The Lightning Room

The Lightning Room With Chloe Benjamin

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Things To Do: Dress up your pet porcupine, read Chloe Benjamin’s “In Which We Pay Tribute to Swallowtails” in our May issue, enjoy the gentle stimulation of our interview.

Interview by DeWitt Brinson

1. What is the connection between strangers and dreams?

All dreams are strangers, and all strangers are dreams? I recently dreamed that I had a pet porcupine named Sweetie. She liked to eat yogurt, and I dressed her in a fur coat so I could pet her without getting pricked. When we hung out in my bedroom, she said, “Favorite room!” When I woke up the next day, I missed her.

2. Do you feel you have to fight for what you achieve or do you let life come to you?

I try to do a little of both.

3. What do people most commonly ask you when you tell them you’re a writer? How do you answer?

I always expect that people will give me the hairy eyeball or ask what I plan to do with an MFA, but I’ve been delighted to find that they’re generally excited and supportive. They tend to ask what my novel is about, so I’ve had to spruce up my elevator pitch.

4. What do you look forward to in the morning?

Coffee.

5. How and where do you write?

I used to only be able to write alone at home, but then I discovered ear plugs, and now I like the passive stimulation and gentle peer pressure of a coffee shop.

The Lightning Room with James Tadd Adcox

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Five of James Tadd Adcox’s “Scientific Method” poems appeared in our June issue. Below, he and Simon talk about empiricism and constraint.

1. Your “Scientific Method” poems have appeared in a bunch of different places – what was the inspiration for this collection, and how big is it? I love that they all have the same title.

The inspiration was a constraint—specifically, I wanted to send some poems to Safety Pin Review, but didn’t have anything that fit the size requirement (small). And I like series of poems that have the same title. I like how the title shapes whatever follows it, and how so many things can be shaped in different ways by the same title. I think I have somewhere around 40 or 50 of these at the moment, but I’ve culled them down to a chapbook of around 30.

2. These poems seem effortlessly, perfectly concise to me – what’s your editing process like? Are the original drafts longer, and you cut away? Or are they painstakingly pieced together from the beginning, very carefully and deliberately? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Dolan Morgan

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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. Dolan Morgan’s story “Euclid’s Postulates” appeared in our April issue. Simon and Dolan talked about looking forwards, backwards, and down paths of no return. Dolan’s first book, That’s When the Knives Come Down, is forthcoming from Aforementioned Productions in August 2014.

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1. “Euclid’s Postulates” is about, among many other things, the tenuous tracks of our lives compared against mathematical principles, and probably inevitability. Bearing this in mind, can you respond to this hypnotizing gif?

Yes, please, let’s talk about this hypnotizing gif. Now, for those who haven’t clicked through, I’ll save you the trouble: the gif includes a rotating green cube. Innocent enough. Familiar shape, calming tone, gentle rhythm. Great. But soon we see a new shape, interrupting our tranquility. A blue pentagon obscures part of the cube, immutable and irrevocable. Why? We can’t say. Then another, and another: blue pentagons definitively overtaking the cube like so many feral umbrellas – jesus, when will it stop? – until the cube itself is entirely subsumed, devoured and disappeared, such that we see clearly now, with a terrifying certainty, that a dodecahedron can be – and in fact has been, right here and now, you can’t deny it, it’s really happening – formed around this simple cube, and that it in fact was always there, waiting to be realized and made manifest. And of course, there is the inverse realization too: that beneath every dodecahedron has always been lurking this cube, mocking in its simplicity. The past is undone in an instant, one life swapped for another. David Foster Wallace has written of this particular kind of horror, wherein a person realizes that what scares us is not only here, but that it has been here all along, that even when we felt calm, safe, and secure, we had no grounds to feel this way. Take for example my sister’s one-time fiancé, Doug, who struggled to find employment. Fortunately, he landed a seasonal job working at a Christmas tree farm owned by a family friend, Eric. Every morning, Doug and Eric would head out in a truck through the trees, getting things ready for the holidays. Now, Eric noticed something peculiar each time they embarked, something that just couldn’t be ignored or denied, try as he might. So, one morning in the truck, Eric said, “Doug, I know you’re pooping.” Turns out, every time they got going, Doug would defecate in his pants, right there with Eric next to him, in the truck. Eric had hoped it wasn’t true, but day in and day out, the facts presented themselves, the irrefutable pentagons slowly formed on the situation, and Eric had to accept and confront it: “I know you’re pooping,” he said. Doug denied it. “No, I know you’re pooping. You’re doing it right now.” Doug again denied it, mid-movement. Eric gave him an ultimatum. “If you don’t admit what’s happening, I’ll have to fire you. You don’t even necessarily have to stop, you just have to admit it. Meet me halfway.” Doug did not. And I can only imagine Doug’s mortification – all that time he thought to himself that he was getting away with it. That no one knew he was pooping. He had a job. He had freedom. The brisk, early mornings. A hard day’s work. But he was wrong, and was forced to understand he’d always been wrong. These are the facts. Or take Gene Hackman: in Coppola’s The Conversation, he plays a surveillance expert who faces a moral quandary after discovering that the people he’s surveilling are targeted for murder – by none other than his own paying client. The people he spies on are concerned, sure, but ultimately unaware of the imminent danger, and it would be a breach of professional integrity for Hackman’s character to confirm their suspicions. Still, his silence makes him complicit. He jeopardizes his otherwise renowned career by finally attempting to intervene. Yet, at the crucial moment, he learns quite viscerally that he misinterpreted the conversation: the people he spied on were not concerned about being murdered, but in fact were plotting a murder. Mr. Hackman’s character must accept not only the horror of this current moment and the finality it entails, but must also contend with each prior moment he misconstrued. He too is being surveilled, has been all along. Everything has been reversed. His life is in shambles. It was never a cube, but always a dodecahedron. One thing becomes another, and in fact was never anything else in the first place. I know you’re pooping. At any moment, a single fact or series of facts, can present itself, such that whole swaths of our lives are swept away, people/places/things, to be replaced by something alien, something new. What we took comfort in up to now was never us at all, and this new alien thing, this unfamiliar thing: that has always been us. There’s no denying it. That’s why I am scared of this gif and will never look at it again. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Jasmine Sawers

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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.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

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Read Jasmine Sawers story How to Commit Suicide in our March issue, then join us as we enter adolescence and howl at elderly hamsters.

1. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done but are not ashamed to admit?

Entering adolescence.

2. How do you deal with your destructive emotions?

I allow them to consume me until I am a howling abyss.

3. What did you do the last time you knew a friend was in an abusive relationship?

Proper friendship is at least partially defined by not spreading the other party’s intimate business in public spaces.

4. Why does being human mean that we will hurt someone, that we will hurt ourselves? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Tanya Olson

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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.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

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Tanya Olson’s Ain’t I Pretty Fought to get into our March Issue. Now read as Tanya beats the shit out of anyone who’d try to put Ali in a Greek box, people who can’t not buy tigers, and those who choose not to see. All this before being eaten alive by a snake-shark.

1. Your bio says you have a book coming out, but that was months ago and YesYes Books’ website says Boyishly is out. Wanna plug it?

Heck yeah! Boyishly is beautiful to look at, unsettling to read. It is an American book that asks why we see what we see, as well as what is the cost of not seeing, not being seen. I also like that it is a book that is stern but forgiving to its readers.

2. Muhammad Ali is like Plato in that he’s known as a philosopher, writer, and fighter. Do you think he should be studied in school the same way the dialogues are?

It would seem a shame to lock Ali up in academia, behind school walls. Ali needs to be free to move between worlds- schools are not good about granting the folks they focus on other understandings, so poor Ali would end up like Plato, a one trick pony (Greek, philosopher, allegory of the cave guy) instead of the beautiful complex dude he is. We need to keep the loud Ali who talked and talked alive beside the liquid Ali who hit and danced beside the Ali who is locked inside his own body, who serves as some sort of cultural touchstone. I love that all those Alis live simultaneously in the poem. Once Ali dies, I’m afraid he’ll become only the guy who used to lip with Cosell or some other similar reduction. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Jennifer Pilch

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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.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

Two poems by Jennifer Pilch appeared in our March Issue. Read them won’t you? Especially, if you work for or own a circus, because Jennifer will infiltrate you, release all of your animals, and drop a mighty sequoia on your ass.

 

1.  What is the connection between sex and the definition of words? Why has it always been that way?

Words are our bodies; definitions are directions how we would like it done.

2.  What questions do you try to answer with your poetry or with these poems specifically?

What collides visually, emotionally, and historically?  There is no other present. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Jessica Alexander

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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. Jessica Alexander’s piece “Daughter” appeared in our April issue – below, she and Simon talk condition narratives, desperation, and volatility.

1. This piece is written as a series of twelve steps along the disappearance of a daughter. What is this the path to? Acceptance? Annihilation?

At the time, I’d coined this phrase “condition narrative” – and I was very proud of it – as in a physical or mental condition. I thought I was finished with events. Done too with characters and settings. I’d just write condition narratives. I’m no longer sure what that meant. I remember thinking a condition is a pattern, not a plot; a repetition, an obsession, or a personal discordance with public time or progress.

2. A sense of abject, frantic loss runs through this piece. I can imagine that things that disappear without explanation are much worse than those you watch vanish before your eyes (or perhaps it’s the other way around) – is this, do you suppose, a universal reaction to this kind of grief?

I have no idea. At the time, I was reading Bataille’s Visions of Excess and I was really struck by the violence of substitution. To me it seemed like he kept situating animals, planets, body parts in a space of impossible longing. So what interested me was not so much the disappearance of a thing, though that’s significant, but that space of impossible longing where objects are almost mythical. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Katie Schmid

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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.  Below, Simon and Katie Schmid talk about roots and brutal youth and hunger and “The Boys of the Midwest 1 through 5,” which appeared in the April issue.

 

1. When you write about the Boys of the Midwest, it’s always as a collective. Is this a generational thing?

In my mind, children go through a pack-like stage. At least, that was true for me. Especially around the ages of 8-11, I was a part of a neighborhood gang of girls in my mostly rental/apartment living neighborhood in Evanston, IL. There was a kind of rangey lazy quality to our movements – I don’t ever recall us making decisions about what to do, we just found ourselves in the midst of activities: playing in someone’s tree house, informing each other of the edible plants we could find in the grass (I remember eating crabgrass and onion grass, though we were not underfed). It’s a weird time. We didn’t live in an especially great neighborhood, but there was the sense that there was strength in numbers, and we were allowed to be on our own sometimes. Left to yourself, you construct a whole kid world that adults have no bearing on. Or at least, the wisdom of adults gets filtered down to the group through kid logic and becomes beautifully warped.

When my family tells me stories about their childhoods, it seems to confirm that lots of kids, given the opportunity, form their own little feral packs at that age, with their own rules and rituals and heartbreaks. It can be brutal and intense and emotional. They force each other to eat bugs, they tell each other wild insane lies and deliver these as gospel truth. Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, has that fierce little protagonist, Mick Kelly, and she’s simultaneously a leader-parent in her gang of neighborhood children and a child herself, given to all the whims and large, unbearable emotions of childhood. I am fascinated by that time, in my own life and in others’. Looming over all of that feral, emotional child closeness is the specter of the “right” world in the form of your parents, the true gods of your life, whose emotions are even more inscrutable and terrifying than your own. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Russel Swensen

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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. Here, Simon asks Russel Swensen a series of increasingly terse questions about his magnificent poems in the April issue.

 

1. “TOURISM IS IMPORTANT” has such a restless quality to it, as if built of frantically-stacked images. I ask this a lot, but how did you construct this poem? Did you know right from the beginning it would be a series in this manner?

Ah, intention my old friend I have to come to pretend I believe in you again. But not so much really. I knew I wanted this to be sort of camera-friendly so in that sense yes, I had some idea of what it would look like [it’s like those really bad rap videos from artists who well never made it like at all but DID make a video: this is MY hood, this is my weird fucked up ice cream parlor, this is the park that makes me unspeakably sad, this is THE WEATHER except it’s personal, it was incredibly cold that day because of me, because of my friend, the cripple, etc.]. And I mean, I say this with nothing but love for those videos – series of vignettes basically that are genuinely tender because the vignettes are all there is, there’s no career, no real light: I get that. I mean, I’m a complete zero as a poet so showing a few shops in my inner city really isn’t that much of a stretch. I hope this doesn’t sound like fucking painfully white. I just have a built-in love for travelogues that are essentially testimonials – this, exactly, is where I’ve been and maybe I don’t get a chance to say it again so I’m a say it loud.

[paragraph deleted that details the writer’s difficulties with prose of which there are many, typical lines being, “I think the basic Ikea-ness of this has more to do with that” and “a stubborn refusal to give up like in a relationship, cf. “I can make this right,” “ok but like “it’s so cold in the d” you see what I’m getting at here” sic for what’s it’s worth] Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Russell Jaffe

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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. Russell Jaffe’s sly, watery end of all things, “Doritos,” appeared in our April issue. He and Simon chat, below.

 

1. Hi Russell. If this is “after Cassandra Gillig,” can I ask what came before? Or after, assuming that the world was re-populated?

It’s after her because she suggested the idea for it! I do love the idea of a post-Cassandra-Gillig-world (PCGW).

Never assume anything about repopulation.

2. This piece is basically two people floating on a boat in the middle of watery nothingness, where all entertainment and civilization have been utterly wiped out. If you’re in love with the last viable person on earth, how do you deal with rejection?

I think that’s what real rejection feels like, at least in my life, be it romantic or job-related. Let me tell you, I once dreamed of working for the WWE as a creative writer. And I had an interview with them to be a content writer for the website! And I gave them some rad ideas and they had me sign a form that just because I had given them any ideas did NOT mean I could keep them or copyright them or that they hadn’t come up with them themselves. Then they USED ALL MY IDEAS ON THE WEBSITE, right down to a series about specific wacky pro wrestler gimmicks of the past and more interactive Facebook-page-like wrestler profile pages. And they told me they had just let 5 people go, which was true. The economy had just tanked. I felt like I was basically the last man in a barren landscape. I cried sitting on my car in Stamford, Connecticut, by a big thing of water and all these big white houses. It was like I had slept and this flood had killed everyone and devastated everything. Dealing with rejection is every step you take and breath you inhale and exhale. You just do it by continuing. Next thing you know, you’re like, fuck, I would have hated that job. I would have hated that relationship.

3. “Doritos” basically reads as optimism: crushed. Is it hard to be cheery when the (your) world is ending?

It’s not because I love the end of the world so much that it’s usually a positive thing for me. It’s a beautiful finale, and this poem is a particularly memorable part of the episodic series we’re all gifted by the universe whose narrative we kind of scrape together and determine day to day, maybe second to second. I can’t write anything if I feel sad, even brutally sad stuff. I feel like the sicker and sadder my poetry is, the happier I am IRL. Continue reading →