An Interview-in-Excerpts with Anne Germanacos

Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, was published by BOA Editions in 2010. Her novel, Tribute, published by Rescue Press, appears in 2014. Together with her husband, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Study Program in Greece on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco.

An excerpt from her novel, Tribute, appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, she answers questions "in the form of excerpts"—with further excerpts from Tribute. Enjoy!

What is writing like?

"An erotic inquiry? An inquiry into eros?

A bit of porn, a smidgen of philosophy."

"I go there alone, mingle with ghosts."

"Need to put things in order, take a walk on a treadmill, translate something, be translated."

"Is this a fault, a quirk, or simply a habit?"

"naked, flipping our skin off, and on again"

"(a sliver of perfection)"

What isn't writing like?

"I watch that line of ants, arduously, marchingly carry a piece of something we neglected to put in our mouths."

"A lover is naked; an artist's model poses in the nude. The writing should seem naked, but the seemingness of it makes it nudity."

When you do it, why?

"I love trading glances."

"Still eager to know the secret at the very heart of the world."

"Time to get going, time to pay attention."

"All of us attempting to fuck our way through life?"

When you don't, why?

"(You know what you need to do but can you make yourself do it?)"

"Just ride out into some sunset or other"

"(If only I could report from another world--or place, at least.)"

"Where do you wear your skin? (Do you wear it, or does it wear you?)"

"A Conglomeration of Curiosities": An Interview with Meagan Ciesla

Meagan Ciesla has an MFA from University of Wyoming and a PhD from University of Missouri. She will join the English department faculty at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington in the fall. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Long Story, Cimarron Review, and others.

Her story, "Real Live African Pygmy," appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Meagan Ciesla talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about World's Fairs, types of research, and unlikely friendship.

My research (read: Googling your name) shows that this is not your only story to include an American World’s Fair (“Incubator Baby World’s Fair, 1939” was published by The Kenyon Review). What interests you about these World’s Fairs and inspires you to make them a part of your fiction?

My interest in World’s Fairs is a conglomeration of curiosities. When I was getting my MFA at University of Wyoming I read Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love for the first time. The novel is about a family of circus freaks and I found it so compelling that I started to research circuses, sideshows, and fairs. Soon after that I went to a talk by Art Spiegelman who mentioned that his aunt and uncle (this is how I remember it at least) escaped the Holocaust because they were attending the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. I didn’t know anything about World’s Fairs until researching them, but as I learned about them they became events filled with technological possibility, competition, xenophobia, and real excitement. Huge advancements were showcased at these fairs that changed the world, and they were critical for what we now consider to be modern progress. It was so unique to have enormous international gatherings, and when so many people are thrown together you get the conflicts and misunderstandings that serve as a great foundation for fiction.

Your story begins with the inscription “in memory of Ota Benga, 1884-1916,” and although fictional, it is based on real-life events. How much research did you do in order to write this story? How large a role does research normally play in your writing process?

I did a lot of research for this story, which is not unusual for me. I found all I could online about Ota Benga and read newspaper stories about him and looked at all available pictures. For this particular story I used a lot of information about Ota Benga’s life to create Musa’s character, but there are limits to facts. I knew he’d been married and had lost his family. I also knew he was put in the zoo and the orphanage and that he ended up shooting himself after removing the caps from his teeth. That served as the scaffolding for his character, but I had no idea what he was thinking or what his experience was actually like. The physical moments of the bones cracking under his feet and of following Campbell through the jungle were just as important as the factual events I borrowed. The sensory experiences are where the fiction comes in – without those you just have a list of things that happened.

A huge amount of my writing involves research because I’m much more confident when I know the parameters of the world I’m writing in. That’s not to say I don’t use my very active imagination, but it does help me define where my imaginative leaps need to start. The novel I’m working on takes place on a dairy farm and to research I worked on a dairy farm in upstate New York for a month just to get the feel for the work and the landscape. I don’t always have the time to do research like that, but I do generally read, research on the internet, and watch relevant YouTube videos and documentaries to get a feel for what I’m writing. Once when I was writing a story about Paul Bunyan I watched several episodes of Ax Men to learn how logging works…I didn’t say research was always hard.

You write both fiction and creative nonfiction, and we’ve seen that some of your fiction is historical. When you’ve created characters based on real people, how did you decide to fictionalize their stories rather than describing them in an essay? What can short fiction do with a story like Ota Benga’s that nonfiction could not?

I briefly considered turning this into an essay, but then I realized writing an essay about Ota Benga properly would take years. I would have to do tremendous archival research and interviews with experts to understand Ota’s life in the United States. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that an essay of that scope wasn’t practical for me at the time. Plus, what interested me the most was the private relationship between Benga and Verner, and the moments I was curious about were never recorded so I had to make them up. Short fiction gave me permission to imagine what could have happened, whereas I couldn’t do that in nonfiction. With nonfiction you have to keep on digging until you find the story.

Can you describe the revision process that “Real Life African Pygmy” underwent? In what ways did it change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any tough decisions?

This story has always been the length that it currently is. I knew I wanted to keep it under three pages because I like the restraint of that page limit and I always saw it as pairing with my other World’s Fair story, which is around the same length. That said, there were huge changes made to the story—not to the events, exactly, but to the tone of the piece. When I first wrote the story the tone was incredibly sarcastic as if the speaker was shaking a finger at everyone who had wronged Musa. For example, the title read: “Real! Live! African Pygmy!” and the lines were almost Dr. Seuss sing-songy, really over-the-top. I had someone read that draft and they said something along the lines of, “This story is telling us how messed up the idea of the White Man’s Burden is, but it’s too easy to point a finger 100 years after this horrible thing has happened. What’s more interesting is what would make someone think what they were doing was necessary.” That changed the way I looked at the story tremendously. I’d read that Ota Benga and Samuel Verner were friends and that became the most interesting conflict to me, mainly because I couldn’t wrap my head around that possibility. I spent the rest of the time on the story trying to piece together how these two men – one of whom took the other to be displayed at the World’s Fair—could have developed such a close relationship. Once I figured that out the tone of the piece changed and it became a narrative of loneliness and friendship instead of a soapbox story.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m revising a novel and am finishing a collection of short stories I’ve written over the past several years. The collection will have both World’s Fair stories as well as one more about Little Egypt, a group of belly dancers at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?

I finally got around to reading Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, which was great. I also recently loved Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall.  

Episode 18: Kenji C. Liu

Kenji C. Liu reads "Ah Kung in the Philippines, 1945" from Issue 59 of The Collagist. He also discusses the inspiration for this poem and recommends "Battle at Biak, New Guinea" by April Naoko Heck in Issue 57.

You can also watch the video version of Liu's poem here:

Kenji C. Liu is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey living in Southern California. A Pushcart Prize nominee and first runner-up finalist for the Poets & Writers 2013 California Writers Exchange Award, his writing is in or forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Barrow Street Journal, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action, The Baltimore Review, RHINO Poetry, Best American Poetry's blog, and many others. His poetry chapbookYou Left Without Your Shoes was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. A three-time VONA alum and recipient of a Djerassi Resident Artist Program fellowship, he holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation.

Episode 17: Lisa Van Orman Hadley

Lisa Van Orman Hadley reads "Making Sandwiches with My Father" from Issue 52 of The Collagist. She also discusses the inspiration for this non-fiction piece (her father, of course) and recommends "Dolls of Our Fathers" by Mika Taylor in Issue 59.

Lisa Van Orman Hadley just finished writing a novel. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Knee-Jerk, Opium and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her four-eyed husband, one-eyed cat and two-eyed twins.

"Palming It with my Brain": An Interview with Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft's poetry has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Nashville Review, and The Normal School. Suzanne is an MFA student at the University of California, Irvine.

Her poem, "Valence," appeared in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with Elizabeth Deanna Morris about romance, the unpleasantness of vulnerability, and the poet's ear.

How and why did you write “Valence”?

I wrote “Valence” because I wanted to see if I could write a poem about a (hypothetical) romantic relationship in a way that would hopefully evoke compelling, elemental emotions without necessarily relying on the sort of literality that sometimes makes ‘relationship poems’ less engaging to me personally as a reader. It’s relatively rare for me to write about this type of material—honestly, I’m more likely to invoke fraught familial relationships in my poetry—so this was somewhat new territory for me. As for how I wrote the poem—I’d say that I tried to let the individual images, objects and sounds guide me from one to the next, thinking along the way about their emotional resonance for me and for a potential reader.

In “Valence,” objects are constantly being stripped down or reconstructed (“I have been chipping apart my skin; I / have been peeling back the cover of / this rabid book” and “Stew in our resurrection.”). Yet, neither experience seems to be positive. Could you talk about how you see deconstruction and reconstruction functioning in this poem?

In that first part of the poem, I was hoping to evoke the double-sidedness of self-disclosure—to communicate what for the speaker is a laborious attempt to make herself vulnerable to another human being. I think you’re right that the experience for this speaker is unpleasant, painful; it’s what she is supposed to do rather than what she wants to do, and so it represents a sort of deconstruction of the self rather than simply an act of self-revelation. Something similar happens near the end with “Stew in our resurrection.” The resuscitation of this relationship essentially depends on one partner’s attempts to deny what seems to be her nature. So the act of reconstructing the relationship is itself pained and complicated, and there’s an ominous quality to it.

Your poem has some really amazing plays of sound in it. We get “back” and “book,” “jetsam of your zeal floats” (which I realized I was drawn to because if you switch “zeal floats” it becomes “floats zeal,” which is close to “flotsam”), and more, until we finally land on “Pat down the hour until / we know it is ours.” How do you see sound playing into your work? Is there a natural musicality to the way your write, or is it more purposeful? Do you see it creating additional meaning?

I was a singer when I was younger, and I think (or maybe I hope?) that some aspect of my musical training has seeped into my writing—that my "ear" is different because of the hours that I spent in tiny practice rooms working on my voice. I’m not sure I’d say that it’s always purposeful—at least, I don’t always sit down and actively choose words for their sonic quality—but I do think that sound often guides me, and I really try to go where it leads. If anything, I think that constructions that are sonically rich sometimes help me to discover and develop meanings that I might not originally have conceived of or intended.

Could you give us some reading recommendations?

Right now I’m teaching a writing course at UC Irvine on readerly empathy and novelistic representations of empathy, and it’s giving me an opportunity to revisit some texts that I’m really passionate about. If you haven’t read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea or Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, you should!

What have you been writing recently?

The last poem that I wrote was a re-imagining of parts of my mother’s life through the lens of noir. I’m also working on a series of short poems that address some metaphysical questions related to mythologies of death, dying, and the afterlife.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Laura Ellen Joyce

Laura Ellen Joyce lectures in literature at York St John University. Her research interests are in experimental writing, extreme cinema, pornography, necrophilia, the queer uncanny, and ecocriticsm. She was project co-ordinator of the AHRC Global Queer Cinema network between 2012-2013. Her novel, The Museum of Atheism, was published in November 2012. Her novella, The Luminol Reels, comes out in August 2014.

An excerpt from her novella, The Luminol Reels, appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, she answers questions "in the form of excerpts"—with further excerpts from The Luminol Reels. Enjoy!

What is writing like?

There is time that is blank. You are on her and you are guilty.

Later, you get dreamy. You slash her open and taste her. When she is in pieces, you hang her to cure. When she is nothing but bone and pearl, you set her on flat paddles in the oven.

The parcels of smoked meat are the best you’ve ever tasted.

What isn’t writing like?

This is a morning task. Once complete you may drink a portion of metallic salts and return to the assembly line. The others must be exfoliated. This reel—the one true reel—must be committed to memory twice per day. The first time will be gruelling. You will be in handstand position, paper fed roughly down your gullet until you are blue. If you lose height, poise or grace, repeat the task.

When you do it, why?

You must feel every bump as you flick over the flesh and think of each pore, bacteria—a yellowy jelly that might burst at any time—in your vulnerable mouth. Blackheads will scud their thighs where sweat collects; blue, dense. Put two thumbnails around the toxic place and let the poison flow away. Scrub the pore out with salt and lime. 

When you don’t, why?

There is only one chance for freedom and that is to enslave the others. If you attempt this, you should write your hate on grey glass paper and bring it to the altar.

"Toys and the Boys Who Loved Them": An Interview with Marcus Pactor

Marcus Pactor is the author of the short story collection Vs. Death Noises (Subito Press, 2012). His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Prick of the Spindle, and EAT.

His short story, "Do the Fish," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Marcus Pactor talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about comedy, fragments, and Go-Bots.

Tell us about the origin of this story (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea) and about how it changed throughout the revision process.

My dad had this pick-up for maybe nine months last year, and he used it to haul scrap for gas and cigarette money. My mom forced him to sell it after too many nights of scrap sitting in the cab, in the driveway, in full view of neighbors. I never saw this truck, but I knew it well from their phone calls. Even before he sold it, I knew I would use it in a story.

The initial plan was to focus on this father and son. It had shoplifting—though the kid back then was lifting candy, not toys. These two were getting drunk together, etc. It was plodding and hokey, and the dad wasn’t half as interesting as Terri and Olivia. Then Go-Bots appeared, and I felt I was touching the real weird core of the piece. I got obsessed with them in the best way. I’d be awake at 3AM, feeding my infant son and explaining to him the difference between Cy-Kill and Megatron.

 “Do the Fish” is made up of two voices: the narrator and an italicized, plural entity giving him commands (which to me felt inhuman, perhaps computerized). What inspired this unusual format of storytelling?

I was greatly (sadly) inspired by the mess I was making. I was writing fragments everywhere—on Word documents on my home and office computers, on memo pads, and on the inside flaps of books. Some people can only write in one place and in one way. I’d like to maintain that sort of disciplined routine, but what am I supposed to do when the words are coming out of my brain and I’m not in my favorite chair? Anyway, at some point I had to organize all this material into a real draft.

I began with questions, but they sounded too ripped off from Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood. I love that book too much to copy it so baldly. So I thought about this guy in his Cy-Kill suit, and I realized just how deeply he doubted and hated himself. No one was asking him anything, and he wasn’t asking anything of himself. He wanted and needed commands, and he needed them in something like primitive MS-DOS lingo.

I have to ask you about the Go-Bots, which play a prominent role in this story. Did you have to do any research to complete this aspect, or were you totally writing out of your own experience with the toys? How much have popular culture and/or nostalgia influenced your other writing, and why?

I rehashed a lot of memories in this piece, not episodes of personal trauma, but plain knowledge of the toys and the boys who loved them. Google helped fill out hazy pictures of the Last Engineer and minor characters like Breez. My research typically is that shallow. I’m not the guy who checks out six books on Go-Bots to learn five things before I proceed.  

Culture, pop and otherwise, is strong gas for the engine. I always start on my own but, over time, bits of whatever I’m reading or whatever gets in my head at a given moment are likely to get converted into fictional material. So, sure, Go-Bots went into this story, and so did my dad’s truck. Last year, I put Eric B & Rakim into a story. I’ve also used Aristotle and William Blake. If I like it, I’ll try to work it in.

In a previous interview, you stated, “Tell a couple of jokes, but be serious. Seriously tell a joke. A purely sad story is not my kind of beer.” “Do the Fish” begins with a description of a dog gruesomely killed by a vehicle—but the story that follows contains some laugh lines (e.g., “That works. It’s the best part of the room,” about the crown molding). I wonder if you could expand on your advice about telling jokes, specifically in the midst of morbidity. How do you know when to tell a joke in an otherwise mostly serious story? In how close a proximity can the comedy and the drama coexist?

It’s like fishing—you’ve got to be patient. That’s because a joke is much more in the set-up than in the punchline. You’ve got to see the characters and see the room. You’ve got to see how earlier details have put an opportunity in place to engage readers from a different angle. If you’ve done that, the joke will come naturally. Of course, some fish, like some jokes, come right out the water on the first cast. There’s no accounting for luck.

As for proximity, I think comedy and drama can appear hip to hip. A well-placed, well-told joke can reorient a dramatic scene. The scene you mentioned, with the joke about crown molding, could have ended with a sappy and premature epiphany, but Olivia forces us away from that. As a writer, you get a bigger view of the situation and a wider sense of the possibilities. As a reader, if the joke works on you, you’re also smiling and ready for more.

What writing projects are you working on now?

“Do the Fish” is part of a series of stories involving spawn trouble, robots and androids, and history. I’m hoping to have enough material for a collection later this year. I’ve also been working intermittently on two other books that may be novels. One involves imaginary statistics, burning women, and squirrels. Another involves a detailed recent history of General Hospital and interviews with a sleeping wife.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Jason Schwartz’s The Posthumous John, Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone, Megan Martin’s Nevers, and Jacob White’s Being Dead in South Carolina. I cannot describe these books in a small space without destroying them. Instead I will say that they are all very good beer.

"The Last Mathematically Possible Melody": An Interview with James Brubaker

James Brubaker is the author of Pilot Season (Sunnyoutside Press) and Liner Notes (Forthcoming from Subito Press). His stories have appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All Story, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Hobart, among others.

His short story, "Spielberg's Unified Theory of Everything," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, James Brubaker talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about music, metafiction, and popular culture.

What was the initial idea that sparked the first draft of this story?

That’s a tough one. The original idea for this story goes back a couple of years, but at that point, it was just about this Spielberg character who was obsessed with narrative. I ended up abandoning that early version because I couldn’t make it work. Then I read something—and it was something weird, like a Facebook post, or an article linked to on Twitter, I don’t even remember—that basically suggested that the search for a unified theory was sort of science’s version of trying to “know God,” or something along those lines. I wish I could track the article down, but the idea was that humans want to find and test this universal theory of all things because it speaks to the same impulses that religion speaks to, that is, it would sort of give order to the universe like religions do for their adherents. This idea reminded me of the Spielberg story I’d started, and seemed like something that could activate that character a bit more, so I went back into the story and reshaped Spielberg and expanded the scope of the story and that was basically a second first draft, or maybe it was my rebooted first draft.

One thing I admire about this story is how unafraid it is to rise to the meta level. In only the second paragraph, you write, “When the boy named Spielberg is six, I have made it so that he will become the boy whose mother died in a car crash when he was six years old,” and then you go on to express guilt for making this decision. When and how did you decide to assert your presence as author and include these metafictional moments in your story?

This was part of the original idea back when the story was just about a guy named Spielberg who tried to find narrative in everything around him, but then the idea was cut for a while and didn’t come back into the story until close to the end of drafting. Since the story was written in this sort of unusual, omniscient, future tense, some echoes of that original meta layer were still hanging around because the constructed author of the piece had to be fairly present to navigate the tense. Then, eventually, after a couple of drafts, I felt like something was still missing from the story, and I noticed a few of those meta-echoes throughout and decided to play around with them a bit, and ended up really liking the new layers of conflict and meaning that it brought to the story.

The main character in this story is named Spielberg, and its first sentence contains a list of some of the famous Spielberg’s movies. Also, your first book, Pilot Season, is described on your website as a “short volume of pilot episodes for fictional television shows.” What can you say about how film, television, and pop culture have influenced your fiction? How have these other media become a significant part of your writing?

I feel like I need to preface this answer by saying that I love books, and I read a ton, and I have always had and always will have a deep respect for literature. That’s why I write. That said, I also watch a ton of movies and television shows, and I’m fascinated by the different ways of telling stories across different media. In studying film a bit here and there in my past, I became fascinated with the idea of montage, and the way Eisenstein and the Soviets sort of invented this new grammar for storytelling in film around montage, and I think that montage is an interesting way to think about writing. Maybe that idea shows up, just a little bit, in this Spielberg story through the arrangement of scenes, but that is working with far bigger pieces of information than montage in film, which generally revolves around connecting and shaping narrative out of briefer, not necessarily connected images. And then, of course, in perhaps a more general way, I think our popular culture is probably the most honest reflection of our cultural values, and so it seems like relevant territory to explore in terms of trying to get at what makes us tick. Pilot Season was written, in part, as a critique of television culture, but also, in a weird, backhanded way, as a celebration of the same—that is to say, television is so mind-bogglingly cynical and is constantly revealing some of our ugliest impulses, but maybe there’s value in that; maybe there’s something accepting and almost impossibly humane that goes beyond simply exploiting our flaws for entertainment; maybe television also sort of re-assures us that cruelty and ugliness are part of our world, and we’re all capable of those things, but that most people want to be and are, basically decent, and that we’re all in that struggle together.

Your bio says that you served as music section editor for a journal called The Fiddleback. Is there a relationship between music and your writing process? Do you listen to music while you brainstorm, write, and/or revise? Do you ever pair works of music with your finished works, like a soundtrack?

Absolutely. I’ve played music since 4^th grade when I had mono and couldn’t play baseball. I started playing the saxophone then and played seriously all the way through my first year as an undergraduate. At that point, I realized I wasn’t ready to commit to the insane practice hours of my peers. People literally slept in practice rooms for an hour or two in between practicing. But my love of music has deeply shaped my writing. The collection I’ve got coming out from Subito later this year is called Liner Notes and explores this love head on, tackling music and the culture surrounding it from all these different angles. There’s a story in there about a fictional private press record being reissued, and another about Flavor Flav traveling through time, and one about the discovery of the last mathematically possible melody. Each story in that book had its own soundtrack as I was writing, just to help construct the world I envisioned for each story. While I was writing Pilot Season, I listened to as many TV theme songs as I could find on Spotify. And as I was writing the collection I just finished, (Science) Fictions, I put together a few playlists of sci-fi-ish, retro-futurist and/or new agey stuff like Tangerine Dream, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Boards of Canada, and would let myself get absorbed in these sort of early 80’s Epcot Center synth drones because I wanted that feeling to permeate the stories. And yes, while I’ve never shared my finished works’ soundtracks, I have a pretty good sense of what they are. I can tell you off the top of my head that the soundtrack for the Spielberg story is Air’s “Kelly Watch the Stars,” Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Explain,” and The Flaming Lips’ “Look…the Sun is Rising.” Also, as a general rule, if no other music is working for writing, my defaults are In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.   

Your second story collection, (Science) Fictions, was recently put on the shortlist for the 2014 Pressgang Prize, where a reader said of it, “Carver and Borges had a baby and it is this third story.” Do you consider those authors to be influences of yours? What writers do you credit most with shaping your style and sensibility?

Hands down Borges was probably the biggest influence on me. I was already thinking of myself as I failed writer in 2002 when I stumbled across a copy of Ficciones. I read that book and said, this is how I want to tell stories. It made me understand things about the ways I was trying to tell stories that I didn’t know how to work with, before. I’ve never thought of Carver as an influence, but I guess, at this point, Carver has been everywhere for a while (I mean, I was first unwittingly exposed to Carver, sort of, when a heavily edited version of Altman’s Short Cuts was screened on a flight to Hawaii when I was maybe 12 years old) and the Ph.D. program I went through had a bit of a thing for Carver while I was there, so it makes sense that some facets of what he did crept into my work. Some other biggies for me are Millhauser, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, and Lorrie Moore. Those are the folks I was reading a lot of when I was in the early stages of figuring out how to tell stories, and I think they’ve probably shaped my writing more than anyone else.

What recent books would you like to recommend to our readers?

At the risk of looking like a suck up, I loved Gabe Blackwell’s The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft. I also love Erin Flanagan’s collection of stories called It’s Not Going to Kill You, and Other Stories. I’m about halfway through Leesa Cross-Smith’s Every Kiss a War, and am enjoying that. The new Pynchon was pretty great. Dan Shapiro has a great book of poems I picked up at AWP called How the Potato Chip Was Invented. Peter Tieryas Liu’s Bald New World is a wonderfully fun and original take on traditional sci-fi/dystopian stories. Catherine Gammon’s Sorrow was one of the most harrowing and heartbreaking books I’ve read in recent memory, but it’s so worth it, and Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum is a beautifully written exploration of hopeful sadness. Also, the 33 1/3 volume on They Might Be Giants’s Flood is probably the best music writing I’ve encountered in a while. And if folks are into comics, Dan Slott’s current Silver Surfer book is a lot of fun, as is Charles Soule’s She-Hulk, and pretty much anything that Matt Fraction is writing. Oh, and also, the Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel series is fantastic.

"The Limits Our Culture Puts on Love": An Interview with Sally J. Johnson

Sally J. Johnson received her MFA from UNCW where she served as Managing Editor for the award-winning literary journal Ecotone. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega, The Pinch, Weave, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Find her on the Internet: http://sallyjayjohnson.tumblr.com/ and @sallyjayjohnson.

Her essay, "Binary," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Sally J. Johnson talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about brevity, binaries, and writing about family.

Tell us about the genesis of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea), and about how it changed throughout the revision process.

I started writing this piece in a class on the lyric essay with the phenomenal Sarah Messer. Originally, it was an experimental essay about two different relationships. It wasn’t until I did a more final edit on it that I pushed it into that binary form. Ultimately, I wanted the form to be really constricting in contrast to what I was writing about, and to mirror our society’s unreal limitations on love (boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, etc.). I’d been thinking so much about that, the limits our culture puts on love (and everything) and its effect on people’s real lives. For instance: my family is the most wonderful, accepting group of human beings you’ll ever meet, but I was still met with some of those tired stereotypical jokes when coming out to them. Why? Probably because we have a culture that shares those jokes and perpetuates those stereotypes. We have people of power and persuasion insisting those jokes are funny or somehow inherently true.

I wanted to show that complication (of love, and of loving people of your same or different gender, of gender itself) in a similar system as this human world that always tries to make things simple: 0 or 1. There’s so much erasure in that kind of space. So, in a miniscule way, I was able to use a binary to show and narrate, rather than erase, an experience.

How did you decide to write about past events in the present tense for this piece? What kind of advantages and/or risks come with making that choice?

To be honest, I think that decision was unconscious. It did serve as a little mental trick for me to get back into the moments I wrote about; to feel as mad or happy or heartbroken or in love while writing as I was then. It’s advantageous since it adds a visceral texture to this piece (I hope). Also, this way I easily avoided summing things up or generalizing. It’s risky because I can/could/did miss reflection that’s necessary. I had to rely a lot on tone and choice of scene to express how I might feel about these events now.

“Binary” is written in ten short vignettes, each no longer than two paragraphs. As both a poet and an essayist, do you find it natural to write with this kind of brevity, or is it a challenge to work with such a strict economy of language?

I wonder if it’s because I am poet that I gravitate toward these smaller sections, or if that’s why I was drawn to poetry in the first place. It is natural for me to write with brevity; I seem to fit there. But, lately I’ve been trying to pull and stretch my sentences and pieces. To say more, show more, steep a little. I like the challenge, but I also love reading longer essays and would love to be able to write them.

This piece includes stories of your family members and romantic relationships, in an essay that explores your sexuality and tackles gender-based binaries. Are you ever wary of writing and publishing nonfiction covering such personal material? If so, how do you overcome your hesitation? (If not, what do you feel about it instead?)

I recently read this great essay by Robert Siegel in the New York Times (about teaching a workshop with his mother as a student). I kept coming back to this line from him: “It’s always been a matter of faith for me that good writing begins with the ability to say what you want without worrying about how others might react.” I think that’s so important, and something I needed about three years ago to repeat to myself like a writing prayer. For the future, I will.

As for before, I was a little nervous. But, my family really is great and supportive of both my life and art. The hardest part about sharing this particular piece was knowing my parents would read things I’d never told them—had chosen not to tell them. It felt like a betrayal, but it was also a relief. I was actually most afraid they’d want to talk about it or hold a family meeting (the Johnsons love their family meetings), but instead they just asked if I needed to talk and otherwise congratulated me on the publication.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’ve been sending out my poetry collection, The Pinning Block, which is about sexuality and arthropods. The poems in it take a look at (or through the lens of) invertebrates as well as humans to think about sex, love, tenderness, and hurt. Lots of those poems are looking for homes, too, so I’m working on the business side of that book. I’ve also been editing more lyric essays like “Binary” and trying, trying, trying to write longer, more traditional essays.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams. Sally Wen Mao’s Mad Honey Symposium. Anything and everything that Roxane Gay has ever written in print or online. I’m really into Murakami right now, so I’ve been recommending him as if I’m a child that just figured out ice cream tastes good, but, still! Also, Meredith Clark won Black Warrior Review’s nonfiction contest with her essay “Lyrebird.” I read it when I got the issue and it’s still ringing in my heart.

"The Past Inherits Us Again": An Interview with Russell Brakefield

Russell Brakefield teaches in the English Department at the University of Michigan. His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Indiana Review, Hobart, The NY Quarterly, and Language Lessons: An Anthology of Poetry, Prose, and Music published by Third Man Records.

His poem, "Effigy," appeared in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about poem-statues, art as permanence in an impermanent world, and the fight to quantify time and define ourselves. 

What helped shape the text for you, in terms of a one-stanza form?

This poem started as a single stanza, as a clump, as many of my poems do. It made sense to me to keep the single stanza form in terms of the subject matter—statues, animated columns, monoliths, etc. I wanted to visually evoke the idea of a statue or plinth. The form allowed the poem to be one solid object, relying then on the syntax, language, and line-breaks to indicate some possible movement, to convey energy, to produce anticipation that the poem-statue might leave the page and “lurch against the sky.”

An effigy, as a representation of a person through sculpture, and as the title, holds weight in this context. I focus on the last three lines; resurrection is paralleled with life, and “the forgotten beasts are left to forage.” Arriving at this last line, I am immediately reminded of the “stone sparrows and frogs crafted from a long gone mother’s hands” and how they “suddenly see themselves, alive.” “Forage,” for me, obtains a positive connotation. What/who do “the forgotten beasts” signify for you, beyond the “stone sparrows and frogs,” and what is the relationship between “a long gone mother’s hands” and the stone animals that “suddenly see themselves, alive?”

I was thinking about how obsessed we are with the apocalypse right now. I find myself drawn to those narratives as well, even though I’ve read/seen them so many times. It is as though we have so little faith that there is any frontier left for us to explore (apart maybe from technology) and so we look to rebirth or resurrection as a possible future. Bleak, but also maybe not? We know what we are doing to the planet and to each other. It is obvious that the questions at the center of these apocalypse narratives are important and compelling to most people: how do we deal with our collective impermanence and how do we deal with our individual impermanence? And it isn’t just about environmental concerns or something like that. It has quite a bit to do with the individual, with consciousness, and with art.

Art often gives us an idea that we are creating some sense of permanence in an impermanent world. Particularly something like a sculpture seems to exist by its very nature to make sustainable something that is not—the human form, animals, architecture. And yet we know that even statues are completely ephemeral in the big picture. Dust to dust and all that.  I was trying to think about how all this would be complicated if, after our fleshy bodies were long gone and even the cockroaches were turning to ash, those effigies that we created were given life, the things we deemed eternal became animate. Does that mean that they then become terminal and transient and the process starts over? Do those new creatures create effigies of their own? And of what? 

Also, at the most basic level, I was just really attracted to the image of all these statues coming to life, disoriented and creaking into consciousness at the same time—Christ the Redeemer stepping down off the Corcovado mountain at the same moment that the statues of frogs playing flutes in my mom’s flower garden suddenly lift their heads and start to play.

Contrasting images weave through this work, highlighting the living and the forgotten (“…the statues will inherit the earth. The founding fathers will lurch against the sky and finally take their place as great distinctions—white granite against a fiery lake”). The “Spindled lampposts,” too, are “alive like tyrant trees.” The stiffness and inanimate nature of the forgotten is constantly being replaced by living, active versions. What pushes these sculptured objects to retain or obtain life, to envelop or signify the past that “inherits us again?”

I can’t say quite what pushes these things to life in the poem. I don’t think it matters. The poem starts beyond that point, in a place that says to the reader “you are dead and these things have come to life, now think about that.”  I wanted the poem to ask questions about what we deem important, the way we cast things into lasting form to commemorate that importance.  I was just watching something on TV today about the football player Lionel Messe’s striking foot cast in gold. And the average football player’s career is something like six years? I wanted to call attention to the way we fight and claw to understand and quantify our time and experience here,  how hard we work to define ourselves even though we know how it all ends.

At the same time, there is also something in this poem, I hope, about all the things that we can’t capture figuratively. The reason that we set about to all this effigy business in the first place is not always political or historical. Part of it is that wonderful thing about art, the way we  keep trying to express the ineffable experiences of living. Even when we inevitably fall short, we still learn a great deal about ourselves and our place in the world. Holding tight the memory of a mother’s hand is not an important biological weapon. It is not an important moment in history. It does not give you an advantage in the

event of a zombie apocalypse. But it is also most likely the place in this poem that  people will look at and connect to intimately, the moment people will draw a line to from their own experiences. Perhaps something made from her hands, a frog or whatever, has in some way stretched the bounds of human experience.  

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading quite a bit of fiction at the moment—We Need New Names by  NoViolet Bulawayo and Conversations by Cesar Aira. I’m rereading parts of Third Reich by Bolano because I’m on vacation, sort of. Poets I’m looking at right now—Brandon Som, Bianca Stone, Sarah Vap, Mary Ruefle, and Charles Wright’s new book Caribou.  I’m always reading Carl Phillips and listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

What are you currently writing?

I’m working on a book about American folk music. The subject of the book is American folk music, but it also deals with artistic innovation, the way music gets moved and translated across time and geography.