Interviews

The Lightning Room with Chen Chen

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

I met Chen Chen this spring at a writing retreat in Amherst, MA, and was thrilled to find his name and poems in the August issue of [PANK]. Chen was kind enough to speak with me about making and reading poetry that’s “queer and hairy and kinda smelly. “

 
 

1. Within the first stanza of “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me” I found myself thinking of Walt Whitman, that most American of poets. I mean, first you have the opener borrowed from the Pledge of Allegiance, and then you move, like Walt in “I Hear America Singing,” into a litany of parallels. However Whitman’s love for America is generous and earnest–your pledge is a great deal more bitter, or at least skeptical–towards American tropes, towards the lover…

Well, I will say this: I love Whitman and sometimes wish I had his totally embracing exuberance, but I think you’re right in your reading of my poem–it’s more skeptical. It’s studied up a bit on postmodernism and poststructuralism, and it’s feeling less certain about projects (like nation-building or committed relationships) that seek to consolidate knowledge, close off possibility. The poem expresses a desire to align or adhere to something, but has a lot of trouble actually doing that–so the “pledge” is a searching for and an exploring, rather than a true avowal.  Continue reading →

Virtual Book Tour: From Here, by Jen Michalski

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From Here Banner - v1

 

Today is the third stop of Jen Michalski’s virtual book tour celebrating her new collection, From Here. The twelve stories in From Here explore the dislocations and intersections of people searching, running away, staying put. Their physical and emotional landscapes run the gamut, but in the end, they’re all searching for a place to call home.

 

Thematically, how does this collection differ from your other books?

I think there are some similar themes of isolation and dislocation that I explored in The Tide King and also Could You Be With Her Now, but the stories in From Here are through the prism of many different narrators, who differ in age, sex, ethnicity, physical locale. I’d written these stories over a period of seven years, maybe, but I think there’s a lot more of me in them than the aforementioned work, my inner struggle of wanting to belong, to find a place to feel at home. But, at the same time, I think, like any story collection, is a good cross section of my work. Some of it I wrote when I was single, some when I met my partner, and I was deep into my thirties and some of my life priorities were changing, and maybe my perspective, too. Continue reading →

The Tangible and Strange: an Interview with Gina Keicher

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Interview by Emily Coon

 

Consider the strangeness and dysphoria of modern existence in America. Poet Gina Keicher does in Wilderness Champion, which roams highways, explores curiosity cabinets, guards lawn volcanoes, and dances in a gun store after the apocalypse.

Emily Coon: Many – most – of the poems in this book are organized into paragraphs rather than lines. Some paragraphs include lines of dialogue. Can you tell me more about that choice?

Gina Keicher: At some point in revision, each of the prose poems saw line breaks. At some point, I also tried to offset the dialogue and give it more space on the page, but the momentum felt disrupted to me. If I write in lines, I tend not to give dialogue its own space, so when I transition to prose poems, I let that convention slide. The dreamy, fluid roll from prose to dialogue appeals to me.

Also, embedding the dialogue became a way to make turns on a technical level. In Wilderness Champion, things change, appear, and disappear. Things get weird. So, letting someone talk seemed like a strange crafty move instead of a strange subject maneuver. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

August author (and august author) Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson talks about pregnancy , palimpsests, and her story, “A Modern Girl’s Guide to Childbirth.”

 

Going by the title of the piece, I expected “A Modern Girl’s Guide to Childbirth” to be a lot snarkier, since most guides titled similarly are so breezy, pragmatic, and of the moment. (Guides to bible study, life, and personal finance were my first three Google hits.) How did you choose instead to place your girl’s modernity in conversation with history—ancient Greece, 17th-century China, 18th-century France, the view of the cemetery?

That juxtaposition between the present and the past came out of a writing prompt. I had the great fortune of being in Lee K. Abbott’s fiction group at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop back in 2013. The writer EJ Levy was Lee’s fellow that year and she challenged us to write a piece with a point of view that we rarely used. We discussed second person, and read short stories like Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie).” Continue reading →

Behind The Fictive Veil: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz

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–Interview by Brian Kornell

 

Wendy C. Ortiz’s story “Interiors” appeared in April 2012 issue of PANK. She is the author of Excavation, a recently released memoir from Future Tense Books, about family, secrets, sex, and coming to terms with her queer identity. It is a book that spoke to me in a way that very few books have before. Ortiz writes with emotional frankness about difficult subjects, while maintaining the lyric beauty of the world around her. I had the opportunity to talk to her about the book and the process of writing it.

 

Brian Kornell: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about stories that demand to be told or ones, especially when it’s memoir, that a writer cannot ignore despite their best efforts to do so. Was this book like that for you? Did you have any hesitation in writing it? If you did, how did you work past that to write it?

Wendy C. Ortiz: This book spent some time being ignored (I always imagined it sitting in a corner, sulking) but when I look back at this time, I recognize now that it was steeping. My hesitations have always been about how I might be perceived once the story was out. I got some practice when “Mix Tape” was published by The Nervous Breakdown last year and in the first 24 hours of it being on the web I went through physical reactions that were all about the hesitation. Then the physical reactions passed and I was fortunate to get good feedback on the piece and knew I was heading in the right direction. That was a good way of working past any recent hesitation I might have had. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Matthew Landrum

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

 

This month [PANK] published a translation of Faroese writer Sólrún Michelsen’s The Rat. Here we talk to the piece’s translator, Matthew Landrum, about reading“Michelsen through Landrum-colored glasses.”

 

1. You mentioned in an email that you’ve just arrived in the Faroe Islands. What’s your relationship to that place? How did you encounter Faroese writer Sólrún Michelsen’s work and decide to translate it?

I found about the islands by accident while reading Shetlandic poetry in a dialect influenced by the Norn language, a dead kissing cousin of Faroese. Fróðskaparsetur Føroya, the university here, has a summer program in Faroese. I came for that and it was love at first sight.

It’s a special place here – grass covered basaltic mountains eroding into the North Atlantic, a language and culture, persistent and triumphant in the face of years of foreign domination, and an arts and literature scene disproportionally strong and large for a population of 50,000. All that has kept coming back and, over the last years, I’ve worked with several poets and writers in translating their work. An organization promoting Faroese literature hired me last fall to translate a few fiction pieces including Sólrún Michelsen’s work, my first dip into prose since some abortive novellas in college. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Suzanne Farrell Smith

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Interview by Brian Kornell

 

Suzanne Farrell Smith’s essay, “Listing to Love,” which appears in the July 2013 issue, catalogs love and loss with a focus on all the little things we can love.

 

1. Name your own executive staff of PITA.

A. Ann Coulter

B. James Joyce

C. My upstairs neighbor, whose apartment renovation has entered its third year

D. Al Roker

2. The piece is presented in outline form. Some items are expanded upon, such as the elevator being reprogrammed or the mix tape, while others are not. How did you choose which items to expand upon and which ones to leave more ambiguous? Did you decide this as you wrote or were these decisions made in the editing phase?

I made expansion decisions after finishing an unwieldy draft of multiple linked lists. Through revision, I decided which items to expand based on which carried more emotional weight. Revision worked like a flow chart. I asked myself, does this item mean something more significant than can be contained by its spot on the list? If not, I left it as a single item or deleted it. If it did, I pursued the meaning through expansion, which often led to a new sub-list. Continue reading →

Interview with Charles Dodd White

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–by Denton Loving

Denton Loving:  Congratulations on your new novel, A Shelter of Others.  You’ve previously published the novel, Lambs of Men, and the story collection, Sinners of Sanction County.  Do you have a preference between the short form and the long form?

Charles Dodd White: I believe I’m best suited to compression, but I like what can be done with a longer work, especially something in the amorphous novella/short novel range. I like the idea of extensive brevity, especially the kind of control typically applied to a more developed story.

DL:  I think of you as a fairly prolific writer.  How long did it take to write this novel? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Cheryl Maddalena

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Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Poet and psychologist Cheryl Maddalena placed herself across the historical divide from Marilyn Monroe and called it a mirror. Read her poem, “Marilyn,” in the May issue, then decide who Norma Jean really is.

 

1. Marilyn Monroe (or at least her pop-cultural image) is so ubiquitous. How did you find yourself ready to take on that cultural weight and make it new?

I wrote this poem some time ago, when I was taking a linguistics class. Apparently, as related by my two professors, in linguistics school the students would passionately argue in the hallways about the which would be more correct: “I dreamed I was Marilyn Monroe, and I kissed me,” or “I dreamed I was Marilyn Monroe, and I kissed myself.” Obviously I felt strongly about the first choice! And I also realized that in my professors’ version, students were imagining being kissed by Marilyn Monroe – completely different from my experience of the idea, which was of two Marilyns.

2. I loved your incorporation of the autoerotic (“while under the table/I kept squeezing/my adorable knee. I simply couldn’t keep my hands/off me”). How does the speaker (and maybe, if you feel like broaching it, the poet) relate to Marilyn as an symbol of desirable femininity? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Franny Choi

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This week we asked poet Franny Choi about violence, domesticity, and absurdity, and she encouraged us to try “letting the rabid dog in your brain run around the yard for a little bit.” We published four of her poems in our March issue.

 

Interview by Diana Clarke

 

1. In “Warning,” I found the most unsettling and wonderful thing to be your pairing of industrial/disaster imagery (oil spill, oilskinned harpoons, eye of the storm) and domestic objects (tape, fly paper, ceiling fan). This culminates in the final line–“a poised fork, stalking the whites of my eyes.” Do you see some inherent violence in the domestic?

I think to say that violence is inherent in the domestic is a risky claim to make — that verges on normalizing domestic violence. But I do think that the line between violence and pleasure is sometimes frighteningly blurry. I was interested in capturing a bit of the horror of confronting this line, and I think absurd juxtaposition is a major crux of horror. Continue reading →