"The Violence Closer to the Surface": An Interview with Diana George

Diana George’s recent writing has appeared in Conjunctions and 3AM Magazine. They did an MFA in creative writing at Brown University and were also the recipient of an NEA award for fiction. George lives in Seattle, where they work as a technical editor, write for the port-truckers newsletter Solidarity, and proofread for Asymptote, a magazine of literary translation.

Their story, "Keyhole," appeared in Issue Sixty-Eight of The Collagist. 

Here, Diana George talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Kafka, dead whales, and ambiguity.

Please tell us about the origins of your short story, “Keyhole.” What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

My stories usually begin with a phrase that intrigues me, rather than an idea. But this story sat in the drawer for a while, so I couldn’t say now what that phrase was.

I know where certain elements came from. The description of the cook and Ziller, of what sex is like for them, came from a sentence in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” In that story, a speaking, educated ape describes his relations with a half-tamed chimpanzee: in the Muirs’ translation, “I take comfort from her as apes do”; in German, “ich lasse es mir nach Affenart bei ihr wohlgehen.” The German sentence was the one I had in mind; it seems crueler than the English version, colder.

But sometimes it’s better not to know where a writer got an image. One day my friend was having his hair cut by a barber from Hungary, so my friend told him all about this Hungarian movie he’d just seen, Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies. The barber had never seen Tarr’s movie, but when my friend described the dead whale being borne through the countryside on a flatbed truck—(and it’s a stunning image, one that resonates with Hobbes’s Leviathan, the rotten ship of state in Eastern-bloc communism, the terrifying muteness of nature, and the death of God, though it’s reducible to none of these)—anyway, when my friend got to the part about the whale, he was expecting the barber to be suitably astonished, but the barber just nodded and said something to the effect of, “Oh, sure. Dead whale on a truck. We saw those in Hungary all the time.” (And they did; a dead whale known as “Goliath” was exhibited throughout Hungary in the early 1960s.) The whale in Werckmeister Harmonies is still a stroke of genius, but I was a little disappointed to learn that Tarr and (and his collaborators Krasznahorkai  and Hranitzky) hadn’t invented it out of whole cloth.

A good deal is left to the reader’s imagination in this piece, most notably the exact nature of Ziller’s “plans for the child.” How much of what is ambiguous or unknown to the audience is clearly known for you? Is it important for you to know all the answers to the questions that linger when writing such a story, or is it better to keep some mystery alive even for yourself?

With this story, I don’t know anything beyond what is on the page. Though if I did know something more about Ziller, perhaps it could only be something in his past. There’s a remarkable novel by Paul Griffiths called let me tell you. It’s narrated by Ophelia, the character from Hamlet, but she’s under the Oulipian constraint of a closed lexicon: Ophelia can only use the 481 words she spoke in Shakespeare’s play. In a way, the book is a transcendental investigation into the limits of what we can do or hope for in this play we find ourselves in, with this language not of our making. Griffiths gives Ophelia a backstory, but when she departs from Elsinore at the novel’s end—sorry, belated spoiler alert—what she encounters is nothing but snow; snow fills her footprints, it blurs any traces she leaves. At the far border of the page, after the end, there is only a blank.

The passage that stood out to me most from the rest is this one that appears near the end: “Let Ziller speak here, through the creature; let all such speech be Ziller’s. Let speech equal Ziller, not because Ziller alone is God, but because he is no less God than is the child. Ziller was not a judge of souls. A sage, perhaps, yes, if you insist, yes, but not a judge. The most fearsome prophet is not the one who condemns without mercy, who declares these damned and these redeemed. If anything, Ziller explained, Ziller knew himself to be this: the prophet of indifference.” This section reads differently for a few reasons—the repetition of Ziller’s name, the second-person pronoun, the switches between present and past tenses—all of which together create a more runaway, rambling tone. How did you decide to alter your prose in this way? What was the driving force behind this unusual paragraph?

I don’t think I can discuss my own prose in terms of decisions; that’s not to say there weren’t any decisions, but I don’t know that they’re available to me now.

There’s a strange movie by Nicholas Ray called Bigger Than Life; James Mason plays a man who takes a life-saving new drug, but this drug has a side-effect one can only call “patriarchal mania.” He gets weirdly into being the Dad: taking his wife and children out for a meal, being the one who orders the food and pays the bill. Later, when it all starts to go horribly wrong, he succumbs to an Abraham delusion and makes ready to sacrifice his son. But there’s already something very strange about him at the restaurant, something uncanny in the way he exults in fatherhood.

I wasn’t thinking about that movie when I wrote this story, and it’s a bit showily self-absorbed of me to make a lengthy exegesis my own brief, brief story, but that’s what we’re here for, so… I’ll put it this way: I would like it to be the case that I’ve written a story that induces a sense of unease, but a story in which in it is hard to say just where that unease issues from. Is it in the plans we don’t read about (perhaps involving a knife and Mount Moriah)? Or is it in the bizarre exaltation Ziller seems to draw from the routine exercise of fatherly powers?

I have the feeling I’m making something up when I describe my intentions here, but still, maybe a compositional principle for Ziller’s rant was that it not resolve this ambiguity.

What writing projects are you working on now?

More fiction. Stories that are different than “Keyhole.” The sense of place is less abstract; the narration is often twisted through a secondary relay of some kind. The language is more ornate, the violence closer to the surface.

And I’m writing a dissertation called “After the End.” It’s about Beckett, Blanchot, and Antoine Volodine. It wants a bit of filling out; there’s still the odd chapter or three to write. But I’ve chosen the dissertation’s epigraph already; it’s Beckett, from Malone Dies: “Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody.”

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

Walter Benjamin once wrote a book review called “Goethebücher, aber wilkommene,” which could be translated as “Even More Books on Goethe, But Ones I’m Glad About.” In a similar category for me, “Beckett Criticism, the Kind You Can Recommend in Good Conscience,” would be Herschel Farbman’s The Other Night.

Some other books that have stood out for me recently are Otessa Moshfegg’s McGlue; Joseph Libertson’s Proximity; Antoine Volodine’s Terminus radieux and the recent translation of his Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. And, also in translation, Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World; and a strange prose piece by the Brazilian visual artist Nuno Ramos, with the unsurpassable title “Ó.”

I’m very much looking forward to Berit Ellingsen’s new novel Not Dark Yet. And I think more people should know about the work of Kinton Ford, whose “Abbreviations” I was lucky enough to excerpt for an issue of Birkensnake.

"The Bizzare, the Self-Righteous, the Mundane": An Interview with Justin Bigos

Justin Bigos is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO, 2014). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared or will appear in places such as Ploughshares, New England Review, The Seattle Review, McSweeney's, and The Best American Short Stories 2015. He co-edits Waxwing and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

His essay, "Door to Door," appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist. 

Here, Justin Bigos talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about bafflement, Jehovah's Witness literature, and turning weaknesses into strengths.

Please tell us about the origins of your essay, “Door to Door.” What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

I think the spark was the memory of the event—or events—of repeatedly breaking into my friend’s house. Over twenty-five years later, it still seems stupid. Who would do something like that? It’s criminal and silly at the same time, but under the surface I started to sense some darker stuff happening. As I moved deeper into the essay, as I remembered that time and shaped it into scenes and reflection, the essay began to explore loneliness and neglect, especially as connected between children and adults. So, the spark of memory and bafflement at memory led, I hope, to some kind of understanding.

Scattered throughout your essay are eight excerpts from articles originally published in a magazine called AWAKE! How did you choose which excerpts you would include in the essay? What kind of emotions did you intend for these excerpts to evoke in the reader?

I found the entire 1988 set of AWAKE! magazines on eBay, and I read almost all of them. I dog-eared sections that stood out, but also ones that did not. I wanted a combination of the bizarre, the self-righteous, the mundane—a range that shows the reader what this Jehovah’s Witness literature is like. I also chose some that felt particular to the late 1980s, such as the homophobic views toward HIV and AIDS. As far as an emotional reaction in the reader, I guess it depends on the excerpt and its placement in the essay. And, honestly, in general I don’t have specific aims for emotional response in my readers. That’s too tricky a thing to wish for. I do hope the excerpts deepened and layered the narrative and reflection in the essay.

The first section of your essay feels very different from what follows. It’s mysterious because we do not yet know your relationship to the man in the taxi, the speaker does not assert himself with an “I” until the third paragraph, and past events are described with the present tense—unlike in the next section, following the first magazine excerpt, beginning with the phrase, “In the summer of 1988,” setting the tone for a more grounded, traditional narrative. What made you decide that the first section should be set apart in these ways, and what is the effect you hoped to achieve?

I had shared a draft of this essay with two writer friends last summer. One of them, Nicole Walker, felt that the essay needed an intro that set the stage by introducing the father somehow. The draft had begun the story with an AWAKE! excerpt, and after chatting with Nicole I agreed that the excerpt was too jarring an intro—not “mysterious,” as you say, but mystifying, confounding, which is not a good way to begin any kind of writing, I don’t think. I know I have a thing—a weakness, maybe—for beginning my stories and essays, maybe even some of my poems, in the realm of the too-mysterious. But, maybe what we call our weaknesses can, with attention, and revision, turn into our strengths.

You are also the co-founder and co-editor of the online journal Waxwing. What lessons have you learned in your role on the other side of the Submittable page that have influenced you when you are writing and submitting to literary magazines?

That’s a tough question. I’m tempted to say nothing. I don’t really connect my editing and writing in any clear way. There is just too much variety in the poetry I see coming into Waxwing, despite the whiny assholes out there who say that most poetry is uniform and dull. It’s not. But I write what I write. There are certainly poets who I’ve found in the slush who I now keep an eye out for—Wesley Rothman comes to mind—and poets who I’ve found in other journals who I then solicited because I loved their work so much—Ladan Osman comes to mind. But how have these two particular poets, for example, altered my writing? I really couldn’t say, except they’ve enlarged my sense of what poetry can be.

In terms of sending my work out, I’d say I’m even more careful about sending cover letters that are concise and lacking typos. Other than that, I send to the journals I think are doing good work and might be responsive to my work. I have much respect for journals and their editors.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing two books: Fingerprints, a collection of stories and narrative essays; and (what I’m currently calling) Prayer After Refusing to Pray, a full-length collection of poems. I am at the moment shifting from the prose back into poetry. I can’t write them at the same time.

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

The Waves by Virginia Woolf. That’s a gorgeous book, six different perspectives all handled masterfully. Also, Steven Millhauser’s story collection Voices in the Night. I had read the title story in Best American Short Stories 2013, and it was my favorite story in the anthology. Reading it a second time, it’s one of my favorite stories ever. I’m currently diving back into Whitman, including the David Reynolds bio. High on my list for the rest of the summer: the novels A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins; and, later this year, the poetry collection Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis.

"The Unrestrained Fleet of Bone": An Interview with Joshua B. Bennett

Joshua Bennett is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University. He has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, and the Ford Foundation. Winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prize, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, New England Review, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and elsewhere. Joshua is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.  

His poems, "Clench" and "home force: presumption of death," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist. 

Here, he talks with interviewer Darby K. Price about violence & the everyday stakes of social life, putting words in the law's mouth, and poems that shake us into action.

You had two poems published in Issue Fifty-Six: “Clench” and “home force: presumption of death.” Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of these poems? 

Clench” emerged from my desire to think about my personal history of violence from an unfamiliar vantage point. I’ve been fighting since I was very young—indeed, the first time I can remember throwing a punch I was around six years old or so, and one of my classmates, Joey was his name, had chosen that morning to fill a tennis ball with a bunch of small rocks and hit me in the back of the head with it during recess. A fight ensued almost immediately. Even then I was not one to tolerate that kind of cowardly— though I can now admit also rather creative—assault on my person. The conflict was eventually broken up, and Joey and I went about our business for the rest of that school year, hating one another in a cordial sort of way.

This sort of thing was fairly common. Insults, or outright physical assaults of all kinds like what happened with Joey, were a central component of my growing up. The threat of physical violence, whether on the schoolyard or within the bounds of one’s neighborhood, was ever-present; it was something you learned to navigate, to contend with. “Clench” was my attempt to think about how my fist might feel about my choice to abstain from fighting, this social-philosophical practice that shaped so much of my thinking about the social world over the past decade, especially given that this abstention dovetailed with my matriculating at an elite private school in upstate New York in 2002; a shift that was most striking, perhaps, not only because it meant not only two hours of travel, and going to a school populated mostly by wealthy, white teenagers, but because no one there ever fought. And it’s not that this was a good thing necessarily. Only that the absence of this approach to making meaning, to resolving conflict in an impactful, absurd, dangerous, costly way, was strange to me. It represented a different way of thinking about the everyday stakes of social life: what you could say and get away with, whom you chose to harm, how.

“home force: presumption of death” emerged from a similar set of concerns. In turning “Stand Your Ground” law into an erasure, my goal was to alter the original document’s force of argument, to destroy and put it back together as a means of indicting its authors, its supporters, all those who praise the logic of private property at the expense of life itself.  

As a reader, I was immediately drawn into “Clench,” a wonderful persona poem written from the perspective of a fist. There’s a tension established between the fist and its owner—the addressee—right away, a tension that shines through in lines like, “Who held you down/ when the whole world went/ spaghetti western & you/ were six bullets short of a coffin’s kiss?” Can you talk about the tension here between the fist and its owner, between violence and peace, between “pen or pot handle” and “the unrestrained/ fleet of bone”?

I think I addressed some of what you’re getting at in the previous question, but I’ll do my best to swerve a bit here without giving too much away. The speaker, a fist—and he’s also kind of a jerk, yes?—is trying to wrestle with its sense of having been abandoned, which is also to say, the fist in this poem is wondering aloud about what it means to be obsolete, and in this sense is contemplating its own mortality. The fist critiques the person that it ostensibly belongs to, in the sense of a deep, mutual belonging, a prolonged entanglement, but it is also pleading. It is also desperately clinging to relevance, and reminding its dear friend, its partner—I prefer these terms to the term “owner,” though I certainly understand its place in your initial question—of the world he only narrowly escaped, a world he would not have survived without the fist. Now, the former beloved has given his hands over to other labors, other forms of poeisis. That letting-go is an arduous, painful process. There’s shame, and blood in it.

In “home force: presumption of death,” you erase the legalese of a Florida Statute—the infamous “Stand Your Ground” law—and craft some beautiful and heartbreaking lines out of that language (lines like “it is necessary// to prevent the body, harm/ him, sing get over it.”) What were some of your goals in working with that language? What unique challenges does a poet face with erasure? 

I’m not sure I set out with a goal in this poem other than to de-familiarize the original document while maintaining the (ostensible, unstable) position of its authors. I wanted to say what it was saying but in my way own way, on my own terms. I wanted to wrest sovereignty from the statute itself. I wanted to put words in the law’s mouth.

These two poems deal directly with violence, whether it’s an inner struggle to remain non-violent, or a codified, state-sponsored violence against people for whom “personhood does not apply”. What, in your opinion, is the role and capability of poetry in this context? In other words, how can poetry (and the poets behind it) respond to what seems like relentless violence and injustice around us?

I‘m not always sure that poetry can do what I want or need it to. I think often of Baraka’s expressed desire in “Blk Art” for “poems that breathe like wrestlers…poems that kill” and then wonder what I would want a poem, any poem, I write to make or unmake in the world if the poem had such capacity available to it, such breadth or speed or life. And maybe poems move people throughout the world every single day in ways that I can’t yet fathom. I’m almost certain that I wouldn’t be an educator right now if I had never heard a poem read aloud. The poetry of Margaret Walker and Lucille Clifton and Fred Moten and Greg Pardlo and Ai and Gerald Barrax and Robert Hayden and Thylias Moss and Gwendolyn Brooks (and the list goes on and on, spanning out into the ether) have utterly transformed the landscape of my inner life, and ultimately made me a much more thoughtful, skeptical, reckless human being. So perhaps we can respond to the injustice and violence of the world by writing poems that move people to the point that they are willing to risk death. If the poem can shake us enough that we are willing to give our very lives for one another, to risk safety and security for the sake of a more ethical set of relations, then we have done something very important though not, necessarily, exceedingly rare. I read Clifton’s “come celebrate with me” in my early 20s and I simply couldn’t go back. The same is true for Audre Lorde’s “litany for survival.” Once I reckoned with the central truths of the latter, that is, that “we were never meant to survive,” as well as those of the former—that, like Clifton, “every day something has tried to kill me and has failed”— I realized that I had to live differently. I had to give my life over to the work.  

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

Right now, I am reading For Malcolm: On the Life and Death of Malcolm X, an anthology of poems edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Burroughs. I am also reading Ladan Osman’s The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony. I just finished re-reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Martin Heidegger’s essay “What Are Poets For?” and Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Oh! And “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument” by Sylvia Wynter, which I am always returning to in one way or another.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I recently completed my first manuscript, The Sobbing School, which I hope to see out in the world in the near future. I’m also currently working on my dissertation, “Being Property Once Myself: In Pursuit of The Animal in 20^th Century African American Literature” which I plan to defend the coming spring. It’s a scary, beautiful time right now as it pertains to the writing. I’m trying to map out two distinct, but related intellectual projects: one that is centrally concerned with giving sustained philosophical attention to black sociality, black suffering, and black imagination that usually takes the form of poems. Then there is this whole other thing, which shares those concerns, but takes the form of a dissertation which deploys extended readings of various novels and poems towards the end of thinking about why and how black folks have historically turned toward animal figures as a means of making certain arguments about black personhood, black ways of being human. So yeah. That’s most of what I’m working on right now: honing, sharpening, putting the poems and paragraphs in an order that has a compelling rhythm to it. In the end, it’s always also about the music. Always.  

"The So Common Inglorious End": An Interview with Nathan Oates

Nathan Oates's debut collection of stories, The Empty House, won the 2012 Spokane Prize. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, Witness, Copper Nickel, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories (2008 & 2012), as well as in Forty Stories. He is an associate professor of English at Seton Hall University and lives in Brooklyn with his family.

His story, "The Dead Forest," appeared In issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist. 

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about nameless speakers, Richard Yates, and being in conversation with authors we love.

Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration for “The Dead Forest”? How did it begin for you?

More so than almost anything else I’ve ever written, this story had a direct and powerful inspiration that I can point to. I wrote the first draft of this story during the two months or so that it took me to read 2666 by Roberto Bolano. During my reading of that very long and very terrifying novel I noticed that my experience of reading it was shaping the way I saw the world beyond the page. I read much of that book late in the fall semester during my commute from New York City to New Jersey, where I teach at Seton Hall University, and I kept looking up from those pages and out at the passing swamps of Seacaucus, or the slums of Newark, or the affluent houses of the suburbs, and everything was heavily tinted by the horror and darkness of that novel. The rain streaks on the window of the train seemed poisoned, the battered cars parked crookedly in front of a liquor store seemed to throb with menace, the scorched mattress rotting beneath an overpass, everything was freighted with the feelings of dread and anxiety I felt in the pages of Bolano’s book. This was one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve ever had, and I began to think about the way that fiction can shape the way one sees the world, the way the dream life of the page spills into the waking world, the way that, if one is a writer, one’s sense of self is built explicitly on the imagined works of strangers. This has often struck me as hopeful and even beautiful, but I saw more clearly through Bolano’s great novel that it could also be terrible and frightening. This story was written in that space, when my entire mind was redirected, refocused, through Bolano’s work.

In “The Dead Forest,” a woman is driven and inspired by a novel she loves. When you sit down to write, do you feel you’re in conversation with the writers and books you admire? If so, how?

As I mentioned, the writing of this story was done in response to my reading of Bolano, but that experience made me think about other books that have influenced me in that way – books by Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Bowles, Shirley Jackson, William Trevor, and others – and about that strange dissociating and yet somehow pleasurable feeling of having your view of the world beyond the page, the “real world” radically altered by the act of reading. Everything I write is in response to what I read, though rarely as directly as happened with “The Dead Forest.” I think it’s vital for writers, especially young writers, to find their voice, but I also believe that one discovers one’s voice in writing through reading, by listening to the voices of other writers, and then adding one’s own voice to the conversation. This, as it does for the character in the story, who is at the beginning of her apprenticeship as a writer, often comes through imitation, and out of that, if one is dedicated and obsessive and has some talent, one’s own style and voice begin to glimmer up. That said, I also think writers change and develop, at least I hope I have as a writer. This story was also written when I was beginning to become more interested in gothic fiction, in ghost stories, and wanted to try my hand to writing something like the works of Shirley Jackson, which, like many other people, I’d recently rediscovered. This was the first such ghost story I wrote, and several more followed.

The star of this story remains nameless, while the author we never meet, James Williams, is known by name early on. What are the importance of names in fiction? Why did you make the decision to only give a name to the author? 

I’ve taught creative writing for over a decade and have found that students love to leave their characters unnamed, and I tend to argue that they shouldn’t do this. I argue that an unusual decision of that kind needs to be justified in the story, that it needs to somehow add to the meaning, or the feeling, the story is generating, not just be because one couldn’t think of a good name (which is, admittedly, hard to do). But even as I occasionally argue this in class, I resist, as I think most writers do, the idea that there are “rules” in fiction, so I wanted to give it a try, to see if I could write a story with a nameless main character (she has a name in my head, but I didn’t put it in the story) and to use that namelessness to add to meaning, tone, and feeling in the story, rather than just be distracting. By focusing so much on the name of the famous writer, I hoped to add to this. The main character is a young, aspiring writer at the beginning of her writing life, James Williams is a once-famous, now-faded literary star at the end of his life. I wanted to play with the notion of identity and selfhood as tied up, for the fiction writer, with the making of the work, that one becomes named and known through one’s work, but also to consider how tenuous this makes one’s identity: James Williams is revered by the main character, but most of the other people in the story, including her peers in her creative writing classes, have never heard of him, and only care about him once he’s dead. As your question suggests, I considered not giving the writer a name – basically, not giving anyone a name – and wrote the first draft that way, but once I understood better what the story was about, I decided he should be named, the only named character in the story.

What were the challenges of inventing a literary genius for the purpose of this story? Were you tempted to use a real author?

James Williams is a combination of a number of different writers, though he is probably most heavily based on Richard Yates, who, toward the end of his life, had faded somewhat from the center of literary culture, and who was in a wheelchair and who died in Tuscaloosa, Alabama while a visiting writer at the University of Alabama. I knew about this situation in Yates’s life, and that he died in poverty, his work largely ignored – though thankfully it has had something of a resurgence recently – and this haunted me: the so common inglorious end that so many great writers and artists come to. Though Yates was the model for the character, I didn’t want the story to be freighted with his name, or to have to be true to the facts of his life – Yates lived for a while in Tuscaloosa before dying, for example – and since the story is so much about the porousness of the boundaries between fiction and life, I wanted to write about a fictional fiction writer based on a real fiction writer, in order to add another layer to the interplay of these elements in the story.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a novel and have recently completed a short story collection. Both the novel and the story collection play with genre, as this story adapts the tradition of the ghost story. The collection includes a few ghost stories, some speculative stories, a few that might be called mysteries. The novel is speculative and political.

Who are you reading these days?

As is probably clear from earlier answers, I read a lot, or at least as much as I can, mostly contemporary fiction. Two authors I’ve recently discovered are Jane Gardam, whose Filth books, especially Old Filth, are some of the best written novels I’ve encountered recently, and Antonio Tabucchi, whose novel Pereira Declares is a gorgeous and brilliant book. But to say I discovered these books is not exactly right: I’d heard of both of them for years, but only read Gardam when my wife, the writer Amy Day Wilkinson, told me I should, and I read Tabucchi’s novel after reading an essay by one of my favorite contemporary writers, Moshin Hamid, in which he recommends it. In this way my reading is in conversation with other writers, and the larger community, in a less creepy way, I hope, than it is for the character in “The Dead Forest.” 

"Ready to Surrender Its Fury": An Interview with Leah Silvieus

Leah Silvieus was born in Seoul, South Korea, and was raised in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from The American Academy of Poets, Kundiman, and US Poets in Mexico. Her work has appeared in Four Way Review, CURA, The Collagist, and diode, among others, and has been nominated for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her multimedia poetry projects have been featured at the O, Miami Poetry Festival, The Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, MO., and the Asian American Women Artists Association in San Francisco. She is a certified yoga teacher and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Miami. She currently divides her time between Florida and New York where she works in the yacht hospitality industry. You can visit her at https://leahsilvieus.wordpress.com/

Her poem, "Aubade Before Storm," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviewer Darby Price about hurricanes, the subconscious, and the sound-shape of a line.

Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of your poem, “Aubade Before Storm”? I’m fascinated by the juxtaposition of an aubade, a song of lovers parting at dawn, with the storm that builds throughout the poem—a juxtaposition that creates a palpable tension in lines like, “We imagine voices calling to us, light/ from the fishing boats, tiding fair weather// and believe no harm.” What poetic opportunities did you see in the storm and in the natural landscape of the seaside?

It was the end of the summer season, and I was crewing a yacht delivery from New York to Florida when a hurricane threatened the East Coast. We decided to take shelter in Beaufort, North Carolina. The day before the storm hit couldn’t have been more beautiful. The weather was unseasonably warm and sunny: We walked along the beaches, chatted with the fishermen returning with their catches, and watched the wild horses on the nearby island. There were no signs of storm until mid-afternoon when the captain turned to me and said, “Do you feel that? The breeze just shifted – you can tell the storm’s coming.” I was fascinated by the way in which such a subtle shift in the weather could foretell so much to someone who knew how to read its language. As I was writing this poem, I was also wondering what an aubade sung between self and memory would sound like. Somehow, all of these ideas converged, and this poem resulted.

One of my favorite things about this poem is the way that you’ve crafted image-rich and sonically pleasing lines out of what might otherwise be ordinary language, as in “gust in breeze, the swell tide-buried beyond the outer banks”. Can you tell me about your approach to shaping the language in this poem?

I often think of my writing process as feeling my way through the sound-shape of the line. I studied classical piano through my mid-twenties, and sometimes I think that I’ve sublimated much of my desire for music into my poems. Though I don’t often write in received forms, I think about poetry like I do music in some ways – in terms of meter, pacing, tone, lyric fragments as musical phrasing, etc. Many times, I develop the rhythm and sound-shape of a line before I understand its conceptual meaning. This poem in particular came to me in lyric fragments that I kept arranging and rearranging until they sounded right to me. That was the conscious part of my process.

There is also a subconscious component to this poem. The phrase that runs between stanzas 4 and 5 originally read, “memory is not a keeping // but a forgetting […]” While first writing these lines, I was thinking about how we often think of memory as collecting remembrances of the past, but maybe we could actually think of memory as forgetting all of the stuff in between the memories we consciously or subconsciously find significant. In any event, I brought this poem to a reading, and when I came to that line, I accidentally read “forgiving” instead of  “forgetting.” I felt that the accidental slip opened up some interesting possibilities for the line and kept it that way.

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

Along with some other fellow writers, I’m taking part in Oliver de la Paz’s 2015 Summer Reading Challenge. You can find my list over at my blog: https://leahsilvieus.wordpress.com/blog/

What writing projects are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a chapbook of elegies and nocturnes.  

"Impervious to Those Invisible Fact-Checkers": An Interview with Magdalena Waz

Magdalena Waz is a writer currently living in Brooklyn. She used to live in Ohio, and before that, she lived in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in NEAT, Threadcount, Utter, and Rabbit Catastrophe Review. You can find her on Twitter @ThrowBigWords.

Her essay, "Cartography #1," appeared in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist. 

Here, Magdalena Waz talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about relocation, brevity, and Google Maps.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay “Cartography #1”? What inspired the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

I’m map-obsessed. I studied atlases and kept a kind of captain’s log on road trips. And it started occurring to me about two years ago that I had relocated either by myself or with my family more times than most people. Much of my life was (and has been) spent figuring out how far I would be from something else, how far it would take me to travel to where I wanted to be. The earliest draft of “Cartography #1” spilled out when I was getting ready to leave Ohio, a place about which I had very mixed emotions.

Obviously this piece is very brief—only four paragraphs long. Do you usually write in such concise forms? Did it require a lot of revision to achieve such an economy of language?

Writing short lets me get angry enough to funnel that emotion into something smaller than my brain. When I write long, it feels as if the impulse gets too distilled, and a few days into writing, I get a chance to reassess that initial feeling and reason it away. To write about something difficult or something painful forces me to re-embody those feelings every time I sit down to work on that particular piece or memory. It doesn’t do me any good as a person or a writer to do that, so I write short non-fiction as a result.

Three out of four paragraphs begin, “Let me draw you a map,” but the first paragraph contains no such use of the second person. What inspired you to make this move to include the reader (or someone else you had in mind, perhaps) in repeated direct address?

This piece was originally written to be performed, and I imagined I would need to set a scene before confronting my audience. I needed a way to show another kind of map, preferably tangible. I needed a way, too, to figure out just what was so important in Poland that I, as a narrator, would want to consider the loss. As you can probably tell from this unfocused ramble, I’m still struggling with what I did in that first paragraph and initially spent most of my time revising those first few sentences.

In the third paragraph, you write about the road from Warsaw to Kraków: “Five hours by car. Don’t know how many by train. I’ve never been. Guess you can Google it now, the distance between two cities, between two homes. Drop a pin anywhere in the world.” Did you use Google Maps at all when writing this essay? How do you feel about the internet’s ability to aid (and maybe also corrode) memory and how that can affect the composition of creative nonfiction?

Oh, there is no doubt that I have had a few paragraphs and a few whole essays completely derailed by a quick glance at Google Maps. When I’m writing about movement across continents, I always feel the need to be impervious to those invisible fact-checkers. I look up what places are called if I never bothered to store that information as a child. But on a larger scale, having Google so close to us might be changing the way we think of truth. The right answer is generally the one at the top of the search results, but when placement at the top of those results is malleable, what am I finding when I type a phrase or question into the search bar?

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m turning away from my essays for a few months to work on a lightly science-fiction inspired novel. It’s still too early to tell what that will look like, but know I want to work with a character who is a sort of rabble-rouser or daredevil.

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

I recently read this little book by Maile Meloy called Devotion: A Rat Story. Not only was it a moving story about money and security and home, but I hope it portends the future flexibility of publishing.

"There Weren't Any Witnesses": An Interview with Adam Day

Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, a PEN Emerging Writers Award, and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Lana Turner, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, Scotland, and the Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest.

His poem, "What Would I Document," appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about John Cassavete's Opening Night, the sense of impotence that radiates from the images, and where the poem leaves the narrator and reader.

What role, if any, did the content play in pushing for a two-stanza piece?

There’s a kind of mental stutter that occurs when making the kind of monologue-like statement one might make to someone, like this poem portrays. It’s both run-on and hesitant, so, choppy. So, the two-stanza form seemed an organic fit for that context. It also felt fitting that if provided the paradoxical phenomenon of seeming symmetry via the couplet, but actually explicit moments, given the line-breaks, of asymmetry, fracturedness, confusion.

The diction pops, and the resulting images carry the most weight. What connects the images for you?

I’ll likely go a bit on the connection between the images. John Cassavetes’ film Opening Night (1977), a film about a stage actress’s intense personal and professional turmoil in the midst of performing her role in a play, is important to me, conceptually. While the character Manny, the manager of the starring actress Myrtle, referring to a scripted moment in the play where Myrtle is hit by her counterpart on stage, asks Myrtle on the phone, “What’s wrong with being slapped?” he is also annoyed by his wife Dorothy’s pantomime of being slapped her face, making a noise of contact with her mouth, and falling limp to the bed. This idea of a female actress, playing a female character, being actually slapped, but in the context of the performance of a play, by a male actor, playing a male character, and then the male manager, Manny, questioning her issues with being slapped, while Manny’s wife makes fun of the actress’s complaining by enacting a violence that is seen as real but “pretend” via performance, but which is quite likely a violence women of the era—both within world of the film, and within the real world—would have experienced in the domestic space, is all just too complex and multi-layered not to play with. Not to mention, the implied sexuality of the slaps—Dorothy and Manny are, after all, in their pajamas and in bed during this phone call. And further not to mention, that the actor and actress play lovers in the play, and play lovers in the world of the movie, while the manager and the actress have also been lovers.

So, “I request it,” becomes both literal: “I” request a playful slap, hard slap in the bed; or “I” “request” a slap because “I” am self-destructive, at times, as is Myrtle, the actress, in Opening Night; or “I” “request” a slap by pushing the other over the edge, such that their most likely reaction is to reach out violently, not that that violence can be excused.

And that water spilling down the back of the desk is precisely the kind of thing that might make one want to throw something, make them want to act out, but there is no one to act out against, only a desk or a cup, some water.

But both slap and the spilling water, even just the sound of it, represent some kind of sense of impotence, of the frustration that a thing cannot be undone, that there is no satisfying practical solution. 

The poem ends with a new image, leaving the reader with a sort of agency in understanding how the story ends for the narrator.  As the writer, where does the poem leave the narrator? What about the reader?

The poem likely leaves the narrator in a paradoxical space where self-recognition, which takes some salt, exists besides a kind of vulnerability. The British satirist Simon Hoggart wrote of a member of parliament, “All through Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, Caroline Flint, the Labour MP for Don Valley, had been bobbing up and down, desperate to catch the Speaker's eye and ask a question. Even in the new Labour party Ms Flint is regarded as something of a hardline toady, an aardvark-tongued bootlicker, a member of an active service unit in the greasers' provisional wing.” The hilarity, skepticism and offensiveness combine for something powerful in a more personal context, where the satire is project at the self rather than the other, but still “in the presence of” others, the satire, though now directed at the self, still public, on view. The reader is both being appealed to, implicitly, but also entirely in the position of agreeing with the criticism, rather than offering the potential for relieving the narrator of his/her poor self-perception. Of course, this mirrors the reading experience, in general: the reader always already either is drawn in or turned off; it’s simply in this cast that that phenomenon is addressed directly, and in a more focused way.

What are you currently writing?

I’m just finishing up very long conceptual poem that utilizes a New York Times travel article as its template, over which is written a confusion its context, “36 Hours in Tuscany,” with the ambience of “the war on terror,” and the historical, cultural, and geographical context of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is more subtle than it sounds.

I’m just beginning a longer “poem” that reworks the really, just laughably horribly-written sex scenes penned by authors like Updike, Roth, Franzen, Henry Miller, Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Styron, and others in the context of two great, radical art house films; the former French, the latter Belgian: Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975). Further contextualizing the “poem” is work from Ikkyū, an iconoclastic Japanese Zen Buddhist Monk who wrote eccentric, often crude and sexual poetry; the Circe section of Joyce’s Ulysses, which usefully confuses gender and sexuality; and Rabelais’ intelligently, flagrantly vulgar Gargantua and Pantagruel.

What are you reading?

I read a lot of contemporary and late-modern foreign fiction in English translation. Right now, I’m reading a fantastic Bulgarian novel by Georgi Gospodinov, called The Physics of Sorrow (Open Letter Books, 2015), and Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s engaging Satantango (New Directions, 2013), a Hungarian novel. Krasznahorkai just won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. I’m also reading Jakov Lind’s Landscape in Concrete (Open Letter Books, 2009), first published in German in 1966, which is wonderful. The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Press, 2015) by Corina Copp, and recently finished Fred Moten’s book of poems, The Feel Trio, which is just a mind blowlingly complex and compelling text. I’m just about to dig into Broc Rossell’s new book with Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Festival.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Gregory Howard

Gregory Howard teaches creative writing, contemporary literature, and film studies at the University of Maine. His fiction and essays have appeared in Web Conjunctions, Harp & Altar, and Tarpaulin Sky, among other journals. Hospice (FC2) is his first novel. He lives in Bangor, Maine with his wife and cats.

An excerpt from his novel, "Hospice," appeared in Issue Sixty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, he answers questions in the form of excerpts Hospice.

What is writing like?

Here is what she remembers. She is sitting cross-legged underneath the kitchen table with translucent tape across her mouth. Is that right? It is night and she can see the bare white legs of her mother who is mopping the floor. It is late at night, two, maybe three. She assumes it is her mother mopping the floor. Who else could it be? On her lap she has placed a small orange pillow and on the pillow a stuffed crow. There is a sound like whispering but percussive and the mop jabs at the floor. The stuffed crow has large white glass eyes not small black ones. She calls him Henry but not to his face. Soon she will open her mouth. She will open it slowly. The tape will peel off her face, first in small bursts then all at once. It is the sensation of becoming, like pecking through a soft membrane or crawling out of a thick lake. But for a moment it will feel like she will never open her mouth again, like she has no mouth at all.

What isn’t writing like?

Every day I feel myself moving away from the self I have been towards something dark and diffuse. But I am certain that my friend is waiting for me on the other side. I am certain he is waiting there, holding with him all my life’s days

When you do it, why?

The games weren’t Tim and Marinella’s first choice and in truth they weren’t very good at them. Often Lucy had to shout corrections or even stop them in the middle of some confused gesture to offer reprimands and show them how a thing should be done.

Look, she told them. This is important. We’re going to play until you get it right. If you can’t do the simple stuff there’s no way we can get to the next level.

When you don’t, why?

I’ll find her, Lucy said, miserably. I’ll be better. I’ll do my best.

Oh no, the head nurse said. No you won’t. I’ve seen your best. I’ve watched it unfold, tethered, as it is, to delusions of insight and propriety. My word! You’re like an unattended

garden hose, spraying everything but the vegetables! No, no, my dear. What you’ll do now is my best. What you’ll do now is exactly what you are told. You’ve had your chance and it

turned out terribly. Now, the nurse said cheerfully, it’s time to grow up.

"The Things I Gravitated toward When I Was Most Lost": An Interview with Melissa Ferrone

Melissa Ferrone lives in Morgantown West Virginia, where she teaches Composition and Rhetoric at West Virginia University. Her nonfiction has been published in Brevity, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, The Fourth River, and The Normal School, among others. She also has an essay forthcoming in The Colorado Review. This August, she will be attending the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Vermont.

Her essay, "Recipes," appeared in Issue Sixty-Seven of The Collagist. 

Here, Melissa Ferrone talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about brevity, chronology, and rediscovering the self.

What can you tell us about the origins of this essay? How did the idea for “Recipes” come to you?

“Recipes” came from a desire to track the changes in my habits, and the changes in my inclinations toward comfort, after being raped. Comfort and security were the two things that I profoundly lacked for a very long time after the assault. The essay is an attempt to retrieve them, to find a sense of completion in the things I gravitated toward when I was most lost.

A part of it, too, is a spin on the idea of “comfort food,” and the idea of the “perfect cocktail” of medications. But most of the essay is the reflection on what I drifted toward in my moments of pain, and how those things (food, or chapstick, or a photograph, or otherwise) cured my sense of loss, if only temporarily.

For instance, in the essay, part of the remedy for my first public flashback is the sleeve of Ritz crackers my roommate bought. It is less about the food itself, and more about the fact that they belonged to someone else—that my roommate bought them, successfully, the way I couldn’t buy the pears earlier in the paragraph; that she existed as a whole person, when I could not. Eating the crackers is an attempt to mirror her normality, a moment where I tried to feed off her sense of comfort.

I first noticed that this piece was moving through time in a non-linear manner when the narrator went from “the hearing, the guilty verdict” to “that day, your freshman year of college.” What made you decide to present events in this essay out of chronological order? What are the advantages or effects of this decision?

The order of the essay came very naturally. I wanted to begin in a present moment to establish the stakes, and then move backward, so the reader could experience the unraveling of the self as well as the unraveling of the narrative and the unraveling of the structure. A big part of this essay is exploring the idea of being unhinged, the idea of losing the self. I wanted to show that by stripping away the most grounding aspect of a narrative: chronology…leaving the reader with uneven footing and a warped sense of time to mimic the struggle of rediscovering direction and identity.

Three paragraphs from the end, the essay shifts focus toward a photograph from your childhood and the moment it was taken, and the final two paragraphs abandon the conceit of a “recipe” seen in all of the others. Why did the piece’s repetition need to be disrupted in order for the essay to reach its conclusion?

I wanted the photograph to serve as that final creation, the thing that I was striving toward all along. Throughout the essay, these lists of recipes serve as both remedies and reminders of these crucial moments. If we’re sticking with the cooking metaphor, the photograph is that finished product, or at least the idea of the finished product, that you’re striving toward.      All these moments, these recipes, are illustrations of the struggle of redefining who you are after you’ve been raped. For me, I had to go far back, to a moment of innocence, of missing home, of family and comfort, to begin to find myself again. I had to break the cycle of grief to remember that intimacy, and so the repetition of the essay broke, shifting into this saccharine memory to show the first glimmer of healing.

Your essay relies on a remarkable level of concision and selectivity of experience. I also see that your first publication was in Brevity, and Kelly Sundberg included your writing in a list of eight flash nonfiction writers. What draws you to such brief forms of essay writing? Does it require a lot of revision to achieve such an economy of language?

I write in two opposite spectrums: very long essays that range upwards of 7,000 words, and very short essays that cap at 750 words. Each form draws on a different part of me, and in that way my writing addresses two different selves.

I come to the brief essay for moments that feel potent, and intimate. In larger essays I find myself reaching outward, pulling things together to enhance the experience and to propel discovery. In the brief essays, everything is already there in that moment, or that realization, or that pattern. And a lot of the work is done by looking closer and stripping away all the excess to get to that core.

It takes a lot of revision and a great deal of patience to craft brief essays. I can be pretty verbose, and go on and on and on, so it is nice to have that word limit challenge me. It forces me to say, “Okay, that sounds pretty and all, but are you really saying what you want to? Is this it?” And in that way it keeps me in check, and helps me stay loyal to what the essay needs, rather than what it can accommodate.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I recently finished an essay that reflects on the darkness between girlhood and womanhood, and womanhood and motherhood. Right now, I’m working on a very lyric, collage-style essay that focuses on beginnings, rebirth, and longing… A kind of exercise on what drives me to write, a declaration of what I’m searching for in my own work.

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

I read a lot of poetry. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Charles Wright’s Caribou. Though it isn’t new, Robert Hass’s The Apple Trees at Olema is always on my list of “Things I’ve Read,” and “Things I Can’t Stop Reading,” along with Terrance Hayes’s Wind in a Box.

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Katie Jean Shinkle

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of The Arson People (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015) as well as Our Prayers After the Fire (Blue Square Press, 2014). She serves as Associate Editor of Denver Quarterly.

Her novel, The Arson People, appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist. 

Here, she answers questions in the form of excerpts from The Arson People. 

What is writing like?

“I have warrants so no one is leaving.”

What isn’t writing like?

It is the final weeks of July, she is so happy to have this month almost over. She hates July. She wants everything to go back to normal, to go back to school in the fall, to forget all of this has ever happened.

When you do it, why?

Seventeen acres of dark underdeveloped trees and grass are on fire.

When you don’t, why?

But her crush had long since not been her crush, her parents moved, and now the house is empty save for random tenants her long time ago crush’s parents allow to live there.