An Interview-in-Excerpts with Laura Ellen Joyce

Laura Ellen Joyce lectures in literature at York St John University. Her research interests are in experimental writing, extreme cinema, pornography, necrophilia, the queer uncanny, and ecocriticsm. She was project co-ordinator of the AHRC Global Queer Cinema network between 2012-2013. Her novel, The Museum of Atheism, was published in November 2012. Her novella, The Luminol Reels, comes out in August 2014.

An excerpt from her novella, The Luminol Reels, appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.

Here, she answers questions "in the form of excerpts"—with further excerpts from The Luminol Reels. Enjoy!

What is writing like?

There is time that is blank. You are on her and you are guilty.

Later, you get dreamy. You slash her open and taste her. When she is in pieces, you hang her to cure. When she is nothing but bone and pearl, you set her on flat paddles in the oven.

The parcels of smoked meat are the best you’ve ever tasted.

What isn’t writing like?

This is a morning task. Once complete you may drink a portion of metallic salts and return to the assembly line. The others must be exfoliated. This reel—the one true reel—must be committed to memory twice per day. The first time will be gruelling. You will be in handstand position, paper fed roughly down your gullet until you are blue. If you lose height, poise or grace, repeat the task.

When you do it, why?

You must feel every bump as you flick over the flesh and think of each pore, bacteria—a yellowy jelly that might burst at any time—in your vulnerable mouth. Blackheads will scud their thighs where sweat collects; blue, dense. Put two thumbnails around the toxic place and let the poison flow away. Scrub the pore out with salt and lime. 

When you don’t, why?

There is only one chance for freedom and that is to enslave the others. If you attempt this, you should write your hate on grey glass paper and bring it to the altar.

"Toys and the Boys Who Loved Them": An Interview with Marcus Pactor

Marcus Pactor is the author of the short story collection Vs. Death Noises (Subito Press, 2012). His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Prick of the Spindle, and EAT.

His short story, "Do the Fish," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Marcus Pactor talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about comedy, fragments, and Go-Bots.

Tell us about the origin of this story (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea) and about how it changed throughout the revision process.

My dad had this pick-up for maybe nine months last year, and he used it to haul scrap for gas and cigarette money. My mom forced him to sell it after too many nights of scrap sitting in the cab, in the driveway, in full view of neighbors. I never saw this truck, but I knew it well from their phone calls. Even before he sold it, I knew I would use it in a story.

The initial plan was to focus on this father and son. It had shoplifting—though the kid back then was lifting candy, not toys. These two were getting drunk together, etc. It was plodding and hokey, and the dad wasn’t half as interesting as Terri and Olivia. Then Go-Bots appeared, and I felt I was touching the real weird core of the piece. I got obsessed with them in the best way. I’d be awake at 3AM, feeding my infant son and explaining to him the difference between Cy-Kill and Megatron.

 “Do the Fish” is made up of two voices: the narrator and an italicized, plural entity giving him commands (which to me felt inhuman, perhaps computerized). What inspired this unusual format of storytelling?

I was greatly (sadly) inspired by the mess I was making. I was writing fragments everywhere—on Word documents on my home and office computers, on memo pads, and on the inside flaps of books. Some people can only write in one place and in one way. I’d like to maintain that sort of disciplined routine, but what am I supposed to do when the words are coming out of my brain and I’m not in my favorite chair? Anyway, at some point I had to organize all this material into a real draft.

I began with questions, but they sounded too ripped off from Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood. I love that book too much to copy it so baldly. So I thought about this guy in his Cy-Kill suit, and I realized just how deeply he doubted and hated himself. No one was asking him anything, and he wasn’t asking anything of himself. He wanted and needed commands, and he needed them in something like primitive MS-DOS lingo.

I have to ask you about the Go-Bots, which play a prominent role in this story. Did you have to do any research to complete this aspect, or were you totally writing out of your own experience with the toys? How much have popular culture and/or nostalgia influenced your other writing, and why?

I rehashed a lot of memories in this piece, not episodes of personal trauma, but plain knowledge of the toys and the boys who loved them. Google helped fill out hazy pictures of the Last Engineer and minor characters like Breez. My research typically is that shallow. I’m not the guy who checks out six books on Go-Bots to learn five things before I proceed.  

Culture, pop and otherwise, is strong gas for the engine. I always start on my own but, over time, bits of whatever I’m reading or whatever gets in my head at a given moment are likely to get converted into fictional material. So, sure, Go-Bots went into this story, and so did my dad’s truck. Last year, I put Eric B & Rakim into a story. I’ve also used Aristotle and William Blake. If I like it, I’ll try to work it in.

In a previous interview, you stated, “Tell a couple of jokes, but be serious. Seriously tell a joke. A purely sad story is not my kind of beer.” “Do the Fish” begins with a description of a dog gruesomely killed by a vehicle—but the story that follows contains some laugh lines (e.g., “That works. It’s the best part of the room,” about the crown molding). I wonder if you could expand on your advice about telling jokes, specifically in the midst of morbidity. How do you know when to tell a joke in an otherwise mostly serious story? In how close a proximity can the comedy and the drama coexist?

It’s like fishing—you’ve got to be patient. That’s because a joke is much more in the set-up than in the punchline. You’ve got to see the characters and see the room. You’ve got to see how earlier details have put an opportunity in place to engage readers from a different angle. If you’ve done that, the joke will come naturally. Of course, some fish, like some jokes, come right out the water on the first cast. There’s no accounting for luck.

As for proximity, I think comedy and drama can appear hip to hip. A well-placed, well-told joke can reorient a dramatic scene. The scene you mentioned, with the joke about crown molding, could have ended with a sappy and premature epiphany, but Olivia forces us away from that. As a writer, you get a bigger view of the situation and a wider sense of the possibilities. As a reader, if the joke works on you, you’re also smiling and ready for more.

What writing projects are you working on now?

“Do the Fish” is part of a series of stories involving spawn trouble, robots and androids, and history. I’m hoping to have enough material for a collection later this year. I’ve also been working intermittently on two other books that may be novels. One involves imaginary statistics, burning women, and squirrels. Another involves a detailed recent history of General Hospital and interviews with a sleeping wife.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Jason Schwartz’s The Posthumous John, Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone, Megan Martin’s Nevers, and Jacob White’s Being Dead in South Carolina. I cannot describe these books in a small space without destroying them. Instead I will say that they are all very good beer.

"The Last Mathematically Possible Melody": An Interview with James Brubaker

James Brubaker is the author of Pilot Season (Sunnyoutside Press) and Liner Notes (Forthcoming from Subito Press). His stories have appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All Story, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Hobart, among others.

His short story, "Spielberg's Unified Theory of Everything," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, James Brubaker talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about music, metafiction, and popular culture.

What was the initial idea that sparked the first draft of this story?

That’s a tough one. The original idea for this story goes back a couple of years, but at that point, it was just about this Spielberg character who was obsessed with narrative. I ended up abandoning that early version because I couldn’t make it work. Then I read something—and it was something weird, like a Facebook post, or an article linked to on Twitter, I don’t even remember—that basically suggested that the search for a unified theory was sort of science’s version of trying to “know God,” or something along those lines. I wish I could track the article down, but the idea was that humans want to find and test this universal theory of all things because it speaks to the same impulses that religion speaks to, that is, it would sort of give order to the universe like religions do for their adherents. This idea reminded me of the Spielberg story I’d started, and seemed like something that could activate that character a bit more, so I went back into the story and reshaped Spielberg and expanded the scope of the story and that was basically a second first draft, or maybe it was my rebooted first draft.

One thing I admire about this story is how unafraid it is to rise to the meta level. In only the second paragraph, you write, “When the boy named Spielberg is six, I have made it so that he will become the boy whose mother died in a car crash when he was six years old,” and then you go on to express guilt for making this decision. When and how did you decide to assert your presence as author and include these metafictional moments in your story?

This was part of the original idea back when the story was just about a guy named Spielberg who tried to find narrative in everything around him, but then the idea was cut for a while and didn’t come back into the story until close to the end of drafting. Since the story was written in this sort of unusual, omniscient, future tense, some echoes of that original meta layer were still hanging around because the constructed author of the piece had to be fairly present to navigate the tense. Then, eventually, after a couple of drafts, I felt like something was still missing from the story, and I noticed a few of those meta-echoes throughout and decided to play around with them a bit, and ended up really liking the new layers of conflict and meaning that it brought to the story.

The main character in this story is named Spielberg, and its first sentence contains a list of some of the famous Spielberg’s movies. Also, your first book, Pilot Season, is described on your website as a “short volume of pilot episodes for fictional television shows.” What can you say about how film, television, and pop culture have influenced your fiction? How have these other media become a significant part of your writing?

I feel like I need to preface this answer by saying that I love books, and I read a ton, and I have always had and always will have a deep respect for literature. That’s why I write. That said, I also watch a ton of movies and television shows, and I’m fascinated by the different ways of telling stories across different media. In studying film a bit here and there in my past, I became fascinated with the idea of montage, and the way Eisenstein and the Soviets sort of invented this new grammar for storytelling in film around montage, and I think that montage is an interesting way to think about writing. Maybe that idea shows up, just a little bit, in this Spielberg story through the arrangement of scenes, but that is working with far bigger pieces of information than montage in film, which generally revolves around connecting and shaping narrative out of briefer, not necessarily connected images. And then, of course, in perhaps a more general way, I think our popular culture is probably the most honest reflection of our cultural values, and so it seems like relevant territory to explore in terms of trying to get at what makes us tick. Pilot Season was written, in part, as a critique of television culture, but also, in a weird, backhanded way, as a celebration of the same—that is to say, television is so mind-bogglingly cynical and is constantly revealing some of our ugliest impulses, but maybe there’s value in that; maybe there’s something accepting and almost impossibly humane that goes beyond simply exploiting our flaws for entertainment; maybe television also sort of re-assures us that cruelty and ugliness are part of our world, and we’re all capable of those things, but that most people want to be and are, basically decent, and that we’re all in that struggle together.

Your bio says that you served as music section editor for a journal called The Fiddleback. Is there a relationship between music and your writing process? Do you listen to music while you brainstorm, write, and/or revise? Do you ever pair works of music with your finished works, like a soundtrack?

Absolutely. I’ve played music since 4^th grade when I had mono and couldn’t play baseball. I started playing the saxophone then and played seriously all the way through my first year as an undergraduate. At that point, I realized I wasn’t ready to commit to the insane practice hours of my peers. People literally slept in practice rooms for an hour or two in between practicing. But my love of music has deeply shaped my writing. The collection I’ve got coming out from Subito later this year is called Liner Notes and explores this love head on, tackling music and the culture surrounding it from all these different angles. There’s a story in there about a fictional private press record being reissued, and another about Flavor Flav traveling through time, and one about the discovery of the last mathematically possible melody. Each story in that book had its own soundtrack as I was writing, just to help construct the world I envisioned for each story. While I was writing Pilot Season, I listened to as many TV theme songs as I could find on Spotify. And as I was writing the collection I just finished, (Science) Fictions, I put together a few playlists of sci-fi-ish, retro-futurist and/or new agey stuff like Tangerine Dream, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Boards of Canada, and would let myself get absorbed in these sort of early 80’s Epcot Center synth drones because I wanted that feeling to permeate the stories. And yes, while I’ve never shared my finished works’ soundtracks, I have a pretty good sense of what they are. I can tell you off the top of my head that the soundtrack for the Spielberg story is Air’s “Kelly Watch the Stars,” Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Explain,” and The Flaming Lips’ “Look…the Sun is Rising.” Also, as a general rule, if no other music is working for writing, my defaults are In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.   

Your second story collection, (Science) Fictions, was recently put on the shortlist for the 2014 Pressgang Prize, where a reader said of it, “Carver and Borges had a baby and it is this third story.” Do you consider those authors to be influences of yours? What writers do you credit most with shaping your style and sensibility?

Hands down Borges was probably the biggest influence on me. I was already thinking of myself as I failed writer in 2002 when I stumbled across a copy of Ficciones. I read that book and said, this is how I want to tell stories. It made me understand things about the ways I was trying to tell stories that I didn’t know how to work with, before. I’ve never thought of Carver as an influence, but I guess, at this point, Carver has been everywhere for a while (I mean, I was first unwittingly exposed to Carver, sort of, when a heavily edited version of Altman’s Short Cuts was screened on a flight to Hawaii when I was maybe 12 years old) and the Ph.D. program I went through had a bit of a thing for Carver while I was there, so it makes sense that some facets of what he did crept into my work. Some other biggies for me are Millhauser, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, and Lorrie Moore. Those are the folks I was reading a lot of when I was in the early stages of figuring out how to tell stories, and I think they’ve probably shaped my writing more than anyone else.

What recent books would you like to recommend to our readers?

At the risk of looking like a suck up, I loved Gabe Blackwell’s The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft. I also love Erin Flanagan’s collection of stories called It’s Not Going to Kill You, and Other Stories. I’m about halfway through Leesa Cross-Smith’s Every Kiss a War, and am enjoying that. The new Pynchon was pretty great. Dan Shapiro has a great book of poems I picked up at AWP called How the Potato Chip Was Invented. Peter Tieryas Liu’s Bald New World is a wonderfully fun and original take on traditional sci-fi/dystopian stories. Catherine Gammon’s Sorrow was one of the most harrowing and heartbreaking books I’ve read in recent memory, but it’s so worth it, and Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum is a beautifully written exploration of hopeful sadness. Also, the 33 1/3 volume on They Might Be Giants’s Flood is probably the best music writing I’ve encountered in a while. And if folks are into comics, Dan Slott’s current Silver Surfer book is a lot of fun, as is Charles Soule’s She-Hulk, and pretty much anything that Matt Fraction is writing. Oh, and also, the Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel series is fantastic.

"The Limits Our Culture Puts on Love": An Interview with Sally J. Johnson

Sally J. Johnson received her MFA from UNCW where she served as Managing Editor for the award-winning literary journal Ecotone. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bodega, The Pinch, Weave, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Find her on the Internet: http://sallyjayjohnson.tumblr.com/ and @sallyjayjohnson.

Her essay, "Binary," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Sally J. Johnson talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about brevity, binaries, and writing about family.

Tell us about the genesis of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea), and about how it changed throughout the revision process.

I started writing this piece in a class on the lyric essay with the phenomenal Sarah Messer. Originally, it was an experimental essay about two different relationships. It wasn’t until I did a more final edit on it that I pushed it into that binary form. Ultimately, I wanted the form to be really constricting in contrast to what I was writing about, and to mirror our society’s unreal limitations on love (boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, etc.). I’d been thinking so much about that, the limits our culture puts on love (and everything) and its effect on people’s real lives. For instance: my family is the most wonderful, accepting group of human beings you’ll ever meet, but I was still met with some of those tired stereotypical jokes when coming out to them. Why? Probably because we have a culture that shares those jokes and perpetuates those stereotypes. We have people of power and persuasion insisting those jokes are funny or somehow inherently true.

I wanted to show that complication (of love, and of loving people of your same or different gender, of gender itself) in a similar system as this human world that always tries to make things simple: 0 or 1. There’s so much erasure in that kind of space. So, in a miniscule way, I was able to use a binary to show and narrate, rather than erase, an experience.

How did you decide to write about past events in the present tense for this piece? What kind of advantages and/or risks come with making that choice?

To be honest, I think that decision was unconscious. It did serve as a little mental trick for me to get back into the moments I wrote about; to feel as mad or happy or heartbroken or in love while writing as I was then. It’s advantageous since it adds a visceral texture to this piece (I hope). Also, this way I easily avoided summing things up or generalizing. It’s risky because I can/could/did miss reflection that’s necessary. I had to rely a lot on tone and choice of scene to express how I might feel about these events now.

“Binary” is written in ten short vignettes, each no longer than two paragraphs. As both a poet and an essayist, do you find it natural to write with this kind of brevity, or is it a challenge to work with such a strict economy of language?

I wonder if it’s because I am poet that I gravitate toward these smaller sections, or if that’s why I was drawn to poetry in the first place. It is natural for me to write with brevity; I seem to fit there. But, lately I’ve been trying to pull and stretch my sentences and pieces. To say more, show more, steep a little. I like the challenge, but I also love reading longer essays and would love to be able to write them.

This piece includes stories of your family members and romantic relationships, in an essay that explores your sexuality and tackles gender-based binaries. Are you ever wary of writing and publishing nonfiction covering such personal material? If so, how do you overcome your hesitation? (If not, what do you feel about it instead?)

I recently read this great essay by Robert Siegel in the New York Times (about teaching a workshop with his mother as a student). I kept coming back to this line from him: “It’s always been a matter of faith for me that good writing begins with the ability to say what you want without worrying about how others might react.” I think that’s so important, and something I needed about three years ago to repeat to myself like a writing prayer. For the future, I will.

As for before, I was a little nervous. But, my family really is great and supportive of both my life and art. The hardest part about sharing this particular piece was knowing my parents would read things I’d never told them—had chosen not to tell them. It felt like a betrayal, but it was also a relief. I was actually most afraid they’d want to talk about it or hold a family meeting (the Johnsons love their family meetings), but instead they just asked if I needed to talk and otherwise congratulated me on the publication.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’ve been sending out my poetry collection, The Pinning Block, which is about sexuality and arthropods. The poems in it take a look at (or through the lens of) invertebrates as well as humans to think about sex, love, tenderness, and hurt. Lots of those poems are looking for homes, too, so I’m working on the business side of that book. I’ve also been editing more lyric essays like “Binary” and trying, trying, trying to write longer, more traditional essays.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams. Sally Wen Mao’s Mad Honey Symposium. Anything and everything that Roxane Gay has ever written in print or online. I’m really into Murakami right now, so I’ve been recommending him as if I’m a child that just figured out ice cream tastes good, but, still! Also, Meredith Clark won Black Warrior Review’s nonfiction contest with her essay “Lyrebird.” I read it when I got the issue and it’s still ringing in my heart.

"The Past Inherits Us Again": An Interview with Russell Brakefield

Russell Brakefield teaches in the English Department at the University of Michigan. His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Indiana Review, Hobart, The NY Quarterly, and Language Lessons: An Anthology of Poetry, Prose, and Music published by Third Man Records.

His poem, "Effigy," appeared in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about poem-statues, art as permanence in an impermanent world, and the fight to quantify time and define ourselves. 

What helped shape the text for you, in terms of a one-stanza form?

This poem started as a single stanza, as a clump, as many of my poems do. It made sense to me to keep the single stanza form in terms of the subject matter—statues, animated columns, monoliths, etc. I wanted to visually evoke the idea of a statue or plinth. The form allowed the poem to be one solid object, relying then on the syntax, language, and line-breaks to indicate some possible movement, to convey energy, to produce anticipation that the poem-statue might leave the page and “lurch against the sky.”

An effigy, as a representation of a person through sculpture, and as the title, holds weight in this context. I focus on the last three lines; resurrection is paralleled with life, and “the forgotten beasts are left to forage.” Arriving at this last line, I am immediately reminded of the “stone sparrows and frogs crafted from a long gone mother’s hands” and how they “suddenly see themselves, alive.” “Forage,” for me, obtains a positive connotation. What/who do “the forgotten beasts” signify for you, beyond the “stone sparrows and frogs,” and what is the relationship between “a long gone mother’s hands” and the stone animals that “suddenly see themselves, alive?”

I was thinking about how obsessed we are with the apocalypse right now. I find myself drawn to those narratives as well, even though I’ve read/seen them so many times. It is as though we have so little faith that there is any frontier left for us to explore (apart maybe from technology) and so we look to rebirth or resurrection as a possible future. Bleak, but also maybe not? We know what we are doing to the planet and to each other. It is obvious that the questions at the center of these apocalypse narratives are important and compelling to most people: how do we deal with our collective impermanence and how do we deal with our individual impermanence? And it isn’t just about environmental concerns or something like that. It has quite a bit to do with the individual, with consciousness, and with art.

Art often gives us an idea that we are creating some sense of permanence in an impermanent world. Particularly something like a sculpture seems to exist by its very nature to make sustainable something that is not—the human form, animals, architecture. And yet we know that even statues are completely ephemeral in the big picture. Dust to dust and all that.  I was trying to think about how all this would be complicated if, after our fleshy bodies were long gone and even the cockroaches were turning to ash, those effigies that we created were given life, the things we deemed eternal became animate. Does that mean that they then become terminal and transient and the process starts over? Do those new creatures create effigies of their own? And of what? 

Also, at the most basic level, I was just really attracted to the image of all these statues coming to life, disoriented and creaking into consciousness at the same time—Christ the Redeemer stepping down off the Corcovado mountain at the same moment that the statues of frogs playing flutes in my mom’s flower garden suddenly lift their heads and start to play.

Contrasting images weave through this work, highlighting the living and the forgotten (“…the statues will inherit the earth. The founding fathers will lurch against the sky and finally take their place as great distinctions—white granite against a fiery lake”). The “Spindled lampposts,” too, are “alive like tyrant trees.” The stiffness and inanimate nature of the forgotten is constantly being replaced by living, active versions. What pushes these sculptured objects to retain or obtain life, to envelop or signify the past that “inherits us again?”

I can’t say quite what pushes these things to life in the poem. I don’t think it matters. The poem starts beyond that point, in a place that says to the reader “you are dead and these things have come to life, now think about that.”  I wanted the poem to ask questions about what we deem important, the way we cast things into lasting form to commemorate that importance.  I was just watching something on TV today about the football player Lionel Messe’s striking foot cast in gold. And the average football player’s career is something like six years? I wanted to call attention to the way we fight and claw to understand and quantify our time and experience here,  how hard we work to define ourselves even though we know how it all ends.

At the same time, there is also something in this poem, I hope, about all the things that we can’t capture figuratively. The reason that we set about to all this effigy business in the first place is not always political or historical. Part of it is that wonderful thing about art, the way we  keep trying to express the ineffable experiences of living. Even when we inevitably fall short, we still learn a great deal about ourselves and our place in the world. Holding tight the memory of a mother’s hand is not an important biological weapon. It is not an important moment in history. It does not give you an advantage in the

event of a zombie apocalypse. But it is also most likely the place in this poem that  people will look at and connect to intimately, the moment people will draw a line to from their own experiences. Perhaps something made from her hands, a frog or whatever, has in some way stretched the bounds of human experience.  

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading quite a bit of fiction at the moment—We Need New Names by  NoViolet Bulawayo and Conversations by Cesar Aira. I’m rereading parts of Third Reich by Bolano because I’m on vacation, sort of. Poets I’m looking at right now—Brandon Som, Bianca Stone, Sarah Vap, Mary Ruefle, and Charles Wright’s new book Caribou.  I’m always reading Carl Phillips and listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

What are you currently writing?

I’m working on a book about American folk music. The subject of the book is American folk music, but it also deals with artistic innovation, the way music gets moved and translated across time and geography. 

“Between Intimacy and Terror”: An Interview with Michael Jeffrey Lee

Michael Jeffrey Lee is the author of Something in My Eye, a collection of stories. He teaches at New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and Tulane University. Recent work has appeared in XO Orpheus, Gigantic, and Room 220.

His story, "Three New Ideas," appeared in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Michael Jeffrey Lee talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about starting 30 stories at once, pulling knives on friends, and the literary scene in New Orleans.

What was the initial image or idea that triggered this story? 

Well, the inciting image I would say was one of someone very close to me pulling a knife on someone else very close to me. The knife puller had just had his computer unplugged, and lost his sense of right and wrong. I promised both parties that I wouldn’t reveal who the puller and the unplugger were in this interview, so I won’t. As far as the form goes, I guess I thought it would be a little humorous to aim really, really low, just feature ideas rather than fully fleshed out stories, ideas and nothing more, eschewing both depth and maturity as I worked through them. Do you think they might go viral one day?     

You play around with time quite a bit, shifting back and forth between the past, present and future. These shifts occur during climactic moments. Were they present from the get-go, or did they emerge later on in subsequent drafts?

It’s nice of you to say that I play with time, but I’ve I have always thought myself a miserably linear writer, incapable of telling a story out of order. I’ve had some editors that have helped get out of my straight-line mind, but rarely seem to do it on my own. Let me think. Gabriel Blackwell gave me some good suggestions but I don’t believe they had to do with those moments. So maybe I did create them! I suspect that I was thinking it would be interesting if the narrator kind of blundered through these climaxes, and in doing so revealed other things, perhaps not. To me these moments definitely destabilize things, they open up this other void maybe, which is always something I’m interested in trying to do on the page. I kind of like the cinematic quality of them too, that maybe these are the movies playing in this narrator’s head. I always imagined these toeing the line between movie and story ideas. One thing is certain, though: our cultural narratives have done something to this person’s head.  

OK, I just checked it out, and it seems that these shifts were in the first drafts.

What I really enjoy in this piece is the ever present threat of violence. At times it manifests, at times it does not, but in all instances it ultimately leads to quiet moments of intimacy between the story’s various characters.  Could you talk more about this decision and how you see it functioning within your story?

It’s a really interesting observation that you make about the intimate moments. To me they’re kind of everything, although honestly I’m not quite sure how they are functioning. Given what’s lurking on either side of them, for me it just makes the intimacy scarier, or funnier. I guess for me most lives constantly swing between intimacy and terror, albeit less extreme forms than the ones experienced by my dear characters. Ah, the tender repression that makes intimacy possible. That breakfast scene with Mom after his bath really cracks me up. I think that I saw this intimacy business occurring in the first idea and then found it happening in the second (albeit in an even more agonized fashion) and then I figured what the hell in the third. It felt a little glib at first but then at the same time it suggested all this weird darkness in the narrator/idea maker and so in they stayed.   

I had the chance to visit New Orleans a few years back and noticed a handful of poets busking       around Jackson Square. As a resident, how would you describe your city’s literary scene?

Are you suggesting that we’re just a bunch of bedizened, bohemian phonies down here, hocking our provincial propaganda to the stumble-drunk, schlock-hungry tourists? Well, some days it sort of feels that way. The city …has obviously been very successful at selling a certain image of itself to the rest of the country (as well as it’s own citizens)—a place of constant inspiration and authentic art-making. And the food…don’t get me started on the food, ha ha. I think that a lot of writers and artists here fall victim to this romantic, highly marketable way of thinking at some point in their stay here, and their politics go to complete shit. This place sort of crushes people’s imagination sometimes, I don’t know—it happened to me. I wrote a whole section of a novel that was actually (I realized it too late) just an in-joke for New Orleanians. Whoops, a whole year down the tubes. But there are some really good writers who make a happy home here. There are fun readings sometimes, too, big-time authors and your standard open mics, and people seem to go to them, especially if alcohol is served. I’ve never thought it a particularly literary town. Actually many of my friends in the art and music community don’t really read books. I try to tell them all about how books make people lead more carefree, fulfilling lives, but it’s always been a hard sell here…too many parades, maybe.

Are you the type of writer who can work on several different pieces at a time, or do you like to stick with a single story before moving on to the next one?

I go on a spree sometimes and begin about thirty new stories, a beginning a day for thirty days, but when’s I’ve finally decided to devote time to it, I’m a one-story kind of person. And yet all my better stories seem to be written in a single sitting. If I ever decide to write a novel again I will have to devise a system that allows me to eat and use the bathroom while staying in the chair.

What are you reading this summer?

I’m reading late Burroughs and the famous Babel book, and Hugh Kenner and Katherine Mansfield, and Zach Lazar’s novel on devilry and Janice Lee’s rumination on Damnnation. I read that book about Stalker by Geoff Dyer. I’ve been catching up on my music criticism. Also crap news and sponsored content, always, always. I want to read Malaparte’s The Skin next but I have a fat Hamsun biography calling my name.      

"The Last Days of the Neanderthals": An Interview with William VanDenBerg

William VanDenBerg is the author of Lake of Earth (Caketrain Press, 2013) and Apostle Islands (Solar Luxuriance, 2013). Recent stories have appeared at Spork, SAND, and Pear Noir. He lives with his wife in Denver.

His story, "A Source," appeared in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, William VanDenBerg talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about Neanderthals, revision, and narrative ambiguity.

So where did spark that led to this story come from? What was the very first idea that led to all the others?

I watched a few things in quick succession about Neanderthals and early humans: a Nova episode called “Decoding Neanderthals,” another Nova called “Iceman Murder Mystery,” and an episode of Walking with Beasts. The last one is pretty bad, the night-vision Mammoth hunting scene in particular. I’d been wanting to write stories that weren’t set in the modern era, and the last days of the Neanderthals seemed like interesting subject matter. I enjoy narratives that gain drama through their setting (George Saunders's “93990,” most of Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn). It also gives the story a fatalist tone that I liked—the setting gives the story its trajectory.

Can you describe how this story changed throughout your drafting process? “A Source” is written mostly in simple sentences and short paragraphs. Were you writing it that way from the beginning, or did this restrained style emerge during revision?

The narrator’s voice was more complicated at first. I was trying to make it distinctive by using odd sentence constructions and avoiding simple sentences, but that didn’t work. Her voice came off like a non-southern writer trying to write a thick southern accent, all misspellings and apostrophes. It was awful. Over the next few drafts I reworked and simplified the sentences, took out most of the stylistic garbage. I used this technique I read about in a Gary Lutz interview, where you blow the text up to 26-point font, which gives the sentence this massive scale. Any dead weight becomes obvious – it can’t hide in a big block of text. That reduction technique produced the minimal, kinda stilted voice that ended up in the finished piece.

I was also working on the edits for Lake of Earth at the time, and I used some things I learned from Caketrain editors Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed. After the piece was accepted, Gabriel Blackwell had some great changes that pushed the story where it needed to go.

The protagonist is a woman who tells stories. Do you feel a sort of kinship with her for that reason?

No, not really. It’s rare that I have much of a connection to my characters, particularly this one.

On your blog, you said of this story: “One of the main ambiguities of the piece is whether or not she believes the stories she tells, or if she’s just stretching her imagination.” As the author, did you ever have to decide for yourself whether or not your protagonist believes her own stories, or does it remain ambiguous even to you? (How hard was it to maintain this ambiguity? Were you ever tempted to delve deeper into the character’s inner life and reveal her beliefs or doubts?)

I never decided whether she believes in her stories or not. I think she might be on the fence as well. She tells the story about the sun and moon without a great deal of motivation, almost by accident, then gets wrapped up in it. From early on, I thought the ambiguity provided some charge to the narrative, and I wasn’t tempted to expand on it.

Re: her inner life, I was always interested in her lack of self (or at least what modern humans define as self). Her existence is governed by survival, which is a largely repetitive act. Eat, shit, reproduce, sleep, don’t get eaten, repeat. Not a lot of time to develop an inner life.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m finishing up a series of twenty linked pieces called MILK TEETH. One has appeared at Alice Blue Review and another at The Fanzine. I’ve also been working on a novel since January or so. It takes place over thirty years and focuses on a pair of detectives, a long dead alien creature, and a young woman who is birthed every ten years by the sea. That one will take a while.

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

Megan Martin’s Nevers is just mind-blowing. The stories in it are hilarious and terrifying and can turn on a dime. Elizabeth Mikesch’s Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me is superb as well, full of dense sentences and a fantastic, unexpected story about hockey. Those two books make a good pair. They both contain a lot of startling, innovative writing about the body. I also stumbled across Ann Quin’s Tripticks last December, and I’ve been rationing the rest of her books. She’s able to pull off these thick spirals of description that completely baffle me. I often read her sentences out loud over and over, trying to unravel them. I’ve only got Passages left to read, and I’m almost afraid to start it.

“Personal Comfort Over the Wellbeing of Strangers”: An Interview with Glenn Shaheen

Glenn Shaheen is the author of the poetry collection Predatory  (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and the flash fiction chapbook Unchecked Savagery (Ricochet Editions, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Kalamazoo where he is a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University.

His story, "Body in the Dumpster," appeared in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Glenn Shaheen talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about dismantling syntax, elaborate pranks and his second manuscript, Energy Corridor.

What got you initially thinking about and eventually writing the story, “Body in the Dumpster”?  

I’m always running horrible scenarios through my head, and one night when I was throwing out some garbage into my apartment complex’s dumpster I imagined what I’d do if there was a dead body in the dumpster. That’s an easy call, though—just get the police. Then I wondered what I’d do if there was a hurt living person in the dumpster. I’d have to jump in, obviously.

I find the logic of your narrator fascinating, especially the way in which he distances himself from responsibility and action by constantly second-guessing what he hears and sees. What was the process like in creating this character/voice and how did it change, if at all, during revision? 

Most of us in contemporary America have this voice within us. A homeless person asks us for a dollar and we imagine they’d just buy drugs or something, so we might say no. We read a story about climate change and think briefly about walking to get groceries, but then we tell ourselves it’s only a mile drive, it won’t hurt that much. We’re experts at choosing personal comfort over the wellbeing of strangers.

Near the end of this piece the narrator decides not to help. He claims: “I decided it was a joke. I wouldn't even call 911. Some kids probably laughing in one of the buildings around me. I almost fell for it, too, leaping into trash and bugs. So I just said ‘Fuck this.’ and left.” Could you speak more about the narrator’s sense of paranoia, of being the victim of some elaborate prank, and how this informed your writing of the story?

I don’t think the narrator truly believes it was a joke being played on him. He’s just constructed the exact scenario in which he wouldn’t have to even try to help, which in this case is a voice recorder placed in the dumpster by some imagined kids. Some kind of elaborate prank! Even if there was a slim chance that there actually was a dying or injured person in the dumpster, he should have still jumped in and tried to help. It’s just so easy for the human brain to talk us into doing nothing in situations in which we clearly should act.

You’ve published books of poetry and flash fiction. What does poetry provide you that flash fiction might not, and likewise how does flash fiction satisfy you as a writer in ways that poetry might not?

In flash fiction I feel more comfortable with narrative (even if it’s fragmented), or setting a piece in an actual place in the real world. I also feel more comfortable playing with/dismantling syntax in my present poems than I do in my present flash fiction. None of this will probably stay true forever for me, though. I’ve written purely narrative poems, before, and flash fiction that tries to function without standard syntax. In my poems I don’t usually like to include a central character, a first person who speaks about his injuries or suffering or victories. In my flash fiction I always want there to be a strong central voice that comes definitively from a character, even if it is filtered through the third person. I’ll write about “me” in flash, or a translation of myself at least, but that’s really not the kind of poetry I’m interesting in creating, though it does seem to be the vogue in journal pubs right now.

What are you currently working on?

I’ve got my second manuscript of poems all “ready,” if you can ever truly say a manuscript is ready. It’s called Energy Corridor, and it’s about connective and communal necessity from an interpersonal to global level, and its failure in our present moment, told through the filter of Houston, where I lived for six years.

You’ve just missed your connecting flight and will be stuck at the airport for the next eight hours. What books are you wishing you’d carried on to keep you company?

I have to take medication to fly, but I’ll pretend that I’m not a big fraidy cat and that I could actually read at an airport, ha ha. I’d love to read back through Great Guns by Farnoosh Fathi and The Year of What Now by Brian Russell for some recent poetry. The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard would kill some time, but these three books are pretty short. I just read Devil on the Cross by Ngugi wa Thiong’o which was terrific and dense, and I feel like I need/want to give it another go, too. Also I’d probably have my week’s pull list of comics, to be honest.

"A Decent Start at Owning My Thoughts": An Interview with Brenda Rankin

Brenda Rankin is a graduate of the MFA program at CSU Fresno, where she was editorial assistant and webmaster for The Normal School. She teaches English in California's Central Valley, and her work has appeared in Knee-Jerk Magazine, COBALT, The Writing Disorder, fwriction : review, and Puerto Del Sol.

Her essay, "A Sweeping Presentation of the Main Theme," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Brenda Rankin talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about epigraphs, research, and writing about her fixations.

Tell us about the genesis of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea).

As the essay’s fixation on the predicament woman in the row in front of me suggests, from the moment the incident occurred, I couldn’t get it, or her, out of my mind. I knew I’d have to write about it, even if it only turned into rambling free-writey philosophizing no one would ever see.

The essay begins with an epigraph from the film Before Sunrise. What made you decide to include this quote? How do you want it to influence the audience’s reading of the piece?

I love to love those movies, and not just because admitting a liking for them seems to be such a terrible idea in most circles. To be honest, those films have always seemed cringe-worthy to me, but in a sweet, charming way—the way it would feel, I imagine, to read back on notebooks I kept when I was seventeen (if I had kept notebooks when I was seventeen, which I did not, and wish I did). They’re a bit too earnest, maybe, a tad too concerned with their own quality of emotion and progression of thought. The actors/characters are too young to even understand what they’re saying, but decide to say it anyway, because it’s what’s on their mind. The movie, and Julie Delpy’s quote, in particular, in its likely-un-self-aware-but-sincere attempts to process life seemed like just the right white flag to put up at the start of an essay like this. Because, really, what early twenty-something has any business essaying on her preoccupations with her own lack of time left on earth? I felt deliciously self-conscious, taking that essay in to my graduate workshop, and got responses that ranged from the expected  “It’s brave, alright,” shrugs, to the classmate pounding her flattened palm down on her copy of my draft in excitement, saying, “Heck yes, you’re a twenty-something feeling all panicky about how you’re running out of time—that IS insane. Own it!” And since all epigraphs are horrible risks as it is, and my entire workshop encouraged me to lose it, I figured a stubborn refusal to eliminate Ms. Delpy from my pre-essay space was a decent start at owning my thoughts.

Interwoven throughout your personal narrative taking place in 2010 are brief sections labeled “Early November, 1893,” which describe Tchaikovsky’s declining health resulting in his death. How much research did you have to do in order to write these parts? How has the research process changed your writing of this and other essays?

I miss being a university student so much as fall approaches each year, and this question has pulled that nostalgia even closer to me. A lot of research went into this essay; once I decided that, close as my emotional connection to his music was, I couldn’t feel comfortable writing about it without spending time reading on Tchaikovsky himself, the structure and pacing of the essay seemed clearer to me. I checked out every single book on the composer and his music in my university’s library, lugged them home, and went from there. I miss access to that library, because yes, I’m a researcher by nature, whether for essays or for my own personal nerdery. I value essays for their constant glorification of research and our personal connections to what we research, and what we discover. The space between researcher and research is a magical one, and I’m thankful essays exist as a means to explore it.

On the subject of feeling the inevitability of death, you wrote about Tchaikovsky and yourself: “He sought catharsis by formatting his morose preoccupations onto sheet music, elevating them from mere mental turmoil to art to be played and shared with audiences for centuries to come. In my case, it works merely as a paralysis, this fixation of the lack of life ahead of me or the ones I love, often rendering me motionless, with nothing to do but leak its impact out my eyeballs.” Do you feel that your writing of this piece helped to counteract that paralysis? Was the essay at all cathartic for you?

I do think it helped, perhaps primarily by the act of admitting and taking ownership of these preoccupations, and allowing many who’ve read the piece to contact me saying, “Yep, me too—I thought I was alone in these ridiculous fixations.” I’ve always been one of those sad souls who seek approval from others for everything, from my clothing choices to my thoughts on death. This is easily my least attractive mental quality, but I suppose choosing to write and submit creative nonfiction for publication means learning to either eliminate those tendencies or embrace them and use them as fuel for essaying. This essay was a positive move in the direction of the latter.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Well, this interview, for starters. And this question has been a fantastic kick-in-the-pants for me, so thank you. Beyond that, I’ve been bird-by-birding it every day, which is an awesome development for me—a consistent writing practice will be my eternal white whale. I’ve been attempting to turn my essay collection (read: MFA thesis) into a decent manuscript. I also have a couple of drafts I’ve been making slow progress on—one stemming from the shattering of the Daisy Buchanan-as-feminine-model fantasy I formed in high school, and another attempting to make sense of the disturbing obsession I’ve had with following Sirius since New Year’s Eve this year. Of course, once the reincarnation of Cosmos took off, I realized that, as much as I love (and re-watch ad nauseam, much to my fiancé’s bewilderment) each episode, it also, inevitably, alters the space around the Sirius essay, and I still need to deal with that.

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

I have a couple of weeks off between the end of spring semester and the start of summer school, so I’ve been making bold (and not always successful) strides in the kitchen. Mark Bittman’s latest, Cooked, has been a fantastic partner-in-crime for me as I’ve worked at learning to cook each day.

I can’t answer this question without giving a tremendous shout-out to the recently-published The Shape of Blue: Notes on Love, Language, Motherhood, and Fear, by my friend and MFA program colleague, Liz Scheid. It taught me so much, got my gears turning, and alternately broke and rebuilt my heart.

"The Darkest Inevitable Logical Conclusion": An Interview with Ben Segal

Ben Segal is the author of 78 Stories (No Record Press) and co-editor of the anthology The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Lit Pub Books). He is also the co-author, with Feliz Lucia Molina and Brett Zehner, of the forthcoming epistolary novel The Wes Letters (Outpost19). His short fiction has been published by or is forthcoming from Tin House, Tarpaulin Sky, Gigantic, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He currently lives in California.

His story, "Yes Hog," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, Ben Segal talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about mash-ups, metafiction, and blockbuster movies.

What can you tell us about the genesis of this story (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea)?

I think you guessed it a few questions down when you ask about mash-ups. I was thinking about what would happen if you made a mash-up not of the actual content of previously existing works but of their logics. To do this I needed to pick a couple of movies that work based on very clear premises. Both Yes Man and Groundhog Day rely on a specific idea, a hypothetical situation that catalyzes all of the narrative. That made them good candidates for this kind of logic mash-up. I also thought it would be pretty funny to take a pair of comedies and run them into the darkest inevitable logical conclusion I could imagine.

The story is organized into numbered sections, the first of which is not 1 but 0. This introductory section explains the conceit of the piece beginning with the phrase “In this story.” What made you decide the story should start with this Section Zero, rather than diving in medias res? In your mind, what is the advantage gained by opening the story on such a “meta” note (with the story acknowledging itself as a story)?

I probably like metafictional maneuvers too much but I really felt like it was important to lay out the cards early for this. If you don’t explain the logic of the world in the story, then it’s just this weird fucked up set of Jim Carey torture vignettes. By using a Zero section, I can set the meta stuff outside of the text proper and use it as a framing device that basically very overtly and honestly says: this is the set piece I’m working with, these are the ideas that this fiction works through. It lets the story exist as a story and as a story about a story. I like being able to bake that multiplicity into the text.  Or I’m just too old-fashioned and neurotic and feel like I need to explain the performance of writing or else it’s manipulative and dishonest and disrespectful of the reader. The answer is something like that.

Your story is a kind of “mash-up,” for the way it combines the main character of Yes Man with the cosmic joke of Groundhog Day. Do you understand any of your other writing as a process of juxtaposition? (Are you at all interested in “mash-ups” in any other media?)

I kind of addressed this earlier but yeah, totally. I was thinking about mash-ups. I was also thinking about appropriation in general, conceptual writing, etc., and how I could appropriate without taking any actual material. What’s cool about this story, to me, is that it’s a mash-up in a different medium that uses none of the physical material from its sources. It doesn’t even use scenes from the two movies. It’s a mash-up that is written from whole cloth but unmistakably still a mash-up. Or that’s the idea. And I’m realizing that it’s pretty perfect for it to appear in a magazine called the Collagist.

I think this story can also be read as part parody. I first detected the biting sense of humor with which you would treat your cinematic source material when I read the lines, “I think he also falls in love. Then the movie ends.” Was it your intention to skewer trite Hollywood storytelling? Or do you see the tone of the story as less sardonic and more playful?

The tone turns. It starts off just really honestly saying: This is the wager of the piece, these are the sources, I don’t know much about the sources though. Then the story kind of has a descent into the terrible and absurd. Then finally, I hope,  the story ends a little more thoughtfully than you’d have expected. It sort of says: Hey, here’s this trashy entertainment and let’s have fun playing with these premises but oh look they actually give us a way to think about ideas like sacrifice and eternal return.

It’s definitely not meant as an attack on Hollywood or a celebration of Hollywood either. Movies are important and pervasive narrative delivery devices and I was interested in taking these blockbuster cultural artifacts and using them for my own ends.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Right now I’m working on too many things. One thing I’m working on is trying to get people to read The Wes Letters, the collaborative epistolary novel/collective memoir thing I wrote with Feliz Lucia Molina and Brett Zehner. We’ve been giving readings and are planning to do several more this summer. Feliz and I also are working on another collaborative project, a trilogy of serial prose poem books called The Middle, The Beginning, and The End. So far we’ve only written The Middle. And then, on my own, I’m still making short stories, slowly, and even more slowly these will maybe amass into books.

What have you read recently that you want to recommend?

I want to recommend many things but most recently I read Insomnia and the Aunt by Tan Lin and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and both were very enjoyable in very different ways. One thing that they share is a tendency towards the understated and domestic. These are often qualities that bore me, but in these cases I enjoyed those kinds of simplicity and the way said kinds of simplicity opened subtly to their own complexities. This is so boring to write out. All I’m saying, I guess, is that I recommend these books even though I can hardly say ‘quiet domestic realism’ without sarcasm. They are good though, and more than just quiet domestic realism.