"And So Must Cry in Public": An Interview with Helen Rubinstein

Helen Rubinstein's fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Ninth Letter, Salon, Salt Hill, Witness, and elsewhere. She is a member of Brooklyn's Trout Family of writers, and an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she is working on a book.

Her story, "Two Sisters," appeared in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist

Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about doubling, perspective, and sibling fights.

Could you talk about writing “Two Sisters”?             

My younger sister was visiting me in Brooklyn, and we got into a fight. The fight was about an omelet, but it was also about something else, and she accused me of always starting this same fight. While she was crying, I huffed off to my bedroom and realized she was right. That’s when I began to write “Two Sisters”—while weeping from anger and shame.

After that, “Two Sisters” became this fun place to return to when I was tired of whatever else I was supposed to be writing. It was more language-playful than the other work I was doing, and more image-playful, too. I played with it until I liked it (not always the case: often, I seem to play with my writing until I can’t stand it anymore). I don’t think my sister and I have had the fight since.

In “Two Sisters,” you do something really brilliant with point of view. At times, the reader experiences all three main perspectives,the I, the you, and the they. I love how this makes the reader feel that the narrator is telling them a story, in person, though it’s not just any story, but instead, a story that the reader should already know (“Now, you must have heard about the cold snap.”) Could you talk about incorporating this style into this story?

Thanks for describing that so kindly! I’m not sure exactly how deliberate it was—I don’t remember thinking about it before it happened. But as a reader and as a writer, I definitely think it’s fun to begin a story from one angle—here, omniscient third-person—and then introduce a kind of pinhole to see out of. I think of the “I” and “you” as pinholes: reminding us of their existence (which also reminds us that this is a story being told) anchors the third-person narrative in a sort of social space.

I also think of it as a way of breaking the claustrophobia of the third-person. I think I was trying to do something similar with tense in the first section, jumping around to break the claustrophobia of the present.

The Two Sisters seem to me to be the same (if iterations), in all of their appearances (even, in fact, when the crying pair meets with the laughing pair). I—and perhaps this is my own bias, since I am a sister—could even see the I/you interactions as two sisters. Could you talk about how these doublings occur? (Or, if you believe they occur at all?)

I do believe they occur! That was one of the best discoveries in writing this—how, though the specific details or settings would change, something in the sisters’ relationship remained fundamentally the same. The relationship is imbalanced, but it’s not clear (to me, anyway) exactly how, and neither of the sister-individuals is ever very clearly defined. I guess I was hoping that, by looking at the two sisters from so many angles, I might somehow hone in on two-sisters-ness, so that the relationship itself becomes the central character.

I didn’t know at the time I was writing this that Lydia Davis has written stories titled “Two Sisters” and “Two Sisters (II).” The fact that these exist seems to confirm the archetype, even if her stories are about slightly more specific sisters.

Could you give us a few reading recommendations?

Helen Phillips’s And Yet They Were Happy is an inspiration. Nicholas Muellner’s photo-essays Amnesia Pavilion and The Photograph Commands Indifference are mind-alteringly great. And Jillian Weise’s The Amputee’s Guide to Sex reminds me that good writing begins with having something to say. Joan Wickersham’s The News from Spain, Miranda July’s It Chooses You, and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? most recently delighted me.

Also, I always recommend rereading Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.

What other writings can we expect from you?

An alternate, semi-collaborative version of “Two Sisters” called “Sisters Trout” is actually coming out in Trout Family Almanac from Papercut Press sometime this fall. “Sisters Trout” was an experiment in taking all of another writer’s editorial advice as blindly as possible. The Almanac is a collaboration between a group of fiction writers from Brooklyn College’s MFA program called the Trout Family. All of the stories are loosely linked, and it should be juicy fun.

 I’ve also got an essay coming out in Slice magazine’s Issue 13, and an essay just out in Best Women’s Travel Writing Vol. 9, reprinted from Witness. I wish I weren’t too superstitious to talk about less-certain expectations! But I am.

"Dream Creation": An Interview with Justin Lawrence Daugherty

Justin Lawrence Daugherty, winner of the 2012 Gigantic Sequins Flash Fiction contest, runs Sundog Lit. "Nothing Out There to Save You" is a story from a novella-in-progress about Aurelio the Lizard-Boy. Another story from this novella is forthcoming from Metazen. Justin sometimes posts things to his blog at justindaugherty.wordpress.com. 

His story "Nothing Out There to Save You" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Justin Lawrence Daugherty speaks to interviewer Joseph Scapellato about myth, comics, and the use of fragments in fiction.

1. Where did “Nothing Out There to Save You” begin for you?

The story began with the idea of Aurelio putting coins over his own eyes. This action has always intrigued me and it occurred to me that this was a great place to use it. All of the initial lizard-boy stories, this one included, started out as individual tales about this boy growing up with lizard features in an otherwise normal world. It quickly changed from that, but this story somewhat reflects that notion. From the coins-over-the-eyes thing, the man being asked to take the boy away was a natural thing and, then, of course, came the conflict within the man himself, asked to do this thing he might not be able to do.

2. Can you tell us about the bigger project that this piece is part of, and where/how this piece fits into it?  (Did this piece play a particular role in the drafting of the project, overall?)

This piece is part of a larger novella, something that's been drafted and is awaiting my axe. The novella is an attempt at mythology creation, in a way, and also at analyzing relationships between the lizard-boy and his mother and (later) with a father figure. The first part of the book focuses on the mother-son arc and how that grows and becomes chaotic, even while (I hope) there's a thread of tenderness throughout the upheaval. This story is part of that first “book” within the larger work. This particular story acted as a way to give the lizard-boy his own bit of characterization, to move him away from the previously-connected story to the mother.

3. In several places, you make use of vivid sentence fragments:

The thrashing of a child, the instinct for life. The going-under, the near-death of almost-drowning. A throng of salmon, forming one solid body, under the boy, carrying him to the banks.

The coins on his eyes. The waking in the night, the coins falling, the man pulling him from his bed.

For me, the stacking of these fragments creates a montage-like effect—they cover a lot of time, quickly, and give what happens the feeling of having happened many times.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this technique—what were/are your goals with it?  (And did it originate as a conscious/unconscious emulation of visual mediums [film, comic books]?)

I've always been intrigued by the use of fragments in fiction. Annie Proulx was the first author I noticed using the technique. I think reading more recent stuff by Robert Kloss and Matt Bell really influenced my use of this stacking of fragments, this attempt to create movement and, like you said, a recurring feeling, that this has happened before. With much of the writing early in the book, I was interested in a sort of dream creation, a sort of film-like experience where the action of the story moved as in a comic book frame (as you mention) or in a film.

It's funny that you mention comic books. As I got farther and farther in the drafting, the concept I had of the book began to take on more of this idea of a comic book narrative. I actually contacted established comic book artists about illustrating parts of it (with no response). This was after I'd been using the fragments and stacking, though, but the influence was always there.

4. As a reader, I really love the Aurelio-mother relationship—although she keeps hiring men to get rid of him, she’s “always lighting up” when he returns.  It seems to me that there’s a mythic grounding to this—the abandoned baby that survives, that finds its way back to its parents.  Was the mother-Aurelio relationship different in earlier drafts?  In what ways did it surprise you as it developed?

I think the mother-Aurelio relationship really is the most important in the book. It was difficult to balance both the terror the mother experiences in relation to her child and the love she cannot shake. There's definitely a mythical grounding in this. So much of what I put into this book I approached with trying to create  or emulate mythologies (whether ancient, in comic books, etc.). The conflicting approaches of the mother toward her son actually came right away in the early drafts. I wrote about this woman hiring men to kill her son, but quickly wanted her to have an overriding sympathetic quality, something that would ultimately salvage the relationship. What surprised me was the balance there and how natural I felt the mother's response to be – both of revulsion and love. It's extreme, of course, and I obviously know nothing of motherhood, but it seemed to me that any parent has moments of extreme love and then temporary annoyance or fear or disappointment or just conflict with their children.

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

I'm working on reworking this novella to be a grander, more “epic” thing, in a way. I am slowly working on a chapbook about an earthquake and the plague it unleashes, all set as the backdrop for a failing relationship between husband and wife. Always working on short stories. I have this novel thing rattling around in my head, too. Perhaps I'll finish something here soon. 
 

6. It’s the summer!  What knock-out writing have you been enjoying recently?  Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

It is! I just completed a near-cross-country book tour and picked up a bunch of great stuff. Just finished Dylan Nice's Other Kinds the other day, which blew me away. So quiet and spare, and yet so fierce and heart-wrenching. I go back to Delaney Nolan's work constantly – she's a writer who's young and ferocious and unafraid and is really doing great work. Matt Bell's new novel is there and I'm working slowly through it, chewing on bits and pieces. Lindsay Hunter's new book. Laura van den Berg's. So much good stuff. I could talk about new books all day, forever. Fun Camp by Gabe Durham. I keep saying I'm going to finally go read Moby Dick. Soon.

"Looking for Communion": An Interview with Matthew Gavin Frank

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright), Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks, Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark.  He teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish liver ice cream.  It paired well with onion bagels.

His essay "The Dawning of the Blue Crab" appears in Issue Forty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Matthew Gavin Frank talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about food, unlikely connections, and grasshoppers.

1. Please tell us about how/why you began writing "The Dawning of the Blue Crab."

The essay is part of a collection-in-progress, tentatively titled, Foood: 50 States, 50 Essays, 50 Recipes. (Yes: 3 Os).  I’m trying to cobble together this weird, lyrical, avant-garde cookbook of sorts.  Each essay begins with the same line of questioning, based on the state, and the choosing of a particular food typically associated with that state: What does the blue crab mean?  What does Maryland mean?  What ancillary subjects will I have to engage in order to answer these questions?  What sorts of people will I have to find as interview subjects in order to get at these answers, or at least a little closer to them?  When I sit down to write a first draft of these, I, of course, have no idea where they’ll go.  I have no idea what the fulcrum of the essay will be, outside of state and food—the springboards.  It’s so exciting when these ancillary subjects begin attaching themselves, like burrs onto pant cuffs, to the springboards.   The Louisiana essay, for instance, is about Crawfish Etouffee and autoerotic asphyxiation.  The Rhode Island one deals with Clear Clam Chowder and the Cognitive Psychology of Transparency—how we think and react differently to things we can look through rather than look at.  Maine deals with Whoopie Pie and James Earl Jones. 

2. What made you decide to write this essay from the second person point of view? What is its intended effect on the reader who learns about “your aunt” instead of “my aunt,” for example?

Well, it’s a boring answer, really.  It’s because it’s not my uncle, not my aunt.  As I was writing this essay, as I’m doing with the other essays in the Foood book, I interviewed a bunch of folks in the state at hand.  Invariably, certain personal connections of mine wouldn’t be able to answer some of the focused questions I had, so they would direct me to friends of friends of friends, and eventually, someone would say, Oh, yeah!  My uncle’s a lobsterman who lost a finger!  Or, Oh, yeah! My uncle used to work in a bowling ball factory and is now getting through his forced retirement by obsessing on racehorse injuries!  And sometimes, I’ve been getting lucky enough to talk to the aunts and uncles themselves, and invariably, I’d be looking for connections between their lives—be it a manner of speech or another aspect of their personalities—and the lives of my own uncles, aunts.  And I’d be looking for odd connections between other nephews across the country and me.  Looking for communion.  So the uncle and aunt in The Dawning... are composite characters, of course; are UNCLE and AUNT, collective archetypes embedded within other archetypes—like MARYLAND and CRAB and JELLYFISH and ORCHID.

3. I admire the way that this essay juxtaposes historical facts and memoiristic scenes. Can you please talk about how researched information can effectively frame our memories and life experiences (or vice versa)?

As a fourth generation OCDer, I’ve long been obsessed with finding the odd connections between my life, and the lives of others, or trying to situate my life within some larger socio-cultural context.   It’s a way to avoid omphaloskepsis, of course, but it’s also a way to find out more about myself—to self-interrogate in very focused ways.  What does my belly-button have to do with all the other belly-buttons?  How would they relate when placed side-by-side?  When forced to collide?  Are there clear patterns?  If not, what sort of heavy lifting is required in order to divine a pattern?  I want to find out, for instance, what my first kiss has to do with Charles Lindbergh and grasshoppers.  That’s the wonderful thing: as writers, we have the power to manipulate connections between just about anything, no matter how seemingly dissimilar.  It just takes research, contemplation, alchemy, voodoo, the P.I.-style discovery of that perfect “bridge” ingredient.  It’s witch’s spell and police procedural; bureaucratic and incantatory, ephemeral, ponderous.  Other adjectives, even.  In a way, I had no idea what my first kiss meant until I learned that Charles Lindbergh was a grasshopper fetishist, and used to, in the Army, as a practical joke, trap scores of grasshoppers beneath the tightly-tucked bed-sheets of his fellows, restricting their, however brief, flight.  Perfect! I thought to myself.  That’s exactly how I felt after kissing Dawn Seckler in the Aptakisic Junior High School parking lot after graduation, our stupid tassled hats getting in the way—like some odd brew of Lindbergh hatching a plan, trapped grasshopper, and a guy who discovers locusts on his mattress.  And what does that mean?  By the way, did you know that grasshopper infants are called nymphs?

4. How have lessons learned from reading/writing poetry informed your work in creative nonfiction?

It’s that bridge ingredient thing.  Lately, I’ve been seeing the segmented essay as a series of stanzas. Also, there is a time for restraint in poetry, and a time when restraint should not be part of the poem’s language.  I’ve been trying to find that balance in these essays: which segment should be a bouillon cube, and which should just unfurl and unfurl.

5. What writing projects are you working on now?

Besides Foood, I’m putting some final edits on my forthcoming book, PREPARING THE GHOST: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright).  In 1874 St. John’s Newfoundland, this mad reverend and amateur naturalist, Moses Harvey, took the first-ever photograph of the giant squid, rescuing the beast from mythology and finally proving its existence, changing the ways in which we engaged the construct of the sea monster.  To take the photo, Harvey transported the squid from one bay to another, and then finally to his home where he proceeded to drape it over his bathtub's curtain rack so its full size could be displayed.  It’s a book-length segmented essay rife with those ancillary burrs—what I like to think of as essential, contextual digressions—like the various reasons we need to mythologize and then kill our myths, for instance; and ice cream.

6. What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Elena Passarello’s essay collection, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande Books), is a dazzler—so endlessly curious, voracious, informative, and just so entertaining.  Passarello and I went back and forth on the Essay Daily website with an Answerless Interview/Questionless Interview.  Check ‘em out.  We totally think we’re cooler than we likely are.

"Trampling Over a Space": An Interview with Matthew Poindexter

Matthew Poindexter's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2009 (University of Virginia Press), Another and Another (Bull City Press), and The Awl. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

His poems "SLOW / FUNERAL" appear in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Matthew Poindexter talks with interviewer Amber L. Cook about tension, rhyme, and law school.

1. What inspired you to write “Slow / Funeral”? Does the poem follow a true account of a funeral procession that you experienced?

Where I grew up in rural North Carolina, it’s common to put signs reading “SLOW / FUNERAL” in front yard of the grieving family and at the cemetery. You’re supposed to drive slowly to show respect. Those signs have stuck with me. As far as the action of the poem, I wouldn’t call it true to life, but whenever an emergency vehicle or funeral procession necessitates driving into someone’s land, I’m uncomfortable. I feel guilty if I’m trampling over a space someone obviously put a great deal of time and effort into making look nice, even if my being there isn’t by choice.

2. Couplets for me often work as units/containers that hold an image or idea together but also create really jarring enjambment. How do you see couplets functioning? What made this form a good fit for the subject of this poem?  

The risk with repeating the same stanza length over and over is the poem falling into a lull and not giving the reader something dynamic. This is especially true of couplets. If I commit to couplets, I almost need that jarring enjambment to make sure I don’t get too patterned. For me, the form functions best as a way to keep the language tight and short so that I don’t try to weave a clause on too long. On top of that, they fit with this poem because their form mirrors two-lane blacktop so well.

3. I really love lines that are conscious to sound, like when you write, “Kentucky-31 bag slumped on the stump of what/ must be/ an oak...” Do you often play with sonics in your poems? 

I believe the sonic qualities of a poem are just as important as any other technical aspect. I like rhyme, but I try to disperse it over the entirety of the poem. Putting all of that sonic play in end-line rhyme makes my writing feel uneven.  I try to punch up the sonics toward the end of the revision process, and I know a poem is getting close to being done when it starts to sound polished.

4. How did you achieve conflict between the speaker/driver in the poem and the lawn owner? 

Feeling obligated to intrude and being intruded upon is what I wanted to propel this poem. The driver has his right to the road in front of him intruded upon, and he loses his ability to feel anonymous and private in his car. The owner has his protected space violated, as well as the privilege to work as he pleases. Even the people going to the funeral are in the middle of a private and personal event that is being publicly acknowledged. The driver, the lawn owner, and the funeral party simultaneously intrude on one another, even though they would prefer not to, and that creates the tension.

5. What’s something that you’re reading right now that is worth sharing?

Right now I’m less than a month away from taking the bar exam, so it’s difficult to describe most of my reading as “worth sharing.” However, the one new book I have made time for is Delaney Nolan’s Shotgun Style: A Diagram of the Territory of New Orleans. Her stories manage to feel simultaneously alien and domestic, and logical but feverish.  They’ve made for a good respite from legal jargon.

6. Is “Slow / Funeral” part of a larger project?

“SLOW/ FUNERAL” is one section of something I’m working on, “The 500 Mile Long Poem.” That larger poem obsesses about driving and uses lines as an odometer. I’ve tinkered with it off and on for a few years, but the project’s definitely worth the time and patience.

"Landscapes of Meaning": An Interview with Sharon Wang

Sharon Wang is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis' MFA program.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pomegranate and Anti-.  She currently lives in Queens, NY.

Her poem "Lullaby" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, Sharon Wang speaks with interviewer Amber Cook about dichotomies, hauntings, and David Foster Wallace.

1. Why did you decide to write this poem as a lullaby? What characteristics seem inherently lullaby-esque to you?

Actually I wrote the whole poem before tackling the title!  I am really terrible with titles.  I think I thought that “Lullaby” might match the cadence of the poem.  Previously, my working titles were “Elegy” and “Ode.”  

2. Even though the title of your poem suggests a soothing, nighttime song, the poem, especially towards the end, carries dark undertones with lines like: “A silver guillotine falls beneath the lids,” “ashes, ashes,” and “And you are here and you are gone.” I really love this pairing. What did you hope to achieve with this combination?

I don’t think I was consciously thinking about that juxtaposition as I was working.  I’d been sitting in a bookstore in Seattle reading the David Foster Wallace short story “Forever Overhead,” which was actually the first piece of fiction I’d read of his and a piece that is extremely different, in tone and in form, from the rest of the stories in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.  I had this weirdest feeling while reading it that he was “pretending.”  Not actually pretending, but showing to the reader what else he could do.  And in my strange semi-entranced semi-deluded state I felt that he was pretending to be a writer like me rather than a writer like him, only he was much better at it than I was.  

I’d resisted reading him for years for the truly terrible reason that I’d associated liking him with “being a certain kind of person,” and it turned out that I felt great solidarity with him, both in that story and in the others in that book.  So this was an intense experience.  I then went home with the cadences of that story stuck in my head, and I ended up free-writing a very preliminary draft of “Lullaby.”  Later it changed a lot (many of the lines were switched in with others from my vaster collection of notes) but the structure and the mix of the cadence and the darkness remained. 

It’s a poem about things that haunt me (existential crisis, or more precisely, “existential knowledge”) and it began as a subconscious analogical translation of DFW.  Now that I look at it, it’s kind of an unfortunate rip-off!  I stole a lot from him.  There are even small structural similarities, particularly in the dichotomy between the static formal/tonal elements and the thematic exploration of time’s relentless undercurrent, as evidenced by the repetition, which uses music to push the narrative/lyric forward while not really letting the reader move linearly.  In the DFW story, there’s a sort of central eradication enforced by moving and not moving at the same time.  There’s an odd kind of suspension that forces emphasis on the present moment but doesn’t tell you how to attribute meaning to it.  The whole thing’s very addressee-and-narrator-effacing, or perhaps human-effacing.  Time is over before the story’s even begun.  It’s difficult to be a human in that world, and yet there is a certain amount of tenderness.  But I’ve gotten away from myself by talking about that story and not my poem, which I wrote perhaps as a way to re-inhabit the feelings I had when I was reading the story.  And it’s highly possible I’m projecting things into my poem that only I can see, which would be a relief on some level!      

3. The repetition of “here” works really effectively in pacing the poem. Do you turn to repetition frequently in your work? 

I think I used to much more than I do now.  I typically pay a lot of attention to the sonic aspects of my work, maybe even relying on them as a crutch to bring a cohesion to images or leaps of logic that a reader might not initially buy as being of one piece, but I’ve recently also become more aware of how creating an overly sonically fluid piece can actually feel too “heavy” or “too much”—the way you might not want to keep eating pieces of rich chocolate cake because it begins to lose a little something.  (Although I have days when I want to.)

I’ve also always been interested in syntactical repetitions and how the building up/ breaking down of those structures creates meaning in a poem. 

4. What’s one book that you think every writer should read? 

So many!  Maybe His Dark Materials.  

5. What projects are you currently working on? Does “Lullaby” fit into any of them? 

“Lullaby” is in a manuscript I completed last fall (Practice in the Shadow Room).  I like the feeling of finishing something and getting to mentally set it aside, although that’s had weird consequences—I’ve actually tried to go back and make changes recently and found that it’s been completely blocked off and lives in a different compartment of my brain, much to my relief and dismay.

For better or for worse, I tend to think in terms of landscapes of meaning (sequences, books), rather than individual pieces, and it’s very nice (read: truly terrifying) to be discovering new territory (read: procrastinating wildly) for now.

"The Ordering of the World": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Virginia Pye

Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust, was chosen as an Indie Next Pick by the Independent Booksellers Association. Carolyn See in The Washington Post called it “intricate and fascinating;” Annie Dillard says it’s “a strong, beautiful, deep book;" and Robert Olen Butler named it “a major work by a splendid writer.” Virginia’s essays can be found in The Rumpus and forthcoming in The New York Times Opinionator blog and she’s been interviewed at The Nervous Breakdown and The Huffington Post. Please visit her at www.virginiapye.com

An excerpt from her novel River of Dust appears in Issue Forty-Six of The Collagist. 

Here, Virginia Pye answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from her novel, explained. Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Writing is the uncovering of consciousness—that brief moment when you first wake from sleeping and separate what you know from what you dreamt, what you remember from what you wish. Of course, writing is also the hard, plodding labor of getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, making your bed and pulling on your pants, one leg at a time.

In River of Dust, a passage near the end of the novel captures that dream of consciousness. Grace imagines herself in her husband’s study late at night. The Reverend is writing at his desk, unaware of her:

She followed the Reverend’s gaze across the room and was startled to see little Wesley seated on the floor in the corner….

“That’s a good boy,” she whispered. “Let your father concentrate on his work. He has much business to attend to.”

Grace rested her hand on her husband’s shoulder. The Reverend started slightly, although, like Wesley, he did not seem to see her.

“Oh, love,” he sighed.

It made Grace’s knees weak to hear his trembling voice. “Yes?” she answered.

Although he couldn’t hear her, he must have sensed a certain attentiveness surrounding him there in the shadowy study.

Writing is that attentiveness.

2. What isn’t writing like?

Now that I have defined writing as a vast notion of consciousness, there is nothing that writing isn’t. But, I’ll make a stab at it: how about if writing isn’t purely arbitrary list-making. Instead, writing is about the ordering of the world. We can’t help but define the world and that impulse and subsequent decision is writing. Because my novel is crafted and hopefully no part of it has been left untended to, it’s hard to find an example of what writing isn’t from within it. But, here’s a moment that comes close: 

…The Reverend pulled his knee close to his chest and released his leg in a mighty kick behind him. There came a crack: the furious blow had landed on something solid yet yielding, and it broke. Yes, the Reverend later explained, it was sickening satisfying—the same sensation he had felt as a boy when crushing rotten pumpkins in the fields with his boot.

Arbitrary violence should fall outside the realm of the ordered world. But then, to compare it to an innocent memory from childhood is a supreme act of naming. Even in trying to offer a moment of randomness the hand of the author (me!) is still very much present. Perhaps nothing in writing can be about not writing.

3. When you do it, why?

By it, I’m going to guess you mean the act of writing. I write because that’s how I make sense of things. I write because I have fun with it. I write because I’ve been doing it for decades and couldn’t possibly stop now. It’s how I frame my life—the chapters of my life are defined by the books I worked on at that time.

In River of Dust, both Grace and the Reverend try to keep order in their minds through religion and custom. When that starts to fail, they flounder, but the impulse to understand their world persists, even when it makes less and less sense:

One mild and moonless evening, as Grace sat by the closed window, she thought she heard bells—high, tinkling bells of the sort camel drivers tied to their beasts to keep them from becoming lost in dust storms. She cocked her head and listened and waited for the sounds of voices. She felt certain she would recognize her children because they would be brought home to her by a chorus of angels, or, given the bells, perhaps camels, or both.

Her urge to order (thank you, Wallace Stevens) is gently teased in this passage. Grace and the Reverend have little concept of how silly they become as they try to maintain dignity in a rapidly deteriorating world.

4. When you don’t, why?

When I don’t write, I’m sick, or busy, or distracted by life. When my children were young, I stopped writing longer works of fiction for close to a decade. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t stopped for that long, but in a way I couldn’t help it. I was immersed in life--up to my elbows in it. I didn’t have the proper distance to write about anything. I practiced what came to be known as “attachment parenting”—now an almost derogatory term, but a practice which suited our family just fine—and so I was pressed up against another human being pretty much day and night.

To write, you need a sense of separation, individuation, even isolation to let your imagination come forward. Still, I loved those years—the immediacy of them, the realness of being always in the moment, and the complete exhaustion and dizziness of it all. Grace’s post birth experience captures that hazy state in which she, or I, didn’t have a prayer of being able to write:

Grace’s children came to her in a swirl of dust and sunlight. Motes of light floated behind her closed eyelids, and when she opened them the sun danced low over the sill before her, bringing with it the children. She thought she heard them crying. She dozed and dreamed and woke again and heard them crying again, this time from quite close. She squinted down at the soft bundle beside her. Rose. Her Rose. Grace’s heart welled up, but her arms were too tired to life the baby to her breasts.

The birth scene in my novel, too, is close to my own experience, except that I gave birth in a Philadelphia hospital and not a Chinese village. I drank herbal potions, though not administered by anyone remotely as magical and maniacal as Mai Lin. Still, in Grace’s state, or my own in those years, writing was a distant goal and dream. Thank goodness, the fog eventually lifted and I was able to look back on that childbearing time and even create a story in which it plays a large role. River of Dust, among other things, is a mother’s own story. 

"Letting Someone, Somewhere Down": An Interview-in-Excerpts with Douglas Trevor

Douglas Trevor is the author of the recently released novel Girls I Know (SixOneSeven Books, 2013), and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space(University of Iowa Press, 2005). Thin Tear won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. Trevor's short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, The New England Review, and about a dozen other literary magazines, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

An excerpt from his book Girls I Know appears in Issue Forty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Douglas Trevor answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Girls I Know.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

[Longing, slipping away from the world, letting someone, somewhere, down.]

He kissed her back. Behind them, at the circulation terminals, students combed through electronic databases and recalled items that had been checked out by other users. Walt heard the same cart with the squeaky wheel pass behind them. He told himself that she was just a stubborn New Yorker with a dumb idea for a book, and that he was just a sentimental Vermonter who thought the world would be a better place if everyone could simply appreciate the same set of poems. Poems, incidentally, all written by white New Englanders. He told himself that the two of them were ridiculous, making out in the middle of the library. He thought of Flora. But he didn’t stop kissing Ginger. In spite of where they were and how different they were, he didn’t want this moment to end.

2. What isn’t writing like?

[Waiting for the phone to ring.]

He waited for Ginger to call him but she didn’t. She was just giving him the space he had requested, he knew that, but he couldn’t bring himself to call her, or his family, or any of his friends. He knew that these people might very well ask him if he was finally making progress on his dissertation, now that he was back on campus. And he wasn’t making any progress. He was still just reading poems, still feeling blocked as a writer. It wasn’t enough for him to tell himself that he was reinvesting in The Poetics of Yankee Peerage. The days were too long, and besides, simply working on a doctorate didn’t seem like an appropriate response to what he had witnessed in the Early Bird. But he had no idea what would.

3. When you do it, why?

[When there is a story to tell.]

“He took me to his house all the way up near Oquossoc, me screaming the whole way, pounding on the window. No one in any of the cars we passed looked over at us. When we got to his place he locked me in his basement. A couple times a day he’d give me food. There was a sink and shower down there. I’d go to the bathroom in the sink. A few weeks later he came downstairs with a mattress and another man. The man gave him money to rape me. I don’t know how much. I found out later that the guy had taken out ads in porn magazines. ‘Young Girl Who Likes Pain.’ It took me a month of getting the shit raped out of me to figure out a way out of there. I ended up knocking the door down with a section of pipe when he was gone one day.

“I didn’t feel like I could go home after that so I moved to Waterville, then Berlin, New Hampshire, then Manchester. I did tricks, worked in a convenience store for a while. I didn’t look like I was thirteen no more. I got arrested for stuff, nothing serious, mostly just cuz I had nowhere to go. Then I started doing speed and LSD and other shit guys would give me to fuck them or suck them off. I’m eighteen now. I take Concord Trailways down from Manchester Sunday afternoon and waitress and dance here through Wednesday. I can’t dance on the weekends because they say my tits aren’t big enough and I can’t afford no enlargements. So I work and buy my shit down here for the week. One of my girlfriends looks after my boy while I’m gone in exchange for speed. I had him two years ago: Jayce. I work down here so it won’t ever get back to him, how I make money.”

A guy sat down at the booth behind them and their waitress stood up, picked up her tray, and went to get his drink order. As she walked off, Ginger wrote madly. Walt didn’t say anything; he just watched her hand fly back and forth across the page.

4. When you don’t, why?

["How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world" —Hamlet]

A short time later, they climbed back into Ginger’s car. She turned the key in the ignition, but rather than immediately hit the gas, she sat there for a moment, slumped over her steering wheel, the collar of her sweatshirt drooping so that Walt could glimpse the base of her neck, the ridge of her collarbones.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She rubbed her eyes, yawning. “I haven’t slept in days. I mean days. And all the sudden, I feel a little down. Why is it always so overcast here? Honestly, I can’t believe the Puritans stayed. I can’t believe they didn’t all just go back to England and become Anglicans.”

"Bring You Back Paceless Paces": An Interview with Purvi Shah

Purvi Shah seeks to inspire change through her work as a non-profit consultant, anti-violence advocate, and writer. She won the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award for her work fighting violence against women and recently directed Together We Are New York, an Asian American poetry project responding to the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. Her book, Terrain Tracks, was nominated for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award. Find her work at http://purvipoets.net, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah/, or @PurviPoets.

Her poem "Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again." appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Purvi Shah talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the push and pull of lines, the process of paper to web page, and the many events that culminate to create one single poem.

1. What was the process behind writing “Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.”?

This poem begins in gates.

I first wrote it on July 25, 2012. Some of the gates of that time I unfasten here:

• A summer collaboration – with poets April Naoko Heck, Sahar Muradi & Zohra Saed – on gates as they relate to histories, passages, cities, and our own human transformations;
• My devouring of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, essays by Jane Hirshfield;
• My finishing the first pada and starting the second in The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali by Edwin F. Bryant –– accompanied by active asana practice that week;
• Planning a celebration for a pivotal birthday (think: excitement/vexations spectrum);
• An old flame, who after perfidy, connected with me on social media (WHAT?!? and forgive me my own net stalking/mixed messages to the universe); and,
• My restlessness of spirit and search for THE RIGHT ONE or as I wrote in my journal that day, “I have pulled down the gate & am…a young girl alight…towards my true destiny.”

In this swirl of the day’s gates, an image of Cerberus popped into my head.

“Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.” streamed forth as my solution for not only escaping the hellhound but for rebirth; enacting the rough work of closing and seeding new directions; and, moving beyond the space of regret, re-tracing errors, and enticing detours to the path you know you must take, the path that makes future. This movement from fear to active faith.

Perhaps on the subway to a Kundiman salon where I was reading that 25^thevening, I wrote the poem’s first draft as outpouring. Upon review in the next few days and weeks, I altered order and added a few lines. You can see the original and my elements of change (prior to the computer variations) here.

2. One of the things that I think poetry allows a writer to do is break open language that we are already familiar with, in this case, the phrase, “beating a dead dog,” which you’ve rejected. What about this phrase prompted its investigation?

For the reasons above, I had been thinking about how the past can dog you. How we allow the past to dog us. At that moment, I wanted to rise and see if there could be a way to make the future your dog. I sought to break the pattern of cause and effect, human binding through temporality – i.e. a future delinked from pasts. Envision fresh potential to actualize it. Given I sought a new view, the language too had to be a new vista on the familiar: perhaps a slight off-rhythm of sorts, a genesis leading to unexpected births, root bearing radical bloom. Poetry becomes palpable not only when you can see newly but rather when you can grasp that sight – as if it were a bird about to fly from your hand & you can watch and accompany this flight. With “Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.”, I aimed to defamiliarize a phrase and the phrasings of our lives. To bring death alive. To live from the yes that arises from a no.

3. I love how you push and pull the density of your lines and stanzas throughout your poem. Could you talk about this poems form? Did it come organically or in the revisions?

Yay! I love the push & pull of the lines too: thank you! As you can see from my snapshot above, the form came through mainly as I transferred the poem from page to computer. But, for me, the form was embedded already, even though the first draft may look like a paragraph or prose poem. Through the shape of the poem, I sought to enact a sense of gates (long lines) as well as movement (shorter lines) & errors or possibilities (the drifted lines near the right margin). That risk of movement, chance knowings/outcomes.

The published poem is slightly different from my final version. Due to the form of the webpage and its line-length limits, I sliced my second and third lines into three lines (lines 2-4 as published). In my version of the poem, these three lines are two tracks that run across a standard size page. They enact a barrier and the poem enacts a departure from that barricade. Essentially, the push & pull is even more dramatic.

In the past few years, I’ve been working across the page with lines/right margins to embody movement, flight, freedom, departures. I hope the form encourages readers to feel less stable and yet more open – perceive their ability to forge new ground. Perhaps this is my yogic poetics. Though only you can know (and tell me) if such felt reality sparks true for you.

4. What books have been surprising you recently?

Most powerful to me recently have been books in the making. Through the Poets House Emerging Fellowship, I had the great privilege of reading and offering feedback on manuscripts by some poets in our group. The dynamic poems I encountered – so different in voice, form, and preoccupations than my own – continually broadened my sense of poetry, my sense of what is possible, my understanding of what matters. I hope these powerful works will reach you and the wider public soon!

In the arena of published works, lately I’ve been relishing the profound layerings of Srikanth Reddy, the threadings of Lee Ann Brown, the questionings/solutions of Evie Shockley, and the bold heart of Joy Harjo. And I’ve been raptured again by the work of Mirabai: I strive for my own work to have such fire, grace, grip, and soul-speech.

5. What else have you been writing?

Desire. In my writing, I return to desire – which encompasses longing, humor, joy, the world.

In addition to now & then tweeting poems @PurviPoets & my Monday Facebook poetry status updates, I have been writing towards my next collection – a series of poems focusing on women’s desire, social status, and being through re-imaginings from three figures of Indian iconography: Mira, Saraswati, and Maya. You can hear one of the early Mira poems I wrote – and another will be published in Quiddity later this year. I’m excited to be stitching the wisdom of “ancestors” in new terrains, to be writing in conversation with cosmos.

I’ve also been exploring writing poems with more humor and feisty attitude (bringing more of myself into the poems!). These recent poems explore the injury sustained by an Ecuadorian nanosatellite or near-lynched mannequins or unwittingly smiting a mosquito with my breast. These days, I’m generally working the line between the sacred and the profane, the reverent and irreverent, surrender and willing change. It is a fine line to walk.

"Intended Only for Sparrows": An Interview with Michael Stewart

Michael Stewart writes odd, short things that have been published in an array of journals and a couple of anthologies. He is the author of A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic (The Cupboard), Almost Perfect Forms (Ugly Duckling), Sebastian, an illustrated book for adults (Hello Martha Press) and The Hieroglyphics (Mud Luscious Press). Later this year, Mud Luscious will be printing his next book, Answers, a series of unhelpful, but hopefully interesting answers to questions submitted by strangers. Currently, he lectures at Brown University. More of his work can be found at: strangesympathies.com.

His story "A Humiliation of Sparrows" appears in Issue Forty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Michael Stewart talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about the lonely life of hoarders, the art of trimming details and the class distinction between the sparrow and the martin. 

1. I’m always curious about the origin of a writer’s story. What was the seed for “A Humiliation of Sparrows”? There are a number of fantastic images throughout the piece. I’m curious if it started with say, “a lone downy feather falling like the first sign of snow” or the rewarding “smell of burning feathers”? Or did it begin somewhere else entirely?

My father tends to hoard things. He has binders of dead money, boxes of old trophies, rows of gutted pinball machines, more boxes stuffed with various magazines. This has always seemed to me a lonely way to live. Those boxes of newspapers or tools or board games start to make the walls of your house thicker, more impenetrable, and the rooms smaller, less livable. So, mostly this was an attempt to work through some of those ideas, and to imagine, really to delight in, the idea of tearing those walls down. 

Additionally, I was looking into the history of the nouns of venery—a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens—and I came across a humiliation of sparrows. Sparrows have always had a particular place in my personal mythology, and something about that phrase opened the story for me. The rest was almost dictation. 

2. Kate is a character that we only catch glimpses of, but is essential to the story. As a first-person narrative that deals, in part, with loss, I wonder if you could talk about the process of writing Kate’s character. Did earlier drafts spend more time with her? Or did you know going in that her character would be one that the narrator could not linger on for any extended period of time? 

Aw, Kate! I spent a lot of time mapping out their relationship: how they met—on the bus, they talked for a week before he asked her out; their honeymoon in Alsace—his first and last trip out of the states, her third; and etc. Early drafts made more mention of her and hinted at her illness, the isolation is caused, but with each revision I trimmed back those details. It felt important that she only be represented by physical things, that any information we got about her should be sparked by objects in his collection. 

3. I couldn’t help but think of Poe’s “The Raven,” as I read your story. Did Poe’s poem inform your story at all? I also felt compelled to look up  information online about sparrows. One site states the sparrow calls on us “to keep our burdens as light as we can in order to avoid a heavy heart.” I thought that quite fitting for your story. At what stage in drafting did you start to consider the type of bird you would have your character deal with? 

I didn't have The Raven or The Tell-Tale Heart in mind when I wrote the piece, but when I reread the story it is obvious that they were influences. You can't—and I can't imagine why you would want too—escape anyone you read under the covers with a penlight anymore than you can escape where you are from.  

Sparrows, as I mentioned before, have a personal meaning for me. My mother was one of those backyard aviarists with a mania for purple martins. She bought books on attracting them, which lead her to putting up a tin birdhouse shaped like some Victorian manner in the center of our backyard. It had dozens of holes for the birds to crawl into, and it was so tall we had to sink it into the ground with a cylinder of concrete. Martins are impressive they dive a lot and the glimmer a bit, so everyone tried to cultivate them. She was, if I remember, pretty unsuccessful and inevitably sparrows would take over the cubbies intended for the martins, and my mother, just as inevitably, would lower the birdhouse and remove their nests. They were just balls of dried grass and a few eggs. For some reason I could never figure out, sparrows were pest; kids shot them with BB guns. This of course gave me an affection for them. I dreamt of littering a tree with birdhouses intended only for sparrows. 

As I grew older, I couldn't escape the idea that this was all about class. We lived in one of the more rundown, prefabricated houses at the time and there was something aristocratic about the martins, something selective and precious that you couldn't buy. A group of martins is aptly called a richness. Sparrows then were more like us. Numerous and capable of living in between places, places intended for others from which inevitably banks or circumstance would remove us. 

The story is about lack and the kind of pull, or orbit, lack creates. Just as Poe's narrator reads everything through the lens of Lenore, so does our narrator through his grubby altars to Kate. I mean, The Raven is really a mundane story. It's the lack of Lenore that turns an inconsequential event into a horror. The raven is no more than an echo, you have to supply the scream. 

4. What are you currently working on?

Well, I am finishing up The Answers, a three-year-old project where I have been soliciting questions from strangers online and answering them in unhelpful, but hopefully poetic ways. The questions have been surprisingly great: everything from, "How did you lose your virginity?" to, "How do I remove a mustard stain?" It's been a lot of fun to write. Everyday there is a fresh prompt sitting in front of you and at least one unknown reader interested in what you have to say. 

5. It’s summer time. What do you have on your reading list?

My reading list? What a wonderful question, here is what is on my nightstand: Wonderful Investigations by Dan Beachy-Quick; A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck (I love this bit on page 107: "The Germans say, 'That man has no ghost in him.' They say of a poor wine, 'This is an unghostly wine.' Thy say a person can be Rich in Ghostliness. That a person of wit possess ghost."); American Science Fiction edited by Gary Wolfe (a fantastic two book anthology of the early stuff); They Live by Lethem (I love this series); The Literary Conference by Aria; Kingdom Come; the most recentHawkeye comic (one of my favorite runs in years, but it's still no Hellboy); Remainder; The Lazarus Project by Hemon;The Giant O'Brien by Hilary Mantel; this seems a good of time as any to mention that the Japanese have a word,tsudoku, for people who collect books with no regard for finishing them; Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum; The Original Laura by Nabokov; Second Sex—de Beuvoir (should be required reading); Seamstress in the Wind, another by Aria;Red Doc by Carson (is Carson our greatest Canadian import?); The Lords of Salem, ghost written by Brian Evenson (I appear, briefly, on page 106); Intimate Memoirs, Simenon's memoir (he fascinates me, for example he claimed to have slept with 10,000women and he wrote nearly 400 books, if you count the novellas); But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer (recommend to me with such enthusiasm by Mona Awad); The Secret History by Donna Tarrt; Cinema Stories by Alexandra Kluge; All That Is by James Salter (I just interviewed Salter about this book, and he is, without reservation, my favorite sentence writer); and speaking of great sentences, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard; Memorable Days—Salter's memoir (rereading for the interview); Out of Sheer Rage, another by Dyer (who it should be said has take digression and made it an art form); The Devil by Maurice Garçon;  Awkward Age by Henry James; The Invincible Iron Man (I'm not sold on the images: too many photo references—it's odd to flip a page and see a Pepper Potts panel that is directly lifted from a cover of last season's Vogue—but the story is fantastic); Recipes for Sad Women by Héctor Abad (the first book of his I've read, it's pretty great); Case Closed; Forgery by Jonathan Keats; The Complete Claudineby Collette (I always seem to have a book of Collette's near me); Xelucha an Others by M. Shiel; Modern Life, N+1;Magritte and the Enigmatic Left, one of the Simenon novels (I often find myself rereading the Margrittes unintentionally—there are 75 novels and some 30 stories. I discovered I had read this one before about 20 pages in, but I can't bring myself to stop rereading it); The Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier; and Cleavage by Chris Tysh. 

There are usually a few more detective novels and a mound of comic books but I just cleared them out on an unexpected day off. 

"Faithful to the Feeling": An Interview with Eleanor Stanford

Eleanor Stanford is the author of História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography) and The Book of Sleep (Carnegie Mellon Press). Her poems and essays have also appeared in Poetry, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and many others.  She lives in the Philadelphia area. More at www.eleanorstanford.com

Her essay "Your Sweet Words, José: Translations from the Portuguese" appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Eleanor Stanford talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about translations, socioeconomic divides, and the music of language. 

1. Could you please discuss the origins of “Your Sweet Words, José”?

It grew out of my experiences talking with my in-laws’ housekeeper, who is an undocumented worker from Brazil. My family and I lived with my in-laws (who also happen to be Brazilian) for a summer, after we ourselves had just moved back from a year in Brazil, and I spent a lot of time chatting with the housekeeper while she made the beds or mopped the floor. Kind of awkward and weird, but after living in Brazil, I was, for better and for worse, a bit more comfortable with the socioeconomic divide that is largely taken for granted in that culture.

2. What is your first priority when working in the medium of translating someone else’s words? Please explain.

My first priority is being faithful to the feeling and to the cadences of the speech, rather than the literal meaning of the words. Even in calling this piece “translations” rather than “a translation,” I was trying to suggest this sense of multiple possible versions, and the impossibility of a single definitive translation.

3. Have you found that lessons learned from your work as a poet have influenced the way you write translations (or creative nonfiction, in general)? How so?

Definitely. In any genre, it is a similar process for me: I am trying to find the music of the language.

4. What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel, set in Brazil in 1968, about a young medical student who gets involved in the guerrilla resistance to the dictatorship and is forced to flee her parents’ home in São Paulo.

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

I recently read and very much enjoyed Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Also Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas (which I reread, as I was teaching it for a class); Mumbai New York Scranton, a charming, quirky memoir by Tamara Shopsin that includes drawings and photos; the novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid; The Pharmacist’s Mate, by Amy Fusselman; and Matthew Dickman’s latest collection of poems, Mayakovsky’s Revolver.