"To Rupture the Narrative for One Breath": An Interview with Doug Rice

Doug Rice is the author of the forthcoming books An Erotics of Seeing: The Force of Photography as Philosophy’s Broken Sentence (Black Scat Books) and When Love Was. He is also the author of Das Heilige Buch der Stille, Between Appear and Disappear, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Skin Prayer, A Good Cu/tboy is Hard to Find, and Blood of Mugwump. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, The Dirty Fabulous Anthology, Kiss the Sky, Alice Redux, Phantoms of Desire, Discourse, Gargoyle, Zyzzyvya, and others. His work has been translated into Polish, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German. He was a Literary Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, and teaches at Sacramento State University.

His story, "A Broken Fairy Tale of Lost Souls," appeared in Isssue Sixty-Four of  The Collagist.

Here, Doug Rice talks with interviewer, William Hoffacker, about fairy tales, revision, and Debra.

Tell us about the origin of your story “A Broken Fairy Tale of Lost Souls.” What sparked the initial idea or caused you to start writing the first draft?

I work from image and voice. Every story begins with an image and then eventually I hear a distinct voice in my head for telling the story. I come to know the narrator and the narrator’s desires and confusions through this voice. For this story, I was walking on the Southside of Pittsburgh two years or so ago and I saw a young girl turning in circles near an abandoned building. Her mother stood off in the distance on the sidewalk talking to someone and occasionally looking over at the girl. The girl walked over to a window of the building, looked in, shrugged, and walked back to her mother. This image and moment haunted me. I wanted to discover why a girl would shrug her shoulders after looking through a window of an abandoned building. I needed to know what changed about her after seeing whatever it was that she saw, so I wrote this story. Part of me was tempted to walk over and look through the window that the girl had peered into, but I feared if I did I would lose the story.

If we may take this story’s title somewhat literally, what essential qualities make this piece a fairy tale? What themes (or tropes, or other literary devices) do you think your work has in common with traditional fairy tales?

One of the primary tropes I worked with has to do with the dual plotted story. The boy has a direct experience that will mark him and the girl follows him and sees him go through whatever it is that he experiences, and this then marks her as well. The marking remains unspoken, unclear, but, hopefully, readers are left with something to think about for both characters. There are two journeys rather than only one, even though on first reading it may appear to be only one quest and the quest itself is not so clear.

I wanted to also give the sense of the not-too-long-ago that is part of many fairytale structures, but I also needed to simultaneously create a sense of the far-off and long-ago. I hoped the fairy tale reference in the title would help to achieve that.

I also wanted to confuse the easy binary of pretty and fair is good and ugly is bad. Clearly, the janitor has a darkness to him but the boy plays along with his darkness and trembles on the edge of being good to the girl while also introducing her to a seedier world. None of the characters fit neatly into either category of being pure and good or impure and evil.

The need that parents have for bedtime stories that appear at the end of my story is important as part of fairytale device. The parents are desperate for a story about the children in the neighborhood, because they are all losing their children and because their own imaginations have disappeared as they have aged. The parents are most likely the vilest characters in the story. Look at what they do to their children in their own bedtime stories. The children are simply young, and the janitor is not completely in control of his own acts, but the parents transform all of this into their own wish fulfillment.

And the final moment of the story: the locking of the truth of what they have all experienced in a stone is another part of fairytale tropes.

And, finally, locating the story in Pittsburgh, a city I love, but also a very prosaic city that lacks fairy tales—aside from those achieved by Franco Harris’ immaculate reception and Bill Mazeroski’s homerun off Ralph Terry—undoes the fairy tale trope. I did not want the story to take place in a typical fairytale setting. I think that would have reduced the story to only being read as a fairy tale.

For the most part this story does not deal in names; the main characters are referred to as the “boy-who-played-with-matches” and the “girl who followed him.” However, in one peculiar moment, the narrator does use someone’s name: “The boy and the janitor did everything that they had agreed on, but none of it was seen by anyone. Not by the police passing by. Not by the boys smoking cigarettes. Not by the girl standing in the snow. Not by Debra. Not even by the boy,” leaving readers to wonder who this Debra is. Can you speak about the decision to refrain from naming the characters, as well as the choice to include this one mysterious name?

In part, my decision had to do with the previous questions. Most fairytale characters are unnamed. Leaving them unnamed or named in the way that they are identified provides a narrative rhythm that becomes part of the narrative drive itself. The characters are searching for their identities as they try to make sense of this one small experience.

And the sudden appearance of Debra is meant to shock the narrative sensibility. Now, readers must rethink what they have been seeing and how they have been seeing what they have been seeing and through whose eyes the story has been being seen. I went back and forth between deciding whether I should give this female character a name or refer to her as a mother. I do not fully know what she means for the story or for the way that a reader understands the story. It does feel important to me, though, that there is this other woman present, and watching. She simply wanders into the story but remains trapped inside a liminal space. My hope is that Debra awakens something inside the reader’s emotional understanding of what is at stake for the boy and the girl and how they will never be able leave this behind. Debra is the woman who came after the girl who follows. That is a deliberate tense confusion. I struggled with how much to develop that moment or to more fully integrate Debra into the story. I cut paragraphs of her watching over the shoulder of the girl who follows, but in the end decided to rupture the narrative for one breath.

What was your revision process like for this story? How much did it change from the first draft to the final?

I revised like a maniac, with wild joy and wonder. As I do with all my writing, once I had written this story, I re-read it many times to see what it was trying to be about and what it might have to say. There is a sweet ecstasy that comes with discovering what my characters have to say and what the world they live in might reveal about my own world. While this story came to me in a rush, more like a poem than a story. I had one solid image and I worked on refining that image. Most of what I did during the revision process was cutting out details that overtold the story. The first few drafts simply had too many details. They crowded the story in a way that made the world too literal. So I cut as many details as I could. But the final draft of the story is not much different from the first draft in terms of narrative design and plot. I played with sentence breath and poetics. I worked on the style more than any other element of craft during the revision of this particular story. I kept moving commas, dropping them, adding them.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I have just completed AN EROTICS OF SEEING: The Force of Photography as Philosophy’s Broken Sentence, which is being published by Black Scat Books. Demian Bern has just completed the design for my book, When Love Was, that I wrote this summer while in residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. I am currently working on a new novel, Daughters of the Rivers, a story about women and girls and ghosts living along the rivers of Pittsburgh. This novel in some ways is related to the novel I just completed, Here Lies Memory. They both explore the myriad of ways that gentrification affects the souls of the people who live and have lived in neighborhoods that have been redesigned for the ease of those with more money than the people who actually built and lived in the neighborhoods for years. I am nearly finished with compiling a new book of street photographs (still untitled).

What did you read in 2014 that you would like to recommend?

A nearly impossible question to answer. I have read many astonishing books this past year, some published recently, some not so recent. But for a few…Moyra Davey’s Burn the Diaries, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, all of Hilda Hilst’s works, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, Hilton Als’ White Girls, James Salter’s All That Is, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ Harlem is Nowhere, Laszlo Krasznahorkai Seiobo’s There Below, and so many more.

"She Had Several Bright Teeth in her Gums": An Interview with Lincoln Michel

Lincoln Michel is the online editor of Electric Literature and the co-editor of Gigantic. His work appears in Tin House, NOON, American Short Fiction, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Upright Beasts, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

His story, "One or Two Afternoons," appeared in Issue Fifty-One of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Keaton Maddox, about constraints, inversions, and the irrelevance of truth.

This story works because of the tension created between the two parts. What was your process for creating the parallel structure, and what inspired you to emphasize the narrative interplay in this way?

Although I don’t think the story reads this way—and I hope it doesn’t—it’s an experimental story in that I wanted to write a first person POV story that radically removed interiority. The narrator describes what he sees and how he acts, but he doesn’t describe his emotions, hopes, or secrets. After writing the first section, it seemed, well, incomplete, but also ripe for an inversion. Since we don't really understand the truth or the character's feelings, the two sections hopefully play off each other in surprising and disconcerting ways.

The narrator’s unreliability makes deciphering the end difficult. The reader is left unsure if he truly is the girl’s father (which means he lied to the woman) or if he’s merely curious (in which case, we can’t trust his motivation). Both possibilities leave the reader in a state of unease. When you wrote the story, did you have a definitive answer in mind, or did you deem knowing the “truth” as irrelevant for this context?

I've never been the kind of writer who writes entire family trees and histories for characters or thinks about the truth of stories beyond the text on the page. (Although I know many writers who do that kind of thing.) For me, I'm trying to have the stories follow their own internal logic and progress organically from the words and actions already in the text. If I initially think a character is going to chop down a tree with an ax, but then feel it makes more sense—for some aesthetic reason or random writer whim—to have him chop off his own leg, he chops off his leg. So, I think it's right to say I deemed the truth irrelevant. That's part of the joy of fiction!

The narrator tells the story in a very nonchalant voice that works in opposition to the peculiarity and intensity of what’s happening. What motivated you to explore this dynamic? What experimentations did you have to make to balance it?

Really just the experiment I said above. I think it can be really fruitful to impose constraints on fiction, and that's what I was trying here. Often, constraint based fiction can read like a wacky exercise or game, but here I was trying to write a story that had the flesh of a normal realist story with weird skeletal movements beneath.

What are you reading?

Currently I'm reading a galley of Kelly Link's new collection, Get in Trouble, which is fantastic, and Italo Calvino's The Nonexistent Knight, which is also fantastic! I think both are good examples of writers who impose interesting constraints or concepts on their work while still producing moving narratives. 

What are you writing?

I'm currently in the middle of copyedits on my collection, Upright Beasts, that is being put out by the great folks at Coffee House Press in the fall. Sorry to plug, but it's true!

"The Nineteen Year Old, the Thigh Gap, the Generation Gap, Snapchat, Hazmat": An Interview with Russel Swensen

Russel Swensen currently teaches at Prairie View A&M University. He earned his MFA in fiction from the California Institute of the Arts and his doctorate in poetry from the University of Houston. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Clock, Quarterly West, Pank, Third Coast, The Destroyer, and elsewhere. In 2009 he was the recipient of the American Academy of Poets/Brazos Award. His poetry chapbook, Santa Ana, was the the winner of the Spring 2011 Black River Chapbook Contest.

His poem, "The Year in Punk," appeared in issue Fifty-One of The Collagist.

Here, interviewer Keaton Maddox talks with him about accessibility, audience, and memory.

The poem is titled “The Year in Punk,” which seems to denote a lifestyle more than a musical genre. How did this shape your development of the poem? What was your process in creating it?

I would say that my hatred of lifestyle definitely informed the poem. It’s just this like socially transmitted disease and no matter how much or how often you throw yourself off a bridge, it always flares up again [you’re glowing in the bracken water baby but no, no one ever said that’s a good thing]. Most of my process was detailed in question 3 because I’ve been answering these in reverse order like an idiot [like playing stage left in order to make it interesting, see what I mean].

I started with the title. I was writing a poem that was a review of the year in “punk.” I was rereading Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You [that book ought to be the proscribed opening for all elementary school classes ok] and thinking a lot about Lester Bang’s “Everybody’s Search for Roots (The Roots of Punk, Part I)” which it’s just this incredibly self-lacerating series of narratives [tiny little death sentences]. “Punk” becomes a vehicle for Bangs to intro his self-loathing, his Usher-like (or Rousseau-sh if you prefer) confessions which ought to bring about absolution, grace, “you’re not that bad kid” etc. The thing with the confessional model [the old one] is that one’s confession must be a full confession or no dice, no bien, you’re fucked man, you hid something and that’s the same as being found out. Structurally the poem was modeled on the notion that “if you don’t shut up I will tell you every bad thing I’ve ever done.” And no one ever shuts up man, no matter what, trust me.

So.

(but everything scares)

The poem oscillates between being hyper-accessible and ruminating on images to which the reader cannot possibly relate. For example, my favorite line is “foxes playing in the snow and someone, always someone, saying ‘those aren’t foxes, that’s your blood.’” Even after several read-throughs, unpacking this line still feels impossibly out of reach. But rather than isolating the reader, these lines form a kind of intimacy and attachment, as if we were right there along side the narrator when these events transpired. What challenges did you face in balancing these esoteric details along side the more readily discernable parts of the poem in a way that integrated your audience rather than alienating them?

If you love a girl you make foxes with her/for her. That’s what love is. I made like a million foxes for this girl Katherine Ciel and after the girl’s gone you still see foxes everywhere, that’s all. “Lil red foxes like the slowest tornadoes ever.” Anyway, it’s incredibly flattering that you believe I do establish intimacy/attachment. Because in my head the only way it could work is to mash up the reader like that fucking bumble bee you know? [won’t my mommy be so proud of me]. Reshape them into some sort of facsimile me [some I don’t know neater sweeter version of me because not me me I wouldn’t do that]. In this here cleaner greener country right? This here maiden journey version of a pretty busted up, not good and also bad, irl “Russel.” This here made of trash boy trying not to offend. It’s easy to scoff (I know) but without establishing a connection, some sense of identification, you’re gonna lose that video crowd.

Kurt Cobain once said “We don’t provoke our audience. They provoke us.” To give you some idea of where I’m at on this one, he was lying/not lying; mutual provocation yknow, like sex like conversation like meeting someone for five seconds on a bus like fucking everything. And yet, there is an audience [I can at least imagine one] and how can they not find this poem alienating? It doesn’t make sense + you’re basically drowning your readers in your um worst behavior.

So how you do you make the medicine go down easier and no you can’t hold a gun to anyone’s head [dang]. Neater, sweeter. I know it looks bad but cleaner greener and a million drowning maidens to be saved… This feels like I’m eliding the question but I think I’m trying to show that I don’t know…. There’s hmm maybe one trick and that’s intensity. Intensity is the only thing.

Because because if you create something furious or plaintive or bitter or longing [“choke to death on your Eros!” I wail from the orchestra pit, you know you hear it, I know you pretend not to] enough then you know people hold onto that. They don’t understand it [they don’t have to]. But yeah, obviously. People don’t understand shit. Not that I do, man. I love Rothko because of the force of Rothko not the meaning of. That’s what I attempt/emulate. That’s what I want. You can’t sense the thing itself but you can tell what it displaces [all poetry is in the dark] and this like negative spacing gives you an idea of shape and force [what’s pushed, what’s fallen] I mean that’s why people say something’s “moving” because at some level it doesn’t matter where we’re moved to it just matters how strongly, how fucking completely.

Write like you’re falling in love and “I will never ever forgive you” at the same time and people get it because that’s how we live. The other thing with moving see is wherever we are, it’s no good [please remove].

Just, yknow, beckon.

Despite of the poem’s title, this piece encapsulates moments from almost two decades of the narrator’s life (as we discover at the end). Everything from Nirvana to Snapchat are touched upon without any breaks or indicators that a conclusive section of time has finished. And because it works outside of chronological order, the whole thing becomes a haze of reminiscence. What role would you say time and memory play in this piece? And how did you go about discerning the order in which you wanted the events to play out?

Yeah… the “narrator” that is one fucked up dude. Glad as hell I don’t have to live in his fucked head every second of every fucking day. Like… that guy’s life sounds like being dropped down an elevator shaft [every second of every fucking day]. I’m a just wobble for a minute here thinking about the poor dude and maybe pour out some malt liquor and maybe kill myself.

I might argue that this is how memory works, particularly the memory (or concept) of a “self.” There is no order. Everything is happening at once and it has already happened but it continues to happen/detonate. My notion of myself is basically a distorted Mogwai roaring sound you know? The stage directions are just EXIT. EXIT EVERYTHING. And at the same time COME BACK. COME BACK PLEASE I NEED YOU I DIDN’T MEAN IT. We’re a devastated and impossibly beautiful confusion. FUCK YOU I LOVE YOU (for example). Being a person is (naturally) a fairly horrible thing to be but it can also be exhilarating. I mean you can accept that nothing makes sense but then you have to make sense of that which that’s pretty much the poem. You give up on the rational (because no, life does not make sense) so you have to try to love the irrational, you have to believe that if you hum the right notes in the right order someone’s head would fucking explode. You have to be- as a poet- like a 3^rd grade version of yourself, you believe in magic [clap your hands], you’re still making potions out of spider webs and cleaning products, bricolage, if it’s there then you use it [put your hair in my mouth], you can make it useful and the right ingredients the right order you become invisible or learn to love yourself or play piano or whatever. That’s poetry or at least that’s this poetry. An accretion of experience and language that grows increasingly frantic in its attempts to pull its own head from the oven, to find the melody in the roar [the honey in the lion]. You don’t get to believe but you also don’t get to stop trying.

So, order or scheme, essentially desperation and fear. The right phrase- not this one maybe the next one- will fix it, has to fix it but it didn’t fix it it’s not right so you have to keep going back to the well [someone’s in there], whatever you’ve got use it, plunder your tweets, use your loved ones [esp their heads], every line of poetry you never found a place for [and you needed to], your dolls, your constant state of loss that does not, however, impinge on your fear of impending loss….

Look it’s my poem so who knows how it actually reads (the only thing you can count on is you’ll care more about your own poem than your readers which I never expect to have any) but in my mess of a head it was meant to be incantatory, a sort of fiery maze that I knew in advance I would not escape but that I still attempted to love that I attempted to address [to worship and muss].

It’s the final poem in my forthcoming book The Magic Kingdom and that’s a like “contributing factor” too. It was everything that had been excluded it was the knowledge that I’d said nothing or said it all wrong and one final attempt to scream my way out of the corner I’d painted myself into.

Beautiful, doomed things. 'Weep for what little things could make them glad' you know? And I do. I do.

“A confession of faith” even though—

I know, I know.

What are you reading these days?

Oh God, almost nothing. Matchbooks? Super bleeding down the mirror happy hour specials? Fucking twitter? (and wanting to tear my own little twittering head off like in IJ). Suicidal tinder profiles.

I was really into these pulpy mystic detective novels by Michael Gruber for a while (this idea that shamans developed a praxis for uh turning into jaguars because look dude they didn’t have tv ok? and look this shaman dude’s in Miami! He’s gonna kill everyone and why the hell not really, yeah I got pretty into that. Can’t wish enough murderous witch doctors on that fucking city). And just dumb stuff like Joseph Campbell or Charles Fort.

I moved to New York (CITY of total misery) fairly recently and turned (murderously) toward Big Unhappy But Sort Of Deliriously Cheerful Books (Adam Levin’s The Instructions, William Gaddis’s JR, Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity, David Foster Wallace of course, everything by Neal Stephenson, really, I reread it all and I liked it, lived like an invalid, why not) and just random stuff about being miserable in New York which there’s not exactly a lack of. Poetry hmmmk I really liked Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone, that book is sexy as fuck. Wanna pull that book’s hair and mess up its makeup. Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture is incredibly sad like living only by candlelight sad. And I mean it’s all about his brother’s suicide and the language has the consistency of cream. Glenn Shaheen, Predatory. Sort of homicidal Americana which means it’s actual Americana as opposed to whatever the fuck the term usually refers to. Thom Gunn and Craig Arnold, always. Johannes Goransson’s A New Quarantine Will Take My Place is fucking vital. Hayan Charara, all of his poems, I mean look up “Usage” or “Animals” and you’re gonna lose your composure. You’re gonna rest your forehead on an ice cold window and not for a little while, all things considered, why would you ever stop.

I can’t forget Karen Green’s Bough Down, (!!!) which it kind of seems like everyone else did. . The reception was very “I guess if you want to hear David Foster Wallace’s widow talk about losing David Foster Wallace, yeah you’ll like this.” Which is such bullshit. It’s a heartbreaking art/object/book and formally as innovative as Maggie Nelson’s Bluets or Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. Not to mention that Green’s work is a gorgeous crazy poet-sad thing. You won’t learn jack about DFW but you can see why he’d love her (or this here version of her created by the text, if you prefer). Gotta love book-her. And if you don’t then I don’t want to talk to you, you, you.

What are you writing?

I’m working on my stand-up routine (haha). But I mean my favorite is still just looking in the mirror and saying (smugly) “now that’s a fucking joke.” [hold your applause like hold onto it and never let it go that’s my like “advice”]. Hmm. I was working on a series of poems that are ummm really weird ransom notes? Like these are some of the ways the kidnappers communicate their like demands?

missing cutlery
no hair ties anywhere not just in your apartment
a mess of hissing flies instead of a voicemail
instead of all voicemails
beautiful crutches in the corner
a life size model of los angeles in the cavity of your chest
animals carved out of butter

….

sock puppets that make you sad
a girl rocking back and forth atop the marble stairs

before falling down

…

someone telling you cicadas are living violins it hurts to play them
that’s why they sound like that
empty cans of diet coke
wherever you go

……

six white kitten that are standing on the roof of your car
when you come outside in the morning
and do not

There’s even some stuff that makes “sense” you know in the context of a bizarre cult sending you bizarre messages (as much sense as that idiot idea can make, basically. But unfortunately the poems sucked. I was writing poems for Cassie Kammerzell who I very much loved but like why would you write bad poems about a great girl. What did she ever do to you, you know? Don’t write poems about people. Also those poems sucked. I was working on a chapbook about cocaine but- shocker!- it really sucked. The research was fun I guess (10/10 wld recommend). I wrote some stuff about Gaza [we were doing a fundraiser/reading for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund] that didn’t totally suck but didn’t live up to the occasion (like I don’t know how I’d feel about publishing poems with moral certainty) and felt a bit like grandstanding anyway. Don’t write poetry that makes you look like a good person. I mean when I read poetry like that I silently turn my back on the book like those fucking NYC cops with the mayor or someone (me) who sees a tree he hates while he’s out walking and gets stuck there all winter turning his back on the fucking tree which probably was never a real girl anyway. I don’t know. I see a tree I see Larry Levis seeing a girl in a tree. Possibly no one is reading this right now. Probably nobody made it this far. I should feel free to say anything. But I just feel exhausted and alone and “the night air feels like fire on my skin.”

Follow me on twitter follow me home and don’t don’t don’t
leave me alone

"It Could Happen Anyplace": An Interview with Martha Webster

Martha Webster is a nurse living in Amityville, New York.  Her work is also forthcoming in Prairie Schooner.

Her poem, "I Imagine My Father Returns from the Dead," appeared in Issue Sixty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about electricity as a metaphor for image development, form following content, and the tension between rage and relief.

There is something rhythmic arising from the combination of two-line stanzas and unique line breaks. How much did content play with your decisions on form?

Yes, in this poem content strongly influenced my decisions on form.  Traumatic emotional material is hard for us to integrate into coherent memories, feelings, or histories.  I think the most damaging consequence of childhood abuse or trauma is the fracturing of personality that happens in the victim.  In my line breaks and stanza breaks, I tried to evoke a “broken,” scarred psychic effect.

A handful of moving and surprising images set the foundation for this piece. For young writers who are looking to develop weighty images in a small space, what advice can you give them?

My process is intuitive.  When I revise I use my imaginary “electricity detector.”  I try to find and delete phrases, words, or syllables that seem to obstruct flow.  I think of flat phraseology as dead tissue, an obstacle to the poem’s true vitality.   Strong images conduct a startling charge.  Frankly I think young people are better “bullshit detectors” than the rest of us.  My advice is:  respect (and inspect) the thrill and the adrenaline rush wherever you happen to find it in your early drafts.

The last image particularly stands out to me because I continue to feel the poem moving even after the final line. What meaning does the last image hold for you?

For me, the last image captures the tension between rage on the one hand and need for pain relief on the other that depression sufferers feel but can’t resolve.  The speaker is still speaking at the end of the poem:  hence the anguish persists.

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading The Selected Levis (Larry Levis) and Correspondence, the letters between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan.

What are you currently writing?

A lot!  I stopped writing entirely between age 30 and 55, so I feel I have a lot to say.

“Severed Hands Comb the Air”: An Interview with Phillip B. Williams

Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza GriffithsPhillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). A Cave Canem graduate, he has received several Bread Loaf scholarships. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Callaloo, The Southern Review, Sou'wester, West Branch, Blackbird and others. Phillip is currently a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis and is working on his MFA in Creative Writing and the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.

His poem, “Almost and Completely,” appeared in Issue 50 of The Collagist.

Here, Phillip B. Williams speaks with interviewer Michele K. Johnson about hatred that sprouts from difference, avoiding sensationalism while staying truthful, and the difficulty of bearing witness.

Could you talk a little bit about what was going on in your head or your heart when you decided that the deaths of Mercado and Makutle would be featured in one of your poems?

I had been working on a long poem about Rashawn Brazell, a young gay man who was murdered in Brooklyn 10 years ago, for years and this poem in The Collagist was originally a part of that project. I wanted to show how internationally the atrocities against LGBT people connected with each other via dismemberment, as though the assumed-to-be straight men who murdered these young men in Puerto Rico and South Africa were looking for something inside of these queer bodies that they themselves did not have but wanted. 

I soon realized that this poem had to stand on its own, as it dealt directly with hate crimes in a way that Brazell’s case had never concluded toward. There was no proof that his murder was, indeed, a hate crime, though his dismemberment was the first thing I thought about when I read about the cases of Mercado and Makutle.

I was distraught, for sure, thinking about how easy it seemed for people to become violent over a person’s sexuality. It’s pretty sad to see the hatred people have toward other people that they do not also have for the very things that make them different, or even more complicated, toward actual systems that have relegated them to victim status generation after generation.

I recently read a post that someone made on Facebook that wanted to shame a group of young men for expressing themselves in what is frequently considered more feminine expressions of sexuality. One of the comments beneath the post was from a Black man wanting homosexuality to be illegal. And it made me wonder how someone who come from a legacy of having every right denied to him and his people, the once-enslaved Afrikan, could also imagine a world where that same level of erasure via legislation would be enacted against someone else. It’s horrifying, actually, the hypocrisy and self-righteous idea that somehow he personally was getting being human right while others were getting it wrong. Meanwhile, as proven by the seemingly infinite cases of police brutality against Black bodies, neither he nor his would be illegalized queer targets are seen as worth anything in this nation. The idea that one’s personal moral code somehow trumps the right for other people to exist really disappointed me and I continue to be disappointed.  I will never understand how in one breath people can fight for their rights but not see how their denial of others’ rights only makes it easier for us all to continue to be destroyed. And this moves through all races, gender identities, and classes.    

Your poem acknowledges the importance of images, but is also fraught with the complications of describing horrific crimes in detail. How did you go about finding this balance?

I’m not sure I thought about it. I know that I wanted the poem to itself be a form of witnessing and to create a space where the discomfort with the grotesque has to be faced head-on. So many people are willing to watch a movie where heads are flying in every direction, homes are blown up, women and children and slain, bombs annihilate communities but refuse to see the everyday atrocities that people live through, scriptless and without the ability to have someone say “Cut!” and interrupt/undo all that has been done. To keep it from being sensationalistic I simply stuck with the facts and avoided adjectives as much as possible. I did not need to dress up the dead and how they were killed.

How did you decide to include the footnotes that gave a fuller account of the deaths of Mercado and Makutle?

The footnotes are to let people know that this is real, this happened, and could happen again. These are not characters about which I write and too this poem, as attempting to perform (and failing to achieve) the act of witness, it also looks towards documentation and memory. We have to remember what has happened to all of our people. How do we create poems that allow us to be global citizens? I think it helps to use the facts as they appear without dressing them up or Americanising them, meaning making subtext of all we write be about how it feels to be an American. And the latter part is as difficult, perhaps even impossible, as me writing outside of my experiences as the unique person I am, but it is worth a try to get at what happens elsewhere with as much objectivity as possible, even when that, too, fails us. 

What are you currently reading? I am currently reading the collected essays of James Baldwin and will probably be reading those essays forever. Also on my list are the following:

[insert] Boy by Danez Smith
Digest by Gregory Pardlo
The Collected poems of Sylvia Plath
The Amiri Baraka Reader (recently reread the play The Dutchman)
Sula by Toni Morrison
Selected Plays of Alice Childress
The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound

What else are you working on right now?

Right now I am working on a novel that I had been avoiding for a few months. What it’s about I cannot say as that has changed over the years and I might as well just wait until I finish to see what becomes of it. I am also working on a series of interviews with young artists and entrepreneurs on the website www.Glappitnova.com, which has been a blast because it allows me to learn how other people treat their promising careers and passions. I also love exposing people to new or newish things. I think so often we forget that standing for something includes spreading the word about quality work that exists but made not get the attention it deserves. Most recently I interviewed the poet Joshua Bennett who has been making moves for years as an artist, but there are still many people who do not know how he is. Again, it’s all about building a community. That is what is most important to me.

“The Party Tricks We Call Answers”: An Interview with Weston Cutter

Weston Cutter is from Minnesota, and is the author of All Black Everything and You'd Be a Stranger, Too.

His poem, "Compromise," appeared in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.

Here, Weston Cutter talks to interviewer Michele K. Johnson about the impossibility of the perfect word, Holy Shit moments, and writing toward the messy stuff.

Does the collision of the world of math and the world of language come naturally to you?

I don't know if come naturally. I suppose. I guess I'd be more tempted to say that I'm (like most, this isn't special) sort of fascinated by system-like things I can't solve, especially system-like things that aren't articulated fully. A map that's only half-filled-in seems the state of most of the stuff we all deal with (even something seemingly simple and obvious—football, let's say—has a level of how-does-that-happen [how does Andrew Luck, the QB for the team currently geographically nearest me, pull off stupendous, seemingly-impossible throws under pressure?]). Anyway. I'm realizing now you only even asked about the collision, not the other stuff. Yeah: the degree to which I love and don't fully understand math is probably the same re language, plus my desires for each—Rhapsodic Clarity, a gigantic sign blinking This Is It, some Hitchiker's Guide machine to spit out 42 or the perfect (or, worse, right) sentence to say in any scenario—are identical and identically of course impossible and impossible not to long for.

Can you speak a little more about the relationship between inevitability and variability as it is explored in the poem?

This seems like one of those questions smarter than either I or the poem is. It's cool and strange to go back to this poem—it's a bit older, and I wrote it the night after what's described in the poem (I'd honked at a kid riding a scooter [he was blocking the turn lane, talking to a friend of his, leaning into the dude's passenger window, gabbing away as if none of us had anywhere to go] and he'd gotten fairly upset, and the situation was kinked because in the back of my vehicle was my then-infant daughter, plus beside me was my beloved, so an interaction that would've—kid- and wife-lessly—been just me sort of Macho Staring at some dude [or flicking him off, rolling down the window to swear, swerving toward him to induce greater fear and remind him of the actual mechanics of car vs scooter] turned into this very Holy Shit moment. My hands got very sweaty, and I remember this prickling that doused my skin as I thought what if he's armed or wants to get physical or or or.). Like everyone I like to believe other people who do things with which I disagree are just Totally Different and Stupid, and I'm Totally Not and Englightened, and in that moment, with that asshole (brown Carhart jacket, short brunette buzz-cut, I'd drive uncomfortably close if I recognized him today, just to mess with him), after the initial wave of Protect-My-Family eased, I realized: the distance between us was slim, perhaps nonexistent. How many folks had I responded equally poorly/stupidly to, behind or in front of a wheel? And part of his response was (this part's a stretch, but I sort of can't imagine a compelling argument to the contrary) predicated on the notion that he was Right, and I Wrong, but POV (of course) ends up shifting radically as one ages/experiences more (part of the whole thing of the poem was just the realization that I could no longer drive as I once had because I had people I couldn't put into the risks I'd gladly put myself in, driving-wise [I make it sound like I'm some terrific maniac; I don't believe I am, but I suppose none of us does]). Anyway: I'm sure the guy doesn't even remember, and truthfully I'd forgotten, too. I suppose I'd just say: life to me feels an awful lot like a process of making mistakes without realizing it, and then, as time draws its curtain, realizing it (and in fairness, also a process of making good decisions without really realizing it, and then, later, realizing those, too). But even still those things--what we come later to realize are mistakes, long after we've made them—are dependent on how we view them. I've been lucky enough—have health and love of family and friends and financial security—to be able to now look with an almost fondness at the urgent fury of my youth and young manhood (because it ultimately hasn't yet cost me too dearly), and so my response in the car was to laugh at this poor guy (after the panicky wave of fear passed), so Raging at some guy just trying to get his wife and (crying, it should be noted—we needed to feed her) daughter and self home from the mall, but it (my response) could've just as easily been something radically different—further escalation, tireless stalking and punishment, calling the police. That's I guess the ultimate fascination: experience is something like a government bond, and how it matures is dependent not just on time but how we choose to slot the time as it courses neutron-like through us. This is all getting so inbent and convoluted. I'm sorry. I've had two cups of coffee; it shouldn't be this bad. I'm sorry.

One aspect of this poem that drew me in was its slow build toward a powerful momentum. How did you work to build this pace for the reader?

That's really kind--thank you. I don't think I've got any idea, or whatever idea I've got's tied up in the process of making. You know Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? In Bolivia they try to get legal jobs, and so apply to protect this spitting guy (who I'm almost sure was the warden in Cool Hand Luke) as he makes his way to gather payroll, and when asked to shoot, Sundance asks if he can move (he's missed the shot he's taken when standing still). The guy (Wikipedia confirms: it is him in CHL) considering hiring him's like, "Just hit the thing, don't get all fancy or whatever—" and then Sundance crouches and blasts the target to smithereens. More and more that to me's writing: movement to facilitate hitting some target, which is all fine and good, but how one talks about how we make those moves seems increasingly hard.

What else have you been writing recently? Is math a common theme in your work?

Lately: poems that keep using "museum" in the title because I'm lazy and want things to seem ordered. Strangely (or not, I guess), I'm sort of pushed off by what feels like the precision or control of "Compromise": I want messier, want poems that take a pick-axe to stuff other than my past. I don't know. Math is or has been common enough—It is a deep love—but it's not been too tempting for a bit now and probably needs a vacation from my skull (as in fairness I need one from its).

What have you been reading recently?

This one's great. So many good things. New books of poetry last year from such dynamiters—Malachi Black, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Jericho Brown, Erin Belieu (I know all those are Copper Canyon)—plus falling back into old Matt Hart and Alex Lemon. I don't know. Exceptionally excited by Danez Smith and Phillip Williams and, on the press related to them, Meghan Privitello (KMA Sullivan's doing amazing things at YesYes Books, obviously). That's poetry and there's plenty more I'm forgetting. Hannah Gamble. Someone needs to release a book by Layne Ransom. I go back to Bob Hicok's and Charles Wright's and Jorie Graham's work more than anybody else. Fiction's in a stack in the next room and right now I'm driving toward: Daniel Torday's Poxl, Laura van den Berg's Find Me, Metcalf's Against the Country and Brandt/Price's The Whites. Sorry for the too-muchness (that's my tombstone).

“Let Them Stain Your Clothes”: An Interview with Meredith Luby

Meredith Luby holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University. Her work can be found in, or is forthcoming from, The Broome Street Review, NightBlock Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Redivider, and Glimmer Train Stories. She resides in North Carolina.

Her story, "Even Quieter Than This," appeared in Issue Sixty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Meredith Luby talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about dark humor, writing scenes out of order and the potential readers’ perception versus a narrator’s perception.

What was it that first began your story “Even Quieter Than This”?

It started with the image of the flower petals. I think most of my work starts there, with one line or image. Then I read something online about the quietest room in the world, it’s a real thing, and people have only been able to spend a few minutes in it, because that kind of silence is sort of terrifying, and I knew I wanted to incorporate that into the piece as well. From there I decided I wanted to approach this story from a sort of psychological point wherein the magical or surreal parts are driven by the narrator’s perceptions. For me, it wasn’t important whether or not the flower petals were real or imagined, but rather how the narrator views them. And she thinks they are real. But she isn’t exactly reliable. So I was interested in how those things could interact, the potential readers’ perception versus a narrator’s perception.

I love the pace of this story. The anticipation seemed to sneak up on me while I was reading it. Initially I thought I’d entered a surreal world. But as the story progressed, the danger—whether imagined or real for this character—had me on edge. Could you talk about the drafting process and the development of the story?

I often write scenes out of order and decide later where to place them. Those changes ended up making a big difference, especially because time is very narrow in this piece. I had to make sure the events where spread out over the story without feeling repetitive or without taking too long to come to a resolution. In earlier drafts the pacing was different and I went through a few that were either too slow or too quick. That was something I had to refine once I had the bones of the story down. I rarely begin a story with an ending in mind, but once I was satisfied with the last lines I was able to more effectively build towards that moment and arrange the scenes more carefully.

The story’s unnamed narrator is very isolated. Throughout the story objects seem to reflect and capture her loneliness (that dried nectarine pit comes to mind). But she also has a lot of humorous thoughts: whether it was the necessity of a good heartbreak or the possibility of a slow, deliberate thief. How intentional were these moments of humor or were these thought patterns apparent in your narrator from the start?

Though there is no actual violence in this story, the threat of violence is ever-present in the narrator’s life. I wanted to have those moments of humor, even if it was dark humor, so that the story didn’t feel quite so heavy or hopeless. And also because a lot of people, myself included, deal with difficult or potentially terrifying things by couching them in humor. That’s how the narrator is able to keep living her day to day life, despite the fact that, not only is she alone, but also someone is breaking into her house every night, by sort of making it a joke for herself and the person committing the crime.

There are so many beautiful lines in this piece. Lines that I would pause to re-read a second and third time. I absolutely love the line about secrets: “You have to pull them from your blood in pieces and let them stain your clothes.” Are there any lines that stick out to you, moments you remember while writing the piece, where you paused and thought: hot damn that’s a killer line?

I think my favorite little section is, “Most of the ones I knew moved to warmer climates. To places closer to the coast. I didn't like looking off that ragged edge. I wanted the security of walls, of streets that extend for miles and only end in more land. But there was no safety in those things either.” This is one of my few stories that doesn't take place somewhere close to the ocean or water, so I was glad I found a way to work in something about coastlines.

What current project are you working on?

I’m very slowly working on a novel. It’s about a fictional town in France that has a reverse of itself underneath it. And the reverse town may or may not be populated mostly by ghosts. But I haven’t decided yet.

As the year winds down, what were some of your favorite books of 2014?

The best book I’ve read this year was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It was so beautiful and careful and heartbreaking. I also really enjoyed Kelly Link’s newest collection, (which I don’t think will actually be released until February) and Patricia Lockwood’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. And if you’re at all interested in humor books Amy Poehler’s Yes Please! was fantastic.

“To Resist and Trouble the Hero Narrative”: An Interview with Joe Aguilar and Kate McIntyre

Kate McIntyre teaches at Allegheny College. Most recently, her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Cutbank, and Cimarron Review, and she had a Notable Essay in this year's Best American Essays. She is writing a collaborative novel based on "The Outpost." She would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their support of the project through a summer grant that funded two student researchers.

Joe Aguilar is the author of Half Out Where (Caketrain). He teaches at The College of Wooster.

Their story, "The Outpost," appeared in Issue Sixty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Joe Aguilar and Kate McIntyre talk to interviewer Thomas Calder about the collaborative process, Arthurian legends and characterization through dialogue.

Did this story begin as a collaborative project or did it evolve into one?

J: I was trying to write an apocryphal Arthurian legend but it didn’t feel right, and I wasn’t having very much fun with it. Kate and I had collaborated before, so I asked her if she’d want to write the story together. We talked it through and decided to shift our source of inspiration away from Arthurian legend to the folklore and mythology collected in The Mabinogion. We also decided to make our protagonists less heroic and more pathetic.

K: Unlike Joe, I hadn’t grown up reading Arthurian legends, so at first I was unsure what I could contribute to the project. My initial lack of familiarity with the material resulted in some funny moments—I discovered that my ideas about medieval England and Wales were heavily informed by Disney’s Robin Hood cartoon. I was finally able to access the project through my knowledge of more contemporary travel stories and quest narratives. Once I drew inspiration from texts about meandering quests—Patrick Dewitt’s The Sisters Brothers, for example, the characters in “The Outpost” started to come alive.

Were there any challenges that surprised you in writing a collaborative piece?

J: If anything, it’s easier for me to write collaboratively than to write alone, although Kate’s ideal to work with. She’s really great at thinking through the larger architecture of a narrative. It also helps that we think the same things are funny.

K: It really is fun. When we’re drafting, we write 500 words or so each and send it back and forth. Frequently I write with an eye toward making Joe laugh. He’s especially good at language-level editing—I’ve learned a lot about compression from watching him work.

Could you talk about writing the dialogue for these characters? I love the naïve enthusiasm they express early on and the fact that a quest will be good for them in that they’re getting fat.

K: I’m glad you liked it! Frequently, I think, questing characters bring a sense of self-seriousness. What they are doing is Very Important, and thus, there is no room for clowning or pettiness. This doesn’t strike me as quite realistic. We wanted characters who stumbled across a cause and peripatetically pursued it when it suited them. We wanted to resist and trouble the hero narrative.

J: We also wanted to characterize largely through dialogue: We’d originally written far more description of characters, histories of characters’ relationships, and an account of the outpost and its surroundings, but the narrative started to feel so unwieldy that we decided to cut everything way back and let the dialogue do more work. Also, Gabriel Blackwell had some on-point editorial suggestions for sharpening the dialogue and excising more unnecessary back-story.

At what point did you decide to further develop this story into a novel and how is the novel itself coming along?

K: We showed the story to our friend and mentor, Speer Morgan, who edits the Missouri Review, and he said we should turn it into a novel. Speer has been unfailingly right about both of our work, so we listened. We had a really productive summer, in which we visited Wales, enlisted some student researchers, and finished a first draft.

J: Yes, Speer’s the best! The trip to Wales was especially useful. It’s one thing to read about a landscape but it’s another thing to hear the rain and to see the hills and to touch the walls of old castles.

What were some works that may have inspired your story’s style?

J: The Mabinogion was important. It packs an incredible amount of narrative into such spare sentences. I also admire that quality, an extreme compression of time, in works like Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices in the Evening and Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography.

K: I’ll second Cellini’s Autobiography, though for me, the voice was most important. Cellini is so brash and willing to make all sorts of moral compromises. He is quick to cut himself slack when he behaves badly, but he holds himself to very high standards in one area—his art. I try to channel this voice when I’m working on The Outpost.

What are you guys currently reading or excited to read?

K: I’ve been reading novels and nonfiction by Christopher Isherwood. He’s such a flawless stylist, and he doesn’t get read nearly as much as he should. FSG is bringing out lovely new editions. I also highly recommend Sara Pritchard’s short story collection, Help Wanted: Female.

J: I just read The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, which is amazing, and now I’m reading At Swim-Two-Birds. I’m also reading The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya and The Blue Lantern by Victor Pelevin. Pelevin’s “The Life and Adventure of Shed Number XII” is a new favorite story.