revision – The Rumpus.net

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir is the culmination of ten years work by an NEA and Rona Jaffe award-winning writer and Harvard-trained legal expert on the death penalty. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a braided narrative, a combination of memory and true-crime reporting. In alternating chapters, it follows the story of the murder of a six-year-old boy and the story of Alexandria’s own past, which the murderer’s testimony forces her to revisit and try to understand.

I met Alexandria several years ago at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts when we were fellows at the same time. I was working on my memoir, and her memoir proposal had recently sold to Flatiron Books, and was on submission to international publishers. I was writing about events I had witnessed and those I hadn’t seen but had to figure out how to put in scene. At the heart of my story were acts of violence, but I wanted to present them in a way that was not emotionally manipulative. When I heard Alexandria read excerpts from her book, I was stunned. She had figured out how to handle all the technical and ethical issues I was struggling with, and she did so with the elegance and grace of a master stylist. Her work has been compared to the podcast Serial, and the TV show True Detective. It’s also been likened to books by Wally Lamb and Truman Capote. I would agree but go further. Her finely chiseled prose has the resonance and intellectual heft of a writer like Joan Didion.

While we were at VCCA, the book sold in the UK. It was an exciting moment that I enjoyed experiencing vicariously through her. I wasn’t surprised there was so much interest in her story. It has everything a reader could want: a plot as compelling as a legal thriller; fully rounded characters; a perceptive and insightful narrator who guides us through the story, as we discover the facts at the same time she does; and a myriad of dilemmas that couldn’t be more relevant and topical.

I wish that I had read this memoir before I wrote my own. There’s so much technique to learn from it as a writer. There’s also a lot we can learn, as citizens advocating for justice in a world that seems less fair and predictable every day. In my interview, I asked Alexandria about both big social issues and questions of craft.

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The Rumpus: Let’s start with the big social issues. How did you get interested in the death penalty?

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: As a child, I was on vacation with my family when my twin brother told a joke with a punch line that included “the electric chair.” I had never heard of the electric chair. So I asked him what it was, and he explained. From that moment on I knew I was an opponent of the death penalty. I had a visceral response to the idea that as a society we would decide to kill somebody in a methodical, intentional way and that we had built a system to execute people. I am the daughter of two lawyers. I grew up idealizing the law as a philosophical record of our commitment to society, and I thought of it as something that pursued justice. The idea that the law would take someone’s life seemed immediately to violate that. So even as a child I had a strong response. Then I went to law school to try to understand why the courts found the death penalty constitutional. I thought there must be an explanation, something I was missing. Because to me, it had always seemed like it would be considered cruel and unusual, certainly. I didn’t understand yet that I might just disagree with the courts. So I went to law school to try to study that. Before I went I really thought of the law as this truth-seeking mechanism, where we have a trial and that trial is designed to elicit truth. I think until very recently in society we still pretty much thought of it that way. We still thought that when somebody was adjudicated of a crime, for example, that the truth was that they were guilty of that crime. Now I think we question that assumption. We understand more that a trial is a competition between two stories.

Rumpus: That’s an interesting way to put it.

Marzano-Lesnevich: The prosecution and the defense each tell a different story, often out of the same facts. There may be a dispute about what the facts are. But even when you have the facts there’s disagreement about how to think of them. And how you think of them comes down to a story.

Rumpus: That makes sense. And your narrator’s voice often sounds like the voice of a lawyer addressing a jury, but the narrator is addressing us, the reader.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes. Starting to recognize that different approach in law school simultaneously made me more interested in the law but also less interested in being a lawyer. I became fascinated with the way we construct these stories, with what gets left in and what gets left out. I suppose, in the book, I’m trying to bring the reader along in that discovery.

Rumpus: Is crafting a memoir like crafting a legal narrative? We have to leave out much, much more than we put in, when we write a memoir.

Marzano-Lesnevich: I’ve been teaching memoir for a number of years and it always strikes me that you can take the same event in a person’s life and, depending on where you put it in the narrative, it acquires a different meaning. For example, the same events, even when they are put in chronological order, can take on different meanings depending on how quickly or slowly time unfolds in the chapter. And an event positioned as the inciting incident leads to a different meaning than the same event positioned, say, as the crisis. I think these choices—where you begin and end the story and how long you linger on particular events—affect how we understand a story and how we understand cause.

Rumpus: The longer you linger on an event, the more emphasis you’re giving it. If something comes first, it’s seen as the foundation for what comes after.

Marzano-Lesnevich: As a writer, one of the things that revelation meant for me was that I had to think about the meaning I was creating when I was structuring my book. For example, the book starts with Ricky Langley killing Jeremy Guillory. I thought quite intentionally about how I don’t want that murder to be in the climax of the book. I really don’t want the structure to indicate that that’s the meaning, that’s the point, the surprise of his death. That would seem cheap to me, somehow. And the same thing with the abuse in my family. I could have started with the abuse in my family and made it the inciting incident but in truth the inciting incident has to be larger than that. It has to be more about the silence and secrets in the family, or the way in which it’s a loving family but there’s still this undertow. Because I wanted my family narrative to be about more than just one thing, I thought a great deal about where to put each event in the memoir thread of my book.

Rumpus: And for the “murder” thread?

Marzano-Lesnevich: I had to carefully consider which events to start and end with. I knew, from reading 30,000 pages of records—

Rumpus: 30,000 pages?

Marzano-Lesnevich: That’s part of why this book took so long to write! So, I knew from the records of Ricky Langley’s trials that there was so much material that hadn’t made it into the trial. So much that had happened and, I think, was relevant to any understanding of the past, but hadn’t been admitted in court. I looked at the way Langley’s story was told in the files and the way it was told in each of the three trials—because it was told differently in each one—and the way it was told in different news accounts, the way the lawyers in the case have continued to tell the story to newspapers, the way that the story was told in a UK play that was based on the case—there were all these different tellings, and even in the records there are different tellings.

Rumpus: Like what?

Marzano-Lesnevich: For example, there was a 1964 car crash that was profoundly devastating to the Langley family and had far-reaching consequences in their lives. The newspaper accounts from 1964 report that it occurred in the middle of the day. But then when people told the story at the 2003 trial they said it occurred in the middle of the night. I think that was simultaneously more dramatic and more believable—the cover of night, darkness, all that. It made for a better story, and I don’t think people consciously chose to get the facts wrong; their subconscious just made a story. So the story is shaped and shaped and shaped and shaped and sometimes the facts are altered. But even more common was that the facts were stable but the way people interpreted them was different—and then those different interpretations got written into, and ended up shaping, future tellings of the story. After reviewing all this material, I realized that what I wanted to do was tell a story that would also be about the construction of all these stories.

Rumpus: And you do. Another difficult thing you make look easy is filling in details for scenes you weren’t present for. The memoir part of the book you were a witness to. But the murder part is often constructed from court transcripts. To keep our attention, you need to turn those transcripts into stories, give us characters we can see and hear. You signal when you’re adding something from your imagination or experience, and you tell us why you choose the details you do. Can you talk about the process? The technical and ethical issues you had to wrestle with and how you made them work?

Marzano-Lesnevich: I don’t think of it as filling in the gaps with my imagination. I think it’s really important to note that I didn’t invent events. It was more that, as I was reading these records—as happens to all of us I think when we read anything incredibly vivid—the scene would come to life in my mind. And so when I would read, for example, about this car crash, I would see these people in my mind. And then I would read that when Ricky Langley was an adult he told stories about having a dream about the car crash to a roomful of corrections officers, and that those corrections officers, they all gave affidavits afterwards in which they said what they recalled and the dream that he told comes through so vividly in these people’s retellings. So what I tried to do was bring that experience to life for the reader. At the same time, because I want to be straightforward about this process, I acknowledge that even as I was writing about how other people were making stories out of the murder, I, too, was necessarily making stories out of it.

Rumpus: Your narrator addresses the reader.

Marzano-Lesnevich: It was really important to me to have an active narrator voice so the reader would always know when I was telling myself a story from these records. My goal is for the reader to feel the presence of a single mind piecing together a story from all the information. And so it was essential for me to note where the facts were quite solid and where they had come from, and that’s why I have twelve pages of source notes at the end of the book.

Rumpus: I think you’re crystal clear about what your sources are and where the facts come from. By using an active narrator as our guide, you show us that we all make pictures when people are telling us stories. I appreciate how you make that process transparent. Did you always know this was the right approach for your book?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh man, I tried so many different approaches. So, so many. And that’s another reason why this book took so long to write, just the challenge of figuring out how to tell this story. How could I tell it in as complex a way as I needed to but still keep the pages turning quickly? As a reader, I really like page turners. So I knew I wanted to tell a story that would envelop the reader, make the reader feel as immersed in it as I felt when thinking about these stories. I tried at one point to tell it in a more straightforwardly memoir way. I tried at another point to tell it in a more straightforwardly journalistic way. I then realized that this element of storytelling that we’ve been discussing was too crucial to this book not to highlight it so I felt that I had to do a construction with a more active narrator. But then, since I have two threads, I had to figure out how to weave them. And the way I did that was I actually wrote a couple hundred-page condensed versions of the book.

Rumpus: Sounds like a lot of work.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yeah, and then I threw the pages away! But the exercise helped me understand how the two stories were layered. I restarted this book many times. After getting the NEA grant, I again jettisoned everything except twenty-five pages and started all over again, basically. But all that work with the layering helped me trust where the meaningful connections were. And also learn which connections weren’t as meaningful. So despite the fact that the book has taken me years to write, about half of the actual pages were written in the last year before turning it in to my editor.

Rumpus: Interesting. Half the book took nine years, and the other half took one.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes—because I think when you finally find the voice of the book, the pages flow much more easily. But to find that, I’m someone who has to write, throw away. Write, throw away. This story took a long time to figure out how to tell, but one thing about that process was that it helped me trust my own sense of the story. It was only in the rewriting, frankly, that I became structurally braver. And also emotionally braver. Because as the structure of the book solidified I began to realize that I could go deeper into the rawer emotions without losing that structure, because I knew enough about the structure and how to keep it going. It’s notable to me that two of the most emotionally intense moments in this book—moments that now think are vital—weren’t there with that intensity until about two weeks before I turned the manuscript in.

Rumpus: Fascinating. Why do you think it happened that way?

Marzano-Lesnevich: If the structure hadn’t been solidly in place it would have felt too risky to delve into the rawer stuff because there would be the danger that the emotion would overwhelm the structure. Which is something I think you have to worry about all the time with memoir.

Rumpus: That it would take you into a detour, a digression that’s so powerful that you leave behind the thread of the story you meant to continue.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Exactly. I’d been working with the structure for so long that I understood how it was going to work, which structural signals I needed to put in, and what the logic of the book was. I think of that phrase a lot when I’m teaching.

Rumpus: The logic of the book. That’s a great phrase.

Marzano-Lesnevich: What I mean by it is, How is the structure tied to the angle of vision of the narrator and tied to the voice? What’s the interior logic to why this book works the way it does? What’s it trying to say about the world? And I think the reason I spend so much time thinking about that is it felt so crucial to this book. Because if there weren’t a narrative reason the teller of this story is so interested in storytelling, there wouldn’t be a narrative reason for how much it moves backward and forward in time.

Rumpus: The structure has to mirror the content.

Marzano-Lesnevich: I really think so. Ideally, the structure itself will reveal something about the meaning of the story.

Rumpus: When I teach memoir, structure is one of the things students struggle with the most. It’s helpful to have examples of different kinds of structures, and I’m sure I’ll be using your book as a great model.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Thank you.

Rumpus: You’ve described writing this book as an exercise in empathy. How did your empathy change as you found out more about Ricky Langley and your grandfather?

Marzano-Lesnevich: When I started first reading these records I had no empathy for Ricky Langley. How could I possibly have any empathy for him? He was a pedophile and a murderer.

Rumpus: Of course.

Marzano-Lesnevich: He wasn’t a person to me. He was what he had done. So when I started, the records were difficult for me because I didn’t have empathy for him. I was reading his therapy notes from when he was an older teenager and it was terrible for me to read them because he was so problematic to me. I mean he still is problematic to me, obviously, but at that point he just seemed evil. But I kept reading. And then slowly it became even harder—because as I read, I started to realize that here he was as a teenager arguably trying to get help, but at the same time being trapped by who he was. My understanding of him became more complicated, and more empathetic.

And then that was really hard for me! And really problematic in its own way, because then was impossible for me to escape the same questions about my grandfather. Who was he, when he climbed the stairs of my childhood bedroom? What was he thinking? What was that like for him? That’s such a terrible question, in a way, to have to ask as someone who was abused by him.

There’s something strange that happens when you write about real people. The real people become characters, which means that you have to have a fully rounded idea of them. I started to see Langley in this somewhat empathetic way—never losing sight of what he’d done, the terrible harm he’d caused, that he’d killed Jeremy Guillory and abused children—but also understanding that he was a person at the same time. Somehow that’s the most terrible, and most necessary, realization to me. And of course it made me think about my own life.

When we write fiction or creative nonfiction, we have to try to see our characters are rounded, and we have to try to understand what their motivations were and what the story they were telling themselves about their actions was even if we don’t agree with it, we have to at least understand it for the characters to be three-dimensional. That drove me to figure out why my parents made the choices they did and who they were as people and what they were struggling with that led them to make those choices. And then there was my grandfather. The realization that I was going to have to engage in that kind of empathy for everyone in this memoir was difficult but also probably life altering

Rumpus: Life altering?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Sure. It fundamentally changed how I saw things. It also forced me to look at my younger self in an empathetic way. Some of the moments in the book that I struggled with writing the most were the ones of me as a young adult and struggling with eating disorders and other problems. I had to look back at her and see how young she was and how much she was trying to handle and have empathy for her.

Rumpus: And yet it’s also possible to have too much empathy, right?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh, yes. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a girl in the records who Langley abused and I thought she was fourteen. I think, had I not been reading very empathetically, I might have stopped short when I was thinking she was fourteen and thought wait, that doesn’t match with everything else I know about who this man is. Is there a hidden story here? But instead, I had been spending so much time with him as a character in a book and as a person through the records that I was trying to see a way to understand him and in trying to think the girl was fourteen, I wrote a story in my head and thought, Maybe this was the one time it was different. Of course it would have been terrible if she was fourteen, too, but to when I found out she was five—at that moment I realized the danger of too much empathy.

Rumpus: It can turn into wishful thinking and denial and cover up.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Absolutely. And I think with my family, part of the reason they made the decisions they did was out of empathy for my grandmother. Out of empathy for her they tried to pretend that the abuse never happened. And that did a great deal of damage. And so with the book, one of the choices I made was to write about my mistaking a five-year-old girl for a fourteen-year-old girl because I wanted to call myself out on the danger of empathy, and to show that what’s important is to come back to the body, back to Jeremy Guillory’s murdered body, and back to the secrets my body held. I wanted to show that we empathize because we’re trying to understand, but at the same time, no matter how many times you tell the story you’re going to come back to the fact of the body.

Rumpus: The body is proof.

Marzano-Lesnevich: We tell stories and there are differences in how we interpret the facts, but there are still facts. In this case, there are many things that will never be known but there is still the fact of the body. And that’s true in my life, too. And so I wanted to show the many ways of holding that duality.

Rumpus: What response are you hoping to get from your book?

Marzano-Lesnevich: The most meaningful thing to come out of this book, for me, has been the conversations. It’s so profoundly moving for me when people read my book and then share their own stories about what they carry in their own lives.

Rumpus: The things we carry.

Marzano-Lesnevich: The other thing I hope people take from the book—and they seem to so far—is the awareness of its complexity. My deep hope was that in reading this story about how we make stories in this one case and also in my life that people might move forth into the world and question how other stories around them were constructed. Or see that construction in their own past. And that also seems to be happening, from what I’ve been hearing from readers, and I’m grateful.

I started this book well before the November election, an election which turned out to be a contest between stories on the national level. And I think there seems to be more awareness now about how we make stories out of facts. And if there’s something I’m hoping for concretely out of the book it’s that people pay attention to that complexity around them. In their lives and in the criminal justice system. And in the political sphere.

Rumpus: That we separate “alternative facts” from real facts.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes, on two levels. Certainly when the “alternative facts” are, as we often see now in the national discourse, just plain wrong. Just plain lies. Like moving the time of the crash, because to move it suited a narrative the person wanted to tell. But also to understand that the way we interpret facts often has to do with fitting them into a story we’re telling ourselves.

Rumpus: So even though you started your book in a whole different political climate, The Fact of a Body couldn’t be more relevant to what’s happening right now.

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Author photograph © Nina Subin.

Lily Hoang is the author of five books, as well as co-editor of the anthologies The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility & the Avant-Garde and 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers. In 2016, she published A Bestiary, her first collection of essays, in which Hoang takes an experimental approach to her work and writes in several genres.

With chapters that are organized around the signs of the Chinese zodiac, Hoang explores themes of family, belonging, loss, and female subjugation. Hoang dives into personal territory, such as the death of her sister, the distant and abusive relationships she herself has endured, and her doubts and reflections about the path her own life has taken. Her storytelling is woven together with fairy tales, such as a story of a man hunting the elusive white tiger that took his father from him, and the juxtapositions that ensue make these essays all the more powerful.

In September, I interviewed Hoang by email as she settled into her new position as Associate Professor of Literature, Creative Writing at UC San Diego. We discussed the importance of genre, the lessons of teaching, and her unusual revision story for A Bestiary.

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The Rumpus: You have published several books, but A Bestiary is your first collection of essays, and it weaves autobiographical material with fairy tales, remembered dialogue, and speculations. Can you tell me about your experience writing a book in this form, and how it affected your approach to content?

Lily Hoang: I suppose the most honest answer about my process is also the least satisfying: this is the only way I know to write, or, at least, the hybrid form is what comes naturally to me. I didn’t necessarily intend to write a collection of essays, but it was the form that the book made of itself. And sometimes fairy tales are real enough to be true to me; therefore, they belong within the boundaries of the essay.

Rumpus: Did the form of the essay allow you to dive into material or themes that you have not been able to explore in other work, or look at ideas or subject matter you’ve written about previously in a different way?

Hoang: I like the way the essay makes my brain move. More than fiction, the essay—or my essays, at least—gives me permission to research and read and read and read. I like to saturate my brain with an idea and when I’ve reached max capacity, I start writing. It’s a frantic but intentional process. It’s fun!

Whereas I have written about myself before, writing in the form of the essay puts more “at stake.” Under the guise of fiction there is safety in the reader’s mistaking the first person narrator with me, but with nonfiction, there is no escape from experiences as distinctly mine. In that way, it’s as thrilling as it is tentative. I type carefully.

Rumpus: Some might say that A Bestiary transcends genre, in its blending of fairy tales, poetry, and memory within its essays. How do you define the genre of this book, if at all?

Hoang: I’m actually quite insistent that this is a book of essays. I think genre is important—I think categorizing A Bestiary as a book of essays is important—because I actively engage at the boundaries of genre. The essay as a form is necessarily experimental (essay comes from essai, meaning to trial, to experiment). More often than not, when reviewers, etc. talk about my book, they call it poetry. Others have called it fiction (that’s a bit further of a stretch!), but while writing this book, I was keenly aware of the parameters of nonfiction and how I can and do engage with the genre of the essay.

Rumpus: How do you approach the discussion of genre within the writing workshops you teach?

Hoang: I take a fairly conservative stance on genre within the workshop, especially in the undergraduate workshop. We read traditional realist short stories and canonized nonfiction (depending on genre). Or, at least, this is what we read for the bulk of the workshop. Only towards the end do I introduce more innovative forms. I think it’s absolutely crucial that students understand the craft components before they begin to challenge them, and my students seem to appreciate this approach.

I spent this last summer in South Africa, where I taught a graduate workshop at Rhodes University. The MA in Creative Writing program there follows the “tradition” of American experimental fiction. My students were better versed in what’s happening in US contemporary lit than I am. It was very impressive, and yet—and yet—their education (students do not need an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing or Literature or English; they do not, in fact, need an undergraduate degree at all as pre-requisite to admission into this program) used experimentation as its base. The problem was that the students could only reproduce or imitate what’s happening on this side of the Atlantic. They’re working within a distinctly American tradition/avant-garde, but without the knowledge or experience or history that launched and landed us into this current and specific brand of experimentation. So my workshop taught them canon and craft, but much more importantly, I interrogated their experimentation: in what ways does American experimentation translate into South African—or even African—experimentation? How does South African history and literary tradition mirror American history and literary tradition that might make our various forms and methods of experimentation analogous or transferrable? It was essential to learn about traditional forms of genre, within both American and South African traditions—and arguably British, too—in order to recognize the holes, the tiny abysses to puncture and rip, to make new.

Rumpus: What was your own knowledge of South African literary tradition before teaching this workshop?

Hoang: I knew absolutely nothing about African and South African lit. I have this thing about travel though: I don’t like to know anything—especially visually—about the space. I want to walk out of the airport and feel the place. I want the rush. I want absorption. I was once working on a PhD in Geography (nothing science-based, don’t be impressed. I was studying Human Geography, focusing on the geography of imagination), so place and space mean a lot to me. I try not to let imagined space influence its placeness. That being said, it’s also possible that I’m lazy, just another ignorant American.

In many ways, I learned all the things in South Africa. The country is powerful. After Apartheid and all that acute pain, their art is revelatory.

Rumpus: Do you see your experience teaching a writing workshop to students in South Africa affecting your own writing process moving forward?

Hoang: I learned so much from my students, but more than anything else, they impacted my writing because they are in my writing. My students are within me, and I can only hope I had such influence to return to them.

Rumpus: Can you explain some ways your teaching has affected your writing directly?

Hoang: It’s funny: I published four books before I started teaching at an MFA program (at New Mexico State), but I didn’t really know what I was doing. Teaching in an MFA program forced me to learn “craft” so that I could teach it. I was forced to learn “domestic realism” so that I could teach it. Simple things like dialogue/scene or world building, I had to learn all that. It was never taught to me. I started my writing career as a die-hard indie writer, ignoring all those old white boy craft things, but it turns out they’re actually quite useful skills. To break one must learn, first. I know not everyone believes in that kind of pedagogy, but I think I learned things the hard way—the most circuitous road possible—and I don’t want my students to learn from my mistakes because I am competent enough to teach them. Now I teach at a very “experimental” program. UC San Diego doesn’t even recognize the genre divide. I’m eager to see how my pedagogy and teaching methods will change in this kind of open environment—and I can only imagine inspiration. When people ask me what I teach, I tell them that I inspire creativity, and that’s a very prized privilege.

Rumpus: The linked essay format of A Bestiary has been compared to books such as Maggie Nelson‘s Bluets. Were you reading anything in particular that informed or inspired your own work as you wrote A Bestiary?

Hoang: I am a huge fan of Maggie Nelson’s work, and I—like so many others—have been massively influenced by her writing. We are always influenced by the books we read; that information is always stored somewhere. While writing, though, I tend only to read philosophy and cultural theory, mostly for research but also mostly for pleasure. I did a lot of research for this book, but any aesthetic influence was something that had lodged itself—logged itself—as potential. And during the writing process, these potentials are held akin to a hand full of tarot cards—or divinatory I Ching sticks—and the most correct form shows itself and returns to me: a revelation.

Rumpus: How do you know when you have done enough research? Does this process continue throughout the writing of the book?

Hoang: I absolutely love research. I love to read, especially outside of creative works. Research—especially for creative nonfiction—is one of my favorite things to do. I want to take in all the information, and when I reach saturation, when I reach a first line, then I can stop reading. Once I understand the form of each specific essay, then I can start writing.

Rumpus: How much of the structure of A Bestiary did you have in mind as you started working on it? What was the drafting and revision process like?

Hoang: I knew fairly quickly that this was a book of essays and that each essay would contain an animal of the Chinese zodiac. The animal itself is not always apparent, nor is it the core of the essay. The animal was a simple constraint for me to better understand and maximize the form.

The revision process is a better story, though. I finished the first draft of A Bestiary in Spring 2015. That summer, I flew to Port Townsend, WA, to read the manuscript to Rikki Ducornet. She kindly and astutely told me that my book was self-serving and self-pitying, that no one wants to read 250 pages of me whining about my life. A couple weeks later, CSU Poetry Center wrote to congratulate me because Wayne Koestenbaum had chosen my manuscript to win their first nonfiction book contest. Imagine my surprise! Imagine my despair! I couldn’t—simply couldn’t—publish this manuscript after Rikki’s critique. So I wrote to the publisher and asked if she would take a revision. When she said I could, I started rewriting and quickly. She gave me six weeks to deliver the manuscript to her—and so we have the version of A Bestiary that is in print today.

Rumpus: Did Rikki have any response to the manuscript she critiqued as “self-serving” then being the winner of a book prize? I noticed that her name appears in the published version of A Bestiary—I assume she was added into the manuscript during your post-award revisions?

Hoang: I didn’t tell Rikki about winning the prize until after I had completed my revision. I wanted to have a manuscript I felt proud about—one that understood and enacted her wise critiques—before I wrote to her again.

Rikki appeared in the published version of A Bestiary because the book that won the prize is totally different from the book I first wrote, and Rikki was a vortex of real talk that made me more honest, with each sentence, for each line, one each page, I forced myself to be honest without pitying myself along the way.

Rumpus: Can you tell me about the title of this book? I’m especially interested in this because you ended up with a tattoo on your arm that is inspired by the cover design: a rat perched on the “O” of your last name.

Hoang: As a working draft, I called this book Zodiac, but as I neared completion of the first iteration of this book, I knew that Zodiac was too obvious and easy and cliché, plus such a title would make the book seem like a biography of a serial killer or something. Instead, I landed on A Bestiary, after trying out Menagerie—which was wrong for obvious reasons. I think the bestiary is a playmate of the menagerie: it’s all about the animals, their captivity and display.

The rat was the designer’s brilliant idea. When I went to go read at CSU, I went with my amazing publisher Caryl Pagel to get a tattoo, and my little rat seemed like the right thing to do. Caryl calls him my Power Rat. He’s got a cute little butt and he’s crawling right into the O on my arm, and where is he going? Nowhere good, that’s for sure. That little guy is about to make some mischief!

Rumpus: What surprised you the most in the writing of A Bestiary? What has surprised you, if anything, in its reception?

Hoang: I was most surprised about the revision process. I’m generally pretty attached to my words, and although my revision process is in general grueling and tedious (I retype the entire manuscript), with A Bestiary, I was more ruthless: I cut my favorite essays, I cut a thirty-five-page essay down to one paragraph, and, most importantly, I did my best to hold myself accountable to all my whining.

I was also most surprised about the form that each essay took. In the first draft of A Bestiary, all the essays were lyric and long, as lyric essays need to be. But as I revised, each essay started to look different. I guess I figured out how to transfer all my “fiction” skills to the existing rubric of the “nonfiction essay” to elasticize both forms. Bestiaries contain both real and imagined creatures; my bestiary contains both real and imagined forms. I remain inside genre by disrupting everything else around it.

I was also most surprised about reader reception. Because this is nonfiction, when I meet readers, they are shy to reveal that they’ve read the book. It’s only after many painful minutes of anxiety-filled small talk that they reveal that, yes, they’ve read my book. We shake hands, again, and they look at me with empathy because they know me, they’ve read my book. They know my secrets—to me, they are still only strangers, but to them, I am someone they know intimately. I want to tell them that even nonfiction is curated. I choose what is in the book. I choose what they know about me. I want them to know there’s still more Lily that didn’t make it into print. Instead, I tell them an anecdote or two about the challenges of writing this book, and then we hug because now we are friends—but I still keep my secrets, this real Lily.

***

Photograph provided courtesy of author.

David Lazar’s third book, I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays & Aphorisms, is a kaleidoscopic rendering of the nonfiction genre; each essay reflects various facets of the possibilities of voice. In some essays, he meditates on past relationships and childhood memories in a voice that pulls the reader close—whatever mysteries he may have accessed also become our own—whereas in other essays, a voice that is part-playful, part-informative, and part-droll constructs a jukebox of songs that have shaped Lazar over the years.

In addition to writing on memories, Lazar critically examines the essay as the “un-genre” and includes “conversations” with Robert Burton and Montaigne. The book concludes with a collaboration with Heather Frise that explores motherhood through aphorisms and illustrations.

Combining thoughtful essays, imaginative interviews, aphorisms, and more, this book not only gives readers a vibrant and dizzying array of nonfiction forms, but also provides new and exciting ways to view the genre’s possibilities as a whole.

In November, I spoke with Lazar at his home in Chicago. He sat in a movie theater chair in his living room and we talked about voice, pedagogy, and the process of discovery.

***

The Rumpus: When I was reading I’ll Be Your Mirror, I kept getting the impression of an Art Deco building: the essays employ many different styles; they are highly structured; poetic phrases embellish the paragraphs throughout; and no word or phrase seems out of place. How do you determine and then execute an essay’s structure?

David Lazar: For me, the whole joy in writing essays is about process—about how writing the essay and crafting the sentences leads you to even further discoveries and felicities of language.

When I start writing an essay, I rarely start with a sense of the construction in mind; I usually start in darkness, with just some vague idea of what I want to start thinking about. Once in a blue moon, I do have a sense in toto of what the essay might look like, but frequently it becomes upset during my performance of writing the essay, as it should be.

Rumpus: Do you have any advice for writers who are just starting out or who may feel anxiety over the process? What should writers do when they’re encountering terror as opposed to joy?

Lazar: In cinema, what’s the great scene of a person lost in a forest; what do they start doing? They talk to themselves. So, when you’re lost in an essay, talk yourself out of it: How have I gotten here? What was it that I just said? How do I untangle this thought I’ve just managed to convolute?

I have always thought one of the essay’s greatest elements is its ability to talk to itself. For me, some of the most beautiful moments in the essay are when the essayist stops herself and says, Wait a minute, where am I going?

I love those moments of inscribed confusion. Instead of being terrified—or in addition to being terrified—go with that terror on the page. Let it run.

Rumpus: So, follow your terrors?

Lazar: Yes. In the revision process, that’s where organization and playing with form and finding the possibilities of form all come in. It’s sculpting; you’re turning the raw material of art, which is to say the process of discovery, into something that lasts as an experience, as something experiential to the reader.

But I never begin with a plan, which is why, pedagogically, I get frustrated when a student comes to me and says, “I want to write a braided essay.” It’s not a terrible thing for “trying out one’s wings” as a beginning student, but it doesn’t warm my blood compared to when a student comes to me with an extraordinarily complex idea and says, “I want to think about this because I can’t quite untangle it.” That, for me, is much more exciting.

Rumpus: In your interview with Mary Cappello, you two go in-depth about pedagogy and teaching nonfiction. You mention that it’s important for an essayist to read deeply and to understand the form and its history. How can somebody acquire this history and background?

Lazar: I don’t want to sound like a scold, but it surprises me that many nonfiction writers aren’t taking the time to read the major essayists of the last several centuries. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julian of Norwich, Blaise Pascal are some examples of the most basic and interesting figures, and you can acquire a really good working history of the essay fairly quickly. But you can go beyond that by searching for the obscure essayists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

You can go as deep as you want and keep ferreting out obscure essayists; it seems that anyone who is interested in their genre should want to know who was writing what and why. These strange discoveries seem to me something that writers always need; writers have always had pet projects from the past—which is a little Mary Poppins alliteration.

Rumpus: That reminds me how your poetry background is evident in many essays. There are many alliterative lines littered throughout and some of my favorites include “the tincture of taboo hinted at the edges of relation” and “even though it was Bellini and not belittlement at middle C.” Do all your poetic phrases jump out of you or do you write them during revision?

Lazar: It’s both. A lot of them jump out, but the biggest thing for me in revision is the hunt for dead sentences. I came to the essay for the first time in 1984. Until then, I was just writing poetry and my ethos was that I wanted each sentence to be wonderful. Now, of course, not each sentence can be equally wonderful, but I strive to have each sentence do something meaningful or move the essay forward.

Rumpus: A dead sentence is filler that doesn’t move the essay forward?

Lazar: Yeah, or it’s a basic transition that I need to spruce up. But more than anything else, when I go back to an essay, I am working my ear and seeing how the essay sounds on the language level because the language of an essay, how it sounds, and whether it is true to my voice, are terribly important for me.

Rumpus: I’ll Be Your Mirror is divided into three sections. “Brigadoon Bowling” employs more of the personal essay voice, whereas “To the Reader, Sincerely” feels like a literary playground where you present some experimental and critical voices. The last section, “Rock, Paper, Scissors, God: Aphorismics,” includes aphorisms and illustrations. How do these three sections speak to each other?

Lazar: I’ll Be Your Mirror is this big, messy book that practices different kinds of the essay and forms of contemporary, literary nonfiction. I give great, great kudos to the University of Nebraska Press for publishing this book that has no clear theme, in which the writer is performing so many different kinds of nonfiction at once.

There is something very lively in the fact that all these essays live in the same house together and that they don’t have to be segregated into different bungalows, and the reader can find the relationship between them. The sections speak to each other through the possibilities of the nonfiction voice to willy-nilly break in and out of form while still keeping the essential character of voice and style, no matter what form is being practiced.

Whether it is “The Typologies of John Earle,” a literary essay, or an aphorism, I think I am writing very much in voice.

Rumpus: You’ve mentioned that the essay voice is distinctly a performative voice and its performativity is similar to how you perform as a teacher. It made me think about Eve Sedgwick’s idea of “periperformatives,” which are utterances that are “not themselves performatives[;] they are about performatives and, more properly, that they cluster around performatives.”

Do you think the essay voice can be both performative and periperformative?

Lazar: Yeah, what’s interesting about the essay is that it is both performative and periperformative; moving back and forth between those two modes is one of the things I enjoy most about the form.

I think that’s also true about teaching; I am both performative and periperformative. As a teacher, I am demonstrating my authoritative possession of a certain kind of knowledge that I am sharing with the class. But then at times I am also, in a very meta-pedagogical way, self-criticizing where that knowledge might come from and whether or not I’m representing, let’s say, a patriarchal point of view in my presentation of that knowledge.

I think the authority is important and the undermining, and questioning of that authority—the hermeneutics—is also important. It’s extraordinary how that is so connected to the essay. It’s Montaigne’s old credo of Que sais-je, or What do I know? I need to know some things in order to write the essay, but then I also know that I don’t know anything; I need to float between those two poles; I need to tap into what I know and how I know it, but I also need to pull the rug out from under me all the time. My persona adapts as I float between those two modes.

Rumpus: In “Brushes with the Great and Not-So-Great,” you write that “the personae we create (at least partly) and the personae we think we’ve created don’t always match up.” How does your performative essay voice promote and/or hinder your persona, overall?

Lazar: The personae we create are a little bit like those ventriloquist dolls that get out of control and start speaking on their own. What we create is never completely under our control after we create it, so as we create a persona, we are also to some extent affected by that creation. I think writers, especially of nonfiction, are aware that the voices they create are always going to be interpreted in a variety of ways.

As I’ve written more of these essays over the years, I’ve found that the voices I’ve discovered in them have, at times, merged with my human voice. And so it seems to me that, at times, I no doubt speak in those voices as well.

What I’ve written in those essays in those personae are things I no doubt have ever thought before, but I think them now; my essays think through me in ways that I am thinking through them. There is an interplay that I am very grateful for and that I think is very interesting and uncanny. It’s a little Frankenstein-y.

Rumpus: So, one voice doesn’t tend to merge more over the others; instead, it’s like a Frankenstein-y feedback loop.

Can you talk to me about your aphorisms?

Lazar: The aphorisms came out of an issue of Hotel Amerika when we put out a call for them several years ago. I also solicited them by writing to James Richardson, a poet and professor at Princeton who is considered the best American aphorist writing today. He generously sent me a bunch and also gave me names of several American aphorist writers.

Over a period of months, I found out who in the United States was writing aphorisms and they sent me wild and interesting stuff. It was just wonderful discovering this little micro-community of this subgenre and then publishing them in “The Aphorism Issue” of Hotel Amerika.

I’d always thought a lot about the aphorism and its place in the essay. There’s certainly an interesting connection and a slight overlap, in fact, of the aphorism and the one-line poem. So I said to myself, “You know what? I’m going to start writing my own on Twitter for as long as it takes until I have a book worth.”

Rumpus: In an interview with Bookslut, you mentioned how the more exciting essays are being published in the subtrade world of independent presses and university presses, such as Nebraska. Are there any books or presses that are really catching your eye?

Lazar: Crux at the University of Georgia Press is a really nice series; they are publishing really strong nonfiction—not just essay, but also various hybrid forms of nonfiction.

In an utterly self-serving way, I am certainly very pleased with the work Patrick Madden and I are doing in the 21^st Century Essays Series with Ohio State University Press. We are putting out some extraordinary essay books, among them Lina Maria Ferreira’s Don’t Come Back and Catherine Taylor’s new book, You, Me, and the Violence.

Rumpus: Could we turn to how the Internet has changed the essay (or not)? There seems to be a longstanding tradition of essayists interrogating public and private space and I was wondering how you think the Internet collapses or contributes to that distinction on space?

Lazar: It’s hard to say, other than the fact that it’s changing; people are putting all kinds of personal information out on Facebook and Twitter and so individuals have become much more comfortable with being in a kind of permanent confessional mode. While the notion of personal space has really eroded, it doesn’t speak to the idea of interrogating the self and knowing the self; you don’t know yourself any better if you put private information out on Facebook.

The question of the self is still there and is still very rich and raw and available to explore, but Facebook doesn’t really hurt it or help it much. I’m quite frankly a believer that Facebook is a factory of anxiety. People are just measuring themselves constantly against what everyone they know is doing or saying.

Rumpus: Back in the day, people would go to the opera to see and be seen and that was the type of public space where you could do that pervasive spying and comparing.

Lazar: But you’d also be seeing the opera.

Rumpus: True. So Facebook is just an opera-less opera. Music features prominently in I’ll Be Your Mirror, especially in “When I’m Awfully Low” and “Lollipop Is Mine.” How does writing about music differ from your approach writing about romantic relationships or childhood memories?

Lazar: I’m pleased with the music sections because they were among the hardest to write. Writing about lyrics is not so hard because you’re essentially writing about literature—you’re in the same medium—but writing about the nature of music itself, especially if you don’t have a formal background in music, means you’re straining the capabilities of your knowledge. You’re trying not to look foolish while educating yourself enough to say something that is both interesting and also technically correct. It’s obviously not enough to not make a mistake, so it’s crucial to say something about the music that you think nobody has ever quite heard before. That’s the hard part, but it’s also the exciting part.

Rumpus: While the focus of “While I’m Awfully Low” is on music, you also write in that essay that there are times that you barely recognize your past self. How was it like writing about someone who is you, but simultaneously feels so foreign to you?

Lazar: That’s always an uncanny experience. I am always trying to decide how real the feelings from the past are. For me, the trick in seeing past selves is to figure out how much to validate and how much to question, which is to say not to be too seduced or go into some swoon by the intensity of my former emotions as I feel them now. But, by the same notion, I can’t resist them so completely that I lose the emotional power of the connection between my past and present selves.

Rumpus: So, the emotional power is what links all of you(s) together?

Lazar: That’s right. There’s an emotional thread connecting all these different selves and, on the one hand, one has to keep questioning, Is what I feel real? It’s been so watered down and distorted over time that you want to ask all those questions about it. On the other hand, there’s the raw truth—there’s the artifact of that emotion—you also want to honor. It’s a balancing act.

Rumpus: Let’s end with an “agree or disagree” question: One is not born, but rather, becomes an essayist.

Lazar: Completely agree. Becoming an essayist has always seemed to me as a bit of a pratfall. Many people I know became an essayist while they were in the process of doing some other work and then discovered the essay. It’s like one of those old silent films where someone falls into a ditch hatless, but then climbs out of that ditch wearing a hat. You’ve had some accident, but it’s not a bad one.

MEAN, a series of vignettes released by Coffee House Press in November 2017, is a memoir in which Myriam Gurba explores how it felt to grow up as a queer Chicana in Southern California. Gurba had a Mexican feminist mother and a half-Polish father, and a mother tongue of English, Spanish, and some Nahuatl. The story begins with the rape and murder of Sophia Castro Torres. Years later, Torres’s ghostly presence continues to make itself known, and Gurba has made her peace with this. “It’s okay for ghosts to exist through me,” she writes. “It has to be.”

Gurba’s prose is dark and sparse, potent yet playful. She combines different registers and rhythms, and weaves together threads of different kinds of privilege, whiteness, sexual assault, and trauma. You get the feeling Gurba would be a good stand-up poet: “I looked down at her Brussels sprouts. They looked cold and evil. They looked like American presidents.”

Recently, I corresponded with Gurba, who has also written a short story collection called Painting Their Portraits in Winter, by email.

***

The Rumpus: You begin with a quote from Jenni Rivera, a singer and entrepreneur who grew up in Long Beach: “Lo mejor que te puedo desear es que te vaya mal.” “The best I can hope is that things don’t go well for you,” is how I’d translate this. Can you tell me about Rivera?

Myriam Gurba: I like this question very much. It gives me the opportunity to share the accomplishments of an artist who died young and goes unrecognized beyond the Latin American Spanish-speaking world in a way that Selena Quintanilla is not. And, by the way, the cult of Selena Quintanilla troubles me in the same way that Frida [Kahlo]’s cult troubles me. Both cults tokenize at the expense of SO MANY OTHER FEMALE ARTISTS.

Anyhow, Rivera sang and recorded banda music, which is male-dominated, and her music often dealt with social issues from a frequently devalued perspective: a woman’s. The lyrics you cite and correctly translated come from MEAN‘s opening epigraph. I appropriated them from Rivera’s hit “Inolvidable,” which, in English, is “Unforgettable.” The lyrics narrate how unforgettable and INCREDIBLE the song’s protagonist is and how her past lovers will never be able to escape their memories of her. The lyrics also suggest that her lovers mistreated her and that her escape from them is a triumph. Because of their inability to appreciate her, she wishes them ill-will in a characteristically cheeky Mexican way.

I chose these lyrics because they a) focus on memory’s role in preserving and overcoming pain, b) celebrate feminine strength and triumph over machismo, c) communicate morbid Mexican humor, and d) are the type of music I later describe in my narrative during moments when I feel haunted by the ghost of a dead Mexican woman. I wrestle with these leitmotifs throughout MEAN.

Rumpus: Your collection opens with “Wisdom,” an essay about a woman, Sophia Castro Torres, who was walking through a baseball diamond and was brutally attacked and raped. Sophia haunts the narrator throughout the book.

Gurba: I start with the murder of Sophia Castro Torres because had this event not occurred, MEAN would not have been written. Her murder, and my attempt to make meaning out of it, are MEAN‘s engine.

Rumpus: Writing MEAN seems, to me, a way of celebrating female triumph over machismo. You’re telling Sophia Castro Torres’s story, you’re talking about your own rape, and other incidences of unwanted sexual contact that occurred throughout your life. Does writing these instances down and sharing them with others feel like a celebration of sorts?

Gurba: That’s interesting. It doesn’t “feel” that way to me but that’s probably because my writing doesn’t “feel” very good to me after I’ve written it, edited it, and then edited it some more. In fact, I feel a lot of revulsion toward my writing and dislike rereading it, especially once it’s in print. To me, the chronicling of those events is an inventory and inventories are seldom celebratory. There might, perhaps, be something celebratory in MEAN’s tone, especially when it swerves comedic. I value laughter a lot and, as a result, I’m willing to pay a high price to laugh or to make others laugh. Maybe that’s where the felicity or joyousness you’re noting comes from. The tone. I didn’t, however, set out to write a triumphant, celebratory work. That seems presumptuous and too athletic for my taste.

Rumpus: Do you feel as though arranging and describing these memories helped you to overcome pain?

Gurba: No. Writing does not numb, comfort, or soothe me. It does the opposite. It tends to excite me and reinscribe pain. It doesn’t function as exorcism.

Rumpus: Food appears often in here. Bulgarian yogurt, French fries, cool dessert parfaits, corn, “Mexican” casserole, kielbasas in tortillas. Is this deliberate? What are your feelings about food?

Gurba: The food mentions are not deliberate. Food is a complicated subject for me. Food brings joy, satisfaction, and conflict. Eating disorders plague my family. Their consequences have been painful, expensive, violent, and deadly. You haven’t lived till you’ve watched a woman die of starvation.

Rumpus: What was your process for writing MEAN? As a high school teacher, did you work on the book mostly during breaks, or were you writing during the school year?

Gurba: I started writing MEAN in 2010. I wrote it during the school year (before and after work), on the weekends, on breaks, and during summers. It went through many iterations. I don’t know that I’d call how I write a “process.” Process seems too methodical. I guess in some ways the process of writing MEAN was like dating. I carved out time to get to know my story and let my story get to know me. We felt each other out. When you set aside time for magic, sometimes it happens. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Discipline and tenacity help magic happen.

Rumpus: Do you try to cut yourself off from the Internet to create mental space? Did you have any writing rituals for this book?

Gurba: The Internet is the best and worst thing to happen to writing. It makes it so easy to quickly satisfy a lot of curiosity but it dampens curiosity for the same reason. It removes the obstacles that used to make hunting for knowledge sexy. I don’t have Internet at home, so that helps. I try not to peek at the Internet (through my phone) when writing, but I don’t have very good stamina. I did burn some cheap incense while writing MEAN so I guess that was a ritual. I wrote part of it with a stolen crystal nearby, too. I wrote part of it in a desert motel by Joshua Tree. I wrote parts of it at particular kitchen tables, too, and choosing those tables felt ritualistic. I also wrote some of it with chickens pecking at my feet.

Rumpus: Do you keep a notebook?

Gurba: I do keep a notebook, but I also compulsively take notes in my phone. Topics that I recently took notes on include sex, the Empire State Building, cologne, and freedom. Looking at my handwritten notes sometimes weirds me out because my handwriting looks so much like my mother’s.

Rumpus: How much revision do you do?

Gurba: A ton. Revision is my reason for living.

With MEAN, I would print the whole manuscript and then pin the pages to a corkboard and retype it, line by line, and refine it as needed. I think of that process as akin to a rock-polishing machine. I’m the machine and I keep feeding myself rocks till they come out smooth enough.

Rumpus: Do you do this with short stories as well? Do you ever tire or grow bored of typing the words out again, or feel as though you’re overexposing yourself to the sentences? I’m thinking of how, when I try to retype short stories from paper copies, that I sometimes feel as though it’s harder for me to see what’s on the page for a while afterward.

Gurba: I sometimes do this with short stories but less frequently. I see things in hardcopy that I miss if I only see words on screen. I do get sick of the words, but I like to see everything spread out because I get a sense of scale that is missing from screen. Going over each sentence many, many, many times gives me incredible intimacy with sentences, especially their rhythm. The rhythm and music of words matter a lot to me and it only takes one misplaced word to spoil the music. Working with a manuscript with that kind of intimacy is kind of like taking a magnification mirror to your pores. Its horrifying but it shows just where the problems are. Of course, I do get bored of the words after a while. I take breaks from them so that we can breathe. And by the time I’m done with my umpteenth regurgitation, I hate the words. They become flavorless chewing gum. Like how really old gum gets once it starts disintegrating in your mouth. Gum that’s lost its elasticity and feels like a sweater.

Rumpus: What’s your favorite historical moment to think about?

Gurba: I’m working on a book about California at the moment. I don’t have one specific moment though I often think about a moment which occurred before I was born: my great grandfather’s “kidnapping” of my grandmother and subsequent “incarceration” of her at a Catholic orphanage with orders that her mother not be allowed to see her.

Rumpus: Your grandmother was kidnapped—how did this happen? How did she end up at the Catholic orphanage?

Gurba: The kidnapping and the California project are unrelated. I’m writing about California because I want to write about place. As for my grandmother, her parents were fighting. So, to punish my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather took the kids and stuck them in an orphanage. He paid to have them kept there. They lived in really nice quarters, away from the other orphans. They ate non-orphan food. They had a piano. It was terrible, but also mildly luxurious.

Rumpus: How are you going about researching this project?

Gurba: Traveling. Reading. Collecting oral histories. Visiting archives. Consulting historians. The usual.

Rumpus: One of the most striking moments in MEAN was when your teacher made eye contact with you when your classmate, Macaulay, was touching you under the table. What a coward. I wonder about these moments of cowardice. Are there moments like this that you’re finding in this new project?

Gurba: Not yet. But I’m sure I’ll get there.

Rumpus: Do you have a recipe for dissolving the patriarchy? Do you think it’s possible?

Gurba: I’m not hopeless about patriarchy’s dissolution and if one considers the last one hundred years of American history, amazing things have happened to expand women’s freedoms. I am an openly queer, biracial woman who has owned property, gotten gay married, gotten gay divorced, worked as a school teacher, published three books, and voted. This could not have happened in the not-so-recent past, so for those who say change is impossible: NO, it is absolutely possible. The future is unwritten. There is no singular recipe for patriarchy’s dissolution. Its dissolution will take many chefs and many recipe books. Or, perhaps I should say WO-many chefs. Lol.

Tara Skurtu’s The Amoeba Game is her first full-length collection of poems. (She is also the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania.) The book begins with “Șoricel,” and the soul as a white mouse “burrowed inside the mouth/ of a sleeping child until he yawns.” It’s a collection concerned with this hidden, temporary nature of the soul. In it, Skurtu seems to be asking, how do we become good again? What is it we need most deeply?

We see sheepheads “big enough to eat,” a sister who saved the Body of Christ to feed to ducks, an English-Romanian dictionary, a train at dusk, and a noseless man playing an accordion.

In January, Skurtu, a two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, and I spoke through email.

***

The Rumpus: How did The Amoeba Game come about?

Tara Skurtu: The Amoeba Game originally came to me as an idea for a short story—I always wanted to write fiction. In one scene, the main character, who’d just come home from the hospital where her lover was dying, realized she hadn’t eaten and decided to fry an egg. And she stared at this egg flapping in the pan until it became an amoeba.

Most of my childhood I was forced to be in girl scouts because my mom was an assistant leader. I was the kid who recorded radio shows alone in my room, strived to become the child version of R.L. Stine, mastered the art of reading while walking—scout socializing was not my thing. But then one evening we played this strange game that didn’t require talking. We each became an amoeba—what that was I didn’t know, but I loved that it was something too small to see, that it couldn’t talk, and that its only job was to move.

We closed our eyes and wiggled until we bumped into each other, then latched on and continued until we became a giggling aggregate of microscopic life. This game calmed me. A simple game I played in childhood became a poem, became a section of poems, and then a book.

Rumpus: Reading while walking seems strange but it’s something I used to do a lot. I love the simplicity of “Eclipse,” and of the first two lines in particular. “The bird moved when I moved/ It was like a klonopin, it slept.” How do you know what to cut out of a poem? What to keep?

Skurtu: I’m grateful that you recognize and love the simplicity of the language in this poem.

If I knew what to cut out of a poem from the beginning, this would solve all of my poetry problems. That said, revision is what I like best, and I revise obsessively until a poem is what I call “leave-alone-able” (to say a poem is finished feels like an impossible diagnosis to me). When I’m writing and revising, I’m thinking all about the essential logic of the poem—the ordered yet nonlinear relationship of seemingly unrelatable things. I try everything until I know everything but this one thing doesn’t work. A poem is not a perfect puzzle, yet it is precisely a perfect puzzle. The first poem of The Amoeba Game, “Șoricel” (the Romanian diminutive for mouse), has six lines. For the better part of a year I revised this poem—which is to say you don’t want to know how many different variations of the line breaks I tried. I showed each draft to Louise Glück, one of my thesis advisors, and none of them quite clicked. Eventually, after many months, she said something like, “I think I liked the first one best.” I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t exhausted all the other possibilities.

Rumpus: Is there something that drives your revisions?

Skurtu: Revision is part instinctive and part learned, and I’m grateful to have had such wise and patient teachers along the way. Lloyd Schwartz taught me most of what I know about line-by-line editing and revising. The first time he returned a poem to me I could barely see it because there was so much writing all over the page. He was teaching me how not to be sentimental, how not to repeat without adding, how to use the most specific verb, how not to control the poem and its landing but to have authority over its narrative at the same time. And, going back to simplicity, Robert Pinsky taught me that sometimes the simple reordering of stanzas can get a nonfunctional poem functioning. Each poem drives its revision, and, as a result, the revision drives the poem. We poets never know exactly what we’re doing, but that, over time and with a lot of practice, we get better and better at producing this work that we have no idea how to write. I’m always learning how to revise.

Rumpus: Do you have a notebook you keep? What does it look like?

Skurtu: Yes, I hate to say it, but I’m like an advertisement for Moleskine’s unlined journals. I write by hand at first. When I teach workshops, I don’t allow computers. Writing makes you feel and shape each letter. The pen is connected to your hand is connected to your brain—you’re not just tapping a square box. Looking at what you wrote on paper is like looking at the contents of your brain. It’s messy and unordered, but everything you need is there. Every single poem from The Amoeba Game first came from notes, and then drafts, in my journals. Oh, and with brown ink. I’m a big-time fountain-pen nerd. I wear a magic pencil (that’s really what they’re called, believe it or not) around my neck. It’s supposedly over a hundred years old.

Rumpus: Who are some of your favorite poets at the moment?

Skurtu: Well, I’ll always be an Elizabeth Bishop girl. I admire far too many poets to name in a sentence, but here goes: Gail Mazur (especially her new book, Forbidden City), Lucille Clifton, Andrea Cohen (read “The Committee Weighs In” if you haven’t already—it’ll explode your brain), Frank Bidart, Jill McDonough, Derek JG Williams, Jericho Brown, David Ferry, Ani Gjika (and her beautiful translations from Albanian), Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, Lloyd Schwartz.

Rumpus: You had two Fulbrights in Romania. What were those like?

Skurtu: My Fulbrights were fantastic—and unbelievable. As a first-generation college graduate, there was always a conscious part of my brain that thought a scholarship of this level was unattainable for someone like me, from my background. And here I was in the fall of 2015 on a plane to Sibiu to kick off my Fulbright with a reading at the annual Poets in Transylvania International Festival—with Lloyd Schwartz and a virtual Robert Pinsky. A week later I found myself with my first apartment in the charming, medieval city of Brasov in the heart of Transylvania (which, by the way, is also the birthplace of my great-grandfather, whom I know nothing about—how strange life is)! And the Commission even renewed my Fulbright the following year.

Rumpus: What did you do there?

Skurtu: I taught undergraduate creative writing workshops and American literature, and I helped my American Studies students launch the university’s very first English literary magazine. I gave public lectures for CreativeMornings and the Power of Storytelling about how poetry can be accessible, how everyone is a poetry person. I blogged about my teaching and the Romanian literary scene for Best American Poetry and translated the work of five contemporary Romanian poets for a feature in Plume (co-edited with MARGENTO, who also selected and translated the work of five poets). And the project I’m most excited about is the new and growing modern and contemporary American poetry collection I started at the Transilvania University of Brasov library. Over a hundred books have been donated so far.

The strangest twenty-four hours of my Fulbright was when I participated in a Literary Death Match in an improvised boxing ring at the Bucharest Peasant Museum. I ended my performance of “Morning Love Poem” (in which I walk into a lover’s shower fully clothed) by pouring a bottle of water over my head. Fast-forward to the next morning, and I’m performing interactive American folklore to children at an international storytelling conference.

Lastly, and with thanks to the tortoise-slow, old Romanian trains, I was finally able to get the order of the poems just right in The Amoeba Game. And then Eyewear Publishing accepted it!

During this time I’d received a publishing offer in Romania, and the press wanted to print The Amoeba Game in translation before the book was to appear in English—a strange and lucky dilemma. And so Eyewear Director Todd Swift published my first chapbook during this time, Skurtu, Romania, a selection of limits-of-love poems from the Romania section of the book. And this appeared in Romanian and was launched in Bucharest at the international book festival. The Amoeba Game, translated into Romanian by Radu Vancu, will appear this spring.

Rumpus: What’s next for you?

Skurtu: Project-wise, I’m not done yet. I’m still translating, I’m thinking of a way to get Mass Poetry’s Raining Poetry on the streets of Bucharest, and I’ve married wonderful Romanian poet and translator Tiberiu Neacșu—now we’re the American/Romanian poetry-portal super duo, and we aim to get more US poets known here and more Romanian poets known in the US and beyond.

Rumpus: How do you balance writing with the clutter of everyday life? Do you have certain rules for yourself?

Skurtu: I’m laughing right now because, since last year when I moved to Bucharest, everyday life has been taking over—living in a new country takes a lot of adaptation. I wrote only two poems last year, and one could fit in my palm. But I’ve never been one to write a poem a day (and I only ever wrote a poem a week when I was in an MFA program and had to). A high school English teacher once told me that a big part of the writing process happens in the experience before writing. I didn’t believe her at the time—although it did make me feel great about my daily procrastination ritual, which is a huge part of my writing process today—but now I know it’s true: we’re always writing when we’re not writing. We’re also writing when we’re adapting, and right now I’m in the process of adaptation. I’m like a child again—I’ve been teaching myself Romanian and only understand about eighty percent of what’s said any given day—I’m hearing, seeing, feeling a lot of things for the first time. I think this might be an ideal space for creation. And, as far as rules go, I’ve found that I’m slowly breaking all of the ones I’ve set. So, in the words of Robert Pinsky: “There are no rules.”

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Author photograph © Cătălin Georgescu.

“You have a better chance of being canonized / than of winning the Mega Millions lottery,” Elizabeth Scanlon writes in her first full-length poetry collection, Lonesome Gnosis (Horsethief Books, 2017), in a statement that captures both the playfulness and the timeliness of her work. In her poems, technology and TV and money have replaced the sacred. We revere the lotto winner, happily, loudly, fantasizing about all the things he will buy himself and his parents, and disregard the poet, talking to herself in a corner, trying to apprehend the inapprehensible. We hold “iPhones… loosely like prayer beads,” while “Christmas [comes] around the corner like a thug,” wanting “my wallet or my heart.”

This is a book yearning to escape capitalism and the productivity economy, the rhetoric of use and accountability; this is a book that doesn’t bemoan technology—that’s corny, Scanlon says in our interview—but that mourns the loss of the quiet and the sacred, of seeking after knowledge without a search bar. And it is a book that does all of this with a wry self-awareness: “Have I become already the person writing about flowers?” Scanlon asks. No, she hasn’t. But if she did, I would still want to read it.

Elizabeth Scanlon is the Editor of the American Poetry Review. In addition to Lonesome Gnosis, she is the author of two chapbooks, The Brain Is Not the United States/The Brain Is the Ocean (The Head & The Hand Press, 2016) and Odd Regard (ixnay press, 2013). She is a Pushcart Prize winner and her poems have appeared in many magazines including Boston Review, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and others. She lives in Philadelphia.

We spoke over Skype about poetry as prayer, the resonances between science and poetry, what it was like to come of age during the shift to digital, brains and trains, and how Scanlon’s work as an editor has influenced her as a writer.

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The Rumpus: From where would your ideal reader enter your work? How would you want them to approach this book—in relation to what ideas, what other books, what literary tradition?

Elizabeth Scanlon: I think as someone who is also an editor of a magazine, I always find it hopeful if someone has read poems elsewhere in the world first before coming to a book. It feels more organic that way, if someone sees the poems in the wild so to speak, and then seeks the book out, that feels great. And it’s always interesting to me to talk to people about that kind of progression—like “Oh, I saw this poem in Boston Review and then I was curious about the book,” or something like that.

Aesthetically, I’m not sure how to answer the question. This book in particular is concerned largely with ideas of knowing, of how we decide things for ourselves, so I guess that would be beneficial if someone were coming at it from a kind of meditative practice, or that kind of life of the mind.

Rumpus: When you say a meditative practice, do you mean an explicitly spiritual one? In my reading, many of these poems seemed engaged with a religious, and specifically Christian, tradition. To what extent do you consider yourself a religious person?

Scanlon: I’m not a religious person at all, though throughout my life I’ve been exposed to many different religious practices. So I think that having brushed by them but never really attached to any of them has influenced my thoughts a lot. My mother was from a Catholic family—a very Catholic family, but she died when I was very young. Part of my family is Jewish. Part of my family has Buddhist practices. So there are different traditions there. And I myself, though I don’t ascribe to any one religion, I do meditate, and I do find the topic really interesting.

Rumpus: Do you have a relationship with God?

Scanlon: I wouldn’t say God. I would say I have passionate relationship with the idea of talking to yourself, with what some people would call prayer—though I think of it more as self-talk—and how that can be comforting or harmful. I think that culturally a lot of the things that people relate to as God are beliefs that they have about themselves. That how we value or punish ourselves is the way we parent ourselves, and we call that God, to not be entirely responsible for it.

Given, the book is called Lonesome Gnosis—the idea of gnosis being something you know without knowing how you know it. If you are engaging in a self-determined spirituality then there is something inherently alone about that. You might want to share it, but you don’t always succeed in sharing it.

Rumpus: So do you see poetry then as a kind of prayer or self-talk, something overheard?

Scanlon: I do think there is an “overheard” aspect of it—that these prayer-monologues are always going on in one’s inner life.

Rumpus: You said earlier you see the book as largely engaged with ideas of knowing. Could you talk more about that?

Scanlon: Sure. I think we construct our personalities on these ideas of what we know for sure—I mean that’s sort of an Oprah-ism—but many people believe in their own capital-T Truth, and I have always found myself very hard-pressed to subscribe to a capital-T Truth. But I find that desire really understandable, right? I mean we want to know something for sure. We seek certainty. But I just don’t know if it exists.

Although, maybe that sounds darker than I mean it to be. To say it in a lighter way, I’d say that I’m more interested in the spirit of inquiry than I am in being right.

Rumpus: Science and the scientific is one of the book’s preoccupations. Do you see science and poetry as having an inherently antagonistic relationship—given that science is in many ways after “Truth”?

Scanlon: No, I think poetry and science are closer than we think. I should also say that in this moment of the hideous Trump abuse of fact, I’m not conflating truth and fact. The truth I’m thinking of is on a spiritual plane; facts are facts. And I think there is a beautiful alliance between poetry and science in that science is the spirit of inquiry. Science, if we are engaging in a deep way, is never satisfied that everything is known. You have to keep looking, you have to keep learning. I mean, granted I’m not a scientist, but in my fandom of it, I think that there is a similar ethos between poets and scientists in that the desire to explore, to find out, is its own reward.

Rumpus: I’ve always seen the connection between poets and astronauts, or astrophysicists—anyone who studies space, really. It’s the one branch of science that people think is useless, that struggles to secure funding.

Scanlon: Yes, how could you not be curious about that? You’re absolutely right; that is a field that just goes on and on, and how could we ever get to the end of that? I don’t think we can, right?

And in the opposite, inward, direction, I think neurology—which is something I touch on in the book and in other poems—is infinite, or nearly infinite. We’ve only just begun to begin to understand how the brain works and what more lies beyond what we know.

Rumpus: Are some of the more science-y poems sparked by outside reading? Do you ever do “research” for a poem, or just bring in what you find while reading in the world?

Scanlon: I am coming at the brain-specific stuff from personal history. My son is an autism spectrum kid—and he is wonderful and thriving, he’s now twelve—but when we first received his diagnosis when he was three, that opened a whole new chapter of my life, of really having to engage with medical research and cultural ideas about what this means, and how you speak about it, and how other people are going to talk to you about it. That was an influence on everything in my life. Suddenly I was reading research articles on a daily basis. So that’s certainly a part of that… um. I lost the train of thought there.

Rumpus: Well maybe we should talk about trains, which feature prominently in the book.

Scanlon: [Laughing] That’s a good lead actually! Well, as a person who is a non-driver—I have never owned a car, never driven a car, I’ve always lived in cities—trains are just part of the landscape of my life. It’s no accident that they show up in poems. Though, too, I think once I noticed that they were showing up in poems, then it became more intentional to keep them there and to really tune into what is going on in all of these environments I am in.

Rumpus: I love the train, and I think, regardless of what you intended, it’s a rich vehicle for metaphor—and punning. Do you see your poems as funny?

Scanlon: I do! I’m always delighted when somebody thinks they’re funny because I think oftentimes I’ll be writing something in a little bit of a jokey way—but there’s darkness there as well—and I guess depending on the reader, some people will be like, “Oh, that’s so sad” and some people will go along with the joke. And both of those readings are fine, but, yes, I do. I’m a person who likes finding the oddness, the funny, in things.

Rumpus: For the record, I think the poems are funny!

I found myself frequently thinking of the sonnet—you have a number of thirteen- or fifteen-line poems—and also—because of your many even shorter poems—of the haiku, or even the koan, while reading your book. Were you working consciously within either of these traditions?

Scanlon: I was aware there were a lot of shorter poems in this collection and part of that is allowing them to be those short little snapshots—in part because when I was writing many of them was in early motherhood, when the available time to write any particular poem was brief. And so, though you go back, and you revise, and you reconsider, it felt truer to allow them to—funny I’m saying “truer,” right? It felt more, uh, accurate to keep them in that short form. A lot of them are “off” sonnets because they were originally drafted as intentional sonnets, but then as I was going back, in revisions, I was like, “You know, it doesn’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to force it to be a sonnet.” But, yes, there is the ghost, or shadow, of a sonnet in a lot of them—not only in lineation but also in that I can’t resist a little internal rhyming. I think poets of our era, people are really resistant to a real rhyme scheme, a strict end rhyme or something, but every once in a while I can’t resist it.

Also as a young romantic person, my first ideas about poetry were really shaped by memorizing Shakespearean sonnets and things like that. I memorized a great deal of them. I went to a high school for performing arts in Baltimore, and we did all of this elocution, we had to memorize and recite things. Now, of course, there’s Poetry Out Loud and all of the national competitions, but that wasn’t really in existence yet when I was young; it was more unusual then. So I think that remains, that definitely is in the cellular memory.

Rumpus: Do you find that work as an editor has shaped you as a writer?

Scanlon: Being at the American Poetry Review as long as I have in a way was my grad school, was my MFA. I came there straight after graduating from Bryn Mawr and have been there ever since. The sheer volume of work that I read, that I have always read there, certainly influences my aesthetic. People have frequently asked me, “Don’t you get tired of it? Don’t you get burnt out?” And actually I feel just the opposite, that the more I read, the more I just want to stay in the swim of it, because it’s inspiring. It’s inspiring even when you’re reading thousands of things and maybe a day passes when none of it blows the top of your head off. But the next day, there will be. There’s something amazing on a pretty regular basis. And that’s really inspiring to me.

Rumpus: Have you ever had anxiety about, I guess, the anxiety of influence—about how all that reading will affect your work?

Scanlon: You know, I don’t, because more than anything I see where my differences lie and how to honor them. Maybe that’s thinking too much of myself, but I don’t experience it as a prideful thing. I think of it more as, “Oh, this is part of what’s really interesting about being an editor and doing this much reading.” It’s that you see the patterns emerge and you see trends certainly, but you also see how someone sounds different and how vital that is, how cool that is.

Rumpus: What differences do you see in your own work?

Scanlon: I have a very strange diction—in terms of word choice and colloquialism; I think I’m pretty unusual that way, and I think that’s both a blessing and a curse. In my own revision process, I frequently find if I’m stuck on something, if I’m examining something really hard, it’s usually either because I think it sounds too chatty and lazy and casual or the polar opposite—that it sounds so highfaluting and weird. That maybe I shouldn’t say “cotillion.” Because I do have an appetite for those kinds of words, for five-dollar words, that isn’t always useful. Sometimes you have to say, “No, come on.”

Rumpus: Could you talk more about your revision process?

Scanlon: It is long and sloppy. I find that—maybe always but certainly in the current era, post-motherhood—for me, drafting a poem is something that happens on the fly, then gets filed away, then gets reopened, redrafted, put away again. Then I come back to it with more intention… I mean it’s just time and time and time again.

I’m grateful to be a part of the Grind, a group of people online who participate in daily writing. I’ve been participating in the Grind on and off for maybe six years now, and it has been so helpful to my revision process. When you do the Grind, you commit to sending your group drafts everyday, no matter what. And it’s not about feedback, it’s honestly just about showing up and having accountability to do it whether you feel like it or not. I find I do move forward with revisions a lot more swiftly than I would otherwise because I’m committing to looking at it everyday. I don’t otherwise do that.

Rumpus: The poems reflect an interesting confusion between digital life and actual life. What is your relationship to technology and new media? What intrigues you about surveillance, about the surveillance state, about that end of the digital spectrum?

Scanlon: Yeah, huh, what about that?

On the surface of it, I would say that, well, my father was a police officer, so that’s a factor in the awareness of problematic authority and what you show or don’t show. But also I think that it has something to do with being Gen X, the kind of “middle” generation, it’s like I lived a completely analog youth and then my adulthood began right at the same moment as the digital era. I remember being in college—I was a freshman in 1991—and email was brand-new. People were still figuring out what to do with it. We’d go and check it maybe once a day in the basement of the library. In some ways I feel completely fluent because, of course, I’ve been using digital media for the entire time that it has existed. And in another way, I’m really aware that I’m of this generation that straddled the divide and still has a different appetite for things before this.

Rumpus: How do you sate that appetite for the before?

Scanlon: I know; it’s a little corny. I’m aware that it’s corny to rail against it. I just think about how our interactions are different. But I mean, obviously no one can go backwards, so in a certain sense it doesn’t matter. Unless you want to choose to be a complete Luddite and just unplug from everything, but I don’t feel that way. I don’t bemoan our technological advances.

Rumpus: Were you writing poetry when you were entering college, and when this “shift” was happening?

Scanlon: I was. I entered college as a theater major, so I wasn’t focusing entirely on writing, but as a performer I was really engaged with text in that way. At that point in my life, I was writing poetry but I wasn’t publishing until much later. I remember feeling a different kind of solace in relation to poetry than to other kinds of writing. I think what it gets down to for me is that poetry is where I work out what I think. It’s where I’m doing the best job of listening to myself. I think some people call that prayer and some call that meditation and for me that mostly happens in poetry.

Rumpus: I asked that question in part because I wondered if living through that technological shift had changed your writing. But maybe it’s impossible to tell because your writing was going to change anyway over such an extended period of time.

Scanlon: Yeah, I don’t know. I wouldn’t lay any heavy meaning on that. I don’t think it changed my writing, per se. But the writing community, that is different. We know so much more about who’s writing and what they’re writing and what’s available and that’s amazing. As an editor and as an advocate for small press publishing, I talk a lot about what a golden age we’re living in. There are a lot of people who want to say, “Oh, poetry’s dying, it’s so troubled, culturally it’s in such a crisis” and everything, but, look—fundraising is always hard, but in terms of the art? The art has never been better. The art is really thriving and extraordinary in this moment. And we know more about who’s out there than ever. That’s real. That accessibility is true.

Rumpus: The “I” in these poems, the speaker, seemed very slippery to me—in part because you often have these long sentences unfolding over many lines—but the effect was one of always being motion, impossible to pin down. For you, is writing a way of escaping the self?

Scanlon: I wouldn’t say it’s escaping the self—for me it’s about honoring and entertaining the multivalence of self. It’s something I talk with my students a lot about; it’s the idea that we can use the “I” and not have to be autobiographers. Even if the speaker is an I, it doesn’t have to be your life story. It doesn’t have to be capital-t Truth. Because there are other things to explore. This isn’t a court testimony; this is a poem! Which isn’t to say that I don’t value people who want to be really faithful to their own autobiography. That’s great, too. But I think—and maybe this ties into my background in theater as well—there’s something valuable in being any “I” that that poem wants to be.

Rumpus: So do you see it as a persona or more as a different aspect of the self?

Scanlon: It depends. My primary mode is in aspects of the same self—it’s in turning the kaleidoscope so you see different colors. But sometimes, yeah, it is a persona thing. Sometimes you find yourself in a state of mind that doesn’t necessarily have the same vocabulary as your normal life, and that’s a gift.

Rumpus: I was surprised to hear you talk about your son, because I didn’t see him at all in the poems.

Scanlon: That’s intentional. Though I see the places where the child looms in some of those poems, in revision, I did dial it back because I’m really concerned with not speaking for someone else or to take without asking from someone else’s experience. For the purposes of these poems at any rate, it was really important to me to think: even if the subject matter is something from his life, what I’m writing about is how I’m processing it.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Scanlon: I have a new manuscript called Whosoever Whole that I just recently finished, just beginning to send it out. I’ve been reading poems from it at different events, so that’s really nice. It’s nice to feel like I’ve got irons in the fire.

Rumpus: Were you working on Lonesome Gnosis when the election was happening? A number of the poems, like “The Brain is Not the United States,” for instance, made me think of that time.

Scanlon: Well, it was published in January 2017, so it was in proofs by the time of the election. So, no, though there exists in my writing—I was going to say “vague” but I don’t think it’s vague at all—a discomfort with the dominant culture, right? I think an awful lot about economic disadvantages and car culture and issues of feminism and racism and workers’ rights, all of those things are always on my mind. So they bubble up no matter who’s president. That’s an ongoing task, or a going concern as they say.

Rumpus: Would you describe your poems as political?

Scanlon: Some of them are. This is, I guess, a bigger conversation about what is political poetry. By one definition, I’d say they all are because I’m someone who is concerned with those things, and who wants to engage, and wants to talk about injustices. On the other hand, they’re not overtly political because I’m not coming at it with an agenda. Though I don’t think anyone who opened this book would doubt for a moment that I’m a lefty, radical weirdo.

Perfect short story collections are not unlike perfect albums. Just as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors or Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, varied in style though their tracks may be, cohere to express a certain sentiment (if not a narrative), so too do the stories in the perfect collection buttress each other so that the whole is more than the sum. And, as rare as a perfect album may be, perhaps the perfect short story collection is even rarer.

What’s most common are the authorial career omnibuses, the equivalent of some bargain bin “Best Of” collection, or those genre-, nationality-, movement-, year-spanning anthologies where details of biography, location, or time period do the curating more than anything else. Yet every so often, a single-author short story collection is published that’s the equivalent of Kind of Blue or Graceland, a narrative tone poem where the assembled stories in their diversity and difference serve to tell an overreaching story in that mysterious and subtle way that only a perfect assemblage can.

Such is the case with Anjali Sachdeva’s brilliant debut collection, All the Names They Used for God (Spiegel & Grau, February 2018). Sachdeva’s stories break down barriers between genres, from magical realism, to American gothic, to science fiction. Themes are explored playfully across genre in stories like the science fiction (or even body-horror) of “Manus” and “Pleiades,” to the disturbing true crime feel of “Logging Lake,” the steam-punk magical realism of “Glass-Lung,” and the western-mobster-romance “Anything You Might Want.”

Sachdeva is the sort of fabulist who rejects the simplicities of allegory; her characters have a bit of the mythic about them but are never simply symbols, even the fantastic titular creature from “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid,” or the angel in “Killer of Kings.” That sense of significance through mystery makes the stories feels intoxicated with faith, but a very idiosyncratic, cracked kind of faith. Such empathy and imagination manifest itself in a shockingly wide range of locations to be explored, from the evocation of a Victorian prairie in “The World by Night,” Gilded Age Pennsylvania and Egypt in “Glass-Lung,” the Nigeria of the tile story, or the parlor of 17th-century poet John Milton in “Killer of King” and the dystopian road-trip romance of “Pleiades.” Some writers have their little corner of the world; Sachdeva has the entire world.

Sachdeva, whose work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. Last month, she and I corresponded about the political utility of empathy in fiction, the Pittsburgh literary community, and the logic of fairy tales.

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The Rumpus: Similar to Carmen Maria Machado’s collection Her Body and Other Parties, your stories seem to defy generic expectations. What’s your philosophy towards genre, and how do you think of your own place within those categories?

Anjali Sachdeva: I read a lot of speculative fiction, but also a lot of traditional literary fiction, and both things have a trickle-down effect on what I write. But I sometimes feel uncomfortable calling my writing speculative fiction, because that umbrella contains some people who are writing things that are so incredibly imaginative or weird that my work doesn’t compare in that regard. I read that kind of fiction and I’m in awe of its sheer creativity. But I think I bring other things to the table, and my enjoyment as a writer comes more in considering the psychological and moral and practical consequences of slight variations on reality, things that feel as though they might happen any day now. I don’t consciously set out to write stories that fit with any particular genre, but I rarely find myself writing purely realistic fiction, and when I do I think it often doesn’t turn out to be as good as my magical and surreal work.

Rumpus: The stories in All the Names They Used for God seemed to draw freely from a kind of fairy tale logic. What a narrative “meant” always felt present, but beneath the surface, as in a dream. Do “meanings” impact how you approach the crafting of a story?

Sachdeva: I don’t ever think about meanings when I write the first draft of something. But I do go back and look at the story as I revise and think about what it’s trying to say. So much of that rests in the ending of the story—a different ending can give a story an entirely different meaning, and I often change my endings a great deal in revision. But in terms of the fairy tale logic, that is partly instinctive. I love reading fairy tales, and I think they have shaped a lot of my narrative impulses. I used to write stories that people would read and say, “This sounds like a fairy tale,” even when the events of the story were purely realistic. At the time it was baffling to me, but at some point I just decided to run with it. Now, looking back, I can identify some particular technical aspects that made the stories sound like fairy tales, and I still use some of those narrative conventions in a more intentional way.

Rumpus: All the Names They Used for God felt incredibly vital and timely—obviously in the title story about the Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria, but in a more general sense as well. What is the role of fiction in speaking to issues of politics and society, and more specifically, how do you understand your own work as taking part in that conversation?

Sachdeva: With the exception of that title story, none of the stories address specific real-world political events, and before I put the collection together, I didn’t think of it as being very political. But in looking back over it once I had assembled the stories, I realized that a number of them were discussing social justice or political dissent in a more oblique way.

So bear with me for a slight detour: many people are familiar with the Milgram experiment conducted at Yale in the 1960s, in which the test subjects were placed in a room with a machine that (supposedly) delivered electric shocks to someone in another room, and were asked to shock the other person at increasingly high levels of strength if that person answered questions incorrectly. The person being shocked was an actor who was part of the experiment, but the people pushing the button never knew that. Most people who have heard of this experiment remember the outcome of the first iteration, which found that 65% of people were willing to deliver the highest level of shock when instructed to do so by the experimenter, even if the person being shocked was screaming or begging them to stop. It’s usually interpreted as proof of the power of authority figures to elicit compliance. But what many people don’t know is that Milgram did a whole series of these experiments to test how variations in the setup affected compliance. People were less compliant if they could see the person being shocked, for instance. And the thing that caused the highest level of noncompliance was if other people in the room refused to give the shocks. Those other people were demonstrating, essentially, “You don’t always have to do what they say.”

In a nutshell, I think that’s what good fiction does for politics and anything else: it models. It models noncompliance with an unjust state. It models compassion. It models different lives that you’re not living but someone else is, and allows you to understand them. I don’t think that kind of fiction is the same as writing that directly addresses specific political situations, which is essential to have, but I do still think it’s important.

Rumpus: I mentioned earlier the diversity in genre across your stories, but that diversity most spectacularly manifests itself in the sheer preponderance of settings. As a writer who seems so grounded in place, could you elaborate on what it is about a particular setting which strikes you as fertile terrain for your fiction?

Sachdeva: When I use a specific physical setting it’s almost always one I’ve been to and have therefore experienced in a very tactile way. “The World by Night,” for instance, is set largely in a cave, and those scenes were based on a trip I took to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. Some of it also takes place on the prairie, and that was definitely inspired by the time I spent in Iowa as a graduate student; the first year I lived there I was in a farmhouse in the middle of a cornfield just outside the city limits, and I loved to watch the storms come in across the land. I don’t usually sit down and say, “I’m going to write about this place,” but I think my own experiences of places like that affect me deeply, and so then when I need somewhere for my characters to go or a landscape for them to interact with, I’m likely to reach for one that I feel connected to.

Rumpus: Your author bio states that your current home of Pittsburgh “is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go.” As a born-and-bred Pittsburgher and fierce partisan of the city, that endorsement was delightful to me! In what ways has the city influenced you? And could you speak to what you think “Pittsburgh literature” might be?

Sachdeva: I have lived in Pittsburgh most of my life, and my mother’s family goes back for a few generations in the city, so I may be just a little biased—I love this city. First and foremost, I love that even though it has great theater and food and parks and all the classy development you could want, including a thriving literary scene, it also has so many strange little back-street places that you can live here for years and never know about. And when you stumble on them it’s like magic. So Oakland is Pittsburgh’s university neighborhood, and a lot of it is bars and fast food and student housing. But if you take the right street—including a set of city steps, these “streets” that run all over Pittsburgh that are just staircases up and down the hills—you end up in this little hillside grotto to the Virgin Mary that someone built into their backyard. It overlooks the highway but you’d never know it was there from two streets away. That kind of stuff is everywhere, and it does fill the place with this marvelous sense of possibility (although of course the Internet makes it hard for anything to be truly secret these days). And beyond that, in a purely practical sense, Pittsburgh is still an affordable place to live, at least for a little while longer. Which, when you’re a writer, is frankly essential.

I don’t know that there’s a particular style that I’d term “Pittsburgh literature”—how can you group Michael Chabon and August Wilson and Willa Cather into any one category?—but in the past year or two I have been delighted to find that some other surreal/sci-fi writers whose work I really love are living here, and I never knew it! Just within the past year, I got to meet Clare Beams (We Show What We Have Learned) and Tom Sweterlitsch (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and The Gone World), both of whom have written wonderful books that I enjoyed before ever knowing that they were Pittsburghers.

Rumpus: Is there any sense in which you see yourself as a writer who has concerns with religion, and how so?

Sachdeva: I don’t actually think that I have concerns with religion per se, but the stories in the collection have a lot to do with the sublime and the otherworldly, and most of them are exploring what people often put their faith in instead of religion: science, nature, even the inertia of the status quo.

Rumpus: I was incredibly moved by your depiction of Milton in “Killer of Kings.” What struck you about Milton as being worth exploring? For that matter, what was the impetus for the stories that were most important to you?

Sachdeva: The story is dedicated to Leslie Brisman, with whom I took a Milton class (and a number of other classes) as a college student. Leslie has an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge about his areas of expertise, so he could not only tell you biographical information about Milton but also explain the way that Milton’s mastery of Latin influenced his writing in English, and how his work changed over the course of his life, and so on. We read a wide variety of Milton’s work, including some of his political writing. I’ve seldom been as intellectually happy as I was in those classes, where piecing together the connections between Milton’s personal beliefs and his political milieu and his writing felt like some kind of NCIS-style drama. Like there were all these beautiful mysteries there waiting to be uncovered if you could just bring the right information to bear and find the right connections. And that’s to say nothing of the brilliance of Milton’s words themselves. So really, that has stuck with me all these years. Then somewhere I read that Milton and Galileo met once, and I thought I’d try to write about that, and when I did all that other long-ago information came pouring back. But other stories had very different origins. “Logging Lake” and “The World by Night” were both strongly influenced by trips to national parks. “Anything You Might Want” was inspired by a Polish fairy tale. “Killer of Kings” was, I think, the only story where I started with a character; more often I tend to begin with a single image or place or scientific fact and construct a story around it.

Rumpus: What’s your process look like? When do you write, how long do you write, how do you write? Is there any particular approach to process that is inviolate for you?

Sachdeva: Goodness, for the most part I would not recommend my process to anyone. I teach full time and I have two small kids, and so even though my husband is a stay-at-home parent and that’s a help, I usually can only write for an hour here or there. Or for half an hour, or before I go to bed when I’m half-asleep. It’s certainly not ideal, and it often feels kind of desperate in the moment. Maybe if I had developed better habits before my kids were born I could have carried them through, but at this stage it’s just grab-what-you-can. But the one thing I’ve done right—for my particular needs—is become part of two writing groups. That means that at least once every six weeks I’m obligated to submit something to the group—a complete story or substantial revision of a story. And there’s nothing like a deadline to put a fire under me. When I know that story has to be done by Friday I will skip social engagements and cut back on sleep and generally just do whatever it takes to get it done, because there’s really no other choice. You can’t email seven other people and say, “Hey sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet up this week but I just didn’t get around to it.” Often that means I’m sharing work that I’m not very happy with, but it does force me to finish each story, and that in turn allows me to start revising. I actually much prefer revision to writing first drafts, and I think it’s easier to do in small bites. I always write first drafts on my laptop, almost always in bed, but I revise on paper. Once I have that stack of printed pages and I can start the fiddling and restructuring and crossing out, I really begin to enjoy myself.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Sachdeva: I’m currently working on a novel, but I love short stories and don’t expect I will ever stop writing them. Even now, when I need a break from the novel, I work on a story. I also write personal essays, and would love to do a nonfiction book in the future, when my life is a bit different and I have more freedom to travel and do research.

The novel Everything Under is a retelling of Oedipus Rex, but it is about so much more than that. It’s a visceral and emotional book, told through bodies of water and bodies of people, reaching forward and back as inexorably as a river.

It’s a shame when the youngest person to do something is boiled down to a statistic, a kind of Guinness Book of World Records simplification. Daisy Johnson is at risk of that. At twenty-eight, she could be the youngest author ever to win the Man Booker Prize, earning the honor for her novel, Everything Under. But reducing Johnson to this piece of trivia has little to do with the luminous, intricate work she does as a writer.

Johnson and I discussed her craft and process for writing this book, monsters and myths, and family, both within Everything Under and in her life.

***

The Rumpus: So how did Oedipus Rex inspire you? What parts of it did you find resonant with the story you wanted to tell, and what parts less so?

Daisy Johnson: The myth was the seed of the novel and—while a lot has changed in the drafting process—that is really the only thing that has stayed the same throughout. I knew that I wanted to do a retelling and, I think, I was looking for a challenge. Oedipus Rex is very much a product of its time, and I was interested to see whether I could fit the story into a contemporary setting. I was inspired by its wonderful, bodily weirdness and violence. It’s a myth filled with babies left in the mountains for wolves and gender transformation and blindings. It also very much has a structure which makes the story feel inevitable; right from the start, there is no escape from the events, and this is something I wanted to steal and put into the book. I wanted the book to feel as if it was rolling uncontrollably to its end.

Rumpus: Did you ever feel restricted by the play?

Johnson: Everything Under went through an enormous amount of rewriting and drafts, and I think part of this had to do with finding the right way to use the myth. The book is a retelling but is also an exploration of a lot of things which the myth has nothing to do with. I personally love retellings—taking a story and reworking it in some way, using ideas to dart off along different avenues. There are retellings in Fen, my short story collection, as well.

Rumpus: How did you assemble the book, and when did you decide about the varying POV? It’s written in alternating points of view and timelines, and I’m wondering whether you jigsawed sections together or wrote them continuously. I can imagine you struggling, going back and forth, but I can also imagine you just writing it and making it look easy.

Johnson: I know that I didn’t make it look easy. Friends rescued me when I was crying in coffee shops. One once told me that if anyone complained about their job as much as I complained about writing this book, they would tell them to quit. In a way, I was learning how to write a novel. But it was also a tricky book to write, as you point out, because it’s fragmented and structurally complex.

My technique for this book was one of intense rewriting. The very first draft is unrecognizable from the finished product. In fact, the fourth and fifth draft are probably quite unrecognizable, too. I would begin with a set of ideas I wanted to explore, a general plot and characters, and then work on an entire draft. At the end of the draft, I would read through and take anything I thought I could keep (which in the early drafts was very little) and then work from scratch again.

I wrote this book entirely from scratch perhaps seven times. It was not a streamlined way of working. It was hard, and I despaired at the end of each draft. Gradually, though, something came together. Gretel appeared and, with her, the idea of language and memory. The POVs changed throughout, and I did a lot of trying things out in one voice and then deleting that and trying it out in another. By the end, I had a load of different threads and scenes, and had to print them out, lay them on my study floor, and move them around to try and find the best way for them to work.

Rumpus: Do you think of yourself as primarily a short story writer or primarily a novelist? Which do you prefer?

Johnson: I think of myself as a writer. I will always write short stories because they are where I’ve come from and because I love working on them. But equally I love novels and am very aware that they are my bread and butter. I have been living with short stories for a lot longer, and I feel I still have a lot to learn about novels, which is exciting. I am also working on essays which are so different and, because of that, enjoyable.

Rumpus: One of the parts of the book that spoke most to me was the troubled mother/daughter relationship. But your acknowledgments indicate that your relationship with your mother isn’t troubled. Can you speak to how you created what’s between Sarah and Gretel?

Johnson: I have, luckily, a really wonderful relationship with my mother. Although this book came from me, and I am buried within it, the characters are not me.

The relationship between Sarah and Gretel came, at the start, from wanting to write about a mother who does not find motherhood natural. In the Oedipus myth, a child is left on the mountain to be eaten by wolves. I wanted to examine the idea of a mother abandoning her child and what that would do to her, how that would change both her and her child.

Gretel was not there in the earlier drafts of the book. She is not from the original myth. She came about because I needed a character to look in on the action—an outsider—an observer who would stand in for the readers’ eyes.

Though my relationship with my immediate family is very good, not all of my family get on, and I suppose I was influenced by that, by the disappointment that comes from a lacking family member. We are expected to love our family no matter what, but this is sometimes easier said than done.

I was also very much influenced, I think, by the missing mothers strewn throughout literature and in finding this mother and bringing her back and seeing what that would mean. King Lear was one of the first places I saw this mother-shaped gap and became intrigued. I was also interested in what happens when an older parent—one with whom we have had a troubled relationship—can no longer fend for themselves. For this I read a lot, but Iris Murdoch’s husband’s account of her dementia was most helpful.

Rumpus: Do you consider Sarah’s relationship with Marcus to be child abuse?

Johnson: This is a really interesting question and one I’ve never been asked before. The things that Sarah does to Marcus are horrific, and I think no one forgives her less than she forgives herself. She is, in a way, driven mad by what she has done. But there is also the question, throughout, of how much she knows, of how much she realizes. And this is something I wanted to leave for the reader to decide. I also want them to decide what they think about Sarah. The things she does are awful, but she has her own issues and problems, and these fuel her every action. We expect mothers in our society to be perfect in a way we never expect fathers to be. She is not perfect.

Is it child abuse? Considering it now, it’s interesting to think about every book and film that portrays an older man having a relationship with a younger woman. We are saturated with those stories. This is a relationship about an older woman and a younger man. Marcus is older than Lolita. But he is also intensely vulnerable, young for his age, lost, confused.

Rumpus: Can you say more about Sarah’s character? I found her difficult to grasp—the book seems to stop just short of making her villainous.

Johnson: I wanted to examine, I think, what it means to write a woman character who is not nice, maternal, easily moved to kindness. At one point Gretel describes Sarah as being like the leader of a cult. I think this is a good overall description for her. She likes power and control because she feels so unable to control her own life.

I wanted the readers to decide what they think about Sarah, and if she had been made a villain they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do this.

Rumpus: One more mother question: I felt the book positioned the mother/daughter relationship as a primary (as in primal) story, because of the “I” perspective of the daughter to the “you” of the mother. Any thoughts on this?

Johnson: A lot of people have asked why I used the second person in some of the book and really, I think, your question answers this. For Gretel, her mother is the pivotal character in her life, the person around which all else moves. Gretel could only address the story to one person. She is not speaking to us. She is speaking to Sarah. And I do think there is something primitive, almost animal, about their relationship. When Gretel is young, there is no one there but Sarah; she has contact with no one else. They create a language together, and because of this Gretel grows up like no other child in the world does. Later, when they’re older and Sarah is sick, the relationship swaps places, and Gretel is the mother and Sarah is the child. So in a way they are always trapped in this, as you say, primal place.

Rumpus: Part of the book centers around a spectral monster called “the Bonak.” Is the Bonak derived from a reference I’m not aware of, as an American, non-resident of an English riverside?

Johnson: No, it’s an invention all my own! I wanted a hard word, almost a sound rather than an actual description of something. I wanted it to be the sort of word that a child might come up with to describe something that lives under their bed or in the wardrobe.

Rumpus: What is the Bonak to you, literally? Or is it deliberately murky and conceptual?

Johnson: The Bonak is what I am afraid of. In that it is whatever any of us are personally afraid of. I have never thought specifically about what it means to me, but I suppose I’m afraid of heights, not being able to write, someone following me home at night. In Everything Under, the Bonak is a creature that lives in the water and steals pets and children. But it is also memory. The fear of remembering. Or the fear of remembering incorrectly.

Rumpus: What is the idea of “the river” to you? As metaphor, as literal place where you live? What did you think of when writing about “the river”?

Johnson: I live by the river in Oxford and, as someone who was a rural child, it is still necessary for me to stomach the city, if only just to know that it’s there if I need it. Some of Everything Under was written while driving a canal boat around the Oxford waterways.

Some of the river-related things I thought about or read while writing were: The fact that anything could be beneath the surface and we wouldn’t know. The book Dart by Alice Oswald. The rivers of the dead, particularly Lethe, which steals memories of life from the dead. Charon the dead ferryman and the idea of guides in fiction. Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi and the idea of loners and idlers haunting the rivers on canal boats. The structural idea of rivers and how this relates to memory: tributaries, Oxbow lakes, etc. All the language around canals and canal boats: locks, windlasses, sacrificial anode. The idea of water as a feminine element, which is annoying except when you look at rivers, where it becomes intriguing. The idea of water as baptismal, making us the person we are supposed to be. Which is sort of what happens to Marcus.

Rumpus: How do you feel about the Booker nomination?

Johnson: It is, truthfully, the best thing that has ever happened to me. It’s not something I ever even considered for Everything Under but it is, of course, what every writer writing in English aims for and to have it for my first novel is just overwhelmingly wonderful. It has also meant that I’ll be able to live off my writing, which I haven’t really gotten my head around yet!

Rumpus: Can I ask indelicately whether you think it’s a good thing that Americans are now part of the Booker pool? (I don’t.)

Johnson: I cannot decide. I loved the novels by American authors which were on the list this year—I think they were doing really interesting things. But I do think it means that books from the UK and the Commonwealth are being missed out on, and that is a shame. It is hard for me, truthfully, to answer this question after being inside the Booker machine and spending time with the writers from the US.

Rumpus: Oedipus is very, very old, one of the oldest stories still circulating in Western culture. But the Bonak is completely new. Did you consider that juxtaposition, the old with the new?

Johnson: I considered it a lot. Oedipus is old, but the story I was telling was set in contemporary times, and was about, in a way, what it means to live in our world at the moment. What I love about myths is their timelessness, how applicable they can be to us even now. If I could have one wish for my writing, it would be for it to feel timeless, for it to mean something to a reader in fifty years.

***

Photograph of Daisy Johnson © Matthew Bradshaw.

Paige Cooper is one of the boldest and most original fiction writers I’ve encountered in years. I cannot think of another writer to compare her to—only to know that in reading her for the first time I had the same thrill, and the same sensation of being changed, as when I first read some of my favorite (and very different) writers as Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, and Deborah Levy, to name just a few.

Cooper’s debut collection Zolitude displays range, depth, and a rare ability to condense so much feeling and intellectual rigor into so few words that I’m still studying how she did it. She’s also versatile, in the sense of being both a “cold” and “hot” writer—some stories are distant and removed, others tight-in and full of exposed, raw emotion. The range is remarkable. Stories like the titular “Zolitude” contain beautifully rendered character observations in an almost classically formal sense, while the astonishing “Record of Working” abandons all the comforts of traditional form in a masterful and unique detailing of the aftermath of an attempt to build a nuclear plant. Almost every paragraph of Zolitude surprises or challenges the reader in interesting and wonderful ways.

Cooper’s collection was rightly long-listed for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize. Her work has appeared in Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and Gulf Coast Online and been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Montreal.

We spoke recently about the politics of the sentence, the reason behind when she isn’t writing, and the difficulty of writing a novel.

***

The Rumpus: I’ve never encountered a fiction writer with quite your particular style. I love this about the fiction—the prose itself has such clarity and yet also challenges. It feels dangerous in a non-word way. How do you think about stories? Has your approach changed over the years?

Paige Cooper: I feel like my focus has progressively microscoped down to the sentence, over the past couple of years. Maybe that’s just a function of late-stage editing versus early drafts, but since so many of the writers I know and admire are poets, I’ve probably been thinking about language a lot more, regardless. Everything the story is doing, the sentence is also doing, or is capable of doing. And I’m interested in de-familiarization—how far you can push until the reader stops opening up and just shuts down—and a tool for that could be as big as a plot point involving dinosaurs, but it might also just be a few non-sequiturs in a row, or a bizarre choice of adverb.

The sentence is also political: I mistrust invisible language, it’s naïve to act like any story’s effects are being transmitted into our bodies without interference or intention. That goes for the news and the latest Avengers movie as much as a chapbook of prose poetry from a micro-press. Our job as writers is to interfere, is to implant something that wasn’t there before. And that sounds like colonization, like power, to me. So even as I lull with escapist plots and settings, I also want to signal to the reader that I am using language to do something to them. The difficulty of the language is a way to remind the reader that they don’t have to consent to reading the story. They can stop.

All that said, cutting sentences down and twisting them up satisfies some math-y part of my brain. I love that part.

Rumpus: In a similar vein, how do you know what to leave out? These stories tend to contain multitudes, I think, by what is not on the page as well as what is.

Cooper: I have a hard time explaining things that I “know.” It feels condescending and false and vaguely manipulative and it bogs momentum. I’m more interested in what I don’t know. On a practical level I always pass drafts by writer friends who will tell me what questions they have, so that I can find a way to inconspicuously answer those questions as early as possible to avoid distracting the reader. Because I do agree that some light handholding is necessary, even as I distrust my own power over which details to put in and which to leave out.

But what I’m writing now works differently than these stories, in terms of information. I’ve never had to deal so directly with what the writer knows versus what the characters know versus what the reader knows.

Information’s slipperiness makes a piece of writing scale weird. You have to write something that’s smarter than you, but its intelligence doesn’t rely on what you can comprehend. Reading your Southern Reach trilogy is a relief to me on this front, because so much of it is cataloguing unknowability: ecological, bureaucratic, interpersonal, scientific, emotional. It makes so much sense that a spy and a biologist would have everything in common.

Rumpus: Do you think about what the reader will fill in when you write a story? It feels like you trust your readers a lot.

Cooper: The leaps that fill in the gaps between ideas are the best thing about reading. It’s epiphanic and creative. I mean, I see why it annoys some people, because it’s work. There are easier things to do with your brain than co-construct an imaginary world that only lasts for thirty minutes. If someone’s going to do that with me, I want to make it worth their while and leave them a lot of space to roll around in. I feel like it’s part of my job to trust people to pick up what’s relevant to them, and leave the rest.

Rumpus: What’s your process like?

Cooper: A story starts when I get excited about something and it helps me articulate a question. Hopefully the question is vital, but it’s not always; sometimes it’s banal, which means I have to dig deeper. And hopefully the exciting thing is not hackneyed or otherwise difficult to work with.

So then I’m wandering around thinking about this question for a while, and everything gets sucked in, seems related to it somehow. I’ll gather two, maybe three disparate things: an anecdote, another text, a landscape, a job. When I have enough, and I’m holding them all taut, they’ll rub against each other and produce weird energy.

Then I’ll write a first draft fast, in like a week or two at most. It’s not charted or planned, but there’s urgency that propels the writing forward. If I let it sag then I often lose the thread and don’t go back until I have something entirely new to add, at which point it becomes a different story anyway. But once I have a draft I’ll put it aside for a few months, and rewrite it. Send it to a friend, get feedback after a few months, rewrite. I’ll do eight or ten major rewrites before it starts to calcify and different elements stop being malleable because they’ve found their correct place.

I have no idea how to write a novel, though.

Rumpus: Can you share how you decided what stories would be in the collection?

Cooper: I used all the good ones. Is that a bad answer? My editor was fine with everything I sent him, but it took me a while to send him enough for a book. Self-censorship is my default state. There are dozens of stories that I abandoned half a draft in or six drafts in, over the years, and I kind of hate thinking about them. Like, they look and sound like stories but they are repulsively lacking something. It may just be my interest. If I’m still interested in a story after spending hundreds of hours with it, then, ok, fine, it’s outsmarted me, it can go out into the world.

Rumpus: When you don’t write, why don’t you write?

Cooper: Wow, so this is the question of my life. Whether I haven’t written in a week or a year, it’s always the worst. Fear of being seen is a big part of it. Maybe, for all of my theorizing above, that’s why my language and/or worlds can be so obscure. No matter how much inventing I do to get the subject matter away from me, my emotions and unconscious and obsessions are still on display. And I know that if I tried to flatter myself or cover my ass it would be so embarrassingly obvious. At the same time, there must be some toddler inside of me yearning for attention and communion and empathy, otherwise I wouldn’t have ever started writing. Not writing is a magnetized state, but I’m not sure if I’m being pushed or pulled.

Rumpus: “Record of Working” is one of my favorite stories of all time. What was the spark for it? Did you always know the ending was going to place the emphasis in an unexpected place?

Cooper: I always worried about that story: the structure, especially. That story was the product of several failed stories that never came together until I started reading about Jack Parsons and the intersection between the Jet Propulsion Lab and Aleister Crowley’s occultism in the 1940s. Around the same time a story in the New Yorker about the ITER tokamak blew my mind with its complexity of ambition, language, and thought. Mostly I wanted to write about the foolishness of the male scientific-rational/feminine occult binary, and the misogyny that festers there. I knew it had to start and end with the ego of the male genius/fraud, so I had to follow him wherever he went: i.e., running away from the consequences of his actions, but still inexorably himself.

Rumpus: Several of these stories verge on the horrific, or at least a kind of wonderful wrong-footing that descends into a deep unease. I’m curious in that context about how you view the world. Dangerous? Darkly magical?

Cooper: The answer is always both. I’m constantly in awe of how much I’ll never understand. So I write from and towards that place. And yeah, it’s entirely dangerous to proceed in ignorance, but at the same time there’s no choice but to move forward. I’m like, aiming for ethics in my fatalism, I guess. The delight of living and creating is that we have so little comprehension or control that what comes up can seem like magic.

Rumpus: “He deletes truth like weather deletes history, imperfectly.” “I thought the key prerequisite would be our psychological capacity to drink each other’s filtered urine.” Just a couple examples of wonderful sentences in the collection. They also suggest to me an underlying sense of humor?

Cooper: Ha, you found my secret jokes! I was one of those kids who was always accused of having no sense of humor. (If you want to wound me deeply, you can call me “serious” or “negative.”) I probably still fall on the ironic rather than the lighthearted side of the humor spectrum—my inept foray into my local comedy scene is a testament to my limited capacity for goofiness, for instance. I leave that to the professionals. That said, humor is only funny if it’s true, and if my job is just to write one true sentence after another, then some of them are inevitably going to be ridiculous. I hope.

Rumpus: Many of these stories are speculative and also intimate in terms of being inside a character’s head. Do you see pieces of the autobiographical here? How do they manifest or live with the speculative elements?

Cooper: This is a tough question, because I try to disguise the autobiographical because it embarrasses me. It’s a different cloth. That said, who has the horsepower to invent everything? I’m definitely more likely to read autofiction than a fantasy epic, because there’s something compelling for me as a reader about sorting out what’s true and what’s made up. Sometimes details present themselves for use. If they make the rest a little more thrilling—even just to me—then I use them.

Rumpus: Do you feel there are themes or situations you keep coming back to? For me, if so, they’re definitely disguised. The collection is coherent and focused by your voice and style, which at least on the surface allows you to roam widely.

Cooper: Oh, that’s a relief to hear! I feel like there’s definitely repetition on certain points—or, hopefully, insistence on them. I mean many of the characters are concerned with trust, lying, paranoia. And a writer friend recently pointed out that almost all of the stories are built around triads of people, which was a surprise to me—even though I knew I’d been turning to platonic love as an alternative god.

Rumpus: You’re working on a novel. Do you like to talk about it or do you hate to talk about it?

Cooper: It’s difficult! I don’t know what I’m writing, exactly. I hope it’s a novel. I only think it’s a novel because it keeps tendrilling out; it’s hard to hold the shape of it. Anyway, I was told last night by a source I definitely trust that if you can write a short story collection, then you can write a novel. It’s voice and style that pulls you through the three hundred pages. That gives me hope.

***

Photograph of Paige Cooper © Adam Michiels.

The story of candlepin bowling is one of secrets, spooks, and love according to novelist Elizabeth McCracken in her forthcoming novel, Bowlaway, out February 5 from Ecco. When Bertha Truitt is found abandoned in a cemetery in Salford, Massachusetts, no one has any idea what to make of her. Not Joe Wear, the watchman hiding in plain sight. Not Leviticus Sprague, the refined doctor whose race makes him an anomaly in Salford. And certainly not the townsfolk, who dream discomfiting dreams of Bertha. Nevertheless, she integrates herself into the town, opening a candlepin bowling alley and proclaiming herself its inventor. Her mysterious appearance will haunt several generations of Truitts as the bowling alley passes hands from the early 1910s and nearly through the century.

In McCracken’s hands this sprawling timeline shrinks and bites, with poetic lines that dissect warring human emotions with precision and delicacy. Take, for example, McCracken on being falsely accused: “The way falseness made you doubt yourself, it deformed your very shadow, the grammar of your soul.” It’s delightful to watch McCracken play with time, incorporating real events into the lives of her characters, like the deadly Great Molasses Flood that brought Boston to a stop in 1919. These tricks of time help us to follow a family whose fate in inextricably linked to New England’s most New England sport—candlepin bowling.

Recently, we discussed

***

The Rumpus: At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I wanted to ask you about incorporating the Great Molasses Flood into the novel. It’s a personal fascination of mine. Could you talk about why you included that in there and why that was so important to you?

Elizabeth McCracken: I’m from the Boston area. There are a lot of little things in the book that are inspired by my great love of books like The Book of Lists and The People’s Almanac. I can’t remember whether that’s the first place I read about it, but I also remember hearing about it when I was growing up in Boston. For years, I’ve had a photograph of the aftermath that my friend gave me. It’s one of those things that I’ve put into things and had to take out because it had nothing to do with anything, which is unfortunately part of my process. I was delighted to suddenly discover that I was writing a book where it made sense to put it in. Henry Dunow—who is my agent and a dear friend—when he read it, he thought I had made it up. He wondered if I had made up that and candlepin bowling, because he’s not a New Englander. In those cases I was delighted that somebody could think that I had made up such things, and then was almost even disappointed that I had not.

Rumpus: I started with the Great Molasses Flood because I’m curious how you create this world that’s fictional and a little whimsical, but still incorporate all these historical details. Do you feel beholden to the history attached to some of these things?

McCracken: I definitely did for the Great Molasses Flood. I’m one of those people who have to go back and realize that my characters have aged twenty years, but only ten years have passed. But somebody came up to me and said, “This molasses flood, does it have to happen in 1919?” and I said, “Yes! Absolutely, that is not something I’m willing to fudge.” I read a great book on the Molasses Flood called Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo, who describes where the various aid stations and mortuaries were located. It was important to me that I got that right.

One of the reasons I’ve always been interested in it, besides the fact that it’s strange, is that in the Boston area, it has attendant myths to it. It was said that in the 1960s on hot days, you could smell molasses because it was just so caught in the bricks and the cobblestone of downtown Boston. And that also on horse hooves and carriage wheels, the stickiness was carried as far as Worcester. I just love those details that seem sort of natural, but almost immediately felt legendary.

Rumpus: This book is such a New England type of novel. I was wondering about the research you had to do for this novel because it spans so many decades.

McCracken: Part of it is that I am a New Englander and I feel very New England-ish. I now live in Texas, which makes me feel like even more of a New Englander than I ever have before in my life. Originally I thought of setting the book in Somerville, Massachusetts, which is where I lived for about nine years, and I felt very constrained by history. I kept thinking, “Would this be possible in Somerville at this time?” The minute I decided to make it an imaginary city, I felt much freer. I wrote a book that was about vaudeville and the movies, and then I was really obsessed with getting everything right, because it happened all in actual places. With this book, I can’t remember how long I tried to make it an actual place, I just remember the thrill of making it imaginary.

Rumpus: There’s a point in the book when the narrator says of Bertha that she’s “the oddest combination of the past and the present that anyone had ever met.” This seems to apply to the book as well because you have characters like Dr. Sprague and Joe Wear, where you have to walk this line of balancing these older attitudes against a contemporary readership with newer ideas. Was that a challenge for you at all?

McCracken: I don’t think so, only because I don’t think I thought of it as I was writing. There’s a huge amount that when I’m writing that happens on a subconscious level. I try to, as much as I can, plunge into the world of the book. There’s a lot of stuff that ends up coming out in the book that I didn’t—I mean, I did put it there purposefully in some way—but it wasn’t sort of an intellectual exercise to get it in.

Rumpus: Are you really regimented; do you keep notes in a notebook that you return to, or does it happen more loosely?

McCracken: For this book, the process went differently than any other thing I’d written. I worked really long hours when I was able to, and I also wrote this faster than any novel I’d written before. I wrote the first draft relatively quickly and then I kept revising it. To me, that helped with being able to access the subconscious. When I say draft, I mean I typed it over and then if there was a part of the book that wasn’t working, I would type that part over and over, so that revision process felt like writing.

Part of it is that I knew less about what was going to happen in this book when I started writing it than almost any other novel I’ve ever written. I simply started writing it and then figured things out as I was going along. So, the first draft ended up being sort of the plan for it. There are some things that are the same, but there were more characters initially, and the ending was different and really quite bad. I wince to think of the corny thing I did at the end of the first draft.

Rumpus: I read that you liked titles and titling chapters and such so I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about settling on the title for this book.

McCracken: It was one of those things where I came up with the title, and then I had to go back and change the name of the bowling alley. Originally, [the alley] was just called Truitt’s all the way through. Because this is a book that has been so overstuffed with stuff, that I imagined it was going to have a wordy title, but none of the ones that I came up with were any good. I liked the idea that [Bowlaway] sort of explained the setting of the story from the beginning. But I also like the fact that it’s a weirdly dreamy name, and that there are bowling alleys called “Bowlaway” across the country.

Rumpus: I didn’t know that!

McCracken: For a while, I went to Amazon to see when the book would be up, but the thing that was for sale was a vintage match book for a bowling alley called The Bowlaway that would come up instead, which I found very pleasing.

Rumpus: What, initially, kind of sparked your interest in bowling and why did you think it would be a good vehicle for this story?

McCracken: Often I like having a bit of material to wrap a novel around. Part of it is to do research and part of it is to have an anchor, so I knew I wanted to do that. I love reading both giant, multigenerational sagas and novels that don’t have that, but I feel like I could wander for a long time—forever—in a draft if I didn’t have some sort of bit of material at the heart of the book. Also, I always like having a one-sentence answer when somebody says, “So what’s your novel about?”

I bowled as a kid, and I knew that I wanted to write a very New England novel. It really feels like there is little that is as New England as candlepin, especially because people still play candlepin bowling in Massachusetts. I like the idea of writing something that regional.

Rumpus: It seems like your revision process is quite demanding, so I’m wondering how you decide what actually needs to be there. Are there ever any tensions that arise between you and your editor where you have to fight for something to be included?

McCracken: Historically, I have. But this book, I haven’t, partly because I’m less precious—or maybe I’m better at leaving things out? I can’t say. When my work does something strange that I can’t quite intellectually justify, I try to trust it anyhow. There are things that might be hard for me to explain why they seem essential to the book, but I feel that they are. There was a lot originally—and maybe there one or two sentences residually left—in which Dr. Sprague was a very prolific painter. There was going to be a giant retrospective of his work at the end of the book, and I understood why I was taken with the idea, but that it didn’t have anything to do with what happens in the book. Part of it was that I enjoyed describing a bunch of different paintings, but I also really loved the idea of—and maybe one day I’ll write about it—every now and then you’ll hear about a large collection of a previously unknown painter. I really liked the idea of writing about that. I think I read a newspaper article about such an artist while I was working on the book and I thought, “That’s great! I’ll cram that in!” But I knew after I had already written it that I could neither intellectually nor emotionally justify keeping it in there.

Rumpus: You mention that idea of an artist retrospective for a later novel, but I was wondering how you keep these tidbits straight about these historical stories and weird myths.

McCracken: I’m one of those writers who has many, many notebooks with the first three pages are full and then I forget about them. I mostly take notes when I’m working on something continually, but a lot of the stuff just cycles back in my brain. Like I said, I had wanted to write about spontaneous combustion and the Great Molasses Flood for years now. I had wanted to write about fire, in general. I guess I’m a literary pyromaniac. I like writing about this stuff even if it has nothing to do with the book and I finally got it in a little bit in this book.

Rumpus: I’m wondering what the impetus is for putting all these very real, but very strange situations into your fiction. It doesn’t feel like you’re inserting it into the story as an aside, but that you’re incorporating them into your world.

McCracken: [Laughs] Why do I insist on doing that? Is that the question?

Rumpus: I suppose!

McCracken: Part of me has always felt that real life is intensely weird and much weirder than people sometimes give it credit for. I’ve always been interested in that both in fiction and nonfiction. I went to graduate school in the late ‘80s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and even though my friends didn’t write basic things that you would think of when you use the words “minimalism” or “realism,” one of the models of what we passed around to each other was domestic minimalism, amazing stuff. I love Raymond Carver’s work, for instance. But I remember even then thinking that realism seemed to me to be a spectrum and not one thing, though when people used the word realism, they were usually attaching it to a writer like Carver or Updike. I think the late ‘80s were a time where there was an idea—not to the people I went to school with and certainly not to many of my teachers—but, this notion that a story looked a certain way and any way that you stepped away from that was like a deviation in a weird way. And I’ve always been interested in deviation and deviance, so…

Rumpus: I do like what you’re saying about realism being a spectrum because there is something very real about your work, but it also feels really whimsical and young, like it’s approaching reality with fresher eyes. Do you ever feel other people influencing in your work or other trends in your work, where you have to take a step back and kind of re-attune yourself to that type of approach to realism?

McCracken: Like anybody, I’m a writer of my time. I love it when people say, “Who are you influenced by?” and you get this chance to mention other writers that you love. But actually, nobody really knows what they’re influenced by and how strange things make their way into your work. I think there are very few writers who are not influenced by everything they read and ingest, whether it’s the highest-minded art or the ads you read on the subway.

Rumpus: Who did you envision the narrator to be?

McCracken: So, I never think of a third-person narrator as a who, but always as a what. When I was in a philosophy class as an undergrad at Boston University, the teacher once referred to God as a “gaseous invertebrate” and I think of my third-person narrator as being a gaseous invertebrate. My students can tell you that I sometimes get quite exercised when people talk about third-person narrators as though they are people, in terms of what the third-person narrator knows or feels. They can go places, they can see things, but I don’t think of them as believing things in the way that human beings do.

Rumpus: There’s something weirdly creepy about the entire novel. You talk about this, all these bits of fascination, but were there any other characters you had a lot of affection for? Or were there any you found more difficult to write?

McCracken: I have a lot of affection for Joe Wear, who was really a quite minor character in early drafts. I ended up putting a lot more of him into the book. And I mean, I like ‘em all. The character who I had the hardest time writing was probably Minna. That was partially because in early drafts of the book a lot more happened away from the bowling alley, but I realized that the book didn’t work when it was away from the bowling alley. The whole thing that I knew about Minna was that she wanted nothing to do with the bowling alley. She felt quite elusive to me because I needed to get her back to the bowling alley at least once and she didn’t want to go.

Rumpus: I’m going to attempt a last question, which is kind of like that “who inspires you” question, but more specifically, do you have any suggested reading or supplementary materials one might think of as accompanying this book? This is a very selfish question on my part.

McCracken: I feel like I have often tried to write something that has the feel of those black and white cartoons from the 1930s by the Fleischers like Betty Boop but also related and I feel like this book is the closest I’ve gotten to that. Something that’s both dark and jolly and kind of scary at the same time.

When nuclear disaster strikes a New York City not so very different from our own, there is only one way out: the Gate, a one-of-a-kind prototype that offers an escape route for exactly 156,000 people. Now on the other side of the gate, these Universally Displaced Persons find themselves in our own New York—a place that is both familiar and utterly foreign. Sometime around 1910, a divergence in the timeline of these two worlds resulted in two separate realities, and now, the UDPs must catch up on ninety-plus years of political, social, and cultural history while simultaneously grappling with the loss of the world they have always known.

This is the premise of K Chess’s Famous Men Who Never Lived, a virtuosic debut novel in which first-rate world-building serves as the backdrop to the recognizably human struggles of the displaced, out tomorrow from Tin House Books.

Before the Gate, the novel’s protagonist Hel was a workaholic medical doctor; her partner, Vikram, was a PhD candidate studying a science fiction novel called The Pyronauts. A cult classic in Hel and Vikram’s world, The Pyronauts exists in this new place only as a single paperback, carried through the Gate in Vikram’s backpack. Deep in feelings of anger and grief, Hel becomes obsessed with the novel, launching a mission to preserve the history of her own world that leads her from rundown neighborhoods and park benches to art world galas and a stately mansion upstate.

K Chess was a W.K. Rose Fellow and her short stories have been honored by the Nelson Algren Award and the Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA from Southern Illinois University and currently teaches at GrubStreet. K lives with her wife in Providence, Rhode Island.

I corresponded via email with Chess in the weeks before the novel’s release. We discussed obsessions, building alternate realities, and revision.

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The Rumpus: It’s easy to imagine a more simplistic version of this story where one reality is clearly preferable: our New York exists as it does, but Hel’s world is either a utopian or a dystopian version. Yet the genius of the novel is that neither version of New York is obviously better off than the other. Even though the departure of the UDPs is precipitated by a nuclear disaster, it’s not a disaster of the sort that we can’t imagine happening in our own reality.

Chess: You know how, in time travel stories, the hero always has to be careful not to set off a ripple effect of unintended changes in the past that will irrevocable alter the present? There are in-story reasons for this—self-preservation, avoiding a temporal paradox, etc.—but it also seems like the audience is really attached to our world not being changed, at least not permanently. We have an idea that the way history happened to shake out here is inevitable and therefore preferable. Presenting an alternate universe that’s not easily categorized as better or worse was my way of signaling that the world of the UDPs is just as real. It’s more real, to people like Hel.

Rumpus: What role did research play in your writing? Or perhaps: what’s the interplay between research and imagination in creating a world that (as far as we know!) has never existed?

Chess: In order to write about divergences from history, I had to know what had actually happened and when. I researched questions like: how was lite beer invented? When and why did Brownsville in Brooklyn become such a poor neighborhood? What’s the history of the swastika? I enjoy that kind of trivia, anyway, so I learned a lot! At one point, a mentor suggested I consult with a physicist about the Gate that enables travel between worlds and how such a thing might practically work, but I never did. I didn’t want anyone to laugh at me.

Rumpus: I read in a Twitter thread on revision that, at one point during the writing of this novel, you flipped the genders of your two main characters. Tell me more! How did you make that decision and why did it turn out to be the right choice for this book?

Chess: This novel grew from a short story in which Vikram was the protagonist and Hel sort of supported him as he figured out his shit. I’m a woman and I like to believe that I’m thoughtful about avoiding stereotyping, but as a consumer of fiction, I guess I’ve internalized the idea that the male lead in a story should be the one who is getting into trouble and that another person, usually a women, will balance him and help him. Once I recognized that this was going on in my short story, I flipped them. That made the task of expansion more fun. It seems to me that many real-life relationships have both a Calvin and a Hobbes and that neither role is implicitly gendered. That said, I’ve noticed that a male protagonists are often unpleasant, yet still relatable. Readers seem to have a high tolerance for men who are stubborn, who complain, who make terrible decisions. I’m interested to see how well people will relate to Hel, who is a mess in all those same ways.

Rumpus: I’m so interested in the main characters’ jobs, and the way their professional lives change after they pass through the Gate. In some ways, it seems counterintuitive: as a medical doctor, Hel should be most able to translate her professional experience to a productive new role in our New York, and yet, it is Vikram who ultimately proves more adaptable. Why is that?

Chess: A lot of it has to do with personality, but some of it’s about privilege, too. Hel is a white woman and her former vocation conferred social capital. She worked really hard to get there, but she’s never had to consider that it could all be taken away. Unlike Vikram, who comes from an immigrant background, she’s used to being seen as an individual, not as a member of a group. So it really does a number on her.

Rumpus: What are your obsessions? How do they inform your writing?

K Chess: I’m not really an expert on anything practical, but a lot of my part-time fascinations found their way into Famous Men Who Never Lived, including Tarot readings, what squirrels do in the winter, the Krukenberg procedure, Ostalgie, and hoarders. This is the longest thing I’ve ever written, so these topics lent me energy when momentum started to stall. And my twenty-five-year-long obsession with shipwreck paintings helped me figure out the climax of the book. (Some other obsessions that did not make it in: survival cannibalism, confidence scams, figure skating, and the X-Men. Look for those in the next novel, I guess!)

Rumpus: I can’t wait to read a book about figure-skating cannibals! Now, I’d love to talk about the premise of the novel, which is both high-concept and beautifully executed—a fascinating thought experiment with a tangible, human ache. How did you end up settling on this particular “what if?” as your ultimate focus?

Chess: I started with the idea of a piece of art that existed only in people’s memories. What would happen if every single copy of a book that’s considered to be important just suddenly vanished? I read A Tale of Two Cities once, in tenth grade, and I still recall details like the improbably long letter written in blood and Madame Defarge knitting and “‘tis a far far better thing,” but not much of the actual plot. A scholar of nineteenth-century prose would be able to recreate what happens in what order, but no one could replicate its essential Dickensian-ness. Yet even if it was gone, I think the story would haunt the millions who have have read it. What kind of apocalypse could make a book vanish, I wondered. And what if it wasn’t a highbrow canonical classic? What it it was a pulp favorite, instead? And then I realized that I had to write parts of the missing book itself, too.

Rumpus: While we’re on the topic of career, I know that you’re a writer with a day job—how does working a 9-5 affect your writing?

Chess: It’s hard! Solidarity to anyone else trying to balance their writing with other obligations. I wrote a lot of Famous Men Who Never Lived when I barely had a real job. I would go in for a couple of hours and then I had the rest of the day to myself. This gave me the flexibility to work the way I always thought was most effective for me—in big, undisciplined bursts. Now, if I want to write, I have to get up at 5 a.m. I don’t have time to screw around as much. Because of the routine I’ve developed, I’ve found I can get into a groove quicker.

Rumpus: I love the way that the items that each of the UDPs choose to bring with them through the Gate becomes emblematic of who they are—a deadly serious version of our hypothetical questions about what you might bring to a desert island. In that spirit, I’m wondering: what would you bring through the Gate? I imagine this is something you’ve thought about.

Chess: I actually haven’t! Is that weird? I’m very comforted by the small objects that live on my dresser. I’ve got a picture of my wife as a fifth grader in a birchbark box, a bottle of perfume she gave me, two brass ashtrays shaped like shells, a plastic skull that I put spare change in. Maybe I’d take one of these useless items. What I realized from writing this book is there’s not a good choice, exactly. Why not go for sentimentality?

Rumpus: You recently taught a class on queer speculative fiction—is that right? Or queer characters in speculative fiction? What does it mean to you to be a queer writer? How does queerness inform your approach to writing?

Chess: Science fiction is a metaphor-happy genre, so there’s potential for queer themes to turn up in all kinds of clever ways. It was exciting to talk about that in the class, but I realized that what I crave most as a queer reader—in any genre—is representation that’s varied and realistic. As a queer writer, my work is creating characters like Ayanna and Angelene. They’re Black women. Their marriage is loving but imperfect. And being queer affects, but doesn’t define, the way they are with each other.

Rumpus: One of the many things that impressed me about Famous Men was the way you write so frankly about sex in a way that really shapes the reader’s understanding of the Hel, Vikram, and their relationship. Was that something that came easily for you? What were you thinking about when you were writing those part of the novel? Do you have any great tips for writing sex scenes?

Chess: I have never written about sex before! I think you’re absolutely on to something here: it’s a way to establish Hel’s and Vikram’s personalities and explore the dynamic between them. Sometimes, couples express themselves in sex when they’re not communicating well in other ways.

Rumpus: I’m also interested in the way the novel manages to be extremely timely and yet you’ve clearly been working on this project for a long time. Were there any current events happening while you were writing this book that shaped your writing process?

Chess: It’s creepy, right? When I was writing this, Mike Brown and Sandra Bland were in the headlines, and my sadness about their deaths made its way into the book. Unfortunately, profiling and prejudice and authoritarianism are perennial themes outside of fiction, too—they always seem relevant.

Rumpus: What are your influences? There is so much in this book that feels original, and yet I know that our writerly minds are always treading the territory of our readerly experiences. What are the books without which this book could not have been written?

Chess: One strong influence is Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, which compiles interviews she conducted with dozens of ordinary people, including the firefighters and “liquidators” called in to do the dangerous clean-up work, and their families. What I especially admire is the way Alexievich allows her subjects’ individuality to come through as they tell their stories. I also read the novel The Insult, by Rupert Thomson, just before beginning Famous Men Who Never Lived and couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s a strange book which has little to do with my own from a plot standpoint, but it takes place in a city that is totally not a real place to its protagonist. I wanted that pervasive feeling of disorientation.

Rumpus: It’s clear to me as a reader that Tin House is doing incredible work, and I’d love to hear about your experience working with them on this project. What was your path to publication like? What has been your experience working with an indie press?

Chess: It’s been great! I want to give a shout-out to my editor, Tony Perez, who not only understood the story I wanted to tell, but had this amazing sense of what the draft needed. He encouraged me to reorder scenes to amplify tension in the second half of the book—something I never would have figured out alone. I also adore the cover and interior design of the book, by Jakob Vala. Everyone over there is really on point. It seems like my path to publication has been pretty typical; it took a couple of months to find an agent and a couple more months for Tony to express interest. The thing that took me by surprise is how long the publication process takes after the deal is sealed. There are periods of waiting in between each step that seem interminable when you don’t know to expect them.

Rumpus: What’s next for you? I see you bravely clocking into the #5AMWritersClub on Twitter. Would you share anything about what you’re working on now?

Chess: I’m working on a book about paranoia and double-crosses on an isolated marijuana trim-scene in northern California in 2010, just before legalization.

Rumpus: I feel like we writers tend to be rather cynical—and I imagine that the process of waiting for a book to come out is rife with anxieties of all kinds. So, as a sort of antidote to all that, tell me: what are you most proud of in this project?

Chess: When I reread my own book at the copyediting and proofreading stages, it was hard to see it the way a stranger would. I was tired of looking at it. But by the middle, I fell under its spell again and got caught up the momentum. I wanted to see what would happen next! That felt really good.

***

Photograph of K Chess © Bradlee Swinton Westie.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Ilya Kaminsky about his latest collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, March 2019),

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 Poetry Book Club interview was edited by Marisa Siegel.

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Brian S: We’re a few minutes before the chat will officially start, but I want to just remind everyone that you should jump in with your questions and comments whenever you wish. Don’t hold back and wait, because we’ll only have Ilya for an hour.

Also, I’m likely to be a little slow with questions and comments personally because I broke my arm two weeks ago and am typing one-handed as a result. I have had more than enough of this winter, I can promise you.

Who all is here tonight? And is anyone colder than I am in Des Moines?

Eduardo Ramos Ruiz: Hi Brian, greetings from the West Coast… it’s cold for California.

Brian S: Hi Eduardo! You have no idea how jealous I am right now. I’d be happy with temps above freezing, seriously.

Liz: Liz in Brooklyn, where we were supposed to get a blizzard today and everything shut down for what turned out to be two inches of snow. Sending empathy.

Eva Woods: I’m in LA and I’ll skip describing the weather!

Megan: Hello from Cleveland, where for once in my lifetime it’s actually nicer here than in most other places.

Debby: I’m here in Seattle.

Brian S: So while we wait for Ilya to join us, maybe let’s talk some about what stood out to us in this book.

Gwen Dawson: I liked how the collection holds together as a single narrative. All the poems are small parts of a whole.

Eva Woods: I think the structure—the poems forming the narrative the way they did, was amazing.

Gwen Dawson: I also liked the glimmers of hope/love/etc., even during the bleak times.

Eva Woods: Those little glimmers of tenderness made the rest of the book even more horrifying to think about in contrast.

Liz: Everything you’ve all said, plus absolutely heartbreaking.

Brian S: It’s such a hard thing to pull off—maintaining the energy for a whole book while also having pieces that will stand alone as poems in their own right.

Liz: He also managed to write with both ferocity and compassion.

Eduardo Ramos Ruiz: Yes, stand-alone poems as part of a narrative… with use of stage direction sign language symbol. It’s a powerful effect: symbols and words.

Gwen Dawson: Brian, yes exactly. Having these stand alone is the amazing part.

Debby: That actually leads in to one of my questions: Did Ilya write all the poems for this book, this story arc, or did he have some he had written otherwise and repurposed them?

Gwen Dawson: Good question; let’s ask that one when Ilya arrives.

Liz: Yes, Debby. In many ways it reads like a novel. I wonder how much Ilya thought of it that way as he wrote.

Megan: I became so emotionally involved in the characters, and as they died off I felt such loss.

Debby: Oh, me too. I felt killing them off kept the book heartbreakingly honest. There wasn’t going to be a fairy tale ending.

Liz: Yes, yes. Our desire for a sentimental solution wasn’t satisfied.

Debby: I also adored the framing how the first and last poem are about our modern Western culpability.

Eva Woods: Yeah, it totally didn’t pull punches there. That was dope.

Liz: I’m so struck by how the book calls us to account for our passivity or courage, and yet the voice of the poet manages to include compassion for our frailty.

Brian S: There are also those moments where it seems like he deliberately pulls back from what we might think of as poetic language. Like in “That Map of Bone and Opened Valves,” with the lines “The body of the boy lies on the asphalt like a paperclip. / The body of the boy lies on the asphalt / like the body of a boy.” Like, metaphor won’t do here.

Ilya Kaminsky: Hello! My goodness, just catching up with all the wonderful questions here! Thank you for this!

Let me try to answer the questions that I see right in front of me, and then if I miss someone’s question, I hope folks will be able to remind me. Sound good? Let’s start. The first question/observation I see is from Brian about “That Map of Bone and Opened Valves.”

Brian S: That bit I quoted reminded me of a part from Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” where she says, “There is no other way to say this.” Metaphor in that moment would cheapen it in a way.

Ilya Kaminsky: Yes, the metaphor won’t do with the image of a boy shot by police lying in the center of the city. Sometime a fact is a fact. The book is full of metaphors, as you might have noticed, but at times it helps to put things into focus when one withdraws from the metaphor when you most expect it. That old Emily Dickinson trick of denying the rhyme when one most expects it. Withholding can be a part of the story, too.

I wasn’t thinking about Carolyn Forché’s poem, but come to think of it now, it does make sense. Carolyn Forché is a brilliant writer.

Ilya Kaminsky: For me, I wanted the onslaught of detail in that poem—so you have the guards in the tower, you have woman being pulled away from her apartment, you have all other kinds of images. Then, in the moment you cite, you do have a metaphor “like a paperclip” and right after the denial of that metaphor.

As I said, I think Carolyn Forché is a powerful writer—to my mind she is one of the best living writers in the world. Without any doubt. My own imagination leans far more to fabulist writers, such East European authors as Bruno Schulz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and even Isaac Babel.

Eva Woods: As you were writing, did you ever run into a situation where you felt you had to kill a poetic darling to serve the narrative better?

Ilya Kaminsky: Ha! Killing of poetic darlings is a good thing to talk about, isn’t it? I have to say, yes. There are several (published) versions of Deaf Republic. Some of them are quite different. For example, there is a version that is a fairy tale that was published in Harvard Review over ten years ago. Then, there is a version in Poetry magazine, about ten pages, that is also different. I did have a reason for these different versions. And, I wanted different versions to exist in the world.

Gwen Dawson: Reminds me of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with all the different versions.

Ilya Kaminsky: Well, that is very nice. Whitman is a genius of revision. If you compare different versions of Leaves of Grass that in of itself is an MFA in revision. Absolutely brilliant changes. The first page includes whole new stanzas, etc.

My own reasons for different versions were far more personal. I am a refugee. I wanted to have the book that would speak to both my experience in USSR and as someone who cares deeply about the current situation/war in Ukraine. That is one side. I also live in the United States, and have been here since 1993. I have lived on the US/Mexico border—less than ten miles from the border. And, I have seen people arrested in the streets and dragged into police vans on daily basis. That is the other side. I wanted to write about that would speak to both of these experiences. That is, I wanted to have the book that I could say truly represents the refugee’s view of the world—of what was left behind, and of where one is now.

Eva Woods: Sheesh, that’s a thoughtful answer!

Brian S: That certainly helps explain what I picked up on in the piece I wrote for Rumpus, about how this book felt both specific to a place and time and yet universal.

Gwen Dawson: Yes, that was one of the things I loved best. This collection seems to be about a very specific town at a specific moment in time, but it’s also about all of our towns right now. That’s why the final poem, is such a perfect capstone in my view.

Ilya Kaminsky: As to universal: I would actually not recommend going for “universal”—that usually means just the majority’s (e.g. white people’s, in this particular country) version of what they value at any given time. One rarely makes works of art when one aims for that. But the particulars that are so evocative that can wake up to many people people at the same time—that is a good aim, in my opinion. That specificity that is specificity to many humans, that locality that is local to many humans, that is the kind of “universality” I think is worth of considering.

Brian S: I agree, Ilya, and that’s an important distinction to make.

Eva Woods: I was just going to ask about the setting! How did you choose what to specify and what to leave vague there?

Ilya Kaminsky: What to specify and what to leave vague… In case your question relates to what I said about being a refugee and trying to portray that double-view: Well, there are many things about USSR or Ukrainian culture that Americans won’t get. There are many things about American culture that folks elsewhere don’t get. So, eventually one finds a balance. But in case you meant more generally… I don’t think things need to be left vague at all. But in fabulist literature, as in most fairy tales, it is a good idea to leave some things unsaid, so that the reader is implicated, so that reader is participating in the story.

Liz: The reader being implicated—I was trying to articulate that idea. You don’t let us off the hook.

Brian S: No, that’s clear from the opening poem

Eva Woods: The opening poem is a knockout.

Brian S: The move between we and I and back to we, so powerful.

Eduardo Ramos Ruiz: Professor Kaminsky, I found the poem “Yet, I am” a powerful existential voice by the speaker from the silence of the book. And the lines, the answer by the child: “On earth we can do / —can’t we— / What we want.”… wonderfully contradictory, kudos! Can you please expand on the importance (existence) of a voice in a silent world? And perhaps the making of the poem, too?

Ilya Kaminsky: That, Eduardo Ramos Ruiz, on voice: Well, one has to be careful with saying voice in this context. Do you mean actual physical voice? Well, many people might have a physical voice (e.g. physical muteness). If you mean metaphorical voice—then yes, sure, I am with you. I think, at its essence, a human voice is an intimate lyrical utterance. The first time the human being sat on the rock and looked at the beautiful landscape and said, Ah. That was, perhaps, the first poet. Or, on the other side: the first time, the human being was hurt, was in pain, was moaning, Ohhh. That was, perhaps, too, the first lyric moment.

Eduardo Ramos Ruiz: Yes, metaphorical speaker’s voice…

Ilya Kaminsky: Well, I hope I answered your question about the metaphorical voice. If not, let me know and I would be glad to follow up. The lyric poem is always in existence between the realm of silences and the realm of musics. (Yes, with an s at the end of both words). The music itself is mere noise, without silences in it. Yes, silence as such doesn’t exist. It is just a different configuration of noises. The voice, that music, that lyric impulse of what is human in us, always rises. But at times it is also at its strongest when it is in whispers.

Liz: While reading I was thinking a lot about physical voice and the ability to speak and hear. How we choose when to be silent, but also how physical disability or trauma can alter speaking and hearing. Knowing that you have a hearing loss, I wondered how your experience of hearing and verbal communication helped shape the centrality of speech and deafness.

Ilya Kaminsky: Well, being hard-of-hearing certainly did shape this book. I may not be the best person to judge how, since it is harder to see one’s self from a distance. All I can say that I am interested in disability moving away from the realm of the hospital (where it is currently placed by the mainstream culture) to the realm of political minority. If we look at it that way: disability is already very much a political question in our country. Just think about our politicians voting to raise their own salaries while voting against our healthcare rights. So, yes, many people’s disabilities in this country are very political. But having said, that, I must confess that as a poet I am interested in the questions of language far more than the above: I am interested in images as a language of its own. Can one write in a language of images instead of English language? Image, after all, is an international language.

Eduardo Ramos Ruiz: Well said, images as symbol… As seen in all cultures.

Debby: I love this conversation, but I have some questions in a completely different direction: Has this poem/play been performed? Have you ever written a poem in ASL?

Ilya Kaminsky: I do not write in ASL. I am hard of hearing person, not a deaf person. Deaf people have an amazing culture and an incredible language, ASL. When I was growing up, my father tried to teach me Russian sign language. It didn’t work out for various reasons outside of my or his control—1980s and 1990s were a rough time in that part of the world. To answer your other question: yes, when book was still in progress, parts of it were performed by New York City Ballet at Grace Farms in Connecticut.

Eva Woods: Could you imagine this story in another format? Film, etc?

Ilya Kaminsky: Thanks to all kind comments. Well, I can imagine it in other formats. But I am not an artist in other formats. It would only work in other format if a person who knows what they are doing imagines it!

Debby: I’ve watched ASL poetry. Would we call that a language of images?

Ilya Kaminsky: ASL is a very rich, very nuanced language. It would be reductive to call it a language of images. To some extent it is, yes, of course. But what I meant is: why not imagine English a language of images? I mean: we had Jabberwocky as an imagined English—a language of sounds. That influenced Modernists tremendously. People don’t talk enough on how much Jabberwocky influenced someone like Wallace Stevens or someone like Eliot or Lindsay, and so on. But what if one could imagine English made entirely of other elements of poetic craft, such as images? What would happen? Where might it take us? This is just one person wondering, of course.

Brian S: My mom was an ASL translator when she was young and I remember her struggle in trying to explain to seven-year-old me that the sentences didn’t work the same way. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood what she meant.

Liz: Have you made other forays into writing in a language of images? I find this fascinating (as well as the political nature of disability, as a disabled person myself.)

Ilya Kaminsky: Yes, my first book, Dancing in Odessa, has two long poems, “Musica Humana” and “Praise,” wherein I consciously tried to write a poem that’s entirely made out of images, even though both have an argument/plot of sorts, etc. I wouldn’t claim to have succeeded, necessarily. But it was fun to try.

Liz: Oh good. I will buy and read.

Eduardo Ramos Ruiz: Dancing in Odessa was an amazing debut… I was fortunate to hear you read at USC, thanks for passing out loaner books. Everybody should get your first book!

Liz: Writers must hate when readers say this, but have you considered expanding on the world of the book? Is this the final version? (I hope not. I want more and more).

Ilya Kaminsky: This book is already an expansion on two other versions of Deaf Republic story that have been published elsewhere. I might do more, I might not. I do wonder about Anushka.

Liz: As do we all! And thank you for Deaf Republic. The book means a great deal to me.

Eva Woods: Before we run out of time, what are you loving right now? Music, books, anything? Did any of the media you’re interacting with influence the book?

Ilya Kaminsky: I am a Shakespeare-crazy person. So, I am re-reading King Lear. I am also re-reading lyric poets such as Vallejo and Mandelstam and Dickinson. I teach Lucille Clifton’s work often. I think she was underrated as an artist. Carolyn Forché was mentioned above, and I just got a copy of her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, which I think is really powerful. I am reading Jericho Brown’s new collection, The Tradition, which I think is fantastic. I think Valzhyna Mort is a very powerful poet. I think Victoria Chang’s new book, Barbie Chang, is an amazing book. Very interesting how she brings multiple different arcs into that book. Also, interesting how she brings music in unexpected ways. I admire many other writers at work today.

Thank you all so much for the kind words. I am grateful.

Liz: Well, there’s my reading list for 2019.

Eva Woods: Fantastic recommendations! Thanks for your time, this was really enjoyable and interesting.

Ilya Kaminsky: My pleasure. Thank you for reading the book. It means a lot to me.

Debby: I’ll be at your reading in Seattle.

Ilya Kaminsky: Very grateful.

Gwen Dawson: I loved this book. Thank you.

Brian S: Thanks for joining us tonight, Ilya, and for this marvelous book.

Ilya Kaminsky: Thank you all. Much appreciated. Truly.

Brian S: Good night everyone! Stay warm if you can.

Ilya Kaminsky: Good night. Many thanks, again.

***

Photograph of Ilya Kaminsky © Cybele Knowles, 2013, courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center.

When in doubt, revise. No one can recommend this enough. What you can say in many words, you can also usually say in slightly fewer words than that.

***

Final draft: An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

First draft: Consider the apple. Consider it daily. Pick the apple from a nearby tree, or otherwise purchase it. Eat it. As time passes, you will be filled with apples. We are pretty sure this is a good thing. In any event, it’s best to keep medical professionals at bay. Healthcare costs are prohibitive. We think, given the apples, you should be fine.

Final draft: When it rains, it pours.

First draft: As they say, when it rains, it rains a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. Many, many drops. All at once and for a duration. There is so much rain. And it moves in such a pouring motion.

Final draft: The early bird gets the worm.

First draft: Whenever you are late-night loafing, raising a ruckus and/or the roof, popping pizzas, popping tarts, trapped in a vise of your various vices—think, my friend, of the bird I am about to describe to you. Some birds are late. Some birds are later. But not this bird. This bird is early. Waaaaaaaaay early. This bird’s a fuckin’ freak! Up by 3 a.m., just cawing his goddamn head off, scratching topsoil helter-skelter, pecking for that sweet annelid fix. Lotta strutting. And hopping. Honestly, we think he might be on something. The way he gets those worms…

Final draft: C’est la vie.

First draft: C’est… c’est beaucoup de choses. En fait, c’est toutes les choses. C’est la naissance, la mort, et les secondes entre. C’est le jour qui passe, et passe encore. Le jour éternel. Le jour que j’oublie, et le jour que je ne peux pas oublier. C’est l’ennui. La tristesse. La joie. Le fromage. Le fromage. Le fromage. Brie, Camembert, Chèvre, etc. C’est la naissance, la mort, et les secondes entre. Combien de secondes? Qui sait? Personne. Je suis humain, donc je souffre. Je suis humain, donc je persiste et mange aussi du Brie. La vie. C’est ça.

Final draft: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

First draft: Have you ever snaked your toilet, just for fun? You would literally never do that. Your relationship with Trevor is the toilet in this overwrought metaphor—apparently operational, as long as you jiggle the handle, and in the event of overflow, leave the premises at once. Tbh my grasp on plumbing, and Trevor, is tenuous at best.

Final draft: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

First draft: Allow me to preface: It is olden days. We live in the way past and grant one another offerings of equine variety. In keeping with our epochal custom, I have just bestowed upon you one equine. Take heed: An oral appraisal of this equine will not be necessary. Whatever is the normal length in equine tooth—his are that length. Look elsewhere.

Final draft: Boys will be boys.

First draft: Then the Lord said to Cain: Why are you angry? Why are you dejected? If you act rightly, you will be accepted; but if not, sin lies in wait at the door: its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it. Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out in the field. When they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord asked Cain, Where is your brother Abel? He answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4: 6 – 9 NABRE)

Final draft: This too shall pass.

Dairy draft: This too shall pasteurize.

Final draft: Birds of a feather flock together.

First draft: Look, there is no delicate way to broach this: We need to reassess the bird situation. The truth is, we are only just beginning to apprehend the full scope of the early bird’s narrative and the ostracism he faces as a result of his earliness. You see, the other birds, the tardier ones… they’ve turned their teensy, plumy backs on him, their downy rumps. It’s quite adorable, actually—that synchronous rump turn. How I wish it did not portend a haughtier ethos befouling the zeitroost!

Based on preliminary fieldwork, we’ve ascertained that the tardier birds have commenced congregating in a large group or drove—“flocking,” if you will. Also, we must never forget: A flock of tweets is another form of murder. In a brash display of togetherness, they’ve relocated their preening circle nearly five furlongs downwind “as the crow flies” (I’ll explain what I mean by this later…)

Final draft: One swallow does not a summer make.

First draft: …and the early bird, cast from his brethren, warbles a premature tune. It is June, the month of solstice, the month of lies. In this TED Talk I will…

Final draft: There’s no time like the present.

First draft: Honestly? They say tomorrow never comes, but you know what? Neither do I, and I don’t see entire schools of philosophy concerned with that puzzle.

***

Rumpus original art by Kaili Doud.

***

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I met Katya Apekina at a reading in Highland Park, Los Angeles, when she and I were both very pregnant. Another pregnant friend and I had gone to the reading together and the three of us saw one another from across the bookstore, moved towards each other, took over the front row of the reading, and immediately became friends.

When I read the manuscript of Katya Apekina’s book, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, I thought it was one of the best manuscripts I’d ever read. I whipped right through it. It’s a compellingly told story, with a non-traditional narrative and some of the most twisted, unusual, and brilliant sentences I’d ever come across. It’s not often you begin a reading a sentence and are completely surprised at where it’s gone by its end.

Apekina’s stories are the same way; there’s something unusual, strange, and dark about her writing, and perhaps the way she looks at the world. Though I talk to her regularly as a writer, friend, and mom of one of my daughter’s best friends, I thought it would be interesting to email back and forth about her writing and her life. We spoke about the immigrant experience, her revision process, and the shape of the novel.

***

The Rumpus: I spoke with your mom a bit about your book. She said there was a Russian book club in Boston and they are in awe of you for a few reasons. One reason is that the book is not about a Russian immigrant. Do you know about this? Can you expand? Your mom said they think you are a genius. She is very proud of you.

Katya Apekina: [Laughs] It’s so nice how supportive my mom has been about the book. My mom is not exactly someone who gives compliments easily. You have to usually pry them out. And I think she used to be ambivalent about me being a writer. She thought I was dabbling. But when she read my novel, she got it. She just saw it as this whole, complete thing that I had done, and she saw me struggling to write it and to get it published, and she was very encouraging and I think impressed with my perseverance. And, I think she was also a little bit relieved that it wasn’t an autobiographical novel, though I know a lot of people she knew were speculating about that, wondering what kind of terrible childhood I must have had to write that book. I didn’t have a terrible childhood.

The book is not about the immigrant experience, and yet I’m sure that being an immigrant, a person always on the outside of the flow of the culture, is what allowed me to write this book. Every book is autobiographical in some deeper, emotional sense, even if it is not literally autobiographical at all. Something in me, in my experiences, drew me to the subject matter.

Rumpus: That’s interesting, that phrase: “outside of the flow of culture.” Can you talk about your experience as an immigrant? How old were you when your family came to America? What was the process? Why did your family emigrate? Can you talk more about how being “outside the flow of culture” allowed you to write this particular novel?

Apekina: As an immigrant, I think I was aware that American culture was not the only culture, that there were other ways of existing in the world. I came to the US when I was three and a half. I remember always being strange, wrong, trying not very successfully to fit in. My favorite color was pink. I cut holes in all my clothes that were not pink using toenail scissors. I remember eviscerating this nice brown dress that someone gave me. All my clothes were hand-me-downs, and this dress was probably the nicest, and I cut a big hole over the front so that I wouldn’t have to wear it. Maybe I would have performed gender like that if I was born here, too. I don’t know. I do remember just studying other people and commercials very intensely and trying to imitate them.

I think being different, wanting to conform but not being good at it, led to me eventually giving up and then growing comfortable in this difference and feeling special for it.

I don’t know exactly how being outside the flow of culture made me able to write this particular novel, other than that if I was inside the flow I probably wouldn’t have come to writing in the first place.

Rumpus: Your writing takes on many different forms—short fiction, novel, essay, screenplay, translation. I like thinking about headspace required to work on certain projects. For example, a novel requires a totally different headspace than a short story, than an essay, etc. Can you take a moment to think about each kind of writing you produce and the difference (if any you can discern) in your headspace—meaning which parts of your brain/body/soul are working? Which are turned off? Can you write anywhere or anytime in one kind of form, but need particular surroundings for another?

Apekina: The novel required my complete concentration, attention, and faith, and I was writing it over a long period of time, every day. I didn’t work on anything else simultaneously while drafting it. (I did when editing.)

With my stories I find it’s best to just write them in one or two long sittings. When it stretches out beyond that, the story loses steam and never gets finished. I might think about it for a very long time, and make notes—but the actual writing usually comes all at once, pretty quickly, and does not change much.

A lot of times I flit between projects trying to settle into something. It’s nice with a novel because every morning I wake up and I know what I will be working on—I don’t have to endlessly go in circles choosing. Screenwriting is collaborative, so that can be nice to have a joint momentum. It’s also the medium I understand the least.

I think a lot about this birthing video I saw once, where the woman is pushing and pushing and pushing, and finally the baby crowns, and the head is out, and then the rest of the body just slips out in one quick swoop, like a magician pulling out a colored scarf. I think there is a lot of work that goes into the thinking and understanding it as a whole, and then once the head comes out, it’s just typing. If you don’t get distracted, it happens pretty easily.

For all the kinds of writing, I need long stretches of quiet time alone. I need time to read and stare at nothing. I am always in awe of people who can integrate work into the chaos of life. I can’t. And, when I am in the middle of something, it’s hard for me to switch gears, to take care of life stuff.

I am also very slow and very impatient, which is not the best combination.

Rumpus: Speaking of pregnancy and books—we were pregnant at the same time, and I know you worked on your book a lot at the end of your pregnancy and when your daughter was a baby, while I was unable to enter into a new project at that time. How did it work for you, being pregnant and having a baby while writing your novel?

Apekina: I was sick during my pregnancy and couldn’t think straight. I thought—I need to finish this book before the baby is born or else I will never finish it. I barely wrote anything when I was pregnant. It was miserable. But then after having the baby, a few months out, I started working again, and it was fine. I had gotten a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and that allowed me to pay for childcare. I don’t remember really how I made it all work, but I remember it as being a pretty happy time. I did not feel overwhelmed by parenthood until later.

Rumpus: Can you talk about being overwhelmed by parenthood and how that related (or didn’t) to your writing? Also, how do you feel about these kinds of questions about writing and parenthood? I know there are some writers who despise this line of questioning because male writers don’t get asked parenting questions.

Apekina: I guess I think male writers should be asked, too, rather than nobody getting asked. Parenthood is an important and time-consuming part of my life. It’s not really connected to my writing life. I would say the two parts of my life are not very integrated. Maybe that is bad? Maybe it creates some sort of tension between the two that doesn’t need to be there? I don’t know. I feel like I have to protect my writing mind, generally, from the onslaught of daily life as best as I can. I think about writers I admire who seem to integrate the two so well—I’m specifically thinking of Grace Paley. Though she did not start writing until later. I don’t know how old her kids were.

Anyway, I guess keeping the experiences of parenthood out of my writing is something that will probably change. I take forever to process things. I will get around to writing about it, I’m sure, and then will understand things about it that I don’t right now. It’s overwhelming, the combination of the mundane, annoying, transcendent, and joyous. It is all a big pile. I think all the time that I want to be left alone, that I want everyone to stop climbing on me and to be quiet. But the permanent absence of those things would be horrifying.

Rumpus: A central and fascinating theme of the book is about the relationship between a mother and her daughters, and specifically the relationship between Marianne, the mother, and Mae, her youngest daughter. It’s a relationship with very blurry lines. I know it is fiction, and nothing at all like your own relationship with your mother, but I think it’s interesting to think about the shifting relationship of a mother and her daughter. Can you speak a bit about your relationship with your mom, and with your own daughter. Did you ever feel a shift in the borders between your body and theirs?

Apekina: I have not felt that with my daughter. She has always felt like a separate entity to me, not an extension of myself. I think I am fairly attuned to her, but we are not at all enmeshed. Who knows if this will change and evolve as she gets older. And who knows how she feels about it.

With my mother, I was very close, especially growing up. I had a lot of trouble differentiating my opinions and feelings and anxieties from hers. I was in my late twenties, flying on a tiny airplane to an art residency in Wyoming; it is actually where I began writing the novel. And the plane was tiny. It had maybe ten or twenty seats. My mother has always been scared of flying, especially on little planes. And I was very tense, staring out the window at the snow covered mountains, gripping my arm rests until my knuckles were white. And suddenly I thought—”Wait, I’m not afraid of this. This is not my phobia. It’s my mom’s phobia.” And the fear was completely lifted. The rest of the flight was fine. I felt relaxed. How strange, right? To have this epiphany and immediately lose the fear.

I have a lot of epiphanies, usually the same exact ones, over and over. My journals really attest to that.

Rumpus: That’s really fascinating, especially if you consider the current research in epigenetics that phobias may actually be transmitted genetically, though of course we absorb so much from our parents in terms of shared experience.

How about your characters—do you feel close to them, like they are a part of you? How do they come to you? Can you expand on the origins and growth of your characters in this novel? Do you have empathy for all of them?

Apekina: I don’t know where most of them come from. They just revealed themselves in the writing as it went. As for having empathy for them—I think I get where they’re coming from, and I understand how they got there. Is that the same thing as empathy? Does empathy imply more warmth? I have a varying amount of warmth, but I do feel like I can split off from myself and my judgments and imagine how they felt. I tried not to let my judgments bleed into the work too directly. I mean, I obviously have opinions! But they felt irrelevant, since I was telling the story from their points of view.

Rumpus: Talk about the intersection between writing a draft and a revision. What happens during the revision process? Where is a story? How many times did you revise?

Apekina: I revised a lot. I revised as I wrote. I started over. I revised after it was finished off of notes my agent gave me. I did seven rounds of revisions with my agent! My revisions were almost all about adding and expanding things. I don’t think I cut much, if anything. People always say that you should just write out the whole draft and revise later, but I have no idea how to work like that. When the writing does not feel right on a sentence level, when the point of view feels wobbly, I lose the thread and am disconnected from the emotional thrust. How do you keep going with it? So, I don’t know. I did outline continuously as I wrote. Maybe that was a self-soothing thing. I felt like I needed to remind myself constantly of where I was going so that I wouldn’t wander away.

Rumpus: Can you draw what you think the shape of your novel is?

Apekina:

Rumpus: Some consider your book to be a bit dark. Are you attracted to “dark” subjects, whatever that means? Psychologically complicated characters, with tumultuous pasts. Why do you think this is what you gravitated towards for your first novel? Is there anything in your past or your family’s past that would lead to your comfort with complex, strange, or somewhat damaged characters.

Apekina: I was curious about how people with good or neutral intentions can still fuck each other up. I was interested in the way people go through the same things but have completely different experiences of these things. I was curious about where in a family one person ends and another begins.

I guess it’s dark. I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms when I was writing, but I understand why people would see it that way. My grandmother read the first chapter with a dictionary and cried. That surprised me.

Rumpus: Why did she cry?

Apekina: I think because she felt bad for those girls. She grew up as a middle child with two sisters. Maybe it brought something up for her.

Rumpus: You wrote this book sort of a long time ago now. Do you feel different having written and published a book? How did your expectations match up to reality?

Apekina: I am still processing all of it. Maybe I will be forever. The book will be out a year on September 18. I’m doing a European tour in the spring. It has been so cool and so overwhelming. I thought, going into publication, that I had terrible stage fright and that I would hate giving readings. I was very stressed about that. And then I discovered that I am kind of a ham. I don’t have stage fright at all. Maybe this also was not one of my own phobias? I am perfectly comfortable reading in front of large groups of people.

I think my life has probably changed, but I don’t know that I can really see it fully, because the process was gradual. The book felt like a huge burden of responsibility—like I needed to shepherd it out into the world. Once I did that, and I could see it was getting to readers, I felt free of it in a nice way. It exists on its own.

So that is how I feel, but simultaneously, there is a bottomless pit inside of me and it can never be filled, and nothing will ever be enough! So, I think I was thinking, when the book gets published I will be fulfilled, and of course no amount of external validation can really do that. So… I’ve been meditating a lot. And trying to write another novel, which feels just as scary as the first time. Scary and exciting.

***

Photograph of Katya Apekina by Andrew Wonder.

When tiny ripples of jealousy become tidal waves, when subtle irritations become suffocating resentments, when quirks become dysfunctions—these are the moments that overtake R.L. Maizes’s characters in her debut short story collection, We Love Anderson Cooper. Maizes’s heavily flawed characters are often funny, sometimes tragic, and always starkly real.

Both a fiction writer and a personal essayist, Maizes’s work has been published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and has aired on NPR. We Love Anderson Cooper is published by Celadon Books and was released in July. Maizes is currently working on a novel, also to be published with Celadon.

I met Maizes through AWP’s Writer to Writer mentor program where we were both mentees in the same cohort. As we built our own writing community, we shared stories, writing, and pictures of our cats. Recently, we discussed the craft of writing, religion, and feeling like an outsider.

***

The Rumpus: Each of your stories is so unique. Can you tell me a little about your process for idea development?

R.L. Maizes: Stories are everywhere. My mother was a therapist, and I inherited the couch from her practice. I imagined all of her clients had wept on it, and I couldn’t bear to have it around. After giving it away on Craigslist, I wrote the story in the collection titled “Couch,” about a therapist’s couch that keeps clients emotionally stuck. To create the main character, I drew on the many therapists I’ve had over the years, good and bad, but especially bad. The idea for another of the stories came to me when I saw a pizza delivery sign on top of a BMW. It was during the Great Recession, and I imagined the owner of the car had suffered a financial setback, perhaps a change in class and social status. I wondered what if instead of being unhappy about those changes, the owner of the car was pleased and relieved. That turned into the story “Better Homes and Gardens.”

Rumpus: Many of your characters are painfully flawed. They may want to do the right thing (or they may not), but they frequently don’t. Did you find it challenging to write these characters?

Maizes: I don’t find it difficult to write flawed characters because I’m flawed and everyone I know is flawed. We all fail to do the right thing some of the time. The conflicts we face between right and wrong or—and this can be harder—between morally ambiguous choices, are inherent to being human. Characters who don’t have moral failings are not only unrealistic, they’re boring. I enjoy writing a terribly flawed protagonist and seeing if I can get readers to recognize aspects of themselves in the character.

Rumpus: Pets play an important role in many of these stories. Your characters sometimes prefer to interact with animals over humans. So, I have to ask, what role do pets have in your life and how did they affect the writing of this collection?

Maizes: Animals enrich my life in all kinds of ways. My husband, Steve, and I live with a dog, Rosie, and a cat, Arie, both rescues. They’re such loving creatures, and they never complain about their unchanging menus. On the contrary, meal times so excite Rosie you’d think she won the lottery, and maybe she understands that being warm and dry and fed, she has. There are definitely ways in which I prefer animals. I’ve never known one to have a hidden agenda.

After my first husband and I got divorced, a different pair of dogs, Tilly and Chance, took care of me. Tilly comforted me when I was lonely, laying her head on my abdomen where it rose and fell with my breath. Chance, who was protective, made me feel safe. I had dog-proofed the condo, putting baby locks on the cabinets because Tilly would eat anything. But after the dogs and I moved in with Steve, in the throes of new love and attraction, I failed to dog-proof Steve’s house. Tilly got into some pet medication and nearly died. I felt horribly guilty. Years later, after Tilly and Chance passed, they haunted me, opening and closing a dog door that no longer existed. In an attempt to banish their spirits, I wrote the story “Ghost Dogs.”

In another story in the collection, “The Infidelity of Judah Maccabee,” the main character is jealous when his cat falls for his girlfriend. After Steve and I began living together, Tilly shifted her affections to him. It infuriated me, and I nearly broke up with him. I thought changing the animal in the story to a cat and the jealous protagonist to a man would keep Steve from recognizing that I was writing about our relationship. I was mistaken.

Rumpus: Judaism also plays a role in some of these stories. How has Judaism affected your own writing or your perception of yourself as a writer?

Maizes: I grew up in a male-dominated Orthodox Jewish community. The sexism drove me from religion and is the reason you’ll find feminist themes in my work. As a child, I went to Jewish schools, ate kosher food, and observed a different Sabbath and different holidays than most people. I was aware that not everyone welcomed Jews. When I was in high school, friends of mine who were wearing yarmulkes were beat up outside of Madison Square Garden. Not realizing I was Jewish, a client in my law practice used the phrase “Jew you down” to describe a negotiation. Experiencing anti-Semitism has heightened my awareness of prejudices of all kinds. As a result, people who are considered outsiders because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, or simply because of how they look have found their way into my work. I’m interested in the challenges outsiders face and how they handle them.

Rumpus: How did you go about selecting which stories to include in this collection?

Maizes: The protagonists in many of my stories are outsiders. The pain we all feel at being excluded and our tremendous desire to belong is one of my preoccupations. I thought readers would relate to characters who are outsiders and would welcome a collection about them because of what’s going on in our country and because each of us has had the experience of being excluded. I shoehorned in a few stories I thought readers would enjoy even if I had to stretch the concept of outsider a bit.

Rumpus: Writing can be a solitary endeavor, especially for someone without a built-in writing community of an MFA program. How have you gone about developing your literary community?

Maizes: I’ve taken workshops at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Tin House, and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, and have met wonderful writers in all of those places. I was part of a cohort of writers that were mentored in an AWP program—you and I met that way—and I’m still in touch with many of the participants. Twitter and Facebook groups geared toward writers have helped me be part of a literary community. When I attend literary conferences, I try to get together with writers I’ve only met online, and I also pick up the phone to rescue online relationships from the unpredictability of social media algorithms. Meeting someone face to face or hearing their voice improves the quality of the relationship. I live in a relatively small town in Colorado and social media can be great for creating community and for learning about books. It can also be a terrible time suck. Use wisely.

Rumpus: Who are your favorite contemporary writers? What are you currently reading?

Maizes: I’m constantly falling in love with new writers. This year, a friend introduced me to Susan Perabo’s work and I read two of her collections, Who I Was Supposed To Be and Why They Run the Way They Do. I adored both. They’re quirky and full of heart. The story “Retirement,” in the former collection, is told from the point of view of Batman’s butler, Alfred. It’s fantastic. I just finished Kent Haruf’s last novel, Our Souls at Night. There’s a gentleness about his books that I love. I find them a tonic for the roughness of life. I’m currently reading This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love., a powerful collection by Jennifer Wortman, recently released by Split Lip Press. Everyone should run out and pick up a copy. I also recently read Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door and have been recommending it widely. It’s funny and moving and painful.

Rumpus: Can you tell me about the novel you’re writing? What stage is it in now and how do you approach writing a novel as opposed to writing a short story?

Maizes: The novel, Other People’s Pets, is about an animal empath who was raised to be a burglar. It will be out in July 2020, and I’m doing final edits on it now. When I write stories, I’m an avowed pantser. I follow the characters wherever they want to go. I tried to do that with this novel and found that it was impossible. I did a first draft that way and ended up with a mess. I had to create an outline to keep track of all the plots and subplots, and to make sure I didn’t describe it snowing in August. I often strayed from the outline, but it helped me remember where each character was and where he or she was headed. The size of the novel also presented new challenges for me. From one draft to the next, and even from one section of the book to the next, I would forget what I had written and risk repeating myself. At one point I had three characters named Sam in the book, minor characters in different sections, but still.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the process of revision. How frequently do you revise a story before you feel like it’s ready?

Maizes: It’s different for each story, but it’s always extensive. After I’ve been working on a story for a while, the words and the structure become too familiar. I can’t imagine changing them. That’s when I put the story aside, or send it to a trusted colleague for feedback. I also use developmental editors to critique my work. I don’t have an MFA, and the feedback I’ve received from developmental editors, in workshops, and from fellow writers, has taught me much of what I know about writing. There’s a fear when you begin to revise that you’ll make the story worse. And that can happen. You can over-revise a story and lose some of the liveliness of an earlier draft. The original impetus for the story can get lost. But we live in the age of computers. So you can always go back to a prior draft. And if you don’t revise, you lose the opportunity to deepen the work. We’re trained to want instant gratification and that works against revision. Writers want to see a story published before it’s as good as it could be or as good as they could make it. I often think about something Antonya Nelson said in a workshop, which is that whatever story you’re working on, you’re only going to write that particular story once, so make it as good as you can.

Rumpus: You’ve also had nonfiction published in the Washington Post and other publications. How does the process of writing nonfiction differ from fiction?

Maizes: I’m predominantly a fiction writer. When I write a personal essay, I have to remind myself I’m not allowed to make things up. I have to ask myself at several points in the drafting, Did this really happen? Do I really know that? How? Sometimes the answer is no, it didn’t really happen or at least I don’t know that it did, and I search my memory for what I actually do know and I research to fill the gaps. I find writing personal essays, which often plum painful memories or trauma, harder than writing fiction, because in fiction you can change or disguise painful experiences, and in that way get distance from them. There’s also the issue of disclosure. In nonfiction, you risk disclosing the personal lives of others. Now, one might have the right to do that, but fiction offers the opportunity to write about things that happened while changing details to avoid embarrassing others. Fiction and nonfiction get at different truths. Nonfiction examines what happened and its meaning. Fiction explores the truth that arises from selecting among countless stories one could invent, and numerous versions of each, the ultimate selection being the artist’s vision of what’s true.

***

Photograph of R.L. Maizes by Adrianne Mathiowetz.

For the fifth installment of The Mentor Series, we’re very pleased to bring you this conversation between Leslie Jamison and her mentor Elizabeth McCracken.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as the novel The Gin Closet. Her new essay collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, will be released by Little, Brown & Company tomorrow. A National Magazine Award finalist, she has contributed to publications including the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Oxford American. She lives in Brooklyn and directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.

Elizabeth McCracken, twice nominated for the National Book Award, is the author of six books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, and Bowlaway. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. She has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University, the University of Oregon, the University of Houston, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas, Austin, and boy are her arms tired.

Their musings about capital-L longing; the differences, if you will, in writing fiction versus nonfiction; and the punctuation manifesto is instructive and inspiring.

– Monet Patrice Thomas, Interviews Editor

***

Leslie Jamison: It feels fitting to commune with you this August, because it was fifteen Augusts ago—as if we were living in a fairy tale—that I first walked into your classroom in Iowa. I was twenty-one years old, vibrating with nerves and desire, smoking my cloves on the wooden porch of Dey House, with the absurd, bristling green lushness of Iowa all around, and you seemed made of velvet and magic: sharp with wit and soft with kindness, nicer than a writer had any business being. Which came as a relief! I’d always been embarrassingly nice, and worried it disqualified me from being a Real Writer.

I remember many things from your workshop, but one of them is that you treated all our characters so tenderly. You were so attuned to their various longings. I felt that in your work, too, as I was falling in love with Peggy’s love for James and his impossibly ambitious body, with its untenable tallness; or the lost, tentatively reaching souls in Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry? And then reading Bowlaway this summer, I was struck all over again by your acute, unsentimental attention to longing, especially unsatisfied longing. (Maybe that’s the only kind of longing?) Margaret, for example: she wants to love a girl who doesn’t need her as a mother; she wants to eat all the candy in the world; she wants a little room with a purple chenille blanket and a lumpy glass lamp; she wants things so hard and for so long she becomes afraid of her own longing. I read that line and felt X-rayed! So I thought maybe we could start by talking about longing, because it was one of the great shaping forces for me as I wrote these essays, too.

How does longing help you understand your characters, or express them? How do you think we’re shaped by the things we long for? How does that unfulfilled longing offer a different set of contours than the way we’re defined by what we have, or what we get?

Elizabeth McCracken: Fifteen years ago! That astonishes me. I remember you and your work so clearly and fondly—I even remember which room our workshop was in, and where you sat in the class, and who sat near you. You were very shy (as you say in The Recovering) but astonishingly smart in your critiques.

Longing! It’s the great subject, isn’t it? I’m thinking of the wonderful first section of the entirely wonderful Make It Scream, Make It Burn called “Longing,” which I find interesting to meditate on since those essays by and large are wishing for things that can’t be attained or even really known with any certainty, never mind embraced. No chance of requitement (which is a word, no matter what my spell check says—funny how mostly we’re left with unrequited love, no verb form, no noun—speaking of longing). Anyhow (sorry, I’m digressive and prone to parentheticals at the best of times): whale, dead theoretical previous owner of your soul, synthetic people. So permalonging.

I love how you write about cynicism and belief and sincerity and skepticism and how they fold over each other. That electrifying ending to “We Tell Ourselves Stories to Live Again”: “We are safe, or else we aren’t. We live, until we don’t. We return, unless we can’t.”

Maybe the spark that results from the friction between belief and disbelief is longing. Longing suggests something darker than hope. A person can decide to give up hope.

It’s possible—though I’m also prone to saying this kind of thing before I know whether I agree with it or not—that essentially longing is plot, or narrative, a thing born in the past and straining toward the future. When I hear the word I think of a character at a tilt, arms out, reaching for the end of the story. That old canard of fiction classes (which I’m not sure I’ve ever said aloud in a class but don’t disagree with): what does the character want? It does feel to me that the surest way to really know a person you’re writing about (fictional or non-) is to know what they long for: longing exists that that intersection of the private and the personal.

Jamison: I love your image of a character with her arms out, reaching for the end of the story. I remember a Wiccan man in prison in Ohio (another story) once telling me that if someone ever learns your true, secret name, and pronounces that name, then he can drain all of your psychic energy—maybe our deepest longings must remain unnamed by that same logic. Thinking about that character with outstretched arms, I’m struck by how many of your characters are outsiders or oddballs. In a sense, of course, who else would we possibly want to read about? We only want to read about the popular girl laughing with her friends on the bleachers once we realize she’s desperately unhappy, too. But your work feels simultaneously invested in outsiders and in the spaces where they find some provisional, fleeting, surprising community. I’m thinking of the bowling alley in Bowlaway and all the folks who might have some temporary or partial home there. I’m wondering how you think about outcasts and community—how these things come together for you? How the work flicks back and forth between them?

And returning to that character lurching through the story, with her arms grasping toward some kind of ending—do you think consciously about giving your characters the things they yearn for? Or not giving them the things they yearn for? Or giving them things they didn’t know they were yearning for? What do you place in their outstretched arms?

McCracken: Now that you’ve told me about the Wiccan Man, I’m obsessed with this thought: sure, if you say the name “Bloody Mary” three times in a mirror, you’ll conjure her up, but how does Bloody Mary feel about that? She probably doesn’t want to be conjured up. At the very least, she wants to be invited places that aren’t slumber parties.

I do write about oddballs a lot, though this is my culture: I am an Oddball American, from generations of them. I kind of don’t mean that as a joke. When I was in the workshop I still had quite a few relatives in Des Moines (my mother was a native Iowan) and one school break my friend Karen, who was driving west from Iowa City, dropped me off and met a few of them and then said to our friends, “You might think Elizabeth doesn’t write realistic fiction. I’ve met her family, and she writes extremely realistic fiction.” My short story characters tend to be mostly less eccentric; not sure why that is—though perhaps it’s because they’re also less historical. The past is peculiar. The present is peculiar too, of course, we’re just inured to its peculiarities. What outfits do we not even notice that will be in forty years the equivalent of the chevron-patterned crocheted jumpsuits that have entire websites devoted to them?

Or to put it another way: I like Dickens, and I think he’s more true-to-life than people give him credit for.

You’re right, I’m always interested in community and public spaces, no doubt because of my years in public libraries. The private self sharpened against the outside world compels me—I feel as though that’s one of your topics, too: the urge to share a child’s possible past life, or your simulated Second Life; Annie’s photographs of María’s family and then your description of Annie as she takes them; all the exhibitions in the Museum of Broken Hearts. Even in “The Quickening,” when it’s your own private life. You write so beautifully about that sort of concentrated light flashing into a darkened room when the door just starts to open, and then what happens ever after.

A lot of your essays are—this is one of my very, very favorite genres of nonfiction—about things that, if you wrote about them in fiction, people would moan about excessive symbolism, or say the notion was too far-fetched. (“I just didn’t buy it,” I can hear an irksome person say in workshop.) A whale known only by his voice! A museum of broken hearts! An entirely synthesized life that is deeply emotionally compelling! Real life is highly symbolic, and I love how you write about that, how it deepens in the essay to be about both the symbols and our need for them to fit together into narrative.

I have all sorts of questions for you about how your essays come to be and how that’s different from your fiction, but let me try to sum it up: do you separate out your reporting from your writing, or, once you know what you’re writing about, do you think about the final project as you research? In other words, when does the narrative kick in for you?

Jamison: Sometimes I feel like a bit of a Bloody Mary figure when it comes to haunting certain subjects in my writing, always showing up once more in the mirror, Oh no! Not her again! It’s like I can get as far afield as I please in terms of the surfaces of my subjects—digital paradise, Civil War photography, evil stepmothers in fairy tales—but the core subjects will always remain the same: empathy and its limits, intimacy and its limits, representation and its limits. I’m always showing up to the same parties with my sleeping bag and my notebook full of questions.

I love how you framed the question: When does the narrative kick in for you? Whether I’m reporting or writing personally, it’s always been important for me not to let narrative kick in too soon. Or rather, to be suspicious of narrative when it rings the doorbell an hour early and tries to convince me to let it in. Because I know it’s my nature to try to construct the story prematurely—”Second Life is a digital DIY refuge for outcasts!” “My frequent-flier father gave birth to my longing for absent men!”—and I want to remain curious and open, attuned to the more complicated stories that live underneath the plot lines that occur to me first, what I sometimes—at least when I’m dealing with personal material—refer to as the “cocktail party versions,” the succinct, overly neat, overly snappy elevator pitch of the psychology at play.

When it comes to reportage, this is part of why I’m terrible at pitches. How could I possibly tell an editor what the story is going to be before I’ve reported the piece? Sometimes I don’t even know what the guiding questions are going to be before I’ve reported the piece—I have to go in there with the questions I think are driving me, but I ultimately end up taking the weird, shadowy little path forking away from the main path, and that’s where I find the story I most want to tell.

It’s important for me to surprise myself as I write. I’m always surprised when I’m reporting—unless I’m really doing my job wrong, or being terribly obtuse, or asking all the wrong questions. But I also surprise myself when I dig back into memory, when I interrogate the stories I’ve always told myself about my own life, and when I revise a piece to zero in on the places where it’s overly simple or pat. That quality of surprise is part of why I think of revision as a fundamentally creative and exciting act.

For this recent collection, I revised several essays I’d written four and five years earlier—not just tweaked, but earnestly revised—and in those revisions, unearthed more complicated ideas lurking beneath what I’d already written: I discovered connections between reincarnation and 12-step recovery I hadn’t known were there; I discovered that my obsession with absent men wasn’t about wanting them to be present so much as it was about finding a certain amount of comfort in their distance.

I love revision as a constant turning of the screw. That sense of excitement is a really important part of my pedagogy, too—it’s why I think something vital and primal and dynamic and alive is happening in workshop, as we help people think harder about the phantom unwritten essays lying buried beneath the essays they’ve already written. And I bring the energy of discovery that happens in workshop back to my own revisions.

All of this makes me wonder about the feedback loop between your teaching and your writing. I see so many lines of resonance between them, particularly in your deeply human attention to characters—whether you’ve created them, or someone else has—but I wonder what the lines of resonance are for you. How do your teaching and writing feed each other? Do they feed each other?

McCracken: I love what you say about revision. Me, too. The trick for all writing but especially books, I think, is making sure the material doesn’t seize up on you, so that revising is as pleasurable and full of possibility as creation. The older I get the less I recognize the difference between composition and revision: they seem the same thing.

If you’d asked me seven years or so ago whether there was a connection between my writing and teaching, I would have said no. (I would have been wrong.) For many years, my calendar was divided. For one semester a year, I taught—usually at Iowa, but not always—and I put all my time into it. Then I went off to write somewhere else. This worked well until it didn’t. Even after Edward and I had kids, we shifted around a bit, but finally I took a permanent, full-time job in 2010, when I was forty-four.

Then I realized how much I’d been fooling myself. For me, teaching and writing are entirely, happily conjoined. They share a liver and a circulatory system, even though I think they have separate hearts. When I teach I tell students that whenever somebody is talking about your work, they’re really talking to themselves about their own work. God willing what they say is something you need to hear; certainly it’s something they need to hear. Me, too, goddammit. Anything I say about student work is something I need to hear, and I can only hope it’s useful for the writer whose work I’m marking up.

These days I tell my graduate students that one of the major reasons they’re in graduate school is to develop their own manifestoes about writing. What writing should do, what they believe are its essential qualities, what they most dream about its possibilities. Persnickety stuff, too, like deep analysis of their feelings about punctuation. There’s very little I can teach any student directly. I can only try to help them think the most interesting thoughts they can.

Recently I’ve become more aware that as I teach I am developing my own theories of what fiction can do—what a short story can do that a novel can’t, and vice-versa; the liberties of autobiographical fiction versus the liberties of memoir; etc.—and so I’m thinking grander thoughts and that worms its way into my own work. I absolutely think that I write better, more interesting short stories than I did when I was younger because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to write better stories of all kinds, not just how to improve the sorts of stories I thought I was interested in.

Also: I grow old, I grow old, and I am so grateful to have the chance to talk to younger writers. I have a horror of becoming a period piece, to think that what seemed important in both form and content when I was in graduate school is how art should therefore be forever.

So here is my last question to you, and I will try to make it not too open-ended. You got an MFA in fiction; you’ve published a wonderful novel but your great success came with nonfiction; how do those two things feed each other?

Jamison: A punctuation manifesto! I think I’ve been writing one for years, without realizing I was doing just that. I think of punctuation in the same way I think about fevers: it’s surface evidence of some deep internal struggle; our use of punctuation can give us so much information about our desires and vulnerabilities as writers, our deep compulsions.

How do they feed each other? There are tons of pragmatic ways that I think my life as a fiction writer feeds my nonfiction: my intentions around building characters (seeing real-life figures as “characters” I need to build on the page); my commitment to scene and specificity; my devotion to sensory detail as a force compelling me to be a better reporter in the field…(On that last, it’s as if the future writer who will sit at the computer, with her novelist’s desire to create the texture of the world in all its glorious particularity, is constantly perched on the soldier of the flailing reporter who just wants to pack it up and go home, saying, No! You have to write down EXACTLY WHAT KIND of carnivorous plant this man has growing in his garden, so you can put it in the piece later on… And what color are its deadly pitchers? And what insects does it eat?)

But I think the truth is that fiction and nonfiction come with such different kinds of liberty, and writing in each allows me to experience more fully and viscerally the freedoms of the other—it sharpens them into focus. The freedoms of fiction are more obvious—you can make shit up! You can change the end of the story!—but when I first started writing essays, I felt like nonfiction granted me the freedom to think on the page as directly and explicitly as I wanted to, and it gave me the freedom to respond to things (other art, other lives, my own life) rather than generating it all from the confines of my head; and that felt intensely liberating. I’m not saying these are truths of each genre—you can think on the page in fiction, and it’s absolutely a way of responding to the world as well—but nonfiction allowed me to inhabit different postures of thinking and feeling, and somehow its contrast to fiction—the thrilling vertigo of moving from one to the other—felt energizing, jarring in the best ways.

Ultimately there’s something shared between them—for me, I think—that’s less about resting anywhere, in any mode or any vein of permission, and more about shuttling between realms of possibility, or directions of gaze: moving back and forth between digging deep into the self and launching far away from the self—no matter what I’m writing, or how I’m writing—that call and response always feels close to the core, that boomerang of looking away and returning.

***

Photograph of Elizabeth McCracken by Edward Carey. Photograph of Leslie Jamison by Beowulf Sheehan.

Stuart M. Ross’s debut novel, Jenny in Corona, introduces a brilliant new literary voice. Set in Queens and Manhattan in the aughts, the book is narrated by Ty, a half-Jewish, half-Catholic twenty-something who works for a business consulting firm on Wall Street. He’s in love with Jenny, a fledgling writer from his Queens neighborhood, but she finds ways to keep her distance. He’s also smitten with his co-worker, Krista Kaplan, but she’s his supervisor and skeptical of Ty because of his relationship with Jenny. His mother has recently died, his father spends most of his time watching movies from the Rocky and Superman franchises, and a senior boss wants Ty to fire his office’s only male African American team member for nebulous reasons.

While the underlying plot elements of this novel are well-charged, the real star of this book is Ty’s voice, which is by turns hilarious, poetically observant, psychologically incisive, and always off-beat. The novel questions our culture from a hundred directions, sometimes with sly allusions or double-jointed ironies, leaving readers in the exhilarating but uncomfortable position of having to think for ourselves about our collective plight. Regarding Jenny in Corona, Rebecca Makkai writes, “Stuart Ross has one of the strangest minds I’ve ever encountered: I say this not as a warning but as an enthusiastic endorsement.” She’s on to something.

To find out more about the workings of Ross’s mind and art, he and I spoke recently over email, discussing his aesthetic influences, the relationship between writers, revision, and rejection, and the role of humor in this first novel.

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The Rumpus: This is one of the most stylistically inventive and tonally complex novels I’ve ever read. The writing is dense with poetic detail, jokes, paradoxes or outright contradictions, bursts of social and aesthetic analysis, and free association. Can you talk about Ty’s voice and some of the effects you’re hoping to accomplish with it?

Stuart M. Ross: First off, thank you for writing the above, and thank you for conducting this interview. There are few greater pleasures for a writer than being read.

Cuts and nicks are important to me. Shaving against the grain with all five blades. Voice is blood and the Band-Aids come later. Maybe Ty’s voice is Salinger’s Zooey Glass sinking into the too-full bathtub, cigarette in one hand and shaving mirror in the other. “Although he looked into the mirror while he lathered, he didn’t watch where his brush was moving, but, instead, looked directly into his own eyes, as though his eyes were neutral territory, a no man’s land in a private war against narcissism he had been fighting since he was seven or eight years old.” Those italics are mine. Much virtue in that as though. If I ever looked for Ty’s voice in books, I would’ve looked into Zooey’s bathroom eyes, and found a steamy Switzerland staring back at me.

Rumpus: Is Ty’s sensibility “just the way he is” or were you thinking of it as a consequence of what he’s lived through and seen? In other words, to what extent did you want to “psychologize” the narrative voice and Ty’s behavior, if at all, as a response to these early experiences?

Ross: I’m not sure any of us get to be “just the way we are.” These traumas shape Ty’s “responsibilities,” as he announces in the second sentence. Ty’s responsibilities include seeking approval from women while craving their criticism, the inability to form and sustain male friendships, enabling his father’s drug addiction, enabling the racism and misogyny of his boss, his unfortunate desire for the no-nonsense Krista Kaplan, the perverse pleasure he seems to take in watching Jenny suffer, and his dream where his mother turns into a mouse hopping like a bunny. Ty is, you know, tied in a knot. On a very old shoe. He attracts those who wish to harm him. If you continue hurting him—if you call him a meathead, the way Jenny does, if you call him a nightmare, the way Heidi Mann does—he will be your responsible friend forever.

The novel’s gravelly structure welcomes the reading you hint at. The first chapter covers twenty-two years of Ty’s life and offers the reader an almost parodic accumulation of psyche-shattering events. The death of the mother, soiling your pants and getting beat up at school, the death of the young artist, the anthologizing of poetry, two instances of abuse—or I might say the diaphanous intimacy of the “best student/best teacher” power relationship—and, upon meeting Jenny Marks, hetero first love. The abuse, in particular, is cruelly tied up in the idea of creation, of creating or finding voice. The remainder of the book can be read as Ty’s inability to locate that voice. Later in the book, Ty says he enjoyed being abused, just to seem cool. Even later, Ty buys a notebook, and says he “hopes to get to it.” You assume he won’t. Because it seems there is only discarded, permanent language, no dynamic critical apparatus, for Ty’s fate. So I tried, with this book, to white some of that permanent language out.

Rumpus: At one point, Krista says to Ty, “You’re funny, Ty. But you don’t know when to stop being funny.” How did you manage the balance between humor and pathos in this novel?

Ross: Humor is energy. I hear the rapper Princess Nokia in one verse unraveling her ethnicity like Carla from In the Heights, and in the next repeating for eight bars: Don’t you fuck with my energy. That’s funny. As a writer I am interested in the way humor moves from the old place and into the new place. That is a source of pathos.

Rumpus: Ty says, “Words don’t matter… Money matters.” What issues in the relationship between art and commerce, or between the individual and the economy, were you interested in exploring in this book?

Ross: Well, we’re up against a word limit here. “Money is the reason we exist,” Lana Del Rey claims in her song “National Anthem.” Is Lana’s “we” Americans or American women? I stick up Bellow’s admonition, too, that New York is not the artistic capital of the world, it is the administrative capital of the world. People hit the big city and fall off into fancy’s dream. They arrive in Act V and now they’re married off, no prenup.

Jenny in Corona is fed up with this. The novel is fed up with flâneurs because flâneurs get whacked for having a smile on their face. The novel is impatient with noiseless city figures weaving gossamer threads. The novel alludes to the close of Teju Cole’s Open City, when the quiet figure escapes Mahler’s gallows to twirl on the fire escapes of Carnegie Hall, but the novel also knows, as Ty fails to instruct Michael Mann, that gazing at the skyline means labor, means “seeing nothing but your client’s next request.” That’s the reality of everything being fair when you’re living in the city. “The young are not so young here,” as Morrison’s narrator writes in Jazz, “and there is no midlife.” The rest, thankfully, is the myth of Eileen Myles.

Rumpus: In many places, the novel seems to chafe against the pretensions or constraints of political correctness. How were you trying to frame the issue of political correctness in this novel?

Ross: Great question. As a human being, I believe in political correctness. If someone is telling me how they feel, some small thing they need to feel respected, I listen to them. But I also, as a person and a writer, don’t believe in atomization. It’s pretty to think the monoculture is finished, but that’s a cybermyth, enriching Twitter’s shareholders and empowering its most famous user, the orange atomizer. Rather, I believe that all of us are, in DeLillo’s eschatological formulation at the close of Cosmopolis, “waiting for the shot to sound.” While we wait, why not write our way out of politics and grow up. Many have written about the weak novels celebrated authors are piecing together, all of which fail to “tackle our time.” Joseph Brodsky warned against this in his Nobel lecture. “The real danger for the writer is finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.”

Rumpus: Ty’s romantic relationships seem to be characterized by intense intimacy, both physical and verbal, and a high degree of detachment. The characters don’t seem to be exclusive with each other and occasionally fall out of touch to varying degrees. What relationship dynamics were you most interested in exploring in this novel?

Ross: Falling out of touch is a nice idiom, isn’t it. Jenny in Corona is about well-fed twenty-somethings with nuptial agency—it’s not The Other Boleyn Girl. Sally Rooney is much better at your question than I am. My novel’s relationship dynamics crash. Suddenly piano, quickly forte. In Rooney, there are diminuendos and crescendos. She also claimed Salinger’s Franny and Zooey as a source for Conversation with Friends, speaking of a character’s transition into a new social world, to become a new kind of person in a “compound, or multiple, love story.” What could be left today but the compound, multiple love story?

Rumpus: I understand that the final version of this book is quite different from the first full draft. Can you talk about your revision process?

Ross: The fiction marketplaces demand so much revision that an author’s “final draft” can end up unrecognizable. So you’re an amateur. You get interest. Amazing! But change one thing! You change everything. And they never email back. But you grow as a writer in this game. It’s one reason no writer can recreate the defeat of their debut. It’s one reason I don’t often self-publish. When have craftspeople not craved the rejection of their gatekeepers? Writers are “self” enough, especially in our anti-modern age when there’s no Pound revising Eliot anymore. There is community, of course, better than ever. But most of us do everything ourselves. Maybe this is a romantic notion, but art is created through the inspiration of inhaling the black breath of rejection, not merely its inboxing and indexing.

In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, the French philosopher Alain Badiou writes that the work of art “sets itself up as an inquiry into the question of its own finality.” For me there is something thrilling about how many times and in so many different ways Jenny in Corona was revised, rejected, accepted, discarded, rejected. And how it ended up so close to home when finality finally came.

Rumpus: The novel includes a lot of comments about art and references to various art forms, especially music and painting. What are some of the keys to your own aesthetic as a writer?

Ross: My cultural upbringing was very similar to what Ty experiences at his uptown music school. We were minded by Lena Dunham types, distracted downtown teenagers whose parents were professional artists. When I see Hannah Horvath, I see our babysitters. Forever I’ve been told how to act, how to behave and dress, what to consume, by downtown hipsters. You shouldn’t listen to Billy Joel; you should listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees. More broadly, most of my teachers were underpaid, over-caffeinated radical white Jewish women, vegetarians announcing the genocide of indigenous peoples before Thanksgiving break. This is all to say that writing that doesn’t engage on a highbrow level, writing that offers false hope, or really any hope, writing that doesn’t push language and moral limits, is not my cup of tea. Crisis managers have a phrase: Run to the trouble. Those are the books I run to.

Rumpus: Who are some of your favorite writers?

Authors that have meant a lot to me the last few years include Greg Baxter, Megan Boyle, Eve Babitz, Amiri Baraka. Always Don DeLillo. Erin Osmon’s Jason Molina biography is magical, as is Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker. I cried for like an hour when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize. Nathaniel Mackey and Eileen Myles are grandmasters. Last winter I read all those Anthony Powell books. A winter I will never get back. Books do furnish a room.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Ross: I’m trying to publish a new novel about a Gold Coast Chicago couple who go to mystical lengths in the conception and delivery of their first child. It’s a parody of “fertility journey” books and a heartfelt addition to them. I Love Our Cyclops is what I want to call it, but I also wanted to call Jenny in Corona Almost There, 57th Street. This new book has a smoother structure and a more discerning narrator. I’m excited.

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Photograph of Stuart M. Ross by Anise LeAnn Photography.

Tina May Hall’s much-anticipated debut novel, The Snow Collectors, follows her 2010 short story collection, The Physics of Imaginary Objects, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, as well as her 2009 novella in prose poems, All the Day’s Sad Stories, which won the Caketrain Chapbook Competition. Both of Hall’s previous books walk the line between prose and poetry, hybridizing narrative with a scalpel’s precision of sharp, haunting sentences, and The Snow Collectors is similarly crafted. The story of a mourning scientist who stumbles upon a dead body in the snow follows Henna’s search to discover the body’s identity, a search that throws her into the now-famous history of the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition into the Artic—a history that someone clearly doesn’t want Henna to unearth.

As a reader, I was pulled into the narrative immediately—a narrative that blends mystery with the gothic, and poetry with prose—as much as I was struck on every single page by the deliberate crafting of each sentence. It’s a rare feat for a novel to be so compulsively readable and so intricately written. Every sentence in The Snow Collectors feels like a carefully chiseled ice sculpture, which is what I couldn’t help but imagine as the novel plunged me into Henna’s winter-encased world. This same quality is what made me an enormous fan of Hall’s work when I first read The Physics of Imaginary Objects and All the Day’s Sad Stories.

Hall and I recently discussed the structure of The Snow Collectors, the research process the novel required, blending genres in her work, and characterization—including how to write a compelling animal character.

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The Rumpus: Thank you for making the time to talk about The Snow Collectors. It’s such a beautiful book, and I want to first ask about characterization. The novel’s protagonist, Henna, is a hydrologist who has lost her family at sea. She is such a fascinating, independent character and I wanted to follow her everywhere from the first page to the end. How did you dig into character development for the novel? How did you get to know Henna as your main character?

Tina May Hall: Henna’s voice was always pretty clear to me, so I just kept testing how much I could throw at her in terms of loss, both personal bereavement and then the larger, more ineffable grief of watching the world expiring. To counter that, I wanted to give her some superpowers, so I slowly figured out through trial and error that she has a semi-magical ability to dowse and loves a tall witchy lace-up boot and is an excellent researcher with a broad stubborn streak.

Rumpus: Many of the characters in the novel maintain a collection or archive of sorts—collections of snow samples, letters, records of birds of prey, a snow almanac, even a museum of pre-environmental worldwide disaster. What draws you toward exploring archival work in your fiction? How does it bind these characters together?

Hall: I love collections and clutter and strange groupings. I’m never more inspired than when I’m peering at the weird odds and ends someone has gathered up like a dam against dissolution, be it a curio cabinet full of colored glass or an archive of letters of a Victorian termagant. I think my own writing process is akin to this kind of assemblage, an accumulation of small bits that get arranged and rearranged until they make a kind of pattern.

Rumpus: The novel centers on the 1845 disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic exploration and the subsequent expeditions launched by his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, to determine what happened. How involved was your research process for The Snow Collectors?

Hall: Too involved, I’m sure! But it was so much fun to visit the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge to read Jane Franklin’s journals and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to see the relics from the lost expedition found on the ice in the 1800s. More recently, I took a trip to Ottawa to see the new items pulled up from the vanished ships, which the Canadian government found in 2014 and 2016. And there was a lot of reading of expedition logs and poring over maps, both favorite activities. I finally had to drag myself away from the research because there is so much written about this lost expedition. It truly is one of the great mysteries of the nineteenth century, and I couldn’t be more excited that the ships were found after a century and a half of searching—though it did require some redrafting on my part.

Rumpus: The novel definitely dabbles in mystery, as Henna draws closer and closer to figuring out what happened to the dead woman and how this relates to the Franklin expedition, as well as in the gothic as Henna’s journey takes her through snow-encased landscapes and labyrinthine houses. The book is incredibly suspenseful and I couldn’t put it down. What role did exploring genre play to you while writing The Snow Collectors, as well as setting the right tone?

Hall: I knew from the beginning of this project that I wanted to play with the gothic, which is a tradition that I really love. So the challenge became how to navigate and celebrate the conventions of that genre and still do the fun indulgent stuff with lyricism and compression of language that usually motivates my writing. I don’t know if it all works out, but it was thrilling to try to push up against genre and density of language and see what strange hybrids emerged. I also became more and more interested in how environmental concerns and the rapidly changing climate might express themselves through a genre that deals in repression and hauntings and the sublime effect of nature.

Rumpus: In addition to playing with genre, the novel is also beautifully written, with some of the sharpest, most vivid sentences I’ve read: “The melted snow exuded a scent: it was the smell of starved blood and ocean voyages, and watered-down turpentine, rotting fruit, the fragrance of a thousand kisses gone stray, the dried remains of small animals in the forest, the salt of an oyster’s milk.”

What is the drafting and revision process like for you? Do such razor-sharp sentences come to you easily, or do you find that you rework sentences again and again until you get them the way you want them?

Hall: Thank you for the kind words about the writing. I wish fully realized sentences came more easily to me! I’m definitely a compulsive re-worker and fiddler and read-it-aloud-er. Fortunately, I enjoy revision and am willing to sit in one place staring at a computer screen mulling over the peaks and valleys of a sentence for unreasonably long stretches of time.

Rumpus: Landscape and setting feels particularly acute in The Snow Collectors. I could feel the deep freeze of Henna’s town and community on each page. How did you immerse yourself in the world of this novel?

Hall: Well, I am someone who grew up in the Southwest and moved to a small Northeastern village that is rife with semi-gothic trappings such as decaying old houses, and transcendent pastoral landscapes, and old-timers who know where all the skeletons are buried. So, although the novel isn’t autobiographical in its main elements—no family lost at sea or dead bodies in the backyard—I have now spent many winters submerged in snow that never seems to end but still strikes me as an entirely romantic experience.

Rumpus: Like the novel’s winterscape, the structure of the novel also feels crucial, told in discrete sections throughout chapters that end with interstitial segments of Franklin’s and Lady Jane’s story. How did you decide upon the right form for the narrative told?

Hall: I originally had lofty ambitions to have the novel be evenly split between the 1800s, focusing on Lady Jane Franklin, and the present day with Henna. Lady Jane Franklin was actually the entry point for the book, and I thought she would be the main character since she is such a fascinating, prickly, ambitious, and determined woman who traveled the world with her own iron bed, gathering up all kinds of objects and scraps of knowledge to bring home to London in between her haranguing of various constituencies to search for her lost explorer husband. However, the present-day story quickly took over. I don’t know if it was my limitations in terms of writing sustained historical fiction or if Henna’s story just became more urgent to me, but most of the research I did ended up in those brief fictional encyclopedia entries, and I’ve reconciled myself to the rather ephemeral, ghostly presence of the personages I originally thought would be the center of the novel.

Rumpus: Henna’s main companion is her deceased twin sister’s dog, Rembrandt. He too is a wonderfully well-drawn character, particularly for an animal, which I imagine can be hard to do. How did you go about developing Rembrandt’s character? For you, are there distinctions between creating humans and animals on the page, or is the process relatively similar?

Hall: I’m so glad you enjoyed Rembrandt! He began with a friend’s dog, a particularly beautiful and noble German Shepard named Lucy (so, Rembrandt’s opposite in nearly all ways) who had a great habit of running ahead in the woods and jumping out at you—it clearly brought her such joy and satisfaction to do it. I gave Rembrandt that habit but then made him ridiculous and uncouth and floppy and overweight because Henna is such a buttoned-up, reserved character in love with her own grimness. She needed some comic relief. And then Rembrandt just refused to be left behind, even when it would have made more sense for him to be shuffled off to a friend or kennel. I knew I’d found a fellow dog-lover in Michelle Dotter, the editor-in-chief of Dzanc Books, when she took such good care of Rembrandt in her suggested edits, reminding me to feed him as the plot heated up and even advocating for a larger role for him in the climactic scene.

Rumpus: Were you reading any other texts while working on The Snow Collectors, whether novels or even works of nonfiction, that felt especially helpful for writing the book?

Hall: Early on, I was most inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Villette for the eerie atmosphere she creates. When the excellent biography, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, by Ken McGoogan came out, it made my job a lot easier, especially since Lady Jane Franklin’s handwriting is tiny and cramped and hard to decipher. In general, I’d say the novel owes the largest debt to the fantastic mid-twentieth-century gothic romances by Mary Stewart, who is a writer I adore for her gorgeous landscapes and intelligent heroines. I read those books as a teenager and still periodically revisit them to be impressed anew at how she infuses the conventions of the genre with wit and a feminist sensibility. So, I was intent on winking at those books while also working to mutate the language in (hopefully) interesting ways.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Hall: I’m writing a series of flash fiction pieces that take the form of exhibits in the Extinction Museum that appears in The Snow Collectors. I’m also working on a new novel that, at this point, is just a mess of tidbits about genetic manipulation and perfume-making and old, island-bound abandoned mansions.

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Photograph of Tina May Hall by Tycho Ngo.

In September 2014, Emily St. John Mandel published her fourth novel, Station Eleven. The book was a finalist for a National Book Award, a finalist for a Pen/Faulkner Award, and a New York Times bestseller. It was called one of the best books of its year by no less than George R. R. Martin, it is currently being adapted into an HBO Max miniseries (written, directed by, and starring an alarmingly talented group of people that I don’t have room to list), and was once read aloud to me, chapter-by-chapter, over the phone by a friend of mine who I will not name, as part of the honeymoon phase of a long-distance relationship.

If you’ve read Station Eleven (and you probably have), then the reason for the accolades is clear. What characterizes Mandel’s fiction is the elegant and thoughtful treatment of characters that you would expect from a literary writer and the drama and pace you want from a genre writer. Her distinctive criss-cross plots were there from her first book Last Night in Montreal. The use of non-linear time to unravel a mystery is present from her second novel The Singer’s Gun. The elegant handoffs from one storyteller to another? There it is in her third novel, The Lola Quartet. Then there was Station Eleven. And now there is The Glass Hotel.

The Glass Hotel isn’t about what you think it is going to be about when you start reading it. Let’s say it’s about international container shipping, and a Ponzi scheme, and the hospitality industry and trophy wives. It is about all of those things but ultimately it is about people, who are mostly connected with one another and are mostly pretty lonely. The book is lovely and surprising.

Leading up to the publication of The Glass Hotel, a couple of weeks before the world stood at the brink of a global pandemic and Station Eleven took on even greater prescience, Emily St. John Mandel and I talked on the phone and discussed her writing process, her newest novel, and how it feels to write the one after the big one.

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The Rumpus: One of the things that people love so much about your work is the construction of your books. The multiple points of view, the non-linear timeline, the way that those are all woven together. It’s impressive that you don’t write from an outline. What’s the process of constructing or drafting a book like this?

Emily St. John Mandel: It’s less impressive than it sounds. The process for me is I just start writing scenes. For example, in Station Eleven I had this idea that the actor died on stage of a heart attack. And then that scene automatically suggests other characters. Surely someone is going to come on stage and try to save him. So the scene develops into a chapter. The characters suggest other characters. I just start writing and try to find something. And after about a year or a year and a half I have an unbelievably messy first draft. It’s kind of disastrous. Nobody sees it. At that point I feel like I’m only about halfway through writing a novel. I have a beginning, middle, and end. And after that I do about two years of revision.

For me, the novel really appears in the revision. I just go over it, over it, and over it. And it’s in going over it that I feel like all of the character development happens. The first draft is almost a placeholder. But as you start to revise a book, over and over again, you start to have moments of thinking: I don’t think Oskar would actually say that or That’s incongruent with the character that I’ve established. You start to get a sense of who the characters are. The structure is always very flexible.

I originally wrote The Glass Hotel in this structure based on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. So that’s a slow march forward and then back in time. I ended up doing almost a complete rewrite after my editor saw it for the first time. My process is really just excessive revision and all of the connections that appear in the final book come about in the revision. I start to notice things that could be pulled together.

It got reshuffled and re-conceived structurally so many times. I’ve always had the sense that I could reshuffle the chapters and have quite a different book. It’s a weirdly flexible process.

Rumpus: In the advance reading copies, there’s a blurb from the editor saying they were afraid to read it when you first submitted the manuscript because everyone loved Station Eleven so much.

Mandel: I was afraid to write it.

Rumpus: Was it scary? Following up something that was so big?

Mandel: It is. It’s approximately the least sympathetic problem in the whole world but there is a certain feeling of pressure. Not from my editors but just this self-imposed pressure. To try to write something that I felt was as good as Station Eleven. It was quite challenging. And it did make writing the book take longer than it might have otherwise.

Rumpus: The main character in The Glass Hotel, Vincent, is named after Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet. I noticed the structure of her name is quite similar to yours.

Mandel: It wasn’t always that way. My maiden name is Fairbanks. I was Emily St. John Fairbanks. Mandel is my married name. But I’ve noticed it, too. I asked my mother; she said it was totally coincidental. I’d recently read that wonderful biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Savage Beauty. She was such a striking figure. She was a poet who was able to command a room and I was fascinated by that presence, and also by a character who raised herself out of one life into another through sheer force of will. That’s appealing to me.

Rumpus: The Atlantic wrote of Millay’s biography that “[her] life rendered [her] work incidental,” making the argument that her poetry has been forgotten because her life was interesting. You’re an artist; you seem pretty private.

Mandel: There are no pictures of my lunch on social media.

Rumpus: Is that a way to protect yourself, or your work?

Mandel: Really myself. I often feel a little bit old fashioned, which I guess is kind of inevitable once you turn forty. The world moves on. I was raised with ideas around privacy and modesty that have kept me out of step with the social media era. I often enjoy following other people’s accounts of their lives. I like reading other people’s personal essays but I’ve never really understood why I would want to reveal myself like that. It’s not that I have some magnificently exciting secret life. I mostly hang out with my four-year-old when I’m not writing. When I travel it’s usually to give a lecture somewhere. There’s not an enormous amount of glamour, though it does occasionally pop up. I have an instinct towards privacy.

Rumpus: When you reveal yourself, it’s through your fiction. I read a throwaway line in an interview that you hadn’t enjoyed living in Montreal and then I read Last Night in Montreal and how the characters felt about the city and thought, “Wow, she really hated living in Montreal.”

Mandel: I’ve gotten a lot of criticism for being too hard on Montreal. I went really easy on Montreal. It was so much worse in real life than it was in that book. Also, I grew up in a really small place, Denman Island, British Columbia which is exactly like Delano Island in Station Eleven. The experiences a couple of the characters have in Station Eleven of going from a really tiny island to Toronto when they’re eighteen and the way that a big city can feel like freedom, that wonderful anonymity while you walk down the street, that’s definitely autobiographical. I’m allergic to writing personal essays but a lot of personal stuff does inevitably seep into my work.

Rumpus: I wanted to ask about location and the specificity of location in your work. Most of your novels have been set in places you’ve lived. You can offer so much specificity about the location and little details that add color that you couldn’t make up. How hard would it be to set a book somewhere you haven’t spent a significant amount of time?

Mandel: I just wouldn’t do that to myself. I would get a thousand emails from readers correcting me on minor details. That’s mostly why I write about places I know. The problem is that places get frozen in time. I have a knowledge of Toronto circa 1997 to 2002 and at this point I don’t know the city at all. There are people who very much enjoy correcting writers. They’re very vocal and have a lot of time for email so I try not to write things about places I don’t know very well.

Rumpus: You don’t do that with location but you do with professional worlds, like finance and shipping. How do you do the research about those worlds where you can’t have firsthand knowledge?

Mandel: You just need enough detail for it to be plausible, is the short answer. It’s important to avoid doing a data dump. Paragraphs of exposition about the ways the stock market works or other details along those lines. A character needs to be able to say one or two things to indicate a deep familiarity with that world. That’s not that hard. If you read a couple of books or read a ton of articles, you can come up with something.

Rumpus: There’s one scene with Joelle and her children where I almost don’t know how you could make that up if you didn’t know it firsthand.

Mandel: I found Joelle to be a heartbreaking character. There’s a long paragraph where she signs her kids out of school and takes them to FAO Schwartz. She’s committed this crime and because of that she’s about to be separated from her children, maybe for the rest of their childhoods. I did an event in a couple of prisons a few months ago. A medium-security men’s facility and then right outside the wall was a minimum-security women’s prison camp. The women’s prison camp really didn’t seem that bad at first. There weren’t walls around this prison camp. There’s a theory that you’re not going to try to escape if that means that when you’re caught you’re assigned to a higher security level. The women sleep in dormitories, not cells, there’s a lot of green space, women read in the library. It didn’t seem that bad.

But then I did the event and a young woman brought up the line in Station Eleven: “Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” And she said, “You know what, we’re all separated from our children, and it’s hell.” And I realized that’s the real punishment, being separated from your loved ones. So I found myself thinking about that in relation to Joelle. What’s the day that you would try to give your children when you think it might be the last day before you go to jail? It’s pitch black, but maybe you take them to a toy store.

Rumpus: Station Eleven is being adapted for television. Has that fact influenced your writing process now?

Mandel: To some extent. The main way it impacts my writing is that I’m careful not to specify a character’s race unless there’s some reason why that’s relevant. Which there almost never is for the work I’m doing. I want the casting to be open for any actor or actress. That’s one concrete one. In general, my work has been influenced by television but more television I’ve watched than the television I’ve been a part of. I’ve always had a visual sense when writing. There’s been so much great television and I think I’ve been influenced by that stylistically. Shows like True Detective where you feel like you’re watching something remarkable. It makes me write shorter sections, and more visually.

Rumpus: I read that you listen to music while writing. Were there particular pieces you listened to for this book?

Mandel: For this book I was listening to a couple of Moby ambient albums and also Max Richter, who is an American composer who I really love. He writes ambient electronica stuff that is kind of on the border between electronica and classical. It’s really beautiful. I had this five-hour soundtrack that I kept on a loop that I’d stop and start wherever I was. For all of my books I’ve had a different soundtrack that I’ve listened to. What’s funny is I find I can’t really go back and listen to them once I’ve stopped looking at the book. They become a part of the experience of writing the book.

Rumpus: There are some Easter eggs in The Glass Hotel that point back to some of your previous work. Are these a wink to your readers or are you imagining your fiction taking place in an expanded Mandel universe?

Mandel: I think the latter. I have this desire, or instinct, to pull the novels together in some way. In a novel or TV or short fiction, you have to focus on something very tightly for it to be compelling. It’s interesting to imagine that there might be a whole other novel that’s centered on the waitress in a scene, for example. Maybe the biggest link between books is Miranda Carroll who in Station Eleven is obviously one of the major characters. In The Glass Hotel she has a couple of cameo appearances, sort of a peripheral character in Leon’s life.

Rumpus: Are you finding threads as you write one book that you’re excited to follow up in another?

Mandel: I find these threads that I can’t follow in Novel A because they weigh down the narrative too much, they take me too far off track, but they stay in the back of my mind. The first mention of Jonathan Alkaitis, a major character in The Glass Hotel, was in The Lola Quartet, my third novel, where there’s this disgraced journalist figure and one of the stories he messes up is the story of Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme. I guess by that point the Bernie Madoff story had broken and I was fascinated by that crime, as you might guess. And that was something that I wanted to write about, this massive white collar crime. I couldn’t really do it in The Lola Quartet because that was a pretty tightly focused novel about something completely different. But it was in the back of my mind as an interesting subject.

Rumpus: Is that subject what first pulled you into this book?

Mandel: It was, and it was even more specific than that. Six or seven of Madoff’s staffers went to prison. Think about the camaraderie that you have in any group of people who work together. You spend a lot of time together. Think of how much more intense that would be if you were showing up at work on Monday to perpetuate a massive crime together. I found myself fascinated by the staffers. What would it take to convince yourself that what you were doing was okay? Did they think it was okay? How did they reconcile that? How do you fall into a situation where you’re committing a crime five days a week? I was fascinated by that.

Rumpus: Do you see this book as part of a conversation in fiction about the 2008 financial crisis?

Mandel: I do think there is already a literature of the financial collapse. I’m thinking about Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett. That was 2010, right around that era, and that was about a collapsing bank. There’s another one, Capital by John Lanchester, a British author, which was an interesting look at money through all these different lenses. When I wrote this book, I found myself thinking about it as historical fiction, if you can use that to describe events that happened a decade ago. It is set specifically in a past time and place.

But then the world started falling apart politically. There was an unfortunate resonance between the kind of figures that we see in politics today and the Madoff-ian Jonathan Alkaitis character. With Trump, and with Brexit on the other side of the Atlantic, and the Australian Prime Minister insisting that climate change is a political problem as his country literally burns. We’re back in the era of the man in the empty suit. I think we’re living in a time of conmen. It made me feel like this book may be more resonant to the current era than, really, any of us would want it to be.

***

Photograph of Emily St. John Mandel by Sarah Shatz.

I don’t remember when or how Kristen Millares Young and I became friends, but I know it happened in Coast Salish territory, specifically Seattle, where she lives and I left. Subduction, her debut novel just released by Red Hen Press yesterday, is a book I have known well for a long time. Set on the Makah Indian Reservation at the northwesternmost point of the so-called United States, the book follows Claudia, a non-Makah Latina anthropologist who has shown up for the purpose of academic extraction; Maggie, a Makah elder whose hoarding-packed home holds stories and secrets; and Peter, Maggie’s son who has returned after years off-rez. Claudia’s presence is situated within a long, terrible tradition of anthropological imposition and exploitation in the real-life Makah community, and rendered here in fiction, readers are asked to look closely at the ongoing work of colonization: it happens in the asking of a question and the recording of an answer, in the exchange of US dollars and whiskey in a bar built on somebody’s homeland, in aided or forced forgetting, in tenure dossiers.

My memory is full of holes; I search my Gmail archives to piece together my past, which is how I know that when Kristen sent me an early draft of Subduction, I was twenty-six days sober. Over the next month, I read the novel in a lonesome apartment in the Seattle suburbs, near the shore of the Salish Sea, which opens to the ocean in Makah territory. I had been out there once years earlier, with an ex-boyfriend, but I, once a good brownout drinker, have only a few memories: a tent, the wet depth of March cold, the blot of a black wetsuit on a gray wave.

I’d moved out from Seattle to the place near the water because my rent would get me more space there. In the city, I’d felt like my place was stuffed full of bad memories; actually, it was stuffed full of old magazines, dresses worn on the worst nights of my life, thrifted sneakers too small for my feet. In a place that smelled like Sound salt and rot, by a window shaded by western red cedars, surrounded by things I never used but carried from one rental to another, I read Subduction. Its characters, in their desires and their flaws, are sculpted from the kind of disruption embedded deep in my own gut.

It wasn’t through luck, or through basic attunement to the human condition, that Kristen Millares Young, a non-Native writer, created characters that rang so true for me, a Cowlitz (Indigenous, though, I must be clear, non-Makah) academic. She achieved this effect by putting time into making relationships. (And, of course, through excellent writing: she’s currently Hugo House’s Prose Writer-in-Residence, her work has appeared in such publications as the Washington Post and the Guardian, and she was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced the Pulitzer Prize-winning ”Snow Fall.”)

I learned to listen by paying attention to Coast Salish people who showed me that a story is not a conversation—you listen until the teller is done. Subduction is the result of deep listening to others and to the writer’s own process, and of letting something take as long as it takes.

***

The Rumpus: It’s a good thing my memory is so bad—I know you and this book so well, and yet I forget so much about how you wrote it, so I get to ask questions authentically. How did you come to begin writing about Neah Bay, about anthropological intrusion?

Kristen Millares Young: When I first arrived to Makah territory, I was not on the job, but I had a journalist’s eye. I had been driving out to Neah Bay since 2004, when I moved to the Pacific Northwest to report for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a newspaper now gone from this world. A few years later, I began researching Subduction in earnest, my heart beleaguered by daily deadlines. As a reporter, I knew too well what it meant to encounter a community at a moment of rupture. I wanted to study what could happen if a researcher stayed long enough to get involved. Would that be better, or not?

It would take me ten years of research, writing, and revising to make this novel into the book I needed to read. As a reporter, taught to write about complex subjects in the third person, I was made to project an omniscience I don’t believe in. For that reason, Subduction is an extended inquiry into the dangers of disembodied knowledge, the currency of mainstream media reports, and too much academic production. I’m glad that more contemporary thinkers invoke their own positionality.

In 2009, grieving the closure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and with it, the loss of my job and the camaraderie that comes from serving your city under the duress of deadlines, I began to write Subduction, a full two years after I had started the research process. This delay—a deferral of the hard thinking a first draft demands—is not something I recommend to my students, though the intellectual and emotional reckonings it occasioned were valuable to my book.

I kept going back to Neah Bay. I slept in tents, in my car, in people’s homes, and in the schoolhouse of a church I did not attend. I learned that the Makah people are generous. I remembered not to show up with empty hands, as too many outsiders have done before. I drank cup after cup of strong coffee, chitchatting on sofas and around dining room tables. I volunteered for odd jobs, whether helping out at my friend’s frybread stand or writing up newsletters for the Makah Cultural and Research Center, for whom I was honored to write the obituary of Doc Daugherty, an archaeologist who worked with the tribe to excavate, identify and catalogue thousands of artifacts buried in the beach at Ozette until the 1970s, when storm erosion revealed the remains of longhouses after hundreds of years of cold wet darkness.

There have been many good academics and anthropologists who have interacted with the Makah over the years, Daugherty and his wife, Ruth Kirk, among them. But over the years, I learned to recognize the incredible perseverance, strength, and optimism that Makah tribal members show in allowing themselves to engage with outsiders, whose engagement began as extractive. Tribal members have good reason to be suspicious of new people. Early interlopers stole skulls from Makah burial sites to send to the Smithsonian, only later compelled to return them.

Rumpus: I felt such a sharp, painful connection to this history when I first read your manuscript, while I was working at the University of Washington, advising mostly Native undergrads (some of them Makah), and all the while, the bones of The Ancient One (commonly called “Kennewick man”) were held on campus by the Burke Museum, awaiting repatriation while anthropologists argued over (among other things) scientific assessments of his skull, with some non-Native anthropologists even suing the federal government to block The Ancient One’s return home. The Burke held his remains but didn’t perform tests, but still, to be in academia at all sometimes feels so fraught for me. But actually, there were quite a few colleagues at that institution, some of them working at the Burke, who showed me that the academy didn’t have to be working in opposition to Indigenous knowledges: objects could be respected as living beings, environmental science could be used for the restoration of colonially damaged land.

Your efforts to involve Makah tribal members throughout the research, writing, and publishing process has struck me as work done with a lot of intention, informed by an understanding of the harm done in the name of “research.” How did your ethical commitment to the Makah people and their history take shape?

Young: I recently brought my children to visit the Burke Museum and was reassured to see a message to museum-goers entitled “The Burke Acknowledges the Violent Legacies of Colonialism” inherent to the institutions of museums, which “reflect a history of colonialism, a form of cultural dominance, that alienates and misrepresents many communities” and “often undervalue the involvement of communities by imposing their own authority when deciding how to collect, care for and interpret cultural property.”

For those who have acted as interlocutors of culture, that acknowledgement is a necessary and vital step to joining a conversation sustained by marginalized peoples for millennia. During the process of researching this book, I shared exactly why I was there—I am researching and writing a novel—which I did years before I actually started writing. Some people want to forget why you’re there. It was my job to remind them. I have long wanted to be present for difficult conversations. For that reason, I’ve been working with an educator in Neah Bay to arrange a book club for people who live there to discuss Subduction with me and each other. Showing up in person is a vital part of doing the work.

Through the character of Claudia, a Latina anthropologist who, though born in Mexico, has felt compelled in her life to erase her own mestizaje, I examined the fraught relationship between the self and the subject, beginning with the ways she tries and fails to codify the knowledge shared with her by Maggie, her main research participant. Like Claudia, having read every academic work created by, for, or about the Makah tribe and its territory since first contact with settlers, I interviewed tribal members. Unlike Claudia, who reshapes her transcripts before sharing them with her research participants, erasing moments which could betray her hope for continued access, I kept and shared the whole transcripts, inclusive of the delightful and revealing meanders that occur when people encounter someone interested in their lives.

To an extreme, for large swathes of Subduction, Claudia hides her true feelings, her actual lived experience, and with it, her ethnicity. Afraid of the prejudice against Mexican immigrants, passing for white when it suits her, Claudia does not represent herself as Chicana, so focused is she on keeping power, even when she disavows her ethical commitments and starts an affair with Peter, a research participant. Made vulnerable by the betrayal of her husband, who just left her for her sister, Claudia wants to protect herself, but doing so exposes the double standard of her expectations. She wants to have full access to this community, this one family and its secrets, but she denies them the understanding of the full range of her humanity.

Now, there are good professional reasons for leaving your dramas at home, but what I have found is that workplaces that do not allow for the personhood of their participants invariably replicate systems of oppression. In Neah Bay, I made the choice to show up as my full self and with my family. Over time, I made a few real friends—tribal members who hosted me and, eventually, my husband and our sons, and who we welcomed to our home in return. Fifteen years after I first began, I’ve come to know that the journey is the reward. There is no other.

Rumpus: The novel’s other protagonist, Peter, is a Makah man. What went into building this character?

Young: A commercial diver, an underwater welder, and an itinerant worker of his own design, Peter bluffs his way through much of his life. By the time we meet him in Subduction, Peter’s methods of coping and survival have stopped serving him, if they ever did. After a long absence occasioned by the death of his father, Peter is back on the reservation, living with the mother he left in a desperate attempt to save his own life, and with it, to rescue an idea of himself as undamaged. Peter has kept moving in order to deny the possibility that his damage is permanent. In each new place, he cultivates, to borrow James Baldwin’s words, “the state of being alone.” But his memories crowd around him, the result of deep trauma and manifesting in anxiety he hides by being both surly and ribald when the mood takes him.

Like Claudia, Peter is deeply problematic. Unable to see his own face, he studies others; like her, he forms judgments which reflect his own prejudice, in his case mostly toward women. Both Peter and Claudia inhabit personas only loosely connected with who they really are, embodying Baldwin’s idea that “the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities into a relationship resembling reconciliation.” I wrote Subduction to effect both reckoning and reconciliation, within the fictional prism of Peter and Claudia, but also within and between myself and the reader.

Rumpus: The interplay between these protagonists’ competing and converging narratives is so dynamic. How did this book take shape structurally?

Young: To put myself into the intense dream state required to vivify interiority for Peter and Claudia, I wrote plenty of backstory and scenes for them, moments which I used to deepen my understanding of their impulses and intentions.

Recurrence is vital to storytelling, particularly within oral cultures. We repeat things we want remembered. Unwittingly, while drafting, I would try different approaches to the same idea. When revising Subduction, I challenged each repetition, whether word, image, or idea, to present new insight into the story, casting a wider frame of reference for the characters and their cultural, emotional, and geographic landscapes.

I first learned to understand subtext as an analytical tool. As a craftsperson, I practice submergence and elision as methods of revision. In that endeavor, I learned to be ruthless when it came to my own time—it didn’t matter how long I’d spent on it, if a scene or a sentence or a clause did not serve, it was gone. For a while, I kept a separate Slaughtered Darlings file of deletions to make myself feel better. I never went back in a big way for that material, but here and there, I nested a paragraph from that document into the actual manuscript, where the pulse of memory lends resonance to the present narrative.

In selecting what would remain in the final version, I called upon a curatorial process to create what Leni Zumas describes, in her own work, as a constellation of stars. I culled the highest glimmering moments of beauty and set those jewels into juxtaposition. At the time, I called it faceting. Each element of the novel was a fractal of the whole story.

I cut as many words from the text as remain—about seventy thousand. At first, as a journalist accustomed to seeing my every sentence published to a broad audience, I was perturbed by the iterative, somewhat wasteful nature of writing a novel. How could this be? Only later did I come to know the benefits of patience and humility with the process—and how that which has been cut still haunts what remains.

At one point during the years I spent in revision, I charted Peter and Claudia’s rising and falling action on a yellow legal pad set sideways, where their pacing formed sine-cosine waves whose emotional energies transferred into the next crest and trough of their interactions. Since song and ocean are motifs of the book, their pattern made sense to me. Fractals emerge unbidden.

In service of a lyric tone, I read Subduction aloud many times, both alone and during dozens of performances I began giving in 2011. The stage divines both strength and weakness quite quickly. It’s a rough way to learn, but it works. I cut that which made me stumble. For that reason, I recommend my writing advisees get out there. Song is made possible only with breath.

Rumpus: And now you have an object, too, to share with your audiences. What are your hopes for the life of this book now that its construction is out of your hands?

Young: Hope is a funny thing. It sustained me for the many years it took to bring Subduction to its readers. Along the way, softened by an anguished despair that belied the relative comfort of my life as a married freelance reporter with teaching opportunities, I came to rely on a small circle of other writers which widened with time, forming concentric ripples that became friendships, music, commiseration, and, yes, fun. I began leading the life that I wanted, despite the hurt, despite the rejection, despite the incessant work to stay afloat.

Melissa Febos once told me that books are a kind of hoax because we write them to start conversations that we are terrified to join. So I was damned glad to read Zadie Smith’s defense of fiction in a recent New York Review of Books, in which she makes the case for writing into the lives of those like but also unlike ourselves. It is, to me, the project of fiction to try to see through the eyes of another, and with that vision, recognize one’s own face, as if for the first time. To cite Smith’s metaphorical use of Emily Dickinson, does that character’s grief weigh the same as mine?

It would have been safer for me to write only from my own Cuban lineage’s diaspora. But we, the descendants of immigrants, must reckon with the fact that our families became settlers at the moment of migration to this country. To explore the repercussions of contact in our multicultural, polyphonic, and colonial society, I wanted to create a work of literature that reflected its multicultural, polyphonic, and indigenous origins, and that meant including Latinx and Native interiority in Subduction.

The years I spent with Peter taught me so much about the privileges and priorities of this country, knowledge which has changed how I show up for indigenous rights. Taught to focus, by necessity, on sustaining a forward trajectory for my own family, whose perch on this territory began just one generation ago, I have tried to orient myself and the institutions with which I interact, whether journalistic or literary, toward a healthier engagement with this land’s first peoples. And here, I come back to Baldwin, who wrote, “For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced.” To be in conversation with you, Elissa, is a real and sustaining moment for me as a writer.

The best wisdom arrives without warning and leaves its mark on you long after you’ve stopped listening for the truths you need to hear. In a workshop I attended while gestating my second son, Luis Urrea told me that getting to do the work is the reward. How true that is, and like all real truths it is both heartbreaking and beautiful. I want to keep writing novels, essays, reviews, and investigations, and I hope this book shows people how much of myself I am willing to risk and dedicate to make it so.

Since Subduction begins with a Baldwin epigraph, I’ll close with the final line of his essay “The Creative Process,” which I’ve cited throughout this conversation, since it has done so much to sustain my hopes for my work. “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”

Thanks for reading. Pa’lante.

***

Photograph of Kristen Millares Young by Natalie Shields. Photograph of Kristen Millares Young and Elissa Washuta by Weston Morrow.