A Small Amount of Space

Jeff Bursey is a fiction writer, playwright, and literary critic. His books include two novels—Verbatim: A Novel (2010; reissued in paperback by Verbivoracious Press with additional material [2018]) and Mirrors on which dust has fallen (Verbivoracious Press, 2015)—and a selection of literary criticism, Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews (Zero Books, 2016).

His story, "A Livid Loneliness," appeared in issue Ninety-Five of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about the importance of dialogue, transitioning from being a playwright to a short story writer, and literary criticism.

Please tell us how "A Livid Loneliness" began for you.

It began with coming across the line on the gravestone at the end of the story in a book of quotations: "Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace." I wondered how to work back from Amelia Earhart's words to an unnamed woman with a traumatic past who thinks of herself as an adventurer. Then I linked the quote to the experiences of certain people I knew.

In this story, you make the choice to indicate dialogue with a hyphen instead of with quotation marks. How do you think this choice affects the way we read the story? At what point in the writing process do you make style choices such as this?

Every indication of speech is artificial, of course. I prefer the em dash as, for me, it seems slightly less disruptive of the flow and indicates movement a little better than the more quarantined approach of the double inverted commas.

In addition to being a short story writer, you're a novelist, playwright, and literary critic. How do the various genres you work in inform each other? What do short stories allow you to do that might be missing from the other genres?

I began as a playwright, so getting dialogue right was important from the start. Eventually I think I succeeded. Plus, I come from an oral culture. Short stories allowed interior life to be brought out in bursts, and "A Livid Loneliness" shows how dialogue can run into and out of internal speech. That became a learning process. Novels allowed for more reach, for me anyway. Literary criticism has brought with it exposure to a terrific range of thinking. Each of these forms enriches and draws from the others. Short stories require concentration on a small set of items, techniques, and subjects so that the most can be wrung from them in a small amount of space.

Do you have any current projects in the works? 

Yes, but as it's still in the concept stage I'll not say more now.

Are there any authors or books you would recommend to anyone who loved your story?

Alexandra Chasin's Kissed By, A.D. Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy, Sam Savage's last book, An Orphanage of Dreams, and Lee D. Thompson's bizarre stories found on the web at various places. None of these write things like my story. They're simply four fine writers who are pushing the possibilities of the story and who retain a sense of humour while doing it. There's encouragement in the very existence of their work, and each one is worth reading.

What Gets Into People?

Glen Pourciau's second collection of stories, View, was published in 2017 by Four Way Books. His first story collection, Invite, won the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have been published by AGNI Online, Epoch, Little Star, New England Review, New World Writing, The Paris Review, Post Road, and others.

His story,"Beer," appeared in Issue Ninety-Five of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about writing from experience, discussing politics in fiction, and writing process.

What first prompted you to write your story, "Beer"? Where did it begin for you?

I typically start a story by writing in a notebook. Sometimes I write lines of dialogue, sometimes I hear a voice, sometimes I'm listening to the noise in my head and trying to understand where it comes from. I read and reread these sentences and look for form and signs of life. Things I hear and see in daily life are included in these notes, and I often write about mundane situations and encounters. In the case of "Beer," there was an overpriced beer at a restaurant, just as in the story. Like Benny in the story, I'd been going to the same primary-care doctor for many years, and after I turned 65 I called to make an appointment for my annual checkup. I was told that my doctor did not accept Medicare, nor did anyone else in the practice. My wife had a primary-care doctor who was part of a large network, and I called to see if I could find a doctor there who accepted Medicare. None of their primary-care doctors did. The person on the phone referred me to a clinic in town that accepted Medicare. I booked it, showed up, and the first thing the doctor said was the exact line in the story. "What's wrong with you?" I decided not to take a deeper view of that question and said, "Nothing." Within the next half minute, the doctor looked straight at me, standing close, and asked: "Democrat or Republican?" Like Benny, I replied, "Is that a healthcare issue these days?" The question stuck with me. I don't usually get into politics in my stories, and I worried that with time the question would sound dated. In my opinion, that has not happened yet.

On a surface level, this is a story about a man who's upset about the inflated price of beer at a favorite restaurant. But this storyline becomes a means through which to explore his unhappiness with the current political climate. How can it be useful, narratively, to approach "big" topics by focusing instead on the mundane?

I am an internal writer, and my stories don't elaborate on huge social forces or have large casts of characters. In "Beer," I'm touching on a "big" topic but showing its impact on an individual. I feel the most recent presidential election in my daily life more than I have any other, and it affects the way I see people, the way I react in conversation, and to any references to politics. Most people I know fear bringing up national politics because the subject threatens to trigger uncivil discussion. Politics imbues and burdens the mundane. One lasting effect of the election is that I realize how little I understand people, after a lifetime of trying. My awareness of my failure of understanding has only grown since then. Our viewpoints are as different as our fingerprints. It's overwhelming to think about this.

This story is mostly about Benny, but it's told from the view of his spouse. Why did you make this choice in perspective?

In Benny's case, I could get inside his head, but the story seemed to have more life viewing him from the outside. I liked the idea of him talking to himself out loud, the inside spilling outward. His wife hears him and tries to come to terms with his agitation. She is a witness, and the reader witnesses both of them. His closing question: "What gets into people?" could be a question she would ask about him. An involved witness as narrator puts some air into the story but keeps it intimate. 

Do you have any new creative projects in the works? What have you been up to since this piece was published back in 2018?

I am always writing stories. Four Way Books will publish my third story collection in 2021. My wife, Linda, and I have recently moved from Plano, Texas to Galveston, Texas, her hometown.

What has been inspiring you lately? Is there an author (or artist, or musician, or director) who you're currently excited about?

I've been reading So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munchby Karl Ove Knausgaard. It helps to read this book at a computer so you can look up the images Knausgaard discusses. He interviews other artists about Munch's influence on their work, and his way of talking about art, form, and point of view applies well to writing. I'd also recommend The Gulf: the Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis. It's a history of the Gulf of Mexico with a strong environmental perspective.  

The Eye for True

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions (W.W. Norton, 2019). His work has appeared widely, including in BuzzFeed, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, The Sun, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, he is the winner of the 2017 Poetry International Prize. His work has been translated into Chinese. Anders holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and lives in Minneapolis. Follow Anders on Twitter: AndersWeePoet / www.anderscarlsonwee.com

His poem, "Jim Tucker Lets Me Sleep in His Treehouse," appeared in Issue Eighty-Five of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with Angela Redmond-Theodore about layers of meaning, listening, and letting go. 

Here is a memory that reads like a poem. Or is it a poem that reads like a memory? How did "Jim Tucker Lets Me Sleep in His Treehouse" come to life?

The genesis of this poem was Jim Tucker's voice in my head saying, "That there's four inches, that's three, that's three and a quarter, that's five, that's five, that's four, and I can go on like that." Those lines looped over and over in my head. The language is musical, and that hooked me, but I felt a compulsion to excavate the layers of meaning hidden in his words. There's this deep pride in the voice, boasting of his eye's accuracy for measurements—yet his true intention is the assertion that his son was even better at such measurements (as he says in the next lines). It's a personal pride that sets up for a much deeper paternal pride. The paternal pride then becomes tragic as Jim Tucker shares that his son is now dead, that he lost his son to the war. But it took drafting the poem to begin to see what was hidden in those lines.

Your use of enjambment takes the poem from line to line, from the top of the page to the bottom, beautifully suited to the monologue describing the construction of the treehouse. Can you talk about your diction and form choices?

I have dyslexia. As a child it took me a long time to learn how to read and write. I did what's called "mirror writing"—I wrote backwards, and if you held it up to a mirror, it looked correct. Dyslexia made me wary of written language, but more trusting of oral speech. Even when I was very young I had an ear for hearing and memorizing how people talk: phrasings, speech tics, and so on. My parents joke that when I was little, if I overheard adults quoting lines from a sitcom, I'd interrupt and say, "No, that's not actually what they said, they said this—" and then I'd quote the dialogue verbatim. As a writer, I spend a lot of my time listening, continuing to develop my ear for speech. Jim Tucker's diction is based on a couple sources, combined. But as a writer, you also have to alter certain elements of speech to make the speech feel real on the page. In other words, you have to make it artificial to make it natural. It's a strange, counterintuitive process. To quote the poet Jack Gilbert, writing about Degas: "Degas said he didn't paint / what he saw, but what / would enable them to see / the thing he had." 

The poem ends with a few surprises: first, the introduction of the speaker's wife, and, secondly, the insertion of the speaker's name, and a joke—Bet you never heard that one before.In hindsight, the poem reads as if it could not have ended any other way, that it was headed in this single direction. Did you have the ending in mind early on? How did these lines take shape?

The ending is as much a surprise to me as it is to you—yet it also felt inevitable once I got there. I think the secret is letting go of intent. Instead, invest entirely in character and the music of language. If you've truly fallen into your character, with a kind of abandonment, they won't say anything they don't want to say. They'll say exactly what they mean to say, which often surprises the writer as much as the reader. While writing this poem, if I was in control of the voice, there's no way in a million years it would have ended on a joke. 

Reading is such an important aspect of a writer's life. Do you make a practice of reading, or do you read in a more spontaneous, casual way? What are you reading for relaxation these days?

I read a lot, as a practice. I'm currently reading A Separation by Katie Kitamura; Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems by Dorianne Laux; Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin; and "The Cave Man Cometh," an article on Neanderthals in the current issue of Smithsonian. I just finished Kudos by Rachel Cusk. Looking forward to reading There There by Tommy Orange; The Book of Delights by Ross Gay; Vantage by Taneum Bambrick; and Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral. Awaiting new works from Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy. 

What are you working on that you look forward to bringing to a reader's eyes?

I'll never tell. I'm working on a new book and it will take me a long time.

Receptacle of Arms

Ellen Stone taught special education in the public schools in Kansas and Michigan for over 30 years. She advises a poetry club at Community High School, and co-hosts a monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ellen's poems have appeared recently in Mantis, Moon City Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, San Pedro River Review, and are forthcoming in Switchback. She is the author of The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers' Cooperative Press, 2013). Ellen's poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net. 

Her poem, "My life as a lawn sprinkler," appeared in Issue Eighty-Four of The Rupture. 

Here, she talks with Angela Redmond-Theodore about motherhood, making a declaration, and the use of rhyme.

The intimate details the speaker offers in "My life as a lawn sprinkler" make me think that you as the author were trying to get at something as you were writing. Where did this poem come from? 

This poem came from my experience raising three daughters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and owning a house with my husband. I was raised in rural Pennsylvania, so suburban living still seems novel to me. I am a gardener, and southeastern Michigan can turn from wet in the spring to prairie-dry in summer. My intimate relationship with mechanisms like my lawn sprinklers fascinates me. I was literally thinking about motherhood and how much it is like a lawn sprinkler as I moved my small metal mechanism around my front yard raised bed, and all the flower gardens. I don't think I got the connection entirely until I read Matthew Olzmann's inanimate object poems. Originally, the poem was called "Winning the west in my own backyard." I must have been thinking more about the conquest of land, how to tame it at the start. 

This question is related to the first. As with any creed or manifesto, the poem's opening words, I believe... signal the reader to pay close attention to what follows. What follows are four stanzas of the inner workings, functions, and musings of a lawn sprinkler; and then two stanzas declaring an understanding of purpose: filling the well, distributing it. Is this a personal manifesto, or an artist's statement, perhaps?

That is an intriguing question. Originally, the "I believe" line is the fifth line in the poem, not the first. The poem is perhaps a bit of both manifesto and statement. It came from noticing and connecting; however, the poem is clearly a declaration. I am the one outside moving the sprinkler around. I describe myself as a receptacle, but one that can adjust and modulate. (In the original draft the children are "draping over hammocks, davenports, porch furniture." The father is nowhere to be found—although my husband would say, in his defense, that the gardens are primarily my creation!) When I realized that I was truly relating my life as a mother to a lawn sprinkler—seeing the arc and breadth of what I did every day raising my daughters—I was able to hone in on the poem's purpose. 

I love the way you've spread rhymes throughout the poem: do-over/spreading over/sweet clover; pressure/ churr, churr; continual spit/twilight dips/fireflies backlit; distributing it. Is there a poet who has influenced your understanding and use of rhyme?

The funny thing is I don't consider myself good at rhyming at all. Intentional rhymes like those in sonnets are difficult for me and often feel stilted. The rhymes in "My life as a lawn sprinkler" were originally embedded in more of a prose poem. In the subsequent revisions, the poem became more spare, and the rhymes more evident. The language of poetry feels alive to me, so sometimes the rhymes appear as I write because I am in the moment of the poem's action. I often write down lines as I walk, for instance. So, I think maybe I am more of an organic rhymer—it it happens, great. If it doesn't and I want to make it rhyme, I struggle.

As for poets who have influenced me, early on it was the language of James Wright and his ability to capture place and people so simply and lyrically. Sylvia Plath amazed me in her ability to mold and craft language to her purposes. But, I don't think of those poets as rhyming poets, exactly. Perhaps Emily Dickinson seeped into me. Walt Whitman could be my father in terms of how I see the earth and my connection to it. I also have always been drawn to Langston Hughes and his evocative, plain and powerful words. My favorite sonnet is "The sonnet ballad" by Gwendolyn Brooks—who I revere. And, of course, there is Shakespeare. I taught Romeo and Juliet for about 15 years in high school, and I am always floored by the sonnets in that play. I want to write one good sonnet like Shakespeare before I die!

Do you read to escape? If so, what is your preferred genre?

I absolutely read to escape. My favorite genre is still fiction, although I fear I am way pickier about what I read than when I was a child. (By the way, I adored Thomas Hardy novels as an adolescent, and I think he had an influence on my becoming a poet, too.) I want a good story that grabs me and keeps going strong until the end—the last novel to do that was An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. The other kind of novel I adore is one that has a sweep so broad and lyrical, it blows me off my feet. The Overstory is doing that to me now.

What project(s) are you working on at this moment?

I am working on a small project called "American abortion sonnets" to keep myself sane and connected in the current chaos of our nation. They are modeled somewhat off of Terrance Hayes' American assassin sonnets (modeled after Wanda Coleman's American sonnets), but I am trying to do the rhymes more traditionally. Given what I said earlier about my challenge with "forced" rhyming, I might need to abandon the form somewhat and improvise as Hayes and Coleman did. 

More broadly, I am writing a poetry manuscript about my daughters leaving home. "Daughters leaving home in the age of aggression" is one of the poems that might be the title. Of course, my own leaving home sneaks into the work. I am also still fiddling with a manuscript I have out in the world about growing up with my mother who is bi-polar. So, like the lawn sprinkler, I am far reaching—and somewhat scattered—in the scope of my work! 

Entering the Cathedral with Melinda LePere

Melinda (Mindy) LePere, a retired Detroit teacher, holds an MFA from Vermont College and has participated in the Springfed Arts writing community for many years. Her work has been published in the anthology At the Edge of Mirror Lake, in The Paterson Review, The MetroTimes, The MacGuffin, The Valparaiso Review, Juked, Mantis and The Ambassador Poetry Project. She received a nomination for a Pushcart. Mindy's affinity for the surreal is manifest in a fascination with puppets, fairy tales and the ordinary strangeness of life. It lurks in missing body parts and was incubated while teaching 20 years in the Detroit Public Schools.

Her poem, "Inside the Cathedral," appeared in Issue Eighty-One of The Rupture. 

Here, she speaks with interview Victoria DiMartino about physical experience both in and out of poetry, exploring darkness through writing, and how our stories provide protection in the darkness of the universe.

Where did you find the inspiration for "Inside the Cathedral"? 

My poems often get sparked by a physical experience, so, indeed I was inside a cathedral immersed in the cacophony of a practicing organ. And then there is a percolation, other images wanting to resonate that are illusive and require patience, that insist on rubbing against each other. Often, a quasi-memory begins to hum, I say quasi because my memory is very suspect¾sort of a gray field of icebergs with only tiny peaks I trip over, everything else is buried. 

The title of your piece is in some ways the first line, as it flows into the body of the poem. Could you talk about why you choose to start your piece like this?

Yes, I wanted to fall right into the poem. Placement inside a cathedral invokes the intimidation of heightened formal religion a place where someone should be praying but the narrator is imitating, practicing, hoping repetition might lead to revelation. The constellations are a similar image for me, the vastness unconnected and yet, we construe patterns and construct stories, the stories our safety nets in the blankness of the universe.

I really enjoyed the lines, "manila paper coated / solid back. He explained we were all there / in his room behind a black curtain." These lines struck me because of their vivid detail and how I could so easily picture them. But also, I was drawn in by the way it felt like logic a child would use, even though there's something darker there. Could you tell us about what the brother is saying/what he drew? 

The entire story is a family fable: the teacher calling my mother to school concerned about the darkness of his portrayal, followed by his explaining he didn't know how to draw people. For me, the darkness of the drawing falls down the rabbit hole of family humor as well as the way the dead are so thinly separated from us. 

What are you reading right now? Is it something new (in terms of style, genre, or subject) or something you've read before?

Lucie Brock-Broido and C.D. Wright. Also, Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyimi and The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig. I like spooky feral things: cryptic messages, almost like they have been translated. All of these are current and new to me.

Are you writing anything currently that you feel is changing you as a writer?

Both poets validate the acceptance of disparate images and trusting their volition to animate the poem. I feel I will be going deeper into the woods, more playful and more sinister. The dead only a room away.

Front to Back

Tiana Nobile is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Kundiman fellow, and a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is the author of the chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (2017). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Her poem, "The Night I Dreamed of Water," appeared in Issue Eighty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with Angela Redmond-Theodore about family, dreams, and revision.

The title is a bit of a giveaway, but with poetry, there's always more than meets the eye. Can you talk about how this poem came to be written?

Around the time I wrote this poem, my great aunt, who lived in New York City her whole life, had recently moved to a nursing home. My father traveled two hours each way to visit her every Saturday morning, even when she couldn't remember who he was. My father was also the primary caretaker for my grandparents who were in their nineties, and only a year before, my aunt had passed after a long struggle with cancer. My father, ever the devoted nephew/son/brother, took all this in stride. The poem was born out of this idea of filial duty, in spite of the inevitability of death. How families must continue to show up for each other, even as the boat begins to sink. Especially if the boat begins to sink.

Skillfully executed by punctuation and line breaks, the cadence of the poem reads like an incantation; or, more precisely, like the recitation of a dream it as enters the dreamer's consciousness, one fresh image at a time. Tell us something about the importance of dreams and the influence of dream-language in your work.

I'm an active, vivid dreamer. Usually, I'll lose the dream after a few minutes of being awake, but this particular dream lingered. As dreams go, I think I was carrying a lot of heaviness on behalf of my father. Most of my dreams are mishmashes of whatever I've been absorbing. This one just happened to sustain a cohesive, albeit surreal, narrative. 

The poem begins with an image of quiet, rhythmic action—A man in a boat scoops water. And although the poem ends with a similar image—Front to back. Side to side.— it's very clear that the storm has left the speaker, and the reader, in a very different place from where they started. It seems to me that the tension between harmony and upheaval is something you've studied. Would you say that it's an ongoing theme in your work?

I love your observation. I do think that a poem can act as a container for turbulence. I often turn to a poem in order to process a feeling or make sense of something intangible or out of reach. I think the poem – its meter, rhythm, form, syntax – can provide a container of "harmony" in order to get close to the upheaval that you mention.

Probably everyone who is reading this has at least one pile of reading material in the room they're sitting in. What is in the pile nearest you?

Interrogation Room by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Drifting House by Krys Lee, To Afar From Afar by Soham Patel, SWOLE by Jerika Marchan, and Arabalis by Leah Silvieus.

Are you writing, or have you written, something that would come as a surprise to people who know you, including yourself?

I'm a slow and meticulous writer, and for me, the surprise often comes through revision. I will work on a single poem for years, and most of my poems undergo several transformations. Most of the time, the "final" poem ends up significantly different from the original, and that can be surprising. It's also the fun and challenging part of working through the life of a poem.

I Always Have More to Give

Charlie Clark's poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. He has studied poetry at the University of Maryland and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He lives in Austin, Texas. 

His poem, "What Tongues Are Given," appeared in Issue Eighty-Four of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Angela Redmond-Theodore about voice, titles as propositions, and the physicality of words.

"What Tongues Are Given" reads as if you couldn't get the words on the page fast enough. How did the poem come to be written?

This poem did come in a bit of a rush. Or at least the initial draft. I think the short lines help suggest the excitement inherent in its composition. There is a choppiness in it, a way that the line breaks work against the clarity of utterance, that I think enhances what this poem is trying to convey. Content-wise, I often find etymology to be a great entry into a poem—there's so much to discover in how a word came to be. They sometimes have these surprising histories. The first section, where the speaker is explaining the history of "ecstasy" in a failed attempt to calm himself, was not actually the first part I wrote. The fourth part came first. The initial trigger was a story my father told me about being locked in a room just a few minutes before my parents' wedding. I immediately started imaging that scenario, imagining what a person in that scenario might imagine (or what would be amusing to have a person in that scenario imagine). And "give," the word the speaker is ruminating on in that fourth section, is fairly flexible in terms of possible meanings. Offering, charity, surrender, breaking. I can't recall exactly how I landed on that word, but the idea of the door having to give so the speaker could give himself away, so to speak, was exciting to me. 

Anyway, once I had the occasion/basic scenario, the use of first-person, and the exploration of etymology, I had a framework through which to explore. Though that makes it sound much more calculated than it actually was (or ever is). I'm usually just groping around, feeling out for something that makes sense or surprises. But having those basic limitations made it easier to know what would and wouldn't work in the poem.

Aside from the groom behind a stuck door, the ur-narrative, of a priest and nun meeting, falling in love, leaving the church—the technical term for that last part is "laicized" (which is far, far too sexy-sounding a word for what it actually means)—and then getting married in a church, that is, more or less, my parents' actual story. So even though the composition happened over a short period of time, that portion of the content had been gestating for quite a while. All that said, I didn't feel a particular need to stay completely true to the specific details of my parents' romance. Or their interests. Those things provided a framework into which I launched myself, looking for ideas and images that would resonate with, expand, or complicate the initial scenario. 

Once I had the groom's voice, I knew pretty quickly that I'd want counterpoint, so the bride's voice felt necessary early on. It read it as counterpoint in terms of voice and character, but also tone. There is a clarity of confidence that contrasts to the way the groom's voice is thinking about words. 

Though I don't remember, I'd be willing to bet that the last section I actually wrote was the third part, in the voice of god. Given where the two characters are in their emotional and spiritual lives, it seemed right to include god in the conversation—there's something about trinities, right? But writing in the voice of god presents its own challenges, so I'm glad that part is the briefest. God probably is, too. But it is also the slowest part, the most casual, I think. Which is how I'd like to think god would be, observing this scenario. 

The contrast between the lengthy, mysterious section titles and the extremely brief, nearly empty, lines that follow is quite dramatic. I'd be interested to know why you chose this form for the poem. Which came first, the titles or the stanzas?

Great question. Some years ago I read an interview with the novelist Donald Antrim in which he said he thought of titles as propositions (The 300 Brothersbeing a great example). That's stayed with me. I don't always follow that tenet, but I think that in "What Tongues Are Given," the section titles do employ that strategy, to a certain extent. The rush of composition led to the short verse lines, and to voices that were limited in terms of how much they would realistically explain about their situation. So the titles provided a good place to ground the particulars of each section; to set the stage. And I think there is something pleasing about the long, overly explanatory titles contrasting with the quickness of the lines. The more information one packs into a title, the more particular and odd they can seem, and the more opportunity there is for the poem to release in different directions. 

But to answer your question about which came first, the lines/line length did, but only just. I probably had the first sentence or two of the fourth part down when I started to suspect the title would need to explain what was going on. So the line length helped determine the need for the longer part titles. 

Always the best / explanations /involve a body. These lines from the beginning of the poem seem to speak beyond the subject being addressed—that is, the definition of ecstasy. They come across, rather, as a tenet to be adhered to, one that the speaker does adhere to as the poem progresses. Is this a personal/professional philosophy of yours as a poet?

Well, thank you. I do enjoy when a phrase or sentence speaks to something beyond the tensions within the poem itself. And I can see how the stakes of the poem suggest a sort of larger striving toward meaning (emotional and spiritual states of being). I'd be wary, though, of saying I adhere to anything as clarified as a philosophy—unless one would call trying to be open to following any particular line of inquiry a philosophy. Most of what I do in my writing life (and, honestly, my life-life) involves uncertain meandering, accumulating material on the page—words, phrases, images—and seeing whether some parts resonate with one another or do something compelling. Even in the case of this poem, where a particular narrative was the catalyst for composition, the goal of the work was to see how far away I could get from the story of a priest and nun falling in love. In that way, the material becomes immaterial. Or I want it to be. Somewhere Larry Levis said he knew early on that his goal was to write poems that were about nothing, whatever their material. I'm butchering that statement to suit my own devices. 

I will say I do believe in, or have experienced, the value of the tactile, the physical—the prop that becomes the proposition. In my writing, I often find the physical to be a good place to begin. Of course, I say that, and then I remember that the poem under discussion begins in abstraction, in breaking down how the word ecstasy's meaning takes shape. So, you know, my philosophy may be that I contradict myself. Though I should say that by breaking down a word, by looking at it as a thing made of parts and containing histories, a word does, in and of itself, become a sort of body. A word can seem to have properties that mirror the physical. And pitting the physical restriction of the speaker—trapped behind a stuck door—against abstract thought is a satisfying launch pad for the tensions with which the poem seems to want to grapple. 

Is there a new (to you) author whose work you look forward to delving into as time goes on?

My wife (poet Sasha West) turned me on to N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy. That's been a compelling thing in which to lose myself. Reading it, I have been regularly astounded by how expansive but internally consistent a world she is able to make. World-building aside (which, that's a lot to set aside; there is so much going on there), Jemisin has a pretty great sense of attack, in terms of tone. There is a good deal in the writing that I find invitingly crisp and bemused. 

Anna Burns's novel Milkmanis similarly incredible in terms of tone. She has a really vast range at her disposal, and in service of illuminating a terrible and seemingly inescapable situation (essentially life in Belfast during The Troubles, though aside from "Milkman" nothing in the book [people or places] actually gets a proper noun). There is a sequence in the book about a dead cat that I will never forget. Or ever fully understand, in terms of how she managed to make it work as well as she did. That book makes for a great pairing with the show Derry Girls. 

As far as poets go, I really enjoyed Jana Prikryl's first book, The After Party,from a couple of years back. I like how she approaches language—there is a lot of wit and play, but in the service of something sincere. I'm looking forward to her new book No Matter, which is coming out this summer. 

Traci Brimhall's Saudade(also recommended by Sasha) was a bit of a revelation. The structure as well as the individual poems and lines. She seems to have a really vivid and capacious imagination. I haven't read too much of her work, so I'm looking forward to going through all of it, old and new. 

And I—along with probably every other discerning reader of poetry in the twenty-first century—am eagerly awaiting Diane Seuss's new book, Frank. Seeing those poems out in the world over the last several years, and seeing how celebrated she has become, has been very exciting. 

Is there anything about what you're currently working on that has made you rethink what you've written in the past?

Hmm. This is an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of failed poems, or only marginally successful poems in my past that are best left there. But I think your question applies more readily to the older poems I thought/think of as successful. When thinking about those poems, my sense is less that my new writing makes me rethink my old writing (it's all about loss, anyway, right?) than that what I'm writing now helps clarify which obsessions/interests are passing and which persist. I do like being able to look at certain poems I've written and think, "yes, I wrote that, and I stand by it, but I have no real interest in writing that now." And I like looking at certain poems and feeling totally flummoxed as to how I managed to make them. That's both exciting and terrifying. 

I've been rereading all the books by my recently departed teacher Stanley Plumly. It's informative to see how willingly he treads and retreads certain subjects, ideas, forms, lines of inquiry. He sometimes even pulls lines or sections from poems published years before and inserts them into new work. See, for example, the last line of "White Oaks Ascending" inThe Marriage in the Treesand the last line of "Childhood" inOld Heart. Or "Lapsed Meadow," inSummer Celestial, and how he rewrites it as "Lapsed Meadows" inOrphan Hours.Even when he is reworking old material, the work does, naturally, expand and deepen. I don't have as clearly defined a range of subjects or interests as Stan did, or at least none that I can plumb so deeply for so long. But in reading his work again, it is valuable to see that one needn't remake oneself each time one comes to the page. I am definitely not obsessive about always doing something new. Nor do I need to have everything I write sound like it proceeds from a singular, unchanging voice. I just don't have enough time at my disposal to be choosy. If I write something and I find it compelling, I'm thankful.

It Isn't Mrs. Miller

Adam McOmber is the author of two story collections This New and Poisonous Air and My House Gathers Desires (BOA) as well as a novel, The White Forest (Touchstone). His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Diagram, and Fairy Tale Review. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

His story, "There's Someone at the Door," appeared in Issue One Hundred and One of  The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Andrew Farkas about simple problem stories, a Schrödinger neighborhood experiment, and the self as other. 

Please tell us about the origins of "There's Someone at the Door." What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?

I wanted to think of story based on a simple problem. I like the idea of setting up a problem at the beginning of a story and then allowing the piece to move forward, step by step, with the characters attempting to solve the problem. 

I live in an apartment in Los Angeles, and every so often, I think that maybe I hear someone knock on the door. Sometimes, I go to the door and look out the little peephole, but there's never anyone there. This is, of course, scary in itself. 

So when I thought about my "simple problem" story, I pictured this husband and wife arguing about whether or not someone knocked at the front door of their house. Then I thought: what would it mean to answer a door if no one knocked? It seemed to me that doing such an act might cause a lot of metaphysical issues that could not easily be resolved.

In this story, you take a completely banal situation (a couple after dinner hearing a knock at the door) and make it, I don't believe I'm overstating here, terrifying. There's no axe murderer or supernatural slasher, but when Alan decides to open the door, I was the person in the movie theater saying, "No! Don't do it!" So, what about the banal can scare us so much? And what about this situation lent itself to investigating this idea?

The door of Barbara and Alan's house felt a bit like the box in Schrödinger's thought experiment about the cat. If the couple doesn't answer the door, then a wide variety of possibilities exist. That's creepy! Then I decided to challenge myself to see if I could continue the feeling of Schrödinger's Cat even after the door was open. Could I make it feel as though there was both someone at the door and no one at the door simultaneously? How long could I continue that feeling?

I'm really interested in Mrs. Miller. At first, she's just there to star in Alan's sick joke. Then, she becomes more of a character when we learn about her life (her husband died and now she lives alone). But by the end, when we combine all of what we've learned about Mrs. Miller together (even her role in the sick joke), she becomes something much bigger – even though she's never actually on-stage. So, how do you see Mrs. Miller working in this story?  

I love that people are asking me about this character. I recently had someone tell me that she thought Mrs. Miller was some kind of witch or a ghost. Now I want to write a story simply called "Mrs. Miller." There's something freaky about the blandness of that title. It pulls at my imagination. In all honesty, I came up with Mrs. Miller because I was trying to think of a possible person who could be at the door. One of my good friends always talks about the "neighbor ladies" who would come around and visit his family in his small town in Iowa. So I created a neighbor lady in this story. Mrs. Miller is a neighbor lady with problems. Her husband is dead. She has lost her keys. She is also, I think, something like Jacque Lacan's mirror. She is the self as other. Barbara and Mrs. Miller may very well be the same person. Perhaps all neighbor ladies are Lacan's mirror?

What have you been reading recently that you might recommend?

I'm rereading all of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. "The Rats in the Walls" will seriously mess with you. Along with that, I'm reading several books by Slavoj Žižek. I particularly like his book called Event. Also on my nightstand are Brian Evenson's A Collapse of Horses, Jim Woodring's Fran, and also How Jesus Became Godby Bart D. Ehrman (a seriously brilliant atheist and New Testament scholar).

What are you writing these days?

I'm trying to write a lot of little horror stories. I also just finished a big horror story about Jesus and the Apostle John. They're lovers and they get in some big trouble after the resurrection. We will see what happens with that.

That Kind of Conversation

Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays The Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writer's Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative non-fiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.

Her poem, "North Street," appeared in Issue Eighty-One of The Collagist. 

Here, she speaks with interviewer Angela Redmond-Theodore about Joni Mitchell and the musicality of literature.

I am moved by the quiet and relentless sensuality of "North Street." Touch, smell, hearing, sight, and memory each take a turn leading the reader through the poem. How did the poem come to be—was it triggered by one sense or another, or did the moment described in the poem awaken your senses?

This poem came to be as a response to both the very circumstances the poem describes and to Joni Mitchell's "Song for Sharon."  For years I have been sort of a student of Mitchell's lyrics, and I was thinking a lot about how that song evolves and turns over and over, how it covers the distances it does. I was also considering what marriage is or could be, feeling both a yearning and a cool detachment from the enterprise. These were not competing but complementary impulses, and that song was often on my mind. It was during a time when I wrote in a studio in an old bank building where artists and writers rented space. Late afternoons and evenings after work, that scene of a busy downtown street, a cinema, and a bridal dress store informed my imagination and much of the writing I did.

This isn't exactly stream of consciousness, but the line breaks and lack of stanza breaks create a connection, or a string of connections—between images, between lines, between phrases—where otherwise there might not be any. How did you come to order the lines of this poem?

I write all of my poems aloud, speaking them while writing or typing, and I reread and revise aloud too. Sound and syntax dictate much of the order of ideas in all my poems, and my ear sometimes leads me towards a logic that I may not have otherwise found. With this particular poem considering issues around marriage, the act of wedding, the notion of being a bride, I was working to perform both longing and a critical, cerebral relationship to that longing. Here, it resulted in locating the speaker in the evocative setting that spring in my studio provided, musing on the evolution of ideas in the song and my speaker's own emotional situation, and a return to the setting informed by that reflection.

I am fascinated by the sudden introduction of the first-person pronoun toward the end of the poem. This move anchors the theme of marriage, which runs throughout the poem, in the reader's mind: I start to make some vows: to get more sleep, / head south again, play guitar, get outside more, / not to die alone.Can you talk about self-reflection, generally speaking, and about the particular decision not to start the poem with these lines?

In this case, the set of "vows" is so emotionally and psychologically located in the situation that I didn't think to place them anywhere else in the poem. When I was first drafting the poem, that list itself surprised me. In revision, my main concern was that the scene include enough of the right details for those lines to feel surprising and also built towards.

Beyond the literal references to music in the poem, "North Street" is remarkably lyrical. My favorite lines are petals falling, gathering about them, beige / as aged lace.What music do you listen to/what do you read to help you refine the musicality of your own voice?

I've mentioned Joni Mitchell, so obviously I love her sense of rhyme as much as anything else in her verse—the inventive ways her rhymes draw connections between words and concepts that surprise a listener. I listen to a broad variety of music, but I write without music playing. In addition to writing aloud, I read prose and poetry aloud, so I absorb a lot from what I am reading at a given time and from what I have engraved in my memory through rereading. For example, I find that when I am teaching Shakespeare, my poems become iambic by accident. Recently, I was reading a contemporary collection that is in blank verse but nods to the epic or Homeric, and my writing tended towards dactylic hexameter phrasing. I either leave my drafts kind of metric or, more often than not, I go through and interrupt the meter depending on what a given poem needs.

What are you working on now that you can't wait to see the light of day?

I've recently completed the manuscript that "North Street" is part of, and I am excited for that to see the light of day. Meanwhile, I am having fun discovering what my next big project will be. I'm seeing new thematic and stylistic patterns, and I am curious how they will develop. I have an evolving sequence of poems that I'm sort of thinking of as short folk songs. These are certainly inspired by the agrarian landscape I grew up in, but they also have a dreamlike quality that comes, I think, from memory having turned what it knows to archetype. In another evolving set of poems, I am thinking about myriad forms of beauty—poetic and visual, cultural—alongside nostalgia, coming of age in the nineties, fashion, glitter and the grit of grunge. These two groups of poems seem to be working as counterpoints to one another.

The World and Elsewhere

Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, All Back Full, and two story collections, Asunderand Good People. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, and the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College. He was a fellow in fiction for the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010 and writer-in-residence at Syracuse University for fall, 2018. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. www.robertlopez.net

His story, "Roy-Boy," appeared in Issue Eighty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about how form influences content, works in progress, and the inspiration for "Roy-Boy."

Where did "Roy-Boy" begin? What inspired this story?

A hundred years ago I worked in a restaurant as a waiter and there was a guy who worked in the kitchen named Roy. I can't say that Roy inspired the story because the rest of it is all fiction or mostly fiction.  

I read this story breathlessly. I felt like I was tumbling through it, in the best way. Was this story always written as one, long sentence, or did the form come through revision? How did the process of writing a single-sentence story differ from other work you've done?

Yes, the form came through the initial composition. I've done a few pieces that are one long, uninterrupted sentence. They're fun to do and the word you used; "breathless" is how I hear it, too. 

The Rupture published "Roy-Boy" in July 2016. Have you changed as a writer since then? If yes, how so?

I remain unchanged, I think. Or I'm always changing in ways I do not care to scrutinize or divulge. 

If your writing was a place, where would it be?

The world and elsewhere.

What is something you've read and loved recently?

I'm currently reading Jeff Tweedy's memoir and am enjoying it very much. For something I can get behind all the way, probably Joy Williams. 

What are three words that describe one of your WIPs?

Slow, Slower, Slowest.