An Interview with Robert Glick, Author of Two Californias

Robert Glick is an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. His work has won competitions from The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Diagram, Summer Literary Seminars, and New Ohio Review; other stories have been published in the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Two Californias, was published by C&R Press in 2019.

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Kristina Marie Darling:  Your latest book, Two Californias, was recently launched by C&R Press.  What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?  

First, thanks for reading! There are so many great books out right now. I hope you find something meaningful and pleasurable in these pages. I hope that the stories don't land too neatly—I'm one who wants a bit of visible messiness. Making treasure from trash, so to speak. 

Speaking as a native Californian, the book is less about California (though all the stories take place there) than it is about, through variation, collapsing overly simplistic boundaries—north and south, etc. While by no means autobiographical, it is more personal than I had originally realized, its spotlights drawn to the unorthodox, sometimes funny, often diversionary ways we deal with loss.

KMD:  What drew you to C&R Press for this particular project?  

They liked the book! It's so important for a press, with the complexities of media economies, to have your back, to support you and the work. I liked C&R's catalogue, their design choices, and the ways in which they wanted to collaborate. It felt ethically as well as aesthetically right, and I'm very grateful to Andrew Sullivan, John Gosslee, and the entire team.

KMD: Your fiction makes innovative use of white space, interruption, and rupture.  What does silence make possible for you as a storyteller?  

Everything. Can noise exist without silence? 

From the standpoint of lineage, the influence of white space came to me from Marguerite Duras, especially the way her blocks of text just sort of hang in air, smoke rings of meanings. For me, silence (and its physical analog, white space) is material, metaphor, tempo. Most of my stories are written modularly, with gaps, often without linear transitions, notated by white space. The reader enters this open space (well, this space is always there, but in Two Californias, it's foregrounded and encouraged) to think, to pause, to insert their consciousness/imaginations. 

The silence also reminds us that the writing, the words, the syntax: nothing but one n/mote, pointing to the more infinite possibilities. The book is not fully closed, can never be fully closed (though one might try). While white space isn't exactly an iceberg, it nonetheless points to everything unsaid. 

KMD:  In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are an accomplished educator. What has teaching opened up within your creative practice?  

Lately, teaching has taught me about the openness and possibility of process. We do a lot of collaborative brainstorming: what could happen in this situation? In what ways can X connect to Y? Writing, for me, represents what Barthes calls a "tissue of citations"—a network of meanings. In this respect, and without dismissing craft, I think about teaching as a means to work with students to be brave and critical in building their own networks. Working with the students has reinforced my own desire to slow down when writing, to pursue possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to me. Then I sneak on to campus late at night, when the classrooms are empty, to make use of the white boards :.)

KMD:  With the recent launch of Two Californias, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?  

I'm on sabbatical(!), so mostly I'm holed up here in Rochester, waiting for the deer to cross the backyard, finishing up The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane. In the short run, I'll be doing a reading/workshop at the wonderful Writers & Books here in Rochester, followed by what I'm sure will be a fabulous University of Utah reading at AWP in San Antonio. Then I head off to the MacDowell Colony in March and April, where I'll visit the oracle each day, and revel in thermoses of soup. I finish off the semester working with the smart, engaged students at Hobart and Smith College in Geneva. 

KMD:  What are you currently working on? What’s next?  

I'm finishing a hybrid print/digital novel called The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane—it should go to agents by the end of the year. 

Set in Kansas City during the 2016 presidential election race, Paradox traces the unorthodox pathways we take through individual grief, collective trauma, and social awareness. After a miscarriage, Grace, a 40-year-old anesthesiologist, must decide whether she wants to have another child, weighing her own desires and her growing political awareness against the constricting biases of suburban life. Her husband Chuck urgently wants to be a father once again. While he waits for Grace to make up her mind, he falls prey to his self-destructive impulses; his imaginary friend, whom he calls The Reckless, forces him to steal a rare, expensive model of Wonder Woman’s airplane. Meanwhile, their two teenagers stumble into dangerous intrigues with Bosnian art saboteurs and rapture-obsessed veterinarians. 

The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane is written as a set of discrete, interlocking sections. Family members and minor characters contribute their distinct voices to the collective narration. The novel also contains non-diegetic chapters, including an MFA thesis in art history (with performative scores) and characters' own creative writings (such as an imagined history of a mysteriously disappeared grandparent). As a general thematic, the novel explores versions of visibility and invisibility (technical, psychological, linguistic) exemplified by the figure of Wonder Woman’s airplane, which, in drawings and animations, requires white lines to make visible the boundaries of the plane’s invisibility. In line with my artistic vision, each section attempts to intensify the emotional and intellectual power of the novel by expressing character-based story through innovative forms of language, voice, and syntax.

Chapters of Paradox have won the Summer Literary Seminars Center for Fiction Prize and the New Ohio Review Contest in Fiction. Other chapters have been published in The Masters Review Anthology. You can read online chapters at The Collagist and The Los Angeles Review. 

While Paradox will primarily take shape in the print universe, some sections of the novel will only be available in digital form (beta).