"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. 

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Janice Lee

Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator, and scholar. Interested especially in the relationships between metaphors of consciousness, theoretical neuroscience, and experimental narrative, her creative work draws upon a wide variety of sources. Her obsessive research patterns lead her to making connections between the realms of technology, consciousness studies, design theory, the paranormal & occult, biological anthropology, psychology, and literary theory. She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter(Jaded Ibis, 2011), and Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, October 2013). She currently lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at CalArts & is Co-Editor of the online journal [out of nothing], Reviews Editor at HTMLGIANT, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design.

An excerpt from her novel, Damnation, appeared in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.

Here, Janice Lee answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from her book. Enjoy!

What is writing like?

Sometimes one willingly enters a dark and empty space, the creaking of the loose boards below, the phantom moonlight above.

- I had a dream that I was carrying a wounded deer in my arms. He lay there limp, depending on me completely and solely for the permission to go on living. Then I dropped him into the river. How can you forgive an act like that? Why were we only made to die?

What isn’t writing like?

A little hunched man is hitting him with a stick. His hands are only nubs and so is unable to fight back. But he can open his mouth, and does, and words come out, as if speaking for the first time. 

When you do it, why?

Sometimes in fear or just bountiful curiosity, we look out the window to envision a new day, a new world, a place with flowers and fountains and people bustling from place to place. We push the curtains aside, stare hard through the rain, focus, and see a cow emerge from behind a dilapidated brick building across the way. Nothing lies in front of him but a vast overwhelming scene of wet mud and glimmering streaks on the ground that pile up and pile down and zigzag through each other like the traces of many movements across and through the town, the strange blueprints of a dance only the cows seem to know the music to. The single cow slowly becomes many, more brown faces emerging from behind the building, and together they make their way towards the western edge of town. No one leads them or chases them but it seems that they all know their way. They take their time—they have their entire lives after all—and one pauses to attempt to mount another, a loud moo piercing the damp air, and another separates for a moment to look in the direction of someone watching them, a contemplative look in its eyes (what do cows contemplate so early in the morning?). Our eyes shift left and we see a few other cows emerge from an alleyway, mooing at the first herd (what are they saying to each other?), their eyes darting around in different directions and their ears absorbing the silence of the wind (though it is not silence, there is the low droning of the wind’s movements through the trees and between the houses, a particular feeling the wind gives, not necessarily a sound), a crow cawing eerily in the distance, and then the cows again, all together, bunched up on the road in front of the doctor’s house, before heading out on the road north out of town, each matching the pace of the others.

When you don’t, why?

Sometimes we forget what we see the moment we’ve seen it. 

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Tara Ison

Tara Ison is the author of the novels Rockaway, The List, and A Child Out of Alcatraz. For more info, see http://www.taraison.com.

An excerpt from her novel, "Rockaway," appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, Tara Ison answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from her book. Enjoy!

What is writing like?

All right, she thinks. You're all ready to begin. She selects a canvas, positions it perfectly on her easel. Mytilus edulis, she thinks, looking at her gaping shell. The common blue mussel. She seizes a tube of pthalo blue, punctures it open.

There. You have begun.

Then dioxazine purple. Aureolin yellow, viridian, ivory, iron oxide black. She studies the moist little squeezings of color on her palette. Even with the employee discount she’d spent a fortune on these studio-sized tubes in her wooden case: Old Holland, the best. Excellent strength of color and lightfastness, no cheap fillers, their pigments still fine-ground by old-fashioned stone rollers and mixed with cold-pressed, sun-bleached virgin linseed oil, each tube packed by hand. She has recited that to customers for over ten years, using her old college canvases as example and display, and, before quitting, purchased herself this grand spectrum. She must be careful not to waste them, all these rich colors.

 The sun through a picture window reflects off the virgin canvas in a harsh, hurtful way. A blank canvas is awful, an insult, she thinks. A sin. You must overcome the sin of the blank canvas.

She seizes a brush. It is a ragged, windy day; sand flecks the window glass and the wooden frames are rattling in their sockets. She sets the brush down, contemplates the mussel, its faint pearlescence, then, determined, punctures one more tube and squeezes out a healthy dollop of rose dore madder. She picks up a palette knife, dips its edge, taps, makes pretty red dots on the palette. Like smallpox, she thinks. Measles. A coughed spray of consumptive blood. Focus, Sarah, she tells herself. Stop playing around. Carpe diem yourself. Seize this opportunity to express and define who you are, now. Fresh start.

She puts the palette knife down, swigs beer, and looks out toward the ocean. A seagull hangs, floats in reverse for a moment, fighting the wind, then flies away beyond her view. At the seam of horizon and sea is a large ship, a tanker, she decides, or some kind of freighter. A liner, maybe a cruise vessel. She thinks of buying an illustrated book about ships, all the different kinds. The ship slowly crosses the three picture windows, absorbing the afternoon. You should have at least sketched the ship, she thinks, too late, as it passes from her last framed view. She gets up, rinses her unused brushes in naphtha in her bathroom sink, props them head-up in jars to dry. She scrapes the red from her knife, wipes it, sets her palette aside. The image of a ship, perfect in its wandering free, floating shipness. A floating seagull. Or the ocean itself, the view from your window, the waves and all that beautiful sky. A simple seascape. You should just paint whatever you see, at the moment, in the moment, to get you started. Set you on the path. Why don’t you just do that? Like a prompt. Yes, that's what you'll do. She rips from A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World several color plates of the more florid, exotic shells and scotch tapes them, careful not to give herself papercuts, over the framed photos of Nana Pearl’s family hung in groupings on the walls of her room.

The humming, relentless sound of breaking waves is beginning to get on her nerves. It is starting to feel as if two conch shells are clamped on her head, trapping the sea’s whispery rise and falls against her ears.

What isn’t writing like?

In her first moments on the empty beach—A walk first thing will clear your head, she tells herself, freshen and focus your vision, maybe you’ll even go for a swim in that promising sea—she spots a clamshell larger than she’s ever seen, sticking up from the sand like a highway divider flap. She brushes it free of grit and plans to hold onto it as a keepsake of this time, until she realizes the entire beach is mosaicked with these huge clamshells, like expensive, themed floor tiling. She switches her allegiance to oyster shells, which, though plentiful, are smaller and harder to spot in the sand. Every day after her morning toast and coffee, then again in the late afternoon before tea and fruit, she makes a ritual of striding the sand to gather one or two oyster shells hued in grays, only the rare, perfect, unbroken ones. They look like little spoons, she thinks. If you were trapped on a desert island, you could collect oyster shells to make yourself spoons. She pictures herself shipwrecked, blissfully, eternally alone, living on seafood and shredded coconut, painting with fresh-squeezed squid ink and wild berry juices. She brings the shells up to her room—pausing to rinse them, and her bare feet, free of sand with the hose Avery leaves on the front porch—and lays them out carefully on the dresser; as the days pass it looks like dinner service for four, then six, then eight, then twelve, awaiting a houseful of convivial guests and a course of soup. She shreds open her UPS box, carefully props her canvases against the walls of her room, arranged so their creamy faces can gaze expectantly upon her.  

She remembers an old prison movie from TV, where the warden warns an incoming inmate in a voice lethal with courtesy: Your time here can be hard, or your time here can be soft. It’s all up to you.

Exactly, she thinks. She feels buoyant, untethered, full of faith.

When you don't do it, why?

During the beach walks her head pulses with the (interesting, recent) art she will make. Images flash in bold, flat-bristled strokes; shapes and colors snap like flags. The new work will offer insight. Will communicate and express her vision. But when she returns to her easel overlooking the sea, the visions split off to pixels, scattered as broken bits of shell in the sand. Her blank canvases stare at her, wide-eyed and waiting. The pulses creep into faint throbs at the back of her head.

Relax, Sarah, she tells herself. You haven’t done this in a while, is all. You’re not used to having this kind of time and focus and space. You’re still acclimating. Don’t overworry it.

She starts carrying a sketchpad with her on beach walks, one of the many bought for this sojourn, all hardbacked like bestsellers. She dutifully strolls back and forth along the shoreline, admiring the expansive and eclectic beachfront houses—Cape Cod, Queen Anne, Art Moderne—sits on a baby dune of sand, cracks the pad open to thick, blanched pages. But then, sitting and clutching a stick of pricey high-grade charcoal, she sees nothing. Her hand wavers over the page as if palsied. The sunlight hurts her eyes, blanks out her brain. The breeze threatens her with grit. It is oddly chilly here, for summer. She retreats into the house with the sheet of paper ruined, crisped from sun and sticky with salt, all for nothing.

The tap water here runs out cloudy; when she fills a glass she must pause for the swirl of opaque minerals and molecules to settle. The glass clears from the bottom, up, fizzing slightly, while she jiggles a foot, holding the slippery glass carefully, waiting.

You have to remember, she thinks: rituals take time. They are invisible in the happening, we don’t see them until they have become.

She decides not to shower or wash her hair until she has completed one perfect painting.

When you do it, why?

The next morning while munching toast and browsing through A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World, Sarah doodles an idea of a shell on the sports section of Newsday, which she is using as a placemat, just below her coffee mug’s damp brown ring. It is not a very identifiable shell, nothing pictured in the book, perhaps some kind of generic gastropod. She looks at it a moment, then sketches in the gastropod’s clumsy little foot, peering out. She is using the black ballpoint pen Bernadette keeps for phone messages, and it blobs a bit, messing things up. She dumps her crumbs on top of the shell and sports section and scoops it all into the box Avery uses for recyclable paper...

Halfway up the stairs to her room she stops and returns to the kitchen. She digs through the trash box and fishes out her insignificant inky shell on the crumbed and coffee-ringed newspaper. She takes the drawing up to her room with her and sits, tracing it with a finger, studying the blank canvas on her easel, while outside the picture window the glassy acid-green waves break with their rushing, hushing sound and stretch to foam on the sand.

"An Apology Cast Wide": An Interview with Kristen Gleason

Kristen Gleason was born in 1979. She has lived in California, Montana, Norway, and Georgia. Her writing has appeared in Quarterly West, Everyday Genius, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Caketrain, and elsewhere.

Her story, "The Rider," appeared in Issue Forty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Kristen Gleason talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about illiteracy, an old theatre, and a jacket with a polar bear on the back.

Please tell us about why you began writing “The Rider.” What inspired you?

When I lived in the north of the north, I visited a very old theatre and that theatre was the world in miniature and on the stage of that world everyone’s empathy disappeared. This story is an apology cast wide.

This story is packed with fresh, amusing combinations of words and odd turns of phrase (e.g., “her chicken-footed house” and “emptied them with double gulp”). Reading such lines, I was reminded of how a person might speak in a second language s/he isn’t completely fluent in. What effect(s) did you intend for these linguistic quirks to have on the reader?

I’m not really in control!

Mastery is gross. It isn’t real. I don’t know about you, but all my practice has made me illiterate, and in situations where my literacy is presumed, I like to be exposed as a fraud by someone getting it powerfully wrong, someone clean of practice and fresh as hell, just as I like to be the Bu who, in a different country, isn’t ruined yet. This could be a feeling that someone could feel, reading this story, if I were lucky.  

The story begins one night, then flashes back as the narrator recounts the events of the previous evening. What made you decide to include both these nights rather than just the one that makes up the majority of the narrative? What is the significance of bookending this piece with Bu recalling one night’s events only twenty-four hours later?

There was not just a hat. There was also a jacket. The jacket was made of black fleece. On the front it was plain, with a zipper, but on the back of the jacket—on the back of Bu—was a polar bear, teeth bared, paws raised. This was the jacket he wore during those few hours he was not waiting, but the jacket was too affecting to show, though he had to have worn it in the interim for the rest to even matter, so—two nights.

The final sentence really solidified the story’s emotional power for me: “Linn arrived in the snowy street, and the two of them laughed, not greeting me, not drinking what I'd bought, not warming by my fire, but watching me wait on the wide, wide stage of the world's theatre.” I noticed that the story begins and ends with Bu waiting and alone. What feelings were you trying to capture and/or evoke by leaving Bu in such an uncomfortable position?

The feeling of his jacket.

Let’s talk about the story’s title. Why “The Rider”? Who is this “unlucky rider, trapped on the spine of the white mare” that Bu speaks of? What does the rider represent to you?

No single thing. I’d been looking at Theodor Kittelsen’s Gutt på hvit hest—

What writing projects are you working on now?

A novel about a fake poet.

What have you read recently that you are eager to recommend?

Farnoosh Fathi’s Great Guns. I recently read and loved Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter. Frankenstein. Spleen by Olive Moore.

"Death by Bear Is Highly Impersonal": An Interview with Amanda Marbais

Amanda Marbais' work has appeared in Hobart web, Monkeybicycle, TRNSFR and elsewhere.  She is the Managing Editor for Requited Journal.

Her story, "Horribilis," appeared in Issue Forty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Amanda Marbais talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about obsessive characters, humor, and grizzly bears.

Please tell us about how/why you began to write “Horribilis.”

Like my character, I’m terrified of grizzly bears. We’ve hiked a few times in Montana, and I’m more comfortable with bear territory now. But last trip, a group of us spotted fresh bear scat on the trail, a giant heap of in-season huckleberries, the color of digested purple crayon. The bear scat ramped the stakes, and we began general bear safety of talking loudly, clapping our hands, and unsheathing bears spray cans. A few yards up the trail, we saw a mother and two cubs on the hillside. (No one was hurt. We discovered a ranger and a group of people nearby.)

There have been only a few dozen bear-related deaths in the last century in the US. There is so little chance of being killed by a bear, a terrorist, or a shooter. Yet, I think the threat of certain violent deaths scare us more than others. We all know eventually, death will happen. But, I think there are small fleeting moments, when we’re suddenly okay with the impersonal nature of death. Death by bear is highly impersonal. I suppose seeing the mother bear was one of those moments when my terror was immediately replaced with awe. (Although, I might not have had such a profound response if the bear took a bite out of me. Then I would have written a different kind of story.)

Your sense of humor shines through very prominently in this story (as in sentences like “To have a cat phobia is to not be able to use the Internet”). At what point in the drafting process do these funny lines generally enter into a story like this (e.g., perhaps you’ve thought of them before the story has begun in earnest, or the humor comes later in revision)?

Most often, these lines emerge in the “first draft” stage, which might stretch over several sittings. (My first drafts are sprawling.) I’m genuinely entertaining myself with those lines. And, they motivate me to run forward with a work, especially in the second and third and fourth, etc. drafts. But most lines come during a stage of writing new content, and never when I’m shaping text or focusing on sentences.

There are times when those lines are ripped off from a conversation, especially those I have with my spouse, who is also a writer. In that way they become a kind of time-capsule about what’s happening in my life, although that’s not the primary intention. Still, it can be a positive effect, spurring me to remember the emotional state I was in, and that opens other scenes, patches of exposition, and characterization.

Our protagonist is a woman who keeps a long list of her phobias, and the character we see her interact with the most is her therapist. What appeals to you about writing for such a neurotic character with a complicated, emotional inner life? What were the challenges of occupying this protagonist’s headspace and writing in first-person as her for a while?

I frequently use this neurotic narrator. First, it gives me the opportunity to make a lot of jokes. But also, I think exaggerating this obsessive inner life, helps me define the character’s features. Her neurosis is born out of her largely unresolved fear of death. Like many of my characters, she is myopic, and it’s the origin of her trouble.

I’m not as neurotic as my narrator. But, I did use her to inflate my own issues with mortality. I like to use obsessive characters to extrapolate about larger fears like growing old, feeling cut off from others, and fears about failing relationships. Obsessive characters allow me room to demonstrate a greater disparity between a character’s sheer joy and her general discomfort with life. The upshot is, I can have them say crazy things.

There are a great deal of pop culture references in this short story, everything from Magnum P.I. to Girl Talk to SheRa. Do you often find these recognizable names making their way into your work? What makes these references meaningful and/or useful to you?

I’m torn on the pop-culture references and often try to steer away from them. (Then they inevitably show up.) I grew up on television and movies. At young ages I associated TV characters’ canned emotional responses with something I was expected to feel, myself. Life is obviously much more complicated than sitcom scenarios, thank god.

I’m interested in this breakdown between the way we feel we’re supposed to experience emotion and the way we actually experience emotion in daily life. A character I’m using in a different piece compares her feelings for her best friend to “how Joan Jett feels for the Blackhearts and Balky feels for his cousin,” which means, she really doesn’t know how she feels at that part in the story, but she has an idea of how she’s supposed to feel. And, the comparison is intended to be absurd.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel that is a crime-drama, family tragedy. It has the same neurotic voice. And, even in times of betrayal, there are probably inappropriate asides. Even when there’s a murder, there are inappropriate asides.

What have you read recently that you are eager to recommend?

I read a lot of great stuff this summer, when I wasn’t teaching. I would recommend a whole list, but the most recent were The Middlesteins, Await Your Reply, and Tampa. All three of these books were great. Tampa, though, seems to be generating a lot of stir I find interesting. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s about a sociopath completely driven by her sexual appetite for 14-year-old boys. (It’s effectively disturbing.) There is an impressive lack of equivocating in the narrative, and that helps it succeed. But, for me, Tampais at its best when the passages are both absurd and sensational. (And there are many.)

"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.