“History Doesn’t Compartmentalize”: An Interview with Madeline ffitch

Madeline ffitch was a founding member of the punk theater company The Missoula Oblongata.  Her stories have appeared in The Chicago Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Tin House.  Her first collection will be out in February on Publishing Genius Press.  She lives and writes in Appalachian Ohio where she homesteads and raises ducks, goats, and her small son, Nector.

Her story, "The Private Fight," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Madeline ffitch talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about family, race and history.

What initial idea led to this story’s creation?

One of the things that was happening around the time I began the story was that my uncle Kurt Vance, a tremendously significant loved figure in my life, an artist and meticulous thing-maker was dying of cancer. I was living very far away from him and encountering a lot of new ideas. He had been an intellectual mentor to me. When I encountered something I’d never heard of, a school of philosophy, a visual arts movement, some piece of history, I realized that I automatically would think of asking him to fill me in on it, on running any new idea by him, just to hear his take on it. And then I realized that I had no way to understand myself and my own mind without him to ricochet ideas off of, that I had no plan for how to continue my intellectual life once I couldn’t talk things over with him anymore. So I started writing from that place. When he was in the hospital a lot of people who loved him sent him messages and pieces of writing, and I sent a draft of the story for him to read, and he died not long after, and my aunt read it to him, and though it may be selfish, I’m glad to know he heard it. Some people say that their families hold them back from writing, but so much of what we understand about love and sadness and what matters, maybe everything, comes from being part of a family, and that’s always going to be difficult, so why not fight for your place in it with these people you love, especially the older people. Remember that they’ve been around the block. They can handle it. They probably understand your mind better than you think they do.

Time is a major issue in this piece. Historical events are both far and near to these characters. Could you talk more about both your approach in addressing this topic, as well as your own interest in the matter?

I had a teacher once, a white guy, who, when asked why he knew so much about the murder of Fred Hampton (the young black panther leader killed by police officers in Chicago in 1969) said, “I’m an American. Of course I’m interested.” And I think that’s part of it. I don’t understand why it seems natural that contemporary American fiction, or fiction written by young people, should not show an awareness of history, or that if it does, it must be done in a self-conscious way or done with capital letters. If you know your neighbors or your family members or anyone besides yourself and other people your own age, you are hearing about and talking about history, and understanding yourself in a political and historical context, and there’s nothing broad or grand about that. It’s just true. But also, I am interested in the way we don’t understand history, or the way that we have heard it retold in these talismanic stories from people we love or are close to, people with a limited and flawed perspective. It helps us understand and misunderstand each other, and I think that’s a vital place for storytelling. For example, as a young white writer, I don’t think there’s any way that I can “get it right” when writing about the black panther party, but I also think it’s worthwhile to acknowledge and normalize the wild fact that history doesn’t compartmentalize. Right? Black history affects white people and black people for sure know that white history affects them. And the ways that we understand and misunderstand each others’ history has real effects on our lives. This understanding and misunderstandings of history are vital places to begin stories from.

I also think that white writers want to leave race alone unless they feel they have something wise to say about it. But that’s such a problem because most white people, most people, surely most writers, aren’t particularly wise about race, yet the history of race relations in America permeates our personal family and regional histories. So when white writers think they can just opt out so that they don’t get it wrong, I think it creates a sort of falseness in contemporary fiction, where white writers don’t notice race or history unless the story is about those topics in capital letters. This ends up colluding with the false idea of a “postracial” society or an apolitical society. It’s really false, but in fiction, it’s also aesthetically false. And it’s boring and safe. So I’m interested in making a mess, getting some things wrong, representing the ways that we misunderstand each other, showing perhaps a foolish but sincere perspective, mostly continuing to write as if history and race matter and are present in the American human experience still because they most certainly do and are.

There are so many heartbreaking lines in this story, whether it be Murray Rose’s notion of diplomacy or Maxwell Conley’s view of love. I experienced a deep sadness while reading this—but that sort of good deep sadness that reminds a reader they’re alive. What was it like living with and creating these characters?

A friend once talked about making post-apocalyptic art, meaning art that will hold up around a fire or in a gutted building the same way it could hold up in a more refined context. I am interested in making stories that acknowledge vitality, that reject the cultural paradigm of the modern malaise. I believe there are other true stories to be told than stories of disconnection, isolations, jadedness, and boredom. I want to confront the assumption that disconnection is what we have to write about, and the only other option is to have a story where people are stupidly “happy” or something. I don’t think that deep sadness comes from being disconnected. I think it comes from being connected. And what seems more true to me is how connected people are, how relentlessly involved and passionate people are. That’s why we can’t get away from each other, and that’s what we love and what we hate, and that’s what’s so difficult, and that’s what breaks our hearts.

I’m curious to hear more about your life as a homesteader in Appalachian, Ohio. What’s your schedule like, as far as writing, homesteading and a raising a young son goes?

Many people fear that having a life outside of writing will make them be less productive writers. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I know that it would be extremely convenient for me to blame my son, my goats, my ducks, my garden, or the maple trees when I don’t getting writing done. I feel I could only do that if I could honestly say to myself that in all the years before I lived this way I actually used every available moment to write at my maximum productivity. And I certainly didn’t. I’m not very sympathetic to those who complain about how hard it is to get the work done. For me, it’s mind over matter. When the blank page threatens, I remember that as a woman writer, my forerunners are people who got the work done no matter what. Ursula LeGuin did it after her kids were in bed, Grace Paley did it and was an amazing activist, very available to her community, Mourning Dove wrote in a tent after a long day of picking fruit. One of my favorite writers is Louise Erdrich and I just read her account of how much reading she got done while breastfeeding. When the goat is milked, and Nector is sleeping, and there’s a bit of electricity, I figure I have an hour or so, and I open up the word processor and write as much as I can. My partner is building us a house right now, actually as we speak, so I do a lot of writing in a small shack that we use as a kitchen, or another shack that we built above our workshop. Both have woodstoves.

I like working outside. I like working with my hands. I like knowing how to build things and make things. I think it’s necessary to be available to your community, to choose some activism to be involved in, to get a little embarrassed with rhetoric. I like to read wild and stylish stuff, quiet slow stuff, but also to read pamphlets, and wing nut confessional letters in all capitals. Maintaining my place in a life that includes writers, artists, farmers, activists, conspiracy theorists, parents, children, goats, and grandparents overall only helps my writing and my intellectual life. Or wait- that makes it sound way too designed. Actually, it’s just the way my life has to be, and I couldn’t imagine it any other way. Also, I should mention that recently, I became a doctoral student at Ohio University, which is in Athens, the nearest town, and that has helped me to find balance and not become, as my urban friends feared, a zombie hippie wife. It has also helped me earn a regular paycheck for the first time in a few years, which is good when you are starting a family.

I know your collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn is forthcoming from Publishing Genius Press. Congrats! Are you currently working on anything new, or are you taking a breather?

Thank you! I feel so great about working with PGP. Adam Robinson is so true blue and all-in. His project is so fearless, so joyously confrontational to drudgery and to old ruts. He just mailed me a big stack of PGP books, and I’m so honored to be in the company of those other PGP writers, a pushy and wild and elegant bunch. I’m hoping to put out a collection of plays—I’m still collaborating on one with my brother, it’s about snake bites—and I’m working on a novel too. I think I might not get to take breathers anymore. Best to just keep writing because the breathers are already built in with the ducks, the goats, the garden, and the baby.

Who are you currently reading?

I am always re-reading Grace Paley, and Mary Ruefle’s book Madness, Rack, and Honey, which my friend, the poet Heather Christle gave me a couple years ago. I still feel kind of like I stole her book because I was looking at it so hungrily I think she felt like she had to give it to me. But then, the poets are always schooling me. I read Gertrude Stein for the first time this fall, and can’t believe it was for the first time, it felt so reasonable and familiar. I’m also reading Charles Johnson’s book Middle Passage. And of course, I am very often reading the classic, The Little Fur Family, which is a work of genius. I have two editions, both with fur covers. I think I like it more than Nector does.

"I Wish I Didn't Know the Meaning of the Word Regret": An Interview with Victoria Cho

Victoria Cho's writing has appeared in Apogee Journal, Quarter After Eight, Word Riot, and Mosaic Art and Literary Journal. She was born in Virginia and now writes, collages, and plays in New York.

Her poem, "a foreign body," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about form, the theme of regret, and the most violent image in the poem.

Each line, with the exception of the last four, appears in sentence form. What about the content prompted this structure?

The arc of the poem as well as my background as a fiction writer inspired this structure. I’m used to writing in complete thoughts and having nice subject-verb agreements. Hence, most of these lines are complete sentences. For the final four lines, which I consider the poem’s climax, I felt fragments were more suitable because they indicated a disorienting emotional intensity. Maybe this is a technique I can incorporate in my fiction!

What image stands out the most to you in terms of illustrating the relationship between the narrator and the lumberjack?

The most striking image in this poem for me is: “An alien slithers down my throat and corners my spleen.” It is the most violent image in the poem, and it refers to the body in a very unsexy way. Having this unsexy reference complicates the relationship between the woman and the lumberjack and her expectations of sex.

I am especially drawn to the line “I wish I didn’t know the meaning of the word regret.” How does regret weave its way through the lines?

I invite the reader to explore the theme of regret on a line-by-line basis but will say that I’m simultaneously curious and enraged by the association of sex with shame, which can lead to the emotion of regret. A person may also act towards someone else due to pressures or expectations he/she feels, and actions in this regard can also lead to regret. I feel lust, shame, connection, and regret can be conflated, especially when a person is just starting to explore his/her sexuality.

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and poems by Myung Mi Kim. The stories are weirdly beautiful and helpful, as my own fiction is becoming more surreal. Marquez writes from the perspectives of ghosts and reflections! Kim’s poems are some of the most abstract I’ve ever read. She plays with translation and disorientation. One poem is all slashes and periods. Another poem takes the shape of a quiz asking for English translations of Korean phrases. I enjoy her dissection of what gets lost in translation.

What are you writing?

I’m experimenting with various genres and am working on short stories, a novel, and more poems. I hope to write more nonfiction, too. This is a tough question for me to answer, as even I am not sure what I’m writing. I only know that I’m doing it.

"Major Events with Alternate Histories": An Interview with Anne Valente

Anne Valente is the author if the recently released short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, and the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in One Story, Ninth Letter, Hayden's Ferry Review, and The Normal School, and her essays appear in The Believer and The Washington Post.

Her story, "The Great Flood," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Anne Valente talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about St. Louis, mythology, and writing a character's mindset.

Please tell us about the origins of your story “The Great Flood.” What sparked the initial idea behind it?

I’ve been working on a collection of short stories about the city of St. Louis, which is where I’m from. I’ve researched some of the city’s pivotal moments as well as some of the stranger facets of its history and culture, and I’ve been drawn to rewriting major events with alternate histories. The Flood of 1993 occurred when I was in elementary school and I remember the water creeping up the riverfront steps toward the Arch, as well as the boil orders and sandbagging and devastation of homes and farms along the Mississippi River. I was researching the history of the St. Louis Zoo around the same time that I was looking into the 1993 flood, and it clicked to combine these elements of St. Louis history and culture into one story. I also read about a man from Quincy, Illinois, who was convicted for purposefully removing sandbags from a levee in order to strand his wife on the other side of the river. The idea of a character tampering with a flood wall developed from there.

What drove the decision to put your story in conversation with the familiar tale of Noah’s Ark by using references to and quotes from the Bible? How and why do religion and mythology intersect with your fiction?

Mythology plays a larger role than religion in my work. I’m often interested in tales and fables and the stories we tell ourselves about the world, which seems an apt way of thinking about the central figure in this story and what kind of narrative he’s constructed about the city around him. In all honesty, I know very little about religion; I read the Bible for the first time in college, and only select passages. Noah’s Ark came into the story as a means of linking the flood to the animals at the St. Louis Zoo, two disparate aspects of St. Louis culture and history that I looked for a way to connect. I had to do some research into the Ark, including reading that section of the Bible in addition to others. My guess is that I took a fair number of Bible quotes well out of their original context and intent. 

The main character of your story seems deluded and irrational, yet he remains a sympathetic protagonist. What did you have to do in order to tap into this character’s headspace? How did you ensure that the reader would willingly follow him on his journey despite his skewed view of the world and his place in it?

I honestly didn’t know if the reader would follow him on his journey, especially since it’s such a claustrophobic one; he has no social interactions, no dialogue, only his tightly bound worldview and memories. With that said, I hoped that this sharp degree of narrowness would allow for the reader to recognize the limitations of his perspective while also in some way understanding it. He has experienced significant loss. He is a character in pain and in tremendous grief. The world has devastated him, the animals his only refuge. I hesitated to even give him a name, and to separate him any further from the reader and from the animals. I hope this pain makes him sympathetic enough for the reader to journey down to the floodwall with him and understand why he might take a chisel to it, why he might break it apart.

Describe your revision process for this story. How much did it change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any tough decisions?

I revised this story considerably between its first draft and the draft that was accepted for publication. Even then, I revised it further beneath Gabriel Blackwell’s sharp editorial eye. This was a tough story for me, in large part because it’s so closed in. Not a lot happens. We’re inside a limited, narrow perspective from start to finish. It’s a story of headspace and psychology far more than a story of plot. But even still, I needed to establish forward momentum somehow and my revisions focused largely on finding ways to further the story without adding actions or events that felt outside of this character’s world. I had to delete scenes. I moved so many other scenes around. This was the first time I’d done that so extensively in a single piece, since chronology matters far less in this story than the progression of a stagnant mindset.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m continuing to work on other stories about St. Louis. I’ve finished a few others in the past few months – one about Forest Park and ornithology, one about the desegregation program between St. Louis city and county public schools – and I hope to turn my attention next to the Budweiser Clydesdales and Busch Stadium. I’ve also recently finished a novel manuscript.

What have you read recently that you would like to recommend?

I’m currently reading Diane Cook’s debut collection, Man V. Nature, which is fantastic. Though I know I’m a latecomer to her work, I also recently finished Anne Carson’s Nox, which was gorgeous and devastating. Up next on my nightstand are two books I’ve been excited to read for months: Haruki Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost. 

"It Is the Escaped Couple's Mischief": An Interview with Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Boneshepherds, named a notable book by the National Book Critics Circle and the Academy of American Poets. A former Fulbright fellow, he has also won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award. His poems and essays have appeared in Grantland, Tin House, Harvard Review, Language For a New Century, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He is a founding co-editor of Some Call It Ballin’, a sports quarterly, and teaches on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program.

His poems, "An Essay on Love," "Ode To Not Having Enough Kids To Play a Game of Baseball," "A Meditation on Water Beginning With Men Fishing a Flooded Avenue," and "Despedida: Quezon City," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, he talks with interviewer Christina Oddo about the origin of the content, the play between the lovers under oppression, and the mystery that exudes from the work.

What was your thought process behind the narrative structure of this work?

I was asked to read a poem at a very dear friend’s wedding and I was all ready to go with something, but then I thought to myself, what if I tried to write something. So, the morning of the wedding I got to it and this story—or a version of it—came out. It’s completely playful and so are the lovers, but it’s under the specter of an oppressive regime. Despite the tyranny, the lovers dream and play. The end is mysterious. We can’t tell if the old woman is telling the truth or not. We suspect that she saved their lives. She’s the trickster, the mischief maker, the babaylan who works, in this instance, on the side of joy.

Maybe the whole thing is overly romantic. That’s ok by me. But I was delighted to discover two people, presumably young, who defy the capricious restrictions of their government; I’m not one of the lovers, I’m one of the townspeople who has forgotten his own joy, his own romance, his own inclination toward the wild, and hearing all that laughter was a reminder to the townspeople (and to me) of the possibilities of living in a difficult time and place. I wanted to write a story with a little bit of love, a little affection, a little politics, and a little bit of mystery and magic.

How does the repetition of words and character actions push the themes present?

I think it’s a device of fables and maybe it’s a device used in storytelling in general. You have characters who do the same thing repeatedly or a series of things. I imagine it’s the same as anything in poetry. One sets up a pattern so that it can be broken. In this case, it was inevitable that the sentries would come and look for them. The repetition of the tasks, for me, did two things: it allowed me to give space for the lovers to dream and for them to play. It’s also fun for me as a writer because I like the whole spectrum of rhetoric that runs between litotes and hyperbole.

What prompted the idea of the “magnificent land?”

That’s the couple’s trouble, isn’t it. This fictional government is pretty simple-minded but extremely powerful. They can build marvels, yet it obsesses over its own power and uses it to enforce these capricious laws. Calling the land magnificent echoes fairy tales, of course. But it’s also ironic because we soon discover the stupid ordinances the government has put in place.

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading architect Christopher Alexander’s two volumes A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Being. I’m teaching a course on poetic forms that’s a pretty rigorous boot camp on prosody that tries to connect strange forms like Patchen’s graffiti poems and Afaa Michael Weaver’s Bop to traditions and treasons of conventional forms. Alexander’s books are all about how to design a living space that can be replicated and varied, as I imagine a good poetic form might be replicated and changed.

What are you writing?

I just finished a new poetry manuscript called Brooklyn Antediluvian, throughout which the threads of race, gentrification, historical violence, the consequence of names/naming and environmental disaster from New York City to the Philippines are threaded together. It is part autobiographical lyric, part immigrant narrative, and part political fable. Also, I’ve got a collection of essays that’s all but finished. It’s a compendium of the criticism, sports writing, and personal essays I’ve written over the years on subjects ranging from weightlifting to pianos to multilingualism to boxing to Chinua Achebe to my father as an ex-priest, etc.

"When You Hit the Buried Center and Strike It": An Interview with Eric Tran

Eric Tran is the author of Affairs with Men in Suits (Backbone Press 2014). His work appears in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. He is a medical student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. For more, visit veryerictran.com.

His essay, "Portraits of Handwashing," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Eric Tran talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about medical school, imitating great writers, and the hidden joy of hand washing.

Tell us about the origins of your essay, “Portraits of Handwashing.” What sparked the initial idea for this piece?

I had just finished my first year of medical school and thought a lot about terrifying things that had become unhidden—not the expected sexy infectious diseases, but things I’d overlooked: while listening to parents talk about a toddler’s runny nose, a pediatrician will silently run through a mental checklist in regards to the baby’s growth and cognitive skills to see if development’s healthy. Similarly, we wash our hands not to get rid of bacteria we pick up from sick patients, but to temporarily remove native bacteria, like staph and strep, that could cause problems in a different part of the body. But I also wanted to explore the surprising, hidden joy involved with that same process.

Your essay begins with the inscription, “after Bernard Cooper.” Can you shed some light on the connection between this author and your essay?

Our connection? Simple: he’s better than me. I don’t mean this facetiously: “The Fine Art of Sighing,” which I shamelessly (really: not an atom of shame) re-wrote, he writes lyrically, intimately, and narratively—I could spend my entire life trying to match him in any of these categories and still come up short. But he does it all simultaneously in a way that makes them stronger as a whole. And of on top of all that, while reading the essay, it was clear that he was queer without him ever making a single reference to such. So to say it again: our connection is that he is miles and miles ahead of me and this essay was a step towards him.

The essay consists of five brief, numbered sections, each a paragraph of no more than about a hundred words. How challenging was it to achieve this level of concision? Were the sections always as small as they are, or did you whittle them down over multiple drafts?

I’ve noticed a strange development in the way I talk: either I have an outpouring of sentences, where I’m trying to gather speed and mass to make my point, or I’m trying very hard to find the exact phrasing and direction. I can imagine it now: I look at the ceiling or at the ground and say words slowly to buy myself time. Writing the essay—which is to say reading it aloud—was the latter: clipped sentences and with big breaths of air to consider my next move. Was it challenging? I don’t know. It just seemed the only way.

I noticed a turn from the end of the first section onward, from a predominantly lyrical approach to a more memoiristic style. (Section One contains “You” and imperative statements, while the other four sections contain “I.”) How did you determine how you would arrange the order of the essay’s five pieces? What made you decide to start with a section that stands apart from the others?

I originally had this harebrained scheme to start tiny and move outwards: in order to understand my conclusions about something the reader would first have to know the memories I brought with me. But I’ve found that the most effective writing for me starts with the larger context and slowly moves towards more intimate spaces. It takes time to build that trust, but when you hit the buried center and strike it, the feeling vibrates back outwards, touching everything that came before it.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Strangely, my bread and butter is the long-form essay, though I’ve produced far more lyric essay and poetry. Right now, I’m trying to be faithful to a memoir about the year I spent traveling with bears (large, hairy gay men) through North and South Carolina to various events like conventions, pageants, and orgies—a kind of self-ethnography of a Californian transplanted into the South. But of course I’m straying a lot (my friend and I often say ‘cheat on your writing with other writing’) with poems about what I’m learning and/or resisting in school.

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

God, everything. I call and text people too often to share a phrase or sentence that caught me by surprise. Last week, a lecture slide said that people with hemolytic anemia will just feel a sense of ‘impending doom,’ that something bad is about to happen.

In terms of books, House and Fire by Maria Hummel is devastating and gorgeous if you’ve ever been a parent, a child, a patient, or a health care provider, or, you know, a person. I’ve just started Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron, which is making me fall in love with books again in so many ways. When I’m working on specific projects I tend to re-read the works I’m trying to copy, so these days I’ll admit to pilfering from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and Rochelle Hurt’s The Rusted City.

"Bending Graceful Curves of Conduit": A Interview with Gary Hawkins

Gary Hawkins is a poet, teacher, and scholar. A letterpress chapbook, Who Do We Know Who Works? is forthcoming in 2014 from Trade Union Press. His poetry, pedagogy, and criticism have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Teaching Creative Writing in Higher Education, Emily Dickinson Journal, and other venues. He teaches and serves as associate dean at Warren Wilson College, and he thrills at having one of poetry's most enviable addresses in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

His poem, "Five (Occupational) Love Poems," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, he talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes about Walt Whitman's workers, stolen poems, and poems that build "in" instead of "out."

Could you talk to us about writing “Five (Occupational) Love Poems”?

Like much of my work, these poems are stolen. I mean that writing for me starts with reading, and in reading I’m constantly taking in the syntax, forms, and music of others. Here, I had been re-reading all of Edward Hirsch, whose work has long supported me with its emotional intelligence, with its song. Ed has a piece in On Love titled, “Two (Scholarly) Love Poems.” Here’s the first one:

I. Dead Sea Scrolls

            I was like the words
                        on a papyrus apocryphon
                                    buried in a cave at Qumran,

            and you were the scholar
                        I had been waiting for
                                    all my life, the one reader

            who unraveled the scrolls
                        and understood the language
                                    and deciphered its mysteries.

This was also a summer when I was up at our family property in Addison County, Vermont, where my wife and I go to write—and I was running myself through a poem-a-day diet. When you’re doing that kind of grind, I think you’re hungry for any kind of gambit you can find. So, when I heard this structure—I was…and you were—I ran with it.

Luckily, the provenance of these poems is pretty direct. While I try to keep good notes, I fear that there are countless undocumented thefts in other poems. Well, let’s call them homages or allusions.

I’m a little bit biased, because I just took this big MFA Exam, and so I also just read all of Walt Whitman in about a week; however, one of the things that I love that Walt Whitman does is look specifically at people with different occupations and investigate (and celebrate!) how they function in the world. Your poem also looks at love from different occupational standpoints. Do you see your poem at all in conversation with Whitman? If not, how do you see yourself differing?

I’m humbled to have this work associated with Whitman. And you are onto something. I think about Whitman and his workers often. Here, I absolutely have Whitman’s catalogs of workers, like “I Hear America Singing,” on my mind. Whitman has two simultaneous perspectives on workers (and really about humans). On one hand, he wants to inhabit and celebrate their singularity, “Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else.” Expertise fascinates me, including specific functions and private idioms. On the other hand, Whitman, as we know, is the poet of multitudes, and so he lays out these “varied carols” in a chorus of individual songs. As much as I’m thrilled by expertise, I see the dangers of sole identity and exceptionalism to work against dialogue and negotiation. Like Whitman, and like Hirsch, I’m proposing love as what can hold us (while allowing us our crucial individuation).

I always enjoy poems in sections, because I love how they build little boxes of language. This poem does something that I don’t normally see in poems, in that the sections get sparser and denser as we move through: first starting with a fairly fleshed-out scene with section one and ending with a flash of moment with section five. This makes the poem feel like an upside-down triangle, focusing in to a single point. Could you talk about writing a poem that builds “in” instead of “out?”

In contrast to my more conscious embrace of Whitman, the inverted triangle structure you describe was not intentional—although I love your depiction of it, and I learn a lot by seeing the poem that way. Still, I may have known that I needed to establish the rhetorical premise of this poem at the outset, and the fuller scene of section one allows the reader time to do that, with the turn of the structure reinforced by the stanza (as it is also in section two). You’re probably also picking up on a tension between the narrative and the lyric in my work. In the past, I set those two modes far apart in what I now see as a false dichotomy. Still, I am an uncertain narrator who defaults to sometimes too-great leaps of the lyric. In staying a few beats longer in scene, I’m learning that I’m often better able to define lyric predicaments.

What have you been reading lately?

Anne Carson’s Red Doc>, which lead me back to Autobiography of Red, through her Greek translations, to the abject Nox, and up to her new pamphlet “The Albertine Workout” (I’m writing on a review essay on her work). Christian Wiman’s versions of Mandelstam, Stolen Air. Maria Hummel’s House and Fire. Chris Ware’s Building Stories. Peter Schjeldahl’s and Dave Hickey’s art criticism. Robert Motherwell’s notebooks. David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays.

What other writings can we expect from you?

The worker persona poems continue to emerge, even beyond the two manuscripts, Worker and Who Do We Know Who Works? already filled with them. I welcome them. Meanwhile, I’m also working on a new manuscript, From the Suburbs, questioning the suburban American experience, including its promises of intimacy and solitude. Here, I’m trying to examine and inhabit the surprisingly coherent, if isolating, place of the suburb and empathize with those who live there, as I did growing up. Again, I’m using persona poems to enter into this space, and I’ve also adopted a prose poem form I’m calling a “short film,” a form that attempts to maintain a cinematic remove from psychic interiors but that will ultimately collapse into lyric.

Thanks for your smart and provocative questions—and for the chance to be part of The Collagist.

"As If the Story Has a Magnetic Pull": An Interview with Nina Solomon

Nina Solomon received her BA and MA from Columbia University. Her novel Single Wife (Algonquin 2003) was optioned for film by Warner Brothers. Her second novel, The Love Book, will be published by Akashic Books in January 2015. She is on the faculty of Wilkes University where she teaches fiction in the low-residency MFA program. She was born in New York and has lived in the same zip code since she was five.

Her story, "Eclipse," appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Nina Solomon talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about internal spaces, daydreaming and New York City.

Please tell us about the origins of your story “Eclipse.” What was the spark that led you to conceive the initial idea?

I grew up in the Dakota in the 1960s, a time when the Upper West Side was a pretty seedy neighborhood. Streetwalkers and drug addicts were as ubiquitous in Central Park as parents with strollers or tourists are now. By the time I was a teenager, that all had changed. Men and women in formal attire were now being whisked away in black limousines. In 1979, I went to a fancy cocktail party in a massive eleven-room apartment one floor beneath ours. Totally out of my element in a linen skirt and one of my father’s white t-shirts, I wandered the familiar layout, walking down corridors and into rooms that bore absolutely no resemblance to the rooms my family occupied just one floor away. What struck me most and stayed with me all those years was how completely different the apartment not only looked, but felt. I’ve always been interested in internal spaces, mentally and physically, and the interaction between the two. Add to that my overall obsession with loss, and the story emerged.

One thing I admired about this story was how the setting, the characters, and their histories all seemed so fully realized and thoroughly understood. How much time did you spend plotting out the backstory of years before the piece’s present moment? Do you make outlines and/or a lot of notes for yourself?

I’m a daydreamer. For me that’s where my stories emerge most clearly. Once I have a germ of an idea, the unconscious kicks in and it’s as if the story has a magnetic pull. I write tons of notes. I have stacks of index cards, many of them written in the middle of the night when a connection suddenly becomes clear or a particular image comes to mind. I never outline. It reminds me too much of eighth grade. I guess I allow my characters the space to daydream too. Lining up the three timelines took a little tinkering, but mostly it flowed out of the characters’ inner dialogue. The present moment of the story was the trigger for the memories, but the three timelines are fluid.

Can you describe your revision process for this story? How much did it change from the first draft to the final one? Did you have to make any tough decisions?

This story was revised probably twenty times and it changed dramatically over a period of years. I was so close to the story that I needed some time away from it to figure out what I was trying to say. Only then was I able to pinpoint where to go deeper, what to cut. This piece, unlike most of my other work, was tricky. I didn’t want to tinker with it too much. I was afraid the scaffold would fall down.

Your website says you live in Manhattan. How does your location affect your life as a writer and a teacher? Does the clamor of New York City inspire your creativity, or does it distract, or both?

I can block out almost anything, so I can write anywhere. The city is a constant source of inspiration. Everywhere you look there’re stories. The downside of living in Manhattan for me is that there are few places to recharge or clear my head. At those times I wish I could teleport to the beach. But I love New York. It has been the central character in all of my work.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I have two projects currently incubating. One is a novel about a sleepwalker. The other is a psychological thriller told in two timelines.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

The Virgins by Pamela Erens.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Alan Michael Parker

Felicia van Bork, 2014Alan Michael Parker is the author of two previous novels and seven collections of poems. His awards include three Pushcart Prizes and the 2012 North Carolina Book Award. Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, he also teaches in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Davidson, North Carolina.

An excerpt from his novel, The Committee on Town Happiness, appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, he answers questions "in the form of excerpts"—with further excerpts from The Committee on Town Happiness. Enjoy!

What is writing like?

How to measure loneliness? Is the wind lonelier than the bee? Is a flower lonely all the time? And what about an empty pocket—what does an empty pocket miss? Or a two-story store with floors of dust? These were our questions, we, the Committee on Town Happiness. (The Committee on Town Happiness, 173)

What isn’t writing like?

Really, until the air’s gone, one never knows where it’s been or why. The air’s not like a person. The air apparently has nothing to do with us—unless or until the air disappears, for only then does the prior air seem real. “Breathless,” “panic,” “choke”: only then do certain words apply. But air that disappears—come now. We might as well try to make a field of purple flowers out of air. Not that we are able. (The Committee on Town Happiness, 120)

When you do it, why?

Our town was like a messy drawer. Or bigger, like a shed where all the whatnots and thingamabobs have been dumped. The whosiwhatsies. So we organized in a good way, with pegboards and little hooks, the floors swept out. Not that your innocent passerby would want to help. Happiness requires a little extra giving, a tad more organizing of our feelings to make our feelings everyone’s, unanimity a goal, like love. Even if the same people were occasionally out-loved. (The Committee on Town Happiness, 133)

When you don’t, why?

Who has the time? Who has the inclination, the energy, the easily suspended morals, the back-up garments, the identically re-tied shoes, the managed hair, the fantastic glimmer, the inter-personal savvy? Priorities, everyone. Happiness first. (The Committee on Town Happiness, 173)

“Getting to the Line Without Crossing It”: An Interview with George Singleton

George Singleton is the author of two novels, six story collections, and one book of writing advice. A 2013 SIBA Book Award Finalist, his work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Playboy. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he was awarded the Hillsdale Award for Fiction by The Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2011. He holds an MFA degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and teaches writing at Wofford College. He currently lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

His story, "Operation," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, George Singleton talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about cutting down story, cunnilingus, and the impossibility of satisfying every last reader.

What was the idea or image or perhaps piece of dialogue that got this story going?

I had been trying to write a novel about these folks. I finally gave up after four drafts, and kind of just started writing stories about Start and Cush.  The image of a social worker coming in—stranger comes to town, pretty much—and how Cush would lie his way through it seems to be the image I had in mind, plus ways he’d try to show that the kid was okay in a variety of ways.

What were some of the issues you had with the novel that led to your decision to turn it into a story?

Well, it sucked, for one.  I kept writing and writing and nothing happened worth mentioning.

Throughout “Operation,” we hear moments about Start’s past, as well as Cush’s own time in Vietnam. How much of these characters pasts did you explore in earlier drafts and how much of that, if any, got cut down during revision?

In the novel(s), there was a ton of past, of course.  There was a whole lot more about his parents and their reason to scram town.  So it all got cut down about 75% or more.  This particular story—with its past as a wannabe novel—is kind of like a reduction process in cooking.

Cush comes across as a wild card. I could imagine him saying just about anything. But in the end, his words and anecdotes are never random. What were some of the joys and challenges of figuring out Cush’s character?

With a character like Cush—whom the reader is either going to like or despise, I imagine—it’s always a game that involves getting to the line without crossing it.  But there’s no daggum way to satisfy everyone.  That scene that involves his describing cunnilingus certainly tests the readers’ sense of decorum, I’m willing to bet.  But so what? I’d rather see how far I can push things, compared to being safe, safe, safe and probably a little boring.

You know, I was trying to come up with a question about the cunnilingus scene. It’s one that I don’t think I will ever forget. Personally, I was drawn to Cush and the sort of mad logic he possessed. Earlier you mentioned Cush lying his way through the interview to make everything seem a-okay. And while there are hints from Start that his life isn’t anything ideal, there are also moments of great pride and protectiveness over his Uncle. It’s such a wonderfully complex relationship. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts and process in constructing it.

I want Start to be both in love with his uncle, and scared of him.

I see from your bio that you teach writing at Wofford College. I’m always interested in hearing individual approaches, as far as balancing teaching and writing. Do you have a set schedule? Do you write when you can? Or is your approach something completely different?

I’ve been on this job for a year.  One year and seventeen days, to be exact.  In the past, I got up in the morning and wrote.  I’m talking something like 4:30 to whenever.  7 or 8.  I haven’t quite figured out my schedule here.  So I’m doing the “write when you can” thing.  So far, it ain’t exactly working out in a way that makes me happy.  And it’s not like I’m teaching hours on end, far from it.  But I have 8 and 10 o’clock classes on MWF, and a 1 o’clock on TTh. In between there seem to be an inordinate amount of meetings.   Something about writing late afternoon some days and early morning others has me perplexed.

What were you doing prior to Wofford?

I taught for thirteen years at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities—it’s lately rated the 101st best HS in America according to US News and World Report.  Kind of like that old TV show Fame.  Smart kids.  Twelve in a class at most.  They wanted to write.  They did.  

You’ve write short stories, as well as novels. Do you find that your novels begin as short stories, or do you go into each new project knowing what form they will take?

Over the years I’ve sat down to write novels, and I’ve finished some of them, and I’ve sent out a couple of them, and nothing happened.  With Novel and Work Shirts for Madmen I sat down to write a story, and it kept going.  More often than not—and this will happen with Cush and Start (or at least a crazy uncle and a half-orphan)—I just start writing stories with the same characters.  That’s kind of what happened with Why Dogs Chase Cars.

Who are some of your favorite characters in literature that remind you in some way of Cush? (This is me wanting to know what other stories/novels I should read, in that I truly loved the tension Cush’s character creates in “Operation.”).

Some of my favorite loose cannon characters are Rooster Cogburn in True Grit; Norwood in Norwood; Sugar Mecklin’s daddy in any of those Lewis Nordan books; Smonk in Smonk; the father in Brad Barkley’s novel Money, Love; God in the Old Testament (ha ha ha).  This is off the top of my head.  There are probably a hundred.  Harry Monroe in Geronimo Rex, for sure.

What are you currently reading?

Yesterday I finished a fine novel by David Joy called Where All Light Tends to Go.  It’s coming out in March, I believe. I’m re-reading Kentucky Straight by Chris Offutt.  Next novel on the list is Hold the Dark by William Giraldi.

"Raised on the Gospel of Nature": An Interview with Amy Benson

Amy Benson’s book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), was the 2003 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize winner in creative nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.  Recent work has appeared in journals such as Agni, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, PANK, and Triquarterly.  She teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University, has been a fellow at Bread Loaf and a resident at Ledig House International, and is the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem.

Her story, "We're Coming for Them," was published in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Amy Benson talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about urban vs. rural life, accepting plurality, and the convergence of past, present, and future.

First I want to ask about your essay “Lamarckian Evolution.” What was the inciting incident for this piece? What sparked the idea that led to your first draft?

The inciting incident was going to the gallery show and watching how the very young children we were with reacted to the fascinatingly grotesque figures and film.  As soon as we entered, the voice of the parental censor chattered in my head: should we let the children see this, will it be too disturbing?  But the accompanying feeling was of compulsion: we had to keep looking, had to let this play itself all the way out, to leave only when we’d gotten everything we could from it.  And, because it was as if we were looking at the creatures of the future, it seemed right to take the babies’ lead.  They would tell us what to make of these cobbled together monkeys.  Theirs is the reaction of the future; we adults are already on our way out.

Most of your essay takes place in a gallery, except for the first paragraph, which depicts an imagined scene in “a time long from now.” When did you know you wanted to start the reader off in this unusual setting? How did you reach that decision?

Partly, it was the creatures themselves that spawned the idea of the fabled future.  And the idea that “once upon a time” doesn’t specify but we automatically take it to mean the fabled past, not the future.  It seems to me that, while we acknowledge their influence on each other, we often encapsulate “the present,” “the future,” “the past” (mythic formulations, all). I’m interested in attempts at creating a more uncanny experience of time: where do we feel the convergence of past, present and/or future.  What kinds of glimpses do we get of the way we and our stuff and our paradigms will bear on the future?  There in front of us was something from the future: the destination of our mountains of refuse, for which the ever-inventive process of evolution has found a helpful/hurtful use.  And we can think these things all while knowing that these primates are a product of a regular human artist’s mind. 

I think often of the opening line of Sherman Alexie’s “Captivity,” “When I tell you this story, remember, it may change…” which, miraculously, sort of folds all the tenses into one clause.  I’d say that has been an inspiration more than once for trying to create more dimension (including the 4^th) in my own work.

Now let’s talk about your story “We’re Coming for Them.” Tell us about your revision process for working on this piece. In what ways did it change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any difficult decisions?

I’m really much more of an essayist than a fiction writer and the fiction I write is more interested in ideas and form than in psychology or elaborately drawn characters/plots. Those elements feel like trappings in my own work—like, why am I messing around inventing the meaningful backstory for a waitress in Flint, MI who I will then place into a predicament?  I love to read realistic short stories; it just feels tedious within my own process, as if I’m doing a paint-by-numbers: here’s where I describe the narrator, here’s where I seek to explain the characters’ actions through past experience, here’s where I cause trouble for them. (I’m interested in writers like Mary Ruefle, Lynn Tillman, Lydia Davis, who write essays and fiction and essayistic fiction that doesn’t seem to pay much mind to things like “character development.”) So the first version of this was briefer, more of a thumbnail sketch, a little more mysterious.  And I was satisfied with that version for quite a while.

But then, maybe a year later, I took a long look at it and decided that, in this case, most of the elements could use more of the…um, stuff of life, to balance out the ideas.  So I let it swell a bit, adding more to the sections about returning to the city, to the reaction to the reviews, and to the final section in which the “we” sort of becomes “them,” building their space machine and falling into their own version of retreat.  It was difficult to step in and make more of it; I didn’t want it to become bogged down.  But I’m glad I did in the end. 

One prominent theme I noticed in your story is the city vs. the “middle of nowhere” (e.g., “But within weeks, the city had seeped back in and we were irretrievably post-marsh, post-night sky, post-distant neighbor, post-lone visionary. We could not all have pole barns, could not all go up.”) How does this dichotomy play out in your own life? In what type of location does your creativity thrive the most?

Ha!—I just got back from a long camping trip in Canada and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to NYC where I live.  And while it would be difficult to imagine living elsewhere right now, it does feel as if I’m suddenly in a cage.  But, honestly, I need both.  In some ways I feel like my mind and creative life are built around that dichotomy.  My first book was a memoir about growing up half in Detroit and half in a very beautiful and sparsely populated part of the UP of Michigan.  My sister and I were raised on the gospel of nature: experience only counted if you were alone on the beach/mountainside/trail, if you submitted to it and lived off the land (or some ameliorated version of that).  But the rest of the year we lived in a regular little suburban house.  So when I was first writing, I was confronting the nostalgia with which I was raised: humanity is ruinous, “nature” was perfect but is tainted by other people (not, of course, by us). 

But I wanted to go further with my next project and really embrace the realities of the present, which, given current and projected population densities, doesn’t leave much room for fantasies about lone mountaintop yawping.  Both the story and the essay are part of a manuscript of pieces that grapple with city life, art, and apocalyptic environmental warnings.  When I moved to NYC around 11 years ago, it was difficult at first, the feeling that I had to share every last experience, that nothing was mine.  But I consciously wanted to shed that recoil; I wanted to give over to the collective experience—and to say: okay, if we know that humans have altered pretty much every inch of the planet and we’re in the midst of enormous shifts in bio-diversity and climate, etc., how can we live with that.  Really live, not simply pine and mourn and self-castigate about our relationship with “Nature” and with one another.

Something your essay and short story have in common: a “We” in place of an “I,” as well as silence concerning the number and identities of the individuals who might make up that “We.” (I see from your website that you’re also the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series, so this must be more than just a fluke.) What appeals to you about these ambiguous plural narrators? What emotional or psychological effect do you hope this choice will have on your readers?

Yes, it’s more than a fluke!  It’s been a bit of an obsession for the past few years and has resulted in this writing project and the reading series.

One of the effects I’m hoping for is simply the acceptance of plurality.  As alone as we might be (and as stridently as we sometimes might defend our individuality), we are very often operating as part of a “we.”  The theories of the internet-as-collective-mind have been really intriguing to me: the idea that given how much so many of us live through our computers and the internet and other social media devices, that we’re participating in collective existence already, and that, further, the internet is one great mind with a whole lot of synapses (a.k.a. human beings).  I recoiled from this idea at first.  But usually it seems like a good artistic challenge to move toward that which disturbs you, to try to understand it, cozy up to it from the inside out.  (And speaking of the inside out, it’s perhaps not a coincidence that I started using the fuzzy “we” in the first pieces of this project a few weeks before I found out I was pregnant. That’s one incontrovertible, weird, brain blurry-ing “we.”)

But the choice of first person plural was also in reaction to having written a book in the first person and reading endless fiction and nonfiction in the first person.  It’s practically all you see… which seems like a problem or at least a blind spot.  The individual can’t be all there is, right?  There’s untapped spookiness and discomfort and connection through other points of view, I think.  And, to me, “we” is just so compellingly unstable.  It’s been fascinating to me, through my own writing and through the reading series, to explore the limits of “we.” “We” is often on the verge of toppling over into “I” or “they,” but where does it persist?

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m at the very early stages of a project about survivalist shelters.  I’m interested in what goes into the mentality that takes an apocalyptic view of the future but thinks: I/We will be the one/s who will survive this.  But I really don’t know if it will be a researched nonfiction look at it, a novel, or something less settled, even an installation. 

What have you read recently that you would like to recommend?

I’m reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories right now, not a book, really, but a whole box full of graphic works in many shapes and forms.  It’s pretty staggering in its inventiveness, but at the same time, the project is spare, full of silence and minute observations.  It’s a “novel” but hesitates not at all to jump around in time, from story to story.  I really like that mixture of the fanciful and the rumpled, lived-in materials. 

I would also recommend Pieces the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon, a book of very short stories/anecdotes I read a few weeks ago.  They are a mix of fact and fiction, morality tale and obsessive anecdote.  They remind me a lot of Lydia Davis’ short pieces, but are more populated, the collected anecdotes of a conflicted town.