interview

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

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

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

The Lightning Room with Trevor Mackesey

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

 

Interview by Diana Clarke

 

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

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

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

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

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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

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

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

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

2. What’s your guilty pleasure?

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

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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

 Interview by DeWitt Brinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lightning Room With Will Kaufman

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

 Interview by DeWitt Brinson

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lightning Room With Elvis Bego

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Interview by DeWitt Brinson

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

 

1.Where do you write? 

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

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

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

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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Hello! Welcome back to Blog People, a venture here at the Lightning Room in which interview editors Simon and DeWitt interview their fellow denizens of The Blog. In our second installment, Simon interviews Dan Pinkerton, author of the column “Marvelous Medicine.”

1. You write the monthly column “Marvelous Medicine” (often subtitled “Books for Precocious Kids and Kid-Hearted Grown-ups”) for PANK –could you tell us a little about it, and perhaps its beginnings?

Sheila was familiar with my writing, so when she took over as editor of the PANK blog she asked if I’d like to contribute something on a regular basis.  I was enthusiastic about doing a themed column, but neither Sheila nor I were too keen on the first couple ideas I proposed.  Then I had one of those eureka moments as I was reading to my kids.  They are six and eight, so they’re starting to read some of the books I remember enjoying as a child, so I envisioned writing a monthly piece on children’s books that might hold some appeal for literary-minded adults.  I presented the idea to Sheila and she approved (perhaps because she also has young kids at home?).

I’ve started by discussing some writers who will likely be familiar to PANK fans – Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, Matthea Harvey – but I’m hoping to branch out and explore “lost” (out of print) books and underappreciated authors. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Kimberly Bruss

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Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

February interviews by DeWitt Brinson.

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Lovely heron hue, Kimberly Bruss’ two poems in our May issue. Now watch. She is reborn! A rum drunk man right before your eyes!

1) I think, natural and familial poems are the most ancient because they’re about all that actually exists, because natural is love and family extends it. How do you feel?

I am never consciously trying to write into a tradition; family and nature are what I love and what I know. They are complicated and beautiful things and, at the end of it all, I’m searching for beauty. Though I do believe that nature must be the original source of pleasure and inspiration. Most people, when asked their favorite place, choose a natural scene, not a busy intersection or the top of a skyscraper. I think nature appeals to us because it reminds of what we can not create. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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Hello! Welcome to Blog People, a new venture here at the Lightning Room in which interview editors Simon and DeWitt interview their fellow denizens of The Blog. For our first installment, Simon talks with Sherrie Flick, author of the monthly column “Eat Drink Book.”

1. Can you talk a little bit about your column, “Eat Drink Book”? By my understanding, it seems to be a mixture of food and drink in literature, and literature in food and drink – what inspired it?

I have ongoing obsessions with both food and writing so it seemed natural to combine them when Sheila Squillante invited me to write for PANK. In my column I look at food/drink in literature on a variety of levels. Recreating food from some books and eating it and reporting in on the results/revelations, looking closely at food within the text, and sometimes including recipes. I want to discover and explore the ways food and literature intersect.

2. Did you have a particular journey-through-food-to-literature or journey-through-literature-to-food? Or have the two always gone hand in hand?

The two have pretty much gone hand in hand for me, although I’ve come to connect them more directly in recent years. I was an English Lit major with a creative writing focus as an undergrad at the University of New Hampshire, and I also worked my way through school at a wonderful bakery in the nearby town of Portsmouth. I continued to work as a professional baker (and write) after I graduated and moved to San Francisco. My creative process is tied to baking in so many ways. (Here’s an essay I wrote about that for Necessary Fiction.)

3. The community of PANK is such a widespread one. Where are you located – beyond the internet – and what do you do there outside of PANK?

I live in Pittsburgh. I’m a fiction and non-fiction writer, and I teach adjunct in Chatham University’s MFA and Food Studies programs. I work freelance as a writer and copy editor for (mainly) arts organizations, and I write a regular garden-to-table food column for Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine. I occasionally curate literary programs around town (previously, I was Artistic Director for the Gist Street Reading Series for 10 years). I cook and bake and garden, and I also play the ukulele.

4. How did you come to know PANK, and to be involved with it?

I’ve known and admired PANK through social media connections for some time and got to know PANK a bit more through Sheila Squillante.

5. What book – not a cookbook, that’s the easy way out – makes you hungriest when you read it? This doesn’t necessarily have to be about food; we’re talking appetites in general.

Wow. That’s a hard one. A book that was important to me in understanding how fiction and food can connect in amazing ways is Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder. It’s a book of fantastical flash fiction all focused on food – but in doing so it’s also focused on family and love and hate and lust too. So I’d credit The Devil’s Larder with whetting my appetite in many ways.

6. Of all the books you’ve read, what is one impossible food or drink that you’re dying to try? (This can either be ‘impossible’ as in ‘utterly fantastical’ or ‘impossibly impractical or difficult to prepare.’)

I would love to sit at John Singer’s table in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. He would silently serve me wine and gin and oranges that he’d pulled from his closet, and I would tell him my deepest secrets.

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Sherrie Flick is author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting. She lives in Pittsburgh.

Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.