"In that Glittery Dirt": An Interview with Elijah Matthew Tubbs

Elijah Matthew Tubbs lives and writes in Arizona. Recent work is featured in Passages North, Sonora Review, Connotations Press, and elsewhere. He is co-founder of ELKE "a little journal."

His essay, "By Way of Salt," appeared in Issue Ninety-One of The Collagist.

Here, Elijah Matthew Tubbs talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about salt in myths, learning from research, and writing in a desert.

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

I was sitting at my desk at work and I realized it was time to write a new essay. I had read an essay by Daisy Hernandez on Brevity during my lunch break and that kicked me into gear. It is such a great piece of nonfiction titled “Wings”.

I am slow writer, especially when it comes to prose, so when I have that urge to write prose (I generally write poetry) I must run with it, quick and hard.

I had been thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah as a topic for a while and after a little research I found I was more interested in the salt pillar that Lot’s wife turned into. After that I just kept finding more and more information about salt and its many implications in other religions and cultures.

From Buddhist tradition to Norse mythology, writing this piece seems like it must have required a wide breadth of research. Is research a regular part of your writing process? How do you do your research? Is it something you enjoy?

Yes, research is key to my writing process. Normally my in-depth research comes during revision, where the first draft is more so smearing the page with ideas.

My research generally comes from searching the internet as it is the most accessible for me.

Research is very enjoyable in my opinion. Many times, I am learning about the topic as I write about it and that makes the writing process very exciting for me. I really hate when people say, “Write what you know.” If I did that, I’d be writing the same thing over and over.

There seems to be some specific intention between the amount of white space that appears between some paragraphs in this piece. Why is this level of separation significant to you? What purpose do you have in mind, if any, for these absences?

Mainly the white space is just barriers between the vastly different myths and traditions I talk about. It looks a little more dramatic now that it’s up and online than it did on my computer screen, but for me it is simple as separation of ideas on the page, for clarity’s sake.

Your bio says that you live and write in Arizona. Are you a transplant or a local? Because I have lived in Arizona for a few years, I am curious how writing from Arizona might differ from other work. How do you think life in a desert climate has influenced your writing?

I was born in southern California but grew up in Cave Creek and attended Arizona State University. I am local.

I think, in my poetry more so, Arizona is extremely influential. Even if I am not writing specifically about the desert, the desert landscape is there somewhere in there. In the form, the tone, or mood. My heart will always lie here in that glittery dirt, wherever else I may be. 

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

Right now, I am finishing up a chapbook of poems, titled “Stomping Ground and Other Poems.” I am hoping to send it out this winter. Stomping Ground is a twenty-part serial poem, and then there’s the others too.

Along with the chapbook, I am looking to apply to an MFA program this admission cycle. I am writing all the statements and essays that come with that long process.

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

Eliot Weinberger. Particularly the book of essays, “Karmic Traces” from New Directions. That book, along with his others, have forever changed me as a writer and directly influenced the essay “By Way of Salt”.

I have also been reading a lot of Larry Levis again since watching the documentary, “A Late Style of Fire,” which I also highly recommend.

Lorine Niedecker and Louise Mathias are others I have been reading lately as well. They are both fantastic poets. I recommend getting Niedecker’s collected poems from University California Press and Louise Mathias’ “The Traps” from Four Way Books if interested.

"Irony or Pathos or Downright Absurdity": An Interview with Marcia Aldrich

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton.  She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. 

Her essay, "Deviated Reports from the Bainbridge Island Police Blotter," appeared in Issue Eighty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer William Hoffacker about police reports, the "hermit crab" essay form, and yellow cargo pants.

Can you describe the process of writing this piece? Since it is classified as nonfiction, am I correct in assuming that these reports are real? How did you obtain and select them? Are any of the details invented or embellished?

My husband and I moved from Michigan to Bainbridge Island in June 2016. We began to receive a community publication called The Bainbridge Island Review which included a section at the end called “The Police Blotter.” As a newcomer to the island I found these entries fascinating. First an odd portrait emerges of a place through the crimes reported, something other than the Chamber of Commerce’s sanitized version. A version that the island doesn’t quite own, I’d say. Second the level of detail included was astounding. And third, the stories themselves surprised me. I’m not sure at what point it occurred to me that I might do something with them, but I began cutting out the pages and putting them in a folder. The earliest entries date from July 2016 to the last entries in November.

At some point, I had amassed quite a lot and began transcribing them into a file including the dates and times. In the process of transcription, I edited the entries because they were too long for my purposes. I was aiming to create a literary essay based on real documents. I also began to hear the literary potential in the entries—by that I mean, I began to hear the irony or pathos or downright absurdity inherent in the accounts.

Selection became crucial. I didn’t want three entries about an older woman driver who ran into a storefront. I discovered that on the island there are many incidents involving older drivers, who mistake the gas pedal for the brakes. And so, it was with all the entries—there were patterns of incidents and it was my job as a writer to find those patterns and pick the best one to represent the pattern, not to fill the essay with repetition. I was looking for what was representative, to give a portrait of the island through the incidents the police handled during this time period.

I did not make up any of the incidents—they all happened and were reported. In this sense, the material is nonfiction. However, I thought of what I was doing as composing a hermit crab essay, a literary form, using nonfiction and recognizable material. I used the police blotter entries to construct through selection and arrangement a literary portrait of a place. Something like a found poem but with liberties taken.

The hermit crab form appeals to me because it’s sneaky. Most of us recognize police reports and find them familiar but we don’t think about what they reveal about a community. As someone who had recently relocated to Bainbridge Island, I felt a bit of an outsider, able to see patterns that perhaps had become normalized or invisible to those who had lived on the island for a long time. We often expect the dominance of the I in personal essays and again the hermit crab form shifts that I more to an EYE. I am not a direct player in the narratives. My activity as a writer is more to see the potential in the material, to select, arrange and witness.

Many of the reports are somewhat humorous, mostly because the incidents described seem frivolous or downright strange. Some lines are quite funny, e.g., “He acknowledged that the need for a haircut may have clouded his judgment.” Then, among these amusing slices of life, a dead body. How did you choose the placement of this morbid tale, juxtaposed with much lighter fare? (You could have titled this section “Body,” or “Drowned,” or “Unidentified,” but I suspect you had a reason for naming it “Nothing” so that it appears smack dab in the middle of the alphabetically arranged vignettes.)

The answer to this question follows upon the heels of my answers to your first question. There’s a lot a writer can do using the tools of selection and arrangement. What I chose might not be what someone else would choose. I’m drawn to the alphabet and other organizing structures because again the structure allows me to frame the material in ways that shape the reading experience. Juxtaposition, for example as you mention, is incredibly powerful in this piece—the mixture of tones and material, seeing the humor in darkness and the darkness in humor. Juxtaposition allows the writer to create a relationship between the parts of a work that complicate the material. Mixing things up, breaking up expectation, creating a different rhythm of reading. This form requires that the reader be quite active in putting the pieces together and cover a spectrum of feeling in doing so. It doesn’t allow the reader to settle.

I did work hard on deciding what to include, where to include it, and what to title the section even though I imagine if the essay is successful, it looks effortless, even natural. But it is instructive to read the raw material I began with, in chronological order with the dates and times, and then read the order I ended up with and the titles. The changes make a world of difference. I’m not sure I could say that all my choices were calculated so much as intuitive and creative. I wanted to be as free as possible. By that I mean, I didn’t want to worry about what the portrait was that was emerging and what islanders would think about it. I sensed an effect was possible. The titles were fun but hard to come up with—sometimes they popped from the material and other times they did not. In all cases, the titles frame what comes after as titles do.

As for embellishment and invention—there is some. I did not change what happened. For example, in Yellow, one of my favorite entries, the cargo pants really were yellow and the guy really found them in his house and had no explanation of how they got there. This entry is close to a found poem. In Buttocks, the book really was a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I didn’t make up these details and part of the pleasure of the essay is in the freshness of the details, a sense that facts can be more interesting than fiction. But I did add bits. For example, in Appointment, I added the ending. The police did suggest that the woman block her phone, stay inside, and lock the door. I added her response—“Forever, she asked.” There are touches and turns, little additions that color the entry, perhaps adding a bit of commentary, a bit of humor over the obvious absurdity. But mostly I think I found the pathos in the scene and brought it out a bit more effectively or dramatically than the straight report.

Why did you choose Bainbridge Island as the location from which you would draw stories?

I’ve probably covered this. I lived in East Lansing, Michigan for a long time and it never occurred to me to make anything out of the crime reports. Why? I think because I was an insider, familiar with the place, part of it, and therefore not spurred to create a portrait of it. But when I relocated to a new, unfamiliar place I found myself trying to understand it, to make sense of it and the police blotter gave me a more intimate portrait than other forms.

What obsessions (or passions, or interests, if you prefer) appear in your writing most often? (Despite the fact that many of these reports end without criminal charges, was this piece at all inspired by an interest in true crime stories?)

You know, I’m not drawn to crime. This was a onetime thing, as far as I know. Although I like to watch TV shows like The Wire and True Detective, I don’t see myself in that genre.

As a writer of creative nonfiction, I have an abiding interest in form—from all manner of the essay to memoir, with a special interest in experimentation. I’ve written a book on a friend’s suicide, Companion to an Untold Story (AWP award winner in creative nonfiction, UGA), an experimental memoir on growing up female Girl Rearing (Norton). Waveform: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women came out at the end of 2016, which I edited and marks my deep interest in women’s writing.

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

Too many and none of them are finished. I can barely make it to my desk for all the piles of unfinished work. An essay of mine, “Float,” was just selected as a Notable essay in the Best American Essay series. This piece is part of a large memoir project called Haze that is incomplete. I’ve written about 200 pages but I am not done, it frustrates me to say. Meanwhile I’m deep into an array of essays drafted over the last year about Bainbridge Island—almost none of those are finished either. And I’ve put together a collection of essays called Grub using a numbered outline system that builds them into one complete system of essay.

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

Of late I’ve been drawn to books composed of short forms. Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness and 300 Arguments. In the category of memoir, H is for Hawk is the best I’ve read in some time. I’ve been reading Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey with great pleasure, dipping in and out.

"Shimmering Like a Living Thing": An Interview with Ösel Jessica Plante

Ösel Jessica Plante's poetry, and flash fiction, has appeared or is forthcoming in the Best Small Fictions 2016 anthology, The Adroit Journal, Puerto del Sol, South Dakota Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Zone 3, and others. She was runner-up in Meridian's 2017 Poetry Contest, a finalist for the Passages North 2017 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and finalist for the 2016 Mississippi Review Prize. She earned an MFA from UNC-Greensboro and is pursuing a PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. She is associate Poetry Editor of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. More of her work can be found at oseljessicaplante.com.

Her story, "The Lick," appeared in Issue Seventy-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about office jobs, single-minded characters, and tongues.

What inspired this story?              

I can’t remember what inspired the story. I know I had been reading a lot of Gary Lutz at the time. I was also working a full-time office job. My boss was a big reader. He would sometimes give me books to take home as though grooming me to his taste. In fact, the day he’d interviewed me for the job he’d walked with me out of the conference room and into the parking lot to my car as we discussed the latest George Saunders novel, Tenth of December, which had come out the previous month. I think I got the job partly because we talked about books. The job, however, turned out to not be a great fit. I was bored within a matter of weeks and would fill empty hours by writing or with long walks through nearby neighborhoods at lunchtime. I was not a terrible employee, but I was not great either. Something about the sensory deprivation that comes from staring at pale green walls and dropped ceilings, I’m sure, led me to fantasize about what my senses were missing. That and Lutz’s keen and odd styling loosened something in me. I wrote this pretty much all at once, which is how I write most of my flash fiction. I generally write a lot of crap, and then, finally, something comes out shimmering like a living thing.

You present us with a strange character, one who licks fruit in the grocery store and tastes snakes. Yet, the beauty and joy in her observations helped me to relate to her: “Each divot in its rippling leather tasted of a chemical anger, a disappearing act, the reflection of our own fear. I could almost calculate with my taste buds how soon its next molting would occur.” How do, as a writer, engage with a character who on the outside seems difficult to relate to?

Hmm, this is a tricky question for me because I don’t often think about a characters’ relatability when I’m writing. I think I’m more tuned to whether they feel honest. Frankly, I’m not sure I would want to be this person’s friend, or even acquaintance. She seems more than slightly off balance and like social situations wouldn’t be her forte. But, what I do like about her is that she is single-minded; she is on a mission. I wanted to see how far I could push my descriptions, to see how absurd I could get but still have it seem grounded in the context of her obsessive compulsion to lick. I did waiver about whether to make the character a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or a ‘they’. But then decided her behavior was contrary to what we expect of women, so I made her female to push against the idea that women should be living pretty, manicured existences.

I also think the tongue is a really strange part of the body, highly sensual, not inner or outer but both. The tongue doesn’t just taste other things, it’s also constantly tasting itself and the body where it lives. Perhaps the ability to have a heightened sense of taste could be related to a heightened sense of self-awareness, but I doubt that’s true. I should have had her sample other creatures’ tongues. You can buy cow tongues in grocery stores, you know. 

The speaker in this story understands her world by tasting it. What’s your preferred way of exploring and understanding your world?

Definitely staring into space while alone, or lying next to someone I may or may not be in the habit of licking.

What is the last book you read and loved?

The first book that pops to mind is Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m also reading book one of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard right now, which is fabulous.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing my first manuscript of poems. It’s called Waveland. I’m also beginning to work on a novella in verse called Radio Brother, about a mother who tunes her son like a radio because she believes she is receiving messages from god. I have future plans to write a book of non-fiction, a memoir, about the time I died.

"A Place of Embarrassment": An Interview with Kaj Tanaka

Kaj Tanaka's stories have been featured in Longform, selected for Wigleaf’s Best (Very) Short Fictions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the nonfiction editor for BULL Magazine. He lives in Houston. Read more of his work at kajtanaka.com.

His story, "Understand," appeared in Issue Seventy-Six of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about MS Word, Borges, and how we relate to our readers.

Where did this story begin for you?

I read things and don’t understand them all the time, which is embarrassing to admit. I’m a very forgetful and lazy reader. I wanted to write a story about that. I think a lot of my best stories come from a place of embarrassment.

How do you compose your stories? Do you compose them in your head, like Borges and the dream man, or do you compose on a computer or paper? How do you think the medium we use to write our stories affects the form our stories take?

I do all of my writing on MS Word. My hand isn’t accustomed to writing with a pen, and my handwriting is almost completely illegible unless I concentrate. The nice thing about writing on a computer is that my stories are very malleable. I can cut, copy, splice, and delete very easily, and I use those tools all the time. It adds another dimension to the composition process. Maybe because of that I don’t plan my stories out in advance. This story, for example, was quite a bit longer at one point, and the paragraphs were in a different order.

I love that the first line, “A person can read something and not understand it at all, even something simple,” sets me up to question my reading of your story. As a writer, is it important to you that readers understand your intent, or are you open to the multiple interpretations they might bring to your work?  

I don’t usually worry about making sure readers understand what I’m trying to accomplish. I know, as a reader, I read things into stories all the time that the writers probably didn’t intend. It doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the story, and sometimes when I find out what the author was actually trying to accomplish, I’m slightly disillusioned. I think when you publish a story you give it away, in a certain sense. People take what they want from fiction, based on who they are and what kind of day they‘ve had. No writer can control for those things. The best a writer can hope to do is write interesting and robust sentences that have the power to appeal to a diversity of people.

Who are some authors that inspire or inform your writing?

I think this story was a riff on a Lydia Davis story. I’m not sure which one, but I was reading a lot her at the time, and I was really taking her into heart. I also look at Richard Brautigan, and Isaac Babel when I’m stuck. They’ve been a big influence on me. Also Borges.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m writing a novel about taekwondo kids in rural North Dakota.

"With Chest Pain but Living": An Interview with Jennifer Givhan

Jennifer Givhan is a National Endowment for the Arts & PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellow, and the author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series), & Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize). Her honors include the Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, and the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, and The Kenyon Review. She can be found at jennifergivhan.com as well as Facebook & Twitter (@JennGivhan).

Her poem, "Madhouse of Spirits," appeared in Issue Sixty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer T.m. Lawson about Allende, Auden, and borrowing.

What is your usual method for writing poems and how did you come by the inspiration for “Madhouse of Spirits”? The title is interesting and to me evoked the title of Isabel Allende’s novel, The House of Spirits, which contained themes of maternity, madness, and generational conflict within families and communities. I can’t unsee the connection!

My poem absolutely borrows from Allende’s work, which I adore. Women in Allende’s novel work from within the power structures, asserting the importance of motherwork during times of upheaval. Taking care of children—mothering—is a definite political and social act. Alba describes how the other imprisoned women care for the children of a mother with PTSD: “the fate of the children, growing up in that place with a mother who had gone mad, cared for by other, unfamiliar mothers who had not lost their voices for lullabies … would be able to return the songs and the gestures to the children and grandchildren of the women who were rocking them to sleep.” Violence begets violence, true. But love, motherlove, begets hope—the chance to rise up out of dark situations and sing. The house of spirits is literally the house of women—of mothers and mother figures who record their stories and alter history by reclaiming it for their children, and by ending the violent cycle through motherlove. My poem takes these ideas and transforms the domestic space, often seen as a peaceful realm of “womanly” import—but so often the home is a place of violence and fear for children, swept under the rug. This poem doesn’t turn away from the destruction and mental illness within, how motherlove can both hurt and heal, is a powerful force.   

I noticed that you open the poem with an epigraph of an excerpt from W.H. Auden’s poem “The Question”, which itself has been seen by critics as ‘riddle-like’, where childhood and adulthood intersect in the mode of madness. The quote “[a]nd ghosts must do again / what gives them pain” has shades of obsessive compulsion in the remembrance of trauma, which carries over directly to the first two lines depicting child abuse. You have woven throughout the poem these interesting themes of childhood fear, pain, parental madness, and the adult perception; we as adults dread and preoccupy ourselves with the past (our childhood, our parents, an echo of what is to come for us). Your term “motherloving fear” brilliantly encapsulates this; of all possible sources for an epigraph to set the tone, why this particular lesser-known piece by W.H. Auden?

Auden’s quote spoke most clearly to me of Jung’s shadow and the dark night of the soul. Through it is the healing. Through it one must go.

Another piece of syntax I loved in your poem was the line “[t]he mother eye isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”. There is definitely a preoccupation with the archetype of the Mother, specifically the more abusive type. A few lines in the poem allude to the novel Flowers for Algernon, in which the speaker relates their own experience with their parent to the protagonist Charlie Gordon, whose childlike mind could not comprehend why he was punished and abandoned until after he acquired higher intelligence and consciousness. The cycle echoes with the later comparison the speaker encounters: “How does one extract the violent bone / without mining that poor child’s spine?” To heal, one must effectively relive trauma; the ‘ghost’ “must do again / what gives [...] pain”. The speaker’s pain is very much intertwined with intelligence, the understanding of the pain, and the neurotic compulsion to dwell upon it. Does the speaker dissociate, separate, and distance themself from this memory? There is very real sense of dread in the language when the speaker meditates on the parenthood, and it seems as if the speaker is in the midst of arrested development when the next stage (the stage the initial trauma’s initiator was at) is considered on the horizon: “I’m trying not to become the kind of parent I feel bound / to”.

The speaker must relive (her) childhood through her children’s eyes. Trauma has ghosted her, but if there is to be healing, she must enter that dark night. She was the Charlie Gordon character before the experiment, and now as a parent has become Charlie at the height of his ability to comprehend—but she fears she is also now his mother. The speaker’s neurosis in the poem comes perhaps from dwelling within so many perspectives at once. Dwelling in another’s consciousness leads to empathy, yes, but so many voices at once is a heavy burden to bear. Epigeneticists now say that our DNA is wired with our ancestors’ trauma. The speaker fears this means she is also bound to the ancestors’ propensity to inflict trauma. She is a house of familial ghosts, has played the roles of both abuser and abused, has come to a crossroads and must choose. Which voice speaks loudest and longest? Love or pain?

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

I’m reading and loving Roxane Gay’s Hunger and Christa Parravani’s Her, both creative nonfiction memoirs, as I’m working on my own, currently titled Quinceañera with Baby Fever.

"The Specter of Disaster": An Interview with Anne-Marie Kinney

Anne-Marie Kinney is the author of the novel Radio Iris. Her short fiction has appeared in Black Clock, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rattling Wall, Fanzine, and other places. She co-curates L.A.'s Griffith Park Storytelling Series.

Her story, "Isn't It a Beautiful Night," appeared in Issue Eighty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Anne-Marie Kinney talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about earthquakes, setting, and characters' inner lives.

What can you tell us about the origins of your story “Isn’t It a Beautiful Night”? What sparked the initial idea that caused you to start writing it?

The idea for the story came from a real-life news item that was making the rounds, the one mentioned in the story, about the fact that we’re overdue for a “big one” on the San Andreas Fault (I live in L.A.). At the time, there was reportedly an increased likelihood of a big quake over a span of a few days. It was the kind of thing everyone says “oh shit” about but then pretty much continues with their day, half terrified, half laughing about it, because what else are you going to do? It got me thinking about the ways we live under the specter of disaster, and especially how it’s becoming a way of life for everyone as the realities of climate change come into focus. And, yeah, people get cancer and get hit by cars every day too, but you still need to go to work and take care of your family, because what else are you going to do?

The line that really opened this story up for me was this: “These are the quiet times I fill in one of two ways: Deep Satisfaction or Nameless Dread.” Mostly the conflict in this story is internal, the narrator’s anxiety. The only external sources of conflict are potential, the threat of earthquakes and the effects of climate change. Is it typical for characters in your fiction to experience conflict from within rather than from without? Do you tend to write stories about people navigating their ordinary lives or extraordinary circumstances, or is it a balance?

I tend to write about internal struggle a lot because that’s what’s interesting to me as a reader. I like to ride around in somebody’s brain, and I often don’t care that much what they do or what happens. Every life is fascinating if you can really get down into it. My aim is to pull something transcendent out of day-to-day life, to find it under rocks if I have to.

Can you describe the importance of setting in your fiction? Of course, with all its talk of earthquakes and temperature, it’s necessary that this story take place in Southern California. How significant of a role does the local environment of the setting usually play in your stories?

Most (all?) of my stories, including my novel Radio Iris, are really built around a place. In the case of Radio Iris, it was an office building, with its frigid air conditioning and white walls. With my next novel it was a run-down San Fernando Valley strip mall. With “Isn’t It a Beautiful Night,” it was a hot car in traffic. Place is mood and mood is life. Most of us spend our lives going to a handful of places over and over again, and those places become our lives. I write about Southern California a lot because it’s the place I know best, but there are infinite places within it. I’m more interested in rooms and streets than in geography.

Please tell us about your revision process. How much did this story change from the first draft to the final? What are your priorities when you’re refining a piece of writing?

My process is very slow, because I don’t like moving on from a paragraph until I feel like it’s right and doing what I want it to do. I like to say I can’t cross a bridge I haven’t built yet. I can’t work on a later section if the section that leads into it is a mess, because everything builds on what came before. So, like most of my writing, the first draft of this story came line by line, paragraph by paragraph. Then subsequent drafts are about pulling back on moments that I’ve pushed too hard and nurturing the parts that feel undercooked. I always knew this story was going to be very short, and it’s more autobiographical than most of the things I write. I sort of had the whole thing in my head before I started, so it didn’t change all that much from start to finish other than trimming fat.

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

I’m currently looking for a home for my second novel, a bit of San Fernando Valley melancholia called Coldwater Canyon, about an increasingly ill Desert Storm veteran stalking a young actress. In the meantime, I’m working on a new novel about a mother and adult daughter facing their demons through a series of extreme weather events.

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

I recently really enjoyed Margaret Wappler’s novel Neon Green. And I’m always reading short stories, currently Helen Oyeyemi’s collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, which is so strange and lovely and expansive.

“The New Rule”: An Interview with Leah Horlick

Photo credit: Maki FotosLeah Horlick is a writer and poet from Saskatoon. A 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her first collection of poetry, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012) was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. She lives on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver, where she co-curates REVERB, a queer and anti-oppressive reading series. Her second book, For Your Own Good, was published by Caitlin Press in spring 2015.

Her poem, "Bruises," appeared in Issue Sixty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Sarah Huener about influences, editing, and agency.

“Bruises” opens with an epigraph that’s referenced—and illustrated—later in the poem. Did this poem begin when you read the Sara Peters poem? If not, how did you start writing, and when did you decide to include the epigraph?

Sara Peters’ book 1994 is a favourite of mine, and I’ve returned to it ever since this poem first bowled me over. “The Last Time I Slept In This Bed” is really only one of a host of luminous poems, but because it’s the very last, and because of the way it deals with the topic of (what I read as) self-harm, it always has given me extra shivers. “Bruises” definitely began as I sifted through my feelings about the poem and reflected on some of my own experiences about my body and pain and choice.

This poem is linguistically taut and avoids being cluttered with unnecessary words. Did you use this style and form from the start, or arrive at them through revision?

I’m so glad that style is coming through for you here! I was definitely aiming for tightness and clarity all throughout the piece, as well as throughout the manuscript which eventually became  For Your Own Good. I find I often have to pare my poems way, way down from the first draft, though—it’s a bit like taking a vegetable peeler and shaving off some of the unnecessary bits.

“This was not an original practice” strikes me as something true of writing in general—that it can be a way to feel “able to choose” and exercise agency of a sort. What are your thoughts on balancing agency with rule-following in writing?

Great question. What works for me is to notice what I respond to in other writers’ work—what exciting shifts are really working, what technical strengths make a good foundation, what experiments really challenge me as a reader—and try to balance that with my own sense of my strengths as a poet. I also read out loud a lot—I find if something looks like a major rule-breaker on the page, it can still really work when performed on stage or read aloud.

What have you read recently that you’ve connected with?

Some of my favourite recent reads include The Devourers by Indra Das and Passage by Gwen Benaway. I’ve been returning again and again to even this page is white, Vivek Shraya’s debut book of poetry. I have also been obsessively reading anything I can find by Melissa Broder ever since I read So Sad Today (during the course of which I missed my stop on the train three times).

What are you working on right now?

I am very fortunate right now to be working on a long-form poem about my family’s Jewish roots in Eastern Europe - thanks to some very generous grant funding I’ll be in Romania & Moldova for two weeks at the end of July 2017 to do some research!

"Aiming for What's Unknown": An Interview with Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Malak (forthcoming from Platypus Press) and Paper, Cotton, Leather. Her poetry has appeared in Cream City Review, Ninth Letter, The Cortland Review, Hotel Amerika, The Pinch, and other journals. Her prose has appeared in Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, South Loop Review, Fourteen Hills, and other journals. She is co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly and an Associate Professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

Her essay, "Misophonia Primer or How You Hear Sound," appeared in Issue Eighty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Jenny Sadre-Orafai talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about sound, discovery, and writing in a trance.

What can you tell us about the origins of “Misophonia Primer or How You Hear Sound”? What sparked the initial idea?

I found myself explaining misophonia to more and more people recently and rather selfishly because I wanted them to be more mindful about their noise levels around me. So, I thought maybe I would just write an essay about what it’s like to really live with it. I’ve come across some people who think I’m just being picky or sensitive, but it’s a real reaction to sound that I cannot control.

This piece is divided into twenty-six short paragraphs, each with its own title (most of them sounds), one for each letter and arranged in alphabetical order. Why organize your essay in this form? Did you write the sections in the same order in which they’re presented, or did you skip around?

I knew I didn’t want to write a conventional essay. I wanted the essay to be snippets of sound—sound coming in and out instead of a constant hum. I also think this format may be more inviting and not as overwhelming. So, I probably wrote it in this way for a reader like me, who can get overwhelmed easily. I actually came up with the section titles first and then skipped around writing each entry.

In the section “Televisions,” you write, “You work in the quiet. Your fiancé works in chaos. You make words and he makes images, So it’s different, you tell him.” I wonder if you could elaborate on this, and I admit my curiosity partially comes from the fact that I am a writer, too, and I find that I cannot tune out many sounds, which is why I keep earplugs at work and use them daily. Reading your essay, I felt I could relate to the speaker’s struggles, although I acknowledge that actual misophonia is rare, so I’m not sure if my “this seems familiar” response to the essay speaks more to my own experiences or to your keen abilities to convey yours in a sympathetic way. What I want to know is: Do you think there is a correlation being a writer and having auditory triggers? How would you describe the relationship between the writer’s life and the world of sounds?

Thank you for this question, William. It’s such an important one. I have always written in some sort of strange trance, so I find anything auditory breaks that trance or spell for me. It almost muffles out what I’m hearing and transcribing. I know this all sounds like a very romantic way of writing, but it’s how I’ve always worked. I do think, however, that sound can be a catalyst for writing sometimes. The sound of two people whispering on a plane, someone clapping too early on a recording of a live symphony performance, a horse clopping on a street during vacation. These can all be seeds for poems, essays, or stories that I stow away for later.

You are the author of both prose and poetry. What lessons have you learned from one genre that you have applied to how you write in the other?

I’ve learned how to really be lyrical in prose ironically and I’ve learned how to walk into a poem without a trail or a map. The lesson of being lyrical helps when writing prose because for me sound is even more important in prose sometimes. And, coming to the page without a plan and aiming for what’s unknown is something that is really felt for readers I think. I feel like the reader wants to discover with you and they’ll know if you already have it all figured out. Where’s the discovery in that?

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

I’m putting finishing touches on my second poetry collection Malak, forthcoming this fall from Platypus Press.

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

I really, really loved Wendy Ortiz’s Bruja, Airea D. Matthews’ simulacra, Brit Bennet’s The Mothers, and Annie Hartnett’s Rabbit Cake.

"To Reclaim Her from the Murderer": An Interview with Corrina Carter

Corrina Carter is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. Her work has appeared or will appear in such journals as About Place, Alligator Juniper, The Fourth River, The Kenyon Review Online, and Redivider. In her free time, she runs, hikes, birds, and researches true crime.

Her essay, "From the Trolley Car to the Field," appeared in Issue Eighty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Corrina Carter talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about "pet" murders, hypotheses, and writing from a nonhuman perspective.

I tried Googling the details in your essay (names, setting, etc.) and found only your essay and other unrelated listings, rather than the news reports I was seeking. So am I right to assume that this piece is based on a true story with the names changed? If so, how did you learn of the story? What are this essay’s real origins?

You’re correct. Bernadette, my father’s cousin, and her parents were very private, so I didn’t use their real names. I also didn’t identify or even directly reference the murderer, a serial killer who has inspired several books, because people tend to remember victimizers and forget victims. I want to change this, to prevent the slain from becoming footnotes to their own deaths. All their fears, needs, and aspirations vanished in a bloody instant. We should at least keep them at the forefront of our thoughts.

Your bio says that you enjoy researching true crime. How much time would you say you devote to this type of research? How often do you use this research in your own writing? How and when did this interest in true crime start for you?

I spend three to four hours a week gathering information on my “pet” murders. The information colors my worldview—and therefore my writing—but doesn’t always lead to an essay. Though I’m not sure exactly when my interest in true crime began, I attribute it to a lifelong compassion for the marginalized people most likely to fall victim to violence: women, children, minorities, runaways, sex workers, and substance abusers, to name a few.

How much of your own invention went into telling this story? How much invention do you think should be permitted while still labeling a piece “nonfiction”?

“Trolley Car” sticks to the facts yet leaves room for speculation. Like Lawrence and Evelyn, I can only guess Bernadette’s final thoughts. But if I had simply written, “Mr. and Mrs. Williams wondered what their daughter experienced before the end,” I wouldn’t have captured the intensity of their desire to get inside her head. (A subconscious attempt to reclaim her from the murderer, I suspect. They, not he, knew her well enough to deduce her state of mind at the instant of death.) I apply the same logic to nonfiction in general. When the truth is elusive, catch it with hypothesis.

You’re a recent graduate of Iowa State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment. What drew you to this unconventional program? What can you tell us about the relationship between your writing life and your passion for wildlife?

I attended Iowa State because most of my work relates to the natural world, especially to animals as emotional, expressive beings. As Marc Bekoff says, “When animals express their feelings, they pour out like water from a spout, raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled.” I envy this immediacy and strive to experience it by writing from a nonhuman point of view.

What writing project(s) are you working on now?

I’m revising my first novel, a critique of land management in the American West told from a mustang’s perspective. The project will require all my creative energy for the time being; it’s over 500 pages and a challenge to edit. I can’t seem to reconcile my formal prose style with the “horseness” of my protagonist.

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

I just read The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy Tyson. This book made headlines upon its release because it contains an interview in which Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who testified that Till molested her, admits to perjury. However, Tyson is more interested in contextualizing the murder than uncovering new evidence. He discusses Southern outrage at the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the political shrewdness of Mamie Till’s decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her son, and the continued relevance of 20^th century lynchings in the Black Lives Matter era.

"The Trouble of Taxonomizing Dogs": An Interview with Robert Glick

Robert Glick is Coeditor of Versal and Assistant Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing and digital literature. His work has appeared in The Normal School, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and The Gettysburg Review.

His story, "Instar," appeared in Issue Sixty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about kindness, rabid dogs, and fiction writers who think like poets.

Where did “Instar” begin for you?

There’s a beginning that we can call an inception point, an image perhaps, and there’s another moment, later, when vectors form a multi-dimensional intersection, and there, you can almost see the crackling overload of language and idea and stress and emotion.

Early on, I knew a great deal about the front story (Jess and Lix finding Ajla, who has just been assaulted in the bathroom of the corn maze mini-mart); I also knew that I didn’t want to tell that story directly, not yet, though Ajla would eventually have her own narration. But really, the story germ didn’t manifest until I had read Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy. Rabies, with its discursive ties to gender, to zombies, and of course to dogs, allowed me passage to talk about the ambivalent, sometimes catastrophic ways our innocent caretaking goes horribly wrong.

The “beginning” for me is almost always a question of style, structure, or language rather than a question of image or event. Yes, the image of Jess sleeping under the piano for protection solidified my desire to tell this story, but really, I owe everything here—both through her sentence syntax and her recursive mode of storytelling—to Susan Steinberg. The narrators in her great collection of stories, Spectacle, gave me a space for Jess to speak in lyric and often impossible ways.

I’m in love with the language surrounding the dog. To name just two of my favorite lines: “The slow cracking of each kibble between Chunk’s teeth made me happy, like a bright flower you luck onto growing out of a tree trunk.” and “My room was full of angry dog hairs.” The narrator has a complicated relationship with the dog. She is afraid of it, but also protective of it. What about dogs interested you when writing this story?

Certainly, as you suggested, dogs, especially for young kids, engender both deep love and, at times, intense (and justified) fear. It struck me that the same dog (even when not rabid) can evoke both emotions, which saved me the trouble of taxonomizing dogs into the tiny soft cuddlies and the big scary steel-jawed. Confronted with such a dog, the brain addles, can’t figure out what kinds of investments one can safely make.

In the framework of the story, the dog could be allowed into interior spaces as bats or squirrels (other carriers of rabies) couldn’t, and so could explore the limits of allowing children to self-actualize, of asking parents to impose themselves. Furthermore, the rabid dog gives us a more complex model for identity and personality; who’s to say that we don’t learn identity formation from animals? And lastly, because Jess knew this particular dog, she could struggle with forms of betrayal that ultimately accelerate her political awakenings.

This piece oscillates between writing that is strictly narrative and writing that is enigmatic and lyrical. When do you think a story benefits from entering a more lyrical space?

I’d apply a bit of pressure to the binary. For me, everything begins with language; the idea of language as transparent, as simply a vehicle for plot, as neutral or objective or unideological, is absurd. Language defaces, deforms, reveals, conceals. So I want even the more direct passages to be lyric, not necessarily in terms of lyrical language or an ambiguity of meaning but in terms of an attention to sound, rhythm, construction, linguistic or neural association. I would be flattering myself to say I think like a poet, but I regret deeply that all fiction writers don’t think more like poets.

You’re of course correct, though, in suggesting that there’s a kairos to moving into a more lyrical space. For me, I like it to be established early, not only as an emotionally shattering end-game. I like it when people toggle the tension between using the lyric in apostrophes and digressions and when they use it for more direct event-moments. And I like it when people express the lyric in addressing the banal and sometimes abject rather than coupling it strictly to the sublime (which of course can also be abject).

I’m not convinced the lyric is a separate mode, something we trot out on special occasions. It doesn’t have to slow the story down; it doesn’t have to map onto a narrator who has a special reason to imagine the world in lyrical terms. I’d argue instead that it’s fundamental to how many of us think; that the lyric is a norm rather than an exception.

Your story is pretty dark throughout, but it ends in a moment of kindness. Why did you choose to end in this moment? Did you always plan on ending it here, or did you stumble upon it?

It’s a moment of kindness, when Jess takes home her friend’s dog, that causes all the trouble in the first place. So while I wouldn’t fully place the rabid dog in parallel with Ajla, there’s a kind of echo here, a suggestion that Jess (otherwise nicknamed the Little Scorpion, which accounts for the title of the story) is still capable of and willing to pursue these acts of empathy and compassion, despite the possibility that the outcome might devastate her. Once I figured out that I wanted the front and back stories in conversation, Jess’s moment of kindness (which, to be frank, might be also seen as an ethical duty) felt like the only place the story could end.

Now for a strange question. If this story was a breed of dog, what would it be?

That’s difficult. It’s probably a big, sometimes mean dog, a dog equally capable of violence and devotion. A dog like a pit bull or a German Shepherd. No, it’s undoubtedly a Rottweiler. I once lived above two Rotties I loved; yet a few years prior, two other Rotties had killed my cat, so perhaps it was that deep ambivalence that best represents “Instar”.

What projects are you working on now?

The story “Instar” is a version of a chapter in my current novel project, The Paradox of Wonderwoman’s Airplane, which I’m in the process of revising. As a result, I knew a lot of about what happened before and after the time period of “Instar”, and I already had an extensive network of ideas to toy with.  

In addition to the not-insignificant challenge of writing a novel, the project is composed of both print and digital components—so I’m also building digital works that come from within the novel itself, like bits of programming that Jess codes in high school, or bits of radical cartography designed by another character, or even performance pieces written by Ajla. I hope that more writers think about print as something that leaps, like a flea, onto other mediums, then leaps back, traversing in and off and back to print, bringing the material of print into conversations about writing.