and grace, that allows us. In the book water acts as a reminder, to look at energy over object. Women have been taught to deny their power for so long. The role of water is both a comfort and a reminder of the force of feminity when women allow themselves access to their own strength. This also serves as a reminder to myself. The manuscript ends, “they cannot sink us, if we name ourselves sea.”

JKD: Who are the women, writers and not, who influence you most? Maybe you could tell us a bit the way their work, their influence, seeps into yours.

My mother, without contest, has been the biggest influence in my life. She has always taught me so much about grace, about how to stay steadfast and grateful even in the roughest seas. My mother has passed down her legacy of kindness and patience. She taught me the importance of laughter and making the best out of anything. While she is the happiest woman I’ve ever met, growing up I could still feel her sadness. Her mother’s sadness. Her mother’s sadness. All this hurt women carry, but seldom talk about. The loneliness of that silence was a huge influence on this book.

In terms of women writers who influence me, Patricia Smith and her book, Blood Dazzler has got to be my number one influence. That book broke language wide open for me. Showed me how to straightjacket a stanza through the teeth of precise verbs and the corset of form.

I’m a self-taught poet. Everything I know I learned from reading and reading so many amazing poets. Reading Blood Dazzler felt like getting an MFA. Patricia’s work taught me that it is how you open the door of a poem, that really gives it its own legs. You must find a new way to introduce the same love and wounds we all share, once you mine the language that makes someone say, I’ve never heard that before. Patricia’s work taught me about relentless revision. I was determined to do everything I could to have a poem that fenced electricity the same way she did.

There are also a number of contemporary female and non-binary poets who I go to for inspiration. Shira Erlichman, Rachel McKibbens, Marty McConnel, Tiana Clark, Paige Lewis, and so many more make me astound me with their lyric and innovation. Their work makes the alphabet new. The ability to create surprise in their work keeps me coming back. There are so many talented women and non-binary writers out that the change the way I look at poetry, and what it can do, daily. They are my permission granters, their works whispers, “Of course you can.”

JKD: What I admire so much about your writing is your way with metaphor, the way it begins as a governing principle of your poetry and then grows beyond comparison into a way of knowing, or not knowing perhaps. In your poem, “THERE IS NO METAPHOR FOR MY MOUTH” you take us through comparison by way of negation, showing us what the mouth is by cataloging what it isn’t, ultimately arriving at knowing, “And yes, I know something / of the night, / half-eaten and thick.” Could you tell us a bit about how this poem came to be? How do you use this very particular kind of negative metaphor to arrive at knowledge?

KGT: Confession: I am metaphor obsessed if you couldn’t already tell. I’m drawn to their electricity and world-building power. You put two things together in a new association and all of sudden you have a new gravity, a new emotional history or life story. For metaphor is a way to personalize the work without being too heavy with first-person perspective.

“There is No Metaphor for My Mouth” was published in 2016 in [PANK]. I was reading “Insert Boy” by Danez Smith and read Smith’s poem “I’ll Spare You Another Poem about my Mouth.” I realized I had so few poems about my mouth.

I use metaphor as a way to uncomplicate my relationship to my body. To other in an effort to understand, to address. Many of the metaphors in my work were created to grapple with guilt and shame. However, when thinking about the parts of my body, I didn’t feel the same about my mouth. The mouth felt like power. It is how I express my sexuality, how I use my voice. It felt strong. I thought about how in the past my voice had been threatened, but I’ve never felt embarrassed about speaking my mind.

This poem is written with my first boyfriend in mind. I dated him for too many years, without knowing what a healthy relationship looked like, eventually, I learned that I was definitely not in one. I think this piece was born out of a place to take back the strength and power. To show this part of my body will always remain strong. The poem is written as a negation to address all the ways he might argue for my weakness, to show ultimately there is power in saying no repeatedly, in naming yourself instead of what someone else calls you.

JKD: Now that Boat Burned is out in the world, what is next for you? Are you at work on a next manuscript or projects in other genres? What can we expect next from Kelly Grace Thomas, because I know I am already anxious for more!

KGT: That is so sweet. Thanks, Julia. For me, the next thing is always beyond terrifying and exciting for me. It’s that moment where anything and everything is possible, but I always wonder if I’ll ever write anything “good” again. Whatever “good” means. I wonder if all artists are as neurotic as I am. Haha. I blame growing up in Jersey, but I also know that it is neurosis that drives me.

Outside of poetry, I am working on two projects. The first is a screenplay with my sister, Kat Thomas. We like to write romantic comedies with an emphasis on comedy. There is such reward in making people laugh. And it counterbalances my poems, which are usually soaked in sadness. I will be spending much of my winter vacation working with her to break story and develop characters. My sister and I have written together before, we wrote a romantic comedy about a pyramid scheme titled Magic Little Pills that won Best Feature in the Portland Comedy Film Festival.

I am also currently working on a dystopian YA thriller called Only 10,001. My husband, Omid, has it has been reading it and giving me amazing feedback on conflict and characterization. I’m about halfway through but have taken a long three hour hiatus because of moving, getting married, working on my poetry collection. I’m hoping to finish my first draft of my novel in the new year.

As for poetry, I am currently working on my second collection. I have about 50 first, second and third drafts. However, it is a collection that is deeply personal, even more so than Boat Burned, and that makes it a little more difficult to see its future.

Over the past 12 months, my husband and I have been trying to build a family. However, after a year of no success and more invasive tests than I would wish on anyone, the doctors have identified some fertility issues.

Each month is a disappointment, it cracks me open, reminds me how fragile I feel, and how badly I want to be a mother. It’s tearing me up; writing helps.

The stigma in society around fertility makes it even worse. From the blame culture, to the silence, to the lack of knowledge about women’s bodies. We know so little and it infuriates me. While I’m nervous to publish poems around fertility struggles in fear of writing a self-fulfilling prophecy, I also think that I owe myself to break the silence and stand with women who are going through the same silent and heavy heartbreak.

One a lighter note. I am also working on a chapbook of love poems about my husband Omid. Patricia Smith has a wonderful list of overused words in love poems. I’m writing and trying to avoid these words when I can. It’s a great challenge.

I have also been planning lots of readings in California and across the country to celebrate the launch of Boat Burned. I hope people will visit my website to see where I’m reading next. Excited to meet new friends and chat about poetry.

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KELLY GRACE THOMAS is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, will release with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Nashville Review, Muzzle, DIAGRAM, and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Director of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. Kelly is a three-time poetry slam championship coach and the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot), currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly has received fellowships from Tin House Winter Workshop, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers. Kelly and her sister, Kat Thomas, won Best Feature Length Screenplay at the Portland Comedy Film Festival for their romantic comedy, Magic Little Pills. Kelly lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Omid, and is currently working on her debut novel, a YA thriller, titled Only 10.001. www.kellygracethomas.com

JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon is currently back east, working towards a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry about the Holocaust, with a special focus on atrocity in former Soviet territories. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, now available from Kent State University Press or other book retailers. Purchase her chapbook, The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014), before it goes out of print in 2020. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in March 2020. Look out for her newest collection, 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. You can find her recent poems in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband. She edits Construction and occasionally writes Other women don’t tell you, a blog about motherhood.

An Interview with Nora Collen Fulton

Posted on January 2, 2020 by admin

(Hiding Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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Writer Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal where she is a graduate student studying English literature. Recently, I received a copy of her new book, Presence Detection System (Hiding Press, 2019). Hiding Press publishes “new works of experimental literature as well as neglected older work in the same vein.” Publisher Andy Martrichn describes the work Fulton does in Presence Detection System as “refracting a dynamism of language wrapped up in a sort of codified imagery. Where are lines drawn? I think that Fulton leaves that up to us to decide, and for that reason there’s a good amount of space to move around, engage, and change one’s mind from within the text.” My interest was piqued. The following interview was conducted via e-mail; only minor edits were made by me.

As cat behaviourist Jackson Galaxy

points out, the ally figure reoccurs elsewhere, in two passages

from Mom’s work which both, interestingly, concern music.

We are further indebted to Galaxy for tracing this theme

to yet another PDS, this time by Keith the Chocolate Shaman—

A Rug Suspended 1,000^th / 1mm Of The Ground—which, as he notes,

explores “the monocameral walled wall’s petition-like dream”

(Toward the PDSs of My Mother, 98). From this point of view,

the golden dude bargaining with his own complicity and privilege

in the presence detection system’s lines symbolizes the camp itself.

~Nora Collen Fulton, Presence Detection System, 2019 [59]

CLARA B. JONES: Imagine that you have invited three persons to dinner and the four of you are discussing PDS. Who would your guests be, and what would you serve for dinner? Why these three individuals, and how does the food relate to your book?

NORA COLLEN FULTON: I love this question! I think anyone who has some familiarity with the way I present myself to the world knows that I love making food, especially for other people. I’m kind of good at it too. I’m going to be a bit liberal with your question and say that the three people I would invite are Laura Riding, Alain Badiou and Bertolt Brecht. The reason being that Riding is my favourite poet, Badiou is my favourite philosopher, and Brecht is my favourite short German revolutionary playwright. I think that Riding and Badiou would probably have really steamy chemistry with each other, but they would get constantly cockblocked by Brecht all night, because Badiou would hate him and Riding would secretly like him… But he would openly dislike her. I also think even though I love these three so much they probably are/would be pretty shitty about trans people. However, I would use my feminine wiles, self-deprecating charm and homey cooking skills to woo them over to the ways of trans-allydom. I would make the thing I always like to make for people when they come over, which is some kind of whole fish, Greek sea-bass probably, maybe pan-fried in oil with a cilantro sauce and tomatillo filling. The topic of my book probably wouldn’t come up.

CBJ: When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer? Who have been your greatest influences?

NCF: The first time I thought I might really want to keep writing poetry was in a class about contemporary Chinese poetry taught by a visiting professor and avant-garde poet from Beijing named Xi Chuan that I took when I was around 22. I remember one day he said: “Many people can be a poet for five years. Many people can be a poet for ten years. Many people can be a poet for twenty years. Many people can be a poet for forty years. Many people can be a poet for sixty years. But do you really want to be a poet for eighty years? Many people can be a poet for eighty years.” I thought that was fucking hilarious. I don’t really know what I think about my influences anymore. Of course, there are writers and thinkers who have impacted me greatly through the years, but today it’s actually friendships with poets and people engaged in the kind of thought that I’m trying to engage with that is more influential. Which reminds me of another thing from Xi Chuan’s class, since I brought it up, where he was describing this poem (I can’t remember by whom, perhaps this is anachronistic, it was a long time ago now) in which the poet is traveling through the snow at night with a lantern, on a journey to see another poet and friend who lives in a distant place. And the idea is implicit in the poem, like, “I will only be able to make this trip a few more times in my life.” The finitude of that. Those kinds of connections are the best part about poetry and thinking and are essential to it, I think.

CBJ: How does your gender identity influence your practice? Has the style or content of your compositions changed since you transitioned?

NCF: I’m not sure whether there has been a stylistic change in general, and it is not like transition has a clear end date or finish line, so I guess we’ll have to see. But PDS did change after I began transitioning. The book’s composition began before I came out, and it spanned an extremely difficult period of my life where I felt like I couldn’t transition, and I guess I was writing through that, through my having given up on myself. I had an extremely hard time finding a publisher for it – it was rejected by every remotely “experimental” press in Canada – so when I finally did find a press who saw some worth in it elsewhere, I was already well into transition and I returned to the book and did modify some things. I added some new work and cut some old work, and I restructured both the first and last poems in major ways, in terms of both form and content. And even more changed during the editing of the book for publication. But I didn’t want to change it too much: as corny as this sounds, I wanted to honor the person who started this book, even if that meant leaving in things that even now can immediately bring me back to the pain and hatred and hopelessness I felt in the past. This process felt like being the editor for someone else’s posthumous collection, which I’m sure is something that other writers whose transition interrupts a major writing project can relate to.

CBJ: I read PDS more than once, finding the hybridity between-sections effective and powerful as, perhaps, an underlying statement about the fractured nature of psyche and perception, in particular, and of society and reality, in general. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the collection is open-ended, in form and in content; in other words, there seems to be no conceptual framework or marker [e.g., repetition of one or more than one element] unifying the text. Now that I reflect, however, perhaps, the technical meaning of “presence detection system,” as a coded sign of sensation or perception, is a metadevice running throughout the book. In any event, keeping in mind Marjorie Perloff’s idea that an author’s “choices” or selectivity can, themselves, unify a volume, how intentional were the formal features [e.g., “splicing” of sections] of PDS—more specifically, what is the text about, and what motivated you to write it?

NCF: I think that if there is an idea that I’m committed to as a poet it is the idea of the multiple, or the way that Badiou has described being as a “pure inconsistent multiple.” This isn’t the same as multiplicity (diversity) and it’s also not the same as multitude (manyness), because there is no “one” and are no “ones” in being. Yet, paradoxically, for Badiou being is also “univocal” – it somehow always ends up speaking and appearing as one. The contradictoriness inherent in this view of being says something about poetry, I think. I try not to read a poem more than once. I try to not write the same poem twice, to never use the same form twice, to avoid making the same book twice. But in that, there is something speaking, I hope. I don’t see what I do in terms of composition as selection or curation, so much as decision. A decision isn’t a choice. Decisions are in a way made for you, and only then do you decide upon them. You don’t decide upon what to bring together like a curator, i.e., one who cures, who picks out the pieces of meat that are going to be good for curing and makes jerky, a kind of deferred sustenance – you decide on which gaps in the multiple are the most essential to keeping the multiple multiple, and you build around those.

CBJ: Kenneth Goldsmith has said, “Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus.” Do you identify with these propositions in any way? Do you consider PDS to be an example of “conceptual” poetry or writing? Do you intend PDS to be read? As an aside, I hope you intend for at least parts of the text to be read—I think “Coat” is excellent, “Prose” is fascinating, though I am not clear about whether the sections are appropriated material—if one needs to know that at all. In any event, what are your thoughts?

NCF: I appreciate you asking this question, because it’s a question that surrounded me as I was beginning to think about poetics, and it’s currently a question that most people consider to be passé or obsolete or closed. I have never identified with Conceptual Writing, and I despise it and its figureheads. My first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published in 2013 when this was a more timely conversation, and it includes a long poem that I described as a “conceptual memoir,” which looks like (and pretends to be) that kind of doctrinaire conceptual text but is in fact almost all “original” writing, made to be an imitation of appropriation. (Actually, one of the only sections of that poem that isn’t of my making is a transcription of a recording in which Marjorie Perloff awkwardly and unsuccessfully tries to get some kind of PowerPoint presentation to work for about five minutes.) One thing that this conceit allowed me to do, besides make fun of these kind of people, was talk about my first attempt to transition and be open about being trans in a way that was in fact the exact opposite of an “effacement of the self.” The joke was that if I came out within a poem that people thought they shouldn’t read, then I wouldn’t have to actually come out. No one got it, but it is still extremely funny to me! Which is another way of saying, yes, you should read things. In my view, Conceptual Writing constellated an array of techniques and methods – many of which I do still use and am interested in – but it also attributed fixed meanings to them, this “ethos” in the quote above which in the end is nihilistic and fascistic and born of privilege, which I disagree with on every point.

At the same time, I feel that in the wake of the well-deserved death of Conceptual Writing there has been a reaction that has uncritically swung poetics back into the realm of naturalism and lyricism. Rather than looking ahead, poets are now looking and identifying backwards, as if searching for a way forward through older aesthetic formations and oppositions. This is not a bad thing, but it has its risks. Now you have to confront the increasingly popular idea that poetry can only be political when it says that it is political, when the new “communist” poetry collection from the new “communist” press has poems in it with lines like “Gee I sure do enjoy partaking in the global proletarian uprising, comrade,” and the poet has a hammer and sickle in their Twitter bio. And when you’re a poet whose identity is in any way “marginalized” you also have to confront the increasingly popular idea that avant-garde and experimental practice can never be as expressive of or as true to your identity and experience as writing that is affectively direct, affectively recognizable, semantically communicative, semantically didactic. I was recently invited to an event for lesbian writers (where I would have been the only trans woman present), and the organizer asked me if my poetry dealt with lesbian or trans identity, because she “couldn’t tell by the look of it.” I have a poem in this book that is just a bunch of puns on Ja Rule’s name and various rule-based systems. Guess what: either that too is a lesbian poem and a trans poem (and a communist poem) because I’m trans and I’m a lesbian (and I’m a communist), or it’s just a poem because poems aren’t trans and poems aren’t lesbians (and poems aren’t communists). This is truly an open question, though, and it is one that I think should be left open because it is generative only when it is open.

CBJ: Writing on your Concordia University profile page, you state, “My research is concerned with the ways contemporary philosophical understandings of ontology and temporality as fundamentally contingent can inform the contested positionality of transgender life, subjectivity, and being. I am interested in how this contestation (and conversation with philosophy) expresses itself through literature and other media.” Can you expand on this statement for non-specialists—giving examples from the real world?

NCF: Some of what I’m thinking about in that statement and my research is probably already apparent in this interview. But I guess I just happen to think that trans people exist, that it is possible to be trans – you know, mostly because trans people exist and being trans is a real possibility, which for me means that insofar as sex and gender and identity exist, and this existence is not anywhere nil, it is possible for sex and gender and identity to change, not just in terms of becoming, but in terms of actual being, to change in a radical way (rupture, not emergence). Among other things, I’m trying to articulate that view of transness in a different philosophical register than it is usually articulated within.

CBJ: In part, due to my interest in Surrealism, I am wont to employ psychoanalytic paradigms in an attempt to mine unconscious motivation of the artist manifested in creative works, including, literature. Based upon my online research about you and your writing, it is my impression that you consider Psychoanalysis to be opposed to your project. If I am correct about this, please discuss your opposition to Freudian and, I would assume, Lacanian and, possibly, Kleinian, formulations. Surely, you understand that some will consider your work, your gender identity, as well as, your typological use of “mother” to be mediators of or, perhaps, to be erasures of, Oedipal constructs? Also, transgender identity might be interpreted as “identification,” in the Freudian sense—interpreted, further, as “twinning” [Lacan] or “doubling” [with both father and mother, male and female, subject and object].

NCF: I like to strew those things around as bait for the psychoanalysts. When I catch one I keep them in a jar in my basement. I’m running out of room in my basement!

CBJ: It is my impression that many young, and not so young, radical poets are averse to the academy and to theory; however, that posture does not seem to describe you. Is this something you’d care to comment on?

NCF: I think that there are two importantly different tendencies of this ‘aversion,’ and as a result we can talk about two different groups arising from them. I think that the first group comprises people who truly do reject any kind of value or potential in the academy and in theory. For them the university and anything resembling a tradition or canon of knowledge can only be the enemy. This first and more militant group either wants to destroy the institutions in which this kind of knowledge production takes place, or they simply want to exist fully outside of them; they have various reasons for this that you can contest, but they have reasons. The second group, however, comprises people who often come from the academy at some point or have some kind of orbital relationship to it; an open relationship. These people turn away from academia and theory due to an apparent disagreement about “tactics,” but they still share the same “strategy,” to evoke that old distinction. These people choose a different tactic – which today might take the form of autotheory, for example, or popular criticism, and is found everywhere in culture writing – that pretends to disdain the elitism of academic specialization and high theory, pretends to orient itself to an imaginary “mass audience,” but really the strategy is the same, in that it just lets one middle-to-upper-class subject orate to other middle-to-upper-class subjects, forming a kind of therapeutic relationship that enables those subjects to find catharsis for their horizontally-mobile guilt and bad faith.

This group of pragmatists dilutes the exact same kinds of knowledge produced in the institutions of scholarship and theory, and they use the exact same tools, hidden behind the curtain of style, but they do so in a piecemeal fashion that is loyal to nothing, as if one can treat the history of thought as a kind of Build-a-Bear workshop that will allow one to make intellectual history and truth about the world as it is conform to one’s ideological goals. (This also takes place within the academy, and always has, of course.) I disagree with both groups. But I respect the writers and thinkers who can be placed in that first group a lot more than the “public intellectuals” of the second. At least the militants have made a real decision about where and how thought should proceed toward an emancipatory and revolutionary project. I’ve just made a different decision. Making a decision, one which can’t be retracted is difficult no matter where and who you are. And I think that as the university and institutions like it wither away (and they are clearly withering away) the position of people like me who think something can still be done with this where and how will converge more with that first group than the second.

CBJ: What are you reading now, and what authors would you recommend to your audience?

NCF: In terms of theory I’ve just started reading Calvin L. Warren’s book Ontological Terror, and in terms of poetry I’ve just finished reading Catherine Christer Hennix’s new Selected Works. In terms of authors to recommend, I will just list some poets (some of whom I know, some of whom I don’t) whose presence has inspired me in the last year: Anne-Marie Albiach, Bianca Messinger, Simone White, Mark Francis Johnson, Ted Rees, Stephanie Creaghan, Will Alexander, Diana Sue Hamilton, and Nicole Raziya Fong.

CBJ: Can you share anything about your future projects. What are your post-doctoral plans?

NCF: I have another book of poetry coming out in 2020 called Thee Display, which is about astrology, communism, my dead dog, transition, the sea, and some other things. It’s going to be published through the Documents series with Anteism Press, a Montreal publisher. As for post-doctoral plans, I have no idea. It’s a long ways off. I hope I can find a way to keep doing what I’ve been doing so far: reading, thinking, living, working, the usual.

CBJ: Is there anything else you’d like your audience to know about your identity and role as an experimental writer, about your practice, or about other matters?

NCF: You first.

CBJ: I’ll take you up on that by saying I intend to appropriate your notion of “imitating appropriation”—the phrase has so much “interpretive power,” as Helen Vendler would say. Thank you for your many cogent insights and opinions expressed in this interview, Nora.

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NORA COLLEN FULTON is a poet living in Montreal. Her first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published by Bookthug. Presence Detection System is her second collection of poems, and her third, Thee Display, is forthcoming next year through the Documents Series, co-produced by the Center for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books. She currently occupies herself with doctoral studies; her research attempts to apply debates in philosophy regarding the relationship between ontology and mathematics to the ontological stakes of trans studies.

CLARA B. JONES is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other writings, she is author of the poetry collection, /feminine nature/ [GaussPDF, 2017]. Clara also conducts research on experimental literature, as well as art & technology.

HUMAN TETRIS: A conversation with Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz

Posted on December 19, 2019 by admin

11:11 Press, 2019

INTERVIEW BY MIKE CORRAO

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I recently had the chance to sit down with Vi Khi Nao and Ali Raz to talk to them about their new book, Human Tetris (11:11 Press 2019), which repurposes the style of newspaper personals and online dating to explore the shape of desire.

MIKE CORRAO: I’m fascinated by the haptic nature of Human Tetris. It’s a book that you’re compelled to rotate and turn as you read. It’s something that has to exist in the physical world to fully reveal itself. Do you want the reader to recognize these qualities in the text? Do you want them to always know that they have this physical object in their hands?

VI KHI NAO: I think we want our readers to acquire the services of a chiropractor. Neck discomfort may be our thing, though only time can tell what other parts might be activated or stimulated by this text. The physicality and rotational quality are born like the game itself, where desire falls on itself and if it falls too fast and the player is unable to sort it organically, it can get entangled. Desire can be a game. Or the number 4. A book as a video game has more interactive dimensions than a book as a book. We might want the players or readers to tap into the reality of desire, its humor and its playful darkness. The book itself is very tetragonally light.

MC: The craning of the neck that you mention leads me to think of the ways that a book can afflict its readers with certain ailments. The immediate answer is weight, but there are other ways (through rotation or small typesets) that books can place strain on the reader. Is this what you would like Human Tetris to do to some extent? Would you like it to create discomfort in its reader?

ALI RAZ: Not wedded to the idea of exacting bodily violence on prospective readers; metaphysical is another thing. Which is to say that I’m not hoping to create either comfort or discomfort, and I imagine that if the latter occurs the reader, if wise, will stop reading. Nothing, I hope, would compel them to prolong their physical discomfort. There’s something to be said about choosing your own pain/pleasure, but ultimately I’m more drawn to the pleasures of reading, which are not simple, than its pains.

VKN: The discomfort only exists on a corporeal plane for the readers. Everything else shouldn’t be about pain, soreness, or psychic confusion, perturbation, or hardship. If it does produce such results, the readers aren’t on the right video game with us.

MC: The language of Human Tetris is reminiscent of the more digital and abstract spaces that we go when we seek companionship. Reading the text, I’m often reminded of forum posts or online dating – the ambiguous wall of disembodied voices. Imagery varying between the apiary, the cybernetic, the caffeinated. When assembling these iso (in search of) posts, did you picture them as coming from disparate sites across the internet or a singular location? Do they radiate out from the same point? Are there real people behind these voices? Or do you see them as strictly linguistic creatures? Or another way entirely?

VKN: I view the book as a literary video game for writers. It appears interactive, but not really. It appears as if there are two or more players, but it’s just adverbs having lucrative careers with stand-up comedy. It resembles the aftermath of programming more than anything human, sexual, or linguistic. Even desire is texture and has no narrative construct or philosophy of being.

AR: Online forums, dating apps – or a real-world bathroom wall. Disembodied voices get close to it. I can’t imagine many of the texts actually cropping up in a dating scenario, whether on- or off-line. It was, for me, very much a literary undertaking in the sense of moving through language, being animated by language: desire in the abstract rather than anything approaching the real, messy thing. Another way of putting this would be to acknowledge the text as a catalog of un-kinks and anti-love. Not only divorced from flesh-and-blood reality but negating it, violently making fun of it. Which is maybe what much of the internet does anyway, even in its mushier corners.

MC: I like this label of un-kinks. Throughout the book, there is an erotics of destruction /consumption/augmentation. There is a desire to consume or be consumed/destroy or be destroyed by your prospective lovers. “You want pasta; I eat your honeyed clit.” / “ISO women who are bad carbohydrates, carbonated lemonade…” Not sure if I’ve got a question here, but it’s a detail I’m really fascinated by if you’d like to talk more about it.

AR: There’s something to the idea of the various thresholds of consumption that run alongside daily life and speech. Biting someone’s head off, wanting to eat a cute baby: there’s not a whole lot that marks even simple linguistic boundaries between anger and love. I don’t think there’s anything new in this idea but it greys, for me, into the totally seductive manner in which so much of erotics flickers back and forth between sex and straight-up violence. Kinks and un-kinks.

There’s this, and then there’s the plain old idea of food as sex by other means. Plain, but compelling. For anyone who doesn’t know it yet, Vi is an outstanding cook.

MC: This is a collaborative book. Is it the first time that either of you has done this large scale of a collaboration? How did it come about?

AR: Definitely the first time for me. It was instructive; adapting to the presence of another in this single text. The most interesting thing that came about was moments of uncanny synchronicity: times when Vi and I, unknown to each other, would end up writing about the same things, images, the same concepts, and only realize after the fact. So there’s a text, and there are two people doing various things to it and it begins to feel like there are three of us altogether, Vi and me and a process.

VKN: I have done collaborative work with others (writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, etc.) before. They haven’t had a chance to get born or publicized or celebrated yet, so it appears as if this collaborative effort is new or first. I was getting sick of reading boring personals that should not be personals and I asked Ali Raz if she would be interested in creating ‘fake’ ones for a book and she said yes. I mean, how does one go about creating personals that are impractical and nonfunctional? Whose existence is designed to pull a quixotic philosopher from the imagination and not from reality? How does one make love to a concept?

MC: On a similar note, I’m curious about the process itself. How did the two of you go about assembling this project? Was it the two of you working separately within the same premise and then compiling the results? Did you work as a hive mind – writing each page together one by one?

VKN: I wrote the first poem and Ali wrote the second and then we alternated. We executed the exercise over an entire month of December. We each wrote one a day and submit it to each other. We had twenty-four hours to create one. Each day is a ruler, which measures our imagination and displays such an imagination via texts. It is a game for ourselves and not against ourselves. Though I can’t entirely say that time was our opponent or adversary. Perhaps it was our supporter even.

MC: Due to the nature of the formatting, Human Tetris has a pretty fast pace. That, paired with the style of the pieces, made reading the text feel like looking over the interface of a social media site. Like each page was a thread leading to a potential encounter or comment section or reply. How fast do you expect your reader to move? Do you want them to linger on each segment?

VKN: I want the readers to not eat a bucket of ice cream after reading each segment. I want the readers to move slowly as if they have been paused in a video game. I want them to experience erotic glitches as if the book has fallen from a 50-story building and the print screen is cracked, its palimpsest reset. Even if the medium refuses to be confused by another medium.

AR: I like your observation, Mike, about the experience of reading the book being like browsing social media. It moves in the same sort of digestible chunks. That said, as Vi notes, it’s probably not a good idea to consume a lot of these ‘digestible chunks’ in one sitting. I don’t have any stake in wanting a reader to read the book one way rather than another, but I’d be intrigued to know what makes the book feel fast or slow as the case may be.

MC: Vi, you mention a desire for erotic glitches. Often a writer will do their best to place their reader in a passive position, creating a large fantasy around their heads. Human Tetris instead fixates on the mechanical qualities of the video game.

VKN: I want readers to see the mirrors of their desire and laugh at them. Our culture takes sex too seriously. The films I watch – lovers are rarely shown laughing hysterically in bed. Erotic glitches break the mirror of fantasy.

AR: Laughter as emotional overload, aka glitch.

MC: Ali, in some of your short pieces, you’ve taken an unconventional approach to artist bios. One saying, “Ali Raz is a cyborg…” another saying, “believes in synchronicity.” Do you consider these to be extensions of the work that they are attached to? Do you see yourself as diegetic to each new fiction or poem you make?

AR: Holy smokes, no! The idea of being of a piece with a text is, to be frank, kind of horrifying. I’d rather be hoping for the opposite: a total split between the thing in the bio and the thing in the text. Which is why I’m drawn to lean, opaque bios that, when they’re not completely terse, don’t really say anything either. More and more now, I’m drawn to the simple, inoffensive bio, the opposite of a cyborg declaration: something so standard and innocuous it slips through the cracks.

MC: Do you listen to music when you write? Is there a genre or artist whose music provokes or inspires you to create your work?

AR: I’m musically slow: stuck in the same loops of music for months, years. Probably everyone else on the planet has a more sophisticated relationship to music than I do.

VKN: Silence is mine.

MC: Vi, this is your eleventh published book. You’ve released work with a variety of different presses. What’s your process for deciding which publisher is the best fit for a given title?

VKN: Some presses write to request a manuscript from me. Others I seek out through a submission window or opportunity (Fish in Exile). A few from writing contests (The Old Philosopher, A Brief Alphabet of Torture). Sometimes there is no best fit, just being at the right place at the right time with a particular publisher. Sometimes the universe helps me out by preventing a particular manuscript from being born as a way of protecting me from terrible publishers. We want some of our soulmates to wear thongs in the relationship without resorting to olive oil or ancient Greece.

MC: I’m always curious to hear what kind of work authors engage with. Were you reading anything as you wrote Human Tetris? Do you tend to read a lot? Do you read more contemporary titles or older works?

VKN: I don’t read. I try to have a vibrant, impotent, prolific sex life with as many books and films as possible. Organically.

VI KHI NAO is the author of three poetry collections, Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), the short stories collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016), and a novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. Vi holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.

ALI RAZ received an MFA in Fiction from the University of Notre Dame. Her work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Occulum, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

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MIKE CORRAO is the author of three books, Man, Oh Man (Orson’s Publishing), Two Novels (Orson’s Publishing) and Gut Text (11:11 Press), one chapbook, Avian Funeral March (Self-Fuck), and many short films. Along with earning multiple Best of the Net nominations, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Collagist, Always Crashing, and The Portland Review. He lives in Minneapolis. Learn more at www.mikecorrao.com

With a Cheek to the Fire: A Conversation with Alexus Erin on her new chapbook, ST. JOHN’S WORT

Posted on December 5, 2019 by admin

(Animal Heart Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY KATE HOYLE

Poet Alexus Erin talks about her debut collection, about the poet as specter, about ritual, politic, and writing to a “capital G God”

Kate Hoyle: There’s so much that this collection is doing, let’s get right into it. St. John’s Wort feels interested in the space between word and feeling, as introduced in the collection’s first poem “June 9th, 2015”. Have you felt these poems as vehicles to bring language closer to truth/experience?

Alexus Erin: I think not just in the first poem, but in all of my work, I’m interested in how my explication of the feeling, my explanation of the feeling, how close it is to the word as it would be read by my reader. I am very interested in semiotics and etymology. In these layers of meaning. So yes, the distance between the word and the feeling, I try to draw a mirror to that space, knowing that a word will never sum it up, but I‘m gonna get as close as I can. In one of my poems, not in this collection, I note how the word blessing comes originally from “to make bleed”. Which is that poem… ah it’s called “Great Black Hope”.

KH: That title. Would you talk about how these poems speak from within and also sort of push up against the expectations of identity?

AE: I’m really interested in all of my work the sort of narratives that we normally subscribe to, particularly as someone who has identities at marginalized intersections, that poem is very much about what it means for the individual when considering the perception of the audience. I draw from WEB Dubois’s idea of double consciousness, the idea of knowing how you’re perceived, by an Other, by an audience, as a Black person. In “Great Black Hope” I bring this concept to my own experience in the world of academia. I attended a largely white, K through 12 private school and there was a black admissions counselor who would call me and my brother “Great Black Hope”. I must have been only eleven, so my brother was eight. To hear that, to be expected to perform to that, it’s a lot. I think Muhammed Ali was called that, I’ve heard it in reference to Obama, but one person can not be the singular hope for a people. That poem is about aspiration and expectations and how a person is not a narrative, a person has one.

KH: There is a holiness present in the world of these poems – They seem to be in relationship with the divine, both in direct conversation with a “capital G” God and also in the intimate sort of rituals they embody, Could you say something about that?

AE: A lot of my poems are kind of like prayers and petitions–when we think of praying, we might think about praises, and about asking a capital-G God for something, but many of my poems say to God “hey, look at what I’m experiencing” and that sounds almost inflated, but because I am a woman of faith and I feel I have a direct relationship with God, it’s almost like saying, “look Dad, this is what I am experiencing, can you see what I’m seeing and feel what I’m feeling?”And there’s a duality in who I’m calling Dad. In some poems, I’m talking about my biological father, and I talk to a heavenly father in others. I think they reference one another. And because God in these poems is linked to the more sobering ideas of death, violence, invasion, and illness, the holiness of the poems themselves does its best to counteract that darkness and acknowledge the inherent holiness in all living things.

KH: I think it does that successfully, there’s a balance, a magic inside the grief. And I wonder about the role of the natural world in these poems, and how it relates to the intimate, and the political? I was reading the collection in Golden Gate Park and as I arrived at the end of this poem, a red tailed hawk landed on the grass just ten feet from me. I’ve never seen a hawk land on the earth before, it felt a certain kind of blessing.

AE: I’m fascinated by that – I tend to ascribe meaning to all things, but I’d really love to know what that means. I don’t think that I am naturally a ‘nature person.’ I spend a lot of time in cities, but the fact that there are other things living that are witness–that serves as another character and another voice – there are times when I am in conversation with nature because, like God, nature is the other thing that sees everything.

KH: Hmm, yes. I love this quote, from your piece in The Poetry Question, that says “As a young, Black, woman poet, the political is paramount and ultimately inextricable to informing my experience; […] Poetry facilitates a platform to express larger political concerns- be they of the mass failures of global powers and self-sick demagogues, to the politics of the body and identity”. This collection holds a vital tension, an intimacy between the historical, the political and the personal. I’m thinking of Coretta Scott in “Black Girl Prayerbook”, of the speaker’s father in “St. John’s Wort”.

AE: I’m always interested in domestic space because of its intimacy and because of the gendering location it has for women, that it can be a space of liberation and has certainly been a space of subjugation. When it comes to “Black Girl Prayerbook” and Coretta Scott specifically, I wanted to imbue an image in the poem of the contrast between the joy of time with her family at the dinner table, against the tragic and turbulent outside. I was writing that poem not too long after Ferguson. I was living in Switzerland, going to class and spending time with friends and at the same time thinking about the plight of my people back home. These things always happen at the same time, and we’ll always experience them at the same time. There’s also the scene in that poem of our music teacher who had been there and marched. She taught us the black national anthem (at this largely white school K-12) and she got so emotional. I never forgot the image of her, that she was re-living the bloodbath of the civil rights movement, that we weren’t there for. This poem and the collection are interested in that dynamic, being aware of, versus not being aware of, acting in the context of the event and acting outside of the context of the event.

KH: You mentioned that most of these poems are coming from a first-person speaker and I wanted to ask, particularly in “Black Girl Prayerbook”, who is speaking, and to whom?

AE: A lot of these poems I wrote in 2014-2015, so immediately I want to say that it’s me writing a letter to God, telling him what I see, how I can go to class and have an argument about morality versus ethics and then go on the internet and watch Missouri burn. Saying to God, look at these two lives I have to lead. Now, interestingly enough, that the poems are being published, and when I read them, it feels like me talking to that me from back then, who was talking to God. I have a spectral relationship with the work, almost phantasmic as if I’m talking to things that don’t exist anymore but that definitely existed, and that in the reading of them I return into that portal somehow. The poems are almost like a reminder—like writing little clues to myself, the way it presents it is that I am talking to God or to my dad or to nature, but it feels like writing myself a secret note, in a code that only I would know how to decode – that’s at least what it’s like when I’m writing.

KH: I love that, I feel that too, that my poems are often something like a “Note to Self, for Survival”. Thinking of survival, this collection does not deal in insignificances. You really address and are able to hold some of the bigger elements of this human beingness. The book brought me into and through a journey of grief and loss, as well as one of wonder, of witnessing. And I really feel these poems wielding the power to resurrect. Do you want to share about the titular poem and how it holds the whole?

AE: St John’s Wort touches on a couple of critical points. That poem oscillates around a difficult time when I was witnessing a lot of difficult things, one of them being my father having an aneurysm. The idea of losing a parent, of losing what he meant to me, the idea of not having a future with my father, somehow the idea held maybe more darkness. The idea that there would be no hope, had a particular sinister quality to me. That poem lives where I feel like I’ve pressed my cheek against the glass of that sort of loss, where being that close almost feels like the loss already happened.

KH: Are there any poems or writers that you remember offering a touchstone, helping you through that time?

AE: I’m a huge Michael Dickman fan. His work has a lot to do with scenes surrounding violence and the suburban, the creeping dark that can accompany the quotidian, as well as flashes of light, flashes of miracle, the supernatural. I’ve actually met him several times, I‘ve told him about this book. His work is amazing, it’s gotten me through so much.

KH: Such a gift and I think a particular power of poetry, to bring us through some of the narrow places. I feel your work doing that. Ok, do you want to talk about form? The poems in this collection take a range of shapes and structures…

AE: Yes. I mostly follow my intuition, but I am a huge fan of the miracle of enjambment, and all the types of meaning aligned space can bring. In my work a lot of the time I am very attentive to and giving a lot of intention to where the lines break. And I’m always a huge champion of space on the page, and space when you’re reading. I think as a person I can forget to breathe, so when looking at my poetry, having that space there reminds me where the breath is supposed to be, where the living is.

KH: Mm, yes. Yes. How are you spending your time now? You’re working on your Ph.D. in Medical Sociology in Manchester—that seems like a lot. Are you taking a breath, a pause from writing, are you writing new poems?

AE: I let the poems make the decision, which is a real choice. So a lot of the time they absolutely just happen anyway. I might intend to do some science, and the poem just says no. When I, God willing, travel to Australia to interview aboriginal women about their experience of birth, I am going to add poetry as a method. So as part of my research, these women will have the opportunity to write poetry about the lived experiences of their pregnancy and about the experience of their care. I think poetic inquiry can be a wonderful method and that it’s terribly underused. I might be the only medical sociologist who thinks so. Some colleagues have said, “well what can a poem tell you?” My response is, literally what couldn’t it tell you.

KH: Exactly. That’s incredible. Yes, the entire worlds contained in a poem. As we close, is there anything else that you want to say?

AE: I guess I’d like to say that a lot of these poems worked very well as a coping mechanism amidst very painful and difficult things happening. So some of these lines are really truly artifacts of older harms. That alone has such value to me. There was a me who was in there. I couldn’t put my pain on pause—I picked up a pen, I came up with something, and I decided to keep it and trust it. To me more than anything that’s the value of a lot of these poems, that they’re still standing there in the heat of the fire. I don’t know how much advice I can give to other poets, but if your work is still close to that heat, I think you’re reader will be able to feel it.

ALEXUS ERIN is an American poet, performer, and Ph.D. candidate living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity, American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, Red Flag Poetry, Silk + Smoke and a host of others. She is the author of Two Birds, All Moon (Gap Riot Press) and Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence (Cervena Barva Press). She was the 2018 Poet Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference and a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018). Her screenplay, American Lotus Project, won the screenwriting award at Temple University’s Diamond Film Festival (2015). When Alexus isn’t writing, dancing, singing, comedy-ing or researching maternal/child health, find her growing plants in your walls as the co-founder of Wallflower Hydroponics, and trying to catch up on sleep.

KATE HOYLE was raised in Moraga, California. Her work has been published in Scoundrel Time, The Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, and Typishly. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

NOT DEAD YET: An interview with Hadley Moore

Posted on November 19, 2019 by admin

(Autumn House Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY CAROL SMALLWOOD

Not Dead Yet, winner of the 2018 Fiction Prize at Autumn House Press, studies the uncertainties of loss, turning a gaze toward the often-silenced voices of the infirm, elderly, and adolescent. Rich in humor and honesty, Hadley Moore’s debut collection of short stories presents a contemporary set of narratives from a lush cast of characters. We find the protagonists of her stories tenderly revealing their pain after the loss of loved ones and coping with the voids left by the passing of youth, happiness, and fulfillment. ~Autumn House Press

Carol Smallwood: Not Dead Yet has contemporary characters dealing squarely with universal problems. Which of the characters did you find the easiest to write about? How long did it take to complete the collection?

Hadley Moore: I say this all the time, but it is true: the process is so mysterious. For me, it isn’t so much that certain characters are easier or harder to write as that whole stories are. I can look at the table of contents of this book and remember what it was like to draft and revise each story—which I wrote relatively quickly; which went through multiple revisions, sometimes in fits and starts over years; which I thought I might never finish—but I can’t tell you why. The process is likely determined by a combination of how well-formed the idea was to begin with, whether I received useful feedback from a reader on an early draft, how much uninterrupted time I had to work on it, and many other factors related to all the as-yet-unknown ways our brains operate. I just have to accept that when I start a new project there isn’t any way to know how it will go.

This book took about ten years to complete, during which time I also focused on other work. Each story felt like a discreet project, and it didn’t occur to me until I had most of them drafted that I might be heading toward a full collection.

CS: Do you write poetry or nonfiction? When did you begin to write character-centered fiction?

HM: I admire poetry but I don’t write it; everything that comes out of me is a sentence. And if I have an urge to write nonfiction, it’s usually about fiction books or fiction writing, but I haven’t published an essay in years. All of this is to say fiction is my literary home.

In my early twenties, I started dabbling in essays, then I got an MS in journalism, and it was a few years after that that I finally decided to try fiction. I was twenty-nine when I started my master of fine arts (MFA) program.

CS: You shared in an interview with Midwestern Gothic: “There’s an austerity to the Midwest that doesn’t lend itself to self-promotion.” Can you say more about that?

HM: This was in response to a question about why there isn’t so much acknowledgment of a regional school of writing of the Midwest as there is of, say, the West or the South. I don’t have a comprehensive answer, but I do think it has something to do with the unassuming nature of (at least parts of) the Midwest. That’s a stereotype and a sweeping generalization, but there are certainly aspects of truth to it.

CS: How do you manage to include humor, even absurdity, in difficult situations?

HM: It’s just the way my brain works! Not everything I write is funny, but much of it has an element of gallows humor. It’s something that presents itself early in drafting, as part of the tone and a character’s situation or worldview. I like to say my life’s motto is “Laugh or slit your wrists,” which I realize can come off as both overly dark and also flippant, but life is hard. You have to laugh at it.

CS: Do you find male characters more challenging to delineate?

HM: No. I don’t think we’re so different, really, in what motivates us and what we obsess over and what the stakes are in our lives.

CS: In what magazines has your work appeared?

HM: Many literary journals: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, the Indiana Review, and others. Many of these are housed in and receive support from universities. I keep an updated list on my website.

CS: What is your literary training, background?

HM: I earned my MFA from the wonderful Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where my teachers were Maud Casey, CJ Hribal, Erin McGraw, Michael Parker, and Steven Schwartz. They were all excellent. I was very lucky.

I also participated in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program with the writer Christine Sneed, who has been so generous and encouraging.

CS: What are you working on now and what advice can you share with those wanting to be published?

HM: I’d like to find a home for a novel manuscript I’ve revised several times, and my current project is shaping up to be thematically linked stories about the assassinations of the 1960s.

Persistence is the key. Writing has to be work you would do no matter what. Publishing ambition is great, but artistic ambition must precede it.

CS: Where can readers learn more about your work?

HM: My website is www.hadleymoore.net, and I very recently got on Twitter @HadleyMoore10.

HADLEY MOORE’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Witness, Amazon’s Day One, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the revived december, the Indiana Review, Anomaly, Quarter After Eight, Confrontation, The Drum, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives near Kalamazoo, Michigan.

CAROL SMALLWOOD is a literary reader, judge, and interviewer. Her most recent book is Patterns: Moments in Time (Word Poetry, 2019)

Writing CROSS COUNTRY: A Conversation with Justin Evans and Jeff Newberry

Posted on November 12, 2019 by admin

(WordTech Editions, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY MATTHEW THORBURN

There’s an interesting tradition of poets writing collaborative books—books in which two writers have a creative conversation, writing poems back and forth to one another or sometimes writing each poem together. This kind of dialogue on the page seems especially well suited to poets. Braided Creek by Ted Kooser and Jim comes to mind, as does Ghost/Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher, as well as Little Novels and the other collections that Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have written together.

I’ve been interested in how this works—how two poets decide to set out on such a journey together, and how they make their way along that road. So when the opportunity came up to talk to Justin Evans and Jeff Newberry about their new collaborative book, Cross Country (WordTech Editions, 2019), I couldn’t resist. Cross Country is a collection of epistolary poems that Justin and Jeff wrote back and forth to each other during 2016 and early 2017. These letter-poems are wide-ranging, encompassing thoughts about the nature of art, religion, family, and politics. I caught up with them over email—from New Jersey to Georgia to Utah and back—during the busy back-to-school season to get the backstory on Cross Country.

Matthew Thorburn: So—let’s begin at the beginning: How did you decide to write a book together? How did this project get started?

Justin Evans: The idea to write a book together began with me. Several of the writers I admire, and two specific mentors of mine, David Lee and William Kloefkorn, had collaborated on several books of poems, so I always had it in my mind that collaboration on a book of poems was a viable creative option.

When the itch hit me some five years ago to write a book with someone else, it became increasingly clear the only person I would want to collaborate with was Jeff. I mean that. I admire so many poets, but when I thought about who I wanted to write with, Jeff was the one. My feelings paid off because almost every critical decision and direction the book required was a result of Jeff’s abilities and intuition.

MT: How would you describe Cross Country to prospective readers? What do you want them to know about it?

Jeff Newberry: It’s a dialogue about life, fatherhood, and faith, a conversation between two men who are trying to better understand their pasts and the turbulent world they inhabit. From a craft perspective, it’s a book about the intertwining of poetic voices.

JE: I would describe it as a real conversation between two people who are somewhere in the middle of their lives, still trying to figure out what it means to be parents, teachers, poets, and people who are aware of the madness which surrounds them. I would want readers to know that everything in the book is sincere, and not jump to the conclusion that the poems are merely confessional. The admissions we make in our poems are starting points, not the results of exploration.

MT: The poems in Cross Country cover a lot of ground—from family life to what it means to be a parent, to memories of childhood and life lessons learned, through to the state of the nation. They also feel very personal—and very candid—about some difficult experiences for each of you. How did you decide what you would write about? Was anything off-limits?

JE: This may sound like a put-on, but the decision to write personally and candidly was a very organic process. I had several ideas for the direction of the book which were wisely rejected, and somehow our focus began to rest on the ideas of faith and hope. I think it was Jeff’s poem about his daughter which really opened things up. He exposed something vital in that poem bigger than itself, which was what good poetry is supposed to do.

From there we started sharing stark reflections of our experiences. He would write a poem and I would write a response. I would write about something that happened and Jeff would write his response. With national events, there was a sense from both of us that something needed to be said.

JN: I know that a lot of poets in our world snoot at and dismiss the idea that poetry can be a kind of therapy. For me, it is. I don’t mean this in a fatuous way. To understand the world, I have to write about it. As such, the ground covered in the book pretty much tracks with what was obsessing me between 2015 and 2016, when the majority of the poems were written.

I find it difficult to write about my daughter. I want to write about her because I want to understand her. The poem “Four Attempts at a Letter about My Daughter” came together from my various attempts at trying to write about her. What that poem showed me—what that poem taught me—was that there is a line between the Madi of this world, the daughter I see every day, and the Madi of my imagination.

MT: This book is a dialogue—a sequence of poems that feels like a conversation or letters you wrote to each other. Did you decide from the outset to shape the poems and the book this way? What drew you to this form?

JE: As I said before, every major decision about form and theme was a result of Jeff. I just wanted to write poems with someone else. I thought it would be cool to emphasize the role that place has in American letters, and write poems about places we were familiar with and write about places we had been assigned to write about by the other person. I thought this kind of noodling around might lead to some interesting work. Jeff, knowing we both shared a love for Richard Hugo, suggested we write letters to each other. That went through one or two iterations before we settled on what is in the book.

JN: Justin says that the letters were my idea. I am convinced that they were his. Either way, the epistolary form had never really attracted me. I was familiar with Richard Hugo’s 13 Letters and 31 Dreams, of course, and I’d read some letter poems here and there. However, the form never interested me—until I began writing them. Having a willing, open audience who was not only going to listen but also respond made the form perfect for the kind of personal issues we explored in the letters.

MT: How did you navigate the pull to have each poem respond to the one that came before, versus striking out in some new direction?

JE: First, let me say that Jeff’s ordering of the poems—he reversed the order in which some of the poems were written—truly made a huge difference. As for new directions, that is also an organic creation. What I mean by that is we never directed each other by saying, “Your next poem should be about….” I think we wrote poems for two reasons. We were having a sincere conversation through our poems, and we wanted to know how each other would respond to what we thought of something. I also think we kept one foot in the real world, never completely giving in or allowing ourselves to become untethered from the real world. Everyday life is not a novel, and it can’t be plotted.

MT: Would you talk a bit about your experience publishing and promoting the book? How did you go about securing a publisher? What has the reception been like from readers?

JE: We divided up the workload. I would be in charge of individual submissions for poems, and Jeff would try to find a publisher. I do not normally submit to contests, but I supported Jeff in whatever fashion he saw his task. I think it also shaped where our poems were seen outside of the manuscript. Jeff found a published very fast, which was both a pleasant surprise and a daunting revelation for me.

Readers I know personally have enjoyed the book. I thought I was going to get a lot more support from family, as has been my experience. While my family still supports this endeavor, so many more readers have expressed their enjoyment. I had a teacher ask if she could read some of my poems in her class, which blew me away.

JN: Unfortunately, the book has not found a wide readership. We’ve had a few people show interest. The poetry market is crowded, and if you’re not in the MFA world, like Justin and I aren’t, it can be hard to find someone who will teach or review your book. I’ve sent out review copies to several magazines. We also promoted it on Facebook and Twitter.

MT: What would you say to other poets considering collaborating on a book? Any good advice—or words of warning?

JE: It is an enlightening experience, to say the least. I would say to go into the process with very few immutable expectations. Most of my ideas about what I wanted to happen had to change into something else. It was all for the better, but if you are set on something happening and your allegiances are in the wrong place, your ego will take a beating. You simply have to keep an open mind, and you need to have patience.

JN: My only advice is this: Find someone you trust. That’s a very important aspect.

MT: What are you working on now? What’s next for each of you? And do you think you might collaborate on another book project at some point?

JE: After reading Battle Dress by Karen Skolfield and Mothers Over Nangahar by Pamela Hart, I am revisiting my military/wartime experiences in a series of short poems.

I think it might be very interesting to collaborate with Jeff again. I am torn between thinking that if we did, it would need to be completely different in order to make it interesting, or trying the impossible by writing letters again. I do know that I need some time to recover and see myself as a poet in the singular for a while before I could even consider collaboration.

JN: I’m working on a book of experimental mini-memoirs. I’ve also got another book of poetry in progress. As far as collaboration? Perhaps. Right now, however, my own projects are keeping me busy.

JUSTIN EVANS was born and raised in Utah. After serving in the U.S. Army, he attended Utah schools and has been teaching in rural Nevada for the past 21 years, where he lives with his multi-media artist wife, Becky, and their three sons. He is the author of four chapbooks, including Four Way Stop, Gathering Up the Scattered Leaves, and Working in the Birdhouse, and four previous books of poems, including Town for the Trees, Hobble Creek Almanac, and Sailing This Nameless Ship.

JEFF NEWBERRY is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. His previous books include the novel A Stairway to the Sea and the poetry collection Brackish. Recently, his writing has appeared in Brevity: Concise Nonfiction, Sweet, and The American Journal of Poetry. He is on the core faculty in the Writing and Communication Program at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two children.

MATTHEW THORBURN‘s most recent book is The Grace of Distance, published by Louisiana University Press in 2019. He’s also the author of six previous collections of poems, including the book-length poem Dear Almost, which received the Lascaux Prize, and the chapbook A Green River in Spring. He works in corporate communications in New York City and lives in small-town New Jersey with his wife and son.

“No Content Warnings”: a conversation with Laura Sims, author of LOOKER

Posted on October 30, 2019 by admin

(Scribner, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Laura Sims, author of the critically acclaimed Looker (Scribner, 2019) opens up about her debut novel, her process and her feelings on content warnings.

Jo Varnish: The paperback edition of your novel, Looker, comes out on October 1^st. How would you describe the novel and its central themes?

Laura Sims: I’d describe it as a literary character study first and foremost, though it also has the fast pacing and dark storyline of a psychological thriller. It shouldn’t be confused with a typical thriller, though; it doesn’t make the expected genre moves—like plot twists and shocking revelations. The novel follows a woman whose life has recently imploded; in the wake of this, she becomes fixated on her neighbor, a famous actress who seems to have everything the narrator wants and believes she will never have: a stable, loving family, an exciting career, a beautiful home, status and wealth. In her obsession, the narrator acts out in increasingly unacceptable ways…and things go very badly.

Through the narrator’s situation, the book explores how toxic our culture of looking at others—whether in real life or on social media—can be. My narrator is particularly vulnerable and embittered by circumstance, but I think anyone can relate to comparing themselves to someone else and feeling decidedly “less than.” In my narrator’s case, some of this feeling can be attributed to how societal standards for women impact her life. She isn’t checking certain boxes women of her age and station are “supposed” to check, so this adds pressure and ultimately has disastrous results.

JV: There are some biographical similarities between you and your narrator. Like her, you used to live in Brooklyn, and also like her, you taught creative writing to adult students at a city school. How do you react to the inevitable questions of author-narrator merge?

LS: I just heard Phoebe Waller-Bridge address this question/issue in an interview. When asked how autobiographical “Fleabag” was, she said: “Women can make things up. It’s not all a diary.” That cracked me up—and also resonated with me. I think it’s true that women get questions about author-narrator or life-fiction merge far more often than men, as if it’s assumed that our imaginations are so limited, our lives so constricted, that we must rely on autobiography for our creative work. I definitely share some autobiographical facts (and a lipstick shade) with my narrator, and we all know that fiction writers do draw, to some extent, on their lives for their writing, but in the end: it doesn’t matter. The character and her story exist independently of the facts and circumstances of my life, and the work should be received, valued, and understood solely as a work of fiction.

JV: Where did you draw your inspiration for Looker’s story and characters?

LS: Living in Brooklyn was a huge inspiration for the novel, because of the way you live pressed up against people from all segments of the socioeconomic spectrum: middle-class families, homeless people, longtime working-class residents, and even celebrities. It was interesting to think of the different worlds we inhabited, all within a relatively small space, and what that kind of proximity might do to someone who perceives herself to be steps away, yet forever separated from a richer, better life. There was one particular day when I was walking home in the dead heat of August, lugging fifteen grocery bags from the store and girding myself to carry them up four flights, when a beautiful actress walked by. My immediate reaction was to envy her seemingly effortless elegance, and to wonder if she had ever carried grocery bags uphill in her life (probably not, I decided). That’s when another woman’s voice, bitter and raging at the world, popped into my head. She couldn’t stand seeing this entitled, richly dressed woman walk by so unencumbered, so carefree. She admired, despised, and envied her in equal measure. I went home, sat down, and started to write in that woman’s voice. The other characters around my narrator came pretty easily, as they were loosely inspired by ‘types’ in my Brooklyn neighborhood.

JV: Is the object of the narrator’s obsession a reflection on our fascination with celebrity insofar as she is a famous actress? Further, was your decision not to name the actress or the narrator a comment on our culture’s interest in surface at the cost of deeper identity?

LS: It can definitely be read as a reflection on our fascination with celebrity, though it wasn’t intentional. In our culture of constantly looking at celebrities, they seem an easy target for fixation, especially for someone who’s in a vulnerable state of mind. It’s potentially harmful to both parties—the looker and the looked at. It’s even dangerous—or unhealthy, at least, for people who aren’t particularly sensitive or damaged. To always be looking at others’ seemingly flawless lives can make our own lives feel thin and dreary by comparison—even if the seeming flawlessness is nothing but a show.

I didn’t intentionally leave my characters unnamed. It was something that happened naturally as I was writing the book, but looking back I see how their namelessness fits with Looker’s focus on how intertwined perception and identity can be. The actress is trapped by the narrator’s perception of her as “the actress”; she isn’t allowed to be more or less than that. And the narrator’s namelessness blots her out, just as she blots herself out, or perceives herself to be blotted out by society. But her namelessness is also useful because it erases the distance between reader and character and helps create the raw, even uncomfortable, intimacy that some readers have described.

JV: The narrator has a complicated relationship with her pet, Cat, who she refuses to return to her ex-husband. What do her changing feelings for Cat tell us about her mental state?

LS: As it shifts from one extreme to the other, her relationship with Cat reflects the moods and stages of her mental decline. She begins by seeing Cat as a nuisance, then shifts to loving her, adoring her, even, when she realizes Cat can be used to manipulate her ex-husband. When things deteriorate further in the narrator’s life, she becomes impatient, unkind. And then her final, most vicious act signals to us that she has finally crossed the line into what many would call madness.

JV: I was surprised to learn how strongly some readers have reacted to the narrator’s treatment of Cat. I know “content warnings” are increasingly used on Goodreads and elsewhere. How do you feel about such warnings?

LS: Yes, I was surprised, too. The moment in the book they’re responding to was the hardest scene for me to write, but it was also the most crucial; inevitable, I’d have to say. She had to do it. She had to show us just how far she’d come from her reasonably ordered, societally acceptable life: very far. I was happy to learn that people felt discomfort, anger, even outrage in response to that moment; it constitutes a powerful reaction to the book, and isn’t that what fiction and other art forms are for? To provoke, in the most general sense: to provoke thought and emotion. I find that ‘content warnings,’ in the sphere of literature, interfere with that crucial relationship between artwork and audience. They neutralize any potential threat to a reader’s state of mind, and in doing so they neutralize the work itself. Make it bland and safe for everyone, so that we may as well be watching a network sitcom (though they’ve come far in recent years) rather than reading a complex work of fiction.

JV: I find it impossible not to empathize with the narrator. Dealing with infertility and the breakdown of a marriage are understandably unsettling, and likely trigger her breakaway from reality. Was creating compassion for her intentional?

LS: I wouldn’t say it was intentional, but I did feel very deeply for her. I didn’t want her to be a two-dimensional villain. (I don’t think of her as a “villain” at all.) My hope is that readers will feel some measure of compassion and empathy for her—as you did—and will see in her some basic human desires: to love and be loved; to connect; to transcend the rigors, indignities, and monotony of everyday life. Maybe she heads down strange avenues in hopes of satisfying these desires, but the desires themselves are universal.

JV: Tell us about your process as a writer. What does a writing day typically look like for you? Over what time period did you write Looker?

LS: On my best, most productive days, I head to a co-working space in town right after the school bus leaves. I try to work for several hours in the morning there, when my focus is sharpest. Then I devote the rest of my day to family business, schoolwork (see below), exercise, errands, etc. But I find it really important to preserve and protect those morning hours when I can. It also depends on what stage I’m in of the writing process. Right now, I’m editing a finished draft, and while the morning hours are helpful, I end up working outside of those hours, too. I can’t stop working. But when I’m struggling my way through a first draft I need more structure to stay engaged. I find drafting painful and editing intoxicating and FUN.

I wrote Looker over a period of about three years. At the time, I was working on other creative projects, too: a young adult novel that never saw the light of day and a poetry book. I was also teaching part-time and getting my Master’s degree in Library & Info Science. (Still getting that degree, by the way. Almost done!) But Looker was my side project, my passion project—I couldn’t stop returning to it, and worked on it whenever I could. One of the things that’s been hardest about moving forward after Looker is trying to recapture that feeling of working on something that no one knows or cares about, in a kind of protective secrecy. It’s something new authors don’t talk about enough: how hard it is, after being seen, to go back and work on something in the same cloistered way you did before you’d published your book. I realize it’s a good problem to have, but it’s been a challenge nonetheless.

JV: For readers who loved Looker, what would you recommend they read next?

LS: There are several books that inspired me (in some way) in the writing of this novel, and I’d highly recommend them because they’re also some of my favorite contemporary novels: The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, Dept of Speculation, by Jenny Offill, and Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. I wasn’t consciously drawing on these books when I was writing Looker, but thinking back, I know they were influential. Also The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Reading that in college had a profound impact on me; it’s the ultimate tale of a woman’s downward spiral and the societal forces that hastened it. I’d also highly recommend Helen Phillips’ new book, The Need—it’s very different from Looker, but plays with genre, too, in that it’s a literary novel with a science fiction storyline and thriller pacing. It’s compulsively readable, beautifully written, and terrifying. Three of my favorite things.

JV: What are you working on at the moment?

LS: I’m working on a novel—well, to be honest, two novels. I’ve got complete drafts of both of them and am working to make them readable before passing them to my agent, who will help me whip them into shape.

JV: Lastly, Looker has a cinematic feel on reading. Are there any plans to bring your story to the big screen?

LS: Not to the big screen, but to the small screen! Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola’s King Bee production company, along with eOne, have bought the rights to Looker. Emily will star as the narrator and produce. The screenwriters are working on the screenplay now; I can’t wait to see how they adapt it.

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Laura Sims’s debut novel, Looker (Scribner), was published to critical acclaim in early 2019; The Wall Street Journal called it “a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror” and Publishers Weekly called it a “chilling and riveting debut.” Sims has also published four books of poetry, including, most recently, Staying Alive; her first poetry collection, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Ottoline Prize. In 2014, she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. Sims has been the recipient of a US-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Originally from England, Jo Varnish now lives outside New York City. She is assistant editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and her short stories and creative nonfiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Okay Donkey, Ellipsis Zine, Brevity Blog and others. Jo has been a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers for two years, and is currently studying for her MFA. She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1.