Interviews

Friday Feature: Dinah Cox’s The Canary Keeper

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The Canary Keeper

Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] author Dinah Cox to discuss the ins and outs of her new book, The Canary Keeper.

The Canary Keeper himself is a failed actor, the kind of person no one wants to listen to at parties, but the eponymous play he stars in features characters eking out existence while in search of their own curtain calls, a chance to hear the applause before the silence sets in. Artist-citizens from the fictional Market Town look to the dimming spotlight and cannot decide its meaning: are they destined for burn-out or blinded by fantasies of themselves as small-town stars? They mark time by way of darkened, lonely highways, indifference from people in power, and the search for opportunity beyond the boredom of Oklahoma’s borders. They step forward, clear their throats, and laugh at their ability to wait in the wings forever, longing for escape to the green room and anticipating that fateful moment when the stage manager says Go.

Erin Batykefer: Names are slippery in these stories. I’m thinking of “Leo’s Peking Palace,” where friends sing Happy Birthday to Leo and half of them sing “Tiger” because they don’t know his real name, or the way Laura’s middle name, Ashley, is used as a slur in “Snowflake.” How so you see names relating to identities?

Dinah Cox: One of my favorite parts abot writing a story is the moment when a character lets me know her name. Her name tells me much about how other characters will perceive her. Rarely have I written nameless characters—though I think I have a story in which one of the characters is named “The Boss”—because a name is not just a marker but a fixture, a place where one’s origins and one’s future might converge. I’ve become accustomed to people messing up my own first name. In a way, that’s given me a kind of namelessness I sometimes resent and sometimes enjoy. But because my own name is somewhat unusual, perhaps I give more attention to names than I otherwise might.

EB: The stage and the idea of performance is a recurring theme in this collection: politics, plays, talk shows, ballet. Were you a theatre kid?

DC: My parents were very heavily involved in theatre; my father was a professor of theatre history, and my mother did a great deal of acting and directing. My sister, in addition to some other, juicer roles, had the honor of portraying one of the no-neck monsters in Oklahoma State University’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. At first, I resisted the family tradition in favor of “making my own way in the world,” but as an undergraduate at Earlham College I majored in theatre, and in my twenties I interned and then worked as a stage manager at an Equity theatre in Michigan. I also spent a memorable summer interning at the Peterborough Players in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

EB: In “Blackout,” I was struck by this line, when the narrator has a moment of panic while arranging props between scenes in a production, only to find the prop cake replaced by a real one: “Had he picked up the wrong cake by mistake–maybe someone working backstage, a real person with real feelings, was having an actual birthday?” There’s real anxiety over real-life consequence of staged performance. How blurry is the line between truth and story?

DC: I worked as an assistant stage manager in a production featuring a birthday cake made of cardboard. It was such a convincing fake, everyone who saw it wanted to eat a slice. So I wrote some version of that cake into a story. But to answer your question, the line between truth and story is blurred enough that, like spun sugar on a real/fake birthday cake, it’s delicious until it gives us a bellyache. Maybe all cakes are made of cardboard after all.

EB: There are a lot of birthdays in these stories–two 21st birthdays, a birthday party not on an actual birthday. What’s your ideal birthday celebration?

DC: I had a pretty nice birthday celebration last year. My partner and I drank elaborate cocktails and cooked an elaborate dinner, drank and ate, and were very merry, indeed. Because all comedies end with a party, I try to have as many parties—throughout the year—as I can; however my parties often include only two people and four dogs: the perfect way to celebrate.

EB: Market Town, where these stories take place, is fictional, but it’s state is real. Why Oklahoma?

DC: The short answer is because I was born in Oklahoma and live here, still. The slightly longer answer is that it’s a sad, haunted, strange, out-of-the-way place, worthy of storytelling.

EB: If you could upload one text into the brains of your readers Matrix-style before they opened your book, what would it be?

DC: How about the American Heritage Dictionary? Or maybe a Post-It note that says, “read a book, robot.”

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about The Canary Keeper?

DC: [PANK] loves you.

Dinah Cox’s first book of stories, Remarkable, was published as the winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize in 2016. Her stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines and journals, including Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, and Beloit Fiction Journal. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University, where she’s an Associate Editor at Cimarron Review.

The stories we tell ourselves about our own history: an interview with Michelle Bailat-Jones

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(Ig publishing, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Jo Varnish: Your new novel, Unfurled, has just been released. Briefly, what is the book about?

 

Michelle Bailat-Jones: It’s a book about a family from Seattle with a secret in their past. In terms of the plot, it’s the story of a young woman named Ella who discovers that the story she’s believed about her life for twenty years wasn’t the right story at all. And maybe she won’t be allowed to know the whole story, or the true story, if such a thing actually exists. It’s about Ella losing her father, the man who raised her on his own, a man she fiercely loved and admired, and about having to go looking for her mother, the woman who abandoned her. It’s also a story about the Pacific Northwest, and the ocean, and fathers and daughters and absent mothers, and imagination and delusion.

 

JV: Tell us about the themes that Unfurled explores.

 

MBJ: The theme of Unfurled is how childhood trauma manifests in one’s adult life, as well as the stories we tell ourselves about our own history and the sense-making work we engage in to function despite that trauma. It is also a mother-daughter book in many ways, despite the apparent focus on father-daughter. And finally, anger is a very big theme in the novel.

 

JV: What was your inspiration for the book?

 

MBJ: I wrote a short story almost twenty years ago about a young woman who loses her father and uncovers a secret while going through his papers. It was set in a gritty, working class neighborhood of the Pacific Northwest, and although that character was much much younger than the Ella of Unfurled, it was the seed of the novel. And then some years ago, I read an article about the ferry system in Seattle, in particular the ferry pilots, and I became interested in that world. At the same time, my fiction is often interested in issues of absence and presence – physical but also metaphorical – and especially how grieving is negotiated within different personalities and family structures. The book grew and morphed over many many years into what it is today, but it grew out of those questions.

 

JV: You wrote Unfurled over an extended period of time. What kept drawing you back to the project? What research was necessary to make the book ‘real’?

 

MBJ: Unfurled is a novel that has taken me almost eighteen years to complete. So in that sense it is difficult to write about how I wrote the book; it would make more sense to talk about how I re-wrote it. Throughout all of these revisions and transformations—all of my attempts to tell the story that was ultimately asking to be told—I changed the lens a lot, sometimes focusing more on John, Ella’s father, or more on Maggie, Ella’s mother. I wrote an entire draft in Maggie’s POV, I wrote several in Ella’s POV but from different points of entry into her story.

Probably the most interesting research I was able to do for the novel involved looking at nautical charts of the Puget Sound. I could literally spend hours going over these charts, learning the names of the passages between the islands and the coves and points that dot the coastlines. These are unusual maps that you need nautical background to understand, so they were very exotic to me, and I found them quite beautiful.

I also took a lot of interest in social services, trying to understand how an individual could vanish for many years at a time. I learned that it is shockingly easy in America for a person to disappear – and this both saddened and intrigued me, and I wanted to explore that idea on the people left behind, what would that lack of control feel like? How does a person negotiate that kind of intangible loss?

 

JV: How does the setting of the Pacific Northwest influence Unfurled’s characters and the action?

 

MBJ: I am a very big fan of fiction that uses setting as an integral part of the characters. I dislike the idea of setting as a character on its own, it’s not that, but just that setting is big, setting has an emotional pull on my characters. This is probably just my own personal feelings on landscape, and most likely comes out of growing up in the Pacific Northwest, with all its looming beauty. But also, the idea that John, the stalwart ferry boat captain, was the kind of person who managed to create a “safe passage” for Maggie or for Ella, through the difficult waters of their lives was key to me, and I tried to mirror this in his work as a ferry pilot and the way the landscape has worked its way deeply into Ella’s sense of self. The ferries in the Pacific Northwest are big hulking workhorses, and I like how they navigate the deeps of the Pacific Ocean.

 

JV: Unfurled is told from the perspective of a single character, Ella, but who tries to grant herself imaginative access to a story that she could not have really known—of her parent’s relationship. What is the effect of this access and how is it meant to inform the reader’s understanding of the story?

 

MBJ: It makes sense to me that children might create a narrative of their parents’ lives and that at some poit that narrative proves to be false. So when John’s death involves learning that her own memories were false ones, I wanted to show how she went about confronting and investigating those memories. What did she believe to be true about her parent’s relationship and how did it influence her own development into an adult? What did it feel like to have to go back over those memories and try to find a line of reality or something really concrete to hold onto? I also think she deserved the chance to re-imagine those memories at some point, something she finally does toward the end of the book.

 

JV: The book is clearly influenced by nautical imagery and scene-settings. Does that reflect a personal interest of yours?

 

MBJ: I’m so lucky in that I grew up spending my summers camping in Oregon and Washington, and learning to fish in rivers and lakes with my own family. I love fishing, I always have. Nature is really important to me, and I think this is really clear in all of my fiction. It was a delight to focus on this in Unfurled. But I have never fished in the ocean – and I always wanted to. As a child in Seattle, we had friends who were into boats and took my family out onto the ocean, even once on a three-week trip up into the Gulf of Alaska, and I loved this so much but my first-hand knowledge is quite limited. The language of sailing is magical, and the science of navigation has always interested me. I really enjoyed researching this aspect of the novel.

JV: At the center of Unfurled is a mother with a mental illness.  What drew you to exploring the effects of her illness on her daughter and husband?

 

MBJ: I have always been interested in how people make sense of their histories, their childhoods. All families, at least to me, are based on variations and versions of stories that are told by different family members. The truth is always situated somewhere near those stories, but no one story can contain the actual truth – if that even exists. In a family touched by mental illness, and one like Maggie’s which involves fantastic and even delusional storytelling, truth becomes even slipperier and I wanted to explore that. But not just from Maggie’s perspective, also from Ella’s and John’s.

 

JV: There are secrets at the heart of Unfurled.  Tell us about the function of secrets in the novel, as well as in family life.

 

MBJ: I think it’s very natural for parents to keep certain secrets from their children. It’s a necessary part of parenting, for safety reasons, for privacy reasons, but when it becomes extreme, as in the novel with John keeping Maggie’s “story” from Ella, it creates a real disconnect. I like to think that this disconnect existed even while John was still alive. This is something that Ella must recognize at some point, that she has internalized this way of behaving between two people who love each other, and this definitely informs her relationship with Neil. I also think that secrets are often based around shame and the image we want others to have of us, so that was interesting to look at in terms of both John and Ella, and where their traumas are located and why they hold them so close to their hearts.

 

JV: Ella is a veterinarian; does her scientific background affect her processing of emotional issues?

 

MBJ: This is something that, I think, came out of how Ella’s character evolved and her resistance to self-analysis. She pretends to be able to look at herself directly, analytically, but she is much more comfortable hiding within the terminology of the one thing in her life she feels competent at: doctoring animals.

 

JV: Michelle, you co-founded L’Atelier Writers, a retreat for writers held in France each summer that is entering its fifth year, you teach fiction writing and you work as a literary translator.  How do these branches of your writing life inform your writing as an author?

 

MBJ: Literary translation is very much like writing, only I don’t have make the story up. In that sense it is actually quite relaxing, even if translation questions can be complicated and make me work hard. I consider it practice for writing as well as an art form on its own, and I cannot imagine being a writer only. L’ATELIER has become a cherished writing community and I’m so grateful to be involved and be able to support a diverse group of writers each year. We have a lot of fun on our annual retreat, but we are also very serious and I’m always impressed with the work that comes from our group. In terms of informing my writing, all these various activities are a way of energizing me with different ideas and connections with people. Book and writing discussions are vital, I feel, and keep me on my toes.

 

JV: You have lived in Switzerland for 14 years. How has your writing been influenced by living in Europe?

 

MBJ: I worry about this actually. I have been greatly influenced, I’m sure, by living outside of the place where I am published. I read a lot of French and Swiss literature, and it is often very different from American or English literature and I cannot help but internalize those narrative structures and find them very familiar, when an American reader might find them disconcerting. The lines are blurry for me. I hope this is a strength, but I also hope I will always read broadly enough to see what I’m doing. I consider Unfurled to be a very American book, but then Fog Island Mountains was hardly American at all. I like the flexibility in that, and I hope I will always be able to do that.

 

JV: Finally, what are you working on now?

 

MBJ: I’m finishing the draft of a novel – and for the first time I’m working in two landscapes: Switzerland and the US. The novel is set in Eastern Oregon and in Switzerland, and I’m maybe a bit superstitious about revealing the plot while I’m still finishing it, so I won’t say too much that’s concrete. Probably because I always do so much re-writing before a novel is actually done. I’m hoping this novel won’t take me eighteen years to finish – although I’m getting close to four or five at this point. But the book deals with radiation physics and ambition, from a woman’s perspective, and it looks at some of the changes in the world, in particular at our current feeling of compromised safety, and how terrorism has become a commonplace concern for people in the west, in a way it wasn’t before, or in a way that we were able to ignore it because it was only happening elsewhere. It’s been a challenging and interesting project, and I’m hoping to finish it up before the end of the year.

—

Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her début novel, Fog Island Mountains (Tantor 2014), won the inaugural Christopher Doheny Award from The Center for Fiction and Audible. Her second novel, Unfurled, was just published by Ig Publishing in Oct 2018. Her fiction, poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in various journals, including: The Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, Public Pool, the View from Here, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Quarterly Conversation, PANK, Spolia Mag, Two Serious Ladies, Cerise Press and the Atticus Review. Her translation credits include two novels by celebrated Swiss modernist, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: Beauty on Earth (Skomlin, 2013) and What if the Sun…? (Skomlin, 2016). Michelle was born in Japan, grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and now lives in Switzerland.

 

Having moved from her native England aged 24, Jo Varnish now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.  Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming in, The Bangalore Review and Necessary Fiction. Currently she is studying for her MFA and working on her novel.

Our Man in Paris: an interview with Malik Crumpler

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INTERVIEW BY CHRISTIAN NIEDAN
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The Gilded Age of the late 1800s saw San Francisco dubbed “The Paris of the West.” A century later, the city’s cultural influence loomed large for young poetry and rap music-minded performers growing up across the Bay in Oakland – among them, Malik Ameer Crumpler. As the calendar rolled over into the 21st Century, Crumpler began performing around Oakland and San Francisco, forging an ever-evolving career as a poet, rapper, music producer, and editor. Currently, Crumpler lives in Paris, France, where he curates, co-hosts, and performs at several of the city’s anglophone poetry and literary showcases. This year, the Bay Area-born Crumpler released his first book of raps, Beneath The Underground: Collected Raps 2000 – 2018, and I interviewed him about the influence of San Francisco on his work:

Christian Niedan: What role did San Francisco play in your early years of rap and poetry performances?

 

Malik Crumpler: In ‘99-2000, I started going to jam sessions & improvisation workshops at La Pena in Oakland, ran by jazz musicians Josh Jones & Mike Auberg. Before that, we always performed in the streets to sell our tapes and chapbooks. Then some college friends at SFSU & I started Bayonics (world music, funk hiphop band), and we gigged all over S.F. constantly until I moved to New York in 2004. We usually gigged at college parties, house parties, artists lofts until 2002, when we started getting the better gigs at Brunos,  Elbo Room, Minna’s, Club 6, Milk Bar, little gallery pop ups, parades, fraternities, festivals at least twice a week, every week. By myself as a rapper and poet, I did featured gigs and solo gigs to promote my albums at the time, Drapetomania, Sanctified, Enchantment leads to… and a couple songs from Nothing Better To do at places like CAL, SFSU, SFU, Sugar Lounge, Great American Music Hall, Buddha Lounge, Slim’s, a bunch of spots in Oakland and Berkeley too. I did too many gigs to count or remember exactly where, but I was always jamming with hip hop and jazz musicians like Lorin Benedict, David Michel Ruddy, O-Maya, Street Scholars, Attik, Otayo Dubb, Black Dot, Black Box, Co-Deez, Howard Wiley, Geechi Taylor, Valentino Pellizzer did a couple jam sessions at the Jazz School with Ambrose Akinmusire, Howard Wiley and all those cats 2000-2004. I also performed at a lot of protest, Anti- Police Brutality, Anti- Bush, Anti- War rallies, festivals too for different organizations like La Raza, Black Students Union, Green Party all that. There were so many places to perform back then, with so many different genres, so often that it was the best diverse learning ground possible. In terms of specific locations in San Francisco back then, we gigged in North Beach, Haight district and the Mission the most, but I can’t remember the names of all those clubs and art lofts.

 

CN: Was there a relationship between Oakland and San Francisco’s rap communities that you observed during the period covered in the book?

 

MC: I had cousins in both rap communities, so for me it was always linked. My cousins in San Francisco & East Palo Alto had rapping friends in Midtown, Hunters Point, Double Rock & Fillmore like RBL POSSE, Totally Insane, Herm, JT The Bigga Figga, Chunk, Dre Dog, that whole Frisco, E.P.A. underground scene in the early nineties, they didn’t really work with Oakland rappers, at all until all that started to change in the mid & late nineties, when the audiences got bigger for both scenes. Later on, I’d hangout as the anonymous youngster around rap crews like Get Low, Hobo Junction, Bored Stiff, Zion I, some of Heiroglyphics, Del especially and all them had a lot to do with that unifying SF & Oakland. To be honest, mob music brought it all together, but that’s an entirely different story. By the 2000s, there was lots of collaboration between Oakland & San Francisco in terms of doing gigs together and featuring on one anothers albums. In hindsight it seems like after the big drug war era declined, the gang wars decreased and that made it possible for the two cities to unite and share their scenes. Nonetheless, if you had a gig in San Francisco, it meant you were starting to bubble. As for the book, Sanctified is a collaboration between musicians and rappers from the entire bay, that was when I mixed genres musically, and collaborated with various world music musicians in the bay, various genres of all that. Prior to that, my albums were mainly Oakland and Berkeley, until Sanctified when I finally got my cousin Problem Child Da Menace from San Francisco and his East Palo Alto crew to rock. But the most collaborative between Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco was Co-Deez album at that time.
(Photo by Christian Niedan)
CN: What are the anglophone performance spaces you organize or perform at in Paris, and what makes each space and showcase unique?

MC: I organize Poets Live, which is currently in limbo as we’re looking for a new location. The other performances spaces I frequent most are Spoken Word Paris, Paris Lit Up, French Fried Comedy, which all have a open mics. Then there’s AWOL writing workshop, B’AM and several different pop up salons. Each is unique in its format and audience, but they’re all the same in that their readers are always from every continent on the globe, so you get an entree of the planet by being at their readings. Also, the caliber from master to beginner is in full effect until you go to Berkeley Books Of Paris features music and writers and artists of all genres, their unpredictable and always great readings, exhibitions, and performances. Ivy Writers is where you find only the professional poets, who publish widely, teach in university, have well known publishers and celebrated books available. At all of these venues you’ll find internationally respected poets, both in academia, street culture and often times in pop culture. Then there’s Poets Live, which I host, we feature poets from everywhere on earth who have books published or are finishing them, and also performance artists. We don’t do music, we don’t do open mics. Then there’s Angora which is a selection of professional poets only, that read in the open mic format. So between all those venues, you can learn and be inspired by the entire world of poetry.
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Christian Niedan is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. In the past, he managed the film website Camera In The Sun, which looked at how people think of the places and cultures they see on screen. He is a regular contributor to literary arts site Nomadic Press and At Large Magazine, where he publishes interviews with writers and photographers.

A Conversation with Amir Hariri

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BY M. SULLIVAN

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(BATH HOUSE, oil and acrylic on board)

“I want you to have that experience that you have walking down a quiet street and looking through a fence and seeing a dilapidated, brick building.” This is what Amir Hariri tells me as I look around his windowless studio on the seventh floor of a high-rise in Midtown. Somehow the small space doesn’t feel cluttered despite the significant amount of work along the walls, on the tables, and stacked in the corners.

At first glance, Hariri’s works do have the familiar look of a building. The components are architectural and structural, yet distorted. Not surprisingly, he studied architecture and engineering as an undergrad at the University of California, San Diego and he also holds a masters in structural engineering from Cornell.

His extensive background in these professional fields inevitably and understandably seeped into his work as a painter, producing abstract works that are compositionally and technically intricate. He considers his approach as similar to other “artist-engineers” or “technical artists” like Alexander Calder —  an American sculptor whose works often use kinetic energy or motor power.

“When I’m painting I’m exploring surface, depth, space.”

It all started with Cezanne, according to Hariri’s timeline.  Cezanne broke up the surface. And that’s precisely what Hariri wants to do. “There is a surface to be explored in a methodical, structural way,” he says, “and I want to explore the process of breaking down an object before we subject or burden the object with our own experiences.”

He had an epiphany while living in Williamsburg and the old Domino Sugar Factory was taken down. He realized he only truly noticed a building once it was gone. Our memories of ruins, the ruins themselves, and the ensuing deconstruction and reconstruction is what fascinates him and drives his work.

There’s a way we react to decay, either by succumbing to it or resisting it. And this idea creates a parallel between buildings and people — they are made, they serve a purpose, they die or are removed, turn to ruin, or they are preserved in some romantic way. With this in mind, he asks himself the question: “How do we create a subjective or subconscious experience of this?” That is, of the memory of a place, the feeling which a particular place can evoke, this passage of time, and of structure and decay. The key for Hariri is subjectivity and subconsciousness and the passivity through which these two things become ingrained in us.

“Memory does not document. It functions to document — but it doesn’t completely — at the same time it’s recording it’s becoming opaque.”

Before he starts a new work he will go to a place, but not to observe, not to take pictures or sketch drawings, but simply to activate his memory. He goes to visit — just to be there. He’ll talk to people, visit again, walk around, and then mull on these visits for weeks or months until all that remains is his subjective, subconscious memory of the place. Then he approaches the memory by painting, drawing, and sculpting. Soon an impression is formed — an impression influenced by the past but now also by the present as what he feels the day that he produces the work will naturally leak into the finished piece: “We cannot help but project our own condition onto things.”

(VILLA NOVA, oil and acrylic on board)

He tells people to imagine walking the same street, the same corner, for years, going home or to work, and then one day you find yourself on the other side of the street and you see a blue awning that you’d never seen before. Your reality is unmade and remade in that moment. The ensuing surprise that mingles with the familiarity of the street is what he hopes to capture in his work. His works thus become the sum product of multiple experiences, and in this way he tries to communicate with the viewer — by giving them a multi-faceted, panoramic view. And this gives his works a truly cubist feel as you decide how to look at something from so many varied angles simultaneously.

It’s an attempt to get inside the viewer’s head. He wants to see what they see and portray every possibility. As such, he’s not interested in being “pure to the visual.” Instead he aims to take the three-dimensional and flatten it, giving his paintings an incredible amount of abstraction. By doing so, he hopes to question what the projection of reality is.

“‘When told the story of a prince turned into a frog and turned back into a prince, children have no doubt that the frog is still a prince.’ —Chomsky said that.”

Hariri chases this idea when he starts a new piece. To keep with the metaphor, he wants the viewer to see the frog and the prince in the same instance. He goes on to explain that people “build with associations” and as a result our eyes take short cuts. “Especially in abstract paintings — we look for short cuts: is it this, is it that?” And he wants to mess with these perceptions by distorting the perspective, changing the space and the relationships between objects in that space.

His overall goal is to create something which never becomes familiar — a piece where there aren’t any shortcuts, and the eye is forced to keep looking. This is how he feels he can best communicate with the viewer — through abstraction, because “abstraction strips something to its core,” something to which everyone can relate.

(RAW MANIFOLD, oil and acrylic on board)

“Roof is shelter, wall is separation — there’s a hierarchy and I use those archetypes to show you ideas in my paintings. So if I show you a stair I want you to move your eye up, if I show you a wall I want to stop your eye.”

In this way, the work is very analytical. He mentions a slew of painters from the cubist, dadaist, surrealist, abstractionist, and abstract expressionist movements and says that, to him, they are are all analytic painters. There’s something they notice that they keep coming back to, trying to figure it out.

This theoretical quality emerges in his interests outside of the studio-proper as well. One of his current projects is an app which uses computational aesthetics to analyze a scene and determine the best way to photograph the scene. Algorithms create feedback loops that point towards an ideally composed image. The algorithms can be calibrated and he even uses them for his own artistic practice. In this light, Hariri say, “I consider my work to be research” — continuing the long line of analytical artists before him.

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M. Sullivan studied art and design at Northeastern University, English & American Literature at New York University, and is a current grad student in The New School’s MFA program. He lives in Brooklyn.

Unearthing NIGHT SOIL: An interview with Dale Peck

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(Soho Press, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY MAIKIE PAJE

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Judas Stammers knows what it means to be different. He’s intelligent, shy, and unabashedly irreverent. His mother is Dixie Stammers, handcrafter of perfectly spherical, perfectly identical pots that sell for millions of dollars. His ancestor is a nineteenth-century coal magnate who put up a school to take care of a mountain he built at the end of his life. That Judas is a gay boy who yearns for a relationship with one of his schoolmates and has anonymous sexual encounters in a roadside rest area are the most normal things about him. Oh, and he has a vivid birthmark that covers one side of his body. That’s just the surface of Dale Peck’s thirteenth book, Night Soil.

Born in Long Island, raised in Kansas, and now based in New York, Peck began his writing career in the MFA program at Columbia University in the 1980s. His first novel, Martin and John (1993) is considered a gripping must-read about the era of AIDS. Over the years, he’s gained a reputation as a cutting literary critic, with the most notorious of his reviews compiled in his 2004 book, Hatchet Jobs. Peck is a writer well-versed in the eclectic and iconoclast. He has been imparting his, candid, straight-to-the-point insights to students in Creative Writing Program at The New School for several years.

One sunny afternoon this summer, I had the pleasure of meeting up with him in a Brooklyn coffee shop for a tell-all about his new novel.

Maikie Paje: You’ve gone through so many phases in your writing and your style’s changed over the years, so who is the Dale Peck who wrote Night Soil?

Dale Peck: This book came out of a lot of different places, seven or eight different impulses. I wanted to write a difficult book, the hardest book I could possibly write. I always write about family and sexuality, and I wanted to write about race and the environment. I wanted to write something that was very formal on the level of the sentence, maybe demanding a little more attention than some of the other things I write. I don’t think this is a permanent way of writing for me, especially because the narrative is so deeply embedded in the book. It took a lot of planning.
The real first impulse for Night Soil was this crazy thing many, many years ago. I was the prize in a raffle. If you won the raffle, you got to commission a book review from me. You could tell me what the book was and whether I should give the book a good review or a bad review. I was very well-known for writing nasty book reviews at a certain period of my career. So, when this raffle was happening, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was being published. “You will be asked to review Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and you will be asked to give it a good review,” that’s what everyone said. The person who won the review was actually a New School student. She wasn’t quite in on the joke, so she said, “I’m going to make it hard for you, you gotta give Freedom a bad review.” I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but it closes with the establishment of this large nature preserve. There’s also a lot of writing about nature in the book that I kind of wanted to offer a different view on. The conservancy in my book started out as a response to the nature preserve in Freedom.

MP: You said, “started out.” Aside from Franzen’s Freedom, what drove the creation of Night Soil?

DP: It was also originally part of a larger book project, a book of eleven short stories and one novella. It was supposed to be the novella. I wanted the whole thing to be about 25 to 30 thousand words and it was very clearly not going to be that. I think the first chapter of that piece is 15 thousand words already. The book of short stories was responding to another book of short stories (because this is something that I often do)—well, essays in this case—called The Twelve Caesars by second century Roman historian Suetonius. One person once described him to me as the Kitty Kelley of Roman historians. There was no competing with Livy, the definitive hagiography of the culture and the people and everything else, so Suetonius decided to do something different—a very novel idea at the time—which was to tell the truth, to describe people in their imperfections. We owe our knowledge of the fact that Caligula and Nero and probably a few other emperors were incestuous to Suetonius. He had a really great eye for detail. The sentence that really got me was that, when he was talking about Tiberius, the third emperor, he said that Tiberius was so strong that he could press his thumb through the skull of a teenage boy. That’s a good detail!

I was struck by a similarity between his characters and a lot of my characters, which is that they have these hero complexes and think that everything would be fine “if you would just do exactly what I said.” It was a long series of projects that I was working on and now I actually don’t know if I am going to finish it or not. Night Soil was going to be the Caesar Augustus story.  The whole reason why Judas has a purple birthmark is because of the color’s associations with the Roman emperor, little things like that.

MP: How did Night Soil go from that original Suetonius response story to the full-fledged novel it is now? What was the process, rather, the evolution like?

DP: At the time I started the book, I thought that I was about to receive this very large check. I thought, “I’m just going to make this book as weird, as dense, as strange as I can, and I don’t care if it just sells three copies! It’s just going to be for me, so I’m going to have fun with it!” I worked on it for six months and it became clear that I was not going to get this particular windfall, so I wrote five or six other books (mostly not under my own name). I came back to Night Soil two or three years ago, and there was no making it more normal. I said, “I like the book” so I was just going to follow its very strange logic where it led me.

Some of my books, I plan out ahead of time and I have a really clear idea of what they’re going to be. But this one was just very incremental; a lot of things were discovered in the course of the writing process which is why it took me three and a half years of writing time plus another five years of background cogitation to get it all together.

MP: Your book covers so many issues and topics at once. Which really came first: creating Judas Stammers or his long, convoluted family history?

DP: Octavian, Augustus Caesar, was adopted by Julius Caesar, but his actual family were the Balbi, which translates into the Stammerers. It was straight up taken from that and I was torn between either calling them the Stammerers or giving one of the characters a stammer. But there’s that John Irving book already and Jonathan Lethem’s narrator in Motherless Brooklyn has Tourette’s so I didn’t want to do any weird vocal tic. I think the first real thing that crystalized for me was Dixie’s pottery. And I knew Judas’s father was going to be missing the whole time, so I just began looking for reasons why he would be missing. I didn’t realize he was going to turn out to be Dixie’s twin brother until fairly late in the book.

MP: That was a crazy plot twist! Would you consider it an unusual choice for you?

DP: You know, in my generation, there was just a lot of incest in our books. It was just a very big thing then. For me, it’s a go-to plot point. I have to not do it but, you know, it’s just such a kick! It was usually very traumatic in the books of my youth, except in the case of Kathy Acker’s very famous book Blood and Guts in High School, in which this father and daughter are having this torrid affair. The daughter loves it. She gets mad when he breaks up with her and ends up marrying some other woman. Dirty, dirty, nasty little book!
I didn’t want to normalize the incest in Night Soil. I wanted you to feel bad for poor Dixie, that her brother loved her so much that he had to run away from her. They slipped up that one time and look what happened!

MP: Let’s backtrack a bit and talk about your setting. You said you based it on a nature preserve. What led you to choose, rather, to create this very specific fictional location and its background?

DP: I was very interested in the idea of writing about regionality in the US without specifying the place. I say that it’s in the South, but I never really say where. The winter, as I made it, is probably a little colder than you get in the South. I looked at a lot of maps of Tennessee for inspiration and I’ve driven though that state a few times. They have nice mountains and it does get a little colder up there than it does in other places in the South. But the setting in the book is not really Tennessee. I wanted to give it a southern but also vaguely midwestern ruralness, with the embedded ideas about race and such.

The idea of going all the way back to Marcus’s time was originally not part of the book, but once I went there, it became endlessly more fascinating. It came to dominate the book. Everything that happened in the front story is because of what had gone on in the past. Researching about coal mining and that crazy age of the robber barons was so fascinating. I had various ideas, but the first line just came to me, as it sometimes does, and it went on from there and I followed it into all these funny places. There was a lot of revision, a lot of stuff I’m always telling students not to do, like knowing what you’re going to do ahead of time to save yourself from having to rewrite everything. I rewrote this many, many times as I tried to work out the kinks. I was very pleased when my editor was willing to publish it because it’s just so damned strange. I was never in a hurry. I took my time with it and let it take me where it was going to take me.

MP: When I think about the past of the South, I think about cotton and tobacco plantations. Why did you choose to write about coal mining? It’s a very loaded topic, so was there a specific motivation for taking that direction?

DP: One of the issues that I had with Franzen’s Freedom is the idea that there happens to be this thing called nature and it’s distinct from human culture. I don’t believe that. Often, when you hear people talking about nature, what they’re really talking about is an artificial construct called nature and I wanted someone to literalize that. Eventually, I came up with this fake mountain range that Marcus Stammers had built. Who the hell can afford to build a fake mountain range? Well, he’s going to have to be someone with an enormous fortune. How did people make fortunes in the 19th century? There are only half a dozen ways and one of the big ones is mining of some kind.
I chose coal because I think coal is a hot-button issue today. We do have a lot of coal in the US but it’s a terrible, terrible way to make energy. On one hand, we can free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, but on the other hand we’re going to pollute the sky and so on. It’s just a really, really messy, messy business. I did know, once I’d created the conservancy and the coal mines, that I was going to have to destroy the coal mines at the end. A seam of coal that big—people are going to be lining up to get at it, sort of wolves at the door waiting to start drilling again.

MP: How did the idea to destroy the coal mine evolve into creating the Academy? It was where former slaves would eventually become students and teachers. Was it a dig at the so-called white man’s burden or was it a manifestation of Marcus Stammers’ guilt?

DP: I wanted the Academy to be something that had started out as just a complete ruse on Marcus Stammers’ part. Basically, he closed the mines because there was going to be a law suit and he was probably going to lose everything because he’d killed too many workers due to negligence. Even though they were black people and it was the 19th century, he recognized there was a very major threat. He was really old by then and he didn’t care anymore anyway, so he said, “we’ll close the damned mines!” And then he needed a project (when he did something he didn’t do it halfway, he did it a 110 percent), so he started building this mountain range and stream. Then he realized that he’d need someone, something, to take care of it. He didn’t want it to look like a business and so he called it a school. But all the school was really doing was teaching gardening. Then, as it happens, somebody signed on to work for him and had their own ideas about things. Eventually, this other philosophy emerged. There’s a weird moment at the end of Marcus’s life which could have been pure delusion or could have been some sort of genuine breakthrough: he spouted a few words and these people made up a philosophy out of it.

Though everything originated as a white man’s dream with white man’s money, it ends up completely run by black people for black people. And okay, this institution, like so many American institutions, has racist roots and is now being perpetuated by black people. Or have they reclaimed it in some way of their own? I definitely wanted readers to wonder about it, the fact that in a hundred years, no one has ever dropped out, no one has ever run away, everyone just stayed until the end and somehow converted to the cause. Is that a testament to its persuasiveness or to the cultish nature of the project? Again, I didn’t want there to be a super clear answer to that.

In the first draft, I wanted to write something, something at a ‘school’ and I just changed the word to ‘Academy’ and let that sit in my head a while. I wrote the first two chapters before I stopped writing the first time. I put it away for a little while, then probably six or five years ago, I wrote the Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow.

MP: Can you talk about that parable a bit? I enjoyed seeing it at the end of the book, trying to solve it on my own. How did you decide to tie it in with the main story?

DP: Initially, that was just a short story but then very quickly, I realized that this story was enunciating some of the ideas floating around in Night Soil, which was then still very unfinished. I put it in the context of the Academy and began exploring it that way. Writing that really helped me understand what the Academy was doing, at least from a philosophical point of view, and to sort of get back into the book and write the rest of the story.

It’s probably one of my favorite short stories. My last book as well had this sort of a right turn at the end. Like, here’s one narrative, and here’s something rather different appended to it. I don’t know if it’s becoming a pattern. I have half a dozen strange little pieces and I may very well tack them onto the end of various books over time.

MP: Let’s talk about the Academy’s one glaring white student: Judas Stammers. He’s quite the crazy, complex, and irreverent character! Where’d Judas come from? Was he an idea that became a character or did you base him off someone?

DP: I think there’s a lot of me in Judas, especially my dark, dirty urges, then magnified into perversions. I like the challenge of writing a character who is smarter than I am and who is more educated than I am. With Judas, especially from the education point of view, he really knows a lot. It was hard for me to indicate the extent of his knowledge because he knows so much more than I do and also to make it seem very natural in the context of all that. I have a lot of anger at political and social and philosophical injustice in the world. In giving Judas this birthmark, I think he gets so many sympathy points as it were, for this anger that people can tolerate. If you were walking around like that and everyone was staring at you, you’d be really angry too. I think that disarms readers a bit.

In the Kirkus review for Night Soil, the reviewer said that Judas’s birthmark was a symbol of his family’s misdeeds. Even though, on some level, I knew people would think of it this way, I tried not to. There are some things you just know are going to happen. Heather Abel was my student when she was working on The Optimistic Decade and I told her, “you know people are going to think about this as a metaphor for Israel, right?” She said, “No, absolutely not!” When the Times review came out, the reviewer talked about what a lovely metaphor it was for the state of Israel. Heather definitely knew what they thought, but if you write to that, then you make it too one-dimensional. So for me, that tattoo—it was always more of a tattoo in my head in a way than a birthmark—was just a way for Judas to disarm the reader, to get sympathy so that he could be angry without alienating people. He’s already rich and male and white. He’s got a lot going for him. He’s too entitled and he’s just going to sound whiny, but if he’s got this crazy, weird mark covering half of his body, it makes people more sympathetic when he rails against the deep-seated perversity of our culture. People are more likely to listen to him.

As the world crystallized, I thought about how the reader was likely to respond to him. I think legacies can be really deforming when it’s just that overwhelming. Look at the Jacksons, the way that they destroyed their faces in the relentless pursuit of fame—and that’s just pop music. Or think about crazy royals and all the nutty, inbred traditions they uphold. We all just like Harry because he seems relatively like a human being even while he goes through all the motions. I think that someone with a legacy like Judas’s is likely to be a little strange.

MP: How much of the way Judas describes things in technicolor comes from the author’s personal style choices and how much of it is from Judas being simply smart, crazy, vivid Judas?

DP: I’m going to say it’s a little more Judas than it is me. The sentences are not very typical of me. I’ve done them before, but not for very sustained passages like this, never for more than like five or ten pages or one little character who’s part of a much bigger picture. To do the whole thing like that was a lot of hard work, just a lot of revising of every single sentence, every paragraph. It was definitely the character who created himself and created his voice, and I just really tried to listen to that and realize it in a distinct way.

MP: In most writing, you see sentences or paragraphs about beautiful landscapes or scenery and think “oh, that’s the author.” But where did that absolutely filthy rest area bathroom scene come from?

DP: Many years ago, when my third novel came out in 1998, I was reviewed with a writer who just happened to be a good friend of mine, Heather Willis. Our books were described as transgressive and were both panned. They said people who write transgressive books are just trying to shock people. Neither Heather nor I considered our books transgressive, nor were we trying to shock anybody. We were both just trying to tell the truth about our experiences, either personal ones or just the way we see the world. This very square reviewer thought that we were just trying to shock people with weird, crazy things like sexual compulsions or families that beat up their children. It’s just the world that we grew up in, sorry!

I like some transgressive books, like George Bataille’s Story of the Eye. It has these little kids, like eleven- or twelve-year-olds having sex on an altar and raping the priest, peeing on him… It was like early 20th century Marquis de Sade. I wanted to write something that I thought was transgressive in my book. I wanted to show how inculcation in a profoundly western, Greek philosophical tradition could lead you to the level of depravity that Judas reaches. It took a lot of cogs and levers and everything else to get there, but, definitely—100 percent—I want to shock people. I’d never wanted to shock people before, but that was the goal here.

MP: So, the tattoo—see, I’m saying it now, thanks—was meant to attract attention one way or the other. How does that figure into the idea of Judas as a sexual being?

DP: I’ve written Judas as a very modern person in the sense that his sexual orientation isn’t an issue for him. That’s partially because at the Academy, like any all-boy institution, especially all-boy schools, there are going to be lots of boys having sex with each other and most of them will not grow up to be gay. It’s about what’s handy. Teenagers want to have sex, and if all you have are people of the same sex around you then that’s who you’re going to have sex with. Boys have been doing that since time immemorial. Judas was in that environment and he had a mom who didn’t care. Fine, be gay and everything else, but you have this tattoo, this birthmark, and that’s going to make it hard to find people who are not put off—just speaking realistically about how the world works.

Sex in roadside rest areas and public bathrooms, it’s a very timeless gay pastime. It’s fading away by and large. In England, it’s still very popular. I lived in England for three years, and my roommate had a standing date in the fourth-floor bathroom of the South Bank Centre in London. He’d go there every Thursday and meet this guy. After nine months they decided, “why don’t we get a coffee” and dated for a couple of years. But you know, they just had sex in the building while Shakespeare plays were being performed downstairs.

MP: Did you draw on a lot of other real-life stories for Judas’s exploits?

DP: I read a lot of gay literature about cottaging and I actually wrote a story that was inspired by my friend’s adventures in those bathrooms. There was a cemetery he used to go to, too, and all kinds of crazy locations. For good or for ill, gay men will have sex anywhere.

Judas’s was basically a kid with a large mark. It was bound to cause psychological damage. If you’re learning to have sex, it’s not the healthiest environment in which to learn. I hope that the reader can see how much he was enjoying it and how bad it was for him at the same time. To me, the redeeming value of the scene is that it’s tragic. This poor kid has such contempt for the way he looks and can only find sexual pleasure in this environment that reeks of feces and urine. He convinces himself that he’s in a sort of sexual heaven. I know people who really love cottaging, but I’ve never met anyone who cottages in a place like that. I don’t think that for this kid, though, with all his baggage, that this was ever going to be healthy for him. He might be having a good time, but he was still fourteen when he started.

MP: How would you characterize Judas’s relationship with his fellow Academy student, Lovett Reid?

DP: I always knew he was going to end up having some kind of relationship with a legacy at the school. I wanted most of the kids who went there to have come from orphanages, to not have a specific connection to it, but I also wanted a few of the students to be actually descended from the slaves Marcus had working in his coal mines. They had to be very conscious of it. So to be Lovett Reid, whose father forces him to go to this school, which, to Lovett, seems to be a symbol of the enduring legacy of slavery yet somehow seems to his father to be a better education than he’s going to get in a private school—you can imagine his anger. It would also give him an independence because he feels like an outsider at that school. I’d say 360 students or something like that—I worked it all out so it comes out to 444 with the faculty and the teachers—are all living together in this foundry. They all have this shared identity of being orphans, whereas the half a dozen townies all have families to go home to. They’re outsiders, just like Judas is. It seemed that if Judas was ever going to get lucky with a boy in his school, it would be with one of the legacies who also felt like something of an outsider.

There’s just that childlike innocence—they were in upper sixth form, the equivalent of 12th grade—about staring at things that adults are taught not to stare at and being fascinated by things that adults would be too self-conscious or perhaps even too nice to be fascinated by. Lovett just finds Judas’ birthmark interesting. He doesn’t mean to be cruel, but Judas is acutely conscious of the fact that’s what Lovett finds attractive or interesting about him. That, and treating him like this sort of dress up doll. I never really decided if Lovett was gay or not. To me, his identity was just as a legacy at the school. How would a legacy student at the Academy treat Judas, not how a gay boy or a straight boy or even a black boy would—just how would a legacy at that place with all the history like that treat the great-great-great-grandson of the founder. Judas is gay as the day is long, but Lovett, I never decided.

MP: Speaking of characters being full-formed or undecided in the progress of the novel, we haven’t really talked about Dixie Stammers, Judas’s mother and a self-styled potter. How did you come up with her character? Was she inspired by anyone in particular?

DP: Unconsciously, I think that she’s inspired by the mother of an ex-boyfriend of mine who was a potter. She made very beautiful Japanese-inspired porcelain, nothing obsessive. Temperamentally, that woman could not be any more different from Dixie if she tried. I wanted the mother to be some kind of artist, not necessarily to the exclusion of her parental duties, but being a parent was not the center of her existence. Most children define that as a huge betrayal, especially with the mother (which is unfortunate and unfair—the double standard that women get placed in all the time). Fathers are expected to have jobs, careers, and all that, whereas mothers are supposed to just have a supplementary income to support the family. The family is their first love, all that sexist bullshit.

I wanted Dixie to be a great artist of some kind. I didn’t know if great meant talented or just meant being obsessive and individual. Somehow pottery came in because Liz (that ex’s mother) is just the sweetest lady and I used to love the fact she made pots and she used a wheel—obviously Dixie did not —then I just sort of came up with pottery and did some research on certain ancient traditions of that art. I was very surprised to learn that a sizeable chunk of pre-Columbian pottery was made with the coil method, which seemed fairly amazing to me. I don’t know if any of those pots are completely spherical, the Native American ones, but a lot of them are pretty damned close. They are just amazing feats of craftsmanship and so I just began building up what Dixie was making as something like that. Slowly, this idea of identicality and mechanical perfection emerged and took shape. Out of anything that I’ve created, Dixie’s pots are my favorite. I don’t know how I got there, but I find the idea of a person doing this to be endlessly fascinating. It just holds my attention.

MP: Dixie’s strange brand of negligence is a very big part of her character. Was that intentional or a byproduct of her being such an obsessive artist? Or was it something else?

DP: I wanted this neglectful mother. I think I was kind of inspired by the mother in Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai. I really love the relationship between the mother and son in that book, which is much closer than the relationship between Dixie and Judas but has some similarities in some strains.

I wanted Judas to be headstrong. To my mind, Dixie understood her son better than he did himself. She understood how independent he was. I think it’s probably difficult to look at the product of your incestuous union with your brother with completely neutral eyes, especially when he has this birthmark. Obviously, the chances of this birthmark went up because she and her brother both carry the gene. I looked it up, there’s a 300 million to one chance that someone is carrying the gene, and even if both parents carry the gene, the odds of it are hundreds of thousands to one that both people will pass on the gene to the child for this to happen. You look at the birthmark and you think of it as a sign of sin, but really, it’s just bad, bad luck. It’s the son she had with her brother, the one time she slept with him, and that’s got to make you feel weird.

I think also, Dixie is this woman surrounded by this incredibly male tradition. I don’t even mention the grandfather’s wife’s name, which would not have been important in the family history. It’s all about the men. The men, the men, the men. She’s excluded from this whole tradition, but she’s brilliant, and she explores it. She’s obviously smarter, more talented than her father, and she knows that her son is being steeped in the same tradition. She’s letting him go to the school. She knows that’s part of it and she believes you have to find your own way with that. Maybe it’s tough love, maybe it’s neglect.

MP: Night Soil has a memoir-like quality to it. How far back in Judas’s past is the main story, and does it being in retrospect affect the way that he tells it?

DP: To my mind, the book is being written around now. Judas is almost 20 years older than he is at the time the book takes place. He’s definitely looking back on it from a distance. I can never decide if I think that Judas is completely fucked up or if he’s relatively sane, all things considered. On one hand, maybe he’s completely nuts in his own self-destructive way or maybe he’s found a way to synthesize all this information and history and his physical self into a mode of being that kind of works for him.

MP: You estimated that you worked on Night Soil for six or eight years. A lot of that time included a huge amount of research. What was the most fun thing to research? Was there anything that you struggled with to make this book your version of believable?

DP: I liked learning about pottery. It was very deliberate there at the end when she begins making her own clay. I didn’t look up ways that you can’t do it, but I’m pretty sure you can’t actually do it the way she did, watering down and diluting clay and purifying it. I always liked that sort of flaw in the carpet, as it were, just to indicate the unreality, but then I really invest in it.

When I wrote a book about my father’s experiences on a dairy farm, I invented this entire apparatus that I called the boom collar as a way of locking the cows in place so they don’t run away when you attach the claw to the udders – just a suction tube, really nothing major. But it was terrible. I just invented this whole apparatus and I gave it half a page, but it doesn’t exist. And I love throwing in a little thing like that because I’m not a realist. I like fooling people. I like it when people are reading something and go “is this real?” and they’re reminded they’re in a book.

I did look up lots of other things like how those things work. Some of that knowledge sticks around and some of it goes away, and a lot of it was just looking things up for the sake of the book, for the sake of making Judas sound erudite. My single favorite word in the book is orological, which means mountain building. I discovered it while doing a crossword puzzle after I had finished the book. It went in the very final draft.

MP: With all the twists and turns of events in the book, is there a scene you’d call your favorite, something you loved working on best?

DP: I really love the book, I have to admit. I love the beginning of chapter 4, when Marcus makes the mountains, that particular history. I really love the rest area scenes—so over-the-top. I love the parable.

Oh, you know what I really love? The scene where Dixie’s mother and father and brother see the shadow coming off the mountain. The first time they see Potter’s field, her brother and her father turn around and she sees the deer get out from under the shadow and run off. She has this kind of moment. It’s somewhere in chapter 3. Nothing too terribly perverse going on!

MP: To wrap up, how would you sum up Night Soil?

DP: I tried to pack every damned thing I could in there. I wanted this book to have a lot of layers.
I guess I’d say it’s about intersectionality, to use a very modern word. It’s about what happens when family and race and nature and philosophy intersect with desire and where that takes you. Which is shaping which? Is the desire shaping all these other ideas or are all these other ideas shaping your desire?

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Maikie Paje is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at The New School. She is a former English teacher from the Philippines and her main creative interests are fantasy, speculative fiction, historical fiction, and literary fiction. Her work has been published in The Philippine Star, Home Lifestyle and Interiors, Blush Anthology, The Inquisitive Eater, and The Rumpus.

 

The Days of Vita Gallitelli: The life of a nineteenth-century peasant reminds us what it means to be a migrant and a woman today in a hostile world

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(Dey Street Books, 2017 in English)

INTERVIEW BY JOHN APRUZZESE

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This month, Helene Stapinksi’s non-fiction novel Murder in Matera about her Italian great-great grandmother will be issued in France as Les jours de Vita Gallitelli. Recently, on a cold, damp morning in April, I sat down with her at McNally-Jackson bookstore in Manhattan—midpoint between her adopted home of Brooklyn and her native Jersey City, and an ocean away from the Italian region Basilicata where Vita spent years of hardship before migrating to the United States—to talk about the book’s origins and its imminent release in Europe.

The novel’s translation into French comes at a critical moment in American and European political and social life in light of current trans-Atlantic debates about migration and discrimination against vulnerable, marginalized persons. While some family stories give us a window into the lives of our ancestors, Murder in Matera draws a clear connection between those lives and the world we live in today. We learn of the practice of prima notte—the institutionalized rape of women on their wedding night—that existed, shockingly, well into the twentieth century in southern Italy. We see how the lives of our immigrant ancestors can teach us how we should treat those migrating today. Stapinski shows how the lessons of the past are like fallen seeds for us to gather, so that together we can sow a more compassionate, prosperous future for all.

All of this is done playfully, as we follow Stapinski through the minefield of Vita’s life and the suffering that drove her to leave her home for the unknown, at times hostile, shores of a new country. We live her fears for her children, her rage against religion, her frustration in navigating the world of southern Italy, and her joy in learning that the past can be redeemed.

John Apruzzese: Murder in Matera is more than just a family story. Why did you feel it urgent to write this book now?

Helene Stapinski: It took twelve years. When I started writing, I saw a New York Times article on Matera showing a religious icon on the walls of a local cave, known as the Crypt of Original Sin, that looked just like me. It freaked me out. I saw it as a sign. Over time, I became more and more obsessed. There are two kinds of reporters—those that come back with excuses, and those that come back with the story. I always get the story. I was like an attack dog. But when people didn’t talk to me, it got me. People seemed ashamed about the sex, not so much the murder. What stopped people was the Gallitelli reputation. A woman’s reputation carries over hundreds of years and shames the people still living in a place.

JA: You grew up hearing stories about your great-great grandmother, Vita, the book’s heroine. How did what you discover match or not the stories you’d heard?

HS: The family stories were limited. All the details were upside down. So I used myself as the stand in for Vita. We knew from family lore she was lively and what she looked like. Just based on what she did in her life—coming over with two kids—you have to be a badass. I believe she was channeled through me. I could see the type of mother she was. The mothers in my family are fierce. She was a heroine. She changed the fate of our family. She lived a painful life in Italy for 50 years, and came to America alone with her children.

JA: As a non-fiction writer, you focus on facts. In your book, however, you foray into lyrical and fictional writing. Why did you make that choice?

HS: When I began writing the book I came up empty handed. So I started reading about Basilicata in order to knit the place together. But as the story developed I realized I wouldn’t be able to tell it from a removed place. I needed to take the reader inside, and non-fiction wasn’t able to do that. It was a little hard for me because I’m trained as a reporter. But my agent told me I needed to take a leap. When we sold it, the editor was completely on board. It was sort of like Godfather 2, switching between here-and-there sepia flashbacks. It was a bit of a risk. But it’s a better book because of it.

JA: What was your approach in developing the structure of the novel?

HS: Early on I realized there was a connection between my research in Matera and flashbacks to what the research revealed. Birth and death certificates, historical literature, all came together to recreate scenes from the past. Sometimes flashbacks can be jarring, but they work in this book. But it wasn’t easy getting the right balance. The three section headings correspond to court procedures: Plea, Discovery, and Trial. To set the tone at the end of chapter one, I dropped in a line from Capote’s In Cold Blood, “there was one shotgun blast and five dead bodies.” My homage to Capote.

JA: Aside from Levi’s novel, Christ Stopped in Eboli, were there other authors or literary/artistic movements that influenced you?

HS: Reading Levi’s book changed me. It had so many similarities to my story. I also read Ann Cornelisen’s Women of the Shadows and Torregreca, books set in southern Italy. Also Gay Talese’s Unto the Sons—I told the female version of his journey back home. Antonio Gramsci’s The Southern Question was important. Gramsci led me from one discovery led to another. That included Cesare Lambroso’s eugenic theory of the ‘inherently criminal character of Italians.’ I discovered these works through an Allen Room Fellowship at the New York Public Library. In terms of film, 1900 by Bertolucci helped me imagine what life was like on a masseria in Italy at the turn of the century. But also, The Godfather 2, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew by Pasolini, and Bitter Rice by De Sanctis. I looked for anything that shed light on what life could have been like for Vita.

JA: You have an obsession with genes and patterns in Murder in Matera. You fear your children have inherited a criminal gene. How real was this fear?

HS: It was more real when they were younger. My son Dean looked like my terrible grandfather, Beansie. This little person you love looks like this criminal in your family. Same thing with daughter Paulina: sometimes when she turned she looked like an aunt of mine who was really awful. But as they got older it was not a concern. And the book put to rest lingering fears. I remember researching Lambroso’s work, part of which took place in Basilicata, to see if there were pictures of my family or Vita’s face. I’d picked up on his descriptions of Italian criminals, such as thin lips, and started to see similarities in my family. It’s bullshit but it really gets in your head.

JA: A pattern returns, however. On Mischief Night in Jersey City, a sock full of rocks ultimately brings Vita’s life to an end. Do you feel there was a reckoning for Vita?

HS: Honestly, no. Things happen and we try to find reasons for them. Vita lived long considering the time she was from. While writing the story, I did feel something mystical going on, like Vita was standing in the way. But we create those things in our heads. It’s also a part of my upbringing. Something happens because you did something. Vita was no doubt considered an adulterous, and was stigmatized. But she moved into the padrone’s household to move up in the world. The padrone helped her get out of a difficult situation. Other women had gone through similar ordeals, but it’s oral history and those women are dead. The padrone didn’t make a record of his sleeping with other women.

JA: Murder in Matera sheds light on the plight of women subjected to the practice of prima notte and forced to be concubines just to make ends meet. This was Vita’s fate.

HS: I’ve thought about researching prima notte. Some Italian historians claim it didn’t exist because it’s not recorded. But think of Harvey Weinstein. Just talk to hundreds of women to find out what happened. The town historian of Bernalda, Angelo Tataranno, told me about prima notte when I mentioned Vita was considered “a man named Greco’s” puttana. He said the padrone’s name was Greco. From there, it was easy to figure out that Vita was sleeping with him by force. It was a survival tactic for many women. Interestingly, the practice of prima notte ended when people got guns. I’m not a gun supporter. But it did give people power and helped them break the feudal system.

JA: You come from a family of strong, independent women. How do you understand that feminine strength in light of persistent social and cultural views about women?

HS: It’s a big hoax. That’s the ironic thing about Italian culture. Women are the center of the family. Mario Puzo wrote the character of the Godfather based on his mother. The strong, just, bad ‘guy’ at the center of the mafia family is based on a woman. So even though women are strong, they are not governing society because men are threatened by them. Women are fierce and always have been, and it’s only coming to light now. But we’re not being given permission to be fierce, we’re taking it. It’s been centuries of men realizing the power of women and clamping it down. It’s no longer acceptable.

JA: Vita was a migrant. She managed to reach New York shortly before the US barred immigration to Italians. It’s hard not to draw similarities with the current Administration’s policy.

HS: I have a real issue with Italian Americans who are anti-immigration. They have cultural amnesia. If you look back two generations at the most, somebody in your family went through what Mexicans and Syrians are going through today. How dare you stop these people from coming into this country. They say Italians were hard workers and wanted to speak the language. Have you met a maid from Mexico in Brooklyn? Have you met a Syrian selling stuff on the street in Manhattan? They’ve escaped horrors. So I used it as a spinoff when the book came out. The 1924 Immigration Act reduced Italian immigration by 90 percent, based on Lambroso’s theories that Italians were subgrade humans. He measured their heads and said these were criminals. It was a lie then and it’s a lie now.

JA: Today, Italy is at the center of Europe’s migrant crisis. Basilicata is held up as a region in Europe successfully integrating migrants.

HS: A film I saw recently about humanitarian workers in Lampedusa helping migrants made me cry. It’s karma: Italians came here, now people are going to Italy. Are you going to treat them as you would like to be treated? Italians weren’t treated well in the US. But it seems Italy is doing a pretty good job today. But it will mean changes and problems locally and nationally, as it has in other countries in Europe like France. So people are using it to their advantage for political positioning.

JA: You oscillate between superstition and skepticism, while at the same time giving yourself to prayer. How has Vita’s story shaped your views of superstition, prayer and the Church?

HS: I’ve always prayed and continue to pray. But I still have issues with the Church. Prayer is a personal thing, as is your perception of a higher power. I’d maybe like to share it in a communal setting but the Church is not it. I inherited superstitions from my family—things like the mal’occhio. We’d place a scapula in the baby’s crib to protect her from evil spirits. There’s a feast in Basilicata called Il Maggio di Accettura, a spring fertility festival where they marry one tree to another. They’ve been doing this for millennia, only now they bring in a priest to bless the tree. Those pagan traditions survive, and immigrants brought them over. Everything we do comes from somewhere else.

JA: You say, “Italy was like a lover who was so gorgeous, he could mistreat you whenever he liked.” Did Italy meet your expectations?

HS: After my first trip, part of me never wanted to return. I thought people would be more helpful. It’s what you see in movies, the family welcomes you for dinner. But most people didn’t talk. I found myself looking at Italians in Carroll Gardens in a different way. I was always so happy to be Italian. It was stupid because I had to open up to things. I had to do my research to come at it from the right angle. Only when I relaxed and adapted to the culture did doors open. Now I want to be there all the time. You can’t impose your culture on someone else’s. It’s a basic approach to life. I have a greater appreciation of my Italian culture, just knowing what those people went through and why they left.

JA: Why do you say writing Murder in Matera was a journey of redemption and forgiveness?

HS: Because my family has a history of being criminals, it did feel like redemption. The Garden of Eden idea came to me because there is the Crypt of the Original Sin in Basilicata. When I first went, the crypt was closed, which was itself symbolic. I didn’t have the eyes to see it yet. And when I was able to, the story flowed over me. Those cave walls depicted the stealing of the fruit, which was the downfall of my great-great grandfather, Francesco, Vita’s husband, that lead to the whole story. It got me reading Saint Augustine. I had to go through the tests before I could gain access to the treasure. For our family, it was redemptive because Vita had been redeemed. We’ve gone from shame to pride.

JA: Murder in Matera was an important milestone. It took twelve years to write. Where do you go from here?

HS: I’ve always got a million projects. I’m currently doing the audio version of Five-Finger Discount. I plan on writing another book, but it’s like having a baby. I want to write a book that needs to be written. I lived in Alaska in my twenties. There was a child molester there who founded the radio station where I worked. I want to write that story but I’m afraid it’s too ugly. But the people I was with in Alaska want me to write it. It would also be about forgiveness because this person, a Jesuit priest, ruined our spiritual lives. All of us left the Church because of him. He molested dozens of young girls, made some get abortions. We only found out later. We carry this burden with us. It’s going to be a pretty heavy trip.

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John Apruzzese works for the United Nations and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing (fiction) at The New School. His writing has appeared in The Adirondack Review and Brooklyn Magazine.

On Oliver Twist, Fables as Fear Holders, And A Young Girl Surviving Stalinist Russia: An interview with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

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(Penguin Books, 2017 in English)

INTERVIEW BY MIKA BAR-ON NESHER

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The Girl from The Metropol Hotel is a thin book that contains within its short vignettes an unspeakable terror: the collective memory of Russia during WWII and the turbulent decades that followed.  Ludmilla Petrushevskaya family belonged to a long line of prominent Bolsheviks who were labeled “Enemies of the State” during The Great Purge. They were brutally murdered. Cast out of the luxurious Metropol Hotel, a former Bolshevik headquarters, the few remaining women of Petrushevskaya’s family were stricken with political stigma and forced into the darkest outskirts of Soviet society. It is in this setting we encounter the voice of the young Ludmilla. Starving with a bloated stomach, searching for potato peels in the trash of a violent neighbor, she wanders the streets of Moscow barefoot in winter singing popular songs or reciting Gogol for alms. She loves books, though they are hard to come by. Her grandmother knows them by heart and recites. Though she displays exceptional academic talents, she is kicked out of every school because she is wild, untrainable, and consistently places her freedom above all else. This young child not only survives but possesses the power to make the terror beautiful with her unique imagination, to turn tragedy into a story, carving out a context for an entire nation’s loss to rest within and remember.

My Skype rings imitating an old phone. I’m waiting for Anna Summers to answer. Born in Moscow, Summers earned a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard; this is the fourth book she has translated by Petrushevskaya, the first memoir. She tells me about her first encounter with her work as a young teenager. During Perestroika, her previously suppressed work had begun to come out little by little, Summers describes the effect it had on her as life-transforming, “I hadn’t imagined one could write like that on that kind of subject.” Summers’ voice is warm with deep respect and love for Petrushevskaya, it’s contagious.

A hybrid memoir, feat The Girl from The Metropol Hotel features drawings, images of Soviet structures, and photographs of Petrushevskaya’s family which were selected and curated by Summers to illustrate what she calls “that long vanished world”. Despite being an autobiography, and in many ways a historical account, there runs an undercurrent of magic and fable throughout the chapters. Summers explains to me that Petrushevskaya loves fables and they play an important role in the Russian literary tradition. Fables and fairytales give shape to unnameable fears, the fear of death can become a sorcerer, loss may take the form of a poisoned apple.

“Russian fairy tales are like no others” Summers explains, “They are both very formulaic and full of individual little detail. In that, they resemble Russian religious icons that follow the same established pattern but at the same time full of individuality. The most common theme is loss. One loses a favorite object, a child, a husband, a bride—often for some silly reason. And then one looks for it—for years. One overcomes countless obstacles, fights monsters, wears out seven pairs of iron shoes—and only then, at the end of seven years of suffering regains what should never have been lost. This narrative structure—loss followed by a long hard road towards recovery–is very much part of Russian mentality

“Have you ever watched Oliver Twist?” she suddenly asks.

“I’ve read the book”.

“Okay, but you should watch the musical” Summers goes on to. “It’s one of the scariest stories ever written, about a child abandoned, betrayed, tortured, starved, abused in every possible way. But the musical, which is a theatrical form that would appeal to Petrushevskaya, turns the most gruesome scenes into magical sing-and-dance numbers. Because they are seen through the eyes of a child, and to an imaginative sensitive child the world, even the world of gangsters, war, starvation, and injustice is always full of poetry and magic to this kind child.”

Today Petruvaskaya lives in Moscow, at seventy-nine years old she is famous for her paintings, books, and more recently a career as a cabaret singer.  Her courage and resilience has helped an entire generation of war children express what was mute and unspeakable. The book shows a young girl who never gives up her power, never checks the resonance of her powerful voice. As child she was a political outcast, but the power of her genius kept her intact. She never cared about publishing or fame, she has been a consistent pillar, always herself, forever attuned to finding the beauty in any setting and the truth in every story.

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Q&A with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Translated by Angela Fox & Christopher Jeffrey

 

Mika Bar-On Nesher: What was your process like when working on this book?

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: I wrote that book–as it happened–when my aunt Vava was dying. She was 93 years old and it was her first time in a hospital. She was very upset there. I, too, found myself beginning to die. I couldn’t eat. I lost 14 kilograms during the time of her gradual deterioration. Every single day, I was writing The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, and I was feeling such guilt, that at 9 years old, I had run away from them with my grandmother. Vava had already completely lost her memory, and I visited her to put her to sleep. Together with the nurse, I changed her clothes, tucked her in, mumbling to her, as a mother to a child, despite knowing that she didn’t understand anymore. And suddenly, she wriggled out (slipped out) with some strength and kissed my hand. And I thought, that I would never let her read my book.

A writer doesn’t control his or herself – I don’t, in any case. I have the impression, that from the first moment of a work, the entire text is already sitting in my head, from the first to the last word. So, this type of process that you’re asking me about doesn’t depend on me. I don’t control this dictation. It comes all on its own. It’s up to you to catch it and write it down. That’s why I always carry a notebook and pen with me. One time, a story came to be, but I was on the metro, in a crowd. And I didn’t have a pen. I arrived home, but to my complete despair, the story had gone. Only the following day, already at work, I went to the library, and by sheer willpower, knowing the story’s content, I forced it back. But it was already a different version. The poetry was gone. The rhythm was gone, the intensity, the word order, that can only be brought on by inspiration. By the way, one critic wrote that if stories match with their rhythms, then they are vers libre… but I thought in response, that’s a very long vers libre. You know, I very rarely edit a written text. I believe that it has been dictated to me as it’s meant to be. It can overtake me anywhere – on the street, on the train, in a store. Besides, as a rule, every tale is a true story. It’s true, the characters do not recognize themselves, I crucially change the surrounding circumstances. Regardless of whether the text is magical or far removed from reality – like in the book There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, for which I received the World Fantasy Award in the U.S.A in 2009. All the things in that book were also written down instantly, at once. When I was raising my children, in the neighboring room lay a sick mama, and so I got to work, right away. Now, I live alone and time started to drag. I’ve almost finished two books, but I wait for the right moment to finish them. The finale of one of them, by the way, is inspired by a James Bond film.

MB: You are one of those rare artists who possess the ability to express yourself in writing, music, and painting. What is the limit and benefit of each medium for you?

LP: I draw constantly on a scrap of paper or in the notebook that I’m writing in. These sketches – just hand movements, some sort of profiles, and then it appears to me – I seem to be making up some sort of stories with these characters. This is how many children behave, they draw, they create and compose. But serious work – watercolors, illustrations for my books, comics, cartoons, portraits, pastels, engravings – for these endeavors it takes a whole day, or even a week, when I cannot spend time on anything else. Over the last few years, I started to sell my work, to raise money to support disabled orphans whom I take care of. Harvard University’s library has purchased 21 of my works, and the proceeds support these children.

As far as the concerts, it seems, I am a born actress, who sings for morsels of bread (like Edith Piaf). This ability to stand before people and sing has long sustained me. I performed on school and university stages. And I even earned acceptance at the Conservatory, since my youth I developed a strong voice with a three-octave range. The concerts were held in grand halls, and from those experiences emerged my passion for being in front of an audience. But I stopped making appearances. Then, I only sang songs for children – or in the summer in the fields when no one could hear me, I’d perform an operatic aria. I’d scare the hares. But I was always singing at home, sitting at the piano, when no one was around. Mainly French chansons. I recorded myself with a tape-recorder, then I’d listen. I’d erase it, and record again. I was trying to sing in my own way somehow. I taught myself on my own.  After all, in private singing, you don’t need a strong voice. More important, you must find your own style, your own individuality. And suddenly, again I returned to the stage at 69 years old. It was World Theater Day, and we were celebrating in a small cafe; after all, I am a well-known playwright. Everyone came – my actors, directors, my fans and students. And I decided among these acquaintances and dear listeners to sing four songs in French. I was, all the same, terrified. But as I began to sing, I suddenly realized, that the joy of the audience was beginning to move me – to my left and to my right, we were all together in the music! All of us! In that moment, my fear left me, and in its place, happiness arrived – I returned to the stage and began to give concerts, I assembled my own musicians and formed the Kerosene Orchestra.

I began to compose my own songs. Waking up in the morning, already fully formed melodies sounded in my head. Ability arises in a person when it is needed after all… and writing the words to a song, that I could do. I am a poet, I’ve filled books with verses. Above all, I began to write songs like monologues, like little one-woman shows. Mostly about lost love. Of course, there are lots of songs about that.

I’ve toured all of Russia with my concerts. I’ve sung in New York (at the Russian Samovar), in Sao Paulo, London, Paris, in many European cities. I not only sing, but I read my rather amusing poems. I design my own hats, rings, dresses. I do my own makeup. The stage – it’s such a joy. And I consider my show to be my very own.

MB: Were fictional characters that inspired you and shaped your worldview as a child?

LP: What books influence you? Which literary heroes? For me, I drew inspiration not from books, but from the children’s groups in the summer camps and in the tuberculosis sanatoriums, where there was one caregiver for every thirty children. And we were alone in the bedrooms. And all throughout the night, I was telling scary stories. I made them up. But the collective is stern and educates children what not to do, according religious traditions – thou shalt not brag, thou shalt not be proud, thou shalt not lie, nor steal, nor sin. Thou shalt not be smarter than others, nor more talented than others. And the punishments are severe. But I always performed in the children’s shows, sang in the concerts, drew in the studios — that was my answer to the collective. I was beaten. I answered. Art is the only place for the outcasts, for the poor, for those who have it worst. The collective opinion cannot conquer them, they can only be ruined by their own inclinations and weaknesses. Alcohol, narcotics. How many of my colleagues, young writers, are dead. Even I, myself, smoked, and at gatherings of all kinds drank wine, and then, when I was pregnant at 37, I quit it all. I stopped eating meat too. But…

MB: Can you tell me what it was like when you first started trying to get published Russia? 

LP: I began writing at the age of 30, and my first story “Such a Girl, The Conscience of the World”, immediately went out to the public, and was mass copied, reprinted on typewriters. But everyone said that they would never publish it. It was published twenty years later. My first play (written in 1973) was forbidden for more than ten years – “Music Lessons”. And my second play – “Love” (1974), was permitted in 1980 and immediately was picked by the three biggest theaters in Moscow. And at 50 years of age, in 1988, came my first book of short stories with a circulation of 30,000 copies. That book, by the way, sold out in a few days. But even after I was widely known, my stories and plays were retyped by different people and were passed from hand to hand. Perhaps, back then I was even more well-known than today. Actors put on my plays in apartments…

MB: Do you have any advice for young writers and artists?

LP: One word of advice – listen! Listen to those who tell the story of their lives. There are many of them. Remember, HOW these people talk, and remember each person speaks for themselves. All of a sudden, someone’s story will hook you and it will lead you write.

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Mika Bar-On Nesher is multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Brooklyn & Tel-Aviv, she studies creative writing at the New School.

How do you live when you’re hiding who you are? A conversation with Tadzio Koelb, author of TRENTON MAKES

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INTERVIEW BY YI ZOU

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Before publishing Trenton Makes (Penguin Random House), Tadzio Koelb had poems, reviews, and essays already under his belt. Now, after four years of on and off writing, editing, and revisiting, he has completed a tale of identity, isolation, and corrupt humans living in a corrupt society. In Union Square, on one of the few pleasant days in the middle of winter, he talks about his journey in writing, the inspiration for his protagonist, and how a story set in post WWII relates to our modern world.

 

Yi Zou: How long has the idea of Trenton Makes been in your head? What inspired it?

Tadzio Koelb: A pretty long time. I remember talking about it with my thesis advisor in my undergraduate program. I was finishing a different novel then, but I had already come across the CD of jazz music by Billy Tipton, who was discovered at the moment of his death to be biologically female.

That had set me thinking about a few different things. Most immediately, how do you live when you’re hiding who you are or what your body is? How do you do that? And I took it to an extreme because I think extremes are where you find more interesting stories.

 

YZ: How long has it taken for you to complete the novel?

TK: It’s hard to say exactly, because I started a bit and then went back to revise an earlier novel that I never managed to place with a publisher. So, I usually say it’s about four years.

You just have to do it. You just have to sit down in front of the piece of paper or the computer or however you function as a writer. Right now, I’m not really doing that since I’m sort of waiting, I’m so caught up in the excitement of publishing this novel that I don’t have the ability to focus on the next thing yet.

 

YZ: Is this a story that you planned out piece by piece before you started writing, or did the plot form as you wrote it? Have these characters changed from how you envisioned them in the beginning?

TK: A little bit of both. I would outline pretty extensively, but when I went to flesh out those various different pieces, they would sometimes be much longer or shorter than I would have anticipated. There were big question marks surrounding some of the events. How to arrive at them, and what all of the various repercussions might be.

Some characters changed, very drastically. I had originally thought that Dion would be almost a cult leader, for example.

 

YZ: Did you ever encounter a block while planning or writing, and what helped you get past it? What did you learn?

TK: I think of writer’s block as just another name for fear of failure. Naturally, I experienced fear of failure all the time. I think it’s a constant. I think if you’re an artist and you don’t fear failure, you’re probably not a very good artist, because you should want to do something that you’re not sure how to do. You should be attempting to do something ambitious and difficult.

I think the most important activity to do for a writer is to read. Reading is an enormous inspiration and a source of almost comradery with other writers, even if they’re long dead. They encourage me and they lead me.

This is my first published novel, but not the first one I wrote. I had an instructor at my master’s course, who used to say, “Writing a novel teaches you how to write the novel you just wrote”. Having said that, though, it’s like anything in the sense that the more you do it, the more you understand it, the less you have the question yourself.

 

YZ: What made you so interested in the post WWII time frame? Did you have to do a lot of research?

TK: I chose that particular time, because the character was, for me, best displayed against a backdrop of isolation. I didn’t want there to be chat rooms, support groups, anything that might suggest a kind of network to which this character could turn. But, I wanted a time that wasn’t so different from our own and I believe that a lot of things that happened in WWII are still affecting the politics that we’re suffering from in America today.

I thought I was familiar, but you discover a lot of small things that would have never occurred to you to ask. How did people get rid of their garbage? Or heat their houses?

 

YZ: Is the style of non-linear storytelling something you employ often?

TK: Yes, it is. In this particular case, I was also influenced or inspired by a book called “The True Story of the Novel” by Margaret Doody. She discussed earlier forms of the novel and different ways in which novels could be structured. It inspired me to be as transgressive in the formatting of the novel as I thought the character Kunstler was in relation to his surroundings and society

 

YZ: There is this element of reincarnation through violence, from Kunstler’s husband to Kunstler and finally to Kunstler’s son. How did this motif come to be?

TK: I pulled in my discussion of Kunstler as, sort of, the ultimate self-made man. I looked at a couple of stories, one of which is Frankenstein. In this case, Kunstler is both Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster. I also looked at the story of Isis, who tried to reassemble her husband but was unable to find his sex organs. I also looked at the Nietzsche-ian statements of the revenge of the son on the father, and these kinds of violent progenitors.

 

YZ: Kunstler ends up doing some incredibly immoral things. Were you concerned with keeping your protagonist “sympathetic” or “likable”?

TK: The important thing about Kunstler is that he demonstrates how bad systems generate immoral behavior. We see a lot of stories about people facing difficulty that are shown as deeply and essentially good, but forced to do something—perform an act—bad. I think that’s a misrepresentation of the way in which we are affected by our inequalities. I think that a corrupt system creates corrupt morality which the individuals trapped inside can’t even see as corrupt. Kunstler is somebody just like that. In order to get what he wants and needs, he will do things that seem, to him, to be justified.

 

YZ: Did you experience rejections while trying to get Trenton Makes published?

TK: Oh, yes, quite a lot, in fact. There were some agents worried about the length. Specifically they thought it was too short. Some liked the first half but not the second half. And some liked the second and not the first. Some, one rather, told me she thought it read like a first draft. It’s almost exactly the same draft, with minor changes, that’s being published one month from now.

 

YZ: Are you represented by an agent, and how did the two of you connect?

TK: I’m represented by Anna Stein, at ICM. I came to her through one of the many ruses I used for meeting agents. Essentially, any time I met a person, of any kind, whether or not that person had any relationship with the literary world, I’d ask them if they knew an agent. And if I submitted my work to agents, and they said it wasn’t for them, I asked them to recommend someone else. I was always on the lookout for an introduction. I got an introduction from a colleague at Rutgers, and I was very lucky that Ana was sympathetic with the work.

 

YZ: What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

TK: For the writing part, I think write what you really want to because you’re going to be rejected a lot. It’s better to be rejected for something you meant than something you did only to please others, and ultimately, you’ll write a better book if you’re being honest. For publishing, I think luck is a huge part of it. I thought I was going to have to publish this book on a mimeograph machine and sell it on the corner. I just got very lucky, I think, that the subject matter was timely, and I found an agent who was interested, and she knew the right editors to go to, and so on.

 

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Yi Zou is a graduate student studying fiction at the New School MFA program.

[A Reviewable Feast] Adult Gummies by K. Karivalis

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Neon Burrito Publishing, 2018

A Reviewable Feast is a hybrid book review/author interview series by Mandy Shunnarah.

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“I saw the best minds of my generation artificially enhanced by the excessive nutrients of two-a-day adult gummy multivitamins, upgraded alongside their devices… going through the motions as the world watched, being completely aware they were being watched… every one of them pretending to work harder than the next but only as hard as will require the least amount of effort.”

With that howler of an opening, K. Karivalis begins Adult Gummies, her satirical novella on the battle between Millennials making art, making money, and often being disenchanted by both. The characters learn the hard way that office jobs can lack creative and spiritual fulfillment, while full time creative self-employment can lack steady income. In the parlance of our times, the struggle is real.

Jen, Kat, Dirk, and Thad work at the amorphous Company, a business whose goings-on we know nothing of besides content creation, advertising, and sales. Jen dreams of being the Content Queen, vying for the head copywriting position. Kat wants to be a “real writer” who’s creatively fulfilled. Dirk coasts along, not having to do much since his privilege as a white man already affords him more money and growth opportunities than Jen, his chief rival. Thad endures the indignities of daily racial microaggressions just going to and from work. Adult Gummies is sardonic social commentary at its best.

I talked to K. Karivalis about Millennial struggles, music as an escape, and the effect of personal branding on art.

Mandy Shunnarah: I’m curious about how this book came to be. Did you have an office job you hated where you ran into the real-life inspirations for the characters?

  1. Karivalis: I landed my first office job when I was 24 and it was at Binder & Binder (yes, the Social Security Disability law firm with ads on daytime TV) and it was bleak, like a caricature of a mundane office job. I was hired as a “writer,” which meant I wrote legal documents and had to learn all these laws about Social Security Disability, etc. The contrast between the rather alternative “artsy” lifestyle I lived the first few years after graduating college and the 9 to 5 world was jarring, almost terrifying, but in a fascinating way because it was all completely new to me. I felt like I was thrown into a movie set, like I was starring in a movie about a young woman navigating the banality of big city office life. So it felt natural to translate those experiences into a book, though I didn’t do so until a few years after I left that job. One particular character (Dirk) is very much based off of a former coworker, the others are more inspired by bits and pieces of people I know and different millennial stereotypes.

MS: One of the things I loved about Adult Gummies is that, while satirized, it’s eerily true to life for Millennials who have worked at a company that produces content. Kat says she wants to be a “real writer, not a copywriter,” and meanwhile the protagonist Jen actively wants to be a copywriter because then she’d be the Content Queen she aspires to be. And yet neither of them fit well at The Company. I imagine there are a lot of writers who feel like this right now––wondering whether they should write for the sake of creating art or write what sells, even if what sells is often substandard. How did you navigate all this? Is this dichotomy something you find yourself struggling with?

KK: The characters Kat and Jen represent this dichotomy: quit your job and pursue your writing dreams with reckless abandon or climb the ladder of being a “professional” writer in a “professional” setting, hoping that if you reach your desired position, you will be satisfied creatively while still having the comforts that 9 to 5 jobs provide. Kat’s decision to (spoiler alert) quit her job and become a “real writer” and Jen’s dedication to playing the professionalism game represent the fork in the road I feel like I am at now.

I currently work an office job but it’s part time, which gave me the time to write Adult Gummies. Before I started working on the book though, I was focused on finding a full-time professional job as a content creator and/or copywriter at a company that I thought embraced the idea of a progressive office environment and encouraged creativity, such as the Urban Outfitters corporate headquarters, which is one of the biggest employers of young creatives in Philadelphia. At the Urban Outfitters corporate headquarters, people bring their dogs to work, buildings are situated on this beautiful campus with trees and public sculptures, there are many artisan options for cruelty-free lunch, you can bring your laptop outside to work on the grass when it’s nice out––this sort of utopian idea of The New Professionalism, trying to rid office jobs of their stigma. I thought the combination of my professional experience and online “clout” (some of these jobs require a minimum amount of Instagram and/or Twitter followers) would make it easy for me to land one of these jobs, but alas, this was not the case. So I thought, ‘okay screw you I’m writing a book.’

Unfortunately, I think most young writers these days give up on The Dream and get the creative labor job and tell themselves they’ll write their novel in their spare time. But this is the climate we are in now––this is the reality of money ruling the world, in addition to health insurance, benefits, sick days, 401K, job security, etc.

About a year into working at Binder & Binder, my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack at the age of 54. I got the phone call at my desk at Binder & Binder (I had left my cell phone at home that day by strange coincidence), and immediately that environment was poisoned with that traumatic memory. I quit my job directly afterwards and worked odd jobs for a year while in a deep state of grieving. I slowly started to rebuild my life and got the part time office job I work now, as a kind of minimal-amount-of-money-making placeholder until I felt ready to return to full time work. After I applied to and didn’t get the creative professional jobs I thought I wanted, I got real with myself and thought: “this is all a big procrastination dance to avoid putting my nose to the grindstone and writing a book.” So then I wrote the book.

I don’t think I would have had the dedication, motivation, concentration it took to write the book if I didn’t go through this horrific experience, but something about being reminded on a ceaseless, obsessive basis of my own mortality and the finite reality of living really gave me the kick in the pants I needed!

MS: I couldn’t help noticing the subtle music references throughout the novel, which was a nice surprise. I saw some Smashing Pumpkins, Pink Floyd, and others. Tell me more about the soundtrack to the novel.

KK: Parts of the novel examine intergenerational workplace dynamics––how employees from each of the three generations of working age people in America right now (Millennials, Gen X-ers, and Baby Boomers) interact with each other on a common playing ground. During the after-work karaoke party, Jeff in Sales (Gen X-er) sings “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins and Kat visualizes him in the time period of the song, in the 90’s, when Jeff in Sales (in her mind) was young and still had hope for a non-conformist lifestyle, before he sold his soul to the 9 to 5 world. The line “Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage” is in a way the thesis for the entire novel: you can hate your job as much as you want but you’re still working the job. Are you a victim of the system or are you playing yourself? Are you staying at the job you hate because you don’t have the financial means to quit or do you just lack the guts?

I decided to feature this song through karaoke because I had attempted singing it at a karaoke night a few weeks before I wrote that scene and it was surprisingly hard to sing. It starts a cappella so I was off key for like half the song. The frustration of searching for the right note after the song already started really helped me vocally express the desperation inherent in the lyrics of the chorus. So that’s what happens to Jeff in Sales too––he’s visibly frustrated trying to sing on key and also visibly frustrated at his life situation. Not only being a rat in a cage, but a rat in a cage that can’t sing its favorite song properly.

The Pink Floyd lyric “All in all your just another brick in the wall,” has become such a widespread shared sentiment for feeling helpless and dissatisfied with capitalism and modern society that it’s a cliché. Because it is so iconic and well known, I liked playing with that lyric and having Kat write on her Tumblr “All in all you’re just another blown up pizza pocket shit-stain on the wall, the white walls, the pin-pricked cubicle walls of the proverbial Dilbert.” Offices are filled with many different types of walls, both physical (glass partition, drywall, cubicle, rows of ceiling-high filing cabinets) and, of course, metaphorical.

I also want to touch on Jen’s karaoke choice, which is “Escape” by Enrique Iglesias. This is funny in context because she sings it to freak out Dirk, singing he “can’t escape her wrath.” Kat also visualizes Jen in the time period of the song like she did Jeff in Sales, but it is 2001, so she gets into a thought spiral about 9/11. Associating Enrique with 9/11 seems absurd, but it kind of made his career. Right before 9/11 happened, Enrique released “Hero” and it was a hit. However, after 9/11 “Hero” somehow became the theme song of honoring all of the fallen heroes of 9/11, and he sang it at NYFD/NYPD memorials, even though it’s a song about a romance, not about actual life-saving heroes. So this sappy, romantic-sad pop song became the theme song for the NYFD/NYPD 9/11 heroes. It was the chosen song for New York radio DJs to remix with audio from rescuers and politicians speaking about 9/11. It just seems so bizarre thinking back on it now.

MS: I want to slap this novel into the hands of every Boomer who’s ever told me I should get a “real job” while asking me to do work for free and simultaneously telling me that my generation ruined the economy. At first, I thought Adult Gummies was about disenchantment with office life, but as the characters find out, freelancing in the gig economy can be worse. In your experience, do you think the economy Millennials have had to battle makes creating art more difficult or do you think it forces us to be even more creative?

KK: This is my hopeful optimist answer: Overcoming obstacles makes for interesting art. Financial obstacles force us to be not only more creative in our budgeting but also more driven and dedicated to the act of creating (because time is money so if you spend time making art it better be worth it, as in it better be spiritually fulfilling or at least make you look cool). Creating can still feel like an act of rebellion, it can still help us express complicated emotions and ideas that go against the status quo.

The internet art of the 2010’s is a good example: artists who lacked the money for a studio space and supplies used whatever software they had on their computer. Music too, like bedroom pop and vaporwave––that all came from people holed up in their rooms with nothing but a laptop with Garageband and guitar or midi keyboard. And as far as promotion goes, everything can be done through social media. Living paycheck to paycheck and working a terrible job that barely covers your expenses is a bleak existence. Dedicating ourselves to creating art gives us purpose and an escape from the monotony of our money-driven reality.

This is my jaded pessimist answer: That being said, there is no denying the current economy makes it much harder for us to do what we want. It’s difficult to live on a minimal income, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have dodged accruing massive amounts of student loan debt, credit card debt, getting sick and being unable to work, supporting family members, etc.

And the attitude we get from Boomers doesn’t help either, though it has given us such glorious tone-deaf clickbait as: “Millennials Aren’t Buying Diamonds, Why?” And that whole “if Millenials stopped buying avocado toast they could buy a house” fiasco. In recent times I have seen friends who were once set on being writers and artists choose the path of a full time job with a steady income after realizing how many risks have to be taken to dedicate yourself to your creative work.

If we take the little time and money we have and throw it all into writing a book, what if nobody reads it? What if it sucks? These were constant ruminations I had before, during and after writing Adult Gummies––a lot of self-doubt, anxiety and fear of failure.

MS: Nowadays it’s not just office workers who have personal brands––even writers and other artists are often expected to have a brand as part of their creative output. What effect do you think having (or striving to have) a personal brand has on art?

KK: I think it can have a profound effect at the beginning but then becomes problematic when the artist or writer wants to do a new project differently, thus having to not only re-brand but re-brand with grace. Marketing is so important (unfortunately) to get your work noticed and most artists or writers don’t know the first thing about marketing (unfortunately).

I picked up a bit of marketing knowledge when conducting research for Jen’s character, and also through my experiences on social media. A lot of the vocabulary in Adult Gummies is the result of my own experience trying to develop a personal brand for my Instagram account. Generally posts that had a consistent “theme” and “aesthetic” would get the most likes, and at that point in time my Instagram was my only active creative outlet (before I wrote Adult Gummies), so I put a lot of heart and time into it. Then I started developing a personal brand.

Kell Casual was my fake name associated with my Instagram account and she is a character who works in a dreary office but wants her microwaveable meals to be ethically sourced! And she rates different brands of adult gummy multivitamins on Amazon and links these reviews to her Twitter! And she writes melodramatic sonnets about hating Mondays! And she needs to know, for the sake of her brand’s philosophy: How does one make something so un-cool, cool?

Developing a personal brand included targeting Kell Casual’s biggest interests. There had to be reoccurring themes, including the character arc of writing and then finishing her book (my book). Jen’s character is kind of a vamped up, more clean-cut version of Kell Casual, like how actors stay in character for a few months to prepare for an Oscar-worthy role. I did a light version of this, performative for the internet, to create a multidimensional, round character for Jen. I lived in a similar flesh to experience similar experiences. Thus writing a book about a Millennial working a mundane office job became part of the brand, and then the brand became the book, and then the book promoted itself, and then people read it and apparently it doesn’t suck.

—

Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born writer now living in Columbus, Ohio. Her essays, poems, and book reviews have been published in or are forthcoming from The Citron Review, Barely South Review, Entropy Magazine, Southern Women’s Review, The Missing Slate, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. Read more on her website offthebeatenshelf.com.

 

Hybrid (kitchen/language/literature) spaces: a conversation with Matthew Baker

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INTERVIEW BY JENESSA ABRAMS

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(LSU Press, 2018)

We are navigating a tight kitchen. Matthew Baker is peeling sprouts off potatoes that have been aging on the counter. He’s planning to make corn chowder. I’m pouring baking soda into a measuring cup. When he reaches for a knife, I am using it to chop garlic. The pot I’ve put out to boil water for my pretzel rolls, he places a square of butter in for his soup. We move in sync and completely out of tune. We’re wearing pajamas. We’re wearing pajamas because we’re both writers who work from home, and also, we live in that home together. Much before our co-habitation, we interrogated one another at an artist residency in Vermont. Ever since, we’ve bombarded each other with questions, sometimes in a hybrid of languages. We are not strangers to inquisition, and Baker is no stranger to formal experimentation, as his debut novel, If You Find This (Little Brown, 2015), a middle grade mystery about familial love and redemption, infuses mathematics and musical notation in the prose. Three years later, enter: Baker’s debut collection. Hybrid Creatures (LSU Press, 2018) is a four-story collection, each of which is told partially in a hybrid language: HTML, mathematics, musical notation and formal logic. I first read the book in an earlier draft in PDF form. Now there is a box of paperbacks from the publisher in my living room. The conceit of Hybrid Creatures is that there are some human experiences that can only be communicated through hybrid tongues. Here, as the author’s partner, now acting as formal interviewer, while cooking alongside him, I will try to do something similar.

JA: Most evenings, when we sit down to talk, we begin with the directive: Tell me a thing or en français: Dit moi un chose, so this shouldn’t be such a leap. Tonight, tell me a thing about the inception of Hybrid Creatures. From writing the first story, did you know you were going to sculpt a collection of hybrid pieces?

MB: (meticulously chopping potatoes in quarters)

My last semester of college, I did an independent study on comics and graphic novels, which got me thinking a lot about different storytelling mediums, and the types of storytelling maneuvers that you can only do in certain mediums. For instance, a really obvious example in film would be how you can switch back and forth between color and black and white, like in The Wizard of Oz, or even Schindler’s List. Or in comics and graphic novels, the types of maneuvers that Chris Ware does with stories told in diagram form. So, I was thinking a lot about that, and about prose, and trying to think of storytelling maneuvers that only prose writers can do.

JA: (watching pretzel rolls as they rise underneath oiled plastic wrap)

That shift into color in The Wizard of Oz is something so particular to the medium. It creates an emotional experience that works solely because we can experience an altered perception of the world visually. I’m wondering about the forms you chose for the stories in Hybrid Creatures. How did you decide which hybrid language was going to go with which narrative?

MB: (plops quartered potatoes into pot)

Well, I didn’t really. I started with the languages. Before I wrote the stories in the book, I wrote a collection of prototype stories, and in each of those, that was all there was, the artificial language, and then I would design the story around that—but I wasn’t satisfied with the prototypes. I wanted to find some way to write stories that not only would use artificial languages from these other fields, but that would incorporate artificial structures from those fields too. So, when I wrote the final stories—the stories in the book—I started with the language, then I chose a structure, and then I designed the entire story around that.

JA: So then the characters in the book, or at least the protagonists or narrators, became people who had a need for that language, or who had an ability to communicate in that language?

MB: (adding butter to sautéing potatoes)

Yeah, the narrator or the protagonist of each story was determined by whatever the lexicon of that particular story was going to be—someone who would speak that language, and who might interpret their experiences and understand their world through that language, and through the corresponding artificial structure.

I like that we’re doing this while we’re cooking, but I also wish that we could just look at each other while we’re talking.

JA: (walks over to stove, stares at Baker)

In contrast to those complex structures, I was struck by how traditional the stories themselves were. It felt almost like an equation—if you had equally complex narratives, in addition to the experimental forms, maybe the stories wouldn’t work.

MB: (stirring sautéing potatoes)

That wasn’t a realization I made until after I had written the prototypes. One of the prototypes was this story published in Conjunctions called “Proof Of The Monsters.” Not only was that story experimenting with the linguistics of formal logic, but it also was randomly written in diary form, and then it also had these speculative sci-fi elements—it was just too much. There was too much happening. So, that was a lesson I learned from writing that story: I needed to simplify things.

When I first started seriously writing, one of my writing mentors was the poet Jack Ridl. You’ve never met him. He’s this kind, wise old poet. After spending three semesters together, the final thing he said to me about my work, the one lesson he wanted me to take away was: If you are going to do a weird thing, only do one weird thing at a time. He probably phrased it much more articulately than that, but that was the gist of it and that was what I took away.

JA: My mentor, Elissa Schappell said something similar about how to balance language and action—the necessity to lower one when amping up the other.

MB: (adding water to pot)

Only do one weird thing at a time was very important advice for me as a writer—in some ways it was the key to figuring this project out.

JA: I have to ask about the mathematics story, “The Golden Mean.” I find that story to be the strongest in the collection, for several reasons, but one being that there is an emotional honesty and vulnerability that is enormously affecting. As you know, I write from experiences that very much look like life, situationally, although my characters are always fictively constructed. You have a very similar familial makeup to the protagonist in “The Golden Mean” in that you come from divorced parents and move between two families. What happens when we write from life?

MB: (laughs and turns the intensity of the stove burner up)

That’s a brilliant question. Can I respond with a question of my own: Is this all the corn we have?

JA: (grabs stool and heads to cabinet)

I believe so, but let me check—oui, mais we have two cans of black beans.

MB: Merci beaucoup, we don’t need them.

JA: Bien. I didn’t forget my question. And don’t forget to warn me when it’s time to start boiling pretzel rolls.

MB: Parfait, we aren’t quite there yet.

JA: The mathematics story—

MB: (adding corn to pot)

Right. When I wrote my children’s novel, If You Find This, I deliberately wrote a book about a dying grandfather as a way to try to process the experience of losing my grandfather. The process of writing that book was therapeutic for me. But for “The Golden Mean,” it wasn’t about trying to figure out anything for myself—it was about trying to express, the best that I could, what it’s like to be a person caught in the circumstance of existing in two families simultaneously.

JA: And you achieve that with the structural division. We feel the incompleteness. In your first book, even if you wrote it, in part, to process your grief, you were also able to intimately communicate the experience of loss to your readers. But here, I suppose what you’re saying is: the math story is less for you and more for us.

MB: Exactly. For me, this project was about taking these very familiar cliché storylines—having divorced parents, losing your spouse, having dementia—and attempting to find a way to make a reader truly feel those experiences. Trying to develop a storyline to use in conjunction with formal logic, for instance, I realized that writing about a character with dementia could potentially be very powerful, because for a character who thinks about the world in terms of formal logic, there would be nothing more devastating or world-altering than to lose the ability to think logically, in a clear sequential order.

JA: That devastation is palpable. It reminds me about what we were speaking about last night, the book and subsequent film Still Alice, and the play Wit. I think in all three examples, the third being Hybrid Creatures, there is a nuanced dimension of poignancy when the individual experiencing failing mental capacity identifies so deeply with their intellect.

MB: And of course, not everyone has a job that requires working with an artificial language or that necessarily shapes the way that you perceive the world. I think many people do experience this, though, across a wide range of fields. For instance, I have a brother-in-law who’s a chemist—maybe that’s a strange way to phrase it, because you know who my brother-in-law is, but for readers—

JA: He’s also very good at board games, but, yes, your brother-in-law, the chemist—

MB: I asked him recently how much his study of chemistry affects his everyday experience of the world. Like for instance, if he was cooking and he was caramelizing some onions and he had butter and sugar and salt and onions in a pan, was he thinking about the chemical reactions happening in the pan at that moment, as he was cooking, or was he just thinking about how good the caramelizing onions smelled?

JA: (hops onto counter)

I love that question.

MB: He said that the answer was both, that he’d be thinking about how good the caramelizing onions smelled, but that he’d be thinking about the chemical reactions happening in the pan too, and that to some extent he’s always thinking about it—that his knowledge of chemistry affects every experience he has. The first time I ever saw that phenomenon replicated in fiction was in the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin—have you read that?

JA: I have not.

MB: Oh, you need to read it. It’s brilliant—also, time to start boiling the pretzel rolls.

JA: (hops off counter and turns on oven)

On it. Now, I want to talk about the influence of research on your writing. I know you’re insatiably curious and your hunger for knowledge leads you to incorporate so much from the world into your work. The result is that it feels like you have an intimate knowledge of so many diverse fields—which is another way of saying, like I’ve often suspected, maybe you’re a robot—or another alternative: the internet has given you a way to be a specialist in everything.

MB: (stirring soup)

A lot of it is research. For instance, even though I studied music and knew how to read sheet music and music dynamics, I wasn’t intimately acquainted with the structure of a classical symphony and the structure of the different movements within a classical symphony. Nonetheless, it was important to me for “Movements,” the music story in the collection, that each of the four sections have the same narrative development as the corresponding movement would have in a traditional symphony.

JA: You do a lot of that work in everything you create, where you bury or embed things that an average reader may not pick up on. It seems deeply important to you.

MB: I love video games, and a wonderful and maybe unique tradition within that storytelling medium is the tradition of the Easter egg—hidden content, bonus content, that can be unlocked or discovered if you invest enough time in exploring the story. As a writer, I’m interested in trying to hide as many Easter eggs as possible in each of my stories, to make it as rewarding as possible for a story to be read multiple times—so that potentially, every time it’s read, the reader can make another startling and wonderful discovery. They’re usually in-jokes. Does that make any sense?

JA: (turns on burner for saucepan)

It makes complete sense. The veracity of your worlds comes through in all of your work. I keep thinking about the philosophy story and the conversations that take place throughout it in the background. It’s an interesting experience for the reader because we’re following a protagonist who is confused about where he is and who he is, and you’ve added all this external chatter. In a lesser narrative, that chatter might just be funny or mildly interesting, but here, the conversations feel inherently connected to the larger story.

MB: Well, this was a terrible idea, as usual—

JA: Interviewing while cooking?

MB: Well yeah, that, but also, I got this idea into my head that because “Proof Of The Century” was going to try to tell the entire story of a nearly hundred-year-old man’s life, and because it was also going to try to tell the story of an entire country over that same hundred-year period, I might as well, at the same time, try to incorporate every major subfield of philosophy into the story too.

JA: That is a terrible idea.

MB: So yeah, you’re right, those background conversations at the family “symposium” are meant to contribute thematically, in that these different characters—in a very casual, everyday, holiday get-together setting—are debating a wide range of subjects that philosophers have been debating for centuries. Ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, etc. Maybe that wasn’t your question.

JA: (watches over saucepan as water begins boiling)

I’m not sure I asked one.

MB: Something else I can tell you about “Proof Of The Century” is that it was also important to me that the proofs in the story include all the basic maneuvers used in formal logic. In the same way that in skateboarding there’s this basic vocabulary of tricks or moves that you can do, in formal logic there’s this basic vocabulary of moves or tricks that philosophers use. Modus ponens, modus tollens, etc—they’re the ollies and nollies of formal logic. In thinking about the various proofs embedded within that story, I decided it was important to incorporate all of those maneuvers at least once—which, again, was a terrible idea, but I did it.

JA: (dumping baking soda into saucepan)

You’re you. Of course, you did.

MB: (staring into foaming saucepan)

That’s a fun reaction! If only the chemist could be here to see it.

JA: (begins dropping in pretzel rolls)

C’est le meilleur. I think we should talk about loneliness. Since language is the way we communicate, I’m curious how isolation features into the book. For me, the reading experience created a connection and sort of broke the individual isolation of your characters and I’m wondering if that was intentional—if you thought at all about the fact that language is the means through which we communicate and that your characters exist primarily in varying forms of seclusion.

MB: Well, for a character who thinks about the world in a hybrid language, who is fluent both in English and some artificial language like HTML, I think that can be isolating—in the same way that if you grow up speaking English and Mandarin, when you’re around people who only speak English, sometimes there will be things you want to express that are impossible to say.

JA: (places pretzel rolls on baking sheet)

And I felt like the hybrid languages were a way to express that which would previously be inexpressible.

MB: Yeah, I think for some of the things you could paraphrase it in English or try to find a synonym, but it wouldn’t quite be the same. You translate stories from French, and I know you’ve said that there are words and phrases in French that no matter how close you get to translating them into English words, sometimes you can’t quite capture the meaning. And that’s just as true for HTML, or music dynamics, or math notions, or formal logic, as it is for French and any other natural human language.

JA: In a way your hybrid languages feel like a form of abstract translation. Let me put these in the oven—

MB: I wonder if this is the first author interview ever to be conducted while both the author and the interviewer were in a kitchen cooking a meal together.

JA: Both in pajamas, bumping into each other in a tiny kitchen—actually, let’s talk about us. We sometimes communicate in a hybrid tongue.

MB: Yeah, in this apartment we primarily speak English, but we also speak in French and Spanish and Italian and now Japanese. But yeah, what’s your question?

JA: Well, talk to me about that. I know for me, there is an additional meaning in saying I love you in very rudimentary Japanese. The texture and emotional experience is different than expressing it in English.

MB: Tell me about the experience.

JA: (walks over to where Baker is searching the spice rack)

I think there is this idea that when I say I love you in Japanese, you’re the only person I’ve ever said I love you in that language to before, and it’s this created thing, learning Japanese together—there is an added level of intimacy, not just in its singularity, but in that it’s connected to a culture that means so much to you. Maybe it’s the same thing in reverse with French. Does that make sense?

MB: (holding cayenne)

Désolé, I need to get to the pot.

JA: Tu est le plus romantique. I guess what I’m trying to say is, until I thought deeply about your book and even about having this conversation, I always just took us speaking in those different languages as an aspect of our relationship. I didn’t necessarily sit with what it meant—with why we do it. Or with why it’s so meaningful.

MB: Well, when you speak two languages, say English and HTML, it’s limiting in a way, because most people speak only one of those languages, but it’s also liberating in that with certain people it allows you to communicate in a richer way, or to communicate more than you could communicate before. And when you speak multiple languages—if you speak, like we do, in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese—then it’s even more liberating because it allows us to say things that we weren’t able to say with English alone. Like I love you, or J’adore tu or Aishiteimasu. Even if they don’t come with subtly different meanings, eventually they take on subtly different meanings, in the same way that sometimes you want to say I’m hungry and sometimes you want to say I’m starving and sometimes you want to say I’m ravenous. I think it feels special and meaningful because it allows us to communicate even very basic things in a deeper, more nuanced way.

JA: I think your stories do the same thing. And I think, in many ways, the characters in your stories probably wouldn’t be able to express themselves without the accompanying languages—or their emotional experiences wouldn’t be able to be communicated without them—Let me just quick check on the pretzel rolls. They’re done!

MB: The soup is ready too.

JA: Parfait, let’s eat.

(walking over to table with soup and pretzel rolls in hand respectively)

MB: (reaching for a pretzel roll)

I’m very grateful to the editors, both at the magazines that originally published these stories and at LSU Press, which published the collection. The formal constraints for this project added a layer of difficulty not only for me but for the editors too. Oh, these pretzel rolls are a masterpiece!

JA: Merci beaucoup, I had to work with my own constraints because we ran out of yeast.

MB: Zut alors.

JA: In thinking again about constraints and experimentation, I’m wondering about Hybrid Fictions, the course you’re currently teaching at my alma mater, The Gallatin School at NYU. Aussi, the soup is trés bien.

MB: Merci beaucoup, Parfait. In Hybrid Fictions we exclusively read and write interdisciplinary fiction: fiction that incorporates subject-specific language, forms, and concepts from other fields of study. Biology, physics, etc. We’re writing stories in the form of architectural blueprints. We’re writing stories in the form of chemical compounds. So, it’s a workshop in a hyper specific subgenre of experimental fiction.

My students registered for this course voluntarily, of course, but still, sometimes these writing prompts make them nervous. I think it can be terrifying, as a young writer, to even conceive of, let alone to actually dare, to break from tradition and to try something new. I think another great fear for young writers is that, if they do attempt something new, that their work will be perceived as gimmicky. Which is a legitimate fear, of course. I try to emphasize that it’s not enough simply to tell a story through some new interesting lexicon, or language, or structure, or form—that it’s still crucial for the story to have an effect on the reader, emotionally and intellectually, and that ideally the experiment should be used to tell a story that’s only possible to tell in this new way.

JA: It isn’t enough to be flashy. It has to actually do something. It has to be affecting.

MB: (dips a pretzel roll into the soup)

To me, that’s the difference between a gimmick and a story that’s worth reading. There are people who write experimental fiction in which there’s absolutely no connection between the experiment and the actual story—the plot and the characters. It’s just an experiment attached to some random story. No matter how brilliant and innovative the experiment is, work like that doesn’t interest me. It’s like watching somebody who’s invented a rocket shoot a rocket into the air for no other purpose than just to show everyone that they can build a rocket. Just to make a loud noise. A bright light in the sky. The experimental fiction that I love, the experimental fiction that excites me, are experiments that are done for a purpose: writers who aren’t just shooting a rocket into the air to show off, but because they’re trying to put a satellite into orbit, or because they’re trying to land astronauts on the moon.

JA: It seems fitting for us to end with space. Both you and your stories are not quite of this world.

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Jenessa Abrams is a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellow and a Columbia MFA graduate in fiction and literary translation. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center and Columbia University. Her writing has been published in Tin House Online, TriQuarterly, Joyland, Washington Square, BOMB Magazine, Guernica, The Offing, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Recently, she was named a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest and both Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award and Fiction Open Award. Her work was nominated for the 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She currently holds a research fellowship at the New York Public Library and is pursuing a graduate degree in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

Matthew Baker is the author of Hybrid Creatures, a collection of stories written in hybrid languages, and the children’s novel If You Find This, which was named a Booklist Top Ten Debut and nominated for an Edgar Award. His stories have appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, New England Review, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and have been anthologized in Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has also taught at Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review.