Joshua R. Helms is Assistant Editor for Corium Magazine. Their work has appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, Gertrude, New England Review, Redivider, and Sonora Review, among others. Machines Like Us, Josh's first collection of poetry, will be published by Dzanc in 2015. Their photo is part of the Low Income Housing Coalition of Alabama's "Home Is..." campaign to secure dedicated revenue for the Alabama Housing Trust Fund (follow the links to learn more).
Their story, "Michael & His Brother," appeared in Issue Sixty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, Joshua R. Helms talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about flash fiction, writing on the Greyhound, loss and violence.
In your story we have five sections that capture different moments in the brothers’ lives and their relationship with each other. The scenes themselves are told in chronological order. Did the writing process itself unfolded in similar fashion?
Not for these five sections, no. When I started writing “Michael & His Brother” about four years ago, I wrote several pieces/sections quickly and mostly in chronological order. Some of those were published. Then I took a long break to work on other projects (a poetry collection, a young adult novel, a hybrid project) and I wasn’t sure when/if I’d come back to “Michael & His Brother.”
After my long-term relationship ended last summer, I turned to writing (as I often do when shit goes awry). I spent some time trying to figure out which project to pick up, how to put my energy to use in a healthy way. It felt like the right time to return “Michael & His Brother,” to these characters I love dearly, to a narrative that I care so much about, and to a form—flash fiction—that (1) I greatly enjoy and (2) is good for baby steps (I really needed baby steps). I wrote a few pieces then, and a couple more in November while I was on a Greyhound headed to see friends and family.
The five flashes here were written out of order and a few years apart: I wrote Bus Stop and Pallbearer in 2011, then Explosions, Missing, and School Night in 2014. It was Gabe’s excellent editorial suggestion to present them chronologically, which I think created a really interesting mini-narrative of the brothers’ lives.
In drafting this story did you explore other moments between the brothers? If so, what was the revision process like? What were you looking for when it came to cutting out potential scenes?
I had other moments to choose from (Christmas, Halloween, A Day at the Zoo) when putting this story together and I explored what it would be like to include those moments alongside or instead of some of the ones here. I’m an obsessive writer and I tend to write about the same emotions and experiences over and over again, so I considered, for instance, if the emotions Michael experiences in Explosions are more revealing or captivating than the emotions he experiences in Christmas, which, chronologically, happens not long after the events in Explosions. The moments were just so close and I thought Explosions was more interesting, so it stayed.
Ultimately, I picked the pieces that I felt were the strongest, the most interesting, the most revealing, the most arresting, and the most distinct from each other. I also tried to choose moments that made the most sense presented together as a story, as a sort of mini-narrative of the brothers’ lives, but also as an excerpt from something larger.
Violence and loss are present in each section. Were these issues that you wanted to explore going in or issues that arose during the writing of the story?
I knew going in that I wanted this narrative to be about Michael learning how to live and be a person without his brother, so this project chronicles his grief as he tries to move on after losing the strongest and most complex bond from his childhood and adolescence. Michael’s loss is a kind of violence itself, and is underscored by all of these individual moments of loss and violence that he and his brother experienced together. Some of my strongest memories of childhood and adolescence involve loss, violence, or both, so it felt right to explore these issues with Michael & His Brother, this narrative-in-flashes that is composed entirely of Michael’s strongest (and, often, most upsetting) memories of himself and his brother.
There were some specific issues around violence and loss that I wanted to explore with these particular pieces. Bus Stop was a way to write about the relentless and traumatizing homophobic harassment I experienced as a kid. I wrote Explosions because I was thinking about a similar car accident that happened when I was four or five. My parents often fought before they divorced, so that’s a sort of constant in the narrative. Pallbearer, School Night, and Missing all explore ways in which the brothers aren’t always able to see themselves as distinct individuals with separate experiences, which I think sometimes happens in families and relationships.
You write both fiction and poetry. Do you notice a difference in mindset when you sit down to write either form?
With poetry, I tend to write in bursts and flashes and not think too much about what’s happening early in the process. I like projects and I rarely write poems that are not directly in conversation with other poems I am writing / have written. Once I have several similar poems and/or poems with recurring characters, I consider the obsessions and concerns, then start to figure out a trajectory or goal for the project (which is not really my first mode of thinking for poetry) and write more poems to help realize that. This process was sometimes agonizing for my first collection of poetry—partly because I didn’t know how to assemble 43 poems into something that made sense and partly because the poems were so achingly personal. I eventually learned how to step outside of the project enough to arrange it into something cohesive. This process has been a bit smoother for the poetry collection I’m working on now.
With fiction, I sometimes have a trajectory or goal that I’m writing toward early on in the process. This isn’t always the case. Other times I just write and see what happens, but that can also make a confusing mess of things, which is sometimes productive, sometimes stressful, sometimes both. My writing process for fiction changed somewhat when I wrote my thesis, a young adult novel (and my first novel). When I started, I had five or six chapters full of plot conflicts and inconsistent characterizations. My super insightful advisor, Kellie Wells, suggested I outline the plot before moving forward. I was initially a bit anxious about this because outlining hadn’t really been part of my writing process before and I was worried about imposing a formula when it didn’t necessarily feel natural (I tend to both need and reject order). I got over myself and wrote the outline and it was one of the most helpful writing exercises I’ve ever done. I’ve outlined most of my fiction projects since.
What are you currently working on?
I’m writing and putting together my second collection of poetry, which includes surreal confessional poems from two projects, The New Promise and The Galaxy. Basically, each set of poems is a reimagining of the course of the same ill-fated romantic relationship. As the poems unfold, there’s a lot of thinking about how the unnamed characters’ identities are performed and changed, how their minds, bodies, and behaviors become unfamiliar, how their physical environments seem irrevocably altered and askew.
I’m also writing more pieces for Michael & His Brother. I’m looking at gaps in the narrative and working to fill them, to create moments that further detail the brothers’ fraught history, to further show the extent of Michael’s devastation. I’m trying to arrive at an ending that doesn’t feel too neat, but I’ve yet to get there.
Who are some authors you’re reading?
Here are some writers I’m very excited about right now:
Katie Jean Shinkle’s novel, Our Prayers After the Fire, is amazing and full of gems like this: “Today we are pulling our teeth out with Father’s pliers, we want to see if we can make holes in our mouths, we want to see holes. We remember when our teeth were falling out, our teeth would be loose and our Father would tie a string around the doorknob to our bedroom and around our loose tooth and slam the door until it popped itself out.” Katie Jean’s book is breaking my heart in the best possible way. Please go buy the hell out of it.
I’m reading everything I can find by Danez Smith, like this wonderful poem included in The Collagist. And also this beautiful poem, “Tonight, in Oakland,” with lines like: “I ride my bike to a boy, when I get there / what we make will not be beautiful // or love at all, but it will be deserved. / I’ve started seeking men to wet the harvest.” His poems blow me away. I’m really excited to buy his book, [insert] Boy, when I get birthday money next month.
Danielle Pafunda’s The Dead Girls Speak in Unison is arresting and brimming with unforgettable poems with lines like, “We’ll tell you / what a corpse is. // It’s a girl // with her shoes / on backward. // It’s a double- / jointed girl. // It’s a glass eye / in a glass jar / in the snapped jaw / of an alligator girl.” Her writing gives me chills. I’m reading her book, My Zorba, next.
Alexis Pope’s Soft Threat is excellent and there are many awesome lines like these from her poem, “Live Through This”: “To my knees I fall always / in your direction My hands twist / into marvelous shapes but the reaching / grows tired Inside me there lives / an orchestra of dreams The planets / have these other plans I decide / to kill you so you will feel / only me forever”. I love this book a ton. Also, some of the poem titles reference Hole songs and the sections are titled with lyrics by Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson from Hole’s album, Live Through This. This is all very meaningful to me.