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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What have you been reading recently?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What current project are you working on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you guys currently reading or excited to read?

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

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

"Even After the Boy's Palms Were Empty": An Interview with Nathan McClain

Nathan McClain lives and works in Los Angeles. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Quarterly West, Nimrod, The Journal, Toad, Linebreak, and Best New Poets 2010. A recipient of scholarships from Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, he is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

His poem, "Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi," appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Darby K. Price, about botanical gardens, hindsight, and Elegance vs. Beauty.

Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of “Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi”?

Well, the cause of the poem (if we’re considering the poem itself as an effect) was an excursion to the Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, CA. I’d met an attractive woman, who also seemed attracted to me, and we took this trip together—as friends. As you might imagine, there was good amount of tension and anxiety between us as we moved through the gardens. As a result, my early drafts of this poem, originally a triptych, attempted to explore the sense of anxiety between two people who could potentially become lovers.

A couple things that ultimately helped the poem were time and distance from it. Also, the fact that our break-up (we finally dated) was completely amicable. Months after the whole boy-meets girl-boy-likes-girl-dates-girl-boy-enter-conflict-enter-misunderstanding-girl-waves-goodbye, I wasn’t angry. Normally, hindsight can be a terrifying or terrible thing (because hindsight can often trigger feelings of regret) but, in this instance, hindsight fascinated me as I thought back on the relationship and its burgeoning. It didn’t seem exactly right to look back on the experience with regret, but how should I look back otherwise? Knowing what I already knew? These questions are what the poem sought to explore.

The title gave me some trouble. I wrestled with whether the final iteration was more love poem or elegy (both of which I feel I’m always writing, or attempting to write). But then, why couldn’t it be both?

In reading this poem, one gets the sense that they have been pulled into this very intimate moment where the speaker is both observing the little boy and relaying his observations to the reader. Can you talk a little bit about perspective in this poem?

The best way I can describe perspective in the poem, and you’ve already picked up on this, is liminal; I’m deeply interested in liminal spaces. Temporally, the speaker sits between past and future, going so far as to conjecture at what would happen “again if given the chance.” But furthermore, to my mind, the speaker has actually been to this place, but can’t help returning to this place, alone, literally or through memory.

I think it’s difficult, when feeling an emotion so strongly—sadness, joy, regardless of what that emotion may be—to not see and shape the world through the lens of that emotion. That reshaping is what fascinates me about a poem like “The Glass Essay,” how Carson skillfully uses figuration to show the reader how her speaker is feeling. All of her images are charged with emotion, and teach the reader that her speaker is in a strange emotional space. While I found the details of the Chinese garden striking on their own, to further transform the details into images seemed a more interesting way of getting at the speaker’s emotional state without simply saying “I’m kind of bummed that this thing happened.” Perspective can be incredibly useful as a tracking tool, a way to control the reader’s eye and complicate a speaker’s gaze. I can only hope perspective is doing that kind of work in this poem.

“Love Elegy” has a really interesting mix of lyrical language and imagery (“I like to think they’re pure, / That that’s why even after the boy’s palms were empty, / After he had nothing else to give, they still kissed / His hands.”) and more colloquial language (“But who am I kidding?”, “So dumb.”) What were your goals in balancing the moments of “elevated” language with the more colloquial language?

Good question: my answer is actually two-fold: I’ll start by saying that my goal with language, in any poem I draft, is to create a speaker who sounds real and human, not simply a construct of me the poet. This, of course, is the paradox because the speaker is a construct of me the poet! But that’s the trick of craft and structure, isn’t it—the writer presents something constructed that gives the impression of the genuine?

Secondly, before starting my graduate program, I can say I largely valued Elegance above Beauty in my work; in fact, I’d say I even confused the two! By which I mean my poems lacked a certain sense of counterpoise to give them greater nuance. I think language works to provide such counterpoise in this poem. The instances of lyrical language and imagery, as you point out, could’ve easily allowed the poem to devolve into sentimentality without the instances of colloquial language. I think the colloquial language undercuts that sentiment and, as a result, provides the poem with a sense of counterbalance. Were the poem constructed only of “elevated” language, sure, it may have been wonderfully elegant (And, believe me, I’ve tried writing those poems), but would it be memorable? The colloquial language complicates the tone and causes the emotion to slide more firmly into place within the reader, I think. Elegance, as taught by one of my advisors, resides on the page, but Beauty resides within the reader. I’d like to write beautiful poems.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m steadily drafting and revising poems towards completing my first poetry collection (which is about finished). I’m also working on new poems that seem to be part of another project. Some of those poems are deeply interested in fable and allegory. Also, I recently spent eight hours in a line for tickets to Comic-Con in New York, which I failed to get… and I’m certain there’s a poem forming from that experience, too.

What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?

Currently, between reading poetry submissions for Four Way Review, I’m reading Carl Phillips’s Art of Daring, which is wonderful. I recently finished Laura Kasischke’s collection, The Infinitesimals—a beautiful, haunting collection. I relocated to Brooklyn from New Jersey within the last month, and finally got around to setting books up on my shelves. Books I’m looking forward to reading in the coming months? Jericho Brown’s The New Testament, Brian Russell’s The Year of What Now, Gregory Pardlo’s Digest, just to name a few. And Elizabeth Bishop, of course. I’m always rereading Bishop’s Geography III.

"If I Must Belong to You": An Interview with Daria-Ann Martineau

Daria-Ann Martineau was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. After earning a BA in Speech and Hearing Science from The George Washington University (DC), she saw there were more interesting ways to understand language. She now holds an MFA in Poetry writing from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Hospital fellow. She has also received fellowships from the Saltonstall Arts Colony and the Callaloo Creative Writers Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in Narrative, Kinfolks Quarterly, and Almost Five Quarterly.

Her poem, "Pas Toi," appeared in Issue Sixty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about the Caribbean and the American South, independence and ownership, and family history.

How does content play with form here?

I couldn’t really tell you. This poem started out in a very unimaginative, linear, free-verse form and I can’t remember what got me to play with white space. I think, however, it pertains to the ideas of things that connect us and those that separate us. I’m talking about two regions (The Caribbean and the American South) that are so culturally different in some ways and so similar in others. I remember reading Their Eyes Were Watching God back in high school and thinking, Wow this sounds like Trinidad! (my homeland) but it’s set in Florida--and not the West Indian part of Florida.

The form seems to foster a disconnect based in language and communication. What do the spaces represent for you?

Partly that. Again, the things that connect and separate us. Partly the struggle between ownership and independence. Also, the gaps in my family history. I’m the youngest in my family and there are things I don’t know about our past, because of slavery and the way things get lost in translation, but also because of repressed memories. Every family has stories they’d rather not air, I think, and respectability is very important in a lot of Post-colonial cultures.

Who is the “you” that the narrator addresses?

My partner. His last name is Butler. He’s from Mississippi.

What are you currently writing?

Think-pieces. Lots and lots of failed poems, mostly around my relationship, which is shifting in some ways right now. Also a bit around Ferguson. If I have children they will be Black and probably American. As that future becomes more likely, incidents like these resonate with me more than ever.

What are you reading?

I was reading Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning. It’s gorgeous. However I had to put it down when my day-job got too crazy. I look forward to picking it back up and finally finishing over Christmas.

"To Hurry the Rain": An Interview with Fritz Ward

Fritz Ward’s poems have appeared American Letters & Commentary, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and many other publications. His manuscript has been a finalist and semi-finalist for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Prize, the National Poetry Series, The Four Way Books Levis Prize, and several other contests. He currently lives just outside of Philadelphia and works at Swarthmore College.

His poem, "Reenactment as America's Most Wanted #48," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes, about slippery you's, little so's, and houses that eat you up.

Could you tell us about the genesis of “Reenactment as America’s Most Wanted #48”?

I was collaborating with Simeon Berry and Cecily Iddings on a series of doppelganger poems several years ago. “Reenactment” never made it to the collaborative phase of the project, but the initial seeds of the poem were sown while thinking about the implications of inhabiting other personas and voices. An earlier variation of the poem was entirely cast in first person, but over time the first-person approach felt too much like an act. As much as I wanted to climb into the persona I had created, something about it felt hollow. It got to the point where the I in the poem felt more like an actor than a speaker. That feeling lingered for a year or two until I became mildly obsessed with the idea of an actor actually playing the part, and then the idea of reenactment quickly surfaced. Somewhere in this messy timeline, I also started thinking about America’s Most Wanted, a show that held a powerful and frightening place in my memory. The reenactments from that show, along with Emilia Philips poem “Entra Tutto,” about a Civil War reenactment, finally pushed the poem into its current version, which in many ways is a reenactment of that early first-person poem.

The “you” in poetry is ever shifting, ever being discovered by the reader. In this poem, I felt like the “you” was in a very different mode than I was expecting, until the end, with “Shhhh, you’re only here to hurry the rain // into my heart.” This felt like the “you” was suddenly a beloved. Could you talk about the use of the “you” in the poem?

The “you” is a god-damn slippery creature in this poem. Perhaps because it was absent from the poem for so many years, the “you” still feels a bit surprising to me when I reread the poem. I wanted the “you” to immediately indict/implicate the reader, the speaker, and the other. I wanted to blur those lines to create a measure of ambiguity and discomfort within the false security of the reenactment trope. Since this is a reenactment, we’re not experiencing the actual events but the recreation of them, and yet we’re experience this recreation for the first time. I wanted the “you” to embody this idea as well—of being both the thing and not the thing. I’m not entirely sure what to say about the shift in the final two lines. The poem wanted something tender and ominous, yet sad and yet complicated. I complied.

Even though the “so” at the end of “You stand just // so” is a little word, it’s given a lot of emphasis by being both on its own line, off set, and italicized. Could you talk about this little word and the weight you’ve given it?

I rarely employ one-word lines, but the line break after “just” and the loneliness of “so” orphaned out there on its own line felt absolutely right. It’s a familiar phrase, maybe even a little worn, but placing the emphasis so heavily on “so” felt like it planted depth charges in the phrase and reminded me how hyper aware you can be of someone else’s body language when you’re obsessed, afraid, or even infatuated. The way they stand sends your heart into a manic episode of panic, fear, or excitement depending upon the circumstances.

What have you been writing recently?

I’m attempting to build a house of poems. My wife and I became homeowners for the first time three years ago and I’ve noticed how significantly my relationship to habitat has changed since then. Each poem focuses on one room of the house, but the room is never named in the poem.  So far, I’ve built the kitchen, living room, hallway, and an unfinished basement. It may all collapse in on me at any minute, but until then I’ll keep hammering. Houses eat you up.

What have you been reading recently?

On the poetry shelf, I’ve recently read and loved Bone Map by Sara Johnson, Cecily Iddings’s Everybody Here, and How to Dance as the Roof Caves In by Nick Lantz.

Last month, I got my fiction fix by feasting on How The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor. Also, Dr. Seuss. My two-year old is obsessed with The Lorax right now.

"What We Do Is Normal": An Interview with Peter Schumacher

Peter Schumacher's fiction has appeared online at The Summerset Review and Smokelong Quarterly. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and currently lives in Colorado.

His story, "Mars," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Peter Schumacher talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about genres, humor, and popular culture in art.

What was the original idea that led you to write your story, “Mars”? How much did the concept change from the first draft to the final?

About a year ago I wrote a series of stories about weird habits. I was trying to investigate the extent to which our daily lives are determined by habits. I didn’t revise this story much, but the composition took shape pretty slowly over a period of two or three months. The Mars stuff came suddenly one day and I was happy about that juxtaposition, and tried to see it through to its natural end.

How did you decide that the entire story should consist of one long paragraph? How do you think this choice affects the reader’s experience of the story?

I began to see that the story wanted to express an entire life, but it was achieving this through a very narrow, very focused view. To me, the long paragraph is both maximal and minimal in a similar way. It is expansive, rhythmic, entrancing, torrential, but it’s also completely unadorned and monotone.

What stood out to me as most unique about this story is the juxtaposition of the mundane with the extraordinary. A seemingly inconsequential act, picking the skin off of one’s foot, becomes how the narrator identifies the main character, the “foot picker.” In one part of the story we read a list of this man’s favorite menu items at a tapas restaurant, and in another part he is on a spaceship bound for Mars. What attracts you to this balance of oddity and the everyday?

Well, I like juxtaposition of tone, genre, situation, etc. Genres are like moods or beliefs or perspectives: one day we have this mood, that view, and the next day we’re somewhere else completely.

Also, the more outrageous the juxtaposition, the more fun you can have. I learned that when I was a kid watching The Simpsons, and nowadays I get the same kick reading Cesar Aira.

Another aspect that caught my attention was this fourth-wall-breaking moment: “It wasn’t true that his foot picking was a Freudian neurosis with its roots in a cesspool of repressed sexual urges. Nor is this an example of unreliable narration: I am simply stating that it wasn’t a neurosis. The foot picking was bad, it was gross, but it wasn’t a Freudian neurosis.” Why give a mostly third-person omniscient narrator this brief moment of first person? What are the benefits and risks of injecting a story with metafictional elements?

It occurred to me during composition that the story invites a Freudian reading—“Why does this guy pick his feet, and what does this all say about the author?” The metafictional moment is a playful, ironic defense against Freudian readers. A joke!

I’m not above jokes and I don’t think of metafiction as a risky technique. Rather it’s a staple technique—it has been in the fiction writer’s toolbox since the beginning. To me, metafiction is honest. Writers know they’re writing stories and readers know they’re reading them.

I’m also interested in this story’s references to television shows. For example: “He pretended he was a Ninja Turtle, usually Donatello. When he was an adolescent he worried over Donatello's sexual orientation. It seemed to him that Donatello was the gayest of the turtles.” Also: “His favorite shows were Breaking Bad and Mad Men. These were popular shows. The foot picker was impressed with the quality of writing in these shows.” How and why does popular culture intersect with your writing?

Popular culture is normal. That the foot picker liked Ninja Turtles when he was a kid or Breaking Bad when he was a young adult tells us very little about him. It’s only normal, and the same can be said for the vast majority of our lives. What we do is normal. We get up in the morning, eat breakfast, shower, whatever. And yet life feels urgent and mysterious at the same time. We can identify a person as a foot picker or Breaking Bad fan and this may be useful or descriptive to some degree, but ultimately no amount of labeling or storytelling will ever get to the bottom of what, exactly, a human life is. The foot picker is the foot picker, for sure, but that’s certainly not all he is. Identity is restrictive; you select a few pivotal bits of personal history, a few personality traits and hobbies, and there you have it: a sense of self! It’s the same in fiction—we use back story and action and physical detail and dialogue ticks to create a sense of character, but this is always conventional and limited; we’re always leaving out the vast majority of the picture and it’s impossible not to, because there’s so much going on at any given moment. That’s what Tristram Shandy is all about, right? The impossibility of rendering in fiction the totality of an individual’s life, because life always escapes perfect expression. Life is lived and experienced, but it can never be fully expressed through art. All art can do is suggest or point and that’s a wonderful thing, totally enough.

What writing projects are you working on now?

More stories.

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

Recently I have read and loved: Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, Eihei Dogen’s Genjo Koan, and Mijenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Stephan Eirik Clark

Stephan Eirik Clark was born in West Germany and raised between England and the United States. He is the author of the short story collection Vladimir's Mustache. A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, he teaches English at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Sweetness #9 is his first novel.

An excerpt from his novel, Sweetness #9, appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, he answers questions in the form of excerpts from Sweetness #9.

What is writing like?

He rattled on like some excitable professor, speaking of abortion doctors stalked by pro-lifers and animal research facilities that had been ransacked by masked activists. He knew of a nuclear physicist who’d been blinded by battery acid, and a scientist with the CDC whose work with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines had so enraged the mothers of autistic children that the government had offered him the use of a new name.

"And you think it could be something like that?"

He squirted more cheese into his mouth, nodding.

I wanted to take a knee. "So what should I do? Call the postmaster general?

"Please. A man who deals in lost mail?"

"What, then?"

What isn’t writing like?

Oh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, members of the Twitterati, hear my dolorous sigh. I had awoken at the age of forty-nine, wondering what I could do about my wasted, ill-spent life.

When you do it, why?

He picked it up, ready to dump its contents into the sink, but before he could, his nose passed over the test tube's mouth and he smelled something sweet. Something warm. Something light and somehow pink. He breathed it in a second time, drawing the odor deep down into his lungs, and it was so divine, a sensation so vibrant and alive, that he imagined he might float up out of his boots.

When you don’t, why?

My performance as both a flavorist and an administrator was suffering—so much so that I feared even Ernst must have noticed. I had become a born-again doodler, a man enthralled by open windows and spiders crawling up the wall. I was sure everyone could see it. My coffee breaks had become more numerous, my “working” lunches more lingering, and if I wasn’t coming in late one morning, I was cleaning out my test tubes and driving home early that same day.

"If He Stays to See the Killing": An Interview with Paul Crenshaw

Paul Crenshaw’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review, and Brevity, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University.

His essay, "This One Will Hurt You," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Paul Crenshaw talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about setting, violence, and direct address.

What sparked your decision to write this essay? How long was it between the day you described in this piece and your writing about it?

I knew shortly after it happened that I would write about it, although I only knew I would, not how or when or what the focus would be. It was a few years later before I actually wrote the essay. I don’t know if it needed time to spin around inside my head, or if I needed time removed from the event to see it more clearly, but I certainly needed time. We could quote Wordsworth here, but I’ll leave it at that. 

You devoted a number of words in this essay to describing the neighborhood in which the events take places, including the state of the surrounding houses and the people you witnessed moving in and out of them. Why did you feel it was important to capture the setting beyond just the porch and the backyard?

I’ve always been a descriptive writer, probably from reading Poe and Tolkien and Frank Herbert and others when I was young. I like detail, and sensory perception—I’m drawn to writers who transport me to the scene of their tragedy or triumph.

But description should always serve a second purpose, and in this essay the people I describe—the drunk couple, the drug dealers and the people who buy from them—are all avoiding responsibility. As was I, and the people with me, gathering to drink on a Sunday afternoon and yell at a TV screen. But we were confronted with a situation where we couldn’t avoid responsibility, and were forced to do something we had no desire to do. The violence inherent in that situation made it even more difficult to deal with, so to put it off, I focused on the minutiae of detail surrounding me—the light, the drug dealer’s house, the sun going down, anything to not have to think about what was coming, to avoid responsibility for a few minutes more, which also helped to build a bit of suspense.

There are moments in this essay, surprising because they are so few, when you use the second person in what I interpret as a direct address to the reader. Most bluntly, you say to us, “You should understand by now where this is going.” And soon afterward, you write, “And now you listen to me, for I want you to know what I did, what I think about sometimes late at night in a quiet house when everyone else is asleep.” To me these uses of “you” made the speaker’s voice seem both more confessional and somewhat defensive. What kind of effect did you intend from this fourth-wall-breaking technique?

I took that from Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Le Guin asks the reader what he would add were he writing the story; she invites the reader to create his own version. By doing so, she makes the reader complicit in the creation of Omelas, and therefore complicit in the darkness hiding beneath the city, which forces the question on the reader whether he would stay or leave.

Here, though, as you point out, it doesn’t function in exactly the same way. The first example gives the reader a chance to leave; if he doesn’t, if he stays to see the killing, he becomes complicit, and is forced to question what he would have done in that instance. The second part is defensive, true, but it also, again, forces the reader to evaluate what he might have done. By defending my own actions, I force the reader to consider his or hers. 

I also feel compelled to ask about the title, “This One Will Hurt You.” Is this also a form of direct address? How did you come up with this title, and what does it mean to you?

I wish I had a great creation story for the title, but it really just came to me. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that sentence suggests—I had the essay completed for a few weeks while I kicked titles around. The funny thing about titles is, once you get the right one, you know it’s the right one, because it works in more than one way.

This title is a direct address to the reader, another warning, like the ones I mentioned in the previous question: “This is going to hurt you—you might not want to read it.”

It’s also, in a more subtle way, about what I do in the essay. Not only that what I had to do was violent, and I could be capable—even as an act of mercy—of something so violent, but that the things we do often wound us in places we can’t see.

Finally, the act of writing itself can injure, and if you read my work, you might be hurt. At least I hope so. I certainly don’t want readers to feel nothing.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Over the summer I finished a novel set in an old tuberculosis sanatorium near where I grew up, so I’ve been writing short essays until I’m ready for another big project (which will be soon). Many of these essays recently have been on the military. I joined the Army National Guard in 1990, and was in Basic Training when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Over the years I’ve been slowly putting together a collection of military essays, and I want to finish it finally.    

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

Thrown, by Kerry Howley. A Ph.D. student becomes enthralled in the world of mixed martial arts, which is not a great way to describe it, but trust me that the book is better than that description. The Shell Collector, by Anthony Doerr, a collection of short stories that take on the feel of myth and magic. And I just re-read Brave New World, one of those books everyone should come back to every few years.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Elizabeth Rosner

Elizabeth Rosner is the author of two highly acclaimed bestselling novels, The Speed of Light and Blue Nude.  Her newest books are Electric City, a novel, and Gravity, a poetry collection (both published this month).  Born in Schenectady, NY (aka "Electric City"), she is a graduate of Stanford University, UC Irvine, and the University of Queensland (Australia).  She has been living and teaching in Berkeley, CA for 30 years.  Her essays and poems have appeared in the NY Times Magazine, Elle, Poetry, Catamaran and many other publications.

An excerpt of her novel, Electric City, appeared in Issue Sixty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she answers questions in the form of excerpts from her collection of poetry, Gravity.

 What is writing like?

         When this page fills with charcoal secrets,

         I will remember how edges and outlines resonate,

         how to bring the scene all the way back.

         I will erase this world into light.

What isn’t writing like?

         People without freedom

         are waiting for answers.

         Behind me,

         the blue sky whitens.

         At this time of day

         nothing is longer than a minute,

         even when I am finally free of breath.

When you do it, why?

         You said it was no way to make a living.

         You loved books, but wanted me to use my hands.

         I wanted to make something out of nothing,

         out of air, words. 

When you don’t, why?

            this is what I need you to understand

            that the grief is part of this scene

            it belongs here

            and every stone is its own piece

            the sharp-edged ones

            the cracked, imperfect ones

            those shaped like fists or eggs or bones

            they speak in the language of the river

                        AND ALSO:

            (there is always a risk

            in the naming of

            things in the naming

            of oneself)