fiction

[REVIEW] Ice Bar by Petra Kuppers

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(Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)

REVIEW BY SARAH NANCE

—

What must stories do? asks the voice of Petra Kuppers in the background of her first collection of short stories, Ice Bar. In her closing remarks to the collection—aptly titled “Field Notes,” positioning the author as a kind of sociologist—she suggests that the ethical charge of a story is to approach the “contours of the world you want to see” (176). The stories in Ice Bar are thus configured to face a world on the brink of environmental, commercial, and industrial collapse, carving out a space for queer lives, disabled lives, and intersectional lives. It will take a new kind of hybridity, Kuppers proposes, to face some of the potential future paradigms we have set ourselves up for: the collapse of infrastructure, large-scale environmental destruction, heightened violence at borders between countries and worlds.

It’s not all doom-and-gloom, however; Ice Bar also imagines other possible futures that present new versions of human life and existence: bodies that merge with machines and plants, otherworldly beings that take form as trolls, dinosaurs, and dolphins to curry favor with humanity and escort us to alternative dimensions, and cracks in time and space that offer challenges to current models of power and privilege. Ice Bar passes no moral judgements, offers no consolation in the face of oncoming disaster, but instead taps into a different kind of potential energy: what are the possible worlds we may face, and how can we recognize every kind of person who can and should be a part of these futures?

The collection’s title story and opener, “Ice Bar,” is set in a near moment of apocalyptic collapse. Alissa, a survivor of sunlight and radiation—a heat that killed—navigates the ravaged cityscape of Oslo until she finds a door to an underground lair: the Ice Bar. Here, a former tourist-trap made of ice is repurposed as a space for interactive performance, friendship, and living. “Dance on the volcano. We will survive,” one patron says to her, “Dance the freaking music baby” (6). In this bar at the end of the world, Alissa joins in a rotating group of performers, navigating a space where binaries of the former world fall away, leaving in its place a queer space of possibility, of paradoxes that the stories which follow complicate, investigate, and celebrate. 

Kuppers transforms prose stories into lyric meditations in ways that are convincing and disarming in their beauty. “The Road Under the Bay” takes the storied history of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, tracing the human and natural costs of infrastructure innovation through the underwater world, where a bridge worker lives on, suspended in water in a new hybrid bodily form. Meanwhile, a woman named Doris feels drawn to the water, having heard a hum calling to her since childhood. As the story reaches a high lyric pitch, Doris’s body shifts in a flurry of scientific description: “DNA strands unweave and reweave, a mitosis of a new embrace. Small cytoplankton organisms wander in, and find their home in new pools, rooting deep through her flesh. Cells burst gently, opening like flowers. Tiny fragments of mitochondria unspool and align themselves with the sticky ends of Doris’s older strands, new pearl strings clicking into place” (120). The story merges the individual worker with grand cultural mythos of the bridge, creating the possibility of a parallel world where he and his labor abide beyond the longevity of humans: “I shall not pass over,” he asserts. “All my nows are down here now, and will ever be. My wages are still waiting to be paid, I shall have my recompense, my promised land, a warm bed” (113).

The collection’s strongest innovations come from its ability to insert the reader into what appear to be conventional settings or situations, and then drop the bottom out from the story in thrilling and unexpected ways that reconfigure what it means to be human, or to have an identity. Ice Bar’s most memorable stories play off of stories new and old, “reinvent[ing] the myths of otherness” to “claim old ground,” as Kuppers describes it (174).

In “Dinosaur Dreams,” a student and an activist both disappear on a seemingly ordinary day, finding each other in a dark underground world where voices beckon them for help. “[W]e need you,” they say, suggesting the world that is to come and beckoning the reader alongside the bewildered women. “They need you, too, after the bombs and fires. We need to build. Are you ready?” (71). Similarly, “Grave Weed” also follows two strangers who meet by chance, this time in a bookstore as they search for the same dusty botanical tome; they become “grave weed” scavengers together, gathering lichen growing on graves in asylum graveyards, tinged with “some mixture of madness, medication and exposure” that “created mineral-rich bones, a special fertilizer” that endows psychedelic qualities when consumed. Their drug trips create interdimensional spaces where they both follow the contours of their institution-related traumas. And, in the fantastically imagined “Vicki’s Cup,” the owner of a coffee shop harbors a magic-infused secret recipe for a drink that keeps her shop afloat; however, in training another woman to help, disastrous outcomes result, suggesting the tenuousness of creation, craft, and supply chains.

The possibility of this break in the supply chain—whether on a personal, institutional, or national level—becomes one of the book’s guiding critiques. Where are we left when guiding institutional structures break down, when the environment’s destruction turns against us, when we are forced to compete for furiously diminishing resources? Stories such as “Dumpling’s Pillar” situate us within the crossroads of destruction, suggesting new ways of forging connection in an era of scarcity. The story’s first-person narrator, a bike messenger, notices something odd about the public transit system one day during her delivery schedule: “All the trains in Southern Norway were down, standing still, their massive engines cooling in the early fall sunshine” (43). As the weeks progress, networks fail one by one, until even cell phones become useless, charger cords repurposed as “garlands in old Christmas trees, slung like off-white offal into the green plastic branches” (44). As the narrator and her companions find new ways of interacting in the world—forming groups for safety, enacting trading economies, jumping on local internet networks that broadcast like old short-wave radios—the story itself shifts from a near-future science-fiction infused tale to one of unexpected fantastical dimension, taking readers in one direction, then abruptly folding in on itself, becoming something else entirely. The narrator meets up with an old friend, Kristin, and the two follow the electronic echoes of an open network where anonymous users exchange mysterious messages. A crack in a tree takes them down a tunnel and underground; there, they happen upon something they could never have expected to find.

In this, one of her most imaginative and unexpected stories, Kuppers suggests a pattern that the rest of the collection builds upon: the current models of networking, infrastructure, and power dynamics are failing us, and possible solutions only lie in unexpected—often unassuming—places. The state of our current cultural moment requires us to imagine alternative worlds that privilege dynamic, hybrid, and intersectional bodies and minds, that promote a sharing of experience instead of hierarchies. It’s no wonder that so many of the stories in Ice Bar take place underground or underwater; these alternative possibilities are not available to us at surface level. Ice Bar’s speculative stories refuse singularity or continuity, offering instead a range of possibilities for rebuilding, reevaluating, and restructuring our world.

—

Sarah Nance holds a PhD in English from UCLA. Her work examines the intersections of illness, environment, and violence in literature, and she’s at work on a book project on the varying micro and macro scales of illness as represented in contemporary culture. Her writing has appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, Belletrist, Faultline, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and teaches in Colorado Springs.

[REVIEW] While You Were Gone by Sybil Baker

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(C&R Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY BARTON SMOCK

—

What if not so strange bedfellows were soap opera and short story? What if promise is a shape that steals the form of its maker? What if keyhole was the eye of an empty clock? What if one could look long enough at the ceiling and so change the color of heaven? If each, then I would say we may one day have a book like Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone. In the meantime, we have Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone.

In different stages of gone-ness are three sisters from Tennessee. Are Claire, Shannon, and Paige. In that order, or not. Each goes from sadness to updated sadness, knowing place as puzzle but seeing differently how a piece can be both missing and extra. As Baker draws them, they are lived-in and in orbit; spirits in a movie about feet touching the earth. Claire, sheltered so early by her belief in free fall; Shannon, silenced by her idealization of reportage; Paige, seeker of a recordable transit. Insomniac acolytes, all. Survivors of synopsis anchored to haunting their individual uprootings. The South is here:  the new, the old, the same, the simultaneous. As is the short attention span of history. As is the subtle and futureless yen a body has for ruin. As is Death, a fourth sister, whose blood has no birthday.

Fathers read of sickness and outside some are singing and this is the church of the unmothered internal. Mind is the dream of memory. Sex claws at the present. Some here are egg-shaped and hiding and asking, sister, can the devoured hear the sound that my stomach is making? I have no answers. There are Fisher Price figures in a crochet dollhouse. I said oh, above this work, and oh again. For I had not guessed doom to be impulsive. For I had not known endings to revive arrival, or grief to put brush before fossil.

As a storyteller, Baker knows revelation is the consoler of plot and that time exists to mourn chronology. As an artist, Baker casts a bite-mark on that vividly tragic fruit as one awed into suddenness and then as three in the twilight of playing dress-up. As a voice, Baker quotes shadows beyond the reach of comment.

I pray you will love this book for its commemorative absences and for its overlapping obscurities. I believe you will for how it navigates so visibly that it trades being spotted for being seen.

—

Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and four children. He is the author of the chapbook infant*cinema (Dink Press, 2016) and editor of isacoustic* (isacoustic.com)

[NEW FICTION] Through the Rabbit Hole

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BY MAUREEN SIMONS

—

I woke with a shock and my head snapped up. Had I missed the stop for Geneva? I blinked rapidly and scanned my train car. Where was my backpack? My passport was in my backpack. My stomach clenched. After a year of riding in third class train compartments I knew better. How could I fall asleep with all my belongings left unprotected?

My head whipped back and forth as I searched the overhead racks and vinyl bench seats. Nothing. There was only one other passenger in the car, a tiny old woman with gray skin and a crocheted flower hat. She was oblivious, snoring noisily as her chin bumped on her chest. I glared at the empty luggage rack and willed my backpack to appear. Nothing. I grabbed the overhead rack to steady myself and sidestepped to the door to find a conductor. The train jolted, and my foot landed on a coil of fabric. I looked down. My eyes followed a corrugated blue strap to my backpack, stashed safely under the seat.

I slumped into the corner of the car, drained from the flush of adrenaline. A mechanized voice announced “La gare a Genève, dix minutes.” I exhaled shakily and pressed my thumb to the racing pulse of my wrist. Ten minutes to my destination and all was well, I told myself. The old woman opened her milky eyes, gazed at me and grinned. She was missing most of her front teeth.

 

I pressed my cheek to the window as the train drew into Geneva. The glass was refreshingly cool. Too cool, I thought, and touched the back of my hand to my forehead. It felt hot, but I shook off the suggestion of a fever. I propped my chin on my fist, impatient to reach the city.

The approach to the rail yard was slow and tedious, the view through my window lifeless and drained of color. Long stretches of grimy steel rails and dull sepia platforms blurred together. As the train bumped hypnotically down the track, my eyes closed and my head began to nod. Anxiety yielded to exhaustion.

As an exchange student at the Université de Grenoble, I had spent the previous three months cramming for finals and writing agonizingly long papers in French. My classes had been yearlong, and grades for the academic year rested almost entirely on a single summary exam or research paper. So much had been at stake – my entire year’s work, the huge sacrifices my family had made to send me abroad. My scholarship. French students knew this system well, but foreign students like me often wildly underestimated the year end workload. For weeks, I had subsisted on minimal sleep, continuous infusions of inky black espresso and meager dinners of ramen noodles boiled on a forbidden camp stove in my bathroom.

Two days before, I learned I had passed my classes – one just barely – and hurriedly shipped a few things home. I had scrimped together enough money to travel for about ten days before my Eurail pass expired. But by the time I boarded the train, I was stupid from intense pressure, poor nutrition and relentless fatigue.

 

At the train station in Geneva, I ran my finger down the lodgings list, searching for the lowest cost youth hostel. ‘Home St. André’, for women only, was surprisingly inexpensive and advertised private rooms. This was a rarity in hostels, so I knew I had to arrive early to claim a spot. I gulped an espresso, dragged my backpack onto my shoulder and set off into the long shadows of afternoon sun.

 

My mood lifted when I arrived at Place St. André and recognized the cathedral. I stopped at the foot of the broad limestone stairs and gazed at the mismatched towers and pillars flanking the church. On my first weekend in Grenoble I had taken the train to Geneva with two other exchange students, and we had stumbled on Cathédral St. André at dusk. Although the church had closed for the day we had crept in through an unlocked side door, drawn by the faint strains of organ music. We tiptoed into the last pew of the empty church and listened as the organist moved around in the loft above us, adjusting the stops and slides on the organ. We decided it was only being tuned and were about to slip out when the first notes of Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D minor thundered across the church. We flattened ourselves against the back of the rigid wooden pew, mesmerized by the music but fearful that even the slightest movement would betray us. Now, ten months later when I stood in front of the cathedral the incident seemed like a mad dream – three girls held captive by crashing chords of organ music, all because of an unlocked door and a momentary impulse.

A flock of ash gray pigeons rose into the air and startled me back to my task. I scanned the plaza until I spied a blue and white metal sign for Home St. André under a stone archway. I hurried to the entrance, tugged open the heavy wooden door and crossed the foyer to an antique elevator. I pressed the button and began my ascent. Moments later, the elevator juddered to a stop and the inside door slid open, revealing an accordion-style metal gate. It was stiff and unyielding, and I had to yank it several times before it finally opened. I fell into the room.

I had expected a modest lobby with a tattooed receptionist languidly inspecting newcomers. And I had anticipated the usual trappings – loud voices and adolescent laughter, the sound of someone tuning a guitar, and the typical smells of youth hostels – tobacco, overripe cheese and the dank odor of unwashed clothing.

Instead I found myself in an elegantly decrepit chamber with a high ceiling and a black and white marble floor. The room was completely still, as if all the oxygen had been drawn from it. No furniture, no people, just a strange sensation that despite its emptiness, the room was in fact inhabited. And instead of the aroma of cigarettes and spoiled food, this place smelled vaguely of rubbing alcohol.

Puzzled, I dug into my pocket and reread my scrawled directions to the hostel. Home St. André, across from Cathédral St. André. Premier étage. Thirty francs/three nights. I turned back to the elevator, frustrated, thinking to retrace my steps. Suddenly I heard a sharp creak and felt a rush of air at my back. I spun around. A hinged panel had swung open, and a backlit figure stood watching me. A woman stepped towards me, her angular face cocked to one side.

“Voulez-vous une chambre Mademoiselle?” Her eyes went from me to my backpack. “Ah, oui, Americaine? “You would like a room?”

My voice faltered, and I cleared my throat. “Bonjour. This is Home St. André?  You have single rooms?”

“Today, just the one. Thirty Swiss francs, three nights. You take dinner with us tonight, yes? We serve the dinner at 19 hours. 7 o’clock. Three more francs only. You pay in advance, oui?”

I tried to read her face as my eyes adjusted to the light. She stared directly at me as she opened a leather-bound register and held out a pen.

“Mademoiselle?”

I looked away and considered muttering an excuse and leaving. All I wanted was a safe place to rest, and after only three minutes here beads of sweat were already forming on my upper lip. I clamped my teeth together and told myself it was just my overtired brain at work, and that any other hostel was probably full. I pulled francs from the pink money belt under my sweater and handed them to her. She tucked the bills into a pocket and smiled tightly as I signed the register.

“Non-remboursable, Mademoiselle. Three days in la belle Genève, non? This way, please.”

I took a deep breath as she turned and strode toward the opening in the wall. Down the rabbit hole, I thought. The elevator behind me rattled as its cables hummed to life and it retreated. Several feet through the opening, I came to an office with a locked window and pass-through linoleum counter. I glanced inside at the glass paned cabinets and jerked to a stop. A flickering fluorescent light illuminated rows of prescription drugs. Orderly little collections of dark orange drug bottles, with neat white labels beneath each group.  Mlle. F. Bertrand, Mlle. M. Gauthier, Mlle. J. Martin.

“You are coming, Mademoiselle?” a voice at the end of the hallway called.

I froze and gaped at what appeared to be a medical dispensary. What was this place? I swallowed hard when I recalled her words “Non-remboursable.” No refunds on my precious 33 francs. I had no choice but to stay here, whatever here turned out to be. I trailed after her clicking heels, turning left and right through so many passages I lost all sense of direction.

The mellifluous notes of a solitary violin reverberated off unseen walls and stopped abruptly when we arrived at a dark blue door. The proprietress’ long hand reached around the doorframe and switched on the light.

“Voila, Mademoiselle.”

 

The room was tiny, with a single bed that crowded most of the windowless space. But it was spotless, and the bed was covered with a thick white comforter. There was a narrow gap running along the side of the room to a small wash basin and mirror. I set my backpack down at the end of the bed.

“Merci, Madam.” I rubbed my shoulder and glanced in the mirror, expecting to see the proprietress standing in the entrance. But rather than her face, I saw the reflection of a young girl. I spun around. A girl, maybe fourteen years old, stood in the doorway. She had choppy short brown hair that looked like it had been cut with nail scissors.

“Bienvenue, Mademoiselle, I am called Orianne,” she said. “You will stay with us tonight? How do you call yourself? You are from where? You are a tourist, or a student perhaps?”

I blinked at her hands, gripped to her chest in a white knuckled ball.

“Ah, bonjour,” I said, looking down the passageway for the woman. No one. I coughed a raspy, nervous cough. Orianne nodded.

“I’m Anne. Yes, I’m staying here tonight. I’m a student,” I said. “Or I was, at the Université in Grenoble. In France.”

She waited.

“But I’m finished now, taking time off, resting. I’m from California.” I was confused why such a young girl would stay at a youth hostel. Was she the proprietress’ daughter?

“Californie!” She turned and called down the hallway. “Elle est de la Californie!” I heard other girls’ voices, chattering in French, calling out questions. “You will tell us about California, please? We can practice our English?”

“Well in a while perhaps,” I said. “But not now, I’m exhausted.” She stood motionless and studied me with intense blues eyes.

“Later, please,” I said sharply, and her brow shot up in surprise. I pressed my lips together and softened my voice. “I need to rest now.” She grinned and loped away.

I heard the girls’ voices start up again then grow muffled when a door slammed. I moved to close the door and caught my breath. Not only was there no lock on it, there was a hole the size of a doorknob drilled through it, perfect for a peering eye. I raked my hands through my hair and sank down on the bed. I leaned back and let the cloudlike comforter envelop me. Despite my uneasiness I fell asleep. I dreamt I was in a concert hall, savoring the work of a master violinist.

 

I woke suddenly to a sharp knock at my door.

“Mademoiselle, le diner!” the proprietress’ voice called. I heard music again as I struggled to orient myself. Was I still dreaming? I patted my warm cheeks. No, that sounded like a Bach violin concerto, and it was as clear and expert as a live performance. The music ended as I pulled on my shoes and sweater. I opened the door and found Orianne. I followed her through the maze of hallways to dinner.

 

The dining hall held about thirty teenage girls, sitting at long oilcloth-draped tables. I gripped the door frame as I struggled to comprehend the scene. A woman dressed in a white uniform and rubber soled shoes was walking around, leaning over each girl and handing out tiny white paper cups. Orianne took my elbow and led me to a table.

“I will bring the dinner,” she said.

The girl seated across the table from me raised her little white cup, a slight tremor causing the capsules inside it to rattle. She regarded me for a long moment, tipped her chin back and swallowed the pills. She carefully lowered her head and pushed blonde bangs from her plump face. A smile emerged through her glassy stare.

“Et voila.” She crushed the little white cup in her hand.

Orianne appeared and set down plates with sausage, lentils and steamed carrots. I gripped my hands under the table and my pulse pounded in my ears. Where was I? How had I ended up in a facility where dinner included a pharmaceutical appetizer? I had been seeking a respite after the grueling mental battle of the last few months of school. How had this happened?

Orianne passed me a basket filled with slices of baguette. I took a piece as she poured me some water. I tore off some bread and tried to chew it, but it was like sawdust in my mouth. “Merci,” I choked out. I grasped the glass of water and drank it down.

“Vous etês fatigué? You are tired, yes? You do not like the food?” Orianne considered me. Her blue eyes narrowed.

I pushed the lentils around my plate with a piece of bread. “I’m okay, yes, but no, yes, the food is fine. Yes, it’s good.”

“You do not like Home St. André?” She cut into her sausage. “Ah, I was the same when I arrived. But now it is better. How do you say? I am taking time off.” She paused. “Resting.”

I lowered my voice. “Orianne, what is Home St. André? This isn’t a youth hostel. Is it a school? Or is it a…” My face flushed.

Orianne gently rested the tines of her fork on the edge of her plate. “It’s a ‘home,’ Mademoiselle. Home, not hostel. It is a home for girls who need some rest. Not so very different from you, no?” I fixed a smile on my face.

 

The proprietress entered the room and clapped her hands. “Girls, we have one guest tonight, all the way from California. Bienvenue, Mademoiselle Anne.” All eyes turned towards me, half curious, half wary. Over the next hour, girls surrounded our table and asked me questions about California. I was doing my best to discuss earthquakes and the probability of movie star sightings when Orianne put a hand on my arm.

“C’est assez. Enough. Elle est fatigué. She will be here for three days. C’est ca, Anne?” I hesitated, and she nodded slowly.

I returned my tray to the kitchen and retraced my steps to my room. I shut the door firmly behind me and pressed my hands to my face. My head throbbed.

Almost immediately there was a knock.

“C’est moi.”

I sighed and opened the door to Orianne, who held a violin in one hand and a bow in the other. “You would like some music?”

I was stunned. Orianne was the source of the virtuoso violin music?

“Since I think you will leave tomorrow, perhaps tonight some music?”

I reddened. “I paid for three nights.”

She tilted her head. “I think tonight you sleep and tomorrow you decide. But first, some Bach. My gift.”

She squeezed into the room. I leaned against the wall beside the bed and pulled the covers around me. Orianne drew the bow across the strings and turned a couple of pegs on the bridge. She did this repeatedly until she was satisfied. She beamed at me and raised the bow and adjusted the violin between her chin and shoulder. I closed my eyes as she stroked the first notes. It was some of the loveliest, and unquestionably the kindest, music I had ever heard.

 

I slept deeply and woke the next morning and found a sheet of music paper on my backpack. “Bon voyage et bon courage, Anne” was written at the top. I studied it for several minutes then tore off the bottom half of the paper. I drew a treble clef across the lines of a musical staff and scribbled a quote from Hans Christian Andersen. “Où les mots echouent, la musique parle. Merci beaucoup, Orianne.” Where words fail, music speaks. I laid it on the center of the bed.

When I heard the first stirrings of people moving around, and the sound of Orianne tuning her violin, I hoisted my backpack and ducked quietly through the hallways. I forfeited my next two nights’ fees and slipped out of Home St. André.

 

I hurried across the plaza and slowed when I reached the steps of the cathedral where a group of children darted in and out of streams of sunlight. At the edge of the square, I turned and peered at Home St. André and the narrow-slotted windows marking its facade. As I sensed it would be, Orianne’s face was pressed against a pane of glass. Our eyes met, and I waved hesitantly. She stared at me, raised her hand in a mute salute and disappeared.

I stood for a long time watching the window, wondering what forces or fortune kept Orianne inside those walls while I walked away. So I did what I knew I could do. I put one foot in front of the other and walked without stopping until I reached the railway station. I dozed on the train to Zurich, and several trains more, clutching my backpack, shifting from dream to dream, and eventually, to wakefulness.

—

Maureen Simons is a writer from Santa Rosa, California. While not being herded by her overactive Australian Shepherd puppy, she writes narrative nonfiction and short stories. She has won two prizes in the Palo Alto Weekly short story contest and has had an essay accepted for publication in a food writing anthology. She attended two juried writer’s conferences – “Lit Camp” in the Bay Area and the Yale Writers Workshop. She is working on a book about the redemptive power of love and caramel sticky buns.

[REVIEW] Crudo by Olivia Laing

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(W.W. Norton & Company, 2018)

REVIEW BY S.N. KIRBY

—

This is not a book meant to soothe. In fact, this is a book that’s been written without any concern for the reader’s well-being. And why should it be? The year is 2017 and Donald Trump is president, Nazis are on the rise, and nuclear war between The United States and North Korea feels eminent. (No sweat, a year later and Trump will tell a rally in West Virginia about how he and Kim Jung Un “fell in love” that summer—kind of like Kathy Acker.) Everything about the book infects the reader with the same skin bursting sensations of that summer in history and Kathy Acker’s general emotional stasis.

Olivia Laing’s debut novel reads as Virginia Wolf stream of consciousness meets William Burroughs’ propensity for crudeness. Every breath and beat of the book evokes feeling rather than thought. What’s remembered isn’t necessarily what a character said or a particularly witty comment, but rather the emotion that the skin is an inefficient container for the self. Everything suddenly feels too tight, as if we too are inches away from crumbling like the world around us. The title itself evokes a sense that the world and the self are hurtling too fast for the writer to catch up with them both: Crudo. Laing’s book is raw and rough, like a deep dive of the id in motion.

The narrative follows a close third on our radical heroine, Kathy Acker. But even this self is a slipping of psyche—a playful act of creative borrowing. Channeling the spirit of a post-mortem Kathy Acker, there is a continuance of the experimentalist writer’s self. Of course, it’s not actually Kathy Acker. She died in Tijuana in 1997. Or did she? I’d like to think not. Instead, I imagine her slipping in and amongst the pages of Laing’s novel, in pure spirit form.

Like Kathy Acker’s work, Oilivia Laing draws inspiration from the creative borrowing of William Burroughs and Andy Warhol. This combination of influence draws from both the late Kathy Acker, who often referred to Burroughs as part of her artistic lineage, and Olivia Laing, who researched and wrote about Andy Warhol for her nonfiction book Lonely City. In the formation of the prose, Laing inserts the late Kathy Acker’s quotes as the thoughts of the character Kathy Acker in a form that mirrors the stylings of Burroughs’ cut-ups. The character Kathy Acker refers to herself as, “Warhol’s daughter, niece at least, a grave-robber, a bandit, happy to snatch what she needed but also morally invested in the cause: that there was no need to invent, you could make anything from out of the overflowing midden of the already-done, the as Beckett put it nothing new, it was economic also stylish to help yourself to the grab bag of the actual.” It’s all very meta.

The lines between Olivia Laing, Kathy Acker the character, and Kathy Acker the writer are constantly thinning. Trying to find and follow the lines can be a bit of a maddening experience. Olivia Laing just married poet Ian Patterson. Kathy Acker marries an older man, another famous writer. Is Kathy Acker the character a stand-in for Laing? Or is the character Kathy Acker a reincarnation of the late Kathy Acker? Or is the character Kathy Acker just that, a character unto herself? There’s a weird and twisted truth in that she is all three. Call me legion for we are many.

Love may be the dividing point of the self and character. Something about the way Kathy Acker describes her relationship to love and partnership feels authentic to her character alone, “she was like a feral animal, she had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as an invasion, as a prelude to loss and pain . . . .” There is something wild and feral about her in the way she moves through the world; doing whatever she wants, whenever she wants. There’s little sense of consequence in action, just pure action from the id. When it comes to loving her partner, she shouts and condemns him on whims that seem more set by nature than emotional causality. It was hot. There was a full moon. Kathy Acker is in a state of constant motion because she has emptied herself out so completely, that she becomes a part of the roving rage and chaos of the universe.

This is what makes Kathy Acker the perfect character to tell the story of the summer of 2017. The translucent line between herself and the outside world tunes her into the emotions of the moment. She acts as a living mirror to the feelings flooding the world consciousness. There is a sense of wanting to destroy for the sake of destruction: “A thing people said a lot that year, and especially the year before, x is a trashfire, also I want to burn everything, sometimes eroded to: burn everything.” She feels this so strongly, and often times without any kind of distance. The same ripping and tearing that the world seems to be tuning into on a mass level, resonates within Kathy Acker’s emotional microcosm. Her emotional states are often a reflection of the outside/inside relationship between herself and others. She is fighting, always. Pushing against something, anything with mass, and trying to break free.

So much of the text revolves around the idea of crashing open the self, which unveils an animal-like rawness to Kathy Acker’s actions and emotions. There’s a rather lovely scene where Kathy Acker feels this sensation of wanting to break open with such intense physicality that it pulsates off the page and beats with a wild passion: “She put the claws on the table and hit them hard. It was brilliant, she would have been happy to smash many more things. She hit the back of the crab as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She hit it again. A network of cracks appeared. She pried at it with her fingers, tearing out small white chunks of flesh.” There is something extraordinary feral about this moment that rings true to the same wild, pure id of the world’s consciousness. Everything feels like it’s being ripped and torn apart. Why shouldn’t Kathy Acker want to feel the same way?

Raw emotion spills upon the pages, leaving the reader with a neurotic and itchy feeling. Like somehow, Kathy Acker found her way under our skin in an attempt to crack open the shells of ourselves. I can almost hear her there, pounding away from within. Suddenly, the world feels too hot, too small, too maddening. As for the question of love, well, Kathy Acker has a moment where—in the same carefree, childlike rush of emotion—she says profoundly that yes, she can and does love! Although, I think Kathy Acker knows herself best when she says, “I grew up wild, I want to stay wild.” Something tells me that for a creature such as this, love may be another container, another shell, another self that is meant to be cracked open and freed once more.

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S.N. Kirby is a graduate of the MFA fiction program at The New School. Her fiction work explores the relationship between man, magic, and nature. She has interviewed musicians across musical genres such as Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance and Beats Antique. Her National Book Critic Circle interviews with Ruth Franklin and Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles were featured on The New School writing blog. She is a frequent reader at TNS After Hours at KGB Bar. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga in New York City. If you smell sage burning, it’s probably her.

[REVIEW] Any Man by Amber Tamblyn

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(HarperCollins, 2018)

REVIEW BY S.N. KIRBY

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Amber Tamblyn’s debut novel speaks to a climate where we face more and more revelations about the monsters that haunt our communities with their self-serving path of destruction and abuse. While the monster in this story is infamous for one peculiarity—this time the sexual predator is a woman, who goes by the name Maude—the unfolding of the narrative plays out like so many others our society has seen. Moreover, it is the public’s schadenfreude and salivation at witnessing this private pain that Tamblyn suggests that we, the public, are perhaps just as monstrous as the predators that lurk in dark corners.

Born in the era of #MeToo and the subsequent disclosures of long standing institutional abuses, Tamblyn’s work gives voice to a cast of men healing after a monster (or is she a woman) destroys their bodies and leaves them naked in the humiliation of her abuse. Some are left for dead. Others are left in their shame. The only evidence she leaves is a six-foot long, white hair.

In the narrative, Maude transforms from human assailant to a mythical creature created out of an amalgam of visceral nastiness. She bounces from human to nonhuman not by her actions, but by the descriptions of her as detailed by the men she assaulted. The first victim, Donald Ellis, sees Maude in a moment of second sight as she moves onto her next victim: “Between the parted woods, a small pair of black eyes peer out and a misshapen scribbled hand claws at the bark, it other arm long, dragging in the mud./The creature is headless./It moves.” Adding to this narrative of Maude, the second victim Pear O’Sullivan goes on to call her, “Maude with cankles and demon egg sacks growing in her gums. Hooved Maude . . . Like a fucking burn victim with babies’ decapitated fingers for eyelashes. With breath like rotting fish and a trail of fur running up the back of her legs and two giant claws for tits.” Here there be monsters.

Something about the physicality of her monstrosity and the way it shifts and changes seems to suggest that there is a shifting component to her selfhood. So often the standard narrative focuses on the transformation of the victims—from victim to survivor—but here Tamblyn seems to suggest that in the very act of becoming an assailant, Maude transforms into a monster. Giving pain is just as transformative as receiving it. But the source of that transformation remains unclear. Is it her soul that is corrupted by these acts? Maybe. For now, the mythical quality of Maude’s physical monstrosity gives her an aura of an omnipresent demon, lurking just outside of our reach.

Maude isn’t the only monster in this narrative. In the echoing and reverberations of voice and power in a media obsessed world, the men left in the wake of Maude are confronted with a cacophony of “support” online and on screen. Through tweets and television transcripts, Tamblyn cleverly reveals the level of entertainment, if not pure enjoyment, society derives from these horrific tragedies. While the author isn’t at a Trump level criticism of the media (no fake news here, folks), there is a kind of blame she places on the media outlets for the way they relish in the private horror of these men.

A caller to Donald Ellis’ radio show, yes he gets his own radio hour, speaks to this quite eloquently, “I realize, more than ever, we need to keep fighting and protecting our kids, not just from predators but also from a society and culture that feels kind of predatory ya know? I mean, that lady did the crimes, but we publicized it. We capitalized on it.” Hey, tragedy makes for great ratings, right? Donald Ellis testifies, “I live in a country built on celebritizing its citizens’ grief and amplifying stories of violence and assault for political gain, click counts, or television ratings. Let me be emphatically clear: They. Don’t. Care. About. Us. People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.” The condemnation is harsh and swift, make no mistake.

While the public focuses on the monster without, the survivors battle the monster within themselves. Because at the core of it all is a story of healing. This is where readers find a there’s a touch of the mystical in the nightmare. Some kind of unseen magic seems to wind its way around the prose and poetry that is untouchable from tragedy. This magic is delicate but resilient. Tamblyn’s novel reminds us that we can live in a world worthy of redemption. While we can’t destroy the monsters, we can heal the ones within ourselves. Even still, in the concrete jungle of New York, Maude lurks and mutters, “Any man will do.”

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S.N. Kirby is a graduate of the MFA Fiction program at The New School. Her fiction work explores the relationship between man, magic, and nature. She has interviewed musicians across musical genres such as Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance and Beats Antique. Her National Book Critic Circle interviews with Ruth Franklin and Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles were featured on The New School writing blog. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga in New York City. If you smell sage burning, it’s probably her.

 

[REVIEW] Read by Strangers by Dean Walker

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(Lethe Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY JOHN COPENHAVER

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Philip Dean Walker’s new short story collection, Read by Strangers, tests, blurs, and breaks boundaries. These boundaries are literal: a group of kids burglalize an abandoned house. They’re intellectual: a professor steals inspiration from her student. And they’re emotional: a mother obsesses over a virtual reality game rather than caring for her child. At times, Walker’s writing is transgressive, wriggling toward experimental: In one story, he employs syntax that mimics the didactic lines of Proverbs and, in another, he experiments with the structure of a playbill biography. His choices are bold and compelling, urging us to question our truths and our desire to push boundaries, to cross a line.

In the preface to Winesburg, Ohio, early American modernist Sherwood Anderson defined what make people “grotesque,” a term the great short story writer Flannery O’Connor would later put her southern Catholic spin on. According to Anderson, it’s when characters cease to be able to hold multiple truths in their hearts and instead adhere to a single, uncompromising Truth. A concept in keeping with our current political moment, but also in line with Walker’s Read by Strangers. Many characters in Strangers latch on to an idea of themselves or the world around them and make decisions based on that idea: “my mother doesn’t love me” or “my boyfriend is out of my league” or “other women are the problem in a male dominated workplace.” Embracing these absolutes leads these characters to make choices that take them beyond a common social or moral framework, leaving us to ponder and scrutinize their actions: Would we behave as they do? Are their actions redeemable?

The opening story of the collection, “Unicorn,” is narrated in the first person plural by group of kids who explore an abandoned house. They are hunting for evidence of the family who lived there, a family who deserted it after the tragic death of their child. What begins as teenage curiosity shifts as the story unfolds; a chilly, dispassionate timbre emerges, as if these kids can’t quite understand the magnitude of what they’re exploring. It’s an appropriate introduction to the collection: Walker invites us to look in, but warns us that we might not like what we see: It may baffle us, offend us, or implicate us. Later, we return to this theme in “Habitat,” which cleverly employs collective narration through group email chain. In it, the correspondents follow the disintegration of a mutual friend, but their concern is clearly rubbernecking in disguise. They want to know the story, but not because they care about the tragic figure at its center. In the penultimate story, “Versimilitude,” a college writing professor, who fears her creative powers are waning, reads a compelling student story and retraces the student’s steps to the source of his real-life inspiration. She then harvests his experience for her own writing, a disturbing step beyond plagiarism. In Read by Strangers, the characters are driven by their singular Truths, often the product of their deep insecurities, which they combat by crossing a boundary, whether it’s breaking in a house, gawking at someone else’s tragedy, or stealing a student’s material for your own. Like Anderson’s characters in Winesburg, Ohio, they’re a menagerie of grotesques, trapped by their Truths.

In several stories, these trespassers realize the horror of their actions and make a gesture back toward the realm of acceptability, attempting to step back over the line they crossed: “I will put my child first,” “I won’t endanger my coworker,” “I am loved.” Whether, as readers, we agree to let these characters back over the line is up to us. Walker leaves us hanging in most cases, bracing ourselves for an impact that we imagine will come, making us as complicit as he is in the outcome of these characters’ lives. If we judge, what does that say about us?

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John Copenhaver is the author of the historical crime novel Dodging and Burning (Pegasus, 2018). He writes a crime fiction review column for Lambda Literary called “Blacklight” and he is the four-time recipient of Artist Fellowships from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He is also Lambda Literary Fellow and Larry Neal awardee. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Glitterwolf Magazine, and others. He grew up in the mountains of southwestern Virginia and currently lives in DC where he chairs the 7-12 grade English dept. at Flint Hill School.

[REVIEW] A Diet of Worms by Erik Rasmussen

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(Mastodon, 2018)

REVIEW BY PRATIMA BALABHADRAPATHRUNI

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Erik Rasmussen’s first novel,  published by Mastodon, has the most intriguing title I have seen for some time. A Diet of Worms, though, is both historically and theologically relevant.  In 1521, Charles the Fifth convened a council in Worms, commonly referred to as the Diet of Worms, where Martin Luther was asked to defend his beliefs.

I open the first page with two question on my mind:  Why the goldfish?  Why the title?

 

“There are a thousand ways to tell how things happened. But there’s no way to know why. You have to pick a reason out of thin air. Then you have to explain it with the same words you use to talk about your shoe. Why should be like a yawn, something everyone understands immediately.” 

 

The book is intriguing; after one read, I still can recollect my favorite instances: the brilliant conversation the teacher Mr. Brush has with Larry as he consoles Larry, using quantum physics as a starting point. Rasmussen’s dialogue is both brilliant and ludicrous. The author is able to conjure for us the old memories of growing up through his everyday characters, elucidating and illustrating with instances that can be easily visualized. There are no greater-than-life characters. There are no spectacular abilities attached to any of them. There is, however, the institutionalized system of everyday life as it is, and how it influences Larry, who could be the kid living next door. Admittedly, this is his story, with a bullet in his pocket and an ailing father being the son of a gun, the  white noise in the background, the man who eats the goldfish and is gone without a good-bye. This is also the story of Larry’s increasing awareness of life, loyalties, friendships and bonds. Like all teenagers, Larry, too, outgrows his adolescent skins.

 

“When your friend likes a girl, he becomes this whole other person …”

 

Larry sounds real.  So do Joey, Ashley, Alexis, Demaris, Mr. Brush, and anyone else in the book; they all ring true. None of them read as farcical or flat. They all  have their own kind of variable, complex lives. Larry, however, seems to be helplessly caught up in the  buccaneering world around his budding adolescence. There is  no catcher in the rye out there to help him. Friends, girlfriends,  father, fate, life, everything seems to spin out of control, move on, and, for a brief moment that lingers, leave Larry behind.

When I was young, I always was surprised that the immobile train on parallel tracks seemed to move along, until we sped past, and there was just the wide expanse of  world around, through the tiny  window. For me, Larry seems to be the moving train, speeding away until he is  a ferocious blur.

It is however, his journey’s closure that wraps it up for me. Here is where the book actualizes its theological argument. Ironically, it is also when I stumble upon the author’s reasoning for choosing the particular title for his book. Except I have to add that the “Diet of Worms” issued an “Edict of Worms”–and I am left wondering whether Rasmussen will come up with a sequel for this stirring debut. Larry, after all, is only seventeen years old as the novel concludes. Ten days after reading the book, I can still see the story happening in my head: a read that was alternately fast- and slow-paced; an experience in which very often, the words flew off the page.

 

“The path was narrow as your shoelace, and up ahead, ten feet, it disappeared beneath the heel of an enormous night.”

 

The reader can either accept the book as a simple story of growing up or  come to terms with the fact that there are more than one way to read a book. Like Larry points out, when it comes to God, people can argue and go on for hours. I can say the same about books.

Goldfish, do you agree?

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Pratima Balabhadrapathruni is a homemaker, writer, and poet. A winner of the in the Poetry Sans Frontieres contest twice in a row, she also has been chosen for the 2014 IWP workshop in non-fiction conducted by the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in OTATA, and Haiku Presence, Haibun Today, and other publications.

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.

 

[REVIEW] Ivy vs. Dogg by Brian Leung

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(C&R Press, 2017)

REVIEW BY PRATIMA BALABHADRAPATHRUNI

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Ivy vs. Dogg is Brian Leung’s fourth book. In 2005, he published World Famous Love Acts (Sarabande Books),  a collection of short stories, which takes a totally different approach to the art of weaving a story. What his novels and short stories have in common, though, is their careful attention to detail and thoughtful rendering. The pace is measured and even, but never monotonous. If I might draw a comparison, Leung’s work is like the spokes of a bicycle, releasing a colorful streak with each turn.

The cover of the book, replete with a giant technicolor squid, evokes this colorful and vibrant approach to storytelling. The ubiquitous “We” that surfaces and resurfaces throughout the book seems almost to come across as the arms of that giant squid.

Which leads to the reader’s first question:  Why does the title of the book have the phrase “With a cast of thousands” featured prominently within it?

Admittedly, as the title announces, the story is about  two childhood companions, both contesting for the position of Junior Mayor.  Still, how many characters can fit into a book of 275 pages?

I realized that it is not just the campaign, and the contesting of Ivy vs. Dogg, that drives the narrative, but it is the town of Mudlick, and the people who can swing the vote either way, that make the narrative arc as inherently unstable as it is. I whistle and startle the neighbor’s cat who has taken to snoozing under the shade of our frangipani. I am sure the cat has a story to tell.  But, it takes a Brian Leung to make that an interesting enough a story to sustain  the reader’s interest.

While the book concludes with the election results and their aftermath, it is not so much the suspense that keeps one’s interest. Rather, it is the dry humor bordering on sociological satire that sails the story through. For, this is not just the story of the popular rich boy, with good looks and blue eyes, and the good-natured plain Jane. It is about the town and the people, their friendships and fraternities.

Yet it is the voice of the Committee that rules the roost, and hands us reason to chuckle or even take a tiny pause, and finally reflect. Printed in large, bold font, and enclosed in parentheses, these pieces of language act as would rumblers on the autobahn, as they slow down the reading, and at times, offer comic relief. It is not as if these dialogue sections always support the text, for many times they seem to be in contradiction to or ridiculously synchronized with that which is being implied in the story. For somehow, the story seems to grow stronger by their presence, as if they were a scaffolding of sorts, although they seem oddly askew, sometimes.

It is not as if the book is a rider to one’s moral conscience. It is not even a social commentary.

(Still, there are specific and concrete expression, which are very precise, and reflect the usual mindset of any small town, and all the people that could make it.

The book is dedicated to among others, also to  “ every home town whose children hear the whispering fists.”

What whispering fists? Later, much later, I realized that the whispering fists are the Committee or really the social pressure on kids who grow up to not be kids and sometimes get to be part of these Committees, or could these fists be fists of determination to be who they want to be, as they fight a social system and social stigma, social oppression?

Some things in the book are purely farcical, or so it seems. When a topiary shaped like a little girl is treated like one and the actual kids are not given enough thought, when  a little girl is hit by a car and soon forgotten or pushed out of the minds, when a little girl who grows to be sensible and social conscious teenager, when  the blue-eyed boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth is always a winner because he is so much more to look at when compared to the plain jane or the wallpaper, …ah, yes, that is the town of the whispering fists, with its omnipresent Committee, surely there must be an instruction or two on rearing children.

(Cultivate the skills of attractive children.) -The Committee.

Or even

(Make your child smoke a full cigarette as a toddler to discourage the habit later.) – The Committee

Of course, the Committee know everything, is always right, and omnipotent…well maybe…

Here is an extract from Page 23 that goes with the Committee’s opinion on Page 24:

“Whatever the case, it’s always been a rough bit of housing and if you live there, it says a lot about your position in life, whether you want it to or not.

(Home ownership is a foundation of moral stability.) – The Committee”

That is not as simple as it sounds. Because, in the book, a boy disses a girl, states she hails from the Pink Ghetto, is poor enough to only live in an apartment instead of a house, even though, he kind of likes her.

Ouch.

When I said, the story reels off like the spokes of something that turns circles, this is what I meant.

Each bit of the wheel that the reader traverses, enlightens us a little more.

(This is not a book for those seeking Enlightenment ) – The Reader

I really wonder how Brian wrote them, these Committee monologues.

My guess is, he wrote the story,  and then spent an awful lot of enjoyable  time coming up with the Committee says, or he watched people playing Simon says… who knows …maybe he read old newspapers as he went about with the editing of the book. New news is no news. Really.

Yikes, I sound like the Committee.

Even though, this book is an absolute unified collage of several stories, given the unique lives of the town folk,  there is a lot of intelligence that went into the pieces of Committee quips, they are hilarious and acerbic, simultaneously. Of course, some are almost innocent and funny…

(Mustaches make a lip reader’s job difficult.) – The Committee

Oh, wait. Here is the text that follows:

“Jacob Alter crossed his legs and put his arms behind his head. He was growing a mustache and it was coming out redder than his hair had ever been. ‘I’ve heard from a pretty reliable source that Ivy Simmons didn’t tell us something very important about her candidacy.’ All of us, as if on cue, leaned in to hear what Jacob was about to say.”

And there, the Committee quip morphs into being the chameleon that it almost always is, it changes its color when hurled into its given its context.

What they do is transport the reader into a social commentary. They offer scope for argument, they involve the reader outside  and beyond the story, enable and afford her to interact in the scenario, without having to interfere with the plot of the story.

The story meanders on, unhampered, as languidly as a horse swishing its tail as it grazes in the meadow with other horses who swish their tails too. And the reader, watches it all, takes it all while thinking about the moral and social implications of sociological structures.

The author becomes the magician; out come all these stories: rainmaker, a plant girl, a woman who talks to the topiary, the man who insists on a fence, and his neighbor who relents, old time  girlfriends, boyfriends, and many more, many many more, a cast of thousands, who fit right into the brackets that hold them all together, allowing them fit right into the plot of the main story: an election campaign where the contenders have to constantly upgrade their acts, for “each event  is only as good as the last event” of the campaign.

But, also, the writer, is engaged in something else: a sleight of hand … and we are drawn into it all, it happens, on its own, without the reader trying to make it happen. There is a story and then, there is a social commentary. The reader is both accepting the story and also arguing the structures and pressures of living in closed societies, especially small towns where everyone knows everyone else.

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Pratima Balabhadrapathruni is a home maker, writer, and poet. A winner of the in the Poetry Sans Frontieres contest twice in a row, she also has been chosen for the 2014 IWP workshop in non-fiction conducted by the Univ. of Iowa. Her work has appeared in OTATA, and Haiku Presence, Haibun Today, and other publications.

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.