Diana Clarke

The Lightning Room with Bree Barton

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

December author Bree Barton talks lust, secrets, spiders, and how she uses “fiction as a landfill for all the banal little happenings in my day.”

1. Your character is a ghostwriter, and so are you. How do experiences from your own life transmute when you write about them, and especially when you assign them to characters who might be entirely unlike you?

I hope this character is entirely unlike me, the poor schmuck. But of course the “you” in this story bears the marks of my own experience. I, too, ghostwrite books for a living. I, too, am driven mad by inconsistencies in hyphenation. I, too, have an intimate relationship with spiders (don’t ask). Sometimes writing a despicable character gives you more freedom in borrowing from your life; you can infuse him/her with your own troubling obsessions or rank desires. I’d much rather create an unlikable character than be unlikable myself. For me the real trick is to harness that transmutation and make it serve the story, rather than just using fiction as a landfill for all the banal little happenings in my day.

2. The line that turns the story does so much work: “Then you see the pound sign has grown legs.” The mechanical keyboard becoming animate, suggesting words taking on form and life of their own, words creating action. The narrative power of a spider as a symbol more than itself. Does that resonate? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Dalena Frost

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

In “Winter’s Kitchen,” November author Dalena Frost wrote hunger and cold. Digest her words just in time for this new dark season.

 

1. I loved your use of apt and incongruous figurative language—the sun a “slow oil bubble” in a “denim sky,” its setting like “a witch deflating.” It rendered the ordinary experience of a sunrise strange, and therefore noticeable and tangible—but even moreso it made the whole idea of figurative writing strange. Why, so often, are we taught to write congruity? What happens when we reject it?

Thank you! If we reject congruity, I hope we can reject traditional or clichéd ways of seeing, and wake up to the present, to seeing for ourselves. The world is always strange and fresh and unsettling, but with familiarity, we forget.

2. There’s such darkness and estrangement in the arrival of the ant-man with his “gleaming, sharp” sword. The haphazard menace of something or someone with “a claim on [our] past.” But writing often demands that we confront history. How do you handle your own? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Yanyi Luo

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Do you long to believe in Whitman’s transcendent vision but criticize his earnestness? November poet Yanyi Luo suggests laughter; it’s “the sound of power unhinging.”

 

 1. “Song of My Selfie” just slayed me with wonder and paradox. How you honor and also skewer Walt Whitman, make poetry out of shoutycaps while satirizing the hyperbolic (performed) enthusiasm that passes for joy on the internet. The search for a “NEW TRANSCENDENTALISM” feels just as urgent as when Walt was writing, and “a BETTER VERSION OF MYSELF” is still such a seductive fantasy. The American dream is so damn persistent. Do you think the internet changed it?

I think that internet technology has given us with the capability for rapid networked communities. This is most significant for those who have been buried, excluded, or misrepresented systemically and historically. We know that the American dream comes with exceptions, but now it is easier—not easy—to begin dialogues with these communities. Those conversations are making their way visibly into mainstream culture. The outlook isn’t wholly optimistic: the internet is a technology, not a leveling field, and the startup and blogger world reflect familiar demographics of overwhelming maleness and whiteness. Whatever change may come from dialogue is still to be seen. Yet, the internet provides the linguistic and satirical context that allows “Song of My Selfie” to exist. I criticize Whitman’s earnestness, but I also want to believe in it, and I sincerely long for a transcendental being that is self-loving but radical, not indiscriminately containing multitudes but constantly looking to enable them and change with them. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Christine Gosnay

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Christine Gosnay’s poem “The Pleasures of the Gut” appeared in [PANK] back in January, we sent her questions about it in June, and she answered them in October. Fortunately, good poems don’t get old, just wiser—or, in reading them, we do.

 

1. Early in “The Pleasures of the Gut,” the speaker is fixated with hunger, but by the closing section she throws untouched food into the trash, while her bowl of oatmeal “leaves four bends of a circle on my two legs/proof of the butter, and the grain, outside my body.” Can you speak to the long cycle you depict here, food moving through the body and also outside it, the speaker’s body participating in some bigger turn of consumption and digestion?

I think about food constantly. Hunger trains the mind and the body; food rewards. Real hungers, hungers you remember, individually, as physical and emotional experiences, shape consciousness and behavior as much as anything from love to abandonment to art. A market thrills me, any place to see piles of food lain out piece by piece, food waiting to be touched and seen; I love to watch people and animals eating, to see a person choosing a meal, to watch plates being cleared of bones, gristle, greens, crusts. Because consumption is a choice and digestion is automatic, there seems a lot to say about what happens to the mind after the body has eaten. Guilt, confusion, sometimes disgust, and sometimes pleasure, if everything was done right. I find it difficult to look at the world after I have eaten and impossible to look away from it when I have not. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 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 →

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 →