"What Haunts Us": An Interview with Margo Berdeshevsky

Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York City, often writes in Paris. Her recent poetry manuscript was finalist for the National Poetry Series, 2015. Her published poetry collections are Between Soul & Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness (both from Sheep Meadow Press). Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received Fiction Collective Two’s Innovative Fiction Award (University of Alabama Press). Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, a portfolio of poems in the Aeolian Harp Anthology #1 (Glass Lyre Press), the & Now Anthology of the Best of Innovative Writing, and numerous Pushcart prize nominations. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Cutthroat, among others. In Europe her work has been seen in The Poetry Review (UK), The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, & Confluences Poétiques. A multi-genre novel, Vagrant, and new poetry collections are at the gate.  She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, or somewhere new—in the world. Her “Letters from Paris” may be seen at Poetry International. For more information, kindly see: http://margoberdeshevsky.blogspot.com/.

Her story, "A Winter's Story," appeared in Issue Seventy-Two of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about photography, love (or lack of), and cross-genre art.

Where did this story begin for you?

I’ll answer this “slant,” so to speak, in the way Emily Dickinson suggested that a poet, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

I once had a lover who complimented my best friend because she had seven children. You see, he said, she is a real woman. To her credit, my dear friend stood up and slapped him. (And the relationship with him did not endure.) 

I could start by saying that I’m a woman who decided very young to not be a mama. Why? A choice. A road, taken. So in one sense I’ve been interested in mothering and/or  not . . . for a long while. The tribal imperative that humans are meant to perpetuate the tribe. And, I’ve been interested in the expectation that all women are meant to be mothers, and good mothers, of course. Compassionate mothers. Protective mothers. And that all children are expected to be loved, of course. They must be. That is a human imperative. A human right. But they are also expected to be loveable.

That said, as one way to enter this conversation: I also once had a terrible cat. I love cats. I love what lives. I love living.  I did not want to do harm. But I had to wonder if he was not some demonic force sent into my life to challenge my kindness or torment me.

From such soil, stories are seeded.

In addition to being a writer, you are a gifted photographer. You often include your photographs with your writing. What draws you to photography? What inspired you to merge your two artistic interests into single projects?

As a creative person, I like thinking outside the box. There is a wonderful line in the Tom Stoppard play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” as the characters are contemplating death, and being left in a coffin, and one says, (to paraphrase), but you'd be in a box. Think about it, living your life in a box, I mean you'd never get out, would you?

I often feel that way about writing or offering work in a single genre. To be stuck in a box. More and more, I come to like functioning in the multi-genre or cross genre. Being a “collagist,” I might say. And so, yes, I have liked to merge  photographs or montages with some of my written works. Embedded, or surrounding them. For me it is one way to invite left brain-right brain receiving. Not as show and tell, but as a way to expand the metaphoric, inherent, or implied.

I’m not speaking here of imagism as construed by Pound, seeking only “hard light and clear images.” But I’m interested in metaphor. Linguistically and imagistically. Photography, while it can certainly be documentary and uber realistic, and illustrative, and haunting as such . . . can also be impressionistic, or expressionistic, can also be part of the poetic lexicon. Can also be another way of telling it slant. And that draws me often, these days. The world I wake in is so often painfully realistic. Filled with what haunts me. What haunts us. I want to address what haunts, but also I’m searching for ways to look with another eye or lens, so for me, photographing is one way to force my vision further.

Sometimes, one image is sufficient. Sometimes, words do the heavy lifting, and anything more would be superfluous. But sometimes, I want to stretch the edge, even erase the edges, open the box and let forms overlap, or whisper to one another, to me, to the one who receives the works I can offer.

Your story ends with a black and white photograph of two baby dolls. Please explain your choice to pair the story with this particular image.

No. To explain would defeat the choice. I believe it is a good choice. The rest should belong to the reader.

The mothers and children in this story do not have happy relationships. There is an uneasiness, a loathing between them. We are used to seeing depictions of parent-child relationships that are perhaps fraught, but grounded in fierce love. “A Winter’s Story” doesn’t follow this common storyline. What interests you about the relationship between the woman and her “devil child”?

Allow me to ask you to return to your first question and my response above. That was a beginning. To say more . . . no, it’s not a common storyline, I admit. But it both frightened me as a subject and seduced me to write it. What happens to the lone and lonely in a world when they are not healed by love? What happens when/if they are unable to love the very one, or the very element that might heal them? What happens if the object that should inspire love is inherently not to be loved. If it is experienced as evil. What is a “devil child?” Is it merely, or definitely  the “shadow?” How has civilization, have we, will we. . . deal with what is detestable in our world, or in ourselves, or in the very thing we give birth to, or adopt, presumably to love?

What are three books you could recommend today?

There is a novel that the wonderful science fiction author, Theodore Sturgeon, gifted me with many years ago. It is called The Book of The Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin Jr. It speaks of a rooster, Chaunteclear, confronting a monster of evil long imprisoned beneath the earth. I’d find it a powerful book, today. Parable, or fantasy, a worthy read.

As a poet, and I am that, as story teller, photographer, woman, wanderer . . . I'd reread “King Lear.” Because we are each so lost on the heath, and terrified of being unloved. And “Macbeth,” because the greed and demand for political dominion and power is so much, too much with us. Everywhere. Now, And now. And now.

And a wonderful new book has just been published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Because that bookshop has been a home to me and a place where the ladders start, for many years. This brand new book tells its story—as it was and is, and “slant.”

What is next for you? Are you currently working on any projects?

Yes. Always yes. I have been photographing stones. Giant, protective, dangerous, beautiful stones. I have a new collection of poetry which keeps adding and eliminating new fingers and toes. It was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, last year. But as Collagist editor, Gabriel Blackwell, says so well, Life is cruel just where art is at its kindest. And so the book is homeless, waiting for cover. And, there is a new collection of works, prose poems or stories (crossing genres..., ) Dark Muse / Can Dance. Some have been first published here in The Collagist. They are morphed with my photographs. Yes. “A Winter’s Story,” published here, is one of them. This new book is now standing at the gate, hand on the latch. Along with a multi-genre novel called Vagrant. Because I am. It is. Vagrant. A bit of an alien in a world I sometimes know, and sometimes am lost in. And I have just written a new poem that I rather like: “Whose Sky, Between (...for Hiroshima day, and more...)”

~

“The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.” —Federico Garcia Lorca

"A Necessity of Artfulness": An Interview with Corwin Ericson

Corwin Ericson is the author of the novel Swell (Dark Coast, 2011) and Checked Out OK (Factory Hollow, 2013), a book-length found poem in the form of police reports. His work has been published in Harper's Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Conduit, Hobart, and elsewhere. He lives in western Massachusetts and teaches at UMass Amherst.

His story, "I Cried So Much that Night, as I Sometimes Did," appeared in Issue Seventy-Three of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about not reading Little House on the Prairie, young narrators, and the power of description.

How did your story, “I Cried So Much That Night, as I Sometimes Did,” come to be?

A couple of years ago, my young niece mentioned “Pa” in a conversation. Who? She’s a hip city girl; she wouldn’t say Pa. Her Ma explained to me that she was referring to Pa from Little House on the Prairie—a teacher was reading one of the books to her class. Those books were important to me as a young reader; they were my first taste of forbidden literature. I remember sneaking them off my sister’s shelf to read them. Not that anyone other than my sister would have cared, but they seemed taboo because I thought of them of them as for girls only. That made them much more interesting.

What were those books about? It turns out, I don’t remember. There was the narrator—Laura, maybe? Her blind sister. Her Pa, you know, Michael Landon. I have no memory of Ma. They lived in a sod house, probably little and on a prairie. There was bad weather and some kind of dangerous animal. Maybe some locust swarms. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is not part of this series.

So, when my niece said “Pa” and invested it with such knowingness, as if we’d all had a shared sense of Pa-ness and have all rolled our eyes at his foibles and admired him for his achievements, I got enthused and wanted to talk about him too, only I didn’t know him. I went to the library and pulled one of the LHOTP books off the shelf and had myself a moment: I realized I didn’t want to know anything more about the plots or characters.

I put the book right back and went home with a sense of purpose—to not read Little House on the Prairie. This was liberating and pleasant. So that’s the sort-of ‘pataphysical way I got to that voice, that character—by hearing a girl say “Pa” and then not reading Little House on the Prairie. I went on to write several stories with those characters and that setting.

We experience the story through the eyes of the youngest sister. What are some of the challenges you faced writing from the perspective of a young narrator, and how did you overcome them?

I wanted to write in a voice that was new and foreign to me, one that allowed for fun and invention and discovery and that I wouldn’t silt up with too much autobiography. That was the challenge. Her limited perspective of the world is exacerbated by her family’s monadic isolation, which was another challenge for me as the writer. I mean a challenge in the sense of an impediment that replaces the journey—we get to the obstacle and explore it instead of finding a way to overcome it. Like doing something instead of getting something done.

I spent a few years messing with the text of a Victorian-era children’s novel, The Wide Wide World, which is written in a girl’s voice. I made cross-outs, erasures, collages on the pages. In doing that, I made a deep study of a fairly stupid book, and one of the things I discovered about it was that there was a regular tide of crying in the book. Every tenth page or so, Sophie would choke up, try to squeeze her tears back, and then bawl. Her tearfulness and her diction, which seems stilted and turgid to me, but which was probably considered a necessity of artfulness when it was composed, were appropriated for the voice of the narrator in my story.

The father’s longing to describe and his struggle to do so seems to parallel the experience of the artist. The speaker also feels this frustration. When she first experiences the roof, she relates, “I wanted, suddenly, to tell my sister all about what I could see, every inch of it so new to me, yet so old to her.” As a writer, can you relate to this sentiment?

Like an author among readers, Pa needs to get out of the way. He’s intrusive and ineffectual. He’s self-deluded, full of rules and inhibitions. Convinced of his own mastery. In those ways, he seems very much like an artist: he must do as he does for reasons he alone knows, and he feels insufficiently appreciated and barely tolerated. In this story, Pa has a fantasy about his daughter going blind. He feels that if she went blind, it would be up to him to describe things to her, as if he were Anne Sullivan. He wants to hone his powers of description so that he’ll be better at it, for her sake. His daughter is actually in no danger of losing her sight, so she resents his meddling and descriptions of the obvious. This is a real peril for many fictional children—someone is always trying to teach them something.

I can certainly relate to this as a writer. It’s both irritating and inspiring to have things described to you. Description can be a real infliction and writers do it all the time.

Please tell us the last book you read that you really loved.

This is a tough question. I’m not sure where I stand on loving books. Just last night, I finished Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, and I was impressed and enjoyed it. Not long ago I read Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country and was delighted to find parts of it set in a fictitious, sinister version of a town within bike-riding distance of my house.

I can remember years ago loaning a copy of Ballard’s High Rise to a friend, who then loaned it to a friend of his who was very sick in the hospital. I asked my friend for it back, and he said he wouldn’t ask his very sick friend for it back. I then had the entirely unloving, selfish thought, “But I love that book.”

I love the constant flow of books I get from my little rural town’s library—I’m a heavy user of the interlibrary loan program. I do actually love Moby-Dick, though we haven’t seen each other in a while. I’ve given Magnus Mills’ first book, The Restraint of Beasts, to a few people and told them they were wrong when they said they didn’t love it.

What projects are you working on now?

I’ve spent a lot of time the past few months working on a big woven wicker mask, which was just shipped to its new owner in Texas this weekend. A few weeks ago I returned to making “hikaru dorodangos”—that’s Japanese for shiny mudballs. I write poems. I think and make notes about the Arctic and the hollow earth and Vikings and inuksuit, ostensibly in service of writing a novel.

"Faced by the Truth of a Looming Extinction": An Interview with Kristine Ong Muslim

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry: Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), A Roomful of Machines (ELJ Publications, 2015), Grim Series (Popcorn Press, 2012), We Bury the Landscape (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012), as well as Lifeboat and Black Arcadia, two poetry collections from university presses in the Philippines. She serves as poetry editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, a literary journal published by Epigram Books in Singapore, and was co-editor with Nalo Hopkinson of the Lightspeed Magazine special issue, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction. Widely published in magazines and anthologies, she grew up and continues to live in rural southern Philippines. kristinemuslim.weebly.com.

Her story, "Genesis," appeared in Issue Eighty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Kristine Ong Muslim talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about repetition, solipsism, and writing in her second language.

What can you tell us about the origins of your story “Genesis”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

The genesis of “Genesis” has a lot to do with me imagining a boy who lives alone inside a house, which doubles as his body. The boy’s inability to get out of his house (or his body), which I wrote as, “Each time he walks past the doorway that leads to the yard, he finds himself standing again inside one of the rooms of his house...” —this one is taken right out of the first season of American Horror Story, where Taissa Farmiga’s character, unaware that she was already a ghost, couldn’t get past the gate. And because I was also reading Conchitina Cruz’s Dark Hours in the period when I was drafting “Genesis” and I couldn’t get that quote off my mind, I decided to incorporate it as an epigraph and as an inline text element.

This story begins with an epigraph that is clearly evoked in the piece’s final sentences. Why did you consider it necessary to begin such a short piece with this quote? What do you think is gained by framing the story for the reader in this way?

Because the Conchitina Cruz quote lent a more strongly felt foreboding to “Genesis” than one I could cobble up and attach to the piece. Because the quote, robbed of its context, simultaneously stirs up solipsism and desperation, two concepts I’m vaguely alluding to in “Genesis.” Also, the quote seems rather fluent in its invented vernacular—the “no, no” part sounds very much like the exhortation of a naïve narrator consumed by hope, by optimism. I used it as a pointer—laid upfront at the beginning of the piece—pointing out to the reader that this, this is the voice of a civilization feigning disbelief when faced by the truth of a looming extinction.

Although the narrator’s voice makes the piece sound quite grand and sprawling, the entire story is only about 600 words long. How do you achieve such rich world building in such a small space? (Also, how much do you revise when writing such a brief piece?)

Repetition is key. Like constructing, brick by identical brick. When seen from afar, the resulting structure appears quite grand and imposing. Up close, one notices motifs that are used repetitively. It is also important to note that I am ESL. I mainly use English for writing. I have difficulty speaking in straight English. I approach the language as one would an artistic implement (as opposed to how I see my native language and its utilitarian nature). I use English primarily for creative expression. I suppose a native-language speaker would think differently because then the use of English comes naturally. For me, it doesn’t.

In revising? I start with something short, like an outline. I write fast. Otherwise, I lose my momentum. I discovered that there are no obvious hesitation marks (awkward scene breaks, etc.) in pieces that I write in one sitting. They sustain whatever energy I’ve pumped into them from beginning to end. And this limits me. I’ve been wanting to overcome this so I can do the same to longer pieces. Anyway, my first drafts are super short. The sentences have faulty construction. Grammar is all wrong. I polish later, add more to the piece. I add color, tone, decide on specificity or vagueness, sound of words when read aloud, things like these. I don’t revise right away. I revise after a few days have passed. Revision is the technical part of writing, the one a writer does for the reader. I don’t have the potential reader in mind when I draft. It is only when I’m revising that I acknowledge the possibility that someone out there is going to read what I’ve written.

You have published books of both fiction and poetry. What lessons have you learned from writing poetry that you’ve applied to your prose, or vice versa? (What are the special advantages or difficulties of working in multiple genres?)

Lessons learned from writing poetry that I applied to prose and vice versa—that there are many ways to tell a lie or a fact. I can sing it, as in the case of poetry. I can go on and on, as in prose, and then end up either not saying anything or saying too much. In prose, I worry about the effectiveness of my transition. In poetry, not so. There are no drawbacks to working in multiple genres. When I get stumped in one format, I can switch to the other. There’s just one slight problem though. If I work straight in one format for far too long, like months at a time, I find it harder to write in another format.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Two interrelated book manuscripts, plus a long essay on my folkloric writing influences.

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

Brendan Connell’s Metrophilias (Snuggly Books, 2016). In this book, various cities are settings and sometimes motivations for escapades and trysts in the name of fanatical love. Metrophilias is a perfect companion to Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chômu Press, 2012), another book by Connell. Lives of Notorious Cooks is a collection of fictional biographies of cooks. Connell has long been one of my go-to models for the fully fleshed out, wacky, and daring vignette. I heartily recommend any book written by him.

Adam David’s The El Bimbo Variations (the Youth & Beauty Brigade, 2016), which consists of 99 retellings of a line from a song by a Filipino band, makes a compelling point about the occasional pointlessness of language and society, about constrained literary techniques and hybrid poetic forms as emblematic of what seems to me as a desperately hopeful attempt to dissociate art from its surrounding context. It mixes smart-alecky swagger and elegant construction, sprinkled with a dash of macabre humor, making the book an entertaining, thought-provoking read.

Another creation by David that I want to recommend is the 39 side-stapled pages of hybrid poetic texts called Repaso (the Youth & Beauty Brigade, 2015). To say that I love Repaso would be putting it mildly as I’ve reread it far too many times the flimsy edges of the front cover have curled slightly I had to weigh it down with a heavy book to whip it back to shape. Two essays, which were indicated to be penned by Adam David, bookend the writings of Mona Lisa P. Cajucom, who was rumored to have killed herself. Footnotes in colloquialism-riddled Tagalog were interspersed with Cajucom’s found-poetry tracts. Whether or not Mona Lisa P. Cajucom existed in real life doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. What matters is that Repaso was eloquent in its recitation about the parts of our lives that happen in small rooms behind locked doors. Cajucom’s writings, which David claimed to have collected (and contextualized through his essays and annotations), consist of a series of rote, oftentimes optimistic depositions that begin with the word “here,” a powerful invocation that instructs the reader on how to view Cajucom—an eyewitness holding a bunch of snapshots she took with her omniscient camera, holding them up to an audience, and describing what those snapshots held. I really love Repaso, and I hope people will check it out. I love it because it lays bare our “hunger for a sort of emotional connection” even in times when we don’t really need one or even in times when we are contentedly out of tune with the rest of the world. Remember being cheerful while stuffed with 100 percent interior darkness—Repaso is more or less like that.

Conchitina Cruz’s There is no emergency (the Youth & Beauty Brigade, 2015) is a fascinating poetry collection. It is suggestive of journalistic reportage. It also doubles as an eerie, hypnotic simulation of the way some of us tend to curate bits and pieces of our lives for publicizing in social media. In There is no emergency, personas painstakingly document reality in an effort to skew it.

Not in the picture is Sarah Sarai’s gorgeous collection of poetry, Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books, 2016), a juxtaposition of the otherworldly with the trappings of modern existence.

"You've Got to Consider Thanksgiving Dinner": An Interview with B.J. Hollars

B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. In February, he’ll release Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds. He serves as the reviews editor for Pleiades, a mentor for Creative Nonfiction, the founder of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

His essay, "Spotted," appeared in Issue Eight-Four of The Collagist.

Here, B.J. Hollars talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about brevity, close reading, and writing about family.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay, “Spotted”? What sparked the initial idea that caused you to start writing the first draft?

It started with the phone call from my father. When he told me about finding the impaled deer, I simply found myself unable to shake myself from the image. I knew it made for a powerful moment, but I also didn’t know how to give that moment a deeper context until weeks later, when I realized that our phone call corresponded with my parents’ anniversary. Only then did I begin to see the loose thematic connections emerge.

This entire essay is only a little over 500 words, yet it contains so much—the story of the dead fawn combined with family history and your father’s “fish out of water” feelings. How do you achieve this economy of language? Does it require a lot of revision and/or restraint to write with such brevity?

Most of my essays start out as drafts twice as long as the final product. I think that’s just part of it. I often tell my students that writing an essay—or writing anything, really—is like carving an ice sculpture (full disclosure: I have no experience carving ice sculptures). That is, they start with the big block of ice and then you pare it back to the bare essentials, to the hidden beauty beneath.

I think often of a phrase I first read in Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer: Put every word on trial. When writing a short piece, in particular, it’s crucial that the writer puts every word on trial. In this way, the writer will always have a clear sense of each word’s function. And if a word isn’t pulling its weight, you got to let it go.

Do you ever have any qualms about using a family member’s stories in your writing? Does your father get to read an essay like this before you publish it, for example? How do you navigate the tricky situation that many nonfiction writers face of writing about family while not wanting to alienate them?

Beth Kephart has some really great ethical guidelines when it comes to memoir writing. Specifically, she gives five rules for what memoir isn’t, including the notion that memoir isn’t “an accusation, a retaliation, a bit of take that! in type.” When writing about family, I always try very hard to remember Kephart’s rules.

But to get more specifically to the question: yes, when my family and friends make an appearance in my work, I often share my work in advance. You’ve got to consider Thanksgiving dinner, after all, and the awkward situation a writer can easily create ‘round the cranberry dressing when it’s revealed that the writer spilled the family’s secrets to the world. For me, memoir writing is never about “spilling beans”; it’s about considering the significance of moments after the fact. It’s about making sense of the mysteries.

Yet beyond sharing my work with family and friends in advance, I often share my work with others who play a role, too. More often than not, people appreciate having the chance to read the work in advance, and I can only think of a handful of times in which someone reacted negatively. Mostly, people appreciate your efforts to tell a story honestly—at least from your perspective. And giving a little advance notice can be a useful courtesy in the world of creative nonfiction.

A few years back I proposed at AWP panel titled “How To Lose Friends and Alienate Loved Ones” which addressed this very issue. And by panel’s end, I’d broken down most of my ethical concerns into a single question, one that I still use to test my work today: In writing this essay, are you trying to document something or exploit someone? For me, documentation vs. exploitation is at the heart of most of this.

With so much focus on your father’s experience and relatively little use of the first person, this essay reads much like a short story. You are the author of both fiction and nonfiction work. What lessons from one genre have you been able to apply to the other?

Lee Gutkind has written often of the many tools available to writers in the world of creative nonfiction. And what he says, mostly, is that creative nonfiction is simply the genre in which writers use fictional tools to write about something that occurred. To this end, I employ many of the same tools I use in fiction: scene-building, character-building, dialogue, narrative arc, etc. For me, nonfiction allows me a little more variety in terms of organizational structure, but everything else—the scenes, the characters, the use of dialogue—are all techniques I first honed with my fiction writing.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I just completed a book titled Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds due out next fall. That was quite an adventure, let me tell you. In short, I attempted to track down several extinct birds (as well as a few “thought-to-be-extinct birds.”). Spoiler alert: I didn’t find any live ones.  But I did stumble upon some glimpses into their world, as well as gaining some unique insight into what we might learn from the birds we’ve lost and keep losing.

Additionally, I’m currently powering through a new nonfiction book on the Freedom Riders. I’m so moved by stories from the civil rights movement, and I’m doing my best to share these stories with as many folks as I can.

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

I spend so much time critiquing others work that I admit I don’t read nearly as much published work as I should. But I did just reread the Francine Prose book I referenced previously, Reading Like A Writer. I’m a sucker for a book on close readings, those that really zoom in tight on a single paragraph and dissect it word for word. Writers can learn so much under those conditions.

Another thing that’s been keeping me from reading more is a new artist residency I’ve been working with this summer. Take a look! And then, maybe apply yourself for next summer…

"Creatures of Complication": An Interview with Kelly Dulaney

Kelly Dulaney began in the cinders of Arizona; now she lives among the red rocks of Colorado. She is the author of the novel Ash (Urban Farmhouse Press 2016) and her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review, Penny, The Best American Experimental Writing Anthology (BAX) 2015, The Collagist, Caketrain, and Abjective, among other venues. She holds and MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and edits The Cupboard Pamphlet.

Her story, "Oil Dog," appears in Issue Seventy-Two of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about buried family history, dogs, the quest for oil.

Please tell us where this story began for you.

Truth told, this story is not entirely fictional and so it did not begin strictly with me.

I have been working for some time to understand the way in which narratives are passed through a family line—I want to know why we repeat and deny the actions of our ancestors; I want to know how we emerge out of our forebears. In 2014, I began to interview my family members about aspects of our family history that had been deliberated buried by those long dead—particularly those buried by my grandfather, Richard Gordon Dulaney. I also began to comb through family documents that had been in storage: old letters, paper clippings and the like. I discovered a copy of a legal deposition that laid out the true timeline and concerns of my grandfather’s life—suddenly, I could see what had made him what he was and I could see how that echoed outwards through the family line.

Here is what in “Oil Dog” is true: my grandfather worked the oil fields of Saudi Arabia in the 30s, earned a degree in physics and deployed to Europe as an officer in the 40s, and planned and purchased the pipe for the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline in the late 60s; my father did survive a fiery and disfiguring car accident; my brother did deploy to Kandahar, Afghanistan; Alexander the Great did once conquer the known world, naming cities and sectors in it for himself (like Kandahar).

I had the impulse to take these truths and weave them—to see what close placement could reveal. I also had the impulse to tell a lot of lies about what I had discovered, because I feel that an invention can lead one closer to an emotional truth than can a litany of facts.

This story is admirable for the way it addresses a global problem without being preachy or prescriptive. Often we see novel writers tackling the “big issues.” Do you think short stories can address issues in a way that novels cannot?

That’s a good question! It’s not one that I’m sure I have an answer for—I hesitate to say that one form can do something that another cannot because I am almost always immediately proven wrong. That said, I do think short stories occupy a strange space in the literary landscape: it’s a form pushed within the workshop—perhaps for ease of pedagogy or tradition—but not one that usually gets the kind of acclaim or attention that the novel does. Perhaps some writers save their energy for the “big issues” until they know they have a novel’s worth of words to write; perhaps short stories that tackle these aren’t as on the radar as they ought to be. I’m not sure. I do know that I myself feel more at home in shorter, more fractured forms—in writing, I want to focus in on emotional resonance rather than explanation.

Why did you choose a dog to represent the demand for oil in this story?

Dogs are creatures of complication. They occupy the border between the human and the natural worlds. They’re uncanny and culturally loaded. They’re communicative, showing an intense interest in and responsiveness to human activity and thought. Dogs are chthonic, too. When my brother redeployed, he told me that it was difficult to see dogs through an American lens again—he had seen them be literal corpse-eaters. I can’t shake that dissonance—a dog is hearth animal kept in the home and a dog is a dangerous animal that scavenges that which has not been properly interred.

There is so much that isn’t interred; there is so much that is kept at the center of the home. I did not intend for the dog to be a representation of the demand for oil (though I really like and respond to that reading); I did intend the dog to be a representation of haunting, of border-space, and of war. Oil lends itself to these things because it is land and territory based and because humans have always found a use for it. And my grandfather remade himself in images of oil and war—whatever he was before that he tried to erase. None of his descendants have been able to properly inter those images: we are still responding to their effects. Or I am—and I keep calling people’s attention to that which they’d like to forget.

So the dog—it seemed a natural link to me.

Describe how you settled on the chronology of this story. One of the many interesting elements of “Oil Dog” is how you move us through time—from the 1930’s to the present day and to decades in between. What was it like to write a story in this way?

I struggled with chronology in my initial drafting! Some of my first attempts were too much like a weak cloud—all dissipation, no tension. Some of my first attempts were too long, too windy—a result of trying to scatter time. So I left it alone for a long while, then came back and played cut up. I preserved only the placement of the first section (necessary to me because it normalizes the presence of the oil dog) and last section (necessary for its ambiguity). From there, I allowed myself to organize in a way that slowly divested the oil dog of its ability to say a full name (moving from “Richard Gordon” to “Alan” to, simply, “Oss—”) and that allowed me deeper access to theaters of war (moving from my grandfather on the practice plains to Alexander at pause in the midst of his campaigns to, finally, my brother in Kandahar). Having those arcs in place allowed me to add the other sections as punctuative or commentary moments, without sacrificing the narrative tension that I had wanted.

What are three last books you read?

In some kind of order, these are:

1: Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, which I loved for its rhythms and variances in voice, for its refusal of anything that might be easily expected in favor of rot and character.

2: Aase Berg’s With Deer (translated by Johannes Göransson)—a reread, and one that I return to often. The lemurs! The fox. Everything in it seethes. It’s so strange and so good.

3: Yu Xiang’s I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain). A former student challenged me, once—he said that my canon is too western. That’s true. I bought this book because of that and then became caught it its interest in framing, its interrogation of narration. I can’t get out of this book and I don’t want to—I want to stay behind Xiang’s door. She’s so loyal to her own eyes.

What projects are you working on now?

I am still writing about strange dogs—flint dogs, salt dogs, red dogs. I want to write a book about myself—about what made me, about my inability to name what matters most to me. I have a title—Cynocephali—and a six part structure. I’m waist-deep in that work.

And, when that’s too much, I rewrite Greek myths that are about bodies. I want to make that into some kind of collection, though I’m not there yet. One day! One day.  

"Until There Are No Edges": An Interview with Natanya Ann Pulley

Natanya is an Assistant Professor at Colorado College. She teaches Creative Writing, Innovative Fiction, and Native American Literature. She's been an editor at Quarterly West and South Dakota Review, and is currently a guest editor for Black Candies. She writes fiction and nonfiction with outbreaks in poetry and collage. Her work can be found at The Toast, Drunken Boat, As/US, and Waxwing (among others). She enjoys felting wool and spending time near the Rockies with her husband JP and two dogs, Voodoo and Mojo.

Her story, "Seven Years of Cups," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about grief, lies, and the strangeness of motherhood.

What first inspired you to write this story about a family that lives inside a hospital?

I’m pretty obsessed with the idea that humans exist in many planes at once. That I can be in my own home with all of the things I know around me, but feel separate. Or that one can be outside in the open with a great sky above, but experience a physical crushing—not just emotional or internal, but a physical reaction like a panic attack. The idea that people who spend a lot of time at a hospital become a part of it isn’t an unfamiliar one, but I really wanted to push that as far as I could. I wanted to see what living years there might look like especially for someone stuck in the suspended, but ongoing loss of a father and I wanted to complicate it further by including a growing family. I think we like to believe that people pull out of dangerous grief and trauma for their family and over time and because they have to, but I wanted to see a person and his family defined by this grief for too long and in an unrealistic way. I wanted to see how long someone could hold onto holding on.

I’m intrigued by the idea your speaker poses of a “possible un-truth” that has floated inside him for so long that it had started to seem like a truth. Are there are any “possible un-truths” you’ve experienced in your life?
When I think of a lie, I think of a vicious thing: something invented as a weapon. While there are plenty of lies in everyone’s world, I’m much more interested in the un-truth. The truth undone. Or a type of lie that exists out of defense or denial or necessity. Not a white lie, but a thing to believe in order to wake up each day. In a very ordinary sense, the lines on a road boast an un-truth. They suggest I’m safe if I stay within them, if I understand their meaning, and if others do as well. I believe in those lines so much that it doesn’t faze me how often I’m putting my life on the line by getting in a vehicle with hundreds of others, often distracted, tired, driving too fast and under weather conditions or other influences. But I do it all the time to move throughout this world. Many years of driving and these sorts of un-truths meant to build some trust in me and the world around me begin to pile up—laws, justice, that fair is fair, authority’s intentions are good, that skin color doesn’t matter. One thing I find incredibly damaging right now when considering #BLM and police brutality is the idea that anyone could ever really understand what this particular type of racism feels like for a black person or a targeted person of color. I’m half-Navajo, but don’t present as Native American to many people and so even though I do experience racism, I’ll never experience it the same way a black individual being pulled over would. We(I) tend to think with enough information and empathy and rational, we can put ourselves in another person’s shoes. It’s not just that this is untrue—it’s that the truth we’ve built up (“We’re capable of really understanding racism now that we’re in the 21^st century”) is undone over and over and over. It wasn’t just a vicious lie used as a weapon by some, but it was also a sad untruth invented to comfort us into believing change is possible in an easy way—a convenient way. I think lies are cruel and painful, but untruths are heartbreaking.

There are hints in the story that the speaker has been violent in the past. Early in the story, he describes a frustrating experience with a contractor friend: “He was just trying to help out but by the time the staff caught up with us, I’d already dug a needle through to his bone.” In his retelling, the speaker is not angry. He actually relates to the contractor, understands that his friend meant well. The violence is buried in the sentence; the speaker seems detached from it. Can you speak to the narrative choice behind this moment? Why is it important that we know about his violence early in the story?

The story starts seven years into the character’s time at the hospital—after this traumatic event of both his father’s demise and the birth of his first child (within some span for him that feels very close). It felt clear to me that the character has been through various stages of grief and trauma—that anger was certainly one of them. Part of his acting out may be due to the type of story it is—this bloated world with everything over the edge, over the edge, over the edge, until there are no edges anymore. But also, I wanted it to be clear that he was not okay, even dangerous and his detachment was not safe. I’m also enamored by detachment—both its blessings and its curses. Seven years into his “life” at the hospital, I wanted his most basic reactions to be worn out, to be old news to him. Obviously, he should worry about this attack of his and possible future attacks. Obviously he should be worried about a lot of things. But detachment cares little for things obvious. And it has no need for shoulds.

The speaker describes his children by their precise age, weight, and height. He seems to know little else about them. Why do you think his children’s measurements more memorable to him than anything else?

Ha ha. This was a fun detail to include for me. First, I was thinking about how newborns are just little blobs of sensations and reactions and how it takes a little time to get to know their personalities (or rather for those personalities to develop). So we relay the strangest information about them when they are born. I am not that great with measurements, but still seem to relay the weight, length, toe count, and eye color of babies when describing them. It’s a strange desire to want to know a person when one can’t. To want to account for an unknown when little simple measurements is all one has. Second, because this character is detached from his own emotion, because he’s in some sort of denial, I think he believes these details make sense. That they relay something real or truthful about his children, when he can’t do it himself. The first child arrived when his father was dying and I think maybe the measurements were the easiest thing for him to hold onto it. And he hasn’t let go of that. Third, I played around a lot with the kind of language these characters might pick up from being in a hospital and in an earlier version of the story, the narrator used more medical terms. But I found this to be … well, cumbersome to read, but also just not fun for me. So I decided this would be the thing that he would pick up on. He was given the measurements of his children when they were as born, it’s what he hears about new life in the hospital each time a child is born, and that’s what he’s sticking to. 

Who are you reading right now?

I recently read Natural Wonders by Angela Woodward, which was such a delight—playful, funny, sentences to nest into, and also, something very sad, but strangely hopeful. And I’ve started Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary and Carmen Lau’s The Girl Wakes. I’m also casually reading Saga, which is a very fun, amazing “space opera/fantasy” comic series. And I’ve been revisiting Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus.” I touched upon it in a class when teaching Joanna Ruocco’s Dan last Spring, but I was so struck by the idea that there is no absurd world. Rather, absurdity is something we bring with us because the world is unreasonable and our expectations of the world can be even more so. Camus says, “What is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational (world) and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” I’ve been re-positioning myself in our current reality with this idea and through this reading. The violence, the election, losing both Prince and Bowie feels very absurd to me, like we all were dumped into an alternate universe this year. But this isn’t a constructive way for me to work through it, I think. Calling the world absurd doesn’t deal with the very real things that were always in motion before this—that led us to this. My “wild longing for clarity” tends to capture me and keep me from action.

What projects are you currently working on?

Mainly my non-fiction collection which deals mostly with being biracial and different forms of trauma I’ve experienced. Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for the emotional toil of working through this collection, so I’m learning patience with this project. But I’m a short story writer mainly, so I’m always kicking about some little somethings here and there. I wonder sometimes if I’m a novelist, but usually I end up thinking: this is just a really long story. Or worse, a story cycle. Ha ha.

I’m also delighted to be a guest editor for the annual horror literary journal Black Candies. This next issue is the “Gross and Unlikeable Issue” with female writers only. While submissions have closed, the reading process has been eye-opening. I expected some of the same topics (pregnancy and menstruation) and we certainly wanted body horror in the mix. But, oh man, so many dead babies. Metaphoric or not. Miscarried, stillbirths, infanticide—dead, dead, dead. It’s been tough reading on my heart. At times, my response has been very poor—wishing for other topics, squirming away. And there are plenty of other story ideas, but these dead babies outweigh them. However, I always have to end my wishing and remember: here it is. This is what women think about and we are told not to. We are told to think of the potential of our bodies and the gifts we give—life, like it’s a prize. But for many women, this is what is horrific about our body’s potential or sometimes failure. Making life, ability and or the monthly reminder of life, keeping a child alive—this is dangerous, dangerous stuff. And here are the female writers that don’t want to hear the glossy and fairytale stories of it. They want to talk about the horror, the abject. So I’m reading with respect and open to the wail here—instead of wanting to shut it out. And, oh, we’ve got some really amazing ones.  Of course, there are plenty of other wonderful and super gross stories by women I’ve enjoyed reading. It’s going to be a great collection with plenty of stories about other topics as well, a girl that turns to candy, another that grows another pair of legs that fall off, and tales weird, cosmic, and disgusting.

"Forever Married to the Pseudonym": An Interview with Michael Shirzadian

Michael Shirzadian lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he studies and teaches rhetoric at Ohio State University. His stories and essays have appeared in Brevity, The Collagist, theNewerYork, Identity Theory, *82 Review, and elsewhere. Before returning to Columbus, he lived in Grants, New Mexico, where he taught high school English, and Boulder, Colorado, where he earned an MFA in fiction. You can contact Michael at michael.shirzadian@gmail.com.

His essay, "Recessional," appeared in Issue Eighty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Michael Shirzadian talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about dwelling in scene, writing about family, and whittling down the work.

What can you tell us about the origins of your essay “Recessional”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

Originally “Recessional” was a section of a longer, braided essay, but I couldn’t figure the braids out, couldn’t make it work, so I excised the section and retooled it as flash. I wouldn’t have written it otherwise; I’ve got a journal full of memories and writing ideas about my friend Ben, but every time I try my hand at one of them I end up scrapping the piece. Every time. I think “Recessional” works because it wasn’t originally a piece about Ben. I don’t think it is now, even. It’s a family piece. I started writing the first draft because I needed a scene where my parents actually worked together—I needed that scene in the longer, family essay—and the weekend when Ben died was the first scene to come to mind. It was only after my wonderful CNF workshop—led by the brilliant Lee Martin—mentioned that the braid might make for a strong flash essay that I returned to the piece with an eye on the kind of narrative/thematic closure that a standalone piece demands.

There are difficult, personal subjects in this essay: suicide, divorce, grief, and imagining your parents during a happier time. When you’re writing about these things, do you allow yourself to imagine how your family might react to reading it? How do you navigate the choppy waters of writing about family in an honest, vulnerable way?

I struggle with this all the time. Part of the reason I struggle is because I never start writing a piece thinking about this kind of reception. There’s something I want to say, maybe need to say, so I say it. It’s on the back end, just before submitting, that I’m forced to wrestle with those choppy waters. The easiest thing at that point is to roll with a pseudonym—which I do often. Too often, maybe. Honestly, “Recessional” doesn’t take on the most sensitive of my CNF obsessions, so I elected, here, to use my real name. Still, I emailed the piece to my mother for publication approval. That’s been super awkward. She gave a curt “ok” and we haven’t discussed the piece since. For me, a piece dies when I get too caught up in considering this kind of reception before the end. Maybe that means I’ll be forever married to the pseudonym. And there are some constellations of words that will never make it off my hard drive. I used to just think fuck it and submit everything and tell myself that the writing comes above all else. But I learned the hard way to take a more nuanced approach. So I’m still working on it, still improvising. I’m very much open to suggestions.

Your entire essay consists of only a little over 400 words. Is it a challenge for you to write with such concision? How do you achieve this economy of language? (Does it require a lot of revision and/or restraint?)

This piece’s economy derives from its origin as a fragment, one part of a defunct whole. That’s an old, reliable trick for flash-writing: take a longer piece and whittle it down. I’m always surprised at the resonant power a piece can accumulate the more you take out, undo. That’s why I dwell in flash. I’d actually say it’s more challenging for me to write a longer piece, to sustain an essay or story beyond, say, page twelve. After that, my longer stuff’s just stringing together multiple fragments anyway.

As far as restraint goes, I’m always opening new documents while I write, copy/pasting lines or ideas that I had included in the original piece but decided ultimately to excise. One flash might produce ten of these documents. I’d be surprised if even one of these ten generates a new piece, but having them written down somewhere—knowing that they live outside my head—occludes my anxieties long enough for me to finish the original.

Your bio says that you write fiction as well as nonfiction. Have you learned any lessons from one genre that you’ve applied to the other? How does your work in nonfiction inform your fiction, or vice versa?

There’s hardly a difference in my work. I could retool a few sentences from most of my fiction and ethically call it nonfiction. As an essayist, I hate exposition; I’m so so so bad at it. So most of my nonfiction is straight narrative, rendered almost entirely in scene. When one of my essays leaves scene it’s usually for something closer to character interiority than exposition. I’m not sure I can even articulate the difference. So here’s maybe what I’ve learned by crossing genres: to dwell in scene, to move slowly through space and time even in the compressed form, to construct characters and to enter their interiorities when I’m looking for the emotional turn—that moment of recognition or tenderness or grace. Both fiction and nonfiction, for me, rely so heavily on that turn. Why not recycle strategies?

What writing projects are you working on now?

I just completed a collection of essays and stories (I wish I could just say one or the other, but the meaning—at least on the title page—would, I fear, be lost). I’ve begun sending it to contests. I’m also a rhetoric PhD, and my current project interrogates the police body camera and the state’s insistence that it adequately addresses the problem of police violence against black communities.

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

My rhetoric research occupies most of my time these days. But I’ll never pass up an opportunity to recommend Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Good Squad or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. Those are both beautiful exercises in fragmentation. I also really dig Holly Goddard Jones—both her novel, The Next Time You See Me, and her collection of stories, Girl Trouble. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Year’s End (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/years-end) is sad and lovely. And this strange little piece, 26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss was almost unanimously adored in Ohio State’s most recent graduate fiction workshop: http://www.kijjohnson.com/26_monkeys.htm. I haven’t read Kij Johnson, but after reading 26 Monkeys I’m definitely intrigued.

"Life on the Winning Side": An Interview with Rob Walsh

Rob Walsh has lived recently in Seattle, Providence, and Seoul. He is the author of Troublers, a collection of stories.

His story, "The Children's Book," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about bringing abandoned stories back to life, fairy tales, and Conan the Formidable.

Please tell us where this story began for you.

I wanted to write a story where someone finds a mysterious object. That was all I knew at the beginning. Before writing “The Children’s Book” I had been working on some longer projects and was getting kind of sick of those longer projects, so I wanted to step away and write something short and fast-moving and hopefully finish it in a day. Would it be helpful to any writers out there if I mention that as soon as I finished the “Children’s Book” I decided it was terrible and banished it to one of my many failed-story folders?

It was at least six months until I found it again. I had forgotten it existed. What’s this? I thought. I could barely remember writing it. Now, just like the young girl in “The Children’s Book,” I had discovered a mysterious piece of writing. And it has led me all the way to this interview. 

What was your favorite book as a child?

Hmmm. Maybe the Redwall books? Do you remember those? And then a few years went by and I moved on to the Conan franchise—not the Robert E. Howard books but the string of franchise titles that came out in the 80s and 90s, like “Conan the Formidable” and “Conan and Indomitable.” I don’t know what to say about them. Conan fights, and wins! Sometimes when you’re a lonely kid who makes a lot of mistakes, it can be nice to imagine life on the winning side.

Do you think the literature we love as kids informs who we will be as adults?

This question is asking me to reflect on the Redwall and Conan books. While Conan got into a lot of skirmishes, I’m much less of a violent force. And I can say pretty confidently that nothing I read when I was ten or eleven has become an influence on the stories I write now. I wish “The Name of the Wind” was around when I was a kid—I would have absolutely loved that book.

Looking back to my childhood, I read mainly to escape. Some might say that’s not a very useful pastime. However, others might say that we develop our capacity for imagination in early childhood.

For me this story echoed the plot of fairy tales—a lost child, a stranger supposedly luring children into his home, a mysterious book—except of course, in this story, the parents are kind and well-meaning. Instead of driving their child away, they want desperately to protect her. How do you feel “The Children’s Book” is in conversation with traditional fairy tales?

When I was considering your earlier question and trying to think of books that I “loved” as a kid, I wanted to write about the Brothers Grimm—but I didn’t know about the Brothers Grimm until I was an adult! I wish I had those stories as a kid . . . then I could give you a better answer for the previous question.

But, yes, definitely, fairy tales are a big influence on my work. How is a story like “The Children’s Book” in conversation with them? Well, I think it’s possible to talk about time and transition, how quickly the story unfolds and jumps ahead. I always appreciate fairy tales that can do a lot of work within a small space. These stories are also unafraid to twist logic, and for me these are usually the moments that feel truly magical.

I noticed, also, that you interviewed Michael J. Lee a few weeks ago. He’s the writer of one of my favorite modern fairy tales, “The New Year.” Would he like that I’m calling it a fairy tale? Maybe not! But I think if anyone is reading this right now and found my story halfway interesting, they should check out Lee’s collection “Something in My Eye.”

I don’t mean to go off-topic. Let’s talk more about “The Children’s Book.”

I appreciate the speakers’ honest attitude about parenthood. I especially love this confession: “In a few years she would be old enough to have a lock on her door, and we would have to knock before entering, so we enjoyed while we could the luxury of strolling into our daughter’s room without the fear of discovering her doing anything that we weren’t supposed to see.” Can you tell us how you found the voice of the parents? Were you inspired by anyone?

Sometimes I feel like all of my characters sound like the parents. When I’m writing, the characters have one job: keep me interested in the project. So I think that’s where the voice comes from: it’s just amusing to me, I have a soft spot for it, and so that’s what gets written. I’m trying to work on this. I don’t want to be called self-indulgent!

You mention an “honest attitude about parenthood,” and this is very important to me even if the characters are a bit silly and absurd. I think there are some truths that become easier to accept or confront when they’re packaged in the absurd. Kind of like how you sometimes need to roll a pill in butter to get the dog to swallow it?  

Who are you reading right now?

I would love to provide a short list of books that I’ve really enjoyed in the past few months:

Peacekeeping, Mischa Berlinski
The Loney, Andrew Hurley
The North Water, Ian McGuire
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Diane Williams
New Animals, Nick Francis Potter

I’m excited about Deb Olin Unferth’s new story collection, Wait Till You See Me Dance. The Internet tells me that this will be coming out early 2017.

I’m also looking forward to The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George and Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh.

One more: there’s a book coming out called The Deaths of Henry King, a collaboration between Brian Evenson and Jesse Ball. Sounds pretty good, right?

What are you working on now?

For about a decade I’ve been working on this trilogy of short novels. Sometimes I think it’s good, but then I look at it six months later and think “You Fool!” and have to tear it up and start again. My hope is that this process will lead somewhere eventually.

I have some new stories coming out, though. There’s one in the current issue of Heavy Feather Review, and two that will appear in the next issue of NOON.

"Sheets of Sound": An Interview with Jaydn DeWald

Jaydn DeWald is a writer, teacher, and musician. Recent poems, stories, and critical essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Best New Poets 2015, The Carolina Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, Writing on the Edge, and many others. He lives with his wife and two kids in Bogart, Georgia, where he’s a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. 

His two stories, "Lineage (5)" and "Lineage (6)," appeared in Issue Seventy-One of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about jazz, writing in the domestic sphere, and how a word compares to a musical note.

“Lineage (5)” and “Lineage (6)” are part of a larger “Lineage” series. Can you please describe this series and tell us how these two stories fit into the larger project?

The “Lineage” series is an ongoing narrative experiment triggered (in part) by Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, a study in which Russian fairy tales are broken into and analyzed as thematic and narratological chunks, which tend to be, Propp discovers, sequenced in particular ways. I won’t belabor this point; instead, I’ll simply mention that I was struck by passages like this one: “The names of the dramatic personae change (as well as the attributes of each), but neither their actions nor functions change. From this we can draw the inference that a tale often attributes identical actions to various personages.” My “Lineage” series attempts to create “versions” or “variations” of a single narrative, but rather than attribute “identical actions to various personages,” the series attributes various actions in identical (or almost identical) sentence structures—most notably the opening sentence of each “Lineage,” wherein the triad of the narrative is established: “My grandmother’s alone, more alone than I, though less alone than my grandfather…”; or, “I’m handsome—a bit handsomer, I think, than my brother—but perhaps not quite as handsome as our father…”; etc, etc. For this reason, each “Lineage” is not so much connected narratively—I don’t think of the characters as members of an extended family, for example, à la the soldiers in William March’s WWI novel-in-vignettes Company K (1933)—as connected morphologically: particular words and phrases and sentence structures, particular narrative moves and units, appear and reappear, like strands of linguistic DNA, across the series. The “Lineage” stories are, to my mind, blood relatives.

On a personal note, I find “lineage” as a subject endlessly fascinating—I’ve become a writer of the domestic sphere—“I like to get lost in my house,” as David Shapiro once wrote—and it’s linked for me to a larger life project: the intricacies of familial relations. My partner, Kali, and I have two kids, a three-year-old daughter and a two-month-old son, and though the “Lineage” stories are by no means autobiographical, writing them has been a valuable, even vital, experience whereby I reaffirm for myself the importance—as well as the difficulty—of intimacy and connection.

In “Lineage (6)” there is a moment in which the speaker addresses the reader. “[D]on’t you think?” he asks us, in reference to his handsomeness. When a narrator or speaker addresses the reader in a story, how do you think that changes our relationship with the text?

Before answering your question, I’ll mention that this address—“don’t you think?”—is one of those linguistic strands of DNA mentioned above: “Lineage (6)” followed the heels of another “Lineage” (which takes as its epigraph this line from David St. John: “Yesterday is so boring, don’t you think?”) wherein that address is repeated like a refrain or, more accurately, a conversational tic. Anyway, considering his extreme solipsism, the “handsome” protagonist of “Lineage (6)” is likelier addressing himself—his own reflection, as it were—than anybody else.

But to your question. I must admit I’m rather ambivalent about the proverbial “reader”—even though I adore those “dear reader” moments in old novels—seeing as my own readers (the people to and for whom I write) are specific people: my partner, my father, a few long-standing writer friends, a few teachers. And yet does one ever really believe that nobody else will read one’s writing? For this reason, I tend to experience readerly addresses as private, despite a text’s ability or inability to communicate widely, so that the general “reader” is in fact a voyeur, eavesdropping on a private conversation. On the whole, such an address will force me to peer deeplier into the peephole (so to speak) of the text. My unavoidable outsiderness arouses my desire to enter.

In “Lineage (5)” the speaker, like you, is a writer. What is the benefit (or what can we learn) by writing about characters who share our passions, our hobbies, or other important aspects of our personalities?

“Lineage (5)” is an aesthetic exploration, which is, of course, always already an existential exploration: Why should I be this particular way, to the inevitable and inadvertent exclusion of other ways? But I wasn’t interested in writing an aesthetics essay. I was interested in enacting—an aesthetic stance in itself, no?—the conflict(s) between generalized areas on the aesthetic-existential spectrum. In any event, for me, the benefit of writing about a writer is that I can enlarge myself: I can enter into the consciousness of a writer whose output exceeds, and whose aesthetic-existential range varies from, my own. Because the occasional battles in writing workshops tend to arise in my experience not from “problems” of execution, say, or attraction/repulsion to particular subject matter, but rather from the clashing of aesthetic sensibilities, the benefit of writing about a writer (a writer unlike oneself, anyway) is that one can become a richer and more tolerant writer, reader, teacher, peer, and maybe even person.

You are also a musician. Do you find any similarities between music and writing as art forms?

Absolutely. Playing music, especially jazz—and I played electric bass for the DeWald-Taylor Quintet for over a decade—one develops valuable, multidisciplinary instincts: one’s body knows more (or better) than one’s mind; twelve notes is more than enough; every instantiation of a tune is a different tune; silence, too, is music; listen and react, listen and react, listen and react . . . How can these instincts (and many others) not influence my writing? This is just to say that, for me, the useful similarities between music and writing relate principally to practice and approach.

Yet there are useful differences, too. Consider musicians like Miles or Jaco Pastorious, musicians who can wound us with a single, arrow-like note. Writing, alas, cannot compete. Even the strongest writing cannot appear (on the page, at least) in a single word, but rather requires an alchemy of words, seeing as a word in isolation cannot be written uniquely—cannot be played, so to speak—though I once dreamt that my laptop keyboard was a piano keyboard, and words were chords, and each letter could be sharped or flatted at will. On the other hand, a single word culled from a gazillion possible words—isn’t that far more precious than a single note, which is merely one of twelve? I love parsing out these differences, and I find the impossible task of obliterating them—the differences, that is—extraordinarily generative.

Do you listen to music while you write? Are there any musical artists who have inspired your writing?

Almost never. Language is its own music, just as music is its own language. Even so, while writing I’ll occasionally listen to a particular piece of music over and over again, when that music is (I mean this quite literally) the soundtrack of the poem or story or essay—as when a character listens to a song on the radio, for instance.

As for musicians who have inspired my writing, they are many and various—too many to responsibly introduce here—though the “Lineage” series is very much indebted to Coltrane. Jazz critic Ira Gitler famously described Coltrane’s solos as “sheets of sound,” and the “Lineage” stories are almost all long, single-paragraph stories, which I rather fancifully regard as Coltranian sheets of sound. Furthermore, Coltrane had a gift for extending phrases beyond their expected conclusions, for broadening or artfully complicating the improvisational units of which his solos are composed—there’s a real reluctance to pause or stop. In one well-known anecdote, Coltrane, defending the length of his solos, tells Miles, “I can’t find a way to stop,” to which Miles replies, “You might start by taking the horn out of your fucking mouth.” My “Lineage” series tries to channel the spirit of Coltrane, refusing the impulse to place periods and end paragraphs—to take the horn out of my mouth—preferring longer, more complicated compositional units.

I suspect this all sounds rather intellectual. Yet when you’ve played jazz and admired Coltrane’s virtuosity for as long as I have, it feels very personal indeed—an act of reverence and reciprocation. As Clark Terry, the great jazz trumpet, once said: “There’s nothing wrong with being a copycat, so long as you copy the right cats.”

What projects are you working on now?

I’m putting the finishing touches (I hope) on a cross-genre manuscript. I’ve also been writing new poems, stories, essays, and occasionally setting poems to music and/or soundwork. Most importantly, though, the project of raising two kids—my own lineage.

"Secret Subterranean Spaces": An Interview Janalyn Guo

Janalyn Guo lives in Austin, Texas and works as a grants management consultant. Her most recent short fictions have appeared in The Tusculum Review, Heavy Feather Review, Quarterly West, and other places. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University and was once artist-in-residence at Lijiang Studio in Yunnan, China.

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

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about rapdoors, edible mushrooms, and Remedios Varo.

How did the idea of the Heart Site and its wish-fulfilling crones first come to you?

I had some old material that I’d written when I spent a summer in Yunnan, China with a Naxi family (a minority group in China with a matriarchal history). The landscape was very interesting. In Baoshan, women would go out and labor in these tiered fields, which were on very steep mountainsides. I’d watch some elderly women scale up and down this terrain to pick vegetables. They were extremely nimble. They carried sickles in one hand and moved like wind. I felt this strange sense of protection because they were everywhere. I started some stories about them and never quite finished any. When I set out to write “Heart Site,” I was attempting to revive some of those stories. At the time, I was also reading 1001 Arabian Nights. Something that really intrigued me about the tales was the repeated discovery of secret subterranean spaces: metal and wood trapdoors in the ground leading to a flight of stairs and finally to a very domesticated space, lavishly decorated with carpets and silks, and a figure waiting to be questioned. I wanted to write a story that opened up into strange underground territory.

So, that sheds a bit of light on how the story originated, though it’s morphed from my plans and there’s not much semblance to what I originally thought it’d be. One reason I enjoy writing stories is that it’s a little bit like putting together a memory capsule, and you don’t know how each thing you add is going to color everything inside. Now that I’m thinking back on how the story came to be, it’s all the stuff I mentioned above, but it could also be that during that time, a good friend of mine had a summer job cleaning statues in Central Park, a beekeeper at a coffee shop educated me on the behaviors of bees, and I was also obsessively reading a Japanese horror manga called Uzumaki, which is all about evil spirals.

The strange is often met with a lack of surprise by the characters within this story. For example, when the speaker and Elsinore encounter crones within the heart, they are undaunted. Why do you think this unflinching acceptance of magic is important, if not necessary, in fabulist literature?

I think that when they step into the heart, they’re already on this quest to find something spectacular, and when they encounter the crones, the world they inhabit turns out to be much more expansive than it seems. So maybe what they feel is more like awe and relief.

I’m often anxious when I start on something new because as I write, I’m waiting for the leap into fantasy. Sometimes, all it takes is the first sentence to feel like I’m there. But, sometimes I write stories that are only realism for the first few pages, so I put them in the metaphorical drawer and come back to them later. I don’t want to force anything. I want the magic to feel inevitable in each story I write, entirely probable within the logic of the world, but maybe initially dormant. I like having fantastical elements in my stories arrive a little bit late.

As for why this unflinching acceptance of magic is important in fabulist literature, I think it has to do with the space we are able to create. It’s evocative. There are so many more ways to tell the stories we want to tell, or maybe, for some of us, it is the only way.

I love that mushroom pickers and light saber-style canes exist side by side in this story. There’s a wonderful combination of modernity and timelessness in this piece. Why did this style appeal to you?

In Yunnan, I wandered around a pine forest with my neighbor, an expert mushroom picker, who then prepared a mushroom dish for dinner. Those edible mushrooms were some of the weirdest shaped and textured things I’ve ever put in my mouth, and I think about them from time to time. At the same time, the town where we stayed was modernizing. A highway was being constructed to connect it to the rest of China.

I think that sense of timelessness, as you described, is what it’s like to wander through a Chinese landscape, sometimes. It’s hyper modern in some ways and also very unchanged at the same time. I also think that if you look at any social landscape close enough, anywhere in the world, you’d find those layers of old and new traditions.

I admit I do like setting my stories in spaces and timeframes that are not easily identifiable. It could have happened in the past; it could be happening in the future. I feel like I’m granted more freedom to build my world.

If an old crone offered you a wish when you were a kid, what would you have asked for?

That’s a tough question. I think I would have made a terribly informed wish. I remember that I was an avoidant kid. If I could get out of doing something, I would, even if it was something I mildly enjoyed—like choir practice or line soccer. I think I would have wished for a little trapdoor to follow me wherever I went so that if I wanted to get out of a situation, I could step through it and immediately land in my bed at home.  

And of course the crone would have said no. So, I would have wished for unfrizzy hair or maybe to be less shy around adults

If you were to pair this story with another work of art (a song, a painting, etc.), what would its companion piece be?

That’s a really hard question, but I have an answer for you! So a companion painting would be anything painted by Remedios Varo. The colors she uses are what I imagine the world of the story would be: reds, yellows, and oranges—a light and dark, whimsical and mysterious. The subjects are often mysterious figures, sometimes emerging from openings in walls. As for music, I would pair this story with something like Erik Satie’s The Velvet Gentleman. When it starts out, there’s this sort of orchestral thing in a melancholy key going on. Then it transitions into something wonderfully playful and MOOG-y. And then there’s all those elements mixing together throughout. That juxtaposition of sounds seems right.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m revising a novel I started years ago, which is challenging because I am not the same person as I was then. I am also working on a short story collection, which is coming easier to me. So hopefully, more things to come from me soon!