Issue 92: Molly Giles

issue 92 cover

Found in Willow Springs 92

APRIL 8, 2023

ISADORA ANDERSON, POLLY BUCKINGHAM, BLAIR JENNINGS, SHRAYA SINGH, & ALISON WAITE

A TALK WITH MOLLY GILES

Molly Giles

MOLLY GILES' WRY AND QUICK-WITTED, observational voice has given life to female characters disenchanted with their circumstances and the underwhelming men that surround them. She is a master of the short form; her language is tight, precise, and caustic and her stories darkly comic. Her endings tum on a heartbeat, often surprising and always resonant as if they couldn't have possibly ended with any other configuration of words and emotions.

Giles is the author of five short story collections, the first of which, Rough Translations, was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award. The stories were described by the Houston Post as "tiny gems, carved from real American life, precise and identifiable." Giles' other collections include Creek Walk and Other Stories, winner of the Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book, originally published by Papier-Mâché Press, reissued by Simon & Schuster in 1998; All the Wrong Places, winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction (Willow Springs Books, 2015); and Wife with Knife, winner of the Leap Frog Global Fiction Prize Contest, 2020. She has also published two novels, Iron Shoes (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and The Home for Unwed Husbands (Leapfrog Press, 2023). Her autobiography, Life Span: A Memoir, is due out through WTAW Press in 2024.

Giles' work has been included in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. She has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaiʻi in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. Molly has also worked as an independent editor for many authors, including Amy Tan.

We met with Molly Giles on Zoom on Saturday, April 8th to discuss how her shift from poetry to short fiction, the unlikely circumstances that started her teaching career, seances, and the inspiration behind her work—including which stories were overheard, divulged, or completely fabricated. In a serendipitous turn of events, several of us had the pleasure of a second meeting with Molly Giles at the Community of Writers conference in Olympic Valley, California where Giles was on staff. This time, Giles was the one asking the questions. Giles was exceedingly thorough and generous with her feedback. Her command of story structure, pacing, and knowledge of exactly when to include a humorous quip was sincerely appreciated. Some of her signature zingers you'll find throughout our conversation.

 

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

How are you doing? I know you had hip surgery recently.

MOLLY GILES

Yes, both hips are full of hardware now, but they're getting me where I need to go. I do walk with a cane, and I'm trying not to point with it. One of my friends said, "It makes you look like an old lady," and I thought, well yeah. I like my cane. I would like to have a little stiletto on the end of it.

BUCKINGHAM

Like Ida's wooden leg.

BLAIR JENNINGS

Ida in Iron Shoes and The Home for Unwed Husbands has leg is­sues. I was wondering if your leg issues might have inspired that.

GILES

No, not mine. But my mother was a double amputee; she was very brave about it, though she did sometimes take her prothesis off and wave it at the grandchildren.

BUCKINGHAM

That leg up in the top of the closet after Ida dies—I couldn't help but think of Flannery O'Connor.

GILES

Yes, "Good Country People." That is a great story.

SHRAYA SINGH

What's your favorite piece of your own work that's been published so far, and why do you like it?

GILES

Probably the very last story in Wife with Knife, "My Ex." It's about how you feel after divorce—that combination of fond nostalgia and absolute fury and continued incomprehension. I've been divorced twice, and I wish I could divorce both exes again. Once wasn't enough. So the enigma of the relationship continues long after the relationship itself. That story is two pages long and and took me two months to write. I was very happy with the end.

BUCKINGHAM

I'm so impressed with your endings. Even in Iron Shoes, there's that turn where she discovers what a louse her husband really is. In the writing process, where do those turns come from? Do they come late? Do they come early?

GILES

I think they come late. That's a good question, Polly, because it's so hard to answer. My main trouble is with beginnings. I think there were about fifteen first chapters to Iron Shoes. By the time I got into the world of it, I could see my way better. When I start a novel. I have to ask, is this going to be a tragedy or a comedy? ls there going to be a wedding at the end or a funeral? I know what direction I'm going in, but I never know where I'm going to end. And in novels the big pressure is to have somebody end with some form of acceptance or redemption, even though that's not often true in real life.

BUCKINGHAM

Before you came in, we had a long discussion because I had read Iron Shoes and they read The Home for Unwed Husbands.

SINGH

We were wondering about the overlap of characters and whether it was going to be declared as an official sequel.

GILES

I think The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone, and, to tell the truth, when I wrote it, I never had the guts to reread Iron Shoes. Iron Shoes is a dark book, and I wanted this one to be a comedy. It started off as a comedy, and then my ex-husband moved downstairs, and it didn't stay funny. He lived with me, in the basement, but I worried about him all the time, and a light-hearted romp it was not.

BUCKINGHAM

The beginning of Iron Shoes, Ida with her legs cut off, is just so gruesome. It really brings you in. And there's that piece at the end where Kay remembers the games she played with Francis­—it's a tender memory but the games are terrible, really mean. So it's not one-hundred percent redemptive. It's still pretty dark. You know she's not done.

GILES 

That's why I felt Kay needed another book. She's still under her parents' thumbs; she still hasn't grown up. I felt Ida needed more time too. She has a lot of my mother's characteristics, but my mother was so much nicer. And the Kay character is sort of based on me, but I'm not half as nice. I have never been as generous nor as thoughtful, no. Most of the characters I made worse, and Kay I made better. I think that's an author's prerogative, right? I hope that The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone but I would love it if it leads anyone back to Iron Shoes.

SINGH 

You said that divorcing someone once wasn't enough, and I think I remember reading that exact line in The Home for Unwed Husbands. I remember underlining it and thinking, this is pret­ty funny. I wanted to know why you write about so many unsuc­cessful romantic relationships and marriages.

GILES

Revenge.

SINGH

That's a great answer.

GILES

I have a little candle that says lucky in love, and in many ways, I have been. I stress the bad parts because I was raised to believe that only trouble is interesting. That's what we used to be taught when we were writing. And I find it's pretty true. So I do stress the negative. I do no accent the positive. My present partner could not be sweeter or lovelier, but I can't write about him—there's nothing to say. He's perfect. So no, it's hard. Don't ever be too happy. It's not good for writers to be too happy.

JENNINGS

That's good new for all of us, I think.

GILES

Are any of you poets? I mean, poets make a career out of being unhappy.

ISADORA ANDERSON

We know you used to write a lot more poetry. What impact did that have on writing fiction?

GILES

I never published a poem until maybe ten years ago. I love poetry. I read it constantly as a child. But the poets I was drawn to were telling a narrative. I loved T. S. Elliot, not because of "The Wasteland," which I still don't understand, but because of J. Alfred Prufrock, a character I related to. As a child, I loved Tennyson. I think if I went back, I would still love Tennyson. I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay—I'm not ashamed of that. I think "The Ballad of the Harp Weaver" is gorgeous. And later on, I loved Dylan Thomas and William Blake. A poet I still love and read is D. H. Lawrence. I love his poems about animals. But I recently took an online course about W. S. Merwin. The course was taught by two other poets. And what they loved about Merwin is that they didn't understand him, and they went on and on about how great it was not to understand things. I think Kevin Mcllvoy said the same thing [in a previous Willow Springs interview], how he loves chaos. Not me. I am the sort of person who, if I start a book and get anxious about what's going to happen, I have no qualms turning to the last page just to find out if they live or if they die because, otherwise, I will not be able to continue. After I know, I don't give up the book unless it's badly written. But I do like to have all my anxieties soothed. I still love W. S. Merwin, even after six weeks of failing to enjoy not understanding him.

BUCKINGHAM 

I do think poets, in general, are happier in uncertainty than fic­tion writers are.

GILES

Definitely. The one poem I did publish, about ten years ago, is the last piece in Bothered, "Young Wife on the Arc." I rewrote it as prose, dropping the line breaks but keeping the rhymes. I didn't start writing short stories until my late twenties. I was married, I had two children, and I was living in Sacramento. I didn't know any other women who wrote or read. I felt isolat­ed and depressed. I took a correspondence course through UC Berkeley, which was wonderful training. I wrote my first short story through that correspondence course and sold it to a mag­azine that promptly went out of business the same month my story was slated to come out. But I was able to submit that story to the Community of Writers, and they gave me a scholarship. So I was thirty by the time I was around other fiction writers—it was heaven.

BUCKINGHAM

Can you talk about the shift in your work from short stories to micro-fiction?

GILES

In that correspondence course, the teacher made me count my words. One piece had to be five-hundred words, another could only be twenty-five words. It felt a little artificial, but I was amazed by how much I liked compression compared to expansion. I'm drawn to the shorter forms of prose. My pieces tend to be narratives. I want them to be understood. When I read somebody like Lydia Davis, I am impressed by the intelligence but often puzzled by the story.

The first flash piece that really worked for me was 'The Poet's Husband," which was written maybe thirty years ago. It was based on going to a poetry reading and watching this beautiful young woman get up and talk about everything that her husband and she shared. And he just sat there nodding and smiling, and l thought, my God. I don't know about you. but if somebody I'm close to gets up, for instance, and starts to sing. I blush. I'm terribly embarrassed for them. But this woman was very self-confident, and she was talking about her affair, her sui­cide attempts, her unhappiness. And he just sat there smiling. That's what inspired the story.

BUCKINGHAM

I want to ask about the title story in Wife with Knife. There's this adage in writing, you have to write four hours a day, or how­ever long, every day. But "Wife with Knife" suggests that this is perhaps a male perspective. Some writers I love, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley, have small but mighty bodies of work. They never had a time in their lives where they could write all day ev­ery day. They couldn't afford that. One thing I heard your story saying was that this is kind of a myth; it's not that people don't do it, but it's kind of a selfish thing. The life we live is important enough that we have to live it, and that doesn't necessarily give us long writing periods. But it does give us the writing. In an interview you said something like, "I've raised kids alone, I've had a gazillion jobs, I've taught, I've edited, I didn't have time to write every day. That isn't my process." Could you speak to this?

GILES

I've never been able to write every day. I mean, I got married at nineteen. I had children right away. I've always had to work. I didn't go back to school until I was in my thirties. I was working different jobs all the time. I only started teaching at forty because my professor was an alcoholic and couldn't finish the course. The chair of the department didn't know who to ask and he just tapped me. I stepped in and was there for the next thirty-three years. As a teacher, I wrote mainly in July. As a young mother, when the children were little, I wrote during their naps. I have scraps of ideas on the back of utility bills that I'll find stuck in my purse. I'm talking to you now from a cottage on my property that I used to rent out. I recently took it over as a writing room, and I feel guilty about it. I don't come out here very often. I'm retired now, the children are middle-aged, I've got what I always longed for, a room of my own, and I'm still scattered.

I do better with deadlines. Rough Translations, my first book, is my MA thesis. It was done because the stories were due in workshop. In our real lives, nobody's standing over you saying, "We have to have this." Nobody cares. Unless you're Stephen King. Well, Stephen King writes every day, even on Christmas, so he doesn't count. I've always had a lot on my plate until now. And now, I have everything I've ever wanted, which is part of my philosophy in life—you get everything you need, just never when you need it. I finally have this great space. And I'm coming to the end of my career. I doubt I will ever write another novel. I want to get my memoir out. And I'm still writing short stories. But the energy for a novel is not there. There is irony in almost everything, I'm afraid.

When the University of Georgia press nominated Rough Translations for a Pulitzer Prize, they wanted to interview me. I got a phone call from a guy with this lovely southern drawl: "Now," he says, "I've noticed that you started college in 1960. And I noticed that you finished in 1980. That's a lot of unaccounted-for time." And I thought, yeah. But unaccounted-for time is often a woman's world. Often a man's, too, but I think more of a woman's. Now that I have nothing but time, I find I'm addicted to the New York Times spelling bee. That takes at least a half hour every day. And then I garden, I putter, I cook; I'm enjoying myself. I love life. But no, I'm not sitting down and writing four hours a day. I never have.

I think it was Grace Paley who said her best advice to writers was "love your life." And I think Keven said the same thing in his interview. He said to look at what's around you and pay attention and be mindful to what's actually going on in your life. All of us here could write a Russian novel just about what's happening since we got up. If you think about all the stuff that's been going through your head and the people who flit in and out of your consciousness and what you see on the street, it's all material. It's just hard to pay attention to all of it—you'd go nuts. But it is there.

ALISYN WAITE

You mentioned your memoir. To what extent do you draw from your own life in your writing? I know some authors like to keep things very separate, where others prefer to be open about the fact that the story is based on their lives. Do you have your own balance?

GILES

Yeah, and it's a balance. "Wife with Knife" was literally me listening to a friend talk. I listen hard to my friends. A lot of my stories are stolen from people who are naïve enough to trust me with their stories. I don't think you can edit yourself out of every story—I'm in about half, I think. The memoir is all me. I'm trying to be as true to my life as possible. I was born in San Francisco, and the book is based on crossing and re-crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It is titled Life Span and is comprised of flash pieces—none of them are longer than three pages—every year from 1945 to the present. It will come out with WTAW in 2024. It's amazing to me the things that have happened on that bridge and the relationships I've had. One thing I still have to do is go through and soften some of the portraits of the people I've known. I don't want to hurt any-body. I know I don't like looking at myself depicted in other people's writing, especially not my own. As I said earlier, the character Kay is based on a really nice Molly—I was never that good to my parents. I've always been snippy, and I've always been lazy.

BUCKINGHAM

We all have a hard time believing that.

GILES

Don't. I can think of specific stories in Wife with Knife where I could say, "Yes I'm in there" or "No I'm not." "Accident," that happened to me. I was rear-ended in Arkansas, and I had such mixed feelings about living in the South. I was dating a guy at the time who was a musician. He was ranting about the Yankees, and I said, "Do you think I'm a Yankee?" And he said, "Oh no. You're a foreigner." Because the South was foreign to some­body who'd grown up in the Bay Area. I made the character much younger than I was and gave her a different life. But the incident happened. "Church News"—I do apologize. A friend told me that story, and I went and wrote it. And then I tried to get her to say, is this ok? And she wasn't sure. Still isn't. "Deluded" is cruelly based on a friend of mine who doesn't read. "Assumption" is sort of a rural myth about a body tied to the top of a van. I nabbed it. "Dumped," I didn't even change the names. I just used my friends. "Life Cycle of a Tick" is very much about a relationship I had. "Not a Cupid"? I was once on a bus in Mexico, and I saw a woman, an American woman, petting this sullen little boy who looked trapped. "Just Looking" was about doing all this weird shopping but never buying anything. "Eskimo Diet" is a fairy story. "Married to the Mop" was about a time I cleaned houses but the character isn't me. "Banyan" is me. "Ears," me. "Paradise," a friend of mine who talks to spirits all the time. "Rinse, Swish, Spit"—I live in terror that my dental hygienist will read it. "Two Words" was based on a tenant I had. I was sitting here in the cottage—I would come back in summer and stay in the cottage and rent my main house out when I was teaching in Arkansas—wondering what on earth to write about, and I saw this little, fat, naked man run out to the garden. He wore a pink feather boa around his neck, and he picked up a garbage can lid and started fighting the deer in my yard and I thought, Okay. "Underage" is totally autobiographical. "Hopeless" I made up because I liked the little kid in it.

JENNINGS

I'm curious now. What inspired "Talking to Strangers"?

GILES

I live at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. A few years ago, a serial killer was on the loose, violating women hikers and murdering them on the trails up there. I loved hiking that mountain alone. When I realized I couldn't do that anymore, I felt angry. I was sitting at my desk, trying to finish a grad school assignment, and the first lines, it was scary, came to me. It was like some­body was speaking directly to me. It was the only channeling experience I've ever had. It's something writers pray for. I heard this voice, and I just followed it. "I know you don't know me," the voice said. And I knew it was a dead girl speaking. I don't read that story at conferences because it's triggering. There are too many women who have been assaulted.

The only other time I've ever had a visitation, if you will, was at the end of my most anthologized story, "Pie Dance." I had no idea how I was going to end it, and it just came to me. You write forty different ends, and you think, I can't I can't I can't. And then it just comes. You had asked earlier about ends; that end was a gift of grace. It's not going happen if you're not there. You have to be with your story; you have to sit with it. Sometimes, magic happens. And sometimes it's black magic. I'm not a spir­itual person, but those were two times where I just didn't know what to say except, "Thanks."

JENNINGS

I've been known to write some dark things. It can affect my mood and throw me into a very deep depression while writing and a couple weeks after. I'm wondering how you get through that and still edit it enough to make it turn out well-crafted.

GILES

I think I'm shallower than you; I don't stay depressed long enough. When I am depressed, I write. If I can't create, I journal. I have journal after journal, and they're all full of crap. The self-pity is incredible. Pages and pages and pages of it, since I was nine. I think of my journals as my puke bags. My daughter has promised me she'll burn them all when I pass. I'm always horrified when someone like Hemingway dies, a beautiful writer who chose one beautiful word after another, and then when they aren't there to revise, their journals or their rough drafts are published. You know, it's just not fair. It does a real disservice to the writer.

I've only had a real depression once in my life, and that was because I wasn't writing, wasn't reading, wasn't going to school. The children were little, and I couldn't take care of them. I cried a lot, and I thought about getting rid of myself. I was in my late twenties—I think the twenties are a terrible time. People in their twenties need to know that things get better. You lose your looks, you lose your hips, but things get better.

BUCKINGHAM

I've been thinking about John Cheever as you've been talking and how some of your perspectives are kind of opposite. I love John Cheever, but he had the writing cabin and the ability to go, "Well, I'm off to the cabin and Mary and the kids can fend for themselves." And also, he wrote his journals to be pub­lished, and then they were.

GILES

Well, they're wonderful. I love those journals. They break your heart. And I love his stories. He does something I admire—­he'll leave the here and now, and slip sideways into fantasy. He does it effortlessly. I've tried that a few times. I don't always get away with it, but I do admire the way he did it.

BUCKINGHAM

Yeah, I saw that in Iron Shoes with the fairy tale and with the blue horse. Like Cheever, you're also writing about a time period in which the cocktail party is really big, and these casual cruelties to children are part of the culture. I wonder about those casual cruelties younger people might be appalled by, and whether the world has changed.

GILES

My three daughters all have children, and I'm looking at the way they have parented; they're so good at it. My parents came out of the Depression and out of the war, and they wanted their own lives. I think they felt they never had a chance. I was writing more about my parents' generation than my own generation, which is a generation of dopers and maybe inept parents but not cruel parents. I don't think we really took parenting seriously. I had my first daughter when I'd just turned twenty; there's a picture of me holding her on my hip like she's a football I'm about to dropkick.

Somehow, all three of my daughters turned out great. All are professionals. One is a geneticist in Amsterdam, another a cannabis publicist, another is an attorney. They are wonderful parents: tolerant, loving, interested in their children. The granddaughter who's living with me now, twenty-one, is going to go home and continue to live with her mother and father in the Netherlands when she goes to college. I would no more have lived with my parents after the age of eighteen than I would have flown; it was unthinkable to me. I grew up in the forties and fifties and my parents had better things to do than parent. It was like that Philip Larkin poem, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." And it all goes back to the mom and dad's mom and dad, so you can't assign blame. You just try not to repeat the same patterns with your own children.

JENNINGS

As I read your stories, I thought, all these men are so horrible. I'm wondering whether you've seen a change in men as well. Are they any better, or are they still the same?

GILES

I think men get better as they get older, and the testosterone dies down. If we could get rid of testosterone for a week, you know how easy the world would be? The Middle East would come together, the Ukraine war would end, the population explosion would slow. It's a terrible, terrible hormone. I found that I at least can talk to men more after the age of fifty-five; they'll talk to you about what they're cooking, what their shopping list is like, their aches and pains. They'll open up. The men of my generation were singularly silent. I remember reading Saul Bellow to find out what men thought. It wasn't clear to me that men did actually think because the men in my acquaintance were charming in many ways, but mute. It was very frustrating. I remember thinking, especially in the D. H. Lawrence novels, florid as they are, oh, this guy's thinking about something that I'm thinking about. It was new to me. I think men are chattier now. I hope so.

One of my early stories is "A Jar of Emeralds." I was mar­ried to this beautiful guy, he was just lovely, but he never talk­ed. And one morning he woke up and turned to me and said, "I feel like a jar of emeralds," and I thought, wait a minute, who is this guy? I want to know him. He's a treasure chest I don't have access to. I do apologize to the male characters I write about because many are one-dimensional cartoons. I'm very aware of that, especially in the last book; I meant it to be a comedy, and I wasn't looking for rounded and deep characters.

ANDERSON

Regarding the unwed husbands, I found myself so frustrated with all the men anytime they spoke to Kay, Neal constantly calling her "Babe," Victor being religiously judgmental, Francis disapproving, and Fenton just not saying anything. How did you ensure that each unwed husband sounded different and interacted with Kay in a different way, and what was your process for writing the dialogue for each one?

GILES

Fenton was easy because, as you say, he doesn't speak. I delib­erately gave Francis the best lines because he's just plain mean. He's a terrible human being, but he cracked me up. With my own dad, if you'd hurt yourself—say you'd fallen down and scraped your elbow—he'd stomp on your foot and say, "Now how does your elbow feel?" It was that kind of Irish "humor'" I grew up with. Neal was the easiest because of the irritating oh Babes. I'm really embarrassed about Victor.

Biff was easy. I really liked the guy Kay met in Greece. He was nobody I had ever met, and I liked it when he talked. But I got rid of him fast because he was going to take over.

SINGH

You mentioned that all the characters from the most recent novel are like cartoons or caricatures, and they're meant to be really unlikeable. Do you have any advice on how to write un­likable characters but still have your reader engaged with the material?

GILES 

I guess the best advice would be to try and be that person. Ev­ery character in a story has his or her own motivation, their own sense of justice, of who they are. To try and actually be your antagonist and try to see things from their point of view takes a real leap of faith, but I do think that listening hard helps, and knowing your character's background. For each of those characters, I wrote a couple of pages on where they were born, what foods they liked, what they wanted to be. I tried to understand who they were. It didn't make me like them, but it did help me see where they were coming from.

JENNINGS

The short story "The Writers' Model" has the fascinating concept of women being physically examined and questioned by male writers who want to write authentic women yet never overcome their false impressions of them despite their interrogations. This reminds me of a discussion among liberal creatives right now. Do we only write our own gender identity, sexual orientation, disability vs. ability, or race so we don't accidentally write something offensive because we can never truly understand another lived experience, or should we become as educated as possible about what each type of lived experience is like and write as many inclusive characters as possible with the guidance of one of those who've lived similar lives?

GILES

You guys are really walking on eggshells in your generation with this stricture you're under, to be authentic, to only write your own gender, to only write your own sexual preference, to only write your own nationality. It seems so unfair. You want to be careful, yes, but the imagination was given to us. It's a great gift. I just can't imagine having to stick with yourself all the time­—who wants to? It's wrong. I think that's one of the great delights of slipping away from reality and writing fantasy because if you write fantasy, you can have green people and pink people and purple people, and you're not offending anybody. You can ac­tually say what you want to say about the world. I don't write it myself. But I think of a writer I adore, Ursula LeGuin; through fantasy she can say things about the world she couldn't say otherwise. My feeling is, thumb your nose at the authorities and write what you want to write. I don't know what workshops are like now, but I'm sure they're scary as shit because everybody is saying, "You can't say that" or "You can't say this." I find it very Soviet. I don't like it. Be mindful of others in your speech, and to hell with them when you're writing. I am delighted that it's opened the door to trans writers, and I'm really glad that I'm reading things that weren't available to read even ten years ago. There's so much new, fascinating stuff coming out.

ANDERSON

How do you balance withholding information to keep the suspense while at the same time establishing trust with your reader so that they are along for the ride no matter where you're taking them in the story?

GILES

Wonderful question. That's part of the reason why we can't teach writing. You'll know when you get into a story yourself what to do, but it's really hard to come up with a rule for anything. I love workshops, mainly for the comradery and the deadlines, but there are some things I don't think I've ever been able to talk about or teach, like tempo in a piece of fiction. You can look at the way other people do it. I love Alice Munro, and I've been looking at the way she withholds information, and I thought, I'll take one of her stories apart and study it; that's easy. But you can't really diagnose her; she's too sly. It's up to you as a writer to feel your way towards what you need to do. And cover your ears—try not to listen to what other people tell you. To deliberately withhold and then put it in there later is very mechanical, and that's not the way we work. I taught for thirty-three years saying, "Show don't tell." I don't believe that anymore; I like to be told. We used to diagram things on the blackboard about how a story arc should go. That's a bunch of hogwash; I never did like that.

I don't envy anybody teaching creative writing now, but I love creative writing classes. I love the community that comes together; I love the way people push each other and inspire each other and give each other heart and hope. I'm in a writing group now. Almost every writing group I've ever been in or every class has a certain undefinable magic just as writing itself does.

WAITE

Can you talk more about your own experience teaching?

GILES

I stepped in scared to death. I was so conscientious the first three years that I would write single spaced typed pages of my critiques of the stories. Students would just throw them out the window as they went, and I don't blame them. I don't have a good speaking voice. I was often told to speak up. I had been reading more than I had been talking, so I couldn't pronounce words. Oaxaca, I couldn't pronounce it. I couldn't pronounce quaaludes. Students would help me a lot. What I loved, and still do, is the fact that when you're teaching a creative writing class, you're getting to know people in an intimate way that you couldn't if you were teaching history or chemistry. That is a real gift, that willingness to be open. Most of us are pretty shy in person, but in writing, you can access each other. I always liked giving prompts. The prompt that has always worked in class is to write for twenty minutes with just the phrase "My mother always" and then follow with "My father never." The responses are amazing.

By the time I retired, I was developing an allergic reaction to student papers so I knew it was time to quit. I know I could never have mastered remembering who's they, who's them, and I would never want to be insulting to anyone in the class. I call my children by the wrong name; I'm sure I would get everybody's gender mixed up. And I didn't want to be that politically aware because I'm not. I was tired of teaching. I had said everything I had to say. So, time to quit. But I still love looking at individual stories and telling people what's wrong with them, especially if there's a way to fix it.

BUCKINGHAM  

Have you done work with other writers like you did with Amy Tan?

GILES

I worked with Amy for a long time and it was a joy. I've worked off and on with Susanne Pari, whose wonderful second novel just came out, In the History of Our Time. I read my friends' manuscripts all the time. I'm still getting letters from students I taught twenty years ago who are now just getting published, and that gives me so much hope. They might be in their late thirties, early forties because it takes a long time. They make me proud.

BUCKINGHAM

You've published with both smaller and bigger presses, and Amy Tan is with really big presses. What is your sense of the contemporary publishing landscape and where we're headed?

GILES

I don't know what's going on in publishing today. I do think books are vastly overpriced. Amy Tan is a phenomenon. Few writers hit the big time so fast—she's an excellent writer and has earned every accolade, but she should not be taken as the norm. Many excellent writers fail to succeed in publishing. They may never get used to rejections but they do have to live with them. I've had more rejections than I can count. After an especially bad siege of them, I'll just stay in bed for an afternoon and then get up, rewrite, resend. They never feel good, rejections.

It seems to me it's women my age who buy books. Bookstore readings are filled with middle aged and elderly women. I go to a lot of readings, and I look around and everybody has gray hair. That's not true of the less formal open mic and coffee and dive bar readings I like to go to; they are buzzing with energetic youth. I want to support writers, so I buy. I get to take it off my taxes. I probably buy $3,000 worth of books every year. I'm try­ing to think of what I've just bought. Solito by Javier Zamora. It's nonfiction. There seems to be a trend towards nonfiction. And there's a real trend, of course, for émigré stories. This is about a nine-year-old boy from San Salvador who gets to America on his own. It's very moving. Are any of you writing for television? I would urge that, or movies. There's a market for writing games. Writing short stories is great, but it's no way to make money.

BUCKINGHAM

There's some really brilliant writing on TV right now.

GILES

Yes, The Wire is beyond brilliant. Sopranos, of course. I think when everybody's out of the house later today, I'm going to watch Succession, but I'm not going to tell anybody.

SINGH

Succession is so painful to watch.

GILES

Because they're horrible people. They make my characters look like angels.

BUCKINGHAM

What's the difference in the process for you between a novel and a short story?

GILES

I love reading novels. But I like writing short stories. Both of my novels have been written like a series of short stories where one, hopefully, flows into the next. I'm trying to think of a novel that I've loved that has that flow in it. Oh, I know. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul. Oh my gosh, it's so good. I recently read a short book by a black writer, she's gor­geous. Gayle Jones. The Bird Catcher. It was like reading jazz. And Claire Keegan's Foster. Perfect. I like all the Irish writers. I love Sebastian Barry. Niall Williams' This Is Happiness is a wonderful book. I can't get enough of them. I just think they're onto something. I listen to novels a lot when I walk. I'm listening to The Rabbit Hutch now. But in answer to your question, the difference between short and long. I don't have the vision, really, for a long novel. I'm not a long-distance runner. I like to go a block, sit down, have a cup of coffee.

WAITE

In an interview with Emily Wiser, you mentioned that the voic­es in Rough Translations are "pretty naïve, self-conscious, and smartass." How has your narrative voice changed throughout the years? How would you describe the voices of the characters in your more current works?

GILES

I do think the voices are smartass in Rough Translations. Then in Creek Walk, I was mainly writing about death, divorce, and depression so it's a darker book. I think what I've done as I've continued to write is experiment with other people's voic­es, rather than with my own. If you hear your own voice on your answering machine, don't you just hate it? I think it's still probably smartass, but older. I've always doodled. And I've al­ways doodled the same woman's face. The woman's face has aged. I think I do have a distinctive voice. But I don't want to know what it is. I don't want to be told, either.

JENNINGS

The Home for Unwed Husbands has gothic horror elements, even though it's definitely not gothic horror—castles, ghosts, mental health issues, toxic relationships, and unresolved trauma. What inspired you to use these things?

GILES

I don't know if people are still reading fairy tales, but I definite­ly grew up on fairy tales. And I do believe in ghosts. So it was natural to me.

BUCKINGHAM

I want to hear more about '"I do believe in ghosts."

GILES

Oh, don't you?

BUCKINGHAM

I totally do. I see that a little bit in your work. I'd love to hear more.

GILES

Well, I've lived in an old house for over forty years. It's in a little rural community off the highway. l was told it was a bordello. And then I was told that it was a train station. I've always had this feeling of people passing through it. Years ago my youngest daughter came to the door and said, "Mom"—it was about three in the morning—and I realized the temperature dropped maybe forty degrees; it was freezing. I said, "I know. Get in bed." And we sat there and huddled. We felt whish whish whish going through the room, and then it disappeared. I think it was a traveler, either that or a prostitute, and it was on its way out. When I was three or four I woke up in the middle of the night, and there was a goblin sitting on my feet. I went to grab it, and I could feel it twisting out of my hands. I believed far too much in fairies as a child. I know I did. At eleven I was still looking under creek beds. That's one reason I loved teaching in Ireland. They actually have little fairy wells in the hills. Probably for tourists and children, but they worked for me.

I'm writing a short story now about a writers' séance. A poet sitting next to me had brought a photograph of this pretty woman in a fur coat. The medium was a frazzled blonde who warned us that we might be contacted by the dead via a physical sensation, our hearts might catch or we might feel a pain in our lungs. Then she closed her eyes, said we were surrounded by spirits, and began to say things like she saw a windmill over the head of a certain famous writer whose upcoming trip to the Netherlands had just been written up in the society pages or she heard someone calling out a message in Spanish to the writer from Latin America. I thought, what a crock. And then suddenly, the poet next to me with the photograph, myself, and the woman to my left all felt like we couldn't breathe. Our throats filled with acid. Tears were running down our cheeks. And we were all coughing. We didn't know each other but we felt as if we were being gassed. The poet's photograph was of a relative who had been killed in Auschwitz. I ended up thinking, no, couldn't be, yeah, it could be, no, it couldn't. But, yeah. it could. Why not be open to it?

JENNINGS

In Three for the Road, all three protagonists leave their current homes in hopes of finding new lives or because they feel like they have no other options, and in The Home for Unwed Husbands Kay is changed by her trip to Greece. Why are you drawn to this type of story arc?

GILES

I don't know; when it comes to fight or flight, I flee. Don't you think it's so much more fun to just get out of there? I'm horrified in my own stories to see how many of them end with someone in a car getting the hell out. I don't know what's wrong with me. I want to pinpoint it before some critic comes in and says, "Hey, she uses a lot of cars." I adore the end of Huck Finn. Lighting out for the territory? What could be better?

ANDERSON

Just for fun, what's on your writing desk when you do get down to business and find the time to write? And are there any tools or habits you feel you can't write without?

GILES

I used to smoke. I'm so glad I quit, but I used to think that if I did, I wouldn't be able to write. Then I found that I wrote just as badly when I wasn't smoking as when I had and it was a relief. It's amazing how when you come to a part in your story that's really going to open it up or push it forward, you suddenly wonder if there's anything in the refrigerator. Or you have to pee. There's some instinct that makes you push back from the computer just when you're about to nail it. I'm restless. I get up and come back and get up again. One thing that's always in my writing room is a couch. I like to crash, and sometimes just meditating or dosing your eyes for a few minutes will help refocus you. I also have a little green Buddha on the desk. So how about you? Do you have any superstitions?

SINGH

It's not my habit, but I was listening to a podcast with Ocean Vuong. He apparently wears boots every single time he writes.

GILES

That's interesting. I love Isabel Allende's process. She starts a new novel on the Epiphany, January 6th, every year. Bharati Mukherjee, who grew up in a crowded house in Calcutta, kept a TV blaring in every room when she moved to Berkeley. We all have different needs. I like having a crossword puzzle book when I get stuck, especially one with the answers in the back.

BUCKINGHAM

The title story in Rough Translations is about a dying woman. Did she have anything to do with the creation of Ida?

GILES

No. She was just a dearly loved friend. Ida was loosely based on my mother. Have any of you tried to write about your mother? The first story that I published was "Old Souls," from Rough Translations. It came out in a magazine at that time called Playgirl. It had a naked man in the centerfold. You couldn't get it at the regular magazine stand. You had to ask for it. My story was sandwiched in between ads for something called Sta-Hard Cream that looked like Elmer's glue. I wanted to show this story to my mother because I was proud of it, and it had been published, so xeroxed it and cut it out column by column between the ads, but I worried she would recognize herself as one of the characters. She read the story, and then she looked up all starry-eyed and said, "Darling? Who's the bitch?" "Diane's mother," I peeped, and she nodded and said, "I thought so." So that was my first published story, and it was an introduction to shame. I don't think dignity is a word that writers can claim. We submit. When your work does come out, you can be proud for the moment. But if you're in a magazine, you may be read on a toilet and thrown away. You just learn to walk tall. And wear boots! No wonder Ocean Vuong wears boots. Good idea. These boots were made for writing, and that's just what I'll do .

 

Issue 91: Brandon Hobson

JPG Issue Cover

Found in Willow Springs 91

JUNE 2022 

JOSHUA HENDERSON, MORGAN HENDERSON, JENNIFER KRASNER, & SAMANTHA SWAIN

A CONVERSATION WITH BRANDON HOBSON

brandonhobson

THROUGHOUT HIS WORK, Brandon Hobson presents stories of Native lives shaped by intergenerational trauma and atrocity and also by cultural continuity and hope. As his characters navigate familial separations and systemic racism, they find themselves in circumstances both relatable and astonishingly surreal. They discover and recover identity; they hurt, heal, fall in love, leave, and find home in a fractured contemporary society. In her review of The Removed for NPR, critic Marcela Davison Avilés writes, “The story in this book is deeply resonant and profound, and not only because of its exquisite lyricism. It’s also a hard and visceral entrance into our own reckoning as a society and civic culture with losses we created, injustices we allowed, and family separations we ignored. It’s a path of renewed mourning, meditation and trauma which at once seeks the vitality of what once was, and justice for what was taken.”

Brandon Hobson is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of The Levitationist (2006); Deep Ellum (2014); Desolation of Avenues Untold (2015); Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award;  The Removed (2021); and The Storyteller, Hobson’s first middle grade book, which will be published in April, 2023. His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in Best American Short Stories (2021) and McSweeney’s among other publications. Hobson served as a judge for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Puerto del Sol. Hobson is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

We spoke to Brandon Hobson over Zoom in early June of 2022, a couple of months after hearing him speak and teach a craft class as a featured author at the Get Lit! festival in Spokane. We discussed the symbiotic relationship between music and imagery, representation, and ways to approach multiple perspectives and world-building in novel writing. We began by discussing intention.

 

MORGAN HENDERSON

Do you start your pieces with clear intentions, and do those remain the focus throughout? Or do you find meaning as you go?

BRANDON HOBSON

I usually start with an image, and then I build from there and see what happens. Sometimes I have an image that I think is something to end with, and I might work toward that image. I might think of a sentence, like an opening sentence, but it’s usually an image. Part of the process early on in writing is trying to figure out what the story is about because I think it’s about something when in reality it’s about something entirely different.

JOSHUA HENDERSON

Can I ask what image you had in mind when you were beginning to write The Removed or Where the Dead Sit Talking?

HOBSON

Sure. With Where the Dead Sit Talking I had an image of a man at a grave site in shackles. That image was in an early draft at the beginning of the novel. With The Removed, a lot of the images came from thinking about the Darkening Land, which is a mythological space used in traditional Cherokee stories, and making that Darkening Land my own—a great old downtown space with these crooked and falling-apart buildings and people walking around sort of bug-eyed and very gray. For me, at least with Edgar’s sections, what was exciting about The Removed was being removed out of this world and into the mythological space of the Darkening Land.

JENNIFER KRASNER

In an interview with David Heska Wanbli Weiden, you mentioned Kathy Acker as an influence for the Darkening Land. It was such a suffocating dystopia in that basement. She has some scenes like that, too. I’m curious to hear how you took that traditional origin, a literary influence, and your own vision and pulled those all together.

HOBSON

I don’t know that I was thinking so much about her when I was writing those scenes in the Darkening Land or writing the book necessarily, but that influence might be there somewhere because she was such an early inspiration for me. Kathy Acker is a writer from whom I learned to be bold and unafraid in my writing. She was one of the first writers where I was just knocked out and thought, “Wow, you can do this?” She does a lot of stuff with language. I think she was absolutely brilliant. My interest in surrealism grew out of reading Kathy Acker and William Burroughs, who I know was a friend of hers and an influence on her. That drew me into writing early on. Exploring that surreal space felt very exciting. I asked myself, “How can I incorporate this surreal element into a modern story?” Thanks for reminding me about her. She was amazing. She still is. I think she’s very underappreciated. Many students have not heard of her, so it’s always fun to introduce her. I know you’ve interviewed William T. Vollmann. I think they were kind of compadres back in the early 90s and were big writers at the time. I was reading both of them, and they influenced the way I’ve been writing fiction.

J. HENDERSON

In the Joy Williams essay “Why I Write,” she describes writers as sharks that move “hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment.” I saw this as describing a writer’s relationship to truth. In Deep Ellum and Where the Dead Sit Talking, it feels like these sharks—the emotional core or truth of the story—are obscured, like the characters either aren’t fully aware of the sharks or there’s something so difficult for these characters to talk about that they can’t quite access it. In Where the Dead Sit Talking, Sequoyah imagines scenarios of tying Rosemary down. These imagined acts of violence feel like they’re expressing something that he can’t otherwise express. In The Removed, the shark—this truth that I think Williams is talking about—feels more like it’s coming closer to the surface. As much as Edgar gets trapped in the Darkening Land, he does escape. The red fowl is killed. What is a writer’s relationship to truth in a story and how does a writer choose to obscure or reveal that truth?

HOBSON

Those are the big questions, very difficult to answer. I discover along the way. That’s done through revision. I don’t know how much I revised those sections, especially those sections of the Darkening Land. I was working with my agent at the time, revising it, and then revising with my editor, and that was after having revised it several times already on my own. What’s the truth I’m looking for, for this character on this journey? What is the question? What’s the image? What am I trying specifically to say? And how am I going to go about doing that in the most effective way or the most artful way possible? The red fowl was actually a later addition in revision. In fact, it may have been the last revision. Then, I went back and added the red fowl throughout the whole book. And I started thinking more about metaphor. I started thinking about colors. When Edgar escapes the Darkening Land, this dark gray world, I wanted it to be a colorful experience, which is why I mentioned cherry blossoms and the colors of other important Cherokee lore—golds, greens, and reds. These three combined colors are on the cover of the book as well. I focused on colors representative of justice, representative of returning from removal, representative of healing. So I began in revisions to start thinking about: How can I use color? How can I use symbol or metaphor to help show what I’m trying to approach—returning from removal—and do it in a unique way, in the most artful way I can? With the Darkening Land, what is Edgar’s truth? And how does that mirror the truth I’m trying to reach—the truth of the entire novel, which is exploring the answers to questions: What does it mean to heal? What does it mean to deal with trauma? What does it mean to deal with generational trauma? Abuse? All these are issues I love to write about. How do we approach them and look for ways out?

J. HENDERSON

It's interesting that the red fowl is one of the later revisions because that really guided me through the Edgar sections. It felt like it was always there, but I guess that speaks exactly to what you’re talking about with finding the meaning through revision.

SAMANTHA SWAIN

I wanted to ask about crafting those ambiguous endings in As the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed. In As the Dead Sit Talking, we’re left with Sequoyah’s question about whether he contributed to Rosemary’s suicide. In particular, he said something like, “no one suspected murder.” We had some argument about whether he felt like his attempt to stop her contributed to her  pulling the trigger or whether he had intentionally helped her pull the trigger. Likewise, in The Removed, I interpreted the Darkening Land as an overdose and thus the ending where Edgar walks down the blossom path as him crossing over. Yet, simultaneously, I thought, “Well maybe he really did live and arrive at the bonfire.” Both of these endings feel really satisfying. I wondered if you could talk about how you conceptualize and approach open endings.

HOBSON

I’m interested in blurring the line between reality and fantasy. I’m also very interested in unreliable narrators and their effect on the reader and how seductive an unreliable narrator can be. With Where the Dead Sit Talking I was getting into the space of a fifteen-year-old boy—well, technically, it’s a man looking back and trying to retell his story. When we’re writing fiction, we’re telling lies, right? We’re making things up. Even if it really happened, how can we alter this a little bit to make it a better story because it’s not a great story right now, so we have to embellish or exaggerate, and we have to do that in a very seductive way. Our job as writers is to seduce the reader. That sounds creepy, but when I’m a reader, so often I’m seduced by the voice, by the narrator, especially when we’re talking about first person, these two works specifically being first person. When I read first person, I’m so easily seduced that I’m willing to follow this voice wherever it takes me. I’ve come across the narrators who, at some point, I’m asking, “Wait a minute, what’s really going on here?” That lends credibility to the story, to the voice of the story, no matter if it’s an adult or if it’s a child. Take To Kill a Mockingbird for example. When I taught seventh grade years ago, I taught that book. I remember talking about how effective Scout’s voice is. Is she telling me everything? Is she leaving something out? How reliable is she to tell me these things? These very dark thoughts that Sequoyah is getting when he’s looking back, why is he choosing to give these to us? Why is Edgar or why is Sonja telling us these details, and what are they leaving out? Those are the choices we make with first-person narratives that, to me, become very exciting.

SWAIN

I see, the ambiguity of the ending stems from unreliability. That’s really interesting.

HOBSON

I’m much more interested in how something is done than I am in a satisfying, happy ending. The Removed was chosen early on as a Book of the Month Club selection, which was great in that it sold a whole lot of copies, but I just wonder whether my work is too weird for many people. And that’s okay. It’s not going to be for everybody. I never want to write something that I think will have a feel-good ending. Not everybody loves Kathy Acker. Not everybody loves David Lynch.

J. HENDERSON

I’ll sometimes go in to Goodreads and see what people have to say about a favorite book, and they’ll be brutal. It’s like getting tossed to the dogs.

HOBSON

Well, that’s part of it. You have to deal with that kind of stuff and overlook it. I don’t have a profile there and don't go there, nor do I look at Amazon reviews. People love to have an opinion about things. I was looking at hotel reviews—we’re going next week to New York—and it’s the same thing, right? They absolutely trash hotels.

SWAIN

In a past interview you talked about feeling like you were not Native enough to write novels like Where The Dead Sit Talking and The Removed. I have often struggled with thoughts of like, “Well, I’m not disabled enough to tell this story.” Could you talk a bit about how you overcame this sort of thinking? What advice would you give to young authors dealing with similar feelings?

HOBSON

I still struggle with those feelings. At some point, it’s about stepping out and being entirely honest with yourself and being the type of writer you want to be. It helped to think of myself as the audience. You’re putting aside what other people are going to think and just saying, “Fuck it. I’m going to write this book for me. This is the kind of book that I want to write. And these are the characters who are dealing with these issues that I want to write about.” It’s also important to lean on the support system of whatever group you’re in. I talk with my friends who are Native about this issue a lot, and it’s really surprising to hear how many have felt the same way. “Am I really Native enough to have this conversation?” It helps to know that everybody feels this way, whether you’re writing about gender identity, disability, or anything else. What also helps is thinking that this is just one story or one book. I’m going to write more. This is something I love to do, that I’ve been doing since I was young, and I’m going to continue to do it. It’s not going to be the end of the world if this one story or book doesn’t work out. Speaking of, Sam, a colleague of mine, Connie Voisine, just got a grant for writers with disabilities here at New Mexico State University. [https://www.zoeglossia.org]

M. HENDERSON

How do you manage what you demand of the reader versus what you give them?

HOBSON

I don’t know that I think too much about the reader, especially when I’m drafting. And again, I’m really writing this for myself, and I’m writing the kind of book that I would like to read.

M. HENDERSON

How do you know when you’re going to construct something that needs to be interpreted versus something you’re going to straight up tell the reader? Is it just intuitive?

HOBSON

A lot of that comes out in revision. When I’m first drafting, which is the most fun, I’m not thinking so much about the demands on the reader. Let’s say I’ve written a scene where someone is hurt by someone who’s just left. I might have them say it, but then, going back, I say to myself, “Well of course, it’s so obvious. I’m showing this person going through this struggle, why would I have them speak it out loud?” So I’m going to cut that. I start thinking about the demands of the reader. Am I being too ambiguous? Am I not looking at my sentence structure? Is this sentence that goes on for a page and a half too demanding? Do I really need this? Is this doing what’s it’s meant to be doing? Should I shorten this? All that is done later on. I actually really lean on my agent and my editor to help me.

SWAIN

That’s something I really appreciate about your work, its accessibility. It’s still nuanced and complex, especially your characters. In past interviews, you had talked about letting the characters speak for themselves and speak through you. I was curious what your character-building process looks like. When you’re first starting a novel, how do you get to know them?

HOBSON

These last two books have first-person narrators, so I have an idea before I start what they look like and what their voices sound like. I don’t know them fully when I begin writing about them, although by the end of the first draft I know them pretty well. Sonja in The Removed, I love her character. I’ve heard people say, “Wow, she’s really disturbing and dark and unlikable,” but I don’t see her that way at all. When I was writing her sections, she was very confident, maybe a little bit eccentric, riding her bicycle to the library and sitting outside on the steps, but I certainly didn’t mean her to be dangerous in any way. If anything, she’s a victim. She becomes a victim of the assault of the police officer’s son. I have her being very confident, very sexual, open about the relationships with younger men. The more I wrote about her, the more I felt that confidence, and that eccentric woman came out. At the beginning, I wanted to have her very fixated on Vin. The more I write, the more I discover about these characters.

KRASNER

It makes me think of something you said in your craft class at Get Lit! in Spokane, “Writing is kind of like acting.”

HOBSON

Oh, thanks. I don’t want to take credit for that. I heard that from Ottessa Moshfegh. I’m a big fan of her work, and seven or eight years ago in Wichita, Kansas, I had dinner after her reading with her and an owner of a bookstore. She was fantastic. That was one of the things she had talked about, how much working through your characters feels like acting. And I thought, “That’s right!” Especially in first-person, though you can do it with a close third, too. You decide how you want them to perform on the page instead of on the stage, right? Even though I find myself too cripplingly shy to be an actor, I can understand it as a writer.

M. HENDERSON

Ottessa Moshfegh is my favorite!

HOBSON

She’s one of my favorite writers working today. And, at her age—I would say young, forty-one or forty-two—her body of work is just amazing. My favorite story in her collection is the last one [“A Better Place”] where the brother and sister go to kill the “bad man.” It has a fairy tale quality. Her new novel coming out this summer, Lapvona, is in a fairy tale style. I haven’t read it yet, but I have the galley here, and I’m excited to read it.

J. HENDERSON

In writing workshops as MFA students, we hear all the time about this dichotomy of active and passive characters. It’s not a strict rule, but we’re often told to avoid passive characters who avoid conflict. But in your work there are characters we might not traditionally think of as being active. Like Sequoyah—a lot of the time he’s just listening to people, observing, sitting back. There’s that teacher who corners him in the bathroom talking about how he misses his house and his ex-wife. Even if he’s just listening, he’s doing so in a way that feels active. He’s drawing these stories out of people. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on what makes an active or passive character. Is that something that matters to you at all? Can a character become active just through the telling of their story, even if they’re just sitting back and not literally doing something?

HOBSON

Thanks for that question and that scene. I don’t know that I think about active versus passive so much as I think about what’s
bizarre about human behavior. I have these conversations with my wife where we’ll say, “Did you notice that guy and what he was doing? What the hell was that?” We’ll laugh about it. I feel like those happen to me all the time. I don’t know that I think as much about active and passive as I do about situations. A large part of Where the Dead Sit Talking takes place at this new school, and when I think about schools, I always think about how strange my experience was, the strange things that teachers would say or do. I’m really dating myself, but going way back, pre-internet, using overhead projectors, and that light flashing—one of the scenes in that book was the weirdness of sitting in a dark room, drowsy, and listening to a teacher drone on and this weird light flashing in his face and finding myself way more interested in looking out the window. I always had this feeling I’d give anything to be able to walk outside and be by those trees, but no, I’m confined in this horrible space listening to this strange guy. I think those situations in the classroom or in P. E. are universal. Maybe I picture the characters as passive because I’m very passive, or just more observational. There’s a scene in Where the Dead Sit Talking where Sequoyah goes in the bathroom and sees a stick figure holding a gun, and I was thinking about all the drawings that I used to see and all the terrible, disturbing things that people wrote as graffiti—hateful, rude, disgusting drawings. Someone drawing a gun. I mean, especially right now. Is that a sign that there is something we need to be looking out for? I wanted to incorporate some of that in the book. I constantly, and I mean constantly, almost daily, when I go to the grocery store, find myself overhearing or seeing things that seem very strange. I’m fascinated by it as a writer because what a great opportunity this is, listening to this couple, this elderly couple, argue about what they’re arguing about. I’m very interested in making the normal feel absurd.

J. HENDERSON

I was thinking about the video game in the Darkening Land that Jackson Andrews is developing, how that feels so absurd but also real, and how the absurdity heightens the way it feels real, something dark and true about America. The video game was fascinating both in the way your approach to handling politics has evolved throughout your work and the way there’s a mixing of humor with a subject that is not funny. It’s really compelling. Also, there’s a manual for the game. How do you go about putting a manual in a novel?

HOBSON

I don’t think it’s really that absurd. Video games with shooting have been around for a long time, and recently there are video games where people have assault rifles and are killing people left and right. Now we’re seeing it play out in real life, not necessarily because it’s the video game’s fault. Edgar is going, “My brother was shot by a police officer. Now I’m in this space where I’m the target because I’m Native.” That’s part of the game, shoot the Indian. I pushed it into absurdity where in the basement Jackson has created this whole sort of replica and Edgar sees his brother. That’s absurd, but on some level, I don’t feel like it’s that much more absurd than what’s happening right now. My eight-year-old son is playing the Oculus. That feels more absurd. Part of my job as a fiction writer is to try to exaggerate those things. Ray Bradbury was onto virtual reality back in the sixties when he was writing The Illustrated Man.

For the manual, I used one of my son’s video game manuals as a model. I actually had a much longer manual and my editor was like, “Do we really need this many pages?” and I thought, “I kind of like all these pages in here, but I see your point. Let’s just stick to the objective of the game and the specifics.” She had a very good point and I think it’s ultimately better shorter, but it was fun to create that manual. I like to experiment, and I like it if a novel or a story has something in it like a manual or something seen as non-traditional that lends itself to the story. Do we really need this script in here? Well, yeah, of course we do. It’s showing something about the character we’re not seeing in a different way. One of the fun things of being a fiction writer is that we can incorporate little plays or drawings or whatever, manuals, and use them in our work.

SWAIN

I feel like that’s part of world-building. It’s very accepted in the fantasy and sci-fi realm that those sorts of things will be in there, but of course it also has to exist for something in the Darkening Land.

HOBSON

Writing should be fun. You want to find the pleasure in it. The more pleasure you have, the better it’ll be. The Darkening Land sections were the most fun to write because I could build that world and create my own video game, and I created my own manual and created my own little place there and tried to do it in a, you know, “literary fiction” way that hopefully works. We forget about the fun when we’re all in workshop and we’re talking about active conflict and asking, “So what is the point of this story?” We all become so critical of one another. We’re heavy with criticism and doubt. We’re doubting ourselves. “Am I Native enough? Should I write it?” I could have given up and said, “Am I even Cherokee enough?” Cherokee doesn’t follow blood quantum, so of course I am—these questions of doubt and these insecurities are a burden on us, whatever they are.

It’s really important for us to go back and think, “What drew me into writing?” Maybe it was Salinger or maybe it was Alice in Wonderland. It’s important to write for yourself like maybe you did when you first started writing stories. I remember the first stories I was writing in college, which were absolutely terrible. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew this is fun. We need to come back to that because we lose that. I constantly deal with people who give up on writing, and/or give up on their books, and I think they’re going about it the wrong way. They’re looking for success or bestsellers. I didn’t start writing stories because I thought maybe I’ll get on a New York Times bestseller list. I did it out of some space of, “I love reading, and I would love to create my own world, I think things will fall into place.” That’s what I have to remind myself. I’m going to write whatever book I want to write. You know, I just wrote a middle grade book for Scholastic that’ll be out next year. I thought, “If I’m going do this, I’m going to have fun with it,” and I did.

M. HENDERSON

What are some things you’ve edited out of your books?

HOBSON

Tsala had longer sections in The Removed, and we scaled back on those. I had more stories from traditional Cherokee folklore, and we decided at some point it was a little too much. Keep it to a minimum since Tsala wasn’t part of the timeline of the novel. Tsala was this sort of ancestor spirit telling his stories. Too much of that would possibly be too much of a digression from the timeline.

J. HENDERSON

You mention digression. One thing that struck me was the smaller stories placed throughout the novels, like the stories characters would tell. I’m interested in stories within stories in my own work. I rarely intend to do it; it just ends up happening. How do you make sure they fit and that, even if there’s a digression, it doesn’t feel like something that doesn’t belong?

HOBSON

As you’re drafting, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. I would just get the draft done and enjoy it as much as you can, and then focus on your revision. It’s much easier to cut that stuff. A story within a story is asking, “What is this saying in the overall context of the novel? What is this telling us about the storyteller?” Let’s say that you have a character and she’s writing a play. You decide to put the beginning of Act One of her play about a woman who is trying to kill her husband. That’s a way of revealing that she is not happy with her husband.

Chekhov says, “Begin with questions.” For me, those questions are: How do we heal from trauma? How do we deal with racism? How are we dealing with abuse? What is justice? Those big questions are important to think about early on. Then, you can start thinking, “I want her story here within the timeline of the novel to reveal something that she’s not going to tell us.” I haven’t read it yet, but Hernan Diaz has a new novel out called Trust that I believe has a novel-within-the-novel, not a whole novel, but one of the characters in the novel is writing a novel, and I think there’s another story within the story, too. I’m excited because I’m like you, Josh, I like stories within stories. Gravity’s Rainbow has a digression and then there’s a digression from that digression. Pretty soon I’m lost as to what’s the point of this digression after this digression, and what does that have to do with the main storyline? Five hundred pages from now I’ll need to remember this because it’s got to be important. That’s very, very difficult. That’s very demanding for the reader, but it probably serves a purpose. But there has to be a point; otherwise, it would have been cut.

M. HENDERSON

The setting and imagery in Deep Ellum was intense and vivid, but you’ve lived in Oklahoma most of your life. So why Deep Ellum? And what kind of research did you need to do?

HOBSON

Deep Ellum is a district in Dallas near downtown that I was interested in because I used to go there when I was younger. There would be bands playing, and it was kind of gritty. It’s been a long time since I was there, though. Now they’ve put in nice condos and coffee shops, and it’s not the gritty, kind of druggy area that it once was. I wanted to relive that through the novella, through the imagery.

M. HENDERSON

Was all of it based on memory, or did you have to do some research?

HOBSON

Just my memory. I’ve been there so many times, and there are so many different clubs and bands that would come through. It felt like this weird space in a city like Dallas. It was its own little artsy space. I skewed it a little bit and blended a little fantasy with reality. Think of like The Royal Tenenbaums—it’s supposed to be New York, but it’s skewed a little bit. It’s Wes Anderson’s New York from his own view. Stanley Kubrick did that a bit with New York. So I was thinking about that idea, of taking a place and altering it to make it your own, which is risky because you always have those assholes who’ll say, “That’s not where that is” or “There’s no light post on that corner of Elm and Crowdus.” But I like blending and doing something a little fantastical. So I took this space, this area of Deep Ellum, which I loved. I knew the story, the brother returning home, sick mom, and a sister who’s dealing with addiction problems. I’m interested in that, like, here’s downtown Spokane but here’s Morgan Henderson’s vision of downtown Spokane. I know she did this for a reason. What is that reason? What is it telling us?

SWAIN

How did you weave the multiple perspectives in The Removed together to make a complete story, and what was that process like structurally?

HOBSON

The difficulty in juggling these multiple perspectives is that they all need to meet at one specific place. What can you do by the end that would somehow thread all of their stories together to make it one unified story? Your multiple characters all need to be probably addressing the same theme or dealing with the same question and then reaching maybe a conclusion. Early in drafting, I had Tsala sections, I had Edgar’s sections, and, okay, I’ve got these four different characters, they’ve all got to come together. There has to be an event or something at the end that draws them all together. For me, it was the image of the bonfire. Granted, it’s ambiguous when they see Edgar or spirits coming toward them, but I hope that the fire is representative of returning home, the last word of the novel being “home.”

A big question in a lot of my work is, “What is home?” I think that’s a big question in a lot of Native literature. There’s a TV series called Reservation Dogs on FX; Sterlin Harjo is a friend of mine. Early on, he and I talked about one of the things that a lot of his other work, his films, explores, “What is home? How do I get home?” In some ways Reservation Dogs is approaching that question as well.

KRASNER

There’s a scene in The Removed, in the Darkening Land, where Edgar puts on a Bauhaus record in Jackson’s house and listens to each side over and over again and parts in Where the Dead Sit Talking where Rosemary and Sequoyah listen to a lot of music together like X, The Velvet Underground, and, I think, Elliott Smith comes up in both books. Do you listen to music to create a writing mood? And how do you pick out bands for your characters?

HOBSON

It’s probably no surprise I’m an Elliott Smith fan, so he probably did show up in both books. I always put in music. I’m a huge music fan, I listen to music all the time. When I listen to certain music it sparks an image. In the middle grade book, I have a snake that’s Bela Lugosi reincarnated as a snake, and the chapter’s called “Bela Lugosi is dead,” right? I’m making my Bauhaus reference there, too.

Certain songs will spark memories that you can then transfer into images or will create fictional images. Gideon, for example, in Deep Ellumit’s been over ten years since I wrote that novella, but I remember thinking about Gideon’s character walking at night wearing his sister’s coat. Music was helping these images form in my head. I’m a little bit obsessive about music. I want to make it part of the books. I think it’s a good space to go into when you’re thinking about your characters. What are those images and how can you use those images on the page? Music feeds our creativity, it feeds the image.

Issue 90: A Conversation with Albert Goldbarth

Goat Cover

Found in Willow Springs 90

JANUARY 22, 2022

POLLY BUCKINGHAM, FOREST BROWN, TORI THURMOND, KP KASZUBOWSKI, AND CAROLINE CARPENTER

A CONVERSATION WITH ALBERT GOLDBARTH

THE WONDER of Goldbarth’s work is in part its wild abundance, its ability to reach as far out as it can and, even within a single poem, move through a dizzying number of written modes and subject matters: quotes from scientists, artists, and writers, snippets of casual conversation, references to pop culture and historical figures, moments of high lyricism, and a certain Goldbarthian chattiness. His work is full of esoterica of the highest order; imagine one of those roadside half-thrift-shop, half-antique-store, half-smalltown- science-museums, and that’s a decent start to an approximation of Goldbarth’s oeuvre. And yet his poems and essays never feel like they exist to show off his knowledge of the things of this world (though his knowledge is staggering); reading them feels more like
reading the imagination at work trying to understand our contemporary predicament with empathy and grace. What makes his moments of deeply felt nostalgia resonant is his relentless attention to the present. Judith Kitchen writes, “Readers who consign him to the category of ‘humor’ fail to see that, as in most good comedy, the poems are a way to bare the pain,” and Lia Purpura writes, “May Albert Goldbarth continue leaving his readers open-mouthed, goggle-eyed, and knocked-out, all of us with our own concussive haloes of stars.”

Goldbarth began publishing books in the early seventies and hasn’t stopped. The occasional two-or-three-year gap between titles is offset by years in which he’s released several titles, including two new collections in 2021/22: Other Worlds (Pitt Press) and Everybody (Lynx House Press). While primarily a poet, he has also written books of essays and a novel, all of which are stamped with his poetic sensibilities. He taught at Cornell and Wichita State University for some thirty years (home of the Goldbarth Archive in Ablah Library).

Albert Goldbarth is not a fan of interviews. He would rather write poems than speak on them, and he would rather we read the poems than ask about them. With some fifty books to his name, he’s clearly too busy writing and reading. Surprisingly, he agreed to speak with Willow Springs magazine in a traditional interview. We met him over Zoom on January 22nd, 2022, another first for Goldbarth, who does not own or use a computer; he types his work into one of his many typewriters. Our correspondences were sent primarily through the mail. His wife, Skyler, provided her computer for the interview. In the interview, we talked about the invasion of technology into everyday life, the story of his first text message, his fascination with the obsolete, the relationship between science and the imagination, and the nature of change. We were honored to speak with him, to listen to him, and most importantly, to spend so much time with his work. The poems, of course, speak for themselves.

 

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

Okay, we’re recording.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH

All right, I’m the old man in the corner right there.

Warning: I don’t think I’m good at interviews. I’m always amazed when I read other people’s and see how eloquent and fascinating they are; it seems I pour everything into my poems. There’s nothing left over for occasions like this.

BUCKINGHAM

I finally read the “interview” you did with the Georgia Review, and I was like, “Well, why are we here? It’s all in there.”

GOLDBARTH

I have to admit, I was proud of that “interview” when I finally finished it. At the start, I wasn’t sure it would work. It was part of this special feature the Georgia Review did. The whole thing must be maybe sixty pages long: twenty-six pages of my poems, a couple of pages of my original handwritten manuscript for one of the poems, two essays on me, photographs that Skyler took, et cetera. And then the editors wanted to do an interview, too, which was not an unreasonable request. And I didn’t want to do it. They asked again. I really didn’t want to do it. Finally, I thought, “Well, I believe in poems, not interviews,” so I said, “What if all the questions come from other poets’ poems and all of the answers come from poems of mine?” I had no idea which specific poems might match up seamlessly as questions and answers, but by the end I thought it worked out. I was hoping it would become the role model for all poets’ interviews in the future, but [sigh] that doesn’t seem to have happened.

FOREST BROWN

I love the way that you were able to engage with other poets and your own poetry for the interview. I wonder if that’s something you do outside of that project or if that was just a one-time thing.

GOLDBARTH

Outside of that “interview,” I’ve never committed anything to a written format in exactly that way and published it, but sometimes I get together with my friends, and we’ll read poems out loud, poems we’ve encountered recently on our own that we think are worth sharing. Do any of you know Richard Hugo’s book 31 Letters and 13 Dreams? I don’t think it’s his best book, but it’s a lovely concept, trying to come up with language that would work as poetry in a published book or journal publication but that also works as actual real-world letters that he really sent out, postally. I appreciate ideas like that, poetry working in the real world and people communicating through poetry.

I still send postal mail to friends on a weekly basis and get postal mail on a weekly basis back. Every week my friend John from Texas sends me a letter typed on a manual typewriter, and we will clip things from magazines and newspapers for each other. Sometimes just the naked clippings. Sometimes we’ll doctor them in funny or otherwise interesting ways. It arrives, you open it, and it’s a meaningful, real-world weight in your hand. It has the impress of a human being’s breath and body behind it. It’s lovely. We’ve been doing this for decades.

I think the postal service represents, in some ways, America at its best. I still go to the post office, my local substation, two or three times a week. My own letter carrier is a woman named Nancy. She’s smart, she’s sharp, she’s funny, she “gets it.” I enjoy talking to her on the porch and typing up little postal related things or photocopying USPS-related anecdotes and leaving them for her on our mailbox. This week I heard postally from my old Chicago friend Wayne, and from poets Alice Friman and Larry Raab . . . the charge of their fingers was still on the paper.

TORI THURMOND

Quite a few of your poems start with research. I wanted to ask where it comes from. Is it while you’re reading you get an idea, and you want to base a poem off that? Or is it the other way around, where you get an idea for a poem, then go research it and pull some of that research in?

GOLDBARTH

Over the course of my writing life, both have occurred, but it seems healthier if I’m simply reading for pleasure, not specifically trawling through things just to find an idea for a poem. I’m reading something, and, bingo, that day or three years later, a little light goes off in my head, “Oh, yeah, I’d like to explore this.” To that extent, “research” sounds too calculated in its implications. Oh, there’s some research of course; but often it’s more like being open to a timely shout-out from my memory storage, my muse node.

BROWN

I had a question about the balance between inspiration and research. I thought of the balance between Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer in some of your work and how they’re connected, but one is more scientific, one more artistic. I wonder if you feel you owe a loyalty to one of those disciplines more than the other.

GOLDBARTH

In my introduction for a book about the sciences and the arts, The Measured Word, I try to address the state of science and the arts back in, let’s say, Wordsworth’s day, Coleridge’s day, when there existed a language that scientists and artists shared. I think they also shared a sense that they were involved in the same pursuits, the pursuit of knowledge in the objective world and the pursuit of knowledge of the self. The well-known scientific researchers of that day read literature and tried to write it themselves. The quest was similar, whether you were a geologist, chemist, Wordsworth, or Coleridge. There’s a famous moment when Coleridge and some other writers allow themselves to be put under what we would call laughing gas in a serious experiment to see how it affects the human psyche. They all wind up floating on the ceiling, getting high in the famous evening’s endeavors.

C. P. Snow wrote an influential book, The Two Cultures, about the disappearance of that communal endeavor, which explores the growing realization that artists and scientists do not live in the same universe any longer and do not share goals or language. I think, on the whole, my head exists back in the world when Coleridge and Humphrey Davy, the chemist, shared a single pursuit and a single vocabulary. A lot of the leisure time reading I do, reading that’s not simply an adventure novel, is work that credits both sides of the divide, to the extent that I can understand the science part at all. In my head, Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer are equals no matter the differences in their lives and their passions. They are essentially siblings, twins separated at birth, similarly and equally involved in attempting to answer the question, “What does it mean to be a live human being in this cosmos?” As I loosely remember, in my essay “Delft” I try to give them equal weight, I mean actual paragraph by paragraph equivalency.

BROWN

With so much of your work dealing with these sorts of characters and also with science and research, how do you feel about obsolescence?

GOLDBARTH

I think it’s my nature to want to eulogize what’s passing more than see the beauty of the transmutation. I understand everything needs to disappear. There’s only a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe. It has to be kept in revolution all the time. I understand you don’t get to move ahead unless you see the world in the rearview mirror diminishing. But at the moment, it seems to me the future, especially in terms of technology, is colonizing the present moment at a dangerously ferocious rate. It feels right that there should be some people who want to put the brakes on, halt that process to a small extent. There’s still a past that we have not happily used for all its pleasures and lessons. And it’s worthwhile for me to stand still for a moment, turn around 180 degrees, and further embrace what’s disappearing before we make the other turn around and face the untested wonder of tomorrow. There’s a beauty in that, and more and more, I think culturally it’s necessary to let the past live on . . . in TV terms, to replay in syndication.

Think of all of the things that were happening in 1913 in a wealth of realms. Harriet Monroe founds Poetry magazine, Edgar Rice Burroughs is publishing the first Tarzan novel and the first great John Carter of Mars novel, the Suffragist movement is doing fascinating, seminal, and brave things politically . . . there was the “Armory Show.” That year seems to be a watershed year that not only allows a number of what we might see as very disparate fields to make very important kinds of advances, but, again, as with Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer, it’s interesting to take the people involved in these discrete movements and see them, at our remove, in a way they might not have seen themselves: as equals working at a certain zeitgeist-cohesive moment of time. I don’t care to abandon that just in the interest of adding a new app to my phone. And, yes, I know it doesn’t have to be “either/or.” Still, our loyalties make themselves known as we choose how to parcel out our affection and attention.

BUCKINGHAM

In an article by David Wojahn, he talks about work that’s based on a Google sound bite versus broader research. He uses you, and he shows an example of a poem from Everyday People. It’s clear when I’m reading it that these aren’t just sound bites; this is stuff you’ve read thoroughly. I guess that’s one reason why none of this feels obsolete—because it’s placed in the context of a constantly changing world.

GOLDBARTH

It was a sweet piece by David Wojahn (himself one of the master poets of my generation), and of course I appreciated its sensibility. If I remember his language correctly, he draws a distinction between the poetry of “knowledge” and the poetry of “stuff,” between factoids grabbed on the run from Google scrolling, and knowledge gained from deeper reading; knowledge that doesn’t get paraded in a poem for its surface “interest value,” but gets constellated with everything else that’s been already incorporated into a writer’s understanding of the world. It’s common to try to differentiate between “knowledge” and “wisdom.” Wojahn reminds us that, particularly in our cultural moment, we must differentiate “knowledge” from “data.”

His essays have been collected in book form, and are themselves—like his poems—fine examples of the best use of deep, empathetic knowledge. Wide ranging, but also rooted in long-term contemplation. And while they can use, they don’t depend upon, the self-congratulatory mumbo-jumbo of academic lit crit terminology: they remain human. (I used to lecture on a Whitman poem, “The Sleepers,” for six hours, spread over two class sessions, unpacking it line by line, often word by word, without relying on lit crit “scholarship”. . . it was the reading, I’m certain, that Whitman himself would have wanted, derived from the poem, not forced on it from the outside.)

I own a number of books on what’s gone out of existence, become obsolete, in your lifetime and mine—all of those things, like the smell of burning autumn leaves, gone from the outside landscape; analog clocks (the very objects that give us “clockwise” and “counterclockwise”), gone from our inside landscape; and the pleasures of brick-andmortar bookstores and library shelf browsing, gone from our psychic landscape. I guess I’m someone who doesn’t automatically find “nostalgic” to be a pejorative descriptor. It can also imply an honorable stewardship of what’s endangered. I don’t particularly read steampunk science fiction, but its feel, of striding into the future without discarding the look and knowledge of the past, certainly has an appeal.

Some of the typewriters I’ve collected (and typewriter accessories, like gorgeous deco-design typewriter ribbon tins) by now have a magical aura around them. And I wish I could show you the Oliver typewriter from 1913 (there’s that year again!), with its keys arranged in a bowl shape like the audience in a round amphitheater, and its gilded lettering. No wonder some young people I know, half my age or less, have taken to collecting them. My arts-minded friend Joey sometimes types a poem, using a manual typewriter, on a four-by-six notecard—a “one-off” in the truest sense—and distributes it into a book on a local bookstore’s shelf, counting on chance to deliver it into (maybe) the right hands. This isn’t going to get him the National Book Award, but who could be blind to the beauty of that act?

I don’t collect antique fountain pens, but my friend Rick Mulkey does, and I know that when I join him in a few weeks in St. Louis at a fountain pen show, my eyes will be popping with a respectful wonder. Another old friend, the poet Bob Lietz, collected those pens (and taught himself to repair their nibs and ink bladders) and wrote an ambitious sequence of poems in which he gives voice to the pens during their lives of active use, creating a heartsore love letter from a World War I soldier overseas or a harsh sentencing coming down from a small-town “hanging judge.” Giving voice to the departed (and their world) seems to me a secular blessing.

BROWN

I noticed, in a lot of your books, your love for Karp’s In Flagrante Collecto.

GOLDBARTH

Yeah! It’s filled with jaw-dropping images of objects from once-upon-a-time and with a sense of the passion behind their being conserved. You know, some of those things we can wave goodbye to happily enough. Do we need Junior League meetings where everybody’s wearing white gloves? Maybe not so much. Kotex? Maybe not so much. I guess we each get to choose for our personal list of what’s a keeper that gets shelf space and what gets boxed up for Goodwill. I find it a little painful to realize nobody knows what carbon paper is any longer. It also makes me realize, and I don’t want to get too self-pitying, how much of my poetry really would not be readily comprehensible to many younger readers. Just a little while ago, I was talking to a friend of mine—I like him a lot, he’s witty, talented, he’s sharp, he reads, he’s about forty years old—and I made a quick reference to the heads on Easter Island. He had no idea what I was talking about. Not only could he not picture the famous heads, he had never heard the name Easter Island. Ditto Speedy Alka-Seltzer and Elsie the Cow. My work is filled with allusions to objects, people, events, places that are obsolete. At some point, if I can pretend my work would be read in the future, it will be read completely comprehendingly only by people who are looking things up every fourth or fifth line as they continue through the poem, which, of course, is not reading the poem as the poem wants to be read. Years ago, and I’m talking maybe twenty-five years ago, a poem of mine appeared in some textbook anthology, Groovy Contemporary Poets: Here They Are, something like that, and I was shocked to discover that there was a footnote explaining what Coors beer was. And there was a footnote explaining who Flash Gordon was. Painful for me, just painful, and that was a quarter of a century ago. Imagine now.

Do you want to hear the story of my very first phone text?

I never wanted even this little flip phone. I was sure nothing like this was going to be part of my life, but there came a time when Wichita’s sickly famous serial killer BTK, which stands for bind, torture, kill, emerged again from under a rock after a long hiatus. The fear engendered by 9/11 was also in the air. My wife was teaching at one place, and I was teaching at another place forty-five minutes away from hers. I thought, well okay, even me, just for emergencies, I’ll get one of these gizmos so my wife and I can stay in touch if we really need to, or, if we hear a noise downstairs, I can hit 9-1-1. So I hesitantly bought one, and for a long, long time, I didn’t use it. I didn’t have any names in my phone book. I didn’t know how to, or care how to, send or receive a text. In fact, most people I knew didn’t even realize I owned one. They didn’t have the number, and they wouldn’t have tried texting me even if they did have the number.

The poet and essayist Lia Purpura, a vastly talented woman younger than myself but sharing some of my sensibility, was with a friend of hers in Baltimore one night. Don’t take this as gospel, but I think alcohol may have been involved. The girlfriend said something like, “I’m going to teach you how to text,” and she said, “No you’re not, I don’t want to know,” “Yes girl, have another drink, I’m going to teach you how to text. Who do you want to send a text to?” “I believe I’ll send a text to Albert.”

So it’s midnight here, 1 a.m. for them. I’m driving around the streets, and I hear my phone make a sound it’s never made before, some kind of alert beep. I take it out of my pocket, and the phone must say something like, “Incoming Text” or “Text Just Arrived” because I wouldn’t have recognized what the sound meant. I pull into the lot of a closed-down gas station to see what this is all about. I manage to hit the right little key that calls up her text, and I remember saying to myself, “Ah-hah! I’m going to teach myself to text her back.” I stayed for forty-five minutes at this closed gas station until I was able to send some snarky sentence or two back to her. So there, Lia! There was no turning back as you know. It’s how technology works. It colonizes. There are now like 800 people in my phone book, whether I want them there or not. Heck, Polly’s in there.

BUCKINGHAM

I run across this dichotomy in your work a lot. You’re so flexible, embracing change, and yet at the same time there’s this important stuff of the past. I come back to the quote from your newest book, Other Worlds, where you say, “I want to be unwilling.” You also very much embrace popular culture. Could you talk about your obsession with pop culture and how it resonates for our cultural identity?

GOLDBARTH

This is my phone. [Holds up his flip phone.] I’ve never touched a keypad that isn’t this type of keypad. If I were to text you the word “Moonlight,” I would have to tap down sixteen times: one for the M, then three for the O . . . So that’s what I’m dealing with. That’s my chosen world.

In the sense in which you’re using that line from my poem, I’m “unwilling” to use a more super-duper model.

About “pop culture knowledge” versus “serious knowledge” . . . Once when I was still living with my parents in a little condo, our upstairs neighbor, Ellie, came down and asked me to talk to her two young girls and convince them to go to college. They wanted to be juvenile delinquents or buskers, or ballerinas, or whatever. She wanted them to be “successful” and make a “good” living. I remember trying to convince her that you should want to know things from the pure delight of knowing things. There’s a great joy in that, and a pure joy. Purity of that kind is important. I still like to believe my writing is not a career but a calling. I’ve been paid to give readings, but I work hard to make my writing a calling as I think it was, say, for Keats, who never went on a reading circuit, who couldn’t have imagined such a thing.

In my head there’s not always a great deal of difference between popular culture knowledge and the knowledge of science, politics, serious cultural studies. It’s all what I called “the delight of knowing things.” I know there’s a difference between reading an Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novel and Foucault, I really do. But they’re both up there in my mind trying to have a voice in my life and be part of who and what I am.

Have any of you ever read The Reluctant Dragon, a children’s book by Kenneth Grahame, who did The Wind in the Willows? It’ll charm the socks off you. The epigraph to the book reads, “What the Boy chiefly dabbled in was natural history and fairy tales, and he just took them as they came, in a sandwichy sort of way, without making any distinctions; and really his course of reading strikes one as rather sensible.” To repeat a term I used earlier, it all gets “constellated” into a single connections-making sensibility. So long as one doesn’t fall down a QAnon rabbit hole or start truly believing the Earth is flat, all knowledge should provide a field to romp joyfully in. In any case, I use the Grahame statement as the epigraph to my book Arts & Sciences. It’s a banner I’m happy to wave.

KP KASZUBOWSKI

I just finished Pieces of Payne. The premise of the book is that you’re having seven drinks with a friend, a former student. That’s making me think of your story with the friend who learned how to text by texting you. I’m curious: what is fiction and what is not?

GOLDBARTH

I thought you were going to ask how often I go out for seven drinks with people. That can be for another interview. I’m not comfortable with the question of what’s “true” or “isn’t true.” I like to say, not just for myself but on behalf of all poets, it’s all true. I mean in the way that a real novel is as true as a piece of nonfiction or memoir, as true about human beings and the human experience. Perhaps even truer than some memoirs, in fact. Memoirs are also fictionalized—by the time it’s a readable, publishable piece of work, it’s all become fictionalized, massaged to some extent. Truthfully, although you can find many poems of mine that refer to a character called Albert, who maybe lives in Wichita, who maybe has a wife named Skyler, I don’t ask that any of my work be taken as autobiography.

There have always been lyric poems arriving here straight from the poet’s heart: think “Summer Is Icumen In.” But it’s easy to forget how drastically things changed with the relatively recent generation of “confessional poets” like Lowell and Sexton and Snodgrass, and with the Beats; easy to forget that for the longest time poetry was defined at least as typically by, say, Paradise Lost and “Endymion”: poems that in intent are true about the human condition, but the innards of which were—like a novel’s innards—based upon invention. I talk with people frequently who are not perplexed to read “Call me Ishmael” even while finding the name Herman Melville on the cover; and yet who are surprised or even offended if I suggest the possibility that Plath might have invented, have shaped events for some of her poems, in the interest of their greatest possible power or her own greatest psychological needs.

BROWN

I had a question not about autobiography but biography. I really like one of your lines, “A paleontologist could step inside and be surrounded by images of life but no life.” Whether it’s with a fictionalized idea of yourself or a character or people in the past, how do we, or how do you, like to see aspects of life that we can or can’t put into poetry? What can we portray in that way versus what just has to be lived?

GOLDBARTH

Well, poems ought to be able to include, and in fact do, anything they want to. It’s poetry, after all, and should be a bastion of pure creative freedom. If you can’t include anything you want or exclude anything you want in your own poem, something’s wrong.

This is going to be a reductive example as part of my answer, but: all of those things we’re calling essays right now, I originally tried to publish as poems. They felt like poems to me, and I think of myself as “a poet.” They happen to be in paragraph form since sometimes paragraphs are, for various reasons we could talk about, a more sensible or useful holding container for the kind of writing that includes characters, dialogue, research material. But in many ways, they didn’t feel any different to me than my poetry did. In fact, I thought it added interest and value to consider them as poems instead of essays. The longest piece of prose-looking writing I’ve ever done, perhaps even including my novel Pieces of Payne, I’d be willing to still think of as a poem. I would defend Moby Dick as a poem any day if you gave me time to think about it and make notes. But no publisher was willing to publish them as poems, in part because they believed they would sell better as books if they were essays, though (and I’ll sigh again) that’s never turned out to be the case.

For journal purposes, it was an easier (and editors might have seen it as a more forthright) way of including work in a table of contents or an end of the year index. My first book of essays was called A Sympathy of Souls published by Coffee House Press. At the time, Alan Kornblum was still alive, the founding editor. He was the one who accepted and edited the book. I remember quite clearly an exchange we had, a postal exchange, in which I kept trying to defend the book as a book of poetry and in which he finally said, and here I’m quoting many years down the line, “Albert, what do you want to shoot yourself in the foot for?” So it was published as a book of essays. Evidently, I don’t have a marketplace mentality. I guess I’m implying the simple idea that the wrestle of “real-self self” with “fictionalized self” can be played out even in decisions on determining genre . . . and that a writer’s claim to absolute authorial freedom can be laid out in that arena, too.

THURMOND

I like that idea—let the poem be what it wants to be, or a poem can be whatever you want it to be. I noticed how your long poems are sectioned throughout the collection. Some sections will be lyric poetry, some will be sections of prose, and then some even dialogue. The poems shift from one thing to another. Is that something you’ve always been experimenting with, or is that combination of form something you came into later?

GOLDBARTH

I’m not sure that after James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, I count as an experimentalist in any major way, but, yes, not all of my work consists of “standard” lineated lyric poems. Even some of my earliest pieces include the idea that a lyric poem can modulate into, or break and become, something that replicates the scholarship of archaeology or anthropology or quote overheard dialogue or newspaper coverage, or take on the form of a play script . . . and then move back into a more rhapsodic, lyric mode. That doesn’t seem strange to me. I like to think, at my most honorable, I’m not sitting around thinking, “Oh this’ll be attention-grabbing, this will show them what I can do, hey look I can do five modes here, take that,” but that instead it’s a holistic expression of the needs of that particular piece of writing. Pieces of Payne is about two-thirds endnotes. There’s the actual straight, novel-like narrative and then footnote-like numbers throughout. I don’t know how you read it, but the idea is you can read the pure narrative all on its own without going to the endnotes as their own cohesive entity, then read the endnotes, or you can flip back and forth and read the narrative and the notes in tandem, a kind of build-your-own-adventure book.

Anyway, I’m offering Pieces of Payne as a book-length example of the kind of “hybrid form” freedom we’ve been talking about. There’s a special issue of The Kenyon Review from Spring 1990 that I guest-edited devoted to what the editors called “Impure Form.” And the anthology American Hybrid edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John presents a very liberal understanding of what a “poem” can be.

CAROLINE CARPENTER

Would you be willing to talk about the immigration experience in your work and your family?

GOLDBARTH

Well, isn’t it a generally accepted idea that we’re all immigrants here, one way or another? Ever since the early hominids left the vicinity of Olduvai Gorge, isn’t everyone from immigrant stock? Even the very first Native Americans came over the land bridge from Asia (though, of course, without displacing anyone). So I don’t know that I have any particular insights. If you’ve read some of my work that deals with it, you would understand that I am a third-generation American Jew. There was a generation of European Jews who came over and wanted to do nothing but leave all of the misery behind and blend in and become good Americans. Parts of that same generation came over and held on to a kind of political fervor, became socialists, became Wobblies, were very politicized. Families broke apart over that divide. My father and mother just wanted to raise a happy safe family and blend in as much as possible, without abandoning a respect for Jewish tradition and ceremony. There were people on the other side, relatives who lived in Chicago where I grew up, who I never met. You see that divide in other cultures, too. I’ve heard stories similar to mine from people—the Mexican tradition, Iraqi tradition, on and on.

My parents were very lower to middle-class Chicago people, not sophisticated at all by many standards, certainly not college educated. They played poker with their friends. My mother read paperback mysteries. My father probably only read the newspaper, and that was it. I know they were naturally bright, but they were not bright in terms of cultural sophistication. At my father’s funeral, my sister and I were sitting in the first row at the synagogue service before we all reconvened at the cemetery. I look around and there are all these tubby Chicago Jews. They’re wearing suburban car coats they got on sale somewhere. They’d be eager to tell you what a bargain they got, too. That was their sensibility. They were straight from the nickel-bet poker table or an overheated kitchen. As I’m looking around, this couple about my father’s age walk in. They’re tall and thin and elegant. These people look like fashion models. He’s wearing a kind of butter-soft Italian hand-tailored leather jacket. She has long, straight, elegantly gray hair. Like Mary from “Peter, Paul, and Mary” in later life. They absolutely don’t belong there. I’ve never seen them before, but there they were at my father’s funeral. Later, I’m talking to my sister and I say, “Who were those people?” She said, “Oh, they’re from the other side of the family,” which is to say, the more politicized side. “He’s a painter,” she said, and I knew instinctively she did not mean a house painter. He was an actual “artistic painter.” When I was a little newbie poet in the family, I was given no idea there was an artist on the other side.

My father tried to keep up a certain sense of religiosity in the household. He also believed in earning a living and making a safe American life for his family. So, for instance, we would celebrate all the major Jewish holidays—we’d light candles, go through prayers, we had a real version of a real Passover seder—but if he needed to, he would work on a Saturday, which of course, Jews are not really supposed to do. It’s the Jewish Sabbath. He would only eat kosher meat and never mix meat and dairy, but he would go out and eat a limited number of foods in restaurants, which a truly Orthodox Jew would never do either. So he made his own, nuanced way through a combination of religiosity and accommodation to the world as it was presented to him.

BUCKINGHAM

I was reading “The Window Is an Almanac” from Who Gathered and Whispered Behind Me. I love Rosie, your grandmother in these pieces. I wouldn’t mind hearing more about your relationship with your grandparents because I like them as people already in your work. Also, there’s a lot of Chagall in there. I wondered about the role of art in your life and your work. You mention artists of light, Vermeer and Chagall.

GOLDBARTH

That poem, as much as I can remember it from a book published in 1981, mixes and matches the study of Chagall’s stained glass with more lyric memories or pseudo-memories of Rosie and my grandparents’ generation. When it ends, she’s dead already, but she kind of mystically appears in the light that might enter through a Chagall stained-glass window, almost as if she takes my hand and I walk together with her, and we converse. The poem takes its cue from Chagall: “Stained glass is easy. The same thing happens in a cathedral or a synagogue: a mystical thing passes through the glass.”

CARPENTER

I wanted to ask about the choice behind naming real life people in the poetry. Most contemporary poets I’ve read refrain from actually naming people who exist in real life. A lot of times, poets will just use initials. But you name them and give them their justified moment on the page. What, if any, power does it give the poem to name the person specifically?

GOLDBARTH

Contemporary poets don’t use “actual names”? Go figure. Maybe the world becomes increasingly litigious. Anyway, I’ll use a “real name” (as I would an invented name) if I think it’s in the poem’s best interest . . . and I’d like to think I still count as a contemporary poet.

I think there’s a power in names: we can see that in everything from tribal ritual, oaths, curses, vows, to lawsuits and rap battles. I try to access that power, although “My friend Doris” in a poem doesn’t necessarily mean in “real life” I have a friend named Doris. Hopefully, as I’ve already said, “the poem” is true to the human condition; but I may have been more interested in how the “d” ending “friend” and the “d” beginning “Doris” make an aural unit. As I said earlier, even what we receive as autobiography and memoir is normally shaped toward certain aesthetic ends. It’s like the difference perhaps between the past and history. The past is its own incomprehensible, unchangeable thing. History is what we make of it. And naming can bestow a poem with the power of authenticity.

In Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, a book length poem I still think is one of the high watermarks of poetry in his generation, there’s a moment when he refers to himself in the third person. He says something like, “Look, Kinnell,” and then he reads himself a small riot act or gives himself a small bit of hard advice. It anchored that moment in a particular kind of believability that it might not have had otherwise. A little later on, a very widely published poet of my generation, perhaps not on people’s radar screens much anymore, Greg Kuzma—he might have been for a while the most widely published poet of my generation in the literary magazines of the time—his younger brother died, I believe in a car accident, and you could tell they were close. You could tell it was a loving brotherly relationship and Kuzma, this man for whom poetry might have been the single most important thing in his life, starts a poem, kind of an elegy for the brother, by lamenting (and accusing), “Galway Kinnell, where were you when I needed you? Bill Merwin, the same.” It becomes a very heartbreaking poem about how even for somebody who loves poetry down to the innermost molecule of his being, there are times when the poetry fails you, even the poetry of some of its wisest practitioners. “Where was Diane Wakoski in her charity, / or Donald Justice of the gentle hand?” There’s Kinnell referring to himself as Kinnell, and a decade later there’s Greg Kuzma using Kinnell in his poem. Both poems profit from the name.

BUCKINGHAM

I was happy to see Robert Bly and Tony Hoagland mentioned in Other Worlds. This would have come out before Bly died. It was a nice surprise.

GOLDBARTH

They were both major, important voices. Bly simply because he was Bly. Absolutely unduplicatable. He just did so much and did some of it so well. The poems, the very thinking, of my generation are different and better for him. He has a poem called “The Buff-Chested Grouse” in one of his later books. The first line of that poem has always resonated with me, and I’ve always been looking for an excuse to use it as an epigraph to a book. It says, and I know I’m quoting word by word, “I have spent my whole life doing what I love.” I think if a poet can say that by the end of his life, it’s a beautiful self-benediction. And Hoagland was good. He was a big poet, an exemplar of how a seemingly casual free-verse voice can be strategized toward effectiveness; a man of deeply tender and complicated feelings; a sly humorist; and someone formidably honest in his dissections of the best and the worst in us. He was very honest about the way he saw human beings. I assume he’s been in the magazine in the past.

BUCKINGHAM

Yeah, I think so. Bly did an interview with us, not when I was here, but he’s among our interviewees

GOLDBARTH

You know, speaking of that . . . I’m not crazy about interviews. I’d love to hijack the questioning now, and talk about how I think interviews are absolutely beside the point. One of the reasons I finally talked myself into doing this was the great list of honorable names that had been part of Willow Springs interviews in the past. I know Bly was part of it long ago. I reread Joyce’s [Joyce Carol Oates] interview. So yes, I know that I’m a little part in a list of grand presences. Still, and with no offense meant to you and the amount of homework you did leading toward this moment, I’m left thinking: if a writer is worth his or her salt, hasn’t he already told me what he really wants to in his or her fiction, in his or her poems? Life is short. I’m going to be seventy-four on Monday. When I open an issue of Willow Springs, shouldn’t I be reading the literature itself, the Real Deal?

Here’s a dictum: If it was good enough for Keats, it’s good enough for me. I think Keats is a great poet, I think I’m a good reader of Keats’s work. (I have an essay I like very much that pairs Keats with Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory.) I’m sure he was not sitting around when he was writing “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and thinking, “Oh God, I only wish there was something like a reading series where I could belt this out loud for people and then they could ask me questions afterwards—let’s call it a Q & A session—and I could hit on somebody, and they would take me to dinner.” He thought the poem itself was enough, and for the right reader it is, and I think I’m a “right reader” for Keats. I will never obviously hear him read his poems. I’m sure she’s probably been taped, but I’ve never heard Toni Morrison read her fiction, and now I never will. I’ve never heard either of them give a “craft lecture.” The phrase would be meaningless to Keats. But I know how to read their work. The other stuff (cue in this very interview), really, is only diverting, is mere chatter, and is nobody’s business. And yet here I am, being interviewed—and in the face of your friendly interest, inveighing against interviews. (“I know! I’ll use the interview as a Trojan horse, to attack the enemy from inside the gates!”) I have no excuse for seeming so passive-aggressive, except that one can’t slam the door in the world’s face every time it knocks. Hopefully, one selects the right knocks to answer. Polly and the magazine seem like one of those “right knocks.”

Often, lately, there’s more time devoted to the Q & A at a poetry reading than to the work, the primacy, itself. I fight against that. A number of years ago, the magician David Copperfield performed Wichita. My wife and I went, an amazing show. There’s a moment where he lifts off from the stage and flies over the audience. Flies right overhead. You can see there are no wires; you can see there are no mirrors. He flies over the audience. What he doesn’t do is come out from behind the curtains afterwards and say, “Okay, a Q & A session now.” Audience member lifts hand: “Hey, that’s a great trick. I’m studying to be a magician. I’ve got some magic tricks in my back pocket I could show you before you leave. Could you tell us anything about how that trick was done or why you even thought to create it? What does flying mean to you?” None of that. He performed the primacy. It was awesome. He’s given the best of what he is, the best of what he has to offer. He’s devoted how many hours to that effect? Hundreds to get that down right. Maybe more than hundreds. It was like watching the voice come out of the burning bush. That’s all that’s required of him. Why would anybody want to spoil it by knowing how it’s done?

So: magic. I think I read other people’s work hoping for magic to strike. As an example, let me use a poet you may know of, Lucia Perillo. From Oregon. She was a wonderful, honorable writer, I reread her frequently, and, as a side note, she dealt with her MS in honorably courageous ways. Gone from us now, way too early. Now I’ll digress for a moment. I remember my eighth-grade English teacher Mrs. Hurd saying, in her little-old-gray-haired-itty-bitty-lady voice, “Anytime you open a book and read it, that writer lives again.” She said it as if it were the most important wisdom she had to impart. So Keats is alive for me. Toni Morrison is alive for me. And Lucia is alive for me through her books. It’s a mitzvah to revive her, for my reading mind to give her breath again. And when I read Lucia at her best, I don’t find myself most immediately thinking, “Oh, that was a clever move” or “I bet this woman voted the way I vote” (although such thoughts may also come, down the line). No, I’m thinking, “Jesusfuck, how did she do that? I couldn’t do that.” She’s a good enough poet to gift me with that amazement: not many are. And that’s the moment you read for and the moment you hope against hope might be in your own work on occasion. “How did he do that?” The magic. The flying.

If I could make Lucia alive again, I’d be happy to go out for drinks with her in that “seven-drinks place.” I’d love to talk about all sorts of things with her. You know, politics, sports, food, gossip, why are guys jerks, why can’t women find their keys in their own purse? I’d love to talk to her for hours, but I bet we would not ask one another “interview questions” at all. “How’d you do this?” “Why did you?” “Where’d you research?” “How much is real, how much is invented?” We would just be people for one another. The one time I did meet Lucia—she hosted a dinner for me at her home—that’s how it went. The one time I dinnered with Toni Morrison, we talked mainly about Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja comic books.

The poet Richard Siken, I think this was before he published his first and very highly regarded book, interviewed me for one of Poetry’s online thingamajiggies about my collection of vintage space toys. He seemed to have his own honest interest in understanding that world of collecting. Although you’ve heard me talk now about what I think of writer interviews, that interview was about the toys and the collector’s instinct. I didn’t mind that interview at all.

I’ve worked diligently all my life in hopes of making my poems meaningful—moving, useful—to other people, and building them solid, to last. They in fact may not be meaningful for given reader X or Y (okay, fair enough), and I don’t know that the culture will move them on into the future. Still, that’s the hope. You may hope that for your own writing, too. But this interview? . . . I don’t mean to insult either you or myself (our intentions are surely good) when I say that it’s ephemeral chat, a small momentary bubble drifting away on the 24-7 litbiz torrent.

KASZUBOWSKI

In this spirit of not asking you about craft then, I came across a poem where you said you were a psychic. Can you tell me about how that happened for you and what that is in your life?

GOLDBARTH

Oh, that’s right! I’ll try to recap what leads to that line in the poem. My wife, or the woman somebody calls his wife in the poem, goes to her beautician, a woman named Lateena. She’s doing the wife’s hair, and some special occasion is implied by the fact that my wife is getting her hair done. The beautician asks what special event is coming up and the wife answers, casually, “Oh, my husband’s giving a reading.” Lateena whaps her forehead in astonishment at this news, this amazing revelation, and says, “Oh! Your husband’s a psychic!”

That’s the comedic setup; the speaker goes on to say, “Oh yes I am.” And he means this not in the sense of a carnival psychic in a hokey turban and a starry robe, but in the sense that real writers—let’s bring Keats and Perillo and Morrison back for a sec, let’s throw in Jim Harrison—indeed know the human condition well enough (even if intuitively and not consciously) to make illuminating assumptions about us. With an inflated sense of self and a dash of humor, my poem risks adding its speaker to that company.

Sometimes I’ve said in conversation, “You know, there were poets before there were shrinks and therapists, before there were priests and ministers and rabbis, and there will be poets long after.” When I was teaching at the University of Texas in Austin, this must have been forty years ago, I had a student in my class, Karen Earle. She was very bright, a little older than the other students, very likable—I was really pleased she was in the course; she made great conversation. She was a psych major. I’m always particularly happy when I see people in workshops who are not English majors or creative writing majors, who happen to be good writers and love reading. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath came up in discussion. Students used to ask in those days, “Why do so many poets commit suicide?” to which I would often say, “Do you know how many plumbers commit suicide?” Anyway, this idea seems to be out there: why are so many poets in therapy? Karen, who planned on being a therapist, raised her hand and said, “I know there are a lot of poets who have gone to see therapists, but let me tell you: it would be a better world if more therapists went to see writers.” If we’re talking about “real writers,” and not just accumulators of CV fodder, I think that’s true. There are worse things many therapists could do than sit down and read a Jim Harrison book.

BUCKINGHAM

At the end of Other Worlds you say, “I’m lost, I don’t feel,” or the narrator says, “I’m lost, I don’t feel.” I appreciate the validation that it’s okay to be lost, it’s okay to scream, it’s okay to be unwilling; I think the book is very guiding for us.

GOLDBARTH

My friends tend to be the kinds of people who regret the disappearance, as I’ve already said, of real-world browsing in brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries—of willingly “getting lost” in the interests of discovering some unexpected treasure. I understand that one can also “get lost” in the online infinitude—in fact for many reasons the powers behind the internet are counting on that—but I still think the very terms “search engine” and “Google search” imply a desire for direction and limitation. Nicholas Carr’s important book The Glass Cage has a section on what disappears—not only attitudinally but in terms of actual neural capability—when we rely on GPS, and not on our brainpower guiding us through terrain, risking “lostness” and maybe allowing us to chance upon some astonishing new locale. Lostness itself is becoming lost.

But I’m riding my hobbyhorse there, when I know you meant interior, emotional lostness. Literature sometimes does validate that kind of free-floating. Hamlet, in his should-I-or-should-I-not overcomplexities, is lost inside himself. Of course (spoiler alert) things don’t turn out splendidly for him. Still, there’s something attractive in his thoughtfulness and maze-like cogitations; and the playwright who creates him also reminds us that in order to experience the marvels of Prospero’s island, you need to be lost to the tempest first—wrecked, even. Alice’s journey through Wonderland is a grand adventure, but she needs to be lost from the world, from the workaday world, to get there. So being lost can also mean being liberated from dailiness, from convention. In children’s literature, it’s often through something like a shipwreck—think Swiss Family Robinson—or through “a journey to the center of the Earth.” In the adult world, we sometimes just have to dig in our heels and close our eyes and ears. “Get lost,” merchants would annoyedly say to immigrant Jews seeking employment in the early twentieth century. Okay; and then some of them wound up creating Hollywood.

BUCKINGHAM

This goes back to the thing that I asked at the beginning, this unwillingness. I’m way too willing. For instance, there are all these hoops that you jump through that are not part of the art itself, like when you get your first book published and you’re asked to come up with lists of contacts and you’re spending like sixty hours on the computer setting up your own reading series. One question that went through my mind when I was thinking about this interview was, “How the hell does he do this?” That’s not, how do you do the tricks, but how is all of that in your head? It’s in your head because you don’t deal with the shit that you don’t have to deal with. You’re unwilling sometimes. I think that’s really admirable.

GOLDBARTH

Thanks, Polly. That unwillingness, let me warn everyone, doesn’t do much for sales figures and awards; so it’s heartening to hear someone value it. I’m guessing your students and your magazine staff live in a world predicated upon willingness. If your writing isn’t a small part of a larger project that includes grant proposals and reading series and tweeting and blogging and reading my tweeting and blogging, then you’re doing something wrong. But I would want to give you the opposite permission. Remember this moment. I’m giving you the opposite permission. It certainly won’t be bad for your writing. You should have the freedom to say, “Here’s my short story, here’s my sequence of poems. I just devoted the last six months to it. This is what I care to give to the world. Now, let’s go watch the World Series.” Some people, and these days many, do have an honest appetite for all of those extra-literary extensions of the creative act. If it’s an honest appetite to, let’s say, devote time and energy to marketing one’s work . . . well, fine. So be it. But that’s not who I am. I assume there are fewer people who read me now than might have read me twenty-five years ago. I’m not online. I’m not blogging. I’m not tweeting. Wichita isn’t Manhattan, NY. I’ve taken myself off the radar screen. (Plus, the whole ancient straight white male thing.) In a way, this doesn’t trouble me at all. That Robert Bly line: “I have spent my whole life doing what I love.” Why would I want to spend time doing things I love less at this point in my life?

BUCKINGHAM

In the interview you wrote for the Georgia Review, Walt Whitman asks you, “Do you think it’s easy to change?” I just finished reading Ovid, so Metamorphosis is in my head, change is in my head, that sense that everything is constantly changing, and yet there’s such a human resistance to it. It feels like we’re at a cataclysmic time in history; part of it has to do with technology and part of it has to do with COVID and part of it has to do with politics. How are you getting through it? And, also, I guess I’m looking for your helpline advice to help us get through the change. Pay by the minute.

GOLDBARTH

It will cost a lot per minute, for the “Covid-Ovid” answer.

I’m not, I don’t think, particularly mystical—although I love reading about flying saucer research and is there really a Nessie and can the dead actually call us up and leave messages on our clouds, stuff like that. But it does feel to many of my most intelligent friends, who are also not mystical, that something is happening now, a convergence of negative forces—COVID and TikTok and Trump Republicanism, QAnon, gun violence, Russian predation and trolling, race tragedy, the erosion of education, et cetera. The rise of terrorism, the death of the printed page, all of these things going on at once. In unfortunate ways, they reinforce one another. These things do seem to be in step, as if there is some power in this universe, some terrible negative zeitgeist at work that might boil out of the Earth in a foul black cloud like a CGI effect in a superhero movie.

Some change is for the good, though. You’re living in some overseas tyrannical regime and you’re being tracked by the authorities (as we all are, and certainly you are every second of your online lives) but there are also radical progressive groups keeping in contact with cell phones or constantly moving internet cafes, trying to fight against the tyranny, using that same technology that the despots do.

Online support groups provide positive enhancement for . . . well, you name it, animal shelters, abuse survivors, struggling bees and butterflies. I underwent three small surgeries last month, all easier and more efficient for being computer-driven robotic procedures. My parents survived World War II and the Depression, and I’ve made it through the Cold War, 1984, and the dreaded “millennium bug.” The foul black cloud may be there, but the sky is larger than any cloud.

As Ovid knows, it’s the nature of things to change. Uranium is always decaying; every second, its life is decaying out of itself into another life. That’s true for you and me, as well. Nothing’s going to be born unless something else dies, and its matter and energy recycle into the new thing that emerges. It’s the way the universe functions. The universe doesn't need us to function in the direction of change. Iron is always going to rust, whether we help it along or not.

Ideally, we can feel “at one” with that cycle. To the extent that (like anyone) I sometimes don’t feel that way, I can become Captain Unwilling: the universe is one of continual change, okay, but it doesn’t need my endorsement, my acquiescence. If I’m doing something, it is, not always but often, going to be to question the forward motion because that’s what some human beings need to be doing. The other stuff is going to happen no matter what. Let the universe take care of that on its own; I have postage stamps to buy.

Issue 89: A Conversation with Ada Limón

Issue 89

Found in Willow Springs 89

FEBRUARY 5TH, 2021

POLLY BUCKINGHAM, MIRIUM ARTEAGA, TORI THURMOND, SARAH KERSEY, & KYLE BEAM

A CONVERSATION WITH ADA LIMÓN

ada-B-W-high-rez-1-e1500674575139

Caption: https://hugohouse.org/events/word-works-ada-limon/

WEAVING NATURAL IMAGERY with memories of the past and moments of the present, Ada Limón’s work explores both gender and race while incorporating elements of the surreal. The Los Angeles Review describes her work as being filled with “discovery, and rediscovery of self and world.” Limón’s poems guide her reader through her speaker’s self-exploration and encourage them to find beauty in the unconventional—in the way a neighbor mows his farm, in an 8-pound female horse heart, in a lady groundhog eating a tomato.

Ada Limón is the author of The Carrying (2018), the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; Sharks in the Rivers (2010); Lucky Wreck (2006); and This Big Fake World (2006). Her new book, The Hurting Kind, is expected from Milkweed Editions in May of 2022. Limón was a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and she teaches remotely from Lexington, Kentucky, where she also hosts The Slowdown, a poetry-focused podcast.

Ada Limón agreed to meet with us over Zoom during the winter of 2020. Amid a year of isolation, our conversation surrounding the importance of underrepresented voices in literature, poetic process, and the evolution of poetic style provided a much-needed sense of togetherness. Limón was candid, encouraging, and realistically hopeful while she allowed us into her world for a few hours on a chilly afternoon.

 

TORI THURMOND

Something that I love about your collections is the variety of form. I read in a past interview of yours that breath is really important when writing poetry. Does the incorporation of breath in your poetry determine the form of each poem or is that a different process for you?

ADA LIMÓN

No, they’re completely aligned. Breath, for me, determines how the poem is read, where we want the reader to breathe, where we as the writer breathe. Allowing for the line breaks, caesuras in the middle of the line, stanza breaks, all of that, where the white space is, is always allowing for breath. In some ways, they operate like stage directions. Once I’ve actually completed the poem, when I hand it to a reader, they should be able to read it in a similar manner to how I’ve placed it on the page and how I intend it to be read.

MIRIUM ARTEAGA

In Lucky Wreck, there were a lot of shorter, haiku-like poems. How does breath operate in those?

LIMÓN

I love that you asked about Lucky Wreck. It’s coming up on its 15th anniversary. Which is crazy because I feel like I’m not that old, right? Those little poems were meant to be like Post-It notes within the book, notes to myself on some level, moments to stop, especially after a longer poem or maybe a more complex poem or a poem that had a heavy subject matter. They were like little breaths, little breaks throughout the book, a place to land after a longer journey—the psychological journey of a poem.

The last poem, “Thirteen Feral Cats,” which is all one poem in thirteen sections, needed to be the ending, the reason for the book. It’s almost backwards in some ways, like it’s built to have some lightness, some cleverness, some joy of living, but that last section confronts mortality in a larger way.

Lucky Wreck was the first manuscript I put together as a manuscript; I would type into one word document. I wrote each poem individually, but I started to see them as a collection right off the bat. I started putting them together, and then “Thirteen Feral Cats” came at the end, and it felt like, “Oh right, it’s supposed be this journey I’m working through, and then here is the reason. My stepmother was diagnosed with cancer. How do I live with this information? And how do these thirteen feral cats play into what it is to want something, to live and also want to tame something?”

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

Have you ordered your books since then in that way, or do you say, “I have enough. I’m going make a book”?

LIMÓN

It’s a combination. Bright Dead Things, Lucky Wreck and Sharks in the Rivers all started as one poem at a time. Then I start to see them talking to each other, and I start to lay them next to each other and  I think, “If this is a manuscript, what am I missing?” It felt like Lucky Wreck was actually missing some of that real straightforward conversation about death.

Now when I build a manuscript, I think, “Okay, if this is a book and these poems are connected, what are the parts I’m leaving out? What are the things I’m scared to say? What are the things I need to push myself into, whether it be scary or hard or maybe even joyful?” The hardest poem to write is a joyful poem or a contented poem. I mean, what does a contented poem look like? There are times when I start to put together a manuscript and I think, “Oh, this needs more contentment. I’m content. I have joy. I look to see what parts are missing, and then I start to fill in those gaps and create a book that has a sense of wholeness to it. I’ve never wanted my books to be just a collection of poems. They’ve always felt like they needed a heart, that they needed a core, and that there was some sort of, for lack of a better word, narrative arc for the reader.

SARAH KERSEY

You have that thirteen-part poem in Lucky Wreck, and you also have a fifteen-part poem in Sharks in the Rivers called “Fifteen Balls of Feathers.” How do you decide when to include section breaks in poems and when to use stanza breaks?

LIMÓN

In both of those poems, each section acts as if it’s an individual poem, but it’s going to be more kinetic and vibrant if it’s part of the whole. It’s sort of about whether or not it can actually exist outside of the poem. Whereas with a stanza break, there’s no question that it needs to be connected, and so it’s giving into the leaps the brain makes. The section breaks feel more like that sort of pinging, where the brain goes over here then over here, whereas the stanzas, there might be a little pause, but the brain is still on track.

BUCKINGHAM

You’ve talked a lot about silence in your poems, and we were talking earlier about those smaller poems with a lot of space around them. I thought of Lorca, who you mention in The Carrying. I wonder if you could speak to his influence.

LIMÓN

Yeah, Lorca has been a big influence on me, and one part of that is those leaps. That’s one thing Lorca has always been really wonderful at, trusting the reader to go with him when he goes into a new realm. It’s no wonder that Salvador Dalí and Federico Lorca were partners and friends, or whatever their relationship was. That giving into the reality has always been a big influence on my work. When I allow my brain to go, “Okay, this is just where it’s going,” instead of stopping myself and going, “This is too weird,” the Lorca mentor in my mind says, “Go with it. Go with it.” I don’t know if it’s always about the silence or the breath, but more about trusting the weirdness of the self. The weirdness of the self might lead you to some place that might not be factual, but it might be truthful.

KYLE BEAM

Could you speak to sectioning in your collections?

LIMÓN

With The Carrying, I started reading it as all one section. I was going through fertility treatments, but that wasn’t necessarily the entire thrust of the book. I needed there to be a place where you could close the door on that and talk about a poem like “A New National Anthem” or “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual.” Even though our emotional state as we’re writing any manuscript is going to color an entire manuscript, I still felt that there were moments where I wasn’t thinking about my own fertility. I needed those moments of breaking. Even though that was the big impulse for the book, I didn’t want it to be the only engine. Those sections became a safe place for me to not always talk about the exact thing that was troubling me.

In the first section of Bright Dead Things, I’m in Kentucky. Why am I here? Why am I writing? And then the second section is dealing with what came before, which was the death of my stepmother, and I probably would not have been in Kentucky if it wasn’t for that. Then the third section feels like a return to the past, all the things and all the people we carry with us. There’s moments of talking about the exes, talking about past loves. Who are we when we enter a new relationship? Do we bring all the people who have been in a relationship with us behind us? We do. Sometimes you notice it. Sometimes you wish you didn’t. Then the fourth section was like, “What is it to be in a relationship?” and having that complicated. It ends in love poems. They’re less than smooth; they’re a little distressed in a way that I hope is truthful. Once I saw the organization for that manuscript happening, I was like, “Oh, this is exactly what it means, what it needs to be.” Also, once I realized there were poems about what the ex would bring to the relationship, I thought, “That person’s going to need a poem,” and I allowed myself to explore that. Sometimes the sections allow me to do what I was talking about earlier, which is to give myself prompts to explore something that I haven’t thought about or maybe haven’t even thought was worthy of a poetic impulse until I’ve seen what’s already there.

KERSEY

You mentioned that the first section of Bright Dead Things is a lot about your move to Kentucky. I was wondering how place and physical space influence your poems and if you set out to write poems about Kentucky, or did those happen without intention?

LIMÓN

Landscape is really important in my work. If I were to say that there are themes in my work, in general, it would be the natural world and animals. Bright Dead Things is the first book that was written entirely outside of New York, so it does have a certain amount of greenness and the natural world, whereas with Sharks in the Rivers, there’s the natural world—the mention of the Stillaguamish, and my family lived in Stanwood, Washington—but, at the same time, the rivers and the animals felt almost metaphorical. In Bright Dead Things they become more real, partly because I was living among them. It’s a different experience to talk about a horse when you’re in a high-rise office in the middle of Times Square than it is to talk about a horse while you’re actually looking out the window at a horse.

There were two things that moving to Kentucky gave me that I didn’t have in New York. One was that greenness and that true interaction with the natural world and the second one was the time to interact with it. Because when you live in a big city, especially in New York, most of your time is spent working to pay to live in that city. I had huge jobs. I was the creative services director for Travel + Leisure Magazine, and I left my house at 7:30 a.m. and came home at 7:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. When I moved out and started freelancing, my relationship to nature changed because I was out in it almost daily. The landscape became much more of my home. It went away from metaphor and became real.

ARTEAGA

Do you think it’s necessary or beneficial for any poet or writer to put themselves into the natural world?

LIMÓN

If I were to say what is good for writers, I would say, no matter where you are, recognize the bioregional area you’re in. I actually think that you could live in Brooklyn and have an incredible relationship with trees and plants and animals. I don’t think I had that because I was so distant in terms of time, but if you have time to walk in the botanical gardens, to walk in the parks—all of those things—you can have an incredible relationship with it. It’s really important, as human beings, for all of us to be in nature. We can talk about ecopoetics or nature poetry, but it’s really important just to recognize the plants and animals that surround us and are part of our community, the non-human animals.

BUCKINGHAM

What I love about your work is that odd combination between the Spanish surrealist vein and that gritty I’m-gonna-take-control-of-things voice, which is also a more narrative strain. I noticed it in The Carrying. Would you speak to those two competing voices?

LIMÓN

There are times where I’m in control and there needs to be a talking back, like the time you insert yourself into the world and you almost have a dominance because you need to for survival. You need to for rebellion. You need to for resistance. And then there are times where you need to receive the world, sit back and actually soak it in. You need to let the world be bigger than you. What a gift to let it be bigger than you. And then there are times you think, “No, I’m going to stand against this, and I will be the hummingbird in the hurricane.”

Those two voices exist within myself, and they very much existed in Lorca’s work, too. When can we be just the human animal, soft and receptive and listening and quiet and let the world happen to us? And then when do we need to say, “No, I need to be in this world, and I need to be using my voice in order to honor people maybe who don’t have the voice”? Those two things are not just necessary for my own poetics, but I think they’re necessary for my humanity.

BUCKINGHAM

Your imagery seems so connected to the Spanish surrealists. Some contemporary poets I can think of, Alberto Ríos and Sharon Olds, also have that striking and wild imagery within a more narrative structure. I wonder if you would speak to imagery and how you see it, where it’s coming from, what writers influence you in terms of imagery.

LIMÓN

I think imagery is key to how poems are made. I don’t think they can be made successfully without it, but there’s also a level at which we edit our own imagery, often outside of our poetic life. We don’t generally talk about the way we’re creating metaphors, or seeing things, or describing something, because maybe how we see it is a little strange. Sharon Olds was my teacher at NYU. I never studied with Alberto Ríos, but I love his work. “Rabbits and Fire” is one of my favorite all time poems. There’s a permission granted with both of those poets to follow the weirdness. I mean, Sharon is really weird. And I also lean into that idiosyncratic self that sees things differently than other people.

THURMOND

All of the collection titles are just breathtaking. Sharks in the Rivers represents exploring the unexpected—you don’t expect there to be sharks in a river. And Bright Dead Things explores finding the beauty in unconventional places. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your process of selecting a title for each collection.

LIMÓN

I love that question. Anyone who works with me always says, “You love titles.” I love titling poems. Why would I want a poem called poem? I don’t want that. I love Frank O’Hara, I love Alan Dugan, I love people who can get away with it, but for me the title does work. It sums up or contains everything that’s in the book. I will continue to be obsessed with titles. This Big Fake World is like a novel in verse—so it’s almost all fiction. And in Lucky Wreck, the idea is, “I’m a disaster but I’m also so happy to be here.” Once I found that title, I could put together the rest of the collection—it was dealing with mortality and the recognition of death as well as joy, and those two things are consistently balanced across all five collections. For Sharks in the Rivers, there needed to be something scary underneath it all; that was the first time really dealing with where my stepmother’s cancer was going. There was a recognition of the fact that the world started to feel a little more haunted, and I felt less and less comfortable living in the city. There was a pull for me going into that book, like a pulsing dark forest of the mind. I retreated into that as much as I could while living in the city. In Bright Dead Things, almost all of the poems deal with the idea of containing living and dying in the same breath. Sharks in the Rivers is the mortality underneath it, and then Bright Dead Things is the idea that we’re both living and dying at the same time. The Carrying is similar; it’s what we carry to be in the world. I feel compelled to say that I’ve always liked hard k sounds; the only book that doesn’t have that is Bright Dead Things, but it still has this brightness. I love a spondee. I tend to like how these sonics hit.

ARTEAGA

Are titles something you start with, or are they something you finish a poem or a collection with?

LIMÓN

It happens both ways, but for the most part they come at the end. Sometimes I think, “What’s this poem doing?” If I give it this title, suddenly it all connects, and I realize what the poem is about. Sometimes I ask myself, “What is this poem trying to teach me, what is it trying to tell me?” As we write, we don’t always know where the poem is going. If we did, the poems would be terrible for the most part. We have to not have any idea what we’re writing. The title also comes from the question, what is working?

KERSEY

Earlier you mentioned how The Carrying occasionally focuses on fertility. I also noticed a lot of the expectation for women to have children. I was wondering if this expectation is as common in literary circles as it is in the rest of society?

LIMÓN

I think it is. I think you’d be surprised if a man wrote about being a father. People would be like, “Oh, the sensitivity, the bravery, the courage.” But then if women write about being a mother, it’s like, “Oh, it’s sentimental.” It’s very strange. It’s very gendered and, like most of all our culture, hetero-maniacal—not just heteronormative, but hetero-maniacal. There’s something about white-predominant culture that’s constantly saying, “Okay, once you have a partner. . . .” That was one of the things about Bright Dead Things I started with. The line “People were nicer to me once I was partnered” has always stuck with me as if I was a problem that had been fixed. Like, “Oh, you’re now more human than you were before when you were single.”

The literary culture is very much also the predominant culture. The one thing I will say is that you do find more of us who have chosen not to have kids. We’ve leaned into a child-free life. You’d probably find that across the board in creative cultures. We’re making something that fulfills us. There’s also a little bit of a selfishness to being an artist. We’re selfish with our time, and that’s important. There’s an enoughness that we feel. People will say, “Oh, I didn’t feel complete until I had a child,” but as artists, there’s a completeness when we create something that non-artists don’t experience.

ARTEAGA

In The Carrying there’s this focus on the body, but then going back to Lucky Wreck, the focus is on the inner self. Is there a distinction between the body and the self? Or are they codependent or independent of each other?

LIMÓN

I’m really glad you pointed that out to me because I don’t think I would have noticed that. The body is essential in The Carrying because I was also dealing with vertigo and chronic illness. It also might have had to do with fertility treatments. It felt like my pain levels were almost always sixes, sevens, and eights while I was writing the book. So, the body was not just with me, but it was with me in a painful way. And I was very aware of it all the time. It was hard not to write about it. Whereas when I wrote Lucky Wreck, I was younger. I didn’t have the chronic illness. I had scoliosis, but the pain levels were not anywhere near what they were when I was writing The Carrying. I love the fact that I was able to not consider the body as much in Lucky Wreck because there’s a youthfulness to it.

We think what we are is our minds or hearts, but if our bodies betray us in any way, if we are having a chronic illness or if we are not able in the way that we were once able, the body becomes a deeper consideration. The body and mind are absolutely connected, but I sometimes wish I could only think about the inner self. I was laughing just the other day at someone asking if I liked teaching on Zoom and I said, “Yes.” Partly because it’s freedom. As someone who has had vertigo and had trouble walking and literally trying to get around, I said, “It’s really nice not to have to worry about falling while getting to a classroom.” There’s a freedom in just entering a space without my body, and my body has become much more of a consideration as I’ve dealt with some severe health issues.

ARTEAGA

Earlier you mentioned that This Big Fake World was a collection more fictional than personal. Is that something you plan to return to?

LIMÓN

There are times I really like to write fiction, and I particularly like to do it in poems. About a year ago, I wrote a project of twenty poems for the Art for Justice Fund grant that was about what it was like to be in a relationship with an incarcerated person. It was all fictional. A lot of things were pulled from real life and real experiences, my own and others, and they’re all in a different perspective. The poems were gifts; it was really fun to get out of myself for a little while. They were heavy poems, but it also felt like, “How can I explore this in a real way?” It felt like the only way to do it was to speak from someone who was not the incarcerated person but the person who was left; I kept thinking about how we grieve people when they’re not gone but they’re caged. That felt like a really important project. But now I have these twenty poems that I adore, but I’m not sure if they’ll fit because my sixth manuscript is more like Bright Dead Things than The Carrying. It’s dealing much more with the self. And I wonder if I should put them in a section or if they’ll be in something else at some point.

BUCKINGHAM

We’d love to hear about the new book.

LIMÓN

I’m sure you guys totally relate to this: I don’t want it to be pandemic poems. I don’t mind if there are some, but I don’t want this to be my pandemic collection. I want it to have a sense of ongoingness and timelessness, though there are poems that deal with the pandemic and that deal with politics in the last four years. But it’s still quite a personal collection. There are a lot of animals in it; it feels like a very alive animal book. It’s slowly coming together, and I’m excited about it.

BEAM

A lot of your work is somewhat autobiographical. How much do you find yourself embellishing to fit the poem or the themes?

LIMÓN

I’m pretty factual. I stay close to what has happened in my own life, but I’ll always bow down to sound. If something sounds better for the musicality or muscularity of the line, I’ll always choose that sound whether it’s true or not. For the most part, the autobiographical thrust of the poem is true, but specifics will be changed, and almost always because of sound.

THURMOND

“How to Triumph Like a Girl” is one of my favorite poems in Bright Dead Things. It’s a new take on the phrase “fight like a girl.” Could you speak to the importance of writing about the female body and female characteristics in today’s society and what that means to you?

LIMÓN

I always say my two favorite F-words are forgiveness and feminism. I feel very drawn to writing feminist work because it’s important to me to recognize what it is to be in a gendered body in a society that privileges one gender. That poem came out of a moment where I was interested in what it was that made me root for those particular horses, what it was to feel a bond to a female animal, and how that felt different than the bond to a male animal. What is it that I’m connected with? I also think that when horses come into my work, they symbolize power. They’re enormous, beautiful beasts. They’re not like the dog or the cat. It wasn’t really about celebrating my own power, but about trying to get power. You write yourself into something you want to believe. I want that huge beating genius machine in my body. What would it be like to have an eight-pound heart?

ARTEAGA

In The Carrying, there is a reoccurrence of suppression of anger versus accepting anger. How do you showcase that in poems about race or gender or politics?

LIMÓN

It’s not only about how I balance it in my own writing, but how I balance it in my life. That’s partly the reason those poems have those moments that lift away from anger, because I don’t want to live there. I can live there, but I don’t want to. I know what anger does. I know what it does to my body. Anger can be useful—it has brought me to the page, rage has brought me to the page before, isolation and otherness have brought me to the page. But when I’m stepping away from the poems or when I’m ending the poems, I do need some sort of acceptance or recognition that I won’t let this eat me alive. That to me is also rebellion, like how Audre Lorde talks about self-care as a radical act. I sometimes write so I can say, “You stay here now, you get to stay on the page, and I get to go walk my dog and have a beautiful day.” I get to have that. I’m not going to live in a place where I’m feeling that fear and anger and torment all the time. It’s a lot about laying it down. I need to put it somewhere. I’ll put it in poems and explore it in poems so that I can also walk away from it.

BUCKINGHAM

I was thinking about “Dead Stars,” which embodies what you’re saying. It’s a political poem with that really nice moment where we “bargain for the safety of others.” How do you see politics in your poetry?

LIMÓN

Yeah, politics are there. You can’t separate them out. You can’t separate who I am out of my poems, and that includes my political beliefs. Who I’m writing for is part of my politics, who I feel seen by is part of my politics. “Dead Stars” is a political poem. It’s an eco-political poem. It’s asking, “What is it to not only use our bodies to bargain for others but also to speak to the animal and to speak to the trees?” There’s so much giving up, and sometimes I want to give up, too. Sometimes it’s all too much, and it’s all too hard.

There are so many topics, we almost become a circular firing squad with each other because we think, “Oh, well if you’re working on women’s rights, are you making sure to include trans rights? Are you making sure to include the intersectionality of race relations? And, if you’re talking about BIPOC, are you making sure that you’re talking about Latinx folks? Are you using the Latinx term or should we say Mexican—because I’m Mexican?” I’m very aware sometimes that it can be overwhelming, and I just want to be like, “No, I don’t want to think about it.” And yet, I’m always thinking about it.

I’m thinking about my ancestors, I’m thinking about my connection to the earth. My connection to the earth is a political act as is knowing where I come from, writing for ancestors who did not have a chance to write because they were crossing a border and living in a chicken coop and not having a chance to actually be an artist. I think, “Okay, I’m going to be an artist because my grandfather, who was very much an artist, didn’t have that opportunity.”

But I also don’t want to write a polemic. I don’t necessarily get a lot from poems that are just telling me what to do. I don’t have the answers. I have a lot of questions, even of myself. I interrogate myself: What can I do more of? When have I done enough service? When do I get to say no? When do I get to say, “I don’t have to be the loudest person in the room right now. Someone else can do that on my behalf.” All of those things are active in my work.

There’s also a leaning into beauty that I feel is very important, especially for writers of color. It’s important that we get to have beauty. We all read nature poems, but it’s primarily white men who write nature poems—or the poems that we know, at least. But then you look at Camille Dungy’s amazing anthology Black Nature, and you realize that’s actually not the case. It’s an incredible anthology, a game changer. It came out in 2009. It’s great also if you’re teaching. It blows people’s minds because it really is like, “Oh wait, I didn’t know how segregated even poems about trees were.” We’ve celebrated those nature poems by white men, but people of color have been writing about nature forever. It’s just that we haven’t read them. We haven’t celebrated them. We haven’t published them. We’re not aware of that legacy. It’s important politically to show that writers of color can write about a groundhog or a butterfly if one needs to do that, if one feels like that’s the pulsing energy within them. We do sometimes have an expectation of and on writers of color that they need to write about their identity—you need to write about your identity in order to be published. I find it a huge disservice to us as writers and as creative people because I didn’t sign up for anything limited. I want an endless opportunity to write about whatever I want to write about. I maintain that I will do that forever.

When we get that pressure from within and outside of our communities to write about certain topics, every part of me is all elbows. Within my community, there are people who are like, “Why do you say Latinx? Why don’t you say Mexican? Do you ever write about your ancestry? Do you ever write about your identity?” All my work is about my identity, but my identity may not be the identity you want me to write about. Of course, there’s also pressure from outside of my community which is like, “Oh, in order for us to sort of fill a quota in this magazine, we would like to have a poem that represents the Mexican-American experience in Lexington.” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t think that’s me actually. I would prefer to write about a bird. Or I’d write it like a love poem.” That to me is a huge permission I don’t feel like we’re always granted. I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. I want to write what I want to write.” Leaning in towards beauty feels like a political act.

ARTEAGA

We know that there’s this push for diversity in poetry, which has been historically very white and heterosexual, and I totally agree that there are negative side effects. But do you think there are more benefits to pushing diversity in the poetry world? Or do you think it comes with a cost for both the reader and the writer?

LIMÓN

I think one hundred percent pushing for diversity outweighs any of the pitfalls of it, but I just want to point out that there are pitfalls. If I were an editor of a magazine and I wanted to make sure that I had a diverse array of voices, I would also look for diverse range, like formally, but I would want to make sure that I was also asking, “Okay, am I publishing a Black man out of Detroit because he’s writing about guns in Detroit, and that’s my own stereotypical perception?” I feel like some of these editors don’t quite have the self-awareness to recognize that what they’re doing is not just diversifying their pages, but actually doubling down on their own stereotypes about who can write what. If you want to diversify—which we do, and it’s a huge, beautiful thing to push for diversity in the pages, a great, necessary thing—we need to have our poetic community look like America, but at the same time, we need to make sure that we’re also not perpetuating stereotypes about who can write what and allowing for people to write whatever they want. Like Wanda Coleman can write a poem about a bird, but then also can write a poem about identity. The poems should get praised equally, and that’s also the hard part. I love the more political work, the overt work about identity. I’m all on board for it. But I also want to make sure that young poets coming up see that they can do that work, but then they can also lean towards joy, even as a way of self-preservation. Doing that heavy lifting all the time is not always good for us. There are times where we need to protect ourselves and write about our friends and about some things that have actually gotten us through, to write about survival. I want to make sure that young writers of color coming up in that world know that the world is open to them and that they don’t have to fall into one category. They can write whatever they want.

KERSEY

I’m curious how writing during this time, during this pandemic, during this political era looks for you and how that differs from normal life.

LIMÓN

I miss life. This is what keeps coming out of my head: I miss life and there is also life. I really, really miss my family. For the most part, I get to see them often, and I’m very close to my mother and my stepfather and my father and his wife and my brothers. I haven’t been able to travel to see them, and that has been the hardest thing. I’ve also been feeling like, “How can a poem matter right now?” I really have to convince myself that it can. Some days I’m like, “It matters!” and I can really feel it, and then sometimes I’m like, “Does it?” Like, what would be more important? A vaccine. A new president. As artists, we’re always asking, “How do I write? How do I find my voice? How do I even allow myself to think that this counts for anything? That this matters?” That has increased a hundredfold during the pandemic. How can I even write when so many people are grieving? When we’ve lost so many people? I try to remember that writing is not just a connection to other people, but a connection to myself. During the pandemic, it’s become more of a discipline, like taking my dog for a walk. This is part of what I need to do to survive. It’s very easy to think, “What good am I doing? Shouldn’t I be volunteering? Shouldn’t I be doing something different?” But this is part of my survival technique, and I need to continue.

I’m also very interested in how our bodies carry grief. It’s important right now, and we’re not even talking about it. When I’m teaching, I’m always asking, “How are you? Are you okay? How’s your mental health? How are you doing?” Students are so used to it now, they’re just like, “Yeah, I’m fine. Just moving on.” And yet, I just read a study that our workday has increased by 48 minutes during the pandemic. Suddenly, people aren’t taking breaks. And then we’re asking, “Why are we so stressed?” Remember when it first started? It was like, “Just take your time, I know we’re going through so much.” And now everything is, “Can I have that ASAP?” It’s completely shifted. I don’t know if that’s just a North American thing, but it feels like we’re all distracting ourselves from grief with our work, and we’re also all trying to make money. We need money, but I’m worried that we’re not paying attention, we’re not grieving, we’re not leaving space to recognize what’s happening because it’s too much. We’ve lost our daily life and then we think, “Oh, who am I to complain that I can’t go get ice cream with my friends? Or I can’t whatever when someone is dying? How does my grief about what’s gone even matter?” I’m worried we’re not processing. The act of writing poems can help us heal. It can help us process some of the things we’re not saying in our Zoom conversations. It seems like this spring people are—for the lack of a better word—feeling harder. What we’re going to start to miss is our softness, the parts of us that can be vulnerable to the world. We put on masks to leave the house. We put on masks to be with each other. Everything now has doubled down on armor, and it’s hard for sensitive people. It’s hard on artists because we create from a vulnerable, soft place, but the world is requiring a much harder exoskeleton.

ARTEAGA

You mentioned in your interview with American Literary Review a few years ago that writing poems that reach outward and inward at the same time was the project of your life. Do you think this will always be important in your poetry?

LIMÓN

I think so, yeah. The idea is that I want to connect, but oftentimes, who I’m trying to connect with first is myself. It’s important to connect with the self and if the poem connects with anyone outside of that, that’s a gift. I don’t sit down thinking, “I’m going to write a poem that someone else will like.” I’m trying to write a poem that will help me or that will remind me about my own connection to the world.

KERSEY

So Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; you mentioned in a previous interview how you felt the pressure was on after it got so much attention. I was wondering if the popularity of this collection influenced your writing process for The Carrying, and how does the increased attention to your work affect your revision process for your poems now?

LIMÓN

Bright Dead Things has sold more copies than I could have imagined. I was really having a hard time trying to figure out what to write, how to write, and how to not consider the success of the book. I never considered success as part of poetry. So I thought, “I don’t want to consider it now because it’s never influenced me in any way.” You never sit down being like, “This poem’s going to make me some money.” It’s just not what we think. With The Carrying, I had to write poems for myself that I thought I might never publish. I got through it by not thinking about the audience, whereas normally I consider it. I pushed the audience away so that I could write as authentically as possible. Then, once I started to put the manuscript together, I let the audience in. It was big, surrendering to composing and creating poems without the expectation of even sending them out, maybe not even publishing them at all. I also had to let go of The Carrying’s success itself—maybe nothing would happen to it, maybe people wouldn’t like it. I just didn’t know. It’s a very different book than Bright Dead Things. They talk a lot to each other, but Bright Dead Things gets read a lot in undergraduate poetry workshops and The Carrying is a little more mature. It tends to get taught more in graduate school. I was really pleased that The Carrying had a nice reception. I was even told by a friend who loved The Carrying and thinks The Carrying is my best book, “I’m so sorry no one’s going to read this.” He’s like, “Your last book was so successful—usually after the success the follow-up isn’t really lauded or read as much.” So I was prepared for it to underperform, and that hasn’t happened, which is nice.

ARTEAGA

How do you feel knowing that there are hundreds of students out there reading your work versus how you feel about family members reading your work or friends?

LIMÓN

It’s super hard sometimes. We’re okay with the strangers. We could tell the strangers our deepest secrets. And then you see your aunt reading it. I don’t think I will ever get over that gut-wrenching fear of family members reading a book, or even just a poem. And I’m really lucky because I have a super supportive family who not only reads my work but praises it and comes to readings. When I was nominated for the National Book Award, they all showed up; we had a whole table. But still there are moments of, “Alright, how will they receive it?” I feel a need to do right by them: to write them well, to write them truthfully, but also, to honor them. That kind of obligation doesn’t come into play when you’re thinking about strangers reading your work.

BUCKINGHAM

Can you turn us on to any poets? Who are you loving right now?

LIMÓN

There are so many great books out right now. Victoria Chang’s Obit is fantastic. It’s heavy, but the way she starts with truth in every single poem and then ends with sort of a magical realism—something strange happens—it’s really marvelous. Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is fantastic and of course it won the Pulitzer Prize so maybe I don’t need to mention it. John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is really great work. I’m literally looking at my books now. Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz is phenomenal. Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood is a beautiful book. Eduardo C. Corral’s new book Guillotine is crushing, but wonderful. Jennifer L. Knox’s Crushing It—bizarrely surreal and funny and just very weird and wonderful. I’m currently reading and re-reading this book by Alejandra Pizarnik, she’s Argentinian, from Buenos Aires, and it’s phenomenal. It’s a new translation called Extracting the Stone of Madness.

THURMOND

Who was the poet that made you fall in love with poetry or your first favorite poet?

LIMÓN

It was kind of a combo, but it was one poem in particular that I was like, “What is this doing?” Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” I read it when I was fifteen. I had read poetry before that, but it felt like, “This is amazing.” Also Sharon Olds, “Connoisseuse of Slugs.” I was like, “What’s happening here, this kind of feels dirty.” Lucille Clifton was a huge influence on me, still is a huge influence; her collected is one of my favorite books. Pablo Neruda, even simply the love sonnets. When I was sixteen, I thought, “These are phenomenal.”

ARTEAGA

Do you think it’s important for people to explore international writers as much as, or even more than, American writers?

LIMÓN

Yeah, I mean we’re in a global conversation and all of these things are connected. I don’t think Merwin would be writing the way that Merwin was writing if he wasn’t translating these Spanish poets, and I don’t think Robert Bly would be writing the way he was writing if he wasn’t translating Lorca. There’s all of these conversations happening. We often get stuck in this idea that the father and mother of poetry are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I just don’t believe that. There’s more to it. We’re seeing a bigger recognition even with the wonderful Native poetry collections that have just come out, like the Joy Harjo book When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through, the brand new Native American Anthology from Norton. It’s fantastic. There are a lot of limitations to the western poetry traditions. When we talk about Neruda, who was before Neruda? Gabriela Mistral. And Mistral was phenomenal, but we don’t know a lot about her. She influenced Neruda, and yet he got all the credit. We kind of stop at the greats—and I love Whitman, I love Dickinson, it’s just that I feel like sometimes it’s a false dichotomy. There’s much more of an international influence. Poetry doesn’t really pay attention to borders. When we talk about great poets, we don’t talk about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico writing in the 1600s. We have limits, and I get that, but it’s a kind of exciting time where we can break some of those limits.

BUCKINGHAM

Where do you see your own work in that line of Spanish and Latin poets?

LIMÓN

It’s funny because in the last five or six years I’ve done a lot of traveling to South America and it really brought me an understanding of what I was doing, like, “Oh, I’ve been doing that because of Lorca or the Spanish poets,” or, “I’m interested in duende in a way that I don’t think I was ever taught to talk about.” Even in the sixth book I call on Mistral and Pizarnik and Borges, and it starts to feel like there’s more of an international legacy to the Spanish language poets that I don’t think I had because, honestly, I had to teach myself. I had to do that work myself. I’ve been lucky that I was able to travel to South America and then teach a class on Latin American poetry. Of course, any time you have to teach a class, you have to learn the stuff and explore it. It made me recognize how much Latin American poetry is in my own work.

BUCKINGHAM

What has the role of teaching been on your work and on you as a writer?

Limón

It’s interesting because, for the most part, I don’t teach that much; I’m still what I call a “rogue poet.” I quit my job in New York City in 2010 and have been primarily working from home as a freelancer—on the road as a poet since then, which is kind of crazy to me. I haven’t had a full-time job, which has been really good for my work, not always for my bank account but sometimes that’s okay, I took a risk. It’s been important to have a sense of freedom as an artist. I’ve been curious as to what it would be like to work full time for a university, and maybe someday, down the line, that’s something that would interest me more. Right now, I really love doing visiting positions. I teach for a low-residency program, so I get to teach for like two weeks. I do these visiting writer things, and I can bring a lot of energy. I can also maybe not get as bogged down by administration and the political work of a creative writing department. In some ways, I still am leaning towards my freedom.

Teaching also keeps me reading. I’m reading and I’m re-reading things, and I get excited—“Oh right, I really love this Marianne Moore poem.” Or you get to say these marvelous things like, “It turns out Elizabeth Bishop was amazing.” A lot of times, if we’re not teaching, we may not revisit things. You may not actually think about reading all of Neruda or all of Mistral, but if you’re teaching it you think, “I’m going to do it.” That’s the big gift, revisiting texts. Right now, I’m the Mohr visiting poet at Stanford and I’ve been loving it. Amazing undergraduates. And it feels like a deep conversation. Especially during this pandemic, it felt really nice to have a sense of community, to feel like we’re in this together as poets. But teaching hasn’t been my identity as a writer like it has for a lot of my friends. I like to do it and I enjoy it and I want to keep it that way. I feel like I always want to bring my best self to teaching, and I don’t know if that would be the case if I was doing it all the time.

ARTEAGA

What would you say to the young poet unsure about pursuing their talent in poetry, or writing in general? Because the United States is dominated by Hollywood and the music industry, and then all the other arts are pushed aside as useless. What would you say to that young writer in today’s world unsure of writing on a daily basis, unsure if it’s going to get anywhere?

LIMÓN

One of the things I would say is that it’s not about making a career, it’s about making a life. When you choose poetry, you’re choosing to pay deeper attention to the world, and you’re choosing really to lean into silence and beauty that could sustain you for the entire length of your years. It’s not about necessarily making an income. I’ve always joked that there’s that saying, “Find what you love and the money will follow.” And poetry, it’s like, “Find what you love and then also get another job that you don’t hate too much.” Poetry, for the most part, won’t make you a lot of money and maybe that’s a beautiful thing. Maybe that’s what keeps it pure. No one’s sitting down like, “I want to write myself a million-dollar poem.” Even Amanda Gorman—she wrote an incredible poem and did an amazing thing, an incredible performance, but she knows that this is a crazy lucky thing that’s happening. She’s very aware, “Okay, this is a moment and I’m going to write it and I’m going love it and enjoy it, but this is a moment.” If you really are interested in being an authentic artist, a lot of what you’re doing is focusing on what it is to create things, and the best joy you will ever have is when you’ve made something that you like, when you’ve created something that you actually recognize is good. The rest of that stuff, publication or recognition, if you keep at it, those things will come.

This is actually a really wonderful time to be a poet. I would encourage young poets to recognize that we’re at a time where we’re the most diverse—there are books coming out all the time, a plethora of books, from all over the world. Internationally, globally, poetry is having a little shine on it right now. It’s partly because the gatekeepers are different now. They’re like dams that got overflowed. But still, publications come slowly. They come far and few between. The thing you can rely on the most is creation itself. There’s a great quote from Richard Hugo: writing is a way of saying you have a chance in the world. I have a chance and the world has a chance and we have a chance together. That’s survival skills right there. I was listening to a Ten Percent Happier podcast. This wonderful Stanford professor, Jenny Odell, was talking about all the things people can do to recommit themselves to the world during the pandemic. She was talking about making time for silence, making time for recognizing the birds out the window, staring at trees. Every exercise, I was like, “Poets do that.” All the skills she was talking about for non-artists are what artists do all the time. You may not make a living out of poetry, but poetry can and will save your life.

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Patricia Goedicke

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Works in Willow Springs 32, 29, 26, and 18

August 20, 1998

Kendra Borgmann

A CONVERSATION WITH PATRICIA GOEDICKE

patty-goedicke

Photo Credit: Poets.org

PATRICIA GOEDICKE WROTE THIRTEEN BOOKS OF POETRY, including her final manuscript, The Baseball Field at Night, published by Lost Horse Press in 2008. Her numerous awards include a National Endowment for the Ans fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Prize. Goedicke was an accomplished and passionate downhill skier and her poems frequently celebrate both physical movement and, quite literally, cerebral movement. In Invisible Horses, for instance, she set out to capture "what it feels like to think." Though her books often have a thematic focus, such as The Trail that Turns on Itself, in which she decided to include all the narcissistic poems she could, her books' themes were not always "preordained."

This combination of cohesion and a resistance to preordainment is reflected in her long and complex thoughts, revealed both in her poems and our interview. She is known for her extended lines and extended metaphors. Goedicke can be tangential, gracefully returning to the beginning, to her starting point, but always, in returning, defining it more clearly. Peter Schjeldahl described her in The New York Times as having "discipline and the nerves of a racing driver. . .with enough vigor to rattle teacups in the next county." The prepositional beginnings of her lines set up an expectation that is often fulfilled many lines later, after a multitude of associative meanings have been added. And yet her poetry remains grounded and memorable, rather than wandering into abstraction. Patricia's poems "are a joy to read, and to reread. And reread," Jonathan Holden wrote. Erica Jong wrote that she is "a poet to read in silence, to read out loud, to reread and to learn from."

The following interview took place in the summer of 1998, at Goedicke's home in Missoula near the University of Montana campus, where she taught for 25 years. One year later, As Earth Begins to End was published by Copper Canyon Press and was declared by the American Library Association to be one of the top ten books of 2000. In 2006, at the age of 75, Patricia Goedicke died from pneumonia related to cancer. Among her notes regarding this interview, she wrote, "Please be sure to speak of my utter joy," and in fact her ruminations on death and deterioration are always balanced by an almost giddy celebration of pleasure and its importance, which she invites readers to share.

 

KENDRA BORGMANN

How has your relationship to poetry changed over the fifty years you've been writing?

PATRICIA GOEDICKE

I suppose the changes are much the usual. Nearly every one of my generation started off much more formally than we wound up. I wound up with more spaces in my mind, and spaces and indentations and movement over the page than I used to have, and I like that. At the same time I think I learned—I hope I've learned—to wander more, to leap more, and I don't really mean to leap only in the Robert Bly sense. I am able to write bigger poems now. At the same time, every time I start going in one direction I very soon decide I've got to change. Right now I'm thinking I must set formal limits. I don't mean in the sense of sonnets or villanelles or anything like that. But I must stretch out within rules because I feel I've become a little too loose, and I want to give myself more pressure, more emphasis on vocabulary, on language again. I've wanted to cover wide landscapes and I forget—I'm constantly telling my students this—that the best way to do that is to concentrate on the particular word. The word produces the landscapes of poetry, deepens them, gives them a perspective and a breadth and height and dimension that the landscapes don't have unless the words are tended to. I don't mean that William Carlos Williams doesn't have that. He goes for the moment, the gesture of the moment, and he says things with a lapidary skill from time to time in the midst of this free flow of change and attention. And I hope I can do that. But at the same time I want to slow things down a little. And I don't know whether that's not coming back a little bit to the beginning, when I wrote with great difficulty and it seemed to me in narrower spaces.

I know myself about as little as anyone does, so I can't really comment on my progress or lack of progress. I'm aware that my poetry has changed a lot, getting steadily, perhaps more abstract, more theme­ oriented. The last book I wrote, Invisible Horses, had a deliberately thematic orientation. I knew I was going to write a book about what it feels like to think. I did a great deal of research into microbiology and neurophysiology. I read enormously, but at the same time my father was a neurologist as well as a psychiatrist and I have always been aware of the connection between the body and the word, the body and the mind, feelings and ideas. That's been a constant in my attention. This was just a more microscopic emphasis on it.

My other books are thematically oriented but they weren't preordained. I didn't decide ahead of time except for one other, The Trail that Turns on Itself, in which I decided I was going to talk about narcissism, and chose all the narcissistic poems I could. And I had plenty of them, believe me, which produced a very gloomy book because I wasn't writing just self-absorbed, bitter, self-hating poems. Not that all narcissists hate themselves, but it's a function of that practice, I believe, and living any kind of a real life. Anyway, that book was a result of selection. I wasn't writing toward something, as was the case with Invisible Horses or the new book, As Earth Begins to End. A lot of these new poems have to do with earth in the sense of the earth of our minds, the mind considered as a complex of chemistry and biology and meditation, and the deterioration of the mind and the deterioration of the body that happens in age, the age of the individual organism, the age of plant, animal, human being, human couple in this case, and the whole world. We are a dying organism, the planet is, the earth we inhabit. On the other hand we are also an expanding organism. There's an attempt in my book to come to grips with that on various levels. Anyway, if these things are changes—the two most recent books, the last one and the one I'm projecting—they are a kind of outgrowth of concerns that have occupied me from the very beginning. I began by speaking of formal changes but there's some connection between formal and content—related changes too.

BORGMANN

When you're writing a poem, do you write a couplet, then make a space and write the next one?

GOEDICKE

Lots of times I do, but very often also I will break things into couplets and one-liners and tercets, too, because I'm very much aware of space. And enjambments, as my students will tell you, are terribly important to me. I think that's where the rhythm and music of poetry come from. And there is a silence that surrounds an image, just as negative space surrounds a sculpture. It's a silence in music which lends itself to a greater emphasis when you come to a single line suspended in space or in silence. Which is what happens to the single word, say, at the end of a line, and then the single word or phrase at the beginning of the next line; the kind of exchange of balance that goes on between those two lines is important to me.

An extension of that is the indentational poem I write more frequently now. The couplets, I think, were an early expression of the same feeling. It's not that I want to isolate things as much as give emphasis to different images and ideas in a dramatic flow. One of my beliefs is that a poem has got to move you, really move you in the old Emily Dickinson sense—if, when I read a poem, I feel the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end, then I know it's a poem. That's the kind of movement I believe a poem has to have; otherwise, it's a kind of wonderful entertainment, the difference between some Shakespeare and King Lear or Hamlet.

The aim is to control the presentation of the images and the sound so that the audience is moved, the readers feel what you want them to feel. And that's where the couplets come from, and where the line breaks come from, and where even the indentations come from. Because the movement is a matter of directing the attention visually, as well as verbally, as well as aurally, as well as kinetically. The breaking of lines and of spaces is what gets you in the gut as you read it or see it, as you feel it. I really believe what's been said somewhere, that indentations work as a kind of subordination, not only semantically but aurally and dramatically. It's a matter of graphics as well as aural. It never exists just on the page or in the head. It's a combination, I think, nowadays, in our age. Poetry used to only exist in the ear but now we have both.

BORGMANN

I've heard it said that the most interesting poetry today is being written by women. Do you think that's true?

GOEDICKE

I don't believe in generalizations, but I would say there are a lot of reasons it could be true. I don't want to say that it is true because I think there are men who more and more nowadays develop a feminine side. But I think that women are more aware of their bodies and therefore more aware of the darker, unconscious sides of life than men are. Also, women have lived for so long—have spent their lives—literately and intellectually adjusting themselves to the animus of the male, that it's easier for them to develop the intellectual side, the animus side, at the same time they're encouraging the feminine side, the anima side, and I think the best poetry is always a combination of yin and yang.

The movement of feminism has helped women to come to the fore and be less afraid of speaking of these things. They are able to be more whole about it than men are. For instance, women's erotic poetry, the poetry of love and passion in women tends to be much more powerful and profound than masculine poetry, where there is so much objectification that you can only identify with it on one level. Whereas with women very frequently you will have many different sides of the relationship, of the feeling of each of the individuals involved.

I was fascinated by a remark made in a New York Times book review recently, regarding Jonathan Lear's book, Open Minded, something about essays on the logic of the soul, whose lynchpin, according to the reviewer, is an essay in which Lear's trying to rehabilitate Freud from some of the wear and tear that he has suffered in the middle of this century—and he suggests that Freud, or rather psychoanalysis, is important not only for our individual freedom but for democracy. That's a remark that I couldn't agree with more, because it has co do with understanding. He says that the danger in a democracy is people going around not knowing themselves. If we believe that everything we do is for the good, and our rational selves are triumphing, then we are perfectly susceptible to the dark side, which is always lurking. If we don't realize that rationalizations not only seem to avoid the dark side but also tend to express it without our knowing it, we're not going to get anywhere when we try to do things together. I don't think he adds that. I do.

And I think that women's insistence on the particulars of emotional and intellectual context is not only what produces the famous networking—which is the ideal vision of what a democracy should be, where things are done by consensus and informed discussion—but also makes for an illumination of both the dark and light sides of human behavior. Which is what poetry does. Which is what the image does. The reason humor is so important in poetry, the pun is so important, is because no great image in poetry ever exists on the page. It has all dimensions to it, all the layerings of dark and light, and it's both smart and dumb, both enlightened and endarkened, and it moves us because of that.

If poetry does that it is always interesting to me, and interesting and moving to everyone, I think. And perhaps it is true, nowadays, for whatever reason, that it's easier for women poets to do that. But I know some men poets who can. I think right now off the top of my head of Forrest Gander, or the critic Cal Bedient whose first book came out of Wesleyan last year; Edward Kleinschmidt has poetry like that; I think Jim Tate does coo.

BORGMANN

Maybe I'm generalizing, but it tends to be women who write poems from the first person, whereas many male poets, I don't know if they're trying to make it more universal, but it seems they don't use "I"—

GOEDICKE

Perhaps it's easier. Women stand on their own high heels or bare feet and want to speak to the world as "I" see it. Perhaps men in business have to speak corporate speak more than they speak "I" speak. In fact, that's one of the things you learn as you go out and join the world of business and corporate procedures. As a woman at least, I have had to learn—in fact I never learned it successfully—I have co go into bureaucratese. I mustn't say in a meeting, "Well, I hate that idea!" I have to touch it in the passive voice and preferably without my "I" being visible or heard. But as I say that I'm hearing, "What is the difference between corporate speak and networking?" There is a very particular difference. I think the corporate is aiming to make a monolithic, single-voiced statement: what "we" will say. Whereas the kind of statement or world view or cultural image of the soul in this century—again going back to the review of Lear's book—would be many voices heard, individually speaking, and joining hands as they speak. And the voice of the minority is heard as well as the voice of the majority. One of my touchstones is Octavio Paz's book of essays The Other Voice, where he speaks for poetry as the other voice, the voice of the personal, the voice of the individual, the voice of the minority, the voice of the unconscious which is a minority in our world, because in order to be civilized, we have to suppress some of our rampant, instinctual behavior. But we mustn't suppress it entirely or we'll be waylaid and ambushed by it. That's one of the ways poetry works most importantly to me.

BORGMANN

What are some of your favorite essays about writing? Is it better to read about writing or read the writing itself?

GOEDICKE

Both, both, both, both. Sometimes, when I read a really wonderful poet criticizing another poet, I learn so much, because I get somebody else's eyes on it. When I read Helen Vendler or Seamus Heaney's marvelous appraisals of other poets, or when I read Randall Jarrell or Cal Bedient—and there are many others critics I'm slighting—that does help me a lot. Jonathan Holden is very interesting on poetry.

Donald Hall has written some brilliant things. There's one essay of his in Claims for Poetry, in which he posits a dark wood with a fire in the center of it, and around this fire are dancing the three archetypal figures of poetry. One is called Goatfoot, the other is called Twinbird, the third is called Milktongue. Goatfoot is prancing [Goedicke gets up and prances, saying, "Oh I can't do it. .. maybe... yes I can."] prancing around the fire in the iambic tromp; Goatfoot is rhythm and that powerful release. And then Milktongue is the baby at the mother's breast sucking words, sucking the world into its mouth, thinking, "I am the world and everything comes in through the mouth, and it's mine, and my unconscious is the consciousness of the world." It's sounds, the aural, speech part of poetry. And Twinbird comes from, I think, the baby is sitting there making patterns with the hands, making twin birds as rhyme comes together and rhythm come together, and those three things, the rhythm, the overwhelming instinctual force, and the melos of the words themselves are the three. They all come together in another wonderful quote from him, "the dark mouth of the vowel through which the image tells its ancient runes." That connects the mouthing of the instincts, the unconscious feeding and greed of the sound pleasure of language with the riddles that are enfolded and then unfolded from the image; they are layered in the images that poetry makes.

BORGMANN

In your essay "Entering the Garden," you write, "Still the dream of somehow or other becoming able to accept the eventual dispersal of ourselves into who-knows-what mores of energy is essential, not only to our political well-being but to the very survival of 'planet earth' itself." Does this pertain to As Earth Begins to End?

GOEDICKE

That's what I'm aiming for. The more we realize that the inevitable is the loss of the boundaries between ourselves and the world, the less it seems we'll cling to the boundaries that prevent us, that say "I can't give this up, I have to have this food, these animals, this place, this space. I don't know how to compromise." And yet if we realize the compromise is coming no matter what, the dissolution of the self, that will help a little. I don't think, and I have very little hope, that we can save anything, but at least perhaps we can go more gently into the night.

BORGMANN

I see that as your brand of optimism. There is something always hopeful in your poems.

GOEDICKE

Well, who's to say? One of the things I was thinking about as I wrote Invisible Horses was consciousness. Where does it begin and end? We have a very narrow view of human consciousness. Animals have a kind of consciousness and plants have a kind of consciousness and it's pretty humanly egotistical to say, along with the Bible, that we are the stewards of everybody else's consciousnesses, but maybe we're not. Maybe it isn't so bad. I don't know if that's optimism. It frightens me to think of becoming nothing—nothing in my sense, but who knows what the other sense is? We don't know what is coming. If that's optimism, I guess it makes life a little more bearable because you don't know for certain. There are two things that are true of beginning students. They don't know how bad they are, and they don't know how good they are. The same is true of this. You don't know what's coming. It all seems so trite and unmoving when it's not a poem.

BORGMANN

Who are the great poets today?

GOEDICKE

My mind pulls an absolute blank on who is great. I don't want to choose. I know poets that interest me tremendously. I'm always fascinated by Jorie Graham. I liked The End of Beauty very much. And a couple of the books after that. I like. . .[Laughs.]. . .oh. . .I don't want to make these distinctions. I resist it because I am indisposed, I suppose habitually, to making judgments. I used to think that was a fault and I still do sometimes when I hear a really scathing critic, usually a young critic or a person with a lot of judgment, speak. In my thinking, an ideal community would be one where every view is expressed, every person's particular, different take on the world is visible, is expressed to everyone else, and the voice would be the sound of all those different voices. That's not choosing what's the best. Ir's choosing where the most agreement is. So if people ask me who my favorite poet is, I list a whole lot of poets, and that's partly what is happening here, too.

At the same time, I'm always stimulated and pleased to be challenged by a mind which says "Oh! You can't like so-and-so because of such-and­ such." A lot of the time, because I have abdicated this judgmental quality, I find myself—and maybe this is a function of the optimism—going too far in the direction of generosity. That's too nice a word for it. I let people get away with things. In talking to critics, such as that person throwing his weight around or being crisp and good about it, I like it because it makes me wake up, and makes me start to do that kind of thinking. Which of course you have to do in your own writing, when you're rewriting. But to begin with seeing and experiencing the world you really have to do that Keatsian negative capability. Otherwise you won't find out anything new and you won't see anything real, anything more than anybody else sees. Keats describes Shakespeare as being a person who is able to encompass all worlds without judging. He can inhabit, without having to decide—Oh, Richard was a bad man. He is able to see Richard in all of his various aspects, and present him to the world, because he has not decided, I don't like him. He has not insisted on his own positive input. He negates himself, is the way I would put it. The scholars would probably be outraged by a definition like that.

He also says—and it's been a long, long time since I read Keats—"You should see the sparrow scratching on the pebbles outside. You must be the sparrow scratching." I never thought of it before, but there is a relationship between Keats and the via negative that is an apprehension which is not prehensile, it's not aggrandizing, but it is, to go from the sublime to the ridiculous word, "wait-and-see." And let it happen.

BORGMANN

Is it true, as Harold Bloom has stated, that the best poetry was written by Shakespeare and that the general quality of poetry has been steadily decreasing since the Elizabethan age?

GOEDICKE

Traditionally, we say that we're in a world where form has broken down, a world of chaos, where all forms have broken up—institutional forms, artistic forms, music, painting, poetry, the novel—everything has broken apart, as is happening to us in terms of our science. We are breaking things down more and more into particles. Even the universe is breaking down into discrete particles. We are seeing things in that sense. That means we can't hold on to the shape of a Shakespearian play or sonnet.

But that doesn't mean that we lose Shakespeare anymore than we lose Bach. We just hear him with different ears, feel him with different insights, think about him with different thoughts. Historically, whatever art form appears is usually initially called formless. Then our ears adjust to it as in music, as in the new poetry. We have postmodernism now, so what do we have after postmodernism? We're adjusting constantly. Although there are giants like Shakespeare, I don't think it's fair to say everything has deteriorated since Shakespeare. There will never be another Shakespeare who can encompass that much. But we don't know how we're going to hear or understand some of the people who are writing today. We've already learned to hear many of them in a different way in my lifetime. When I stopped going to school, the end of my poetry books was devoted to Elliot and Pound, and many of my teachers were just throwing up their hands over Elliot and saying, "Well, we can't understand him; this is a breakdown of form."

BORGMANN

Do you dream vividly?

GOEDICKE

I don't know that I dream more vividly than anybody else, but I do dream. I do not write about my dreams, because I think dreams conceal—either deliberately or just by their nature or the constitution of the dreaming mind. And it's the business of poetry to reveal. So when I'm faced with a dream that has been moving and exciting and interesting to me, I consider it. I'll use parts of the dream, but I wouldn't ever just recapitulate the dream. I try to understand what the dream is saying. I very often use the word "dream" when I mean "poem," and "poem" when I mean "dream." A poet loose enough in a dream sort of state—not really dreaming—allowing the free play of the unconscious will come up with words and images that cause her to say, "Where did that come from?" the same as a dream will. And a poet's response to that would not be as an interpreter of a dream, analyzing it, at least not right now, but instead to move it forward, to push, to play with it more, to do a kind of waking dreaming with it. At the same time, trying to use that other resource we have, language, to express it. Once you do that, the language begins to tell you other things, because dreams, like poems, are full of puns. But the poem is a far more conscious process, a conscious release of the unconscious. That's why it's so hard, because it's so easy to will a poem. You say, "Ah! I know what that's about." And then you're lost. You give a quick, glib ending, and you set the poem so it won't move again. Whereas it may have a life that you haven't discovered yet.

BORGMANN

Have you ever had something bubble up from your unconsciousness where your consciousness said, "No, I can't write about that," either because you might hurt someone else or yourself?

GOEDICKE

Oh yes. I used to just make sure the person didn't recognize himself or herself. And if the poem were published, I'd be sure it was published in a magazine the person would never see. But sometimes those poems are the best. They are the ones, for me anyway, that are easiest and loosest, and I have the most fun with them.

It's no accident that it's easier to write a curse poem than a praise poem. I mean a good curse poem. You're letting out stuff that's original, because you've been suppressing it. Suppression is the enemy of originality, of course, and of honesty. We're busy being polite and civil and we don't let things out. I think poetry is based on both praise and cursing. . .swearing. What's the opposite of praise? Denigration? Hatred? I don't know. But misery, joy, those things are both there. It's hardest to talk about the praise and the good things but you have to be able to. If you are all sunshine and joy no one is going to believe you, because we know it's not that way. But if you bring in the dark part of it, that makes it whole. Usually.

One of the things that has always interested me is how much many of the philosophers I've known have been drawn to poetry. And vice versa, how many poets are drawn to philosophy. I think it's intimately connected with, I'd say "ground and sky" or "earth and sky," but also body and mind. I do believe if you concentrate on one aspect, you are fascinated by a lack of the other, and you want to go to it. And since both poets and philosophers are after wholeness, you tend to keep an eye out for the other, and of course both are yearning inevitably for some kind of—not an absolute—but an answer.

I'll tell you a secret about Invisible Horses—I'm always waiting for some smart-ass person to say, "Oh, we know what those horses are in the burning stable. They're just the shadows in Plato's cave. We know that." And they are, in a way, because, it seems to me, now here we are back on the dark side and the shadow, but the shadow and the substance—we're always searching for what is substance and what is shadow. What's particular and what's general. How to make the particular general and the general particular.

BORGMANN

How do you write what's in your heart when it's painful and you want to avoid it?

GOEDICKE

Why is it easier to write about sad things than happy things? But here you're saying some things are too sad to write about. And in a way, they are. When Leonard and I first met—in the MacDowell Colony—he asked what my favorite line of poetry was, and I said, "Brightness falls from the air," from "Litany in a Time of Plague," by Thomas Nashe. The brightness falls and yet fall is bright, too. And there's always poignancy and beauty because it will not last, because it's falling, it's transient, and your awareness of it, that's the shadow of the sunlight. It's hard to write about because of that pain and yet it's important, it's wonderful, because in writing it, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can say, "Brightness falls from the air." And there is the brightness. And there it is falling.

I can't tell you the number of times that something beautiful and wonderful has struck me and brought me to tears, or almost to tears, because of the awareness that it's not all. On the other hand, there are moments, as Jocelyn Siler said to me, that are "moments the devil can't get at." They're not necessarily conscious moments, but sudden feelings, little bits of bliss that float across your landscape or emotional interior. They're not really expressible but they are there. The fact of their inexpressibility is what encapsulates them from the devil.

When I had cancer, the first breast cancer, and even the last one, I wanted to write about it right away. But the nature of things made it impossible. Then gradually I decided I shouldn't, and it was fine. When I wanted to write, I could. In fact, there was a period in my life when my friends used to keep saying, "Are you all right?" It had been ages, and I was cured, but they were still worried, because I kept writing about it. It's that emotion recollected in tranquility of Wordsworth. When there's some great grief that occurs, it's a truism, but I think true to say that you mustn't write about it too soon. There is some pain that takes a while to deal with. It's frightening and so you need to wait to let it come out. But part of the way out of pain, in a way, is the shaping of it, and once you pour it out and then begin to shape it, you begin to feel some kind of control, some kind of intimacy with it which is not painful. I used to have a philosopher aesthetician teacher who talked about the "savage shriek of ecstasy." He said we are savages. We go up to a sunset and we want to express it. We feel this glorious thing, and what do we say? "Wow, gee, come look, isn't this great?" Or we feel a tremendous emotion toward someone, and we say, "Oh! I love you." Or we artlessly say in pain, "Ow, ow, ow, ow." But once you begin to put it into words, and you have any pleasure in the words, and any pleasure in the shape you're beginning to make, then you begin to be able to stand it at the same time you begin to be able to express it. The reason you can't do it when it's so close is because you're too busy saying, "Ow, ow, ow." I think that's how it works.

Issue 52: A Conversation with Phillip Lopate

issue52

Found in Willow Springs 52

April 25, 2003

Sarah Coomber, Bridget Hildreth, and Travis Manning

A CONVERSATION WITH PHILLIP LOPATE

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Photo Credit: Harpers Magazine

Widely regarded as one of America’s foremost living essayists, Phillip Lopate’s publications include three books of personal essays (Bachelor-hood, Against Joie de Vivre, and Portrait of My Body), two poetry collections, and other works on teaching and on film criticism. He is a frequent contributor to such periodicals as Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and The New York Times Book Review, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honors. Phillip Lopate is also known as a first-rate teacher of nonfiction writing; currently he holds the Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches for the MFA program at Bennington College. He visits with interviewers Sarah Coomber, Bridgit Hildreth, and Travis Manning on a recent visit to Spokane.

 

HILDRETH

We are interested in your view of the state of creative nonfiction. What styles of literature are on their way out? What styles are on their way in? I know John Keeble, Eastern Washington University creative writing professor, hates the title “creative nonfiction,” so if you want to address personal narrative instead. . .

LOPATE

I think I prefer the term “literary nonfiction.” Creativity is such a strange thing, as though people would intentionally write uncreatively. It’s a little bit like Robert Frost’s line about the poet: “You don’t call yourself a poet, others call you a poet.” You don’t call yourself a “creative nonfiction writer.”

Certainly I think that the personal narrative has grown a lot in the last ten years. Part of what happened is that with composition, which is the service workhorse of English departments in the university, and the course that everybody has to take, freshman composition, you get to turn more toward personal narrative in the last fifteen years. It just started in places like Stanford with the Voice Project (a program that brought professional writers to campus to teach freshman). There were people in the field who were saying the best way to turn students on to writing is to get them to tell their own stories and work from their experience. Before that it had mostly been taught as a kind of legal-brief way of summoning arguments, rhetoric and persuasion. I still think that is one of the dominant models, and deserves to be, but there began to be more of them for the personal narrative.

Then of course the vogue of the new memoir had a lot to do with it. And the textbooks that were adopted, not just mine (The Art of the Personal Essay, Anchor Books, 1994), which is really not a textbook dealing with the personal essay but which has had a long, popular run. But the real mammoth-selling textbooks began to use a lot of personal narratives, and they also covered the spectrum in terms of multicultural authors. So you started getting these kind of contemporary classics, like Richard Rodriguez for instance, which I think is excellent writing, but basically you have one of every thing: Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American writer, Sonja Sanchez , Sandra Cisneros and so on and so forth. This became a way to placate political correctness.

HILDRETH

In the education field, textbooks were, especially following Birkets book, The Gutenberg Elegies, being forced into broadening their spectrum to become more inclusive.

LOPATE

One of the curious things that happened was that there was this market-driven emphasis on the contemporary. I think the reason why my Art of the Personal Essay has continued to have a niche is that I insisted on starting with the ancients and moving to the present. A lot of teachers wanted to be able to teach not just the contemporary. I think it is really strange to teach only the contemporary, to ignore the whole tradition. This is an old tradition. This is not something that is a recent vogue. As long as there have been writers, writers have been telling their personal stories. A writer has only his or her own experience to work with, however they may transform it. They could make it science fiction but they are still working with the motions that they observed themselves. Many times it’s not science fiction, it’s much closer than that. There have always been autobiographical novels like Martin Eden by Jack London or The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler or Red Burn by Herman Melville, because people want to turn their experience into stories.

Of course, you go back to Cicero and St. Augustine, the personal witness, the attempt to develop a voice that’s flexible and intelligent and sympathetic on the page. This is one of the grand traditions. I am particularly insistent on linking up with that, with that past. My only view is that personal essays, if not all personal narratives constitute a kind of conversation and that we are talking to our predecessors and ancestors as much as we are talking to the contemporary audience. Many writers will tell you that.

COOMBER

You mentioned the new memoir, is that supplanting something else? Is there anything that is getting thrown to the wayside?

LOPATE

I do think that the new memoir has undergone a kind of mutation from the old autobiography, or what they call “memoirs,” plural. It used to be that you sat down to write your life, usually when you had lived a large part of it. There were the memoirs of old generals and actresses whose stardom derived from their popularity as public figures or as politicians, rather than because they were writers. The writer’s memoirs, which is a kind of separate form, also tended to look at the rhythms and the rises and falls of a life, so the subject matter became development. In the new memoir there tended to be a shrinkage of chronology, so that thirty-year-olds were writing about their experience up to age 18 or something, and it became much more a form about the crucible of adolescence. And of course even if they wrote into their forties there was a tendency to pitch the memoir toward a single afternoon talk-show theme, like physical disability, sexual abuse, incest, alcoholism, addiction--and this was a reductive approach which also tended to emphasize the autobiographical protagonist as a victim who got over this problem. You see, if you are writing a long autobiography there is no one problem you get over. It’s life. You have to keep living it. You may start off with some difficulty, but you have to keep going even after you succeed.

It’s a curiosity of many autobiographies that often the first third is better than the rest. For instance, if you look at a book like History of My Life by Charlie Chaplin, his period of being knocked from pillar to post as a kid and trying to develop a sense of self and professional self and making forays into early film-making, all that is quite exciting. All that is the construction of a self. Once he became a big star it tended to be, “Then I had lunch with the Duke of Windsor and then I saw Lady So and So afterwards,” and it becomes much more boring, it becomes now a period of being with other wildly successful people. The major issue has been solved.

The new memoir has tended to focus on one issue and also the new memoir has tended to bring in a lot of techniques from fiction and poetry. This probably has to do with the genesis of nonfiction in MFA programs. In the beginning God created fiction and poetry (laughter).

MANNING

And drama somewhere back there.

LOPATE

Somewhere drama. In fact, now there is a magazine called The Fourth Genre, dedicated to essays. Which is a nice magazine and the title is wittingly saying: “We’re the last ones.” Nonfiction was the Hagar and Ishmael of the literary biblical family.

A lot of writers who began in poetry or fiction began by writing memoirs. They found that they could actually get a book of memoirs signed up more easily. Mary Carr, or Lucy Greely both began in poetry, for instance, and took their MFA degrees in poetry. What I have found is that the prose of the new memoir is affected by the techniques of fiction and poetry. There tends to be a greater emphasis on lyrical language, and some of the invidious notions of “show, don’t tell” have even percolated into the nonfiction sense of the craft of nonfiction. “Show, don’t tell,” it seems to me, is far too broad a rule even in fiction since a lot of great eighteenth, or nineteenth-century fiction certainly does show and tell. It’s a crude formulation, which has a greater truth in it. Of course if the teller has a wonderfully modulated voice and mind, I can see it in any method of telling. When Stendhal is on a roll, who cares if he’s showing or telling? I don’t want to fight that battle. What I want to say is that this interdiction against telling began to percolate into the craft of contemporary nonfiction, so that in workshops that I teach I’ll often hear students say, “Well I think you should do this as scenes,” and I’ll think, well, maybe yes, maybe no. The issue is not to do it as scenes or not as scenes. The issue is to bring a lively understanding or intelligence to voice in the material.

My idea, and it’s not just my idea--it’s the cornerstone of Vivian Gornecks’ book The Situation and the Story: It’s not so important what the experience was you want to tell, it’s what you make of the experience. People think they are entitled to tell the story because they have suffered. Emily Dickinson who would sit in her room and hardly go out and have a universe at her disposal. I remember saying to this class in Minneapolis: “It’s not enough to have cancer and have been sexually abused as a child. You’ve got to make it interesting on the page.” There is nothing intrinsically interesting about any material. If your mother was a prostitute, and your father was a drug pusher, that might just play as tawdry. It’s really what you do with the material.

So that puts a premium on mind and style. I do think that the personal narrative taps more directly into powers of thinking and reasoning than, let’s say, fiction and poetry. Or to put it another way, the unconscious plays less of a role. For instance, in fiction it may be important to develop a narrative where unconscious symbols resonate inside the narrative. That may not be important at all in a personal essay. I think that part of the resistance the fledgling autobiographical writers have to working in the form, is they use it kind of as a resistance to the mind. Because in our culture, the heart is privileged over the mind.

For instance, I was teaching a workshop and there was a presentation by one student who had earlier in the term written a very good narrative about her early years. In fact, her mother was a prostitute and drug addict, but she had done a brilliant job in making it interesting and showing how she thinks about it now as well as how she experienced it then. The second presentation she made was filled with a kind of confusion and myopia, because she wanted to get into the immediate sensation of what it felt like to be so confused. I said: “This will not do,” and several students defended her and said it recaptured her vulnerability.

I thought this was a misunderstanding of form. That you don’t just replicate the vulnerability and confusion, that you have an obligation to access as much understanding and wisdom that you can. That used to be the attraction of the personal essay and autobiographical narrative: that you were in the presence of somebody who was not dumbing down, who was trying to share as much worldly understanding as he or she could.

HILDRETH

Can we look at how that’s been received. I think about Loren Eiseley, who was definitely influenced by Montaigne’s rambling Sallies of the mind. He was also influenced by the affects of Edgar Allen Poe’s application of story and myth, and applied this to his personal essay.

LOPATE

But do you know the wonderful memoir by Eiseley, All the Strange Hours? Eiseley led a kind of gothic life.

HILDRETH

Well, he was not received well and so he did kind of turn inward. He wrote to no audience, is what he said.

LOPATE

He wrote to no audience. His mother was deaf and he was a hobo for a while, riding the rails, very poor. He witnessed his father’s tragic death. He had a lot of those sensational deficits going for him. But he had one of the most intelligent profiles of the twentieth century. Every sentence of his is modulated and he is drawing on whole centuries of formal writing. He’s not only trying to situate you in the moment of confusion and make you feel that confusion; he’s trying to give the emotion of it, but also his understanding of it. I’ll go farther and say that in Eisley’s case, his use of metaphor and myth has real resonance because you don’t feel that it is coming out of Creative Writing 101. You feel that he is somebody that has extreme difficulty in making relationships with other human beings. He has to look to fossils, to creatures, to the stars in order to feel out his relationships.

COOMBER

Turning the questions back to your work in particular I’m wondering if you can tell us about the vulnerability that there is in being a well-read personal essayist. People know your family dynamics, parts of your body, your relationships. When you walk into a room of readers, do you feel overexposed? And do you care?

LOPATE

I don’t care. What’s surprising is that people read and forget. I’m sure the most attentive readers don’t, but in a way they read for the pleasure of the moment, and they’ll remember some things but not others. So you know, I’ll meet a reader and it will come up that I’m Jewish and they are surprised, and I’ll say: “Well, didn’t you read the book.” But they are not reading to compile a dossier on me; they are reading for something else.

Also, I don’t entirely identify who I think I am with this person. It’s not that I’m lying —essentially I’ve told the truth— it’s that it’s one experience to know the page and another to be in a social situation. Montaigne said something like, “Friends of mine who I wouldn’t dream of telling things to can go to any local bookstore and find out any of that stuff.” I am to some degree a reserved person, a little shy, certainly not somebody who rattles on about my self socially. Most of the time I would rather get somebody else to talk about themselves. I don’t need to hear my story; in fact, before I remarried, it was a problem in dating because I would get bored having to tell this stuff over again. I really felt like saying: “Why don’t you go to the bookstore and you can find all this stuff out.” When I’ve written an experience satisfactorily to my mind, then I don’t think about it much more. It’s a strange using up of one’s experience. The written account comes to replace the memory.

COOMBER

Do you think you are losing your memories, almost, by putting them down?

LOPATE

No, because so much happens to a person in a lifetime that you can never write about everything. There is always going to be much more that you haven’t written about than you have written about.

HILDRETH

And always things that are unresolved.

LOPATE

And always things that are unresolved. So I get pleasure in confiding on the page, or pushing myself to a point where I feel like I’ve gone deeper or I’ve gone further. That’s a reward. I’m looking to get to those passages. So it doesn’t bother me, because it doesn’t affect my interactions at the moment. I still have to feel my way through my defenses and another person’s defenses when I meet a stranger. The same awkward catch-as-catch-can experience.

COOMBER

How about another part of this issue. You write very personal things about people you’ve known: family, lovers or whoever. Do you run these things by them before they go to print, or is everything that happens to you fair game and it just goes without saying?

LOPATE

Well, I don’t run it by them; I don’t want them to have censorship rights on my material. I don’t think everything is fair game and I don’t feel entirely justified. That is, I don’t have a single ethical formula I can apply. It’s true that by yourself you can portray other people, and it’s true that writing personal narrative, you are going to write about other people because nobody is an isolate. So you define your own personality by projecting through other people to a certain extent. I think that there are ethical questions that need to be decided on a case-by-case basis. What I try to do is not to use my writing as a vendetta, to get back at someone or to prove that I was right and they were wrong. But obviously I am more vivid to myself than other people are to me, so to some level what I am doing is conveying what it feels like for life to come at this particular individual.

COOMBER

What you said a few minutes ago is that you don’t feel completely justified in what you do. Its sounds a bit like your credo: You won’t use it as a vendetta, but you are trying to show how your consciousness perceives the world.

LOPATE

If people are looking for a nonfiction license issued by me, in the same way that a poetic license works, I am not the one to give it to them. I continue to have ambivalent feelings. I continue to hold back material that I don’t write about. I don’t write about everything. I do protect some people. It all depends. I have hurt people by the things I’ve written, so I can’t offer myself as a model on the safe way to do this. All I can say is that if you are going to be a writer, you are probably going to have to accept the guilt of articulating your visions which may not suit other people.

HILDRETH

And would you say that that is also a distinctive character in your personal narrative, the Montaigne’s concept of apologist? That you formulate an apology on the page for what’s about to be said?

LOPATE

I think you have to reflect on your practice. I think that you can’t start out with the assumption that you are a good man, or the last good man. If you are observing yourself, you have a need to be prepared to find dislikable evidence. So it’s a form both of self-justification and self-condemnation, perhaps.

MANNING

What thoughts do you give to audience as you are writing the personal essay? Are you writing to a specific person? A demographic? An aspect of your own personality? How does that imagined audience affect how you write various personal pieces?

LOPATE

I would say that I take audience into consideration in a few ways. On one level I don’t take audience into consideration; I just try to write as close to the thoughts that are being dictated to me through my brain as I can. The first draft, I’m trying to get my thoughts down. I try to write for the illustrious dead who will be forgiving and understand that I am trying to walk in their footsteps. So I write to the shades of Lamb. “How’s that, Montaigne, Stevenson saying, “Here’s my little missive, I’m trying to do what you guys have done.” I know they will understand some of the gadgets I’m using because I do see myself in the literary tradition. So some people might say they are writing for God. Since I’m never sure if I believe in God, or doubt I do, I would say I am writing for someone who’s smarter than I am, who will at least be tolerant of my flaws. If you write down, you’re going to get in trouble, so try to write up. That’s my understanding of my practice.

The other thing that I do is I try to keep my audience in mind to the degree that I anticipate the audience’s boredom or irritation. So it isn’t so much placating the audience as just trying to keep the audience engrossed. Cynthia Ozick once paid me a compliment in that she found my writing to be engrossing. I thought that’s as much as I want. Engrossing is good. If I can just keep it engrossing, a person can disagree, but at least they don’t go into a zone, the flat-line boredom. When I read another personal essayist and I feel that basically I know what is going to come from the next five pages because I’m just going to tromp through the expected positions, I just want to skip. So you want to keep it engrossing.

COOMBER

When you say you’re trying to keep it engrossing, are you talking about for an audience, like Montaigne? Ivy Leagues? Readers in the working class?

LOPATE

Not Montaigne. I mean what Virginia Woolf called the common reader, which I think of as somebody who is educated. They don’t have to be Ivy League--my father had a high school education and tried to go to night college, and it didn’t work out, but he read a lot. There used to be much more of this understanding of the working-class autodidact. It really doesn’t matter the level of formal education. What matters is how much someone is willing to open himself or herself to a book.

I can’t write to the bottom level of the typical magazine editor. That’s like a grasshopper. I fortunately had the experience of being a book writer before being a journalist or magazine writer. So now when I write for magazines, they know to expect a certain thing from me and I’ll never be entirely able to be processed into their extraordinarily quick attention spans. If they’re going to publish me, it’s because they like the idea of having some other kind of voice coming in. They like to think they can tolerate a certain amount of literary, “old-timey” voice. But I can’t write for that short attention span. It’s so inhibiting. I have to feel like I can at least develop some points.

MANNING

Do you think that the audience for a personal essay or memoir is still growing? In the 1996 Writer’s Chronicle article with John Bennion, you said that your attempt with The Art of the Personal Essay was to reestablish the genre of the personal essay. Do you think the book has done that, looking back seven years now, and is the personal essay genre or sub-genre continuing to grow up?

LOPATE

I don’t think that my book did that, but I do think that my book contributed in however a slightest way. There was a hunger in the culture at large for personal narrative. Not very different from the hunger people have when they watch the Oprah Winfrey show when somebody says, “My mother was shot to death by a killer and then he put a bullet in me and then I almost died.” I mean, there’s a curiosity about authentic experience, and with that a kind of impatience with the artifacted, fictive plot. I think that fiction has lost a certain claim of intensity. There’s always pulp fiction and genre fiction, but I think that the whole culture has wanted to hear people stand up and testify. I think that speaks to a certain religious inclination in American culture.

MANNING

Like the sermon.

LOPATE

The sermon has a connection to the personal essay and not just the sermon but the revival meeting, where someone stands up and says: “I was a drunk, I was a gambler.” Also the media magazines, newspapers, have a constant need for copy that is readable and that they don’t have to edit much. There are tons of hybrid, semi-essay articles. Someone begins by talking about himself or herself to establish and determine authenticity. Let’s say the author knows someone who was bulimic, for instance. And then, the author interviews the experts in bulimia, and then goes to a different party. This is a kind of hybrid, semi-personal essay, semi-article: The person goes out and gets some facts. This isn’t the practice of the art at its highest. We have to look at the fact that magazines, newspapers have an endless appetite for topical articles and that one of the ways of approaching topical articles is the personal experience. And they also have these niches like the back-of-the-book, the six hundred-word article; there are even newspapers where somebody not on staff can send in something, as long as its six hundred to a thousand words for the op-ed pages.

MANNING

How about the other forms of media—Internet, TV, radio—how is the personal essay creeping into those media?

LOPATE

On NPR, you see essayists on TV, Andy Rooney. Certainly the Internet has encouraged many more people. There’s a big market and appetite for the watered-down product, but there may be no greater market for the most literary examples. I think it’s just as hard to get a collection of personal essays published now as it was ten years ago. I don’t think there’s any further market. I think what you have is a kind of disguised collection of personal essays: Somebody writes a self-help book, somebody writes of his experiences, like Lee Iococca, basically in a series of essays. Nobody thinks of it as a series of personal essays; basically it is.

But for someone who is enamored of Didion or Baldwin or Lamb or Hazlitt, Montaigne or Stevenson, to be writing a collection and then trying to get it published, I counsel patience and forbearance because it may be just as difficult. I happen to be one of few lucky writers who can publish collections of my essays. Most writers who publish collections of their essays are famous already as novelists, let’s say, an Updike or Ozick or Saul Bellow can get a collection of essays published. But to not have established distinction in another area and try to achieve it directly as a personal essayist is difficult. There are collections that continue to be published, sometimes by small presses and sometimes by very small presses (laughter). I’m trying to make a distinction between the very large, broad area of demand, which made some people say, “This is the age of the essay”, and on the other hand a very small demand for the art of the personal essay at its most refined.

MANNING

How many copies of The Art of the Personal Essay have been sold?

LOPATE

The Art of the Personal Essay has done very well. I can’t count the number of copies, but I can tell you that I continue to get royalty checks and was able to buy a car, make other purchases, basically it’s been a good story for me. I’m now attempting to do another thing like that, which is I’m editing an anthology of American movie criticism from the silent era to the present, which will attempt to assert a canon of the best American criticism, which I hope will be adopted by film programs and English programs. Occasionally I experience a twinge of chagrin that my most popular book is an anthology and not one of my own one hundred percent Phillip Lopate books. We take what we can get.

COOMBER

I’m interested in your view of truth in the personal essay. It stems from an earlier discussion we had about “The Moody Traveler” (in a collection of essays, A Portrait of My Body) It was about a situation you encountered in the past and when you described your writing process, you mentioned that after writing it, you went back to notes taken at the time of the actual event and found that they differed, somewhat substantially, from the essay that you wrote. You opted not to change it then, and went forward. How do you justify that as practitioner of the personal essay?

LOPATE

I guess that because I consider the personal essay a story, and consider myself a story-teller, I do feel sometimes that I can take liberties. For the most part, I don’t take liberties. I’m a great believer in purity. It doesn’t bother me so much to break the rule in that way. It’s not as though I was describing the negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War, where it would really be important not to distort the truth. This is something that I don’t lose a lot of sleep over. I try to work from factual materials as much as possible because I enjoy the idea of shaping what actually happened into a narrative. But I’m aware that I’m slicing and shaping, and I’m leaving out so much, so I’m already distorting. This is another acceptance of guilt on my part You almost have to be a little shameless to be a personal essayist.

COOMBER

Do you feel that in a case such as this, where it doesn’t matter that much because it’s your story, does that impinge on your credibility for other nonfiction pieces?

LOPATE

Is someone going to say, “This person admitted that he changed one detail in one of his pieces, therefore we can’t believe him in another piece?” No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this issue has ever really come up, where someone has challenged the veracity of something I’ve written. Maybe because I’m writing about such insignificant people, including myself, that it’s not really an issue. But also it is because whenever possible, I do tell the truth. This is an interesting issue. There is honesty, candor, the truth, facts . . . I try to be as honest as I can. I like the sound of honesty. Sometimes when you’re having a conversation you exchange small talk for a while and then your friend says something or you say something that comes from a different place, a more honest place, and it is as though in the soundtrack of your life, the music changes keys at that moment. I like that changing of keys. I like that moment of honesty.

HILDRETH

In your forthcoming book, The Waterfront, you are dealing with a lot more factual information and research-oriented topics, and it seems like a slight departure from what you have been doing in the past. How do you go about putting that into a story format and how do your keep the story from “flat-lining”?

LOPATE

What I had to do in The Waterfront was find stories all along the New York City waterfront, and go with them and try to convey my enthusiasm for the story. For instance, I have a long chapter on public housing in my book because in New York the projects were built on the waterfront due to the fact that a lot of that land had been abandoned. The land in parts was quite decrepit, sometimes toxic, and so the projects were easy to assemble, particularly above 96th Street where you get into Harlem. So there are all sorts of issues of race and class, but what interested me is that it all began so idealistically. There was this tremendous movement of reformance to build public housing. I know that I still believe in public housing, and that the federal government should go back to funding public housing.

So what I tried to do was to disentangle the past and try to figure out how it began so idealistically, how that dream was deferred and became rather grim so that a writer like James Baldwin could write about the projects and Harlem as a kind of nightmare. And then, to give it another twist, these projects were not destroyed the way they were in other parts of the country, but they continued to work. To find what was still reclaimable about them is to understand the current optimism of the New York Housing Authority to improve them, to complicate a story because most middle-class people regard the projects as unredeemably awful. And I was coming from a different place. I was coming from having grown up poor and asking myself, “Don’t they continue to perform a good function by giving decent, affordable housing?”

The fact is that nobody picking up my new book The Waterfront would think they would find a chapter on public housing. It’s just not what you would think. I like the idea of finding a story that was unexpected and carrying it out so its vicissitudes about idealism, cynicism, despair, more idealism, come to a kind of stand-off, you might say.

MANNING

What sorts of research did you do for that chapter?

LOPATE

I did a lot of library research, read the controversies and arguments of the time. There was no one book that had a history, so I had to go to articles. For instance, the initial idea of building towers was seen as progressive because you have more green space around it. The [project] towers were originally coming from that “towers-in-the-park-notion,” which has since to a large degree been discredited. There was this impulse to tear down the slums and build these clean spanking towers. Of course, you’ve got people arguing, “Well, maybe those tenements have more vitality and are more comfortable than these towers in the park.” You go through a lot of ironies and ambiguities. Everyone is proceeding to some degree from a good heart, but it plays out in very different ways.

There’s an example of researching. And then I walked around with people from the New York City Housing Authority and they took me through the places and I got over my initial fear and came to see them in a different way.

HILDRETH

I’m initially curious: Not knowing the terrain myself but from having spoken with friends who grew up near the waterfront and grew in the seascout program. It was free for every child. Children who have grown up in the projects have access to a geography that many adults have no idea about.

LOPATE

Would they have access to that geography? Because highways were built around the waterfront in Manhattan, they would have had to cross these major highways to get to that waterfront. That’s one of the great tragedies of New York is that the highways cut people off from the water. A lot of what I’m doing, in effect, is to question the knee-jerk politics of my peer-group and to say, “What do I really think?” and not “What am I supposed to think?” Actually, there’s a lot of politics in this book. It’s the equivalent of asking yourself about the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War: “What do I think about this?” and not “What am I supposed to say?”

HILDRETH

So you’ve embedded the politics with story?

LOPATE

Yes. For instance, there’s this very important figure in New York history, Robert Moses, who was kind of a master builder of New York. Moses has become an archvillain in the mass narrative of New York and I went back and looked at some revisionist takes saying actually he did an incredible number of great things. He did some bad things, and we think of [him] because it’s paralyzed us from doing anything new and bold.

We’re so afraid of planning in general. I’m trying to assert my own view of the city and the city in the making. That interests me. At one point in America, it seemed easy to make cities. People seemed to know how to do it. Now whatever they do, they feel like they’re acting in bad faith: They feel clumsy. And that happens in Spokane (Washington) as well as in New York.

MANNING

So which narrator is going to walk the pages of this book? Which Phillip Lopate persona have you chosen?

LOPATE

A middle-aged Phillip Lopate. Because I say at one point, when I was younger, all I needed to do was walk around and I would be filled with poetic lyricism. And I can no longer pretend to have that sense of the younger man walking around and turning everything into writing. So it is, in effect, a more disenchanted observer, but there are positives to disenchantment as well as negatives. It’s somebody who has a lot of affection for my native city and has seen so many ambiguous developments: good plans that didn’t get built, bad plans that did get built. Things that have had different results.

I’m trying to explore a place because a lot of me is that place. I consider myself, my identity, as a New Yorker almost more central than my identity as what, as a Jew? Probably I’m more New Yorker. It’s a central part of who I am.

Issue 53: A Conversation with Rick Bass

issue53

Found in Willow Springs 53

October 24, 2003

Brian O'Grady and Rob Sumner

A CONVERSATION WITH RICK BASS

Rick-Bass

Photo Credit: The Elliot Bay Book Company

RICK BASS IS THE AUTHOR OF EIGHTEEN BOOKS of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Where The Sea Used To Be, and editor of the anthology The Roadless Yaak. Bass lives with his family in northwest Montana’s million-acre Yaak Valley, where there is still not a single acre of designated wilderness. In October 2003, Rick Bass talked with Brian O’Grady and Rob Sumner at the home of the writer John Keeble, a ranch located southwest of Spokane, Washington. During the conversation they sat on the rear porch, still under construction, and enjoyed a meal of freshly slaughtered pork as the sun settled into the horizon beyond the hills of pine. We are eating bowls of chili.

BRIAN O’GRADY

Before you started writing, what effect did a compelling story have on you?

BASS

Before I started writing, I read a lot, as a child, but certainly not as much as my children read, it’s just what I thought of as a lot. And I’ve met other people along the way who really do read a lot, what I’ve thought was a lot was more just a hobby. I’m in awe and some envy of truly serious readers. That’s a long answer to say I probably didn’t read as much as I thought I did. I loved it and I read everything I could but there’s people who don’t go to sleep because they love reading, I mean they read twenty-four hours a day. In retrospect I realize I’m not one of those kind of people and certainly now that I’ve become a writer I don’t have the luxury or indulgence of becoming that kind of person when paradoxically I most need to be.

A single story can have a huge influence on a writer, or a reader, or any person, and for me that story was Legends of the Fall, the novella by Jim Harrison that really made me want to write fiction. I loved to read fiction, I loved to read nonfiction before that point, but reading that story made me want to try and write it. I don’t why. I mean I know why I like that story, why I love that story, but I just remember having that impression of how big—the cliché about that story is epic, which is an overused word, but I just remember how big the emotions and content, scale, voice, everything about that story was larger and fuller than what I had read previously. And not to take away anything from Legends of the Fall, I’m not saying it’s the only book that way. It could have been other stories in the world but I had not to that point read them. I believe there’s a story like that for every reader. I think eventually, sooner or later, you encounter them. If they make you want to be a writer or not, who knows? There are too many variables there, but for me it did make me want to be a fiction writer.

O’GRADY

Do you aim for that range of emotion?

BASS

No. I wish it were that simple, that I could have a guidepost, or model, or scale against which to measure each work, if that’s what you’re asking, but I don’t aim for anything other than just to do the best I can. And that almost sounds defensive, but it’s liberating is what it is. And conversely or paradoxically it’s not so liberating, because that’s pretty tough to ask of yourself to do the best you can every time. I mean you can only do the best you can one time, and then that’s your best. The only thing I aim for is to do the best I can given any emotion, any range of emotions, any character, any range of characters, any setting. Whatever story or essay I find myself in I just try to do my best, which is usually task enough. That can be taken the wrong way when I say that’s task enough. I don’t mean that, “Oh I’m so wonderful that it’s hard to match my best,” I mean it’s so easy to be lazy, I think it’s hard enough for everybody to do their best every time they go out(,) or even try to have the courage to attempt their best.

Jonathan Johnson comes out with a plate of ham, baked beans, and salad for each of us. His three-year-old daughter, Anya, and John Keeble’s dog, Ricky, come out with him.
Jonathan: I don’t think we’re going to have room for all of them here.
Rick: This is incredible. This is so good.
Jonathan: I’m sorry the silverware has to be inside the toilet paper.
Anya stays outside with us for several minutes while her dad brings out the rest of the food. Rick gives Ricky some pets.
Brian: You were right about getting out here.
Rick: Good.

O’GRADY

Do you still get the same impact that you did before your writing, when you read fiction today?

BASS

More so. Much more so.

Rick smiles.
Rick: That dog.
Jonathan: I’ll bring Ricky inside. Come on, Ricky. Come on!
Ricky falls to the deck. He wiggles about on his back and wags his tail.
Rick begins to talk but starts laughing at Ricky.
Rick: I have not fed that dog. Laughter.
Rick: Oh my gosh, you are a trickster. That’s great. No, I said, come on, not lie down and roll over. You misheard me. Roll over so I can scratch your belly and feed you. Give you pork.
Laughter.

BASS

A great story affects me more now than it ever has. I rely upon reading as tonic more than I ever have. I think that’s probably just a function of age as much as profession. You’ve seen, approaching or in the shadows of middle age, and you still haven’t seen everything but I’ve seen a lot more than I had seen when I started out being a writer, which is to say when I started out making notes about what the world looks like. That’s a bad place to come to as a person. So I really rely on fiction and nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to pull me out of that, the natural tendency we have as individuals to go into that telescopic place of diminished perception, observation, newness, wonder, all those significant artistic notions. A good story means more to me now than it ever did as a young person. Also, having wrestled with writing for almost twenty years I have a greater appreciation now for when it’s done well than I did. And that’s not to say I took it for granted when

I was younger, I still loved reading great things but my palate was not as developed then.

Rick eats between questions.
Rob: I’ll let you chew.

ROB SUMNER

You’ve noted the importance of not overly controlling your writing. When you’re developing a story how do you refrain from interfering too much?

BASS

I would say something like that and it’s true, but you grow and prob- ably contract too, but you grow as a writer, hopefully, and go through phases and spells, play to your strengths and then work on your weaknesses. For me, personally, that has probably at one time been a strength, to not control a story or just go with the intuitive and subconscious and trust those instincts and focus on feeling them as powerfully as possible. It’s hard to argue against that approach, that can be kind of a tiring way to go through stories, one after another, but it can also be deeply and strongly felt. As I get older, for lack of a more precise term, the intellectual side of writing does interest me more, if only that I’m slowly learning my way into it. It becomes like a game to try and control a story now and tinker with it, make it go this way and go that way. That’s still a dangerous impulse, and the best stories for me as a reader or a writer, and the truest stories, are the ones in which I don’t control them, but am tapped into the emotion more than the intellect. That said, I’m becoming comfortable enough with, I guess, theory, for lack of a better word, to be aware of it as I work. Structure, or any of those conscious things, as opposed to the infinitely more powerful subconscious.

SUMNER

You’ve stated that emotional truth informs the structures of your stories. Is emotion always central for you?

BASS

Yeah. To answer your second question, or to answer the question, yes, I mean if you—yes, there’s just no other answer but yes. But I’m not sure I understood the first thing you asked.

SUMNER

Well you’ve talked—

BASS

Or mentioned.

SUMNER

—about how emotional truth, that the emotion of the story that you’re writing develops the structure, kind of tells you where to go with it.

BASS

It can and usually does, and in the past it has for me, but what I’m interested in now, and maybe it’s almost out of boredom or something, but I don’t think that necessarily has to be true. You can have an emotional truth underlying a structural instability or a structural falsity, and a story could in theory be all the more powerful for that. It could enhance that emotional truth, but on the other hand to have a structurally sound and logical creation that has a false emotion, artificial emotion beneath a structure that might fit an emotion you’re trying to get, that wouldn’t work. So the answer to your question, yes yes yes, but again the obverse is not necessarily true. As long as the emotional truth is being felt by the narrator or the author you can have a good structure or a bad structure and you’re still going to have a story.

O’GRADY

Just before we sat down we were talking about your essay in Why I Write, “Why the Daily Writing of Fiction Matters.” In it you stress the importance of engagement with the world as well as with the world of the imagination in fiction. Is that balance between engagement and imagination an evolving process for you?

BASS

I want to say no, I want to say that it’s pretty much a fixed variable, a fixed rate, a constant, that I need a certain amount of x to yield a certain amount of y, and that’s what I believe. I don’t ever write about that. You would think—I would feel like that can’t be possibly true, because people change, everything changes in the course of its existence, but it seems constant to me. When I get enough physical activity, that yields intellectual and emotional growth for me or even an expansion of feeling. And when I’m not in the physical world the other aspects of me tend to shut down too. It’s just that simple. That’s all.

O’GRADY

Along those lines, something else that you mentioned in that same essay, have you been able to follow the advice you give, to be able to write every day and also to be in constant contact with the physical world in light of the other activities that you do?

BASS

That’s a trick question. Let me figure out how to get there. For the benefit of our reader, can you clarify that device of which you speak, of which we speak?

O’GRADY

In the essay you say specifically that you spend your mornings writing and then your afternoons walking.

BASS

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, because sometimes I tell stu—I thought you were talking about another advice, a device, so, good, you’re not, because I don’t follow that one, that other one. But I don’t follow this one either anymore. [With] the activism and family desires and obligations, I just make a choice every day. I’ve got to do what I want to do after writing and some days I don’t even write because of the other obligations of activism and so on. So no, I don’t, and that’s a real handicap. But everybody has handicaps. Some people have to work for a living. [laughter]

SUMNER

You’ve warned of our culture’s increasing corporatization and homogenization and how writing is a way to rage against the resulting constriction and entrapment. How does writing challenge sameness?

BASS

How does writing challenge what?

SUMNER

Sameness.

BASS

Well within writing, back to that notion I talked about [earlier], about literature being about loss or the recognition of loss, you’re also remaking the world. Either you’re celebrating the world the way it is, knowing that it’s not going to last that way, or you’re already actively re-creating an alternative world, an alternative logic, an alternative justice, alternative boundaries in the world. You’re putting on paper and presenting to the ‘true world’ or the ‘real world,’ the existing world or the present world. And that very act challenges sameness. You know, you’re putting your money where your mouth is, you’re investing the time of your life to put down this model, this blueprint, this plan of another world with other values, and giving craft time and attention to that work, just as surely—

Rick is interrupted by Jonathan Johnson, who comes outside with three beers.
Rick: Oh, I can’t, I wish I could!
Jonathan: You’ve been bested, eh? [laughter]

BASS

Writing doesn’t necessarily have to challenge sameness, I mean you could be a press flack for the Bush administration and just be fighting furiously to hold on to the status quo and pull the wool over voters’ eyes and say all is well in Bethlehem. So writing doesn’t necessarily have to challenge sameness, but, on the converse, it certainly can.

SUMNER

You’ve quoted before William Kittredge: “As we destroy what is natural we eat ourselves alive.” That’s quite different than what Bush’s press agents are writing. Your own writing seems to tend to something quite different than a Bush press agent.

BASS

I mean fiction, good fiction, has that quality of naturalness to it, in that it’s being its own thing, and you don’t even know what that thing is, you just know you have an emotion, you don’t know what story is going to come out of an emotion, you’re not trying to advance an agenda, you’re just trying to get an emotion out of the vessel of your body into the world, and that’s the only agenda at play in good fiction. That’s a pretty natural process, it’s an expulsion, and a procreation or a creation or perhaps a re-creation of an emotion in you, but it’s creative. So that is natural, it’s not a destructive or even really manipulative impulse, or exploitive. It’s pretty natural.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, can be a real challenge. You can have other less primary, less elemental goals or desires in the writing of nonfiction. You can have direct values that, by the nature of the medium, come into play. It doesn’t mean it’s less natural, and for that matter to say that to manipulate or exploit is unnatural is like a dog chasing its tail. That’s natural too but I don’t think of it as being as primary or elemental—that’s the raw emotion with the human filter. What I like to think of as really good fiction I think of as being more primal than that, not even having the human filter but just being the thing itself: the physical essence of joy or sorrow rather than the narrator or writer filtering that emotion into creative nonfiction.

SUMNER

In a book like Oil Notes you paint a picture without trying to change anyone’s mind. In other nonfiction books, like The Nine Mile Wolves, you’re trying to affect change. And then there’s your fiction, where you don’t know what’s going to happen.

BASS

That’s a fair gradation. For me there’s pure fiction, and then creative nonfiction which just has kind of an edge of me or the human condition. And then there’s the you-know-what-you-want-and-you’re-going-after- it kind of nonfiction which is more of the latter group, The Nine Mile Wolves or The Book of Yaak kind of book.

SUMNER

So are these different types of writing definitely separate for you?

BASS

It’s almost a question of level, how far into the subconscious I am. With fiction it’s not even a temptation to bring in an agenda or even me. You’re supposed to be in the characters and in the setting and that means you’re not in you, that means you’re certainly not in your politics. And in environmental advocacy work you’re so into the issue your art doesn’t get into it at all. I guess the creative nonfiction part of that triumvirate is where it can get interesting, where you can bring in some pure fiction for a while and then also attempt to bring in some hard core advocacy. That can be interesting. But that’s why it’s the middle ground for me. With fiction I’m not ever even tempted to get on a soapbox.

O’GRADY

You said before that writing and reading fiction can help writers and readers overcome natural and cultural boundaries.

BASS

I suppose it can. I don’t remember saying that.

O’GRADY

I’m paraphrasing of course. Do you think that as a country we look at fiction in that way, as a weapon against those tendencies?

BASS

I’ve never thought about it. Are you asking me how I think in this country we tend to look at fiction? This is going to be off the kettle, calling the stove black or however that saying goes, but I think in this country. There’s a tendency among too many to look at fiction as making a statement of politics or even personal values. I understand what a joke for [it is] me to say something like that, because my environmental advocacy is so fiercely partisan. It depends on the reader but I see a lot of people read fiction and try to filter it through a lens other than what I think the writer was intending, which was the human condition. A lot of readers will try to extrapolate from a piece of fiction into judgments and assumptions that don’t hold up. But it’s always been that way, and that’s a weakness but it can also be a strength of fiction, the fact that it can be mutable, that it’s a universal currency, that it can be a universal dialect in language. It should be, and yet the readings of so many books are slanted toward the times, the culture, this day and age. It’s a good question but I can’t answer it. Most readers are different.

SUMNER

If we could talk about your new collection The Hermit’s Story. Longing has played an important role in your fiction. Earlier work has often focused upon the rage of people as they try to get along in an uncooperative world. In the new collection we find characters such as Dave in “The Prisoners” and Kirby in “The Fireman,” divorced men who can see their daughters only rarely. Both Dave and Kirby have moved from rage towards a more deadened feeling. What interests you in their saddened, hardened emotional state?

BASS

I don’t know, I don’t know. What you said previously, about them moving toward detachment, may be what touches me about characters in those situations, that they’re moved toward survival and their acceptance of pain. Under one reading you could look at characters in those stories and say, “Well, they’re copping out, they’re detaching rather than embracing their pain,” but I don’t read those, or I don’t read “The Fireman” that way. [In] “The Prisoners” the characters have more of a subconscious detachment, they haven’t yet realized that they’re detaching to stay alive, but if you’re trying to stay alive then you’re trying to avoid foreclosing on the possibility of not being able to be sensate. So that is, if not heroic, it is still nonetheless, well it’s maybe not even dying but it’s not a full disengagement. You can detach in order to retain the ability to engage, and I mean that’s what, it’s just a diminution of ambitions, perhaps. Bittersweet would be the emotion there. And that’s an interesting conflict or interesting tension, interesting duality of emotions…[trails off]

Jonathan Johnson is approaching the table with three pies balanced on his arms.
Rick: Good god almighty!
Jonathan: One per each. Pumpkin cheesecake, turtle cheesecake, and pumpkin pie.
Brian: Umm, I’ll have some of the pumpkin pie. Rob: I’ll try that pumpkin cheesecake.
Rick: Ah…My God, that’s the hardest question. Johnson: He’s been rendered inarticulate by dessert. Rick: Yes, yes, all of it.
Johnson: All of the above, eh? Rick: Just the tiniest sliver.
Johnson: Of which? Rick: Of yes, of each. Johnson: Okay. I gotcha.
Rick: I mean, but you can imagine…pie.
Johnson: Pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, tiny sliver of each. Can somebody open the door?
Rick: Yes.

Rob: No more sun.
Rick: Yeah, never was much. Frosty. [eating] What are these little red things?
Brian: Those are pomegranate seeds.
Rick: Oh yeah?
Rob: Yeah, they were good.

SUMNER

Kind of tied into the longing, what we’ve just been talking about, memory in your work seems to work as a type of longing. Ann in “The Hermit’s Story” holds a memory of her trip to Canada “as tightly, and securely, as one might clench some bright small gem,” and Russell and Sissy in “The Cave” are hit by the realization that though their memory of the cave was bright and strong in that moment, “even an afternoon such as that one could become dust.” These are characters trying to hold on to what has already passed. In a way they reflect your stressing of fiction as a way of reconnecting what has been isolated.

BASS

Not to sound like a smart ass, but yes. I mean, I would agree. Certainly. I’m not conscious of those kinds of thoughts but that doesn’t make them any less true or even surprising to me that I wouldn’t have been able to explain them. A lot of people talk about memory as a kind of landscape, and that really interests me, that makes sense that, you know, you’re looking back, but . . .

Jennifer Davis comes outside with plates of pie. Jennifer: . . . cheesecake. [laughing] Sir.
Rob: Thank you. Brian: Thank you.
Jennifer: Here you go. [To Bass:] Yours is coming. Rob: Yours takes more time.
Rick: Bring the wheelbarrow!

BASS

But, in memory, you are obviously looking back at country that you traveled through, you are making a map, a map of that territory, but the way you say it was smarter. […] I mean, fiction is a device to preserve memory? Is that what you meant? Enrich memory?

SUMNER

To try to hold on to our own memories, or things that we’ve lost.

BASS

Hm. I suppose so. I mean again, literature is about loss or the recognition of loss, in celebrating or bringing the attention of art and craft to a story you are both celebrating and preserving something, for sure. You don’t think about presenting it to a future, but I think about presenting a story to the present, because it’s already in the past as you imagined it. There’s some movement across time and it’s almost kind of a resurrection, sure. Take something from the past and bring it all the way back up to the present, take it back to the contemporary moment, and that is an act of preservation.

My own memory is really bad, so I suspect that there’s something larger to that than what I’m grasping.

Rick: You guys are missing out. Rob: The turtle?
Rick: Yeah.
Rob: Yeah, I was eyeing that one. Pumpkin cheesecake. Maybe there will be some left for us when we’re done.

SUMNER

Now here’s another. Let’s talk about work. Artie in “The Prisoners” works in real estate and Kirby in “The Fireman” is a computer programmer. Both men find their jobs either numbing or irrelevant. They make money for their companies but find very little value in their work. So Artie goes fishing and Kirby volunteers as a firefighter, activities that working-class people do for a living. In the fishing and the firefighting there is an immediacy to the activities, a direct physical engagement with the world around them. What’s the relationship of work and passion in these stories and in your writing?

BASS

I don’t know. I don’t even know how to explain it, but work is what you do, that’s how you are—one of the ways—that you are in the world, to state the obvious, and almost everybody has to work. If you’re going to write a story about engagement with the world . . . Let me back up. I guess what it speaks to in part is what kind of story do you like as a reader and a writer, and the stories of the sad, dead weight, heart-dead, bittersweet, life-wasted stories of detachment and desensitization that are not infrequent in contemporary literature, while technically masterful and even emotionally masterful, after a while I get to feel, as a reader, cheated by the repetition of these subdued responses when the point of the story is your response to it. A little goes a long way, I get it! And that’s life, I get it! And so I like to personally look around for almost more elemental stories, where there’s a little less ambiguity. I don’t think that gives up anything in terms of sophistry, I don’t concede that at all in stories that really speak to me. If you’re interested in reading or writing a story about which a partly successful attempt at greater engagement with the world is achieved, it’s hard, a real trick to pull that off with a story about somebody who didn’t do something, as opposed to a story in which it was in somebody’s character to do something, and work is something to do, so it seemed hard to leave work out of some stories. But the wind is in your face if you’re going to write a story about somebody who’s going to feel the world deeply, but that person doesn’t feel deeply enough about the world to engage with it except when he or she is on the pages of your story. It seems artsy—it can run the risk of becoming artsy and artificial. There are, I’m sure, people who do not work who are fully engaged with their senses and the world, but the wind is in your face, in the writer’s face.

Rick coughs.
Rob: You doing all right?
Rick: I’m shoving pumpkin pie in my face. I’m doing all right. [pause] It’s my favorite.

O’GRADY

In “The Distance,” you have a Montana family visiting Monticello with the result that Thomas Jefferson, westward expansion, and the dynamics of one 21st-century family coalesce into a single story. Central to the story is the boundary between wilderness, or wildness, and control and our attempts to balance these elements. What motivated you to dig into the mistakes of America’s past?

BASS

Um, almost sounds like a smart-aleck answer, but—

O’GRADY

If you take issue with the question—

BASS

Well, not even so much as issue but again a lot of the questions you’re asking are so thoughtful, intelligent, that there’s a danger of them presuming an awareness on my part that that’s what I was aiming at, which was not the case. It doesn’t make it not true, I just didn’t know of some of the things that were going on there. The arc of this country at this point in time I find severely disappointing, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t fret about or rage about it. So that’s embedded in my subconscious, it’s embedded in my subconscious that it even comes up into my consciousness, but I don’t set out to write fiction to say those things. I just think, “What am I feeling?”, and then I start painting pictures and say, “This is what I’m feeling. This is what I see.”

So I would not argue with any of that, but it was not a conscious goal, because that would be a political assertion. It’s there, you’re right, but my first impulse was just trying to get the pictures accurate, that landscape, that point in time, that disparity between them. The Louisiana Purchase inhabitant in new-time versus the Louisiana Purchaser in old-time and the crisscrossing, it’s just a good structure, a good zone, good opportunity for conflict and richness.

Something about that story . . . Well, you asked, “What, what was the genesis for that dynamic?” I think what authorized me to tell a story like that, or enabled me to, is that living in the Yaak in the 21st century, we’re faced with the same choices on such a heartbreakingly smaller scale. The scale to Jefferson’s perception, then, was infinite. It wasn’t infinite, but he perceived it to be infinite, his culture perceived it to be infinite. And now, goddamn it, nobody perceives it to be infinite, we all understand how damned finite it is, we can measure down to the last foot how finite it is. There is 188,000 acres of roadless lands left in a million-acre landmass in the Yaak that’s still even eligible for wilderness designation, which is to say let these last 18.8 percent of the landmass go about its own natural processes, to burn or rot, grow old or die, grow young again at its own pace outside of our own manipulations. Not to cast value judgments even on our manipulations, just to say these last 18.8 percent of places in this incredibly wild valley we’re going to save, for no other reason than as a test case, scientific base of data, against which to measure our own future successes and failures. So living there is where that story came from about slavery and control, land and control and science and knowing everything or thinking you know everything. But I don’t think those things when I’m writing a story, I’m just realizing it now.

SUMNER

How’s the Yaak doing, Rick?

BASS

It’s in a tough way. It’s got a Republican White House, Republican Senate, Republican House of Representatives and they’ve had three years to stuff agencies and cabinets and committees with industry lobbyists and right-wing philosophers, and they’re not big fans of wilderness or wildness. They’re not big fans of much of anything of what I care for, so it’s about the worst I’ve ever seen it. We’re in the middle of a forest- planning initiative, so if I can make a request for people who read the interview to write letters I’ll send information on that.

SUMNER

That was our last question. Do you have a final thought?

BASS

Too many final thoughts.

SUMNER

They’re never final?

BASS

They’re all final.

Issue 54: A Conversation with Melanie Rae Thon

issue54

Found in Willow Springs 54

February 13, 2004

Lisa Frand and John Baker

A CONVERSATION WITH MELANIE RAE THON

melanie-thon

Photo Credit: University of Utah English

Melanie Rae Thon is the author of two collections of short stories and three novels, including her most recent work, Sweet Hearts, which is set in the forest and plains of Montana. She has had other work published in Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review and Story. She won the Whiting Award in 1997 and an NEA grant in 1992. Originally from Kalispell Montana, she received her BA from University of Michigan and her MA from Boston University. She has taught at Harvard University, Emerson College, Ohio State University and at a women's prison. Ms. Thon currently lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah. In February, 2004, she spoke with us at the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane, Washington. Our discussion seemed to weave in and out of the common threads that bind writing and the struggle of humanity, including exploration, risk-taking and redemption. Throughout our conversation, a fire burned in the large fireplace before us in the hotel lobby, complimenting Ms. Thon's quiet and soothing voice.

 

LISA FRANK

Your characters are all very well crafted and complex, and are all very different from one another, with various backgrounds. How do you go about creating characters for your stories?

MELANIE RAETHON

I usually have some questions that guide me. Like with the story "First, Body," I had been to a lecture on autopsy and there was a man there who looked Vietnam vet age. He was an extremely large man and he had an obviously very serious knee injury and it came out in conver­sation that he actually injured his knee in the hospital. So, I thought, Wow, there's a story there! He never said he was a Vietnam vet, he just kind of had that ragged, torn up look and he was about the right age, so I made chose connections and thought, Okay, Vietnam vet comes back from Vietnam intact, works at the hospital and messes up his knee. How would that happen? And so it was the explosion of the question in my mind that set me on the course of trying to discover Sid Elliott and his story. But when I work on a short story, I often do two hundred pages of exploration; in fact, in the story, "Little White Sister," I did fifty pages of exploration in the voice of the woman who dies and who only speaks seventeen lines in the story. So, I did fifty pages of trying to figure out who she was. But I couldn't have found the seventeen right lines that she speaks if I didn't know her well, if I didn't know her background. It [the exploration] brings me close to the people-the characters-and it helps me see them physically and spiritually, and it helps me understand their experiences. So, I have this massive list of questions in terms of exploration. I think now, because I'm getting older, I actually write less. But I think more.

JOHN BAKER

It sounds like a lot of work, but you also talk about the joy that comes in the act of writing. Is that also a big part of it?

THON

It's a huge part of it. I'm a victim-as much as any other writer-of wanting to have a product, of wanting to have a beautiful story to send out to the world and have people read it. I get into that, but then underneath it all, there is still the thrill of knowing your characters, of discovering their worlds, of becoming more familiar and less afraid. A good example of that is in Sweet Hearts, with the character of Flint, who is an outlaw. I have been interested in juvenile problems for a long time and I have visited juvenile detention centers, but I had never been to an adult prison, so I had to go to the scare prison and do research for that. The one, huge obstacle in my teaching career at that point was that I had always wanted to teach in a prison, but I was too afraid. I thought they'll look at me and think privileged professor, Miss Do-A­ Good-Deed or something. Then, while doing a tour of tribal colleges a couple of years ago after working on that novel for years, I visited the women's correctional facility, where I taught a class. Throughout that experience, I was so completely comfortable. I walked into the room, and unlike a traditional classroom, all the women walked straight up to me as they came in and shook my hand and introduced themselves. We sat at these little tables and it was just like a group of women getting together and talking or playing cards. It was very intimate and I felt safe and comfortable, because I thought, You know, I'm not completely ignorant. I don't know what it's like to really have to live in prison, but I'm not completely naive and small minded, and so I thought that it's okay for me to be there. And that's what's real, this deep, internal satisfaction of saying, I'm not so limited, I'm not so naive. I can go into any place and have that peace of mind.

BAKER

A lot of times we think too much about how our work is going to be perceived, which can be a roadblock for a writer. How important is it for a writer to write unpretentiously, or rather truthfully?

THON

Writers are both incredibly arrogant and incredibly insecure, si­multaneously, and those two things are so close, really. They're set up as opposites, but really they slide in and out of each other completely. But as for the pretension-I think chat the way I get around that emo­tionally and spiritually is to do those hundreds of pages of exploration, to spend years doing my research so that I'm not just taking a pose, I'm not just doing something artistic, I'm not doing something in terms of craft, but I'm really trying to understand. And that's not a bad thing-to try to understand-and I think that when we think, Oh, I'm doing this because I want praise, I'm doing this because I want money, I'm doing this because I want to be famous, all of that, you know, is ridiculous. But if you're doing it because you want to understand something that you don't understand, that's a good thing to pursue and the writing that comes out of it-whether you get there or not, I mean you try to get there, but you don't know that you will get there-but I think if you do it honestly and you do the explorations and you do the research, you're going to be changed by that. And you're going to come back to your life in a new place, and that's a good thing.

FRANK

In Sweet Hearts, the narrator is a deaf-mute and the aunt of the protagonists, which is an extremely interesting choice in many ways. What makes a character a good narrator?

THON

I didn't have Marie as the narrator until after I had been working on the novel for about three and a half years. I was lost, actually, in terms of who was telling the story. I had all these pieces from different kinds of perspectives and I hadn't pulled it all together. It was terrible. I could've presented it that way, I suppose. It's post-modern, everybody. It's cool you figure it out! [Laughter breaks out.] But I really feel passionately, you know, about helping my reader understand my world. It's really very old-fashioned, I know [ laughter]. And then I went to Montana to live alone and do research right in the area [where the story is set]. I wanted to live on the lake in the area where the motel was and it was during that time-you know, I was alone all the time, I was silent all the time, and the sounds that I heard were really minimal, they were limited to natural sounds mostly, which was glorious, except for by choice when I would go out into the intrusive world-that I started to hear the voice of someone who couldn't hear, and that was fascinating to me. She'd been a character in the novel, but she wasn't the speaker. And then there was a day when I was walking along the river and she started speaking to me fiercely about her father and she had a very passionate voice. And I thought, There it is. There's where the heart in the story is.

BAKER

How important is it for a writer to be or to become uncluttered and uninhibited and unshaped by the mainstream culture? Do you think it's important to have a view or an understanding of the culture and still try to become as uncluttered and uninhibited as we can as writers?

THON

I like moving between the two. I have many stories that have urban settings and I am painfully aware of the culture and our current dilemmas and I just really finally have to withdraw to really do the real writing. But it's almost impossible to live that way and I'm not sure that it would be good ultimately. I mean, I really like moving between the polarities and being exposed and then having my space.

FRANK

One thing I've really appreciated in your writing-in First, Bodies, as well as in Sweet Hearts-is your willingness to experiment and take risks. But with that also comes the willingness to fail, which I feel is underrated and can also be a good thing, because you ultimately learn from your mistakes. Can you talk about your willingness to take risks?

THON

I think every story is a failure, that our vision is like way up there [holding her hand high above her head] and that through our revisions, we kind of go like that [starting with her hand down at her head, she slowly moves it up, but stops when she gets only half-way extended] until we only get to here and then we go, I'm not going to get any further with this piece. There's no way I can get to the vision of it, which is always far beyond what you can render. But you've learned something on the way and you go back into new material from a different perspec­tive, and so from my viewpoint, everything's a failure. So, why not take the risk? {Laughter] But it's the same idea as the exploration, that if you're going to learn something, if you're going to hope to become more compassionate through your work, through your exploration, then you have to take risks. And I also really believe-and you know, scientists say this-that we only tap into, at most, about a tenth of our imagina­tions and that's what I see with my students all the time. When they're trying to make things fit and make things work and to tell a story and do it the straight way, their minds just clamp down. And as soon as they have an exploration to do, as soon as you say, "Don't worry about the product, just go," suddenly their minds are on fire, you know, and they're going in twenty-five different directions at once and then you've got two hundred pages and somehow you have to make sense of it. That's kind of a drag, you know [laughter] and it's hard to figure that out, but I think better to have the two hundred pages and never make the story than to do twenty pages that are precise and perfect and well crafted and didn't get you anywhere.

FRANK

If you have a piece that isn't working, how do you know whether to keep working on it or to pitch it?

THON

There were a few stories along the way that I pitched, and certainly very early in my writing, everything got pitched eventually. But now what I discovered is that if I stay with it long enough, it morphs until it becomes a story that is okay, one of those okay-failures. If it's not working-first of all, that language... I always tell my students, "There is no 'This is working, this is not working,"' which I just find annihilat­ing-but if l reach a point where I think, I can't make this story make sense for myself, then I think, there's something in here that's the heart of it that I can take out and I can use that as the core to transform it into something else. So, eventually, if I stay with it long enough, it becomes a story I want to tell.

FRANK

That's something I need to learn a little bit, so I appreciate that [laughter].

THON

But I think what I said about pitching stories early on ... What I always tell people is that nothing that I wrote in graduate school be­ came part of my published work, with the exception of a story that I actually started as an undergrad that was in completely different forms as an undergrad, in grad school, and then finally in the published ver­sion, which ended up as a totally different story. But nothing that I generated in graduate school became part of my published work. All of that was learning.

BAKER

I'm glad to hear that, actually [laughter).

THON

Many people do publish a book right out of graduate school, their thesis becomes their first book. I know a few people like that and I think, Well, bless your hearts, lucky you [laughter).

BAKER

You must've encountered some self-doubts, like What am I doing writing? But when did you know that writing was your calling, your vocation?

THON

In my first semester in college, when people asked me what I was going to do, I said, "I am a writer, which was incredibly silly and naive on my part [laugher]. I had no idea what that meant. I had written very, very little, just bad adolescent poetry and it was just totally silly. But was true for me-and what has always been true-is that I could not live, I literally could not live, if I didn't do it. I couldn't survive in the world. The world was too tumultuous, too confusing. My sorrow was too deep for me-and that's the adolescent poetry still seeping out [laughing]-to survive. So, I didn't ever think of it as a choice and I think that a blessing, really. One of my friends said he had a choice, he could either be a thief or a writer [laughing]. And for me it was like, I could either be a waitress or a writer and I was a waitress for thirteen years. It's made my mom crazy as you might imagine, but I just never thought I'd do something else, you know, and I didn't publish for a long, long time. I just never thought that was an obstacle. I think I was really lucky that I grew up in a different time period. People now-your age-are under a lot more pressure to make money, to be successful, to get your careers on the road. I was a waitress for five years straight after graduate school and never during that time did I think I was making a mistake. I thought, I'm becoming a better writer, you know, I'm not publishing, but I'm becoming a better writer. I just kept doing my work.

FRANK

The daily experiences also seem to help with writing. All the bor­ing, mundane stuff and interactions with different people.

THON

Yeah, everything goes in there.

FRANK

Yeah, even all those lost years, as I like to call them [laughter]. Not lost totally, but ...

THON

You can learn to love anywhere, you know, and ultimately it's about who do we love and who are we trying to love and you don't have to be in some prestigious job to figure that out.

BAKER

I've heard writers say that our work as writers and artists really should be not to glorify the human spirit, but to uplift it, and from reading your work, I would guess you would say the same thing, but I'd like to hear what you have to say about that.

THON

I would be hesitant to say that artists and writers should do anything. People have different views on making art. But I think for myself, what I'm always trying to do in my work-for myself-is to learn to love more intensely, to learn to be more compassionate toward people of whom I'm afraid and people with whom I'm intimate. And for me, that happens in my writing, that's how I get there. The product, the writing itself, is the bi-product. The quest for me is to make my life bigger, so I hope that when readers read my work, they feel that it opens them to feel more compassion and less fear, and the possibility of loving more people or loving the people whom they love with greater depth, greater openness. Many people say my work is "dark'' and every time they say it, I can feel the dagger. And I think, Oh, don't you see the joy? Don't you see that these people-no matter what their circumstances-they're trying to love, they're trying to stay alive through their love however difficult their lives are, however much they've suffered. All of my people are trying to love, and people who say my work is "dark'' never buy that argument. But that's what I hope that my work does. Once again, with thinking of the work as a bi-product, I think that for me, the work that I do helps me go into the classroom, helps me be with my family, helps me go into the prison. So, the work is at least doing the work on me-slowly, slowly, slowly, with many falls backward [laughter].

FRANK

This is in connection with what you just said. Before I actually ask the question, I'm going to first apologize for using the word "dark," [laughter] although I think you'll forgive me when you hear the rest of the question. Sweet Hearts is a really dark story, but all the charac­ters-no matter how bad their sins-seem to have a strong desire for redemption, a desire which leads to hope, which in turn lends itself to a more hopeful reading of the ending, which I ultimately find to be more interesting. Can you talk about redemption and its place in humanity and in your characters?

THON

I think that if we're seeking redemption truthfully, not some sort of I'm going to make amends and then everything's going to be alright, but if we're seeking redemption in the sense of repentance, and repentance meaning literally turning, and that turning isn't one turn of conversion, like Okay, now I'm going to be a good person, but the constant turning into new situations, and facing new situations with love and openness and trust and to behave decently toward other human beings and other living creatures, as soon as we honestly begin to seek redemption, we are redeemed. It's just like as soon as we seek God, we have already found God, whether or not we understand that, whether or not we recognize that. As soon as we begin to turn into that place, the process has already begun and hope is eternal in that motion as long as we keep remind­ing ourselves that it's not okay to feel like, Okay, I'm safe, I made it. I experience this like a hundred times a day, that feeling of relief, when understanding washes over me, and that feeling of despair, when I feel my heart close toward someone, where I start to judge someone or I start to need something from a friend and then am disappointed by them. That kind of closure keeps me from seeing. So, it's constant and a constant reminder to keep turning and turning and turning.

Issue 55: A Conversation with Lan Samantha Chang

issue55

Found in Willow Springs 55

OCTOBER 28, 2004

Brian O'Grady and Adam O'Connor Rodriguez

A CONVERSATION WITH LAN SAMANTHA CHANG

chang

Photo Credit: University of Iowa

Lan Samantha Chang was born to Chinese immigrants, who left China when the communist government came to power in 1949. Her parents moved to the small Midwestern city of Appleton, Wisconsin. Chang said that since her Midwestern youth, she’s “constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents’ experiences.” Her books—a collection of stories, Hunger (1998), and the novel Inheritance (2004)—demonstrate a desire to not only learn about and replicate her family and cultural history, but also to discover more about how culture and family relate to identity.
She holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale, an MPA from Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—an experience she said was “the best thing I ever did.” She is currently the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University.

Ms. Chang was interviewed over lunch at the Silver City Grill, a restaurant in the Ridpath Hotel, downtown Spokane, Washington. Before the interview, we discussed politics, moving, then her writing process.

 

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

What does an “on” writing week look like for you?

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG

I’ve been fortunate to be able to get up and write right away. So, an “on” week for me would have me waking up in the morning with very little interaction with people and working for three or four hours—until my mind gets tired. For a long time, I lived in a studio apartment, so it was basically twelve feet from my bed to my writing desk. I kind of liked that. I felt like my life was focused in a way it no longer is. When I first moved to Cambridge--—because of the high price of real estate—I wrote in my office at school. I think writing at school slowed me down, because of the internet. I would turn on the computer and worry that somebody had written me an e-mail; that would take up a few minutes and divert my mind. When I’m really “on,” I write before I check my e-mail. And I’ve organized my life so the e-mail is at school and I don’t have access at home. After I started living with somebody in my studio apartment, it was hard to work at home so I worked at school. I think that’s one of the reasons the last part of my novel took so long to write.

BRIAN O’GRADY

Did you move as you were finishing Inheritance?

CHANG

I moved constantly while I was writing the novel. I wrote the first draft of the novel in California. Then I moved to Iowa City for seven months. I moved to New Jersey for about a year. One month, I lived in Wyoming. That was my official residence, because I was between apartments at the time. Then I moved from there to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year, then I moved to Iowa City for a year, then I moved back to Cambridge and finished it there.

O’GRADY

With so much moving around, how long did it take to complete the novel?

CHANG

Seven years. And I probably lost a year to those moves. Every time I moved, I lost at least two months. One month to pack up, the other to get settled.

O’GRADY

Did that throw your writing off?

CHANG

It didn’t throw my writing off—teaching threw me off. Starting a new teaching job can disrupt my rhythm, depending on the intensity of the experience. Another thing that disrupts me is changes in my non-writing life. Getting married, that was a disruption. But other writers I know say it’s possible to make these adjustments and figure out a way to get the work done. I think the challenge for writers is figuring out how to write and live at the same time. That’s why graduate school is great. Even though you don’t realize it, you have so much time. It’s really wonderful. Later, you look back and think “Lord, I could’ve done so much more.” I could be wrong, but in general, that seems to be the case.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

In the novel, Inheritance, people move a lot, too. Do you think that’s related to your real life?

CHANG

I think that because of the material I covered in the novel, moving was a structural challenge I had to overcome as I wrote. My characters were born in the eastern coastal area of China, then they moved to in- land China, then to the eastern part again but to a different city, then Taiwan, then two different parts of the United States. I think that was a typical pattern for a person born of that era and of that particular class or group. There’s a whole group of immigrants to the United States who left China in the late 1940s or even 1949, when the communists came to power, moved to Taiwan, then came to the United States for their educations. And they all know each other; it seems like they do anyway. Whenever I run into their children, it always turns out they had some- thing in common with my parents. It was a little diaspora. Their lives were highly mobile. My mother, for example, moved 26 times before she was 18. After that, she moved to the United States, met my father and settled in Wisconsin.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Are they still there?

CHANG

They’re still there. I think that’s because my mother needs to feel like she belongs to a place. Although she’s never said so in so many words, I think their moving around so much when they were young has made them appreciate being in one place, whereas I grew up in Wisconsin, was born and raised in Wisconsin, went to high school in Wisconsin. And since then, I’ve constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents’ experiences. But I think it’s more that I’ve followed my writing opportunities, and I haven’t had any control—but no, that’s not true: it’s not that I haven’t had control; it’s that I’ve chosen to fol- low the opportunities with nothing to tie me down. Until now. Now I’m married. Now I work in Cambridge. We’ve moved to Somerville, bought a place to live. And we still don’t feel tied down. We feel like we could move. We feel like we could still be free.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Did Inheritance mirror your own family’s history?

CHANG

It’s not a family history. In fact, there’s almost nothing in the book that happened to my family. But my father’s brother was actually a communist. And my father did find out about it sort of accidentally. Not in the same way Li Ang discovers his brother’s a communist. What happened to my father was, he and his brother spent some time traveling when they were young, for college, because the Japanese had encroached upon the north and had occupied Beijing, where they were from. People left the occupied territories in groups, and one of the groups was an educational movement. The universities tried to move to southwestern China, where the new capital was, and form their own interim, wartime university. My father was part of that university. So he left home pretty early on. But his path led him away from his brother, to Taiwan. My father wasn’t a communist but he wasn’t a nationalist, either. He was apolitical, so he left China because he thought there would be upheaval and trouble when the communists took over. There was a period from 1949 until the 1980s when China was basically out of reach to the average person who didn’t live there. My father had no news of his family at all. Then when Mao died, the country began to slowly open up. My father found news of his family and went to visit them, at which point he learned his brother had died. And he also came to understand that his brother had been a very active communist party member. He returned to China in the early 1980s, and when he was there, while looking at some publication, he saw a list of high-level communist officials and saw the name of a guy he knew growing up, his brother’s best friend. And he realized that somehow the two of them had become communists together. This was so interesting to me—because I knew so little about my father’s family—that it worked into my mind. I was writing about a country divided by politics and war, and it seemed that writing a book about a divided family would be an accurate view. I wanted to write about the intersection between something very large and a very intimate story, so that was one of the ways I was able to access such an intersection.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

While Inheritance might not be a “political” novel, it has a definite interest in politics in so many ways—family, sexual politics—but also the politics of immigration. How did the political changes in China affect the families and eventually push them to America?

CHANG

That is something that has happened as long as immigrants have been coming to the United States. Pressure—often political—in their home country pushes a people out in search of a better life, and, as I said, I think my parents belonged to a certain wave generated by civil war, the fall of nationalism, and the rise of communism. That’s interesting to me. I think about all immigrant writers, especially the wave of Jewish writers after World War II--…

O’GRADY

I wanted to ask you about that. You mentioned in an interview that you had a real interest in second generation Jewish immigrants.

CHANG

When I was first learning to write, I was deeply influenced by a Bernard Malamud story called “The Magic Barrel.” I don’t know why the story stuck with me as much as it did, except that there’s a deep sense of longing there. In the story, Leo Finkle’s parents are both dead, and there’s a sense that, while he’s living alone, he needs to move on, and yet he doesn’t know how to find somebody with whom to do that. I think that sort of isolation, cultural isolation, affected me, as did the character Pinye Salzman, a sad marriage broker who smells like fish and has an unpleasant home life, who is trying to work miracles for this young man and eventually does. The fairy tale quality of the story seems to have combined the contemporary life of New York at the time with a sense of long ago and far away. It speaks of the idea of an “old country.” The emotional resonance of post World War II Jewish writers really speaks to me. Phillip Roth’s first book was really important to me while I was learning to write as well. I read an introduction he wrote to an anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus. In the introduction, he said that he was completely taken with the idea of departure, obsessed with the idea of leaving, at the time. And really, the book is about leav- ing your culture and holding on to your culture and I think that really struck me at different points of my life. Particularly because in studying writing, in becoming a writer, I was essentially leaving behind some of the hopes of my parents.

O’GRADY

You’ve talked a little about the assimilation issue and how that ties in with your interest in Jewish writers after World War II. How does that play out in your stories?

CHANG

I think assimilation is a central issue only in one of my stories, one called “The Unforgetting.” It’s about a Chinese family that moves to the Midwest and tries to leave their old life, but as time goes on, they find that they can’t forget the old life. Meanwhile, their son, who was raised American, does what Americans do: leaves home. I think that captured some of my feelings about assimilation—that it’s necessary to a certain extent, but at the same time, it’s a tremendous loss. I mean, it can be a particular loss in the relationship between parents and children and different generations of immigrants.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Related to that, I read that you visited China for the first time as an adult. Did you feel more like an American visiting a foreign country, or more of a “homecoming” feeling?

CHANG

I felt both like an American and a person coming home. We entered China by flying into Hong Kong, then we flew into Guilin, which is in central southern China. It’s a region famed for its scenery, and I recognized the oddly-shaped mountains from beautiful pictures my parents had hung in our living room. But I could tell the people there saw me as a foreigner, since I was clearly raised somewhere else—I didn’t speak the local dialect, and my Chinese is a little awkward. So I felt odd. But as we went further north, closer to where my father was from, I felt more and more at home. China’s a huge country, and the people everywhere are different. People up north are taller—you could say generally they tend to be taller and look more like me. As we got closer to where my father was from, I felt that I was encountering some familiar element I couldn’t explain, partly because the people started to look more like me and the dialect became more familiar, sounded more like my father’s dialect. Actually, he doesn’t speak a dialect, he speaks Mandarin with a Beijing accent. And as we went toward Beijing and then Xi’an, I felt as if I really was discovering where my family came from. I then met my father’s family and there were a lot of similarities, even though we were essentially strangers. I think in that way, it was a homecoming. And I remember going to Shanghai, where my mother’s from, and seeing all the buildings and places I had read about or she had told me about, so I had the feeling I was going someplace familiar.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Do you think that homecoming feeling inspired what Xiao Hong felt in Inheritance when she returned to China to visit her aunt?

CHANG

I do. And it’s also a feeling that many people have told me about.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Were any of the place descriptions of China based on what you saw when you were there?

CHANG

Almost all. The description of Chongqing, the description of the landscape around there, the Yangtze River, the description of West Lake, were things I had seen. I will say, though, there were certain descriptions I had to completely invent. For example, I was in a bomb shelter when I was in Chongqing. I went to a couple of them, but I was never in one when it was being bombed at night.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

That would’ve been hard to simulate.

CHANG

Right, exactly.

O’GRADY

The gambling in the book—did you do research?

CHANG

Well, I went to Las Vegas and I played Paigao.

O’GRADY

They have that in Vegas?

CHANG

Yeah, and it’s actually all over in California, too. I learned a lot about it when I was living in California. And I asked my mother about it. She had played it as a child on New Year’s. It’s sort of a child’s game, but it can be quite devastating. Basically the host either wins or loses big, and it’s entirely up to chance; there’s no skill involved. Not like poker, where there’s some skill involved. Paigao isn’t like that.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

You say your mother knew how to play, but in Inheritance, only the men get to play.

CHANG

Well, the men were the ones who got to leave home and start gambling, although women gambled all the time, too. I mean, my grandmother was a huge Mahjong player; she played constantly. According to my mother, they would start in the morning and play until early morning, go to sleep, then get up and start playing again. I don’t understand what the pleasure was. I’m not interested in games. But my father is interested in games, and my parents play Mahjong now that they’re retired.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

So you didn’t have much fun in Vegas?

CHANG

Not really. I’m not a gambler by nature. It seemed to me that after I’d been writing the book for a while, I realized one of the interesting aspects of the book was that there was an element of extreme chance that was represented by the game, and an element of extreme control, which was Junan, the main character. She was obsessed with trying to control the outcome, control the outcome to the point where she made the biggest mistake of her life—

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

She took it to her death, really. That was the one sad thing I felt about the ending. I felt that a lot of things in the book were resolved happily, though bittersweet. But Junan stuck to her guns until the end.

CHANG

She really did. See, I like her for that. I mean, I was interested in a certain kind of characterization, character development different from the psychological model that says someone undergoes a transformation, or that we, as readers, must understand more deeply the psychological reasons for the characters’ behaviors. And I feel that in my book, no one really undergoes a psychological transformation. Well, several of the characters do not undergo psychological transformations. Particularly Junan. She is the same; however, we see her in so many settings that we learn more about the degree and the nature of her obsessions. That is a different kind of character development.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

But I think as a reader, I rooted for Yinan to reconcile with Junan. Her not achieving reconciliation set a different tone for the end of the book.

CHANG

I like the idea of acknowledging that there are things that are not settled by our lives, and there are questions that can’t really be resolved. That feels more real to me than the idea that everything can be happily resolved. I don’t know, because I haven’t died yet. I don’t know what that’s like and it’ll be too late by then.

O’GRADY

How has your degree in Asian Studies helped your writing? Do you think it’s important for a writer to have knowledge of an outside discipline?

CHANG

I have mixed feelings about how to answer this question. I teach undergraduates, many of them very serious writers, and they want to know if they should major in English. I always tell them they don’t have to. At the same time, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would take a lot more English courses than I did in college. Of course, when I was in college, I had no idea I was going to become a writer, and I was taking English classes as electives that I worked in secretly and enjoyed. It’s not that I didn’t take them seriously, but I didn’t take seriously the idea that I should study English. And when I went to my MFA program, I realized there were all these books I hadn’t read. I feel like I’ve been catching up ever since. So that’s one side of the story. On the other hand, I don’t think I could’ve written Inheritance if I hadn’t majored in East Asian Studies. I learned so much about China in college. And I learned the language, which was very important to me in writing the book. I encourage my students to do as many different things as they can, because once they get writing, it’s hard to get out to do too many different things.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Many writers have mixed feelings about MFA programs, but coming from an MFA program yourself, what do you think are the benefits and disadvantages to attending one?

CHANG

I don’t have mixed feelings about MFA programs. I think going to get my MFA at Iowa was the best thing I ever did. I had not studied writing in college. Reading John Gardner’s book, The Art of Fiction, a number of times, cover to cover, was the extent of my writing education, aside from a few community courses. So, when I went to Iowa, I felt supported and sustained by the mere fact that I was surrounded by people solely interested in writing. They had given up whatever they were doing, and in many cases traveled thousands of miles, to go to this inland, small-town setting in which writing was taken extremely seriously and there was a long heritage of writing. I think MFA programs can provide shelter and sustenance for people at the right point in their lives. I think sometimes people go to MFA programs too early, before they have time off. And in those cases, an MFA program is like an ex- tension of their college educations. I don’t think an MFA program can be appreciated by everybody until they’ve had a chance to leave school and try to write on their own, which is always a real struggle. So it was wonderful—I learned an enormous amount about craft. I met people who are still my readers. I had two really, really good years.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

I saw that your books have several Iowa professors in the acknowledgements.

CHANG

They matter to me. They still matter to me. When I was at Iowa, each person I studied with taught me something. But I think many people who go through MFA programs are disappointed for one reason or an- other, often because of expectations. They go to the program expecting to meet a mentor who will then help them. That was not my experience. What I found instead was that I met a peer group that became very sustaining to my life as a writer. A poet who I deeply admire told me that it’s more important for a young writer to see and watch an established writer than for an established writer to see and watch a young writer. In other words, people want established writers to notice them because they think it might be some kind of touch from a world they can then enter. It’s actually more important that they watch that person and see how they conduct themselves, the things that they do and don’t do, what they do that you wouldn’t do. I think that’s one thing the MFA program provides. It provides an opportunity for writers in training or aspiring writers to watch and learn from established writers. The learning is not always direct, it’s not always someone taking you by the hand; it’s often things that you glean. And it’s not necessarily what the established writer wants you to glean. I remember going with a professor to a reading at a place the name of which I won’t mention, to watch a visiting person of high eminence give a reading, and having the professor explain to me that “this is how not to give a reading.”

O’GRADY

A couple stories in Hunger have bits of different styles. “San,” for example, has a sort of detective story in it, where she’s picking up clues about her dad’s life. In “Pipa’s Story,” she’s getting stories from the out- side world, and there are fairy tale elements to the story. Do you try to try to mix forms?

CHANG

I do try to mix forms. I’m very interested in the tale. The early drafts of Inheritance had huge tales in them. I had a whole generation of characters that aren’t in it anymore. There was this whole big scene in a gambling house, where this big tale’s being told about the evolution of the kiss in lovemaking. This got cut, because, as many readers pointed out to me, it was totally irrelevant to the novel. But it’s always been a form that interests me. In terms of the detective story, I picked up as a child that we are born into time after our parents, and the only way we can find out about them, if they don’t tell us, is by spying on them. And I think that will constantly appear in my work. I don’t see that going away because it’s one of the things that most troubles me, the fact that we’re born forward in time and we can’t go back and revisit. That really bothers me. I think “Pipa’s Story” has some elements of the gothic, which I didn’t understand when I wrote it, with the big house and the conflict at its heart and the magical qualities. There are also elements of the tale in that story. I was experimenting, somewhat consciously—just stretching my wings and trying to incorporate different elements of stories I’d heard. In a way, Inheritance takes a lot of its narrative thrust and flow from a “low” genre—the made-for-video or made-for-TV movies that a lot of Asian people watch these days. They’re often historical, filled with drama, and full of scenes where someone is begging or pleading to somebody for something and they don’t get it. You know, the ones with enormous turns of plot, huge, dramatic incidents. I took some of that and consciously put it into Inheritance; the way the action is handled is a kind of tribute to popular culture.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

There is a strong point of view shift in the middle of Inheritance, when you go from a third-person omniscient to a first-person narrator in Xiao Hong. How do you think zooming in on Hong’s first person narrative intensifies the effect of her character? Or more broadly, why did you do that?

CHANG

Finding the point of view was one of the hardest things I had to do while writing Inheritance. I knew my material before I knew my narrator, I knew what story I wanted to tell before I knew the narrator, and it took me a long time to understand who would be the best narrator for the story. I never understood, when I was reading the Janet Burroway textbook Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, why she had two whole chapters on point of view, because it seemed pretty straightforward. People are always able to say, “Oh—here’s a mistake in point of view,” but I realized as I tackled the novel that point of view is more complex and slippery than I understood it to be when I was starting out as a writer. In the novel form—as in the short story, but especially in the novel—point of view is a crucial choice. The difference between writing a novel and a short story is that in a novel, you have to live with your choice for 300 pages. I look at a novel like The Great Gatsby and I understand why Fitzgerald chose the first person and why he chose Nick Carraway as his narrator. But I can also see how that choice, to some extent, dictated so much about the book’s form in many of its complicated places, like where Nick tries to relate stories of things he could not possibly have seen. And I find it interesting that even a brilliant book like The Great Gatsby can have places where it is hamstrung by its point of view. I knew I had to choose a narrator, and that the narrator didn’t have to be a person in the story. But I also knew I had to somehow knit many years together. It was difficult to rely on repetition as a means of knitting the story together, because the story moved from place to place. There were no physical, geographical locations I could use to anchor the story. Look at a third-person epic, such as 100 Years of Solitude: you’ll notice that it takes place in the house, and indeed, García Marquez’s working title for the book was The House, so that every time he returns to the house, you get a sense of continuity and control of the narrative. You can’t do that if you’re constantly moving from one place to another. I decided to rely on a person to be the unifying force in the book. Then I had to decide who it would be, and I had the choice of using the main character, Junan, or someone of her generation. Or someone of her daughter’s generation. Or someone of the youngest generation, which is what I tried to do first because I had been given an admonition by an editor—not my editor—that I should make someone from America the main character or the book wouldn’t sell. Of course, I didn’t go with that editor, but it stuck with me; I wanted to create an American voice, but I didn’t in the end, because I realized the story encompasses two countries, and that the person who could best tell the story was somebody who had lived in both countries and understood the bridge. Hong was that bridge. But I had to start the book before she was born. So I used the idea of the family story to make it possible to create an opening to the book that didn’t include her.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

It didn’t feel like an enormous shift in voice, and that’s probably because it was the family story, and she could easily have been recounting it.

CHANG

That’s right. And I wanted to create that sense of a tale. I think the tone of the book was dictated by the need to fit the third-person and the first-person parts together. And as a result, I learned while I was writing the book how much choices of material and narrator—all that stuff we learn in beginning fiction classes—have such a huge impact on what kind of object the book turns out to be, what tone it has. I don’t know if this is the kind of book I would’ve written by choice, but it turned out to be like this because of what I chose to write about. That’s how I feel about it.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

What do you mean, “by choice”?

CHANG

Well, I mean, it comes across as an epic. Although really I don’t know because I can’t read it. But I know that I’m perfectly capable of writing a completely different kind of book. But not with this type of material. If that makes any sense. I feel like the material in this book is very different from that in Hunger; Inheritance has a different tone than Hunger, it is an entirely different kind of object than Hunger was. I don’t have a problem with it, but I’m aware that part of it has to do with what I was trying to write about, the choices I made.

O’GRADY

Are you working on anything new?

CHANG

Last spring I wrote a 100-page manuscript about some poets, but I realized I haven’t written poetry as an adult, and I felt I should include some poetry and I couldn’t, so I stopped. I’m still thinking about it; I was actually writing about an MFA program, but I thought, “That’s crazy, too; who would want to read about one of those?” But I felt it would be best to put that aside for a while and try going back to it later, since I’m still interested. Since then, I’ve been dealing with changes in my non-writing life: I got married, we bought a place, and we moved into it. That took up a few months. Now I’m working on a lot of the projects I took on after the novel, the ones I took on because I felt my life would be empty without it. I feel that one of them is particularly interesting. It’s a landscape dictionary, edited by Barry Lopez, that will be published in a year or so. In the landscape dictionary, forty writers describe 800 American landscape terms.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

What words do you describe?

CHANG

Some of them are quite technical, such as “debris cone.” I’m also doing basic words, such as “harbor” and “Back Bay.” New England ocean terms, it seems to me; they must’ve given them to me because I live in New England. And I got a couple of desert terms, such as “slick rock,” local to Moab and that area of Utah. And some fun terms like “lover’s leap.” There are 52 places in the United States named “lover’s leap,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and they all have things in common. One of the interesting things about writing for the dictionary is that I had a struggle—I had to break through my resistance to it—but the struggle was trying to adopt an authoritarian third-person point of view about a subject outside of myself. I had never done that before.

O’GRADY

How long are the entries?

CHANG

They’re about 150 words. And they want us to do them in a “writerly” way. It’s a lot of fun, and I think I’m learning something, but I’m not sure what. That’s the way it is always, though.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

How would you like to see your career go? How might you like to be remembered as a writer?

[A long pause.]

CHANG

I think what writers really want is to be read. If people continue to read my work, that would be my greatest wish fulfilled. [Another pause.] I’m thinking about this. It’s a really interesting question. [An- other pause.] But don’t people all say the same thing? Don’t they say “I want to be remembered as an important writer of the 21st century” or something like that?

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

Something like that. But I think it’s especially interesting to ask because you’re young; you’ve got a lot of books left in you.

CHANG

We’ll see. I’d like my books to continue to develop in depth and substance. Obviously. I’d also like to write more short stories and novellas. I love different lengths and forms. But I think what I want most is for people to continue to read my work.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

So it’s a communication itch with you?

CHANG

I don’t know if I’d put it that way exactly, but I think most writers want to be read.

O’CONNOR RODRÍGUEZ

You say “read,” not “liked” or “respected.” Is there a distinction for you?

CHANG

No. No distinction. I just want to be read. I don’t have very big ambitions at the moment. Well, I’d like to be able to keep going. It’s very hard for people to keep going. People say it gets harder and harder as they continue on. But I’d love to keep going. I always had the idea of improving as a writer over a long period. That was always my goal. I never wanted to be a “flash in the pan” or a “one hit wonder” or a prodigy because it can set up disappointment. I always want to continue learning.

Online Exclusive: A Conversation with Kirsten Lunstrum

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Works in Willow Springs 

February 3, 2005

Adam O'Connor Rodriguez

A CONVERSATION WITH KIRSTEN LUNSTRUM

lunstrum

Photo Credit: www.kirstenlunstrum.net

KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM WAS BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA in English and writing from Pacific Lutheran University and an MA from the fiction writing program at the University of California, Davis. Her short fiction has appeared in Calyx and Willow Springs, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, This Life She's Chosen (Chronicle, 2005) was named a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" title. the New York Times Book Review calls the collection 'An impressive debut from a promising young writer."

During the interview, which took place at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, we discussed the role of faith in creative work, how family reacts to the autobiographical elements of fiction, and the pressure of being considered a "poster child" for a young writer's success.

Lunstrum currently resides in South Bend, IN with her husband, the photographer Nathan Lunstrum, and teaches English at Saint Mary's College and Indiana University, South Bend.

 

ADAM O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Since you're a young writer, what should people know about your personal history?

LUNSTRUM

I was born in Chicago, but we moved a lot, something like 26 times. My mom was a nurse. My father was in grad school—he was going to be a professor—and when he left his Ph.D. program he had a lot of jobs—at a bank, at a men's clothing store, as the vice president of a travel corporation. Eventually he went to seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. We spent two years there, then the year of his internship in Lincoln, Nebraska. By the time he finished that, I was in high school. We moved back to Washington—Bellingham, Monroe, Edmonds, Lynnwood. Now my parents are settled, and it is such a relief to feel like we have a home.

My husband and I helped them move into the first house they've owned in years a couple Thanksgivings ago, and it was an emotional day for the whole family. We've never had a place that felt like ours exactly, and so moving them into this house was momentous. We feel grounded in a way I don't think any of us did before.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Is your religious belief one of the reasons the sex and violence are coned down in your work?

LUNSTRUM

I hesitate to call myself a religious person because of what that word—religious—has come to imply in our culture at our particular moment in history. But, yes, I am religious, and yes, I think my faith and my upbringing in the Lutheran tradition shapes my writing.

In a sort of practical sense, the stories and language of the Chris­tian tradition taught me about storytelling. In my family's household, my sister and I were taught biblical stories as metaphor, rather than as evidence or factual history of our faith. I think this encouraged me to search out metaphor and to relish it—and more important, to see the way in which metaphorical truth can be more true than facts. That is an essential lesson for the young fiction writer, I think—the lesson that fact is not always truth.

I also think I learned rhythm and cadence in listening to my father's sermons. He's an amazing writer, and often his sermons took the form of long poems or short stories. I liked listening to the sound of his voice through the walls of his home office as he practiced and memorized his sermon search week, and listening to the more finished product on Sunday mornings. I think his sense of language as a spoken, living thing helps me when I construct my own stories. I still read out loud as I write, go­ing over and over sentences vocally until they sound right to my ear.

My faith probably underpins all of my stories, and probably is part of the reason sex and violence are limited in my work. I don't mean to suggest that faith eliminates sexual desire or our tendencies toward violence—not at all. But I do think that my Lutheranism has caught me to search out grace in life—and to see the grace of people finding ways to carry on with their lives. The kind of redemption that comes in the continual carrying on.

The other reason my stories don't include much violence is because I'm not interested in violence, I haven't lived it, so I don't even think I'd know how to write it, or that it's necessary for me. I'm more interested in those small internal changes in characters. That's where my faith comes in, too. Faith is subtle. In our culture, we like to see faith changing people in drastic ways—lives turning upside down, people who were scoundrels being suddenly reformed. And although I'm sure that may happen to some, I think real faith is much more subtle. It changes perspective and self quietly and without much glory or fanfare or glamour. I'm interested in how, sometimes, the most miraculous thing is the person who accepts what is and keeps going.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The one scene of violence in the book is completely shocking—when the kid in "Exhibitions" loses his hand.

LUNSTRUM

That story is more about how the mother deals with his imperfec­tion than about the violence. And there's grace at the heart of that story, too, when she realizes at the end that what is imperfect is often more beautiful than what is perfect. And the missing sex is more my own worry that I wouldn't be able to write it correctly. I've read so many bad sex scenes. It's implied in certain stories, but I don't want to be one of those writers who gets wrapped up in tangled sheers. I know I wouldn't write that well. I'd rather imply things. I'm aiming for elegance. I don't know if I hit it, but I want to avoid things short of that, if I can. A woman I went to school with, Jodi Angel, who wrote The History of Vegas, writes amazing sex scenes. They're graphic, bur they're not at all off-purring. So I know it can be done. But not by me.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

How did you come to writing and to fiction specifically?

LUNSTRUM

I wanted to be a ballet dancer, so I devoted my teenage life to danc­ing. When I was sixteen, I went to college through the Running Start program, part of the point being not only to escape my horrible high school experience, but also to have more time to dance. That year, I auditioned for a company and failed miserably, because I'm not a good dancer. After I failed, I went through this depression about what I was going to do with myself. Then, I couldn't get into a particular creative writing class I wanted to take for fun, on a whim, so I signed up for the only English class left. I was lucky enough to get a creative writing teacher teaching a composition class. He let me write all my papers as stories, and he became a mentor. Rich Ives, he still teaches at the com­munity college in Everett. He really encouraged me. I started writing then, and I haven't stopped. I think, too, the first story I ever sent out, which was in that first quarter I took creative writing, was to Seventeen magazine's fiction writing contest. And it placed. So I thought, Well, this is easier than I thought. Which was completely not how it worked out for me. But I think that encouraged me, helped me keep going. Then I kind of fell in love with it.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Your husband is a photography professor at Notre Dame—what's it like being an artist married to an artist?

LUNSTRUM

Being married to an artist is a blessing, I think, especially because he's not the tortured soul type. He's grounded, a practical thinker. He approaches his work, maybe because it's photography, in a measured, technical way—the same way he tends to approach life. It's good because he stabilizes me. I'm not a tortured soul either, but I tend to be more emotional about my work. I'm fitful when I'm writing, more fitful when I'm not writing, and he tolerates that in me and actually, in living with him, I've learned to be more disciplined but less uptight about my work habits, too.

I'm also glad he's not a writer. I could never be married to a writ­er—I'm far too competitive for that. I like that we have our own worlds to disappear into during the day, and that we can then come together in the evening, pleased to re-enter our relationship. He doesn't read my work until it's finished, and I don't see his photos until they're printed. We don't make suggestions or dally in one another's projects, and I like that.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel you're living the dream, having your master's thesis become a published work?

LUNSTRUM

You know, you're in a fiction writing program, or you're sitting in your room writing, and you think, If I have just this one success then everything will be okay and I'll never feel self-doubt about the writing again and it'll just be beautiful. It was not that way at all. It made thinks worse.

All of last year, I was totally paralyzed by the publication and I couldn't write anything, because I thought it wouldn't live up to this book. I felt, just as more experienced writers always tell you you'll feel after your first publication, like a fraud or a fluke. I was horrified by the idea that I would be a one-hit wonder. That I would never write anything of value again. I didn't think I would be able to do it, so I would try to write and it was terrible—I would feel physically sick when I sat at my desk. I'd never had panic or anxiety attacks before, but now I'm sure that's what I was experiencing.

I'm returning to writing slowly. I've written a few stories—and I'll keep a couple of them. I think I became so bound to perfection—to trying to surpass what I did in This Life—that I tied my hands. I've had to try to forget about rules, forget about readability, focusing on the process rather than the finished, perfect product.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel the short story is a superior form, at least for you?

LUNSTRUM

For me, it is. Although sometimes I think I'm inferior to the novel. I love the way a story allows you to narrow your focus as the writer. There is no room for the unnecessary or the extraneous in a short story, and that leads, I think, to a kind of refined and elegant prose. And though I've read a few novels that achieve that kind of precision in the longer form, I don't know if I am up to that challenge yet.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

All the stories in your collection have a very Northwest perspective. Even the one that's set in Iowa has a western perspective on snow. Do you think your northwest upbringing is essential to your stories?

LUNSTRUM

A lot of times my stories start with wanting to write a place. Especially ones like "The Skin of My Fingers," which is set in Juneau, Alaska. That one started because I went to Juneau and wanted to write the place.

I think that when you move around as much as I did as a kid, you want to find home. I remember living in the Midwest, thinking, When are we going to go back home, to Washington? and feeling like that was the center of the universe. Because of that feeling, when I moved back I became more aware of the place. I love the Northwest, and I think I love it more than I might have if I hadn't left it. And I think the characters a lot of times are looking for home in these stories.

Writing the land was a large aspect of the program I attended at UC Davis, too. That rubbed off on me, I'm sure, though I don't write landscape in the way some of my professors or fellow students did. Landscape is not the focus of my writing, but I do consider landscape as more than just setting in my stories. I think my characters are shaped by the regions in which they live.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You're a very physical and object-oriented writer. How did that style emerge?

LUNSTRUM

That's my favorite part of the writing process. I love writing descrip­tion. That's where I'm having fun in the story. I kind of write myself ways to have fun. And I like stories to be visually interesting. I've probably had too many workshops, with the whole show-don't-tell thing going through my head. But I often don't care as much for stories that have just a first person narrator talking to you. I want to see the place, so maybe that's my effort at that—

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You do write some first-person narrators, though.

LUNSTRUM

Those came last. The first story I wrote in first, "By the Skin of My Fingers," was an experiment to see if l could write first-person, because I was so used to writing in third. I went through this process—and that was the first story I was thinking about it—of deciding how much description you can put into a story before it becomes overwhelming to the reader, because I was reading a lot of Alice Munro then. She goes whole-hog, puts in everything and gets away with it. I felt, in that story, I got the closest to putting in as much as I could. And I was pleased that it seemed to work out. Also, that story feels the most autobiographical, even though nothing in it actually happened to me. And I feel closest to it.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You only have one male point of view character in chapbook, and he only tells half a story. Is it a conscious choice for you to write primarily from a female POV, or did your editor just pick these stories?

LUNSTRUM

These were the only stories that I had for them, so it wasn't their choice. But I wouldn't say it was conscious, either. I don't want to make a gender stereotype, but I think because I'm female, it's easier to speak in a female voice. So, generally, the characters who occur to me are female. But Otto, in that story, is—I met this person on a trip who that story is loosely based on. I was struck by him, was really interested in why he had made the decisions in his life that he had made. I wanted to be in his head for a while. But I think I'm a little nervous to write men, especially younger men. I'm interested in trying it more. I know lots of writers who are able to write in either gender, but it's a little scary to do it, just because I want it to work so bad. The one novel I wrote after college, the one no one saw because it was horrible, was all cold in the POV of a twelve-year-old boy. So it's not that I haven't done it.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Many characters in This Life She's Chosen have "complex" relation­ships with their mothers (and in one case, a mother-in-law), and the ways mothers and children see each other is a theme you return to several times. I'm not going to ask you, "How is your relationship with your mother," but, do the character relationships in the book mirror your own life?

LUNSTRUM

I don't think I'm alone in this—a lot of women and probably men go through a period of figuring out How am I like my parents? How am I not like them? and I think the characters in the stories are doing that quite a bit. And that mirrored my own life, because I did go through that. All through my childhood, I was told how much I looked like my mother, and every family reunion, people would pull out baby pictures of both of us and say, "You can't tell the difference. They're the same person." And we do have similar qualities in our personalities. So I spent a lot of time individuating. And that's happening in the book, too. But my mother isn't any of these characters. They're all fictional, drawn from many people.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

How did your family react co the book?

LUNSTRUM

My father calls me almost every day to tell me if they spelled my name incorrectly somewhere online. My parents bought the book Tues­day and I'm sure the people at Barnes and Noble were tortured by the fact that I was their daughter. But they've been good about it. They had read all the stories before. Actually, they're usually my first readers for any story, because they're good readers. My father writes poetry, and he writes a sermon every week. So we can talk about that. And my mother is a voracious reader. They read things first and are usually great about not being upset if something's based on our family.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What about your husband?

LUNSTRUM

He's really supportive. The last interview I did, the woman asked me, "Is your husband nervous about your view of marriage?" I was sort of taken aback by that. It hadn't occurred to me until then that people might read into the stories and assume things about me. I don't know why that hadn't occurred to me. But some of the questions the charac­ters are struggling with regarding their marriages are questions I have asked.

I remember coming home from teaching after we were first married, and standing over a sink of dirty dishes thinking, When did I become this kind of wife? Our marriage is very egalitarian, and my husband actually does all of our cooking and our laundry—does his fair share of the mundane household things—so I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But I think a lot of wives of my generation, since we are among the first to really expect a kind of truly equal partnership, have that fear of Wifehood in the back of our minds. A fear of sacrifice. Though, I think part of what some of the marriages in my stories are working out is the necessity of sacrifice in marriage. The way in which a partnership challenges you to hold on to your individual identity while working to nurture the shared identity you have in the relationship.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Has teaching affected your writing?

LUNSTRUM

I don't get much writing done while I'm teaching because I take the teaching so seriously, and live the teaching so intensely. Teaching reminds me why I love writing, though. Because the students are reading things for the first time, and I suppose it's like being a parent, because people say you see your own childhood again, and reading certain stories that I read when I first went to college over again is great, because I get to fall in love with them again.

It's rewarding, too, to watch students fall in love with reading or writing. I had a student last quarter who seemed to have just stumbled on her talent for writing, and it was an amazing thing to be able to spot that and encourage her to keep working. I love the way teaching allows you to feel like both the giver and the receiver of a great gift.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You use the word "love" for books. What authors and books do you love?

LUNSTRUM

Alice Munro is my favorite. Elizabeth Bishop, I love her shore stories. I think she's beautiful. I really like John Berger. Gina Berriault. Julie Orringer's first collection, How to Breathe Underwater, is really great. She has a story called, "The Isabel Fish," an amazing story about this girl who is with her brother's girlfriend when they're in a car accident that lands them in a pond and drowns the girlfriend, and it's about the repercussions on the girl who witnessed it and lived. I really like the shore story most.

This summer I'm reading Alice McDermott, too. I've just finished At Weddings and Wakes, and before that, Charming Billy. She's my new­est favorite, I think. I feel like I'm learning how to write when I read her work. Her sentences are so elegant and careful, her details so rich. And she moves effortlessly through the daily lives of her characters. I've been noticing how her novels don't have much plot. Very little actually happens that one might call plot. But I'm drawn in as a reader anyway, and I come away from her writing feeling like she's told me something essential about the experience of living. I think that's marvelous. I want to know how to do that.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Several reviews of your book thought your cover art suggested that the book was "chick lit," though the content surely isn't. Do you worry about your book possibly getting thrown in with some less substantial literature?

LUNSTRUM

I talked to the publisher about this, actually. They send you a ques­tionnaire about such things. That was one of the questions: How you would shelf your book? And I don't want it to be classified as "women's fiction." Not that I'm slamming women's fiction—there's a lot of good fiction written for women by women, but I also want it to be literary. I don't know about the cover. I suppose I had veto power, but it didn't occur to me that the cover would evoke that response. Though part of it is pistachio and pink. So I suppose, maybe. But I don't want the book to be thought of that way. I don't think it's geared only to a female audi­ence, though it deals primarily with female characters. It's more about the experience of figuring out who you are, of figuring out where you belong in the world. That's a universal experience. So I hope they don't miss shelve it after its fifteen minutes is up. I don't want it to go the way of—I don't want to mention any book titles—but I don't want it to be shelved next to something frivolous, because I don't think that it's frivolous and I hope other people won't.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel your experience getting your MA in Creative Writing was useful?

LUNSTRUM

I get frustrated with that whole debate about whether writers should get MA's or MFA's or not, because I don't think it can be anything but useful to be in a community of working writers. And to have time to do your work as your sole purpose. That seems like it can only be a benefi­cial experience. Some people make it less than that, but I think that's a decision on the writer's part. In that way, it was a huge blessing to have those two years. And I met people who I think I will consider writing mentors for the rest of my life. And I met peers whose work inspires me, and I keep in contact with them, and that helps. When I look at the writing I was doing when I got there and the writing I was doing at the end, my work had completely changed over those two years. The ocher piece of it was that it's an MA, not an MFA. Sometimes I debate whether or not that was a good choice. But my experience was so good, in terms of the writing and the classes, that I wouldn't change my mind about it.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Could you describe the process you went through to get your book published?

LUNSTRUM

I was saying to someone the other day that I'm a really bad example of this question. It didn't happen like they say it will. The MA was my thesis, pretty much the ten stories that went in the book, in a slightly different order. After I defended the thesis, Pam Houston said, "You should send this out." She gave me the names of a few editors, and was nice enough to e-mail them and say, "Look at the book." I sent it out in July to a couple places. When I hadn't heard back by September, she sent it to Jay Schaffer at Chronicle. He called me within two weeks. I thought he was going to say, "Make these changes and we'll look at this again," but on the phone he said he wanted to buy the book. It happened really fast—May to October. You spend your whole life having people tell you that it doesn't work that way, especially because none of the stories had been published before. I thought that would be a problem. I was really worried that since none of the stories had been published, I would be embarrassing myself, like publishers would get the collection and be like, Who's heard of this person or any of these stories? It felt good that it didn't happen that way.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What if someone said you were some sort of "poster child" for graduate writing degrees?

LUNSTRUM

I'm not sure I'm comfortable being the poster child. Because, you sit in a room by yourself and write your little stories. And, when I'm done with a story, I'm done with it. So now that they've been published and they're out in the world, I don't feel connected to them anymore, and so this whole coming out to talk about them is bizarre, and being put in a position where I'm the poster child of what's supposed to happen—or, of what isn't supposed to happen—is also strange. I'm still more excited about going home and writing the next story than I am about getting up and giving readings. I feel a lot more comfortable at my desk than I do hawking the stories. That's the strange piece of the job that I wasn't expecting. I've been aiming toward having a book since I started writ­ing, and I know that I should be soaking it up—and I am—but it also doesn't feel quite real. I don't feel like the book is what I wrote. When I saw it the other day at the bookstore, I was excited but at the same time it doesn't feel like it's mine the way it would if it were an 8½" x 11" page that looked like it had just been through a workshop.

I work at my writing, and I think I'm very hard on myself, so I don't want to suggest that I haven't "earned" this by not working hard enough. But I know writers who have worked longer and harder than I have, and who have not had publication success. I feel a little un-entitled. And I feel young. I am beyond happy to have had this book published when I am still a young writer, as it is already opening doors for me, and as I feel like I have been given the gift of time for a long career, but I also feel a little shamed by my age when I see writers who are much older than me and still struggling for this—for publication. I am embarrassed at times to admit to my age.

The other odd thing about publication is the social responsibility that has come with it. Writers aren't social beings, so it feels odd that the results of success in this world force us into sociability—readings and interviews and all of the promotion for a book. But I don't want to sound ungrateful. I'm so grateful.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The last line of your book is "Like a hope chest opened up." While the tone of the story at that point is bittersweet, do you have a hopeful outlook on the world?

LUNSTRUM

I think that if you write, you necessarily think the world is beau­tiful. Otherwise, why record it? So I would say yes, I have a really hopeful outlook. But I think more than that, because that just suggests something about the future, I am constantly struck—and this sounds so corny—but I am constantly struck by how beautiful the present is. And I'm not talking about my personal situation. I mean the things around us. Like the other day, I was walking in Spokane, and I ate at a Greek restaurant, and I had these purple olives on my plate and it was sunny out and the light was coming through green on the window ledge in a particular way, and those kind of things make you think it's worth getting up. I think you have to feel that way if you're going to write.

O'CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

When you're eighty—and I know this is an unfair question—how do you want people to talk about you?

LUNSTRUM

I want people to say then what I hope they say about the book now. That the writing's elegant. That it's true. And that they find themselves in it. I want people to have the same experience reading my stories that I have reading the stories I love. The kind that settle with you for a while, that you don't forget right away. More, though, I hope I learn to be how I want my stories to be. I hope I can live elegantly, to be a graceful human being. I don't know if l have that down yet, at 25, but I'll keep trying.