The Lightning Room

The Lightning Room with Lena Bertone

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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.

 

“Self Portrait,” by Lena Bertone – a story written in mirrorings – showed up in our April issue. To celebrate, Simon and Lena discuss narcissism.

1. What is the most narcissistic piece of artwork you’ve ever seen?

I love that Frida Kahlo’s relentless self-portraits feel so self-indulgent, yet they’re so vibrant and full of pain and story. I love her painting of her sitting next to herself, holding hands with herself, both of her hearts exposed.

2. “Self Portrait” has a marvelous, reflective quality to it – what was the first image or line that struck you to begin writing it?

The first line was the first line—I liked the idea that Leo’s wife would be disturbed that he painted himself as a woman. He promises he hasn’t done it before, but he doesn’t promise that he won’t do it again. 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 →

The Lightning Room With Jenny Sadre-Orafai

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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.

Today, Simon talks with  Jenny Sadre-Orafai, who brought two poems to our February issue earlier this year, about burning young things.

 

1. “Biography of Teenagers” seems to explore, in part, the fumblings of adolescence as a substitute for later, averted maturity, a desire to concretize things before they happen. What do you think drives our desire for the past over the present?

Perhaps we spend so much time with the past because it’s what is known. We have been there. We know how it all happens. We lived it. We can’t know what will happen this second. There’s a sense of control, ironically, in the past.

2. Both “Biography of Teenagers” and “Treasure in Timber” explore burned-out or elided history, post-dated moments: can you share another moment of deleted history?

I visited Seattle and British Columbia when I was seventeen with my parents and sister. I remember feeling like we would never get back home. I was an anxious teenager who missed her boyfriend and listened to a cassette he made over and over again. Before leaving the Seattle Airport, the news reported that a body had been found in Kurt Cobain’s home. That’s what I remember most from the trip and not how much I was missing by just being there. I would go back to Seattle eighteen years later. I wore flat shoes and walked everywhere. I watched giant seagulls strut and the water shine around them. I didn’t waste it the second time. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Nuncio Casanova

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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.

Today, Simon talks with Nuncio Casanova, whose photo collage “Once There Was A Giraffe” appeared in our February issue. Ages later, he brings us wisdom from the old masters.

for pank

 http://www.coroflot.com/nunciatura

1. This is a wonderfully surreal collage-piece. For mixed-media work like this, what comes first, the images or the words? And how?

Both come first and then I close the eyes. They start to lick and bite each other, rumour has it. I trow thence cut-out heads, one here, two there, and whole phrases grow horns, and vice versa, when I place misspelled words. To be honest it is completely the contrary, everted, backwards, then show it to a mirror and put upside down, cut in pieces and add garlic, onion and oregano, fry in whale oil at high heat for 20 minutes and then send it to Greenland via priority airmail.

2. When it comes to creating surreal, Dada-inspired works like these, how do you select what images/phrases to use to build the story? What is the process of creation like, in a style that traditionally relies on so much experimentation, randomness, and subconscious motivation?

The entire process will be accurately described as capricious, because I say so!

3. What’s the most bizarre place from which you’ve ever cut a photograph?

Where I had glued them! That was quite more impressive… would have been, because the lights went out. Oh, if you had seen!

4. Does this piece come from a larger project?

Yes, it does. After eating the emperor, the crocodile eats almost everyone in the story, including the grandmother of Herodotus and Nuncio Casanova, and then escapes to Leningrad and eats ice cream until he explodes.

5. Can you name one of the thousands of wonders circling around the belly button of a Victorian lady? Please?

Ha! Try to get your own Victorian ladies! Be aware that they are extremely slippery at this time of the year.

6. What else have you learned from Dada?

I learned nothing and besides I have to reassure myself three times per hour that I am awake. I demand my money back!

 

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

The Lightning Room with Kallie Falandays

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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. Today, Simon talks with Kallie Falandays. Back in our February issue, Kallie pulled us apart as she put us together. Now, she speaks:

 

1. “I Want To Tell You Yes” and “If Morning Never Comes” are both profoundly physical poems, of pulling things out and stuffing things in. Are these based on specific people?

Yes and no. Yes they are based on real people, but no because it’s not the real person but the imagined person that these poems explore. That world (of imagination) is sometimes infinitely more interesting to me.

2. What is the most uncomfortable (not physical) experience you’ve ever had.

That experience is probably buried somewhere too deep to find at this moment.

3. “I Want To Tell You Yes” reads like a demand, mixing a kind of visceral carnality with images of nature, as if subverting one of those boring nature poems. Is this poem really about innocence lost?

No, it is more about going to what is lost and wanting to undo it – not necessarily so that it becomes whole, but so it becomes again and again.

4. Tell me one soul you’d like to completely tear apart.

That’s one secret I will not reveal. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Tara Mae Mulroy

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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. Today, Simon talks with  Tara Mae Mulroy, whose story,“The Last Hurrah,”  from our February issue is loss itself:

 

1. The atmosphere in “The Last Hurrah” is just perfect – the unease of being abroad; exotic history and locales coupled with familiar things taking on unfamiliar dimensions (the McDonald’s, the dogs; the Greek alphabet); it heightens the sense of a couple in limbo. What brought you to Greece to write this story?

As a wedding gift, my father, who travels for a living, offered to comp our plane tickets for our honeymoon. My husband is also a manager for a hotel, so since we were footing the rest of the bill for our honeymoon, we sought out locations that would a.) be able to be flown to and b.) provide us with a hotel discount. Athens, Greece ended up being that place. Athens was far from what we expected though. As we were flying over, the economic riots started, and our first foray into the city center ended up with us in the middle of the riots, our eyes watering from tear gas.

On top of that, we couldn’t find hummus, falafels, or gyros because that’s Turkish, not really Greek, food. The city was covered with graffiti, and most of the public transportation was shut down due to the riots. We sent expensive text messages home to our families to let them know we were okay. It was a strange two weeks. When I started writing this story, I wanted to re-create that time of discomfort and exoticism. I imagined a failing marriage and the husband running out to join the rioters. It ended up as a love story. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Marcelina Vizcarra

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Welcome back to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with Marcelina Vizcarra, whose story “The Oldest Living American” appeared in our February, 2013 issue. The secret of immortality, below.

 

 1. “The Oldest Living American” explores, among other things, our glorification/souvenirification (which is not a word) of objects or people recovered or still present from our collective past. Why do we suppose we do this?

That’s a good question. I think these relics give us a vicarious participation in our past. Maybe if we connect to something outside of our timelines, we extend them. That’s the optimistic aspect. But there’s also a darker theme in our efforts to distinguish ourselves, a sense of ownership that I’m guilty of, to appropriate all manners of objects and people from the cabinets of history. In that respect, Harvey is a sort of living Wunderkammer that can be picked through, and his panoramic experiences can be appraised against market trends. Lately, I’ve come to view our collective past as yet another store for the modern consumer, yet another way to define ourselves by what we purchase.

2. This story presents a number of perspectives of the same, very old man; in so doing, you manage to bring up a host of issues surrounding what we do with our old; what inspired you to write this story, and to use this multi-perspective approach?

Some of my first jobs were taking care of elderly neighbors, and then the institutionalized, so these characters tend to volunteer often in my writing. I’m especially fascinated by the artificial stasis imposed upon them during their slide into dependence, along with its accompanying indignities—perhaps the most offensive being the assumption of muted emotions, or worse, naïvete. I suspect that the fear of this marginalized future is what funds our society’s contradictory stances—disdain for old age but celebration of longevity. Harvey embodies both, so I put his death under public scrutiny, harkening back to the old coroner’s juries. Continue reading →