interview

NOT DEAD YET: An interview with Hadley Moore

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(Autumn House Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY CAROL SMALLWOOD

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Not Dead Yet, winner of the 2018 Fiction Prize at Autumn House Press, studies the uncertainties of loss, turning a gaze toward the often-silenced voices of the infirm, elderly, and adolescent. Rich in humor and honesty, Hadley Moore’s debut collection of short stories presents a contemporary set of narratives from a lush cast of characters. We find the protagonists of her stories tenderly revealing their pain after the loss of loved ones and coping with the voids left by the passing of youth, happiness, and fulfillment. ~Autumn House Press

Carol Smallwood: Not Dead Yet has contemporary characters dealing squarely with universal problems. Which of the characters did you find the easiest to write about? How long did it take to complete the collection?

Hadley Moore: I say this all the time, but it is true: the process is so mysterious. For me, it isn’t so much that certain characters are easier or harder to write as that whole stories are. I can look at the table of contents of this book and remember what it was like to draft and revise each story—which I wrote relatively quickly; which went through multiple revisions, sometimes in fits and starts over years; which I thought I might never finish—but I can’t tell you why. The process is likely determined by a combination of how well-formed the idea was to begin with, whether I received useful feedback from a reader on an early draft, how much uninterrupted time I had to work on it, and many other factors related to all the as-yet-unknown ways our brains operate. I just have to accept that when I start a new project there isn’t any way to know how it will go.

This book took about ten years to complete, during which time I also focused on other work. Each story felt like a discreet project, and it didn’t occur to me until I had most of them drafted that I might be heading toward a full collection.

CS: Do you write poetry or nonfiction? When did you begin to write character-centered fiction?

HM: I admire poetry but I don’t write it; everything that comes out of me is a sentence. And if I have an urge to write nonfiction, it’s usually about fiction books or fiction writing, but I haven’t published an essay in years. All of this is to say fiction is my literary home.

In my early twenties, I started dabbling in essays, then I got an MS in journalism, and it was a few years after that that I finally decided to try fiction. I was twenty-nine when I started my master of fine arts (MFA) program.

CS: You shared in an interview with Midwestern Gothic: “There’s an austerity to the Midwest that doesn’t lend itself to self-promotion.” Can you say more about that?

HM: This was in response to a question about why there isn’t so much acknowledgment of a regional school of writing of the Midwest as there is of, say, the West or the South. I don’t have a comprehensive answer, but I do think it has something to do with the unassuming nature of (at least parts of) the Midwest. That’s a stereotype and a sweeping generalization, but there are certainly aspects of truth to it.

CS: How do you manage to include humor, even absurdity, in difficult situations?

HM: It’s just the way my brain works! Not everything I write is funny, but much of it has an element of gallows humor. It’s something that presents itself early in drafting, as part of the tone and a character’s situation or worldview. I like to say my life’s motto is “Laugh or slit your wrists,” which I realize can come off as both overly dark and also flippant, but life is hard. You have to laugh at it.

CS: Do you find male characters more challenging to delineate?

HM: No. I don’t think we’re so different, really, in what motivates us and what we obsess over and what the stakes are in our lives.

CS: In what magazines has your work appeared?

HM: Many literary journals: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, the Indiana Review, and others. Many of these are housed in and receive support from universities. I keep an updated list on my website.

CS: What is your literary training, background?

HM: I earned my MFA from the wonderful Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where my teachers were Maud Casey, CJ Hribal, Erin McGraw, Michael Parker, and Steven Schwartz. They were all excellent. I was very lucky.

I also participated in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program with the writer Christine Sneed, who has been so generous and encouraging.

CS: What are you working on now and what advice can you share with those wanting to be published?

HM: I’d like to find a home for a novel manuscript I’ve revised several times, and my current project is shaping up to be thematically linked stories about the assassinations of the 1960s.

Persistence is the key. Writing has to be work you would do no matter what. Publishing ambition is great, but artistic ambition must precede it.

CS: Where can readers learn more about your work?

HM: My website is www.hadleymoore.net, and I very recently got on Twitter @HadleyMoore10.

 

HADLEY MOORE’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Witness, Amazon’s Day One, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the revived december, the Indiana Review, Anomaly, Quarter After Eight, Confrontation, The Drum, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives near Kalamazoo, Michigan.

 

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CAROL SMALLWOOD is a literary reader, judge, and interviewer. Her most recent book is Patterns: Moments in Time (Word Poetry, 2019)

Writing CROSS COUNTRY: A Conversation with Justin Evans and Jeff Newberry

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(WordTech Editions, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY MATTHEW THORBURN

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There’s an interesting tradition of poets writing collaborative books—books in which two writers have a creative conversation, writing poems back and forth to one another or sometimes writing each poem together. This kind of dialogue on the page seems especially well suited to poets. Braided Creek by Ted Kooser and Jim comes to mind, as does Ghost/Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher, as well as Little Novels and the other collections that Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have written together.

I’ve been interested in how this works—how two poets decide to set out on such a journey together, and how they make their way along that road. So when the opportunity came up to talk to Justin Evans and Jeff Newberry about their new collaborative book, Cross Country (WordTech Editions, 2019), I couldn’t resist. Cross Country is a collection of epistolary poems that Justin and Jeff wrote back and forth to each other during 2016 and early 2017. These letter-poems are wide-ranging, encompassing thoughts about the nature of art, religion, family, and politics. I caught up with them over email—from New Jersey to Georgia to Utah and back—during the busy back-to-school season to get the backstory on Cross Country.

 

Matthew Thorburn: So—let’s begin at the beginning: How did you decide to write a book together? How did this project get started?

Justin Evans: The idea to write a book together began with me. Several of the writers I admire, and two specific mentors of mine, David Lee and William Kloefkorn, had collaborated on several books of poems, so I always had it in my mind that collaboration on a book of poems was a viable creative option.

When the itch hit me some five years ago to write a book with someone else, it became increasingly clear the only person I would want to collaborate with was Jeff. I mean that. I admire so many poets, but when I thought about who I wanted to write with, Jeff was the one. My feelings paid off because almost every critical decision and direction the book required was a result of Jeff’s abilities and intuition.

 

MT: How would you describe Cross Country to prospective readers? What do you want them to know about it?

Jeff Newberry: It’s a dialogue about life, fatherhood, and faith, a conversation between two men who are trying to better understand their pasts and the turbulent world they inhabit. From a craft perspective, it’s a book about the intertwining of poetic voices.

JE: I would describe it as a real conversation between two people who are somewhere in the middle of their lives, still trying to figure out what it means to be parents, teachers, poets, and people who are aware of the madness which surrounds them. I would want readers to know that everything in the book is sincere, and not jump to the conclusion that the poems are merely confessional. The admissions we make in our poems are starting points, not the results of exploration.

 

MT: The poems in Cross Country cover a lot of ground—from family life to what it means to be a parent, to memories of childhood and life lessons learned, through to the state of the nation. They also feel very personal—and very candid—about some difficult experiences for each of you. How did you decide what you would write about? Was anything off-limits?

JE: This may sound like a put-on, but the decision to write personally and candidly was a very organic process. I had several ideas for the direction of the book which were wisely rejected, and somehow our focus began to rest on the ideas of faith and hope. I think it was Jeff’s poem about his daughter which really opened things up. He exposed something vital in that poem bigger than itself, which was what good poetry is supposed to do.

From there we started sharing stark reflections of our experiences. He would write a poem and I would write a response. I would write about something that happened and Jeff would write his response. With national events, there was a sense from both of us that something needed to be said.

JN: I know that a lot of poets in our world snoot at and dismiss the idea that poetry can be a kind of therapy. For me, it is. I don’t mean this in a fatuous way. To understand the world, I have to write about it. As such, the ground covered in the book pretty much tracks with what was obsessing me between 2015 and 2016, when the majority of the poems were written.

I find it difficult to write about my daughter. I want to write about her because I want to understand her. The poem “Four Attempts at a Letter about My Daughter” came together from my various attempts at trying to write about her. What that poem showed me—what that poem taught me—was that there is a line between the Madi of this world, the daughter I see every day, and the Madi of my imagination.

 

MT: This book is a dialogue—a sequence of poems that feels like a conversation or letters you wrote to each other. Did you decide from the outset to shape the poems and the book this way? What drew you to this form?

JE: As I said before, every major decision about form and theme was a result of Jeff. I just wanted to write poems with someone else. I thought it would be cool to emphasize the role that place has in American letters, and write poems about places we were familiar with and write about places we had been assigned to write about by the other person. I thought this kind of noodling around might lead to some interesting work. Jeff, knowing we both shared a love for Richard Hugo, suggested we write letters to each other. That went through one or two iterations before we settled on what is in the book.

JN: Justin says that the letters were my idea. I am convinced that they were his. Either way, the epistolary form had never really attracted me. I was familiar with Richard Hugo’s 13 Letters and 31 Dreams, of course, and I’d read some letter poems here and there. However, the form never interested me—until I began writing them. Having a willing, open audience who was not only going to listen but also respond made the form perfect for the kind of personal issues we explored in the letters.

 

MT: How did you navigate the pull to have each poem respond to the one that came before, versus striking out in some new direction?

JE: First, let me say that Jeff’s ordering of the poems—he reversed the order in which some of the poems were written—truly made a huge difference. As for new directions, that is also an organic creation. What I mean by that is we never directed each other by saying, “Your next poem should be about….” I think we wrote poems for two reasons. We were having a sincere conversation through our poems, and we wanted to know how each other would respond to what we thought of something. I also think we kept one foot in the real world, never completely giving in or allowing ourselves to become untethered from the real world. Everyday life is not a novel, and it can’t be plotted.

 

MT: Would you talk a bit about your experience publishing and promoting the book? How did you go about securing a publisher? What has the reception been like from readers?

JE: We divided up the workload. I would be in charge of individual submissions for poems, and Jeff would try to find a publisher. I do not normally submit to contests, but I supported Jeff in whatever fashion he saw his task. I think it also shaped where our poems were seen outside of the manuscript. Jeff found a published very fast, which was both a pleasant surprise and a daunting revelation for me.

Readers I know personally have enjoyed the book. I thought I was going to get a lot more support from family, as has been my experience. While my family still supports this endeavor, so many more readers have expressed their enjoyment. I had a teacher ask if she could read some of my poems in her class, which blew me away.

JN: Unfortunately, the book has not found a wide readership. We’ve had a few people show interest. The poetry market is crowded, and if you’re not in the MFA world, like Justin and I aren’t, it can be hard to find someone who will teach or review your book. I’ve sent out review copies to several magazines. We also promoted it on Facebook and Twitter.

 

MT: What would you say to other poets considering collaborating on a book? Any good advice—or words of warning?

JE: It is an enlightening experience, to say the least. I would say to go into the process with very few immutable expectations. Most of my ideas about what I wanted to happen had to change into something else. It was all for the better, but if you are set on something happening and your allegiances are in the wrong place, your ego will take a beating. You simply have to keep an open mind, and you need to have patience.

JN: My only advice is this: Find someone you trust. That’s a very important aspect.

 

MT: What are you working on now? What’s next for each of you? And do you think you might collaborate on another book project at some point?

JE: After reading Battle Dress by Karen Skolfield and Mothers Over Nangahar by Pamela Hart, I am revisiting my military/wartime experiences in a series of short poems.

I think it might be very interesting to collaborate with Jeff again. I am torn between thinking that if we did, it would need to be completely different in order to make it interesting, or trying the impossible by writing letters again. I do know that I need some time to recover and see myself as a poet in the singular for a while before I could even consider collaboration.

JN: I’m working on a book of experimental mini-memoirs. I’ve also got another book of poetry in progress. As far as collaboration? Perhaps. Right now, however, my own projects are keeping me busy.

 

 

JUSTIN EVANS was born and raised in Utah. After serving in the U.S. Army, he attended Utah schools and has been teaching in rural Nevada for the past 21 years, where he lives with his multi-media artist wife, Becky, and their three sons. He is the author of four chapbooks, including Four Way Stop, Gathering Up the Scattered Leaves, and Working in the Birdhouse, and four previous books of poems, including Town for the Trees, Hobble Creek Almanac, and Sailing This Nameless Ship.

 

JEFF NEWBERRY is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. His previous books include the novel A Stairway to the Sea and the poetry collection Brackish. Recently, his writing has appeared in Brevity: Concise Nonfiction, Sweet, and The American Journal of Poetry. He is on the core faculty in the Writing and Communication Program at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two children.

 

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MATTHEW THORBURN‘s most recent book is The Grace of Distance, published by Louisiana University Press in 2019. He’s also the author of six previous collections of poems, including the book-length poem Dear Almost, which received the Lascaux Prize, and the chapbook A Green River in Spring. He works in corporate communications in New York City and lives in small-town New Jersey with his wife and son.

An Interview with Alex DiFrancesco on their forthcoming book, All City

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(Seven Stories Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JESSICA MANNION

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Alex DiFrancesco has had a busy year. Their essay collection Psychopomps was released  by Civil Coping Mechanisms in February, and their novel All City is being released by Seven Stories Press on June 18. While both books are excellent, this interview focuses on All City. It is an important book, and very possibly a prophetic one. All City speaks for the people whose stories do not often get told, much less told with nuance and compassion.

All City takes place in a New York City of the near future. The chasm between the haves and have-nots is wider than ever, and climate change has sent superstorms of increasing violence to the shores of the city, tearing it down with wind and water. Those with the means always leave before the storms hit, but those without resources and means, those who have nowhere else to go, must remain and hold on to what they can by sheer force of will.

The book primarily follows three people, their struggles to survive, to regroup and find security after Superstorm Bernice, and to build new lives in a world that’s a mere muddy remnant of what they knew before. Even after the waters recede, life doesn’t get any easier; there is no new food being shipped in, medical care is practically nonexistent, roads and bridges are destroyed, and the wreckage of the storm is everywhere, bringing with it vermin and sickness. As resources diminish, violence increases, and there are few places where one can feel safe.

Alex lived in New York for about 15 years, but has since moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where they are an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University.

Jessica Mannion: Having just read All City for the second time, I loved it even more. There’s a lot to unpack. In part, I see it as a kind of hybrid love letter to and eulogy for New York City. Can you talk about the changes you saw during your time living in NYC and how living here influenced your writing, and your life as an artist?

Alex DiFrancesco: So now, when I think back to when I moved to New York in 2000, I realize I was a shock-wave gentrifier in Bushwick. I was a white, queer, artist who was specifically moved into a very affordable space at the time by people looking to develop it. I didn’t understand that at the time! I was just out of a small town in Pennsylvania, and thrilled that I could work part time as a lunch server in a little Middle Eastern place, write most of the day, and still pay my rent and have money to party a little. It was the dream, for me, to move to NYC and become an artist. I lived in a dirty loft and had a desk made out of a couple boxes and an old door, and I wrote every day. I was highly suspect about going back to school, and NYC provided so many ways other than that route to become a writer.

I remember in around 2005, I was working at some film-release party on a boat moored in the Hudson (those were the days when Craigslist still had the best odd jobs), and someone way slicker and cooler than me asked me where I lived, and then proclaimed Bushwick as “up-and-coming.” I had this sudden, distinct understanding that I would no longer be able live there, and that I had been the beginning of that process for people who had been there much longer.

I lived in NYC for around 10 more years after that. First I had to move all the way to the end of Brooklyn. Then I moved to Queens. Then, finally, just before I left, a friend was letting me pay way less than she could have charged for a room in the apartment she owned because there was no way I could live there and afford it anymore. What I made had stayed the same, and my rent had tripled.

But ultimately, living and scraping by in New York made me the artist I am today. I went to school at the New School, and learned from some amazing professors. I joined a writers’ group with some of the most talented writers I’ve ever worked with in it. I went to lectures, worked in bookstores, interned in publishing. It’s helped me build my life around the written word in so many ways. I’m sad every day that there’s just no place for me there anymore.

JM: What does All City mean and where did the idea for the book come from?

AD: The term “all city” is old graffiti slang for an artist who has painted in all 5 boroughs of New York. When I wrote the anonymous artist character into the book, I thought about how nearly impossible this would be to accomplish if you were working in the post-collapse conditions of the book. I decided to make him do it anyway.

The book was a mash-up of what ifs, really. I started writing a list of them after Superstorm Sandy destroyed parts of New York City, and also shortly after Bansky did his month-long NYC residency where he guerilla-installed a new project in an undisclosed location every day for an entire month. I’d also been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina. The ideas just sort of melded together.

JM: The novel is primarily told through 3 characters: Makayla, Jesse and Evann. There’s so much going on with the characters: they are all affected by this Superstorm Bernice, and they all experience displacement and a certain degree of trauma, but because of their social status and circumstances, each experiences / survives / processes that trauma differently. Why did you choose these characters to tell this story?

The first draft of this novel was a super sloppy 40,000 words written during NaNoWriMo. I didn’t really participate in the community aspects of it, but I did challenge myself to write the proposed amount in the month of November. Once I had the list of what-ifs, I started to look at them from different angles. Makayla came first, because I wanted someone who would likely be without many resources besides her sense of community and her relationships. I added Jesse in because it’s very important to me to portray trans lives in the larger context of the world — in such a way that they’re not isolated, but also not in trans-only spaces all the time. Evann felt necessary, too, because you can’t show the have-nots without showing what it looks like to have it all.

JM: Another character – a mysterious mural artist – remains unseen, but his Art starts showing up everywhere in the devastated city like crocuses in the spring. What role does Art play in All City? How have the visual arts influenced or inspired you as a writer and artist?

AD: There are a series of works of visual art in this novel that are all carefully chosen and all mean different things.

Evann, the art collector, is given a Basquiat when she graduates from design school. This kind of started as a joke, because I made her collect Basquiats and first editions of Ayn Rand books. What kind of awful person wouldn’t get the irony there? Then, like a lot of the things I do to amuse myself in my writing, I started taking it seriously. Really, what kind of person wouldn’t get that? Certainly not one like me, or anyone I’d care about. But someone. So Evann was born out of love for Basquiat and Ayn Rand.

There’s a scene where two trans street punks go into The Met to look at Van Gogh paintings, and one of them starts crying because they’ve never seen Van Gogh’s sunflowers and never realized how dead they were. The other one says, no, they’re dead but they’re still moving and full of life, that’s how much life Van Gogh saw even though he was so sad. It’s one of the few times in the book that art is just enjoyed and not commodified.

Then, Evann owns two more paintings that play symbolic roles in the story. She owns Richard Bosman’s woodcut “Full Moon” and John Lurie’s absurdist watercolor “Bear Surprise.” The role of “Full Moon” (which shows one man beating another to death in a boat) is to show Evann looking into a world she has no idea about, but the other characters are all to familiar with. The role of “Bear Surprise” (which shows two people having sex in the woods and a bear yelling “Surprise!”) is because it’s Lurie’s most famous but probably least-skilled painting, which Evann totally doesn’t understand. It’s a little poking fun at her, to have it in there. I also learned while doing research for the novel that Lurie was one of Basquiat’s early mentors, so I felt compelled to write him in because of that connection.

Art is really commodified almost every time it appears in  the book. It’s made for the right reasons, but it’s consumed, often, in ways that are more about the owning it than the divineness of it. I have very silly and almost spiritual beliefs about art and where it comes from, but the art world and the world of the novel are both kind of ugly and gross and highly capitalist rather than about communicating the thing that makes art worth making.

JM: How does All City explore ideas of ownership?

AD: I’m thinking of the ownership of space as the main way it works. There’s a luxury condo, and when it’s not something that the rich want, it’s good enough for the poor. It’s a place they can make a utopia. But then it becomes something that the rich want again, and it’s too good for the people who have made it their own. This is a microcosm of the gentrification of New York, in the book. So really the way ownership is dictated is on the desires of those who have the money to protect their “rights” to a space, not those who work to make it their own.

There’s also something there about the use of graffiti as a way to take and remake public spaces as something belonging to everyone, for everyone’s use and enjoyment. It’s ecstatic and community-based, much like the true community-building that happens in the luxury condo. I don’t think I could’ve told this story without the addition of graffiti.

JM: How does All City explore the concept of hope – about the future, about a better life, about belonging – and who ultimately will see their hopes realized?

AD: Hope is fraught in All City. There are people like Evann who have implicit access to it, when they choose it. There are people like Makayla who make it out of what they have. But I want to say that the last scene is my probably depressive final take. Who gets to see that which is supposed to bring us hope? Who doesn’t? And who are the few people who believe that hope is a starting point, something they saw once, and carry that fire as far as they can?

JM: In part, All City is a story of survival. How do you explore survival and the things some people must endure in order to do so?

AD: Without giving too much away, I think the biggest traumas in the book are one character’s rape, one’s loss of a parent, and one experiencing a hate crime committed against the person they love. These characters all rally, at least for a while, or eventually, to use the trauma they’ve experienced to make the world around them better. It creates empathy in them rather than destroying them — but sometimes it destroys them too. I think the idea that some people choose to make sure that no one goes through the horrible things they’ve been through is the driving idea behind a lot of these characters. They’re not saints, and they’re not perfect — but they’re driven by the fact that traumatic things have happened and they’ve turned them into compassion, which then turns into community and survival.

JM: The characters Makayla and Jesse in other circumstances would often be seen as outsiders of society, but you put them front and center in the book. Why did you choose to tell this story from their perspective?

AD: This is always my goal, to put the outsiders at the inside. I think I have always felt like a bit of an outsider myself, so I’m not really sure how I could sustain an emotional and moral core to a novel without it being heavily focused on characters who see and feel and experience things outside the norm or the default.

Also, it’s a highly political act to write the stories that people say shouldn’t be told. I knew Jesse had to be in there because I’m a trans person, and queer representation means something to me. I was really a bit hesitant to write Makayla because she’s a minority I’m not a part of, she’s a woman of color. Certainly, a woman of color could have written Makayla in another way, and it would be entirely more appropriate for her to tell a woman of color’s story. But I also had been reading so much about the aftermath of Katrina, and the poor people left behind, and it struck me as absurd to try to tell a story of gentrification and climate change and survival from multiple perspectives without characters of color. I took as much feedback as I could get from folks more aligned with her perspective.

But it was incredibly important to me, outside of specific demographic, to tell the story of those who had been left behind, and, more terrifyingly are being left behind. All City is, in some ways, a warning. But it’s also the story of those who’ve been pushed so far out that they’ve had to make their own way, and know what they’re doing when things really go down.

(photo by Emily Raw)

JM: In many ways, Evann is a controversial character; she is probably the least sympathetic and the one who causes the most harm. Yet she would certainly not view herself that way, nor would much of society. How is her perspective important?

AD: I wrote Evann about 16 times. You might recall from when we workshopped this book in our writers’ group, people were referring to her in Snidely Whiplash terms, because she was just that bad. The somewhat less dastardly Evann who ended up in the final pages was born largely out of my wonderful editor, Sanina Clark, pushing me to make her less villainous. Sanina had asked me early on if Evann was a cipher, a stand-in for gentrification, and I said that no, she was a villain, for sure, but I also wanted her emptiness and need for consumption in place of being able to feel anything to be real and human. Sanina pushed me through rewrites to make Evann less of a complete monster, and more of a asshole human, if that makes sense.

In some ways, Evann is the most important character I’ve written thus far (at least to me), because she’s the life most outside of my own, which is what writers are supposed to be creating, I think. With every other character I was able to find something inside myself to return to like a compass when I started to go astray with them. I really had to work to find this place with Evann. I used to take walks in Green-Wood Cemetery to Basquiat’s grave all the time, talking to his ghost and think about Evann doing the same.

But she also plays an important role in the story in that we have to see the other side of this huge divide in the future world. If we see Jesse nodding out in a dirty IRT station from scrounged opiates, we also have to see Evann fucking a guy with pearl studs in his dick, you know?

JM: Your essay collection Psychopomps came out in February of this year. How do these books inform each other?

AD: I think people who read both will see bits and pieces that reflect each other. Sometimes I kind of feel like writing creative nonfiction can be like pulling back the curtain and seeing the little dorky man in a suit working the controllers. That’s me, the little dorky guy in Psychopomps, and All City is like the illusionary Oz.

I’m only half-way kidding. Anyway, read both; keep my cat in her favorite wet food.

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Jessica Mannion is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. Her writing can be seen in The Literary Review, Alliteratti, and other publications. She also does copy-writing on a variety of subjects.

A Conversation with Amir Hariri

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BY M. SULLIVAN

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(BATH HOUSE, oil and acrylic on board)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(VILLA NOVA, oil and acrylic on board)

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

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

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

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

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

(RAW MANIFOLD, oil and acrylic on board)

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

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

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

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

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

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(Dey Street Books, 2017 in English)

INTERVIEW BY JOHN APRUZZESE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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INTERVIEW BY YI ZOU

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

YZ: What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

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

 

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

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.

The Mystery and Mythology of Found Audio by N.J. Campbell

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INTERVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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Two Dollar Radio’s latest publication is hot off the press. Found Audio by N.J. Campbell is a Russian nesting doll of a novel with layers of mystery, mythology, madness, and suspense.

When three stolen audio tapes of questionable origin land on Dr. Amrapali Singh’s desk, along with a large sum of money to analyze them, she has two days to extract any clues as to the origin of the tapes and the identity of the unnamed journalist whose story they hold. Using her keen ear and expertise in antiquated audio formats, she transcribes the tapes, which form the majority of the novel.

From the murkiest bayous of Louisiana to the walled-in city of Kowloon to a chess tournament in Turkey, the unnamed journalist searches for the City of Dreams––a legend akin to El Dorado and the lost city of Atlantis. The clues to where this City of Dreams might be come sporadically, over the course of several decades, and each time he gets close to finding it, something mysteriously happens to affect his perception of reality. Whether under the influence of alcohol, mental illness or the energy-draining humidity of the bayou, our unreliable narrator is thwarted and the City of Dreams remains just that: a dream.

I read Found Audio in one sitting, completely engrossed in the story. Just as Dr. Singh was enraptured by the tapes, I, too, was Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

The novel is a brilliant work of metafiction, and the story within the story is as irresistible as gossip from a friend of a friend. The foreword and afterword are both in the form of letters written by the author, N.J. Campbell, which further add to the mystery by tinkering with the thread-thin line between the extraordinary and the realm of possibility.

There are degrees of truth in the otherworldly tales, which ignite curiosity and propel the reader deeper into the narrative. Found Audio reads like a modern-day version of “Kubla Khan,” where the fantastic is ever-present, just beyond reach.

Being the curious person I am, I Googled many of the myths and legends in the book and was amazed to find that many of them have been documented. The City of Dreams is a renowned myth, the walled city of Kowloon really was torn down in 1993 and The Turk was a chess-playing automaton from the 1770s, later revealed to be a hoax. I even found an obituary for an Otha Johnson in the Times-Picayune from 2003, which fits within the timeline and the location of the story. While his obituary didn’t mention him being a snake hunter, judging by the number of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren he had, it sounds like he lived to be quite old, just like the Otha character in the novel.

While each of these myths may seem disparate on the surface, Campbell weaves them together with a deft hand.

“I remember things that interest me, and they inevitably show up in my work. Stringing them together is partly happenstance and partly planned catastrophe,” Campbell says. “What I mean by the latter is that I’m very critical of my own work. I don’t want to get bored with it, so I’m constantly trying to push myself to see what might come out of further exploration. If I think I can’t do something, I have to do it. And a lot of this stuff all being strung together is me just trying to see in what way something can or might connect to something else.”

As evidenced in Found Audio, Campbell has found that his best writing comes from challenging himself to write his characters out of seemingly impossible problems.

“My friend Joey said it best: ‘If you’re an artist and you can risk it, you have to. You won’t be able to back down.’ That’s really stuck with me. So, in many ways I deliberately try to see how far I can push my narrative––what if that character tells me to get lost? What if I paint myself into a corner I know I can’t get out of? I can always go back and tear up the floorboards, but I want to see what might happen if I build myself into places that look like dead ends.”

Some of Campbell’s best ideas have come to him while at his day job, which is working for a small university press.

“I am 0% involved in anything to do with the publishing process. I literally pack boxes, take orders, and buy shipping supplies. That’s it. But that gives me total freedom to think all day about whatever I want,” Campbell explains. “My body is absorbed in a mostly physical task, and my mind wanders. It’s been majestic. I’ve worked manual labor jobs most of my life to keep my mind rested in order to write.”

The mystery doesn’t end with Found Audio. His next writing project is in the works, though he’s not quite ready to share. “For some people I know, talking about what they’re working on is helpful, but for me it’s not. I get self-conscious and that’s a distraction,” Campbell explains. “I will say that I work very diligently and very deliberately, but I don’t talk about anything until it’s done.”
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Mandy Shunnarah is a writer based in Columbus, Ohio, though Birmingham, Alabama, will always have her heart. Her creative nonfiction essays and book reviews have appeared in The Missing Slate, Entropy Magazine, and The New Southerner Magazine, where she won Honorable Mention in their 2016 contest. You can read more of her work at her website, OffTheBeatenShelf.com.

 

Haints, Horrors, and Hilarity: JD Wilkes on The Vine That Ate the South

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INTERVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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Vine-That-AteIf you grew up in the rural South, you’ve probably heard tales of big cats, vampires, the Bell Witch, flesh-eating kudzu, and other terrors that go bump in the night. You may have even encountered some yourself, though probably not all in a single outing. Unfortunately for the protagonist of The Vine That Ate the South––and fortunately for us––he did.

Author JD Wilkes spared hardly a Southern folk demon in his debut novel, The Vine That Ate the South. It’s a Homeric tale of going into The Deadening, a patch of haunted woods in western Kentucky, in hopes of coming out not only alive, but with an adventure tale so heroic as to woo his One True Love away from his sworn enemy.

The ultimate destination of our unnamed hero is The Kudzu House, where legend has it an elderly couple was eaten alive by carnivorous kudzu and their skeletons can still be seen strung up by the hungry vine, like two burned out bulbs on a strand of morbid Christmas lights.

When the myriad of Southern haints and frightful creatures are encountered alongside the more corporeal menaces, like trigger-happy hunters and murderous Masons, you’re not entirely certain what’s real and what’s not––and that’s where the magic happens. Rather than a moonlight-and-magnolias glorification of the South, Wilkes shows just how fearsome it can be––literally and figuratively.

The Vine That Ate the South is not only suspenseful, but also uproariously funny. Whether he’s recounting a run-in with a lisping, overly eager pastor or remembering the day his girlfriend-stealing nemesis found his family’s “shit knife,” our protagonist is like that hilarious uncle who always tells the best stories, genuinely unaware of his natural talent for comedy.

The style and tone of the novel, as well as its deft storytelling, mirrors the music of the band The Legendary Shack Shakers, of which Wilkes is the frontman. With the band’s punk, blues, and rockabilly tunes, lyrics rife with apocalyptic Biblical references and Wilkes’ onstage persona as a Southern gothic preacher, The Vine That Ate the South is like a Legendary Shack Shakers show contained between two French flaps.

I talked to Wilkes about his writing process, his influences and his varied artistic talents.

Shunnarah: I so enjoyed The Vine That Ate the South. The story kept me turning pages well after I probably should’ve gone to bed. The novel reads like a bard finally wrote down the South’s oral mythic history. Were you conscious of that bard-like quality as you were writing? How do you think the oral tradition plays into Southern culture?

Wilkes: I wanted the book to read in a “high prose,” florid manner that mirrored the lushness of the Kudzu. The words needed to overwhelm you at times. But I also tried to cut it back and clear room––much like the characters do with their machetes––by allowing plain speech in spots. That way you hopefully get a nice balance of old-school verbosity and simple Southern humor and wisdom.

Shunnarah: I know The Vine That Ate the South wouldn’t be considered a humor book, but there were parts where I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. I’m curious to hear more about your thoughts on how humor factors into Southern culture and storytelling.

Wilkes: I think humor is or should be a part of Southern writing. Flannery O’Connor was satirical and humorous, of course. John Faulkner is a bigger influence on me than his brother William.

Irvin S. Cobb, from Paducah, Kentucky, is too. To write about a place with such an intense history, one must occasionally pop air into it. Levity is what keeps novels like mine from descending into depressing historical fiction or even horror.

Shunnarah: It seems like going exploring in the woods and seeing at least one big cat or mythical creature is a Southern rite of passage. I say that having explored some creepy shacks and seen a big cat or two myself. I’m curious to know if your own explorations and otherworldly encounters fueled some of the scenes in The Vine That Ate the South.

Wilkes: Yes, I also enjoy walking around in abandoned places in the woods, ha! Careful we don’t get shot!

One place nearby is an actual ghost town in the woods along Clarks River. It’s called Carter Mill (it’s talked about in the novel) and there’s nothing like letting your imagination run wild through all those old dilapidated timbers and tar paper. You can even make up your own stories about what happened there… mix it in with the truth a little. Let the storytelling take on a life of its own. It’s something I did as a kid and still do.

Shunnarah: I noticed that the unnamed protagonist calls his companion in adventure, Carver, “crazy” on several occasions. Though Carver is his best friend, he’s self-aware enough to know Carver has a few screws loose. As someone who calls the South home––but who has left, traveled the world, and come back––are there times when you feel like an outsider like the protagonist, too?

Wilkes: I think I’m secretly jealous of people like Carver, a simple redneck who can handle himself in any situation. He’s not that nuanced and he’s the absolute opposite of an intellectual. But it’s his ability to blend into the wild that makes the main character wonder if he’s just crazy… Carver even seems to be an extension of the terrible forest itself. But I see the character as less crazy and more visceral, even feral. A man in complete union with nature at its deadliest.

Shunnarah: Your first book, Barn Dances and Jamborees Across Kentucky, was a work of nonfiction published by History Press. Did you always know you wanted to write a novel at some point or was there something about writing Barn Dances and Jamborees that inspired you in that direction?

Wilkes: I never dreamed of really writing a novel. It was really all just a lark.

While on tour with my band in Norway, I cracked a laptop open for a light source while riding through a long tunnel in the mountains. I was homesick so I figured, “Hell… Why not start waxing poetic about Kentucky?” Those Arctic Circle surroundings might’ve inspired my slightly-Tolkienesque approach, though. It really looks like Middle Earth up there!

So I reckon I just started thinking about the lore of the South, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon stuff that Tolkien studied. Thinking about how we have stories, too.

Shunnarah: In addition to writing the novel, you drew all the illustrations. And on top of that you’re an accomplished musician, both as a solo artist and as a member of multiple bands, most famously The Legendary Shack Shakers, and a filmmaker. How does your love of one inspire and influence the others?

Wilkes: All my pursuits are aimed at telling the same kind of story: epic southern mythology. So there’s always this overarching theme despite the varied media I dabble in. Each medium is just a different discipline that I have learned “good enough” to get the stories across to the public. The hope is that each and every creation will combine to form my own little universe, one that people will enjoy visiting from time to time.

Shunnarah: What’s next for you? I’m interested in any creative projects you’re working on, though I’m especially curious to know if there are more books in the works.

Wilkes: There’s a solo record in the works with some of the Squirrel Nut Zippers guesting. There will be another mural project or two––I just did a large painting for the historic Coke Plant in Paducah. And I’m always writing tunes for The Legendary Shack Shakers. New album comes out in April!

Despite the workload, I’m still vaguely entertaining Carver’s next move, way in the back of my brain. Wonder what he’ll do next …

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Mandy Shunnarah is a writer based in Columbus, Ohio, though Birmingham, Alabama, will always have her heart. Her creative nonfiction essays and book reviews have appeared in The Missing Slate, Entropy Magazine, Deep South Magazine, and The New Southerner Magazine, where she won Honorable Mention in their 2016 contest. You can read more of her work at her website, OffTheBeatenShelf.com.

[INTERVIEW] HAUNTINGS, HUMOR, POETRY, AND DOGS – AN INTERVIEW WITH KIMMY WALTERS

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INTERVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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killerWhether she’s writing about the endless curiosity of the body, the challenges that accompany being a feminist who isn’t afraid to defend her autonomy, the humor of living in a semi-rural area, or the wisdom of dogs, Kimmy Walters will delight you.

Walters is young—26, to be precise—so Millennials especially will recognize themselves in Killer’s pages. Walters’ debut poetry volume, Uptalk, was published in 2015, also by Bottlecap Press. At this rate, poetry connoisseurs will have much to look forward to.

Walters’ is the kind of poetry you can’t help but want to read, even when you’re falling asleep with the bedside lamp on. It’s the kind of poetry you read aloud to your friends because you just can’t keep it to yourself. The kind of poetry you want to read at stoplights even though it would pain you to be caught in the midst of a poem when the light changes.

While some modern poets default to snark, Walters is confident enough in her poetry to let each piece speak for itself rather than forcing the reader toward a quick, easy, often moralistic conclusion. Killer asks the reader only to observe and acknowledge—what readers glean beyond that is entirely their own.

Though the entire volume is captivating, the standout poems are “Good Morning, I Am Not Going to Commit Suicide Today,” “Does Your Soulmate Speak English,” “Marrying a Husband,” “Poem About How Little Affection I Had for Him,” “Giving Blood,” “The Water Was Filled With Swans,” “People Person” and, of course, the namesake, “Killer.”

I talked to Walters about her writing process and how her life experiences have informed her work.

Shunnarah: One of the things I most enjoyed about Killer is that while your poems are flush with meaning, they’re also extremely enjoyable on the surface level. Was the accessibility of your work always important to you? Did you ever have a memorable moment of throwing your hands in the air in frustration while reading a poem and think, “What does it all mean?” and vow not to make anyone do that?

Walters: Thank you! I’m not sure I ever consciously decided I wanted my writing to be accessible–I just didn’t have any interest in writing anything super opaque. I don’t get frustrated with needlessly complex writing so much as I get disinterested. I start looking around like “What else is going on?” I’m not going to spend a lot of time with a page that’s not really trying to communicate with me, and neither are most people.

Shunnarah: In the poem “Killer,” for which the collection is named, you speculate there may have been a killer who previously lived in your residence. Have you learned more about the house’s history since writing that poem?

Walters: I just looked up the house that poem was based on in Google Street View and there is a single black folding chair on the porch. Seems ominous…

It’s possible a killer lived there. That whole town was haunted as hell. One time my roommate and I slept downstairs in sleeping bags so we could try to get an overnight audio recording of the upstairs ghost. It was inconclusive.

Shunnarah: A number of the poems in Killer have a dark, subtle humor that is rendered sublimely in the text. I also noticed the recurring theme of dogs, creatures who manage to be simultaneously sage and goofy. Tell me more about your sense of humor and how it has developed in your poetry.

Walters: I’ve been depressed for a large portion of my life, and I dealt with it by constantly telling myself jokes. For a long time I thought that’s what everyone’s interior monologue was like. My sense of humor comes from years and years of trying to distract myself from being sad.

Shunnarah: You studied linguistics in college—deviating from the more common path of studying English literature or creative writing. Tell me more about how the study of linguistics gave you insight into language and influenced your poetry.

Walters: I didn’t have a lot of direction when I entered college, but the adults around me warned me against pursuing an English degree because they thought I wouldn’t be able to get a job. (I later found that it’s not easier to get a job with a linguistics degree, and a lot of people don’t know what linguistics is.)

It’s kind of an accident that I ended up with this degree, but it was a good course of study for me. I’ve always been interested in what language is capable of, its history, and how it changes. Studying linguistics definitely encouraged me to be more playful with language. The first thing you get taught in an introductory linguistics class is that you need to stop being such an asshole about language, which was true for me and probably all of my classmates.

Shunnarah: You’ve talked extensively about your use of social media as a poetic medium—namely making poetry out of the tweets from the now defunct horse enthusiast bot account, @horse_ebooks—so here’s the obligatory social media question. Many fans of your poetry found you via Twitter and Tumblr. Do you think blogging and social media, particularly Twitter because it requires brevity, have helped guide people to modern poetry?

Walters: When I was a tween, the thing to do at my school was to keep a blog, so I’ve been writing online for about 13 years. Connecting with people online is easier and makes me less anxious than trying to meet people other ways, and the way I’ve connected with people is by sharing writing or art.

Over the years I’ve had a lot of practice creating things that I want people to see. I took to Twitter quickly because I’m usually brief anyway. Twitter’s character limit is a constraint on writing the same way that the rules of haiku are. I mean, like anyone, I’ve tweeted “who up?” but hella old poems essentially boil down to “who up?” too. It’s one of the Big Questions.

The internet is a buffet and I am going hog wild on it. It’s so easy to sample things—I read articles online about subjects I’d never think to actually buy a book about. That may be where some of the interest in poetry is coming from. Someone who’d never browse the poetry section of a bookstore might have a poem come across their feed on Twitter or Facebook and find that they like it. Then they’ll come across a tidbit about food science or body language and like that too. We take in so much information; some of it’s gonna be poetry.

Shunnarah: Killer is your second collection of poetry, the first being Uptalk, which was also published by Bottlecap Press. In what ways have you evolved as a poet from Uptalk to Killer?

Walters: I think I was more focused while writing Killer, and generally had a better idea of what I was doing. I felt more confident writing, because I knew that people had responded positively to my work, and made quicker, less self-conscious decisions. The style is similar, but tighter, I feel.

Shunnarah: What are you working on now?

Walters: I’m figuring that out! I’ve just been writing poems and waiting for some theme to hijack my life so I can write another book.

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Mandy Shunnarah is a writer based in Columbus, Ohio, though Birmingham, Alabama, will always have her heart. Her creative nonfiction essays and book reviews have appeared in The Missing Slate, Entropy Magazine, Deep South Magazine, and The New Southerner Magazine, where she won Honorable Mention in their 2016 contest. You can read more of her work at her website, OffTheBeatenShelf.com.