"A Private Moment between the Writer and the Writer": An Interview with Gretchen VanWormer

Gretchen VanWormer grew up in Burlington, Vermont.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The Laurel Review, The Los Angeles Review, Zone 3, and PANK.  She lives in Washington, DC, and teaches writing at American University.

Her memoir, "You in the Navy, 1941," was published in Issue Fifty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Gretchen VanWormer talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about dismemberment, meta-writing, and a love letter.

What inspired you to start writing about this story from your grandfather's life?

It’s a pretty visceral one, so it’s always stuck with me. Nothing like a good dismemberment story. After he died, I wanted to try to make something out of it (the loss & the story). That’s when I realized the story itself had all these missing parts. So the essay became about that as well.  

How did you make the decision to use second-person pronouns throughout this essay? (What effect do you want this unusual point-of-view strategy to have on the reader?)

The point of view choice was less about trying to affect the reader in a particular way, and more about that feeling of missing someone and wanting to talk to him. The essay’s a love letter of sorts (albeit a slightly creepy one), so it just felt natural to use those pronouns.

About halfway through the essay, you express a desire for more precise details to enhance the original narrative, and you imagine some of the possibilities, for the sake of telling a richer story (with purposes such as "If I knew these things, I could do a better job with atmosphere" and "Anything to tweak the tone"). Later, you refer to the connection between black thread and typed words as "the obvious metaphor." At these moments, I understood the essay to be rising to the meta-level: writing about writing, to some extent. What are the benefits and risks, in your mind, of inserting this kind of meta-storytelling into your work?

As a reader, I like a little meta; it has so much potential to be moving. Rick Moody’s “Demonology,” for example, is heartbreaking in the best way. I think it just has to be grounded in the emotional terrain of the story. When I was writing this essay, the meta part grew out of the feelings of loss, so I was comfortable using it.

Of course, some cases of meta-writing do strike me as too cold or cerebral, because their meta bits don’t seem to connect to anything resembling a feeling. It’s as if I’ve stumbled in on a private moment between the writer and the writer. And I want to say: “Yikes, dude. Lock the door if that’s what you’re up to.” 

It's not until we read the phrase "now that you're ash" in the final paragraph that we learn your grandfather is deceased. Why did you choose the ending as the right moment to reveal that information?

I think my instinct there was that a dead grandpa story is a hard sell. So I wanted the reader to hear the propeller story (and the other war stories) before getting to that part. It’s an important detail, because it helps the reader understand the purpose or motivation of the essay. But it’s a shorter piece, so it seemed like it could come at the end and the reader wouldn’t bail.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Lately I have an obsession with natural history, and enjoy looking at humans through that lens. So I’m writing a number of essays that are in conversation with that. I’m also working on short stories—I seem to especially like writing about women who are funny & dark & Odyssean.

What is on your reading list for 2014?

Related to the natural history thing, I’m reading this book edited by Tom Baione called Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library. The colored plates it comes with are really odd and beautiful. And it’s making me want to track down some of those books, especially works by EHA (Edward Hamilton Aitken). He’s so funny—says of the weather: “The only thing to be complained of at this time in Bombay is a certain tendency to liquefaction. Chemically speaking, one gets deliquescent about the end of May.”  

I also want to read Christopher Hitchens, Mortality & Amy Leach, Things That Are. And many, many others. 

"Long, Lavish, Latinate Sentences, Carefully Balanced": An Interview with Edward Gauvin

Two-time winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright program, PEN America, the Centre National du Livre, Villa Gillet, and the Lannan Foundation. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010) won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Coffin Factory, and The Southern Review. The contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, he writes a column on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review.

His translation of Pierre Bettencourt's "Incidents of Travel Among the Metamorphosians" appeared in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.

Here, Edward Gauvin talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about translation, European fabulism, and internalized habits.

Could you please briefly tell us about the origins (author, historical context, etc.) of this story, “Incidents of Travel Among the Metamorphosians”?

As a writer, Bettencourt was best known for his “fables,” which these days fall somewhere between flash fiction and prose poems. He penned hundreds, much to the disdain of Vichy censors, but shrugged off his friends’ praise, saying he was too influenced by Belgian Henri Michaux, or protesting “Who could claim to be a writer after reading Rabelais?” He was an eccentric whose life, in many ways, rivaled his fiction for strangeness, a world traveler who sojourned in Dar es Salaam, Madagascar, and Vanuatu.

It’s very difficult to establish a Bettencourt bibliography in any way complete or reliable, since almost all his early works were self-published—self-printed, in fact, on a press he bought for 10,000 francs in 1941. He printed his fables in an outbuilding while Nazis were billeted in his father’s house (his mother left when he was seven). He got offcuts from a local stationery shop, which suited his chapbook-sized press. His greatest sorrow was having to melt down an old, barely serviceable set of Elzevir and make new type, but it was a time of scarceness and scrounging. On this tiny press, seven pages at a time, he printed works by playwright Antonin Artaud and poet Francis Ponge. He took unique liberties with his own books, inserting altered banknotes, drops of blood, or such notices as: “This book was printed in an edition limited to 110 numbered copies, of which 25 are scented… Readers who have purchased numbers 26, 48, 69, and 109 will die within the year.”

And how did you come across this text? What was its unique appeal to you?

Over the years, my research into the French and Belgian fantastic has led me down some twisty, obscure alleys. I first heard of Bettencourt from the dryly witty, impeccably dressed Jean-Louis Gauthey, founder of the French indie comics press Cornélius; rather, it was his fervent recommendation over dinner that reminded me I’d seen the name listed, almost as as an afterthought, in the only major histories of the French and Belgian fantastic, by Marcel Schneider and Jean-Baptiste Baronian (respectively).

Thankfully, it’s not hard to get your hands on some Bettencourt these days, for a slight but not outrageous premium. The renaissance of his reputation is based on the rediscovery and re-publication of works old and new almost a generation later, mostly by the small press Les Lettres vives in the early ’90s. Of course, as I’ve noted in a longer biographical piece on him at Weird Fiction Review, Bettencourt comes from an important family, and has always had well-placed fans, like editors Jean Paulhan and José Corti, or writer Marcel Béalu. He just chose to go his own way most of the time. As he once said, “I am a man who never made himself a career.”

“Incidents of Travel Among the Metamorphosians,” a later work, dates from 1983 and was published in a 1994 triptych of stories called Le Piège [The Trap]. Much of what I translate is fantastical; I was looking for something with a science-fictional edge, and in Bettencourt specifically, for a longer piece, as I’d come off reading a lot of his fables. I’ve been gathering the various fantastical tales I’ve published in the last few years with an eye toward an anthology that traces the evolution of the Francophone fantastic from the end of World War II to the present—a period gone missing from literary histories, but during which a great many astonishing things happened, which are just waiting to be brought to light. “Incidents” strikes me as very Calvino-esque, a distinctly European fabulism that developed in reaction both to American SF, which dominated the pulps there, and the legacies of various avant-garde movements gone underground.

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

Like writers who can’t move forward till they perfect the first sentence, which somehow informs or begets all sentences to come, I’m a stickler for setting the tone. A bad first step wrongfoots everything else.

Unless perhaps you weren’t referring to “first priority” in terms of process, but aesthetics? The late William Weaver, translator of Calvino and Moravia, identifies a kind of translatorial buck-passing wherein “but that’s what it says” is offered as an excuse for resulting obscurity or obtuseness. You’ve had those conversations, haven’t you, where you and a friend seem to be talking about the same thing only later to realize, when camaraderie or alcohol has abated, that despite using the same words, you weren’t referring to the same things at all? Misapprehension is constant and ubiquitous, but translation, I think, masquerades as a kind of fixative for that: the possibility of agreeing on meaning.

It’s interesting that you refer to translation as a “medium”; rather, I think it’s the process of adapting between the two media of different languages. And each medium has its own constraints: cultural or technical, perceived or imposed.

Have you found that lessons learned from translating text from one language to another have influenced the way you compose your own original writings in English (including, perhaps, everyday things, emails, etc.)? How so?

I’m supposed to speak on this at AWP very soon, so thanks for asking! I better start thinking!

Both languages have distinct syntactical advantages. I don’t think one learns lessons from working so much as internalizes them directly, sometimes as (bad) habits, such that you really have to dredge deep to articulate them. I’m honestly not sure which came first, my love of long lavish Latinate sentences, carefully balanced, or my immersion in French reading. A certain “work amnesia” other writers have talked about results with the products of both writing and translation: you get it out and forget it, though it actually remains a part of you, later surfacing in unexpected ways only a third party can more clearly point out.

I also think translation, like any non-writing profession a writer has, tempts readers with a “handle” that is useful for marketing but not necessarily applicable to the work in question. Bits of biography cloud our readings of things because, thus informed, we go looking for evidence of them, and often as not find them as a result of determined looking. Which is to say, French will always be a valid way of reading my English, but not necessarily the most pertinent.

What writing/translation projects are you working on now?

This is a busy year. I’m looking for an agent for my first story collection, seven stories which came out over the last year in various litmags like The Kenyon Review, West Branch, and Birkensnake. Apart from the aforementioned Francophone fantastical anthology, also seeking a publisher, I’m doing the next 2 Toussaint books for Dalkey. Hopefully, Wakefield Press, the publisher of my recent Ferry collection, will have some good news soon about a certain Belgian fabulist.

Meanwhile, the comics mill keeps turning. Recently, I’ve enjoyed working on Frédérik Peeters’ SF series Aama, a historical epic by Alejandro Jodorowsky (he of the gory, hallucinatory El Topo), and the next volume of Best of Enemies, a history of Arab-American relations by David B. and Jean-Pierre Filiu.

High profile releases for the coming year are probably Ludovic Debeurme's Renée (Top Shelf), Joann Sfar's Pascin (Uncivilized Books), and Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, a prizewinning political satire based on the writer’s time as a speechwriter for former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin during the two crucial years between 9/11 and Gulf 2—remember, when Bush made everyone hate us? It’s sort of a political tell-all meets The Office, with great cartooning by Christophe Blain. Writer Antonin Baudry is now the French cultural attaché at the NY embassy. Apart from the book’s own qualities, this was the first time I've worked so closely with an author whose English was so good, and together we actually adapted/re-wrote parts of the book, moving away from the original text.

Ah yes, and February will bring some other comics excerpts in the annual Graphics Issue at Words Without Borders: Matthias Picard’s Jeanine, the oral autobiography (so to speak) of a prostitute; Nicolas Wild’s Tehran travel memoirs, Silent Was Zarathustra; and the aforementioned Weapons of Mass Diplomacy.

What did you read in 2013 that you want to recommend to the people?

I’m genuinely puzzled by how books find their way into my hands: some mysteriously cut ahead in the to-read line, while others jump in from elsewhere altogether. These lists never seem to match up with my stated intentions or research interests. Maybe I read them to get away from what I do? Over the past year, I enjoyed

the novels

Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman (aka The War of Dreams)
Charles McCarry, The Miernik Dossier
Don Lee, Country of Origin
Steve Weiner, The Museum of Love

the collection

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust

and the graphic novels

Hans Rickheit, The Squirrel Machine
Jason, A Pocketful of Rain and Other Stories
Jim Woodring, Weathercraft

The French digital comics magazine Professeur Cyclope is good fun.

I have trouble keeping track of individual stories and comics issues, but I liked some horror by David Nickle, some Daredevil by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, Prophet by Brandon Graham, poems by Dean Young, and French short stories by Pierrette Fleutiaux, Yvonne Escoula, Sylvain Jouty, Eugène Savitzkaya, and of course, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud.

"Alive Again, and Born Double": An Interview with J.P. Grasser

J.P. Grasser is originally from Maryland. His work explores the diverse regions he has called home, most insistently his family's fish hatchery in Brady, Nebraska. He studied English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South and is currently an MFA student in poetry at Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from The Journal, Cream City Review, Ninth Letter Online, and Nashville Review, among others.

His poem, "Sign," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about slanted light, pre-birth re-birth, and papyrus.

Could you talk to us about how you wrote “Sign”?

“Sign” developed from a conversation I had with my mother on a bright morning last spring. Nature was beginning to wake up, the trees were greening, and life seemed endless—though of course, the “glare” Larkin describes in “Aubade” is always crouching somewhere in the subconscious. I was particularly struck, that morning, by the magnetism of the pagan or occult in relation to spring. When she confessed that the in vitro fertilization occurred on a Friday the 13^th—a day she has always (strangely?) considered to be lucky—I knew there was a poem waiting to be written. The more of the story she related, the more I was sure that it was one of those rare occasions when life provides a writer with all of the necessary symbols, and it becomes his job to synthesize, organize, and commit them to the page.

The poem went through many drafts, the initial of which was written quite quickly. Given our twin-ness, I knew it had to be in couplets, though I tried slant-rhyming couplets first. Somehow, these seemed too austere for a subject I considered tender—and already tempered by science. So, I reined the form in some, opting for internal rhyme (which seemed appropriate, given the internality of the fetuses). Once I felt I was in the right vicinity, formally, the content quickly fell into place.

The image of objects being slanted comes up twice in this poem: first, as something complicated the speaker’s mother’s pregnancy (“cervix slanted.”) At the end of the poem, we learn the light “does not come in slants, / but washes, or else grows up from the river itself.” Both times, the slanting seems negative or at least not preferable. Could you talk about your use of “slanting” in this poem?

Though I didn’t intend for “slanting” to have particularly negative connotations within the world of the poem, and wasn’t entirely conscious of the meaning during the poem’s composition, I suppose I have always carried around an image that defines winter light: somewhere, in a study that I’ve never been to, light slants through the Phoenician blinds. Dust motes dance in the light-lancets, thrown down in parallel bars to a hardwood floor. Someone has stacked books in parallel rows, on a shelf, and the light and the edges of the bindings form a type of grid. I’m not sure where this image came from, though it feels as real as any memory. The way I imagine spring light, when the world is in full swing-dance, is as a type of envelopment. Blinds and doors are thrown open, the dust is beaten from oriental rugs draped over wrought-iron railings. Children play in the street.

I have also been quite intrigued by two poems that deal with light and its qualities, which certainly influenced my treatment. Dickinson’s “A Certain Slant of Light” and Anthony Hecht’s “A Cast of Light” both inform my poem. While Dickinson views light that comes in slants as a morbid harbinger, Hecht uses the chaotic, archipelago-like pattern of light cast on a forest floor to expose the fundamental interrelatedness of all things. I like Hecht’s take a whole lot more than Dickinson’s; he suggests a type of connectedness and inclusion that I agree with completely.

In this poem the speaker muses over the different possibilities of what could have happened to a twin in the womb who had vanished: the possibility of the living twin absorbing the dead one completely, as well as the possibility of fetus papyraceus, or, as you more delicately describe it, “Or else each of my fibers pressed by your new growth / into a parchment-like disc at the base of her womb.” And yet, neither of these happened to the speaker or the speaker’s sister: instead, both reappear and live, live until the day, at least, that the speaker commits this poem to the page. Which is interesting in that it feels like a pre-birth re-birth. A re-awakening before becoming fully awake. Could you talk about this theme in your poem?

In many ways, you’ve described something fundamental to creation in any sense, but especially to art. I’m always writing to surprise myself, to wake myself up to the truth of a given situation, in the hopes of becoming fully awake in the world. What a reader’s mind does to a text is—I think—a different type of reawakening, though no less worthy. We read and explore the world around us for the same reasons we write, to sharpen perception, to wake up to our lives. Maybe every poem we write or read is a smaller order re-birth? And each time we sit down at the blank page, a type of pre-birth?

I was particularly struck that the very syndrome that might have ended me before birth was etymologically related to papyrus, a medium that has been used for artistic creation for millennia. It resonated with me, on a thematic level, that one’s job as a writer is to put life down on paper, but what if the writer became the paper? It could have easily happened, but it didn’t. Ultimately, the possibility of non-existence is at the heart of every poem, and for some, that possibility is glaring.

Could you provide our readers with some reading suggestions?

A good friend recently gave me Richard Jones’s The Correct Spelling & Exact Meaning, which I have been finding delightful in its handling of etymology, engagement with typographical characters, and syntax. While I was unfamiliar with his work, Jones has kept my critical and emotional attention fully engaged. Additionally, I have (finally!) gotten my hands on a copy of Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins. The poems Traci creates are always exquisitely wrought, chock-full of sprezzatura and tenderness. Of course, the poems of Philip Larkin, Richard Wilbur, and Michael Longley continue to instruct and delight me. And, I’m looking forward to picking up a copy of Erica Dawson’s The Small Blades Hurt.  

What else have you been writing recently?

I’m currently working on a full-length manuscript, which ultimately tries to reconcile my experiences on my grandfather’s fish hatchery in Brady, Nebraska with my upbringing and education near Washington, DC.

"Still I Will Find Ways to Open Myself": An Interview with Kate Wyer

Kate Wyer lives in Baltimore. Her writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Unsaid, <kill author, PANK, Exquisite Corpse, and past issues of The Collagist. She attended the Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania on a fellowship from Fence. Wyer has completed a novella and is at work on a second. She is employed in the public mental health system of Maryland.

Her story, "Land Beast, Part Two," appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the language of animals and the economy of bodies.

Could you talk about writing “Land Beast, Part Two”? What was it like to write a sequel to a short story?

It’s less a sequel and more of a continuation. I divided the story into parts because it felt like there should be a pause when the two rhinos meet. I also wanted readers to spend more time with her alone, to feel more, before the story shifted. I knew there would be a lot of time for the two to interact in confinement. I’m still working on Land Beast.

I had a friend from undergrad that came back from a workshop in which a classmate had written a story about a family going through a divorce from the perspective of the family cat. The workshop did not go well, because no one understood why the cat mattered--it was more of a novelty then anything. Here, though, we aren’t viewing human actions through the eyes of a beast (at least, not as the main thrust of the story) but instead understanding the beast interacting with its environment and other caged animals. Why tell this beast’s story from her perspective? How did you balance writing the life of a non-human animal in a human language?

That workshop sounds unfortunate. I hope that writer didn’t end up too discouraged to try again. I say, if there has to be a divorce story, be the cat. The cat matters.

I choose my rhino’s story because she matters. I saw a picture of an Asian rhino who had had her horn chainsawed off her face. The picture hit me. It hurt.

If I thought too much about it, I wouldn’t have been able to write the story. I found myself saying, Would a rhino say that?, but that question was just so ridiculous I had to let it all go and just write what was coming. I did get a little tripped up on whether or not the rhino would say attenuated, when she says a blanket felt like “attenuated mud.” Now, was that pushing it? Was that word in her vocabulary? Ha. I went for it.

When it comes down to it, I’m a land beast. It is my hope that the story of a brutalized female experiencing the loss of her child and her freedom transcends the boundaries of her species.

In “Land Beast,” we learn that the speaker killed a woman who was trying to get the beast to stop eating her mustard greens. In “Part Two,” the beast says “They have women handle me. Before these women, the closest I had been to one was the one I killed. The smell of that kill flares in my nose and makes me pant. How easily my body humiliates me. Shames me.” Could you talk about how the body figures into this piece and your writing, generally?

Land Beast is definitely about a loss of control over what happens to her body. She was drugged and then her body was mutilated for profit. The story comes from my real anger and despair about the economy of bodies. I mean that in the broadest sense, not just poaching and not just beasts.

When I was writing the story I became interested in how the mind is often not able to control the body. I enjoyed writing from the point of view of a rhino because they have terrible eye sight and a very, very strong sense of smell. I was able to imagine seeing through smelling and what that would mean for memory. The immediacy of smell. In my imagining, the smell completely overwhelms her and places her back in that field. Her body brings her back to violence.

The body also overpowered her grieving, or I should say, compounded it, when she thought about mating and having another calf. She felt desire and then became angry with her body for moving on before her mind processed her grief.

I have a fear of anesthesia because I can’t control who touches my body when I’m under. That fear definitely played a role in writing her story. I wrote a story that was in Issue Eleven of The Collagist back in ’10 that came from an opposite point of view—it was loosely based on Michael Jackson’s near constant desire to be unconscious.  When I write about the body, I’m writing about control. Writing a story from the point of view of an animal allowed me both distance and intimacy.

What are some of the best things that you read in 2013?

Baltimore writers had a really good year. Heather Rounds wrote a book called There (Emergency Press) that is a fictionalized account of her time as a reporter in Kurdistan. Jen Michalski had The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press), which is hard to sum up—it’s about what happens when a solider in WWII is given a Polish immorality herb.

I also read all of the English poet Alice Oswald’s work. I especially loved her Dart, which is a book-length prose poem in the voice of the huge (and deadly) river Dart in Devon, England.

What else have you been writing recently?

I started a new novel. There are three characters: a girl, a cow, and a monk. There isn’t much talking, since one of the characters is a cow, and another is a monk who has taken a vow of silence.  

I have a novella, titled Black Krim, that’s ready for the world.

And, as an aside, I want to mention that the Western Black Rhinoceros went extinct in 2013. The International Rhino Foundation is one conversation organization working hard on behalf of the remaining animals. I recommend visiting their site.

"Someone Loves Us, They Must": An Interview with Gabriella R. Tallmadge

Gabriella R. Tallmadge serves as Social Media & Web Content Manager for One Pause Poetry and is currently working on her first full-length collection of poetry. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Passages North, Crazyhorse, Sou’wester, and Salamander. She can be found in North Carolina and on Twitter (@GRTallmadge).

Her poem, "What Apocalypse," appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, she talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about slippery titles, the sky in summer, and seducing the reader.

Could you please walk us through writing “What Apocalypse”?

I remember one afternoon in the parking lot of my local supermarket when I was struck with some of the images that would later go into this poem. It was late summer and the sky looked dark and like it wanted to storm. The grackles where there too, squawking and making all kinds of alarming noises. Cumulatively, the whole thing felt very ominous, like something bad was about to happen. That’s when I started thinking about the concept of the apocalypse, as both the biblical collapse of the universe and also as the many things that happen to us all the time that feel like the end of our world.

I’m really curious about the title of this piece, maybe because every time I think I understand it, it seems to slip out of my hands. At first I thought it was maybe sarcastic—but then the poem isn’t. Some of the imagery certainly feel apocalyptic toward the end, “The machine of this month is run on the earth’s electrical urges,” especially. But by the same token, the poem begins “I thought the world might end” (my emphasis), which seems to indicate that this isn’t the end at all. Could you talk about your title?

Yeah, I like that the title is a little tricky. Without the punctuation the phrase is free to turn in on itself and, as you’ve discussed, speak in different tones. Similarly, the poem is at times defeated, afraid, searching, and defiant. The poem’s imagery is full and empty, it rises and falls, it ends, but begins again. I kept thinking about how the apocalypse could be the end of everything for everybody, but also something small and personal that only one person experiences. At the time I had written the poem, my husband had just come back from a long deployment to Afghanistan. That experience felt like the end of the world to me even though some people in my life had no idea he was gone. It was a little like living in two worlds and I think the poem (and the title) speaks to the strangeness of that experience.

I love how each stanza of this poem is punctuated with a single line. The poem move rather quickly between images, but the single line stanzas help the read pause and readjust before the next stanza. Do you think that you could talk more about how you developed the form?

Thank you! I knew right away that I wanted to work with a long-ish line, but the first drafts of this poem proved to be muddled or just too overwhelming. I was in a workshop led by Cynthia Huntington while I was developing the poem and when I asked her how I could better the form, she said “First, you have to seduce the reader. Then you can take them anywhere you want.” From there, I went through about a thousand more drafts and then figured that I could be as bizarre or dreamy or apocalyptic as I wanted as long as I gave the reader some sort of a formal pattern to hang on to.  I landed on alternating the thick, imagistic stanzas with the single lines because, like you said, it helps pump the breaks a little bit and situate the reader. I liked the visual contrast as well—I think it looks like the lines, like the speaker, are falling through each weird world held inside the larger stanzas. But did I end up seducing anybody? I still don’t know.

What have you read recently?

I’m almost done with Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn and right before that I read Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture. Next on my list are three titles from former classmates at the University of North Carolina Wilmington: Rochelle Hurt’s poetry collection, The Rusted City, John Mortara’s interactive e-book, Small Creatures/ Wide Field, and Eric Tran’s chapbook, Affairs with Men in Suits.

What writing are you working on right now?

I finished two new poems the other day so for now I’m reading and revising older stuff. It’s all part of the larger project of completing my first full-length collection. Thanks for the opportunity to work with you on this interview!

An Interview-in-Excerpts with Tom Williams

Photo Credit: Tim HolbrookTom Williams's novel Don't Start Me Talkin' will be published by Curbside Splendor in February, 2014. Williams is also the author of the novella The Mimic's Own Voice, and a contributor to the forthcoming anthology Four Fathers (Cobalt). He chairs the English department at Morehead State University.

An excerpt from his novel, "Don't Start Me Talkin'," appears in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, he answers questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from Don't Start Me Talkin'.  Enjoy!

What is writing like?

“Every night we play I hear it occasionally, that rough and raw and real sound I heard for the first time in my bedroom. Usually in a few notes or, at best, a song or two. Tonight, though, that’s all I hear. Every harp player I stole from is in my ears. Big Walter Horton’s mellow phrasing, Junior Wells’s showmanship, James Cotton’s rhythm, a whole lot of Little Walter’s bends and Sonny Boy’s trills and draws. Plus there’s my own sound, my own blues blowing for all to hear. It’s a different kind of blues, I have to say. It’s coming from all those lonely nights in Troy, later in East Lansing, when I listened at night to black men from another generation—another world, it seemed—and played along, yearning to connect but never dreaming I’d actually get a chance to play next to one. I only hoped I could take a harp and make it talk to me in a voice I understood.”

What isn’t writing like?

“Relief and sadness alternate through me like waves”

When you do it, why?

“I wanted to learn how to kick up such a racket myself”

When you don’t, why?

“[B]eer seems a more tolerable alternative.”

"Not Everything Needs a Name”: An Interview with Matthew Vollmer

Matthew Vollmer is the author of two story collections—Future Missionaries of America and the forthcoming Gateway to Paradise—as well as a collection of essays—Inscriptions For Headstones. He is co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts and is an editor for the University of Michigan Press' 21st Century Prose series. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech.

His story, "Gateway to Paradise," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Matthew Vollmer talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about quick-wit, Gatlinburg, and writing when you feel like writing. 

Can you talk about the origin of your story “Gateway to Paradise”? Did it begin with the idea of a robbery gone wrong? Or perhaps the Riley character? How did it come about?

I honestly can’t remember exactly where or when this story first began to unfold. In fact, I just tried to track down the original version of the story and it had the same first line. First page or so remained the same. I remember thinking that I wanted to try to write a crime story because I’d never written a crime story. I remember thinking that I wanted the characters to be young, that I wanted them to be from the town where I grew up. I thought a robbery gone wrong would be fun to write about, in the classical sense of having something substantial at stake. I remember thinking that Riley would work at McDonald’s because I worked at a McDonald’s. I remember wanting to base Jaybird partly off a friend of mine who isn’t a criminal and doesn’t possess the same kind of charisma but who knows how to do all the stuff that Jaybird does. I remember wanting to write from the perspective of a girl who wants to escape but who slowly gains a power and confidence of her own.

Humor is present throughout the piece, but it provides more than mere laughs. It adds to the character’s overall complexity—especially Riley. The descriptions of the people and locations in Gatlinburg—while funny—also lend to the piece’s sense of despair. How important is it to you to have that sort of blend in your writing?

Despair and humor seem closely related to me. There’s a fine line. My wife could tell you that, because she lives with me and can’t get a straight answer from me half the time, like she’ll ask me a question that needs a real answer and I’ll give her a fake one because I think I’m funny but instead of laughing she becomes greatly aggrieved. (Okay, maybe not “greatly.” Just “aggrieved.”) Furthermore, I think lots of things are funny, especially in my hometown, and especially in Gatlinburg, a place I visited a number of times when I was a kid. And maybe that’s why I’ve spent a good portion of my life making fun of others and myself. The people I knew growing up—the guys at the True Value, the old men in the barber shop, the women who worked at my dad’s dental office, the tellers at the bank—seemed to communicate solely by giving each other a hard time. They were all so quick-witted and funny. As a kid I thought, I’ll never be that quick or smart or funny. And I’m still not sure I am or ever will be. At any rate, I do like to use humor in fiction (or nonfiction) as a mechanism for generating linguistic energy—I think I’d classify it as a defamiliarization technique. Sometimes, simply describing something is funny because the thing being described is totally absurd. I feel like I could create an hour-long comedy special simply by putting into words the sights, sounds, and people that flow through Gatlinburg.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee. For those who haven’t experienced it, your story does a nice job of capturing the town. It’s a bizarre place. A sort of permanent carny town, surrounded by the beautiful Smoky Mountains. As with your humor, Gatlinburg itself also seems to be functioning as more than a mere backdrop. Did you know right away this was where the characters would end up, or did Gatlinburg emerge in later versions of the story?

In an earlier version, I imagined and actually wrote a scene where Riley and Jaybird purchased a bunch of camping/backpacking equipment and headed for the Appalachian Trail. Just get lost for a while. Then I got bored with that and came up with the idea of Jaybird’s truck breaking down and the two going their separate ways for a while. Also, my wife and I took our son to Gatlinburg a couple summers ago, where we visited the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Aquarium and took him to the Mysterious Mansion, which was so scary we had to ask the hooded monster who was pretending to torment us to show us the way out. At one point during our journeys up and down the main drag, we saw this family and the mother had a t-shirt that said “Property of Jesus,” and the dad had a t-shirt that said, “World’s Greatest Dad.” They were quite a pair. My wife said I should write a story about them. So I put them in the story.

At one point in your story, Jaybird tells Riley: “Not everything needs a name.” Names and how we identify/present ourselves are present throughout the story. Is this something you went in wanting to explore, or an aspect of the story that grew out of revision?  

Jaybird’s a mystic—at least in his own mind. I think, in general, he attempts to resist the confines of the literal. He seeks transcendence and transformation. A name defines and therefore encloses. A name serves to separate. If you asked him, he might say that from a Taoist’s point of view, the world was once whole. Then names came along, and things got separated. Anyway, when Jaybird utters that line in particular—that “not everything needs a name”—he’s expressing his resistance to names, but also his resistance to his own culpability. He doesn’t want to take responsibility for what he’s done, in part because he’s vengeful, and therefore has a screwed up idea of justice.

As for how “naming” works in the rest of the story, you’re right—I’m obsessed with names. At one point, I wanted to refer only to the mom as “Property of Jesus” and the dad as “World’s Greatest Dad.” And for many drafts that’s how it worked. I just thought it would be funny. But then it seemed too repetitive. Like I was telling the same joke over and over. The naming obsession, though, that’s totally related to Gatlinburg itself. Like many American vacation spots, there’s a glut of T-shirt emporiums. Why is this? Maybe because Americans want their identities to be clearly defined, want to be known, want to be recognized by what they endorse and support. In some ways, it’s an act of aggression. This is who I am. (And, as the T-shirt of one of the characters in the story says, “Deal with it.”) I love all this and at the same time it frightens and fascinates me.

This notion of wanting to be recognized by what one endorses and supports seems crucial to the scene in the story where Riley leaves her bag with the mother. Riley’s understanding of the woman—based entirely on how the woman presents herself—leaves Riley (and the reader) expecting the woman to go through her bag and discover the gun and money. Yet this doesn’t happen.  This seems a crucial moment in the story. Would you mind talking more about this? 

In an earlier version of the story, Riley returns to the room to find the mother in tears. There's a sort of melodramatic conversation about how the mother assumes Riley to be a criminal, and a revelation that the woman's family isn't in any position to help her, that in fact they're completely broke and running on fumes of credit cards. Riley ends up excusing herself to use the rest room, then leaves the money behind for the family. I wasn't satisfied with that version, partly because it seemed too convenient that Riley would find a way to dump the money and partly because it suggested a sort of false absolution. (Not to mention that finding a giant stack of money in one's motel bathroom might raise more problems than it solves.) I prefer the final version, where Riley transfers the burden to Jaybird; I see it as empowering for her. No longer is she at his mercy of his whims, and as a final act, it represents (I guess) a sort of liberation.

As a faculty member and director of the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech, how do balance your writing schedule with your teaching schedule?

I used to think that I needed to write every day. And I used to write (almost) every day. But now, more than ever, I write when I feel like it. And that feels okay, too. Some days, I write a lot. Some days, I don’t write anything. And my schedule is so screwy—I’ve got meetings out the wazoo—so I never really know when my writing time is going to happen. I write when it’s time to write. I write when I feel compelled to write. When it’s fun. And that might be in my office at Tech. It might be in a committee meeting. It might be while I’m walking the dog or cycling or hiking (I’ll stop to take a note, and, yes, I consider note-taking to count as “writing”).

What is the latest project you are working on?

I never have just one project. I work on things sporadically and piecemeal until they start to form themselves into something with real momentum. “Gateway” was years in the making, but only because I’d get interested in it, then get bored or frustrated and take a break. I think that’s important—to let the work breathe. Also, I have a short attention span, and flit around from one thing to the next, so I like to have and basically need at this point a ton of different things to work on; it’s sort of like building a monstrous house with a ton of rooms, and working each room one at a time.

As for what I’m working on specifically, I just finished editing a multi-authored book (with over sixty different contributors) called The Book of Uncommon Prayer. I’m looking forward to working with Karen Braziller at Persea on edits to my next collection of stories. And I’m also working on essays. I’ve been writing a lot lately about growing up in the mountains of North Carolina in a Seventh-day Adventist family. I grew up in a religion that I ended up leaving behind—except that I didn’t really. You grow up steeped in ways of thinking and even after you reprogram yourself the ghost thoughts still hijack your brain.

Are there any works of fiction you are excited to read in 2014?  

I’m excited about Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams, which is not fiction but totally worth mentioning and endorsing here. I want to dive into Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book Two before Book Three comes out in May. I recently received a galley of Catherine Lacey’s Nobody Is Ever Missing, and I know that’s gonna rock. And Mary Miller’s The Last Days of California just arrived in the mail. Which reminds me. I also need to order Ben Marcus’ Leaving the Sea. Excited to read that, too.

"Risk Another Deafening Day to Whisper": An Interview with CJ Evans

CJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press, 2012) and a chapbook, The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series. He is the recipient of the 2013 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and his work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, and Massachusetts Review. He's the editor of Two Lines Press and a contributing editor for Tin House.

His poems, "The Wing's Lesson," "Inquiry into Owls," and "Inquiry into Beckoning," appear in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about lofty words, questions (or lack thereof), and looking at a windmill.

Could you tell us about your process of writing “The Wing’s Lesson”?

The germ of “The Wing’s Lesson” was A. R. Ammons’s poem “The City Limits”. And—this happens sometimes after reading a poem—trying to get away with using a lofty word he used, “radiance,” in a poem of my own. I put radiance on a page and wrote around it for a few months. Ultimately, though, when Ammons says, “when you consider / that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen, / each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then / the heart moves roomier,” he’s getting a feeling from light that’s foreign to me. I mostly see light as screens at night, the ungodly bright bus interior, nonstop cable news.

To me, transcendence (that radiance) is a low-light affair—on a porch, under a dim incandescent bulb. It’s generally a pretty ‘simple’ poem, but I was trying to get to a breathlessness then ease it with that “millions and millions” at the end. An escape (transcendence?) into something wilder, but less quick.

Your two inquiry poems were interesting to me, because I expected some sort of question in the text, or a hint of a question, but there were no questions! Is it ironic to be asking questions about the lack of questions in two poems about inquiries? Could you talk about inquiries and how you see the question functioning and not functioning in your poems?

The Inquiry poems are part of a series I began writing when my wife and I got married. In them, I was thinking more of scientific inquiry—the positing of a theory then attempting to find a proof. To be a good scientist you have to be able to absolutely commit to your theory, but when it’s proven wrong to your satisfaction, abandon it without a second thought. That seems a lot like marriage to me. Because I’m not sure “because of all of life is only once, but it glows” is really an answer to anything, but it’s certainly a theory of why my wife ignoring me while combing her hair could be so beckoning. Is that an adequate answer to a question about questions without questions?

In “The Wing’s Lesson,” you write, “Pull up your coverlet to conceal / the invading volume of the modern.” Indeed, in your other poems, you focus on the images that reside in and around nature: “the dead fish,” “the arctic night / or the mimic octopus.” Could you talk about how you see these images working in your poetry? Are you often working to reject “the invading volume of the modern?”

I don’t fetishize being a luddite, but I do try to be wary of anything too easy. I really like that my Iphone has all my music and maps on it, I know about the mimic octopus from youtube, I enjoy twitter and facebook and all that shit, but I don’t think anybody on their deathbed is going to wish they spent more time playing Candy Crush. (Oh shit, I hope not—could… could I be wrong?) I get annoyed, sometimes, about the value these things are given in our culture. I think we should let ourselves be better than US Weekly thinks we are. Again, I think all of that stuff has its place and time, but I’d just rather go see a windmill.

What’s on your 2014 reading list?

I’m moving to France in a couple of months on the Amy Lowell Scholarship, so my plan for 2014 is to mostly read contemporary French poets, but I’m packing Beast by Frances Justine Post in my carry-on. Bianca Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is one I’m looking forward to. Lately I’ve also been revisiting Lorine Neidecker and early Susan Howe. William Gass’s On Being Blue. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I would love for someone to buy me the full run of Cahiers from Sylph editions. There are so many great chapbook presses, and I’ll stock up at AWP: Poor Claudia, New Michigan, UDP, Greying Ghost, Horse Less Press, Dancing Girl, Little Red Leaves, etc.

What else have you been writing recently?

Just poems. I was working on the Inquiry series, but I think that finished itself, so just poems right now for my second book.

"Enough Time to Love and Be Loved": An Interview with Marci Rae Johnson

Marci Rae Johnson teaches English at Valparaiso University. She is also the Poetry Editor for WordFarm press and The Cresset. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Redivider, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Rock & Sling, The Other Journal, Relief, The Christian Century, and 32 Poems, among others. Her first collection of poetry won the Powder Horn Prize and was published by Sage Hill Press this year.

Her poem, "Mr. Rogers Is Flipping You Off," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interview Elizabeth Deanna Morris about fathers, substitutions, and when the poem knows itself better than the writer.

The title of “Mr. Rogers is Flipping You Off” is from a Cracked.com article about unusual photographs of famous people. What about this one in particular inspired you to write this poem?

I grew up in that ancient time period when there wasn’t 24 hour television programming for kids, and Mr. Rogers was one of the few programs I watched regularly. I think for many of my generation, Mr. Rogers functioned as something of a substitute father, especially since so many fathers in the 70s were the only income earners in the family, and thus spent a lot of time at work. The way he uses his middle fingers also suggests, I think, a more innocent time. (Or perhaps more a desire to return to a seemingly more innocent time.) As soon as I saw this photo, I remembered my own father using his middle finger to point, with no awareness of what that gesture meant.

I think the father is an interesting character in this poem, because he arrives as a parallel to Mr. Rogers (both of them use “the middle finger / of his right hand without irony”). Yet, his relationship to the speaker is one of moral education, but a morality that is beyond the speaker’s understanding, to “not comet adultery.” Mr. Rogers, on the other hand, is playing with the speaker. Could you talk about relationship between these two characters and the speaker?

I think we often tend to look at our parents, and especially our fathers as godlike figures (whether you attend church and are familiar with the father language for God or not). And any time there’s an association with God, moral education, and moral judgment as well, comes into play. Mr. Rogers, however, represents the role I think children would rather have their fathers play: that of playmate. The person who not only sets up the train set, but plays trains with them. (He does of course, teach lessons as well, but I remember him first and foremost as playmate.) As a parent now myself, I think it’s hard to find that balance between being the authority/teacher and the friend.

I think that your use of the tercets is really interesting in this poem. I think of the idea of counting “1, 2, 3,” and the end, with the really beautiful line “Never / enough time to love and be loved,” with the idea of counting down “3, 2, 1.” Could you talk about your use of tercet in this poem?

I think the use of tercets in this poem might be one of those occasions where the poem knows more about itself than I do! As I wrote and then rewrote this poem many times, I changed the stanza length often, and in all honestly, I still wasn’t terribly happy with the form. I revised it again recently and turned it into a poem with no stanza breaks at all because I felt the pacing of the poem wasn’t quite right. I wanted to speed the poem up by deleting the stanza breaks, and I wanted to push the images together more dramatically so that the leaps between images and thoughts squeezed together and created more tension. After seeing, though, how the tercets might be working, I’m rethinking the poem again! It often feels to me as though poems are never quite done, and I know I’m not the only poet who will return to a poem and make changes even after it’s been published!

Have any books kept you particularly warm this winter that you can recommend?

Yes! I’m a huge reader and I count on books to keep me warm during the winter, especially with all the snow we’ve gotten in Michigan this year. I’ve especially loved Mary Syzbists’s National Book Award winner Incarnadine. Religion is one of my passions/interests, so I was thrilled to see this thoughtful religious work win the award. And then I recently discovered Karen Russell’s fascinating stories in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

What other texts are you working on right now?

My first book of poems was released in November, so I’ve been focused on marketing that book—which for poetry primarily involves giving reads. And right now I’m also working on putting together my second book (which will include the Mr. Rogers poem). My second book contains mostly poems that are responses to other texts: books, pieces of art, photographs, weird stuff I read about on the Internet, etc. The book explores that idea that most anything we encounter can be “read” and responded to as a text. I also hope to start working on my third book soon, which is going to involve some research and travel to insane asylums from the World War II era. Most of those remaining are museums, though some still function as psychiatric hospitals (and many are believed to be haunted).

"The Hair Stylist Who Fell Twenty Feet and Landed Upright": An Interview with Roberta Allen

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including the novel, The Dreaming Girl, which was republished in 2011, two short short collections, a novella-in-shorts, a travel memoir and writing guides. She has recently finished a novel and two story collections. A conceptual/visual artist as well, she has work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum. She leads private writing workshops.

Her story, "Forgotten," appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, interviewer Melissa Goodrich chats with Roberta Allen about darkly-humorous details, the collective unconscious, and a series of imaginary islands.

How do auxiliary details help inform your writing? Like the shared stylist who had once fallen twenty feet off a cliff while hiking and landed on her feet, or the all-white bedroom, or the old boyfriend who bar mitzvahed his dog—all of them vivid, curious, and full of metaphoric implications.

 

I am drawn to details—some darkly humorous—that exemplify to me, the strangeness of life, the strangeness of human experience and behavior, (the hair stylist who fell twenty feet and landed upright, the bar mitzvahed dog), and the absurdities that abound in the world. Curious and peculiar differences are remembered by the narrator rather than connections between one character and another. Details moved the story in directions I didn’t expect it to take and played a part in determining the form of “Forgotten.” 

 

At the end of this story, the narrator has lost more than her memory—but the actual friendships with the people she’s struggling to recall. Do you consider her forgetfulness a defense mechanism? Or a kind of trauma she’s suffering (“is there a giant repository with all the words that were ever spoken?” “Can the desire to remember fool you into believe that you do?”)? Those black Australian caves stick out to me—kind of magnificent, kind of horrific—“the sort of nothing…which seems to suddenly drop to infinite depths.”

The narrator, who is older and afraid of memory loss,  plays a game with herself. A serious game. She is testing her memory. I imagined the narrator as a character who doesn't have much feeling for Katherine, Valerie or Yolanda. The narrator’s anxiety about her memory (not the friendships) fueled this story for me. But she may be hiding her motives for remembering. Of course, the unconscious has its own motives. The “black Australian caves…which seem to drop to infinite depths”) are a metaphor for the unconscious, for all the memories that are lost, that may never be retrieved—not only in the narrator's memory but in the collective unconscious as well. The same holds true for “the giant repository of all the words that were ever spoken.” After the banal incident that triggers her memory of the characters, I imagined the narrator struggling to recall them because they are unimportant to her.

If I said that memories of important people in her life, important events, might have aroused too much anxiety in the narrator, I think I would be reading into my story more than is there.

You’ve written many short-shorts (a novella in shorts as well as two short short collections)—is your current writing still signified by the brief, or are you writing longer work these days? Do you ever combine your writing with your work as a visual artist?

 

I am reworking longer works, originally written years ago, that were unsuccessful or left unfinished. The ones I’m rewriting still resonate with me. In between, I am writing surreal flash fictions, each less than 200 words, as part of an ongoing series, Amulets From Imaginary Islands. The name of each island mixes up the letters of an existing one. The flash fictions were inspired by a series of my photos, which I call amulet photos. These are my only stories that combine images but the stories also stand on their own.  My conceptual art is something quite different.

 

What excellent things have you been reading?

 

I was impressed by The Guardian, Sarah Manguso’s memoir, and by the novel, Acqua Viva by Clarice Lispector. I thought I had read just about everything by Lispector, translated into English, except for the two novels that came out last year, Acqua Viva being one. (Her other books I read in 1989.)  The story collection, Family Ties, which isn’t recent, I somehow missed but I’m enjoying it now. I wish I had more time to read. There are a number of books on my list but my writing, my art—the solo exhibition I am preparing for—and my writing workshops keep me very busy.