The Sky's Hand In You: A Review of Katie Farris's A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving

How to summarize the end of life that has become such a concrete possibility that every moment is infused with the question: will one survive or not? How to diffuse this in poetry? In A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, Katie Farris graciously and bravely erases the boundary between the artist and the theme, offering her body as the site for meaning-making.

I go to the world with my tongue out
and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys

in the lock,
a six-inch scar instead of a nipple.

“This scene has a door / I cannot close,” Farris shares concerning a cancer patient’s condition. The personal stakes couldn't be higher. Yet, the poet’s body is entrusted with an additional responsibility: to carry the poetry for as long as it can. The poet wishes “to train myself to find in the midst of hell what isn't hell.”

The motif of training recurs here, as if, instead of merely focusing on the cure, one is called upon to take advantage of one’s vulnerability to further one’s capacity to generate warmth for others. On the sharp edge of mortality, one creates beauty out of one’s very impermanence. “I was no longer hungry: everything was everything; the roots in my skull shifted and I/ lay down beneath my own branches.”

And the other side of the mirror: the love, grief and hope that accompany illness. In the opening poem, Farris explains,

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world,
to offer poems of love to a burning world.

With tenderness and compassion, the poet observes the loved ones’ tension and despair:

how pain enters
their face
like a hand hunting
inside a
puppet

In the end, the poems become the interface between the suffering of the author and her partner and the world’s suffering on their behalf, an exchange rendered resonant through the reader’s recognition of our shared mortality. “And whom / can I tell how much I want to live? I want to live.” Miraculously, it is the reader to whom the poet addresses her plea.

Does suffering enlighten, and would one chose to be enlightened in this way? So often in our living and dying, the choice is not offered.

The sky always
has its hand in you,
as if you were a puppet,

through your ears down
your throat in to your
lungs…

The inspiring, inventive title itself offers a polyphony of meanings. The work is the net whose weaving will catch the body, so that the body may continue to weave this beautiful work. But also:

I will need a rope
to let me down into the earth.
I’ve hidden others
strategically around the globe,
a net to catch
my body in its weaving.

Step by step, the poet takes us through diagnosis, chemo, surgery, and the beginnings of recovery. “Three drains, five scans, twenty thousand dollars!” This account buzzes with immense humanity, and the urgent intensity of Kafka’s Hunger Artist whose proofs the writer was still correcting on his deathbed.

I’m delighted that Katie Farris’ full-length collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, titled after one of the poems here, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2023. May the poet continue to stand in that forest for many years, bringing us her most illuminating work.

An Interview with Chris Wiewiora, Author of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean

The Distance Is More Than an Ocean is a recounting of Chris Wiewiora’s experience coming to America from Poland, his father’s home country, as a child and then returning as an adult, forcing him to reconsider the homeland that framed his childhood and wrestle with the tenuousness of memory. The moments of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean are situated distinctly in place, but also in places: from a Polish elementary school classroom to an imagined Mississippi River, from Florida’s Coco Beach to the gray, rainy streets of Warsaw. Set against varied landscapes, these reflections on travel, memory, and childhood show the complex ways in which our environments both shape us and are reshaped by our recollections of the people we were in those places—and by the people we became when we left them.

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You chose specifically to subtitle/categorize The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a “travelogue memoir.” Where do you see the line drawn between those two genres? Why was it important to you to have readers consider this as both?

I wanted to label my chapbook with the genre of nonfiction, since the publisher Finishing Line Press’s books and most chapbooks are poetry. I wanted to make sure that readers knew that my chapbook, while lyrical, isn’t poetry. Still, nonfiction contains so many sub-genres.

Nonfiction is the only genre defined by what it isn’t: not-fiction. Who knows why it isn’t labeled non-drama or non-poetry; perhaps since it contains both? Anyway, I wanted to define my chapbook by what nonfiction it is—not just that I didn’t make it up like fiction—and so I used the subtitle of travelogue and memoir.

Both a travelogue and a memoir follow records. A travelogue is a record of travels, while a memoir is a record of memories. I wanted readers to know where I was going in my writing: traveling from the United States to Poland, but also traveling from my adulthood to my childhood.

In The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, I switched between present tense for my travels back to Poland and past tense for my travels back to my memories of Poland. I used tense as a line between the two sub-genres. I saw the line between them as what happened (travelogue) and what I remembered (memoir), but the chapbook walks that line between the sub-genres like when I returned to my family’s Warsaw neighborhood and I was confronted with mis-remembering our duplex, which could serve as a metaphor for the sub-genres under nonfiction: a house split in half with two entrances but under the same roof.

There is also a relationship here between prose and poetry. A poem by James Seay serves as an epigraph to the book, and these pieces reflect the way poetry thrives on compressing, fragmenting, and extending beyond singular moments. What roles do the processes of compressing and fragmenting memory play in writing about the past?

Ten years ago I began The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a poetry collection titled Side by Side. The poems explored my mother’s West Virginian family as well as my father’s Polish family. My poetry sprawled and swelled and contained multitudes. Side by Side contained much too much!

Seay’s poem “Patching Up the Past with Water” gave me a colander to strain through the flood of my writing. I wanted to sift through my past. I wanted to find the quicksilver. I needed to find a way to contain what mattered, but it felt so slippery.

Six years ago, I began to write the poems into essays that became The Distance Is More Than an Ocean. First, I wrote an essay titled “Welcome Back”—where I visited my family’s old duplex on a beautiful summer day in Warsaw, while I remembered the cold and gray and cramped other seasons there. The walk through the neighborhood made me confront what I had remembered with what I then experienced.

I felt like my memory was being rewritten. My memory was fragmented and so my writing needed to reflect that. About three years ago, I began to distill those essays. I compressed them from my mother and father’s family to only my father’s family, and then from the United States to only in Poland, and then within Poland to only Warsaw, and I continued to compress my travels and my memories until I could contain them in a chapbook.

When we write about a place from our past, I think we’re not evoking so much as recreating what we remember of that place. How did you negotiate Poland as both a historical space and a personal one?

If the past is prologue, then place is the past’s foundation for the present. I read some Polish history and travel books, but I didn’t use any of that in my chapbook. I wasn’t writing about the historical past and place of Poland, but rather I was rewriting the personal.

I started the chapbook with flying back to Poland—to the same airport, but renamed—and I finished it with my walk through our Warsaw neighborhood. At the end of the chapbook, I considered how the Nazis destroyed the capital’s Old Town area but after the war the Poles rebuilt it from preserved paintings. I had written a personal way from my own history: I had my poems from ten years ago and I had my memories from decades before that—both served as foundations for me to rebuild Warsaw from my return trip and from my childhood.

As a child you viewed yourself not as Polish, but as an American growing up in Poland, longing for the country you considered your real home. But your father was a Polish immigrant, making Poland, to an extent, your family’s homeland. How has writing about these places allowed you to explore the personal/internal tension of being pulled between them?

I used to only say, my last name is Polish. Now, after writing about my past, I say I’m half-Polish.

I want to specifically thank an editor, Tina Schumann, who anthologized my essay, “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I,” in Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents. That essay served as the undercurrent through my childhood in The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, where I had moved from a Polish kindergarten to the American School of Warsaw and when I had refused to learn more Polish while also not fully knowing English. Tina welcomed me to claim both places.

However, both places don’t exist anymore. The United States that welcomed my father’s family after the war doesn’t philosophically exist anymore, but also the Poland of my family’s homeland doesn’t literally exist anymore. When my grandmother was dying, my father showed her Google Maps and she traced a river back to the valley where her father had been a sort of border patrol agent. However, their village is now in Ukraine.

More recently, my father found out from his cousin that his grandfather’s wife’s family name might be Ukrainian! Some of my father’s family refuses to accept that. However, my first thought was, what Ukrainian writers do I know?

Language itself is a part of this tension as well, as the child version of Chris Wiewiora rejects the language that makes him less American. In one vignette, you’ve returned to Poland as an adult and, as you observe your father and a family friend converse in Polish, narrate that you “don’t remember enough of the language to follow their conversation.” “Remember” is a conspicuous, telling word to apply to language.

Could you talk about how lacking (or losing from memory) a language creates a barrier between a person and a place in which that language is spoken? In what ways would knowing that language allow one to access that place differently?

Language makes us human and allows us to connect to other humans. Language accesses history and thoughts and dreams. Language allows us to remember.

We tell ourselves stories. As Joan Didion would add, “In order to live.” We retell those stories so we continue to live on. But if you don’t know a language—can’t speak it, can’t hear it—then you can’t tell stories and those stories die.

During my return visit, the way I “heard” Polish was my Dad translating it into English for me. At the same time, I had been immersed in the language of Polish while growing up in Poland. I had grown up hearing it and speaking some of it, but thinking I forgot most of it. However, when tapped memory seeps and then trickles and then flows. By the end of our return visit to Poland, I found myself babbling small phrases and then the concepts of what people said formed like shapes in clouds, readying to rain understanding.

Making the Right Narrative: Eve and All the Wrong Men by Aviya Kushner

“You have no idea what happens when you make one creature out of another,” warns the speaker of one of Aviya Kushner’s poems. Her chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (dancing girl 2019) makes the brave choice to revisit the biblical first woman so often featured in literature. Unlike other treatments, though, Kushner’s poems focus on transformation of self-in-relation to fully separate self. Her modern Eve refreshes the myth by dealing not with sin or sensuality but the (re)modeling of identity through encounters with the wrong men.

The women in Kushner’s poems share in the female legacy: “I was taught I had no choice/but to inherit Eve’s path on earth.” Eve, responsible for the downfall of Eden and for original sin, set women up as the gullible, subordinate sex. Eve positions us, as women, in an existence defined relative to men rather than independent beings. Rather than accept the limits of this legacy, though, Kushner sets out to find the “wrong men,” responsible on some level for perpetuating the limits women face.

The titular wrong men walk the pages of the book, often overheard at breakfast tables trying to make desirable partners of themselves using whatever tools they can assemble, one being language. Praising everything the desired woman says as “interested, interesting, interest, and oh yeah, incredible,” he hopes to hear himself reflected back in his partner, as the original Adam did of Eve. “Honey From the Wrong Men” finds language manipulated even more insidiously for consumption: “a whole bakery in the mouths of men, /saying anything for a taste.” In hearing the words, a woman knows she equates to transient pleasure, but being a delight “at least for the next hour” can be seductive. At best, these men are irritatingly amusing. At their most insidious, these men subsume the women they pursue, and “take me into how he read/the world.” The goal, then, is to come away from the wrong men with something of the self intact, which mostly happens.

Regret and relief at times collide in intriguing ways for the speaker. In “Perspective,” the speaker sees clearly “The life I could have had/stands in front of me,/wrong as the wrong man.” What was lost and perhaps once longed for becomes clear as “the angle of the wrong,” suddenly sharp and blindingly visible. “Bed” extends this sentiment to the ex married to another woman, and the gratitude at having escaped her fate. Identity, here, comes from the breakaway: who she could have been but did not become so.

When it comes to the women Kushner wants to be, readers find she admires the unsuspecting but authentic female. In “Imagining the Thoughts of the Lovely Eighty-Something Woman with the Vintage Glasses, Who Lives a Few Floors Down,” the speaker lives as unapologetically as any woman can ever hope to live. “I am who I am,” she says, “like the sea is the sea.” While her life has its imperfections (a flaky neighbor whose inattentiveness leaves the speaker to go out in the cold and snow), her soul is satisfied by the view from her window, augmented by her imagination. She first admires these “utterly man-less, there at the end” women in “Men” for the way they don’t want to be her, young and man-seeking. There’s a similar awe, if not admiration, for the “toothless hooker” who attracts a constant stream of men despite her unflattering appearance.

If the collection leaves us wanting in any way, it does so perhaps in the art poems. While David and Venus of Urbino certainly channel themes of sensuality and male/female dynamics, they are static figures in a collection that is constantly moving, flitting from encounter to encounter as it studies the sexual politics dogging women since Eden. Kushner is most successful when spreading gathered detail across the page or starting hard truths in the face.

Ultimately, Eve and All the Wrong Men leaves us with a modern Eve in the form of a woman seeking to reclaim and remodel herself separate from the men who wrote her into the character they wished her to be. Through all her transformations, she has made self-determination out of her inheritance.

Life Sucks, Let's Go Shopping!

Marisa Crawford’s Big Brown Bag, my copy of it, anyway, begins with a hand-written epigraph that reads “life sucks, let’s go shopping!”, emblazoned in the blue of the pen I’d just handed her.  The printed epigraph is equally telling: an excerpt from Plath’s The Bell Jar, something about discarded wardrobe items disappearing into the “dark heart of New York.”

Big Brown Bag is a little brown book that is simultaneously perfunctory and deeply profound; it paints a world in broad, plastic strokes, which yield to pure moments of bereavement, and which seem concurrently brooding and blithely consumerist: “I got the long black dress. The dress that leads to nowhere.”  Crawford’s mourning is deemed unavailing in this first line of the collection, but it provides the impetus for the poems to come, which are rife with strongly voiced juxtapositions in the vein of this first tidbit.

Goodie’s, the fictional department store where our protagonist has found employment, provides a backdrop where she can mask her devastation in the trappings of modish fashion and sticker-prices.  Ok, there aren’t sticker prices, but there is a tension between authentic feeling and the culture of buying cool shit: “I am floating toward the earrings and I am pulling toward the world.”

Crawford’s speaker is authentic in the sweetest way.  Not “sweet” like Little Bo Peep sweet, but “sweet” like things were sweet in the 90’s, when 8th graders wore Smashing Pumpkins shirts and watched The Breakfast Club as a rite of passage.  All of these things figure in the broader narrative of Big Brown Bag, as the collection is interested in the perennial MacGuffin of “growing up.”  The speaker has “grown up,” is as grown up as 30 is, and debauches in naiveté with the acumen of the poetic eye.

This is a collection that finds something like joy in the art of masking mourning in the mundanity of trend-shopping facilitation; it is an aggregate of verse-moments that recall the zenith of childhood’s ambition and carouses in its weird disaffection.  Mainly, though, it’s good.

These poems are plainly stated, sharp, and strongly voiced.  They are well-wrought, without a word misplaced, but they paint a speaker who is less sure-tongued.  The speaker happens upon a kind of insight that conflates the agony of loss with the quiet satisfaction of having replaced the vital parts.

Life sucks, let’s go shopping.  Let’s wear different blacks and ride them into the dark heart of wanton anonymity.  Pick up Marisa Crawford’s Big Brown Bag, put Gazing Grain Press’ fourth chapbook inside, and settle down for a good read.  You’ll find your sense of self negotiable, but forward motion is untenable without a degree of caprice.  “Memory is a tire.  Change it.  Go from there.”

Identity Schisms: The Space Between Desire and Fulfillment

Earlier this year, budding Virginia poet Gabby Gabby released a new e-chapbook in .pdf format. First impression: Pretty Flowers is brief. Very brief. Discounting the cover, a postscript and two small illustrations of Virginia, the .pdf only has twenty pages of text (a mere 65 sentences) in a very large, peach font. The poem’s meaning lies compacted into so few words but with some reflection and re-reading, it expands outward like a haiku.

The chapbook begins with the declaration that the poet would like to visit every state fair:

I want to go to every statefair in the United States.

I donʼt think I really likestate fairs but I like theidea of being the type ofperson that likes state fairs.

I think if I tried hardenough I could really bethat person.

From this simple premise, the author touches on a variety of issues revolving around the concept of identity. She admits to feeling the angst of missing out on life, the need to travel in order to feel fulfilled. She ponders whether or not she would break her vegan diet for the sake of eating a corn dog, the staple food of state fairs. She confesses that she does not like state fairs, but likes the idea of being someone who does.

In a brief set of nine stanzas, the author’s self has already begun to unfold with some its complexities: let’s take, for an example, her vegan diet, which is inarguably trendy, and also a diet typically prone to questioning and prodding to determine authenticity – non-vegans seem to always know just enough about veganism to interrogate their vegan counterparts and find flaws in their adherence to the diet. In mentioning her veganism immediately contrasted by the need to eat corn dogs for the sake of ‘completing’ an image, that of the state fair-goer, Gabby has awoken this disparity between what we are and what we try to be in an interesting way. Just as non-vegans will ask vegans why they don’t crave meat when they’re at a diner, friends pressure you to be in the mood for a corn dog just by virtue of being at a state fair.

The questions of identity that the text poses are expressed in a very direct language, one that quickly progresses away from that initial intent to discuss state fairs into examining the relationship between space and fulfillment. A brief interlude wonders about the contentment of Michiganders, dealing with the division in their state:

I thought about howpeople on one side ofMichigan must really missthe people on the otherside of Michigan.

She also posits that Michiganders would likely know whether or not they were lonelier than, say, Mainers, regardless of having ever visited Maine. Here again we see the disparity between actually knowing what a label entails and what we expect of it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been to Maine or can feel the essence of the adjective ‘Mainer’: based on pure geography there is an expectation that we take as real and defining in terms of that category’s fulfillment.

Gabby then discusses Midwestern states and what their “square” shape implies about their identity. This geographical meandering progresses until we land in Virginia, the poet’s home state. Gabby externalizes her general discontent in life into the identity of her state, claiming it is outdated and boring. She envisions a more exciting life for herself.

Sometimes when I tellpeople that I live inWilliamsburg I let thembelieve that I live inBrooklyn.

I try to imagine myself inBrooklyn.

For some reason I amimagining myself passedout and almost nakedsomewhere in Brooklyn.

For some reason I thinkthat is a very ʻBrooklynʼthing to do.

It is also a very ʻGabbyʼthing to do.

We’re slowly working forward and unwrapping layers of questions about identity, namely, the disparity between who we are and who we would like to envision ourselves as being.

Despite its brevity, Pretty Flowers encapsulates one of the most complex problems in dealing with autobiographical writing: the distance that exists between the narrator of the text and the writer herself. We typically determine the level of intimacy or authenticity in a work based on the brevity of that distance. When the author effectively closes the gap between their real self and the persona of their narrator, we deem a work to be “authentic” or “intimate.” This is what is strived for in journals, diaries or confessional poetry.  If we determine that something in the text is not a substantiated fact of the author’s life, we cry “inauthentic” and demerit the work.

Gabby, however, is not just writing about her own life, but rather about the crisis of identity itself. As she projects the “Gabby” that she would like to be, she consistently reminds us of the fact that this projected “Gabby” is inconsistent with the real one, the one living behind the keyboard. The poet’s penname itself indicates a constructed identity: she has replaced both her legal first and last name with a repeated, disyllabic nickname that comes off ludic. What’s more, she incorporates that nickname into the text when she says:

It is also a very ʻGabbyʼthing to do.

The inscription of her own name into the text would constitute what Derrida designates the signature de la signature in his critical text Signéponge. As opposed to the signature proper, which expresses identity and serves as a written source of veracity (think of authorial rights, the name on the book cover), or the signature of style, that is, the use of a “set of idiomatic marks” that stylistically points to the author, the “signature of the signature” is the embedding of the author’s name into the text itself.  In this act of self-inscription, the writing becomes a reminder of the inherent schism I mentioned earlier.  As readers of poetry (particularly confessional poetry), we unconsciously bought into this narrator’s identity and left behind the question of authenticity; now we stumble upon a replica of the name on the cover inside of the text, and we remember that a real person, outside of the text, exists – one that perhaps does not conform perfectly to the narrator we’ve “bought into.”

Pretty Flowers pivots around this concept, constantly reminding us that these projections of what the “real” Gabby would like to be never manage to become anything more in the text than just that: projections. Rather than fictitiously portraying herself at those state fairs, eating corn dogs, or stripped bare on a bed in Brooklyn, the only literal action in the text is Gabby sitting at a keyboard imagining other realities for herself. The height of this game arrives when the author inscribes herself in the text, a signature that, according to Derrida, serves to remain and disappear at the same time — a mark that serves to affirm identity but also blur the lines defining it. 

Even on a linguistic level, the penname is built upon two syllables that position themselves on opposite ends of the vocal chart: the open ‘a’ and the closed ‘i.’ This cohabitation of opening up and closing off, the double motion of an identity that projects itself outward but also negates that projection in acknowledging the separation that exists between its potential and its fulfillment: that is what sustains the concept of ‘Gabby’ in the text.

Towards the end, we see the realization of this fusion of opposites. Gabby apologizes for the lack of “pretty flowers” in the text, a segue into a wrap-up where she discusses her romantic life. The ties between geography (that is, appearance) and qualities return in the form of the question: is Virginia a downward sloping or an upward sloping state? In simple terms, if you see it as a downward slope, you’re a pessimist; as an upward slope, an optimist.

Sometimes I look at a mapof Virginia and think that adownward slope could bekind of fun.

Kind of like a slip and slideor the side of a cardboardbox pressed up against agrassy hill.

Maybe I am an optimist. Atleast for today.

Identity is never simple. Optimist or pessimist? Our poet is both.

Searching For Burlee: A Review of Burlee Vang's The Dead I Know

I should tell you, I know Burlee Vang. However, it’s been a long time since we’ve spoken or even been within a glance. So I should say, I knew Burlee Vang, because of that slight technicality and because it feels okay to talk about him in the past — that’s how we talk about people who are important.

I should also tell you that I’m not writing this recommendation because I knew him. Actually, here I write about a Burlee Vang that I didn’t even know — Burlee Vang the poet. I never met this part of him. For half a year, we were in the same fiction workshop. I caught glimpses of his poetry in his prose, but it wasn’t until this, The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth, that I held poems of his.

The Burlee Vang that I did know and I didn’t talk much. I didn’t know him the way most people can say of their friends. Didn’t know where he lived. Didn’t have his phone number. Didn’t know his wife. Didn’t know the things that upset him (I never even saw him upset). But I did know his favorite writers and that we liked the same ones — their pains and their ability to love despite it, perhaps because of it — and that was enough to begin a friendship, the kind that had small and few conversations, like poems actually, that briefly say a lot.

He was a serious writer, more than anyone I knew, so after our short conversations I imagined him running to the house I didn’t know, and writing with the things I did know — a spiral notebook that he folded like a newspaper under an arm, and a Bic. Still, I wondered if I had been right. Had he gone into a room to write all day? Had he committed every minute of his day to writing? Was he having the same problems that I was experiencing — loneliness, frustration? Those were things I always wondered, and still do, so I read this book of poems like answers. As if this Burlee, the poet, was telling me about the other.

In his poem, “Eating Without the Poet,” I found a possible answer to my previous questions. The wife of a poet calls her husband to dinner, pleading with him to join his family. “Again, husband: how many hours have you/ spent with your poems? Come sit beside us now./ Look, the sun is bleeding outside our kitchen. . . .” The husband responds, “Still too much beauty to speak of . . .” And she replies, “Do you know that letting go is a kind of beauty?”

But I still don’t know. Was he the poet missing from the table? Was he searching for peace through his writing? Did he refuse to eat in an unsettled state? Why did he write? In his ars poetica, I hear him say, “Maybe because I’m dying,” and “Perhaps I desire too much/ the things I’ll never have/ Or the things I’ve lost.”

I had these questions for Burlee because the prose of his that I read during our workshop gave me the feeling that we had the same blues — diaspora blues. Mine, the Mexican-American blues. His, the Hmong-American blues. Now I know that I probably didn’t see much of him because he was putting this book together — writing his blues into songs. In these poems, Burlee Vang welcomes us into a pain he has kept honest while crafting for us to enter and walk away with truth and history without suffering its consequences (the way the people in his poems have). We will not know what it feels like to be a Hmong man living in hiding, shot when searching for food, and then begging to be carried by the living things in the river where he lays half-dead. We won’t know what it’s like for a Hmong woman and her son to leave a war-torn country, only to enter a new kind of battle and struggle in the U.S. We won’t know what it is like to be a poet writing about an ongoing war while his brother dies in that war. But we do exit hurting differently — a pain that comes with understanding a truth, a secret, kept away from us as is the story of the Hmong.

The last time I saw Burlee was in our English department’s hallway. We knew it would likely be the last time we saw each other, so we stopped to exchange our final words. I can’t tell you what we said to each other. I’ve tried to remember but can only recall some words. I can tell you that after reading this book, I now put lines of his poems into the missing dialogue of that memory. When I enter that last conversation in my mind, I tell him of my sadness, how I feel like I die as I see my aging parents fade with their work, and he says, “spread your shadow as if in flight.” When I tell him about my writing and the sacrifices I’m making make for it, he understands, and says, “I’ve told the dead to let me sleep—/ they can talk forever.”

This is a book for everyone searching for answers. The answers are here.

An Interview with B.J. Hollars

BJ Hollars likes tea. All kinds of tea. Has one entire kitchen cupboard jammed full of chamomile and green and white and Sleepy Time and citrus and black teas — and he’s really nice about sharing. It must be the tea that makes him one of the hardest working writers I have ever met. He rises at five in the morning to get started before his computer, then heads to campus to teach a full course load, then gets home to edit one of three anthologies, work on a novel, edit a few short stories, finish his grading­ — and he still somehow finds time to visit the gym, walk the dog, watch reruns of his favorite TV shows, and throw the occasional backyard barbeque. Oh, and his first child is due any day now. Hollars is also one of the most humble, happy, and approachable writers I have ever met. Maybe it’s the tea.

Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Hollars is the author of Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and is at work on another Alabama-themed book of nonfiction. He is also the editor of You Must Be This Tall To Ride (Writer’s Digest Books, 2009),  Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings (Pressgang, 2012) and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). His writings can be found, well, all over the place: North American Review, American Short Fiction online, Barrelhouse, Mid-American Review, Fugue, Faultline, The Southest Review, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Hobart, among others. I recently caught up with him over a virtual cup of tea to ask a few questions about his most recent work, a chapbook entitled In Defense of Monsters published by Origami Zoo Press.

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Megan Paonessa: Congrats on your new chapbook, In Defense of Monsters. I remember when you began this project, it was partly meant to demonstrate to a group of composition students that a case can be made for anything whatsoever — even Bigfoot — if one can write a strong enough argument. I recognize in these essays lessons I would teach my own students: how to use a counter-argument to strengthen a claim, how to introduce research with a signal phrase, etc. When did your chapbook’s opening essay, “In Defense of Sasquatch” stop being a teacher’s experiment and start taking on a life of its own?

B.J. Hollars: That’s a really great question, and to be honest, I’m not sure when it expanded beyond the classroom. Sasquatch simply held me hostage, would not let me go until I’d proved him back into existence. It was funny, wandering the University of Alabama’s Gorgas Library in search of proof of Sasquatch. I left that library with a two foot tall stack of Sasquatch books, but none of them got me much closer to the truth. When I stumbled upon Arizona State University’s “The State of Observed Species Report,” I think the essay began to gain traction. The report kept careful count of the number of species that vanish and are discovered each year, and the fluctuation of species was simply startling to me. Sasquatch no longer seemed like such an impossibility given the thousands of other species that emerge from the wilds each and every year.

MP: Your essays ask us to question the moment logic took over imagination and disallowed us to believe in monsters. The narrator is persistent in this respect, heaping eyewitness accounts upon legends upon history upon statistical representations of otherwise unbelievable claims proved fact. Outwardly, the narrator presents a logical argument for the existence of monsters. Why was it important to you to make a valid case for these monsters?

BH: I often fear humankind is too quick to lump all of the “unknowns” into the realm of impossibilities. It’s simply easier for the human mind to conceive of a reality it’s more comfortable with. Thomas Jefferson is a great example of a scientific mind willing to dream beyond the stifling boundaries of “scientific certainties.” In 1796, Jefferson examined some unknown bones and dreamed them into a giant American lion. They actually belonged to a giant ground sloth, though this wouldn’t be made clear for many years. I’ve always admired Jefferson for his ability to see the world differently, even when he was wrong. He didn’t view America as a land of limitations, but rather, a place of possibilities.

MP: Sounds like your next project should be about Jefferson!

So, your narrator believes in monsters — or wants, at the very least, for us readers to entertain the idea of their existence. But let’s assume the narrator’s voice and the author’s voice are not one in the same. On some level, don’t you-as-author need to jerry-rig the essays in order for the stories to come alive in their most successful ways?

BH: Ha. Perhaps jerry-rigging is the proper phrase for what I’m trying to do. Do I take some liberties of logic? You bet. But what makes these essays unique (I hope), is that they’re wholly grounded in scientific fact. I try to rely less on fringe science and moreso on national studies, such as ASU’s “The State of Observed Species Report” mentioned above. I try to keep an open-mind in order to pry the reader’s mind open as well. One can certaintly challenge my conclusions, but its far more difficult to refute the facts. This is why I’m careful to include a Works Cited page at the end of each essay. I want the reader to see what I see.

MP: A few notable writers have written mock-essays in the past — I’m thinking of Jorge Luis Borges in Labyrinths, or even your mentor’s book Michael Martone by Michael Martone — stories that the turn the idea of fiction on its head by posing themselves as nonfiction. Are you interested in this overlap? What is the appeal of writing a fictional piece posing as nonfiction?

BH: Good question, and I suppose the answer to it is rooted in the assumption that I consider these essays fictional. I’m not sure I do. I’m quite familiar with many fictional forms that pose as nonfiction (the literary equivalent of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, perhaps, though far less menacing), but I’m not sure that’s what I intended to do with these essays. I really am trying to talk straight about monsters, but, as you mention above, I’m simultaneously employing the vehicle of “monsters” to talk about imagination as well. There’s a link — however precarious — between monsters and the extinction of imagination. To write off monsters like Sasquatch and Nessie is one more giant leap down an already constricting pathway. I think imagination is paramont to creativity and maybe monsters play a role here, too. Why not let them be the cure to an ordinary life? We need to be capable of dreaming of Bigfoot prints in order to find our way back to a pathway of imagination.

MP: You’re a fan of monsters. You’ve gone to a Bigfoot convention or two, perhaps in the same way Trekkies and Gamers go to their respective functions, or perhaps more for research — but I don’t think you came back cynical, in an informant sort of way. In fact, you seemed sympathetic. Are you? Do you think these convention attendees need essays like yours to exist?

BH: Another great question, and you’re right — I did come back from the Bigfoot Conference quite sympathetic to my fellow Squatches. This sympathy, I think, came as a result of my understanding that the people who attend Bigfoot conferences are not necessarily die-hard believers as I’d assumed. In fact, the people in attendence were far more skeptical than I imagined. Most of the conference’s presentations were grounded in science, and many of the debates revolved around what form of science might best prove or disprove the case for Bigfoot.

I recently shared my chapbook with a few of my friends in the Bigfoot world, and I’m still waiting for a reaction. Squatchers are quite protective of Bigfoot; they’ve grown weary of the world thinking they’re crazy for even considering the possibility that a 600-pound hairy beast may, in fact, roam the wilds of America.  I’m not sure if they “need,” my defenses of monsters, but I like to think of myself as an ally to their cause. But in the end, monsters are only the half of it. I’m defending imagination as well.

MP: I’m a fan of any writer that pushes the imagination — so thanks for your work, BJ!