Jennings, Brittany – Page 17 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 61: A Conversation with Marvin Bell

Interview in Willow Springs 61

Works in Willow Springs 79 and 60

October 15, 2006

Brett Ortler and Zachary Vineyard

A CONVERSATION WITH MARVIN BELL

Photo Credit: robertpeake.com

Marvin Bell is the author of nineteen books of poetry and essays, the most recent of which, Mars Being Red, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. “What sets the new poems apart from those of the 1990s,” according to Publisher’s Weekly, “also brings them close to some poets of the 1960s: they speak out directly, angrily and almost despairingly against the current administration and the war in Iraq. There are ‘too many body bags to bury in the mind.’ Unlike many poets of protest, though, Bell ties his antiwar sentiment to an awareness that, even in peacetime, we all must die: ‘We need to think of what might grow in the ﬁeld / from our ashes, from the rot of our remains.’”

Born in New York City in 1937, Marvin Bell grew up on rural Long Island. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Alfred University, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and a master of ﬁne arts degree from the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and served two terms as the state of Iowa’s ﬁrst Poet Laureate. He has also taught at Goddard College, the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington, Wichita State University, and Portland State University.

“Poetry doesn’t easily reveal itself,” Bell said during his opening remarks at the International Camouﬂage Conference at the University of Northern Iowa in 2006. “At ﬁrst glance, it looks and sounds like the utilitarian language we use every day, but it isn’t. It can be the lie that tells the truth. It can follow an indirect path that reveals more than a straight line would… In other words, to see it, one sometimes has to take a second look. And, indeed, one can be looking directly at it and not see it until it moves.” Bell’s many honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia.

His books of poetry include Rampant (2004); Nightworks: Poems, 1962–2000; Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2 (1997); A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1994); The Book of the Dead Man (1994); New and Selected Poems (1987); Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See (1977), which was a ﬁnalist for the National Book Award; A Probable Volume of Dreams (1969), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Things We Dreamt We Died For (1966).
“Art is a way of life, not a career,” Marvin Bell wrote in “32 Statements About Writing Poetry.” We met with him at his home in Port Townsend, Washington, where he talked about teaching, poetry, the personal sublime, and political engagement.

BRETT ORTLER

Do you think there’s too much emphasis on writing perfect poems?

MARVIN BELL

Depends who you are. I don’t think Charles Bukowski worried about it. What is “perfection”? And how does one attain it? Some think it requires writing slowly, laboring through revision after revision. Yet some excellent poets have written fast in an improvisational manner. There’s no one way to write. I believe that, I don’t just say it. Don Justice is an example of someone who wrote very slowly, even though he believed poets should write a lot. I once took over an oﬃce of his in Iowa City and in a drawer were a few sheets of paper on which he was working out three lines in a poem called “For the Suicides of Two Years Ago”—three lines about the black keys on a piano, and he’d typed them over and over, making tiny changes. I think people make art in many diﬀerent ways, and genius in the arts consists of getting in touch with one’s own wiring. It’s not a question of good and bad.

Bill Staﬀord’s attitude toward writing was something else. He used to say that writing is a natural human activity, and he would allow an audience to think whatever they wanted to about him. He was tough inside. I saw him, in a sense, diminish readings where the event seemed too important, where people seemed to be making a fuss. He would read fewer poems than usual and mainly small poems—it’d still be a wonderful reading—but it’d be short, as if he were taking a position against making it too important. When he went to a party after a reading, if there were important people in the room, and people in the corner who seemed to feel as if they weren’t sure they belonged, he would head right for those people. I never saw a man who could pay better attention. When he was talking to you, he was right there talking to you.

We were up at the Midnight Sun Writer’s Conference in Alaska— both teaching—and I said to him, “Let’s write some poems back and forth sometime.” And he agreed. So I got home and I was thinking, Whoa, I’ve got to write a poem and I’ve got to send it to Bill Staﬀord. It’s got to be a good poem. And while I’m thinking that, here comes Bill’s ﬁrst poem. We didn’t have e-mail in those days, so we’d write back and forth, and we published a couple of books of that work, but we hadn’t intended to publish—it was just something we started to do. Sometimes Bill would send three or four poems, one of which would be the oﬃcial poem. It didn’t matter whether the poetry was good—whatever that means—it mattered that anybody could do this, that there was a community about it and that it was fun. Someone told me that Merwin may have suggested the same thing to James Merrill years ago. I used to do it in classes. We’d draw names out of a hat and people would pair up and write six pairs of poems, going back and forth.

ZACHARY VINEYARD

There’s a small press trying to recreate that in Idaho—Blue Scarab Press. They print chapbooks with ﬁve poems each from two authors.

BELL

Blessings on small presses. There was a fellow in Idaho who printed pamphlets of Staﬀord poems, Donnell Hunter—he’d do a pamphlet of Staﬀord’s work every year. And he also did a pamphlet of poems Bill and I wrote during the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, where we decided to write poems back and forth each night about the conference. On the nights when it was my turn I couldn’t sleep because I had to write my poem, while Bill was up at ﬁve in the morning writing, who knows, six poems. Bill knew that judgments were beside the point, and he wrote a lot, published thousands of poems. I asked him, decades ago, whether he’d written hundreds of poems or thousands. He said, “Thousands.”

And I said, “If you say thousands, that means you’ve written at least two thousand poems.” I hardly knew him yet. And he said, “Well, last summer, someone lent us a cabin in Oregon, and I had a little desk and whenever I ﬁnished a poem, I’d put it over here on the right side with a stone on it. And at the end of the month I had about…” and he held up his hands to indicate a ream’s worth of paper. I understand that for years he only wrote for about an hour and a half in the morning. He’d start with a little something and just go with it. I’ve written in his style, but I don’t generally write that way. The line that I cherish by William Carlos Williams, that shows up in Paterson, applies to Bill: “Only one solution: to write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.” That’s a very diﬀerent attitude than trying to write perfect poems.

VINEYARD

How did you end up focusing on sentences in poems?

BELL

Some years ago I wrote a poem that sounded like—I don’t want to be too fancy about this—but it had the feeling of having been taken from a book lost to antiquity. So I called it, “From the Book of the Dead Man.” And there were some other unusual things about it. Every poetic line was a sentence. That is, the sentence was also the poetic line. And the sentence was elastic. You know, it’s syntax that provides opportunities for an enjambment, or an end-stop, changes in pitch, pace, timbre… It’s syntax that’s the real secret to free verse. So I got away from the obsession with free verse lines in that poem. In eﬀect, I did away with the ongoing arguments about the poetic line. And the poem had two parts with titles. It’s one thing to have stanzas or sections, but two separate parts with titles—what is that? But of course the implication is, Oh yeah, you thought the poem was over. But it doesn’t have to be over. And the truth is, I don’t believe any poem has to end where it ends.

People talk about terminal pleasure—which sounds like something in a Greyhound station—but a great ending doesn’t have to be the only ending. You can keep going and make another great ending. That’s how the brain works anyway—things coming from diﬀerent directions all at one time. And everything connects, but it doesn’t necessarily connect right now. So things in the second part of a dead man poem might connect to the ﬁrst part or they might not. You know how in workshops, if you repeat something, you’re told to get rid of it? But the goal of poems isn’t to be as eﬃcient as possible. If it bears saying again, say it again. So I did that.

Jane Yolen, who’s published and edited over a hundred children’s books and writes poetry now and then, was doing an anthology—“about adult fantasy,” she said. I wasn’t sure what she meant. She said, “That dead man poem of yours would ﬁt, but they have to be unpublished poems, so send me some new work.” I forgot about it and didn’t do it. Next year I saw her again and she said, “You never sent me a poem, but I’m doing a second volume.” I sent her some unpublished poems that might be adult fantasy, and she sent them all back and said, “Well, these are nice, but, you know, that dead man poem, that would’ve worked.” So I said to myself, Okay, she wants a dead man poem. I wrote a new one, imitating the ﬁrst one, and after I wrote that one, I got even more interested in the form. I wrote another one and another and pretty soon I was oﬀ and running. I loved the form of the dead man poem because I found that I could put anything in it. Also, it ﬁts my philosophical leanings and the way my brain operates.

When I’m teaching, I like to say it doesn’t matter what you start with, it’s the quality of attention you pay to it afterward. You can put anything in a poem so long as you make use of it later. You may not even have to make direct use of it. You might just make use of things that ﬁt with it. You want to be alert to where it leads.

I kept writing dead man poems and published two books of them, but the truth is there are a lot more dead man poems than that. I’m considering writing another book of them. There are ﬁve in the new book. Some reviewers are likely to say, “What the hell? You have these poems and then these poems? They don’t look or read anything like each other.” If so, they should look again.

A few years ago, I was writing a friend and I said, “I’ve written the last dead man poem and goodbye to the man of my dreams.” It turned out to be the next-to-last. I had to write one more to ﬁnish that book. But I got an e-mail the next day and my friend said, “I know other peoples’ dreams are boring, but listen to this: You were seated at a table in Brussels. You had a red pen in your pocket. A red drink on the table. And a big pile of paper on the table. You looked like you didn’t want to be bothered but I felt I had to greet you. When I did, you looked sad and perplexed and you handed me the pile of papers and you said to me, ‘I’ve written all these poems called Following the Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps and I can’t put them in my book because I wrote the last poem for it last week.’” So I started writing poems called Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps, which look like dead man poems but have a diﬀerent point of view. And that was that. When workshop members want assignments at conferences, the last assignment I give is to write a dead man or a dead woman poem. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes not. It’s a form anybody can use, as far as I’m concerned. Poets and critics develop these ideas about what a poem should be, but it’s limiting to do that if you’re a poet.

VINEYARD

The dead man poems remind me of the surrealist poets, the spontaneous association. Do you identify with that aesthetic?

BELL

I don’t think we have had real surrealism in American poetry, but that’s what our quasi-surrealism was called because poets weren’t known to be doing anything like it before that. Real surrealism—pure surrealism—wouldn’t make any sense. We have certain episodes of surrealism in poetry. Bill Knott wrote a couple of books that were real tours de force. Jim Tate has what people call a surreal element—I don’t really think it’s surreal, I think it’s dark comedy or something else. Russell Edson, people will apply it to him, but again, it’s not really surrealism. He’s a fabulist.

I suppose the so-called Deep Image School thought of themselves, in a way, as surrealists but it seemed as if the images they were supposed to have brought up from the subconscious were too convenient. They weren’t exactly Breton—he brought up images from the subconscious that convinced you that you didn’t want to know him. [Laughs]

There are surrealist moments in the dead man poems, but the dead man poems are not surrealist. That’s the thing about the dead man form, it accommodates everything—the fantastic, sentimentality, abstract thinking, water, dirt and air. I think Ashbery’s poems, which can themselves contain all sorts of things, are sentimental, actually, but he also has this, you know, raise-your-mind concept. It accommodates surrealism, socio-political poetry, the Absurd (with a big A), and I like that. The other thing is, most people think of the dead man as a persona, but I don’t—I think of it as an overarching sensibility. There are certain truths that you could say underlie such a project. One of them is mortality. But the dead man is alive and dead at the same time, which allows him to say and do things that another speaker wouldn’t be able to.

ORTLER

Do you think it’s harmful to have a distinct view of what poetry should be?

BELL

It’s natural for young poets to have an idea of what poetry should be, to be creating aesthetics, because how do you start writing? It’s hard at the start to just feel that anything goes. You naturally have feelings about what’s good—and there are many ways to try to say what’s good and what’s better. But many of our institutions deﬁne poetry by dumbing it down. They’re supposed to be spreading it, and they are, but it’s often a watered-down version. Well, it’s not up to me to say every chocolate manufacturer should make great chocolate, but I can choose which one I eat.

At the other extreme, the poetry that gets the most attention from critics is poetry that needs unpacking, that has some diﬃculty about it that the professor has to explain to the class. I think that’s one of the reasons Stevens is taught a diﬀerent way than Williams is, and probably more often, because he invites explanation, commentary on the work, and Williams often writes in a way that excludes commentary or makes it unnecessary. The work that gets promoted in literary circles is work that has stylistic eccentricities, imaginative eccentricities, needs to be unpacked, is diﬃcult or obscure. I don’t have any position against that at all, but I think it’s only part of the scene. A great deal can be seen in good poems that do not require classroom unpacking, but it takes a special kind of reader. There can be layers in what appears to be direct expression. To me, that is more interesting than beautiful words in the ether.

Robert Lowell, many years ago, said in an interview something like, “American poets do a very diﬃcult thing very well.” And it’s true—I think American poets attempt to create individual styles by making the language diﬃcult, by putting a pressure on the language that makes it, as Williams said about poetry, “a less well-made or better-made machine.” When Bly was publishing The Fifties and then The Sixties, he published an essay called, “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry.” He said American poetry is like a pinball machine, full of levers and buttons and lights and razzle-dazzle, while poetry in other countries is a diﬀerent thing, based more on the quality of imagination and the quality of emotion, and often with a socio-political stance to boot. That’s neither good nor bad, it just is, even still. And I think Ashbery will be taught more than Neruda. I mean, Neruda will be taught as a socio-political, cultural ﬁgure more than his poetry will be closely read because most of Neruda’s poetry doesn’t require unpacking. He’s a little surreal in his second book, Residencia en la tierra, but the poems don’t require a critical unpacking, not really. To me, analysis is worth more than judgment—by analysis, I mean description—you know, what is the poem doing?

ORTLER

How has the current political situation aﬀected your work?

BELL

The new book, Mars Being Red, is largely wartime. The New Yorker just took four wartime poems. One of them is set in Bagram and concerns the torture of a taxicab driver who was arrested even though they knew he was innocent. For The New Yorker to run something like that seems to me indicative. It’s hard for me not to be engaged by the news, not to be concerned about socio-political matters, but I can’t say that everybody should be.

I’m going to teach some classes at Grinnell when I’m back in Iowa City, and I’m thinking of telling the students that all the poems have to be about the news. I don’t care where they go with it. They can write about the shoes on a dictator, but I want the poems to come out of real events. The poems might be crap, but I feel as if it might be interesting to try it instead of everybody writing another love poem or another nature poem or another father poem or another there-wasn’t-enough-beer-at- the-party poem. Maybe it’s a stupid idea and won’t work, but I just think my own generation has been a little deﬁcient in dealing with things that are not about the personal sublime—and that topic is to be honored. There was a time when I thought that was the highest achievement in poetry, but I haven’t for a long, long time. And I could be completely oﬀ-track and maybe that’s what poetry is and that’s what it always has to be and always will and should be—the personal sublime—but I think you can write about the personal sublime, which is a term I just made up, and still be in the socio-political world. I would prefer to be able to do that myself. I’d like American poets to be more involved.

When the Iron Curtain came down, the poets in Eastern Europe were beside themselves because their work had mattered so much. You could be put in jail for your poem, and people were, all the time. The poems were important. But America loves everything, co-opts everything—even if there’s a club against baseball and apple pie, there’ll be a website up in a week, you know? And I used to joke that the general drift of governments in the last twenty years was to the right, so one day we might ﬁnd our poems meaning more and we’ll be put in jail. [Laughs]

In America, we don’t have a recognizable force of political poets. I think my generation are stylists of the imagination, most of them, and they’re good at it. But one could do something else if one wanted to. It’s a truism—but I don’t know if it’s true—that most political poetry is bad. I’m partial to philosophy, certain kinds of abstract thinking, but I think you can write that and still set it on the battleﬁeld or in governmental chambers or in alleyways with the homeless.

I don’t make a rule for anyone. It’s hard enough to write anything worth rereading. Why should you have to do this or that? But I’ve been a poet for a long time and, in a lot of ways, it’s easier to be a poet at twenty than a poet at sixty, because, at sixty, you’ve done a lot and you don’t want to do it again, and you know some things too well. For it to be surprising or worthwhile to yourself, you have to take a new path through the woods, and get lost deliberately, to ﬁnd a new approach. A new style leads to new content.

ORTLER

Do you think our country is going in a direction where poetry might matter more?

BELL

Bly said, I think in a poem, that the country is breaking up into tribes of the saved. That was a long time ago, twenty years probably. I think that’s what’s happening. Critics try to come up with the top ﬁve or ten American poets but it’s been nonsense for a long, long time. You can’t have Milton without Anglican England. You can’t have Shakespeare without Anglican England. You can’t have Dante without Catholic Italy. You have to have a kind of agreed-upon myth and belief structure to have “The Great Writer.” You can’t have that in this country, because it’s too diverse, too big, and there are too many tribes—and it’s becoming more so, not less.

VINEYARD

Do you think that’s why we haven’t seen the American epic poem?

BELL

I think that’s probably one of the biggest reasons you don’t get many poets trying to write the great American poem. The other thing about long poems is that nobody will sit still for them. How many crawls and promos can CNN run at once? How many ads can pop up while you’re trying to read the weather? It’s insane. But we’re very sophisticated. When I was a kid, when we’d go to the movies, we weren’t looking at what time it was. We’d wait for the next show if there were only ten minutes left, but if there was an hour left, we’d walk in. And you’d turn to the guy behind you and say, “What’s going on?” In about three sentences he’d ﬁll you in. Because the ﬁlms were so slow and there were no jump cuts. If the cowboys were out on the range, and all of a sudden there was a jump cut and they were in the kitchen, half the audience would turn to the person next to them and say, “What happened?” You don’t realize how incredibly sophisticated you are. People won’t sit still for a long poem. Poets do write longer poems at times. It would’ve been the normal taste once, but now it’s an acquired taste.

A few years ago, there was a group of younger poets who were making a big noise about being the new formalists. And they wrote long poems and poems that seemed long even when they were short. I thought they were rather dull, myself. One day, I asked Don Justice, who was a very good formalist, if they were any good, and he said, “Oh, no.” [Laughs] There’s a wonderful story of a young poet going to see Williams. He hands him a sonnet and Williams hands it back and says, “In this mode, perfection is basic.” In other words, you have to be able to write a perfect sonnet before you can write a good one. You know who the young poet is? Ginsberg. Of course he goes out and writes Howl and Williams writes the introduction to it. Williams also cracked later that, “All sonnets say the same thing.” You know he’s speaking metaphorically. But in this mode, perfection is basic.

VINEYARD

What is “Line Disease”? You’ve mentioned it before—writers focusing so much on line that they lose focus of the poem as a whole.

BELL

Hmm. I don’t know what I meant. Sounds good. [Laughs] People did talk for so long about free verse—actually people have stopped talking about free verse—but what’s happened is, line should make a diﬀerence. On the other hand, free verse is free, so you are free to have the lines not make a diﬀerence, because something else is going on in the poem. That’s what happens with prose poetry, you no longer have the lines, so maybe you have something else. Nobody knows. We think Keats is a great poet. A hundred years from now people might say, “Can you believe they thought Keats was good?” We’re so tied up in our own subjectivity, we have no way of knowing what people will like a hundred, two hundred years from now. One thing I know for sure is that I don’t know anything for sure and I tend to distrust critics and poets who think they do. Some work demands more of itself, it may not be obscure, it may not be allusive, but it demands imagination of itself, it demands socio-political engagement of itself, it demands pressure of language on itself, it pushes the envelope in some way—imaginatively, intellectually, verbally. Is this progress? I don’t know, but it’s change.

Most poetry books end up under dormitory beds, and nobody reads them. The person who gets the most out of a poem is the poet. Same with a painter and his or her painting. The great thing about art is that it’s the big yes, the one place in the world where you have permission to do anything and be anyone and go anywhere and transcend time and space, which you absolutely do not have in your daily life. One in the morning, you’re writing a poem, next thing you know it’s ﬁve in the morning and you have no idea where the four hours went. It just takes you over.

On one hand it’s Poetry with a big P, on the other hand it’s just poetry and it’s a symptom of other things. I know a lot of poets who have had great success, but have not been made happy by it. They wanted something from writing that writing wasn’t going to give them. The writing was symptomatic. It was a manifestation of deeper things. And if you make it something else, if you make it the goal itself, then that’s no diﬀerent than deciding that your life should be devoted to bowling. I think that philosophy and art as a survival skill are more important today because there’s bad news in your face every day. I think for young people, philosophy and the arts are important survival skills.

ORTLER

In an interview, you said that much harsh criticism of young writers and MFA programs is self-hatred or hatred-beyond-disguise—

BELL

Arguments about MFA writing programs are truly academic. People who criticize MFA programs have a point, but the point isn’t worth making. Do we really think MFA programs were designed to produce the greatest writers of the century? Did we ever believe that the teaching of creative writing is the same as the teaching of geometry? Writers tend to protect their turf. They want to say everything is lousy ever since them, and MFA programs make an easy target. If you want to put down a general group of people in the poetry world, that’s how to do it. It’s a version of the old argument that you can’t learn anything in school—you know, get out and see the real world. But people in MFA programs don’t live in the classroom, and they’re only in the program for two or three years. And some of the people who’ve been putting down MFA programs were themselves part of writing classes at, say, Harvard or Yale. You should only criticize what you’ve been part of, I think, because that’s what you know, but even then you may not know much.

Most people who go through writing programs aren’t going to be writers ten years later, but they’ll carry something from that time, some sense of creativity, of what writing is, what poetry is. The only reason to go to an MFA program is to hang around with other writers for two or three years and write like crazy. The truth is, you learn to write by reading. There is no other way. You model your writing after what you’ve read. If you read good poets, then your poetry will contain similar characteristics and maybe you’ll write a good poem. If you read boring poets, your poetry will probably be boring. You don’t learn how to hit a baseball by watching somebody strike out. You learn from watching someone hit a home run—a single is better, actually—and even then you can’t learn just by watching, you have to have a lot of pitches thrown to you, and then maybe somebody can give some advice.

There’s very little to say about writing poetry that isn’t obvious. I thought about writing a book about writing poetry, but then I decided it’d be pretty thin. You’d think that after teaching workshops for over forty years, I’d have a lot of ideas about it. And I do have a lot of ideas, but mostly about rules to break. When I started teaching in the ’60s, I used to tell students that the publication of poetry by big houses in New York was going to turn out to be a blip on the literary map. The future was like the past: small editions, small presses. I didn’t know I was going to be right, but that’s what I thought. Because originally what you had was a bunch of editors in New York who were willing to publish a cookbook so they could publish literature. Now you have editors who only want to publish cookbooks or romance novels, and they publish a book of poetry or a good book of ﬁction every once in a while so people won’t yell at them. It’s just a business for them.

The last few years before I stopped teaching, a certain kind of student in the Workshop had a diﬀerent notion of all this. They didn’t want to be known by a lot of people. They believed that if a lot of people liked your work and you were getting published a lot, you were no good, that it was a specialized thing for a specialized audience and that’s all the audience you wanted. They tended to be language-poetry-inﬂuenced or theory-inﬂuenced, and people like them founded magazines or presses and they just wanted to be part of their specialized group. Their work was often happily obscure.

Language poetry started out like surrealism in that the poets said to themselves, What has the use of conventional language got us? War, poverty, hatred—you know. Surrealists wanted to shake up expectations. So the new avant-garde got rid of lines and wrote in paragraphs, they broke the syntax of sentences, they wrote poetry that eschewed linear sense. They wanted to defy expectations so people could experience language and consciousness freshly. Much of the criticism supporting language poetry is elegant b.s.

A lot of the structuralist and post-structuralist theory in the academic scene seems to be based on two things: language is relative and language is subjective. So there’s cultural slippage. That’s basically what a baby knows—from the ﬁrst time Mom says No in a diﬀerent way. Language is impure. Nonetheless, what we say overlaps what other people understand it to mean. This is how language works: if you look up a word in the dictionary, the second deﬁnition doesn’t mean exactly what the ﬁrst one meant. Promote this to the phrase and it gets worse, promote it to the sentence, the line, the stanza, the poem, and it gets worse. Nothing is synonymous with anything else, but what one person says or writes and what another hears or reads overlaps. Writers are people who work in the overlaps. They accept the impurity of language. They just get on with it. Language is impure, so what.

Issue 62: A Conversation with David Shields

Interview in Willow Springs 62

Works in Willow Springs 59

March 1, 2007

Samuel Ligon and Adam O'Connor Rodriguez

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID SHIELDS

Photo Credit: The Rumpus

David Shields is one of today’s most controversial writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: “While on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know—Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geoﬀ Dyer— in another sense he’s accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.”

In addition to his new book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Shields is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a ﬁnalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reﬂections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader; he’s written reviews for The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Shields has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he teaches at the University of Washington. Since 1996, he has also been a member of the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, and Farsi. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonﬁction panel.

We interviewed Mr. Shields on two occasions, and this printed version is a combination of those interviews. The ﬁrst meeting was over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, on May 19, 2006. We met again at Hsu’s restaurant in downtown Atlanta, during AWP’s annual conference, on March 1, 2007.

SAMUEL LIGON

Your two upcoming books, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, have similar structures. Were you working on them simultaneously?

DAVID SHIELDS

I see the connection between those two books. So much of them is trying to argue my view for a kind of nakedness or a kind of rawness. In each case, I’m trying to get either to the primitive body or to the primary text. I’m trying to strip the body of defenses or the text of ﬁctional apparatus. I see them as corollary texts in this interest in what I would call nakedness, stripping the body of false spiritual consolations. They have similar opinions toward what I’ve come to regard as the groaning contrivance of the ﬁctional apparatus. There’s a drive for what I would call the raw or the naked in both books.

LIGON

You talk in these upcoming books about becoming conscious of taking risks. When you mention rawness and nakedness, you’re talking about a kind of risk-taking. Can you address artistic risk-taking?

SHIELDS

My ﬁrst novel, Heroes, is probably my least risk-taking book. The book is back in print and I’m proud of it, but it’s not my favorite, because the whole idea of embarrassment matters a lot to me, the idea of nervous discomfort, nervous-making. To me, the best way of doing that is some level of psychic risk on the writer’s part. Obviously not literal risk; compared with actual physical risk, it’s certainly diﬀerent. But I guess part of my drive from ﬁction to nonﬁction, if you want to call it that, is that the temperature of the room seems to go up in my nonﬁction. The nervousness goes up when there’s a sense that things you’re talking about aren’t under the guise of ﬁctional apparatus, because you can’t hide behind that.

For instance, in Black Planet, the narrator/author, who I call myself— but who to me is a ﬁctional projection or exaggeration of my real self—says that while having sex with his wife, he basically imagines that he’s Gary Payton, the basketball star. There’s a review in The Washington Post by Jonathan Yardley that suggests my wife should divorce me. To me, that’s just the highest praise. The book got under his skin that bad. It made him that nervous. So many books bore people to death. In reality, I never felt exactly what I wrote, but I said I did because I wanted the book to channel white guilt, white insanity. All these things. Have I ever felt that? I don’t know. Maybe I thought it. I must have thought it on some level because I wrote it down.
All these ideas are so interconnected—embarrassment, nervousness, risk-taking, rawness, primitiveness, nakedness. These are my watchwords as a writer and reader.

LIGON

But to get to what? You’re talking about creating this emotional state in the reader and writer—to get where?

SHIELDS

To what it feels like to be alive. I can’t know what it’s like inside you and you can’t know what it’s like inside me. We’re existentially alone. One of the great values of art, especially writing, is that it actually allows conversation. The loneliness that we feel as human beings is bridged through extremely serious literature. It deﬁnitely doesn’t get bridged, in my view, through well-made stories. I watch you create narratives, like I’m watching you build bridges, and I applaud that bridge-making. But I don’t get to know you in a thrillingly intimate way. And when someone writes about how his father used to beat him and that’s how he came to become a heroin addict at twenty-one, I’m not interested, even if it’s not done in some boring, bloodletting way. I’m interested in knowing the deepest secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets really are the same.

We all have demons within us that we project as fears of insanity. And that’s what creates the moment when the narrator of Black Planet projects a Gary Payton-esque sex doppelganger. Some guy from a magazine happened to interview me a couple days ago about that book, then he sent me links to his blog. During the interview, he seemed to like the book, but in his blog, he criticized it. All these other readers were typing in, saying, Yeah, you go man! or whatever. One guy wrote that he expected, at some point in Black Planet, for me to ask Gary Payton to “Do my wife.” That was so interesting because it told me that my book made this guy so uncomfortable he had to ﬁght oﬀ the insight by projecting those insights onto me. In those moments, you’re actually getting to something. So he thinks he’s trying to ﬁght oﬀ my insights with a kind of, It’s your problem man, not mine, whereas a more serious reader, a more adult reader, would wrestle with it.

There’s also an opposite example from that same book, another line people talk about a lot. In the book, I say sort of embarrassingly that I’m not the type of person who, out of politeness, opens the door for people. But if the person behind me happens to be black, I tend to open the door, I tend to not want to be racist, and I also tend to open the door for women, playing like, you know, the polite usher. I deﬁnitely debated a thousand times whether to put the line in or take it out.

In an indirect way, that line is more embarrassing than the other line, and so many people have come up to me, a lot of black people, saying, Thank you for writing that. And white people say they’ve felt that all the time. I didn’t think anyone else was as crazy as I am. Black people told me, You have no idea how many times I’ve felt that. And in those moments, human beings are actually connecting in a really interesting way. Conversation gets deeper. Human beings get to know each other slightly better. The loneliness of the human condition, to put it grandly, is slightly dislodged. And writing is no longer some time-killing activity, it’s actually connecting human beings. That’s what I’m about.

LIGON

I see that in ﬁction, as well. I’m thinking of “A Small, Good Thing” by Carver, where we see that connection occur. We also feel it in Carver’s “Cathedral.” The end of “The Dead.” Chekhov’s story, “Gusev,” in which readers see and feel that connection. Are you saying nonﬁction creates more opportunity for connection than ﬁction?

SHIELDS

Yes. But obviously it’s subjective. It would be absurd to say that Black Planet matters, but “The Dead” doesn’t. I’m not going to put myself in a totally ridiculous position. Who knows why, after writing three novels, but ﬁction has gone slightly ﬂat for me. I ﬁnd Carver hopelessly sentimental. “A Small, Good Thing” is terrible and “Cathedral” is really bad. Those are just very sentimental works. He’s a hack. He wants you to love him for loving humanity. Talk to Tess Gallagher about how Carver appropriated “Cathedral” from her. You know that was her story, her visitor. I’m interested in that story. Carver, this loving guy. He stole that story. But in the ﬁction, he presents himself as Mr. Enlightened—Look at how I love humanity.

LIGON

Although that protagonist does not come oﬀ as somebody who loves humanity. He comes oﬀ as a misanthrope.

SHIELDS

At the end, he does. And everyone talks about the Chekhov story, “Gusev.” I almost always love ﬁction writers’ nonﬁction more. For instance, Chekhov’s diaries interest me far more than any Chekhov story. Cheever’s journals are by far the best book Cheever wrote. Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up interests me more than any Fitzgerald novel. J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is to me Coetzee’s best book, an amazing mix of lecture and confession and quasi-novel. “The Custom House,” the preface to The Scarlet Letter, is better than The Scarlet Letter.

LIGON

Are you more interested in those works because they provide insight or connection to artistic process?

SHIELDS

I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just saying this is what interests me. For instance, the other day I was teaching Stephen Frears, the British director. He directed The Queen and was doing promotional interviews hoping to get the Academy Award. The interviewer was talking to him about his previous movies, and High Fidelity came up, which Frears directed, and they were talking about the Nick Hornby novel on which the ﬁlm is based, the voiceover work in the ﬁlm, and how Frears worked to try to translate the best moments from the book into the ﬁlm. Frears found, to his surprise, that the best moments were the voiceovers, and especially the direct speeches of John Cusack to the camera, not just voiceover, but actual direct address. He said something very interesting, something like, “What we realized was that the novel was this machine to sort of get to these twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and masculinity and art and music and list-making, and masculine distance, and masculine drive for art, masculine trouble with intimacy, blah, blah, blah.” And I realized that is the way I experience almost all novels. You have to read seven hundred pages and then you get these insights that were the whole point the book was written for and the apparatus of the novel is there as this elaborate, huge, overbuilt scaﬀolding.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you think ﬁction should go away?

SHIELDS

For me, I mean obviously everyone should write and read what they write and read. If you want to be Bell and write these huge novels about Haiti, more power to you. You probably have far more readers than I have. I’m just trying to stay alive as a writer and reader. Ninety-nine percent of stuﬀ, I cannot get a toehold on—so many books that people praise, endless books, books that win prizes. If you put a gun to my head, I could not read Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections.

LIGON

What about his nonﬁction?

SHIELDS

It’s not good either. I’m just trying to read stuﬀ I actually love. Most readers are bored. I don’t want to read out of duty, I want to read out of love. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. They form a tradition which D’Agata calls the lyric essay. And I just want to go to the mat for those books because I really love them. They sustain me and nourish me, and some of them happen to be quasi-novels, like Tristram Shandy or Proust. Or V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World, which is published as ﬁction in the U.K. and as nonﬁction here, which is interesting. Or Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, the only bad parts of which are the novelistic moments; the parts which are pure, gorgeous meditation about Flaubert I really love. I’m trying to stay alive and awake and not bored and not rote. I don’t know if you know the new, young nonﬁction writer, Eula Biss. She’s at Northwestern.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The Balloonists.

SHIELDS

I love that book; it’s beautiful. I’m meeting with her because she has friends publishing short, book-length works of poetic nonﬁction. It’s a wonderful crowd. I think The Balloonists is really strong work.

To answer your question, Adam, about what I want to do with ﬁction: There are a lot of works of ﬁction which I love, primarily because they retard the narrative impulse. Their motor is not “Guess what happens next.” Their motor is “Watch me think deeply about human existence, watch me take you as the reader deeper into the human predicament.” And maybe they have a very slight novelistic frame, very slight, like Camus’s The Fall, say. I feel like, Why are we here on the planet—to tell each other stories? For me, no. For many people, yes. I want to try to understand slightly better who we are as a species. The energy of storytelling is, “Guess who is behind the closet?” I don’t care who’s behind the closet.

LIGON

Yet there is a lot of narrative in your work. Not anecdotes, but narratives from your own life—

SHIELDS

But it’s subservient to a larger investigation. There’s a wonderful line which I probably appropriated in Reality Hunger. It’s a line from Alain Robbe-Grillet. He says something like, “The anecdote is not dead. The innocence of the anecdote is dead, that we can no longer tell stories naïvely.” Stories are still told. And I deﬁnitely still tell stories, but I would say I tell stories not naïvely, like I’m aware of who is telling them. I try to undermine them. I try to ironize them. I try to put them in triplicate quotations marks. I try to marry them to the larger investigation. There’s a story in A Handbook for Drowning called “A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire,” which to me is sort of the crucial break in my work. And my sister books, Heroes and Dead Languages, are to varying degrees relatively traditional novels. A Handbook for Drowning mixes the essay and story and brings a collage from the pieces some read as quasi-confessional, personal essay, some read as relatively traditional story. And the pieces that interest me the most kind of blur forms. “Brief Survey” is the ﬁrst time I did that. There’s a critical reading of Joyce’s “The Dead.” There’s a third person account of obsessive basketball playing. There’s a discussion of looking at pornography. There’s a discussion of the protagonist visiting a massage parlor. It’s like six or eight diﬀerent little things, and you’re supposed to ﬁgure out how they’re all connected. I think it is a short story. There’s a character named Walter in it. It felt like something popped open for me in that story, where the loyalty of the ﬁction is not “Guess what happens to Walter next,” but “Watch me investigate how platonic desire works. Watch how fucked up you can be when you’re always projecting desire out—some absolute outside yourself—rather than some desire you actually feel for real.” In ten short pages, I’m actually investigating something about desire—and the stories are part of that investigation, as opposed to the other way around.

LIGON

Would the statements or ideas have weight without the narrative?

SHIELDS

That’s the objection most people raise, and I think it’s legitimate. When you just want the insights—where Nick Hornby stands, his essay on the male animal. And that’s not probably what we want. I’m not interested in psychobabble either. Or street philosophy. I’ve talked about the war without and the war within. People have diﬀerent aesthetics. And for me, the way that a novel works, say, the war is generally without. Which is to say that characters do battle with each other. King Lear has an argument with Cordelia and they are sort of butting heads, then at the end, there is some resolution. The essay form, the lyric essay, the personal essay, is just as full of conﬂict, and the conﬂict goes inside—the writer at war with himself. I ﬁnd the intimacy of that discussion takes me to a deeper psychic place. I ﬁnd the intimacy of that more naked- making, more strip-mining, more primitive, raw, embarrassing, et cetera. Someone else—say you or Jess Walter or whoever—would ﬁnd the form I espouse solipsistic, narcissistic, navel-gazing, or whatever. And that’s okay. But I prefer the war within. I ﬁnd the level of discussion, potentially—not by any means always—but potentially thrillingly higher. When that’s good, nothing’s better. A lot of it is horrible, memoir or journalism, or woe is me stuﬀ, but when it really is at the highest level, it is really important to me. Maybe the war within is my own self-enclosure.

LIGON

Do you want to consciously articulate these truths or realities in a way that a painting might not let you? We have a response to painting or music that might be emotional, that might be just as true but diﬃcult to articulate. Are you interested in clear, conscious articulation of truth?

SHIELDS

That’s a very good point. I think I am. There’s this line by Yeats that I disagree with, which is, “You can’t articulate the truth, you can only embody it.” That’s wrong. You can articulate the truth. I really believe in language above all else. It goes back, as so many of my tropes do, to stuttering. I grew up with a stutter, still stutter slightly sometimes. I wrote a novel about it. In a way, it’s sort of the core of my being. So many of my theories unconsciously draw from it. I love articulation. I love saying—telling, not showing, that workshop bromide. Bromide of bromides: Show don’t tell. I so adore telling. Showing bores me to tears. It always has. When I think about my favorite moments from Huck Finn, they aren’t like, Oh look at this plot turn or this dialogue. It’s just Huck saying something. Those are the moments that I live for. I am drawn toward articulation as revenge on stuttering.

LIGON

I’m guessing that you don’t care for Flannery O’Connor’s stories—

SHIELDS

I did a brutal thing to Flannery O’Connor once. I was trapped in some cabin for a long weekend and I read the collected O’Connor front to back. That is one formulaic writer, I promise you. Every single story is exactly the same story. Obviously she was a master crafter of stories. I went through a phase where I very much admired O’Connor. I think “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” an awfully well-made story. But she doesn’t interest me. I couldn’t imagine reading her. She is a religious writer. I think so much of my work is founded on a godless meaninglessness. There is no meaning. We are lost. We are existentially alone. How do we get through the next hundred years of our lives, or the next ﬁfty? If, ﬁnally, your vision is underwritten by religious salvation, we’re on very diﬀerent sides of the path to hell. But who am I to criticize O’Connor? She is a quintessential example of someone who is by all accounts a great writer who holds zero interest for me. Especially the third person. I’m just allergic to the third person. To the degree I can read ﬁction, almost by deﬁnition it has to be ﬁrst person, because at least we’re pushing toward some authorial “I.” The moment that we’re in the storytelling mode, I tend to be not interested. But who am I to end the world of ﬁction? Obviously a ﬁction writer and a poet and a nonﬁction writer are all trying to get to the same stuﬀ.

LIGON

I see Reality Hunger as an artist struggling to be vital, to be born, in eﬀect. And this is an artist who is already alive, who has already been an artist for some time—

SHIELDS

And this artist is me? This is me struggling to be born?

LIGON

Yes.

SHIELDS

How so?

LIGON

I see you creating systems of belief about art in the entire book and then examining them, arguing with these beliefs, building them up, tearing them down, looking to other artists for insight.

SHIELDS

That’s exactly right. This friend of mine read it and he said that it’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. But obviously my friend was being sort of coy. By most accounts it will not be thought of as my most personal book.
Is he—I mean, am I—born or am I dead?

LIGON

The conversation is ongoing, I think. When you talked before about Cheever’s journals, it seems that you’re interested in how that artist exists. For me, Reality Hunger shows an artist struggling with who he is, struggling to create meaning in his life and out of his life.

SHIELDS

I was listening to this show on public radio recently. It’s basically three or four stories read aloud by actors on a Broadway stage called “Stories on Stage,” something like that. Again, I’m sort of making an easy case. Some guy was reading a Cheever story. It wasn’t “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” but it was very close. Basically a story about a guy who is somewhat estranged from his wife. He’s living in Rome, and he writes a sort of fantasy version about how they’ll actually connect. It was a beautiful story and fun to listen to when I was driving around. So beautiful that when I got home, I ran to my radio so I could hear the end. But it pales compared to the journals. I probably sound like I’m kidding, but they are far and away Cheever’s best book. They’re basically journals he kept from 1940 until he died. They’re very consciously written—written for publication, it’s obvious. They’re so sculpted. There are scenes that come in and out and leitmotifs. It’s an amazing work of art. But hearing the ﬁction story, as well done as it was, was the sketchiest investigation. You’re comparing a twenty-page story to a 300,000-word journal, but still, the ﬁction felt like gossamer compared to the depth of the journal. The journal let him get away with absolutely nothing. He was relentless toward himself, and in so doing, connects himself with us. The ﬁction is full of grandiosity of logic, and he gets away with murder. I was constantly listening, going You lying sack of shit, I read the journals. I know what it’s like at ground level for you. Don’t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings. Not that the ﬁction by any means has to have a sweet ending. The groaning contrivance of the story compared to the electrifying rawness of the journals, there was no comparison. To me it was a really instructive example.

LIGON

Reality Hunger contains dozens of unattributed quotes from various writers, ﬁlmmakers, philosophers, and other people. Are you getting any noise from Knopf on the legal end?

SHIELDS

They’re publishing The Thing About Life ﬁrst, to my shock and dismay because to me, Reality Hunger is a more timely book. I was pushing for a Vintage Paperback Original published maybe in September—just go. Forget the galleys, forget everything. But for some reason, they insisted that The Thing About Life come out ﬁrst. And Reality Hunger will follow in September of 2009. So in a way that book is, frankly, not really on their radar yet. They bought both books together, a two-book thing. So I’m just developing all my legal arguments.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What if they ask you to include an acknowledgements page?

SHIELDS

At one point in the book, I say, “You get a brownie point for every diﬀerent quote you identify.” That pretty much tells it. They’ll either deal with it later, or—I don’t know.

Jonathan Lethem is a good friend and we have a sort of pact that when it comes time to make that argument, we’re going to go in and just argue the case to the hilt. And I’m probably going to lose the debate, to be honest.

There are quite a few quotes from John D’Agata in there. And John said, “Promise me you won’t ruin the book by putting a bunch of sources in the back.” Everyone has been amazingly generous in the spirit of the book. I have quite a few quotes from my friend Michael Logan. From a former student, James Nugent. Paul Bravermann. Friends are the main quotes. A lot of them, I’ve remade. Some are my own. So much of the argument of the book depends on learning those boundaries. The moment you’ve said page twenty-one is from Vivian Gornick and page twenty-nine is from Coleridge, the book is over. It’s not over, but it’s considering domestication.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Remote has an acknowledgments page—

SHIELDS

The paperback does, and it’s kind of cool because all those footnotes are in the back.

LIGON

What about a page that simply says, “The following works were considered or used as part of this collage.” In eﬀect, the acknowledgements page. That’s it.

SHIELDS

I’ll probably be thrilled if I can get away with putting something like that in the back. I’m talking brave now, but we’ll see how far I get when it comes down to it. I would love it if there was something elegant about silence. You remember in the end of The Wasteland when Eliot tells you where every quote was from? I hate that whole idea. If you recognize the quote, ﬁne. If you don’t, ﬁne. But the idea of turning it into this kind of snarly apparatus—

LIGON

Why do you think Eliot did that?

SHIELDS

I think he was trying to raise the mystery of the work. People went into Eliot’s library. What was that book of his called, by that lady? Jessie Weston? From Ritual to Romance? Something like that. They went into Eliot’s library and it still had the cellophane wrapped around it, a book he was supposed to have been quoting from. The point being that so many contemporary poets will give you every line. Like, “Line twelve is a translation of…” That’s such a dead gesture of quasi-scholarship, of good citizenship. I feel strongly—as do so many friends who are quoted in the book—that citing everything would hurt the book’s intent. I feel strongly about it. I’m going to argue strong. Obviously I’m not going to say, Well, forget it. I’m not going to rip up the contract. I’ll deal with it as I deal with it. Why do we need all these citations of sources that pretty much anyone can ﬁnd on the web? The biology of acne or something like that? Why do we need that snarly apparatus?

LIGON

When is it appropriate to attribute credit?

SHIELDS

I think John D’Agata is really good about this issue. It’s almost like an art form struggling to be reborn itself. John has this feeling that if we’re going to look at nonﬁction as art, we’ve got to stop sourcing it. And if you’re writing a work that has no aspirations to be art, let’s say a biography about Thomas Jeﬀerson or something—it’s a work of history. I don’t read that; I don’t write it; I’m not interested in it. You’re going to source the fact that someone else found a document about Jeﬀerson as a slave owner or something like that. And you’re writing this history of Thomas Jeﬀerson. In that kind of work, you have the whole snarly apparatus. But in the kind of work that I’m trying to champion, that I’m trying to write and read and love, you ﬁnd a feeling that if a work has any chance of existing as a work of art, as a liberating thought experiment, we have to get away from the idea of sourcing things. It establishes a pedestrian or journalistic and/or scholarly context. It takes away the whole aura of a work of art which is crucial to the planet. Look at painters, the way they approach art. Look at Rauschenberg and Warhol. Do they say, This comes from the Campbell Soup Company? They just go and do it. Until all the lawyers got involved. Look at how musicians and hip-hop artists come in and just slash and burn. And turntablists go in and remake stuﬀ. The moment you get lawyers involved, the moment you get journalistic and scholarly good citizenship involved, you’re dead. If anyone wants to take my work and remake it, they’re more than welcome. If anyone wants to take Black Planet and make it into, whatever, an opera—it’d make a great opera; if they want to take Remote and turn it inside out—they’re welcome to it. If it’s aspiring to be art, it’s crucial we remove the rubric of non-art in my view.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Why is Reality Hunger structured the way it is, in 563 sections?

SHIELDS

The fact that we all teach, that I’m not up on some Vermont mountaintop with twelve hours to write every day of the week, that I’m checking the Web every ﬁve minutes for gossip of some kind. We live in an attention deﬁcit age. I’m inﬂuenced by collage artists from the last hundred years. I think it’s totally congruent with what I argue. It’d be absurd for me to have a three-hundred-page essay that’s smoothly lucid and coherent. It’s the way I think. There are twenty-six categories from A–Z. That’s a sort of funny idea of the alphabet. There’s a pretext of being thorough. We’ve got the A–Z, the explanation that explains nothing. The categories mean relatively little except you’re supposed to realize how much turnstile jumping there is in the categories. Sometimes something’s in the wrong category. The A–Z stuﬀ feels fairly arbitrary at times. The quotation. You can’t tell what the “I” espouses. You ask, Who is saying this? David Shields? Robert Lowell? George Orwell? Who is saying this? Categories are break-downable. I even argue for the virtue of brevity in the book. Drawn to collage, aphorism, sound bite.

LIGON

Many of your books are broken into similar short sections—

SHIELDS

A friend of mine called it “Aphorism sent through radiation.” I just love that idea. Remote is not quite as fragmented, but it’s pretty montage- like. Enough About You is somewhat. Body Politic is somewhat. But this pushes it further. Collage—to piss oﬀ some more people—collage is the evolution beyond narrative. It’s the next step. I’ve written ten books and there’s almost a direct movement from very grounded, well-made, linear, realistic novels. The ﬁrst is a four-hundred-page book and each chapter’s forty pages, and boy is it grounded in the real, in narrative. Now I’m onto a book like Reality Hunger, where there’s no section longer than a page. I don’t know what to say other than that’s how my mind thinks. The books I seem to love the most are often what I would call speedy and they cut to the chase. There’s very little furniture moving. There’s very little table setting, just bursts of language and of insight. A ﬁction writer might ask, “Okay, we’ve got a bunch of insight, but where’s the context?” There is a context. The book is nothing but 563 insights, but they keep building upon one another. The context needn’t be narrative. The context could be contemplative. That’s what I’m drawn toward now.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Should people still read your ﬁction?

SHIELDS

That’s a great question. I’m doing this sort of easy thing where I’m like nah-nah-ing at ﬁction as a way to boost the assignment of nonﬁction, but I’ve got three books of ﬁction out there that on some sort of trivial level, I want people to read.

LIGON

Is it a trivial level?

SHIELDS

I’m just saying trivial level of, Let’s go out and buy those books or something, as if those book sales will change my life in some substantial way. I still love those books. Those books still matter to me, especially Dead Languages and Handbook for Drowning. Heroes to me, less so because it’s so traditional and so conventional. There’s very little of my aesthetic driving it. It was inﬂuenced by a University of Iowa aesthetic. I was trying to write in a realistic way, a traditional way, a conventional way that probably doesn’t play to my strengths.

But Dead Languages is so clearly the forerunner of what I’m doing now. The reason it is ten times a better book than Heroes is that I’m making all the gestures I’m making now, but further still. Dead Languages talks about stuttering. It talks about masochism to a certain degree, it talks about self-destruction, my love-hate aﬀair with language. It’s phrased in ﬁctional context, but it’s the evolution of my artistic aesthetic. I think that book holds up really well. And I really like Handbook for Drowning quite a lot, too. The pieces I love the most are the most collage like—“The War on Poverty,” “Brief Survey of Ideal Desire.” Those books are not very far from my current work. I’m encouraged by the idea that you’re supposed to change as an artist. Part of me is stupidly nostalgic for my early ﬁctional writer self. Somehow calling yourself a novelist still has a slight glamour to it. I mean, it doesn’t really have any glamour in the culture, but in literary culture it somehow still seems slightly more respectable. Whereas the stuﬀ I do doesn’t even have a goddamned name.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you have a name for it?

SHIELDS

I like John D’Agata’s term, “lyric essay.” It’s sort of a mouthful, but I despise this “creative nonﬁction” term. It’s absolutely meaningless. I don’t mind “personal essay.” But a book-length essay, what do you call it? What do you think of it as?

LIGON

You call Reality Hunger a manifesto.

SHIELDS

Manifesto is a very speciﬁc-book word. The Thing About Life—what would you call that? A collage?

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

It’s less a collage than even Enough About You. It seems like a struggle between the personal story and scientiﬁc research, those two things playing against each other.

SHIELDS

But then there are the quotations from all the sources. I hope there’s a relatively complex play. Tolstoy weighing in, quotes from Lucretius to Coetzee, me and my dad. Somehow those play oﬀ each other in what I hope is an interesting way. Do you have a term for those kind of works? I think lyric essay seems to be catching on. Someone will be crowned a genius if they can come up with a term for this. I don’t know. It’s such a shame, though, to be working in a form. Literary nonﬁction sounds sort of self-congratulatory and self-marginalizing, as if somehow you’re writing an essay on Shakespeare or something. And creative nonﬁction? Creative as opposed to what? Destructive? Destructive nonﬁction? Maybe that’s what I write. Destructive nonﬁction. That would be good. I swear that’s it.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

If you have one book coming out that’s a meditation on death and one that’s a manifesto, what could you possibly do after that?

SHIELDS

I’m starting a book about sex. Part of me feels like that’s sort of the goal. I’m deeply middle-aged, so I want to make sure to cover a lot of big topics.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Sex, death, and life.

SHIELDS

Exactly. Sometimes I’ll get an idea for some book, like from the guy who runs the mailing place around the corner, who’s from Iraq, and we always talk about the war. Part of me wants to do a book with him about Iraq or something. I have all these ideas, dozens of ideas for books. You want to make sure that they are essential topics. You kind of want to get down what life feels like to you. It’s a good question. I feel like writing The Thing About Life changed my outlook. It made me both very morbid and completely free from morbidity. On the one hand, I feel like, My God, we’re just animals and there’s no point to anything. Okay, if there’s no point to anything, you might as well try to enjoy life on some level. Dark ﬂuid entered my body through that book in some really serious way. Though I think the book is not heavy. It feels sort of light.

We are just nerve endings. And that book does feel like some end game on some level. The manifesto’s saying, Here’s what I believe about art. So I agree, I’m at a weird impasse. After I ﬁnished those two books, I couldn’t do anything for a couple months. I just sort of reorganized my ﬁles. I threw a bunch of stuﬀ out. It was like some weird death thing. I threw out all these old clothes. I cleaned up my computer ﬁles. This weird cleansing. I had really gone through these two crucial discourses which I’d been dying to write for my whole life, death and art. Destructive nonﬁction.

Issue 62: A Conversation with Tess Gallagher

Interview in Willow Springs 62

Works in Willow Springs 58

July 16, 2007

Shira Richman and Maya Jewell Zeller

A CONVERSATION WITH TESS GALLAGHER

Poet and author Tess Gallagher. Photo by Brian Farrell

Photo Credit: Bryan Farrell

Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, to logger parents—her mother was a choker-setter and her father was a spar-tree rigger. The fact that she lives in Port Angeles now could make her life seem deceptively simple. Gallagher has lived and traveled all over the world. She has graduate degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Washington, where she studied with Theodore Roethke in his last poetry workshop. She has taught at the University of Montana, Syracuse University, the University of Arizona at Tucson, and St. Lawrence University in New York, among other places, and has made regular trips to Ireland since 1968. It was through friends in Ireland that she met Josie Gray, her “Irish companion,” with whom she has co-authored Barnacle Soup, a collaboration of stories Gray has crafted through years of their telling, which Gallagher has captured and preserved on the page.

Gallagher has participated in other collaborative eﬀorts including translating the work of Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, and writing plays and screenplays with her late husband Raymond Carver. She has published eight books of poetry: Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, Willingly, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge, Portable Kisses, My Black Horse, and Dear Ghosts; two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses and Soul Barnacles; two collections of short stories, The Lover of Horses and At the Owl Woman Saloon; and a book-length interview with Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi, Distant Rain.

Gallagher’s work is “substantial yet lambent, earthy and spiritual,” writes Donna Seaman of Booklist, and “evokes the power of the unseen as well as the seen with breathtaking clarity, creating metaphors so surprising, radiant, and apt that the world seems to expand in their wake.” In a way not unlike Wordsworth, Gallagher manages to enshrine not only the mundane, but the tragic, by seeing the world as her holy place. She was generous enough to invite us to her home where she served us homemade date-bran muﬃns and raspberries that she had picked the day before. We ate and talked over coﬀee in a room with walls of windows, surrounded by trees.

MAYA ZELLER

Your connection to the land is apparent in your work. Do you think this connection is ampliﬁed because of your roots in Port Angeles?

TESS GALLAGHER

Two things were very important. One was that my mother was actually from farm people in the Missouri Ozarks. They had a thousand acres, and I had access to that land when I was a child and I could range over that acreage—walking and on horseback—and explore. I don’t know how many children really get to explore vast amounts of territory like that; it builds something else in you. I went into caves where the Indians had lived and I was out in the ﬁelds planting the grain crops and taking hay to the cattle and helping my uncle deliver calves, and was there for the sheep shearing. My father came from itinerant farmers. They were poor and they rented land and farmed it and made gardens. My mother made her own garden as long as she possibly could and I used to garden with her.

My parents decided they wanted to give us something nobody else would give us and that was the experience of farming. So when I was about ten, they bought a little piece of land, out west of town at a place called Dry Creek, about fourteen acres. We learned milking cows. We had chickens, pigs, and raised calves we fed on the bucket, and we also did planting.

Those two things are important, my grandfather’s land and the acreage my parents bought, and maybe a third thing would be that my mother and I ended up being widows together here in Port Angeles. She had that farming gene deep in her—that need to dig and make outdoor spaces. So she and I gardened together. When I was having trouble with my garden, she would come over and in ten minutes she could make things right. She had a real knack for using tools and improving, and she was strong.

One time we were planting a rose over here on this side of the house before the trees got so tall and we hit a boulder. I said, “Oh Mother, let’s not plant it here. This is a boulder. Let’s just choose another place.” “No,” she said. “The boulder is coming out.” For two hours we dug this boulder. When we got it all dug around, I said, “Well, how in the world are we going to get it out?” She said, “Get a plank,” so I went and found an old board. We stuck this down in under the edge of the boulder. I mean, it was the size of—I don’t know if there’s anything in this room that I could tell you. About two of those dog beds. Huge. She says, “Push down on the plank and we’ll see if you can budge it.” I couldn’t budge it much so the two of us got on the end of that board and we rolled that stone up out of that hole. We got another plank, so the two of us were on two diﬀerent planks and we managed to pry it out.

It was really an incredible feat, but when I go back to that, I ask, What was happening there? Okay, we moved that stone, but there was something about her will that was aptly demonstrated. I hope if I got anything from her, and I know I did, that one of the things I got is, Just don’t give up. Find a way. She could always ﬁnd a way, and she was often proving that the way is close at hand.

SHIRA RICHMAN

How does gardening ﬁt into your creative process?

GALLAGHER

Well you know, you have the body—the whole body. You cannot be there writing the poem hour and hour and day and day. You’re not just this walking head. So you have to ﬁgure out some things to do with the rest of the body, things that make your body a whole thing instead of just a head running everything.
Gardening integrates my intelligence without my having to think about it. I love digging. I like to plant ﬂowers. I like to water them. I like to feel the sustenance of the water going onto the plant. I like to come over to Mother’s land, which I purchased after her death. I can see where the deer have been sleeping. I like to notice that this plant grew or that the deer snacked on it—all those little things of having a garden.

I like to worry about something that’s not making it, and to think what I could do to help. I like lifting ﬁfty-pound sacks of mulch, slamming them down, and ﬁguring out how to do the hard thing of getting it spread. I like digging weeds, which I was doing over at my cottage in town yesterday, the place you stayed, and not using—as much as I can manage—any chemicals, because you don’t want your baby playing in it, don’t want it going into the aquifer. When my workman says, “Let’s put weed killer around these apple trees—Roundup,” I say no, because I’m going to eat those apples.

I fell in love with an orchard over at my mother’s. People can fall in love with other people and they can fall in love with towns, and cities, and other countries, and languages, and poets—but can they fall in love with an orchard? My lawyers were very curious after my mother died, and her land and house were going to just be sold, and I said, “No, I don’t think so. I’ll try to buy it. I will take the money I had coming from the estate and put some more with it and try to buy it.” The lawyers said, “But you already have enough property.” I said, “Yes, but, I’m in love with the orchard.”

I prune it every February with a young man named Josh Gloor, who comes from Sequim, and we have three glorious days where we’re pruning those apple trees and chatting. I love that time. The sun will be shining, or it might be raining. We might have to take shelter at intervals. I will pick up all the limbs so he doesn’t have to bend over, ’cause I’m close to the ground, a nice way of saying “short.”

One of the things I like doing is to get my body real tired. I want to go to bed with a tired body and I sleep really well when I do that. I used to suﬀer from insomnia—when I couldn’t get that physical exhaustion from working in the garden. I’m now taking care of three gardens, so I sleep ﬁne.

At Sky House there is no garden because I arranged it that way. I didn’t want a garden there. I wanted a place where I didn’t have to worry about anything, and at Sky I don’t garden. There are ferns and salal there. Things that grow naturally. But I’m glad I have Mother’s now. I can dig there and make spaces. I’m in the process of reclaiming her garden because it got out of control when she was sick and when I had to take care of her, so I couldn’t work on the garden at the same time. She was my garden.

So, now I’m picking out blackberry bramble and other invasive plants that come into the garden. At the cottage in town that I got for Rijl and Tiernan to live in, there’s a very beautiful garden because it’s compact and you can see the diﬀerence you make. At Mother’s, it’s hard to see the diﬀerence you make because it’s too big really to be a display garden. It does have the delight of encouraging you to wander, which lets you meditate.

RICHMAN

Do you have writing rituals or habits?

GALLAGHER

Really, if a poem is coming to you, you will ﬁnd a way to get it. When I’m writing I don’t have any appointments that day. It is hard to keep people out of that morning space. You’d think—I have no husband here, I have no children—that I could arrange that time, but there are many other things that can want to come in. Especially workmen. They always want to come in the morning. They are great despoilers of the day. So I try to make all the appointments at what I call the teatime hour, which is three or four o’clock. That allows me my day.

I like to be at Sky House when I’m writing, because people don’t call me there. That telephone is a monster and unless you take it oﬀ the hook, you’re going to get calls. Somebody is going to think they need you. They’ll want to ask you something. The computer is a terrible villain, too. I try to save those morning hours. And if I have anything that I should take care of, any business, I get it done the day before.

RICHMAN

Then you don’t necessarily expect to write every morning?

GALLAGHER

Right. I make that time. If you get into a run of poems, that is the most anguishing time because you’re going to run into these impediments. I can remember being really angry at certain people during the time I was writing Moon Crossing Bridge. They were interrupting and bringing fractious things into my life. But that marvelous rippling of poems, you don’t get into that often, so you can’t depend on it. You have to really work most of the time and just hope and expect that something will come. The expectation helps. If you sit down and you don’t expect anything, you might not get much. I know that that’s away from what William Staﬀord said—to have low expectations, but I am of an opposite view. I think something wonderful is going to come and I’m going to put pressure there. I’m going to ask for that something special to come.

ZELLER

Kind of like meditation or prayer?

GALLAGHER

Yes, I really get out of the world when I’m intending to write. I also assume that all the spirits of the writers I have loved and have read and been with are available to me, that I have access to those energies. Just like invisible apples, I can reach and pick, can bring the images down to me. I might fail, but the expectation is, to me, helpful.

ZELLER

Do you read while you’re waiting for the poem to come?

GALLAGHER

I try not to watch myself very much at the beginning of this process. I’m very casual with myself at the same time I’m expecting. Now, how you can do the two things, I don’t know. As I’m expecting and hoping, I’m also very sideways with myself. These things are coexisting, because if I look too directly in it—at it—I will jinx myself. Isn’t this a crazy way to think? But in fact, this is how it is.

So I will have a lot of little distractions. I might light some incense. I might drink some coﬀee. I might take Peggy, my dog, out for a quick walk. There will be books lying around, and these will be all manner of books—nonﬁction, ﬁction, poetry. I might pick up any of those and read, just to get some language, to kind of prime the pump.

Right now I’ve got an assignment from Ciaran Carson, who was my old friend from Belfast and we exchange work. I read all of his novels and his poetry and he reads mine. In fact, he’s very much responsible for helping to ﬁnd a press in Belfast for Josie’s and my book, Barnacle Soup, the book of Irish stories. When I was reading recently at the Seamus Heaney Center in Belfast—that’s where I used to live for a short time, Belfast, in 1976—he suggested that I was such a wild child, why didn’t I try writing in some kind of form? And I said, “Well suggest something.” He said, “Why don’t you write fourteen fourteen-line poems with half rhymes.” So I’ve started to write those. And it’s really hard.

I did write a lot of stuﬀ in form when I was a student of Theodore Roethke. And Nelson Bentley, also at the University of Washington, had us writing in form. I did some things in form even for David Wagoner, but I never really liked writing in form. I didn’t feel like I got from form what I needed to get in writing poems. I hadn’t revisited it, so I thought, Well, okay, I’ll go back there. My Belfast poet friends are very much deeper into form and using form, in the belief that you will get some things using form you might not get otherwise.

RICHMAN

Are you ﬁnding that to be true for yourself?

GALLAGHER

I ﬁnd it very awkward. I think it’s all a failure so far—but I’m not going back to look at it. This is another thing that is diﬀerent for me this time. Usually, I will bulldog the poem right down and I will be very intense with it for however long it takes to get it right, but this time I’m just writing and not judging. I’m going to accumulate these poems and then I’ll go back. I’m not too sure they’re going to amount to much—but maybe I can bring them around later. I’m going to reserve my judgment about them. I have a sense that I don’t know what I’ve got there.

RICHMAN

How soon after starting a poem do you usually begin revising?

GALLAGHER

I would continue to write that entire day. And then I would work the next day and the next day until I got it just right. The poems are coming with such surety now. It’s like being a tightrope walker—you have your balance after a while. I don’t have as much revision as I had at the beginning of my writing. Maybe I’m a less good writer, I don’t know, but I feel that somehow I have gotten into my way and that it is very helpful to me. I can trust it a lot more.

RICHMAN

If we were to go to Sky House and look at your writing area, which books might we ﬁnd lying around?

GALLAGHER

I just got Michael Burkard’s last two books from Sarabande. I had not kept up as well with him since I taught him last, at Bucknell University. Of course, he was my husband for four years and we were at Iowa together. During that time we exchanged poems and we had a relationship that really lived poetry. It became kind of the pattern for what I wanted and which I ﬁnally got, in a comfortable reciprocal way, with Raymond Carver.

It was a great pity that our timing—Michael’s and my timing, for our relationship—was a bit oﬀ because you really need your life well in hand for that whole thing of two writers together to work. We were both trying to ﬁnd ourselves during that time. It was a very confusing time, early in our poetry lives. We had just come directly from Iowa to our ﬁrst job at St. Lawrence University.

An unfortunate part of the public life of the poet is that some poets reach the public in magazines that are more national, and others will be publishing more in the poetry venues that poets read, and Michael became the latter kind of poet. A poet’s poet. I so admired the courage in his work, to choose that path, but I don’t know if it was really a choice or just how he was, really. Probably that’s how he is. He was always going to write that way. He has become a bit more accessible, at least in these newer poems, I feel.

ZELLER

Did you choose a diﬀerent path?

GALLAGHER

I don’t know if the word “choice” is correct, because what one does is governed by talents, by necessities—in the language. I wanted a wide readership, so maybe that determined the way I moved in a poem. Michael would allow a lot more ambiguity and unknowns in his poems, things that would be unresolved. I loved to read that and, as I said, I ﬁnd his poems now much more accessible than the early poetry he was writing. I love to get close to them again. We’re in contact, which we hadn’t been for quite a while—for no reason, just that I moved oﬀ the East Coast and we didn’t meet anymore. It’s such a big country.

We used to meet occasionally, and I, in fact, had wanted Michael to have a job at Syracuse—which is so ironic. I argued hard for him to be able to teach with us because he was friends with Ray and me after Ray and I were together at Syracuse. Ray was instrumental in helping Michael to get sober. Michael has written about his sobriety battle so it’s okay to mention that. He talked with Ray about this. I couldn’t get him in to teach there at the time. Conditions weren’t right with the people he would be working with, but now he’s teaching there and I’m so happy about that. The students were wonderful. One of my ﬁrst students was Alice Sebold. She took about three classes with me and also took ﬁction writing from Ray. Lucia Perillo was one of my students there and Jane Mead. Both wonderful poets.

ZELLER

Might you talk a little about your relationship with Lucia Perillo?

GALLAGHER

Lucia came out west and she worked at Mt. Rainier as a guide. She had studied biology in California, but she had also written poetry there with Robert Hass, and then she returned to Syracuse. Her parents were from New York. She became my student and got her MFA from Syracuse. I used to have all my classes in my living room, so it was very cozy. We got to be friends, and Jane Mead was in that class and Lucia and Jane got to be friends. So when Lucia came out West, Jane would come from Iowa or California and the three of us would have girls’ night over at Sky House. It remained a wonderful thing that the three of us could stay close.

When Lucia got this diagnosis of the MS, it happened the year that Ray died. I was, of course, devastated by that loss and she was devastated by her news. I remember us going out to Cape Alava with my sister and her family and we hiked out to the beach across those plank boardwalks through the forest and sword ferns. We made a campﬁre and I remember staying up the night with her talking about going on despite really diﬃcult and soul-wrenching circumstances.

It was, for me, a very helpful conversation that night, to see what she had to struggle with and to get her also to understand that I had really made the choice to go on in the best form possible—that if I could go on, maybe she could go on. We actually had that conversation. I don’t know if she remembers it, but I felt it was a very special conversation, both of us talking like disembodied souls under the stars.

ZELLER

Does a person have to experience pain or adversity to write purely?

GALLAGHER

I don’t know about the word “purely,” what that is, because everything is so mixed—your pain with your sorrow with your joys. I don’t think you can even experience your happiest times without some dimensionality, and how are you going to get that if you’re not open to really going down with the diﬃcult things? You can’t just be Miss Bubbly all the time. You have to let the hard things come into you and be with them and understand their dimensions and live through them, fully. For me the way to live them fully is my writing. That’s a very big help to me. You can’t escape sorrow. It’s here for us and anyone who thinks they’re going to get out of this life without pain or sorrow—you will be avoiding so many things that could be cherished and interesting and soul-building, so we say. I like to be with my friends when they are in trouble. And I want them to be with me.

I had this experience of breast cancer, which began in August of 2002 and it was instructive—how my friends came to me like I was the little bird that had fallen out of the next tree and they were all around me calling, saying, We’re with you. We’re with you. You can do it, and that really helped me. They came from as far away as Japan. My Japanese translator, Hiromi Hashimoto, ﬂew all that way. Haruki Murakami ﬂew from Tokyo—he and his wife, Yoko. They came to Seattle where I was going into my chemo. I was already bald as an onion. I had put a water-based hummingbird tattoo on my bald head and Yoko was photographing it. It was just one of those rub-oﬀ kinds of tattoo. We giggled together over it.

The companioning of your friends can do so many things medicine can’t. Medicine is not going to be able to save you at some point and while it is not saving you, you have to have something else. The reason my kitchen is so full of photographs is that I’m keeping all these people with me. I consult their images in the morning when I’m looking around, at the beginning of the day, thinking, Where are you now? How are you doing? I will, at intervals, be in touch consciously and unconsciously by glancing at their photos with a lot of those people. But yes, you are going to write out of those hardships. Ray used to say, “If there’s nothing going wrong, there’s no story.”

But that doesn’t mean that in your poems you won’t ﬁnd the joys and you won’t ﬁnd the light. But sometimes you’re just going in darkness, and you think, Oh, I never will get there. You have to be very patient with yourself and with the poems, to hope they will bring you back round.

RICHMAN

In an interview with Daniel Bourne, you mentioned the “intuitive magician-mind” that allows us to create the “leaping of poetry.” How do you keep that intuitive magician-mind alive, active, and accessible?

GALLAGHER

It’s been diﬀerent at diﬀerent points of my life, but Tiernan, my grandnephew, has been a big part of that during this phase of my life. He is so bright and so wonderful—just the exuberance of him—it teaches you what you could have. I surf on him like he is a great rolling ocean. I love to see what he’s going to think of next and to bask in that and try to be in some kind of lively dimension with it that’s not an Old Fogey Girl thing.

When I was nursing Mother in the last year of her life here at Ridge House, where we are, I was at that far end of the life skein in tending to her. She had congestive heart failure and she had Alzheimer’s dementia. I would have the day here and then I would go over to Rijl’s—my niece’s—and see Tiernan and the whole day would be so refreshed. I’m glad, looking back, that I could allow myself that. That I could say, Where can I get refreshed? and to realize that I could go there to be a child with Tiernan.

RICHMAN

How do you know if an idea will be a poem or a story?

GALLAGHER

In a poem, you may have some characters, but if you get too many you’ll write a huge, rollicking book of one narrative strain. Then you need to go to ﬁction or you’ll lose concentration of energy in the poem, make it scatter and fragment. I ﬁnd myself cutting out characters in poems in order to preserve that concentration. I think of poetry as having a higher emotional density than prose. I want that in my poems, anyhow.

In prose, you have to be willing to put up with details that are not poetic; they don’t have that strength. These go into writing the kind of ﬁction I write, which is a kind of realistically based ﬁction, and these details help establish the grounding for the lives you are going to tell that make up the story. That’s the fabric, the warp and weft of the weave.

If I want a story, I start collecting a lot of details and listening very carefully to what people are telling me and making notes. I’ll usually be working from the template of somebody’s story. I feel like prose comes much more from outside me than poetry does. Poetry is intimate and more generated in my own theater, shall we say. But in prose I have to be responsive to that story that’s coming to me and there has to be some part of me that goes out to meet it.

In my poems I’ll have little snippets of stories that all of a sudden zoom in like a mad hummingbird into the poem. For instance, in the poem, “Sah Sin,” the hummingbird poem, the detail about the mother who has her dead child with her on the bus—I had no idea that detail was going to come into that poem. I had stored it away when someone told me that story, years before, and here it came like a comet falling into the poem.

It’s very helpful in either process to maintain a great openness and freedom to admit whatever wants to come in. That’s what I do and one of my students gave me the best compliment I’ve ever had. He said, “Tess, you taught me how to be free.” What he meant was probably that openness to be receptive to anything. Even your old working methods—throw them out—and allow yourself to have access to all those things that may come to you.

ZELLER

Have you considered writing a memoir?

GALLAGHER

Well, I kind of feel maybe like Ray did about this. He didn’t write a memoir either. Of course, he died at age ﬁfty, but he felt, I think, that his life was very well contained within his ﬁction and his poetry. His poetry was more alive to his life than the stories. He said that his work was all he had, also, of religion. I kind of feel that way, too, that to come straight on to my life I might drive out the mysteries of it. I love what Emily Dickinson said: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” The memoir—it can ask you not to tell it slant. That is worrisome for me. I like to tell it slant. I like to be cloaked and a bit hidden.

Even as open as you may feel my poems are, they also are mysterious in some elements. Some books more so than others. I think that Moon Crossing Bridge is quite an oblique book in some ways, although one can have deep access to it emotionally. You may not know line to line exactly what I’m saying, but you will have emotional access and that is something I love—to give a person the ability to understand with their emotions what they can’t understand with their heads, their reasoning. To be able to do that in language—because music can do that and painting can do that—this is the attempt I make in poetry.

ZELLER

We talked earlier about your birth name, Theresa. I wonder, because you use Tess for your publishing name, how much of your identity is a self-construct and how much is imposed from without?

GALLAGHER

It’s a combination. Within your family and your private life maybe, more of that birth identity is still available. I remember my mother in the last years calling me Tess and really disliking that, but she began to take on the terms of my life away from the family at some point because no one around her knew me as Theresa—the name she had given me. They all knew me as Tess so they were all calling me Tess—the people helping me with her care. That was kind of an annoyance, frankly. Some of my nieces call me Tess and I don’t like it much, but I don’t correct them. They have to do what they want.

Tess was a name that I took on at the very beginning of my writing and it was a curious event where an actor from Durbin, South Africa, said to me, “Theresa Gallagher—no, it doesn’t sound like a writer.” He was very aware of image, because he had acted with Sir John Gielgud. He had a folder with his own picture, looking gorgeous, that he had to show when he went to get an acting job. He said, “You should be called Tess—Tess Gallagher, now that’s a name.” I was beginning to send out my poems and I sent some under that name and, magically, all the poems were taken. So I thought, He’s right.

At that time, of course, I was in the military zone. My ﬁrst husband was in the Vietnam War preparation. He was a pilot and the people around me didn’t know me. When I went to them, they asked my name. I said, “Tess Gallagher,” so that began to be what I was called. Theresa Gallagher is still very much alive though. When I write my poems, I draw on that persona, too. Over the years it’s gained its own veracity, its own powers.

ZELLER

Your father called you Threasie.

GALLAGHER

That’s a very dear name. I like that a lot. Josie Gray, my Irish companion, has great names for me. He calls me Scut, which means the tail on a rabbit. I call him Master and he calls me Slave sometimes. I like that Slave because we are making this book, and I have to do so much of the drudgework of it. I must have read this manuscript for Barnacle Soup 150,000 times to get it all right. Josie has no idea of all that is involved in getting a book ready for publication.

He’ll call me Miss American Pie or just Pie. We’re always renaming each other. It’s a bit of fun in the day. I call him Buddha-lugs because he has these lovely big earlobes like a Buddha. Lugs is Irish for ears. He was sixty-nine when I met him, but he was very young in his spirit and he’s still very young. He’s eighty-two but he’s still one of the youngest people I know. Because he’s ready for anything. Any wild notion I have, why, he doesn’t make fun of me. He tries to come on board.

I became a vegetarian in 2000, and he’s a man who loves meat and potatoes, but he makes room for this. He’s concerned about me getting my protein and he starts to read about how I can get it. When I want to save the sheep in Ireland out of his herd, he humors me. He let me have this sheep and the sheep’s baby lamb. Now I have four sheep and lambs in Ireland. Josie saves the wool for me and I’ve been able to get this made into raw roving, cleaned and ready to weave with. He’s an adventurer and that’s why he became a painter, and his storytelling is coming into written form in our book, Barnacle Soup, from Blackstaﬀ Press in Belfast, and eventually, in 2008, by Eastern Washington University Press.

RICHMAN

What else are you working on now?

GALLAGHER

I talked about these fourteen-line poems. Of course, I’m always carrying Ray and diﬀerent things have come to the surface there— Jindabyne just came out. That was the ﬁlm made by Ray Lawrence, based on Ray’s story, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and it’s ﬁlmed in Australia in Aboriginal country. I’ve followed that along as it was being proposed and as it was being made. I kind of became friends with Ray Lawrence on e-mail. He was so nice to keep me involved.

I’m reading—I forgot to say earlier, when we spoke of her—Lucia Perillo’s nonﬁction book, which is fantastic: I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing. It’s about her MS and what that has brought to bear on her art and her apprehension of life and the ways she has steadied herself with her poetry, with her own writing. It’s a powerful book.

ZELLER

You’ve been a mentor for her and she’s become a mentor to you?

GALLAGHER

If you’re lucky, a wonderful thing happens in that your student becomes your friend and they’re working in ways that inspire you. She has always been that way for me. Lucia always gave as much as she got, I have to say. The same with Katie Ford, who was another of my students. Katie was just here at Ridge House before she moved back East. She brought her manuscript, Coliseum, about Hurricane Katrina and we looked at that together. You get to participate later with those writers that you’ve nurtured—that’s a big gift that teaching gives you, that you just don’t get, I don’t think, anywhere else.
I can’t believe I fell into this life where I get to be around so many intelligent, wonderful people—really just interesting and vigorous and searching and courageous people. It’s amazing.

ZELLER

In your essay, “My Father’s Love Letters,” you write, “I began to see poems as a way of settling scores with the self.” What scores do you have left to settle?

GALLAGHER

You don’t know them really until the poems start to reveal them. If I ever lose my curiosity, I won’t be a writer. Poetry is like a witching stick. It’s telling you what’s there, where the water is. That’s how I use it, anyway.

I didn’t know when I wrote “Apparition” how strongly those stories that my uncle had told me had aﬀected me, or what they meant. The poem tries to give the moment its full due, give that story its full due. I couldn’t work it out in life—I couldn’t say to the uncle, I believe you, what you’re telling me. I believe you saw or somehow encountered the spirit of your dead brother. I couldn’t tell him that directly, and again it’s that slant thing, that if I spoke this in the moment, then I would somehow invade the mystery and there is this curious decorum that we maintain with the mysteries. In writing the poem, though, I can come closer to it than I could in life—in my actual, walking-around life. But unless your inner and outer life is very vigorous, your poetry is not going to be very vigorous.

I love not knowing things and that is at the heart of being a poet, that I don’t feel in a place of judgment a lot of my day, although I know very well how I feel about things. I was out visiting an old childhood friend of mine, who actually was with me when Ray was very ill and in fact the night that Ray died. He was my childhood badminton partner, Jack Estes. We read a kind of Zen poem that said something to the eﬀect of how wonderful life is if you don’t read the newspapers. We were laughing about this poem and then I thought, I should have corrected myself and really let him know how politically engaged I am—that I am looking to see what’s going on in this country. I’m dipping in all the time to ﬁnd out.

I don’t think it’s great to be oblivious in times like this. We all need to be doing whatever we can about the huge trespasses upon our Constitution that this Bush administration has brought down upon us. We ought to be enraged and ﬁghting in every molecule. At the same time, we can’t drink poison all day from it. You have to take in the amount you need to know to inform yourself, but don’t drink the poison. The Buddhists say something like what I was saying in Instructions to the Double so long ago. Ages ago! They say, “Don’t drink poison at the poison temple. Go to the golden temple.”

Issue 64: A Conversation with Dorianne Laux

Interview in Willow Springs 64

Works in Willow Springs 78 and 63

April 19, 2008

Terrance Owens, Shira Richman, and Tana Young

A CONVERSATION WITH DORIANNE LAUX

Photo Credit: divedapper.com

Dorianne Laux is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Facts about the Moon (Norton, 2005), was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She recently published a chapbook called Superman: The Chapbook, and co-wrote, with Kim Addonizio, The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasure of Writing Poetry.

Laux says of her poems, "It's really important to me for people to understand what it is that I'm trying to say. On the other hand, I don't want to write simple poems. I want to give people something really meaty to chew on." Her poems balance the complexities of life with an understanding of the emotions of ordinary people. In her poem, "Facts about the Moon," she writes, "The moon is backing away from us / an inch and a half a year. / That means if you're like me / and were born around fifty years ago / the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth. / What 's a person supposed to do?"

Born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952, Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. She is known for poems of personal witness and for writing about everyday experiences. A review in the American Poetry Review referred to her book, Awake, as "Gutsy in its use of daily practice, daily grief and joy. Dorianne Laux's Awake is one of the best first books I have ever read. These are poems of remark able maturity."

Awards for her work include a Pushcart Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Awake was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry and her second book, What We Carry, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Laux has taught at the University of Oregon, and now lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches at North Carolina State University. We met at the Spokane Club where Laux peeled an orange and discussed pop culture, jazz, and the beautiful arches built by termites.

TANA YOUNG

It seems that much of your work is autobiographical. Am I correct in reading it this way?

DORIANNE LAUX

I'm a poet of personal witness. I know there's a lot of feeling out there that the "I" is dead and the reader is a void, but I feel I'm talking to somebody. I don't know who it is, but I'm talking to them, and I'm telling them about my experience of being alive, hoping that experience somehow translates or touches someone else's experience of being alive. So yeah, it's almost all autobiographical. There are moments when I shift things, and of course memory is faulty. And then on top of that, you're translating what you feel in your heart and your guts and spirit, trying to translate those things into language, which is already an impossible task. It's all a pastiche, but it's true to my experience—as true as I can make it.

YOUNG

There's a contrast between the idyllic sense in the poems you've written about your child and the difficulties described in the poems about your own childhood . What do these poems tell us about your journey?

LAUX

I came from a dysfunctional family as many of us do. My experience is not that different from anyone's, it's just that people don't tend to talk about it because it's embarrassing, or shameful, or complicated. Too complicated. Like somebody innocently asks, "Hey, do you visit your parents?" Well, it's just too complicated. So I might say, "Sure, yeah, it's fine. I have a wonderful relationship with my parents," or my siblings, or whatever.

My parents' generation wanted things to be economically better for their children. They worked hard to ensure that their children didn't have to work as hard as they did. I think my task was not so much to make things economically better for my child, although that was certainly a goal. But I was also trying to make things emotionally and spiritually better for my child. And they were. So it's still that American concept with a different slant, or a different set of goals. I wanted her to have a childhood that was free of all that. Of course, I didn't protect her completely, and she didn't have an idyllic childhood. You know, bad things happen all the time no matter how hard you try.

One might look at those poems and think, Well, this is what it's like to have been a mother to this child. It was like that, and this poem is representative of this child's life or this relationship between mother and child. And in fact, it's one moment that's been captured. I have yet to capture other moments, maybe, that aren't as idyllic.

To me, poems in some ways are wishes. They're asking us to look at what our best possible situation could be, so that we have an actual visual or aural representation of what we can work toward. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's like that. It means that we wish it to be like that, and so if we can somehow make that alive in language, we can actually make it alive in reality.

SHIRA RICHMAN

In your latest book, Superman: The Chapbook, you seem to be playing with the intersection of the ideal and reality. How did you choose to publish a chapbook at this point in your career?

LAUX

Well, it was wonderful in the way it came about because Joe [Millar] and I went to visit Redwing, Minnesota, where they have an artist colony called Anderson Center for the Arts, and on the grounds they have Red Dragonfly Press. Joe and I would go over every day to watch this wonderful guy, Scott King, work at his small press, and he has a couple, maybe three of these old, falling apart, beautiful, antique printing presses. He's one of the few people in the United States who still makes type, actually forges the type, you know, casts it with metal.

We were just fascinated. We'd go over and watch him casting type and the hot metal pouring down through this little funnel and the letters coming out and he's cutting them. We were hanging around all the time, bothering him. How do you do this? And how do you do that? So one day, he asked us if we would like to make a broadside. He said, "You can actually set the type yourself if you like."

We went over and started setting the type, which was nor as easy as it sounds. There's this big box with all the letters set up in this counterintuitive way, all the most used letters on the outside, and the least used letters on the inside. And so we're trying to find the A and the L and also trying to make sure that the M and the N don't get mixed up. We'd set the type, and then make an experimental plate of it and realize we had all the letters backwards and upside down. We'd have to start over. It took us hours and hours and hours to get these two little broadsides. The broadside I made was of "Hummingbird," which is from Facts About the Moon.

After we made the broadsides, Scott asked me if I'd like to do a chapbook. He had created chapbooks for authors like Barry Lopez and W S. Merwin. He enjoys making these fine-press, beautiful little things and he wanted to know if I had a group of poems that I thought might work well together. And I said, "Sure." So we worked on that for a while—he did all the work on it. I didn't do any more typesetting.

Those are new poems, and it's somewhat common for a writer to put together a chapbook of new poems that you wouldn't get anywhere else, and the small press makes some money. All those poems will be in my next full collection, but they'll be published in the chapbook first.

RICHMAN

Are the poems about pop stars indicative of a general direction in which your work is moving?

LAUX

Those poems were really influenced by reading people like Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, these kinds of pop poems about popular culture. Among my poet friends, I'm the one they come to when they want to know about popular culture. They're like, "Who is Bono?" [ Laughs.] Many poets, they're just not hip to all this—"What's Survivor?"—and I can tell them. "What's Facebook, MySpace?" I know all this stuff. I don't know why. I'm just a junkie for popular culture, and when I was growing up in San Diego, I loved all the popular music of the day.

So I thought, Why shouldn't I write about these people I know? I grew up with Cher. I feel like I know her intimately. Why wouldn't I write a poem about her? And Superman; I feel really embarrassed for how much I love Superman. No joke. When a Superman movie comes out, man, I'm right there. I want to see it. Of course I know that Superman is absolutely ridiculous. This whole idea of America—he's going to save the world—it's romance at its highest pitch. Yet there's something moving about it, something very stirring about Superman. I'm not sure if this is where the bulk of the work is headed, but the poems were fun to write and will flavor the new book for sure.

YOUNG

Those poems feel like coming of age pieces to me. They take me back to the '50s, '60s, '70s, to those summers.

LAUX

Those were good days. They were also terrible days. Of course Superman is not Superman in that poem. He's Superman with cancer, and he's smoking dope, and he's trying to stop the pain in his head, knowing he can't save the world. He breaks my heart in that poem. But that's how I see the United States in some ways, too. He's representative of this culture, which is sick. It's an interesting way to get to some material. Pop culture can influence art on a deep level. If you read somebody like Denise Duhamel or Tony Hoagland, you realize there's something deeper going on underneath that surface. When you think about popular culture, you think immediately of surface. But what's underneath? Like the whole idea of the Beatles breaking up, and what that public and highly contested division meant to a generation.

TERRANCE OWENS

You're known for writing about ordinary people, but these pop culture references seem to go against that in a way, though they also connect ordinary with not-ordinary people—

LAUX

Well, Superman is as not-ordinary as you can get, and yet I make him an ordinary man. The same with Cher, who's this huge diva-idol, but in my poem, she's just a woman getting Botox treatments. So yes, I am dealing with a patently not-ordinary person, but I'm taking my vision and applying it to her. And of course, Cher is ordinary. If she weren't ordinary, she wouldn't be influenced by a culture that tells her she's not beautiful. She's scared. She doesn't want to get old. She doesn't want to lose her attractiveness, her sexuality. That's what all of us are facing.

RICHMAN

David Wojahn said he thinks Americans have difficulty allowing the personal and the political to intersect, and that's why there aren't a lot of successful American political poets. What are your thoughts about that?

LAUX

I do think it's difficult. Our definition of the political is complex. We think of politics as being what's going on, for instance, in Iraq right now, or what's going on in the government, or some issue like feminism, or something that we can put in a little box and say, "Here's the issue, and here's the person talking about the issue." However, any time you ask readers to consider their lives, in any aspect, in any way, to consider their relationships to their children, to their lovers, their husbands or wives, to their jobs, to money, to power, whatever, you're asking them to stop and think. That's a political act, especially right now in America.

We're having a hard time stopping and thinking. We're having difficulty recognizing what makes us human beings. That we're on the earth for a very short time. That life is precious. That death is on the doorstep—that's a huge thing. You're asking people to stop making widgets for a minute or two and consider what role they're playing, not only in their lives, but on the large stage. Any art that's political stops people in their tracks for a moment and asks us to consider.

So it depends on how you want to define political, and I think my poems are political in the way that I just spoke of. But it's also true, more and more, I think, that they're moving into a larger arena. On the other hand, I am not an overtly politicized person. I certainly have my ideas about things—and how I vote, how I move through my life has political implications, but I'm not, quote, a political poet.

In some ways, I think poets tend to be apolitical, because we are so open to possibilities, which makes it difficult to come down on one side or another. We see the complexities of things, so it's difficult for us to say yes or no. We're dealing with stuff that's somewhere between yes and no.

If you said, "Do you think it's right to kill people?" I would say, "No, absolutely not." On the other hand, I suppose there are situations in which I'd have to reconsider that statement, while many people wouldn't. They're firmly on one side or the other. So is that political? I don't know. In some ways you're in Hamlet territory. To be or nor to be. You're going to be asking yourself that question for the rest of your life. There are no real answers, and we know that. And poetry is a way of allowing a human being to live between those two ideas and feelings for a little while.

YOUNG

This reminds me of the encounter you describe in "S. Sgt. Metz," in which you get to the person underneath the camouflage.

LAUX

The uniform, yeah, you could see that man in front of you and say, "Oh my God, what is this guy doing going to war? What an idiot. I hate everything about him, everything he stands for." Or you could be on the other side of things, and say, "Look at this brave young man." Both of those positions are simplistic ways to look at the human being standing there, trying to do the right thing, and you're looking at him really trying to see who he is.

As an artist, I looked at him and thought, This is the perfect specimen of a male human being. The idea of him torn apart on the streets of Iraq was horrifying. To think of this beautiful human body, perfect in every way, put in front of bombs and gunfire was just unfathomable.

Maybe he'll get through, you know? That's the other thing, he's a real person in the world. I never spoke to him. I just observed him, and I saw him talking to an older woman who was standing in front of him, jostling her bags, and he helped her. I could see that he was intelligent, kind, graceful. He was this human being living his life and that life was going to possibly be cut short for reasons I can't fathom, and I don't know if any of us can.

Humans are absolutely fascinating creatures to me, and I so much want to represent them in their dignity. We're capable of miraculous things, and on the other hand, we are cruel, horrible, just horrible. I'm infuriated by humans and absolutely awestruck at the same time. We're such fallible, fragile creatures. And this takes me back to my youth during the Vietnam War when I was saying, "The war is wrong. I'm burning these letters. I hate you. How could you do this?" It took me living for thirty or forty years to look at my brother and realize that was my brother I was hating. How could I have a brother who was killing people? How could I sleep with a boyfriend who was killing women and children? I was too young to recognize certain complexities that I'm now able to recognize. When I was younger, I thought, Oh, this is right and this is wrong. Now I realize I don't know what right and wrong is. All I know is that human beings are gorgeous and worth preserving.

RICHMAN

Hearing you talk about Sergeant Metz makes me think of your poem, "Teaching Poetry with Pictures." Why wasn't that included in Awake?

LAUX

I know. Why wasn't it? My editor didn't like it. He said he just didn't like it, so it stayed out. And now it's gotten so old that I've never thought to put it in a book. I'd forgotten it until you mentioned it right now. I've written a number of poems that have ended up in anthologies or magazines but that never made it into a book.

There's a little poem I wrote that was on the Portland buses called "Romance," and it's only a five- or six-line poem. I really like it, but it's never made it into a book. It just hasn't fit somehow. These poems are just sort of out there, but they're not completely lost. You found one of them. Maybe it will make its way into a book someday. Who knows? Maybe somebody who has more time or interest or patience than I do will gather them.

OWENS

You said in an interview that "First lines are often important when determining the rhythm structure of a poem." What's the spark that first allows the rhythms to come in?

LAUX

It's like music. When you listen to Glen [Moore], who plays jazz, and who I love to read with, he'll just take a line, a piece of music, a musical phrase, and start playing with it. It's basically—this won't be worthy of an interview because you can't transcribe it into the text, but it could be something like [hum s a jazz riff]. That would be the phrase, and then he goes [hums contrapuntal jazz riff]. And then you take that phrase and you start playing with it. That's American jazz, the one thing we export that's beautiful. Most of what we export is not so beautiful, mostly violent movies and fast food. But jazz is something we can be proud of. Now we take any rhythmic phrase and play with it.

That said, I do have a few rhymed poems. "Life is Beautiful" is an example:

Life is beautiful and remote, and useful
if only to itself. Take the fly, angel
of the ordinary house, laying its bright
eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out
delicately along a crust of buttered toast.
Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest
dump where other flies have gathered, singing
over stained newsprint and reeking
fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate
ballet above the clashing pirouettes
of heavy machinery. They hum with life.

I can hear the music that I'm playing with, and the lines are approximately syllabic—between eight and twelve syllables per line, somewhat dactylic—beautiful, delicate, intricate. It's also a rhymed poem: Useful/angel, out/toast, singing/reeking, intricate/pirouettes, and it's end rhymed—all the way through, ending on "disorder," and "gorgeous." Not perfect rhyme, but good enough for rock 'n' roll. The poem posits a question: Maybe there are too many of us, and yet the other side is that we're "gorged, engorging, and gorgeous". Yes, maybe there are too many of us, but on the other hand, isn't it beautiful? [Laughs.] Stuck between yes and no.

I grew up in a musical family. My mother played piano, so I was inundated on a daily basis with music. She would play everything from Beethoven, Bach, classical music to pop songs to musicals. She'd play from The Music Man, South Pacific, whatever the popular musicals were at the time. Also, I'd come home from school and say, "I heard this new Sonny and Cher song," or, "I heard this Beatles song," and she'd listen to it, pick it out on the piano, and play it for me. She could play anything. And everyone in my family ended up being musical, except me. I try to put it into my poetry.

RICHMAN

How did that happen?

LAUX

When I was first born, my mother divorced my father and went to California. She was a struggling, single mother and finally met my stepfather and was scared of having kids. When I was coming up, she played, but they couldn't afford a piano. Later, she managed to get one and she started teaching the children. Well, I had already gotten past the rhyme of being taught piano. So, my sister after me, my sister after my brother, all of my brothers and sister's kids play. I did play guitar, but I dropped it after a little bit and went to poetry. I think I took all that musical training into my ear. I could recognize a musical phrase and see how it could be played with to make it interesting.

That's one of the things I start with. "Life is Beautiful." I hear that word phrase as music. I love reading aloud because, to me, it's like playing an instrument. All the phrasing is like singing. I feel like I'm singing; I'm just not singing. [Laughs.] But it feels like singing to me.

YOUNG

There's a point at which one goes from being a student poet to a master poet. When you write, are you still pulling from a mysterious place?

LAUX

Probably 90 percent of what any artist does is practice. We practice and we fail and we fail. You set your pen to the page every day, and of course, you're hoping that something grand will happen. But the chances are slim, and you know that going in, but you go in anyway. That's faith. You keep hitting the page, hoping that something's going to fire, something's going to happen, something's going to bloom out of it. And the more you practice, the more that possibility of success is present. The more you do anything, the greater the possibility that something might actually come of it. So you constantly live with failure, and yet, you know that that failure is teaching you something.

B. F. Skinner discovered this thing, intermittent reinforcement, where you can reward somebody at random intervals. It might be the third time, and the next time it'll be the twenty-fifth time, and the next time it'll be the first time, and the next time it'll be the eighty-seventh time. You can't know when the reward is going to arrive, but that's what keeps you going. It's going to come sometime. And that's all I care about. I don't care if it comes the hundred and fiftieth time as long as it comes, and it's a very powerful thing. Any time you happen upon a poem, your spirit, your entire body, is filled with this energy of that magic that has happened, and you'll do anything to get back to it. You'll do anything to find it again.

I don't worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I'm always writing, but there are times where I'm just not on my game, and I'll use that time to read some new poets, go see some art, walk down to the river and just stare at it, or have a conversation with my sister, or whatever—do whatever it is that I do in my life, hoping that I'll get filled up enough. And something will happen, some juggling will happen and boom.

Ellen Bryant Voigt has a great essay in her book The Flexible Lyric. I can't really write about poetry. Some people are wonderful at it, like Ellen Bryant Voigt. I get lost writing about poetry. But she writes these wonderful essays, and in one of them she talks about termites—I think it is—how some people were studying termites. And they put them in a kind of aquarium with all their stuff they use to build these beautiful arches that make nests—dung and wood chips and whatever it is that they use. And she said the termites run around chaotically for a long time, and they have little pieces of this stuff in their mouths. Ultimately, one termite will accidentally drop a piece and another termite will drop another piece on top of it. And once that happens, they all get excited and run over and pick up chips and start making the arches.

When that happens, they all get alert and they'll say, "Okay, it's time to make an arch." And I think that's a wonderful metaphor for how we make poetry. We're just running around in these chaotic circles with dung in our mouths, or wood chips, or whatever. And we drop something and then something else and suddenly this arch starts to appear. We really don't know how it works. I think Ellen's essay comes closest to describing how a poem happens.

It's just this odd coupling of sound and image; our minds are so filled with chaos. Our bodies are filled with it, our emotions, our spirits are just chaotically running around, saying, "What, what? What, what, what, what, what?" And then something happens, and things start to make sense for a moment. Of course that's all that it is, a moment, the moment of making the poem—and the moment of getting everything into its order is a beautiful, ideal moment. Then you go back to chaos, hoping for that moment again .

OWENS

That's a good metaphor for jazz, too.

LAUX

Absolutely; that's what jazz musicians are doing—riffing off a phrase, hoping that things will come together and build an arch of some sort. Of course an arch is a beautiful metaphor, right? There are termites on both sides, building their columns and they meet in the middle. And so you can think of that too as the reader and the writer. They're coming together in the middle and touching.

YOUNG

Are there people you read that help get you in a state of mind for writing?

LAUX

Reading other poets is often what will spark my imagination. I'll see one of their arches and get inspired. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll write a brilliant poem; it just means I'm inspired. It has to be both inspiration and something else that happens. I reread the poets I teach: Phil Levine, Ruth Stone, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, Carolyn Forché, Lucia Perillo, Gerald Stern, Lucille Clifton, C. K. Williams, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marie Howe and Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, another good essayist. Too many to list, but you get the idea. I love poetry that feels as it thinks. I've been memorizing Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Assault." Those poems inspire me.

But lots of things inspire me. Travel—I'm really looking forward to moving to North Carolina, because it's going to be a whole new landscape, a whole new culture, a history that I'm completely unfamiliar with, new people. All of this change is wonderful for a writer because you're shaken out of your habitual responses.

We all get habituated, right? You get up in the morning, have your coffee, and read your newspaper, and that's great. Everybody loves life in its mundane, daily aspects. It's what makes us feel secure. But I also start to go numb a little bit and I don't see what's around me. So I put myself in a new situation and suddenly I'm really seeing the person next to me, hearing music, and I'm smelling, and I can't help but want to write it down.

YOUNG

Do you have a particular time that you write every day?

LAUX

Some people are very disciplined, but everybody has their own way of approaching their art, and for me, because I started my writing life as a single mother and while working as a waitress, it wasn't like I had an office and time every day that I could sit down and write. Life was too chaotic. So I got it when I could. When my daughter was off at school, I'd write. Sitting on the bench waiting for her to come out, I'd write. I'd be doing an errand, and I'd pull over to the side of the road, pick up a Jack in the Box bag, and write something on it. That's how I managed to get poems written—in between times. I've continued doing that.

Whenever it strikes me, I sit down and write. Of course now I'm in a university, so I have all summer to write, which I never had when I was coming up as a poet. I have that time, and my body does sort of click in when spring comes. I can feel my body going, It's getting to be writing time. Yeah. It does kind of get into these seasonal responses. Joe and I are going to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for five weeks this summer, and we'll write every day.

I'm hoping I can start putting the new poems together and making them into a book. I need concentrated time to do that. I can write the poems between times, but doing the revision work—that's the hard part. When you're at a writers' colony, you get up in the morning, have your breakfast knowing you have hours to write before lunch, and more hours after lunch and before dinner, and you can get a lot of work done. But most of the time, you're just squeezing it in, and that's fine with me. I'm happy sitting at a bus stop and writing a poem.

RICHMAN

Or at the airport.

LAUX

Yes, I started that Metz poem at the airport. I got halfway through it and my plane was called. I went down to Santa Cruz with my friend Ellen Bass and stayed for a couple of weeks. Ellen gave me an exercise. She said, "I want you to use these words, and these phrases." So I went back to the Metz poem and used the exercise to help finish it, and I used all the words she'd given me. I'm grateful that I can write anywhere.

RICHMAN

Your attraction to capturing moments, is that why you don't write fiction?

LAUX

I love people and psychology. I love stories, dialogue, relationships, description, everything that goes into making a story. But I also love compression and music. And of course our best prose writers do, too, but I'm much more interested in moments. I love reading novels and short stories, but as a writer, I'm not so interested in Fred getting from the living room into the car. I couldn't care less. I want to go inside Fred's soul and play there. Not that fiction writers don't do that as well, but they've got all these other concerns. And I'm much more interested in the psychological moment , the moment of epiphany. I want brush strokes versus whatever is the opposite of brush strokes, which I don't think there is an opposite. But that's what I want to do. I just want those light feathery things.

But back to practical circumstances: I only had these moments in time to write because I had a child. I had to get the dishes done. I had to get the rag out, and the mop. I was writing in these tiny spaces and it's difficult to write a novel like that. You could, but it wasn't something that I had a whole lot of time for, so poetry was a great form. I could use all this stuff: dialogue, arc, character, description, and I could use it all in a very small space within a limited amount of time. While my daughter was at school, I could do this. Poetry was a practical issue for me. I could do a draft of the poem and then go off and come back and play with it a little bit and go away and come back. But more than practical, it was the fact that I loved sound. And fiction, novels, prose at its best does have that sound, but it's a rare novel that 's musically beautiful throughout. It's more often getting information out: And then she went to the store and picked up some oranges and a gun. It's moving things along on a plot level, and I'm not so interested in plot. Reading plots, yes, but not writing them.

OWENS

You seem interested in meeting your readers in the middle, not making them walk across the whole bridge themselves—

LAUX

I grew up as a navy brat in San Diego, living in Quonset huts with bunches of other kids from all over the world, and those kids couldn't care less about reading the back of a cereal box, let alone a book of poetry. Those are the people of my life. Those are the people I want to speak to, the people I grew up with, ran around in the canyons with. It's really important to me for them to understand what it is I'm trying to say. On the other hand, I don't want to write simplistic poems. I want to give those people something to chew on. And that's a fine line, writing a poem that's accessible, and yet has the complexity you feel it needs to be a true work of art. So yeah, I want to meet my reader, and I want mystery, but not misery, not where they're throwing up their hands and saying, "What is this? I can't understand it. What the hell's going on here?" It may be out of fashion, maybe even a bit radical these days, but I feel strongly about being understood.

Issue 74: A Conversation with Andre Dubus

Found in Willow Springs 74

March 9, 2013

Elizabeth Kemper French and Joseph Salvatore

A CONVERSATION WITH ANDRE DUBUS

Photo Credit: andredubus.com

Andre Du bus's fiction dives into the underbelly and wresrles with copies we often turn away from: crime, poverty, infidelity, violence, merciless bullying, and pathetic sex. His lush layers
sensory detail ground the reader in the smallest moments of his characters' lives and their often unresolved conflicts. We tumble along with them, with rarely a redemptive branch to grab on to. From his first book of gritty scories, to his novels, memoir, and most recent collection of novellas, Dubus looks unflinchingly at the inner lives of the common man and woman: bartenders and recovering alcoholics, construction workers and criminals, bank tellers and strippers, wives and husbands. Even though these characters are sometimes hard to watch, there is a beauty to their tragic stories that keeps us mesmerized. They are bruised and real, and even if we want to turn away,we cannot, because we recognize their desperation in ourselves.

Dubus grew up with his three siblings and single mother in the tough, economically depressed mill towns along the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. He chronicles his childhood- his despair, his estranged relationship with his well-known father, his turn to violence and eventually writing-in his 2011 memoir, Townie. Over the years he has held many jobs that still allowed him to write: bartender, carpenter, house cleaner, halfway-house counselor, and teacher, all of which gave him a deep well of vivid detail to draw from for his fiction.

Dubus is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and Townie. His most recent book, Dirty Love, published in the fall of 2013 , was a New York Times Notable Book selection, a New York Times Editors' Choice, a 2013 Notable Fiction choice from The Washington Post, and a Kirkus Starred Best Book of 2013. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a 2012 recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Known for his gregarious and generous personality, Dubus' scandor and humor strike a sharp contrast to his dark prose. A beloved professor and devoted father and husband, Dubus fills his days with family, teaching, writing, and exercise, but as a self-proclaimed Luddite, he rarely depends on technology to help him out. We met in the Marriott in Boston in the midst of a snowstorm, out of which Dubus had to dig his car to drive to us from his home in the town of Newbury port. Because the weather delayed him, he continued to update us by phone , but never by text. To ensure the interview would be captured, we put many pieces of technology in front of him, a digital voice recorder, two smartphones, and even an old-school cassette tape recorder purchased from Radio Shack in the late 1970s. Dubus is on the record proclaiming his fierce vehemence against these new technologies. We began by asking him about the role of technology in his life and in the life of the writer.

ELIZABETH KEMPER FRENCH

We were talking about technology a few minutes ago, and I'm wondering what role it plays in your life and your writing.

ANDRE DUBUS III

None. I'm not getting on the digital train. I don't have one of those (a smartphone) and never will. But I'm an asshole, because we'll be at a bar, and I'll say, "Come on, buddy. You're terrible to own one of those, but while you have it, what's the score of the game?"

I don't like modern life- with these gadgets. I know there are advantages to them, and what writer doesn't like the research capability of the internet? I remember I was writing a novel and wanted to know what gasoline cost in East Texasin 1941. I had to call the Boston Public Library long distance from Newbury port. A nice old lady answered the phone. "Just a minute, dear," and she goes off to the stacks. Ten minutes later- long distance, waiting-"I'll have to call you back." Four hours later, I get the information. "Ir was seventeen cents, dear." And now, in your underwear, within a quarter second, you can get that information. I don't like how we're all staring at screens. I cannot cell you how many times I will look up at a reading- and you know what it's like, when you're reading your work, it's like you' re opening your soul; it just feels so vulnerable- and someone in the audience is looking down at a screen. Ir's like you're trying to kiss someone, and they're watching TV I chink it's changing us. Every night, everyone in my house is on
a screen. Sometimes, it's legitimate. My wife has a dance business,doing work. But she didn 't have to do that work before she had the computer; work only happened during work hours. My daughter has the iPhone glued- sewn- into her hand , and she texts a thousand times a minute. And my sons are on the internet doing all they do. So it's a philosophical turning-away-from, and a temperamental turn in g-away-from. The older I get, the more simplicity I want. I don't chink these thin gs have helped us. I chink they've made us little rats, made us pay attention to little, stupid shit. I see this ad, and all these quick cuts, and the logo for the new gadget is, "Always connected." But I want to be disconnected. I want nothing to do with being connected. I want to call when I want to call. And I'm not going to call.

FRENCH

What do you chink of the personas people create of themselves online? Especially on social media sites like Facebook?

DUBUS

I find that part poignant-that people need to show who they were before they're dead. And I think they have every right to pick and choose how they're going to promote that or express char. I'll never do it. My publisher made me get a Facebook page a few days ago, but I'll never go on it. I said, "Put this letter on there," and I wrote: "Dear readers, I'm not a fan of this whole digital world, but I'm a fan of human beings, and so this is here for you to know where I might be, and if you want to come meet me in person, I would love to see you in the flesh-and blood, eye-to-eye way. But that's it. I'll never be on chis again. Sincerely, whatever." My wife's got a Facebook page, which she doesn't have time for, and I'll look at the people on it, because how can you be a writer and not investigate a little bit? I'll look and I'll see that most of my friends who are in their fifties, for whom a family never happened- they fell through the cracks as wives and husbands. They're Going to die without having kids. And my heart goes out to these people, because my life began when I had kids. I think, They're all alone. Why not reach out to people you haven't seen for years? Why not? I'm not going to do it, but I'm not going to judge it. So, yes, I am a Luddite. I recently got a contract on the email that said just cut and paste and send it back this way. I wrote back saying, "I don't know how to cut and paste."

JOSEPH SALVATORE

Many emerging writers today are cold by their publisher to promote their work through social media. The AWP conference is a viral place for mostly unknown writers to gather and network. Can you talk about the career versus the work?

DUBUS

I'm not criticizing. I know a lot of publishers are in peril financially, and so they've pushed this task onto us because they've laid off their publicists, and they're trying to cut corners. I have to say, for me, this whole career consciousness is a kind of poison.

I think it's a publisher' s job to do all this shit, so I resist it, and I think we have every right to say, "That's your job. You're taking fifteen percent of every book, so earn it! I'm writing another one." I really feel that way. But let me take that back, coo; there's a caveat to that. I've been fortunate enough to get some nice advances for the last few books, and so I'll do a sixty-city fucking tour even though a book tour is a recipe for self-loathing. I'm very fortunate that I'm in the literary Boston community, because I've got a lot of good writer friends now, and while I didn't always hang out with writers, I have a good chunk of them now, and they're fun to hang out with. But I try to avoid any activity that makes me career conscious, because I am as susceptible to it as anyone. I didn't want to be a writer to be a writer. I just like writing.
You read Townie, so you know I came to writing basically to save my life, and I was surprised it was in me, but it's in a lot of us; there are six or seven writers in my clan. One of the benefits of being my dad's son is I quickly realized no one was going to give me any positive attention whatsoever. The world was not only going to ignore me-it was going to kind of go after me.

I thought, I'll just do it for me- no, not for me- for the characters who are coming. I'll just show up every day. A day writing badly, or mediocrely, is a hundred times better than a day where we don't get to

the desk at all. I never lose sight of that fact that it's a wonderful gift from the Divine, the Mysteries, whatever these things are around us, that I found early on something that, when I do it daily, makes me feel magnanimous toward humanity, keeps me curious, keeps me alive, and it's been a wonderful happy accident that I actually had a career happen. Because that was never the plan. Early on, I couldn't afford an office. There was no office at Emerson College. I was driving one day, thinking, Wow, when the radio's off, this car 'is pretty quiet. So I started to write in my car. I wrote all of House Of Sand and Fog over four years in my car. It was 5:30 in the morning- if it's a carpentry day, I'm in my work clothes; if it's a teaching day, I'm in my teaching clothes. I would get my coffee, go to the graveyard, pull up next to a grave. I'd open my composition notebook, sharpen my pencil with a utility knife, and I'd feel like sleeping. If it 's winter, I've got the car running with the heat on. If it's summer, the windows are down and I'm wearing bug spray. I read a paragraph: "Ah, it sucks. Fuck." Cross it out. Write two lines. Stare at them. Write three or four more lines. Write a paragraph. Ooh! Something's starting to happen. Ah, fuck, time for work! And have to put it aside. But four years later, I had a book.

FRENCH

So did it take the full four years to write House Of Sand and Fog?

DUBUS

It took three years in the graveyard. At the end of that, I had twenty two notebooks with a beginning, middle, and end, and then I had to type it. I spent a year typing and revising. Then I sent it out. It went to twenty-four, twenty-five publishers over two years, which is normal. People don't realize this. My first three books went to over a hundred publishers. Seven years of no's to get those three yes's. I also had the model of watching my father; his life never changed at all, whenever he had a book out. He also had a very small publisher. He would get some nice reviews, but he never made much money.I'm grateful for the material success I've had, but it's been a happy accident.

FRENCH

I'm curious about writing in longhand. House of Sand and Fog was in different viewpoints. Did you find , over the course of three years, that it was difficult to find where you were? If you were in Kathy's viewpoint, was it difficult to go back and find where the Colonel was? How did you manage that kind of multiple viewpoint, especially on paper?

DUBUS

Well, it wasn't so much the paper as the lack of time I had to write. I just did a talk with Daniel Woodrell-Winter's Bone-and before every writing day, he reads the entire manuscript before he writes the next sentence. If you've got two hundred pages-that's four hours of reading- before writing the next sentence. So Everyone's got their own way. For me, and this may have helped, I knew I had thirty-one minutes, maybe, in the car before I had go to the highway to hit the job site or the classroom. I would reread enough to get back into character, and with the notebooks, it's crossed-out lines and arrows and numbers. But here's what I love about writing longhand: I built a soundproof cave in my basement, like a jail cell, five feet wide, six feet rail, eleven feet long. It's got a little port window I cover with a blanket, a little desk, and a blank wall- and I'll put on my headphones and I'll Play music and I'll type the previous day's longhand into the thing, and then I'll turn off the music and read over the typed stuff, making revisions, and then I'll keep writing longhand. I need the physical intimacy of flesh, blood, bone, wood, paper. It helps me enter the character.

SALVATORE

So you don 't listen to music when you're doing fresh composition?

DUBUS

No. I have to have complete silence. I put headphones on that I used to use for my table-saw work. I can hear jackhammers or squirrels, but I can't hear human voices.

FRENCH

Do you think it slows you down, in a way that's helpful, to write longhand?

DUBUS

Writing longhand does slow you down. There's a great line from Goet he: "Do not hurry. Do not rest." Some people say, " I need the computer, because my ideas are so fast." I say, "Ideas? I don't trust ideas. Ideas are just ideas." I trust the other stuff. I love that line from Flannery O'Connor, from Mystery and Manners: "There's a certain grain of stupidity the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and that's the quality of having to stare."

What I love about longhand is that when you look at that screen on the machine, every thing's so fucking perfect, the margins, everything. It's like having a partner you think you love- she's so beautiful- but there's really nothing going on between you. He's so handsome and nice, but there's just nothing happening. So every thing's sexy, but I'm dead inside. The handwritten manuscript is homely; it's ugly. It's full of crossed-out words, X's and numbers-read this first, then this and this, then arrow back four pages. It's a messy pain in the ass, and when that starts to read well, you think, Well, there might be something happening here. So I would sometimes read twenty pages of mess, maybe five pages typed, and then I'd write in thirty-one minutes three sentences, and then I'd start the car and go. I like how it slows me down.

FRENCH

In your class at Emerson, you talked about the process of discovery when you're writing a first draft, trying to capture what's happening as truthfully as possible. Later, you've got a beginning, middle, and end, and you know it's not there yet, but you have a sense of what happens, a sense of the conflict in the character you might not have realized at first. The characters slowly reveal themselves to you. So when you go back to revise, do you fear that you're imposing something on the characters now that you're more conscious of the work?

DUBUS

I love this Richard Bausch line: "If you think you're thinking when you're writing, think again. You're much closer to the dreaming side when you're writing, so just dream, dream, dream it through. Then when you're done, try to look at what you've dreamed like a doctor looks at an X-ray, and cry to be terribly smart about it." He's talking about revision. I've stolen Janet Burroway's distinction of story versus plot, and I use it in classes all the time, because I think it's helpful, the way she elegantly lays it out: Story is a causal sequence of events, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You have to give yourself permission to write through seventy pages of brush, where you know you're kind of off the trail, and you've lost the scent, but you've got to write it to find your way back. You may not keep all that you're writing about his history in dental school, but you've got to know who this dentist is, who's married to your main character. Even though a little voice in your head says, "Ah, this is fucking really slow.This is such a-so what?" But you've got to find it. So what is plot? Plot, Burroway says, is how we arrange that causal sequence of events in order to highlight emotion, dramatic tension, theme, aesthetic, to make it more beautiful, to make it more fully itself. So go back to Bausch. He 's talking about that X-ray on the wall. Even then, he says, 'Try to be terribly smart about it." I think he's talking about plotting. And even then , it's not a contrivance. Plotting is much a dream-like state; it's more rational, analytical, and logical than dreaming, but it shouldn't be too much that way. When it gets too much that way, that 's when you're assuming, Oh, she's a recovering alcoholic. I have to keep remembering that. But then I remind myself: Wait a minute. These are real people. I don't think they're just creations of writers. I think, when you're writing well, you're finding them in another dimension; it's an act of spiritual excavation.

What distinguishes a good work from a great one, despite all the aspects of craft and all the skills you bring to it, is genuine curiosity. I'm speaking for myself. You teach what you need to learn. My worst writing has been when I have not been curious enough about the material. My best writing has been when I have been totally curious. He said this, but is it all that? She says this, but is this all she thinks about what she said? Is this all she feels about what she thinks? And is that all he said when she said what she thought, after she said what she felt? That Hemingway line: "Every writer needs a built-in, shockproof shit detector." Why is my shit detector going off every time I'm in this really well written scene I wrote? I remember when I was in my twenties at some reading, and some famous writer said, "Oh, it gets harder as you go along." I didn't know it then, but I think he was saying that even though you've been practicing writing daily for decades and are more nimble than you were when you starred you can describe a woman sitting in a chair, with a light behind her, overlooking Boston, maybe a little more deftly than you could thirty years ago-but just because you write well about something doesn't mean it happened. We get to be such good liars, we're not writing the truth anymore. When I write a story, I'm never gripped with the desire to tell the story. I'm gripped with the desire to find the story, to find it. You can't choose what you'll be pulled coward. Let me give you an example: For years, off and on, I've read in the newspapers about a certain kind of predator. He's not a sexual predator, not a violent predator-just a guy who does something weird. And it's always interested me. But, apparently, not enough, because whenever I've sat down to write his story, twice now as a novel, it collapses like a house of cards. I did a bunch of research and I wrote really, really hard. I've been writing long enough- and I read it. It's a decent passage; it's a decent piece of dialogue. Again, ch is the whole notion of: The writing's not bad; I've been doing it a long time. But it feels ... It took me years to start saying chis in writing classes: To me, there's a difference between making something up and imagining it. Just because I want to write from the point of view of this guy doesn't mean he wants me to be his daddy, doesn't mean he's going co co me co me.

FRENCH

Did you feel less connected to him as a character?

DUBUS

I felt like an actor pulling off a decent performance. But here's what happened. I go into his first victim , a woman working in a bank, kind of a pretty, overweight woman. So, okay, I'm going to co-opt her point of view, just to find her a little bit, and then I'm going to zap her with my guy. I've been writing for three months from his point of view. With two paragraphs of writing from her point of view, she felt ten times more real than he did.This is the mystery I'm talking about. One of the dangers of fine art instruction in graduate programs-undergraduate, whatever,conferences-is that we can demystify the process too much. It's mysterious to me why this overweight, lonely, pretty woman in a bank is far more real to me, in minutes of writing about her, than this guy. So, okay, I'm going to ignore that feeling. I'm going co keep writing, because I'm going co zap her with my guy, because that's the fucking novel I want co write, and I'm going to write it! After maybe six days, two weeks of writing, it was so clear that her passage was imagined and real. And his was fake and contrived and better written because of it. Pascal said: "Anything written co please the author is worthless." I really believe that. I don't chink we get co do what we want co do. I believe writing is an act of humility, of opening yourself co so something larger and allowing it in, no matter how you feel about it. So that lady turned into the first novella in the book coming up. She never even saw the guy again. He was like a Hollywood set held up by telephone poles. I let him go.

FRENCH

Have you had other characters you felt distant from, who you had to work harder to understand?

DUBUS

Lester in House of Sand and Fog.

FRENCH

His point of view is very brief.

SALVATORE

And it's dose-third, as opposed to the two firsts. What happened with Lester?

DUBUS

Here's the thing: I know Sand and Fog became a big success, but I'm haunted by it. I think a better writer would have written a better book, and I'd like another stab at it. One of the challenges for me was Lester. I've got these alternating first-person points of view. Now, this is it again: back to mystery, right? The Colonel-I tried all these various points of view-he would not come, until I got to first- person present, which I didn't want to write in, because I wrote a lot of my first book in first-person present. I said, "It's too intimate, too close." But he would always show up in the present. And then Kathy would only show up in first-person past. I tried all these points of view. Isn't it weird that the only present -tense character in the book doesn't survive it? He can' t tell it in the past tense. That was not conscious at all-just intuition.
When I get to Lester, Kathy's in the house. She's drunk and suicidal, and the Colonel's gone. I'm thinking, Oh, this is great, man. This might actually be a positive thing for once in my writing life. But then, it's fucking Lester, sitting on the porch. I kind of stared at the page for a while, and I just kept seeing Lester. I'm just staring and there he is. I see him waiting. I remember thinking, Fuck! I don't want to get his point of view. I've got, like, a hundred and eighty pages in their points of view.Isn't it kind of late to bring him in? I thought, I'm not bringing him in. I'm going to go back to them. But they were just in a tableau.
I kept seeing him on that foggy porch in the fish camp in the woods, waiting for her. I said, I don't want to write about you, motherfucker, but I guess I have to. I went in with a first- person narrator, because I had this little rule in my head: You can't go from two first-persons to a third. What the fuck? I have to do it first. So I did a first-present. He sounded like a bad piece of matinee cowboy writing. I'm waiting for my woman on the porch. Where is my cute, little alcoholic sex ... " It was awful. I tried first-person past, and it was worse. I tried third-person subjective, but it was still a little more distant- the third. A little alarm went off: You can't go to a third-person POV! And I thought, why not? All of a sudden, I could feel him. I could feel him far more than I could before, but I still felt, all the way through him, through this whole section, he was saying ... With the two first-person points of view, it was two hands pushing this way: "Back off, Jack." When I finally found the third-person subjective voice, one hand was saying, "All right, come on," and the other one was saying, "Back off" For a while, I felt like an artistic failure to not have both hands pulling me in, as I felt with Kathy and the Colonel, bur then I said , " No, chis is you, motherfucker. This is how you are. You've got a guard up, don't you? You're an inauthentic kind of dude. I'm just going to let you be."

FRENCH

I recently looked at House of Sand and Fog and a few other multiple-viewpoint novels for what I'm writing now. I was crying so organically follow all my characters' voices, how they spoke to me, and was concerned the points of view weren't all marching. I had that same moment of-Really? Am I allowed to do that? So it was helpful co see what you had done, mixing first-person past, first-person present, and third-person past, and say, "O h, sure, you can do that."

DUBUS

That's why reading is so important for writers. I'm mystified when I hear people say they don't read when they're writing. Are you kidding me? I remember hearing this story about Richard Yates at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and I heard my father say it years later- that he had two points of view in the same sentence, and everyone said, "O h, you can't do that!" And he said, "Well, I just did."

Again, that great line from O'Connor: "The writer can do whatever she can get away with. Unfortunately, none of us have ever been able to get away with much." This notion that the art is larger than the artist, that there's such a thing as dramatic unity, and effect, and aesthetics, and some things hold, and some things don't. It's endlessly exciting. I've been doing this for-I don't even want to say it, because I've only published five books- but I've been doing this for thirty years, five, six days a week. The only time I didn't was when we had our kids. For, like, three days I didn't, and then when I had pneumonia twice. I'm as excited about it as when I began, because it's such a descent into the unknown. It's scary and exalted, and I love stepping into the not-knowing. I think one of the dangers of being a successful writer, in terms of books and publications and money and all that shit, is I think you can run the risk of becoming more a thinker than a dreamer. I'm trying not to do that.

SALVATORE

I'm going to return to Lester for a moment. At some point, he takes the bullets out of the gun and gives them to Kathy. And at one point, he thinks, I could have told that kid, "It's not going to work; there are no bullets in there." And he might have stopped the whole thing from going down. You talk about struggling to create Lester. But Lester was probably, in terms of Greek tragedy, the one that scared me the most, how easily you can go from being an upstanding citizen to falling in ways you never could have imagined.

DUBUS

The truth is, the inauthentic feeling, I ultimately concluded, was him. He did not feel like a contrived character to me, or I wouldn't have left him in. I would have rewritten the whole rest of the book. I am mortified to say that there is so much Lester in me. I've never been a cop, I've never had a gun, but it is no stretch for me to imagine going from being an upstanding citizen to some guy in a jail cell.

FRENCH

And to save the victim, right? That's really what he was doing. He was partially motivated by saving a woman, who he felt something terrible was happening to.

DUBUS

Which brings me back to this notion of imagining versus making up. I'm writing from her point of view, but at first I didn't know she was an alcoholic. I knew she was a cokehead, but I've met coke heads who could drink, I've met alcoholics who can do a line of coke, but not go down the coke road, and then there are those who have dual addictions. I thought, Maybe she's not an alcoholic. Maybe her husband was alcoholic and into cocaine. Maybe she's just a recovering cokehead. Lester's pouring the wine on that date, and she's drinking, and I was actually surprised to see it escalate. She's drinking nips of Bacardi, and now she's going down the spiral, and she's at the gas station , getting gas. I'm following her, thinking, All right, so I'm shitfaced, and I'm fucked up, and this mother fucker'staken my father's house, and I'm the fuck up of my family,and I see the gas is empty. I wasn't like: I will now send her to the gas station to get gas to burn down the house. I go get gas, and I see it with Kathy-Motherfuckers, we're all going down. I'm filling the gas container, and then I go to put it in the trunk, and I see the gun. I forgot the gun was there! She's looking at it; I'm looking at it over her shoulder, kind of in her skin. We reach for it, and I'm thinking, What the fuck's going to happen now?

Stephen King says, "To me, these books are found objects." I thought that was really remarkable and true. But look, none of that can be taught. Ron Carlson says: "Details are for the writer only. They are the instruments by which we steer." So many younger writers think, Oh, yeah, well, I'll give him a job later. What do you mean, give him a job later? Are you kidding me? A guy who comes home from working on hear as in an operating room is a different human being than someone who's been shoveling shit- a different human being than someone who's been changing bed pans or bundling mortgages and sending them to Taiwan.You must know what your character does all day. Not just that sensory detail is so important. We all know, we are more in the room than someone who's blind and deaf. They'd be in the room in a different way; they have other gifts that come out, but they are not in the room as fully as we are, because they have been robbed of two important senses. When I write, I'm not bringing in all that sensual detail so much to give the reader a felt experience, although ultimately I do want to give the reader that experience. The main reason I'm bringing in all that detail, though , is so I can be in the body and in the moment with this character to know what's really going on. Let me give you an example-I'm writing from the point of view of Kathy. I'm waking up in my car. I'm sleeping outside the house that was wrongfully taken from me. I've got to pee, and I've got to brush my teeth. But I'm hearing power saws. Now, I know that they're circular saws, because I'm a carpenter, but she's hearing power saws, and she looks out and there are carpenters, cutting into the roof of her stolen house. Even with the bad taste in my mouth and having to pee, I am now running barefoot across the street: What the fuck! That's my fucking house! I'm running with her, and what do I see? An upside-down piece of roof sheeting, with a bunch of roofing tacks sticking out, and she steps on it, nine little holes going into the bottom of her foot. She pulls it out. As soon as that happened, as a writer, I'm thinking, Ah, fuck! Now every time she's in a scene, I've got to remember her foot. The writer could say, "We ll, fuck it. Maybe she just stubs her toe." But that would be making it up instead of imagining it. What your imagination gave you was the sheeting with nails, now work with it. Summon the nerve and the faith, and work with it.

Now what happens? Well, one action stories a causal sequence of events with a beginning, middle, and end. Or that causes them to come down. She's in the house, getting her foot wrapped by this Iranian lady who doesn't even know who she is, and it's sweet. Now I'm in this motel room with my wrapped foot, that's been wrapped all day with an Ace bandage on a hot day. There's this guy who I, as a writer, don't know who the fuck he's sniffing around. I don't even want him in the story. Why? Because I don't want to research cops. But he's sniffing after this woman. I'm not trying to judge, but I'm just allowing him to-okay, here he is. He walks over. She's unwrapping her foot, because it's hot, and as she's starting to unwrap it, she's afraid it's going to smell. And that's right when the handsome, young cop is there and, frankly, she doesn't know it, but nobody wants to smell bad. She sits back so he doesn't smell her stinky foot, and when she sits back, he takes that as some sort of invitation to sit on the side of the bed. She's leaning forward to get more comfortable and then they're kissing, and then they're fucking! And I'm writing this thing: Aw, come on. Bullshit! And then I think, Come on! What kind of a prick are you? And then: What is this? What are you, like, a sex addict, too? This is so fucked up. And the next day, my shit detector did not go off. Now I've got this cop in my story. That whole novel never would have gone to its catalytic, tragic end, without the introduction of that cop and his gun, which never would have happened if she hadn't stepped on nails.

SALVATORE

Cause and effect.

DUBUS

That's all I try to impart in classes. I say, Look. Anyone's invited to this party; you just need real, authentic curiosity, an ability to dream, and concrete, specific sensual detail. Put those together, and it always leads to characters in trouble. Why? Because everybody's in trouble all the fucking time. This is another thing that upsets people, especially Americans: All three of us-hopefully none of us have big trouble, but if I scratch the surface a little, we all have some trouble. That's normal, and that's where stories lie.

SALVATORE

So when Lester sleeps with Kathy, at what point in the writing do you have to figure out why he's having trouble with his wife, and when and if the backstory with him and his kid will come into it? What's the relationship between revision and continuing to tell the truth?

DUBUS

I tend to write chronologically, and I allow cause and effect to happen. That's not to say that the finished story will be in the shape in which I wrote it. With Lester, I begin where I chink he begins in the book, which is, he' swaiting: Where is she? S h e said she'd be here. Why isn't she here? I just left my wife. It's like people: some you're just more attracted to, male or female. You just get along. With Lester, I didn't want to hang out with him. I would rather hang out with the tyrant, the proud, rigid Colonel.
Actually, let's talk about the Colonel and then do Lester, because the first few weeks of trying to write from the point of view of this Iranian guy, he wasn't showing up, and I finally figured out why he wasn't showing up. I found the first-person voice pretty soon, but he still wasn't showing up. I realized I was judging him. I realized I thought, You're a prick. You were with SAVAK, the CIA-controlled death squads. You were a piece of shit. You're just some powerful bastard. It was totally unconscious on my part. There's that great line from Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. He said, "You know,Max, the writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand." I wasn't seeking to understand, but I thought I was. Again, it's like convincing yourself you're kissing her and you're really turned on, but something's not happening. I had this plywood desk I built in our little apartment and I was staring at the plywood. I cut it with a dull blade, and it was a shitty cut, and I was thinking, You don't do anything right. You don't go get a sharp blade. And then thinking, You know what? You're judging this motherfucker. And what happens in life when you feel prejudged by someone? You say, "Fuck you." I think the same is true of characters. He felt prejudged by me, and he said, "Fuck you." So I'm looking at this shitty jigsaw cut, and I said, "Why don't you really try to understand this guy?" I remember asking, "What's it like?"

Charlie Rose asked Mike Nichols, the director, "What's the main question the storyteller asks?" Nichols said, "Well, it's not the main question the newspaper reporter asks. The main question the newspaper reporter has tO ask before writing his or her story is, 'What happened?' What the storyteller asks is not, 'What happened?' but , 'What's it like? What's it really like to be in this thing that's happened?"
So now I'm going to be more open, less judgmental: What's it really like to be a guy like you, from your culture, working with these blue-collar people? As soon as I felt myself embrace genuine curiosity, he showed up, and he stayed. The same thing with Lester- you asked about Lester's marriage and all that. I had far less judgment against Lester. I was just a little irked that I had to go to the third-person point of view and to another character two hundred pages into the story, bur that's what was presenting itself.It was a much shorter trip to genuine curiosity about Lester, but I remember thinking , Okay, who are you, anyway? I called the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department , and got a hold of a Captain John Wells. I probably made twenty calls to him over the next few months. It was a matter of: What's it really like to be a field trained officer, seven o'clock, after a twelve-hour shift training younger cops, just left your wife, you're on the porch, you're kind of horny and lonely, probably hungry,and you want a drink, and she's not here. You had that sweet kiss-just the one. And now, it's like acting: Where is she? And now I'm in the car, driving, going into Lester.

FRENCH

Writing a novel takes such a long time-so much of it spent in that dream state you spoke of, not knowing your characters yet, not knowing where you are going.

DUBUS

Yes, no matter what's going on in your life- a novel can take a long time. That one took four years; The Garden of Last Days took five-and a-half years; Bluesman took three years; The Cage Keeper took six years; Townie I tried to write for twenty-eight years, three different times. You're going to go through all sorts of highs and lows and changes in those years, but your novel doesn't. This whole notion of imagining versus making up: I cannot tell you how many sex scenes and meal scenes I've written, drinking scenes, that I cur. You're bringing yourself to the characters, but you cannot bring your literal life to the page; you have to find a way to begin to turn it over to them. I think some of the sex is too explicit in House of Sand and Fog. I mean, there's this blowjob. Why do I need that? But I remember why I wrote it so explicitly, and I actually cut two or three moments from that, because I needed to find out what they had together. I still am not sure. I think there was more needy, addictive sex than lovemaking between them, but I needed to write it explicitly to find out. I could feel her need for him. I felt a lot of addictive, desperate need, and not a lot of love.

SALVATORE

I remember thinking the scene with Lester and Kathy was about disconnected intimacy from his wife, a dearth of intimacy for this guy. So he comes togerher with this woman who might be looking for a connection through sex. It's the moment they both have, a collision that was honest, albeit damaged.

DUBUS

I've met couples over the years who are companions, or lovers. I can't tell you how many marriages I've seen where they'll tell you they haven't had sex in five years or something, and they seem to have a solid union. You know where Lester came from? One of the things I cut out of Townie was- I went to Mexico with a bounty hunter, looking for a contract killer. I was twenty-two and had a fake name, and the guy was a bad, bad guy. We went to gay bars, bisexual whorehouses, because he was bisexual. I was meeting with US Marshals and FBI agents, DEA guys from New York, and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. One night, three in the morning, I'd done some surveillance on a diamond thief. I actually did this for like six months, and it was interesting, but I cut it from Townie, because Townie had its own narrative arc. This felt like a whole other narrative arc. So I cut it. I was a quiet boy, just listening and sitting across from a US Marshal, who had just come from a raid that night. He had this crooked mustache. He was kind of handsome. He looked more like an English teacher than a US Marshal. He looked like he shouldn't be carrying his gun. He was talking tough and almost blew off this guy's head, but I thought, This guy looks like he should be teaching Ezra Pound somewhere. Fifteen years later he shows up in my story.

FRENCH

You just said you were a quiet boy. My interaction with you as a student, or later if reading an interview or catching something that you've done over the years, always showed you to be this incredibly gregarious, open, warm, no-boundaries person. So I was struck by the Andre in Townie, who seemed much more solitary and introspective, even brooding. How do you connect those two pans of you to being a writer?

DUBUS

When you talk about those two selves, the truth is I was scared. Writing Townie brought that back, and educated me to that conscious fear. I spent most of my youth afraid. I was afraid all the time. I was a bright kid, and I was in blue-collar neighborhoods , where articulate, bright kids get stomped, so I always hid my smarts the way a lot of women do.

I got back in touch with me writing Townie: I was physically small, sedentary, weak and terrified- and bright and depressed. Then all the suffering changed, and I willed my way out of it. I became violent, and then I became who I always was. I think if I'd grown up in a safe environment, the way I'm raising my kids, I would have been the class clown. I would have raised my hand. I wouldn't have been ashamed. I once wrote a paper on Walt Whitman that I snuck to the teacher, because I didn't want anybody to know I wrote the paper on the homosexual poet. I was up till three in the morning, making it really good. I didn't do a lot of homework. I wasn't a good student. But I loved Leaves of Grass.
It was learning to defend myself that I fought my way onto my own two feet. So, you know, motherfucker, I deserve to be here, too. What do I mean by "here"? On the planet. My brother was really hard to write about in that book. I took a more traditional male route, where I rook all my hurt and converted it into rage, and I became homicidal. If I'd been an athlete, I could have taken that rage and thrown a football or swung a bat, but I used my fists and feet. My brother did what a lot of girls do-which is a generalization, but I think there's some truth to it- he took all his hurt and rage and turned it inward. He got depressed and sick and wanted to die. I felt it was important to have his suicidal route and my homicidal route. But it was my homicidal route that led me to the nerve it takes to write.

I don't know if I'll put this in the book, but I've been thinking about it since. You know when I write about that membrane? Joe and I just met. If l reached out and touched his cheek, I'd be violating his personal space. But it was in that first fight that I really found out what it was. I saw a shoving match between two fathers at a kids' hockey game a few years ago-"Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?" They're pushing and shoving each other in the parking lot, and I looked at them, and I thought, Neither one of them is a fighter. Neither one, because there's no foreplay in fighting. None. We're in it- BO O M! My point is, anyone can learn to throw a punch, and it's good and it's valuable, but for experienced fighters, it's like a psychological hymen, and once you break it, it's always broken. Once you punch someone as hard as you can in their face, you've learned to violate the intimacy of another human being, and you'll always know how to do it. And, frankly, it's hard not to reach for that. It's like having a gun; it's like having a nuclear bomb.
I'm not going to belabor everything that's in Townie,but I Don't think I Wrote about this directly, and I've been thinking about it. I'm An uncle figure for a lot of young people, and one of them is a young woman I've known since she was a kid. She's Twenty-seven, twenty-eight now, and she's got a boyfriend who was a brawler from Haverhill- real rough kid. He and I were drunk one night, and kind of reminiscing about fighting, and I was a little ashamed, because I was really reminiscing. We both admitted we kind of miss that moment right before it's going to happen, where you're squaring off and you might get killed. There's such an adrenaline high to the physical combat that's about to happen. You don't know this guy; you don't know how dangerous he is; you don't know how much crazier he is than you are, and it's up to you and your body to get out of this. There's a real thrill and a nerve to step into that unknown. You talked about the quiet me, and, yeah, I am outgoing and gregarious. I was always, but I was afraid to be that way, because I would get stomped. Once I got through the violent years, I realized there's a similarity between the nerve it takes to step into a combat situation and the nerve it takes to try to enter the skin of another human being with a pencil.

SALVATORE

Another membrane?

DUBUS

Another membrane- when you go, Why can't I be her? Why can't I go all the way?

FRENCH

Are you saying that gaining nerve through violence helped you have the nerve to imagine yourself as a writer?

DUBUS

I'm hesitant to say this out loud, because I don't want any young man or woman thinking, I'm going to go kick some ass so I can be a writer. I don't think anyone's going to take it literally, but the truth is, with my little path in life, it's hard to imagine that I would have found writing any other way. I had to fight my way onto my own two feet, to stand there and plant myself and say, " You know, I'm not a piece of shit. I have a life, and I'm going to live it." Once I worked through all that and survived physically and didn't hurt anyone too bad, I think I did find myself in a place where I thought: Okay, now I can start. But it was totally unconscious.

SALVATORE

There's Something about the way you've talked about your writing ritual-a daily act of trying to become the other, your own relationship to a Creator, even your atheism- which suggests a spiritual side. Is that side connected to your art? I was thinking about your father's daily practice of Mass and then writing and running.

DUBUS

Let's talk about the ritual. Because I think that's what you're talking about more than anything. I reread an essay of my dad's recently, maybe "A Father's Story," in which he writes, "Belief is believing in God. Faith is believing that God believes in you."

I do not believe there's a God who loves you. I do not believe there is a loving Creator who knows me and loves me. I feel deeply alone, and whatever good happens to me comes from my hard work, and that's it. I think there's value to feeling alone. So there's that versus ritual. If you look at the word "ritual," it comes from the Latinritus: it means "river." When you step into ritual, you're stepping into some ancient river. I have pagan rituals, and I've never told anyone, but I'll just share it with you. I've got to have a cup of black coffee- dark roast, French Roast, organic. Black. I begin each writing day reading poetry. I've got about four hundred volumes of poetry, and every time I do a reading in a bookstore, I buy a book of poems. I love poetry; I don't write it, but I love it. Right now, I'm reading The Great Fire by Jack Gilbert. If I'm procrastinating, I'll read six or seven poems, and I might read two poems, back to back. Then I'll sharpen my pencil with a blade. I've never told anyone this, but I'll tell you: My wife- I'm hesitant to do it. It's funny how we don 't talk too much. Fuck it. If it has power, it's just superstition, but it's so interesting the superstitions here, because, again, there's a great line in ancient Chinese: "If the mad dog comes at you, whistle for him." My wife gave me two stones:one's a piece of quartz that represents love, and the other is a piece of aventurine-green- that has to do with creativity. I hold those two stones in my left hand the whole time I'm writing.

FRENCH

Even when you were in the car, did you do that?

DUBUS

No, and not when I'm traveling, I don't bring the stones, because I'm afraid of losing them. They stay in my cave. But also, one of the first writers who really influenced me was Breece Pancake. Have you read his story "Trilobites' '? I turned a friend of mine on to that story- he's actually the bounty hunter I worked with, and in his world travels he found a fossilized trilobite, and sent it to me. The trilobite's on my desk, and then a dear brother of mine, who was an artist, brought me back a bottle of water from the Delphi Oracle in Greece. That's been on my desk for twenty years. I write with these stones in my hand; I write with a sharpened pencil; I have headphones on, for complete silence; I have the Delphi Oracle water, the fucking trilobites; the ghost of Breece Pancake; and then , lastly,there's a little piece of alder wood that my cousin put two holes in, and now it's a pencil holder. That's on my desk, too. And my Mead composition book. I am all about ritual. I'm a pagan. I ain't no Catholic.

I remember when Doctorow said he writes in front of a blank wall. He said the only reason he doesn't write in front of window, or in front of a photograph or painting or inspiring quotes is because that blank wall makes him go back to his sentences. I write in front of a blank wall. But I really am merciless about my mornings. Mornings are the dream time.

FRENCH

Early mornings?

DUBUS

I'm not an early dude. I've got to get my eight hours. I go to the university twice a week, and I don't have to be there till, like, two in the afternoon. I'll get my two youngest to their high school, Fontaine's at her dance studio. I get my coffee, go to my cave, and I'm there from 8:30 to about 11:00, and that's it, and then I go about my day. Sometimes it's not that long. For many years, my magic writing time was an hour and fifteen minutes. That'd be about fifteen minutes of staring, then about twelve minutes of foreplay, then about forty minutes of hard work, ten minutes of cool down, thinking about lunch and phone bills. You're out of there. But you can get a lot done in seventy-five minutes a day.

I'm not convinced more time is helpful. My old man, when he was crippled, had a tiny end table where he kept his medications, reading material, ashtray; he was laid up for months. He asked me to build him a larger table. I built one out of pine, three times the size.So he put his medication there, his book. In a week, that whole fucking thing was full. I said, "Dad, why do I have a feeling that if I built you a six-foot table, that's going to be equally full?"

SALVATORE

We were talking about the quiet kid who comes through the fire, but I've been thinking about the spiritual side of you and this thing you do. Not only the feminine side I think I see, but the teacher. You can really quote scuff-not only quote it, but you live it; it's not an act. And you've got so much committed to memory. I feel like some of this scuff suggests a kind of secular ritual, where these are almost like prayers for you, secular prayers. You have so many of those. Was that a part of the way you were reaching yourself?

DUBUS

I have poems memorized. For that reason. They really are like secular prayers. I think I retain what helps me, and I think what helps me is when someone has articulated what I've intuitively felt and never known. Then the words are there for me to give to someone else, if it's helpful to them. I do say, often, that I'm full of shit in so many ways, but what I really mean, where I'm really full of shit is I talk like an atheist, but I feel like a holy man. So I feel like a fraud. Instead of the holy man who's the fraud, I feel like the secular guy who's a fraud. I knew a woman who was going through a horrible time. She was raised Irish Catholic, and she doesn't pray, she said, "Because I don't believe in God, and I think it would be hypocritical of me to pray now that I need him." I said, "That makes sense." I said, "You know, I pray all the time, and I don't believe in God." Right now, my son's driving from Ohio to Florida with a bunch of frat boys to party all week, so I'm praying my ass off about that, because I have to. But the truth is, I do believe- and studies have shown- people fighting cancer. You've heard of this study? They had two groups. One group of people fighting cancer were prayed for by five hundred people- they didn't know they were being prayed for-and another group was not prayed for. The group that was prayed for, eighty percent did better than those who were not prayed for.

I have a hard time believing in a strong head honcho. I don't believe it, and I don't believe there's a God who knows my name. I'm a nameless speck. But I'm a sacred speck, as you are a sacred spec k. Have you read "The Magic Show" by Tim O' Brien? There's a wonderful line in there: "Writers tend to be the kind of people who want to enter the mystery of things." I think that's true of readers, too.

SALVATORE

The kid in Townie was scared, as you said. He was traumatized. And I'm hearing about different spiritual aspects in your life. This sensitivity strikes me as a characteristic of people who suffer from PTSD; one of the characteristics of PTSD is a hyper-awareness to the world.

DUBUS

Yep. I was in a Mexican restaurant with my wife, Fontaine , about five years ago, and something was really weird about the dinner. First, we were having a date, just the two of us, and then I realized, Oh, wow.

I've got my back to the restaurant. I hadn't sat like that in twenty years. I said, " Honey, my back's not to the wall." She said, "You Want to switch?" I said, "No . I'm going to do it. I'll have another round, though." Writing Townie rustled up some emotional sediment. I feel post-trauma coming back. Every day before I work out, I'll do this joint-loosening warm up that's part martial arts yoga, and I've got my eyes shut when I do this stuff, and I see the workout I'm about to do. For ten or fifteen years now, I can shut my eyes in a gym; since writing Townie, I can't shut my eyes. I shut my eyes, and I feel some body coming after me to fuck me up. So my eyes are open again. I am always standing in a room, scanning it.

FRENCH

So writing this memoir wasn't healing in some ways? Instead, it brought everything back?

DUBUS

It was both cathartic and wounding; it cleansed me and fucked me up. I think maybe one reason I try to describe the scene in a precise way is I need to know where I am in the room.

FRENCH

In one scene in Townie, there's a full paragraph of sensory description - I think it might be at Salisbury Beach.

DUBUS

I read that last night at the Literary Death Match.

FRENCH

It touches every sense, and that happens so much throughout Townie. I wonder if it is a way, like you said, of grounding yourself, but it also does the same for the reader- because Townie isn't as linear and cohesive as your novels are; it's fragmented, a little more reflective of memory.It jumps back and forth in time and age, but it also grounds the reader in setting and scene. I would read a paragraph or two-sometimes it would just be sensory detail- and as a reader I knew exactly where I was: sound, sight, smell.

DUBUS

First of all, my memory's not that good. Words, quotes are in my head, song lyrics are in my head, poems are in my head. I can see a movie tonight, and I won't remember it next month- it will be a new movie. I forget what happens in books, too. I remember lines, but I won't remember stories. So how can I write a memoir? This I find really poignant about human beings: If you look at the word "to remember," it means the opposite of"dismember." Chop, chop, chop. To remember means to put back together. Which is why I believe the better memoirs for me are the ones where I feel them sincerely trying to put something back together. Once again, what's fueling the writing, even though it's about your own life, is curiosity. Like, I know what happened in my childhood, but What the fuck happened?

FRENCH

We were asking that question, too, of you: Is this really writing by discovery? If you already know the story?

DUBUS

Go back to Mike Nichols's line: "What's it like? What's it really like to be in this thing that's happened ?" What I found about writing Townie was: Okay, thank God, I'm off the hook for having to come up with the events of the story, the way we do with a novel or short story. I know the events: That's the night I got my ass kicked, and I almost got beaten to death. If the cops hadn't shown up, I might have died that night. My creative powers are free to try to capture, What's it like? What's it really like?

Back to sensory detail: I find at least three in each scene to activate it. But with Townie, I used it as a way to open my memory,not consciously; I just noticed that it kept happening that way, so I kept it up. I'll give you an example: I write about Old Newburyport, which really was a tough , ugly, abandoned waterfront town. I met a guy at the gym last week, who's ten years older than me. He said, "My name's Bruce. I grew up there. No one could fucking walk down that street. You'd get your ass kicked. Even if you lived on that street." We were talking. I remember staring at the page, seeing how isolated my brother and I were, how we were the new kids, and it was a tough town, and all the kids were cruel, and we had no uncles and no father around and no mother around because she's working fourteen hours a day- and we would sit on the stoop. So, I'm going to write about sitting on that stoop on a summer day. What's it like? What's it really like to be in this thing?

I tried to capture the hot sun, and then the smell-that fucking broken sidewalk in front of our little house always smelled like dried piss, from the drunks who would stumble home from the barroom. A drunk really did wander into our foyer and piss on the floor. Here I am, the older writer, remembering forty years earlier: I could smell the hot piss, the dried p iss, and now I smell this sweet smell on the paint. The older writer knows it's lead paint, flaking lead paint. I'm trying to describe two smells and the feel of the hot sun on our faces, and then, all of a sudden, a panel opens in my memory: Oh, yeah! One of those days, Cody Perkins and those three guys see us, and they start chasing us. And now, Yeah, we fucking ran! O h, that 's right! We ran through the lumberyard! I remember, We jumped over the fence! We got away! We went underneath the pier. Oh! That's when the fucking drowned guy gets pulled out! When I sat down to write that day, I wasn't thinking, This is the day I write about the drowned man to show thematically the danger of mortality. I just remembered: What's it like to sit on that fucking stoop? Back to Ron Carlson: "Details are the instruments by which we steer." That writing session ended with us walking underneath the pier, where I wanted to stay until dark to avoid those guys, but we didn't want to see the dead guy. All of it I'd forgotten until I wrote that. What triggered it was genuine curiosity and sensual derail, which opened panels into my memory.

FRENCH

That makes me think of the Nadine Gordimer quote: "Writing is making sense of life." Because you went back and discovered and relieved these memories and could maybe look at things more objectively, did you make more sense of your life?

DUBUS

I did. I needed to put the pieces back together to become more whole. I think something shifted , changed. Probably the whole time I was writing it, I thought, This is not going to be a book. It's just too private. But I'm turning fifty. Richard Dreyfuss has this great line: "When you're turning fifty," he said, "you're probably closer to your grave than your high school graduation." I felt, this is going to be for my kids. They're going to know me better, and they're going to know where they come from better. I thought , I'm nor going to make this a book. Thar freed me to write more honestly. I saw Mailer in an interview once, it might have been with Dick Cavett: "So, Mailer, you've lived such a large life. Why haven't you written a memoir? You have so much co write about." Mailer said, "I don't chink writers should write memoirs." And Cavett or whoever said , " Why?" This spooked the shit out of me. Mailer said, "I chink a writer's childhood is like a piece of quartz. In every play or novel that you write is light you shine through the quartz at different angles, which has its own spectrum of colors. I'm afraid if I write directly about the quartz, I'll lose my art." So I'm chinking, Fuck! What am I doing to my quartz? And then I realized, if I never write another word of fiction again, if I'm all done , well, I'm all done, because I so need to tell this story. Then I thought , You know what, Norman? Aren't there other quartzes? What about the quartz of being a husband and father? What about the quartz of being a teacher? What about the quartz of being a carpenter?

Finishing Townie put something behind me. I'd already noticed something weird happening: I've never been able co write about the Merrimack Valley in my fiction. All my fiction is based somewhere else. My old man sec all his stories in the Merrimack Valley. I remember ch is interview with Updike, and he called my father the Bard of the Merrimack Valley. I remember reading chat and chinking, He wasn't the Bard of the Merrimack Valley. He doesn't write about this place. It wasn't a criticism; it was an observation. Maybe Kerouac might have been a little bit the Bard of the Merrimack Valley; maybe Greenleaf Whittier. My father's art was formed in some mysterious way, the way all our art is, through the circumstances of his childhood: in l 930s-'40s French-Irish Catholic south Louisiana. Catholicism was huge. Being a Marine was huge. Then the '60s come-chat went into the pot. All the ocher mysterious forces created Andre Dubus's art. He finds himself living in New England , this displaced Southerner, and he secs his stories in the town in which he finds himself, because char was his artistic inclination. But he never wrote about the Merrimack Valley. He set stories there the way Faulkner set stories in Yoknapatawpha County. It was his Yoknapatawpha County, but I felt like he never wrote about this place. There was no frustration-well, there was a little bit of frustration , bur nor much- I just thought it was really inaccurate of Updike to say char.

Since writing Townie, this accidental memoir chart come s from an essay about baseball and my son-these novels I've coming out in the fall are all set in Merrimack Valley. It's like I had written about it literally, having grown up there, being a mill town kid, from an educated family, and now I'm free to dream about it. I couldn't do that before.

FRENCH

You had one story in 7he Cage Keeper that's highly autobiographical.

DUBUS

"Wolves in the Marsh."

FRENCH

Was that harder for you to write at that time?

DUBUS

Yes. John Irving said, "I think that there are at least two kinds of writers: Those whose vision is more somber and tragic, and chose whose voice and vision are more comic." I think about other differences between writers: Those who are more painterly, and those who are more auditory. Hemingway was painterly; Faulkner was auditor y. It's all about voice and language with Faulkner. With Hemingway, if you gave him some brushes, I bet he could have painted. Then there are writers who can create fiction directly, derivatively from their lives, and those who cannot. My father, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, just to name a few, could write derivatively from their lives. My father's vision was narrow and deep- extremely deep- but he wrote derivatively from his life. I recognize ex-wives. I recognize us kids in his work. I recognize friends in his work. A friend of mine read my first two books and said, "Where are you in your work?" I said, "I don't want you to know. I'm trying to be these people."
I don't think one is better than another, but I realized, finally, "Wolves in the Marsh'' was hard to write because it was too derivative. I'm not a writer who can write from my life. Townie I tried to write three times as a novel. I probably put eight or nine years of writing into it. First it was called Lie Down and Make Angels,and it was terrible. Whenever the father figure came out, based on my father, I made him look worse than he was. The mother: I made her look worse. Whenever little Sean Dolan appeared- me- I made him look better than he was. It was dishonest. Capote says, "A writer must write as cool and detached as a surgeon." I didn't have the detachment. Finally, I was able to write it as this accidental memoir, and it has freed me, in some ways. I have wrestled some things into place inside me, but nothing simple, because my post-traumatic stress is back again.

SALVATORE

Can you tell us a little bit about the forthcoming novellas? You talked about how you've shifted a little. Are they more autobiographical, other than just the geography?

DUBUS

No, they're not. The book's called Dirty Love. One story is from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl and the eighty-one-year-old great-uncle she lives with. Another is from the point of view of a fifty-six year-old man whose wife just cheated on him, and their marriage is going down the tubes. Another is from the point of view of this woman looking for love. Nothing directly autobiographical, but I realized ... Here's a beautiful line from Willa Cather: "A writer is at her best only when writing within the character in range of her deepest sympathies." I asked myself, Where are my deepest sympathies? I don't like global warming! Homelessnessis mean! No! It's only after you've written something that you discover the answers, right? I'm thinking about Bluesman: It was the third novel I wrote, but it's such a first novel. It's overwritten, and what haunts me most about this book when I look back-the guy who directed House of Sand and Fogs a id about Bluesman,"It was an okay book, but it didn't seem like your book." I realized I wrote that book outside the range of my deepest sympathies.

There was a lot of me in that Iranian military man in House of Sand and Fog, there was a lot of me in addictive Kathy; there's a lot of me in fucked up Lester. I was trying to put a lot of me into these characters, but it was more from the outside in Bluesman. I am haunted by that book, because I feel as if l wrote it outside the range of my deepest sympathies. It's all subconscious; it's all the dream world. Again: imagined versus made up. You only know that when you are with your center, when you hold the stones, and sharpen the pencil, and stare and wait.

Issue 73: A Conversation with Major Jackson

Found in Willow Springs 73

April 13, 2013

Christian Gotch, Aileen Keown Vaux, Casey Patrik

A CONVERSATION WITH MAJOR JACKSON

Photo Credit: poets.org

Major Jackson's poetry is clear, fluent , and musical, sometimes relying on formal structure, sometimes referencing pop culture, and often investigating how seemingly disparate subjects can interact and inform each other. He asserts that a poem "becomes a kind of time capsule," and as such, can contain references to both Kanye West and ancient Greek mythology, as illustrated in his poem "Letter to Brooks," when Jackson writes: "O, Orpheus grant the skills to stir / the dead like Kanye mixing music with fire, I ... Rescue the underground so they can aim higher." Here, the poet's use of high brow and lowbrow references also connects the present to the past.

Jackson is the author of three collections, the first of which, Leaving Saturn, won the Cave Canem Prize, and was also a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A former member of the Dark Room Collective, and current Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson experiments with form in his work, without sacrificing the vernacular of the Philadelphia neighborhood he grew up in. As Andrew Dubois pointed out in a review of Jackson's second book, Hoops, his "greatest strength ... is his ability to marry without anxiety the traditional forms of the English poetic tradition with ... the human concerns of an urban, black population."

Jackson's poetry draws a road map from classic traditions to the heart of the inner city, always with an ear attuned to the blues and jazz rhythms he grew up with. Whether he's inhabiting the persona of Sun Ra or writing an extended epistolary homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, his poems combine striking imagery with muscular, fluid rhythms.

We met with Mr. Jackson at a deli in Spokane one afternoon last April, where we talked about Kim Kardashian, building community, and the seduction of sound.

CASEY PATRICK

How do pop culture references interact with more highbrow references in your poems?

MAJOR JACKSON

I've never made distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, although some would say I come from lowbrow. The education I received made everything open and available to me. No one said, "Although we're teaching you Shakespeare right now, that's not yours. That belongs to the Brits." To learn about Plato's Republic-to read Plato's Republic eventually it's all kind of absorbed into your DNA, and eventually it becomes part of how you order and shape the world around you. When you put those bricks of intellectual inheritance and knowledge into a form, it creates a certain dynamism, the melding of cultures, and it's also a nod to the past. Allusions- whether they're Greek or biblical or whatever-create a bridge to the reader. If something's in a poem that a reader's familiar with, they're on stable ground. And if they're not familiar, they might seek out whatever's being referred to, and it might enhance their reading.

AILEEN KEOWN VAUX

Is it optimistic to hope that readers will perform their own research?

JACKSON

I think there's always a bit of optimism on the poet's part. Some of my friends who read Anne Carson- a classicist, a scholar- feel intimidated by her, but I believe one of the brilliant strategies in her work is how she makes classical figures contemporary, creating an opportunity for us to look at them as human and fallible. She asks what basic kinds of emotions did Eurydice deal with, or Pygmalion, who wants to sculpt the perfect wife. We exercise this wonderful power as writers; we get to impose meaning and import on the world around us, including how it relates to popular culture. If I write a poem about Kim Kardashian, she might not be the familiar name in forty years that she is today, but my poem will help continue her life. That's what happened with Marilyn Monroe as a cultural icon. There were enough people who wrote songs about her, or poems, or who created image of her that her story didn't get lost. We get to shape the future in that regard. We push our present day passions forward in a poem, and the poem becomes a kind of time capsule.

KEOWN VAUX

Do you think incorporating a variety of references into your poems indicates an active searching for a variety of audiences?

JACKSON

If I am doing that, that audience would be geeks like me, people who get kind of high off of history, pop culture, hip-hop, Greek mythology, people who've traveled to the places I've traveled, who've listened to the music I've listened to. It's more like I'm creating a community around me, across boundaries of class, race, gender.

KRISTIN GOTCH

In an interview with Green Mountain Review, you talked about feeling debilitated after the success of Leaving Saturn and the subsequent fear of letting your readers down. Once you build that community around you, how does it change with each book you publish? Do you still experience that psychological connection?

JACKSON

I guess I do, to some extent. First books normally don't gain the kind of attention that Leaving Saturn gained, and I felt fortunate and blessed, but I also felt like I needed to keep writing similar poems. It was like having a pancake house that everybody comes to every morning, and every morning they want the same order. Do I change the menu? Do I change the recipe? My impulse was to go forward and be loyal to my own aesthetic and emotional and intellectual interests. And if readers don't follow, the hope is that other readers will appreciate the different types of poems I'm writing. I know that people might want what you gave them before. But I was only one book in, and I kind of felt a shift at that time. And then I had a really drastic shift from Hoops to Holding Company, and at that point I didn't care.

KEOWN VAUX

What happened between Hoops and Holding Company?

JACKSON

Divorce, heartbreak, falling in love, travel, reading poets I hadn't read before- Cavafy, for example. I thought the poems in Leaving Saturn were written out of a certain kind of urgency. These new poems were, too, maybe even more so. But some of what helped drive that newer work wasn't connected to what was going on in my life. Some of it was just being kind of restless with poetry. How could I teach myself something about language and art?

PATRICK

In Hoops, we see a continuation of poems that we first saw in Leaving Saturn. Would you talk about that evolution?

JACKSON

Well, the poems weren't finished for me. "Hoops" was meant to be a sequence poem, as was "Urban Renewal." In fact, I had imagined my first book not being Leaving Saturn, which was my graduate thesis, but being a book filled with "Urban Renewal" poems, modeled off of poets I was reading who did similar kinds of poems-Robert Lowell and Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott. All three men put out books that had these sixteen-to-twenty-line poems that felt like extended sonnets. So I starred in that sequence and wrote it for Leaving Saturn when I was a graduate student, and then I wrote some more of chose in Hoops. Now I've gone back to writing "Urban Renewal" poems. I want to fulfill chat dream of writing a book of only "Urban Renewal" poems. I'm not sure how they'll be received, but that's my mountain to climb.

GOTCH

All of your books seem to be in dialogue with one another, but you're also in dialogue with different poets, living and dead. Is that emblematic of your own work, or do you see that something poetry does in general?

JACKSON

I come from the African-American literary tradition, particularly the Black Arcs Movement of the 1960s, which influenced me when I was an undergrad at Temple University. I studied with one of those poets, Sonia Sanchez. As someone who's explicitly interested in social justice and peace, I admired the social function that particular poetry seemed to take on-and part of that project, writing poems that would raise awareness, was in the tradition of the praise poem. So you have poems to Malcolm X and John Coltrane and Frederick Douglass. These are historical figures. But are they likely to be caught in schools? When I was younger, probably not. The poem became a vehicle to raise awareness. And when Sonia Sanchez gave readings, before she read, she would just- in a kind of roll call, in this trance-like way- call out all these political leaders, artists, musicians, poets, and I loved that, because poetry emerges out of a long tradition of praise, but, historically, praise poems were for the fallen dead, a soldier or a great general, and what she celebrated were creative, imaginative individuals. And then I heard the wonderful Polish poet Adam Zagajewski talk about entering the conversation of what it means to be human, and that concept became important to me. One time, a man came up to me at a festival where I was attending a friend's reading , and he said, "You're Major Jackson ," and I said, "Yeah, and you must be a poet," and he said, "No, I'm a counselor. I run a group for men who batter their wives. But I open every session with your poem 'How to Listen."' And I was just floored by that. Because I imagined my readers as other poets, or at least as a kind of poetry reading public. The fact that poems can enter into other realms of our lives made me think a little more seriously about chat conversation of what it means to be human.

KEOWN VAUX

You've talked about how art influences community, specifically how it functions among communities of artists. There's a line in "Letter to Brooks" where you call Thomas Sayers Ellis your Ezra Pound , in reference to Eilis's role in the Dark Room Collective. Can you talk about how these writing collective form and if physical proximity plays a role?

JACKSON

What triggers poetic movements is often a reaction to some sort of dominant poetics. And on other occasions, as in the case with Pound, there's a dynamic figure who's politicizing his or her particular aesthetic agenda. I mean, Pound was the manifesto king. I guess with the Dark Room Collective, it was proximity, but what I love about that group is that it was founded by readers who were admirers of a tradition in American literature, or a wing of American literature, that wasn't being acknowledged, at least visibly in Cambridge when Thomas [SayersEllis] and Sharan [Strange] and Janice [Lowe] were students in the Boston/ Cambridge area. And then it kind of widened- I mean, I was down in Philadelphia, Natasha [Trethewey] was kind of close, in Amherst, Massachusetts. So, yes, geography can be important. The thing with the Black Mountain Poets is that it was [Charles] Olson who was there, for the most part, as that dynamic figure. [Robert] Creeley wasn't there Creeley would come later, Denise Levercov never set foot on campus, so it was orchestrated slightly differently than other groups.

PATRICK

Why do you think these groups form so consistently throughout history?

JACKSON

I think it's out of common interest. Two years in an MFA program isn't enough. I somehow landed with poets in New Jersey- and I adore all poets, let me just say. But there's the poets around Princeton and then there's the southern Jersey poets, and I think we just naturally become cliques. Like I was saying earlier, in terms of reacting to dominant aesthetics, that was very real in the '50s, when we had a reaction against Modernism and then swung way back in the other direction, with a certain kind of formalism, and then those people were in the academic institutions and became the granters of awards, deciding who got published , and so there had to be a reaction against that.

GOTCH

When these groups form, there seems to be the risk of building expectations. In an article you published in the Boston Review about Countee Cullen, you said he wanted to be read "as a poet, not a Negro poet." Do you see readers having those same sort of expectations from African-American writers today- or any groups of writers?

JACKSON

Less so today, let's put it that way. I think what we're realizing is that there are not homogenous kinds of experiences for ethnic and racial groups in America. There's many different ways of being a woman, or being an African American. In fact, I like to believe that we're widening our understanding of what a human being is with these particular markers. How do people both refract and individuate their lives as humans- people who are men, women, white, black, Asian, Latina, octogenarians, teens, transgendered? I had a student who was a female-to-male transgender, an honors thesis student, and I loved the poems he wrote. They were so rich in humanity. One poem was about being young and teaching the girls how to pee standing up. Someone else has probably had that experience, and if I think about the canon as a collection of selves, I want that poem in the Norton Anthology, so that, again, we have a wider understanding of what it means to be human, and don't so easily fear and hate what's unfamiliar. With the wide range of poets writing today- I'm hoping we'll see writing in ten, fifteen years that will be more representative of the rich community of selves that we are.

PATRICK

Understanding what it means to be human seems like it would necessarily involve the political. In an interview with Third Coast, you said, "I do not believe in safe subjects." Are there any subjects you find too dangerous or off-limits?

JACKSON

You've heard of Minnesota-nice. I think about how there are just some things that aren't discussed, and I see what that does to a family and to individuals. I want to believe that there's no topic that's off-limits, and I do believe that all things come to light anyway, at some point. It may be years down the line, but at some point, we see it. What's great about a poem is that you can go to it with a certain amount of freedom from those temporal and spatial kind of restraints. Sharon Olds told me about an exercise she received from Muriel Rukeyser when she was young. Muriel said, "Write the poem you would never show anyone."

KEOWN VAUX

And Sharon Olds went on to make a career of that.

JACKSON

Exactly. It takes a kind of courage, a kind of vision and courage. Some people dismiss poems grounded in personal experience that might seem a little too revealing, but you don't have to read that poet. Just don't read them. Some people appreciate the personal, though, because we too often live our lives in silence, even when there's suffering and anguish. And the poem, I've realized, really does become a vehicle, a life raft to some extent.

KEOWN VAUX

Sharon Olds has an interesting relationship with her readership, because a lot of people want to read her work as purely autobiographical. Is that something you've faced, as well?

JACKSON

I had a neighbor who was a mental health counselor, and one day he said to me, "Major, I read your poems. I see that you've had a traumatic life," and I thought, Dude, you know nothing about me if you're going to read my life through my poems. It's too easy to make a one-to-one correlation between a life and a poem. Someone who wants to do that- a critic, a reader- does not realize the nuances of composition that may transform what was once fact into fiction. And poets, too, exercise their imagination and play with the facts so that they'll serve the poem, rather than serving up a transcript of their life. One of the things I found frustrating when I read Ian Hamilton's biography of Robert Lowell was his strategy to start with the poems and then connect them to what was going on in Lowell's life. It seems dangerous to try to do that, because if we're writing about our lives, there are things that are being translated. The language itself is going to play a role in that transfiguration.

I think if l attend to the aesthetic decisions of a poem, if l look at my line breaks, if l think about metaphoric language versus overly descriptive language, I believe- and I'm aiming for a certain kind of cadence, a certain kind of sound- if l tend to those pleasures, because that's the first order of seduction for a reader, the aesthetic dimension-if I tend to that, then naturally the poem is going to evolve away from whatever "facts" I bring to the page. I tell my students that they can play with a reader's expectations of who's speaking. If they're thinking they're getting too much of the self, then do a little bit of cross-dressing, you know? Or, truly, write out of some other speaker's experience.

KEOWN VAUX

What do you get out of writing in someone else's voice? What changes in the writing process?

JACKSON

Stepping into someone's shoes creates moments of empathy- and the relief or freedom from having to come up with a subject, particularly if you're used to writing about your own life, or turning to your own experiences. Writing about someone else can also invite other kinds of intelligences to go to work in a poem. When you write about other people, you're the historian, you're the psychologist, trying to figure out motivations. Sometimes I don't know what motivates me to do the things I do, but I can assess someone else's behavior and sequence of actions, and theorize about why they did what they did.

KEOWN VAUX

In other interviews, you've mentioned place as a vehicle for getting readers to think critically about their own cities, their own towns.

JACKSON

And place is a convenient way of talking about the interior.

PATRICK

Philadelphia appears a lot in your work, though you've lived in other places. Has living elsewhere changed how you view Philly?

JACKSON

I think we create our paradises wherever we are. Some people have a difficult time seeing what's special about where they're at. When I moved to Eugene, Oregon, my affection for Philly grew. It was almost like I was asleep, and in the waking moments of writing I could reflect back on those times. I could almost smell the rain on the sidewalk, or I'd recall my mother driving along the Schuylkill River, on Lincoln Drive and Kelly Drive, the windows down. Those are foundational experiences, and I guess there's always a longing for Philly. But it's been the other way around, too, in that Philly has allowed me to discover my other sacred places. Cape Cod is one of them; the Northwest is important to me. New Orleans is important to me, too. Having lived there, I try to go back every two or three years. So, yeah, I've been in Vermont eleven years, but Philly still excites me.

KEOWN VAUX

How do you define a sacred space?

JACKSON

A sense of safety, a sense of my body feeling like- I'm about to get all mystical, but when I land in certain places, there's a kind of calm, a lack of anxiety. The people are decent. There's a certain regard for life in all of its manifestations, the natural world and other human beings. And of course, these places are all over the world. I'm just starting to be able to have the means to visit other places and have those same sorts of experiences. I feel like it should almost be mandatory that before you go to college, you drive cross-country with maybe two or three other people. And maybe you do volunteer work where you get to know people, not just driving through and stopping at diners and filling up your gas tank, but really getting to know people. Just imagine all the connections you could make.

Issue 65: A Conversation with Fady Joudah

Found in Willow Springs 65

February 13, 2009

Rebecca Halonen, Rebecca Morton, and Shira Richman

A CONVERSATION WITH FADY JOUDAH

Photo Credit: Poetry Foundation

Fady Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in Houston, but he isn't generally described as Texan. His parents were born in Palestine and, besides the United States, his father's career as a professor took the Joudah family to Libya and Saudi Arabia. Fady Joudah continues to lead a life of international engagement. He has practiced medicine in Zambia and Darfur, with Doctors Without Borders, and in what he describes as a "war zone" in Texas, the emergency room of a veterans hospital.

Joudah became well known in the literary world somewhat suddenly when, in 2008, his first book, The Earth in the Attic, was published as the winner of the Yale Younger Prize. That same year, The Butterfly's Burden, his translation of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry, won the Society of Authors' Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. If I Were Another, Joudah's second translation of Darwish's work, was released in October 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

About The Earth in the Attic, Louise Glück writes, "These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of the conception is inescapable. Fathers and brothers become prophets, hypothesis becomes dream, simple details of landscape transform themselves into emblems and predictions. The book is varied, coherent, fierce, tender: impossible to put down , impossible to forget. It will make itself felt."

As a Palestinian-American, and having worked extensively with refugees around the world, Joudah expresses the sense of displacement poignantly, while offering hope through his view of its universality. In his poem "Proposal," we see the displaced re-placed in disorienting, often alienating contexts: "I think of a little song and / How there must be a tree"; "We left our shoes behind and fled. / We left our scent in them / Then bled out our soles"; and "God reels the earth in when the sky rains / Like fish on a wire." But it is the constant shifting, which the sea seems to do best, that offers the promise of survival:

And the sea, each time it reaches the shore,
Becomes a bird to see of the land
What it otherwise wouldn't.
And the wind through the trees
Is the sea coming home.

Poetry, like the sea, offers accessibility to the things most longed for, as Joudah expresses in a piece he published in the Kenyon Review, "In Memory of Mahmoud Darwish," in which he addresses Darwish: "I would memorize and forget you, tuck you in deep hiding places of my soul, as if I were slowly saturating my being with your seas...sea, that word that also stands for prosody in Arabic."

We met with Joudah, during the annual AWP Conference, in the Chicago Hilton, where we discussed spiders, playing with time, and "one of the best-kept American secrets."

SHIRA RICHMAN

I'd like to start with a question about the title of your book, The Earth in the Attic. As humans, our lives revolve around the earth, yet in this book the earth is relegated to an isolated, confined, but elevated place—the attic. Can you talk about how you happened upon this beautiful, strange metaphor?

FADY JOUDAH

It's a metaphor that comes out of a simile that is in one of the poems in the book, "Along Came a Spider." As the poem indicates, I happened on it because in one of the refugee settlements where I served, we would wake up an amazing plethora of spider webs after night rain. And spider webs disappear very quickly when the sun scorches them and the moisture evaporates. So it was an amazing scene to drive in the Jeep toward the clinic every morning during the rainy season and see the earth like an attic, in the sense that it was filled with spider webs.

As that poem, "Along Came a Spider," addresses, it was for me the whole idea that the displaced people of the world, the stateless people of the world, or even the non-citizen citizens of the world—if you want to expand it beyond the boundaries of of governments, nation-states, and refugees—are in the attic. As you say, it is maybe, physically, a higher place. But not in all places is the attic a higher place. In some cultures the attic is a separate room, not necessarily a separate floor as we have in many of our homes. Nevertheless, it is just the idea that you store something you don't want to throw away, your sense of existence—you store it and ignore it. Only when you move from that house do you check what you left in the attic and see what you want to take with you or throw away. It was that kind of negligence that I was after.

RICHMAN

Were you also thinking about the story of when spider webs hid Muhammad by covering the mouth of the cave and saving his life? Is there something especially treasured about spider webs?

JOUDAH

What interests me is: How does one divert his gaze to nature, without addressing nature as something separate from what we call human progress? Living where I was—I don't like to name the place and I'm going to get to that—we were surrounded by spiders and other insects. You live comfortably with them. If you see a spider in your house, you don't call the fire department. So I found myself roommating with spiders or living with spiders and that sent me to the childhood story about Muhammad and then to ideas of identity and spirituality and religion. And that also sent me to another concept, which is the very distinct reality that an Arab or a Muslim in the English language is and has been persistently dehumanized, really.

I say this with particular care, not to necessarily make that identity holy by virtue of an absolute sense of victimhood, because no victim is necessarily a saint and there is no such thing as a race of victims. But I do think there is an arc in the poem that tries to address the humanity of the name, beyond the jargon of history. There's also a particular slippery slope in the poem I'd like to address about revolutionary ideas in general. I was trying to create, revolutionize, introduce the concept of displacement of the refugee as that which sends us into a new era of hope and "progress," because it is that sense of horror as byproduct of the nation-state that will probably get us past this limitation of the nation-state and its concept of citizenry and so forth.

In a sense, all religions, when they arose, were modern, revolutionary; they broke with the past, and they advanced the people that initially jumped on the ship. They advanced people, whether or not they were monotheistic. Then myths and traditions and rituals take place. I went far to try to reengage the concept of modernity through the refugee. It's a bit problematic because if you are a refugee or a stateless person or a displaced person, it does not necessarily mean you are some form of saint, whatever that means. But I think we don't have enough recognition of the victim as a victim first and foremost. And there's always a tendency toward apologetic that end up dehumanizing victims more and more.

REBECCA MORTON

Yesterday, at your reading, you mentioned that you work to not abstract people's suffering.

JOUDAH

I think we all walk around with a filtered vision of other people's suffering, and naturally we cannot preoccupy ourselves with it too much if we are going to go on with our daily lives, nor should we to a large extent. But I think that people's suffering becomes a matter of image-intensive desensitization. I think this is particularly the case for us in the U.S., because we are among the five percent of people in the world who have access to the Internet, to movies, to the digital age, and so forth. We think this access is actually the norm, because each of us has whatever phone we have that we can't operate and laptops and so forth. I see the importance of universalizing suffering. One does not necessarily need to carry the banner of each trauma in the world to at least remain cognizant that suffering which plagues us all is really in large part a product of the abstraction of some people's humanity and not others'.

Some people are seen as fully human, so their suffering is something we connect with and make holy, and other suffering is just racialized or what have you. There is—I think in Darfur—a stunning example of an entire movement that was and still is obsessed with naming the atrocities, and it is unfortunate because it does nothing for the people of Darfur. Even if the naming stuck, it would still do nothing for the people of Darfur. What remains of that "game of the name" is basically racial politics. I was shocked about this because I was there and suffering was far beyond the pettiness that we think of in our important intellectual skin here in the U.S. We're always the interventionists; we're always the ones who are able to do something about things. But the suffering I witnessed was beyond all this jargon.

Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia something called The Paragraph. You won't find it in all editions of Minima Moralia, but there's a section in the book Can One Live After Auschwitz? called The Paragraph, and he basically talks about the term, the aporia, the paradox, or the unsolvability of naming something and what happens to the name, and he was specifically referring to the UN charter on genocide. It's a fascinating precedent in the '40s—around sixty years ago—about how this whole idea of naming genocide will eventually turn into a game of names. After what point does suffering on a mass scale deserve no name and become something that has to be addressed, or at least recognized, by everybody?

I go back to the concept of the universality of suffering. The answer to this for some people is: Well, we've decided in international law, which is an important thing if it is at least adhered to and approved—and that is nor the case—that if it's genocide, we will intervene. The game of the name is to do enough to where those who know how to play with the law—whether they wrote the law or know how to play with the wording—go far enough in their atrocities not to have it called genocide.

So what happens? Ethnic cleansing is, in many people's minds, an early stage of genocide. So do you not intervene there? What about civil war that is so horrific in its detail, in the Congo, or in Angola when they had their civil war, or in Sri Lanka, or in places that didn't have civil war—what the Indonesian government did in East Timor? How can you claim that there is a holiness of suffering more important than another or even a legality of suffering? How can you turn such massive suffering into a classification? And whatever answer you give, we have enough history to show us that we know what happens with the politicization of suffering. It dehumanizes the victims repeatedly.

I'm not necessarily saying that we should reduce our threshold for intervention. I'm not necessarily sure that the word "intervention" is the modum operandum here for me, but I think what interests me the most is: Are we truly willing to recognize, first and foremost, suffering, without gaming the name? And then, if we get to that point, what happens afterward? Because I think it would be, hopefully, a brighter moment.

REBECCA HALONEN

How do you understand the role of a poet in all this? What is the poet's duty?

JOUDAH

I don't think that writing the poems themselves has to address these issues necessarily, but I do think that one has to be engaged, as a whole person, with such things, to be open to them and courageous enough to recant one's errors of judgment regarding a larger humanity. I say these words as though I've reached this state, but I'm very far from it.

I can't say that poets should do this or write that. It's an art form; it's an imaginative state of being that dabbles with time, and it cannot necessarily be limited to certain concepts. There's a lot more to poetry and art than the drama of American family life or the politics of refugees. There's room for both ends of the spectrum, I think.

Bertrand Russell engaged himself as a literary man and a morally committed person. For instance, many of us don't know that the Russell Tribunal (after Russell's death) for human rights declared the U.S. action in Vietnam to be genocide. And here's a man who was celebrated in the English world and the Western world and the world over, won the Nobel Prize and whatever. It is not necessary to say that the U.S. has to be punished or not punished. I'm not even getting there. All I'm saying is that the Tribunal's declaration should be recognized. Again, until we recognize such things, morality becomes a political game.

A poet should be engaged wholly with such morally difficult questions, being very careful and aware of the slippery slope of proximity to power. You don't want to raise a banner. We can all get a little too passionate and find out twenty years later that we actually got a little too intense about an ideal or an ideology and ended up as fascist as those we were professing against. But we do have examples of people like Bertolt Brecht or Walter Benjamin who were Marxists and had no trouble backing away from Marxism, when it stood as a political regime they recognized as a problem.

A poet has to be fully engaged, but also has to be careful of the dangers of ideology. I think a poet should struggle for a form of moral and cognitive independence from the jargon of politics or history.

HALONEN

Do you think political poetry is attempting to do that?

JOUDAH

I don't like the term political poetry. I think it is demeaning, and probably a reflection of certain problems within the literary canon and its relationship to power establishments. It's convenient to call something political poetry, because it seems to deflect how the poetry establishment itself is deeply embedded, naturally or otherwise, within the larger political system of power, and I think it's essentially a description as full of hot air as truly propagandist poets are.

There is no such thing as political poetry and non-political poetry. There's good poetry and bad poetry. Whether good poetry happens to be about your dog or about war—it doesn't matter to me. But anyway, there's good poetry. And good poetry is not simply defined by form and theme. There's a larger human engagement that should be addressed within it.

MORTON

You touched on this before, but I'd like to return to naming. There are no place names—or very few place names—in your book, and because of this, I think the reader is a little unsure about how to inhabit the poems. It feels a little like we, as readers, not being placed, are in a sort of exile. I wonder about exile and the position of the outsider in the poems.

JOUDAH

I have to answer in two parts. I think that refusing to name the place is because of the tendency toward sensationalizing the locale, and that distracts from the suffering and the humanity of others. People refer to Darfur in my book of poems, and I insist on not mentioning which parts of the poems speak of Palestine and which speak of the Congolese and Angolan refugees I took care of in Zambia. But it's interesting that some people feel a particular sense of comfort in mentioning Darfur, and that's their problem, not mine.

There's a lot of stuff that merges with so many other states of being. I hated the idea that people would say, " Did you hear what he wrote about in Zambia?" And it's not necessarily about Zambia. It's about the human condition.

There's no doubt that identifying myself as a Palestinian rubs many people the wrong way. The information is also utilized by people to ends I'm not interested in whatever those ends are. You mention the word "Palestinian," and you get people standing on either side of the aisle. I'm not interested in that in my poetry—maybe in some other arena, but not in my poetry. Sometimes it's comical to me to hear the commentary or to read reviews because some people are trying to dabble with how to make sense of political views in the book. Actually, what they're trying to do is make sense of their own political views or lack thereof, not necessarily the poetry that I'm trying to write.

As for exile, I think it's the state of the poet, period, whether it's internal exile or external exile, and in most cases it's both, which I think is also a state of the human condition. I think we all feel internally exiled from ourselves or even our loved ones. You wake in the morning and you're tired of going to work. You put on a particular persona when you're at work, and it's different when you're at home and it's different when you're with your mother or your father or your wife, husband, and so forth. Sometimes the pressures of life make you feel like you're far from who you think you are or who you aspire to be or all these things that we grapple with in modern day psychology. Then there's the external exile, which goes back to the original point that I mentioned—the idea of one of the syndromes of our contemporary existence: What does it mean to be a citizen?

MORTON

I read that you began writing during your residency. What was it that you wanted or needed in poetry during that time?

JOUDAH

Chinua Achebe said something about how you write because you have a story to tell. I have a story to tell; I could have written novels or I could have written essays, but why did I write poetry? I don't think anyone knows how to answer that question. I just think it's some little twist in the brain, that I'm inclined to the rhythms and patterns of poetry as opposed to other methods of linguistic expression.

HALONEN

Do you write in Arabic?

JOUDAH

No. My relationship to Arabic has become quite automatic. There are many instances where I am probably writing something in English directly from Arabic, not being conscious of it at the moment, but when I put it down on paper I realize exactly where the syntax came from, exactly where the automatic translation process came from.

RICHMAN

Why don't you write in Arabic?

JOUDAH

Because I exist in English, I guess, for a large part—as far as writing poetry. In reaction to that, I chose translation from Arabic into English to maintain a relationship to Arabic in poetry. But I have a busy life as it is—as a physician, a father, and a husband. I'm trying to write, I'm glad to be writing. I'm writing and so I'm happy about that. I don't want to put too much emphasis on linking my identity to the language that I write in, as if it's somehow part of a political statement or a cultural statement. I'm glad to be writing poems when I can.

HALONEN

Can you talk a little bit about the opportunities or limitations of translation?

JOUDAH

Translation is a mistreated aspect of poetry. I think all poetry is translated. Perhaps all life is translation, since we consider reality as a matter of perception, and so is our perception of our own reality through language. It comes across as a translation. At least in creative writing as opposed to the hackneyed speech that we all share over the air and whatnot. So that is one aspect of it.

The other aspect is that the actual process of taking work and writing it in a new language gets a bad rap in the sense that the concept of fidelity is, I think, prostituted by even the best minds. Because there is no such thing as infidelity and there is no such thing as fidelity. All forms of translation suffer from fidelity and benefit from it, and suffer from infidelity and benefit from that. Those who say, "Well, you should try to make it seem as much of a natural poem as in the host language," are after fidelity in a different way than those who say, "No, you should be strictly accurate and representative of the original language." They're after a different kind of fidelity. Or a different kind of infidelity. Freud would be happy with this.

What's most important for me in translation is the transference of the spirit of the text. If I translate poetry five or ten years from now, I might have a different opinion, because I think my relationship to language changes as I learn more and have different opinions about it and so I approach things differently. I do think translation should attempt to infuse something new in the host language, so it allows for that sense of mystery to exist, as opposed to those who want a natural poem in the host language—whatever that means, because "a natural poem" has its own problems. The host language has a wide array of "natural poems." I think Celan said, "There is no such thing as translation. You write a new poem." I disagree with him, because my poems take a lot longer to write than it takes me to translate. But that's not what he was talking about. I think he meant that if you're infusing something, you are writing a new poetry, introducing a new poetry.

RICHMAN

You seem to use rhythm deliberately in your work, and in many places I've noticed a symmetrical meter, most obviously in the titles The Earth in the Attic and The Butterfly's Burden. When scanned, they have identical rhythms. There's symmetry in many parts of the poem "Pulse"—in section seven, within the line: "One of us shouted Wow in her sleep," and between the lines of the last couplet of section nine: "Then saplings and mud. / And then the dried sand." How deliberate are you in determining your rhythms?

JOUDAH

Not very, at this point. I used to count syllables a lot, and not for lines. I counted them sometimes for sentences, and sometimes, in shorter poems, I counted them for the totality of the poem. But not per line. I do like the focus on a deliberate rhythm, as you call it. And I also do like occasional merging between classical prosody, if you will, and a contemporary sense of rhythm. But I go a lot by my ear, knowing that poetry is largely dependent on normal speech, whatever that means, and on normal speech patterns, which are varied.

There's an interesting concept in formal contemporary Arabic poetry, similar to what I said, where the unit for prosody, which is called taf 'eelah, is basically in the entire poem or in the entire stanza, so it's not dependent on a line. And I was always interested in this way of looking at the whole poem. That goes back to why I used to count syllables in the entire poem. If I had an even number, I considered the poem metrically complete. But that's obviously not true, because you can also have an odd number and it all depends on whether you use an anapest or a dactyl or a trochee and, again, it goes back to speech patterns, so it's not fixed. But it is a whole idea that in the sentence, in the stanza, or in the entire poem, there is a sense of complete foot count, if you will, a complete meter of sorts, without the focus on line-per-line symmetry.

RICHMAN

I don't know if I'm imagining this, but in "The Onion Poem," is there a glimmer of a ghazal?

JOUDAH

I remember sharing that poem with Marilyn Hacker, and she said, ''I'm glad to see you're making your own form of a ghazal."

I don't like the ghazal form, though, to tell you the truth.

I don't disparage it at all, but somehow it just doesn't appeal to me. I like repetition in poetry, and I think poetry is dependent on repetition and parallel, but I'm not into that form. I guess you could say if the idea in "The Onion Poem '' is to repeat the tone of question—the repetition of question and answer, which is an ancient idea in poetry—you could say that it parallels the ghazal in that sense. I guess "The Onion Poem'' presents its own dialectic in the first question and resolves it, seemingly, in the answer, in the reply. But then again, if I say that, I am not paralleling the ghazal line; I'm just paralleling an ancient method of call and response in poetry.

Formal elements in poetry, especially in free verse, are wonderful when they go past that idea of metrics and numbers, because there are so many aspects of language that lend themselves to formality, whether regarding alliteration or anaphora or epiphora or parallelism or chiasmus. All these wonderful tools, for me, are what make the free verse poem formal.

RICHMAN

In the poem "Proposal," the sea becomes loosed from its seabed and becomes a bird. It becomes wind, which allows it to see aspects of land and to know the trees as home. To what extent do you identify with the sea?

JOUDAH

I don't know. I feel a little emotional to address the question. It's a trope. The sea is a trope. I guess I can hide behind that in my answer.

RICHMAN

I was wondering if you were referencing the fact that the Mediterranean Sea dried up at one time and then somehow returned to its place?

JOUDAH

If I engage in this conversation, I'd be analyzing the privacy of the poem, dragging it out into some sort of a factual discussion, and I think that would take away from it. For me, it's important that readers see and hear that sea the way they wish—as the Mediterranean or as the sea you hear in the air when you're far from the sea. I'm also aware that some people don't know what to do with the mention of the word "Haifa," for instance.

I'm addressing my wife and her father and my father. But really, the poem was written far away from the past and the Mediterranean. I can tell you that much.

MORTON

In the book's first poem, "Atlas," the speaker says, "Let me tell you a fable." This sort of storytelling appears throughout the book. Why?

JOUDAH

I don't have a spontaneous inclination toward a full narrative poem, but I think narrative is essential to poetry and to the contemporary poem. To incorporate it, I have to wed it to lyric. Some people have a rash about the concept of "lyric narrative," and some people are puritans—either there's a lyric poem or a narrative poem. I guess I believe in that merger, or that unity.

I have a tendency toward playing with time. Narrative means that there is a chronological order, or disorder, but I try to incorporate lyric into my narrative so that the narrative appears to be from within my time and from without it. Some people might use the word "legend" or "myth'' for that, and for me, much good poetry comes out of the attempt, the successful attempt, to rewrite myth.

But what is meant by myth? Is it the sublimation of a ritual? And I mean sublimation in the way solid goes into gas, that chemical process. So you take a ritual and you somehow release it of its own physical properties through the language of time. Whatever that means. In interviews you have to say, "Whatever that means." You have to include these disclaimers.

HALONEN

Which poets do you return to?

JOUDAH

I think it varies in different phases. I used to go back to Rilke, but I don't look at him at all now. These days I go back to George Oppen. I love his lyric. I think he's an incredibly engaged poet with the world and has a wonderful sense of humanity that pierces through ideology. A light with luminosity. You can see there's something magical about his abandonment of poetry. He quit poetry and then twenty-odd years later he returned and had a very prolific output in his older years. Through those years you see how he progressed with his syntax. Or not how he progressed, but how he varied and experimented with syntax and lyric. It's refreshing to see this engagement with the world in his actual life and in his poetry while still being true to art itself—instead of getting lost in ideologies.

He's one of the best-kept American secrets. There is a rise to his name now because we are in a state of war. Which I think diminishes his brilliance. This brings me back to political poetry—a lot of people consider George Oppen a political poet, which for me is just absurd. Maybe it's similar to how people get all worked up about the term "confessional poetry."

RICHMAN

I read that when you were seven, you were watching television, and you announced to your mother that you wanted to be a doctor. What were you watching?

JOUDAH

I don't know. I know there was a family gathering—my aunts and cousins and so forth—and we were in Libya at the time. It's a question we all know—everyone turns to you when you're younger and says, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I don't know why I said I wanted to be a doctor.

I must have been overwhelmed by some sense of…I was thinking about it this morning actually, and this is a way to address the restructuring of memory. This morning I wanted to say that I must have felt some sort of angst in the room or in the family situation. Something must have happened. My family—my immediate family and aunts and uncles and my older cousins—are all refugees in the true sense of the word. They had rough childhoods. I don't know if some of that sense of anxiety was somehow seeping in the conversation and I picked up on it and decided that I had to say something or whatever. I have no idea.

RICHMAN

When did you realize your interest in poetry?

JOUDAH

Probably around the same age, because I used to memorize a lot of poetry when I was younger and recite it and get encouragement and support for such memorization. I started to write random lines— three- or four-line poems or something in Arabic prosody. So I think I've had that interest since a young age, but there was all this side-tracking, with the medicine and leaving one culture and coming to the next. Eventually, I realized I just had to keep writing. I had to keep expressing my own existence.

Issue 67: A Conversation with Prageeta Sharma

Found in Willow Springs 67

APRIL 10, 2010

SHIRA RICHMAN & AMANDA MAULE

A TALK WITH PRAGEETA SHARMA

Photo Credit: poetryfoundation.org

Prageeta Sharma is the Director of the MFA program at the University of Montana and author of three poetry collections, Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question, and Infamous Landscapes. When asked about a guiding notion for The Opening Question, she answered, “I started with the idea of a kind of unabashed confrontation with disappointment and worked towards a way of reeling it in with a hopeful lyrical edge.” Her work takes on topics to which many may have aversions – philosophy and feminism – with humor and insight as seen in poems such as “Everywhere:”

I was crafting crafts, I had needles, I was sewing butterflies

like women do – but only in terms of thoughts,

not in terms of doing. Or I thought, alas,

lightness is part of the commune of despair.

The scene of a woman doing needlework becomes increasingly strange when we realize she is embroidering thoughts. The thoughts open passageways that lead into communes in which despair surprises with its lightness.

Poems, Sharma asserts, are “places in which you can actually take ideas on, and figure out how they can be inhabited.” Her poems, Major Jackson writes, reveal “’the posture of the life of the mind.’ ascending, where humor is unabashedly handsome and an enormous intellect alluring even to the most cynical pedestrian.” While Jackson points out the ascendant movement of Sharma’s poems, Lisa Jarno talers us to their transcendence: “Prageeta Sharma’s poems are as ever imbued with a crafty playfulness by which the appearances of the ‘I,’ the ‘You,’ and the ‘We’ transcend tricks of the trade.” Thomas Sayers Ellis also notes the expansiveness and profundity of Sharma’s poems that, as he puts it, “seem to live everywhere we’ve lived without wallowing in identity or judgment.”

Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, to Hindu parents. “Being raised a Hindu,” she says, “I was taught to honor knowledge and books like a religion and so for me poetry keeps this relationship close, true, active.” She earned an MFA at Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies at the New School in 2001. In 2010 she received a Howard Foundation Grant. We met with her at the Hyatt in Denver during the Association of Writing Programs Conference where we discussed escaping the institution, poets are creative consultants, and limits of the image.

SHIRA RICHMAN

Your poetry addresses feminism in a playful, humorous way. Does humor feel like a way to be taken seriously when discussing feminism?

PRAGEETA SHARMA

I always felt like I had this split personality culturally – I was very quiet, but in my poetry I felt conscious of what a dramatic voice and a dramatic “I” sounded like. It felt melodramatic to me at times. I wanted to construct a voice that was closest to my personality in speaking, in the way that Frank O’Hara had that kind of conversational tone or Kenneth Koch. It was natural to think about a feminine voice that could be conversational and informal, or intimate in ways that weren’t exaggerating the terms of intimacy, but were playful. It is a kind of feminist position to feel comfortable with your voice and engage the reader without putting on airs or trying to construct an over-determined identity for the poem.

When I was beginning to write, a lot of Indian poets were educating the reader about their identity. I wanted to present my personality rather than educate the reader. I’m interested in how we can be, not our best self, but our quirkiest self in the poem, because we have to be this other self all the time. Our artistic self, or the need to be an individual, should be in the poem. That’s a feminist act: to not be one-dimensional in the poem. But I do think a lot of Indian women, culturally, are set up to not have anything to say – except to explain, or to mediate, or to be a messenger of something “more important” than their inner lives.

RICHMAN

Such as what?

SHARMA

When I went to grad school – I graduated in 1995 – there was a lot of “salvation” fiction about the first-generation immigrants and immigrant experience. The subject matter was also very domestic, and I was sort of rallying against that passive “I,” where the character was examined through an omniscient narrator reporting on the culture the characters were immersed in, but never having an opinion about it. You were basically writing for a white reader, who would learn about your culture through you. You were learning nothing about it. You were just putting it on display.

I didn’t want to create poems that merely educated the non-Indian reader. I wanted poems where thinking was happening, because that was a canonical thing. Helen Vendler would talk about the thinking that was happening in, say, Keats – and I’m actually not trying to align myself with “great poets,” but it became this real whiteness – that writing was cerebral thinking, and if you were a person of color, you were telling your story or you were writing the narrative. You were educating people around you instead of actually thinking in the poem, too. It’s important to explore the variety of cognitive experiences in the poem rather than just telling a story.

AMANDA MAULE

Where do you see that thinking happening, or what kind of thinking are you doing in your poetry?

SHARMA

I don’t know if it’s evident in the progression of the books – this is just something I’ve always returned to – but I like thinking of the poem as that place to speak about theory without it being academic. Artists are developing their theories about the world, and we do that in a poem. We don’t have to do it in an essay. That’s the kind of thinking I hope I’m doing. All the stuff that you can’t do anywhere else.

In all three books, I have poems where I’m proposing ideas, a personal philosophy that I think is lofty in an absurd way, but where it’s fun to be absurd with thought. I think a lot of German philosophy is lofty, and a lot of Hindu is more general – you know, general audience ideas. So I wanted to explore places where you could have extravagant thinking without having it fixed to one movement or another. I think men do this all the time. And going back to humor, when women explore humor, sometimes it’s sort of slapstick or jokey, and that can be awkward. But there are so many male poets who are funny in their poems, like Kenneth Koch.

RICHMAN

I think women are funnier.

SHARMA

Women are funnier. I’m just wondering if it’s as much in the poem as in the way we interact and engage. But we may be funny when we’re making points when we’re remarking on something that’s unfair. We can be slightly snide and funny. Are we using the poem as a place to enjoy our playfulness? We are now, I think. A lot more poets are. Arielle Greenberg is, I think. And Matthea Harvey, in the way in which her humor is felt through abstraction and character. There’s that playfulness to the poems. I think her second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, does that. She has nouns and objects stand in for people. I think there’s a lovely quality in the strangeness of the humor there.

Among South Asian poets, I think there are a few male poets who explore craft and wit, really think of it formally, but I’m wondering if there’s still not more of that playfulness that could be found. In terms of gender, I’m not sure if we’re still fixed with the kind of confessional “I.” Or when we experiment, do we just extract language from the narrative and not necessarily put our personality in there? I don’t know where we are with humor in terms of cultural identity. But in terms of gender, a lot of women are playing; they just don’t want to be too slapstick. There’s a particular poet who I’m not going to mention, who may be just a little too funny. Then you’re like, Ugh, I don’t want that. I don’t want to be a comic. So there’s the risk, I think. A lot of men can be comedic and even use one-liners, and it’s okay. They just take that kind of space.

RICHMAN

I’m having trouble thinking of funny male poets. You mentioned Kenneth Koch.

SHARMA

Kenneth Koch I really love. And Tony Hoagland.

MAULE

Dean Young can be funny, too.

SHARMA

Yeah. And people have said they see connections between what I do and Dean Young’s work, structurally. I like his work. I haven’t thought about it in relation to my work, but I certainly know he was publishing when I was younger, and his poems were playful and exploratory. Structurally, they had a voice that was working against some perceived notion of the poem he was undoing. That’s something I like to do. If there’s a rule, I want to play with it.

RICHMAN

One of the funny poems of yours is “After the Weekend with Geniuses.” The fiction writers are the geniuses who are full of pages, and the poets are the warriors and false gardeners who end up languishing on the lawn like love-starved lawn ornaments. Are poets lazy and ornamental? How are fiction writers different?

SHARMA

I spent a weekend with a bunch of fiction writers and we were helping Heather McGowan, a fiction writer, think about her first run of edits on her novel, which was experimental. Whenever we talked about it, I would say, “You know, if it were a poem, you could just do this and you wouldn’t have to do those fifty things.” But it was never helpful because she couldn’t just do this. So I thought, “We’re so extravagant, poets. We can just do this little thing and then lounge about and not do any more.” With the poem, you have a lot of autonomy I don’t think you have as a prose writer. We poets have more autonomy to be ourselves. That’s extravagant, I think.

MAULE

Dean Young has surreal tendencies. Do you see a relationship to surrealism in your work?

SHARMA

My undergraduate study was really formal, and I learned a lot about modern and contemporary poetry – the canonical lens – and then went on to Brown, which was an experimental program. There was a new or different, alternative cannon: Stein and O’Hara and Ashbery. And realizing you could read Eliot and Pound and go one way, or read Eliot and Pound and go the other way. You could go to Lowell or you could go to Olson in your thinking. That was really new to me to think that – Oh, there are open parentheticals, or, Oh, language, words can stand in for other words. You don’t need a simile here; we don’t need to do this with craft.

Then I moved to New York and realized that the poets who seemed to have the most fun, in general, were having fun on the page and having fun in their lives. It spoke to me that I could play in the poem, and I could find surrealism. I think there are some poems trying some surrealism….

But I guess, more, it’s imagination – really figuring out where you want your imagination to be. I think it would be easy to say that I’m surrealist, but I don’t think I am. I don’t think it’s a structure I try on. I just like pairing certain ideas. I like being contrary, so a poem is set up to sort of contradict itself. Just as we go from one thought to another, the poem invites another idea. I don’t think I’m as experimental at all. I’m that square peg in a round hole. I’m not sure what makes the poems so different from somebody else’s in terms of contemporary, nontraditional poems – if we call narrative traditional. But I don’t know if we’re doing that anymore.

I do like some surrealism, but after a certain point I get tired of a poem being purely nonsensical, in the sense that I don’t need meta-symbolism for the poem. Tate does an American surrealist thing where suddenly you step back – I forget which poem it is, but he’s talking about a daughter marrying a prince. After a certain point, you realize the absurdity of this father-daughter relationship and where it goes, and it’s quite metaphorical but it’s also absurd, and you understand that the essential part of the poem is that father-daughter relationship can be estranged in such complicated ways that you might not be able to talk about them directly. I love Tate because the surrealism provides a way to talk about complicated relationships. The surrealism serves a philosophical purpose, makes room to talk about something. I think Dean Young does that, too. I think American surrealism, if that is indeed the right term, does something that the metaphor isn’t always able to do.

RICHMAN

In some of your more recent work, you put the urban into a wild setting, such as being mugged in a river. What sorts of things do you do to ground or un-ground your imagination?

SHARMA

I don’t know how I ground myself. I do feel like an outsider in ways in the West. I used to feel like an outsider in suburbia, growing up with no other Indians around me. I can really go to places where things are invented for me. There are social norms I have to explore. I try to create high stakes around some questions, and then my imagination takes over. I position myself in a place where I have to explain myself, and the terms that I’ve set for myself are both real and imaginary. For example, Homi Bhabha, the theorist, talked a lot about – I’m going to butcher this because it’s been a long time since I’ve read the essay – but he talks about how colonized people will mimic the colonizer. That’s a very interesting power dynamic. He has this beautiful line where he says, to paraphrase here, Mimicry represents ironic compromise, not always representationally but even in the language, then I was somehow enacting a theory that felt very close to me, which was about power relationships.

RICHMAN

You seem to write a lot about ideas – your ideas about ideas, and what triggers a viewpoint.

SHARMA

Theory is interesting to me. I’m naïve and excited about it at the same time. Poems seem to be places in which you can actually take ideas, and figure out how they can be inhabited.

RICHMAN

Do you think that’s a common view? I’ve heard that ideas are for essays and images are for poems?

SHARMA

I can’t stand rules like that. After a certain point, you have to have the strength and character and belief to be a writer. Images aren’t going to save you from yourself. Beyond craft issues, you have to start wrestling with why you are who you are. Your poems are going to have to save you. If you think about great poets, they’re always doing something new. If we talk about anyone who’s doing something interesting, we’re not talking about how they follow the rules.

I’m teaching an insider and an outsider class where we read poets inside and outside canon. I think what’s hardest for all of us is to say what makes us uncomfortable. When do we think the poet is getting away with something? Why is that so disturbing? When do we think correcting them is appropriate? What are the problems with over-determining the body of work by any given poet and its significance? Sometimes I just want to stop being in the institution and say, Well, what is the real pleasure here, and what’s the pleasure you’ve been taught to experience in the poem. Un-schooling may allow you to write something different.

RICHMAN

What would it take to escape the institution?

SHARMA

I don’t know if anyone can escape. In grad school, our professor, William Keach, asked my friend what he was doing for the summer, and he was like, “Oh Professor Keach, I don’t even want to tell you, you’re a Socialist/Marxist.” And he said, “No, I want to know what you’re doing for the summer.” My friend said, “I’m working for Citibank,” and Keach said, “We’re all working for Citibank.”

In essence, we live in the institution. I think I make fun of being in an institution because I work in an MFA program. There are things that naturally happen in that environment. But I think it’s funny to think more ironically about it being an intentional community and that we all agree to be a certain way and do certain things and push against certain things. It seems people don’t generally like work that’s far from the institution. “Language” poetry’s been co-opted by the academy, but people don’t know what to do with spoken word. People see a lot of outsider poetry as being written by someone not knowing, not reading, or not understanding literary traditions. It’s interesting to thing about what inside and outside mean.

I try to introduce my students to poets who either write outside the academy or don’t consider their poetry identity to be their primary identity – you can have a multi-functional, professional identity. Ofelia Zepeda is a linguist at the University of Arizona, and she’s a poet. What she’s don’t for Tohono O’odham culture – she’s been preserving Tohono O’odham language for Native communities – has been primary and has served her poetry, and her poetry enacts it. I think it’s interesting when you have certain ideas and your work enacts them, so that you’re engaged in how your work does something maybe larger socially.

I think that goes back to how I want South Asians to feel good about how complicated they are. Rather than trying to please the reader or aim for certain success, they can fail. So much immigrant culture is based around this idea of needing to be successful, so usually you don’t choose to be a poet because it’s not a choice that can pay the bills or that can make your family proud of you. In some Indian communities, it’s fin to be an intellectual. But being a poet is kind of scary because it’s creative.

I’m interested in communities where people do explore the difficult: being a poet, writing about things that aren’t cool to write about. I think if you’re only success driven, your art will fail.

MAULE

Could you give more examples of outsider poets you’re teaching?

SHARMA

We’ve read Amiri Baraka; his earlier work as LeRoi Jones is so popular. People love how he writes about influences – the Beats, Black Mountain, Olson, Pound, Eliot – in ways that re-center him around racial discourse. He’s not that confrontational in the earlier work, but the more confrontational he gets, the more uncomfortable the white reader is with Baraka.

I found I was in this non-place where I didn’t feel threatened by the work at all. I was interested in the politics, and I’m interested in what the work tries on. I’m trying to explore what it’s like to be a white reader reading work that’s confrontational, having never occupied that space where I’m confronted as the person employing the power. It’s interesting when you’re both inside and outside, and I’m trying to get my students to figure out how their identity is complex but not generalized. They love the canonical work. I taught Jorie Graham’s first book so we could talk about a first book that propelled someone into the canon. They can identify all those moves in Graham. They can very much imitate Graham. But imitating Baraka is hard for them. If we go back to Homi Bhabha’s ideas of mimicry and ironic compromise, maybe they’re not experiencing enough of that compromise in the poem.

I’m also teaching an Indian poet, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, who’s a cognitive scientist. She writes out of the model where there are some strange narrative turns in the poems that you don’t expect. We’re reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Claudia is Jamaican, so she looks at her identity as it relates to being in America, but she also has other ideas of lineage – that’s the thing I’ve really been trying to get my students to thing about. What if they could construct this imaginary lineage that they come out of? What would it be? Would it culturally represent just one thing? What does that mean, to be a contemporary poet writing out of one kind of lineage? Some poets aren’t writing out of just one lineage.

Some of my students – especially at the undergraduate level – are like, “We don’t have a lineage, and we don’t know what you mean by that.” I have to ask them, “Do you want to have a lineage, or do you want to figure out the places you’re writing from? Wouldn’t it be nice to think of it as a lineage, or is it that a cultural thing – that I would want a lineage?” Because in Indian culture, you really love the idea of mentoring, passing down wisdom. I always loved that idea that I had a lineage.

In talking about feminism, maybe you can have a feminist lineage and thing of women you write out of. I’m always thinking: What do we do with class now? or What did Sharon Olds offer or Anne Sexton? I don’t really like Sexton’s work that much, but she was a big outsider poet in a lot of ways. She was a sort of strange housewife in therapy in Newton, Massachusetts – I’m from Framingham, Massachusetts – so I always thought, God it’s funny to think of her getting on the subway and going to Cambridge and taking a workshop and having her therapist. That was very outside.

RICHMAN

Speaking of lineage, it’s been said that in Infamous Landscapes you are responding to Wordsworth and a landscape “cast in hysterics.” Can you talk about this?

SHARMA

I see Wordsworth as naïve and lofty and I thought of what the feminine equivalent of that would be. So I thought, I want to try hysteria. I’m interested in the individual and the sublime and how you have the landscape stand for certain emotional intensity and registers. I wanted to reposition that kind of loftiness in a feminine voice and see what it would look like. But then, I also like George Oppen and Barbara Guest, so those three influences, if you put them together, would feel closest to the work in that book.

I wanted to replace a kind of innocence or idealism with more of a hysteria. I say “hysteria” but I don’t mean that the woman is always cast as hysterical. I just like taking up space in ways that confront the masculine poetic authority. What do we have for poetic authority for women? We can be kind of dramatic and insistent upon certain ideas, but we can also be confrontational.

Somehow we haven’t managed to assume the same kind of, even, romantic poetic authority. It’s very hard to figure out, so I was just trying to assume poetic authority in ways that would mirror or counteract it in romantic work. I mean, Byron has so much poetic authority, and yet he’s transgressive. You know, we’re always hearing how bad Byron is, like, “He’s having way too much fun.” I mean, they all did.

Wordsworth is kind of the most naïve – I say naïve because the poetic authority is always that wandering and speculation – but you don’t really know where you’ve arrived at the end of Wordsworth. I was thinking of inhabiting that romantic space, but enriching it with a more feminine sensibility, rather than a childish one, or a naïve one.

MAULE

Where do we find poetic authority? Or does it just happen and we look back on it and say, “There it was.”

SHARMA

I think we are steeped in the poetic authority of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and we have it in the 20^th century, too – I guess Lowell had poetic authority – but I’m thinking of Eliot and Pound. I always felt really uncomfortable with male poetic authority because I felt that it was a way to flex knowledge. It was like saying, “Okay, pack the poem with everything you know.” And if it didn’t have that, such as in Lowell’s later work that’s more confessional, then it becomes, “I’m a wealthy man who can’t bear it.”

I started to connect to this poetic authority with craft, so that you have to set up the stage, your poem has to have placement, the voice has to be determined, and you have to figure out if your images are really serving what they’re supposed to serve. When you away from tradition, what are you doing it for? Are you turning away from poetic authority or are you reconstructing a kind of authority that has been ignored or has not been engaged with? I think you can do it formally or informally. People always talk about Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott: what Brathwaite does informally, Walcott does formally. You know, Omeros is an amazing book for what Walcott does with Homer. So, wow! That’s an incredible shift in poetic authority.

I’m thinking about whether authority comes out of craft or if it comes out of the space to do what the poem needs to do. Historically, I think it came out of white men who believed in the tradition. I think I’m always trying to deconstruct the tradition, to figure out if you can have authority after that. But I know that I have a lofty authority in my poems to try all this out.

MAULE

If my name was Prageeta I would want to put it in a poem, and you’ve done that. How does this affect the relationship between the poem and the reader?

SHARMA

I like to be self-mocking in the poem and I like to have the reader understand that certain truths are constructed but that I am still trying to play with the seriousness. So we have the “I” as the ultimate authority, but what if you put your name in the poem? What does it do to the “I?” Or what does it do when I’m writing in the third person and I refer to myself as the third person? It’s obnoxious in one sense, but it can also allow the poem to have a natural remove: I am removed in some way from the authority of the “I.” I’m playing with that.

I apologize a lot, and I am interested in how we have certain gestures that are constructed culturally in terms of gender, and how we play with our diminutive self. I try to position myself in these powerless places that are my most vulnerable powerless places, and then play with that. Or, when the reader is instructed or spoken to, it creates an intimacy in the text. It’s almost a reaching out or an invitation. I like trying to break down the spaces of reader and speaker so that there’s an intimacy that maybe the speaker doesn’t always have.

MAULE

I see that breaking down of the space between reader and speaker in Bliss to Fill. The whole first section is called “Dear _______.”

SHARMA

Yeah, I’m interested in the lyric in that book. In that epistolary form, that heartfelt engagement, I really am trying to speak to the reader as a friend, or as all sorts of manifestation. I wrote that in New York my first couple of years there, steeped in a fabulous writing community.

A lot of poems in The Opening Question were my graduate manuscripts that were reformulated with additional work. So, Bliss to Fill was my second manuscript. I knew it could be freer because Subpress Collective was a really generous project. So I could enjoy all of the vulnerability of O’Hara’s lines. That was really an exciting time to think about the immediacy of the poem. I don’t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy of the poem. I don’t know if my poems now are as focused on that immediacy as they were in Bliss to Fill. There is a certain rawness to that book that would be hard to recreate.

MAULE

Poetry allows us so much freedom and intimacy and the ability to lounge out on the lawn. What is the biggest challenge of poetry?

SHARMA

Our challenge is that we allow ourselves to exist outside the economy. That’s why we get a lot of freedom. It’s very political and very interesting and if people could sit comfortably with that, they’d feel more empowered.

RICHMAN

Value, worth, and money come up a lot in your work.

SHARMA

I’m lucky in that I have a good job. Before I took this job, I worked a lot of different jobs in New York and I had the same questions with each: “Okay, who is the person I’m working for?” Or, “How’s this environment going to help me be creative, help me believe in a lifestyle, and help me take care of people whom I love?”

I worked for a famous artist who made a lot of money. He taught me essential things about being an artist that were not about the work. And so I realized, The work is private – you do it, you believe in it – but you have to make smart decisions about who you are outside your work. You have to deal with money. You have to know how to. This artist taught me how to insure things. I learned that poets should be collecting art and figuring out how to have assets that are non-traditional. Poets should be immersed in their culture, the culture being produced around them, and engaged with it. And to really live in your mind by being shrewd – don’t think that just because you’re a poet you can’t figure out how things work around you.

I am really interested in money. I don’t know if it’s because I’m first generation American born and my parents are immigrants; they came here from India with 200 dollars. They’ve done well, they’ve struggled, and they’ve experienced a lot of racism and a lot of discrimination. I have, too. I don’t have the luxury of not thinking about money, but I also really love what poetry offers me in terms of my identity.

At a meeting yesterday, I was joking and everyone went silent. I said, “Well, you know, we may not be able to promise our students lucrative careers, but they won’t have a midlife crisis.” I think we’re providing them an inner life, which actually keeps people from buying crazy cars or leaving their spouses. I think there are a lot of interesting things that poetry offers that aren’t about money. But I’m still a director and I recruit people to come to an MFA program. I’m not trying to be a hypocrite. I get a paycheck. I don’t want people to take out loans for poetry. But I also think that people take out loans for the most ridiculous things anyway. Like why would renovating your house be more important than your inner life? I think people should pay more attention to what they spend money on and what it means to spend money on something. What’s actually nourishing?

RICHMAN

I love this set of directions for poets and I’m especially interested in the one about how poets need to be engaged with their culture.

SHARMA

We are so keen to historicize what has been interesting in the past for poets. It’s like saying, “In the 50s, we had O’Hara who’s a poet among painters. Oh, that’s great.” Well, he was smart about knowing what was going on in a really exciting world – a parallel universe of art-making. A lot of those poets were involved in the arts and they knew they were on the pulse of seeing great work as it was being done, and they were also making work and making connections.

We have a weird economy of high and low art, but we forget that curators are looking at what’s happening in strange rural places and seeing amazing work coming out of those spaces. Poets need to participate in everything going on around them or instigate or initiate or collaborate and see themselves as participating and engaging… or articulating a sense of what’s going on around them. That is, creating the history that will then be romanticized.

It just seems strange. I think scholars can do all that historicizing. Poets need to be making work right now and believing that they have some kind of agency. It’s useful to not historicize, to not call attention to something that doesn’t exist anymore, but to look at the living artists. All these careers are propelled by just believing that you have agency – by doing something new – and a lot more poets should worry less about whether they’re being read or how many books they’ve sold and just be more involved in the arts in ways that will feed them.

You don’t have to think you have to be somewhere; you just have to be immersed fully where you are. Dale, my husband, is a performance artist, and I will have a crazy work week where I’ll be talking about poetry and I’ll be writing a little bit or whatever. And he’ll present something and I’ll just think, “Oh my God, it’s just genius.” I know I’m biased because he’s my husband but he has taught me so much about being in your work all the time and believing that it’s the most meaningful place that you have to be in the present, and understanding and engaging with it.

MAULE

Do you see any potential for technology/poetry collaborations?

SHARMA

Well, my biggest fantasy – have you been to BAM in Brooklyn – the Brooklyn Academy of Music? I remember my parents actually went there in the 70s when Peter Brookes had created that adaptation of The Mahabharata. It was a very experimental theater in the 70s, and here was this suburban family from Boston going to see this beautiful adaptation of the classic Indian text.

But then I thought, Wow! Brooklyn Academy of Music has done all the great commissions, and the poets have collaborated with artists and composers. Tom Waits and his poet wife have done these incredible productions. And I’m thinking, Well, all the language in all of those things has the lyric in it. It’s got poetic elements. It’s fragmenting language in order to heighten it, so it all involves poetry when we’re looking at experimental theater or multimedia productions.

I think poets could be more actively engaged in cross-genre productions, in the aesthetic experience and the pleasure of it. In my workshop, I teach Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and I think, How does video art become so extravagant, whereas when you have it in the poem, it’s unreadable? People will watch video art or animation – why is the visual element so much more engaging than what your mind can conjure? Why is it so disturbing when it happens in the poem? But you can spend five million dollars on it and have it represented at a gallery and it’s conceptually the same thing. In some ways it’s more flawed because of its budget.

I think poets need to hijack more things. We need to be out there saying, “You should really have a poet do that.” Matthew Barney should hire a poet to work with. We bring a lot more imagination to pieces. Sometimes what’s surprising about some of the video art is that it’s literal or Freudian. Even David Lynch. But we have his early videos and we see credit to C.K. Williams as a consultant on one of his films from art school. It would be nice if poets were not seen as so “fringe-y” but more useful. Like vessels of imagination.

MAULE

Why are poets seen as “fringe-y?”

SHARMA

Because we don’t make money. Painters are “fringe-y,” too. Until they have big accounts.

RICHMAN

So many people think there’s no need for so many people studying and writing poetry, but it seems like you’re arguing the opposite – that as many people as possible should discover the inner life of a poet.

SHARMA

I don’t think you have to be teaching at a university to be a poet. I don’t think you have to give up who you are to do one thing or four things. There are 5,000 students entering MFA programs a year. But that’s a very American thing, isn’t it, to have anxiety around people studying the subject? Isn’t that inherently competitive? Say we could have 5,000 people a year who are more engaged with their humanity? Though you could be a narcissist going through the program, so you have to split the 5,000. Maybe 2,500 are interested in bettering themselves. Not that poetry has to be therapeutic. But on the flip-side, all of those narcissists are actually doing something productive, instead of being awful people. So, in some ways, however you come out as a writer, it’s all productive.

RICHMAN

What do you do in your life to maintain literary friendships and the kinds of community you need to nurture and support yourself as an artist?

SHARMA

I like community; I like being involved in what people are doing, but I think a lot of people don’t. They want the community to serve them, but they don’t want to do enough for the people around them. I’m not saying I do everything right, but I like paying attention to what people need. What I really like about the MFA program is that you’re all present with each other. And that stays. I think students and faculty get to keep and protect and preserve the community around them. But I think it can be hard being the poet. It’s easy to send poems out and publish, but it’s hard to believe that you did the right thing. That’s where all the struggle is – believing that it’s okay to be a poet, especially when you’re invisible.

But, then it’s kind of funny, too. I’m seeing a family friend tonight – she’s going to come to the “One Hundred Days Reading,” this celebration of Obama’s first hundred days in office. She’s a nurse in Boulder and I was like, “There’ll be a lot of people in this space; it’s going to probably be a little bit unsettling.” It’s like, all of the interest and engagement – I don’t know how many of those poems are going to make sense to her. But Obama makes sense to her. And then she’s going to have this funny experience with these poems playing in rhetoric language. But it’s all play, ultimately. That’s what’s so confusing to non-writers. They’re like, “Oh… this is all fun.” and that’s the secret. We’re having fun all the time.

Issue 69: A Conversation with Robert Lopez

Interview in Willow Springs 69

Works in Willow Springs 55

February 3, 2011

Blake Butler, Samuel Ligon, and Joseph Salvatore

A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT LOPEZ

Photo Credit: unsaidmagazine.wordpress.com

The fiction of Robert Lopez occurs in a world simultaneously oppressive and hilarious, in which people fail to recognize their spouses or lovers, in which something is wrong but it's not clear what, in which characters are subjected to a kind of imprisonment they don't understand and, at first glance, hardly seem to care about. But they do care; throughout the work, characters demonstrate a deep, subtle resistance to the restrictions of their lives and relationships and institutional affiliations or entrapments-a resistance coupled with an inability to master forces in a world they can't begin to understand. Often noted for his distinctive voice and style, Lopez creates worlds and characters we somehow at once recognize and yet have never seen before, arising from language and cadences that compel like a kind of beautiful, weird song.

Robert Lopez was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised on Long Island. He's the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and, most recently, a book of stories called Asunder. The Faster Times notes that "the Lopez syntax has evolved over the years to become both recognizable and utterly unique in its uncompromising approach. Language may be a dull instrument, but it's the best we've got; lucky for us, Lopez is up to the challenge." The Review of Contemporary Fiction refers to his prose as "like a great jazz performance : pointedly provisional, even damaged, and solicitous of audience participation."

Lopez's stories have appeared in Bomb, the Threepenny Review, New England Review, Willow Springs, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino, and many other places. He's taught at Columbia University and William Paterson University, and he currently teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Pine Manor College's Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. He's been a fiction fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center. He edits No News Today, a blog, or running anthology of dispatches from a deep pool of writers, including Roy Kesey, Amelia Gray, Terese Svoboda, Jess Walter, and Nelly Reifler, to name but a few.

We met with Mr. Lopez at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington DC, where we talked about logic and connective threads, damage and its aftermath, repetition and refrain, knowing and not knowing, and how, as a writer, "you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions."

BLAKE BUTLER

Throughout your work there's a balance between knowing and not knowing, revealing and not revealing. Your characters seem at once unaware of their social function and hyper aware of it. Is this a product of you, the writer, not knowing what you're going to write as you're writing?

ROBERT LOPEZ

I'm always most interested in not knowing. That's my default. To me, there's authority in that ignorance, because I know that my narrators and characters don't know anything and I know that they're aware that they don't know. I also know that it's frustrating as hell to them, but that they, on some level, accept it. They want connection with people, but they know that connection is never going to happen.

JOSEPH SALVATORE

They want connection so badly they can't do it right?

LOPEZ

They don't know how to do it right.

SAMUEL LIGON

What makes a story feel complete to you?

LOPEZ

By the time you get to the end of a piece of fiction, I think you should feel that you've been someplace, that you've had an experience. Somewhere I read John Turturro saying, when asked how he played a character: "Well, what you saw is what I did. I can't really go beyond chat." Similarly, for me, the way a story works is how it works. It's an intuitive thing. I might feel, Okay, here's the end. But that doesn't mean I necessarily know how my fiction works, or that I want to demystify it.

I do have a sense of how short stories work structurally and formally, though I can't say I understand the workings of long fiction, even though I've written two novels. There are probably ten failed stories I cannibalized for Part of the World. Same thing with Kamby Bolongo Mean River. I cannibalize what doesn't totally succeed in its original context but chat has something good or interesting, some language or a situation, and I use chat. The fragmentation leads to something that starts to feel complete. I like what Donald Barchelme said about college-something like "Fragments are the only form I use." I work with fragments because it's the only way I know how to work when I put together something long.

BUTLER

Some of the linchpins for your characters are their feelings of comfort when they recall memories from childhood, particularly in Kamby. All else-the concrete reality around the narrator-seems somehow chimerical.

LOPEZ

And what's funny to me is that I don't find anything particularly sustaining in memory. The present always beats the hell out of anything we may have done in the past. Same goes for the people in my past people I loved. Memory is flawed, hazy, and therefore unsatisfying. So it's funny that to the narrators or characters in my fiction, memory is the only thing that's reliable or real.

LIGON

What's the driving force of Kamby?

LOPEZ

The character is static-he's confined. But he wants out. It's his desire to escape that's the driving force, unlike, for example, Beckett's character in Molloy, who's in this bed, in this room. He doesn't want to be anywhere else. He's accepting of where he is and what he's doing. He's telling his story; he's going to cell it now, tell it one more time, etc. Whereas, the narrator of Kamby wants the hell out of that place, but he doesn't know how to achieve the escape. That's where chose suicide attempts come in-if they are suicide attempts. Bue if he were to get out, I don't chink he would be able to survive.

LIGON

What's wrong with him?

LOPEZ

I have no idea.

SALVATORE

You've said that you write in a state of not knowing, and that, after the writing is over, you remain uncertain of what you've done and maybe even why you've done it. One could say chat your books enact that same not knowing. So, not only are the characters and the reader kept in the dark, but the writer keeps himself in the dark, too?

LOPEZ

That's exactly right.

SALVATORE

So you're totally resisting the old Fiction 101, which is that you should know your characters' predilections and preferences- what color sheets he sleeps in, which cereal she buys, whether his wristwatch is digital or has a face. This is the stuff we're told we're supposed to know, even though cereal and wristwatches are never mentioned in the story.

LOPEZ

Exactly. For example, there's no mention of the parents of the narrator in Part of the World, and I have no idea about them-who they were, how they brought him up. It never occurred to me. The truth is, to me there's no such thing as character. There's no such thing as story. Or plot. All we have are words arranged on a page. It's on the reader to make character. There's no such thing as a Holden Caulfield. Somehow readers experience and feel like they know this character, but there is no real character.

SALVATORE

But language has to signify something. Plot exists because the writer chooses to construct language to make meaningful articulations that move in a particular direction. We can't just say that words are empty signifiers.

LOPEZ

Of course they're not empty signifiers, because then you could put any words in any order. In the Raethke poem, "My Papa's Waltz," the words are in a very specific order. Half of the poem's readers think it's about child abuse, the other half think it's a father and son horsing around. Does it matter what Roethke's intent was? No, it's up to the reader to decide. As a writer, I'm going to do what I have to do to keep myself engaged. I hope I'm going to keep a few readers engaged along the way. And then, what you make out of it is what you make out of it.

LIGON

In Kamby, the reader does get deep context for the narrator's life. We end up knowing a lot about him. Why do you show us what you show us in Kamby?

LOPEZ

I never think about what needs to- well no, that's a lie- I do think about what needs to go into a story to compel the reader. I love what VS. Prichett said: ''A short story is something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye in passing." I've always held onto that. And not just for a short story, but also for a novel. Obviously a novel has to be fuller; it has to be a different experience. But you can cultivate the "not knowing" part of that fullness. And so, what's left out of Kamby and what's left out of Part of the World is as important as what's put in.

The narrator in Kamby talks about his injury, and then he mentions a place called Injury, Alaska. Now, is Injury, Alaska a real place? I have no idea, but he claims to have grown up there. Some of his claims are kind of ridiculous because, obviously, there's no place in Alaska where they need air conditioning. So is he intentionally fucking around with the reader? I don't think he's intentionally trying to be duplicitous.
Unlike many writers, place really doesn't interest me. Which is why Part of the World doesn't "take place" anywhere. Kamby might take place in Alaska, or it might not. Very few of my short stories even mention place. And none of these people have jobs-at least that are mentioned. The jobs of the characters don't interest me. What does interest me in, say, Kamby, is what is revealed about the character through his memories and his feelings about those memories. Whether it's Charlie being a boxer, or his mother being kind of an abusive deadbeat. But my intention is not to explain why he's where he is or how he got in that situation.

BUTLER

All of these things we're talking about-the traditional elements of fiction-are play-toys for what's really the magic of your writing, which is the logic. In your novella, The Trees Underground, we watch a character's logic evolve by bouncing back and forth between orchestrations of place, person, and memory. In Kamby, when the character remembers what his brother used to do to him, it isn't as interesting as him trying to figure out why he remembers that and who exactly that guy was. And it's logical; it's like math without anything following the equals sign. How do you use what I'm calling logic as a tool in your writing?

LOPEZ

It's a great question and it really resonates with me. How do writers create transitions in narrative? My approach is to pick out something that's come before the time in which the story takes place. I try to create a connective thread. So it's just a matter of finding out what those threads are and which of those threads interest me. The narrator of Kamby might mention something that his current tormentors are doing to him; and that's going to catapult him into talking about the time he was with Charlie and they were out early one morning sneaking out of the house or whatever. I couldn't possibly work without that logical progression from point to point. Maybe I rely too heavily on it.

BUTLER

But that's where the emotion is for me, because that's how life feels.

LOPEZ

And that emotion is: How the fuck did I get here.

The narrator of The Trees Underground finds himself someplace and has no idea how he got there. But he's there and he's responsible for people who need his help. He doesn't know what qualifies him to do any of the things he's doing, yet he has to do them. He's also hoping to get the hell out of there, just like in Kamby Bolongo. But unlike in Kamby, he has responsibilities. Both narrators find themselves mysteriously confined to a place. Both narrators feel a certain impotence because they have no real free will; they can't leave for some reason or another.

SALVATORE

And in Trees Underground it becomes a question of, Does he really have these responsibilities, or is this something they do to keep him busy because he's annoying?

LOPEZ

Yeah, it could be that as well. Absolutely. And I don't know the answer.

LIGON

Is the logic logical? Is it rational?

SALVATORE

It's logical to the narrator in the moment he's in. It's like a dementia patient. You watch them and in the moment they're convinced-"This is this way and that is that way"-and the next minute, they're almost a different person. "No-that's not how it is." And it continues to change because something's wrong with their brain. It's true now, and it's true now, and now it's not true, but it'll be true again.

LOPEZ

Most of us can connect, maybe, to these narrators or characters to a degree, but not completely. The narrator of The Trees Underground is kind of extreme-dull-witted and totally befuddled by what he's doing and who these people are, and he doesn't understand very fundamental things. I think this rubs up against what we know of the world and how we move around the world and feel like we can give the appearance that we're competent. We're holding it together to an extent.

LIGON

Does fiction need damage to work?

LOPEZ

I think we're born damaged. I think we're marked at birth. You know, you come out of there and they slap your ass, and it's already traumatic. And immediately you're thrust into coping mode. As Larkin so famously said: Your parents, they fuck you up. And then our schools fuck us up. So, yes, I find damaged characters, damaged narrators to be the most compelling kind. But they have to be human at the same time.

BUTLER

The damage is always off the page. We don't know what the hell is wrong with a character, as though we're getting the aftermath.

LOPEZ

It's always the aftermath-when they're taking baby steps toward something that resembles recovery. For the people in my fiction, it's baby steps all the way through, across tenuous ground. They're trying to make it across somehow, without getting more damaged along the way.

BUTLER

You use a lot of diched language and repetition and something that almost feels like sampling. Characters repeat things they've heard. But you're not really quoting it; you're sticking it into the rest of their speech. It's like they're dinging to these meaningless ways of speaking.

SALVATORE

Yeah-the characters skew a cliche chat reveals some kind of mystery in the story. And then the form enacts it by this recursive-what might be called repetition, but I'm thinking more like Gertrude Stein's recursion where when we return to either a phrase or a sec piece, it's slightly skewed again. Is chat a strategy you practice?

LOPEZ

We all know the experience of deja-vu, like, I've done this before. I play with chat experience in Part of the World-places and events and thoughts and language occur and reoccur. I use borrowed language to illuminate something and to create tension. In Part of the World, the narrator is totally unaware that he's ripping off Nabakov or Proust or Wallace Stevens. Sometimes he's doing it verbatim, and sometimes he's fucking around with the text. But he has no idea, because he doesn't know what's his and what isn't. He can't distinguish a thought that might be original from something that he read or that someone said to him. He appropriates what another character says to him the same way he appropriates Beckett or Shakespeare. He doesn't know what belongs to him.

LIGON

The repetition makes your sentences and word choices feel extremely deliberate. Your teacher, Amy Hempel, has been referred to as a "line writer." Are you a line writer?

LOPEZ

I think there are certainly line writers, who produce work in which the line becomes the dominant experience of reading, as opposed to work that's all about story or narrative. You could say Alice Munro is a narrative writer. But Updike, to me, was a line writer. Those sentences are put together in a way that seems much more sophisticated than, say, Alice Munro's.

Music was a big part of my experience growing up, and as a teenager I started singing and playing guitar. I'm into the ways that music works structurally, and this informs my use of language and line. Repetition is key in music-the refrain is a vital element. If you cake refrain out of music then the whole thing can fall apart.

LIGON

Is there risk in too much focus on line?

LOPEZ

There can be, certainly. And sometimes risks work out and sometimes they don't. Sometimes a writer's prose is so dense that a reader isn't able to extract any emotion. The language can be meticulous; the lines, the sentences, can be perfect. But one can't get any feeling out of it. I've read well regarded work chat has left me feeling cold- not cold as in the chill of fear-I mean cold as in flat-lined: books that are perfectly constructed, but I couldn't draw a visceral response from the work. Language-wise they might be perfect, but I need something more. The language can't be-for me, for my sensibility-it has to work for me. Like Gertrude Stein said, there has to be a "there there."

SALVATORE

It's interesting that you talk about the need for emotion, and Stein's "there there" in light of your strategy of cultivating ignorance and not providing characters with jobs, places, and in some cases, past history. You've said you want compelling-

LOPEZ

It has to be entertaining.

SALVATORE

So, on the one hand you don't want to know too much about what's going on behind the curtain of your fiction. And yet you actually, I chink, are a craftsperson who's mo re conscious of craft than he's admitting. And who, as a reader, responds to the very craft elements that he feigns ignorance of. This is what it seems to me Blake was saying about characters making him feel human feelings. I'm wondering if, when you talk about creating compelling work, you're not simply talking about plain old plot?

LOPEZ

Ah, God. I have no idea. I mean, for me- it's like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography. I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. I know it when I do it.

Sometimes whatever it is that we're calling "compelling" happens in the initial composition, and a lot of times it happens in the revision. For instance, in Part of the World it happened solely in revision, because in the very, very first draft, absolutely nothing compelling happened. I was playing with the tenets of the nouveau roman, trying to get rid of everything to see what was left. But then, going over it, I thought, Okay, you need something to happen. So, chat sense of a "there there" definitely happened in revision with Part of the World.

LIGON

What bores you as a reader?

LOPEZ

Again, it's similar to the Supreme Court thing. For instance, each of you goes about creating a story in an entirely different way, but when I read your work, I feel there's a heat that's generated. On occasion, I pick up The Night in Question, by Tobias Wolff, and every semester I teach "Bullet in the Brain." Bue I recently picked up Back in the World and I read all the first lines, and they just weren't as dynamic as his other first lines. Writers are cold, "The whole story has to be in the first line." What bores me is the overly familiar, the pedestrian.

SALVATORE

If we apply chat logic, "Call me Ishmael" would probably not pass-

LOPEZ

No, no, "Call me Ishmael" certainly does. There's something arresting about "Call me Ishmael." Is chat not your name? Who are you? What else would we call you? That, to me, is a brilliant opening.

SALVATORE

Amy Hempel used to say that she couldn't write past one line if that line wasn't working. Is it that way for you with the first line of a story or novel?

LOPEZ

Every piece I've written-the novels, stories, or the play I just finished-comes from a single line. They never come from an idea or an image or an experience; they come from one single line. And the next line pushes off the previous line. In Kamby, that line is "Should the phone ring I will answer it." I like the contingency of that. There's power and powerlessness in that line. "Should the phone ring," which is totally outside my control, "I will answer it."

SALVATORE

The theorist Gilles Deleuze, in writing about Melville's Bartleby, says that the comical is always literal. It can't be metaphorized because of the way it works in Melville, the syntactic queerness of "I would prefer not to," a linguistic formula that is the story's "glory" and which "every loving reader repeats." He talks about different kinds of humor, including works by Kleist, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett. Do you see yourself as a part of this lineage? It's a humanizing kind of humor, in a certain way.

LOPEZ

I saw this really good movie recently- Winter's Bone. It was entirely humorless. Now, you can do a dark, dark movie, and I respond to darkness. But God damn it, have some laughs along the way. That was my major problem with that picture- there wasn't one chuckle or light moment or even a dark funny thing; there was nothing funny at all. When that happens, it's one note and no matter how compelling it is I don't respond the way I'd like to respond. I'm not saying I want something to be jokey, like Dave Barry in the Miami Herald or something.

BUTLER

I think there are two kinds of humor: inside and outside. Your characters tell jokes about things they think are supposed to be funny, or that they really think are funny, which makes their shitty world a little better. But then, there's the humor where you're looking at this guy who's keeping track of which way his erections go, left or right. And he's not joking . The scariest moments are when I see your characters doing things I do myself. I'll be reading about something a character does and I realize that I do that and I'm like, "Oh my fucking God!" Because everyone does those things in different ways.

LOPEZ

I tell students that you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions. You have to use that stuff because it's ultimately going to make the work vibrant and come off the page. All the stories we tell have been told a million times before. Nobody's going to come up with a new story. It's all the same old thing; somebody is losing something, somebody wants something, somebody is afraid of losing something, somebody is afraid of wanting something. We can't not write those stories. We cultivate the strange things that make us unique, and that uniqueness is what connects us to other people. Otherwise strangeness is just a freak-show. Like what you see on Jerry Springer.

BUTLER

You've said you don't know how to write a novel-that though you've written two novels, you don't think of yourself as a novelist. Do you consider your novels to be very long short stories?

LOPEZ

No, I think they're novels. But when I think of a novelist, I think of someone who sits down and writes novels. John Updike is a novelist, Anne Tyler is a novelist. I do consider myself a writer, but as often as not, I feel like it's almost always a happy accident every time one of these things comes together- whether it is a one-page story or a novel; like it was almost the luck of some sort of draw.

BUTLER

The last lines of "Monkey in the Middle" are, "I've come to realize that what goes on when I'm not around is none of my business. Mostly." If it feels like luck to you, why do you keep doing it?

LOPEZ

Because it gives me something that nothing else does, and because it's what I can do. When it's working, it's such a satisfying feeling. And, you know, it's nice to have the books on the shelf. You can look at them and say, "I did that," although I rarely do this. At any rate, there's a line in the Wallace Stevens poem, "The Planet on the Table:" ''Ariel was glad he had written his poems. They were of a remembered time/Or of something seen that he liked." And then later in the poem, there's this: "Some affluence, if only half-perceived,/In the poverty of their words." The desire to make something that wasn't there before motivates me.

There's a magic when a line comes and you put another line behind it. I remember Stanley Elkin saying something like-at this point he was in a wheelchair-"Well, I might not be much physically, but on the page, I'm a god." When we write, we can be gods. Though, of course, our readers don't think of us as gods. Kamby certainly has some detractors a few people have voiced their disappointment about that book.

LIGON

What do they want that they're not getting? Plot?

LOPEZ

I imagine. But they can go to a million other writers for chat. It's none of my business. I wouldn't know plot if it knocked me in the-

BUTLER

But you're a huge movie lover. And plot is a major part of movies, particularly certain kinds of movies that I know you like, like The Godfather. So what's the difference between telling a story in image and writing a script?

LOPEZ

When you do something visually you have the instrument of the actor who communicates so much without using language-without resorting to the base thing chat language is. One of my favorite moments in film is the brilliant Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day. He's in his parlor, right? And he's the most uptight character you're ever going to come across-entirely introverted and withdrawn, scared of human contact. He's in his parlor, he's in his safe place, and he's reading a book, and a woman he's attracted to, played by Emma Thompson, invades his space. She wants to know what he's reading; she's curious. "What are are you reading? Just tell me what you're reading." But he doesn't want to tell her. By not wanting to show her the book, he's saying, "This is my private time and you're invading it. I want to be alone." He's holding the book to his chest, but she's insistent; she's moving in on him, which he is not inviting at all. She's caking the book physically from his hands. And the heat chat Hopkins has in his eyes, of repression-he wants her, he's extremely attracted to her, but he doesn't know how to go about the next human move. He can't negotiate it; he can't handle it; he can't express it, certainly. But Hopkins somehow manages to communicate all of that without language. It's all here; it's all in his face.
That's what film can do. And I can think of other moments. The end of Big Night is one of my favorite moments in film. The brothers have had this argument, it was horrible, and you think they're now estranged. You think, This is it, they have to go their separate ways. The very next morning they're exhausted, they've had this big night and there's a scene entirely without dialogue that goes on for minutes. It's extraordinary. Stanley Tucci makes eggs for himself and then for his brother, played by Tony Shalhoub. The whole scene is like a silent movie at this point. That's the kind of thing that when we write fiction we just can't do. And in film, I want to know what's going to happen-I expect to know. I require plot. Whereas, in fiction, I don't require that at all.

LIGON

You have a deep emotional response to the ending of Big Night. Can you talk about a similar response you've had to fiction?

LOPEZ

You know, it's funny. I've almost never had- I'm not quite our new Speaker of the House where I can cry on a dime, but I can get emotional. I can be emotional. Music has moved me that way many times, film has moved me that way. That hasn't happened in a long time with film, though. But there have been times with film where I've either felt leveled in the seat, where I can't move, or I've been moved to tears. I have never been moved to tears, except for one time, with reading. And it wasn't fiction, it was nonfiction. It was Andre Dubus in Broken Vessels. There's an essay in that book that moved me to tears. But for fiction, I'm neither-it's a different feeling. It's visceral because I do feel stirred somehow. I feel compelled, I feel entertained, but somehow it's a different kind of emotional connection. Maybe it's because it's the thing that I do. I don't know.

LIGON

Do you get as much pleasure from it today as-

LOPEZ

Not even close.

SALVATORE

In what, reading or writing?

LOPEZ

Reading. I read my friends, and I get pleasure out of that, but there was a time when-if a new book by a writer I admired was coming out, I was there that Tuesday getting it. And that doesn't happen anymore. I think I've been over saturated. I teach four workshops a semester. That means I'm reading critically all the time. So even if I read somebody I consider a friend and who I like-not even a close friend where I want to read everything, but a casual good friend and I want to support them-I pick up the book, because I'm supporting it and I'm reading them, and I like their writing. But I go for a little bit, and then it's as if I say, Okay, I've got a sense of that, and I put it down. It always feels like I'm on the job.

BUTLER

The pleasure factor has diminished for me, too. I don't necessarily feel on the job, but I feel the pulling away. Each year I feel a little less pleasure, reading and writing.

LOPEZ

I remember feeling it was a magical experience to get a new book. Magical.

SALVATORE

What are some of those magical books you couldn't wait to buy? And what are you drawn to today?

LOPEZ

These days, there are no authors other than my friends that I'm excited about. Because it seems I've already seen what's being done. There's nothing new for me there, which I know is bullshit, but whatever. And the books that I loved in the past- well, I picked up I Sailed with Magellan recently, and I remember the first time I read "We Didn't"-it was in the nineties-and that story knocked me on my ass. I thought it was one of the greatest things I'd ever read. It lived in my memory as a brilliant, brilliant story. But when I recently picked up I Sailed with Magellan and reread "We Didn't," it just wasn't happening for me.
That story is the same, but I've changed and now the story doesn't work for me. I lament the change. I've become too ruthless as a reader. If there's a line, if there's a clause that explains too much or feels too commonplace, I can't abide it and I stop. But I did read The Coast of Chicago recently and totally dug it. I didn't have a single moment where I thought, "Well, whatever." But looking at I Sailed with Magellan, I've been trying that and it just hasn't happened for me. And I don't know exactly why.

SALVATORE

Your work, it seems to me, is influenced by David Markson and Samuel Beckett. Would you talk a bit about those influences or others?

LOPEZ

I've said this before, but reading Hemingway's ''A Clean, Well Lighted Place" many years ago made me want to write a story. So I wrote a story or two. I had no instruction, I wasn't an English major. I took lit classes in college, but didn't pay attention in them, so I never did the work. I actually paid for the papers I handed in. The way I was taught literature in high school and college was to look for symbols and memorize and extract interpretive meaning that was concrete. We would read a poem and say, "What's the poet really saying?"
What's the poet really saying? The poet said what's on the page.

SALVATORE

But poets do talk about how hard they've worked on a metaphor, and to make a particular, very aestheticized event for the reader, right? So poets are thinking about it.

LOPEZ

And that's poetry I'm not interested in. I read Wallace Stevens. I love Wallace Stevens. I don't want to know that he's trying for metaphor, because to me, he's not. To me, he's putting language down that has metaphor. To me-and I tell this to my students all the time-it's like acting. You want to feel the anger, you don't want to show the anger. If you feel the anger as an actor, the anger will come out. But if you're crying to play anger, you're going to be overacting. If a writer is trying to be true to whatever he or she is putting down on the page, the metaphor is going to happen. It has to happen, because everything. I mean, we don't live in a bubble. We don't live in a vacuum. Everything is contingent upon something else. Everything is related to something else. So metaphor is inevitable. It arises. It cannot not happen. So, when people say, "I'm trying for a metaphor, I need a metaphor," I think it's the wrong way to go about it. It gets heavy-handed. It makes the reader say, "You're not trusting me as the reader to get it, and so you have to hit me over the head with it."

LIGON

You mentioned Hemingway-

LOPEZ

Hemingway made me want to read. When I came across Carver, he made me want to be a writer. Not just write a story, but make a life out of this activity. There was something about the power and mystery of chose stories. Every one, at the end, had a punch in the gut. I felt like I'd been someplace. I felt I'd experienced something. And I had an emotional, visceral connection to it, along the lines of "Ballad of a Thin Man;" something has happened here but you don't know what it is. And I was totally fine with not knowing what it is.

But when I came to read Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, and the fragmented way chat was put together, I said, "Okay, fragments. That's something I can move around in." And so that worked with me and that sparked something in me. And also, Beckett's Molloy-where he strips everything down, and gets rid of so much. I like what Faulkner said in his Nobel acceptance speech, ''All literature is the human heart in conflict with itself." And, to me, I try to distill that down to someone in a room-How did I get here? How do I get out of here? How do I make connections with other people? There are feelings of isolation. And disappointment. Beckett and Markson handle that on a language level and a narrative strategy level that moved me and opened up my head to what could be done on the page.

LIGON

In contrast to some of the bleakness of the worlds you create, are you a romantic? Your characters are so often disappointed, like: "It shouldn't be this way. We're damaged and it shouldn't be this way." There's something innocent and romantic in that view.

LOPEZ

I've never thought of it in those terms, but I think you're right. I mean, I think all of my narrators believe that life shouldn't always be this hard. This is how it is, but it shouldn't be this way. And almost like Jesus on the cross: "Why have I been forsaken, oh Lord? Why me? Why have I been forsaken?" But then, also: They get through somehow. Somehow, they get through.

Issue 75: A Conversation with William T. Vollmann

Willow Springs 75 Cover shows pink pressed flowers on rough paper.

Found in Willow Springs 75

April 12, 2014

DAVID ALASDAIR, MELISSA HUGGINS, GENEVA KAISER

A CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

Photo Credit: Elliot Bay Book Company

When I'm dying, I want to think I did what I felt was best for the words I was writing," William T. Vollmann declared in a 2014 essay in the Atlantic. "For an artist... it's good to remember that nothing is true for all time-and therefore, that all is permissible. You shouldn't get stuck in any one truth."

The author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, Vollmann is known for placing himself in dangerous situations in pursuit of artistic authenticity. That same quality has made him into something of a cult figure among his fans, drawn to the mythology of a writer whom the New York Times Magazine described as showing "a disregard for personal danger that would shame Hunter S. Thompson or Errol Flynn." At twenty-two, he traveled to Afghanistan in hope of supporting the mujahideen rebels' fight against the Soviets; in the early 1990s, he survived a sniper attack in Bosnia that left his companions dead; he also spent two weeks solo at the magnetic North Pole, researching a novel, during which he nearly died of hypothermia. He's written about smoking crack with prostitutes, riding the rails, and visiting a nuclear hot zone in Japan, among other subjects, but says he writes without an intention to shock his readers. "I don't shock myself, and I don't care about shocking others," he told the Paris Review in 1993. 'Im not an egocentric or a performer."

Vollmann has traveled widely in his search for knowledge and understanding, writing about subjects as complex as immigration, poverty, war, climate change, racism, prostitution, and others. He also takes photographs, paints, draws, and produces other artwork in his studio. In 2013, he published a book of photographs, a series of self-portraits, cross-dressing as a woman named Dolores. "Not only am I physically and emotionally attracted to women," he writes in the introduction to the book, "I also wonder what being a woman would be like."

His novel Europe Central won the 2005 National Book Award in fiction, and his seven-volume book on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. Named by the New Yorker in 1999 as "one of the twenty best writers in America under 40," he has written for many publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Spin, Granta, the New Yorker, and Outside Magazine.

In 2012, Harper's published Yollmann's essay, "Life as a Terrorist: Uncovering my FBI File," which recounted Vollmann's discovery, upon filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act, that the FBI once suspected him of being the Unabomber. In the essay, he details the loss of personal freedom he experienced as a result and criticizes what he sees as an American surveillance state.

We spoke with Yollmann during the Get Lit! Festival in Spokane shortly before the publication of his collection Last Stories and Other Stories. We discussed empathy, the importance of story, and his travel to places of conflict.

MELISSA HUGGINS

Empathy is a significant part of both your fiction and nonfiction. In Riding Toward Everywhere, you wrote, "I never want not to feel." Could you elaborate?

WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

It's discouraging seeing the misery and suffering of others and knowing you can't alleviate most of it. I wonder what kind of a world we are making for ourselves. As far as I can tell, we're doing almost everything wrong. You send money to United Way or another charity and you think about how a lot of it might go toward salaries, and what's left will go toward some policy that may or may not be effective. Does any of it get to the people who need it? I feel similarly about global warming, that there's nothing I can do. A lot of my friends say they put away the paper or turn off the news when they hear about it, because it only upsets them. I don't want to be that way.

I felt reluctant to embark on the book I've been working on about fossil fuels versus nuclear energy, because it's such a dismal and complex subject. But in 2011, I happened to be traveling to Japan right after the tsunami, so I went to Fukushima and visited the forbidden zone. It was extremely upsetting. I returned in 2014 to find that, in many ways, it's worse. There are so many places we would rather not think about-the Hanford nuclear site here in eastern Washington, for example-because the truth is, once there's any sort of radioactive contamination, it will be a problem for centuries. Who wants to face that? The only thing worse than facing it is not facing it. I feel it's my obligation to speak up. Not necessarily to expect I can make a difference, but to try.

HUGGINS

Do you think that's every artist's obligation?

VOLLMANN

No. Nabokov once said that he banished from his bedside any book that told him what he should do or how he should feel. He thought that was almost always bad art.

DAVID ALASDAIR

You've been described as "a globally conscious voice," and you seem to participate in much of what you see. Do you think it's enough to report what you observe, or do you need to be a global participant?

VOLLMANN

Ghandi said that you should consciously eschew the desire for results. Do what you think is right, and hope but not really expect. I think that's a sane and consoling way to look at it, but there's always an opposition between words and action. That was one of the two things that most tortured Yukio Mishima and probably led to his absurd political suicide. He felt like writing great books was not enough. All you can do is your best. You never know how you're going to affect people. I'm proud of the little things I've done for people in different parts of the world, bur for all I know, some of those things have ended up causing harm. You can never be sure. Maybe somebody has read one of my books and decided to do something more important than I ever did. I can hope so, but I'll never know.

ALASDAIR

How is your approach different from that of a journalist?

VOLLMANN

I've met journalists who think the most important thing is getting a good story. I would rather let the good story go if l have to do something indecent. If I have a very clear story, I can be pretty sure I'm missing something, because the answers are always muddled. If someone says, "It's obvious the Taliban are bad," guess what? It's not obvious at all. It doesn't work like that. Things are always more complicated than you think. Of course there's a danger in being paralyzed by that, but maybe that was one of the reasons Nabokov said what he did, how he didn't want the book to declare, "this is this," and "that is that." In a novel, you want things to be ambiguous and nuanced and complicated. Up to a point, that is. You don't want to come away from a book saying, "Well, I don't know whether Hitler was good or evil." But you can say, "It's very interesting that even though he was evil, he was kind to animals, and the people around him liked him." In a way, that makes him worse, more dangerous, more effective. It also means he had the capacity to be good in certain ways, but didn't exercise it. To me, that makes a book more interesting. Of course if you're prosecuting somebody like that at Nuremberg, you say, "It doesn't matter if this Nazi was nice to animals. He deserves the death penalty."

GENEVA KAISER

During your National Book Award acceptance speech, you described how you learned about the Holocaust in school, then learned that you were German. You said you tried to read yourself into that horrible event, to attempt to imagine how anyone could have done that. What do you mean by reading yourself into the event?

VOLLMANN

I think it's something every writer ought to do. Flaubert famously said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." I have to feel that I'm in all my characters, because the only way for me to make the characters real is to think, If l were this way, then maybe this is what I would have done, and if l believed this, then I would come to this problem that way. Otherwise they're opaque to you. You have to put yourself in everybody you write about. That doesn't mean you have to go out and kill six million Jews to understand Hitler. It simply means asking yourself, What would Hitler think? What would I do if l believed all this garbage? It's a creepy exercise to start imagining yourself being some monster, but a useful one. As long as people are opaque to each other, there's no hope of international or social understanding.

ALASDAIR

When you were younger, did you think you could fix problems you saw in the world?

VOLLMANN

I used to think there were answers. Now I think there are questions. Those questions have to be answered, and once we arrive at an answer we've done something important and necessary, but the most common mistake is to think we've answered a question for all time, that there is no other possible answer. I like what Jung says about the shadow, how there is a dominant paradigm in our consciousness and in society, and that it has come into being for a very good reason and serves its purpose. Whatever we define goodness or justice to be, that is central in our consciousness, while the stuff we define as bad gets pushed to another part of our consciousness, so much so that we feel very strongly about it and can't even consider that there might be something good in it.

Jung also used to say that in a war, the center of evil is usually about a kilometer behind the enemy lines. That's how it is now. People are saying how awful al-Qaeda is, how terrible the drug lords are, how we have to stop the child molesters-and these are all legitimate things to worry about-but as we go on insisting that things are this way and not that way, reality is imperceptibly changing. Suddenly, these concerns are going to be irrelevant. The things that were so important in our parents' time or our grandparents' time-all the worries about the Cold War, how we had to watch out because the Communists were going to come and get us and maybe the Russians were going to start a nuclear war, nowadays, who cares? That's why it's important to always re-examine who we are and what we think we know.

ALASDAIR

Do you think that, as a society, we ask those questions enough? At your reading in Spokane you said, "Each and every one of us here is a potential terrorist," and the audience laughed. Have we come to terms with living in a surveillance society?

VOLLMANN

I think we treat it too seriously. My FBI file is ridiculous, and very possibly so is yours. Without the Freedom of Information Act, I would never know that. Yes, of course, any of us could be a terrorist, and it's almost certain that there will be another September 11, that some terrorist will get through. Maybe there will be a dirty bomb dropped on Spokane someday. Bur part of the problem comes from insisting we know the answer. I'm sure Bush and Obama meant to do good by attacking and continuing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a lot of people think maybe they have. I don't. I think it's been a disaster. But maybe Bush thought that was all that he could do, that it was the only answer he could see. If I think of it that way, then some of my disgust goes away. But the longer we prosecute these ineffective and unjust wars, the more enemies we make, and the more people are determined to take revenge against us. Even if that weren't so, the fact that people hated us before means they're going to hate us again. Saying that we have to give up so much of what's valuable about being American-being able to say what we want and do what we want, even if it's eccentric or even hateful-for the sake of some illusory safety ... maybe that's like the old military joke: "We had to destroy the town in order to save it."

HUGGINS

Personal freedom is something you examine in many of your essays and books, including Riding Toward Everywhere and Imperial. You seem to be wrestling with a dichotomy of being proud to be American while also experiencing disgust at certain actions or attitudes.

VOLLMANN

I'm very proud of the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The idea of being American is inspiring to me and inspiring to people all over the world, the idea that our homes are our castles, that we can all go to hell in our own way, that we may not be equal in capacity but we are equal before the law, and that we are ruled by a government of laws, not a government of people. But of course all these wonderful things that Whitman expressed so beautifully in Leaves of Grass are mostly illusory. Only a small portion of them have ever been realized. Sure, it was liberty and justice for all, but not for women, not for blacks, not for a long time. Yes, there was a sense of infinite freedom, the ability to go where we wanted on the frontier, but only at the expense of the Natives. I think it's important to remember our history and say that our country is a work in progress. It will never be perfected, because human nature is imperfect, but it's something to strive for. When the Constitution, for instance, is violated, there's no reason to be surprised or shocked. It always has been and always will be. But it's important to say, "I object to this."

I believe, though I cannot prove, that my mail has been opened for many years. Either some yo-yo is opening it, or envelopes aren't what they used to be, the machinery at the postal service is really bad, et cetera. If l get some books from my French publisher, the box is open, and oftentimes the spine of every single book has been carefully slit. I take these nice books and all I can do is throw them in the garbage at the post office. I have no recourse. When that happens year after year, you get a little crabby about it. Is that irritation and sorrow I feel worth saving the rest of you from a dirty bomb in Spokane? Of course it is. But what if it doesn't do anything? As far as I know, I'm pretty harmless, and maybe all of you are harmless, too. So if 99 percent of us are harmless and they started doing this to 99 percent of us, would it be worth it? Of course there's no answer, just a question. I have my answer. But my answer could change if there were a dirty bomb.

KAISER

At the beginning of Poor People, you write that poverty is never political. If it's not political, what do you think it is?

VOLLMANN

Poverty is a state of being. Like everything else it can be politicized, but the people who experience it deserve to own it and to feel it in the way they want to feel it. It's really a facet of consciousness. You could be poor and believe that you were poor for one reason, while I might not think you were poor for that same reason. But you might say, Well, this is how I feel about it. I could be poor and have more money than you. You could have no money and be happy and not consider yourself poor. I think it's important for us not to get in the way of others and say, We're going to define what you are.

HUGGINS

Are there political solutions for poverty?

VOLLMANN

There are political solutions for everything, of course, but people don't agree on politics. They don't agree on what poverty is. There have always been poor people, therefore it's likely that there always will be, therefore there is no permanent solution. To think we can solve it with a stroke of a pen is utopian. In Poor People, I mention that Vlad the Impaler had what he thought was the greatest solution to poverty: he took all the poor people and had a banquet for them and then burned them alive. Problem solved. But guess what? I saw somebody who was poor yesterday, so it wasn't entirely effective.

KAISER

In Poor People, you stated that you pay people for interviews and for taking photographs of them. Do you worry that paying someone for their story will cloud the authenticity of a piece? Is there a risk of someone saying what they think you want to hear or not giving you the full truth?

VOLLMANN

You always have to wonder that, whether you pay people or you don't. You never know for sure, but some of it depends on how you pay and what you're paying for. I think that when people don't have anything, it's the right thing to do. I pay them so I'm not just taking from them. Hopefully, I'll get something out of it, maybe financially, maybe not, but at least I'm going to learn something. It's a lot easier for me to pan with ten, twenty, or a hundred dollars than for them to acquire that amount of money, so why wouldn't I do that?

I know the New York Times has all kinds of guidelines: you can't accept things from the people you're interviewing; you can't let them take you out for dinner; you can't pay for this or that. I can see where they're coming from, but I think that's mistaken. When I interviewed Ted Nugent, he had me over to his house for dinner, and I got to meet his family and see how he cooked some venison that he'd killed. It was great. Of course, I was grateful for the meal, but it didn't change one word I said about him. I like to think we can all be big boys and girls and not sell or buy our opinions for trifles. Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." But why not pay people what you can and what seems fair? In a way, I think that's a more freeing thing. If anything, why shouldn't I be able to say what I want to say? They're still getting something out of it, even if I were to say something perceived as negative. It doesn't bind me in any way.

However, it does depend on what you are paying for, what you are asking, how leading your questions are. When I went to Taliban Afghanistan, I expected to dislike the Talibs very much, expected to think that what they were doing was wrong and unpopular, that they were despots. Instead, I mostly found that the Taliban were wildly popular. Since Afghans are devout Muslims, they would tell me, "The Taliban is the most perfect government on Earth. It's so close to the glorious Koran, and we're so lucky to live under the Taliban, because they've protected us from the time when the warlords could just come into your house and carry off your wife or daughter forever, leaving you with no recourse." They said over and over: "Nowadays you can take a gold coin and leave it in the street for twenty-four hours, and it will still be there, because anyone who takes it will get his right hand cut off, thanks to Sharia law. Thank God for the Talibs; they are the greatest."

Of course, I thought, What about the women, what do they think? Again, I found that our perception of the Taliban infringing on the rights of women was not entirely true, because most of the women were rural women, working in the fields, who had never been able to read or write anyway. As I traveled through the fields, they made sure to show me. "Look, here they are with no burqas, you can see their faces, they're working. The only ones who have really suffered are the urban educated women, who are 1 or 2 percent of the population." So I'd say, "Let me talk to a woman and see what she thinks." Which of course was like trying to wander around inside the CIA. To try to talk to a woman? What a disgusting thing to want to do. But sometimes it would be arranged where a woman would lock herself in the bathroom of a house and agree to talk to me through the bathroom door while her husband and son and her brothers were present, all frowning and listening and she'd say, "Oh, yes, I love the Taliban, they're the most perfect government on earth." I'd think, Okay, you have to take that one with a grain of salt. But every now and then, I would manage to meet begging women on the street wearing the burqa, with nobody around, so they could never be identified, and they would tell me the same thing. I would weigh that a little more heavily. They had no particular reason to lie. You can never know for sure, but you can consider when the answer is likely to be skewed. Though I'm sure if I had been a fool and told the man whose wife talked to me from the bathroom that I really wanted her to say the Taliban are terrible, and offered an additional five dollars to get her to say that, I'm sure she would have.

On another trip, I was in Yemen and I knew there was a lot of female circumcision occurring there. I've always been interested in understanding more about it, so I asked my interpreter whether there was anyone I could talk to. I wanted to find out what the families think of it, what the girls think, this and that. He said, "Sure, I'll arrange it. The local butcher is about to cut some girl's parts off tomorrow, and you can come and see." He told me the family would need a couple hundred dollars. I started to suspect that they were going to circumcise their little girl only because I was paying them. So I said, "Oh, no thank you; I guess I don't want to do it." I would have felt awful about something like that. In terms of the difference it would make to that family, a couple hundred dollars would be like $200,000 or $2 million for us.

It's so important to think and think and think before you're in that moment. Usually, you have to make your decision quickly. One of the most important decisions I have to make when I go to a dangerous place is whom to trust when I walk out of the airport. Fortunately, I've never made a wrong decision or I'd be dead. There have been a couple times when I thought, I don't like the way this person is behaving and I'm not gonna do what they're telling me to do. But most of the time you have to look at them, decide right away, and go with it.
When it's only my life, the stakes are relatively low. Hopefully, if something happened to me, I would hardly even know it. But I do want to be careful and think that I'm not victimizing anybody. Most likely, I have. Most likely, we all do without knowing it.

HUGGINS

Would you say that your travels, often to dangerous places of conflict, are driven more by you as a writer or you as a person? Would you have felt compelled to visit those places whether or not you were writing about them?

VOLLMANN

Mostly by myself as a writer. When I first went to Afghanistan, I wanted to do something good. I hoped to write about it later, but the most important thing was to try to do something for the Afghans. When I went back to Taliban Afghanistan twenty years later, I only wanted to write about it. There was nothing fun about going there, and I had no real expectation of being able to accomplish any good, though I still had a feeling of obligation to the people I'd met, who had been so kind to me when I was in my twenties. Sometimes in Sacramento, I
hear people say things like, My boyfriend's over in Afghanistan kicking some raghead butt, or something along those lines. That's not the way I look at them, and it's important for me to tell people how great they are. Whether that does any good, I don't know.

ALASDAIR

In An Afghanistan Picture Show, you said, "I always asked for facts and I never thought to ask for stories." Do young writers make the same mistake? Have you changed in that regard?

VOLLMANN

I was an idiot. I think our society tends to make that mistake. We think that if we have some kind of numerical statistic, we really know something. We forget that statistics themselves are only stories. If you look at a beautiful atlas or if you go on the spider web and they simulate something for you onscreen that seems quite real, you have to remember the old maxim of the programmer: garbage in, garbage out. Those things are only as good as their data. A story is like one of the photos I sometimes take with my big 8" x 10" camera. I have a few seconds, I see someone, I say, "Please let me take a picture of you in this doorway," but it could be a year or more until I've printed it and actually look at the photo. That's when I see something about the background or the person's expression and realize, Oh my gosh, this really means that. The camera can see and remember things I can't. It can capture something objective and special about a moment that I wasn't capable of recognizing.

It's the same thing with a story someone tells you. When I interviewed the neo-Nazi skinheads in San Francisco in the 1980s, there was one guy who told me very proudly, "It's so great when we go out and murder the niggers." I thought, Do I have any proof that he ever killed a black guy? In a way, the most important thing is the story itself: that's what he wants to be known for, that's part of his identity. That's in the background of the photograph. That you can trust. When you tell another person something about yourself, you create a persona. You're clothing yourself in something, looking your best. In a way, this was his way of looking his best. The context is so important.

ALASDAIR

For both your fiction and nonfiction, you've traveled to physically experience locations that you're writing about. How important is that to your process?

VOLLMANN

For what I do, I think it's very important. But what I do is not the only way to do anything. In the Seven Dreams books, the subtitle of the series is "A Book of North American Landscapes." The first volume was about the arrival of the Vikings in North America, and I was able to go to Iceland and walk through the ruins of Erik the Red's farm and think, Okay, this is more or less what it looked like to him. These are rocks that he probably gathered with his own hands. Here are the gulls, here's the ocean, here's the midnight sun. How does this make me feel, and how would this constrain me? It's one more way of entering into a person's consciousness. You can't get all the way there, but you can get some of the way. You feel differently in a desert than you do in a forest, so if you're trying to write about forest people, you can enter one and experience a closed-in, teeming feeling, you can think about how there's much less light and how that might make you feel, and how while moving through dark sections of the forest it might be easier to imagine that something sinister and unseen is present. I think that's helpful in trying to recreate the psychology of people.

The immersion is tiring at the beginning, when you haven't brought the material alive. As I was writing Argall I had to build up vocabulary lists of Elizabethan words, and it took a while before it felt natural to use them. As I was writing Fathers and Crows, I had to learn a lot about the different forms of technology used by different Native tribes. You try not to make mistakes. There's a huge amount of drudgery involved. It's like learning a foreign language for me, maybe because I'm not so good at foreign languages. It's tedious trying to memorize vocabulary and syntax. But once you've gotten a little bit of it into your head, you have something to build on and it gets more fun. When I'm near the end of one of these Seven Dreams books, for instance, I almost always dream about the characters at night. I wake up and feel like I'm in that world, and I know exactly what this person or that person would do. Of course, I don't really know what they would have done; I only know what my recreation of them would do. But it's a fun and beautiful feeling. Even if it might be a bleak book, there's something fulfilling about having that kind of play in a world I've dreamed up.

It's wonderful traveling and not knowing what you're going to learn. Tiring, sometimes frightening, but so interesting. You never know how any given day will go. Often you think you haven't accomplished something, and then the last interview, which maybe you'd seen as an afterthought, teaches you so much. But once you're going through the material, you might not know what you've really accomplished and then you find a common thread here and here, although this contradicts that, and you begin to get some kind of a consistent, nuanced picture of the particular subject. That usually happens in the writing. I think it would be a terrible thing to go somewhere and want to write an article about how bad the Taliban is or how good the Taliban is. Because how would I know? In Riding Toward Everywhere, I quoted Thoreau along the lines of, "It's so important not to let our knowledge get in the way of what's far superior, which is our ignorance." As long as I know I'm ignorant when I go somewhere, I have a chance of learning something. Otherwise it's hopeless.

KAISER

Do you put more research into your novels than your nonfiction?

VOLLMANN

In some ways, yes. If you're writing about something that's right in from of you, then of course there's effort involved, but you go out and see what there is to be seen. You don't have to try to imagine what things looked like, so in that sense it's easier. Writing Imperial was kind of a long slog, but I enjoyed it, and so much of it was primarily about what I observed. Even now, I wouldn't say I know enough about illegal aliens to write a novel about them. I would have to do much more research, and it took me a number of nonfiction books dealing with prostitutes before I could create, in my opinion, viable prostitute characters, which I finally started to do in The Royal Family. It takes a while to get to know people.

A while back, I was closing out some of my old notebooks, and found I had some notes that hadn't been used. They were from Sarajevo during the siege, when I took a lot of notes for Rising Up and Rising Down. I don't think I could have written the story "Escape" convincingly without my experiences in Sarajevo. That story is the first in a kind of triptych at the beginning of Last Stories, and in a way, the young couple in the story, who were based on a real couple killed during the siege, gradually turn into ghosts. I decided to protect their posthumous privacy, give myself more freedom, and make up different personalities for the characters so that I could use whatever material I got from people I talked to. It became more vivid than having to look at their photographs and describe them exactly as they were, which would be more the Seven Dreams approach. But the last two times I visited Sarajevo, before I wrote the story, I asked people what they remembered about the siege, and was amazed to find that people told me, "That never really happened. That was just an urban legend." Quite sad, really.

HUGGINS

You've observed that humans, particularly Americans, are terrible at remembering our history. In your example from Bosnia, that couple, who were dubbed the Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo, did exist. How do you attempt to separate fact from fiction when relying on the stories and memories people relay to you?

VOLLMANN

If you tell people's stories and their own stories change over time, then the fiction is the fact, and that's what you want to report. Often very good things come out of that amnesia. One time, I was writing a story about Cambodian gangs in Stockton, California. Historically there's a lot of unfriendliness between Cambodians and Vietnamese. The two countries have been fighting each other in various forms for many, many centuries. But when these refugees came to Stockton, the kids started getting picked on at school by black and Latino gangs, though they had never known these other ethnic groups. In self-defense, or so they put it, they formed their own gangs. Because all the Asians were lumped together in the eyes of these other groups, Cambodian boys were suddenly going out with Vietnamese or Hmong girls, and they were all the same to each other. Their parents said, "How can you do this, how can you go out with her?" But they'd overcome that. It didn't matter to them anymore. Of course, it's just as much of an unpleasant story as a happy one, since they were joined together in order to fight other ethnic groups. But it's still interesting.

ALASDAIR

Has your view of the world changed over time? Have you become more cynical about people or more optimistic?

VOLLMANN

The longer I live, the more I like individual people, and the more pessimistic I become about groups and institutions and humanity in general. Last fall I gave a lecture in Santa Barbara and there was another speaker, a vegan who advocated for human extinction. Now, I like to eat meat. I have an idealized version of where steak comes from because I used to work on a cattle ranch. I killed the cattle myself, and I thought they had a pretty good life and didn't suffer. But maybe if l saw a factory farm I would think, I really shouldn't do this. Or maybe it would be okay. That's an area in which I've never educated myself.

But I can see where she's coming from. The planet would be better off without us, and it might be that the only thing that would save both us and the planet would be a massive human die-off. Since we don't seem able to regulate our greed, maybe if there were some tremendous epidemic, it would give the ecosystem a chance to recover and save us long term. Would I push that button to kill most of the human race? I don't know; that would be pretty hard.

ALASDAIR

When you see history repeating itself, such as recent events in the Ukraine, do you feel a call to activism, a desire to be part of it?

VOLLMANN

If I were twenty, I would. Now I look at that conflict the same way I look at the situation between Israel and Palestine. It's a very, very old and complicated problem. The only thing I know is that if someone tells me who's right and who's wrong, that is wrong. It would be wonderful to have the privilege of going there to learn what I think, to figure out how I could help someone, but that would take a lot of time and resources. Could I do it? Maybe. But if I do one, probably I don't have enough money or enough years left in my life to do the other. I wish it weren't so. I keep crying to do more for others, wondering whether I have done enough. That's the crazy, haunting thing. It's so easy to harm somebody and so difficult to help anybody. It's really, really hard to know what to do about almost anything.

History repeating itself: that's how it's always been with human beings. Otherwise, children would be better than their parents. But the human race seems to stay at about the same level. You have to expect it.

ALASDAIR

At your reading in Spokane, you spoke about what makes you appreciate Cormac McCarthy's work. Do you think the nihilistic, amoral universe he writes about is close to what you've seen on your travels?

VOLLMANN

I think he's a great writer. Maybe the greatest American writer alive, maybe not. McCarthy is mostly interested in a certain kind of relation between people: in aggression, exploitation, obsession. Sadomasochism. That stuff is all present in humanity, and that's what he chooses to focus his work on. But I don't think the world is so monochromatic. A lot of people are kinder than his characters. Similarly, Shakespeare is a great writer, but I don't believe that people think and act in such complex, colorful ways as he made them think and act. That doesn't make him any less great, it only means he's adhering to a different kind of reality.

One of the reasons I liked McCarthy's Border Trilogy was that I thought it was kind of a departure for him. Suddenly he allowed some human tenderness. The Road is ultimately an optimistic book: it's about the love of a father and his son. All of us who are parents know that in the normal course of things, our job is to prepare our children for our deaths so that they can go on without us. That's exactly what happens in this book. In a way, it's the most normal story in the entire world, which makes it great.

KAISER

It's often been observed that your books are longer than most publishers generally accept. How has your relationship with editors changed over time?

VOLLMANN

It's become easier in the sense that as we all get older, it gets easier to say no. You find out that a consequence of being agreeable is that you get trampled on, and then the book isn't as good. So you might as well say no. Some people think the most important thing is to please their publisher and maximize their sales, and that's fine. They'll say, "My agent thinks I should get rid of this," or, "The bookstore wants me to change the title." A lot of my writer friends do that, and I don't look down on them for it. I only know that if I were going to do something like that, why wouldn't I sell insurance? I could probably make more money.

I would rather do it my way. Then, when I suffer the consequences, as I often do-lower advances and poor sales and so forth-I take responsibility for it, instead of thinking, I did everything I could to please these people, but there was still some unfortunate result; woe is me, what a victim I am. No. I'm proud of the choices I've made, and I would make the same choices again. I was very lucky when I first started publishing to have an editor in Britain. One time I asked her, "How long can the book be?" and she said, "Bill, it has to be as long as it needs to be. No longer and no shorter." That's what I've tried to live by.

That being said, when I write for magazines, I let my stuff be cut all the time, and never once has it been an improvement. I let them do it their way, and they send me the finished version and I throw it in the garbage. They say, "How was it?" and I say, "It was perfect," and they tell me, "Bill, you are so easy to work with." And everyone laughs all the way to the bank.

HUGGINS

Your work often experiments with style. Do you begin with form, or does content determine style?

VOLLMANN

It depends. I originally thought Seven Dreams would all be one volume. But when The Ice Shirt turned into its own book, I realized I wanted to write it in the Norse style, with kennings and so forth, and later I knew Fathers and Crows had to be in that florid, pseudo-French style. If I could, I would do that with each of those novels, make each one appropriate to its period. But a book like Europe Central is told in a more neutral style. The book switches between the Nazi voice and the Soviet voice, and it also has an omniscient narrator telling the story in a certain voice that doesn't necessarily relate to those two warring societies.

Generally speaking, it's more fun for me to write fiction than nonfiction. I had fun in parts of Imperial, but with fiction you can express what you want to say using a beautiful sentence. In nonfiction, it's good if you can make your point with a beautiful, clear sentence, but you can't ever let language get in the way of the important thing you're trying to say. You're less free. The work I call nonfiction is really nonfiction, so I don't make anything up, though there are certainly times when I would like to. In An Afghanistan Picture Show, there's a kind of reverie I had when I was there and I included it, but I would have loved to have made my experiences with the mujahideen a little more dramatic, with a little more finality. But I won't do it. I don't think that's right. However, in nonfiction you are attempting to understand something, and the quest to understand something can be very exciting in its own right.

Fiction, on the other hand, can certainly contain elements of nonfiction, but I'm free to shape those any way I like. In The Dying Grass, the book about Chief Joseph, I deviated from the history more than I often did in Seven Dreams. This was because General Howard divided his army into two columns when they were chasing Joseph, and one column never got to Montana because Joseph took another route, so those people just turned around and disbanded. But because I'd already gotten invested in these characters and I was trying to make their relations with Howard say something important in human terms, I had him keep the whole army together. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, as long as I footnote everything and explain why I didn't have him do this but instead had him do that. Whereas if you're writing something based on a Norse saga, you figure they probably made up a bunch of stuff anyway. You have lots of freedom, just like in the good old days when you could write science fiction about Martians and canals and the watery world of Venus, but those days are long gone.

I change my style all the time. But I don't pay very much attention to what other people tell me to do. There was this neat old guy down in Imperial named Leonard Knight, a Christian guy who started painting a dirt ridge and called it Salvation Mountain. He kept adding more and more paint, and people started donating paint, too. It looks like Candyland down there, except it has all these messages to repent. He must have been at it for more than twenty years, and he died last year. One time he said, "You know, Bill, people are always telling me how to improve, and I know that almost everyone is smarter than I am and I know that if I just did it their way my work would be so much better, but somehow or other, I just keeping doing it my way." He had a big smile on his face. That's how I feel, too. My books are flawed and so are McCarthy's and so are Shakespeare's. Everyone's work is flawed, but at least my flaws are my flaws.