"Gaining Energy through Torque": An Interview with Caryl Pagel

Caryl Pagel is the author of two collections of poetry, Twice Told (University of Akron Press), and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death (Factory Hollow Press). Her poetry and prose have appeared in AGNI, Entropy, The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review, and Volta, among other journals. Caryl is the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press, a poetry editor at jubilat, and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She is an assistant professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches in the NEOMFA program.

Her essay, "Lost in Thought," appears in Issue Ninety-Seven of The Collagist. 

Here, Caryl Pagel talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about women's faces in public, the essay's form as tornado, and attention to sound and rhythm.

Please tell us about the origins of your essay “Lost in Thought.” What inspired you to start writing the first draft?

The essay arose from some combination of stumbling into Harry Callahan’s “Women Lost in Thought” series in the National Gallery in 2012 and the pernicious, enduring circumstances of a woman being harassed when walking down a street alone. The Callahan photos are from the 1950s but seventy years later a woman’s face in public is still an interestingly controlled (or vulnerable) space. One must manage not to smile (inviting positive attention), frown (inviting advice, i.e. “smile, honey!”), appear unkempt or ugly (inviting cruelty), or brandish beauty (inviting violence). Moving through a day this way can feel like striking a pose and holding it; becoming closed, ghost-like.

My favorite parking garage in Chicago (where this essay takes place) has a mural from Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s series “Stop Telling Women to Smile.” One imagines that Thoreau, Rousseau, O’Hara, and Walser were rarely interrupted in their reverie by relentless pestering. “Lost in Thought” moves through several other subjects (Vivan Maier’s street photography, mediums as original grief counselors, and trance states, etc.), but that’s where it began.

This essay (over 4,500 words) is presented in only one paragraph, unbroken except for a few interspersed photographs. How did you decide that the essay should take this form? Was it a challenge to compose a text of this length in a single paragraph?

The engine of this essay is association; I imagined the form as a tornado, gaining energy through torque, needing a kind of pressurized formal momentum in order to create instability, to launch.

You are the author of both poetry and nonfiction. What lessons have you learned from your work in one genre that have made you a better writer in the other?

It’s tough to claim “better,” but poetry has a clear influence on my sentences: I pay attention to sound and rhythm, occasionally disregarding narrative ease. I’m interested in moving from moment to moment, step by step (as one does when accustomed to working in the unit of the line), as opposed to generating essays via scene or plot points.

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

I’ve just finished the book that this essay is a part of, currently titled Out of Nowhere Into Nothing. I think I’ll return to poetry for a while.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Last week I attended a reading by Suzanne Buffam and Srikanth Reddy; one of the best readings I’ve been to in years. I recommend everything the two of them have written.  

Two prose books I’d recommend are Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields (Fence) and Caren Beilin’s Spain (Rescue Press). For a taste of their intelligence and humor, check out the interviews between the two of them at the Fence blog. 

Three other wonders I encountered this year were Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark (Dorothy), Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury), and Milk by Dorothea Laskey (Wave Books).

“The Underground Laundromat”: An Interview with Paul Albano

Paul Albano is from Milwaukee, WI. His work can be found in cream city review, Paper Darts, and Whiskey Island Magazine. He teaches English at the University of Alabama.

His story, “Nation of Cavaliers,” appeared in Issue Ninety-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Andrew Farkas about vampiric dental mutilation, the ice floe approach to short fiction writing, and unobtrusiveness.

Please tell us about the origins of “Nation of Cavaliers.” What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

It was initially written as a companion piece to another story featuring most of the same characters on another leg of their journey. I’m not sure what the catalyst for that story was, but I remember composing the initial shell of it during the many, many hours I spent waiting for, and riding on, trains and buses around the city—so my guess would be all of that stuff and boredom. 

The version of Chicago you present in your story is a combination of the real one and of a ruinous, seemingly diseased nightmare city. And yet none of the characters are bothered by the terrors that surround them. Why did you decide to portray Chicago this way? And what do you think this portrayal does for your story?

I’ve long been fascinated with depicting things as heightened versions of themselves, particularly with Chicago—which always seems to be teetering on the edge of nightmarish self-parody. For “Cavs,” the ambition is to use the setting to propel the primary emotional arc of the story—one character’s belated realization that he lives inside a nightmare—through the accumulation of madness and despair forever floating around the periphery.

In spite of the Gothic horrors in “Nation of Cavaliers,” this story is hilarious. I would even say, it’s so funny we forget, at times, that almost every living thing in the piece has mutated into some sort of monster (Mugs throughout is even consciously, although only superficially transforming himself into a vampire, no matter how insanely painful that transformation may be). What role do you think humor plays in this story, then?

Well, I suppose the intent at least is for the humor to undercut the potential dramatic moments of the story—which can build an odd tension for the characters (and hopefully even the reader)—as well as magnify the Vampiric dental mutilation and other horrors by presenting them as normal, quotidian occurrences all motivated by an internal logic.  

Unlike the lavish speech Mugs quotes from multiple times (and which supplies you with the title), the prose style here is very straightforward, economical. Even the dialogue is summarized, meaning we get almost the entire story from a first person narrator who does nothing in the piece but tell us what’s happening. Why did you choose this style for “Nation of Cavaliers,” and why did you choose to have the story narrated by a character so innocuous he’s praised at one point for his “unobtrusive presence?”

It’s a style of writing I really like and try to use frequently—and I imagine it started as a clumsy parody of Hemingway’s (in)famous “iceberg” approach (though with far fewer moments of poignancy or depth, so really more of an “ice floe”). In terms of the character, I think of the protagonist as a kind of embodied third person cinematic narrator—he reports on the surrounding people and events that enthrall him, but does so with limited editorializing and virtually no sense of interiority (born from both his intense fascination with the universe and his inability to understand much of it). The aim (and connected to the previous question) is to create humor by juxtaposing the flatness of the narrative voice with the calamitous world it describes. 

What have you been reading recently that you might recommend?

I just finished a Nero Wolfe book (Bitter End—by Rex Stout), which is my favorite of the Golden Age Detective series. There are many things I like about the books—the abundance of important newspaper headlines and drugstores that also serve corned beef sandwiches, and of course all scenes where someone takes off a hat and hands it to another character who seemingly always fails to give it back—but I’m drawn to them primarily because of the language. Stout is the best sentence-level writer I’ve encountered in the mystery genre and while his work never reaches (or reaches for) the hardboiled mythology of Chandler or Hammett (both of whom I’m also huge fans of and would highly recommend), the central conceit of the series—that Nero Wolfe refuses leaves his brownstone on business, and thereby never investigates the actual crime scene, which forces him to solve the mysteries almost purely with rhetoric—is something that I, as someone fond of both words and not going places, find grandly inspiring.

What are you writing these days?

I have a short story coming out in Entropy later this month—it’s a home invasion story about the Ghost of Christmas Present—but beyond that I’ve mostly been working on a novel that refuses to end no matter how many words I throw into it.

"And to What Kingdoms, By What Covenant?": An Interview with Robert Campbell

Robert Campbell is the author of the chapbook In the Herald of Improbable Misfortunes (Etchings Press, 2018). His poetry and criticism have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Collagist, Columbia Poetry Review, River Styx, Ninth Letter, Asheville Poetry Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Sundog Lit, Zone 3, The Adroit Journal, and many other journals. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, short-listed for the 2015 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, third place winner of the 2013 River Styx International Poetry Contest, and previous winner of the Flo Gault Poetry Prize through Sarabande Books, Robert holds an MFA in poetry from Murray State University and an MS in library science from the University of Kentucky. He lives with his partner and animals on a winding country road in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky.

His poems, "Jesus for Lobsters" and "Hero, by Which I Mean," appeared in Issue Seventy-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Courtney Flerlage about revision, voltas, and the natural world.

How did you begin writing “Lobsters for Jesus”?  

I often stumble into poems with really strange questions in hand. In this case, I wanted to peer into the idea of religion through an animal lens. They used to keep dozens of lobsters in little tanks in grocery stores when I was a kid. They were so crowded that they would be piled on top of each other, and I find that image so disgusting and ripe for metaphor.

Even as its topic seems playful upon initially reading the title, “Jesus for Lobsters” strikes a unique urgency as it describes the imagined “Lobster Jesus” who is “neither kind nor personal.” I’m caught by the poem’s voice, its confidence from the very beginning of the poem: “Say there are fifteen holy beatitudes for lobsters. / Pretend with me. Blessed are the spiny ones, / for their hearts shall be smoothest.” Here, even as the poem invites the (seemingly) playful consideration of lobster beatitudes, the syntax suggests, through its imperatives, that this imagining has a goal, an ending reward, something serious to say. And it does: by the end of the poem, the focus shifts, and the lobster becomes an image of human hunger, emphasized all the more after an empathetic and almost intimate consideration that the lobsters are left unprotected by “Lobster Jesus” who “isn’t going / to save you.” This careful shifting of playfulness and urgency makes for a compelling poem—could you share a bit about how the poem found its way into this balance?

It strikes me that the poem found its way toward a darker tone over several revisions, and I'm not exactly sure at which point I decided that it needed a little darkness. Speculative poems, for me, tend to veer off into a kind of playfulness that can be a lot of fun, but the danger is always writing something that isn't anchored to a necessary discussion. The benefit of delaying the serious voice is that you can avoid being too on-the-nose and also catch the reader off guard. But something necessary really has to be there, otherwise it's all play.

The sonnet form of “Hero, By Which I Mean” accomplishes what voice does for “Jesus for Lobsters”—it generates a sense of momentum even as the poem shifts focus. The poem starts with describing a familiar hero, the “Most handsome person in the room, who laughs / the loudest at lame jokes.” By the end of the poem, however, the harsher side to “hero” is revealed: “Most choked by pills. Most thrown / down stairs.” The repetition of “Most” at the beginning of each sentence (“Most crass” and “Most bar-hopped, most cruised, most stopped”) as the sonnet drives the poem forward through rhyme opens increasingly intimate portraits of the “hero.” Did the poem always exist as a sonnet?

I guess I always intended the poem for the sonnet form (it was written as part of a series of "hero" sonnets), but you know how things go: an early draft usually doesn't fit the form very well, so you begin to whittle and play around with it until it does. The volta was an important part of this poem for me, and that emerged pretty early on when drafting the poem. I like poems that pivot. When I wrote this, I was very interested in the idea of celebrity and the voice of the outsider, so I really wanted a voice to challenge the hero and somehow address how our love of celebrity is often closely paired with our love of destruction-as-spectacle.

What are you reading right now?

Prose poems! Robert Duncan has some really cool ones in A Book of Resemblances. He's such a lovable weirdo. I recently bought The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, which features poems and essays addressing the form. It's really lovely, and I highly recommend it.

What project(s) are you working on? 

My chapbook, In the Herald of Improbable Misfortunes, just came out this year from Etchings Press at the University of Indianapolis, so I've been doing a few readings and trying to help promote it. My new work is coming along very slowly and is very grounded in the natural world. My husband and I have lived on a small farm for the past two years. You see some wild stuff out in the country: strange weather, animal guests, lots of death and renewal. Some of these poems are quite a bit darker than what I usually write. I always seem to be reaching for the voice of the outsider in my work, and the natural world is kind of the ultimate Other, in a way.