"Lining Up for Starvation": An Interview with B.J. Hollars

B.J. Hollars, is the author of two books of nonfiction, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America—the 2012 recipient of the Society of Midland Author’s Award—and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Tuscaloosa forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press in 2013. His short story collection, Sightings is forthcoming next year from Indiana University Press. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

His nonfiction pieces "The Megatherium Club" and "Leningrad" appear in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, BJ Hollars talks to interviewer David Bachmann about cannibalism, voluntary starvation, and stories worthy of preservation.

1. Part of the power of these pieces are their brevity. Were you ever tempted to make them longer or were they longer in previous drafts? Would something be compromised if you were to exploit, for example, the case of 36 self-starved men in Minnesota or the accomplishments of William Stimpson for even another paragraph?

I was very tempted to expand, and in fact, for several drafts I fell victim to the longer form.  “Leningrad” was actually spurred by a 15-page essay called “In Defense of The Donner Party,” in which I tried to defend the party’s alleged resorting to cannibalism during the winter of 1846-47.  The essay sprawled and sprawled and ultimately went nowhere.  It took me four months to write, and in the end, all I was left with was the inspiration to write “Leningrad,” which was enough. 

“The Megatherium Club” was sort of the opposite.  I’d tried desperately to expand the piece, but I just kept running into dead ends.  I researched the members (even spoke with the current president of the 21^st century version of the club), but nothing was as interesting as the men in their now famous photograph, which I reference. 

I’m not sure anything would have been “compromised” or “exploited” if the essays were longer, but I just don’t think they were meant to be.  It took me a few tries, but eventually I stumbled upon the proper length, and that meant short.

2. You end each of these pieces with an italicized question that is fairly large in scope. To what extent are these meant to instruct, provoke, resolve, or none of these?

You’re right!  I do end both with an italicized question.  How funny that I never noticed that before.  Of course, it sounds absurd to say that now, but it’s absolutely true.  I suppose I never noticed it because I never intended these essays to be together.  They were written at least a year apart from one another, and I eventually pieced them together simply because they both seemed to explore a historical moment in the form of a nonfiction short-short.  That’s about the only resonance I initially saw.  Upon reading them again, these essays suddenly seem like kindred spirits—inseparable in some way—though I promise you there was no master plan here.  I always figured my subconscious was smarter than my conscious; this just proves it.

But to answer your question, I don’t think these questions are meant to resolve a thing.  Maybe I did mean for them to provoke a bit (after all, they do sort of pivot toward the reader), but I don’t think I had any real agenda here.  If anything, as is true of most of my nonfiction—especially reportage—I want to give readers the facts in an engaging manner and allow them to draw their own conclusion.

3. In “The Megatherium Club” you seem to tow the line of indicting the club’s hedonism during a time of war and celebrating their scientific contributions. Do you think that’s a reasonable reaction to the work? Do you want the reader to form an opinion of the Megatherium Club and if so, what is it?

Yeah, I think that reading is about right, at least for most people.  I just got done saying I want readers to “draw their own conclusions” from these essays, but it turns out I may be leading readers directly down the interpretive path you just mentioned.  As I began researching the history of the Megatherium Club (which was a side story while trying to research an essay about the megatherium itself), I became fascinated by these young boys who seemed to love their world but didn’t know how they fit in it.  They could bestow most anything with a name, but a name didn’t guarantee familiarity, merely classification.

4. You make some forthright comments here, such as, “What little we actually know of these men speaks to our own failure as preservationists.” To what extent is the goal of this piece to preserve the men in this club by exhuming them?

I suppose that might be an ulterior motive as well.  However, I don’t think I’m interested in preserving them because I think they necessarily deserve it.  I mean, I think they do, but as I note in the essay, many of the members of the Megatherium Club already have natural wonders named after them—glaciers, valleys, rivers and whatnot—so what good will my measly 600 or so words do for them?  I want to preserve them for the readers’ sakes.  Yes, the natural world is mysterious, but so are the people who study it, and perhaps, so are the people who read tiny essays about the people who once studied it.  We’ve all got our own stories worthy of preservation, but for now, I’d rather preserve somebody else’s.

5. In "Leningrad" you begin with the desperation of hunger during war time and end with voluntary starvation. Although the latter was for the sake of science, there is also a sense of recreation to the act of depriving oneself sustenance, almost like how the act of taking hallucinogens erases the constraints of the tangible. How do you want the reader to react to the 36 starving Minnesotans?

I suppose I really don’t know how I want the reader to react on this one, but I know I had a very visceral reaction when I first learned about these experiments.  It seemed like such a trespass on the limits of scientific experimentation.  After all, the Nazis were performing starvation experiments on one side of the ocean, while on the other side—back in Minnesota—we were performing our own starvation experiments in or order to counteract the Nazi’s starvation experiments.  There seemed to be this perilously thin line between the morality of these very similar acts.  The major difference, I suppose, was that in the Auschwitz labs prisoners were starved against their wills, while back at the University of Minnesota, people lined up for the abuse and were called patriots.

6. Your assertion that the club’s discovery “...reaffirmed their faith that the unknown was everywhere, that America was in need of taxonomy” suggests that America was in need of repair or enlightenment that it may not have ever received. Your assertion that “...neither parent adequately defined the word starving” similarly suggests a personal and/or societal imperfection born of deprivation, a void born of ignorance. Do you want either of these works to comment on society’s glaring flaws or is that something you want to avoid?

The trick, for me, was to leave the reader with something to think about without shoving a didactic message down anyone’s throat.  I’ve recently found myself falling into the likely bad habit of leaving my essays with a final line or two of condemnation toward my subject.  I don’t do it for any kind of “holier than thou,” complex from which I may be suffering, but simply because I’m shocked that so many atrocities of the recent past are already long forgotten.  Many of us seem to have a sense that “bad things” once occurred, but we don’t seem to believe we have any obligation to think about them.  It’s as if we privilege “bad things” with mythic status simply because it’s easier than facing hard truths.  I suppose, at some level, I want to force the reader into viewing these hard truths.  I want them to see the protruding ribs on the man who ate sawdust in Leningrad.  I want them to peer deep into the bullet hole that killed a man at Gettysburg.  Maybe we can learn from these “bad things,” maybe not, but forgetting them entirely shouldn’t be an option.   Burdens are meant to be carried.  Sometimes I think I just don’t want to carry any of them alone.  

7. What are you reading these days?

Not nearly enough, of course, but most recently I’ve managed to sneak in Chad Simpson’s Tell Everyone I Said Hi, which is great.  I’m also reading all kinds of research stuff, so a lot of dusty old books about giant squids and misidentified creatures and Sasquatch, as always.  Oh, and every historical marker and museum plaque I can get my hands on.  That’s where all the best stories come from.

"When You Get Inside, the Walls Are Words": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Lydia Yuknavitch

Along with DORA: A HEADCASE, Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER: A MEMOIR and three works of short fiction. Her book REAL TO REEL was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER won the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice 2012 and the PNBA Award 2012. She teaches writing, literature, film, and Women’s Studies in Oregon.

Here, Lidia Yuknavitch answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with excerpts from her new novel DORA: A HEADCASE.  Enjoy! 

1. What is writing like?

As for my girl wall story, well, I remixed it and turned it into a bitchin’ little art installation called: “Dora: A Head Case.” You have to enter a Dora room lined with pink plastic and vag fur and Vaseline in order to experience it. When you get inside, the walls are words. There are stories about everything that’s happened to me in my dumb little life. There are lines from sex books and lines from bands and lines I collected in bathroom stalls all over the city. And letters to Francis Bacon and even advice here and there to Sig, like “Sig, you gotta decrease your douchehood next time you get a girl client.” On the ceiling of the girl room is a film with the most bitchin’ soundscape you will ever hear in your life playing in a loop. The sounds of boots on pavement and wind and rain banging the cord of a flagpole. The sound of dog breath and Lexus engines and bum pee and violin concertos all mixed together. Ave Maria’s high notes and things waitresses at Shari’s yelled at us and falling glass. The sound of water. Of a metal bar rolling on the concrete of a parking garage. Birds and electricity hum. Sound is everywhere besides in your voice.

2. What isn’t writing like?

I blow pumpkin color monkey chunks all over the side of the car. Sorry Ave Maria’s mom. Everything smells like bile and spit and girl puke. My head feels like a hard metal pinball has gotten loose… I wipe my mouth. Cold night air beats my head up outside the window of the Jag. Ave Maria is petting my neck. Obsidian has her leg crossed over mine. Like she’s trying to keep me from blowing a hole through the top of the car. Without expression, I’m a zombie girl.

3. When you do it, why?

I wonder where voice lives in a body. Is it in the throat, where the flaps pound each other to death, making us think we’ve got important fucking things to say? Or is it in the mind, where thoughts crash crazily into each other pinbally and dinging, until they slide down the chute and out the hole and into the world? Couldn’t voice come from anywhere? 

4. When you don’t, why?

Next time you talk with a female? Ask her which city her body is. Or ocean. Give her poetry books written by women. Like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and H.D. and Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson. Let her draw or paint or sing a self before. You. Say. A. Word.

"A Trace Upon the Keys": An Interview with Charlie Clark

Charlie Clark's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, The Journal, The Laurel Review, Smartish Pace, West Branch, and other journals. He studied poetry at the University of Maryland and lives in Austin, Texas.

His poem "Devil Doing Scales" appears in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Charlie Clark talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about form, the devil, and movement between lines.

1. What was the beginnings and endings of writing “Devil Doing Scales”?

This poem is part of a group of poems that explore the devil as a character, or explore a character called the devil. Most of the ideas I get for writing are born out of seeing something in another piece of art that inspires me, confuses me, or for whatever reason sticks with me. In this case, I had been reading Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. It’s just an amazing sequence. Reading it, I was thinking a lot about the sonnet (a form I often go back to), as well as mythic characters and how a sonnet sequence can provide a foundation that frees you up to look at a character or image or idea from different angles and through varying lenses. At the same time I was re-reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods, and was once again floored by how he, like Rilke, balances formal consistency with varying tone and perspective. I also had Anne Carson’s work in mind while I started these devil poems. I adore her work, Autobiography of Red in particular. In that book, Carson is playing with a mythic character, but uprooting that character into a contemporary landscape. Weirdly, I read no Milton at all while working on these poems. I kind of liked the idea of a sonnet sequence about the devil that ignores that considerable shadow.

This is all the general background of influence. The specific impetus for this poem, and the sequence of poems from which it comes, was reading Kevin Prufer’s Fallen From a Chariot, and seeing how he uses angels in some of the poems in that book. His angels are mythic creatures but also very physically present—real beings in the real world. I was fascinated by how he navigated that paradox, and, frankly, wanted to steal it. So I went for the flip side of angels: demons. And demons quickly became devils.

“Devil Doing Scales” was one of the earlier poems to come out of this experiment. I came up with the title first, which is not my usual method. Usually titles are hard-earned afterthoughts. With these poems I decided to come up with titles first, and to treat them like propositions. I would play the poem off the title to see what unexpected directions I could make the poem go in. In the case of this poem, the title came quickly, and the first line came almost immediately thereafter.

Let’s see. That’s all about beginnings. As far as endings go, I had everything but the ending finished for quite a while. I just couldn’t nail down how I wanted to exit the poem. So, in that way, writing the end of the poem was the end of my writing of the poem. That’s probably not too uncommon an experience, as good endings are incredibly hard to write. (Coincidentally, Marianne Borouch has an excellent essay on poems’ endings in the most recent New England Review. It is definitely worth reading: http://www.nereview.com/ner-33-2the-end-inside-it-by-marianne-boruch/) I tried out a number of directions for the ending of “Devil Doing Scales,” all false starts. I really wanted to create a contrast between the physicality of playing the piano (poorly)—of the devil character’s fat fingers, for instance—and the supernatural element of a character like the devil. The ethereal quality of music became the hinge from which I was able to move in a successful direction, finally. Music can have a ghostly quality in the way that it is present but not visible or concrete, as well as how, after experiencing it, it can live on so clearly in memory. The ghost that appears at the end there is just a part of the furniture of the imaginative/supernatural space I was occupying at the time. I also enjoy the idea of a ghost getting comfortable with the recent fact of its ghostness, and how that echoes back to the physical limitations of the devil while playing piano.

2. I’m curious about your choice to spread out the lines of this poem with paragraph breaks between each one.  This gives the effect of keys on a piano, along with the more obvious emphasis of each line.  Could you please talk about this choice of form?

The form is the one I decided upon for the entire sequence, so there wasn’t specific decision-making happening when it came to this particular poem. Generally, though, the idea of the monostich became a part of the generative process for these poems. Prior to writing these poems, I’d been writing a lot of poems with long, long lines, and very convoluted syntax; work that blurred the line between poetry and prose in a very deliberate way. The devil poems were in part a reaction against that. I wanted each line to have a very specific, singular life on the page, whether by containing a complete piece of information, being end-stopped, or something like that. Of course, that never works perfectly, so this poem illustrates a balance, I think, between the enjambment-heavy writing I’ve done in the past and my interest in exploring the structural integrity of the line.

When revising poems, I’ll often separate parts of lines so they have their own space on the page. This way I can focus on the music of a particular portion of the line. After I get something I’m satisfied with, I will stitch the lines back together. Here I wanted to emphasize the line to myself, and to ensure that the emphasis wasn’t diminished. I wanted each line to have its own resonance, and the monostich was a way I thought I could accomplish that.

Also, while this poem is a sonnet, it is loosely a sonnet. I thought that monostichs would help de-emphasize each poem’s sonnetness, so that readers wouldn’t get hung up worrying about the extent to which the poem does or does not satisfy the varying formal requirements of the form. When I say “readers,” I guess I really mean myself. I am often in the camp of readers who, upon discovering that a poem is 14 lines long, has to spend a lot of time tracking all the possible additional formal measures by which the poem might more completely be a sonnet. Does that make sense? I wanted to use the 14-line size of the sonnet, and play around with octets, sestets, couplets, etc., but I didn’t want to blind myself by worrying about those formal components. The monostichs provided a way to work against that, as I don’t recall Petrarch writing in monostichs.

3. You make a really bold move between the title and the first line. The speaker seems to acquiesce that the devil wouldn’t play scales or wasn’t playing scales, but instead, “Chopsticks.” The “fine” that starts the poem is so lovely too: we, as readers, are faced immediately with the poem’s annoyed tone. Could you discuss this move from title to poem, or perhaps how you see titles and poems connecting?

I came up with the titles to the poems in this sequence before I moved on to writing the poems. Sometimes the titles were general, thematic overviews, sometimes they operated like first lines. These relationships between title and poem didn’t reveal themselves until the poems were written. In the case of “Devil Doing Scales,” it turned out that there was an undercutting, contrasting effect in the relationship between the title and the poem’s opening.

The opening line came not long after the title, and appeared pretty much fully formed. I think I messed around for a few minutes with trying to describe the act of doing scales, but got bored with how obvious that would be after reading the title, so I decided to take a different tack. Also, I like the idea of the contrast: scales are practice, “Chopsticks” is fluff, a way to goof off. (I say this as a non-piano player. I could be wrong.) I enjoy the opening gambit of the “Fine,” both for its chatty tone and for how it challenges the title. I’m not sure who the speaker here is, though there is, I think, a bit of the free indirect style in the approach of that “Fine.” The devil would probably prefer to be doing scales, or Chopin, or anything more complex, but he’s limited to “Chopsticks.” So the voice here is a little bothered by what it’s admitting. I can see the devil being upset with that limitation. It’s a part of the humanized character I was interested in exploring. In stories, the devil usually shreds, right? Or can confer the ability to shred upon those who offer up their soul to him. It’s the idea of the devil as all-powerful (to an extent). So I enjoy the fact that he isn’t shredding here.

Thinking about the humanizing impulse: while I wanted this devil to exist without a real moral imperative, I didn’t want to strip him of his supernatural quality. He’s still a kind of corrupting influence.  

4. Have you been reading anything that we can cozy up with once fall fully opens up to us?

Well, I never want to let a chance go by without championing the work of David Antin. His talk pieces are amazing. There is very little in common—OK, nothing—between his work and “Devil Doing Scales,” but his influence shows on other work I’ve done. i never knew what time it was was my introduction to his work, and I’ve gone back through most of his books since then. I remain consistently impressed with the level of imaginative and intellectual rigor he displays. These pieces are essentially semi-improvised lectures that he then goes back and edits for publication. But there is always something about the movement or the connections that occur in them that have the texture of poetry. And that he’s doing this without the net of prepared text amazes and horrifies me. There are some great recordings of his work at the PennSound website: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Antin.php. I particularly recommend “War” and “How Wide Was the Frame.”

As far as recent reading goes: some years ago I happened upon a copy of Cid Corman’s translation of René Char’s wartime journal, Leaves of Hypnos. I finally got around to reading it recently. Char led a group of resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation of France. I’m not sure that the book is in print, but I highly recommend seeking it out in libraries or online. It’s an absolutely fascinating book that includes diary entries, aphorisms, sketches of natural observations, as well as some interesting thoughts on leadership during wartime. The closest example I can think of that creates art out of the dreadful tedium of underground resistance is Jean-Pierre Melville’s filmArmy of Shadows. Though Char was in the countryside almost exclusively, not in Paris, so Melville’s movie is more dynamic and sexier as an illustration of that experience.

Jorie Graham’s most recent book, Place, is an intriguing book for me. I keep going back to the poem “On the Virtue of the Dead Tree,” in particular. She channels Whitman in it in interesting and unexpected ways. She is propulsive in her cadence, and yet in order to read her you must read her slowly. That friction is very engaging. Also, she tries to enact a kind of simultaneity in her poems, where the multiplicity of conscious attention is contained at once. I’m not explaining it well. Hers is a seemingly impossible task, and one that I find engaging and enviable.

What else? I’m working my way through Geoff Dyer’s last collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. I was vaguely familiar with him prior to picking up this book, but am eager to go through his whole back catalog now. It’s a fascinating read. The book is arranged according to subject matter. The first section contains his essays on photography. I’ve been reading it for about a month and am still only in that section of the book. I keep re-reading individual sentences and essays over and over again. There’s such a great intelligence at work. It’s always such a thrill to discover a writer whose mind and way of seeing both clicks with something inside you but presents it in a way you’ve never considered or figured out in a conscious way for yourself. That’s happening all over the place in these essays. I’ll give you one quote, about the photography of Edward Burtynsky: “Burtynsky produces images whose beauty is freighted with a political/ecological purpose that is unavoidable and unobtrusive.” The pairing of “unavoidable and unobtrusive” is such a smart analysis of the political content of Burtynsky’s photography. It describes a way of addressing matters that I’d like to strive for in my own writing. Dyer’s book is absolutely littered with these kinds of observations.

I’ve also recently read several of Heidi Julavits’ novels with great enjoyment. Her most recent, The Vanishers, is wonderful. I briefly campaigned on Facebook to have Sofia Coppola buy the film rights for it. That means I annoyed a few friends about this for a couple of days, then moved on to some other distraction. Which isn’t to say that shouldn’t still totally happen. Coppola’s interest in, for lack of a better phrase, women in captivity, is right in line with what’s happening in The Vanishers. Plus, there are psychic attacks! Reading that book alongside her husband Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet is an interesting experience, given they have nominally similar speculative conceits, but explore them in very, very different ways.

5. What other writing-type projects have you been working on?

The sequence of devil poems was the last “project” that I can speak of. Those poems are starting to trickle out here and there: there are devil poems in recent issues of 32 Poems, BODY, and Front Porch. Bellingham Review and Third Coast will each have a devil poem in upcoming issues. It’s gratifying to see them making their way out in the world.

As far as new work goes, I suppose I’m kind of always writing, in fits and starts, but there is no high-concept project happening at the moment. When I go too long without writing, I get antsy; worried that I’m getting out of writing shape, so to speak. My solution is usually to try an ekphrastic descriptive exercise. Describe a piece of art, and discover something about it through the descriptive act of looking. (Geoff Dyer does this amazingly well in the essays I mentioned above.) Because I’ve been pretty busy lately with my regular, non-writing life, and it’s been hard to find time to write, most of what I’ve written has come out of such exercises. Poems that try to be the act of looking. There is an interpretive impulse present in the fact that you are rendering something visual in words, and it’s fun to move between resisting and surrendering to that impulse.

Also, occasionally, a word or phrase in the media will catch my attention. There were these apocalyptically terrible wild fires here in Texas last fall, and somewhere along the way I heard someone mention, or somewhere read about, an Indian named Buffalo Hump who had burned up portions of Texas in the late nineteenth century when the state was still being settled. Researching that name became a way into writing about the fires. Or, Emperor Diocletian, about whom I knew nothing, got some mention a few months ago. It was in relation to a tiff between Paul Krugman and Ron Paul. I knew nothing about Emperor Diocletian, so I googled him. It turns out he was Roman Emperor in the late 3^rd to early 4^th century, and famously issued something called the Edict on Maximum prices in a failed attempt to stop inflation. I don’t remember the exact context that Krugman and Ron Paul mentioned him, but it’s a salient subject given all the national and international worry about inflation and economic growth. That happens sometimes, and these random bits of information can turn into the trigger for a poem, something to try to make sense out of. Or confusion out of. The minutiae of history or political commentary can make for most engaging fodder. 

"To Draw That Slow Fountain Into Your Mouth": An Interview with Alicia Jo Rabins

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and teacher based in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, 6x6 and the Boston Review. She holds a MFA from Warren Wilson and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Rabins tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, and is currently completing her first manuscript of poems. 

Her poems, "How to Confess an Affair," "How to Be a Prophet," and "How to Make a Red Velvet Cake," appeared in Issue Forty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about whimsy, prose poems, and the form of the "how to."

Could you talk about writing these “How To” poems?  

I’m fascinated by self-help literature and also by ancient spiritual texts.  Is there a difference beyond the patina of years?  I’m not sure. I lived in Jerusalem for two years in my early twenties, immersed in Hebrew, Aramaic and sacred Jewish texts and practices.  Studying (and living) those texts, the relationship between words and spiritual practice made a strong impression on me—the texts were quite beautiful, but also legalistic, so the words lived on a level beyond the simply aesthetic, with prescriptions for actions that shaped my days.   I like working with a How To form because it frames the aesthetic and meaning-making pleasures of a poem within the power, directness and pragmaticsm of spiritual texts addressing needs in daily life.  Also, I love Julio Cortazar’s instructional manuals and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. 

I’m curious to know about your choice of form for these poems. I’ve written in this sort of mode before (the “How To”), and I always tend to revert to numbered lists. Why the prose poem or the lineation? Do you think the weight of calling them “How To” allows you more freedom with the form, since the reader has a better idea of what to expect?

I do have a couple list poems in the series, as well as some small, lineated poems, but as you’ve noted, the vast majority are prosepoems.  I don’t remember consciously making this formal decision, but I think is was my instinct because the prosepoem most closely resembles the form of the ancient texts which inspire this series.  Midrash and mishna in the Jewish tradition, as well as Buddhist and yoga sutras, come down to us in the form of a series of interlinked, brief sections without defined lineation—what we could call “prosepoems.”  This probably reflects the process of oral transmission; lineation requires literacy and access to duplication, whereas small chunks of nonlineated text are ideal for memorizing and passing on.  Another way of saying this is that a numbered list draws more on a modern technical writing model of instructional text, whereas I am drawing on the ancient spiritual mode of instructional text. 

And yes, I think (or hope) the “How To” form has the formal benefit of building a container which generates some surface tension for the series, allowing for greater experimentation and risk within the poems.

In these poems, the body is broken open and made whimsical in a devastated way (for example, the torso turned to fish bowl with the fish swimming inside in “How to Confess an Affair.”) How do you see whimsy working in these poems? Is it just the movement to metaphor often found in poetry, or something else? 

To turn your question back on you if I may, I’m curious what “whimsical” means in this context—is it the same as imagination, or something else? 

The most powerful writing class I ever took was called “Imaginative Writing,” with Kenneth Koch.  One thing I took away from that class was a delight in imagination itself—that, as the Surrealists knew, as well as the creators of Greek myth and so many other writers, there is sometimes a truth beyond the literal truth, one that can only be accessed through imagination and metaphor.  I suppose I am interested in a use of metaphor that is transformative rather than simply comparative.   I believe in symbols, and that sometimes a body is as much fish bowl as body, and a lover a goldfish, and a piece of information a hook in the fish’s lip.  Is that different from other poets?  Now I’m curious.

What should we be reading, from your perspective?

Oh, I don’t know about what people “should” be reading, but here’s what’s on my desk right now, by which I mean my bedside table: Maggie Nelson, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Claudia Rankine, Dorothea Lasky, Filip Marinovic, The Possessed by Elif Batuman, a book of accounts of westward journeys by American pioneers, and a self-help book called Mothering from Your Center (I have a toddler).  Also, a plug for Hoa Nguyen’s excellent and innovative classes—she’s based in Toronto, but offers a remote version—reading and writing through a poet’s collected works.  So I am currently immersed in the Complete Philip Whalen with Hoa’s guidance.

What else have you been writing? Do more of these “How To” poems exist in the world?

I’m currently finishing up my first full-length poetry manuscript, which includes about fifteen poems from this series.  There are lots more, and I’m also, separately, hoping to publish a chapbook of the complete How To series.  There are a couple in the current issue of Sentence Magazine, a few appeared in American Poetry Review two years ago, and one was in the New Delta Review this spring. 

"Make Justice of My Body": An Interview with Jonterri Gadson

Jonterri Gadson is Debra's daughter. A Cave Canem fellow, she is a recent graduate of University of Virginia's MFA program in poetry and the current Herbert W. Martin Post-Graduate Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Dayton. Her poetry has previously been published by The Rumpus, Tidal Basin Review, Muzzle, and other journals. Her chapbook, Pepper Girl, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in Fall 2012.

Her poem "A Body's Winter" appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Jonterri Gadson speaks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the body, desire, and freedom.

1. How did you go about writing “A Body’s Winter”?

I was reading Ed Roberson’s Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In at the time with an online poetry book club of Twitter poets. Roberson’s poems put me in a cosmic mindset. Plus, I was experiencing winter in Des Moines, IA, which was a combination of various levels of cold/isolation. So I started there--with the weather--and took myself where I wanted to be through the poem.

2. The body is such a central figure in both of the poems in this month’s issue. Specifically, the body seems to be a place of entrapment (I’m thinking of the lines, “I ache to be atmospheric” from “A Body’s Winter” and the more obvious “Made of my body / a prison” from “An Appeal.”) Could you talk about how you see the body as image in your poems?

It’s funny because I didn’t used to write about the body at all and then suddenly I couldn’t get away from it. When I’m speaking of the body, most times, what I really mean is desire. I think of a body as an entity that desires, desires to be desired, and is desired.  

3. I keep coming back to the line “Make     justice / of my body.” It seems such a calloused line compared to the last line, “show it you want to come home.” Could you talk about your movement between these lines of this poem?

When I think about the first line of “An Appeal,” I think of using the body as a method to achieve freedom; finding freedom in the realization and expression of the body as a being that desires. I was also speaking in literal terms about the appeals process in the US criminal justice system and that an appeal can be a way of gaining freedom, going home.

4. What have you found gut-wrenching to read recently?

According to my Twitter account, on September 15 at 1:39 AM I felt that “it should be absolutely illegal” for Vievee Francis to have written “Taking It.” Hours later at 10:45 AM, I was still “shattered.” It’s the way the poem doesn’t flinch, doesn’t really turn away from the terror even when it acknowledges that it is turning away. Is it possible to be more authentic than that?

5. What are other writings that you’ve been working on? 

My chapbook, Pepper Girl, just came out with YesYes Books. As far as new writing, every other week I workshop 4-5 pages of poems via video chat with a fellow poet I met at the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop last summer. I’ve also been writing personal essays. And I’m writing book reviews for some poetry collections I am really excited about.

"This Time I Keep My Eyes Open": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Courtney Elizabeth Mauk

Courtney Elizabeth Mauk received her MFA from Columbia University and has published in The Literary Review, PANK, Wigleaf, and Necessary Fiction, among others. She is an assistant editor at Barrelhouse and teaches at Juilliard and The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop. She lives in Manhattan with her husband.

An excerpt from her novel Spark appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Courtney Elizabeth Mauk answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from her novel.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

The flame appears instantly, as if it has always been there, a living creature awoken from its hiding place by my hand. Instinct pushes me to drop the match, but I hold on until the end, only a matter of seconds, when the fire meets my flesh. The burn sears through me. I close my eyes, wanting the heat to fill me, to go on forever…But the burning stops. Only the sting remains.

I strike another. This time I keep my eyes open.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Next, to a scratchy recording of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” three dancers perform a slow burlesque. They are identical, almost robotic: hair short and slicked back, lips painted in motionless hearts, perfect hourglass figures bound in red corsets. They kick their slender, fishnet-clad legs high over their heads, ruby slippers flashing. The men on the floor whistle and shout for recognition, but the dancers do not derivate from the choreography.

3. When you do it, why?

The night sharpens, the head of a pin on which he balances, alone. The volatility stops his heart, and then his pulse races ahead, welcoming the sweet deliciousness, the addictive bravado of desire inextricable from danger.

4. When you don’t, why?

Lying awake at night, listening to Jack breathing beside me, I have clenched my hand in the sheets. I have tightened my body, squeezed shut my eyes, strained every muscle for an answer to my questions, a point of understanding. And I have found nothing. My reactions are lacking, my wants incomplete, my soul inadequate. In those moments, I have hated my weakness.

"A Space in Need of Renovated View": An Interview with j/j hastain

j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/ Eight Ball Press) and the xyr trilogy (a metaphysical romance). j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, Housefire, Bombay Gin and Aufgabe. j/j has been a guest lecturer at Naropa University and University of Colorado.

j/j's piece "Subsection from XYR" appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, j/j speaks to interviewer Joseph Scapellato about the violence of pronouns, writing-as-activism, and narratives that perform smear.

1. Where did “Subsection from XYR” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

I have been working a lot lately with what it might be to create an inclusive declension. A pronoun or site of reference that is literally a place where queers (and queer allies) can sort of rest in indelible accuracy for a while. Feel ourselves being held.

This work has felt necessary to me, because to identify with an accurate pronoun is to begin to be able to flow, to rant. For folks for whom binary-derived pronouns do not fit or resonate, it is sometimes difficult to just tell our realities, speak of our bodies, our desires—so, engaging embodied understanding of the intensities of the violences that inaccurate pronoun uses can induce, is really an activism for me. “Xyr” came in as a form of resistance—as creative relief of the violences of particular assumptions in regard to binary-based pronouns. The subsection published at The Collagist is part of a full length, work which is part of a trilogy (The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance).

2. I love that you’ve described this engagement as activism.  To what extent do you think that the act of writing is—or could be, or should be—activism?

I think that the extent that someone treats it as activism combined with the reverberative effects of the writing are what indicate it as activism or not. I do not think that all writing (or all art) has to be activist, and I also think that there are different levels/layers in regard to activisms in writing. Some writing indicates itself as activist by way of its content (see Bell Hooks, Alfred Whitehead, even some of Leslie Feinberg’s), and I also think that there are activist writings for which content is not the dominant concern (kari edwards, David Wolach, etc.). I guess to me, it all depends on the position of one’s heart and hands.

3. One of the many things I enjoy about this piece is the artful interplay between concrete physical actions—

show xem that it is erotic for you to be wrapping xem. to be keeping xem. "try not to breathe, it will be  ok." then when half way through: "ok, breathe from just your nostrils." then all at once: "try to breathe  with your whole body, now. right now." hold xem as the metal wire cuts in.

—and assertive lyrical abstractions—

to occupy and be occupied by torrent, as a way to birth a phenom-colossi; an our in what was ever  previously an isolated my.

To me, this resonates with this piece’s pronoun-transformations: pronouns, after all, are assertive abstractions that attempt to evoke “concrete” physical genders.  Can you talk a little more about how you conceive of the relationship between the concrete and the abstract in this work?  (And/or your use of pronouns in this piece?)

Well, I think I may have done some of this above, but I certainly have more to say about it! You are right about the tension (but like hinge, not like disagreement) that is created by “concrete physical actions” and “assertive lyrical abstractions.” For me, these work together to generate both distinct, but also blurred view (which is important when creating space to can hold more than something singular).

You mention pronouns as “assertive abstractions [attempting to] evoke concrete physical genders.” I think that generally (especially in the context of binary pronoun attributions from sites exterior to the bodies which are being referred) this is the case (and is part of what is in need of renovation), but in order to push/inhabit the place that I am proposing by way of Xyr, whether or not the genders being referred to are “physical,” need to be flexible. Of course as a base of any current conversation regarding gender, is the need to differentiate gender from sex (just thought I would throw that in here to be sure we are on the same page).

I guess I am saying that I would feel ok sharing an accurate reference with a seraph—that in fact I would prefer sharing an accuracy with a not-even-fully-materialized being over having a pronoun schlepped onto my shoulders simply because of a historical norm or a lack of having had renovating view applied to a space (as my body is, as many queer bodies are) in need of renovated view.  

I sort of just went off there, but what else could be expected when invited to speak about pronouns! Thank you!

As far as abstraction vs concrete in Xyr, I would say that there is a necessary continuum of shifting, of sway—that a sort of inner rhythm between many components (including concrete act and abstraction—but also including image, sound, narrative that performs smear, etc.) allows Xyr as a whole, to be a conglomerate with many interacting features. I want whole brain, whole body stimulations! I like to think of The Xyr Trilogy as a moat made of many pieces of stained glass, held together by honey. It is fragile, but if you are careful in it (and try to engage it by moving with it as sway (as opposed to by rigidly)) AND if a primary interest of yours is to experience unforeseen illuminations, then you certainly can cross and find!

4. I’d love it if you elaborated on the idea of a “narrative that performs smear”—what exactly do you mean by “smear”?  (What’s being smeared?  How does one go about creating this effect?  And what are some examples of other narratives that perform smear?)

Sure! When I say narrative that performs smear, I am talking about narrative with its intents not solely focused on linearly upholding a certain sequence of events by way of structural and modal limit. So, diffuse, but at the same time not unable to indicate specificities specifically (in Wikipedia, Diffuse Interreflection is discussed as a process whereby light reflected from an entity, touches other objects in surrounding zones, illuminating them as well). Performance of smear is the narrative mode that I created in order to move through the pages of Xyr so that there is in fact simultaneously the articulation of a story (figures experiencing certain physical and non-physical events) and the possibility for the form to stay open enough that psychic/intuitive data be able to remain in it. Intents, points, meanings, possibilities are all being smeared slowly, musically. Maybe we could think of this as the embodied act of infinitely wandering a sonorous mandala, seeking all forms of stimuli (divergent to form/intent or not)—as sensations leaking through somnambulist or only partially visible presences.

I would say that in their own way Anna Joy Springer, Melissa Buzzeo, N. Brossard, JA Tyler, Robert Gluck and some of Bhanu Kapil’s paragraphs also perform smear (though they would probably call their engagement/s with narrative something different).

5. In your bio, you mention that you’re currently curating an Anthology of Queer Nudes.  Will you tell us about this project, and how it does/doesn’t intersect with “Subsection from XYR”? 

The Anthology of Queer Nudes is a project that has been in the works for a while now (and still has a while to go). The premise of the book (when KFS Press and I were initially discussing it) was to make a space for the queer body and the queer page to be examined by those of us whom identify as queer (so we could be speaking for ourselves). The project has really branched out into various manifestations though, a bigger scope than I had initially imagined. Of course, the expanding of scope is always a gift, so I am excited! The Anthology of Queer Nudes definitely shares residual traces with Xyr (I mean, as a queer I feel emancipated by The Xyr Trilogy so I would imagine other Queer identifying (and Queer allied) folks might feel honored/ held by it). However, as is stated in the Extro in Xyr, the book does not claim any universal queer experience, so maybe the best idea would be to ask folks how it made them feel once the full length is published?  

If you are someone who identifies in the above stated way and wishes to get in contact with me about appearing in the book please feel free to send me an email!

6. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

Perhaps this is a good time to flesh out what the other two books in the Xyr trilogy are like. Xyr is a system of smeary sketches of figure becoming lover in gender-specifying space (or, at least that is one way to describe it) in response to three of HOUSEFIRE Press’ prompts as well as by many bibliomancies performed on the pages of very old journals.

The second book (called Xems) is a radical POV change from the inter-echoing between the lovers in Xyr (Xyr and eventually the revealing of a second Xyr) to a third figure introduced into the double-Xyr space (which is a space eventually revealed as Xems (a double possessive)). Xems takes place in Xems home/body setting (where the third figure is staying, renting the house) after the fact of a single-Xyr death. In Xems, a new feminism of frenzy is being considered by way of the third figure looking at and feeling Xems by way of Xems opera of grief (which begins with that third figure slipping fingers into the back portion (the hand-written pages) of the published opera of grief, after digging it up from the garden in back of Xems house).

The third book (called Letters to the Divergents: A Cryptozoologic for Xems) is comprised of a nearly a hundred letters to various species that are referred to (by that third figure in the Xems book) as “Divergents” because they are not believed in (mythological forms, as with Nessie or Sasquatch, etc.), under-related-to because they are not well known (as with the Olm (blind amphibian)) or simply because they are despised by the status quo (the Tongue Eating Louse). In the final book of The Xyr Trilogy the third figure (introduced in Xems) courts The Divergents by way of threading them to the enigmatic Xems throughout intercessory-interventionist letters. 

7.  What knock-out writing have you been reading recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about? 

Oh yes! I have been reading DMT: The Spirit Molecule (just for the sake of really getting into the pineal gland and its wild emissions!) and Mystics, Masters, Saints and Sages. Jeanne Hyvrard, Helene Cixous and Marguerite Duras always knock me out. I am looking forward to reading Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (though not exactly an upcoming release it is new to me). I also think Dzanc’s The Freak Chronicles looks really exciting!

"The Process is Part of the Purpose": An Interview with Alan Stewart Carl

Alan Stewart Carl lives and writes in San Antonio, Texas. His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry, PANK and elsewhere. Currently, he’s trying to find new and better ways to balance writing with fatherhood. Sometimes he writes about this at AlanStewartCarl.com. 

His story "After We Were Nothing" appears in Issue Thirty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Alan Stewart Carl talks to interviewer Joseph Scapellato about "pouring," dialogue, and plot. 

1. Where did “After We Were Nothing” begin for you, and how did it get to here?

This is one of those stories that was filled by a lot of spigots. For several years I’d been toying around with a different story that took place at the coast and involved various references to mythology. For whatever reason, I could never get that story to work quite right. Then, one day, the first line of “After We Were Nothing” came to me out of whatever pool of words our first lines emerge. I wasn’t sure where it would go but I started pouring things into it. The Lucretius parts inserted themselves because I’d recently read The Swerve for a book club. The boat parts came from that earlier coastal story. The child aspect came from my vast collection of parental fears. Oddly—or at least oddly for me—the first draft yielded the exact structure I ended up using in the published piece. My revisions were more about getting the language and tone right. And that took quite a while.

2. When a draft begins to become a receptacle for “pouring things into,” does the act of writing become in any way cathartic or therapeutic? (And does it ever feel like it’s working the other way around—as if the story’s pouring things into you?)

Sometimes it feels as if all of my writing is just me working through the complications of life. I don’t know if it’s ever therapeutic in any curative way, but it’s definitely enlivening. I often feel fuller for having written. In fact, I’d say the more I pour into a story, the richer and more alive I feel after its completion. That’s not to say there aren’t days when I find my writing to be so god-awful that I want to bury myself under blankets and play Angry Birds instead. And yet, then again, that’s not to say only my “good” writing enlivens me. I can feel absolutely great after having written something I later realize is complete trash. Writing is such a strange experience. At least for me. The process is part of the purpose. I do this as much for the act of doing it as I do for the eventual act of publication. 

3. I love the decision to render dialogue without quotation marks and identifying tags (I said, he said, she said, etc.).  It leads to charged transitions—such as when we go from this exposition:

We were the parents unburdened.  Drunk and slurping on oysters.  We were freedom.  Life.

 —to this wryly apt line:

But I think we were confused.

For me, the result is that the dialogue sections, though visually “separate,” resonate powerfully with the rest of the work.  Can you talk a little about your decision to render dialogue this way?  (What do you think dialogue can/should do?)

Thanks for the kind words. I’m glad all of that worked so well for you.

To answer the question: whenever it won’t horribly confuse the reader, I like to work without quotation marks. Part of that is simply aesthetic (I prefer the cleaner look). But the other part is that I like the way a lack of quotation marks keeps things a bit destabilized. I tend to deal a lot with characters who exist if not in an outright warped reality then at least in a reality heavily tinted by their emotional/mental state. For me, going without quotation marks lets me more easily push against a reader’s perception of what is and isn’t real. In terms of dialogue, I like to keep it uncertain as to whether the characters are actually saying those words or whether those words are someone’s interpretation of what’s being said. That’s probably why, in this story, I also made the choice not to use identifying tags. I think something as simple as “he said” or “I said” or “she said” would’ve created too much of an anchor. I don’t like over-anchoring stories. I prefer to unmoor the world and give it a kick. Not that I plan to regularly abandon identifying tags. It’s not going to become my m.o. or anything.

4. What writing projects are you working on right now?

My biggest focus right now—to the detriment of so, so many other things—is finishing the first draft of a novel. It’s my second attempt at a novel. The first one I completed two years ago; but after some time I decided I’d written it too quickly and it wasn’t really the kind of novel I wanted to write. This one feels a lot more like me. And I hope to hell to have the first draft done before the leaves fall.

5. I’ve heard other writers talk about their first novels as “learning novels.”  In addition to not writing it so quickly and making sure that it “feels a lot more like me,” what else have you learned from writing the first novel that you’ve been applying to the second?

The first answer that comes to mind is: plot. I’ve learned that a novel’s plot is a monstrous thing that will slam you against the coliseum walls the moment you lose focus and dip your spear. In that “learning novel” I let the need for plot dictate my movements to such an extent that, by the conclusion, I found that I’d more or less written a sci-fi adventure when I’d intended to write a skewed-world meditation on love. The narrative act of skewing the world set in motion various elements of classic plot. But, since meditations are light on plot, the whole love thing never materialized in the way I’d envisioned. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy plot both in what I read and what I write. I simply didn’t anticipate how much plot would brutalize the meditative aspects. For this new novel, I don’t have any less of a skewed-world conceit but, from the very first drafts of the very first pages, I’ve been rather militant about restraining plot’s innate desire to rampage through the text. I’m keeping the character’s basic plot concerns simple (i.e. they want to get from point A to point B) while allowing their emotional/spiritual/psychological/etc. needs to create the real momentum. Basically, I’m trying to do a better job of balancing the gunfire with the lingering gazes at the sea. That’s probably novel writing 101 stuff. But it’s one of the biggest lessons I learned. All that remains now is to see is if I’ve applied the lessons well enough to make this new novel something better.

6.  What outstanding writing have you been reading recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

The essays on the Rumpus have been so good this year. I tend to read those during lunch and I’m often moved not just by the topics but by the writing itself. As for the world of fiction, I picked up Don DeLillo’s White Noiserecently (picked it up off my shelf where it had sat in my less-than-orderly queue for several years). A long while back I read “Pafko at the Wall” and found it phenomenal but, for reasons that are lost to me now, I didn’t pick up anything else by DeLillo until White Noise. Not reading more of DeLillo sooner was a mistake. The writing in White Noise is exceptional. The sentences are so rich you can taste them and DeLillo isn’t afraid to be both silly and intellectual (qualities I enjoy in fiction as well as in life). The story itself hardly matters, although the plot is fine enough. It is the writing and the thoughts behind the story that carried me along. From my understanding, most consider other novels of his to be superior to White Noise, so I’m eager to dive deeper into his work.

Of course, there are other things I’m looking forward to reading. I’ll be picking up Junot Diaz’s new collection. And I’m very much anticipating Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies. And although it was published earlier this summer, I’m looking forward to Caitlin Horrocks This is Not Your City.

"It Is Where You Do the Work": An Interview with Matthew Salesses

Matthew Salesses was born in Korea and adopted at age two. He is the author of The Last Repatriate and Our Island of Epidemics. His new book, I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in Feb 2012. You can find recent stories in Witness, Guernica, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, Hyphen Magazine, and others. Matthew edits fiction and writes a column for the Good Men Project.

Five pieces from his book I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying appear in Issue Thirty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Matthew Salesses speaks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about the arts of composition, revision, and distance.

1. Where did these five pieces begin for you, and how did they get to here?

I think one of these, “Good Thing She Had Money,” was a part of my original manuscript of about twenty less-than-one-page stories. The book these are from, I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, is 115 pieces that make a novel about a man whose illegitimate son shows up, surprise, when his mom is dying. The man has commitment issues, shall we say. I started with one story, the first story in the book, and maybe a year later, when I was looking for a new project to keep my mind off the frustrations of novel-revision, I thought of that story and how I had never felt done with that character and situation and voice. Especially voice.

I ended up writing twenty more or so, then sent those out to a few places. The Lifted Brow asked if I had 20 they might sprinkle throughout an issue. I said, I could. I wrote twenty more. As a way of generating the stories, I was using objects around my house and trying to incorporate them. Objects are something I think are very important to fiction, but that I often overlook until later drafts. In “Good Thing She Had Money,” the object was just a bed. I was trying to turn sentences around, trying to make each sentence close to a journey of its own.

With about 40 pieces, I had a chapbook manuscript. I sent it one place and was told it was too short. For a while, I left it there, waiting for submission periods to open. Then Civil Coping Mechanisms wrote asking if I had a book. I said, I could. They wanted 120 pages, so I had to write a lot more. Anyway, there was still a lot of room for the story to grow. And I was still addicted to that voice, to what I was trying to do with those stories. And I also liked the idea of a novel of these tiny pieces. My thanks to Michael Seidlinger—without him, this would never have been a book.

The other four stories were written in this later period, filling in gaps while trying to maintain gaps.

2. I love the decision to not designate these pieces as “shorts” or “short shorts” or “flashes”—here, they appear as “five from I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying.”  For me, this hints at how they “belong together,” at how they tell a larger story.  Can you talk a little about your decision to leave these pieces designation-less?  

I’m actually very unsure about what to call the pieces, which is why I try not to designate them. They’ve all been published as fiction, but I’m not even sure they’re more fiction then poetry, or at least what poetry I can make. It is important to me how they fit together. But it is also important to me that they can stand apart.

Though I think I like them more as a whole and that I was thinking a lot as I wrote about how attrition works in fiction, how little by little, something can lodge in your heart.

3. These pieces are rich in mystery.  Compelling distances expand and collapse between the characters: the boy seems to be as far away from his mother as he is from the narrator and the woman; the narrator refers to the woman not as “wife” or “fiancé” or “girlfriend,” but more mysteriously as “the wifely woman.”  What role do you think distance plays in evoking mystery?  (In evoking relationships?)

Distance, I suppose, is what I’m calling “gaps” above. I think it’s important not to tell a reader everything. Most writers would agree with that, I’d bet. I’m more likely to take that idea too far than not far enough. I like for readers to draw their own connections.

There was this study I heard about once, where people were shown a drawing that wasn’t fully completed, though they could fill in what was missing in their head. What was missing was obvious. This stressed people out, not having it finished. It made them really want to fill in the gaps. I guess I think this is a good thing: that unsettledness, that desire to complete the image. It means your mind is working. I like leaving the gaps a little wider, so that the drawing isn’t so obvious, so that people still want to fill in the missing pieces but can do so with their own images as much as with what is there.

4. To what degree are these pieces representative of I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying?  I’d love to hear about how they do/don’t “fit” with the work as a whole.

These pieces are just one small thread in the story. In the way that they talk about accepting the boy (or not) into the “family,” they are representative. A lot of the book is about this transition, and the effects of this transition on the narrator. There are a few threads that aren’t represented here (or at least as fully): like race, infidelity, “goodness,” commitment, owning who you are.

5. You recently finished up a wonderful stint as Writer-in-Residence at Necessary Fiction.  In your second post, you write: “Here’s the selfish reason I wanted to do a Revision Month.  I wanted other people’s knowledge.”  After soliciting so many thoughts on revision—and sharing your own—how have you “revised” your personal understanding of revision?

I haven’t revised it so much as edited it. I’ve learned things. But I still believe what I believed before about revision, that it is where you do the work. That people need to know more about it then they are given in workshops, yet that it can be taught.

6. What writing projects are you working on right now?  (The novel that you mentioned during your residency?)

I am working on a novel, yes, currently titled, The Artist’s Model, though it has had several other titles. It’s about an American who goes to Prague and gets in an affair with the wife of a famous artist. It’s set in 2002, when a major flood swept through Prague and destroyed a section of the city, Karli'n, in which the American and the wife are trapped.

I’m also working on a book about adoption, with an adoptive father, a conversation of sorts, that I hope will be of use to people confused about how adoption defines them. I’m confused.

The revision posts may also become a book, perhaps. We’ll see if anyone wants that.

Then there’s a story collection. I’m stretched pretty thin.

7.  What knock-out writing have you been reading recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about? 

I am glad you asked this. I’ll recommend some books by Korean American writers, since people don’t read enough Korean American writers. I can’t recommend more highly Forgotten Country, by Catherine Chung. I also very much enjoyed Don Lee’s new book, The Collective. Jay Caspian Kang is coming out with a novel soon, The Dead Do Not Improve. I’ll actually be writing about Asian American authors for a new magazine, ALIST, that looks to be something important and special in a difficult landscape for minorities

"A Vanity That Thrives Within Her": An Interview with Chelsea Bieker

Chelsea Bieker received an MFA in fiction from Portland State University, where she teaches creative writing and composition. Her work is forthcoming in The Normal School Literary Magazine and Gold Man Review. She is currently at work on a collection of stories.

Her story "" appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Chelsea Bieker speaks to interviewer David Bachmann about losing beauty, the fierceness of loyalty, and refusing to check in with reality.

1. The characters’ life situations in these pages are unfortunately plausible. Where did you get these situations and where did this story begin? (Was this born of observation, or was it purely imagined, or neither, or both?)

I think it was a bit of both. The story began in my head with the image of this faceless former beauty queen. This sort of freak attack (sulphuric acid thrown on the face) has happened to at least two women that I have read about, and it has been widely covered in the news. I guess I always tend to think of what lies on the other side of that news feature. Who are they, really? There is usually an optimism in their interviews that I find interesting and admirable, but as people, we are of course so fluid, and I wondered what might be lurking in the darker corners of an experience like that, after the news cameras leave. So that was the ground I began on, but the characters that came forth and their particular situation were purely imagined. I have been long intrigued by the desperate mother-daughter relationship, and Daisy and Florin display these very strange and intimate practices in their day-to-day lives, that exhibit physical closeness, but emotionally, very little. A fierce loyalty at times, but a quickness to betray. I think many times in my stories I play with the mother role, either with her absence, or her damaging presence. This interview could quickly turn into a counseling session if I’m not careful, so I will stop there, but as for their actual situation—essentially forcing her daughter into underage prostitution—that came possibly from thinking about the problem of sex trafficking in the city I live in, and how it might look if I took away the images we see so often in the media of the traditional pimp, and girls on street corners dressed a certain way, and a certain clientele…what if it was in a small farming town and it was very quiet, and there were no drugs involved, and no leather knee-highs? And that life becomes Florin’s normal very quickly, because she is so young and has watched her beautiful mother do it, and seemingly been very “successful” at it.

I also thought a lot about the role of beauty, and how it plays out in women’s lives, and for Daisy, beauty is her God and it is all that matters and it has dictated her entire life. It is her trade. I’m interested in what happens when people lose their “thing” so to speak. And her thing is her beauty and the way she measures everything.

2. Perhaps because I was so invested in each character and where they would go next, this piece seemed to move quickly through time. As a writer, how do you think about pace?

As I was writing this piece, I remember feeling like the real-time story didn’t actually start until about five pages in, which for me felt like a long while to get the clock rolling. Florin gives us a long bit of backstory, detailing her mother’s attack, and setting up place before the first scene begins in the AM/PM with Quince. From there it moves quickly. I wrestled with that structure, but I went with it. I tried moving things around a bit, and eventually kept it that order. I think getting Florin on the page and painting their town and describing the accident, was important to me. I don’t think pace was really on my mind writing the story, but certainly something that I noticed later. This story felt different structurally than some other things I have written. I think I had more of a mind for sound in this piece. I like to think, ‘would I read this story after reading the first paragraph?’ On this one, I think I would. I want to know what kind of town this is! Ha.

3. I’d love it if you commented on what previous drafts of this work looked like. Did any drafts include drastic departures from what we read now?  (For example, did you ever have Daisy delivering on her promise to end her life?)

The original draft was very similar to this version, aside from the end. The first ending involved Quince—the girls walking together up Olive Avenue and Florin realizing that Quince doesn’t accept her label as “town slut”, is totally unaware of it, and it illuminates her own denial over who she is and what she is doing. Later I rewrote it to include a final scene with Florin, Daisy, and Osbourne because it felt true. I knew in draft one I was avoiding that last interaction by separating Florin and Quince, and I think relied on the easier ending. But easy isn’t true, so I rewrote it with Daisy.

Also, one of my mentors, Leni Zumas, read the original draft and advised me to not over-tell it. To just immerse the reader in that world and resist explaining everything through Florin’s narration. This draft is cut down a bit from the first, on a sentence level.

Daisy never delivered on the promise to end her life in any draft. I imagine that people have three parts—body, spirit, and mind—and within those, many other things are going on as well, but generally it’s good to have all three rocking and rolling. To me Daisy doesn’t have all three. All three of hers have dwindled, been tarnished, are perhaps totally gone. She’s floating around, she’s lost her body, the trauma has caused her to lose her mind, and her spirit was tied to her beauty, which to her, has been lost. It’s a recipe for disaster, and suicide could be an option for her, but there is still a vanity that thrives within her. To me her threat was more about power and control over Florin. Making her fearful, making her want to preserve her mother. Daisy is also very dramatic. Many of her lines are so regal and absolute that (to me at least) it’s almost comical.

4. Florin’s voice seems like it should be one of desperation given her circumstances, and yet it feels very matter-of-fact, almost empowered, perhaps because she has been trained to so readily accept facts by her mother. Is this how you would expect the reader to interpret her character?

I like to write about people who are down and out, but refuse to check in to reality. There are moments when Florin feels sorrow and desperation, and the story revolves around this idea that she might move to LA to escape, but overall, she clings to her role as the expert on her trade. She may not have a traditional education, but she was schooled by Daisy, who is very prideful, and she can tell you all about it with assuredness. I also didn’t want to make her whiney. I don’t like to read whiney characters. Her situation is terrible, but I wanted her to be pushing against the urge to roll over and cry about it in some way.

As for how I expect her to be read, I don’t think much about that as I’m writing. I do think about psychology and the various ways we adapt to our surroundings to survive. Children will adapt and defend the parent even in dire situations. To me, Florin has adapted. It’s all relative. This is what she knows. But there is of course deep pain in that, which I do hope comes through as well.

5. Is there such a thing as actual love between any of the characters in this work? (Is there supposed to be?)

Great question. I think about love in fiction a lot. To me as a person, I have come to understand love as an action word, but in my fiction, I think most of my characters are not capable of that, and they cling to ideas of love as a mode of desperation and control. Actual love exists in a form here, maybe, but mostly it is shown as means of avoiding aloneness and escaping fear. I think Florin loves her mother and wants to please her. But you can love someone and despise what they do at the same time. We are just that complex, and it’s fascinating. I wrote a story with a psychologically disturbed/sociopathic narrator, and she tries to explain this difficulty getting feelings to go from the head to the heart. To go from cognitive awareness, to a felt thing. And she can’t do it, though she wishes she could. On some level, Daisy falls into that a bit, too. Her obsession with self renders her incapable of caring for another truly and with abandon.

6. What are you reading these days? When you read something compelling, do you ever think I want to write like this, and do you ever find yourself writing like the writer you are reading, even if you don’t intend to? If so, what is your reaction to discovering this trend?

I just finished Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins. I can’t say enough good things about it. They are amazing stories, so rich and so multi-layered. I am in awe.

Reading amazing work makes me want to write. I don’t know that I intentionally mimic the writer I am reading, but I know if affects me. Reading opens up new alleyways in my mind for writing, like oh! Look what they did! Now I want to! Reading the Watkins has reinforced my urge to incorporate many different narratives in one story. She does it so well, and it is worth studying. I remember reading Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty, and it affected the way I was writing voice in a big way. Reading during a difficult writing time is usually a good massage for my brain. I can come back to the work refreshed. I want to go read now.

7. What are you working on these days? Work of length? More short stories? Both?

I am pretty rooted in stories at this stage in my life, though I hope to write a longer work at some point. I am working on a collection where the stories take place in the Central Valley of California. I grew up mostly in Fresno, and as a teenager hated it, but once I moved away and got some distance, I was able to examine it through a new lens. I am trying to dig deep into the rich landscapes there. There is so much history. I am also so inspired by my family history as well. My dad and older sister have stories that just trigger my writing bone. I am trying to mix some of that in, too. It all feels very legend-like. And you can’t make up some of the names he throws out there! In Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor, she talks about taking advantage of what’s yours, and I am trying to tap into that in this collection. Life can be tragic, or it can be fodder for great stories, and I’m trying to do the latter.