Interviews

The Lightning Room with John Smolens

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Read John Smolens’ “Possession(s)” in our February 2014 issue, and when you can’t get it out of your head, see below:

 

Interview by Diana Clarke

 

1. The structure of “Possession(s)”—block text that is both a story and a how-to for surviving personal pain (the death of the narrator’s wife, in this case)—reminded me a lot of Jamaica Kincaid’s story “Girl.” In “Girl,” Kincaid uses the same kind of overwhelming text-block to convey the constraining and contradictory messages her young narrator receives about being a girl and growing into a woman. Do you see yourself writing into (or around, through, etc) cultural messages about mourning (i.e. what’s acceptable, how we should do it) and/or masculinity? How?

“Girl” is a brilliant story.  Of course I can’t speak for Jamaica Kincaid, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that story didn’t just come to her all of a piece.  What’s important is the story feels that way.  That’s how it was for me while writing “Possession(s)”:  it’s as though the story has always been there and you’re just fortunate to be tuned in to the right wave-length to pick it up.  Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” has similar attributes.

Mourning is a good word.  It rolls out softly; I even like the way it’s spelled, containing its own urn.  What is mourning?  It’s not just keening; it’s not just visible and audible responses to death.  The great irony of Albert Camus’ The Stranger is that Meursault, when put on trial for murder, is found guilty largely because he did not sufficiently display remorse over his mother’s death.  To not appear to mourn properly can be perceived as a most egregious cultural slight, not just an error in deportment but an insult, because it suggests a lack of respect, not just for the dead, but for those who have felt compelled to mourn in what society considers the proper, acceptable fashion.   Continue reading →

“language helps us hold the world and in doing so holds us”: A Conversation-Interview with Megan Burns and Laura Madeline Wiseman

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Laura Madeline Wiseman: In her NPR interview with Terry Gross in October 2011, Marie Howe talks about mystery and the unsayable in poetry. In talking about one her poems, she says, “I think I was trying to tell a narrative or trying to tell a story or trying to explain something. I don’t know. I couldn’t, you know, every poem holds the unspeakable inside it, the unsayable, you know, not unspeakable as in taboo but the unsayable, the thing that you can’t really say because it’s too complicated, it’s too complex for us.” Can you talk about mystery and the unsayble in your new book the Sound and Basin?sound and basin

Megan Burns: Laura, I like this idea of the “unsayable” rather than language being unable to hold what we need it to; it transfers the onus onto our ability to give space to what the poem can do. And sometimes, we as the poet, need to invest a bit of trust into the poem’s ability to be a placeholder for these events that seem to evade a simple telling. My first book, Memorial + Sight Lines, dealt with post-Katrina New Orleans, and I struggled a lot with being able to find the right “words” to capture that experience. So much new language emerges from these traumatic events, and in Sound and Basin, this struggle continues as I try to bear witness to the ongoing destruction caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. My third child was born months before the explosion and I watched the Gulf being flooded with oil as I would breastfeed her, so the experience of this destruction of life and the preciousness of life is deeply intertwined in this collection. It’s strange to qualify disaster, but the Deepwater Horizon event felt to me so much more perilous than Katrina, because if we destroy our waters with such careless negligence than there really is not much hope for a future planet for in which my children can live. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Trevor Mackesey

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Empathy is a natural reaction to literature. Read Trevor Mackesey’s “The Containment Store” in the April issue, then come back here and see if you feel more human(e).

 

Interview by Diana Clarke

 

1. In “The Containment Store” you strike a really difficult balance between logical progression (the increasing percentage at which the machine reads Scott’s emotional makeup) and association (the emotionally charged moments that Scott recalls throughout the story and that slowly wear him away) that reads quite naturally. How did you arrive at that structure?

I was concerned with the story’s plot, which might be read as a young couple enters a store, speaks to a salesperson, and nothing happens, and initially used the percentages as a narrative crutch. My hope was that the numbers might act as shorthand for what was going on within Scott, signifying the progression you mention and later his change. I also hoped they’d operate as a unifying return, linking the memories and providing limited access to Scott for Anne and Andy, who are in some ways even more removed from what is happening than the reader.

2. I thought it was super-interesting that you paired emotionally invasive technology, which seems extremely contemporary/internetty, with the physicality of big box-style stores, which fade in importance with the rise of online shopping. How do you experience those places (internet/big-box store) as narrative spaces?

I’ve moved around a lot, and several times I’ve had this experience standing in the middle of a big box store when I’ve glitched and realized I could be in Miami or Reno or Bozeman. Considering how different those locations are, it’s a feeling that is both frightening for its implications and comforting in its emotional projection. You can’t always be where you’d like to be, but standing next to a wall of kitchen gadgets in a climate controlled, brick-and-mortar clone, you can imagine the exit will take you anywhere in the world that has been conquered by convenience and low, low prices. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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Welcome, once again, to Blog People, a venture here at the Lightning Room which gives you the pertinent deets on our fellow denizens of The Blog. In this installment, DeWitt Brinson presents the progression of the physical into a single syllable, as Scott Pinkmountain asks you to go with him and you must not ask where. Check out his Column Work: Surviving The Arts

1. What is the importance of art? Both the word and the concept?

Just to scrape the edge of this infinite question, I’ve been thinking a lot about how art has the potential to be one of the very few non-capital-driven endeavors in our otherwise Capitalist-circumscribed existences. For that purpose alone, it’s a life line. At this point in our culture, to be engaged in any public endeavor that is not for the purpose of making or spending money is essentially a radical political action. If you view family life, daily functional creativity (cooking, childcare, walking, sewing, etc..) and intimacy and play among friends and loved ones as private endeavors, spiritual practice as a kind of in between, and art as a public practice, art is pretty much it aside from direct political activism for standing up to genocidal, oligarchic Capitalism as it’s being perpetrated today.

As for the word, I don’t know it has any importance per say, but I’m glad it’s a simple, single syllable, grunt-like word akin to food, sleep, sex, birth, death. It helps strengthen the case for it being an imperative life function.

2. What’s your guilty pleasure?

If I could talk about it in public I wouldn’t actually be feeling much guilt about it, so there’s no honest answer to this question aside from declining to answer. But in terms of pop culture, I eat all kinds of shit and usually hate myself for it while/after it’s happening – superhero movies being my Achilles Heel, as I grew up reading and loving all things Marvel. I don’t feel guilt about that stuff though, just self-loathing and embarrassment. I draw the line at reality tv though. I have to preserve some self-respect. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Chris Speckman

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Interview by DeWitt Brinson

 

Consider the gnat as large as a relationship and a clue as pleasurable as it is rich. It is in the bondage of form we find Chris Speckman unrestrained. Check out Last Words for Larissa in our May issue.

 1. How difficult was it to make the actual crossword puzzle?

 It was extremely difficult. I almost gave up several times. I started out working with a few free crossword puzzle design programs that were really glitchy and not at all intuitive. I eventually just made a blank template and did the rest by hand.

 2. Did you start with the words or clues?

The words. I can’t imagine starting with the clues. I had some ideas for puzzle words that seemed emotionally resonant, and a basic idea of what the clues might be for those words. But that process got abandoned quickly when I figured out how hard it was to make real words fit on the grid. It never occurred to me that filling in the blanks for a crossword puzzle would be even more difficult without any clues to follow. As soon as I managed to fill in the puzzle, it was set in stone—I didn’t have the patience to tweak it. Changing one word forces you to alter eight other ones.

What was cool about having the puzzle set first was how it impacted my storytelling. It was sort of like working with a fixed poetic form. I knew the first line of the story needed to use the word “gnat.” So that forced me to consider all the possible permutations of the word and all associations I had with the word prior. I ended up stretching language in ways I never would have considered without the self-imposed restrictions. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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To best understand Mia Sara’s interview it is necessary that you stand up, forget about Julie, and get yourself to the top of the Chrysler building. Check out her column Wrought & Found.

 Interview by DeWitt Brinson

1) Where do you find the photos? Do you search for them or wait until they find you?

“Woman, stuck in a bag, on the Chrysler Building.” An example of my everyday image search. Also, I’m colorblind, so I tend to like images in black and white, but sometimes color is worth it.

2) What’s the most common sound in your current life?

The sound of my daughter talking to her “Nintendog” Sparky.

 3) What was the first poem you fell in love with and how does that differ from the first person you loved?

 “Down By The Salley Gardens” by W.B. Yeats. The first person I loved was of Irish extraction, melancholy, and musical. Not so different. Still some of my favorite attributes, I’m a sucker for a melancholy baby. Continue reading →

Call for Applications: Interviews Editors, PANK Blog

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Hello! It’s me, Opportunity calling!

PANK Blog is looking for a new editorial duo to run the fashionable and fascinating LIGHTNING ROOM series, which interviews PANK Magazine contributors.

Exciting! Perhaps it will be you!

Things to Think About Before You Apply

*This job is a labor of love. Nobody on the editorial staff of the blog or the mag make any money at this. But we do our best to make the lit-space sparkle and we have very cool swag. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Will Kaufman

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 Read Will Kaufman’s Selling The Fall in our May issue, then join us while we become the perfect human platonically together.

 Interview by DeWitt Brinson

 

1. How was your childhood? One truth and one lie about it, please.

a) I grew up comfortably middle class in a San Francisco neighborhood with about five million Chinese restaurants and markets. I had a stable childhood, in that my family stuck it out in the same house for twelve years even though my parents probably should have been splitting up when they were getting pregnant.

b) I was a savvy kid, who definitely knew the difference between “Stussy” and Macy’s generic “Stylin'” brand. I watched MTV and My So Called Life and understood my peer’s frame of reference, and so fit in quite well.

2. What would you like to improve about your writing?

Everything. I want to tell stories that engage and enrapture with sentences that challenge and undermine. I want my writing to embody an emotional and ontological ambivalence. Obviously, I’m a long way off. Also, that shit sounds like it would be too irritatingly precious for anyone to ever actually read. Except for Moby Dick. Moby Dick was a nearly Platonic experience for me.

At this particular moment I’m trying to better understand the crafting of plot. I should probably also learn proper grammar and punctuation at some point. And then become a wholly better being so I can potentially produce work that would live up to my expectations. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Elvis Bego

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Interview by DeWitt Brinson

Check out Elvis Bego’s There Like Nothing is Ever There in our May issue, then grab a watermelon and come watch him being obscene in cafes while he reads every book in the world at the same time hoping to meet a Jesus he doesn’t believe in.

 

1.Where do you write? 

The thing is you’re never not writing, so: everywhere. As with most writers, it happens in two stages, making notes and the actual composition. I never go anywhere without my notebook. I spend obscene amounts of time in cafes scribbling in the notebook — small observations, lines of dialogue, ideas for stories and essays. I also make lists, endlessly. Lists of stories to write, chronological lists of my books, that is, the ghosts of my books to come, often with dates of publication, which seems dangerously pathetic. And now that I have written and published a number of things, I try to come up with a possible list of stories for a first collection.

For actual composing, I work mostly at home. Either in total silence or with wordless music, something perfectly realized, like keyboard music by Bach or Schubert or Scarlatti.

Then there’s the third stage, the absolute necessity of not doing anything. It may even be the most important part of the process (hateful word). I don’t know who it was that said, When a writer is staring at the wall he is not doing nothing, he is working. I think that’s true of any artist, as well as any self-respecting building inspector. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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Welcome, once again, to Blog People, a venture here at the Lightning Room in which interview editors Simon and DeWitt interview their fellow denizens of The Blog. In our third installment, Simon interviews Randon Billings Noble, our reviews editor.

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1. What do you do outside of PANK? I’m always curious to hear about the daytime lives of people working in the small press/literary magazine community.

I write – usually essays, right now a collection of them – and wrangle our three-year-old twins.

2. Where are you, spiritually and geographically? Our team is a far-flung one.

Geographically? Washington, DC. Spiritually? New York. Or Sunshine, Wyoming.

3. Can you tell us about your first-ever experience with PANK?

Nope. Continue reading →