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First Novels and the Art of Revision

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Most first novels are really second novels, since most first novels go unpublished. Writing for ZYZZYVA, Rumpus contributor Aaron Gilbreath talks through his experience having his debut memoir rejected, eventually leading an agent to suggest he write a novel instead:

He wasn’t telling me to call a novel a memoir, or to capitalize on a hot genre. He was telling me to re-imagine my story, to try a new angle. Magazine editors did this all the time: rethink this, they say in the margins of your essay draft, redo that, go further, go deeper.

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The Joy of Writing

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What happens when writing ceases to be enjoyable? Over at Beyond the Margins, Dell Smith discusses how the joy of writing must eventually yield to the joy of a finished draft because while writing first drafts might be pleasurable, the work leading to a final draft rarely is:

The only way to finish something is to revise it. Revising for me was anathema. As joyous and euphoric as I found writing the first draft, revising dropped me to a new level of drudgery. Revising my writing was impossible for me to do well for an extended time. I had no patience for it and I usually gave up and simply moved on to the next first draft.

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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely

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In Thomas H. McNeely’s breathtaking debut novel, Ghost Horse, Buddy Turner’s family has fragmented around issues of betrayal, class, and race. Father, mother, grandmothers on both sides—these adults repeatedly expose the boy to their anxious misgivings and covert desires. His friends, too, are part of the shifting terrain of 1970s Houston and the products of their own troubled homes. Their interaction is marked by tenderness, violence, and inscrutable sexuality. The Super-8 movie the boys are planning, about a ghostly, rescuing horse, explores both pain and the fantasy of comfort; the film becomes—like narrative itself—a shared goal, an escape, and one of several weapons the boys end up using against each other.

Released in October 2014, Ghost Horse is the recipient of the 2013 Gival Press Novel Award. The book has already been widely praised by critics, but my favorite remarks come from Stephen Burt, author of Belmont and Close Calls with Nonsense: “McNeely’s prose—superbly attentive to what goes on in Buddy’s head, and why—sets up scenes few readers will forget: it’s a novel whose beautiful sentences match the wrong-way turns, the blood-red futilities, and the available insights, of its rough lives.”

McNeely’s writing has an incantatory feel as Buddy ruminates over significant memories, testing them for accuracy and insight. What is real? is an implied question throughout. The book takes an unflinching look at how one’s perception of oneself, others, and the world is formed—and how on earth we might begin to make sense of it all.

McNeely grew up in Houston and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where he reviewed films for The Daily Texan. After college he became an investigator for The Texas Resource Center, a public interest law firm that represented death row prisoners during their appeals. This experience became the basis for his first published story, “Sheep,” which appeared in the Atlantic while McNeely was still an MFA student at Emerson College. He went on to receive several awards, including the Wallace Stegner Fellowship. McNeely currently teaches in the Stanford Online Writers’ Studio and the Emerson College Honors Program.

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The Rumpus: You set Ghost Horse in Houston in the mid-1970s, and this unforgettable place plays a heavy role—neighborhoods near Rice University vs. neighborhoods near Hughes Tool, parochial schools (exclusive and less-so), freeways, vacant lots, oil barges, chain-link fences, dogs kept in pens. And everything about this setting feels inextricable from issues of race and class. Can you talk a little bit about Houston during the time of the book and how it inspired you?

Thomas H. McNeely: As everyone is, I am haunted by the place I grew up. Buddy, the protagonist of Ghost Horse, is also at that haunted stage of life, a transition from childhood to adolescence, and of course by his father’s absence—that haunting and absence is central to Ghost Horse.

The Houston of the seventies, at least as it exists in my memory, was a much wilder place than the Houston of today. There was a lot more country to it. The social divisions between whites and African Americans were very rigid, as they still are. One factor that upset this rigid division was the emergence of a Latino middle class that started to move into white neighborhoods. The Joe Campos Torres case, which is referenced in the book, was an intersection of this country lawlessness and the growing economic and political power of the Latino middle class. A group of police officers drowned Torres, a Mexican national, in the bayou, and there were riots in Fonde Park, where a scene in the book is set.

That was one aspect of that wildness and lawlessness. Another was the Dean Corll murder case, at the time the largest serial killing in U.S. history, which is also referenced in Ghost Horse. The majority of Corll’s victims were from a ten-block area in a low-income neighborhood called The Heights. This went on for years, and the police did very little, because those boys were expendable.

Those stories formed my view of the world—there was a very clear sense, depending on your race and class, whether you were safe. That’s right there on page one of Ghost Horse—Buddy feels safe, but Alex, his Latino friend, doesn’t. I tried to capture some of that feeling—and also the vastness of Houston, the huge industrial open spaces that seemed haunted and super-human and almost magical to me—they still do.

Rumpus: Those murdered boys are the ones Buddy keeps imagining he hears. It’s such a powerful, frightening element of the piece—Buddy is most likely protected from many things, moreso than Alex and even the abused Simon, but the presence of the dead boys suggests a vulnerability to all boyhood that gets played out over and over in the book. Buddy’s own vulnerability at turns becomes cruel, generous, guilty, sexual, desperate, sad—all rooted in his own wrenching and wretched family circumstance. Did you have in mind the particular vulnerability of boys as they come of age when you started? Why do you think coming-of-age novels persist in relevance to so many readers?

McNeely: Thank you for noticing that about Buddy—I worked very hard to explore the facets of his vulnerability in the novel. He is both a victim and an abuser. He is not an easy character to like, at times—and these are my favorite kinds of characters.

Children live in a world of savagery that seems as foreign to adults as a different planet. In Ghost Horse, I tried to channel that violent, lurid world as best I could. Simon, Buddy’s friend, seems to be the alpha male, the aggressor—but he is really a mirror of Buddy. In a way, Simon is the most interesting character, and I think my favorite character in the book. At school, Simon rules the other boys like a despot; but at home, he himself is a victim. His own aggression is a reaction to his father’s abuse.

What creates the savagery of childhood is, of course, adults’ abuse, spread through children. I think that’s why coming of age novels endure, and will always be relevant, because we look back at that gauntlet we ran through our own childhoods, through conflicts which are never truly resolved, and yet we can view them as if they are foreign. Maybe this is why writers find this territory so fertile—its strangeness and familiarity creates its own world, like fiction itself.

Rumpus: Ghost Horse is a Southern coming of age novel, as is my own recent novel. Did you have particular Southern literary models in mind when you were writing the book? Do you see a difference between coming of age narratives set in the South and in the rest of the country?

McNeely: Oh, yes. Southern coming of age narratives have to carry the extra weight of the South’s racial history, which I definitely had in mind writing Ghost Horse. One of the losses I was trying to capture in the book was the moment, familiar to anyone of my generation who grew up in the South, when one’s friendships with people of different races changed.

This was one of the markers, for me, between the worlds of childhood and adulthood. Before a certain age, adults didn’t really care about whether you were friends with people of other races. But as one grew older, the gulf between the races widened. I don’t think that this was malevolent or even consciously considered on the part of adults; it was just part of one’s acculturation, one’s formation into a white male Southern adult.

As for Southern literary models, I had a couple in mind, books I read when I was not much older than Buddy: Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote; The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers; Flannery O’Connor, especially her great overlooked novel, The Violent Bear It Away. There are other books in there, as well, my first loves, which I read at that age, in forty-five cent paperback editions from my grandmother’s bookshelves: The Catcher in the Rye, 1984, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I had no idea of what any of it meant; I tried to get some of this into earlier drafts of the book, but it seemed pretentious. The medium for Buddy narrating his own life, for his growing self-awareness, became the movies.

Rumpus: Right. Movies rarely seem pretentious—unless you call them films. The use of movies in the novel, both watching them and making them, is a vehicle for thinking about your young characters’ developing sense of personal memory, self-consciousness, and moral sensibilities. How do you think media affects the way children come to know themselves? And what shifts about our experiences with media as we grow older?

McNeely: I often think about what my eight-year-old daughter’s ability to instantly replay her own experience, to be the star of her own experience, does to her sense of herself. The Luddite in me is inclined to think it’s nothing good, but it may just be a different tool of self-consciousness.

On the other hand, though, she is being reflected back to herself in the company of all of these perfect-looking people on her iPad. And in my students, I see a different sense of privacy and selfhood—they seem both less concerned about privacy, which seems like an ever more quaint concept, and at the same time stunted in their ability to connect with each other. Capitalism’s victory in commodifying interaction is fairly complete, at least in American middle-class culture. Charles Baxter has a phrase in one of his recent stories—”the post-zombie affect”—and that seems about right to me. I can’t really imagine what my daughter’s sense of self or of her relationships with other people is going to become.

In Ghost Horse, I made a fairly conscious decision to avoid media that was in any way contemporary. For example, if I had set it a few years later, it would have been plausible for Buddy to use a video camera, which would have meant that he could record and play back scenes much more easily. But it was important to me to convey the texture of that time—because I do think that how we record our experience affects how we view it—and also for reasons I don’t entirely understand, to let his recording of his own experience be as if it were a movie, not an actual movie. I don’t think it would have worked as a trope of his world view and self-consciousness if I made it actual.

Rumpus: There’s something about the immediate play-back, isn’t there? That experience of having oneself reflected back instantly, like you’re talking about with your daughter. I sometimes think about the difference between performance art and creative art (not that performance art isn’t creative—it is) and feel like media has turned us all into performers, even reluctant ones. I think about myself doing my ZOOM chat with my online students. Now I’m keeping lipstick in my desk drawer because I have to watch myself talk to my students—we all appear on-screen, like those opening shots of The Brady Bunch. Without lipstick there’s definitely a zombie “affect” (not exactly what Charles Baxter means). Watching yourself in action is different than just being in action. In some way, Buddy’s creating the movie and not being able to watch it as it goes is more like an offering. There’s—I guess you could call it—space between the creation of it and the viewing/evaluation. Now it seems we’re forced to do both at the same time. As a writer, it’s so hard, on a computer, not to revise as you revisit the pages of the previous day. This can be toxic for a second-guesser like me.

McNeely: I know what you mean about revision—I tend to go back and fiddle and fuss—though my experience with Ghost Horse, in which I ended up doing a major last-minute revision that I think changed the book for the better, has somewhat broken me of this habit, I hope.

One reader of Ghost Horse said to me that they thought Buddy seeing his life as a movie was evidence of trauma-induced dissociation. As I understood Baxter’s “zombie” quote (it’s in a recent story, “Ghosts”), he was talking about this affect as a kind of personal style peculiar to our times, perhaps the result of so much social trauma—9/11, environmental disaster, the endless wars. But I think it’s also a result, for upper- and middle-class Americans, at least, of being overexposed, of always being “on,” as you say, in this vast narcissistic technological echo chamber.

I often think about what this has done to writing—this loss of a sense of privacy. Many people, like George Saunders, are writing about this, but I wonder what it is doing to the traditional coming-of-age narrative, for example, in which the character experiences an internal change. Alice Munro has been remarkably prescient in exploring how her characters perform their identities, how an internal self is both elusive, easily misplaced, and all the more vital at this time.

Rumpus: Interesting to think in terms of social trauma—and to think of it in conversation with more private, personal trauma. I know you’ve experienced some dramatic personal events in the last ten years—how did these experiences affect Ghost Horse?

McNeely: Personal trauma certainly played into writing this book, on many levels. My father committed suicide in 2003, about three years into my writing Ghost Horse. I was in the second year of my Stegner. I remember talking to Elizabeth Tallent and telling her that I didn’t know who I was writing the book for anymore. It took me a long time to figure out what that really meant.

In a strange way—and this may sound very cold-blooded—my father’s suicide allowed me to write the book. Before he died, I was writing it to him—a kind of instant feedback that wasn’t very helpful to the book—and after he died, it became a way to try to communicate with him, which wasn’t very helpful for the book, either.

Though the book is very autobiographical, I had to let go of the characters as stand-ins for real people, as conduits for reaching people who were absent in my life, especially my father. It was a long struggle to do this, both emotional and artistic, and I think that really only in the final revision, many years later, did I reach this goal. Though it is a very personal book, I realized that it had to become impersonal for it to work artistically. I had to let go of the idea that it was a means of communicating with him and with a whole host of other ghosts—even though I think that is what it is. But that is only its personal meaning.

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Technology Never Forgets

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Draftback is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to watch every keystroke of every revision made to a Google Doc played back to you, opening up a new way to study how writers write. Chadwick Matlin at FiveThirtyEight tried the extension, however, and he sees a dark side:

Embedded in Draftback’s ingenuity is also a certain kind of inevitability: that writing, like any commodity, is at the mercy of a technology that never forgets.

[Its creator] has laid out the utopian case for what that can mean: People learn how to write in a way they never could before. But there’s a dystopian one, too. Because of the way Draftback works, anybody with editing rights to a Google Doc can see that document’s past.

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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex #14: Liz Prato

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I can’t remember exactly when I met Liz Prato. She claims down below that it was at Wordstock, that lovely ink-stained Portland conclave. But I’m always so stoned those weekends that I wind up at Voodoo Donuts, fogging up the glass and making everyone nervous.

So be it. I do know that I’ve had Liz in a bunch of classes and that she always brings a wisdom and poise that is both deeply inspiring and, at the same time, personally annoying to me, her alleged “teacher.”

I have also read a good deal of Liz’s work over the years and was pleased, though not at all shocked, to learn that her debut story collection, Baby’s on Fire, would be published this month by the most excellent Press 53.

This provided the proper excuse to force her to endure a few slobbering queries from her old alleged prof.

Here’s how that went…

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The Rumpus: I believe you have taken three classes with me, though perhaps it feels like more to you. Please comment on the profound nature of these experiences.

Liz Prato: There was that time I realized that reality is subjective. That my experience and another’s experience of the same event are not the same. So does that mean reality is real? And, also, if you wave your hand through the air, rainbow-colored tracers will follow in its path.

Oh, wait… that was an acid trip from 1988.

Actually, I have learned some profound shit from you. Such as: it’s my narrative responsibility to tell the reader everything they need to know to care about my protagonist. And that it’s not enough to entertain people; we need to move them, too. And that writing is an art, not a commodity, and we are artists, not brands. That’s all foundational to how I move through the writing world.

Rumpus: Actually, I think you misheard me. What I said about writing is that it “boils down to developing a brand that allows you to establish a multi-platform presence in the marketplace with synergistic retail partnerships that maximize your revenue streams.” But let’s not quibble over language. Instead, let me ask this: How did Baby’s on Fire come together? At one point did you think, “Hey, I’ve got a book on my hands”?

Prato: I used to think that a short story collection was just an author’s previously written short stories cobbled together. And then, five years ago, I ran into Molly Antopol at AWP in Denver and asked her what she was working on. She said, “A short story collection,”EPSON MFP image and it was like the first time it occurred to me that a collection isn’t random. It’s planned. It has a theme and a feeling to it. So, I started looking at my stories differently. What was I really trying to talk about in the ones I’d written, and how did I want to continue to explore that going forward? I knew I was writing about the ways we get broken, and how we live with that, how we can remain whole, despite our brokenness.

When I started sending the collection out, I didn’t really have a sense of how to organize it. I was trying to think like an editor—ordering the stories so the book, as a whole, had its own narrative arc (“Man, if I end on this story the reader will be simultaneously devastated and fulfilled!”). The collection kept getting rejected, then Natalie Serber (author of Shout Her Lovely Name) told me to front load it with my absolutely strongest work. Make the editor fall in love immediately, and they’ll be more likely to either edit less successful pieces later on, or say, “Okay, just because the second-to-the-last story doesn’t work doesn’t mean this isn’t a great collection.” Which should seem obvious, right? But it was a revelation to me.

Rumpus: I read a number of pieces early in their genesis and was deeply impressed by their transformation. Can you talk about your revision process?

Prato: Funny—I have a 75% written craft book on the revision process of “When Cody Told Me He Loves Me on a Weird Winter Day,” which includes a chapter titled “The Almond Factor” (I think you said “Why don’t you tell your reader this upfront?” about 25 different times in your critique). I worked and worked that piece because I loved it, I loved what I was going for, and I loved my characters (even though several got axed, in the end, because they just weren’t working). I was incredibly lucky that when Hunger Mountain picked it up, the editors did some deep editing with me. I used to think if a publication didn’t edit a piece before publishing it, it meant the piece was awesome. But Hunger Mountain saw something they really liked in the story, and knew it wasn’t quite where it needed to be. They were willing to take the time to work with me to get it there. That’s a great compliment, in my mind. Kevin Morgan Watson, the editor of Press 53, also did that with “Minor League Lessons.” That story had been rejected a bazillion times but he said, “I really think you have something here; I want to help you make it work.” That’s the most generous thing any editor can do.

Also, it helps that I enjoy revision. I like the process of going deeper and deeper and finding out what I don’t know about my story. That’s part of why I’m a writer—to learn, to understand, to delve into the human experience. Revision is an extension of that.

Rumpus: There’s lots of talk these days about “literary citizenship.” What does that phrase mean to you?

Prato: Don’t be an asshole?

This thing we do, creating art, involves a lot of rejection and commoditization and self-doubt. It’s too easy to give up. Don’t let other writers give up.

That being said, man, I hate the phrase “literary citizenship.” It’s no longer something we should just be naturally inclined to do—help out and support each other—but it’s become some sort of self-congratulatory mandate. Who’s dictating what it means to be a good literary citizen, anyway? It seems to mean reposting and re-tweeting your fellow authors’ work on social media, going to as many readings as possible, hosting and planning readings… and don’t get me wrong, those are all good, important things. But not everyone is comfortable with, or physically or emotionally capable of all that. So, for me it just means: help when you can. And don’t be an asshole.

Rumpus: You live in Portland, Oregon, which may be my favorite city on earth. My question is simple: did you move to Portland with the tattoo, or were you forced to get it?

Prato: I told myself that I’d be subversive by not getting a tattoo. That’d show them right? But there’s only so many times you can receive the withering, disdainful look from hipsters—I mean, it’s super important to have their approval, right?

Seriously. I’d never gotten one because I couldn’t imagine any one image I’d still want on my body ten weeks from now, much less ten years. Plus, I’m a total pain wimp. But about a year ago, I started considering getting a honu (Hawaiian sea turtle). I’m spiritually connected to the islands, so I wanted to be able to carry that with me all the time. I didn’t know why I was so attracted to the honu, but when I looked up its meaning I learned that it represents the navigator who is always able to find its way home. That feels important to me as I go out into the world with my first book, and with some pretty scary nonfiction. Then my tattoo artist told me in Chinese tradition, the turtle is a symbol of longevity—which doesn’t exactly run in my family. I desperately want that for myself. Boom—honu tattoo.

Rumpus: I know you’ve been publishing some searing non-fiction. What’s next for Liz Prato?

Prato: I recently completed a memoir chronicling the five years during which my elderly dad and adult brother fell into severe mental and physical illness and addiction, resulting in both their deaths—and my own breakdown. So, you know, it’s a light-hearted romp. Now I’m taking a break from writing about my fucked-up family and am starting a new novel. I’m hesitant to talk about it, because I can’t believe someone hasn’t done it already and am afraid someone else will do it faster and better than me. But let’s say I’m reinterpreting a modern classic with a soundtrack from 1983. So far, I have a lot of multi-colored index cards, an iTunes play list, and the resolve that “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” will not be in the book.

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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jonathan Travelstead

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I get an email from Cobalt Press. The publisher I work with there is super excited about the new poetry collection they’re editing. The collection is titled How We Bury Our Dead and the poems are the work of a firefighter from downstate Illinois. The poet has also served overseas and lost his mother and the resulting poems weave together his experience with loss and grieving. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read, the publisher tells me. He then asks me to help arrange a reading for the poet, whose name is Jonathan Travelstead. My first thought is what a great name for a poet—so evocative of movement and adventure. My second thought is of course, but now I better read these poems. The poems are amazing—and as advertised—thoughtful and moving ruminations on grieving and loss. But so is Travelstead himself. And in meeting him, and listening to him read, I want to know more, and so I ask him to talk about his work, and over the course of several weeks, we email one another, and the resulting conversation about death, writing, and exercise, is—no surprise—amazing and moving as well.

***

The Rumpus: How do we bury our dead?

Jonathan Travelstead: The attitude of North American culture towards burial and grief is a grotesque one. I remember at eighteen—over-stimulated with too many classes and too many jobs to pay for them—I took a Death and Dying course and read some of the most fascinating books on how our culture deals with—or doesn’t deal with—death. The year or so it took to finish How We Bury Our Dead’s title poem, I revisited those works to inform the speaker’s anger when he goes to his mother’s funeral (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying; Mary Roach, Stiff; James Agee, A Death in the Family). Finishing the poem, I only realized then it was more a commentary on our antiseptic attitude towards not only death, but grieving, and a lashing out at the funeral industry’s part in prolonging that grief.

We are still a fairly repressed culture. The funeral industry has become such a behemoth presence that they have wormed their way into our values system over many generations and reshaped our attitudes towards how we interact with the dead. I remember trying to wash my mother’s body and the men from the funeral home in their dollar stiff suits telling me not to worry, they would take care of that. Surely there is value in preparing your own deceased at home? Outsourcing the disposal of our deceased may actually be a missed opportunity for the most intimate stage of the grieving process, acceptance.

Rumpus: Your answer reminds me of my father’s death and how one of his friends wanted to build the coffin. The funeral home wasn’t thrilled about it, but it was his way of grieving the loss. How do you think writing this collection, and writing in general, helped you with the grieving process?

Travelstead: Writing the first draft was a necessary first step in processing just what it is to lose the only person that would still hug you if you didn’t call for three months, or if they found out you’d once kicked a puppy. Throughout multiple revisions, however, I was hopefully able to distance myself enough from “writing-as-grieving”—that crying in the dark—to crafting something that moves artfully through a process as well as other landlocked geographies, honoring denial as much as acceptance.

I can’t locate or remember who first said it, but the process of distancing one’s self enough from emotion to begin crafting a work suitable for print reminds me of a quote I’ll paraphrase, poorly: “To write the blues you have to stand outside the blues.” Or maybe William Wordsworth said it better: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Writing for me is a mapping of previously unknown tributaries, or, as in Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” discovery through writing. Stephen King says the act is like going down the river to drink. Writing allows me to interact with my feelings and intentions in a kind of feedback loop, or phatic dialogue between my heart and mind that’s reminiscent of seeing what your head looks like when placed between two funhouse mirrors.

Like any writer, most of my heavy lifting is done in isolation. Mornings not at work, the phone and my accessibility to the world are cut off to everyone except my fiancé and the fire department. Afternoons, like my dog or a mental soundtrack, whatever poem I’m working on usually comes with as I go on a run or to the gym or out to the woodshop. 

Rumpus: There’s a lot of amazing stuff to unpack here, and yet, I want start by picking up on this last thread, and ask you to comment on the intersection—for you anyway—between exercise and writing and possibly even grieving itself.

JT Typographic cover full drop.inddTravelstead: Physical activity has a relationship with everything I do. I grew up believing the diagnoses that I had both Attention Deficit Disorder, and ADHD (just add hyperactivity)—two popular conditions sold easily to parents of indomitable children in the 80s by doctors who sometimes received the rough equivalent of a commission for giving them. As a child I remember feeling as if I owed my accomplishments—or when they were lacking—to a condition that is still as poorly understood as its meds.

However, I wanted to escape the victim narrative of allowing it to own both my failures and successes, and so I spent hours bicycling between Southern Illinois’ corn fields, Shawnee National Forest, and old coal mine roads, and soon found that structuring my day with long periods of moderate-to-intense activity allowed me to manage scattershot thoughts. Today, whether it’s the act of setting out and my foot padding against concrete as the miles slip behind me, or the attention demanded by sets of arm-leadening pull-ups, I find a sense of presence in physical activity that releases the dross of anxieties.

I think what I’m talking about is “zen,” or inhabiting a moment, completely. I feel like an open window, vulnerable to whatever feeling blows in when cycling, running, or lifting, depending upon the season. When taking a break from writing, oftentimes I listen to an audiobook, the story-laden music of Josh Ritter or Gillian Welch, or sometimes just listen to myself breathe between footfalls. I remember re-listening to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as I ran around the back nine of a golf course in Olney, Illinois—home of the white, albino squirrels—and a few tears leaked out between strained breaths and the court scene in which Atticus Finch delivers his summation, thinking how odd a crying runner must have looked to any golfers.

Rumpus: This reminds me of the time I was on a long run and a PSA came on the radio with Phil Jackson talking about breast cancer and I thought about my mom—who is a survivor—and I started crying profusely. But that’s not a question; my question is about anxiety and whether you think there are any benefits to struggling with anxiety when you’re a writer or artist?

Travelstead: In my case, absolutely. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I try to borrow the same motivations from my career as a firefighter and consider the writing process as seriously as I do entering a house with black smoke puffing from its eaves. In a poem any unconsidered line, word, or break can have toxic consequences to the speaker’s authenticity, or intent. Which is not to say I emerge from writing in the same state as I do after a structure fire—I just may feel like it, emotionally.

With any craft, or work in which someone takes pride and makes a living, I can’t imagine anxiety not being a functional tool for producing their best work. However, I consider it to be the best tool only when confined to the final stages of the writing process, and stifling in the early, creative stages to the point of analysis paralysis—that condition where the writer smothers the poem by over-thinking it, or planning too much. As a work is revisited and crafted I find anxiety to be helpful, necessary even.

I write for an imaginary audience that has ADD but that is also shrewd and discerning, and whose attention I will lose if it intuits a writer’s lack of authenticity—both in terms of my own struggle with the underlying tensions, and also of the speaker’s within the narrative. As writers, if we’re minding our craft—and a little lucky—then that struggle is passed along to the reader. It’s not only a motivator, it’s also a defense mechanism for combing out a word choice or movement that can throw off a poem’s voice, or identifying whether a risky line inches too far towards sentimentality.

Rumpus: I love this response, and though I generally shudder at asking a writer about their writing process, any answer that compares writing poems to putting out fires may well demand it. So, what is your process?

Travelstead: I don’t consider myself one of those magnificent bastards that sits down and ball-peens a poem out in a week or two. In fact, I find the act of writing even a single poem to be a tremendously difficult and months-long process, one that involves as much reading (fiction and nonfiction, mostly) as it does being planted in the saddle of my desk chair.

Because I find writing so difficult, quiet and solitude are as necessary as being singular. Most mornings I read for a few minutes, then let my dog take me for a walk before eating a full breakfast, trying not to do any two things at once. I usually write for an hour or two, and then spend fifteen or twenty minutes submitting finished work. When I feel satisfied that something is finished, I put it aside for a number of weeks before reading it aloud, then deciding whether it’s ready for sending out.

What I don’t mention—but is just as much a part of my process—is having meditative, physical distractions. I think my most effective composition is often done when I’m changing the brake fluid on my motorcycle, or cleaning the house—and my partner enthusiastically agrees. In the finishing stages I find that scanning my lines, more research into specific language, and asking for comments to be more helpful. Rereading the Elements of Style never hurts, either. 

Rumpus: Sorry, I got stuck on the phrase “balls-peens” for a minute. Very embarrassing that. That said, I am struck that even as we talk about meditation, exercise, housecleaning, and walking your dog, there is a real structure to how you think about all of this, and I am wondering if you might take a moment to talk about the value of structure to the artistic life and creativity?

Travelstead: I’d wager that the most talented, prolific writers tend towards structured lifestyles where they know “this is the thing I do at this time,” essentially “going dark” to the world for awhile. Trust me, the dishes and Twitter will still be there at 1400.

Sure, creativity doesn’t always thrive on daily structure, but I think being habituated to a daily schedule actually increases the reception of good ideas and prevents them from bottlenecking. I do my best writing long after that creative burst, and try to keep the pathway between inspiration and execution clear.

Rumpus: Speaking of pathways, we may be just about done, but before all of that, can you talk about what’s next and what you hope to work on after that? And if I left anything out, this is your chance to correct that, so please do feel free to run with this.

Travelstead: I’m still doing readings for How We Bury Our Dead, but have also just begun sending out a manuscript with the working title Conflict Tours. In it, the speaker moves from his time as a medic on the Mexican/US border to the Appalachian Trail, to touring Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone. Besides an addiction to traveling to places of internal or recent conflict, the speaker is dealing with what he considers to be an addiction Adderall, or Ritalin—something I haven’t yet seen in poetry.

Most of what I’ve been working on lately has been set in the “near future” sub-genre of science fiction, many of which have been picked up such as “God Particle” (Gyroscope Review), “Church of the Civil Engineer” (Panoply), “Cloud Fables” (Rose Red Review), “A Motorcycle Salesman Looks Back” (The Freeman), and “Nocturne With Light Cyclist” (The Citron Review), among others. I’m not sure yet if they’ll eventually form up into a longer work, but I’d love to hear from anyone who cares to check them out.

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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dinty W. Moore

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Creative nonfiction, in its modern incarnation, is a relatively new genre, and Dinty W. Moore is, through both his writing and his stewardship of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, inarguably one of the key figures in its ascent. I’d describe his newest book, Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy, as a rumination on the conventions and practice of the personal essay, except that this is Moore, who’s famously friendly and accessible, and phrases like “a rumination on the conventions and practice” are likely to make him wrinkle his brow and mutter something about graduate student speak. So, let me try again. His newest book, Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy, is a funny and engaging conversation between Moore and other key figures in the genre, such as Philip Lopate, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Diane Ackerman, Michael Martone, and some polar bears.

The book—some of which was written on cocktail napkins stolen from the bar at Casa Nueva in Athens, Ohio, where Moore is the director of Ohio University’s Creative Writing Program—answers some of the burning questions of the genre, such as how many em-dashes are too many em-dashes, and is it okay to peak through our neighbors’ windows in order to write about them. But this is not a craft book. (If that’s what you’re looking for, check out Moore’s equally excellent Crafting the Personal Essay.) Rather, it’s a book that leads by example, using Moore’s own essays to demonstrate how the essay functions.

What follows is a discussion of the book between Moore and me that took place via emails sent over the course of several weeks. In the interest of full disclosure, I should let you know that I’m currently a PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Ohio, and Dinty is my dissertation director. There may be some sucking up in the questions posed, then, because I really need my dissertation defense to be successful. But my enthusiasm for this book is genuine. Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy is Moore at his best. It’s witty but also substantial, and the conversations between Moore and his interlocutors get to the heart of what makes the essay such a compelling form: its capacity to render, on the page, the human experience.

***

The Rumpus: The conceit of the book is that you are answering questions about essay writing for a number of very well-known essayists—including Cheryl Strayed, Phillip Lopate, Judith Kitchen, Roxane Gay, and Sue William Silverman. They sent you funny, charming letters, and it’s clear that everyone is in on and enjoying the joke of it, but also that they are asking meaningful questions. (I particularly like Lopate’s, “I am curious about how you deal honestly with male-female relations in general and specifically your past girlfriends on the page without coming off as a male chauvinist pig.”)

I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the collaborative parts of the book took shape. In many ways, it’s an act of community, and you’ve gathered authors from across the wide spectrum of creative nonfiction. And, although you’re going to hate that I’ve put it this way, you’re a central part of that community, from your years of stewardship at AWP to your role as the founding editor of Brevity, one of the genre’s flagship journals. So, could you talk to us a little bit about creating a book that reflects and includes that community of writers, and also about why you so obviously believe that having such a community is important for both writers and for literature?

Screenshot 2015-09-18 10.47.02Dinty W. Moore: I think, Sarah, that you have me confused with Barack Obama. He was a community organizer, as you know, well before he forged his birth records and started collecting everyone’s guns. You are correct, however, that I am passionate about the importance of community in our literary field, and in the combined strength that comes from the generosity of editors, mentors, readers, interviewers, and advocates, but really, as for Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy, I had an idea for what I thought might be a humorous project— answering tongue-in-cheek questions from other essayists— and I picked folks who fit two main categories: 1) They were contemporary essayists whose work I much admire, and 2) There was a chance they would actually answer my e-mails. My hidden agenda was simply to have some literary fun on the page.

Rumpus: Okay, fine, answer in the voice of Mr. Essay Writer Guy if you must. I’ll be your straight (wo)man. By the way, according to Wikipedia, this means I should get 60% of the take for this interview. So, I’ll set ‘em up and you knock ‘em down.

Anyway, Barrie Jean Borich writes in her letter that she’s been using Google Maps to spy on her neighbors in various states of dishevelment and in the midst of Xbox chicanery. She asks, “What are the ethics of writing about people who don’t know I’m looking in their windows?” You carefully avoid answering her by distracting the reader with the image of yourself waddling around in your boxer shorts and with your Google Maps essay, “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge.” But, really, we want to know: is it okay to look into the windows of our neighbors in order to write about them? Does this make us Peeping Toms or just writers who are very dedicated to the research process? What are the boundaries to which the ethical essayist must adhere when it comes to writing about strangers?

Moore: I’ll answer this one non-ironically, or at least try my very best. It is my belief that given a few factors, we can and should write about anyone we need in order to write our stories, without bearing too much angst or apprehension. Those factors are 1) Sincerity of motive, and by that I mean we don’t enter a project with an agenda but are writing about people because the human species is fascinating and understanding human beings and their complexity benefits us all, 2) Empathy, 3) Honesty, and 4) A willingness to b.s. check ourselves at every juncture, to make sure we are living up to the first three. I’m assuming, by the way, you mean “looking into the windows of our neighbors” metaphorically. I don’t advise actual criminal trespass. I do, however, discuss in Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy (in response to a question from Dinah Lenney) the difficulty of writing about our own children. I tried that once and failed spectacularly. Perhaps we can never understand our own children, because there is too much of ourselves inside there, or perhaps we are just blinded by the illusion that there is so much of ourselves inside of them. See, a serious answer, just when you didn’t expect it!

Rumpus: In “Have You Learned Your Lesson, Amigo,” you write the essay twice: once as a straight narrative, once as a critique of that narrative. This sort of meta-writing—in which you both write the piece and write about writing the piece—is one of the strengths, I think, of the essay form. I was wondering if you could talk about the place of meta-writing in meaning making in creative nonfiction?

Moore: Can I talk about the place of meta-writing in meaning making in creative nonfiction? That’s a lot of ‘m’s in one sentence. “My meta memories mystify millions!” is my new motto. But yes, the essay form is indeed rooted in meta moments. We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means. Otherwise, essay or memoir is flat: it is just “this happened to me” or “I happen to think this about that.” If a writer isn’t examining and re-examining her ideas and observations in each draft, ending up places she never thought at the beginning that her essay would take her, then she is not doing the job.

Rumpus: This book is full of highly stylized voices, both your own and those of the letter writers. It’s very clear, in these framing elements, that everyone’s tongues are planted firmly in their cheeks. This got me thinking about the comedic in creative nonfiction, and the ways in which this allows you to tackle difficult subjects, such as writing about ex-girlfriends without being a jerk, in ways that might not be possible in a work with a more serious tone. Your writing often approaches these complexities with a light-hearted tone that belies the seriousness of the ideas you engage. Could you talk a little bit about how you deploy comedy and voice in your writing?

Moore: Comedy comes naturally to me. I find it difficult to turn it off, rather than hard to turn on. That has been a problem at various stages of my life— and is currently a problem during recurring somber departmental budget meetings— but all in all it is a happy gift. Countless humorists and comics before me have pointed out that telling a truth people don’t want to hear somehow becomes more possible when you wrap that truth in funniness. In my way of thinking, Richard Pryor, Wanda Sykes, and Louis C.K. are essayists as well as stand-up artists. The body of work they provide over time explores race, gender, class, power, powerlessness, and relationship in ways that reveal deep truth and shake our perceptions, though we often aren’t aware in the moment because we are too busy peeing ourselves. I say shit that makes my wife squirm, and some of my colleagues probably think I am little more than a jolly jester, but I take pride in pointing out moments where the emperor has no clothes. (I’d rather see the empress naked rather than the emperor, to be honest, but you take what you can get.) And I make people laugh. That’s a good thing. We need more of that.

Rumpus: In “Four Essential Tips for Telling the Truth in Memoir and Securing That Blockbuster Book Deal,” you show us several versions of work you’ve written toward telling the story of a night when your mother, drunk after a Christmas party, side-swiped several cars and then drove you both to City Hall and turned herself in. This piece is, on its face, about memory and writing from it. But it seems to me also to be about the awful writing we do when we are starting out, and how we can only get to better writing by going through—rather than around—that awful stuff. What advice do you have for writers who are still in the awful part? How long does it take until things get better?

Moore: My writing from age twenty-one, which is where that essay begins, is stunningly horrible. But you know, my writing from yesterday is stunningly horrible, and you would agree if I didn’t revise it ten times before showing it to you. My advice to writers who are still in that awful part is this: thank goodness we can revise and adjust and tighten and rethink before going public with our words. Revision is our friend. Our best friend. I love revision. I want to kiss it all over its big fat generous face. If I weren’t happily married, I’d probably try to get frisky with it.

Rumpus: You play a lot with form in this book. There are essays written from Facebook posts and on cocktail napkins, using Google Maps and found on your answering machine. How do you feel that the Internet and electronic publishing are changing the possibilities for the essayist? Please answer in the form of a document which states that I have satisfactorily defended my dissertation and met all the requirements for my doctoral degree.

Moore: Sarah “Little Al” Einstein has satisfactorily defended her dissertation, or will soon enough, and she has satisfied all of the requirements for her doctoral degree except those that are still out there, sitting sadly unfinished somewhere on the road between Athens and Chattanooga. Plus she has mad skills in making pickled vegetables. How’s that? As for the other part of the question, I think technology is changing everything about writing. I love the good old book with glue and binding, I really do, but that is just one way of experiencing text, and suddenly we have so many new ways, including our laptops, our phones, our watches. People in my generation agonize over this. People much younger than me don’t agonize at all. They just go ahead and find ways to transform publishing. I’m on the side of the young people, because they know where the good drugs are.

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The Rumpus Interview with Karolina Waclawiak

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When I recently went to the Los Angeles launch of Karolina Waclawiak’s newest novel The Invaders, I was intrigued by her thoughts on how women are devalued as they age. That said, I was a little concerned I might struggle relating to this book; my upbringing, which was very southern Californian and poor, couldn’t have been more different than the characters she portrays. The Invaders is a dark tale of a stepmother and her stepson surviving in a wealthy, safe, and beautiful but somehow deeply disturbing beachside community. To my surprise, when I sat down to read it, I found myself invested. I could relate to these characters, and I was eager to talk to Karolina about why.

Karolina is the author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms published by Two Dollar Radio in 2012 and The Invaders published by Regan Arts this past July. She is also currently the nonfiction editor at The Believer.

***

The Rumpus: How’s your book tour?

Karolina Waclawiak: It’s been good. It’s been really interesting because I’ve had women come up to me at the readings and sort of divulge personal stuff to me about their relationships and how the book really hit close to home for them and they hadn’t read anything like it before. They felt so connected in terms of the pitfalls of a marriage or what’s at stake.

Rumpus: Was there any particular person that really shocked you?

Waclawiak: I read in my hometown in Connecticut and a woman came up to me and said, “Thank you for writing this. I want to give it to everyone I know in town because I feel like we all kinda need to know our situation.” There are two camps, which is women who say they feel akin to these feelings and then another set of women who feel this is depressingInvadersCOVERWeb and don’t need to read about this. Kind of like ignorance is bliss. In talking to book clubs, I think some readers just want to feel uplifted by the things they read instead of having a reality thrust into their face. I could write those sort of things but I don’t know how.

Rumpus: This is your second book. How has the process differed from your first book to this book in terms of writing it, the tour, reader responses, etc.?

Waclawiak: With the first book I didn’t know what to expect and I feel like I got really lucky with the amount of press that it got. It had so much to do with Two Dollar Radio having such an amazing collection of books and people waiting to see what they come up with next. Being published by them was the best case scenario in the indie world because they’re so well-respected. I think I assumed the second book would be easier to sell because I had such a great reception with the first one. With my first book I didn’t have an agent. I had queried agents but no one wanted to take me on because they thought the book was too hard of a sell or they thought I needed to have a more likeable character as my narrator. They basically all told me you have to rewrite this book to make a likeable character. Which I really bristled at. So I started sending queries to indie publishers, because I figured if I’m expending so much energy trying to find an agent, why not? And so Two Dollar Radio picked me up and then I got an agent. I figured with the second book it wouldn’t be so hard, but it was. It was really hard. I think it took a year or a year and a half to sell the book. I was getting a lot of good responses from editors saying we love this book, but publishers were not as excited because I had an unlikable female narrator and so from a marketing standpoint they weren’t sure if women would want to read the book or if they could sell it to book clubs. To write a book about female aging, female sexuality, and female invisibility is sort of on par with writing a book about death. Americans don’t want to act like death exists and people don’t want to talk about aging.

Rumpus: We don’t want to talk about the very obvious elephant in the room.

Waclawiak: I got a lot of pushback. I had people wanting to see the second book in terms of press and stuff, but I think the big turning point for the second book was Oprah Magazine picking it up for the lead review for August. And that’s been really interesting because the book has been publicized as a summer read. You think, especially with the cover, you’re gonna get some breezy book and then you open it and it’s dark and depressing. This wasn’t a summer read. So I started thinking in terms of what makes a summer read. I started asking if that is a slur in the book community. Does that mean you have a light and fluffy book? What is a beach read? And what does it mean for my book to have been labeled a beach read? It’s funny because a friend of mine tweeted “I’m sitting drinking rose at a beach club in the summer and it’s hard for me not to think about The Invaders.” It’s really fun to think about because I kind of love the idea of the book being an impetus to look around the communities and think about the secret lives of these people.

Rumpus: I think you’ve inspired some people watching this year.

Waclawiak: That I love.

Rumpus: The book alternates between Cheryl and Teddy. I love the back and forth point of view, especially in some chapters where they’re going over the same events with their different points of view. Did you always intend to write it that way?

Waclawiak: It had several incarnations and I always was focused on Teddy because when I started thinking about this story and this community I was around Teddy’s age. I felt very connected to him. Over the course of ten years of thinking about this story I started becoming closer in age to Cheryl. I had written a short story where she was a background character and I pulled her up to the forefront and I didn’t want to lose Teddy but I also wanted to tell Cheryl’s story and I remember someone in the whole selling-the-book process saying just get rid of Teddy.

Rumpus: Oh no, that would’ve been a tragedy.

Waclawiak: I said no way because I’m dealing with the duality of being trapped when you’re born into this community and being trapped when you try to get into this community and I think that the insider-outsider perspective is so necessary for the book. To me they’re both outsiders even if one was born into this world and so it never occurred to me to make it just one person’s point of view. They’re both unreliable narrators, so you’re seeing the world through their eyes and you’re seeing people through their eyes and you know if there isn’t this sense of deep development of other characters in the book it’s because it’s just how Cheryl sees them or it’s how Teddy sees them so maybe they’re not seeing the nuances of you know, someone like Laurie.

Rumpus: I feel like they both on some level essentially wanted out of the community but Cheryl is really fighting to keep what she has and Teddy assumes he’s going to have no problem with staying and getting things handed to him. And in a sense, he’s right. He’s born into that but at the same time you can tell he doesn’t want it.

Waclawiak: Right, but I think he doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to want. When you live in a rigid community—especially where there’s a legacy of you know exactly what trajectory you’re supposed to be on—you don’t know what the other options are. And every other option seems like a failure. Especially if your father is like Jeffery and your life has been laid out for you. There’s a sense that Teddy doesn’t really appreciate how hard it is to get to where he is, especially as a starting point, where Cheryl knows exactly how hard it is to get there so she doesn’t want to let go of anything. She’s worked for it and lived around it because she knows what the alternative is; Teddy doesn’t.

How to Get Into the Twin PalmsRumpus: If Cheryl had left before the event at the end of the book, how do you think she would’ve faired in the world?

Waclawiak: This is something I always think about. She hasn’t worked for ten years; how are you supposed to get back into the job market and essentially support yourself when you haven’t worked? You’re educated but your values diminish, especially as an older woman. I see a lot of women who get into circumstances where perhaps their husbands are cheating or they’re not happy but they haven’t worked for twenty years. What are you going to do? And then you’ve lived this lifestyle for so long, your alternative is to what? Move into a one bedroom apartment? Yes, that is obviously an alternative but I think sometimes women will say they don’t want to give up the lifestyle, so they’ll stay. And I used to think that that was a really black and white wrong decision. I empathize with them more now because it’s so much more complicated when you essentially leave your entire community. It’s their identity, and so leaving means completely losing your identity too.

Think about it—all these towns are microcosms of the world at large, and there are different stratospheres and the people who’ve lived there longest have the most power or have the most money and so even if you get new people coming in they’re not going to want to rock the boat because they don’t want to become outcasts. It’s like high school. It’s just we’re trapped in this perpetual high school wanting to be in the in-clique.

Rumpus: There is this other element to your book: preying on youth. Cheryl does a lot of reflecting about women aging and how their husband’s attentions are therefore turned on younger women. And there are two examples of the opposite where women are preying on younger men. You have Teddy with Jill and Cheryl and Stephen.

Waclawiak: In addition to female aging, I really wanted to look at sexuality and acceptable forms of desire, and I thought it was really interesting that Teddy was attracted to older women. But it felt unacceptable and sort of secret; he was never going to talk to his friends about liking a forty-year-old. With Cheryl and Steven, you know, she’s attracted to him because he feels dangerous and also he actually pays attention to her and it makes her feel powerful. So I think in sexual relationships it’s always interesting to me who has the power. I think when you feel like your power is dwindling in your relationship you look to other places to find that power. I do think it’s really interesting to think about power dynamics in sexual relationships, so I wanted to look at that in terms of age. And then there’s this sort of scrutiny that the younger guy will always leave and it always feels linked in tabloids with the woman’s ability to have children or not. It’s so interesting to me that a woman value is tied to whether or not she is able to have children and that’s directly connected to your age, so there’s a line in the book that I had that basically said men only want you when you are fertile. I believe that because we’re all animals that we’re hardwired to procreate, but the older woman has less value because she’s got an end point to when she can have children, and men don’t really have that, so they’re always valuable.

Rumpus: Do you think that things would have been different for Cheryl if she had a kid with Jeffrey?

Waclawiak: I think she would have had less regret. I think much of the choice for her to not have a child was directly linked to Jeffrey not wanting to have children anymore. She would probably channel a lot of her energy into having a kid so her being who she is, she would be less unhappy.

Rumpus: What do you think the future holds for Teddy?

Waclawiak: He will probably end up back home. I think there is a sense of, “Oh I can make it in the outside world,” but when you don’t necessarily have the tools to do so I think it takes a lot of courage to walk away from the world that you’re born into and say, “I don’t want this, I’m going to live another way.” Especially if it’s all you know.

Rumpus: One of the more secondary characters that I really loved was Tuck. Tuck is the person I was rooting for, especially at the end, with his act of defiance. I feel like Cheryl wished that in some way that it was her being able to act on these feelings that she was trying to suppress.

Waclawiak: Tuck is the type of person who never necessarily had a job. There’s never been a fear that he couldn’t get this life or afford it. In many ways he’s Teddy grown up. He’s comfortable in who he is and he’s comfortable that his place in this society is not going to change. He’s not fighting for anything like everybody else, except against Laurie who he feels is this person who’s abusing her power. I thought about him a lot after the book. I think he sort of just wants the neighborhood like it was when he grew up. Like in my first book, I knew if I was going to write a bleak book I needed to have some kind of humor. He is a laid back guy and I think you need points of humor in these kinds of books.

Rumpus: I could almost see him wearing a Hawaiian shirt because he knows they can’t do anything about it.

Waclawiak: What are they going to do?

Rumpus: There are two characters, Jeffrey and Cheryl’s mom, whose relationships with Cheryl feel very parallel in the sense that they are both lost to her. Would that be fair to say?

Waclawiak: That’s a really good point. We only have control of how we react to things and we can put our best effort forth to mend fences or mend relationships but we have no control over how the other person is going to take what we’re doing or take what we’re trying to fix. They can either accept it or reject it. And so it’s interesting to me when one person wants to fix something and the other person is done. A large part of the book was me essentially playing with the idea of where does love go. You can really love someone and all of the sudden it disappears. Of course it’s not overnight, but over time, love erodes. I heard the secret to a long marriage is never falling out of love at the same time. I thought that was genius. If you both stop fighting, that’s when the trouble happens, and I think the same goes for any kind of relationship, especially something as fraught as a mother-daughter relationship.

Rumpus: Do you sympathize with how the husbands act in these communities?

Waclawiak: I have sympathy for everyone and it took me writing this book to gain sympathy for everyone. In the end, we’re all human and we all want to be loved. There’s a lot of sympathy to feel for this sense of deep unhappiness for something that you’ve worked for in this world, that you’ve surrounded by, but you’re not happy with and knowing you can explode your life and move somewhere else or you can sit there and obliterate yourself and act like you’re happy with the alcohol or drugs or whatever. And there are of course people that are happy in these towns—Tuck being one of them, his wife being another—but there’s also this sort of deep sense of unhappiness and thinking, “But this is what we were supposed to want.” I think that goes for both the husbands and the wives. It makes me sad, but I think it’s worth looking at and I think it’s uncomfortable to look at and I think that’s why people have had an adverse reaction to looking at it.

Rumpus: If Cheryl had been included more, would she have been happier?

Waclawiak: I think the inclusion would make her happy. I think maybe that’s what we want. To feel a sense of community with people. But then you know the women who are included in this community aren’t happy anyway. They’re all sniping at each other and they’re all speaking behind each other’s back and stuff so I don’t know. It’s hard not to think we’re doomed.

Rumpus: On a different note, what is your writing process like?

Waclawiak: I have a full-time job so I really try to write nights and weekends and lately I have not been doing a good job. I’m working on another book and I’ve been sidelined with a lot of different things but I’m going to get back to it. I’ll write a first draft semi-quickly, just get it out and then I’ll take everything and look at it and think about what’s missing and then I’ll fill in. So to me, I want to get to the end before I start doing any revising or going backwards, and I think that’s really helped me. I remember being in college and I was in the screenwriting program and I saw classmates sort of working on the first act of the script for the KarolinaSkylightfirst semester and tweaking it and tweaking it and never finishing anything, so I became obsessed with finishing things. I’m a compulsive finisher—even if I think what I’m coming up with is terrible, I need to finish it so that I can have something to work with and start from page one and do a rewrite.

With this particular book I’m writing right now, I really have to be in the headspace for it. For the first time in my life, I got an Airbnb and ran away and sat there without Internet or television and wrote for four days. I think I’m going to have to do that a lot more with this book. I think sometimes with social media we’re so inundated that we don’t have an attention span anymore so it’s important to take us out of our comfort zone and our day-to-day and to say, I’m paying for this therefore I need to make this worthwhile.

Rumpus: Can you tell me more about your current project?

Waclawiak: The book I’m writing right now is about miracles and death, specifically a miracle that occurs in the desert in Texas. I’ve been going to the desert in Texas and I’ve also been going closer to home in Joshua Tree to be able to write and feel the desert vibes. It’s about religious miracles and why we believe what we believe. The first chapter was published in VQR in the summer issue. It’s a huge departure from what I’ve usually written but also is still investigating the things I’m always obsessed with in my books, which are women in peril and women trying to sort out their life and their world.

Rumpus: We talked about how dark The Invaders is. Does the subject matter you write about ever affect you as a person or your mood?

Waclawiak: I was a real joy to be around while I was writing this book for three years. My husband kept asking, “Are you finished? Can you be normal again?” It really affects me because I have to be in the headspace of these characters. I’ll tell you being in Cheryl’s headspace was really not a place I wanted to be. There’s a desperation to it and this melancholy that you can’t shake and so it was affecting my point of view. I would obsessively watch couples on the street and pick up their behavior. I was also seeing a lot of couples having silent dinners at restaurants. That was really bumming me out. So yeah, I’m a person who’s deeply impacted but what they’re writing and it’s hard.

Rumpus: So you edit at The Believer, which is one of my favorite publications. How has your editing career affected you as a writer?

Waclawiak: It’s actually helped me tremendously. I think it’s been really smart to edit nonfiction as a fiction writer because I don’t get bogged down or depressed while editing. I’ve learned a different sort of narrative structure in a really interesting way editing nonfiction and it’s made me more conscious and careful about what I’m doing. I think that’s also just editing in general, because when I’m editing, I’m refining what other people have done. So instantly now when I work on my own stuff I’m always thinking about revising and refining. For a long time I was so anti-revision and now to me it all seems like problem solving and so that part of the process isn’t as terrible as it used to be.

Rumpus: Does that ever get in the way when you’re doing first-draft work? Does your editor brain try to kick in?

Waclawiak: I might write notes to myself now saying when you come back to this make sure to hit this, this, and this. Points like that, but I still have to get to the end.

Rumpus: Switching gears a little more, you live in Los Angeles, which has a very vibrant literary community. What do you think about the community here?

Waclawiak: I think the community here is so awesome and supportive. People come out for each other and everyone is so nice and inviting. It seems like a much lower pressure situation here. It’s just sort of like, we’re all doing it. We’re all in this together and that’s relaxing and nice.

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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jonterri Gadson

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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Jonterri Gadson about her new collection Blues Triumphant, her love of editing, and the intersection of poetry and comedy writing.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month the Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts an online discussion with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To join the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, click here.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears

***

Brian S: Can you talk about the way you structured the book? Like, the use of lines from that opening run of sonnets to make poem titles and so on.

Jonterri Gadson: When I was sending my book out and getting feedback from others, I kept hearing that the poems were good, but that the book needed a frame. No one understood what the poems were doing together. So out of frustration, I was like, “Fine! I’m going to structure the heck out of this thing!”

Brian S: Did you write poems to fit into spaces in the book then?

Jonterri Gadson: Francine Harris had a lot of sections in her book (maybe thirteen, I think), allegiance, and I read it so many times and finally felt like I understood why the poems were in those sections. So I thought I’d try different ways of grouping my poems. It turned out that each of the lines from the sonnet crown had its own theme and the poems felt like they fit together in those groupings, so I went with it.

Jonterri Gadson: I didn’t write more poems to fit, I actually removed poems that didn’t fit and I think that was the key. I had poems that I liked that just don’t belong with my other poems, so I finally had to remove them.

Brian S: That’s always so hard to do, isn’t it?

Jonterri Gadson: SO HARD. Hahaha.

Brian S: I think that’s one of the hardest things to convince my students of—that not everything you write will ever be finished or will find a home somewhere. Sometimes it never gets past being a Google doc.

Jonterri Gadson: Exactly. I had to tell myself that those poems would still exist, just not in this manuscript.

Brian S: You have so many landscapes in this book. Can you talk some about what having been in so many areas does to your sense of place?

Camille D: I like to dream about my Selected Poems, wherein the homeless pieces will one day find homes. But I loved how all these poems were all so well aligned. Thanks for this book, Jonterri!

Jonterri Gadson: Yes, there’s always the Selected Poems to look forward to eventually! Hahaha; thank you, Camille!

Brian S: I saw that some of these poems appeared in your other two chapbooks. How long have you been working on this book as a whole?

Camille D: I’d love to get back to that opening sonnet. There are so many interesting forms throughout this book. What sort of ideas drive your vision of how to shape a poem?

Jonterri Gadson: The sonnets are the oldest and they were written in 2007/2008. Wow… I felt like I had an epic story to tell and Denise Duhamel assigned sonnet crowns for us to read in the workshop I was in with her. I think the first one I read was by David Trinidad and then I eventually read Natasha Trethewey‘s, so they opened up my eyes to the possibility of a longer form.

Camille D: Ooh, those are both great ways to be introduced to the crown!

Jonterri Gadson: I read a lot before I write and I try to decipher how poems are functioning and then I experiment.

Blues TriumphantDana: I keep reading “Blues Triumphant” (the poem) over and over. Can you please talk a little about your inspiration for that poem in particular and how it came to be the title of the collection overall?

Jonterri Gadson: I write a lot of narrative poems and the title poem “Blues Triumphant” was an experiment in not being so linear and narrative. During that time I was writing a lot about not having a relationship with my father so I realized that in spite of that, I’m alive and I wanted to celebrate that.

Brian S: Does being a teacher help with that? I mean, does having to break down poems for students (or even just to prep to teach them) help you figure out what you need to write?

Jonterri Gadson: Teaching absolutely helps me. I actually enjoy the part of class prep where I break down poems. I used to break down poems for fun in my diary. I started doing this with Claudia Emerson‘s poems after I saw her at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in 2008. Late Wife really moved me. I also saw C.K. Williams, Sharon Olds, and Major Jackson there and started analyzing their poems. Major Jackson had talked about how he did that with Whitman’s poems so I didn’t feel so weird for doing it anymore.

Vievee Francis gave me a manuscript consultation at Callaloo and she liked “Blues Triumphant” (the poem) and she said, “Save that for a title. Not for this collection, but eventually.” My manuscript went through so many changes and it got to the point where that celebration in spite of everything fit, so I went with Blues Triumphant.

Dana: Ooh, that’s wonderful. It certainly feels like a celebration. It’s the type of poem that makes me want to stand up and recite it aloud!

Brian S: When I saw the title (before the poem) I remember thinking of it in a musical sense, and that since the blues are generally speaking the root of most American music, they really are triumphant.

Jonterri Gadson: I thought about it in the musical sense, for sure. And there’s triumph in the survival that allows one to write and sing those blues.

Camille D: That poem, “Cardinal Sin,” is a gut-wrencher. There are so many poems in this book that turn and then turn again, into deeper and both more painful and… triumphant territory. If there’s a question there, I think it’s to ask if you would be able to articulate the drafting/revision process that allows this for you.

Jonterri Gadson: Thanks, Dana! I love reading it aloud.

Brian S: What made you decide to break up the Patricide Epistle poems?

Jonterri Gadson: Vievee Francis suggested to me that the Patricide Epistles were three separate poems and I hadn’t considered that before. Eventually I was able to place them in the manuscript in a way that felt like it marked a shift in the speaker (me) each time they appeared. They all have different tones.

Camille D: Forest Primeval (by Vievee Francis) is next on my reading list. I’m looking forward to it. It will be interesting to read it with the echo of Blues Triumphant still in my head.

Dana: Just in a general sense, would you mind sharing a little about your writing practice/process or any ‘writing rituals’ you have?

Jonterri Gadson: I actually really enjoy revision. Not the writing itself, but the result of revision feels like magic to me. I think it’s the discovery of those turns and new territory and those moments when what the poem is *really* about surfaces that is so exciting. With “Cardinal Sin,” I’d had the opening lines “I don’t love my son the way I thought” written in my journal from Louise Glück’s “Brown Circle” poem. I didn’t know why I loved those lines. Everything in that poem actually happened so it was a matter of matching the obsession with the Glück line up with the experience and then saying what I was most afraid to say over and over again until I ended the poem.

I wrote most of these poems by forcing myself to stay awake after I completed my son’s lengthy bed time rituals with him. I would force myself to write for two hours. I had so much anxiety that I was failing… failing him, failing myself so I would honestly ask myself, “What am I most afraid to say?” and then I would write poems about what I wouldn’t want anyone to hear me saying out loud.

Brian S: That’s something I should try, though I’m so exhausted by the time the girls finally go to sleep that I don’t know how I’d do it. Maybe that’s the point. To write from exhaustion.

Camille D: I was thinking the same thing, Brian. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and beat everyone up, but there’s the ticking clock of the morning.

Jonterri Gadson: It’s so hard, Brian! So many nights I’d wake up in his bed and not even realize I’d fallen asleep! Lol. Then I’d make myself write and then go to bed. There was no other time to do it and that pressure was motivational.

Brian S: Kids, man. They make life so hard. 🙂

Jonterri Gadson: Hahaha they make life so everything.

Brian S: I know you’ve been doing some comedy writing lately. What’s the latest on that?

Jonterri Gadson: Right when this chat started, I got an email that I’m a semifinalist for a TV writing mentorship, so that’s the very latest. I write for an all-female comedy show in NYC and I take sketch and improv too. I realize that I really just like having an effect on people and comedy (when it’s done right) accomplishes that. Laughter is an instant response and I enjoy it.

Brian S: Woohoo! Congrats! And yes, I know that feeling. I’ve never been willing to do more than tell jokes on social media though.

Jonterri Gadson: I did the NBC Late Night Writers Workshop this year and they were really intrigued by the fact that I’m a poet. I love how one thing leads to another. I feel like I’m getting signs that I can pursue my different creative interests at the same time and that’s given me a lot of confidence to move forward.

Camille D: Before we go (how does time fly so quickly?) I have to tell you that I love the titles all through this book. They’re the sort of titles that pull me into poems. Then the poems keep me inside them.

Jonterri Gadson: Thank you, Camille. I do not like titling! I think titles are so important. I think you actually told me at the Minnesota Writers Conference when I had a consultation with you that the poems were good but the titles needed work. I put in that work! Hahaha. So it’s great to hear you say that. I remember everything!

Camille D: I remember that now! So delightful to be able to see beauty come to fruition.

Brian S: Who are you reading these days? Anything new we should be on the lookout for?

Jonterri GadsonBrandon Courtney actually has an amazing mini chapbook, Inadequate Grave, that just stuns me. I also really love Tafisha Edwards’s poems and I can’t wait for her chapbook to come out. Oh, and Phillip B. Williams’s work is genius. Michelle Penaloza‘s poems make me cry even after a million reads and I love a good cleansing cry.

Brian S: We did Phillip’s book for the book club when it came out. Such a good book.

Thanks so much for joining us tonight and for writing such an amazing book.


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The Rumpus Interview with Maryse Meijer

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In Maryse Meijer’s debut collection, Heartbreaker, there is no unnecessary adornment, nothing to detract from the dark torrents that move the stories forward. Taboo, sex, gendered power, and violence are deftly explored, and the writing is fresh and surprising. If this book were an animal, it would be one of those reticulated pythons that swims away from the familiar shore to colonize small islands.

Kelly Link has said that the unreal requires the real. Here, both abound. Some stories contain gothic and fantastical elements. Others are realistic, strictly speaking, but contain an eerie sheen. The ways in which Meijer deftly handles the relationships between her characters and the emotions involved makes these stories feel very real indeed. The prose may be harsh and spare, but Meijer clearly respects the misfits populating these pages, like the girl at fat camp who has a sexual relationship with a fox, or the guy with a hump on his back who begins having unusual sex with a woman with a deformed leg.

Maryse Meijer’s work has appeared in or at Meridian, St. Ann’s Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, the Portland Review, Joyland, actual paper, 580 Split, and elsewhere. Heartbreaker was published with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux this July. Meijer lives in Chicago.

I spoke with Meijer through email about the new book, the revision process, creating tension in her stories, and life as a twin.

***

The Rumpus: Can you talk about how this collection came together? Which stories came first? Was there a central question you were asking?

Maryse Meijer: The stories in Heartbreaker were written over a period of about eight years. The collection begins with the oldest, “Home,” and ends with the most recent, “The Cheat,” though otherwise the collection is not arranged chronologically. Of course, there were many stories that didn’t make it into this collection, and I didn’t have a clear sense of what unified these particular pieces until I looked at the final manuscript. One thing I see now is how often the stories deal with power, raising questions about who has it and why and what they want to do with it. If someone thinks they have the upper hand in a story, they’re usually wrong—which is not to say that whoever does have the power uses it to any positive end. Perhaps this has something to do with feminism, and a desire to examine how our Western constructions of romance and sexuality do all kinds of violence to everyone living under patriarchy, including men, of course, and young people and animals and even nature. That makes the collection sound more overtly political than I think it reads, but the politics are certainly there.

When I sit down to write, I try not to think about anything—I just follow a very specific image, or try to create an atmosphere that interests me, and then I see what happens. It all feels very mystical and impersonal at the time, but when you put a collection together I think you realize that what you thought of as some distant and disinterested muse churning out these supremely individual gems is really just your own obsessive brain beating the same horse with different sticks.

Rumpus: Are you a ritualistic person? Do you have any writing habits you observe, or do they shift?

Meijer: I don’t have any rituals, really. Because I have a four-year-old daughter, I work at night, but I only work when I want to. I don’t force it. Things go in waves—there are times, like now, when I can work a lot and feel quite productive. But there are times when I’m only editing, or times when I need to read more than I need to write. Sometimes I’m overcome with such an intense craving to just read and read and read—it’s physical. I imagine myself eating books. Or I want to watch a lot of movies, or listen to music, things that inspire me. So I do those things and don’t worry about how many hours I spend at my desk. But I love to write—it’s never a chore—and so it feels simple. Writing is a supreme pleasure, and I’m lucky to have the time and space to do it.

Rumpus: I love this strategy. And I can feel that the work isn’t forced, that these stories were pleasurable to write. It comes through when a writer’s struggling, I think. One of my favorite stories was “Fugue.” I love the twist, when you realize this girl is not a Laura, is not like any girl these boys have met before. What was the process of writing this story? Where did you begin?

HeartbreakerMeijer: On one of many long distance road trips I stopped and bought some snacks from a young woman who seemed to be working the nightshift alone at one of those 24-hour truck stops. She appeared quite confident and cheerful, but the idea of working the night shift at a place like that really terrified me. For a couple of years I knew I wanted to write something about a similar sort of place, but it wasn’t until my twin sister came up with an idea involving fugue states that the story came together.

I think in some ways that girl is like many girls those boys have met—they just don’t realize it. They don’t realize that this thing they do, their shtick or whatever, is a part of a larger tapestry of violence that our culture would like us to believe is harmless. Her experiences aren’t singular or special or particularly rare, and yet somehow she becomes monstrous, and the question of what makes her appear that way is what interests me. There’s something about the way she forces us to look at her that is uncomfortable—that seems, somehow, unfair, even violent. For a split second I sympathized with those boys, and that’s when I realized I’d written a horror story.

Rumpus: I also want to talk about “The Daddy.” This is a story about a married woman, with a family, who seeks a father-daughter relationship with a stranger. This is a beautiful story. What was most important to you to unearth here? Why did you write from the perspective of this woman?

Meijer: With “The Daddy,” I wanted to understand something about intimacy, maybe. I don’t remember where the idea came from, but as I was writing I was surprised by how normal the relationship between the two protagonists seemed to me—and how it felt like it was really working, until, of course, it didn’t. The roles of beloved daughter and worshipped father can feel very powerful, because we assume the child-parent relationship to be based on “unconditional” love. We assume it lasts in a way that other forms of romance rarely do. Which is bullshit—familial love isn’t unconditional, safe, or necessarily empowering or lasting—but the fiction is appealing, because there are so few outlets outside of marriage/physical relationships for intimacy, and this is one of them. It’s considered safer than relationships that involve sex, and more enduring than friendship or marriage. And it appears to us as “natural.” Not, of course, in the form that it takes in the story—then it appears to us as kinky, or crazy—but I admire the courage the characters in “The Daddy” possess, and I’m sympathetic with their desire to create an insular world in which accomplishments, age, looks, and money don’t matter. It’s a nice idea. And the way it fails interests me a great deal.

Rumpus: You do a great job of ramping up tension, something I struggle with.

Meijer: Tension—well, it’s nice to hear that you think it’s present in these stories, but I’m not sure how it works. When I’m writing I like to feel like the space I’m in in a story is a bit oppressive. If something feels too loose, too roomy—if I don’t feel contained, I guess—then I know that the tension isn’t there. I’ve probably written too much. Trimming the fat in a story is essential. And gesture is very important to me—how characters move, how they occupy space, how they use their faces, interact with objects—and I suspect that there’s some connection between the tension inside a character’s body and the tension we feel as readers. Tension is physical, so it’s important to show where it exists on a physical level in a narrative. It has so many sources and so many manifestations. Tension isn’t all about plot and conflict, I don’t think. The body seems essential, too.

Rumpus: I agree—tension can be so many things. And it’s wild what cutting excess can do to the writing. So, what is your revision process like?

Meijer: I revise a story for years—at least, I did. I’m trying to change my habits. When I started making changes to these stories after the final proofs had gone to the publisher I realized maybe I had a bit of a problem. It’s fear, probably. Over-editing is a kind of shield, a way to protect yourself from criticism by never letting the work go. If you can always excuse the deficiencies in your work by saying, “Oh, it’s just a draft, I’m not done…” then you’re being a dumbass. You’re not allowing the work itself to take the risk of being really read. Part of it may be that I’m afraid of someone else thinking that think my work is really good, or perfect, or whatever, while they think it’s…not. It’s the Carrie scenario of “they’re all going to laugh at you”—silly girl, thinking you can write, when you used the same adjective twice in a paragraph!

Beckett was one of my childhood writing idols, and torture himself over every syllable. And it’s true that paying that kind of attention to language yields some rewards. It forces you to respect your own work, and the reader, by being ruthless with yourself, by being disciplined. I also genuinely love editing—not just my own work, but the work of other writers as well—and I’m comfortable in that space, wielding the red pen. I love to cut. I like to think about words. I like to stay in a story as long as I can, because I’m interested in these worlds and in these people. But now I’d like to be equally comfortable creating. I’d like to think that in two decades—I started writing seriously when I was about ten—I’ve learned something about making stories. I don’t need to second-guess every choice. And I now have an incredibly insightful agent and editor who, along with my twin, can spot the bullshit I can’t.

Rumpus: You have a twin? That’s interesting. What’s she (or he) like?

Meijer: Danielle is my muse, my best friend, my co-creator. Much like the Brontës, we created what some people call a “paracosm”—an intense imaginary world with scores of characters—starting when we were very young, and we still spend much of our time in that world today. We write back and forth through online chat programs, spinning out stories together, and many of the ideas and characters and dialogues that we create find their way into my work. Danielle is brilliant at dialogue, and she has a knack for comedy—something I lack. The boy in “Rapture” is based on one of her creations, and there are countless little bits of her ideas present in every text. My first novel was based almost entirely on a story we made up together. She basically ordered me to become a writer when we were growing up—the idea was that she’d conquer the science world (she’s now a philosophy professor and a very accomplished dancer), and I’d take care of the artistic side of things. She is the person I write for, my ideal reader, my first and best editor.

Rumpus: I adore the boy in “Rapture.” He felt so real to me. I liked not knowing much about him. One question that occurred to me while reading “Rapture” and others was, did you receive feedback on these stories that you chose to ignore?

Meijer: The main criticism I got in grad school was “where’s the backstory?” Some readers don’t feel that they connect with a story unless they can use psychology to make sense of a character’s motivation—and psychology seems to be all about backstory. I’m suspicious of psychology in general, and I don’t take pleasure, as a reader, in trying to contextualize a story in those terms. Which is not to say that I don’t like backstory—I have nothing against it, and I enjoy plenty of writing that employs it liberally. It just doesn’t seem to occur to me to dig around in people’s pasts when I’m writing. Part of that has to do with working on a small scale; my stories don’t unfold over long periods of time, there’s not a tremendous amount of action, and I focus on one or two characters at a time. There’s not a lot of room for backstory. I work a lot in present tense. The focus is usually incredibly narrow. These are just habits, and not a conscious veto of other methods—but they represent a worldview, a perspective, that feels right to me.

At one point a reader did want to know a bit more about Kathleen’s family in “The Daddy,” and I wrote a draft that attempted to prove, I guess, that her marriage was unsatisfying, but it didn’t work. Not everyone is going to take Kathleen’s word for it, and that’s fair, but—isn’t it pretty clear that she is, actually, unsatisfied? Her actions speak volumes. I don’t think most of us understand why we do all the things we do. And our answers to questions change; truth, motivation, personality—I feel like these things are unstable. And I know that in my experience as a reader that my sympathy with/understanding of a character happens pretty immediately—either I believe the voice of a story, or I don’t. I never get to a patch of backstory and think, “oh, yeah, now I get it.” Sympathy isn’t logical. It’s emotional. You can know something is true, and you can also feel that it’s true, and that feeling is what I’m always running after, not the knowing. So I try to get the emotions right and hopefully, for some readers, it works.

Rumpus: Kathleen’s dissatisfaction was clear to me. As a reader, I find I don’t really need much backstory. As I writer, it’s something that makes me nervous. I never know how much to put in. I can sense backstory in “The Daddy,” even though if it’s not there. Sometimes implied backstory is so much more satisfying—I get the picture. We know Kathleen can’t be satisfied from the first line. But I can understand people wanting that. What are some of your favorite short story collections? What do you like about them?

Meijer: Joyce Carol Oates is my one of my very favorite short-story writers, particularly the collections she published in the 1960s and 1970s (Wheel of Love, Marriages & Infidelities, The Goddess and Other Women are favorites). She’s done everything I ever tried to do, and she did it a billion times. There was a period where she was turning out these enormous 400-page collections back-to-back—one a year, in addition to all the novels, criticism, poetry, etc. she was also publishing at the time—and each story in each of those collections is absolutely brilliant. I mean brilliant! And so very strange and hysterical and sexy and grotesque and disorienting. Her writing about women and girls appeals to me. Her approach to sex and desire and youth and family and politics appeals to me. Her use of language, of mystery, of voice. She can do everything. I don’t think people are reading her backlist as much as it should be read. I don’t think she gets credit, among writers of my generation, for paving the way for the rest of us to write this kind of hallucinatory, surreal prose that we’re still calling, when we see it elsewhere, cutting-edge. There’s a story in Marriage & Infidelities titled “Did You Ever Slip on Red Blood?” which is just a nutty-ass title, and the story lives up to it. And it’s almost, what, fifty years old?

I also love George Saunders, because his stories are inventive and hilarious, yes, but also so incredibly sincere and humane and hopeful. He got us past irony, I think, and that’s a huge accomplishment. Miranda July‘s No One Belongs Here More Than You also displays a tenderness that appeals to me, and the stories relate to gender and sexuality in a way that rings absolutely true. Kathe Koja’s Extremities changed my life—her voice got inside my head early on in my writing life and I have to try very hard not to copy it every time I sit down to write. And Lindsay Hunter‘s Don’t Kiss Me is the best example of successful flash/short short fiction that I know—she can create a voice in a single sentence, and she understands how thin the line between hilarity and tragedy can be.

Rumpus: What’s on the horizon for you? New projects in the works?

Maryse: I am revising a first novel, finishing up a second story collection, and getting ready to put a book of poems out on submission. I like to have more than one project in the works at a time, so that I don’t get too broody about whatever’s not working with a particular piece.

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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Tommy Pico

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Tommy Pico’s IRL is a stunning book-length lyrical poem following the mind of a contemporary Kumeyaay man, Teebs, living in New York City. The book opens with a risky text that Teebs sends to his beloved—a man known only as Muse—and the spiraling obsessions and actions Teebs makes while waiting for a response, which takes the form of an extended text message. Through this, we witness Teebs’ passions and traumas, both inherited and new-made, and woven through all of this somber and serious poetry is a piercing humor that is wicked and genuine. There is so much radiant life in this book, like a dear friend, it’s hard to be away from it for too long.

I was lucky enough to have the chance to talk to Pico about his book, poetry, Indigenous poetics, and kettle corn, in between his mounting schedule after the release of IRL earlier this month through Birds LLC. His second book, Nature Poem, will be out through Tin House soon.

Let me speak a little bit about Tommy’s work here.

Tommy has intentionally formed his lines to be short in IRL, (short for “in real life,”) after the appearance of a long text message, but the lines are also broken for breath. You can follow the quoted lines below with a bit of a pause at the line break (not all poems do this), and it adds to a very real conversational tone to IRL, and it gives distinct emotions to the speaker because of the specific and careful choices that Tommy makes.

…We are going
to have this argument
again. Adam eats an ice cream
sandwich. I eat allllllllll
the ice cream sandwiches.
This is basic science. Adam’s
body was made by God It’s
always looked kinda divine.
My body is a scum bag.
My landlord is a dick.
Adam was never given
peanut butter cups n onion
rings so he wd stop biting
his cousins I mean, there’s
no grocery store on the rez.
Adam has an apple
and maybe some juice. Up-
keeping the palace of
Adam is a dream…

When you read, “…We are going / to have this argument / again…” a distinct attitude comes across. And it’s kinda funny, we’ve all had these thoughts before—though here it’s a touch more dramatic, and that more—that subtle increment towards hyperbole—is a key element in Pico’s humor, as well as honest and silly, seemingly out-of-place images, like Teebs eating a bunch of ice cream sandwiches, which is presented humorously, while showing us a rare darkness.

It must be mentioned, his sound work is really complex and invigorating. The ease with which we glide through the conversational text keeps us from seeing more pointedly how Pico uses sound, if we don’t look for it expressly. If we look at the line “again. Adam eats an ice cream / sandwich….”, we can see and hear that while the subject matter may not seem poetic, the craft and care with which Pico commands the fluctuation of the letter a in this line, and the multiple sounds of the a, the slant rhyme of “again. Adam” and “eats…cream” is the mark of a serious poetic talent to do all of that in just one line. And this is just one line of the book.

***

The Rumpus: I gotta know, man, while writing IRL, when did you know that it was going to be a book-length poem?

Tommy Pico: I didn’t initially think of IRL being a book or even a poem at first—I was just trying to write a really long Tumblr post. A couple months in, I read from it at a garden in the Lower East Side alongside Ariana Reines and Pamela Sneed. They are both sort of mentors of mine (in my mind [btwn me and you]), equally familiar with my work, and I could see them regard this differently that what I’d written before. I started to realize it would break my heart if this “epic” I was laboring over got lost in the feed. I knew then it had to be one of those stupid book-things.

Rumpus: Speaking of getting lost in the feed, you’ve spoken before about using the Tumblr feed as a kind of way to judge the strength of a work of yours. In what ways has using this method affected the generation of your work and your revision? What did it change?

Pico: It really beefed up my editing process, in the sense that every word had to earn its keep. It made my writing more concise, more compelling (I hope!), and more deliberate. It also took out the “importance” of having to write a capital “P” “Poem.” I was just writing some mess on the Internet.

Rumpus: How did it feel when that first thought occurred, “This is going to be a book-length poem,” and what did it feel like when you got sort-of settled into knowing what shape it was going to take?

IRL coverTommy: It was kind of terrifying so I tried NOT to think about it as much as possible. Thinking that words will become “poems” tends to make me freeze up, so I treated it like a game. I wrote as much as possible Monday to Thursday and cut as much as possible on Fridays. It helped me not be too precious about anything I wrote. And I’m not going to lie, it was a lil comforting. I figured everything I wrote from then on would get funneled/channeled into IRL. In that sense I thought of it as a book that would never end.

Rumpus: In the process did you feel any urges to break IRL into smaller poems, and, if so, how did you fight those thoughts?

Pico: I didn’t really feel the urge to break it down because the exercise was actually to NEVER stop writing IRL, ya know?

Rumpus: I can’t imagine surviving revising a single poem twenty pages long, let alone ninety-eight! What did you do to make it through that process?

Pico: I didn’t revise too much while I was writing, besides the Friday slash-and-burns. When I’d finally (for lack of better words) “pinched the loaf,” revising was kind of a nightmare. I cried a lot. It helped when I started to see sections emerge that I could isolate and wring out on separate days. TBQH I have read that damn poem so many times over the course of edits, section edits, line edits, and copy edits that it could never cross my eyes again and I’d somehow live.

Rumpus: How did you go about revision when it came to writing comedic parts of the book, keeping the sonic register tight and still delivering these really funny moments?

Pico: I revised and read out loud a lot, and started to understand how the jokes and the drama would earn their keep beside each other, and sometimes open for each other. When it came to revising the comedic parts in particular the rubric was: am I laughing? Unfortunately I’m under the impression that I’m hilarious :-/

Rumpus: There are so few people writing book-length poems right now, did you look to anyone for any guidance in IRL’s making?

Pico: In terms of length and really driving it down the field or whatever, I took my cue mostly from A.R. Ammons. There are people whose work I identify with more, whose themes or obsessions I’m perhaps more in conversation with, but when I read ol’ Archie I get the distinct impression that poems come to him the same way they come to me.

Rumpus: Sharp turn: where are your thoughts on the role of Indigenous poetics, the direction it’s taking and that you’d like it to take, poetics in general?

Pico: I’m not sure, but what I can tell you is that poetry offers me a way to rewire and channel the sense of cultural loss that I feel into a new kind of culture, without losing myself or having my identity subsumed into a monolithic “Indian” identity. It perhaps offers a kind of Indigenous cultural repopulation. That’s my first thought, anyway.

Rumpus: Destroying the monolith is so important. What do you think Native writers can do more of/less of to leave the monolith as rubble? What can Non-Native writers and readers do?

Pico: The more of us there are out here sharing our work and telling our own stories and flying our freak flags, being our intricate, strange, and idiosyncratic selves, the less power the monolith has. It can’t apply to everyone if we’re allowed to be different. For non-Natives I would say just don’t tell me about your maybe Cherokee great grandmother.

Rumpus: California has the largest Indigenous population, yet there are so few of us California Native poets. There are some Indigenous nations who have so many poets they have a laureate system. Why do you think it is that there are so few of us from California? And what has it been like for you, navigating a Native writing life with so few other California Native poets?

Pico: Is it specifically a dearth of California Native poets? Because I just see a dearth in general. I can say that in Kumeyaay country, the reservations are all really small, so there might not be the same institutional support or space for a “poet laureate.” Coming out to New York I didn’t really expect that there would be many Indigenous Californian poets, so I can’t say it’s been surprising. There are certain metaphors like fire or drought or chaparral that have a particular Californian association, that maybe a CA NDN would “get” differently but, I don’t know.

Rumpus: What do you think the function of poetry is for you in the version of America that surrounds you, and in the re-visioning of America that’s happening now?

Pico: The news cycle can and does absolutely demoralize me and breaks my spirit regularly. I don’t know if it’s THE function, but A function of poetry for me rn is holding America accountable to itself, alongside a tide of exceptional poets that I am lucky to also call friends: Morgan Parker, Solmaz Sharif, Kamden Hilliard, Christopher Soto, Camonghne Felix, Paul Tran, Jayson Smith, Jennifer Tamayo, Angel Nafis, Wendy Xu… the list, thankfully, goes on and on and on and it’s so real.

Rumpus: So you named the book IRL, but this Teebs is a character (which is hilarious, btdubs), which has me curious, man, what are your thoughts on the constructed personas people cultivate online?

Pico: Constructed Internet personas used to completely annoy me because I took them personally. It felt like people were deliberately trying to over-perform the poppy aspects of their lives in order to make me feel bad. But lately I’ve been starting to understand that A) Other people aren’t me, B) Everyone’s relationship to the Internet is their business and not mine, and C) Most people are just trying to find a way to get by and feel less crazy in this freakin place. Let them have their beach selfies for god sakes.

Rumpus: There are references to Grindr, where real hook-ups are conceived in a digital space. Tell me more about the process of your treatment of the intersection of the internet and reality that occurs in this book.

Pico: The conception of the book as one long text message notwithstanding, “reality” and the “Internet” are kind of needling into each other the way that “reality” and “poetry” kind of thread into each other in the way that “salt” and “sugar” kind of suture to make kettle corn. It’s like, “salt” and “vinegar” are principal gods in the pantheon of my munchies! Jk. Poetry gets to be the medium for a lot of mixing, of ages and voices and landscapes. It makes sense to me that the Internet is a metaphor.

Rumpus: How do you see the Internet shaping poetry and showing up in poetry? It’s been such a force for change in our lifetime.

Pico: I love Internet lit mags, I love being able to send someone a link to a poem, I love getting links to poems. It’s for sure made poetry more accessible. Before, it seemed like publishing credits were less about the poem and more about the bio. Who is really going to open up that 100 page journal to page 43 and read yr little thing. Come on.

Rumpus: You make use of emoticons. As someone who is really excited that you did, I ask, could you talk about your choice to include them in the poem? Moving beyond that, like you’ve said, IRL is shaped after text messages. What function do you think emoticons and emojis have in language?

Pico: In a very basic sense, they add a kind of intonation to a line that might not otherwise exist in the flat world of text. It’s another way to guide someone’s interpretation in the absence of them being able to hear your actual voice. I used them in the poem because I use them in my casual communications and sexts etc. and I wanted to give IRL some degree of intimacy and spontaneity.

Rumpus: Who have been some of the biggest influences on your poetic craft, influences who are not poets, and how has their influence taken shape?

Pico: Nicki Minaj’s voice is so spry and dramatic, I love how she can speed up, slow down, and go from tender to angry and giddy in the length of a single breath. In a personal sense, Ariana Reines, Alexander Chee, and Pamela Sneed have each given me their eyes/ears/time at times when I really needed guidance. A.R. Ammons is my dude, poetry wise. I don’t think I would have made the jump to long poems if I’d never read his work before. He really knows how to take the ball all the way down the field. I just made a football reference. Kill me.

***

Photograph of Tommy Pico © Niqui Carter.

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The Rumpus Interview with D. Foy

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Reading D. Foy is like stepping on a hornet nest—in the best way! His prose is topnotch, sonic and squalid and beautiful. He also knows how to spin a hell of a yarn.

His new novel Patricide is a kaleidoscopic look at issues ricocheting around our world right now—masculinity, legacy, genetic betrayals, truth—and Rumpus family friend Joshua Mohr lobbed some questions to D to celebrate the release of this stunning and important new work.

[D. Foy and Joshua Mohr spoke back in 2014 about his novel Made to Break and “gutter opera,” a form of novel that Foy invented and that distills multiple voices into one narrative. –Ed.]

***

The Rumpus: You are the mastermind behind the whole “gutter opera” on the page, that wonderful combination of squalor in a story’s essence and emotion, while imparting beauty on the sentence level, a cocktail that worked so well in your first book. Did you try using the same techniques here? Or did Patricide require its own sovereign codes of construction?

Foy: Nothing I’ve ever done has followed the same protocols. This isn’t to say that’s not the case with many other writers—Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind, and George Saunders, Flannery O’Connor, T.C. Boyle, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, John Cheever, Georges Simenon, and even Elena Ferrante and Joan Didion, among others, writers who, for all their wonder and power, often come off—to me at least, and certainly I’m far from the final word on this—as one-trick ponies. This isn’t to say, either, that I don’t like a lot of what some of these writers do, nor do I intend for this to disparage them. I’ve read all of Vonnegut’s books. He was huge for me when I was young. John Cheever, too. I learned a great deal from both of them. And I learned more from O’Connor than from the two of them combined. And Didion and Ferrante? Are you kidding? Their work is as gorgeous as gorgeous gets. What I mean is that these and other writers have relatively articulated modes of working that they follow like a chant. It’s their power and their weakness. Certainly their relative approaches have made them all a lot of money. That way just isn’t my way. I’ve always felt that once I’ve done something, I’ve done it. Going forward, I don’t avoid what I’ve done for the sake of it, but because I’m more interested to learn other ways to see and do.

1-foy_patricide_frontcover_finalOn the other hand, I can say for sure that gutter opera is my definitive mode of working. Made to Break, which I wrote in 1998, was the first book to manifest as a successful, working example of this mode, even though I hadn’t laid out its principles. I simply called the work gutter opera, more as an intuitive way to describe it. It wasn’t until I published that book in 2014 and got asked to teach a course on gutter opera that I articulated its principles in writing as best I could. There’s quite a bit to it, actually, but in brief, and very generally, I “define” gutter opera as “a mode of creating art that is best characterized by how it expresses a way of thinking, a way of accessing and synthesizing, by whatever means, so long as it’s natural, the memes at our disposal. Gutter opera is ontological. It is not, in other words, about this or that but about this and that, which is life itself, being.”

Essentially, it’s a way of approaching my work through a variety of interrelated codes that I more or less stumbled on over the years, codes according to which I’ve learned to access new ways of seeing and doing and which I’ve trained myself to bring to bear on my process. So while Made to Break is radically different than Patricide, the value systems by which I made and appraised them are the same, if that makes any sense. Patricide is as much a gutter opera as anything I’ve done, expressed according to its own specific demands and needs.

Rumpus: Let’s stay on this concept of “value systems.” As artists, we want to challenge ourselves on a project-by-project basis, so how were you upping your literary ante with Patricide?

Foy: Oh, man, you might better ask how I wasn’t upping my literary ante with this book—there’d be so much less to talk about. Really, it seems there’s nothing in Patricide that didn’t some way or other push me to the extremities of the limited power I’ve been given.

But to answer your question, I need to talk a bit about my methodologies first. The creative mode I engage starts from within. I don’t mean “within” in the sense of “imagination”—though of course there’s that, too—but rather in the sense of mindfulness, in the sense of concentrated awareness. The Jesuit scholar and sage Anthony de Mello tells us that effort isn’t the way to growth—or rather effort of itself, unmoored from awareness, isn’t the way to growth—but only to repression and collapse. The examples he offers pertain almost to anything. I can put food in my mouth, he tells us, but my effort can’t produce appetite. I can compliment someone, but my effort won’t produce real admiration. I can get in bed, but that getting will never bring me sleep. Hard as we try to change who or what we are, he says, our efforts won’t do more than change us superficially. Or in other words, our efforts won’t do more than change our behavior, which is what we do, and never why and how. Awareness, and the understanding that comes through awareness, according to de Mello, is the only way to change.

In the context of making art, the “change” that interests me lies in the movement from distrust to trust. As a young writer, I tried every way I could to forge a unique style, as though style were something to be made from without, like building an engine or a house or a dam. But my efforts did nothing. I found or made no “style.” What I found was frustration and bitterness, because nothing I did really came from me—as in from within—but from others, from the artists I was copying, from the idea of what I thought I should be making, from, that is, without. For all my many long efforts to cultivate a “unique” voice and style, in the end what I made was merely flimsy artifice. And artifice, I’ve found, reflects distance, and all that distance kills.

Almost always I failed to finish any little thing. After years of this, and I don’t know how, it occurred to me that the reason I couldn’t finish was that on the whole I didn’t trust the medium through which I was struggling to tell my story. And what is the medium through which I ought to tell my story? My language, sure, but before that, the true medium through which I ought to tell my story is my mind, and the thoughts my mind thinks. My language wasn’t right, my progressions and structures and everything else weren’t right, I had no style or voice, because my thoughts weren’t right. This only stands to reason. I had so much trouble because I never trusted my own thoughts.

So when I say that art is an inside job, I mean that it starts with us, and with our minds. Since what we perceive and how we perceive it dictates what we write and how, perception is the requisite state for writing. To better understand myself through better understanding my thoughts, and hence to trusting myself through trusting my thoughts, I needed to train myself in the things of perception—principally attention, intuition, and digression, all of which, when acting together, amount to an artist’s style. Real style—or what at any rate we call “style”—is nothing more or less than the form the artist’s mind assumes in the moment of her art’s creation. The form of the artist’s art, which is inseparable from her art, expresses the artist’s mind in all her splendid particularity at the instant she creates. It’s the only expression her art can assume.

To your question, then, in Patricide, in Rice’s father and in The Father that is all the fathers that ever were and, more or less, all the ways we do things now—our morals, our laws, our customs, our codes, the bunch of it patriarchal—I found myself against a seemingly insurmountable leviathan that forced me to rely on these aspects of myself in ways I never had. And when I did, when really and truly I trusted that I was always where I needed to be, no matter what, I developed solutions I wouldn’t otherwise have developed.

I used all three points of view, for instance, in a kind of whirling unison, together with a horde of constantly shifting linguistic approaches. The structure of the book is a tornado, so just about everything in it has its basis in a circle. Omnipotent as this father/Father was, I, or rather Rice, had constantly to move around it, as opposed to come at it head on. There was never a moment in the work when I wasn’t challenged, and certainly I was almost always frightened that what I was doing would ultimately collapse.

Doubt, though, is a tricky thing. Obviously, it can seriously fuck you up. And yet it can also drive you through the blackest conundrum, if you allow it, kind of the way you let a trainer or a workout partner push you past your perceived limits at the gym or wherever. For me, the doubt and the trust are two parts of the same thing. If truly you trust, doubt can do what it likes. You can be as afraid as you’ve ever been, but these things don’t matter. In the end, your trust will see you through.

Rumpus: Wow, I love that answer. And it really speaks to the work novelists do that’s not on the page, figuring out, from a behind-the-scenes perspective, both the books they don’t want to write—and the ones they do. In my own process, I don’t trust my hypotheses about a project. They ultimately inhibit my willingness to let the book be in charge of its Free Will, rather than me superimposing my own systems. I’m curious how you conceived structure here. Did the tornado-architecture reveal itself while you generated the nascent material? Or were you using that organized chaos as a vessel from the jump?

made-to-breakFoy: Well, because I never outline in the formal sense, and because intuition and digression are the principal means through which I explore my obsessions, the book’s structure wasn’t immediately clear.

And yet it wasn’t long till it appeared, the way, really, a tornado seems to manifest from nothing. Once I realized I was writing a book of its own, as opposed to supplementing a passage from another work, as I thought I was when I began, the structure appeared of itself in a form-reflecting-content sort of way.

Memory is itself circular. The imagination is itself circular. Each has its power, of course, but united they can very quickly generate a storm whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts. My task was dual—to let these powers have as much space as possible, to be as close to them, even inside of them, as possible, while ensuring from a detached remove that they didn’t break into all-out mayhem.

It’s a strange alchemy, when I consider it in retrospect. It happens, because of and through me, even, though it’s difficult to say precisely how.

Rumpus: The strange alchemy! Perfect. And it’s true, that cocktail of intuition and revision. So I’d be curious to hear how you handle the rigors of remixing while still honoring the intention of intuition. All authors revise in their own nuanced ways. Can you tell us one of your remix tricks? And if that word “tricks” sounds too smug—how’s this: in your process, how do you balance honoring your imaginative intentions while holding the art to a high standard on the line level?

Foy: Here’s my process from the view of a ten-thousand-foot-flyover: first draft, then store; read-through, slash, swap, add, then store; read-through, slash and swap, then store; read-through, slash, swap, and line-edit, then store; read-through, line-edit; read-through, line-edit, read-through, line-edit… So once I’ve cut the big fat, filled in the holes, arranged the parts to suit, and have begun to line-edit, the process tends to repeat itself for a good while—as a long as the work requires.

And like you say, honoring the essence of the work is the big challenge during this phase. The remix trick gets very tricksy here. You’ve got the voice of the work to contend with, for instance. That’s the first thing. It’s always the first thing for me, the narrative voice, the narrative consciousness, in fact, I’d go so far as to say. Typically this consciousness awakens close to instantaneously. That is, I sit down to work, and depending on my subject or concern, a narrative consciousness asserts itself within seconds or minutes. This is where trusting yourself and your intuition is vital. Once that voice and consciousness manifest, I trust them explicitly and allow my words to follow.

After a time, and I’ll bet you’ve experienced this—I don’t see how you can’t have—an aura develops, as well, in which the whole work is enveloped and from which it’s inseparable. That aura is the sum of the narrative consciousness, voice, and, very importantly, tone. In revision, maintaining fidelity to this aura is my chief commitment. And I use the word “fidelity” very specifically, because if I try in any way to alter the work’s seminal aura, a feeling arises that’s close to guilt, as if I’m betraying a vow or pact. That feeling is like a warning signal, which I ignore at my own peril. It tells me, essentially, to back the fuck off. What’s interesting, also, is how eventually, even inexorably, while the consciousness and voice will remain largely as they were from the outset, the general tone in revision tends to shift and sway ever so subtly, contingent, I’d say, most of the time, anyway, on the minutia of the line. Once my sole concern becomes the line, I’ll work it pretty relentlessly, according to a mixed set of criteria—word choice, rhythm, cadence, flow, dynamic, duration, meaning, connotation, etymology, culture, and the like.

So, say, for instance, a sentence includes a specific product, person, history, or event. Regardless of what, it’s a meme, those I mentioned earlier—some cultural entity that through the process of repeated transmission and replication assumes a power uniquely and universally its own. Richard Dawkins coined this word back in 1976 to express his concept of how knowledge moves through a culture, the way traits pass through multiple generations via genes. He defined it specifically as “a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” In any case, depending on the age of the reader, a given meme conveys a specific meaning, and often even a variety of meanings, each working at different levels. The choice of a given meme alone, then, can dictate the nature and direction of a sentence, the information it’s conveying, epistemologically, historically, personally, and so on. This is just one of the things I try to address when working the line. You can see from this how quickly the critical permutations might expand.

Rumpus: The rad thing about your long answers is that I’m finding myself nodding along and smiling, especially when you were talking about narrative consciousness. I don’t think about it that way, necessarily, but I use similar language: Free Will. When I’m exploring a new book of mine, I’m trying to find its Free Will, rather than my clunky authorial superimpositions. It leads nicely into something I’ve long admired in your prose: the line. You talked above about the cocktail of criteria you use as you finesse the line, but I wonder how you handle these things if they’re not wholly aligning—how you use that dissonance to your advantage. If, say, the current culture of the line needs one solution, but, say, something in its etymology might require a different solution. I know this is an arcane question, but line editing is often incorrectly reduced to just syllables and sonic potential. There’s as much going on in these “behind the scenes” issues as in anything else. Can you unpack this a bit?

Foy: I’m really glad to see you’re into these things as much as I am. And I really like the phrase “Free Will” to express what I think’s essentially in the same neck of the woods as the stuff I’m getting at, the honed awareness that enables us to explore these nexuses of intuition. This Free Will of ours works on all sorts of levels, too, right?

In your stuff, and I’m thinking especially about your latest, Sirens, Free Will is most evident in the work’s structure, which reveals itself across a trajectory of wonderfully interconnected relays. This sort of intrigue isn’t the product of artifice, to my mind. The realization of structures like yours in Sirens doesn’t seem to me possible to achieve through artifice, but through intuition, or Free Will, alone. You can’t outline a structure like that. You can only feel your way into it until, like a face hidden in the image of another face, it emerges unmistakably to let you know, “Yes, this is this, this is real, and now I have the means to see it through.”

And clunky authorial superimpositions, too, mine especially, have become so much easier to catch than they once were. Hemingway, despite my various issues with him, was right when he said every great writer has “a built-in bullshit detector.” This facility is no doubt inherent to us all, but once we begin to use it, we’re able further to sharpen and train it. Not only do I find that nowadays I can fairly easily call myself out on most of my shit, but also the same shit stands out to me so much more flagrantly in the work of others.

But to your interest in the minutiae of the line. It’s so true that this aspect of writing is criminally neglected. I think this is the case more now than ever, given our culture’s generally insatiable appetite for quantity over quality, with the message itself over its medium. I can’t tell you how often I hear this or that writer hailed for the beauty of their prose only to find, in my opinion, that prose to be serviceable at best.

The line is far from merely a function of syllables and sonics. For one thing, the syllables and sonics are themselves a valise of sorts within which we can pack all sorts of meaning. There’s a guy, for instance, Chuck Wendig, whose advice I see frequently touted—and this is nothing against him personally, I don’t know him or really even his work itself, but only his advice over at his blog—who believes, and tries forcefully to impose his belief on his readers—that our words don’t really matter, that no one really cares about our words, and that those of us who think otherwise are simply deluded and self-involved. “You,” I read in one of his posts, “are in the way of your story. Hard truth: writing is actually not that important… You write and write and write and use too many words… Quit that shit. Get. To. The. Point. And the point is the story. Not the words used to tell that story.” Many others agree with this perspective, too, I presume, but I could not disagree enough. I find it blatantly problematic, in fact, and at the heart of so much of what I believe is a cultural malady. What Wendig is describing is a single kind of storytelling for a single kind of story. But there are as many other ways to tell many other kinds of stories. The line is itself a story, in fact, and the various components that make it amount to both its meaning and its way. Or rather, there are many stories within a single story, all which work collaboratively to tell the principal story. This is true right down to the line. And this is what I’m talking about, one of the things I’m talking about, that is, and what you’re getting at in our concern with, say, the issue of the dissonance in a line caused by its culture and its etymology working at odds.

The solutions to these sorts of impasses are many and diverse, but the principle that guides me when working toward harmony in a given line is whether each of its components work toward a mutually inclusive end. Sometimes the dissonance is the end. Sometimes I may want to show through the components in the line the irony inherent to this dissonance, for example. The dissonance, then—as in, say, the music of Satie—is the very thing that pleases. Other times the concern may be just the opposite. We see dissonance in a sentence whose ultimate aim is to express a relentless logic, the rhetoric of which, for the logic to be unassailable, must flow like water in a river, one bend to the next, and we have to eliminate that dissonance.

There’s not fast rule for any of this stuff. Again, for me, it comes back to intuition. We don’t always know what we’re doing before we do it. We know simply that the only way to a place of surety lies in the doing itself, as we push forward. When we believe in ourselves and trust in ourselves and through that trust have the faith in ourselves without which we can’t make our art, we’ll always get exactly to where we need to be. But, again, we have to do it. We have to find comfort in discomfort, we have to find a freedom in the dark. Without such commitment, and the conviction that supports it, we’ll never have the wherewithal to leap into the countless abysses at whose bottoms our secrets are waiting to be found.

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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Abeer Hoque

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I’m grateful to fellow women writers of color who reach out to recommend interviewees for this column. When I received an email asking if I’d be interested in meeting a Nigerian-born, Bangladeshi-American writer and photographer who had spent her coming-of-age years in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, of course I said “yes.” A few months later, I met Abeer Hoque and read Olive Witch: A Memoir which chronicles Hoque’s childhood in Nigeria in the 1970s, her unhappy teen years in Pittsburgh, and her time in a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. A work of prose interwoven with poetry and intersecting timelines, Hoque’s story of “family, race, sex, and the treachery of memory” has been praised for its “razor sharp edges” and “elegant and exhilarating” writing.

Hoque is also the author of the linked story collection, The Lovers and the Leavers, and a coffee table book of travel photographs and poems, The Long Way Home. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a 2007 Fulbright Scholarship, and the 2005 Tanenbaum Award, and she has received fellowships to attend residencies at Sacatar, Saltonstall, Summer Literary Series St. Petersburg, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay, and Albee.

Hoque’s writing and photography have been published in Guernica, ZYZZYVA, Outlook Traveller, 580 Split, India Today, The Daily Star, and the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, among others. She holds BS and MA degrees from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.

In this interview, Hoque talks about growing up in the predominantly white suburbs of Pittsburgh, rewriting her memoir manuscript ten times, and looking for the poetry in prose.

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The Rumpus: Traditional publishers sometimes expect authors to fit their book into a single category. It’s either a coming-of-age story—

Abeer Hoque: —or a memoir about mental health, or a travel memoir, or about how I became an artist.

Rumpus: And yet, Olive Witch is all of those things. So, my first question is how did you pull that off?

Hoque: I am not sure. Olive Witch started off as [an assignment] for a class. When I started my MFA program, everybody—nonfiction, fiction, and poetry genres—had to get together the summer before and take an autobiography class. For this class, we had to read a couple of autobiographies or memoirs and write a forty-page autobiography. It could be one thing in your life or your whole life.

I was twenty-seven at the time, and I wrote a forty-page autobiography. It started when I was about age five and went all the way up to age twenty-seven. And I loved writing it. I thought of it as writing these little stories from my life.

I ended up expanding on it, writing the rest of it over the two years I was in the program and making it into a full-length book. At that point, it was a hundred and fifty pages. Most of what I wrote then is still in the book. I maybe cut one or two chapters or sections.

The travel parts come in as a function of the way I grew up. My parents left their countries of birth. My dad was born in British Raj India and my mother in East Pakistan, both in present-day Bangladesh. They lived in Libya for four years after getting married, and then they moved to Nigeria where I was born and grew up. We moved again when I was in high school to the US. The travel parts are part of my upbringing, so I think of Olive Witch more as a growing up story. And it ends around when I was thirty, which is funny because when you think of a childhood story, you usually think after your teenage years it’s done. But there are the delayed adolescence years. I don’t think anybody would argue that people in their twenties are still growing up in a lot of ways. And certainly for me, that was the case. I still had a lot of growing up to do well into my twenties.

Rumpus: What was your experience like, finding a publisher?

Hoque: I had a lot of trouble finding an agent or publisher in the United States. I queried probably over one hundred agents and a few dozen indie publishers. And I had serious interest from about half a dozen agents or publishers. Some would say, “We are interested, but these are the problems with the narrative.” They felt like the three parts, set in three different countries, didn’t fit together. They found the American part, the middle part, to have a different tone of voice than the Nigerian and Bangladeshi parts. So, I spent a lot of time rewriting to try and make the parts all fit together.

The American agent had the most trouble with the American part. And when I finally got a publisher in India—HarperCollins India published it first—they had the most trouble with the Bangladesh parts. [Laughs] So, then I was thinking, “Will a Nigerian publisher think the Nigeria part is not working?”

And so, I had to do a bunch of rewriting. It ended up being wholly rewritten maybe ten times before it finally did get published in the form that it is now. I thought it was ready every time. I have this writerly ego, where every time I finish a draft, I’m like, “Okay, now it’s perfect!” And then I would give it out to readers or a publisher or an agent, and they’d give me huge, far, far-reaching feedback. And then I’d go back and rewrite it again. “Okay, now it’s great. Now it’s working, now it’s much stronger.” And then I’d go through another round again. That’s what happened between 2005 and 2015! I rewrote it so many times.

It wasn’t until after 2012, when I went back to Nigeria after twenty-five years, that I could actually finish the book. I needed to go back.

Rumpus: So once you went back to Nigeria, you felt that it was complete?

Hoque: I did, yeah. It was a combination of things. I found a publisher, HarperCollins India, who thought the book was working on a pretty basic level, on a very fundamental level. And my editor there, who I love, was a really good reader for me. He went through it with a fine-tooth comb, and I made a lot of changes with him. Not as overhauling as some of the other changes I had made. And I trusted him with the story, so it made it a lot easier to do the rewrites with him.

Rumpus: How do you know when to trust the editor and make changes, and when to hold fast?

Hoque: I had worked with an American agent before [working with] the Indian publisher. I trusted her too because she really loved my writing, and she really loved the book. But she thought there were huge problems with the American part, and I didn’t. After rewriting it with her four times over the course of a year—four entire, huge times—she still couldn’t get a handle on the American part. So, I had to part ways with her because I thought, “I just can’t change this or cut it anymore than I have already.”

The HarperCollins India editor gave me more specific things to do and not such big changes to make. Although the American agent never said, “Cut the American part,” [her feedback] was just too big and vague for me to work with.

Rumpus: Do you feel that the background of the editors had anything to do with their ability to give you helpful feedback?

Hoque: Perhaps. Perhaps the Indian editor was more willing to go with an experimental book, one that has little poems at the beginning of each chapter and weather conditions and slightly different voices throughout each of the three parts. Maybe they were more willing to work with that whereas American agents and publishers wanted something that was a bit more regular and cookie-cutter, in the tradition of memoir.

Rumpus: Had you decided either in the beginning or somewhere along in the process that you would just keep looking until you found the publisher that was right for your book rather than turn out another cookie-cutter memoir?

Hoque: I’ve always made it a point in my writing life to only write what it is I want to write. And that goes not just to revising pieces the way that I like them, but also the kind of writing I will do. So I’ve always said that I have to have another way of making money so that if what I write is inaccessible and unsaleable then that’s fine. It’s going to be the thing that I want to write about versus, “Let me try to target whatever market.” And then, hopefully, eventually, there will be someone who wants to publish what I’m writing, no matter what it takes. And Olive Witch did take fifteen years.

I started writing the book in 2001, and it was my thesis in 2003, so the very first version was in 2003. And then it got published in India in 2016. But 2015 was when I finished the last draft of it. So, that’s about twelve years of re-writing.

HarperCollins has a global distribution arm called HarperCollins 360. They pitch books from different regions to other regions. So HarperCollins US is publishing Olive Witch this month.

Rumpus: I know from the book what the origin is, and I’m trying not to include any spoilers here, but why did you choose that for the title?

Hoque: It’s a good question because “Olive Witch” really doesn’t mean anything. It’s a nonsense nickname, a made-up nickname, that I got in college. But these two words have followed me since then. When I made my website in 2005, I decided to call it Olive Witch because that’s one of the names I’ve had for myself in my head for a long time. So when it came time to name this book, that seemed to be the most natural name.

Rumpus: As you know, I met you in person and got your book all at the same time. So the title had me wondering, “Is she writing about an ancestral religion?”

Hoque: You know, over the years, people who have never read my book have just come to associate these words with me. They make these witchy references or olive references, so it’s become a part of how they relate to me, or how they think about me. It ends up being what they think it means to them, which is fine with me.

Rumpus: Well, the story I told myself, before I read the book was, “Some asshole kid in Pittsburgh called her that! Some suburbanite kid.”

Hoque: No. [Laughs] Well, it actually was a kid from Pittsburgh who came up with it. My college boyfriend. He also happens to be from Pittsburgh. [Laughs]

Rumpus: Okay, not what I imagined! I thought it was an insult.

Hoque: I did have a lot of nicknames, just because “Abeer” sounds like a funny name, or a weird name, in America. I’ve gotten far less applaudable names. So, I’m fine with Olive Witch.

Rumpus: So we have this Pittsburgh connection, and we both know that it’s not always the kindest city to brown and black people. What was it like for you, growing up here?

Hoque: I hated high school. I mean, I think everyone hates high school in some fashion, or maybe most people hate high school. I know some people who didn’t, and I’m always astonished at how cool they must have been. Because you’re already so uncomfortable in your skin when you’re thirteen. And when I was thirteen, I was shifting continents and cultures and entering a space where I just didn’t understand the rules for how to operate, and how to communicate with people. And so, Pittsburgh was where I did all that.

And I hated Pittsburgh for so many years because of the uncomfortable growing up years that I had in high school. I was in a suburb of Pittsburgh which was pretty white and pretty provincial. And it wasn’t cool to be smart. Not that I thought of myself as smart, but one thing I knew I was good at was school and that was not cool.

And the things that were cool were things that I couldn’t be. Like good at sports, or really pretty or really funny. So, I had a hard time in high school. It was really hard for me to just figure out the system and figure out who to be in that system. And so, I basically stopped talking. I just was a bit of a silent observer all through high school.

And I’m kind of grateful for that experience in a way. Once I left high school and was able to figure out who I wanted to be and who I wanted to be friends with, I realized I wasn’t the only one who was suffering. That Americans suffer too in high school. It wasn’t just because I was a foreigner coming into a place, or because I was one of the few non-white people in my high school. That experience gave me a real insight and an empathy for the American high school experience, which is a huge part of being an American.

So, even though it was so painful, it was really enlightening. And it made me able to relate to people. Whereas if I’d have come years later, like in college, I don’t think I would have understood as well what it means to be American. So, a lot of things were mixed up in those years, like race and gender, which I wasn’t able to parse that time. I just thought I was just different, and I didn’t know how to engage.

Rumpus: Both your photography and your writing are very intimate and have these global themes with what feels like an emphasis on place. So this has roots in your early life.

Hoque: Because my parents gifted me an international life, it’s a necessary part of who I am, this idea of place and trying to figure out where I fit in. It’s something that I’ve always struggled with, but I’m grateful for that because it makes me see things with new eyes. I love that feeling.

Rumpus: So Olive Witch deals with place, love, loss, and mental health. How has your family responded to the book?

Hoque: I know my siblings have read it. And they’re both very supportive and loved the book. I don’t know about my parents. I gave them a copy when it came out in India. It’s sitting on their coffee table, but I don’t know if they’ve read it. My dad is now suffering from memory loss. He has Alzheimer’s so I’m not sure he actually would be able to read it. Or if he’d be able to retain it.

My mom, however, is a super bookworm. But I have to admit, I’m kind of afraid to even ask her if she’s read it. And maybe my siblings are scaring me about it, saying, “I’m not sure if this is a book you want our parents to read.” But I actually would like to know that my mom has read it, and I think she would enjoy it even though I think some parts of it would be painful for her. Or maybe just too open, or tell-all. And I have shared some chapters over the years that were parent-friendly that she really loved. But I don’t know if she’s read the book as a whole.

I know that one of my aunts who I’m super close to has read it, and she loves it. She’s been very supportive of me.

Rumpus: Were you worried about your family’s reaction when you were writing the book?

Hoque: Oh, I was terrified of it. A large part of the conversation in the nonfiction classes that I took in school was how to write about people who are close to you. I learned while writing these stories that you have to ignore any fears, any paranoia [in order] to write what you want to write.

And so, I said to myself, I’m going to just write this book and then maybe after it gets published, if it ever does, I’ll worry about it then.

Rumpus: Other than worrying about what your family would think, did you find yourself hesitating to write as candidly as you did, for other reasons?

Hoque: The other thing I had to struggle with the idea that what I write doesn’t have to be the whole story. It doesn’t even have to be my whole story. If you read this book, it wouldn’t be like, okay, now you know everything. It’s one version of my life that I’ve chosen to tell at this time of my life. And there’s always more. There’s always more to somebody than what’s on the page. Or even what they tell you. Everyone has an inner life that’s rich and complicated. Even your closest partners and family and friends will never know everything that’s in there.

When I write, I remind myself this is the story I’m choosing to tell, but it’s only part of the story. And the way I remember something is not necessarily the way someone else will remember, and that’s okay. I want to acknowledge other people might remember it differently, but still stand by my right to say how I saw it.

The first thing I ever wrote in my MFA program was nonfiction and that brings into play all these things about writing about real people and the tricks of memory and how your version of things is necessarily going to be different than others. And even the way you remember something when you’re twenty is going to be different than the way you remember it when you’re forty. If I were to write this book now, I think I would write a different book because I’m a different person now.

Rumpus: Did you have any concern about stigma around writing about mental health?

Hoque: Yeah, and it’s still so very much a stigma to be depressed. Like a weak thing. And certainly this is intensified in Bangladeshi, South Asian, Asian and immigrant communities where these aren’t things you’re supposed to suffer from, or make public. I’ve found it difficult just because I did grow up in a world where it’s not a thing to talk about.

But I have also been able connect because people relate to being sad, they relate to being depressed. Everybody has had this sensation, so it’s a real connecting, connective experience, as painful as depression is.

And it’s really important to talk about it. Thankfully, it’s getting better, and it’s talked about more. Even in Bangladesh, there are people who have their psychiatrists. One of my friends [there] is married to a psychiatrist, and his patients aren’t the rich people who can afford to have mental health issues, or the pernickety artistic types. You get a lot of middle class people who are having problems with their families, or with their own mental health issues, and it’s okay to go to somebody to talk about it. There’s still very much a stigma, but when you talk about it, people can relate to it, and maybe add their own stories.

Rumpus: In addition to memoir, you tell stories through a number of forms and genres—poetry, novels, short stories, erotica. Do you have a form or genre you’re most comfortable with?

Hoque: I definitely feel most comfortable with poetry and nonfiction. When I started writing fiction, it was more of an experiment to see what it would be like to write a short story. And I got a lot of feedback that said, “Go back to nonfiction,” that those stories were more natural and had more confidence. But I kept writing fiction because I was determined to get better at it. I wanted to stretch myself and figure out how to tell short stories better.

I started writing fiction after I had gone through a whole round of agent rejections for the memoir. The novel [The Lovers and the Leavers], a collection of linked short stories, was my first published foray into fiction. Olive Witch is the second book of mine that HarperCollins India published.

And the other novel I’ve been working on for the last five years is about memory loss. Many of the agents I queried about the memoir said, “Oh, we’re looking for novels now,” and I was thinking, “OK, I’m going to write a novel and maybe I’ll get that published first and then these other things will finally come through after.”

So I started from scratch and wanted to see how much better I could get at fiction, because it does not come naturally. It’s something that I definitely have to work at. Hopefully, this second novel will be the next thing that comes out.

Rumpus: I read that you’re also working on a series of ekphrastic poems. Poetry that describes another work of art—a painting, photograph, or sculpture. I had to look that up!

Hoque: I also had to look it up because somebody told me that the stuff I was writing was ekphrastic, and I said, “What’s that?” At the time, I had gotten so focused on prose, but I wanted to get back to writing poetry because it makes me so happy to write a poem. It will take me five days or a month of rewriting and rewriting, and I just find it to be a really satisfying process. But I wasn’t doing it, and before I had only written poems when I was inspired to write. I was trying to make myself write poems, and I couldn’t figure out what to write about.

So, I thought, I’ll write poems based on these photographs I’ve taken and that will be the launching point. I’ll look at the photographs and make up a story either about the mood or the color of the content. And I’ll write a poem about it. And that’s where the series started, just to try and jump start myself back into writing poetry and having to inspire myself.

Rumpus: When did you know that you were a writer?

Hoque: I had an epiphany when I crashed and burned out of business grad school. I’d been working at a startup for a while, and I hadn’t written for a long time. I had written poems when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. Then all through college and business school, for ten years of my adult life, I hadn’t written anything. And so, I started writing again, pieces of poems.

And I had this long wall in my apartment which I covered with butcher’s paper, and I would fill the entire wall up [writing] with markers. Every time the paper filled up, I would put a new one up, just layers and layers of butcher’s paper on my wall. And I didn’t think about it, other than the fact it felt really good to do it. And people would come to my apartment, stand in front of this wall and read all these pieces of things that I was writing. I made a joke at some point, “Oh, look, all this writing. I should be a writer.” And a friend turned to me and said, “I think it’s obvious to everyone except you, that you are a writer.”

It was a lightbulb moment, and I didn’t look back. I decided to apply to a writing program because I was shifting careers so drastically, and I thought it would be a great way to find friends who are writers, to make a creative community from scratch. And also, to create some work. Because if I went to school, I would have homework, and I would have a thesis. So I would have pieces that I would be writing.

So I went to the University of San Francisco for the MFA program. It’s one of the only programs that lets you study different genres. So even though I entered into poetry, I ended up doing a combination. I wrote a memoir that involved poetry, a mixed genre piece. But I also took fiction workshops and lectures. Being able to take all these different genres, which is something that MFA programs unfortunately do not typically allow, let alone encourage, was really important to who I have become as a writer. I was able to play in all those genres. I think all writers should take poetry, no matter how much they’re afraid of it, or hate it. And that’s part of the problem. People are afraid of it or hate it. But if you actually engage in it, then you can see how it could be a part of your literary personality.

The fictive techniques I learned in my class, about how to tell a story and narrative arcs and building a character—all these things are really important in nonfiction as well. And in nonfiction, knowing where the story is—that’s important in fiction too. The small moments of nonfiction that often become your larger essay themes, you can also draw on these in fiction. You have everything to learn, from all of the genres.

And from the moment I enrolled in that program, when people asked me what I did I said, “I’m a writer,” even though I hadn’t written anything other than the ten poems that I had submitted as my portfolio for school. I was determined to embarrass myself into being a writer just by saying it.

This is something really important that every writer should do from the time they start writing. Don’t say you want to be a writer. Just say you are a writer. Speak yourself into being.

Rumpus: Yes! Okay, so let’s talk about heroes. I imagine that your writer heroes or role models are across genres as well.

Hoque: For sure. But I have such an unconscious understanding of how my own writing comes about, I need other people to tell me. Like in school, I needed other people to tell me what my stories were about, what the major themes were, because I couldn’t tell myself. So, in the same way, I can tell you the people who I like to read, but I’m not sure how they figure into my writing other than me just totally, subconsciously, copying them. [Laughs] But they include nonfiction and fiction writers, novelists and short story writers. And poets, of course.

One of my favorite authors is David Mitchell because he combines story and very beautiful writing, and he uses form in a way that I think is really ingenious.

And Toni Morrison, of course. She can just wind her stories in these small moments and just build them out, and have characters that just explode from the very first moment she introduces them. You know exactly who they are and where they are. And she never, for all the kind of raw and plainspoken detail, it never isn’t beautiful, the way she describes things.

There’s a debut poet, who I just read, Ocean Vuong. His first book of poetry is called  Night Sky with Exit Wounds. He’s a Vietnamese-American poet, and his book is about family and immigration and sexuality. I’ve never before sat down with a book of poetry and just read it from start to finish and then immediately started over again. It was brilliant. It was like reading any great novel.

In nonfiction, one of the most beautiful, inspiring books I’ve read was Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. She writes about the slums in Bombay, and when I first started reading it, I didn’t realize it was nonfiction because it had such a sense of barreling narrative with these characters who were so alive and desperate from the very get go. She told their stories brilliantly. I was enrapt in this world.

So basically, I like it when people can tell stories and language is also a very important part of their work. I just love pretty language. I’m a sucker for something that people often rail at—the quality of the sentence. I’m completely guilty of this. I highlight. I highlight sentences, so when I write little reviews of books, which I do for every book I read, for myself mostly, I start off just by typing out each of the quotes that I’ve highlighted. That’s part of the joy I get from reading is how people can put together words and describe things in unusual and beautiful ways, compact and beautiful ways. It’s the poetry. I look for poetry, I guess. The poetry in prose.

Rumpus: That’s a nice way to put it because whenever people talk about beautiful language, rcrical language, I wonder, Where’s the line, though? Because there’s lyrical language, but then we eschew flowery language. So how do you strike that balance?

Hoque: [Laughs] This is often applied to my writing. I’m a little bit conflicted about that because sometimes I’m just writing some pretty, flowery things and not really saying anything with it. But then I also respond to it in other people’s works.

Rumpus: “Lyrical” is so overused in reviews, it’s just been rendered meaningless.

Hoque: Yes, meaningless, totally.

Rumpus: But your writing is just so straight at you. It’s like when I met you in person. You really look people in the eye. You’re watching everything, and you’re taking it all in. And your writing is like that too. You are presenting everything, very unflinchingly. And so, that’s what comes to my mind, more so than “lyrical.” That’s not to say I don’t find the language in your work beautiful. The language is beautiful.

Hoque: When I first got to college, in my head I was inventing the person I wanted to be because I had basically spent all my high school years silently observing this terrible landscape, traumatic landscape. And so, when I got to college, I was like, Alright, now I know things that I want to absorb and the things that I want to project. I’m not the pretty one, I’m not the funny one. It doesn’t matter if I’m smart. I’m going to be bold. I’m just going to tell the truth and that’s going to be my niche. That’s going to be my thing.

And I also did it because it’s such an unusual thing. People never say what it is they think, and so I could distinguish myself in this way by saying what I think. And of course, you want to be different when you’re young, and so it was partly for shock value but partly also because it was something that made sense to me instinctively.

And it’s become, obviously, a part of how I write as well. It’s to tell the truth, to try to get to the kernel of it, the center of it. I’m glad that’s what you pick up in my writing because I think it’s also part of my personality.

Rumpus: Right, and it’s not easy because I think sometimes when people do that—in writing and in life—they don’t do it well. It comes off as performance. But you’re very organic. And that makes your writing such a joy to read, even the really painful parts. So, thank you for your book.

Hoque: Thank you. I’m so glad you responded to it the way you did because that means everything to me as a writer.

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Author photograph © Josh Steinbauer.

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Writing Romance: The Rumpus Interview with Sonali Dev

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Sonali Dev’s latest novel, A Change of Heart, tells a story of love and healing set against the violent backdrop of India’s illegal organ trade. Two years after the murder of Jen, a young doctor working in a Mumbai slum, the book opens with an encounter between Nikhil, Jen’s widower, and Jess, a single mother who claims to have been the recipient of Jen’s heart. As the book continues, Nikhil and Jess connect in spite of their painful histories—and the growing menace of Jen’s killers, who threaten both their relationship and their lives.

If you’re anything like me, A Change of Heart is the kind of book that you devour in a weekend, carried along by the chemistry between Nic and Jess, the momentum of the plot, and the novel’s wonderful supporting characters—from Nic’s mother to Jess’s roommate to the corrupt officials back in Mumbai.

In all her books, Dev writes compelling female characters wrestling with the tensions between traditional and contemporary roles, women who find empowerment in the face of family conflict, sexual violence, and repressive social norms. Throughout, she captures a broad expanse of modern India, transporting the reader to Bollywood sets, rural villages, Chicago condos, and Mumbai schools.

Readers of Dev’s previous work will recognize Nikhil and Jen, whose wedding provided the occasion for the dramatic climax of her previous novel, The Bollywood Bride. This novel and Dev’s first, A Bollywood Affair, have been recognized as best books of the year by NPR, the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal. Dev’s work has also won numerous prizes including, in 2014, the American Library Association’s award for best romance.

I spoke to Dev about her latest book, along with the romance genre, writing non-white characters, and the parallels she’s found between writing and architectural design. Our conversation took place via Skype from her home outside of Chicago.

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The Rumpus: At its core, this book is a love story, but there’s a strong suspense plot line here, too. What drew you to that part of the story?

Sonali Dev: Nikhil and Jen were in Bollywood Bride, and they were both characters that I loved so much—but their story had already been told as a part of Bride, so, as a storyteller, I was intrigued by what happens after. I knew how they met in Afghanistan [in Doctors Without Borders] and all of that… but when I started writing, I had these two characters who constantly put themselves in these very dangerous situations, and so, sure enough, in one of those dangerous situations, something bad happened. It totally took me by surprise, and then I was like “oh crap,” you know?

When you find your soulmate… what happens when that just blows up in your face? Especially for a person like Nic—he’s so happy with whatever he gets, and he’s done, he doesn’t question it. That started intriguing me. And then there was Jess, who was this really dark, damaged character, who was never meant to be a heroine: the story became about this woman who had enough darkness to pull him out of his darkness.

Rumpus: There’s something sort of poetic about the idea that Jess wasn’t supposed to be the heroine because that’s sort of what her life story is about—becoming the heroine after all this hardship. And her situation allows a mystery or suspense element to take center stage in a lot of places.

Dev: Right. It turned into this suspense plot almost organically—because her child is under threat. As soon as a character is under threat, suspense comes out of that. Amazingly enough, I’m not a mystery reader. My definition of hell is a murder on page one, and four hundred pages before I figure out who did it! So the emotional part of the story practically wrote itself, but getting the nitty gritty of the crime part was work.

Rumpus: It comes together so well. I was also thinking that this book has your first real villain. Before, all the characters we see are these really complex humans, but here you have a really deplorable person in the character of Asif. Did it feel different to write that character?

Dev: I find writing villains to be a very situational thing. I mean, you’re right, in the first two books, there are people who do the wrong thing, but they’re not really villains—because in life generally that’s how it is. But with Asif—putting myself in that situation, of being somebody who’s dark enough where he has no guilt about it, he’s so inside that evil it’s not even evil to him, it’s just mundane—that kind of madness was really kind of interesting to write. I actually had fun with it.

With things like the organ black market and human trafficking, that are just horrendous as concepts, you still have to put a face on it to really internalize it. Because it’s not just a concept. There are so many protagonists in that evil: the people who buy those organs, the people who meet to sell them, the middlemen—the same is true of human trafficking. There is such a human element that individualizing it in the form of a villain, for me, really worked.

Rumpus: Thinking now of the love story piece: something I enjoy about all of your writing is the attention you give to food in relationships. The moment that first got me choked up in A Change of Heart was early on when Jess is teaching Nikhil how to eat again, in spite of his grief over Jen’s murder. Why do you write about food? Why do you feel like it’s something that can be so moving to us?

Dev: I think that is entirely my family. My mother is the youngest of four sisters, and there’s nobody on earth who can cook food like they can. I mean, I swear to God, these meals could pull you from the edge of disaster, and so it’s such a big part of me. I moved [to the US] twenty years ago, and I’ve lived my entire adult live here, and we’ve had so many nieces and nephews that we’ve parented because they’ve come here to go to college, and they come home and our home becomes their home, and a big component of that is food. When you’re an immigrant, food is also a little way of holding onto your culture, which people who live in that culture naturally sometimes lose.

Food is also such a way to connect, it truly is, to nurture, to invite people into your home. I think it’s part of everybody’s life and people don’t even realize it. I mean, as women now, when we work, when we’re part of partnerships and relationships, a man who can say, “You’re tired, what can I bring you to eat?” That just changes your entire relationship, from someone who doesn’t say “Honey, I’m home,” when you’re slaving over a keyboard.

Food is a language, but the funny thing is that even though I never set out to make my books about food, everyone says, “Don’t read these books hungry.” I didn’t expect it—it just came naturally. My fourth book, which I’m revising right now, is actually my first book that’s set entirely in India—it’s set in one suburb of Mumbai—and someone said, “I hope there’s one of your kitchen scenes in there.”

Rumpus: Another sensory pleasure that I wanted to ask you about is sex. When you set out to write your first sex scene, what was that like? How do you approach that piece of it?

Dev: I love that you blushed when you asked that question!

One of the first scenes that I write is that pivotal sex scene—that turn, finally, from dancing around each other to getting that connection. This is what I am thinking about when I talk about the genre structure of romance. These first four books are structurally, absolutely romance in terms of hero/heroine conflict and the emotional turmoil of growing to allow love in. So the sex scene is metaphorical in many, many ways in these stories. When you’re writing and you’re starting from a place of complete disconnection, or a place of disillusionment, or a place of darkness, I know that’s what I have to hit. It’s one of the first scenes I write because I know that in all their interactions [the characters] have to slowly be coming to a point where they can become that open, where they can let each other in to that extent. For me, the sex scene is that—it’s that opening up physically, a representation of opening your heart. I have a teenager, and I keep trying to explain this to her—yes, sex is fun and all of that, but there’s a vulnerability in it.

And there’s a vulnerability in it especially for women in cultures where you’re not allowed to own that, where it’s given so much importance in terms of your worth, and certainly in these three books, for all of the characters, it is that. They don’t own their own bodies, they don’t own their own sexualities, so the moment that they do, something integral changes—so that’s what a sex scene is to me, too. I don’t know if you want to quote me on this, but I remember we were in a workshop one time, and I said, “All my characters fuck with their hearts.” And I have friends who will now throw that in my face all the time—“Well, that’s so classy, Sonali.”

Rumpus: I feel like we see that vulnerability you’re talking about even more in A Change of Heart because Jess is a survivor of sexual violence. How did you deal with that when you were sitting down to write that scene?

Dev: Usually, sex scenes are very easy for me to write. This one was not. Idealistically, I wanted it to be a certain way. I wanted it to be the experience that I would wish upon any survivor, and I think a lot of Nic’s character developed because I wanted him to be a guy who could do that. But finally working that scene out so it doesn’t minimize, so it is convincingly healing—that was hard. Because that scene is all vulnerability. I think it was aspirational, more than anything else. And I think that’s one of the things I love about writing romance—people will say this is not realistic, but I so badly want it to be. I so badly want these things to be possible.

Rumpus: Your training originally was as an architect. Do you feel like that informs the way you approach writing?

Dev: Absolutely. There are just so many parallels. One of the things is the process of revision, the process of imagining something or conceiving something as a concept, which is your first blast of design or your first blast of story, your first dirty draft, as we call it. That’s how I write—it’s very hard for me to write my first draft. I hate it; it’s like pulling teeth. It only turns into a story in revision. That is how design works also because you’re layering and layering and revision and redoing it until everything is in its place and meeting standards while still not just keeping with your original design, but enhancing it as you go along. So that’s the easy parallel to make, I think—the fact that you’re completely okay with your first shot not being your final shot. Revision, revision, revision, in both things. In design, it’s often where your client says, “Well, this isn’t just right, that isn’t just right,” and you tweak it while keeping their vision and your vision. And in a story the process of critique partners and editors—so taking feedback and pouring it back into your work—is another thing.

Rumpus: I’m so interested in that. Can you talk about your transition from working as an architect to starting to write fiction?

Dev: So, really simple transition for me: I always wrote. I started writing very young—it wasn’t something I ever set out to do, it was just something I always did. Being raised in India and being raised with that whole, “You do something and you stand on your own two feet” kind of family, making money as a writer was not—well, even today, it’s a dream, it happens to very few people. It’s not even happening to me yet. So I’d never even considered writing as a career option in my twenties. Obviously, I loved art and design and all of that, and architecture seemed like a perfectly good fit, but all through architecture school, I perpetually heard the words, “Sonali: sketches not words. Sketches not words,” and that should have been my indication. As early as six months after I graduated, I was working in an architect’s office, and I had a friend who was working for this trade magazine called the Indian Architect and Builder in Mumbai, and I said, “Really? How did you get that job? That’s my dream job!—it’s architecture and it’s writing!” and she said, “Really? It’s your dream job? Come in and talk to the editor.” I had just come out of a pretty brutal breakup, and I was feeling pretty powerless, and every time I feel powerless, I want to do something to assert my power. I said, what do I really want? I want to work for an architecture magazine—that was my extent of my dreams at that point, and so I picked up the phone and I called the editor. I went in the next day, and this was the first time in my life, I’m sitting across from this woman, and she says to me, “Well, do you have a need to write?” and I said, “Seriously? You have it too?”

I never thought I’d write fiction… but my best friend is a movie producer, and she had just made an award-winning movie, and she was reading a lot of scripts that were not connecting with her. We’ve lived on different continents for twenty years now—we’ve been friends since grade school—and we’ve talked almost every day. So, we’re on the phone, I have little kids, and we say, “How hard can it be to write a good commercial script?” And she says, “You know what? You write—you should just write me one.” And I said, “I think I will.” Famous last words. Two weeks: I wrote a script, and once I had done that—and of course, it never got made, it still sits under my bed—but once I had lived with the characters and created a world. Once you’ve done that, I don’t think there’s any going back…

I went to the library, borrowed every novel-writing book I could find, then took classes at the University of Chicago and all of that, and finally… I was trying to write this really complicated literary novel, which was just my way of saying I didn’t know what genre meant, and people kept saying, well, write what you love. And I always loved love stories. I didn’t read that much genre romance, but in everything I read, I was always seeking out the love story. And then I read my first romance, which was completely accidental. My husband went to the library when I was sick, and I asked him to pick me up something to read, and he picked me up Katherine Coulter’s Rosehaven, a medieval romance. He comes home, I look at it, and I’m like, “Really? You’ve been married to me for ten years and you think this is what I read?” Then I started it, didn’t sleep all night, finished it, went back to the library the next day, read her entire backlist, and I’ve never stopped since. Again, I called my best friend on the phone, and I said, “Did you know there’s actually an entire genre that’s just love stories?”

I was trying to put together this story of these four couples through four socioeconomic backgrounds in Mumbai and it was—you know, of course, I took on the hardest possible thing, and was struggling with it. Then I got sick, and I was quarantined for six weeks, and feeling very sorry for myself, and I was on the phone with my friend, and she said, “You know what? You should just write something that you love.” And Bollywood Bride was a story that had been in my head for years, so I just sat down and wrote the whole thing down, and there was no looking back.

Rumpus: That transition into thinking about writing romance leads us to something else I wanted to talk about, which is this idea of the romance genre, and how it’s perceived in the industry and outside of it. You’re talking about how this literary novel that you had originally conceived of was about class, and about these relationships between couples, and a lot of the thematic material that I feel like is very much present in your work now. Do the books that you ended up writing, which are marketed as romance and women’s fiction, and you said you feel like, structurally, are romance—do they feel all that different from what you originally wanted to write?

Dev: Absolutely not. When I found romance structure, genre structure, it completely set me free because, again, another thing writing has in common with design: you have to understand structure to play with it. Once I had the confines of genre structure, I realized I could tell any story I wanted and all the stories I wanted, and so to answer your question, these are exactly, absolutely the themes I wanted to address, these are exactly the kind of stories I wanted to tell. I think romance, especially today, is a genre where you can really play. There are more subgenres in this genre than, I think, in any other one, and you can just about tell any story. There are very few rules.

Rumpus: Yet there so many people out there who belittle romance by saying that it’s formulaic. I think what you’re saying is that that formula is actually a tool, like any tool that a writer would use to tell a story, and that allows for this huge diversity of kinds of stories to be told.

Dev: Exactly. It’s about understanding a craft, and using that understanding to then break rules and build upon that. And as far at that whole snobbery against romance—I have no patience for it, truth be told. I think there are good books and bad books in every genre—it’s what calls to you. Evidently, there are a lot of women that romance calls to. And anyone who chooses to judge that, well, it doesn’t surprise me because what women choose to do has been frowned upon for years. But we’ve continued to do it and people will either continue to judge us or walk away. I have no patience for having to explain myself. Have I read formulaic romance novels? Yes. Have I read formulaic mysteries and fantasies and all of that? Yes.

Rumpus: Are there formulaic literary fiction novels? Yes!

Dev: Exactly. And do literary authors follow structure? Yes! It’s a looser, wider structure, but there is absolutely a structure to those novels, too. As far the romance genre and being part of it, I think anyone who’s ever attended a convention or meeting of RWA—you have to be there to believe it. I always say that the romance community, which is almost all women—all businesses should be run that way. Any good business has to focus on the bottom line, absolutely, focus on the product—we love our product like nobody’s business, we understand it, we continue to develop it, we continue to evolve it. And there’s community—we try to grow the community as a whole, all the time, everyone from the biggest bestseller to a newbie. Everybody’s helping everybody else. You can say this is a warm and fuzzy feminine thing, but it’s not, it’s amazingly powerful and it makes a lot of money.

Rumpus: And with the state of book publishing being what it is, that’s pretty important.

Since we’re talking about publishing more broadly, I know you’re often referenced as a quote-unquote “diverse” voice in the industry. Can you speak to that and where you feel like we are now with respect to diversity?

Dev: Well, timing is everything. I think even two years before my book sold, my book would not have sold. So have we seen evolution? Absolutely. Have we seen growth? Absolutely. We’re definitely not where we were when I first tried to start to selling these books. So, it’s the clichéd answer, where we’ve come a long way, but we have such a long way to go.

Some of it is that the expectation from editors and agents is that there has to be absolute excellence before they will take you on. I’ve had an agent say to me, “Well, you write a Kite Runner and no one can stop you,” and I remember asking him, “So every white book that comes to you, your expectation is that it’s Gone With the Wind?” and he said, “So what you’re trying to tell me is that you want your mediocrity to do well?” and I said, “Not at all, but what I want is for the definition of mediocrity to be a level playing field, and it is not.” There is that expectation, that of my hundred clients, I will take on one brown client who has to be this supernatural being of literary brilliance—but that’s not how it works. Debut novels are seldom the best work of authors. Authors develop like every other professional, every other artist, and they develop with the support of good editors and good agents. You need to take us on for promise, you need to take us on unpolished, and you need to be part of that development, just like you are a part of that development for authors who write white characters. So in those more nuanced ways, we have a long, long way to go.

I actually do not like the word “diverse” at all because, you know, I’m not diverse, I’m Indian! But anyone who writes books about characters who are not white has had editors who say to us, “Well, why don’t you…? Why don’t you change one of the characters to white?” And it’s nothing against these editors: they want to sell books, they perceive of their readership as demanding something, but that readership is only demanding more of what the publishers have given them for two centuries. If you don’t start giving them more choices, they won’t even know what to demand. At least now, because of smaller houses and because of self-publishing, readers have read more and so readers are demanding and readers are accepting a wider array of things, but it’s despite big publishing, not because of it. I think if big publishing got behind it, we would have some really spectacular results.

We are now in a place where, at least, growth has happened—where there are agents and editors who put out calls for diverse books. I mean, when they get one or two they’ve had enough, which is not okay, but at least they’re doing that. They’re not hitting delete on a subject line that says Bollywood Bride. Long before I came on the scene, people had advocated and worked really hard, and I’m definitely reaping the benefits of that. I hope that somebody else in the future will reap the benefits of whatever work I’m doing now.

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Author photograph © Vernice Dollar.

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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Julie Buntin

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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Julie Buntin about her debut novel, Marlena, the writers and books that influenced it, tackling addiction with compassion, and the magic of teenage girls.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month The Rumpus Book Club hosts a discussion online with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To become a member of the Rumpus Book Club, click here. Upcoming writers include Gabrielle Bell, Samantha Irby, Achy Obejas, Danzy Senna, and more.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Marisa Siegel.

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Marisa: Hi Julie! Welcome to our very old-school book club chat room. You are here 🙂

Julie: Hooray! Thank you so much for having me. I love how retro this is.

Marisa: It looks like it’s just us right now, but let’s get started and hopefully some members will join shortly.

Julie: Sounds good!

Marisa: So, I’m always fascinated by and curious about epigraphs. Can you talk a little about the Le Guin quote that prefaces the book? How/why did you come to choose it?

Julie: Yeah sure—first, I love that book, and even though on the surface, a work of sci-fi might seem to have little in common with Marlena, I feel it’s an influence. It’s a beautiful story of, among other things, an unlikely friendship, and it also has a lot to say about the process of storytelling and truth, the relationship between those two things. Marlena, for me, is a book that’s about telling a story—how impossible and beautiful it is to try to get to the truth of our own stories, via memory or the act of writing them down. That epigraph speaks to that, I think, or I hope. 

Marisa: That’s a great answer, and yes, I read the “larger purpose” of Marlena as being about how we tell the stories of our life.

Julie: Yeah, I was definitely thinking about that a lot as I wrote—what do the stories we tell ourselves about our pasts have to do with who we become? How important are they?

Marisa: And can I just say how much I loved this book? It was equal parts extraordinary literary craft and thriller-ish pure fun. I don’t know if I’ve ever read something that can do both of those things so well! How long did it take you to write the book? The language is precise and exquisite; it reads like a book that was stitched together carefully. Was it always going to be a novel?

Julie: AW thank you Marisa. I love to hear that—I am a big reader of pretty much everything, from more literary stuff to pure thrillers, so I would hope the book carries echoes of both. I first starting writing about these characters in early 2011 or thereabouts, though I didn’t start working on the novel seriously until probably 2013. Once I did really begin to focus on it, I think it was probably two more years before I finished. This is a long answer to your question, but I guess I’d say about four years, in earnest, but I revise in kind of a weird way—I don’t fiddle with the draft on the page until I’m really happy with it. So most of my revision process once I had a full draft involved printing the mss out and retyping it, so I could mess with the language/rewrite the sentences as I went. That’s maybe why it feels careful? I “rewrote” it many, many times.

Marisa: I think that as an editor, I could sense that. But I don’t think it reads that way; the experience of reading it was effortless. I read in chunks, because I have a two-year-old and I read everything on The Rumpus, but Marlena was easy (even though I kept stopping to write down quotes. SO MANY quotes).

Marisa: Rural Michigan—its landscape and people and weather—is almost a character in this story. How much of that is drawn from your own experience growing up in Michigan? Did you visit Michigan while working on the book?

Julie: I probably visited Michigan once or twice in the early stages, when my family was still living there. They’ve since moved away. The landscape is largely drawn from my own experience, but I moved away from Michigan the summer before I turned eighteen. So to say drawn from experience, really means drawn from memory, so I wouldn’t say it’s a totally reliable portrait of the place—it is authentic to Cat though, as a narrator, in the sense that she’s remembering her home too. That’s one of the reasons I changed location names, etc.—I didn’t want to have to be “true” to that landscape, but I did want to evoke it, or at least evoke a representation of it that was a blend of my memory (as the writer) and Cat’s memory, as a character with her own experiences of the place that are different than mine. But some of the details are very lived-in—the way the town feels, how it swells in the summer, etc.

Ann B: How did you go about researching tweaker culture?

Marisa: That’s a great question, Ann! Literally next question on my list. Julie, you’ve shared that you lost a friend (who Marlena is not based on, if I recall correctly, but perhaps a little bit inspired by)—did this drive you to write about the subject? And yes, tell us about the research/was there research?

Julie: Hey Ann! Thanks for coming. I asked a lot of questions. Questions of people I knew had experience, including a family member. And I also did some reading. Methland and Dreamland were both helpful books for me.

Julie: While this story is very much a novel, and the events did not happen/are not based on reality, I don’t think I would have written this book if I hadn’t had the experience of losing a friend to complications related to substance abuse, and also, I have a family member who is an addict.

Marisa: That’s really interesting to me personally. I grew up with a cocaine addict father (who OD’d a few years ago. It’s hard to make me feel compassion for addicts. But you did.

Julie: I felt a great sense of urgency after my friend died, and as I watched my family member (I’m not sharing the details not to be coy, but because it’s an ongoing thing) struggle with similar problems. I kept thinking, what is it about adolescence that draws some girls onto this dangerous path? Or not adolescence, exactly, because it’s not just that. But what’s the attraction in self-destruction? Where is the line? How do you know when someone has crossed it?

Marisa: Did you ever have a version of the story where Marlena didn’t die? Or was that where you started from? Was there ever a version where you concretely explained her death?

Julie: Yeah, it’s really hard. And I think that’s something readers struggle with too—like, an addict is not a likable character.

Marisa: But somehow, Marlena is likable, both through Cat’s eyes and also on her own. I felt sympathy and empathy for her. And even for Ryder. I can’t say the same for Bolt or Marlena’s dad, though.

Ann B: I’ve been reading so many unlikeable main characters lately. I actually found Marlena refreshing.

Marisa: Can you talk a little about the unnamed girl in the library? What purpose(s), in your mind, does she serve for the story and for Cat? I have my own ideas, but I’m curious to hear your intentions with regard to the character.

Julie: To answer your question, Marisa, about Marlena’s death—the book always started and ended where it did. I wanted to write about substance abuse, and I don’t think a concrete explanation of Marlena’s death, even if it might have been more satisfying for some readers, would have been an accurate or honest depiction of what that so often feels like. There are always questions, lies, things hidden, things you’ll never know. Especially when you’re young, as Cat is when it happens, and miss so much—maybe because you’re self-absorbed, or maybe because the addict has become such a good liar. And because this book is largely about grief, too—through the lens of that friendship—the death was always the beginning of the story. It’s the train barreling down the tracks—it’s the thing Cat can’t escape, that she knows is coming. It also would have felt disingenuous to me in a first person narrated novel to withhold that information from the reader—if Cat is telling the story, she comes to it with what she knows. It’s not about how Marlena died, it’s about the way that’s impacted Cat’s life.

Ann—thanks for saying that. I never thought about Marlena as unlikeable as I was writing, though I have heard from other people that they find her hard to take. And Cat, too, for that matter.

And Marisa, as for the girl in the library—I thought of her, in this story of different women dealing with substance abuse, as another version of how things might go. You might survive, and you might become Cat, right, functioning sort of, but not quite. Or you might not survive. Or you might end up in that in-between place, like the girl in the library. Not functioning, not dead. But lost. Those aren’t the only three paths, of course, but I wanted Cat to bump up against another possible version of that story…

Marisa: Do you think Cat gets to a place of understanding that? I hope she does.

Julie: I do! I think of the ending as a happy ending. Cat, in reclaiming the story, in trying to see it and her role in it for what it is, in saying this is what happened to me—that’s an act of empowerment. It’s more ownership than she’s ever taken before. She’s writing it down—and in writing it down, she has clarity, she might be able to move on. I don’t have like, a vision for where she winds up, but I think of it is hopeful—though I definitely wanted to leave it open to other interpretations.

Lynda: I agree, Ann. I found Marlena to be refreshing too. Despite knowing her outcome, I was cheering for her, my heart broke for her. I felt like she was a victim of circumstances going down the only path she knew.

Marisa: Yes, Lynda! It even felt like sometimes Marlena tried to break the cycle, but couldn’t quite get there. And she was intelligent, and had more awareness of what was going on than a teenager might (or than Cat seemed to). It was heartbreaking, and rendered lovingly.

Lynda: Completely, Marisa. There were times when I felt like Marlena was the adult in the novel. She knew what was going on and tried to protect those around her. I also felt like she was trying to shield Cat from the darkness and had a deep love for those she cared about. I guess why it was heartbreaking that she died but also so real.

Marisa: Cat’s mom was perhaps my favorite character, too. As I got to the final third of the book, she really came to life for me.

Julie: I’m so glad to hear you both read it that way—I agree completely. Marlena is so young. Blaming her seems so strange to me—or any teenage addict for that matter.

Marisa: I also want to say how much I love that we are exclusively focusing on the female characters. In an interview with Electric Literature, Julie, you were asked about unlikable male characters. But this book really celebrates female friendship, even the ugly parts, and just sort of pushes the men to the side. It was wonderful in that way.

Julie: I loved that question from EL. I honestly didn’t even think about whether I was portraying male characters unfairly. This is probably TMI for this interview, but I grew up with a father even more absent than Cat’s—to me growing up was so defined by women, I don’t know, I think that must have just come out sort of in the writing in a way I wasn’t totally aware of. I don’t think of Ryder and Greg as bad though; they’re just dumb teenagers, dumb teenage boys, which is a different animal.

And Linda—yes! Marlena is definitely way more adult than perhaps she should be; I think those pressures were part of the life stress for her. She had to be in this role of responsibility with Sal, and even with Cat (because Cat is younger, more naive), even though she needed help.

Marisa: Yes! That totally comes through. Ryder and Greg felt like boys I knew (and maybe TMI, but yeah, dated) in high school and college.

Marisa: Julie, you’ve already listed Le Guin as an influence. Any other books that were influential for Marlena? What were you reading while you wrote?

Julie: Okay, influences—I love this question.

I think Housekeeping, by Marilynn Robinson, was an influence. The poetry of Rita Dove and Elizabeth Bishop. I love Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore, and I think in a lot of ways that was the book that gave me permission to write this one.

Marisa: I haven’t read that Moore book, but it’s going on my reading list now!

Julie: I love how elegiac Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is, how it feels like a piece of music, how nothing much happens in the sense that it mostly just follows two girls at the height of their teenage friendship, and how that nothing much has taken up so much psychic weight in the narrator’s life years later—how that’s the last time she felt fully alive, maybe, fully free.

Marisa: I really like that comment about permission, because you are writing about difficult subject matter and that’s something I struggle with (and maybe a reason I don’t write as much right now).

Julie: Marisa—it’s a beautiful book, I think you’ll love it.

Marisa: That sounds wonderful. There’s so much pressure to “write something meaningful” or whatever… And when you are steeped in wonderful writing, it almost feels like why even try to add your own voice?

Julie: I had to give myself that permission ultimately, but it helped, reading writers like Lorrie. And permission is such a funny thing—like we don’t need it. But I felt like I did, from someone. I felt like I needed someone to say, writing about teenage girls and how much they mean to each other, how those friendships shape your life, that’s meaningful literary work.

Marisa: To that point, has your work at Catapult affected your writing? You must read a ton, and you interact with so many writers putting together amazing workshops.

Julie: I think more so than my work with the creative writing program, the great privilege of editing a few other writers has taught me how to become a better self-editor, which I definitely applied to this book.

If you’ve just gotten done giving a writer who is amazingly talented a really killer line edit, you kind of how to apply that to your own stuff. I was able to kill my darlings like a maniac after I started editing for Catapult.

Marisa: As I was reading this, I kept thinking, here is a book that would make a phenomenal movie. Could you see Marlena being adapted for film? (Would you want it to be?)

Julie: It’s funny, my husband, who is also a writer, always says how he’d be thrilled if his book got adapted to film. I’m not so sure.

Marisa: I could see that, especially now knowing the real-life connections to the subject matter. And because it comes alive so fully on the page, a movie might spoil that. It’s almost like, it felt like a movie while I read it. I have my own ideas of what each character looks and sounds like. That doesn’t happen with every book I read, but definitely it very much did here.

Julie: I am glad that it felt visual to you—I hope that the language has that quality. I worry about things that probably a smart screenwriter would find a great solution to—but how do you capture the toggling in time? And how do you capture a voice? That said, it would be incredibly meaningful to see these two girls, who I have come to love so much, rendered in that way. So I guess my answer is that it would be cool, but I would also be nervous. 

Julie: Yeah totally! It’s funny it’s like, my publisher sent me a cover at one point during that process with two girls on it, and their faces were very specific. I was like no, I’m sorry— they’re too specific. They will define Cat and Marlena, and that felt kind of unfair to the reader?

Marisa: Oooh, good call. I wouldn’t have wanted someone else’s idea of them at all.

Julie: They didn’t look like what I imagined, too, so I was definitely biased 🙂

Lynda: I work in publishing—covers are so tricky… we debate them all the time. It really can make or break a book. Glad the cover ended up in a text driven direction.

Lynda: I would love to see Marlena as a movie—or even as a short series.

Marisa: Lynda, I agree; I think if it was done well, it would be remarkable to watch. But if it wasn’t, it would be a damn shame.

Ann B: Ditto on the series. The landscape. The thriller aspect.

Julie: Thanks, Lynda. I do think it would be pretty special if the story got another life in that way. And one of the best things about working with a publisher is that what was once really solitary—the writing process—suddenly becomes this intense collaboration with a bunch of smart people who give the story new dimensions. That is awesome, and working on it as a film/TV show would have that element, too—so I’d definitely be down. It’s funny you guys are asking this because I think my agent just sent it around to some producers a couple days ago. We’ll see!

Marisa: I know people kind of hate to answer this question, but given that this was a debut novel and it’s amazing, what are you working on now? And here’s a follow-up: do you ever write in other forms? Or will the next project definitely be a novel?

Julie: I only write essays and novels. Am I allowed to say that? Maybe someday I’ll write a short story again but I seriously doubt it. When I left grad school I was so relieved that I’d never have to write anymore stories.

I am a pretty slow and painstaking writer—the whole typing out the piece from start to finish thing every time I do another draft keeps me moving at a snail’s pace—but I am working on another novel now. It’s set at a boarding school and I’m in the super early stages—no more than a few scenes and some notes. But I can say that it’s in third person, with more characters, and the primary character is an adult—though there are still teenage girls. I can’t get away from them for some reason.

Marisa: Teenage girls may be the most fascinating creatures ever, so I’m into it.

Lynda: There’s not much more fascinating/complex/in-depth etc. than the teenage girl. If you get her right like you have done, Julie, you hit the jackpot!

Marisa: We’re coming up to the end of our hour. Any other burning questions for Julie? And just one more from me: What are you reading right now? Anything forthcoming you are especially excited about?

Julie: The last book I loved was The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker—it’s also about female friendships, but these women are also animators and creative partners, so their relationship has that element. It’s so vibrant and alive and absorbing—page-turning and moving at the same time, and it asks a lot of important questions about what it means to tell someone else’s story, what their responsibility is to their material. Highly recommended.

Julie: Thank you Ann, Lynda, and Marisa! So fun to talk to you three. And so many thanks for reading Marlena so thoughtfully and for your questions—such a pleasure to talk to you about the book, and an honor to be read so closely.

Ann B: Loved The Animators. Of course, you would relate

Julie: Ann—it’s soooo good. Glad you liked it. too.

Lynda: Thank you! Looking forward to sharing Marlena with friends.

Julie: Thank you all again!

Ann B: Many thanks.

Marisa: Will add The Animators to my reading list, too! Thank you everyone for joining us, and Julie, thank you for answering our questions and for putting such a beautiful book out into the world!

*** 

Author photograph © Nina Subin.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #81: Chanelle Benz

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Chanelle Benz’s debut collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, is filled with characters often facing a moral crossroads. The stories contain the unexpected, like a classic Western complete with local brothel as well as a gothic tale. Benz’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, The American Reader, and Granta.

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The Rumpus: I was so fascinated by this debut because there are so many different voices, and I’m always awed by someone who can take something so disparate and make a whole of it. What pushed you into trying these new voices, and how did you do it? 

Chanelle Benz: Right around the time I wrote [the story] “Adela,” I was reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and it touched back on a childhood love of reading. I feel he’s able to operate on this higher level where he’s really digging into philosophy, and playing with different literary traditions, but it’s such a joy to read, too. And so I thought, what if I did a little experiment: what if I wrote a sci-fi story, what if I wrote a Western, wrote all these different forms.

When I was working with George Saunders [at Syracuse University], we were in our final year, he said, ‘We all know now what our first strength is, what we do well. What is the thing in our right hand, but also what’s the thing in our left hand? What is our other strength? He talked about being able to flip sides between your strengths and your weaknesses, to take the weak side and flip it over, and to be aware of that in your work. My first strength is voice; the other thing is form. Once I have the voice and a clear entry into a world, I think, what’s the container? What are the rules that I can sort of push against? Sometimes they’re not even necessarily rules. So with “Adela,” I said, I’m going to write this in a choral children’s voice. Sometimes it’s something else: second person as POV, or I’m gonna write this backwards.

Once I’ve got that, I feel like I can just write out a whole sketch, which I always push myself to do, to draft really quickly. Because I like to have it all out there, and I think I like to go a little faster than my critical mind can catch up with. The license to make bad decisions and let them be unfixable. A lot of time I have an idea of the ending or the turning point, which is always melodramatic in my first iteration. And usually it turns away from that. So knowing that about myself, I just let myself go. I think that’s really important if a story has any chance at greatness.

Rumpus: The suspension of the critical mind is essential for anything that’s a really moving piece of fiction because if you’re second-guessing yourself constantly, one, you don’t get very far in the writing process at all, and two, I think you end up with something that’s a hollow of whatever you were inspired by and lacks the you in it. Because you’re subconsciously pushing back with all the things you “know” to be “right” or “true.” The necessary thing for a writer is to just go and let the story run itself.

Benz: Absolutely. I think you should be a little afraid of what you put out there. A little nervous that people are going to see through it and they’re going to see you. Nobody likes the idea of this, but I like it: That there needs to be blood on the page. I think there should be some piece of you left on the page so when you put it out there you’re a little nervous. And the funny thing is, no one ever sees it! No one ever sees the concession of this preoccupation that you have.

When I first put the novel out I was really nervous; when I published “The Diplomat’s Daughter” in Granta, I was really worried that I would get hate mail. Also because right around that time that it was published, there was a bombing in Beirut, and there’s a bombing in Beirut in the story. I was nervous that somebody would call me out: ‘It wouldn’t happen that way.’ But of course, we’re never as important as we think we are.

Rumpus: Short stories tend to be linked by character and setting. But yours is linked by tone and atmosphere. There’s a sense of the down-and-out, a wild desperation, a semi-managed fear. Each of these characters feels a little feral, too. And I wonder if that was something you felt intimately, where that comes from.

Benz: I think it’s an accident. Well, it isn’t an accident; I have become semi-conscious of it. But it goes back to the idea of the Zen target—you’re not trying to write about yourself or your preoccupations or your fears or the kind of emotional landscape you’re trying to excavate. But sometimes you reveal yourself.

There is violence and abandonment in [my stories]. Part of it comes from my life, and part from the narratives we’re drawn to in the world. One thing with the collection I did notice was that there’s a moment of violence in the stories that the characters can either participate in, resist, or sometimes there’s a third option. I like to think about the turning point in the story—and this comes from my theatre background—in terms of something that the character wants. You ask, did they get X, did X happen? The answer is either, yes, no, or yes but not in the way they thought. My teachers in acting school always said the best option is usually the third one. Because there’s usually some kind of turning of the knife. That’s one thing I was going for.

And then, part of what I’m interested in is hearing from voices we haven’t heard before, that are outside, marginalized voices. Partly from being a brown woman myself—you don’t see yourself in stories very often, you don’t see yourself in literature or in film, at least not growing up. So I kind of had to invent a way. If I didn’t want to be a prostitute or a washer woman then I’d have to find a way to inject myself in history. I guess the slave narrative is part of that too.

Rumpus: A lot of these characters are loners. They feel very much on their own against the world. You take these strong characters and box them in, and then see how they fight their way out and how they move through the world after. 

Benz: That’s interesting. I think when tragedy befalls us, when we’re depressed, or oppressed, a lot of times we feel alone in that. So you do have to fight your way to any connection. In general, yes, these characters are outsiders, marginalized, but they have to fight or they’ll drown. I’m also interested in the ways we betray what we love. The body betrays us. The way fear makes us betray ourselves. We do things that before we would never do.

Rumpus: Yes. There’s also a great sense of foreboding in this book. After you get through two, certainly by the third story, you come to recognize that violent moment is coming. I find it interesting the way fear and love are balanced in this book and that so often, I won’t say fear wins over love, but the survival impulses that fear brings out trumps love often. I think stories that do that tend to be far more interesting than those that look toward the perpetual good, because life is not perpetually good.

Benz: Yes. I think too often people say, “Your parents love you,” or, “I love you,” and that’s supposed to be some kind of definitive answer. And it’s like, yes, but does your family love you well? There’s good love and there’s not good love. It doesn’t mean the not good love isn’t passion, isn’t devotion, isn’t deep feeling. But there’s also that it’s not necessarily good for you. And I think especially with Lavinia, it’s sort of out of the frying pan and into the fire. I’d infinitely prefer the fire. Wouldn’t we all? I don’t know. I’m easier on death than everybody else. But I do think you have to love your characters, at least, more than other people might.

Rumpus: Of course. Is there one you love most?

Benz: No. I go through cycles where you forget about a story and then remember it again. A lot of people say, “Your characters are your children.” But I say your characters are your mom, your sister, your best friend, your child. They’re all these different relationships. Sometimes I move closer to a character and then further away. Right now I’m probably feeling the most loving towards James. Because when “James III” was published in Guernica I reread it a few times and remembered what I loved about writing that story and the challenges of it. I felt for him and enjoyed him again. 

The story I could keep working on is “The Diplomat’s Daughter.” I feel it’s sort of like a deck of cards, there are so many themes I could go through, so many different pathways in that story. I have like six different versions; that’s just the one we ended up publishing. I find it very fun to work on.

Rumpus: You get the sense of reading it that there’s so much more, but there’s not an dissatisfaction in that. You just feel there are so many levels and angles and pathways in it, and I think that and also in Orrinda Thomas’s story, those two sparked a deeper understanding that carried into the rest of the stories.

Benz: I revised Orrinda for the book. I did a little more research. There’s a plantation called The Whitney, the only one that’s a museum about slavery. It only opened in 2014, which says something. But it was interesting. There’s a map with all these plantations along River Road along the Mississippi, hundreds of plantations, landlocked. And I realized, if you’re in a plantation in the middle of that, even if you escape, where can you go? You’re just running through plantation after plantation. It’s almost impossible to get out. You’re doomed. When I thought about her, I thought about how when you’re locked into a pretty impossible situation, there’s no way for you to get out but still you have to keep going. And she knows that more than the slaves do.

Rumpus: More than anyone! She understands the peril of going in there.

Benz: It’s literally riding into hell and being like, “I probably won’t be able to climb my way out of here.”

The thing about working on “The Diplomat’s Daughter” and inhabiting Natalia is it’s a very dark story and a dark place to be. It’s hard to inhabit for a long time. Hard to think about how you live with yourself after seeing certain things and doing certain things. Once you take a life you can’t put it back. It’s the mark, this shame, this burden, on your soul. I thought about “The Diplomat’s Daughter” in that way—if she does the thing they want her to do, if she does the thing she’s trained to do, she will always be marked by it.

Rumpus: Revision is tough, but it’s so good, too.

Benz: As much as I like to write messy drafts and really sketch badly, I think revision is also very fun. Because that’s when you’re asking yourself: “What am I saying about the human condition” or “what is this actual narrative” or what is actually on the page or what ways can I cut and recast that will change the trajectory of it. I think that sometimes, I don’t know why, we’re taught that coming to the end of a short story is enough and revision is this onerous thing. But I enjoy it, even on the sentence level. Little words you can hack away, and working at the sentence to make it really muscular until each is this finely cut jewel. It’s definitely a lot of work, and makes you realize the strangeness of the direction the story might be going in.

Rumpus: One-hundred percent. It’s also the place where you get to see what you did when you were in the frenzy and the thick of it, and you come back after a breather and think: “Oh! I didn’t know I was going there, but I see it now.” There’s a pleasure in that.

Benz: I really enjoy cutting, probably too much. I slash and burn. There’s a perverse relief in that. You know it’s a good sentence but no, it has to go. It’s not necessary.

Drafting is potential. But revision is power. You made your story into something powerful, something bright and glittering and sharp and colorful.

Rumpus: In so many ways, it’s where the real strength of a writer lies. I think a lot of people can get lost in a story and putting the bones onto the page, but do you have the wherewithal and the time to make it into something, as you say, like a finely cut jewel.

Benz: Writers always talk about getting to that mindset of writing like a reader, which is so hard because not all of us are Zen masters! But that’s what we’re all going for. What we’re all trying to do.

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Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt

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Life within a body is hard. In Large Animals, Jess Arndt takes a truth so obvious that we tend to ignore it and renders that truth absurd, hilarious, and a little bit redemptive. As someone who defines the body as essentially “a swarmy, queasy place,” Arndt revels in the body’s inconvenient needs, its instability as an identity marker, and the gender ambiguity that trails her narrators from Atlantic City to the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles. She also has a fair amount of fun allowing them to morph into the odd walrus or share an inner emotional world with a chair, to dip their toes in transcendence. You could call this collection transgressive, but ultimately Arndt is after something deeper, revealing the raw emotions that surface in every kind of human container, the feelings always scratching at the skin, waiting to make contact.

There’s a kinetic restlessness afoot here as these characters wrestle with their own lovability while going to dare-deviling lengths to get love or sex or hopefully some of both. Their longing inevitably outsizes the bodies that contain it, but that’s no reason for them to stop trying to make it hurt less. Throughout all these stories, Arndt is as skilled at blurring the boundaries between external reality and that of the body as she is between male and female, natural and unnatural. She distills the awkwardness of simply being human into a primordial world where nature dissolves and intermixes seamlessly with urban artifacts and ruin. For all its lush weirdness, I found this world deeply familiar.

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The Rumpus: In “Beside Myself,” the narrator’s girlfriend says at one point, “You always put yourself through stuff like this… trying to write.” I’m wondering what you’ve put yourself through to write this book as well as what your general practice is like. What have been the unavoidable costs to you of becoming a writer?

Jess Arndt: I love that you pulled that quote out. These are my favorite parts of writing—arriving at a weird little promontory or cliff of a mini-realization. The things you can’t plan for. Of course, I didn’t set out to say this or that in the story about “my” life, but when something emerges like this, that does feel true, it’s always nice. Maybe this is a way into saying that I usually hate composing and am terrified of writing fresh work. I’ll do mostly anything to avoid it, and sometimes it gets so bad that I really start to loathe myself, and even all the extra yoga and other kinds of hard-to-manage-health fixes won’t solve it. Then I know the only way out of the pit I’ve dug is: try to write.

This book has been so long in coming. I started it while living in New York—teaching in the day, often bartending at night, breaking up with somebody. And it wasn’t until I fell in love again and moved out to the Mojave Desert, as a way station to LA, that I had the mental and physical space to finish it. I do feel very porous to the world around me, and I do think I begin to feel very obligated to whatever life I set up, the people in it, the relationships, the plants, the animals, the things. So moving to the desert, where it was nothing but dry and the landscape basically said—“You can try to hunch here if you want, but I CERTAINLY don’t need you and also, good luck buddy”—was, at least temporarily, an immense relief. This feeling, of the tension between the life you kind of intuitively create as a support system and the room you might need to create your work is something I think artists are so often struggling with. It was helpful then, as you noted by pulling the above quote out, to try to deal with some of that uncomfortable vertiginous “come close, get away from me” feeling, by actually letting it pop up in the writing explicitly.

It’s painful to try to take the space to write, at least for me. It’s also funny looking back at that quote now. In one way, it still feels very true. But really I think how it works is: I put myself through stuff living, and then somehow rescue it/myself by employing it in my stories.

Rumpus: You have an enviable way with verbs: “… a line of sweat slurred along my chest binder,” “… it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me” etc. And your stories, in general, contain a lot of movement. What do you think this says about your narrators? Did you consciously try to inject a sense of restlessness into them as characters?

Arndt: Throughout my life, people have said to me (and probably say to most writers): “You’re a writer, so you’re obviously good with words.” I couldn’t feel farther from that (of course awesome, enviable) truth. To me, talking is hard. Committing to meaning via marking words down is almost impossible. Each time I enter language I’m embarrassed; I fumble around. Bodies, at least mine, feel like these big inarticulate lumps. But there is so much to feel—so much raw feeling. I think in these stories I’ve reached for a kind of maximalism of undigested feeling, but tried to arrive there through a highly controlled approach. Maybe somewhere deep down inside, I think the less words on the page the better, i.e. the less risk. So it is true—I’d rather have a verb than an adjective. If that verb can imbue the sentence with an electrical current close to what the body that is intertwined with that sentence might be feeling, even better. Best, to me, is when language isn’t allowed to describe. I like it as part of the human meat grinder: mixed up with the body it’s come out of. Also, I find with verbs, I often hit a moment of panic. It goes like: (yelled very loud in my head) “CMON HOW CAN YOU SAY THIS BETTER? MORE ECONOMICALLY? WITH MORE PUNCH?”

In terms of restlessness: yes. The narrators are not exactly restless like wanderers (although they do wander), as much as restless like: where can I rest in a world where I don’t easily find myself represented? What are the strategies—often, at least in this book, self-destructive strategies—if I cannot rest, to keep myself moving? Huge caveat here: I think this can apply to almost anyone who has a body.

Rumpus: I love how the narrator’s gender inserts itself into these stories almost seemingly at random, as when Tamara in the final story, for instance, assumes the narrator is a lesbian because his Adam’s apple isn’t big enough. You seem to be having fun with ambiguity throughout the book. How much was that at the forefront of your mind when constructing the plot of each story? Or did some of that insert itself later?

Arndt: Ambiguity is a daily experience for me. Yesterday, for instance, the parking attendant guy at the chiropractor I go to called me “sir” what seemed like fifteen times in a five-word interaction. Maybe that doesn’t seem ambiguous! But, in my everyday, I never know how someone will read me, or what they are reading “of” me. This has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember—a gender negotiation that often seems hyperbolic or arbitrary. Add to that a kind of “imposter syndrome”—i.e. what if they find out? Find out exactly “what” is never clear. I like that you bring up story construction because I do really believe that, for me, stories can’t come out apart from this or on the side of this. They’re kind of built through it. If a compressed effervescence, or gallows humor, sometimes emerges too, that’s great. I do think it’s funny (the whole system), when looking at things from the outside, if the outside is where I already am. I also think it’s crushing. Both—pretty equally true.

Rumpus: Simply being nonbinary or fluidly gendered now seems to make a political statement. In these dark days of Trump, do you feel pressured to represent a certain community through your writing? Is this—potential political readings of your work—something you’re comfortable with as an artist? Something you want to encourage?

Arndt: I think what you mean is that just “being” means something political, in our current climate. I agree. But terms like “nonbinary” and “gender fluidity” also seem like places of language arbitration. They all have their particular historical hue. I am happy to be an LGBTQ artist, a gender nonconforming artist—someone who writes up close to these things. But also, something I think you’ve quite astutely pulled from the book, is that I’m even more comfortable the blurrier it gets. The body is such a swarmy place. At least it is for me. And I have to believe that much of what I’m feeling is possible to be felt by much of this planet’s population. Don’t get me wrong—I believe in the specificity of experience, especially with regard to minority subject positions. But also, when I think: “Ugh you said ___, and it made me feel seen and also it made me embarrassed and (to approximate a line from my book because I can’t seem to make up a new one) ‘I felt like red construction paper was stapled to my throat’”—I might be feeling that way because of gender, but haven’t you also felt that way at some point? You who have bodies?

Rumpus: To me, all of your stories feel like tightly constructed collages. You’re a wizard at creating friction and movement through juxtaposition of dialogue, for instance, with kinetic descriptions of cityscapes. This has to take some intensive editing work. So I’m wondering how the revision process works for you. How much material do you have to cut to get to the final product, and how painful is this?

Arndt: “Collages” is a great word. It might just be how my particular brain works best—“put this next to this, hope some of this rubs off on this, crumple it up and pray the outside observer can feel it.” In terms of editing, though—the more I cut, usually the happier I am. The problem is, ideally (at least, I have this idea in my mind) the best way to work is to create a lot of material and then shave it down from there. I’m the opposite. I’m so afraid of composing that I’ve already edited it to bits before it gets on the page. That said, there were some painful moments when working with my real-life editor, Julie Buntin (who I owe so much to for her vision and perseverance and humor), where she felt I was being excessive, or a little overdone. I think there’s a danger in being too familiar with, or comfortable in, your work. In my case, I’d read these stories so many times. Annie Dillard talks about it in her book The Writing Life. Basically, I’d naturalized the cadences in my head so completely that it became hard to pull anything out. That’s where trust comes in I guess. Often, Julie would say “out,” and I’d say “fine.” Once in a while, though, I’d say “no way!” I’m not entirely sure if this was because I was thinking with my best writing brain, or because I was just overly smitten with a line, or because I was scared. In any case, some stayed. Give me five years, though, and I’ll probably agree with everything she suggested. Somebody said to me: fight for what you believe in because you are really the one who has to live with it. I also followed that.

Rumpus: Your narrators seem self-deprecating to the point of hilarity, though there’s a sadness also underlying this. In “Jeff,” she blames herself for Lily Tomlin misunderstanding her name, admitting she speaks with marbles in her mouth. In “Moon Colonies,” we see her leaving the woman she wants to have sex with alone in the hotel room only to lose almost all the money she’s just won at the casino. I felt most of these narrators had trouble accepting love from the people they wanted it from the most. Is this—a consistent thread of disappointment in love—something you consciously were going for? How much of this has to do with gender ambiguity, and how much with simply being human?

Arndt: I’m glad you get the hilarity. I agree there’s a kind of manic, sad quality to it.

I think it’s almost impossible to accept love from others when you don’t know how to love/accept/be with yourself. Maybe it sounds canned but, at least in my life, it’s felt true. So here are a bunch of narrators, who are really very close to the same narrator, projecting outward in order not to have to deal with themselves. Maybe this gets back to your restlessness question. The itchy, agitated state keeps them from having to fully encounter truths they might not like or know how to deal with. But it also forestalls any ability to make real connections with the surrounding world.

Being checked or challenged at one of the most basic points of entry into society, i.e. gender, makes cohesive subject formation really hard. How to be a self? In this way, “Am I recognizable? Am I lovable?” is a gender question. But again, I do think most people with bodies have felt some shade of this at some point in their lives. It is hard to have a body. To accept the container. To feel, when moving around in the world, that a cohesive, readable statement is being maintained.

(And wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to?)

Rumpus: For the most part, this book is a particularly urban creature. There’s a forceful beauty to your descriptions: “the gum trees chatter their dry long tongues” in “Shadow of an Ape,” for instance; the roots of Japanese knotweed “flanged out at the base like butt-plugs” in “Together.” This seems to embody the tensions between the natural and unnatural while also dissolving them through the vividness of your prose. Blurring the unnatural and natural likewise seems like it may comment on the body, giving us the freedom to reshape it in the same way we do our landscapes. Am I onto something here?

Arndt: I think you’re onto something, in the sense that the narrators of these stories share a permeability with the world(s) around them. And are—maybe as a survival mechanism, maybe as the special lesson they’ve entered the book to try to impart—in an unending series of blurriness-es. The disquiet (I think) comes from a lived feeling that there is no “natural”—or if there is, they don’t have entrance to it. This sounds dramatic but when I think about it, I visualize what I’m trying to describe here in 3D—as a kind of primal yell. It jostles everything. Then, from that electric Jell-O moment, it’s not such a big move to have your sexuality grow from walrus parts or to share an inner emotional world with a chair.

Rumpus: In “Beside Myself,” the narrator says, “Some bodies needed more space,” but there’s an inescapable sense of all of these narrators feeling imprisoned inside a body whose needs subject it to constant suffering. Yet at the same time I feel like this is also the source of most of your writing’s humor. How consciously, then, did you invoke humor to both offset and highlight this pain?

Arndt: Maybe you’ve located the pivot point. I often find being in a body excruciating. It is also true that I want to keep living, and to do so, I need my body. Here I am right here on the couch in the dark while my newborn kid sleeps, using my body to answer these questions. (And hoping, as he grows up, that he feels more spacious in his body than I have yet learned how to be in mine.)

About the humor? Everything is so emotionally close to everything else. Like how real happiness contains a little corner where you are also bawling. Or how everything can kind of be summed up by: I’m crying/I’m laughing/I’m shitting my pants. Humor puts us in our bodies, usually. We have an uncontrolled physical reaction that, I hope, lurches us into new space. But this makes it sound so planned. Mostly, the humor is a way for me to let off steam in a scene. And give a little lateral distance. First of all, for myself, and secondly I guess, for the reader.

Also I just have to say, there are some genius comedians who deal so deep down in the queasy body. Louis C.K. and Dynasty Handbag, for starters. And George Saunders. In my experience, the funniest writers are dealing with the hardest stuff.

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Author photograph © Johanna Breiding.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #91: Meghan Lamb

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Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that renders her immobile and takes away her ability to speak. Her husband must become her caretaker, living with a woman who is and is not his wife, newly alone but living still in an unsettling domestic companionship that is uncannily unchanged. For both husband and wife, memory haunts and disquiet seeps in and spreads.

Here, we discuss writing about illness and the body, traversing boundaries of fiction and memoir, and what it’s like to return to and revise a text written by your younger self.

Meghan Lamb is from Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as an editor for Dorothy, a publishing project. In addition to Silk Flowers she is the author of the novella Sacramento (Solar Luxuriance, 2014). Her fictions and essays can be found in DIAGRAM, Redivider, Nat.Brut, The Collagist, The Rumpus, Passages North, PANK, and elsewhere.

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The Rumpus: As the biographical note for Silk Flowers states, you wrote the novel during a nine-month period wherein your left leg mysteriously stopped working. The female protagonist of the novel, identified as Wife in the opening list of characters, also suffers from a mysterious illness. The wife’s illness is not yours—you eventually received a diagnosis (peroneal neuropathy) and your leg recovered, while the wife remains undiagnosed and her illness eventually consumes her. But the biographical note does gesture toward an element of memoir in the novel. Were you consciously adhering to or sidestepping any genre boundaries as you wrote?

Meghan Lamb: Silk Flowers definitely gestures toward memoir in the sense that it incorporates some of the strange, estranging physicalities of my own experience, electric pains, reverberating auras, stuff that’s difficult to describe, let alone explain, because we don’t really have the language for it. But even more so than my own, direct experience, the book revolves around my anxiety of imagined, potential experiences, around questions I couldn’t help but ask myself when the neuropathy was an active force in my body. Will this get worse? Will my marriage dissolve, if this gets worse? Will I get to the point where I can’t communicate something that needs to be communicated?

That last question was constantly on my mind, as someone who’d worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant for the elderly and a caregiver for individuals with disabilities. I’d worked with people in the late stages of Tay-Sachs, Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntington’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). I was intimately acquainted with the effects of these degenerative disorders, not only on the people who experienced them, but the partners and family members who absorbed them by proxy. This shadowy process of absorption—the desire to communicate through the separateness of bodies, through the fog of illness—is something I really longed to capture in Silk Flowers.

So, in that sense, this book is all about “boundaries,” observing them, avoiding them, attempting (and failing) to traverse them, and the genre of “memoir” (the specter of a human being’s precisely articulated story) is certainly one of those critical boundaries.

Rumpus: Could you talk about the actual process of writing the book?

Lamb: To begin with, I wrote this book from the spaces where I spent almost the majority of those nine months, on the couch and in my bed. It was a bizarre liminal stage of my life (even though, at the time, I had no idea it was liminal) where I had to quit my physically demanding caregiver jobs and work from home. My writing sustained me in a very literal way, in the sense that it was literally the only thing I was doing outside of eating, sleeping, mundane couch-based work tasks, and being ill.

Maybe that’s too simplistic of an image to offer. I was able to walk around a bit after a few months, when I had a leg brace made for me, but the plastic rim of the brace curved right into the damaged nerve, and if I walked too far, it made things worse. So, in that sense, every walk I took felt like a shady bargain with my own body, trading one need for another

Writing the book felt a lot like that, too.

The editing process of this book was equally unusual, but ultimately befitting its interests. To make a long story short, it changed hands (between editors/publishers) and that was a fairly redacted process. By the time I sat down to re-edit the text of Silk Flowers, five years had gone by. I was no longer ill. I’d gone through a divorce. I’d remarried. I’d lived in four separate cities.

It was an amazing experience, re-visiting and editing these words I’d written in an altered state at the age of twenty-four, a rare opportunity to converse with the thoughts and the language of a past self. There were plenty of moments where my own voice and perceptions were recognizable to me as myself, but there were also a great number of moments that made me think, W.T.F.? What version of me wrote this? But in a book that’s so invested in the experience of disassociation from yourself, from your own body…I think that sensation was really generative, helped its performative tensions to resonate more authentically (at least from my own admittedly distorted vantage!)

Rumpus: Silk Flowers is beautiful, lush, and sensually written, but it’s also pretty frightening. We watch the wife’s body and mind succumb to her illness, and both she and her husband, in interweaving sections, are haunted by memories of loss. I’m curious to know if you consider Silk Flowers to be a work of horror, and more generally what your relationship to horror is?

Lamb: Many of the women writers I admire—the Brontë sisters, Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Anna Kavan, Joyce Carol Oates—spent much of their careers skirting along the margins of horror, masterfully examining the dark edges of human experience. Or, maybe more to the point, a lot of their writing is concerned with deconstructing the elements of horror fiction, slyly gesturing to the reader’s perception even amidst eerily embodied sensory description. That peculiar tension between embodied physical detail and the reader’s disembodied observance was definitely something I was interested in channeling with Silk Flowers. I wanted to enmesh the unsettlingly visceral with the arguably even more unsettling sensation of looking on and watching.

I wanted Silk Flowers to feel, at turns, like a play, or even a “bad” horror film, and there’s a whole other book I could write about my relationship to the genre as it pertains to film and theater. Specifically, the erotics of sparse, stagey dialogue, how it weirdly augments the horror of an overwhelming situation. A person repeatedly shouting the stupidest, most obvious statement they could be shouting. Oh no! What’s happening? Look! What! Help! A name called out, again and again, until that name—the person attached to it—is defamiliarized.

That defamiliarization is what speaks to me the most in horror, which is, by its most basic definition, “an intense feeling of shock or disgust.” What could be more horrifying than an unknown force manifesting itself within your own body, or the body of someone you feel you should be close to? Even more horrifyingly, this is something almost everyone necessarily experiences at some point in their lives (or knows—at least on some level—they have yet to experience): the absence of a partner or family member who is nevertheless, still, physically there.

Rumpus: I’m always struck by how you write the body. Your characters, in some ways, are so embodied, so acutely aware of their own sensations: “Her skin rises and falls, a fluid shimmer. It feels almost pleasant, now a part of her, this energy, familiar as her heart, her lungs, her liver.” But there’s a way, too, in which your characters feel entirely disembodied and absent from themselves, like people observing a performance of themselves from the outside. This seems especially true for the wife in Silk Flowers, who must experience and also bear witness to her own body’s illness. Would you call it an othering of the self? How do you navigate your characters’ relationships to their bodies as you write?

Lamb: I would absolutely call it “an othering of the self.” Thank you for giving me those words! And I wish I had a more satisfying answer for your amazing question, namely because this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about (though not in such precisely expressed terms). For now, all I really have to offer is my desire to write around absence, these gauzy vacancies—“a fluid shimmer”—meant to serve as a kind of shorthand for the rifts into which our words fall, these weird dead zones of language. And I can only imagine I navigate these dead zones in the ways everyone else does, by circling around them, gazing fearfully.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Lamb: I am working on a nearly finished full-length short story collection called Significant Others that (fittingly enough) revolves around the aforementioned concept of “othering of the self” (specifically, the collection explores this self-othering as an unspoken or unspeakable tension within relationships.) I am also working with Spork Press on a soon-to-be-published illustrated novella called All of Your Most Private Places that features call girls, the desert, an unnamed city, and an atomic museum based around the weird mannequin houses used in the 1950s and 1960s on the Nevada Test Site. I’m about halfway finished writing an art book entitled New Years Eve at the Pine Burr Inn and a novel entitled Failure to Thrive, both which explore life in the Pennsylvania coal region from very different lenses.

And I’m always working on numerous shorter projects: short stories, essays, reviews, etc. Blind Spot by Harold Abramowitz, In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse by Carolyn Zaikowski, The Sky Isn’t Blue by Janice Lee, Dust Bunny City by Bud Smith, The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan, and The Disintegrations by Alistair McCartney are some of the wonderful books on my roster (which is to say, everyone else should also read them!)

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Author photograph © Jason Pappariella

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Can We Even Trust Ourselves?: A Conversation with Jac Jemc

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Jac Jemc’s new novel, The Grip of It, opens with a young couple moving into a new home. James and Julie find a house just outside of the city where they met, and though we learn more about their backstory as the novel develops, we know from the start that they are leaving a tension behind that still lingers in their relationship.

This tension begins to mirror the physical space of the house itself, a house that begins to morph and transform in ways that neither James nor Julie at first quite believe. Stains line the walls. Mold finds its way into the tap water. New spaces appear from the blueprint of the home’s architecture, hidden rooms within rooms. And James and Julie take increasing interest in their reclusive neighbor, Rolf, and the secret he and the entire town seem to keep.

Jemc’s novel of literary horror is sharply written and builds compulsive momentum, alternating between James and Julie’s points of view in short, dense chapters. The language is vivid and the syntax deliberate, building sentences that unfurl the novel’s growing unease. A novel centered on a haunted house that will inevitably also haunt the reader, The Grip of It is an intensely satisfying narrative that calls into question what trust means—of our own minds, and of the relationships around us.

Jac and I caught up over email about the novel in the months leading up to its summer release.

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The Rumpus: How did the concept for this novel first develop? More specifically, how did the story of a haunted house come to you?

Jac Jemc: I’ve always loved ghost stories and haunted houses. My favorite horror stories tend to be domestically focused. Even if the house isn’t necessarily what’s driving the action, they have vivid settings containing the haunting—House of Leaves, Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals,” all things Shirley Jackson, Bayona’s film The Orphanage, and Hitchcock’s Rear Window. I know you’re also a fan of the Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, and my favorite story of them all in there is called “Maybe You’ll Remember,” and it’s a hotel room that gets transformed to hide a secret. It’s the same plot as Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, and both stories really hit close to a theme I find myself writing about again and again—who is trustworthy? Can we even trust ourselves? Setting a story in a haunted house allows all of that fear to take physical form.

Rumpus: That physicality is present on the page when James and Julie first enter the house, and the home’s unique architecture is highlighted within the novel’s first ten pages—its hidden compartments, its rooms within rooms—which also immediately introduces a sense of secrecy, foreboding, and dread. How did you establish tone within the novel, and strike the balance so well of creating the right mood without giving too much away?

Jemc: Well, I’m not a writer who outlines or knows where a story is going when I begin so I think the short answer is that it’s easy not to give too much away when you don’t have any idea of what there is to give. The story started with the hidden compartments, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them. In thinking about tone, the first draft was a lot darker and more intense. In subsequent drafts, I tried to provide some spots of light because that seemed more realistic. People wouldn’t stay in a house if they weren’t convincing themselves that things weren’t as bad as they seemed, so I attempted to thread some humor throughout to show the ways that James and Julie are trying to make the situation work.

Rumpus: The humor seeds comfort between them early on in the narrative, but then a sense of dread begins to build—first, Julie and James notice growing stains on the walls, then they hear an unsourced humming sound, and then bruises begin to appear on Julie’s skin. How did you decide upon which strands to thread of their growing unease, and how to space these throughout the novel as the tension builds to more disturbing occurrences and events?

Jemc: This was something else that came with later drafts. In the first draft, the rate at which I introduced new elements of the haunting was pretty relentless. I was so excited to make up eerie events that each chapter (and the chapters are short, as you know) uncovered something else that tormented one or both of the inhabitants of the house. I had to delete a lot when I started editing. At various points there were cats and rabbits running through the house and zombie-like strangers on the beach, and for a while, James kept eating more and more but wasn’t getting bigger. In the first draft, I put everything in, and then in the second I could see what I’d been working toward and cut away all the pieces that were just keeping me engaged in the drafting process.

Rumpus: Much of the novel’s tangible horror builds upon the cracks within James and Julie’s relationship as well, which is also introduced early, even in the ways they talk about the house that suggest hidden layers of tension between them. How did you get to know James and Julie as characters, and learn about and decide upon the fault lines between them?

Jemc: I have to give so much credit to my agent, Claudia Ballard, because she was so patient and helpful in the process of later drafts. I didn’t think that James and Julie needed something that was already pulling them apart before they moved, but she insisted they did, and, as always, she was right, so James developed a gambling problem that drove them out of the city and created that foundation of distrust that underlies all of their interactions. That detail reveals so much of their characters, how they face problems, and how they deal with each other. James takes chances. He doesn’t necessarily have a reason for what he does or a plan. Julie is methodical and pragmatic. People with different coping skills break down in different ways and can often be critical of the way others handle or mishandle stress. The gambling problem freed up a lot for me in understanding the two characters and how they process what’s happening.

Rumpus: Dialogue feels especially hard to write and get right, and yet I was struck throughout the novel by how much work your dialogue was doing. It was true to the scene and to the conversations taking place, and yet it also did tremendous double-duty of advancing mood and theme. In one section, for example, when James and Julie are first exploring these rooms within rooms, James says, “It’s extra closets in an old house, fallout shelters and pantries, and we’re not used to being prepared.” What advice do you have for writers trying to achieve this balance and make their dialogue do work for the narrative?

Jemc: This is so nice to hear because I often think of myself as being rather weak at writing dialogue. I love getting deep into characters’ heads and that often means that I can stop short of letting my characters interact with each other. Related to that though, I never tire as a reader of noticing when what a character thinks is different from what they say out loud, and I had that distinction in mind throughout the book. When do James and Julie lie to each other and why? Is it to benefit themselves or to reassure someone else? When do they choose not to speak because they’re trying to figure out what they think or how it will be received?

Rumpus: The novel alternates between Julie’s and James’s first-person points of view. How did you decide on this structure for the book? Was it difficult to explore two different voices in the first-person?

Jemc: So difficult. The most difficult part of this book for me. I’m still not sure I pulled it off. Also, there used to be a third narrator. Rolf, the neighbor, was also a voice for the first four drafts. My agent gave me notes about something feeling off and no matter what I fixed, the book still wasn’t working. I let a couple friends read drafts and finally Aaron Burch—fiction writer and Founding Editor of Hobart—astute and brave and generous reader that he is, sent me some notes, the final note telling me I had to cut Rolf’s voice. I think I responded, to multiple pages of notes, with one sentence, “What would the novel even be without Rolf’s voice though?” I stewed for a good month and avoided working on another draft. Removing his voice wouldn’t mean I could just cut those chapters. It meant I needed to find a way to get all the information he was delivering to the reader via James and Julie instead, and I was so angry about how much time and effort it would take. Eventually I realized Aaron was right and I got to work on rearranging. Once I’d gotten the book down to two voices, I went through and tried to clean up and focus on a couple key questions—What do they each pay attention to that the other doesn’t? How are their verbal patterns different? On a couple of occasions, I realized that James was noticing something in the house that Julie would more naturally pay attention to, and I had to flip chapters and change the language, or vice versa. I lean on first person a lot in my writing, and I’m pushing myself to use third person in the next project I’m working on, so we’ll see how that goes.

Rumpus: The house itself is menacing and foreboding throughout the novel, but so is the neighborhood they move to—its sameness, and the eeriness of that sameness. In one passage, Julie is struck by how similar their house is to their neighbor’s house and thinks, “Everything in our house looks as if it had been replaced with a replica.” How did you decide upon the setting?

Jemc: I wanted the setting of the town to be as menacing as the house itself to show, hopefully pretty quickly, that this story wasn’t about something as simple as a supernaturally charged structure. Everything is upset and unsettled between James and Julie, including the way they encounter the world outside of the house—nature and local businesses and work. They’re suspicious of everything, even the familiar, hence the skepticism about the replicas in their house. I was driven by the concepts of both jamais vu and déjà vu and that revolting uncanny valley.

Rumpus: Horror so often relies on psychological doubt—that one person is seeing things and no one else believes them—but here, both James and Julie are seeing and experiencing strange things, and so are their friends and their family members who stay with them. This was such a refreshing way of handling this, and to me, seemed to lay bare further conflicts beyond simply trying to get others to believe them. Do you see this novel as working with certain expectations of horror and pushing back against others? As a novel that is both literary fiction and horror, how did you decide on how much to unveil or even solve?

Jemc: James’s and Julie’s experiences of the haunting intersect and diverge. Sometimes they experience the same thing, but they don’t tell each other. Sometimes they experience something totally different and share it or not. They both try pretty hard to trust the other person. It goes back to that question of wondering who we can trust, including ourselves, which both works with the expectations of a horror narrative and pushes back, I think. I’m resistant to answers in fiction, generally, but I’m often resistant to definitive answers in regular life, too. Final decisions and diagnoses and rulings—I’m generally distrustful of them all.

I’ve spent some time thinking about what it is I was actually writing about in this book, and I think much of it was driven by the fact that my dad got severely ill, very quickly, and nothing has really improved his condition or proven a very satisfying answer for what’s wrong. We’re told he has MS, but it’s an MS that looks unlike the MS from which anyone else I’ve spoken to suffers, and it’s an MS that doesn’t respond to the drugs in the same way MS normally does. The answer we’ve been given is totally unsatisfying to the point of not even feeling like an answer.

My impression is that most major conflicts and confusions never get fully resolved, and so, in fiction, I like suggesting possibilities, but dislike confirming things one way or another because it feels truer to human experience. I provided more suggestions within this novel than I would have had some early readers not encouraged more resolution, but there’s still room at the end of the book for each reader to decide what happened and why. So that’s another way I felt like I was pushing back against expectations of the genre. I also had a good time incorporating things like rumors from the townspeople and local history, and that felt like I was working with conventions in an almost spoof-ish way at times. It’s such satisfying work to write in a new style and figure out your own place in that particular tradition.

Rumpus: You’ve written one previous novel, My Only Wife, as well as a short story collection, A Different Bed Every Time. How has this book differed from your previous books, both in the writing process and in its production?

Jemc: For a long while I thought I was an experimental writer and that that exempted me from thinking about narrative and pacing in more traditional ways, but that was coming from a place of fear. I’ve always loved voice, to the detriment of everything else, but with this book, I really wanted to try to tell a story where I wasn’t letting myself off the hook for all of those other conventional story elements—character and plot and setting. I put much more significant work into the later drafts of this book than I had into previous projects.

Rumpus: What are you currently working on?

Jemc: I’m working on the first draft of a novel about Mad King Ludwig. If you’re unfamiliar, he’s the king who built all the frothy castles in Bavaria and paid for Wagner’s opera when he should have been protecting Bavaria from being swallowed up by Prussia in the late 1800s. His cabinet was so disturbed by his lack of engagement in political affairs that they had him dethroned and institutionalized, immediately after which he was found dead in the lake outside his castle-cum-asylum. He’s the center around which everything in the story rotates, but four female characters who are just as unconventional occupy their own threads of the narrative. The element of unusual, ominous domestic spaces is present here too, with the castles, but I’m finding it a refreshing challenge to work with a new vocabulary of images and location and interpersonal dynamics and fact. I enjoy the way the early stages of a project can feel like a puzzle to be solved. This one feels like I’m doing the puzzle in the dark, but I’m counting on the lights to click on at some point. They always have before. I’m also working on a novel about shopping, but that one is growing slowly and quietly and may never be more than a weird fictional list I keep.

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Author photograph © Jared Larson.

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The Inner and Outer Self: A Conversation with Sylvia Brownrigg

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In Six Memos for the Millenium, Italo Calvino identifies the qualities he aims for in his work: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, but died before finishing his sixth memo on consistency. And perhaps also before he drafted a seventh. Imagine: some Calvino correlate to Barthes’s idea of jouissance, the pleasure which an author takes in her work. Certain authors beam clarity, and a large part of their clarity comes from the pleasure with which they tell a story. As a reader, you know when the singular subjectivity of a writer arcs and meets the page with a kind of sizzle: why else are we all here if not to share our version of the world?

With a sprezzatura that hovers just above a work and invites us in, Pages for Her shows Brownrigg returning to the world of her second novel, Pages for You, with such speedy exact visible light, you will truly wish to read it in one sitting. That said, the book offers so many psychological and lyric pleasures, moments of great perception, a reader will want to return. The effect is that of a deep summer lake: glistening on the surface, fathoms to explore below.

I wrote from Cyprus to Brownrigg in England about a work that bridges two distinct moments in two women’s lives, spanning northern California and New Haven.

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The Rumpus: Your work, over five distinct but related works of fiction, touches on such a vast array of themes while also bearing, as an almost moral project, one particular core question: the disjuncture between female interior and exterior life.

In certain of your works, this disjuncture between interior feeling and external sociocultural expectation radiates into a larger geopolitical unease (e.g., The Delivery Room). What led you, in the tradition of so many great novelists (we begin this interview on Bloomsday) to return with such intimacy to the world you began in your second book, Pages for You?

Sylvia Brownrigg: That is a great question or pair of questions. The gap between the inner and outer self is one I’ve found interesting, even essential, about the way we move through the world. In The Delivery Room, I enjoyed traveling back and forth between the perspectives of the patients and that of the therapist—with the irony that with your therapist, you are at least supposed to be your most authentic self.

In Pages for Her, the two women characters, Flannery and Anne, are also grappling with the personae they present to the world and how they feel behind those masks. Ostensibly, Anne is successful in her academic career, poised and sure of herself, but a recent personal grief has shaken her. Flannery has, by contrast, fallen into the roles of mother and wife, which have taken a more traditional shape than she had imagined. The experience has dislocated her: moved her so far away from the self she once was that she feels unmoored.

In meeting again after a long separation, the two women are able to help each other rediscover selves they had lost. That is a powerful element of what the love between Flannery and Anne has meant for them: they realize that they have each held within them a sense of who the other once was, twenty years before. That makes their reunion complicated, deep, unexpected. Sweet.

In terms of returning to the characters of Pages for You: an interesting challenge of rediscovering the characters was that in the earlier novel we only ever saw the beautiful, ultimately elusive Anne through Flannery’s adoring eyes. So we did not really know the ‘real’ more vulnerable person within. Discovering Anne now, in her late forties, required me to delve into a character who had been only seen from the outside, before. That has given this new novel a different kind of depth.

Rumpus: Toni Morrison once said she began writing to find the work she could not find elsewhere. As a reader, is there a fiction you have been seeking for some time? Where has your thirst been slaked and where does it linger? Who are your forebears?

Brownrigg: That’s a great quote from Morrison, and who could have imagined the story of The Bluest Eye until she had? When I wrote Pages for You, writing a pure, intense love story about two women that did not politicize that element of their relationship was something of a novelty. The way that novel poured out of me when I wrote it (eighteen years ago!) may have come from an urge like Morrison’s: I want this to be a story in the world, what it is to fall so intensely in love with another woman when you are just discovering your own adult woman self.

Pages for Her explores very different elements in the women’s lives though again through the prism of the love these two women have for each other. I have also, inadvertently—as I’ve realized, now that I’ve started talking about the novel in interviews—created a novel that gives voice to bisexuality, and that is a subject not perhaps given its fictional due. Flannery and Anne are both women who have very significant men in their lives, and women also.

I like your question about thirst. I think I’m not alone in seeking, at times, fictions by smart women that illuminate the ways people find their balance, if they can, between the core of their creative selves and the work of being a mother, a partner. I have recently been reading Rachel Cusk’s cool and powerful accounts of some these issues in Outline, and I’m looking forward to Transit, next.

Rumpus: What led to write Pages for You? 

Brownrigg: Pages for You is set at college, during the main character, Flannery’s, freshman year. Flannery has come east at age seventeen and this is a story about all of Flannery’s discoveries during her first year away from home: intellectual, cultural, and of course, sexual. She becomes infatuated with a graduate student named Anne and the two embark on a passionate affair. Her relationship with Anne, including the heartbreak she suffers, changes everything for Flannery, and is the start of her growing up.

I wrote Pages for You seventeen years ago, and curiously (and probably not coincidentally) it was a transitional moment in my own life: I had recently met the man with whom I would have a family. This was a seismic change for me, not least as it also involved moving country (back home to the US), and I think that that state of change made it easier for me to carry myself back, imaginatively, to that time of life when everything is changing and expanding. The narrative of Pages for You is not autobiographical, but the character at the heart of it was close to me. At seventeen, Flannery is, in her quiet and self-effacing way, voracious: she wants to learn, discover, love. Anne shows her the way.

Rumpus: What has changed in you or your conception of writing (or yourself as a writer) since that book?

Brownrigg: Another fun question to answer! I would love to hear your thoughts on the same question, as you also have explored very different territories in your various fictions, and have written both on a larger historical scale as well as a closer intimate one. I think a writer’s self-conception necessarily shape-shifts, according to the nature of the work itself (and wonder if you agree?).

There was an urgency in the writing of Pages for You appropriate to the kind of breathless and lyrical novel it is, that made writing it seem more like writing poetry, at times. This is reflected in its form, too, the short chapters. I had never written this way before; I had many very set rituals about my novel-writing, all of which went out the window during the composition of Pages for You. (I even shocked myself by writing a chapter or two in bed! And I’ve never done that since.)

Before I started Pages for You I had been laboring away at a book that had a much bigger canvas, and was more politically ambitious; when the story for Pages for You took over I was surprised and a bit wary, but had the instinct that I should follow it, even if it meant leaving my more complicated, research-padded novel behind. That was the right instinct, because Pages for You was the novel I had to tell.

Rumpus: What would you say might be a few of your greatest non-literary influences?

Brownrigg: Great question, and how perfect that my eye first skipped over the ‘non’ and started wondering what other writers to mention…

In film, Richard Linklater’s lyrical, bittersweet stories of lovers who meet, and re-meet—the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series—have been an inspiration. He has a great ear for how people actually talk, as they try to stay connected with each other. (And how brilliant was Boyhood!) I think Noah Baumbach’s films often have this quality too.

Sharon Horgan’s TV series Catastrophe is not so much an influence as it is a consolation, dealing with many of the issues I mentioned above. The even darker British show Fleabag is stark and great. I love comedy, am one of the countless people who find Louis C.K.’s dark, philosophical perceptions hilarious, and true. (I even went to see him live with my teenaged son… which was a challenge during some of the filthier parts, though we were each in hysterics.)

Now, if I switched gears and started talking about plays and theater, we’d be here all day…

Rumpus: When and how did you first begin to take the act of writing seriously?

Brownrigg: It’s hard for me to give a non-pompous answer to this question. I used to love to pretend, to play pretend games, when I was a kid (either with my best friend, or by myself), and I distinctly remember a moment when I was some ridiculous age, like seven, and realizing that if I just wrote down these tales I was making up, of lost puppies, or orphans in a blizzard or whatever, I could potentially write a little book. Pretty much from then on, that was my ambition. I was lucky to have teachers who indulged me, or at least read me, who allowed me to feel serious about the writing (and illustrating) I did. I even wrote a novel, when I was fourteen.

However. Taking writing seriously, and feeling I could move out into the wider world with what I’d written: those were two very different things. This takes us back to your first question, I guess! (The difference between projections outward, and how one feels within. In myself, I always knew I was a writer.) From a young age, writing was serious for me, but I felt nervous about how other people might feel about what I had written. I still do!

Rumpus: About your writing process: I know you begin by hand in notebooks, and further that your prose reveals a lapidary writer, dedicated to the careful carving out of sentences. How do you begin and then revise? What are some of your inner voices and which must you silence, which do you heed?

Brownrigg: It’s true about the notebooks, but as my handwriting looks more and more like a script produced by a special effects department to denote ‘madperson’ or ‘alien,’ I am finding this system more unwieldy. Still, the transfer from my notebook to the laptop gives me a first and crucial moment to edit the original outburst, and that is helpful. I tend to do the early revision as I input the story into a file, and then wait to do more revision till the whole draft is complete.

The inner voice I ought to pay more attention to is the one that says: Too many words! Too many adjectives! Enough with the adverbs, already! Fortunately, because I write book reviews and some journalism, that helps provide some experience and discipline in paring things down. In first drafts, I can often be… well, I don’t want to say flamboyant, and I don’t want to say sloppy, but… Unrestrained, might be a polite word for it.

The internal voice I most value is not a voice at all but rather an ear: my ability to listen to the rhythm of the words, the music of the sentences and paragraphs. It’s important to hold on to that, even or perhaps especially in the revision, the edit, when sometimes the hacking away of material (see above) can alter the sound of the language too much.

Rumpus: Conflate this question with any of the above or address separately: what part of writing is not addictive?

Brownrigg: ‘Addictive’ is a really interesting adjective—I associate addictions with the sensation that you can not stop having or wanting more, and that does not seem to be how I feel about my writing. In fact, with the demands and efforts of daily family life, scheduling, and logistics, I often wish I were more addicted to the process of writing than I am—that it compelled my time in that way. To continue the analogy: if writing were a drug, there would be whole days when I might go around with a pounding headache, having forgotten that that drug is available, right in my notebook, to offer me relief.

I’m hoping to go into a phase this fall again where I access that drug more often! And if I become addicted to writing my next novel—I can live with that.

Rumpus: If every writer finds a balance of stasis and movement which we then call style, how do you like to treat the Apollonian urge to plan and the Dionysian happiness of discovery? What tells you when you wish to push the breathless momentum of narrative rather than linger in the lyrical truth of a character’s psychology?

Brownrigg: The Greeks! They wanted to have it both ways…

I know just the tension you mean, though, of course. It has expressed itself differently in my different novels, I’ve found, I wonder if that is true for you, too? Not surprisingly, my shorter, smaller-scale fictions have often wandered where they wanted, whereas the longer, more complex works do require a map or itinerary. Without one, it is possible to take a bad turn, and wind up a hundred pages in the wrong direction.

Looking more carefully at your lovely and intricate second sentence, I see there’s another element of what you’re asking, I think about the balance between plot and character: when to pause for an interior passage, and when to move on to the action. This is a great point to be conscious of, and something I perhaps understand better during the rewrite or edit. During the original draft, that balance is pure instinct, I think. (And not a flawless one.)

Rumpus: Who lives in your imagined community of readers?

Brownrigg: You do! Rumpus readers, Times readers, mind readers. Movie critics, union organizers, gardeners, athletes, grandfathers. Girlfriends and boyfriends. Parents and artists. Baristas and Uber drivers and caterers. My friends. Your friends. Even your enemies, or mine, if we have any, because maybe after reading each other’s work and the work of others, we’ll see less need for enmity or conflict. Well, that’s a dream of course—a fancy, an ideal—but it’s nice to think of it.

***

Author photograph © Claire Lewis.

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