interviews

The stories we tell ourselves about our own history: an interview with Michelle Bailat-Jones

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(Ig publishing, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Jo Varnish: Your new novel, Unfurled, has just been released. Briefly, what is the book about?

 

Michelle Bailat-Jones: It’s a book about a family from Seattle with a secret in their past. In terms of the plot, it’s the story of a young woman named Ella who discovers that the story she’s believed about her life for twenty years wasn’t the right story at all. And maybe she won’t be allowed to know the whole story, or the true story, if such a thing actually exists. It’s about Ella losing her father, the man who raised her on his own, a man she fiercely loved and admired, and about having to go looking for her mother, the woman who abandoned her. It’s also a story about the Pacific Northwest, and the ocean, and fathers and daughters and absent mothers, and imagination and delusion.

 

JV: Tell us about the themes that Unfurled explores.

 

MBJ: The theme of Unfurled is how childhood trauma manifests in one’s adult life, as well as the stories we tell ourselves about our own history and the sense-making work we engage in to function despite that trauma. It is also a mother-daughter book in many ways, despite the apparent focus on father-daughter. And finally, anger is a very big theme in the novel.

 

JV: What was your inspiration for the book?

 

MBJ: I wrote a short story almost twenty years ago about a young woman who loses her father and uncovers a secret while going through his papers. It was set in a gritty, working class neighborhood of the Pacific Northwest, and although that character was much much younger than the Ella of Unfurled, it was the seed of the novel. And then some years ago, I read an article about the ferry system in Seattle, in particular the ferry pilots, and I became interested in that world. At the same time, my fiction is often interested in issues of absence and presence – physical but also metaphorical – and especially how grieving is negotiated within different personalities and family structures. The book grew and morphed over many many years into what it is today, but it grew out of those questions.

 

JV: You wrote Unfurled over an extended period of time. What kept drawing you back to the project? What research was necessary to make the book ‘real’?

 

MBJ: Unfurled is a novel that has taken me almost eighteen years to complete. So in that sense it is difficult to write about how I wrote the book; it would make more sense to talk about how I re-wrote it. Throughout all of these revisions and transformations—all of my attempts to tell the story that was ultimately asking to be told—I changed the lens a lot, sometimes focusing more on John, Ella’s father, or more on Maggie, Ella’s mother. I wrote an entire draft in Maggie’s POV, I wrote several in Ella’s POV but from different points of entry into her story.

Probably the most interesting research I was able to do for the novel involved looking at nautical charts of the Puget Sound. I could literally spend hours going over these charts, learning the names of the passages between the islands and the coves and points that dot the coastlines. These are unusual maps that you need nautical background to understand, so they were very exotic to me, and I found them quite beautiful.

I also took a lot of interest in social services, trying to understand how an individual could vanish for many years at a time. I learned that it is shockingly easy in America for a person to disappear – and this both saddened and intrigued me, and I wanted to explore that idea on the people left behind, what would that lack of control feel like? How does a person negotiate that kind of intangible loss?

 

JV: How does the setting of the Pacific Northwest influence Unfurled’s characters and the action?

 

MBJ: I am a very big fan of fiction that uses setting as an integral part of the characters. I dislike the idea of setting as a character on its own, it’s not that, but just that setting is big, setting has an emotional pull on my characters. This is probably just my own personal feelings on landscape, and most likely comes out of growing up in the Pacific Northwest, with all its looming beauty. But also, the idea that John, the stalwart ferry boat captain, was the kind of person who managed to create a “safe passage” for Maggie or for Ella, through the difficult waters of their lives was key to me, and I tried to mirror this in his work as a ferry pilot and the way the landscape has worked its way deeply into Ella’s sense of self. The ferries in the Pacific Northwest are big hulking workhorses, and I like how they navigate the deeps of the Pacific Ocean.

 

JV: Unfurled is told from the perspective of a single character, Ella, but who tries to grant herself imaginative access to a story that she could not have really known—of her parent’s relationship. What is the effect of this access and how is it meant to inform the reader’s understanding of the story?

 

MBJ: It makes sense to me that children might create a narrative of their parents’ lives and that at some poit that narrative proves to be false. So when John’s death involves learning that her own memories were false ones, I wanted to show how she went about confronting and investigating those memories. What did she believe to be true about her parent’s relationship and how did it influence her own development into an adult? What did it feel like to have to go back over those memories and try to find a line of reality or something really concrete to hold onto? I also think she deserved the chance to re-imagine those memories at some point, something she finally does toward the end of the book.

 

JV: The book is clearly influenced by nautical imagery and scene-settings. Does that reflect a personal interest of yours?

 

MBJ: I’m so lucky in that I grew up spending my summers camping in Oregon and Washington, and learning to fish in rivers and lakes with my own family. I love fishing, I always have. Nature is really important to me, and I think this is really clear in all of my fiction. It was a delight to focus on this in Unfurled. But I have never fished in the ocean – and I always wanted to. As a child in Seattle, we had friends who were into boats and took my family out onto the ocean, even once on a three-week trip up into the Gulf of Alaska, and I loved this so much but my first-hand knowledge is quite limited. The language of sailing is magical, and the science of navigation has always interested me. I really enjoyed researching this aspect of the novel.

JV: At the center of Unfurled is a mother with a mental illness.  What drew you to exploring the effects of her illness on her daughter and husband?

 

MBJ: I have always been interested in how people make sense of their histories, their childhoods. All families, at least to me, are based on variations and versions of stories that are told by different family members. The truth is always situated somewhere near those stories, but no one story can contain the actual truth – if that even exists. In a family touched by mental illness, and one like Maggie’s which involves fantastic and even delusional storytelling, truth becomes even slipperier and I wanted to explore that. But not just from Maggie’s perspective, also from Ella’s and John’s.

 

JV: There are secrets at the heart of Unfurled.  Tell us about the function of secrets in the novel, as well as in family life.

 

MBJ: I think it’s very natural for parents to keep certain secrets from their children. It’s a necessary part of parenting, for safety reasons, for privacy reasons, but when it becomes extreme, as in the novel with John keeping Maggie’s “story” from Ella, it creates a real disconnect. I like to think that this disconnect existed even while John was still alive. This is something that Ella must recognize at some point, that she has internalized this way of behaving between two people who love each other, and this definitely informs her relationship with Neil. I also think that secrets are often based around shame and the image we want others to have of us, so that was interesting to look at in terms of both John and Ella, and where their traumas are located and why they hold them so close to their hearts.

 

JV: Ella is a veterinarian; does her scientific background affect her processing of emotional issues?

 

MBJ: This is something that, I think, came out of how Ella’s character evolved and her resistance to self-analysis. She pretends to be able to look at herself directly, analytically, but she is much more comfortable hiding within the terminology of the one thing in her life she feels competent at: doctoring animals.

 

JV: Michelle, you co-founded L’Atelier Writers, a retreat for writers held in France each summer that is entering its fifth year, you teach fiction writing and you work as a literary translator.  How do these branches of your writing life inform your writing as an author?

 

MBJ: Literary translation is very much like writing, only I don’t have make the story up. In that sense it is actually quite relaxing, even if translation questions can be complicated and make me work hard. I consider it practice for writing as well as an art form on its own, and I cannot imagine being a writer only. L’ATELIER has become a cherished writing community and I’m so grateful to be involved and be able to support a diverse group of writers each year. We have a lot of fun on our annual retreat, but we are also very serious and I’m always impressed with the work that comes from our group. In terms of informing my writing, all these various activities are a way of energizing me with different ideas and connections with people. Book and writing discussions are vital, I feel, and keep me on my toes.

 

JV: You have lived in Switzerland for 14 years. How has your writing been influenced by living in Europe?

 

MBJ: I worry about this actually. I have been greatly influenced, I’m sure, by living outside of the place where I am published. I read a lot of French and Swiss literature, and it is often very different from American or English literature and I cannot help but internalize those narrative structures and find them very familiar, when an American reader might find them disconcerting. The lines are blurry for me. I hope this is a strength, but I also hope I will always read broadly enough to see what I’m doing. I consider Unfurled to be a very American book, but then Fog Island Mountains was hardly American at all. I like the flexibility in that, and I hope I will always be able to do that.

 

JV: Finally, what are you working on now?

 

MBJ: I’m finishing the draft of a novel – and for the first time I’m working in two landscapes: Switzerland and the US. The novel is set in Eastern Oregon and in Switzerland, and I’m maybe a bit superstitious about revealing the plot while I’m still finishing it, so I won’t say too much that’s concrete. Probably because I always do so much re-writing before a novel is actually done. I’m hoping this novel won’t take me eighteen years to finish – although I’m getting close to four or five at this point. But the book deals with radiation physics and ambition, from a woman’s perspective, and it looks at some of the changes in the world, in particular at our current feeling of compromised safety, and how terrorism has become a commonplace concern for people in the west, in a way it wasn’t before, or in a way that we were able to ignore it because it was only happening elsewhere. It’s been a challenging and interesting project, and I’m hoping to finish it up before the end of the year.

—

Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her début novel, Fog Island Mountains (Tantor 2014), won the inaugural Christopher Doheny Award from The Center for Fiction and Audible. Her second novel, Unfurled, was just published by Ig Publishing in Oct 2018. Her fiction, poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in various journals, including: The Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, Public Pool, the View from Here, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Quarterly Conversation, PANK, Spolia Mag, Two Serious Ladies, Cerise Press and the Atticus Review. Her translation credits include two novels by celebrated Swiss modernist, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: Beauty on Earth (Skomlin, 2013) and What if the Sun…? (Skomlin, 2016). Michelle was born in Japan, grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and now lives in Switzerland.

 

Having moved from her native England aged 24, Jo Varnish now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.  Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming in, The Bangalore Review and Necessary Fiction. Currently she is studying for her MFA and working on her novel.

[A Reviewable Feast] Adult Gummies by K. Karivalis

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Neon Burrito Publishing, 2018

A Reviewable Feast is a hybrid book review/author interview series by Mandy Shunnarah.

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“I saw the best minds of my generation artificially enhanced by the excessive nutrients of two-a-day adult gummy multivitamins, upgraded alongside their devices… going through the motions as the world watched, being completely aware they were being watched… every one of them pretending to work harder than the next but only as hard as will require the least amount of effort.”

With that howler of an opening, K. Karivalis begins Adult Gummies, her satirical novella on the battle between Millennials making art, making money, and often being disenchanted by both. The characters learn the hard way that office jobs can lack creative and spiritual fulfillment, while full time creative self-employment can lack steady income. In the parlance of our times, the struggle is real.

Jen, Kat, Dirk, and Thad work at the amorphous Company, a business whose goings-on we know nothing of besides content creation, advertising, and sales. Jen dreams of being the Content Queen, vying for the head copywriting position. Kat wants to be a “real writer” who’s creatively fulfilled. Dirk coasts along, not having to do much since his privilege as a white man already affords him more money and growth opportunities than Jen, his chief rival. Thad endures the indignities of daily racial microaggressions just going to and from work. Adult Gummies is sardonic social commentary at its best.

I talked to K. Karivalis about Millennial struggles, music as an escape, and the effect of personal branding on art.

Mandy Shunnarah: I’m curious about how this book came to be. Did you have an office job you hated where you ran into the real-life inspirations for the characters?

  1. Karivalis: I landed my first office job when I was 24 and it was at Binder & Binder (yes, the Social Security Disability law firm with ads on daytime TV) and it was bleak, like a caricature of a mundane office job. I was hired as a “writer,” which meant I wrote legal documents and had to learn all these laws about Social Security Disability, etc. The contrast between the rather alternative “artsy” lifestyle I lived the first few years after graduating college and the 9 to 5 world was jarring, almost terrifying, but in a fascinating way because it was all completely new to me. I felt like I was thrown into a movie set, like I was starring in a movie about a young woman navigating the banality of big city office life. So it felt natural to translate those experiences into a book, though I didn’t do so until a few years after I left that job. One particular character (Dirk) is very much based off of a former coworker, the others are more inspired by bits and pieces of people I know and different millennial stereotypes.

MS: One of the things I loved about Adult Gummies is that, while satirized, it’s eerily true to life for Millennials who have worked at a company that produces content. Kat says she wants to be a “real writer, not a copywriter,” and meanwhile the protagonist Jen actively wants to be a copywriter because then she’d be the Content Queen she aspires to be. And yet neither of them fit well at The Company. I imagine there are a lot of writers who feel like this right now––wondering whether they should write for the sake of creating art or write what sells, even if what sells is often substandard. How did you navigate all this? Is this dichotomy something you find yourself struggling with?

KK: The characters Kat and Jen represent this dichotomy: quit your job and pursue your writing dreams with reckless abandon or climb the ladder of being a “professional” writer in a “professional” setting, hoping that if you reach your desired position, you will be satisfied creatively while still having the comforts that 9 to 5 jobs provide. Kat’s decision to (spoiler alert) quit her job and become a “real writer” and Jen’s dedication to playing the professionalism game represent the fork in the road I feel like I am at now.

I currently work an office job but it’s part time, which gave me the time to write Adult Gummies. Before I started working on the book though, I was focused on finding a full-time professional job as a content creator and/or copywriter at a company that I thought embraced the idea of a progressive office environment and encouraged creativity, such as the Urban Outfitters corporate headquarters, which is one of the biggest employers of young creatives in Philadelphia. At the Urban Outfitters corporate headquarters, people bring their dogs to work, buildings are situated on this beautiful campus with trees and public sculptures, there are many artisan options for cruelty-free lunch, you can bring your laptop outside to work on the grass when it’s nice out––this sort of utopian idea of The New Professionalism, trying to rid office jobs of their stigma. I thought the combination of my professional experience and online “clout” (some of these jobs require a minimum amount of Instagram and/or Twitter followers) would make it easy for me to land one of these jobs, but alas, this was not the case. So I thought, ‘okay screw you I’m writing a book.’

Unfortunately, I think most young writers these days give up on The Dream and get the creative labor job and tell themselves they’ll write their novel in their spare time. But this is the climate we are in now––this is the reality of money ruling the world, in addition to health insurance, benefits, sick days, 401K, job security, etc.

About a year into working at Binder & Binder, my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack at the age of 54. I got the phone call at my desk at Binder & Binder (I had left my cell phone at home that day by strange coincidence), and immediately that environment was poisoned with that traumatic memory. I quit my job directly afterwards and worked odd jobs for a year while in a deep state of grieving. I slowly started to rebuild my life and got the part time office job I work now, as a kind of minimal-amount-of-money-making placeholder until I felt ready to return to full time work. After I applied to and didn’t get the creative professional jobs I thought I wanted, I got real with myself and thought: “this is all a big procrastination dance to avoid putting my nose to the grindstone and writing a book.” So then I wrote the book.

I don’t think I would have had the dedication, motivation, concentration it took to write the book if I didn’t go through this horrific experience, but something about being reminded on a ceaseless, obsessive basis of my own mortality and the finite reality of living really gave me the kick in the pants I needed!

MS: I couldn’t help noticing the subtle music references throughout the novel, which was a nice surprise. I saw some Smashing Pumpkins, Pink Floyd, and others. Tell me more about the soundtrack to the novel.

KK: Parts of the novel examine intergenerational workplace dynamics––how employees from each of the three generations of working age people in America right now (Millennials, Gen X-ers, and Baby Boomers) interact with each other on a common playing ground. During the after-work karaoke party, Jeff in Sales (Gen X-er) sings “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins and Kat visualizes him in the time period of the song, in the 90’s, when Jeff in Sales (in her mind) was young and still had hope for a non-conformist lifestyle, before he sold his soul to the 9 to 5 world. The line “Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage” is in a way the thesis for the entire novel: you can hate your job as much as you want but you’re still working the job. Are you a victim of the system or are you playing yourself? Are you staying at the job you hate because you don’t have the financial means to quit or do you just lack the guts?

I decided to feature this song through karaoke because I had attempted singing it at a karaoke night a few weeks before I wrote that scene and it was surprisingly hard to sing. It starts a cappella so I was off key for like half the song. The frustration of searching for the right note after the song already started really helped me vocally express the desperation inherent in the lyrics of the chorus. So that’s what happens to Jeff in Sales too––he’s visibly frustrated trying to sing on key and also visibly frustrated at his life situation. Not only being a rat in a cage, but a rat in a cage that can’t sing its favorite song properly.

The Pink Floyd lyric “All in all your just another brick in the wall,” has become such a widespread shared sentiment for feeling helpless and dissatisfied with capitalism and modern society that it’s a cliché. Because it is so iconic and well known, I liked playing with that lyric and having Kat write on her Tumblr “All in all you’re just another blown up pizza pocket shit-stain on the wall, the white walls, the pin-pricked cubicle walls of the proverbial Dilbert.” Offices are filled with many different types of walls, both physical (glass partition, drywall, cubicle, rows of ceiling-high filing cabinets) and, of course, metaphorical.

I also want to touch on Jen’s karaoke choice, which is “Escape” by Enrique Iglesias. This is funny in context because she sings it to freak out Dirk, singing he “can’t escape her wrath.” Kat also visualizes Jen in the time period of the song like she did Jeff in Sales, but it is 2001, so she gets into a thought spiral about 9/11. Associating Enrique with 9/11 seems absurd, but it kind of made his career. Right before 9/11 happened, Enrique released “Hero” and it was a hit. However, after 9/11 “Hero” somehow became the theme song of honoring all of the fallen heroes of 9/11, and he sang it at NYFD/NYPD memorials, even though it’s a song about a romance, not about actual life-saving heroes. So this sappy, romantic-sad pop song became the theme song for the NYFD/NYPD 9/11 heroes. It was the chosen song for New York radio DJs to remix with audio from rescuers and politicians speaking about 9/11. It just seems so bizarre thinking back on it now.

MS: I want to slap this novel into the hands of every Boomer who’s ever told me I should get a “real job” while asking me to do work for free and simultaneously telling me that my generation ruined the economy. At first, I thought Adult Gummies was about disenchantment with office life, but as the characters find out, freelancing in the gig economy can be worse. In your experience, do you think the economy Millennials have had to battle makes creating art more difficult or do you think it forces us to be even more creative?

KK: This is my hopeful optimist answer: Overcoming obstacles makes for interesting art. Financial obstacles force us to be not only more creative in our budgeting but also more driven and dedicated to the act of creating (because time is money so if you spend time making art it better be worth it, as in it better be spiritually fulfilling or at least make you look cool). Creating can still feel like an act of rebellion, it can still help us express complicated emotions and ideas that go against the status quo.

The internet art of the 2010’s is a good example: artists who lacked the money for a studio space and supplies used whatever software they had on their computer. Music too, like bedroom pop and vaporwave––that all came from people holed up in their rooms with nothing but a laptop with Garageband and guitar or midi keyboard. And as far as promotion goes, everything can be done through social media. Living paycheck to paycheck and working a terrible job that barely covers your expenses is a bleak existence. Dedicating ourselves to creating art gives us purpose and an escape from the monotony of our money-driven reality.

This is my jaded pessimist answer: That being said, there is no denying the current economy makes it much harder for us to do what we want. It’s difficult to live on a minimal income, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have dodged accruing massive amounts of student loan debt, credit card debt, getting sick and being unable to work, supporting family members, etc.

And the attitude we get from Boomers doesn’t help either, though it has given us such glorious tone-deaf clickbait as: “Millennials Aren’t Buying Diamonds, Why?” And that whole “if Millenials stopped buying avocado toast they could buy a house” fiasco. In recent times I have seen friends who were once set on being writers and artists choose the path of a full time job with a steady income after realizing how many risks have to be taken to dedicate yourself to your creative work.

If we take the little time and money we have and throw it all into writing a book, what if nobody reads it? What if it sucks? These were constant ruminations I had before, during and after writing Adult Gummies––a lot of self-doubt, anxiety and fear of failure.

MS: Nowadays it’s not just office workers who have personal brands––even writers and other artists are often expected to have a brand as part of their creative output. What effect do you think having (or striving to have) a personal brand has on art?

KK: I think it can have a profound effect at the beginning but then becomes problematic when the artist or writer wants to do a new project differently, thus having to not only re-brand but re-brand with grace. Marketing is so important (unfortunately) to get your work noticed and most artists or writers don’t know the first thing about marketing (unfortunately).

I picked up a bit of marketing knowledge when conducting research for Jen’s character, and also through my experiences on social media. A lot of the vocabulary in Adult Gummies is the result of my own experience trying to develop a personal brand for my Instagram account. Generally posts that had a consistent “theme” and “aesthetic” would get the most likes, and at that point in time my Instagram was my only active creative outlet (before I wrote Adult Gummies), so I put a lot of heart and time into it. Then I started developing a personal brand.

Kell Casual was my fake name associated with my Instagram account and she is a character who works in a dreary office but wants her microwaveable meals to be ethically sourced! And she rates different brands of adult gummy multivitamins on Amazon and links these reviews to her Twitter! And she writes melodramatic sonnets about hating Mondays! And she needs to know, for the sake of her brand’s philosophy: How does one make something so un-cool, cool?

Developing a personal brand included targeting Kell Casual’s biggest interests. There had to be reoccurring themes, including the character arc of writing and then finishing her book (my book). Jen’s character is kind of a vamped up, more clean-cut version of Kell Casual, like how actors stay in character for a few months to prepare for an Oscar-worthy role. I did a light version of this, performative for the internet, to create a multidimensional, round character for Jen. I lived in a similar flesh to experience similar experiences. Thus writing a book about a Millennial working a mundane office job became part of the brand, and then the brand became the book, and then the book promoted itself, and then people read it and apparently it doesn’t suck.

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Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born writer now living in Columbus, Ohio. Her essays, poems, and book reviews have been published in or are forthcoming from The Citron Review, Barely South Review, Entropy Magazine, Southern Women’s Review, The Missing Slate, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. Read more on her website offthebeatenshelf.com.

 

Salt Houses author Hala Alyan talks Immigration Through Poetry and Her Upcoming Collection of Poems

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INTERVIEW BY LAURA METTER

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Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist and most recently, the author of Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). But after the long-form fiction, Alyan’s already back to working within poetry, a place she knows well–past collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, Four Cities (2015), and Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.

I talked to Hala about the work, its thematic concerns, and her poetic process.

Laura Metter: Why poetry after a novel?

Hala Alyan: These pieces came organically after I was finished with Salt Houses and had sent the novel off to my publishers for editing. I wrote many of them during a trip to Marfa, Texas last year. I don’t usually plan which genre follows the other; actually, most of the time, I’m working on several projects at once. It helps me stay excited about what I’m working on.

LM: Is there a connection between these poems and your novel?

HA: My new collection is a meditation on the transforming landscapes of womanhood, wifedom, loss and exile. To a certain extent, both the collection and the novel use language as a cultural vehicle of sorts, trying to create a dialogue between two worlds: my American existence and my Arab one, exile and the rebuilding of life in its aftermath.

LM: What went into your process of selection or sharing?

HA: They were painful ones to write, but completing them felt particularly cathartic. Given the legacy of immigration and war in my ancestral homelands, I wanted to share poems that examine that migration, both literally and emotionally.

LM: How do these poems connect to yourself?

HA: They were all written during my actual twenty-ninth year, which was a strange and difficult and marvelous one. In many ways, this collection is my most honest, the one in which I am most transparently myself.

LM: Is there a theme?

HA: If I had to pick one, it would be—the creation of home when all one knows is exile and flight.

LM: What were some of your biggest challenges getting this book finished?

HA: In terms of Salt Houses, I would say discipline when it came to editing was particularly overwhelming. I would keep losing interest and want to start writing something new. I have the easiest time with the “freeflow” part of the writing process, and am most stumped by editing, rereading the same passages over and over. I get so bored…

LM: What helped you finish this collection?

HA: I was lucky enough to secure a couple of residencies over the last year that gave me enough time and space—not to mention access to nature and inspiring artists—to put the final touches on the manuscript.

LM: Do you see yourself continuing more with novels or poems?

HA: Hopefully both. The one thing I’m really excited about experimenting more with is non-fiction, especially personal essays.

LM: What do you want your audience to take away from this collection?

HA: Honesty requires a little fear, at least the way I do it. I’m hoping readers can recognize the truth in these pieces, that they felt urgent and necessary to write. Also, I hope I’ve done the narrative of immigration—as I experienced it in my family—justice.

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Laura Metter is a young fictionist and poet based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her poems and essays have appeared in Adanna Literary Journal and The Artifice among other magazines.

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Below is an excerpt of Hala Alyan’s forthcoming poetry collection:

 

Dirty Girl

 

See, I knew I’d make my mama cry if I stole the earring and so into my pocket it went. I asked America to give

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me the barbeque. A slow dance with a cowboy. Pop goes the grenade. Pop goes the Brooklyn jukebox. Give me male hands, oleander white, hard, earnest, your husband in the backseat of his own car, my jeans shoved down, the toxic plant you named your child after, a freeway by the amusement park that jilted girls speed across, windows rolled down, screaming bad songs at the top of their lungs.

~

After the new world. Before the New one. The Peruvian numerologist told me I’d be trailed by sevens until the day I died.

Everything worth nicking needs an explanation: I slept with one man because the moon, I slept with the other because who cares, we’re expats, the black rhinos are dying, the subway pastors can’t make me tell the truth. Tonight Z isn’t eating and five states away

I’m pouring a whiskey

~

I won’t drink.

~

I count the green lights. Those blue-eyed flowers your father brought when I couldn’t leave my bedroom. The rooftop, the weather, the subway empties its fist of me, the red salt of my fear. A chalky seven stamped on the pale face of the sleeping pill.                          What I mean to say is

~

I’m divisible only by myself.

 

 

Gospel: Texas

 

Poison ivy I

never got. My grandmother

 

asking the Burger King cashier

for pommes frites.

 

First shooting

star. First silverfish. First carrot

 

in snowball. Kansas on the

weekends, the blade

 

of I-35. Permission slips.

My mother

 

dressing me as a

pilgrim for a school trip.

 

Arabic word for girl

longer than

 

English word for

no. First valentine card.

 

First grasshopper.

The seventeen windows

 

of that simulated

colonial town,

 

peering in every

single one. Pretending

 

the air we churn

is butter.

 

 

The Female of the Species

 

They leave the country with gasping babies and suitcases

full of spices and cassettes. In airports,

 

they line themselves up like wine bottles.

The new city twinkles beneath an onion-moon.

 

Birds mistake the pebbles of glass on the

black asphalt for bread crumbs.

 

*

 

If I drink, I tell stories about the women I know.

They break dinner plates. They marry impulsively.

 

When I was a child I watched my aunt throw a halo

of spaghetti at my mother. I’m older than they were now.

 

*

 

In an old-new year, my cousin shouts ana bint Beirut

at the sleeping houses. She clatters up the stairs.

 

I never remember to tell her anything. Not the dream

where I can’t yell loud enough for her to stop running.

 

And the train comes. And the amar layers the stones

like lichen. How the best night of my life was the one

 

she danced with me in Paris, sharing a hostel bed,

and how sometimes you need one knife to carve another.

 

*

 

It’s raining in two cities at once. The Vendôme plaza

fills with water and the dream, the fountain, the moon

 

explodes open, so that Layal, Beirut last daughter,

can walk through the exit wound.

Unraveling Trauma and Title IX: An Interview with Sarah Cheshire

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INTERVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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I don’t know what the other entrants’ chapbooks in the 2017 Etchings Press Chapbook Contest were like, but I know Sarah Cheshire’s win for Unravelings was well-deserved.

After becoming romantically involved with a trusted creative writing professor and mentor, “Jane Doe” is forced to recount the details of the relationship––including its varied manipulations and abuses of power––for a Title IX investigation. Unravelings is a fictionalized memoir in the sense that names, locations, and other identifying information has been obscured for privacy reasons, though the Title IX proceedings Unravelings describes mirror what Cheshire herself experienced as an undergraduate.

At only 51 pages, Unravelings is the epitome of “though she be but little, she is fierce.” Through primary source documents like texts, emails, and Title IX reports, as well as lyrical verse and prose poetry, Unravelings guides the reader into the complicated truths between confidant and abuser, victim and survivor.

As a cord of twine unravels, it becomes frayed––so too does this story as it progresses. Paragraphs lead to speculation and ask unanswerable questions that boil down to how did we get here? Each time, the reader is brought back to center through vibrant repetition and verse––almost like a prayer for understanding in the labyrinth of institutional bureaucracy that oversees even the most intimate matters.

In this way, the chapbook is both a literal and metaphorical unraveling––one that resolutely echoes the thought patterns and stages of grief felt when healing from trauma.

I talked to Sarah about the writing and healing process.

Mandy Shunnarah: I appreciate the use of screenshots––like the texts, Facebook messages, and emails––and the official-looking Title IX documents. Tell me about your decision to add in those elements rather than making the chapbook text-only.

Sarah Cheshire: As a part of my writing process, I spent a lot of time re-reading old emails and text exchanges between myself, Professor X, and others implicated in the story, trying to reconstruct what happened and how it felt. I was really just trying to jog my memory, but found that these documents in and of themselves told a story.

Much like the experience itself, the social media exchanges were fragmented and nonlinear; oscillating rapidly between moments of clarity and moments where logic seemed to be suspended. There was a frenetic, yet poetic quality to them that conveyed the state I was in that year almost perfectly. I also think that, as collected “evidence,” these screenshots provide a bridge between Doe’s memories and the story the institution is trying to tell. They were the last thing I included, but ultimately I think they are what ties the piece together.

MS: What challenges did you face in the writing process?

SC: Going into my M.F.A. program, the situation I wrote about in Unravelings was still very fresh in my conscious. Whenever I would sit down to write, I would still feel like I was writing under the critical eye of the man who evaluated my creative work throughout college; whose mentorship both sculpted my creative voice and ultimately undermined the confidence I held in that voice.

This might sound melodramatic, but throughout my process of writing Unravelings I kept thinking of a line in one of Virginia Woolf’s essays: “Killing the Angel in the house [is] part of the occupation of a woman writer.” To Virginia Woolf, the Angel in the House represented the pressure women writers face to write the versions of themselves that men want to read, rather than their true selves. To me, the Angel in the House was the looming feeling that I was still writing to appease my college mentor’s toxic gaze. I knew that I needed to, metaphorically speaking, “kill” this gaze in order to reclaim my own voice.

Unravelings was the first piece I completed as a graduate student. It was a very hard piece to write, partially because the events of that year still felt so convoluted in my mind. Basically, I wrote it because I felt I wouldn’t be able tell other stories until I’d fully unraveled this one.

MS: I found it interesting how, despite Professor X taking advantage of Doe, she protects him in the Title IX proceedings. Statements that might identify him are redacted at her request and she requests an informal investigation, rather than a formal one. Often trauma victims’ actions are misunderstood––can you talk more about that element of the story?

SC: Well, this was a man who dragged me through the mud, but who I was also in love with. He was coming from an incredibly traumatic past, which he shared with me privately (in retrospect this was also a violation of boundaries) and which added an extra layer of nuance to my perceptions of him.

I included redacted moments (which, in the text, mainly consist of striked-out but still legible details about his past) because, rationally, I knew that his past shouldn’t excuse his behavior but, in the moments where I was asked to hold him accountable for this behavior, I still felt an emotive need to contextualize it. I knew that he really fucked up, but we had also seen each other in incredibly vulnerable moments and I still felt a sort of convoluted tenderness towards him.

Essentially, I think I defended him because I was having a hard time reconciling his abuses of power with the tender moments that we shared, both in intimate spaces and in our writing. I am told this is common amongst survivors. Sadly, I think many survivors end up justifying the actions of abusers because they have seen the goodness in these people and want to believe that this goodness still exists, even when it’s being shrouded by anger or violence or manipulative behaviors. I believe that trust and emotional sensitivity—the ability to, as Rihanna would say, “find love in a hopeless place”––are beautiful, radical qualities that a lot of survivors possess.

In the feminist utopia of my dreams, these qualities would be celebrated. It’s only when others exploit them, and we find ourselves searching for ways to love those who continue to hurt us, that they become curses. Ultimately, I think this was my problem; why I ended up protecting him. I truly believed that he was better than his actions and he just needed more time to prove it. I believed this until his actions subsumed me, and my own story got lost inside of his.

MS: As I read Unravelings, I got the impression that formal proceedings like Title IX ask things of abuse survivors that are often difficult or impossible to give––such as linear memories and externally identifiable examples of gaslighting, for example. Based on your own personal experiences and the research you did for Unravelings, do you think Title IX effectively seeks justice for victims?

SC: This is a complicated question; one that I actually find myself grappling with often when thinking about Title IX, as well as the court systems, the police, and other forces survivors are told to appeal to when seeking justice.

Over the course of my four years in college, Title IX saw many positive reformations. I witnessed huge strides in the extent to which survivors have been able to access certain forms of justice through the institutional apparatuses in place, mainly due to the tireless activism of campus survivors and the founding of advocacy organizations such as KnowYourIX. This it is not to say there isn’t a huge amount of work left to be done; I find it nauseating that, in the year 2017, we are still seeing cases of women dropping out of school and even taking their own lives because the system has failed them.

In my case, however, I actually felt like the Title IX system was working to the best of its ability—I was treated with humanity and validation by the officers involved, and for the most part, felt agency over how the process played out. My issue isn’t with Title IX per se, but with the task that it holds people to; the task of creating clarity in narrative, when stories, trauma, and people themselves are innately so very messy.

Something I thought about a lot while writing the book was the notion of grey matter; the spaces between black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. In my opinion, the most genuine stories come out of these grey spaces. These are the spaces of nuance. The whole purpose of a formal Title IX process is to weigh evidence and determine which side of a story is “right” and which side is “wrong.” This need for clear delineations of truth inherently puts survivors of trauma at a disadvantage because in moments of trauma, it is common for linear memory to become disrupted.

I also think that the way that these systems box people up in their individual sides of a story can inhibit perpetrators from engaging in the deep critical self-reflection necessary to truly hold themselves accountable for their actions––and, ultimately, to rectify and change. But I’m less concerned about them.

I think justice means different things for different people. I, personally, don’t feel like justice, on a fundamental level, would have been served simply as the result of him “getting in trouble” for his actions. Maybe this is because of some lingering twisted desire to protect him, or because, if I’m being completely honest, I partially blamed myself for how everything unfolded (and still do, which I’m working on). But I like to think that I feel this way because something in me resents the notion that the messiness of stories and human emotions can be resolved simply by weighing facts and legislating right and wrong.

I think that Title IX is necessary in that it holds institutions accountable to survivors and is effective when implemented correctly and compassionately. But I also think punitive models of justice have their limitations. If we’re ever going to see shifts in sexist paradigms, we need to find additional ways to hold people accountable for their actions, ways that give space for healing, restoration, and consciousness-raising rather than just punishment and deterrent.

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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 Citron Review, The Missing Slate, Entropy Magazine, and The New Southerner Magazine. You can read more of her work at her website, OffTheBeatenShelf.com.

The Personal, the Political, and the Musical: An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib on They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

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INTERVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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To say Hanif Abdurraqib writes about the music that’s the soundtrack to our lives is an understatement.

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is the first essay collection from Abdurraqib, who is a music columnist at MTV News and a poet whose work includes the collection The Crown Ain’t Worth Much from Button Poetry. Whether it’s Marvin Gaye, My Chemical Romance, Chance the Rapper, Carly Rae Jepsen or Nina Simone, Abdurraqib is writing about the music that makes sense of the world and validates the experiences of those who suffer most when the world is doling out its pain.

The essays in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us are a forthright look at life at the intersection of music, race, class, and culture. A Springsteen concert opens the door to a meditation on Michael Brown. Putting Nina Simone vinyls on the record player gives way to a discussion on how black people’s stories are taken from them by white hands. Listening to My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade on the tenth anniversary of its release leads to a discussion on death, grief, and hope in the dark. Future’s recent albums ask listeners to consider the kind of breakup-induced heartache from which it feels impossible to fully heal. A look back on years of Fall Out Boy shows stirs a contemplation on friendship, suicide, and living on your own terms. A ScHoolboy Q show explains how a word can be violence on one tongue and deep companionship on another, depending on the color of the mouth that said it. A Cute is What We Aim For show ponders misogyny and the feeling of having grown up when the art you once loved hopelessly stagnated.

These are not essays on background music or classical tunes praised in the ivory tower of academia. Abdurraqib writes on a breadth of musical taste that is wide and varied, yet all of it is accessible and modern––likely artists Millennials grew up listening to or currently have on their iTunes playlist. Abdurraqib is taking the music many already enjoy and asking us to consider its more profound implications. Readers are asked to investigate the ways in which music shapes and informs our lives.

This essay collection is not for white readers in the sense that it doesn’t pander to them. There are essays on experiences that white people will never know firsthand––like the terror of being pulled over by police because you supposedly look like a criminal or the sanctuary of black churches. For white people, the essays are a necessary trojan horse: it sells them what they want––music writing––but it gives them what they need––social justice.

I talked to Hanif about writing, music, and black joy.

Mandy Shunnarah: What I love about your essays is that they live at the intersection of the personal, the political, and the musical. It’s clear the essays span over the course of several years, so I’m curious what the trajectory of your writing was like. Did you start out writing music essays and incorporate your story and issues of social justice over time? Or have you always blended the three?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I think I’ve always been interested in how the personal can work its way into a narrative without (hopefully) overtaking a narrative. I say personal and don’t simply mean the actual body––but also the emotions, interests, feelings that rest in the interior of the personal. I’m not really setting out to get people to believe what I believe. Rather, I’m trying to get them to find something new and unique in music. Perhaps risk seeing it as something greater and seeing where their own personal narratives might align within the songs they love. So I guess I’ve always blended the three, but I’ve never really imagined it as blending as much as I’ve imagined it as a different way of viewing a landscape I love looking out onto.

MS: Your taste in music is eclectic and it’s clear your ear is keener than the casual listener. How did you become interested in a wide range of artists? Are there genres you feel like you’re only just dipping your toes into?

HA: I grew up in a house with a lot of music, and so I kind of developed my ways of hearing and listening at an early age. It’s a bit of a stretch to say that I grew up in a “musical family”––it’s not like my siblings and I were in a band––but my father played instruments around the house. I had a brief and unsuccessful stint as a trumpet player.

But more than that, I listened to music that my parents carried with them into the house. Jazz and soul and salsa and funk and songs from South Africa. I am the youngest of four, so I got to absorb all of the music which trickled down from my older siblings. My older brother and sister would introduce hip hop to our house, sure. But also, since we were children of the 90s, I got exposed to grunge, metal, and classic rock––all of which allowed me a path backwards, so that when I was old enough to start charting my own musical tastes, I was doing it with a working knowledge of the past, and I’m always so eager to dig out the tasty and unique parts of history resting underneath a recording.

I want to know about what happened to Fleetwood Mac in between Rumours and Tusk. I want to know about Nick Drake’s brilliant burst of output and then his mental and emotional decline. I watch The Last Waltz once every single year and mostly just for the way the camera picks up Mavis Staples whispering “beautiful….” after the Staple Singers join The Band for a stirring rendition of “The Weight.” I see a whole story in all of those moments. I’m listening to the actual music, sure. But I’m also interested in filling the spaces that simply listening sometimes doesn’t afford a listener.

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to sit in our room with a tape-recorder boombox, and we’d listen to the radio all day long, back when folks had to listen to the radio all day to maybe catch a song they loved once or so every six hours. And when the song we wanted to hear came on, we’d rush to press record on our tape recorder, and rip it right off of the radio. And there was that burst of excitement––hearing this thing you’d been hoping to hear and rushing to capture it. It felt like the slow opening of a gift that ended up being exactly what you wanted, every single time. I’m trying to capture and maintain that kind of excitement about music. I’m trying to carry that with me, even when I have the weight of so many other things to compete with.

MS: Out of the hundreds (thousands?) of concerts you’ve been to, if you could only pick one to see again, which one would it be and why?

HA: Oh, I think probably one of the early Fall Out Boy shows that I write about in the essay “Fall Out Boy Forever” in the book. Likely the 2003 Halloween show they did in Chicago at some shitty venue where the stage collapsed.

It was such a fascinating moment because I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment like that again, where I’m watching the turning point for a band happen in real time. My pals and I had been going to their shows since about a year earlier, when they started playing to tiny crowds and were getting heckled endlessly. The Chicago emo/pop-punk scene was at an interesting place in 2002-2003, because a lot of these dudes were just coming out of MUCH more hardcore bands, and the transitions for some of them proved to be difficult. Fall Out Boy was kind of a band without a country, largely due to Patrick Stump’s distinct singing. They were too pop for the hardcore scene, but definitely too difficult to access for the pop scene. It took about a year for them to get traction, but when they did, they really took off.

That Halloween show was the one that really turned the corner for them. I remember it well because shit got so crazy that the stage collapsed and they had to stop playing. Pete Wentz was used to wading out into the crowd and getting this mostly lukewarm reception, but that night when he walked out into the crowd, kids were jumping on his back, tearing at his shirt, grabbing his head. It was wild. There were almost 100 kids packed into a room that maybe only should’ve held 70, tops. You could see on the band’s faces that they had no idea what was happening. In a way, Fall Out Boy was born that night. Since I’m pretty disconnected from the band in its current state, I’d love to see that one more time.

MS: Some of the most poignant essays were those talking about the myriad ways joy is ripped from black people by white people and the systems of oppression they created. In addition to celebrating black musicians, which you did beautifully in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, what are some of your favorite expressions of black joy?

HA: The way my friends sing the words to the songs they know and then make up the rest. The opening moments of a spades game––that first hand, when anything feels possible. The old black woman at the eastside market I go to from time to time who looks me up and down and says it’s good to see you, baby, and I know she means it. The way a joke can echo through a group text and shrink distance. The grease that lingers on the hand and then perhaps upon the fabric of pants after dipping fingers into the Popeyes box. The way the clock pushes past midnight on a Tuesday and I look at my watch in a city that is not my own and insist that I have to go to sleep, and the people I love will give me a hard time until I am leaning over, wrecked by laughter, no longer tired.

I don’t know. I think in order to talk about the lack of joy as a type of violence, you have to know the architecture of joy itself, and realize how precious it is when it is in arm’s reach. I think you have to accept the many forms it takes. These days, I’m interested in the joys that are pre-existing, already waiting for me to slide into. I’m trying to remember those best and not take them for granted.

MS: Since your last book was a collection of poetry, I’m curious about how you balance your poetry and your essay writing.

HA: I imagine everything as a poem, some blooming wider than others.

__

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 Citron Review, The Missing Slate, Entropy Magazine, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. You can read more on her website, OffTheBeatenShelf.com.

Appalachia, noir, and fishing: an interview with David Joy

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INTERVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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I read a lot of crime, but few novels impress me so much that I find myself still talking about them six months after turning the last page. David Joy’s The Weight of This World belongs to that small group. While the combination of grit, superb storytelling, violence, and beauty make this novel a must-read, Joy is also a pleasure to talk to, so I decided to dig a little deeper into some of his passion, his writing, and books in general. Here’s what he had to say.

GI: The Weight of This World is beautifully written, but it’s also packed with enough brutality to satisfy fans of horror fiction. How do you achieve such a wonderful balance?

DJ: As far as balance, I think that largely comes from the writers who most influenced my work. I remember the first time I read William Gay’s short story, “The Paper-Hanger,” which is one of the most disturbingly violent stories I’ve ever read, but I was blown away by the beauty of his prose. There are lines in that story where he’s describing a murdered child in a freezer, lines like, “Ice crystals snared in the hair like windy snowflakes whirled there, in the lashes,” where Gay is very deliberately creating that play between beauty and horror. I think ultimately he’s doing this in order to make the violence more palatable. If you can achieve the right balance you can coax a reader through all sorts of darkness.

With the comparison to horror, I think that boils down to the realism of the violence. I don’t hold back or shy away from presenting something exactly as it is. There is no grace in dying. I don’t live in some fantasy world where people double over from gunshots and writhe then still like the old cheesy Westerns. At the same time, my work certainly isn’t gratuitous. There is a very real danger in sugarcoating violence, in repeating that John Wayne bullshit that glorifies and dismisses the act of killing as something trivial and easy. This isn’t violence for violence’s sake. I’m making very deliberate choices. In Where All Light Tends To Go, I had an eighteen-year-old narrator who was ill equipped for the violence he found himself surrounded by. I wanted the reader to experience what’s happening with the same sort of shock as the character. With The Weight Of This World, that novel is very much a sort of treatise on violence. I want the reader to walk through the blood. I want to force them to confront it and to ask big questions.

I think Dave Grossman’s On Killing is one of the most important books ever written about violence. Everyone should read that book, but especially anyone who is going to write about violence and the act of killing. Anyways, there’s a passage early on in that book where he writes, “They are things that we would rather turn away from, but Carl von Clausewitz warned that ‘it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.’ Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the ‘dark beauty of violence,’ and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.”

That’s why it’s so important to present violence in all its horrible ugliness, because only through capturing that reality can we start to have real, meaningful conversations about it.

GI: There is enough great literature coming from Appalachia to keep readers away from New York white-rich-straight-male-finds-himself-in-Brooklyn narratives for years to come. What is your role in that movement? Do you even consider it that?

DJ: Michael Farris Smith and I have talked about this a lot, about the void that was left in the South over the last few decades. We lost so many writers in just a few short years—Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, William Gay, Eudora Welty, Harry Crews, Tim McLaurin. I think if there is a movement, that’s what it’s a reaction to; it’s a matter of doing our damnedest to fill that void. When it all boils down to it, those are the writers who influenced me most. I’m rooted in writers like Ron Rash, George Singleton, Lee Smith, Daniel Wallace, Brad Watson, Jill McCorkle, Silas House, Tommy Franklin, and so on. I think for all of the writers who’ve emerged out of the South and out of Appalachia over the past five or ten years, those are the people whose footsteps we’re following. You come out of a place like this and whether you like it or not you stand within a shadow. You stand in a shadow cast by everyone before you and all you can hope is that your work lengthens it, that at the end of the day your work adds to that conversation.

GI: You’re a mountain man and I’m from a barrio near the beach, but it seems like we both grew up surrounded by struggle and a rich storytelling tradition. How does that upbringing shape your prose now?

DJ: I very much ascribe to that Cormac McCarthy belief that, “The core of literature is the idea of tragedy.” I think bearing witness to struggle can, as hard as it is at the time, make for damn rich ground to mine. We’re not talking about not getting the car you wanted for your sixteenth birthday, or having to hold off a few months to get the latest iPhone. We’re talking about missing meals, about deciding whether you keep the lights on or buy a few groceries. We’re talking, as Rick Bragg once put it, “about living and dying and that fragile, shivering place in between.” That’s pay dirt for a writer. And coming out of a storytelling tradition like the South for me, or Puerto Rico for you, I think puts us at a tremendous advantage. I can’t imagine growing up in a place where story didn’t matter. What a horrible, horrible life that would’ve been.

GI: Your career took off pretty quickly. This makes newbie authors look up to you and ask for help, tips, blurbs, and probably a connection. How do you deal with this?

DJ: I’ve been incredibly fortunate both for the success and for the support from fellow writers. The hard truth is that there are plenty of writers a lot more talented than I am who haven’t gotten their shot, and quite possibly never will. I have no idea what makes certain books take off. There’s really no rhyme or reason to what makes a bestseller. Part of it is timing, sure, but then I think about a book like Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me last summer. Flat out that was one of the top two or three novels that came out last year. It was that good. Period. Even more it was about a gymnastics family and it released a week before the Rio 2016 Summer Games Olympics. Talk about timing. By all reason that book should have been in the top five NYT Bestsellers. Who the hell knows why it wasn’t? And that’s not to say that book wasn’t well received, because it definitely was, and rightly so, but I have no idea why some books take off and others don’t.

As far as other writers, I’ll never forget what it was like when that first novel was coming out and I got a blurb from Daniel Woodrell. I mean I idolize him. To think that he read my work still boggles me, and he didn’t have a reason in the world to do it aside from kindness. Another one is Ace Atkins. I think he’s one of the most talented writers I know. I respect the hell out of him on the page, but even more so as a man. He could call me right this second and ask anything of me and I’d be there. I owe him that much. I feel that way about Ron Rash, Tawni O’Dell, Frank Bill, Mark Powell, Michael Farris Smith, Silas House, George Singleton, Megan Abbott, Donald Ray Pollock, Eric Rickstad, Reed Farrell Coleman who are all a hell of a lot more talented than me and were kind enough to read my work and support what I was doing. I know what it’s like to not have an audience, to not have any work out there on the shelf, and I’ll never lose sight of everyone who supported me. I carry that with me and I carry that forward. Bottom line is that if I can help someone I help them because that’s the way this thing works.

At the same time, it’s rare anymore for me to go a day without someone I’ve never met asking me to read something. There are nine books sitting beside me on my desk right now that people sent me to read. So the truth is there comes a time when you have to say no and I think that’s a hard balance to find. I think it’s hard for most writers to say no, because most all the ones I know and love and respect are first and foremost damn good people when you get to the heart of it.

GI: Fishing is at the center of your life now. Every fisherman in the world has a different answer for this, and I’m curious about yours: what is it about fishing that keeps you going back for more?

DJ: Maybe the most beautiful passage I’ve ever read on fishing came from Alex Taylor and I can’t remember if it was in one of his stories or from his novel, The Marble Orchard, but he wrote, “There was now in him the desire to wrangle one thing out of the dark waters and have it leap and fight and finally be subdued by his hand. Because there is a kind of faith with fishing. It is the belief that the brevity of all things is not bitter, but a calm moment beside calm water is enough to still the breaking of all hearts everywhere.”

I think it’s exactly that and it’s always been that even when I was a kid. It’s chasing the same thing that Buddhists are chasing through meditation, it’s that moment of absolute thoughtlessness when everything else disappears and all that is left is the present. For me, I have a hard time reaching that place any other way so I’ve devoted a great deal of my life to being next to water. That’s the only place where I feel at ease. Fishing has always been my center.

GI: There is no fiction like that found in the “true” stories told by fishermen. What’s the most outstanding/memorable/incredible fishing tale you’ve heard?

When I was a little kid I used to always get up early on Saturday mornings and watch all the fishing shows—Roland Martin, Hank Parker, Bill Dance, The Spanish Fly with Jose Wejebe, Walker’s Cay Chronicle with Flip Pallot—but I remember one time when I was really little seeing this documentary on PBS about a noodling tournament in Oklahoma. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone grappling catfish. People in my family jug fished and ran trotlines, and I’d caught plenty of catfish on rod and reel, but I’d never seen anything like that. I remember this one fellow on there saying you never knew exactly what might be in the back of one of those holes. Might be a catfish. Might be a snapping turtle. Might be a snake. He told how his brother stuck his arm in a hole once and a beaver got ahold of him and gnawed his forearm down to the bone clean up to his elbow.

Anyhow, there was a father and son fishing together and the boy might’ve been seven or eight years old, but they waded up to a hole and the father stuck his arm back in there and felt fish. The problem was that the hole was too deep and he couldn’t get back far enough for the fish to latch on. So this man took his son and shoved him down in that hole feet first and all of a sudden that boy got to screaming and hollering and the man dragged him out and that catfish was latched onto that boy’s legs. I’ve never seen anything like it. Here’s this father shoving his little boy down in a hole for a thirty, forty pound flathead to bite down on his legs. I just laid there in awe watching it, and I’ve never been able to shake that image in all the years since. Long story short, think long and hard before you go getting in a fistfight with an Okie.

GI: Your work is character driven, but there’s also a lot of attention paid to the beauty of each sentence, the cadence of each passage. How much of that comes out naturally and how much is editing/rewriting?

I think the ear for it comes naturally, at least for me. I hear a good sentence in the same way Thelonious Monk heard rhythm, or Dave Brubeck heard scales. Now I’m absolutely tone deaf when it comes to music, but I have a natural ear for language. Ron Rash talked one time about loving the way vowels and consonants rub up against one another. In the same way, I think I’m drawn to sound more than anything else, and that’s probably why I read so much more poetry than fiction. As far as writing it though, I don’t think that comes naturally at all. That’s very much a matter of shifting phrases, changing words, cutting articles, playing with things and tinkering with a sentence until there’s music. It takes a lot more work for me to construct a sentence than it does for me to recognize when one is working.

GI: Appalachian noir. Rural noir. Country noir. You fall into all of them and yet your work is clearly David Joy noir. Do you pay any attention to labels?

There’s a danger to labels that I think has led writers like Daniel Woodrell to distance himself from terms like “noir.” For too long merit has been measured by wine sniffing, elbow patch wearing, shiny shoed academics who turn their noses up to any label other than “literary.” Anyone with half a brain can recognize it’s snobbish bullshit. To dismiss someone like Ursula K. Le Guin under the guise of science fiction, or to dismiss a writer like Stephen King as a genre writer, that’s the danger of labels. Benjamin Percy had that great collection of essays last year titled Thrill Me where he did a wonderful service in addressing a lot of these issues. I think we’re starting to move away from that trend, and that’s a wonderful thing. I was on a panel with Megan Abbott in France last fall and she said she believed crime fiction had become the new social novel and I completely agree with her. So I guess what I’m saying is that as readers we need to be sure that we’re not carrying any sort of bias in regards to those labels. The book must stand alone.

At the same time, I’m not one to shy away from labels. I think my sentences stand for themselves and so if someone wants to talk craft we can talk craft. I like the idea of noir, especially as an emotional description capturing a sort of shadowed mood cast over a story. Benjamin Whitmer had a great essay a while back where he talked about the idea of redeemable characters and happy endings being a fairly new construct in regards to literature. Hollywood endings always hit me as such a cop out. So when a term like noir is used correctly I’m really grateful as a reader because it tends to point me in the direction of something I’ll probably dig. I also recognize that my work isn’t for everyone. I want to go to the darkest places imaginable and search out some small speck of humanity. I think it takes a brave reader to go to the places I want to take them. I hope there’s a payoff for venturing into the dark, and, for me, I believe that there is. Only through heartache and suffering do we arrive at any sort of philosophical awareness, and, in the end, that sort of revelatory moment is what makes it worthwhile.

GI: There’s a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to Appalachia, and part of that can be blamed on books that take place there and don’t understand the place, the people, the culture. Now that everyone writes about everything and everywhere, do you think authenticity still matters?

DJ: When I think of the truly great books, the truly great writers, I can’t think of one who wasn’t deeply rooted to place. James Joyce traveled all over Europe. He wrote Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake while living in Paris. But could you imagine him having not written of Dublin? You know, he said, “I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.” Joyce’s idea that, “In the particular is contained the universal,” is exactly what Eudora Welty meant when she said, “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” I don’t want to live in a world where Faulkner didn’t stick to Mississippi. I don’t want to live in a world where Ron didn’t write of Appalachia. Those books are sopping wet with place. I think there is an incredible beauty in knowing a setting as deeply as those writers knew theirs. I think you can sense that connection on the page just as I think you can sense when someone’s bullshitting. There’s nothing worse than reading a book and having the language ring untrue. As soon as I hit that place in a book, I’m done. I’m not reading any further. Toss it to the fire. It’s kindling.

If the details aren’t right the reader will never buy the big lie. So whether the writer’s of that place or not, it goddamn better feel authentic.

GI: Your Twitter feed is a great place to find great authors other than yourself. Any names/books you’d care to recommend here?

I think it’s rare for me to find a book that I absolutely love, especially a novel. So I wind up rereading a lot more books than I do finishing something new. I go back and read Jim Harrison and Larry Brown and Cormac McCarthy. Recently I reread Benjamin Whitmer’s Cry Father. I’m obsessed with Daniel Woodrell and Donald Ray Pollock. As far as novels I’ve read this year that I loved, I really enjoyed stumbling onto your work. Zero Saints is a wonderful read. I think the best novels to come out this year were Michael Farris Smith’s Desperation Road, Steph Post’s Lightwood, and Mark Powell’s Small Treasons. Frank Bill’s got a new one titled The Savage that’s coming out this fall and it’s brilliant. I think the best story collection I’ve read this year was Scott Gould’s Strangers To Temptation. I thought that book was wonderful, kind of like if George Singleton had written a season of the Wonder Years. I think more people need to be reading Robert Gipe, Crystal Wilkinson, Charles Dodd White, and Sheldon Lee Compton.

But I’m going to do this a little differently than most novelists and name five or six books of poetry I’ve fallen in love with this year. One of my favorite poets, Tim Peeler, has a new book out titled L2, which is a sort of linear, novel-esque story told through poetry and I loved that book. Gritty as hell and just damn beautiful. Another one of my favorite poets, Rebecca Gayle Howell, has a new book, American Purgatory, that’s incredible. I think she’s one of the most powerful poets at work. If you haven’t read her already, read her collection Render: An Apocalypse and you’ll fall in love. Recently, I read a beautiful book by a South Carolina poet named Kathleen Nalley. The title is Gutterflower and it comes out some time in September, I think, but her work has really stuck with me. I stumbled onto a poet named Adrian Matejka and read a book of his, The Big Smoke, which was sort of the story of the boxer Jack Johnson. A wonderful press, Hub City, put out a book by Ashley M. Jones’ titled Magic City Gospel, and there’s a poem in there titled “Sammy Davis Jr. Sings To Mike Brown, Jr.” that will wreck your world in fourteen lines. Lastly, I finally got my hands on Ray McManus’ Red Dirt Jesus. I’ve always loved his poetry, especially the poems in his book Punch, but Red Dirt Jesus was one of those books I found at the right time. I was finishing my next novel, a book that’ll come out next year called The Line That Held Us, and I read a poem of his called “Missing Curfew” and as soon as I read it I knew the final image of the novel, I knew how I wanted the last words to sound. I have Ray to thank for that.

The Lightning Room With Chris Speckman

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Interview by DeWitt Brinson

 

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

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

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

 2. Did you start with the words or clues?

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

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

The Lightning Room With Dawn Sperber

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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.

 “Our Master of Psalmody,” by Dawn Sperber, appeared in our February issue. Below, Simon talks with Dawn mutable pronouns and religious ecstasy.

 

1. I’m really curious about the origins of this piece – what possessed you to write it, or what was the first image or phrase that struck you and had to be written down?

I actually wrote the first draft of this story when I was 20, almost half my life ago. I’d picked a handful of words from the dictionary to write about (neuter, psalmody, saffron, glissando), and as a result, this weird story pushed out of me. I loved it back then, but it was more like a story seed. A couple years ago, I opened a box of old writing and found it inside. I still felt the story, so I decided to refine what had inspired me.

I’ve always felt that the sacred parts of life don’t stay in cordoned-off areas, and the idea that God disapproves of sexuality sounds like a set-up for self-deceit. Instead of trying to control our passions out of existence, it seems only natural to look for balance with who we really are and find the divine in every aspect of life. This is one of the reasons established religions make me nervous. If we’re going to find balance in our crazy selves, shouldn’t we start out being as honest as possible? To me, Lee embodies a lot of the messy sacred richness that doesn’t fit in prescribed boxes.

2. I love the casual shift between Lee’s gender pronouns in this story. It creates an indeterminate yet mythic figure, with this mysterious yet subversive power. Who is your favorite person to hear singing?

Mm, it changes. I get song crushes and haunt certain songs for weeks, knowing I shouldn’t fixate, that it’ll weaken a song to hear it too often, but I love being in love. Those song crushes end up fueling a lot of my stories. Some recent ones were sung by The Civil Wars, Anais Mitchell, and Jeff Buckley. Continue reading →