The Lightning Room

The Lightning Room with Suzanne Farrell Smith

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Interview by Brian Kornell

 

Suzanne Farrell Smith’s essay, “Listing to Love,” which appears in the July 2013 issue, catalogs love and loss with a focus on all the little things we can love.

 

1. Name your own executive staff of PITA.

A. Ann Coulter

B. James Joyce

C. My upstairs neighbor, whose apartment renovation has entered its third year

D. Al Roker

2. The piece is presented in outline form. Some items are expanded upon, such as the elevator being reprogrammed or the mix tape, while others are not. How did you choose which items to expand upon and which ones to leave more ambiguous? Did you decide this as you wrote or were these decisions made in the editing phase?

I made expansion decisions after finishing an unwieldy draft of multiple linked lists. Through revision, I decided which items to expand based on which carried more emotional weight. Revision worked like a flow chart. I asked myself, does this item mean something more significant than can be contained by its spot on the list? If not, I left it as a single item or deleted it. If it did, I pursued the meaning through expansion, which often led to a new sub-list. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Cheryl Maddalena

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Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Poet and psychologist Cheryl Maddalena placed herself across the historical divide from Marilyn Monroe and called it a mirror. Read her poem, “Marilyn,” in the May issue, then decide who Norma Jean really is.

 

1. Marilyn Monroe (or at least her pop-cultural image) is so ubiquitous. How did you find yourself ready to take on that cultural weight and make it new?

I wrote this poem some time ago, when I was taking a linguistics class. Apparently, as related by my two professors, in linguistics school the students would passionately argue in the hallways about the which would be more correct: “I dreamed I was Marilyn Monroe, and I kissed me,” or “I dreamed I was Marilyn Monroe, and I kissed myself.” Obviously I felt strongly about the first choice! And I also realized that in my professors’ version, students were imagining being kissed by Marilyn Monroe – completely different from my experience of the idea, which was of two Marilyns.

2. I loved your incorporation of the autoerotic (“while under the table/I kept squeezing/my adorable knee. I simply couldn’t keep my hands/off me”). How does the speaker (and maybe, if you feel like broaching it, the poet) relate to Marilyn as an symbol of desirable femininity? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with 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 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: 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 →

Call for Applications: Interviews Editors, PANK Blog

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Hello! It’s me, Opportunity calling!

PANK Blog is looking for a new editorial duo to run the fashionable and fascinating LIGHTNING ROOM series, which interviews PANK Magazine contributors.

Exciting! Perhaps it will be you!

Things to Think About Before You Apply

*This job is a labor of love. Nobody on the editorial staff of the blog or the mag make any money at this. But we do our best to make the lit-space sparkle and we have very cool swag. 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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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 →