"A Slow March toward Becoming": An Interview with Andrew R. Touhy

Andrew R. Touhy, a recipient of the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award and Fourteen Hills’ Bambi Holmes Fiction Prize, is also a nominee for inclusion in Best New American Voices. His work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Colorado Review, Eleven Eleven, and other literary journals. He teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco and Berkeley, and lives in Oakland with his wife and child.

His story, "Lame Head," appeared in Issue Sixty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Andrew R. Touhy talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about names, time, and dreams.

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

If I recall correctly, the outline of the piece came to me in a dream. The next morning I set to work getting what I could down in sketch form. I had something like ten written pages of moments or “Lame Head” scenes that hung rather loosely together. So the story began in vignettes and pretty much stayed so, although over time, draft by draft, I tried to flesh them out and build up more of a traditional narrative arc, scant as that may be.

I was unemployed at the time, I should say, biking around Berkeley with a handlebar basket for groceries and such. Laid off, like Lame Head and the plastic rental plants, when the first dotcom bubble burst. And I was thinking a lot about “positions” we hold in our daily lives. Identity is always on the table when I put a character together. Who am I today? Who was I before? Who will I be/allow myself to be tomorrow? There are all these markers out there, designators of who and what we are and should be—should want to be. But how do we really know who we are, come to own who we really are, contradictions, competing desires, lucky breaks and warts and all? To this day I struggle with what I can only call this condition. Back then, with no job, no income, and no place I needed to be from one hour to the next (with the exception of a donation-based yoga class), I was certainly feeling rudderless, although I was working hard at becoming a writer. That was one identity I knew I wanted to adopt or . . . better yet, absorb to the point of second nature.

So I guess you could say I was divided up psychologically. And I found I somehow needed to express this, to give it form in the materials of the material. I didn’t think this through, though. It was an instinctive, even playful choice. Hence the answer to your next question.

The protagonist of this story is known to the audience by three different names (Lame Head, Editorial Assistant, and Plain Me), and which one the narrator uses in a given moment seems to depend on the character’s circumstances and/or mood. How did you come to the decision to refer to your character only by these nicknames and never a more conventional name?

Lame Head was Lame Head’s name from the get-go. He pretty much thinks of himself rather lamely as Lame Head, so I ran with it. I’m sure I thought it was a funny name to use, initially. Meaning, it sounds absurd, like a dumb thing to hang on a character, a kind of pronouncement, but at the same time it is also a pointed attempt to deflate his big-headed self-consciousness. There’s a lot going on in his head, not much of note exactly, but a lot of chatter and static and worry and judgment and fear, etc. He’s pretty self-absorbed and aware of that fact, so it could easily be a name he saddles himself with, as we all do. Oh, you Bone Head you and so on. But in Lame Head’s case, the label has swallowed him a bit like Jonah’s whale. Lame Head is the way—whatever his real, given name is—the character moves through the world now.

So, yes, you could say that his name encapsulates his mood in the story, or his emotional state. His mental state too. He clearly feels and acts—and is—out of sorts, cut adrift, searching, although not very effectively, for something to either anchor or activate him. For me the story is a slow march toward becoming. Or more accurately: a slow march toward understanding that a becoming is possible. Part of that possible becoming is simply realizing that it is okay to be him, that he’s not as bad as he makes himself out to be. At least I hope that’s in there. He’s been selling himself short for a long time, in other words. But it’s not too late.

The other titles, if you will, came about during revision. They handle those moments when Lame Head is feeling more confident or delusional, or simply balanced/penitent/earnest or “normal.” They are a bit more specific and prescriptive and effective than “Big Head” and “Little Head” (or “Small Head’), don’t you agree?

In the first paragraph Lame Head wakes to the sounds of construction that is anticipated to continue “until the intersection of Woolsey and King was left to look like nothing had happened,” but after that the reader never learns what kind of something really did occur at that intersection. Also, the story gives us references to someone named Allie, when the protagonist writes to her and when he recalls one of her “dark-cloud tirades,” but we’re never told with clarity just what his history and relationship with Allie is/was exactly. How much of Lame Head’s backstory did you dream up and/or plot out, and how much did you leave up to even your own imagination? And how do you figure out where to draw the line between what the reader should be privy to and what we have to fill in ourselves?

Well, I imagine the intersection healed. Or—right now, today—it’s under construction again. You know how this works, one day they’re digging up the streets of your neighborhood, the next the big trucks and smelly stuff and yapping men are gone and you can’t remember the holes and rubble. I was, I think, evoking (invoking even) time. Its fast slowness; its slow fastness. Its seamless and frequently insufferable movement one way or the other. As well as setting up Lame Head’s mood time by way of this immediate material world: what’s out his window. Today? Yesterday? Tomorrow? I don’t think much about backstory, except to maybe take it away when I feel I’m being too informational. Stories aren’t explanations, as Tim O’Brien has said. We all forget this, or can’t control ourselves enough in the rewriting. At my best I mete out connective tissue as needed, as little as possible at that. Otherwise I ruin my stories with deadwood. Allie, I think we can imagine, is a significant other. She suffers Lame Head’s mooty dramatics because she can see the angels of his better nature. They go on I’m sure to get married and argue little and reproduce a whip smart baby-blond boy named after a poet. But that’s not part of the story yet—no more a part of it than the night they met and why, specifically, they’re wounded in love.

So it—forestory, as well as backstory—stays on the cutting room floor in service of the moment-in-time crisis. The midstory. Lame Head’s got some blind spots.

In a story full of strange scenes, one of the weirdest is Lame Head’s dream near the end—a scene that combines Tom Waits, a video arcade, and references to Ghostbusters. Besides the obvious sources from pop culture, what inspired the creation of this dream sequence? What do you consider to be its function in the story?

It’s not a dream sequence but rather a dream, right? Lame Head is actually dreaming, and we, lucky us, are privy to that. I’m sure—like many of the things in the story—I had this same dream. I know I’ve always wanted to meet Tom Waits. I’ve never really considered its function in the story, though. In fact, I was leery of including it in the piece—no dreams and all that in fiction, as they are one removed from reality and we’re already straining a reader’s suspension of disbelief. But I think the dream is odd and funny, that’s the most important part. And when I look at it now, and analyze it some, I realize that it’s there to express how low Lame Head is emotionally, psychologically. Dreams are supposed to be good or sweet or happy. Or, if they’re nightmares, scary, foreboding, etc. Here Lame Head has a pretty middling dream. It is full of impotence, zero gratification, frustration. He has no agency in the dream, and this mirrors his feeling of his own life at the moment. He can’t muster enough imagination to dream up a good nightmare, or enjoy a simple satisfying cup of coffee with a childhood hero.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Trying to write new stories. Always. Sending my collection manuscript (“Brother from San Francisco”) out to contests and presses. I’ve just finished a story about wearing a beard. It’s a pastiche piece, told in close-cropped vignettes that barely hang together to form a whole. Like my own facial hair.

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

Reading Charles Baxter’s A Relative Stranger, along with his collection of essays on the art of subtext. Wonderful stories, wonderful essays. I’m reading Richard Bausch’s collected stories—the big red hardcover one (672 pages) from Harper. Will be reading The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter when I get a week or weekend free from my life. It’s summertime. There’s hope.

"He Showed Me His Other Mouth. He Wanted Me to Kiss Him There.": An Interview with Jacques Debrot

Jacques Debrot has a PhD from Harvard University and chairs the department of Literature and Language at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee's Cumberland Mountains. His short fiction appears recently in Pear Noir!, 101 Fiction, and Wigleaf.  In 2013, two of his stories were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

His story, "I Am Jerzy Kosinski," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Keaton Maddox about literary celebrity, forcing fiction into biography, and dissatisfaction with the realist illusion of traditional narrative.

This piece works as an extensive character study without the protagonist ever being able to speak for himself. Your time line fluctuates order without abandon (with all “interviews” taking place various lengths after Jerzy Kosinski’s suicide) and the setting constantly shifts location as well. What was your thought process for forming the narrative in this way, bit by bit after the fact?

My model for the interviews were the short monologues at the heart of Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives.  What appealed to me—in addition to the mimicry the different voices required—was the idea of playing with at least three different chronologies: the timeline of the events in Kosinski’s life, the order of their appearance in the narrative, and the dates at which the interviews occurred. There wasn’t anything to stop me from having an interview conducted in 2012, say, precede another in the story, transpiring in 1991.  Or to place one interview at a Bahamas resort immediately next to another in a New York cancer hospital, or at the Stonewall Inn.  I hoped this would call attention to the story’s constructedness.  I didn’t want to hide the seams.  I wanted the reader to see the raw edges.  But also, I suppose I’m not interested in the kind of effort required to retain the realist illusion. I don’t see the payoff.  I mean, in order to tell the story of somebody’s life in twenty pages, which is one of the things I was trying to do in “Kosinski”, you have to leave out so much.  And if you attempt to accomplish it in a more or less conventional manner you inevitably get caught in the trap of having to account for your elisions, of having to explain and justify them, etc. The aim is to lull the reader into a passive, dreamlike state.  But there are more interesting possibilities for fiction.    

Let’s talk about the second mouth. My first time reading through the story, this was the most confounding part for me. Obviously, Jerzy Kosinski was a real Polish novelist who was confronted with plagiarism allegations and killed himself in 1991. Yet, having all the responding voices reference his second mouth (which was not real), forces the reader to acknowledge this piece as fiction. What was your aim for this inclusion?

In the first drafts of the story, there was no second mouth.  “Kosinski” was pretty much straightforwardly Kosinski. I wanted to merge the different genres of fiction and reportage and biography—or whatever—but I felt I was leaning too hard on the “facts” of Kosinski’s life. The traditional way to write yourself out of this problem is to retain the facts, but give your protagonist the kind of deeply imagined interior life that biographers aren’t permitted to invent.  But I just wasn’t interested in going that route.  And I didn’t want to abandon the facts of Kosinski’s life either because they were precisely what fascinated me.  So I put the story away for a year.  And then one day I picked up Charles Burns’ graphic novel, Black Hole. In the book there’s a type of STD that results in bodily mutations, one of which is growing a second mouth.  And as soon as I read that I immediately knew it’s what I would give Kosinski.  It just seemed to me to be a suggestive metaphor for his being bereft of his original language, Polish—his second mouth—as well as for everything else that he repressed about his life.  It took me a day, I think, to make the revisions.   

What was it about Jerzy Kosinski that led you to want to fictionalize a comprehensive understanding of his life in the wake of his death? How did this play into the title of the piece where a narrator claims himself as the protagonist without ever speaking within the story itself?

An argument could be made that Kosinski was one of the major literary figures of the 1970s.  He won the National Book Award, served two terms as president of PEN, and sold as many books as practically anyone else who was writing serious novels back then. But he seemed just as interested in becoming a celebrity.  And he worked very hard at cultivating an image of someone living on the edge.  He visited sex clubs, he skied and played polo with the super-rich, and he was constantly dropping hints about being a CIA agent, or working for SAVAK, or Israeli intelligence, or the KGB.  It became a part he played on Dick Cavett and the Tonight Show (where he appeared twelve times). And now he’s forgotten.  I don’t think he’s read at all by young writers.  That was one of my anxieties about the story.  I was worried that readers wouldn’t know who he was.  Of course if you become famous for your prose style and it turns out you’re not actually writing a lot of your own work, your books aren’t going to last.  But it also says something more generally true about the half-life of literary reputations.  In the long run everyone will be forgotten.  Anyway, in the original version of my story, the narrators were Kosinski’s ghostwriters.  He had dozens of them, apparently.  So they really could say, “I am Jerzy Kosinski.” But after I went in another direction, I decided not to change the title.  Now, however, it wasn’t an assertion anymore, but a question.  What I heard was, “Am I Jerzy Kosinski?” An identity that never possessed an interiority, in any case.  But was always—even more so, or at least more self-consciously so, than other people’s identities—a fiction.

What are you writing?

Among other things, I’m writing two more absurdist interventions in the lives of real authors.  I think about them and “Kosinski” as a kind of triptych.  The second, recently finished, follows D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, to Lake Chalupa in Mexico.  The third, almost complete, is about William Burroughs. 

What are you reading?

 I’ve been on a Javier Marias kick recently and have just finished The Infatuations and Tomorrow in the Battle Think of Me.  Edouard Leve is a writer I’ve just discovered: Suicide and Autoportrait are both very powerful and strange. I think I’ll take up the challenge of Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers. Also I’m reading Michael Gorra’s book about Henry James, Portrait of a Novel, and Ben Jeffery’s take on Michel Houellebecq in Anti-Matter.

"Trying to Chip Away at Universal Truths": An Interview with Erica Trabold

Erica Trabold (@ericatrabold) is a writer of family and memory. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, Weave Magazine, Penumbra, and others. She writes and teaches in Oregon, where she is pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction.

Her essay, "Canyoneering," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.

Here, Erica Trabold talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about family stories, universality, and mythic inspiration.

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

Two years ago, my husband and I took a roadtrip from Nebraska, where we lived at the time, through the deserts of the American southwest. One of our first stops was Roswell. We were interested in the place for a variety of reasons, namely the UFO conspiracies and kitschy roadside attractions, but I also approached the place with a kind of reverence. It’s the city where my biological grandfather lived for most of his adult life. Because my dad was adopted as a child, I never knew my grandfather—all I had was this story he would tell about taking me to New Mexico when I was a baby. Being in Roswell again felt a bit unreal. When I walked into Carlsbad Caverns, I realized I was reliving a moment I’d been imagining my whole life.

In the first section, amid telling the story of a trip taken when you were a year old, you wrote of your parents that “they have told me about our trip and my behavior dozens of times. I don’t ask for careful explanation. I assume I have always been attracted to the mysterious, adopting family stories as part of my own. In my memory, they are solidified.” When you are crafting personal essays and your own history through tales like this trip, how much investigation do you do into your family’s stories? If indeed you are willing to “assume” that you’ve always been a certain way, to what extent can you permit yourself to fill in the gaps of the unremembered past with your own solidifying?

Nothing ignites my curiosity more than hearing a story about myself I can’t remember. My dad is always telling these beautiful little vignettes. He tells stories so well and so often that they just become part of my repertoire, and I consider my retellings nonfiction. Words like “assume” teach the reader what to expect from my work—assumptions, gaps, second-hand information. In this essay, I’m much more interested in how we remember and interpret experience than I am in fact-checking my dad. Instead, I’m attempting to mirror the ways I know what I know in the essay’s language and form. Telling our family history any other way wouldn’t be true. There’s so much we just don’t know.

Perhaps the most riveting descriptions in this essay appear in the section where rocks growl and boulders become bears, culminating in this unforgettable line: “Ten thousand ghosts created the sand beneath your feet.” In this essay you’re combining science and your own experiences of caves and canyons to create something that sounds like a creation myth. What is the relationship between mythology and your writing? Can you speak about how a work of nonfiction can be in dialogue with, or become an example of, myth-making?

Stories passed down through generations often take on this quality because they sound a lot like myths. They explain our origins. They give us history. They tell us who we are. They offer a reason why. I have found it impossible to write family history without mythic inspiration, and I think it’s somewhat our responsibility as writers to continue the tradition by creating our own.

Your essay takes an interesting turn in its final paragraph. Here’s an excerpt of what I’m talking about: “Now imagine a hole the size of your heart. Not a giant thing, but miles deep and grand in its own way. You fall in. You’re loving it.” Up until this point the essay has not contained any direct address. What made you decide that the essay’s final move should be a switch to second person and this invitation to the reader (unless, of course, you had someone else in mind for the essay’s use of “you”)?

The conclusion of the essay does feel like an invitation. I think this is because, as a genre, nonfiction is always trying to chip away at universal truths. It’s always asking the reader to consider the myriad ways a single experience contains significance and meaning. A lot of times, the essayist’s nod to universality is a whisper, but because of this essay’s fragmented nature, I felt I needed to make its universality louder. Though the final lines are certainly open to interpretation, my hope is that each reader can cling to something that accords with the way they’ve experienced the world.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m still essaying about water—lakes, oceans, droughts—and I’m always going to be writing about my family. They are the most interesting people I know.

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

Lately, I’ve found myself gravitating toward short story collections, which is a genre I’ve had little to no experience reading. I’m right in the middle of Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t, which has been a treat so far, and I just finished Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn. Both women have inspired me in a way I wasn’t expecting would influence my approach to nonfiction. I’m grateful.

"To Pay the Dentist or Some Other Piper": An Interview with Kathleen Heil

Kathleen Heil’s poems, stories, essays and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in FENCE, Gigantic, World Literature Today, Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Guernica, BOMB, Quarterly West, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Born and raised in area New Orleans, she is a 2015–2016 Sturgis International Fellow in Berlin. More info at kathleenheil.net.

Her essay, "Three Cut Short," appeared in Issue Sixty-Nine of The Collagist. 

Here, Kathleen Heil talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Umberto Saba, brevity, and moaning writers.

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

I have my former professor Geoffrey Brock to thank for learning about Umberto Saba's work and the notion of imitation as a form of translation, which served as inspiration for my “Cut Short” pieces. Brock edited The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, which includes excerpts of Saba's Shortcuts, and led me to seek out the complete Scorciatoie in the original Italian. (They haven't been translated in full into English but Estelle Gilson's translations of The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba [Sheep Meadow, 1993] offers a nice introduction to his work).

Of course this essay is very concise—only three paragraphs, each one standing on its own to some extent, as the title implies. How do you achieve such an economy of language? Did it require a lot of revision to trim down the word count, or does this kind of brevity come naturally?

Hmm. Naturally, I guess, but I have Saba to thank, since his pieces acted as templates for my own. His Shortcuts are aphorisms insisting on the truth of what they proclaim, while at the same time undermining our faith in such statements, since they point to the dangers of making such confident proclamations with their tendency toward the absurd. It's probably helpful to contextualize the pieces in the time he was writing, the 1940s, when faith in ideological certainty had dangerous, disastrous consequences; a time, perhaps, not entirely different from our own, when you consider the dangerously absurd naïveté of young Europeans and Americans willing to embrace the hateful ideological 'certainties' promoted by ISIS.

In the second paragraph you write, “[…] when you don’t pay for something they say it has no value which is why people don’t care about literature and also maybe why writers are always moaning about something most people don’t care about because of money because there are no rock stars in literature and the ones who think they are rock stars are a bunch of weenies (name your names now). But sometimes there is joy and always there is lots of moaning. This is true of religion, literature, and rock music.” As a writer, do you find yourself moaning as described here? What are we moaning about mostly?

Ahh, good question! Most definitely, and all too often. I think writers are an easily aggrieved bunch, and I of course include myself in that statement. I think we often moan about cultural capital, i.e. prestige, as a way of avoiding talking about anxieties related to survival, safety, and love—those old chestnuts. To be fair, it is hard to live in a culture where value at-large is tied so closely to cold hard cash, which is good for rock stars and maybe for religion but not so great for writers. You can't pay the rent with a contributor's copy (and of course, neither can most journal editors, since they often work for salaries either negligible or nonexistent); instead of detailing why I think this is problematic at best, I will simply say that this model has elicited, on my part, more than one crying jag/freak out, when I've been called to pay the dentist or some other piper. That said, I don't think anyone needs to feel sorry for writers (though that, as I said, doesn't stop us from complaining, which, come to think of this response...).

Your website shows that your writing takes many forms: poetry, essays, stories, and even translations. What writing lessons have you learned from one genre that you’ve then taken into how you write in another?

Geoff Dyer's multi-genre and cross-disciplinary writing has served as inspiration for my own approach, which is to let content determine the form and to be suspicious of, as he calls them, “clichés of expectation” surrounding form. A less pretentious way of putting it would be to say that I try to follow my curiosity where it takes me. If I still haven't answered your question, it's because I think the strategies we develop as writers are only semi-conscious at best, and so though I'm confident that writing in one genre informs and enriches my work in another, I also feel somewhat ill-equipped to explain the process.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I'm translating a script from Italian, revising my poetry manuscript more like the weather, and  needing to give some revision love to a novel-in-progress entitled Whale Watch. Finally, as a Sturgis International Fellow, I'm thrilled to have recently moved to Berlin to research and write about the city's international contemporary dance scene, and extend all my thanks to the Sturgis Foundation at the University of Arkansas for their support.

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

Alejandro Zambra's Facsímil (Hueders, 2015), a novel-cum-standardized test, an excerpt of which was recently published in The New Yorker, in translation by Megan McDowell; All Night It Is Morning, poems by Andy Young (Diálogos, 2014); Gail Hareven's novel Lies, First Person, in translation by Dalya Bilu (Open Letter, 2015); and finally, it's not a recent read, but I'd like to proselytize on behalf of the Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov's wry and touching auto-fictions (I'd suggest starting with The Suitcase, in translation by Antonina W. Bouis [Counterpoint, 2011]).

"Weasels Solve Everything": An Interview with Annie Bilancini

Annie Bilancini writes and teaches in Marquette, MI. Her work has appeared most recently in journals such as The Collagist, Knee-Jerk, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is an associate editor for Passages North, helps co-edit the hybrid prose journal Threadcount, and serves as an associate editor for content at SmokeLong Quarterly.

Her story, "The House of Schiaparelli," appeared In Issue Sixty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Annie Bilancini talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about research, hybridity, and lipstick.

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

This is maybe going to sound really silly, but this story actually exists because of a misguided Sephora lipstick purchase. Or maybe that’s an awesome reason to have written a story.  Regardless, this story is a result of a bright pink lipstick from Nars called “Schiap.” I bought it on a whim because it was such a ridiculously bright pink, but I had no idea what the name meant. After a quick Google search, I discovered the lipstick was an homage to Elsa Schiaparelli, and I was instantly smitten with her and her work.

Your writing about Elsa Schiaparelli and other historical figures (such as your “Lady Tyger” story published in Smokelong Quarterly) must require a lot of research. What is the relationship between fact and fiction in your writing about real people? What are the limits of loyalty to the subject’s actual biography, and to what extent are you comfortable with inserting your own invention into their remembered lives?

The research portion of the writing process has been a blast, and working with Elsa’s story was particularly instructive because she was an artist and had a lot to say about the creative process. It helped me think about not only what to include in the piece, but how to include it. I wanted each section of the piece to represent both a moment in her life, as well as a design she had created, so crafting the prose was heavily inspired by her designs. This actually resulted in much denser prose. The sentences were more complex, more finely tuned. I felt like I was trying to write the designs. So I suppose the “facts” showed up on the page in unexpected ways.  As far as the limits of loyalty, I knew I wanted these pieces to be flash, and the kind of flash I enjoy writing often focuses on excavating moments, which nearly always results in some kind of invention on my part. The facts were there, but in order to make a piece of art, it was necessary to wrap those facts in sounds and images that very well never may have existed. Knowing what I know about Schiap’s allegiance to reality (or lack thereof), I felt a lot more comfortable taking those imaginative leaps on the page to represent her life and art.

The sections of this story seem to be arranged mostly in chronological order, beginning in childhood and ending after the war. The one notable exception that I can find is that the lines, “She is buried in this color. It is not her design,” do not come at the very end but in the penultimate section. How did you decide that the story should not end here but with another memory from her childhood? What was your goal for this story’s ending?

That was actually based on a workshop suggestion from my instructor (the amazingly fabulous Jen Howard). She felt the piece needed to build momentum toward something beyond chronology. The piece isn’t meant to be strictly biographical, so its organization couldn’t and shouldn’t be time-based. Moving toward that final image, the seeds in her mouth (which isn’t something I made up; she actually did that!) and that anticipation, that was such a wonderfully loaded moment and such a compelling image.  Ending the story with what is essentially a meaningful act of creation felt right for someone whose own creations were so important to the culture and history of fashion at the time. Jen’s feedback was integral to bringing that moment about.

Your bio says that you also co-edit Threadcount, “a journal of hybrid prose.” What is your definition of a “hybrid” in literature? Why is it important to you as an editor that the pieces you publish not be easily classified within one genre or another?

For me, the definition of hybrid prose will always be in flux. The nature of what “is and isn’t” in literature is always changing, and I think that’s what fascinated and frustrated us as the journal began to take shape. So at Threadcount, our goal is to publish prose that resists easy categorization. That’s not to say a reader couldn’t consider some of the works we publish a poem or a piece of flash fiction because many of the works we publish still have the shape or the curve of familiar forms. It just may be that some basic rules are broken; a short story’s narrative structure is abandoned in service of singular, surprising image (like this, for example).  I think we just wanted to create room at the table for all the writing out there that isn’t quite this or that, but this other thing that takes up space on the page in an unexpected way. You know, prose that walks like a duck and talks like a duck, but is actually your uncle stricken with a mind-controlling fungus. That old chestnut.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Right now I’m working on a flash series that kind of riffs on the writing of Marie de France (a medieval poet). Medieval literature is great fun because it’s a lot of “And then this happened! And then this happened!” All those rules you’re taught about narrative and character are completely dismantled. It’s deus ex machina out the wazoo, but in the best possible way. For example, in one story, two weasels show up out of nowhere at the end and save all the principle characters from harm and everyone lives happily ever after. The weasels don’t really seem to symbolize anything. They just show up, resolve all the issues that the story has built up, and then scamper back into the forest. And the lesson, of course, is that weasels solve everything.

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

I just finished Fjords Vol. 1 by Zachary Schomburg, and I loved it a lot. I’m also reading The Ant King: And Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum, and it’s teaching me a lot about how to have fun with writing.

"The Truth her Great-great and Great-great-great Grandchildren Would Not Perceive": An Interview with Jill Stukenberg

Jill Stukenberg, a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University, lives and teaches in Wausau, Wisconsin. Her stories have appeared recently in Devil's Lake and Burrow Press Review.

Her story, "The Lady," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviwer Keaton Maddox about religious inspiration, inter-generational connectivity, and fiction founded in reality.

You capture very well the plight of immigrants trying to make their way in America with little support or help (other than what they believe is helping them from the divine). What kind of research did you conduct in order to capture this difficult way of life so accurately? And once you learned the necessary history of these circumstances, how did you translate that into the formation of this piece?

Thanks. This was definitely a different story for me to write—I usually write about contemporary life. But here’s some unveiling, which will probably reduce the magic of the story: I was drawn to the material from an actual New York Times article read over my breakfast cereal one morning about the formal papal recognition of a 19^th century Virgin Mary sighting in northeastern Wisconsin near where I grew up and where my extended Belgian immigrant descendent family still lives. So there’s a lot of the story right there, which came to me through unintentional research. I was taken with the story, though, because I’d never heard of the little shrine, though once I started asking family members they all had stories, for example of crawling on their knees to the shrine, of people leaving crutches there. When I began writing, I started with the contemporary descendants reacting to the national news of a miracle connected to their own family (my first ideas are pretty imaginative, huh?) but then I became more interested in the idea of someone else living at the time and hearing the news of the vision. What would that be like—that the Queen of Heaven made a visit to your neighborhood, but not to you? I realized I’d have to do more research, which I had mixed feelings about. I wanted to keep the people I was creating at the center, but I also didn’t know anything about them or the details of the visitation. I started reading more about the sighting and that led to some reading about Belgian immigrant life at the time, mostly just on websites though. I had this idea that I wanted to be loose about it. I just wanted details that appealed to my imagination—cholera, carrying shoes to town. Even up until the end (final editing for The Collagist) I had the story set in the wrong season because I liked the images of high summer and the feeling that it would have been hot when Mary visited. But at the last minute I begged the editor (thanks again!) to let me change those details; suddenly it seemed to me that the story should be more anchored in the historical fact that it had been October. Still though, there’s some research I have never done: I’ve never been to visit the shrine. I understand there’s a large parking lot to accommodate all of the visitors now—that made me not want to go there while I was writing.

The Lady herself seems to represent a large swath of different ideas for each of your characters, even if that representation only assumes mere skepticism for some. What does she mean to you personally, and how did that vision play out in your world creation process?

I guess the fact that I had never heard of the little shrine, while my older, baby-boomer relatives had as children made pilgrimages on their knees says a lot already about the cultural and generational viewpoint from which I was writing. I was raised Catholic, though I didn’t choose to confirm, and I later chose a Jesuit university, though mostly because it meant going to a big city—for me, Milwaukee! So I’m not religious, though I have had some Catholic education and I do find religious ideas, including the idea of Mary making visitations of her own —like a First Lady on tour—interesting. And as a writer, I hope I’m not insensitive to mystery.

Your story emphasizes intergenerational connection and the importance of lineage in context. What was your goal in establishing such distinct familial pasts and futures?

Those things sprouted in the story because of my own family history. Though even my great-grandmother was born here, my mother is still a “full-blooded” Belgian, and she has nearly fifty cousins, many of whom still live around Brussels, Wisconsin. If we need an electrician, interior decorator, or city councilman we call up a cousin. One reason the notes of modern family members stayed in “The Lady,” though, is because it balances out—or perhaps illustrates the weight of—the miracle. If the Mother of God makes a visit to someone (or even someone’s neighbor), it had better toll through time, right? It should rank up there with the most outstanding events of any family history for generations to come. Another reason it’s there is because it’s the other, if more quiet, miracle of the story that any pair of settlers, like Tellie and her husband, did survive, and that what resulted from their gamble to cross an ocean and have children in a dangerous place are hundreds of people driving around in cars and reading newspapers online at their breakfast tables. By the way, by comparing that to a miracle, I don’t want to say that European colonization was unquestionably good or reflective of divine will, just that it is miracle-like in its hugeness to think of how many lives, with all of their stories, can result from one pair of humans and their one choice (plus maybe some luck, magic, grace, or what have you).

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a novel set in northern Wisconsin, though in contemporary time. There’s a mother and a teenaged daughter who live at a fishing resort, and a visiting grandmother who may have kidnapped the “grandchildren” who are with her, with a plan to lead them into the Chequamegon National Forest.

“The Lady” is also part of a collection of short stories mostly set in the upper Midwest, and I’m seeking a home for that book. So if you know anybody interested…

What are you reading?

Vacationland, by Sarah Stonich, a novel in stories set in northern Minnesota. I keep going back to it with the intention of studying it, and then just get distracted again by the characters and sentences and place. It’s really outstanding. Also, The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, which is nonfiction and yet also completely absorbing. It is also, perhaps, leading me again down that dark path of toying with fact in my fiction. How many details of climate change can my novel set in northern Wisconsin include? Can climate change itself be a force, a character, as real and unreal as the Mother of God? 

"It’s a Back Story, Way Back": An Interview with Laurie Blauner

Laurie Blauner is the author of three novels, Infinite Kindness, Somebody, and The Bohemians, all from Black Heron Press, as well as seven books of poetry.  A novella called Instructions for Living was published in 2011 from Main Street Rag.  Her most recent book of poetry, It Looks Worse than I Am, was published in 2014 as the first Open Reading Period selection from What Books Press. A poetry chapbook was published in 2013 from dancing girl press.  She has received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship as well as Seattle Arts Commission, King County Arts Commission, 4Culture, and Artist Trust grants and awards.  She was a resident at Centrum in Washington state and was in the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2007.  Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Field, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Collagist, and many other magazines. She is the winner of Leapfrog Press's Fiction Contest; they will be publishing her novel The Solace of Monsters in 2016.  She lives in Seattle, Washington.  Her web site is www.laurieblauner.com.

Her story, "The Unsaid," appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist. 

Here, Laurie Blauner talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about family, revision, and writing in multiple genres.

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

Family. Particularly my family. Much of the story is true or, as is often the case with fiction, it tells a deeper truth than the real events. Some of this material was covered in my first novel called Somebody. I wanted to create a similar tale with parallel or intersecting themes but in as concise a form in fiction as possible. And, with the title, I wanted to show what was unsaid between family members, the unborn and the person carrying her in her body, between drinks and the narrator, and everyone else.

To me the richest, most intriguing part of this piece is the middle section, “Before: I,” which describes a moment in time before the narrator’s birth. What inspired you to write this scene and place it outside of chronological order? How did you decide for yourself how much the unborn first-person narrator should know of this moment?

That part set up the mother and narrator’s difficult communication before and after her birth. In that sense it’s a back story, way back, and we often don’t think or remember things chronologically.

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

I found my handwritten, original copy of “The Unsaid” and saw that I had revised the story several times, changing words and whittling away sentences but, overall, the story didn’t change a lot. And sometimes that happens, that I don’t need to change much but, especially with my longer work, not often. This was probably because of my familiarity with the subject matter (see first question) and because I write poetry and condense everything (see next question).

You write both fiction and poetry. What lessons have you learned from writing poetry that you have then applied to your prose, or vice versa?

I like to condense everything. Both my poetry and fiction often inform each other in style, story, and themes. A phrase in poetry might find its way into my fiction. My prose is lyrical and dense and my poetry has spread out a bit, becoming more conversational. One lesson I’ve learned is that plot can be quite fluid and changing in the same way poetry can contain so many different elements.

What writing projects are you working on now?

A new book of poems, concentrating on science. And a new novel about a young couple’s stubborn, emotionally indigestible relationship told in short paragraphs.

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

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns from 1959, a realistic yet imaginative short novel with lovely language. And I just started Envy by Yuri Olesha, which is good so far, written in 1927. (I’m a little behind in my reading).

"The Brittle, Desperate, Suffocating Love": An Interview with Heather Wells Peterson

Heather Wells Peterson earned her MFA from the University of Florida in 2014. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she writes dialogue for virtual patients and recently finished writing her first novel.

Her three short-shorts, "Spit It Out," "A Ghost," and "Echolalia," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.  

Here, Heather Wells Peterson talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about family, brevity, and a narrator's tone.

Each of your three short-shorts consists of only one paragraph. Is it a challenge to reach this level of concision, or does such brevity come naturally in your writing process? How much revision was required to achieve such an economy of language?

I find this kind of concision incredibly difficult. I think for some people, this length comes naturally—they think this way, I suppose. I’ve always envied that. Most of the time, keeping a story this length is virtually impossible for me.

That said, these stories took very little revision. I was reading an excellent, excellent book called Abbott Awaits, by Chris Bachelder. It’s a novel divided into bite-size vignettes. Reading the book just put me in this very short zone. For a few weeks, stories fell out of me in bite-sized chunks. Then, the trance left as quickly as it had come. I spent some time tweaking sentences, but for the most part, this was one of those rare occasions when something leaves my brain fully formed.

In “Spit It Out,” the man does not spit it out, and we never quite learn what “it” is. The woman becomes increasingly desperate, crying “goddammit” and “Please, please,” while oblivious to the narrative ticking clock that is the tide inching ever closer to her and her son, increasing the suspense, unresolved by the story. In your mind, what are the advantages of ending this piece before the next event happens (e.g., the man spits it out, or the woman digs it up, or the man suffocates, or the ocean gets them both wet)? Why this moment and not the one that follows?

Families are fragile. I think that knowledge was most on my mind as I wrote this. The image of this poor mother almost accosting her adult son, begging him to spit out something that could choke him, while surrounded by other families who are enjoying their day at the beach is, to me, a representation of the brittle, desperate, suffocating love that can bind a family together. The encroaching tide is ominous, and it’s creeping closer, and it’s nearer to this woman and her son than it is to all of the families who are not, at least so obviously, subject to the same brittle, desperate, suffocating love. To me, this approaching darkness isn’t anything specific—any certain event, for instance—so much as it is the mother’s panic and solitude, the looming knowledge that she is alone and responsible for her son, who can’t reasonably be expected to be responsible for himself.

In “A Ghost,” you again withhold information and choose ambiguity, as seen here: “She does not know that the very piece of wood on which she sits is stained with blood. The blood is over one hundred years old. It could be from a small cut, from a birth, from a murder—this information is unavailable—nonetheless, it must be there somewhere, deep in the pitted, knotted slab of wood.” The narrator tells us something Carrie doesn’t know, so we’re not limited to her perspective, but some information is still unavailable, so the narrator must not be omniscient. What type of point of view did you imagine for this narrator? (If you weren’t consciously thinking about imposed limitations or liberties taken in the narrative perspective, what sort of tone or style did you hope to conjure with this narrator’s voice?)

In all three of these pieces, without realizing it as I wrote them, I was using a clinical tone combined with very specific, personal details to create a kind of taxonomy of living grief. In “Spit It Out,” the grief is a mother’s for her son, who is alive, but who will always depend on her, as well as for herself and the burden she has necessarily taken on, while in “A Ghost,” we are dissecting Carrie’s grief for her parents’ marriage, and by extension, her childhood. The scientific, detached tone creates a distance while, at the same time, making the narrator seem impartial, as though the voice is staring at these small tragedies under a microscope and recording every significant piece of evidence with detailed precision.

From this clinical impartiality comes the knowledge of the blood in the wood beneath Carrie. When I was small, I also worried about ghosts in the old furniture in the old house I grew up in. I knew that many people had lived there since long ago, and, therefore, had likely suffered, been ill, given birth, screamed at each other, and even bled and died in almost every room. Extrapolating from this knowledge, then, Carrie must be sitting on blood—it is just statistically probable. However, she doesn’t know that. What she knows is that her parents are fighting, and will probably split up, so she distracts herself by listening for the ghost.

In “Echolalia,” we return to the subject of disability, which we saw in a different form in the adult son of the first short-short. Also, as before, the central character here is the mother of the disabled person in question. What is it about these relationships and difficult positions that draw you to create such characters? What are the complexities of their inner and outer lives that contribute to narrative richness and interest from outsiders?

I think this relationship is, in itself, a conflict—not between the people in the relationship, but within the parent who is raising a child she knows will have a rough time of it. There is a peculiar and combustible mixture of love, devotion, guilt, and resentment there. The mother worries for her daughter, but mostly obliquely—much of her time is spent worrying about worrying (or not worrying) about her daughter. She is caught in a cycle of guilt, resentment, further guilt, further resentment, which is why she can’t exit the emotional vortex and achieve any kind of relief or peace.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I just finished a novel in January, and I’m at work on another one now. It deals with some of these themes—the fragility of families, and the consequences both of breaking those brittle bonds and of not doing so. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is on her deathbed. She has studied death all her life, and she knows what awaits her. But she is alone, so she returns to her past, reliving old failures and relationships, excavating for any source of comfort she can find. That sounds like a real downer, and sometimes it is, but it’s also about learning to accept one’s fate, and the grace that can be found in humanity’s will to continue to live despite knowing that one day we all die.

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

As I mentioned above, Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder is beyond amazing. I also just finished two great memoirs—Sally Mann’s Hold Still and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. And I’m reading Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene now because the novel I’m writing is centered around a mystery, and Greene was a master at that.

"An Ode to the Eternally Obsessive": An Interview with Ravi Mangla

Ravi Mangla is the author of the novel Understudies (Outpost19). His stories and essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, The Paris Review Daily, American Short Fiction, Tin House Online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Rochester, NY.

His story, "Face," appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Ravi Mangla speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about ambiguity, television withdrawal, and taking your time. 

At the heart of this story is a man who fears losing his identity. I’m curious about what came first for you—the concept for the story or its emotional core?

The concept came first. There are few things more frustrating than seeing a familiar face on television and not being able to place it. At least with television, you can farm out the grunt work to IMDB. No such database exists for the real world. I’ll often spend days thinking about a face, trying to remember where I’ve seen it before. I love stories where small, seemingly negligible problems metastasize and assume some deeper cosmic significance. As someone with mild OCD tendencies, I often find my attention diverted by dripping faucets and odd buzzing noises. “Face” is an ode to the eternally obsessive.

Lyle never places the man’s face. When we leave the story, he is still reaching to remember. What appealed to you about ending the story in this way?

A clean resolution is tough to pull off in short short fiction. The form, for whatever reason, lends itself better to ambiguity. Someone (please don’t ask me who) said that successful fiction begins with a small question and ends with a big one. I’m not usually one to trot out aphorisms, but this one seems especially germane.

“Face” is beautifully concise; the whole story is only a paragraph long. Tell us about the revision process that led to this final draft. Did you start with more or has the story always taken this form?

There was actually more building up than paring down. The first half of this story was written five or six years ago. Every couple of years I would pick it up again and add a handful of sentences. Therein lies my advice to fledgling writers: If you don’t know where to take your story, set it aside for several years. Or if you can’t wait several years, a day or two will probably suffice.

If you, like Lyle, had a “specialty,” what would you like it to be?

Figuring out what TV show my neighbor is watching from the muffled sounds coming through the apartment wall. (I’ve been without a television for a few months now and I’m suffering from severe withdrawal.)

What are you currently working on?

An essay on the legal and social history of jaywalking. But I hope to get started on a new novel later in the summer.

What are you reading?

There are three library books on my desk: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems by Albert Goldbarth.

"Animals and Oceans and Trees and Vertigo": An Interview with Monica Datta

Monica Datta's work has appeared in Conjunctions and The Collagist, among others. She has received grants from the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund and the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Her story, "Brotherhood," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.

Here, Monica Datta talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Aristotle, outlines, and islands.

Can you speak about the decision to begin the story with an epigraph from Aristotle’s Rhetoric? How did you choose this quote? How do you consider it to be in dialogue with your story?

The passage from Rhetoric corresponds to the longer interrogation of philia in the Nicomachean Ethics, but defines the verb form, philein, i.e., the act of loving, and therefore it’s something perhaps more profound and complicated than philia, which also includes affinities of utility – between cities or religious orders, or businesspeople and their clients – or relationships based on shared hedonism rather than a depth of caring. Aristotle outlines the emotive components of philia as a kind of fraternal love, close to friendship, but also something deeper, the integrity that binds the social contract.

In the story philia exists as a kind of multiple entendre for not-quite-love, not-quite-friendship, not-quite-brotherhood. Reiko has a lot of integrity because she has never wanted to be anything other than herself. Initially she finds the work merely icky – rather than dangerous – and the other characters unintelligent and therefore deserving of what happens to them.

Your story spans many areas of the protagonist’s life and history—her primary school preferences, her deceased half-brother, her relationship with her divorced parents, multiple jobs. In order to fit so many details into a short story, how do you keep track of these many aspects of a character’s existence? Do you create any outlines, like character studies or profiles, or do you keep it all in your head and let it come out in the writing?

I don’t normally write outlines, but Reiko was so alien to me that I had to sketch her out. After that I saw her everywhere. She’s a star athlete but has never known physical pain. She might share a taxi with friends and take up 80% of the space. She might steal a younger girl’s birthday cake because she wants it. Reiko is expressive of and realizes every desire except for the obvious, influenced perhaps by her mother’s turbulent romantic life. All this, however, allows her to take on, and ridicule, the work she does for Anna.

Her family manifests a series of island conditions: her father has returned to Japan and she’s not close to her itinerant mother and her Algerian grandparents are stranded alone in Sydney, having built and abandoned a whole life in Paris. But Reiko prefers animals and oceans and trees and vertigo. She would have done well with an older brother.

What was your revision process like for this story? How much did it change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any difficult decisions when cutting or adding?

I wrote perhaps ten drafts in four months. It was initially quite plotless; I was conflicted about how much personal growth Reiko experiences and wanted to avoid a morality tale. There was less addition and subtraction than constant refashioning, and then lots of pruning, like a bonsai.  

What writing projects are you working on now?

More alphabet stories, including an alphabet of phobias about a tennis coach with gills, and a tragicomic novel annotated by a sprightly Lacanian psychoanalyst.

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

It’s a stretch to call it reading, but I’m making my way through the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an incunabulum from the Renaissance. It’s a strikingly modern – probably the first book to consider text and layout the way we understand it now – collage of beautiful and often erotic woodcuts and many languages, and likely the product of many artists and writers though attributed to a Venetian monk. It surrounds the dreams of Poliphilo, whose name implies a love of cities and architecture, “everything,” and a lady named Polia, whom he keeps missing, very possibly in that sequence.

More contemporarily I really enjoyed Kim Thuy’s Ru, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island.