Something is Afoot: An Interview with Andrea Ross, Author of UNNATURAL SELECTION: A MEMOIR OF ADOPTION AND WILDERNESS

Andrea Ross’s debut book, Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness (CavanKerry Press, 2021) explores the rewards and dangers of exploring the natural world, living an unconventional life, and questing for ancestral identity. This suspenseful read is a surprising and poetic yet accessible narrative. As an adoptee, I was attracted to the subject matter, and discovered an elegantly structured and nuanced book that relies on pacing and imagery. It is a memoir devoid of confession and cliché, a feat as deft and daring as the two interconnected experiences Ross describes: living as an itinerant back woods nature guide, while searching for clues as to her family of origin. The Grand Canyon and the canyon of sealed records mirror each other, and she describes facing them with the same curiosity and fortitude.

In the last year, adoptees have made great strides in recentering the adoption narrative to focus on the people most affected and most ignored: adoptees themselves. Writers, filmmakers and podcasters have gone public with meaningful works addressing an experience that the culture both glamorizes and illegitimizes, one that makes detectives out of ordinary citizens as we seek information and connection that the rest of the world takes for granted: ancestry, heredity, and family. I took special interest in discussing these powerful shifts in perspective with Ross, as much as discussing her craft.

We spoke in person on March 26, 2022, during the last hours of AWP 2022, after she moderated a panel called, “Each Book Another Me: Mapping the Progression of Self Over a Career.” A mix of fatigue and buzz, adrenaline and soul, filled the halls of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, as friendly maintenance workers moved the loiterers like us toward the doors.

During the panel Ross introduced her work this way: “My first book is called  Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness… it maps the human need for belonging both from an adopted person’s perspective for belonging to community, belonging to other people but also belonging to landscape: the idea of landscape as a surrogate for lost family, landscape as the body of the beloved and landscape as a living breathing entity which we are in relationship with.”

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KFK: So in the panel you reveal that this memoir started as a book of poems.

AR: I can send you some of them if you want to take a look at how the poems and the prose interface with each other.

(The corresponding poem and prose excerpts are at the end of this interview.)

KFK: I would love that. It was interesting hearing you talk about how, because of audience and message, that it had to turn into prose.

AR: I'm glad you caught that. My memoir has a certain reader in mind. I wanted to explain to people who aren't adopted or haven't been touched by adoption, the particular brand of loneliness that adoptees experience, especially when they're from closed adoptions in which they're not allowed any information about their origins. The book I'm working on now has a completely different audience and I think that as a writing teacher we talk all the time about who is your target audience? What kind of background information can you assume they have? What do you need to tell them? What kind of language or jargon or vocabulary do you use?

I thought, “I really need people to get the message and it's not coming across in poems even though I just spent two years working on them.” But it took a lot longer than that to write the book as it turned out.

KFK: How long did it take?

AR: I would say beginning to end probably 10 years. I was also raising a small child and trying to launch my career as a teacher and so I didn't have a lot of time to devote to it, but also a lot of it was just really hard stuff to go into and I had to pace myself because I would just get sad and I didn't want to go too dark and not be able to pull myself back out. I would set aside time for writing the really hard stuff and try to compartmentalize, so yeah it took a long time.

KFK: So you saying, “This is going to be really hard to write…” I have to say I had this book sitting on my nightstand for a week thinking, “This is going to be really hard to read…” because as you know I'm adopted, too.

 AR: How did you find it when you did dive into it?

KFK: I felt… lightened. It was a great feeling… So tell me about your three semesters with poet Lucille Clifton.

AR: I mentioned in the book I was not an English major or a creative writing major as an undergrad, but I did like to write and so I took an intro to poetry class. Once you've taken the intro poetry class at UC Santa Cruz, you were allowed to try to get into the advanced poetry class, but you had to submit a portfolio to be considered. I imagine there was some pressure on Lucille and the other professors teaching that advanced class to only accept people in the major, but she said she would just kind of meditate on people’s manuscripts and pick the ones that she felt that were people who had something that needed to be spoken, and somehow that happened three times.

She's sort of a patron saint because I don't know what I would have ended up doing if I hadn't had the boost from mentors like her. It really was kind of like sitting in the room with a prophet because she would just say these things that were so profound. She was such a national treasure and she touched so many people. I just felt super lucky to have had that time with her.

KFK: Did you read Guild of the Infant Savior: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book by Megan Culhane Galbraith?

AR: I did.

KFK: What do you think of it?

AR: I liked it! Megan and I have been in contact ever since we realized that our books were being published at the same time. I like that hers is so different than mine. It makes me feel more secure that mine has its own niche but interestingly so much of it is just saying something similar, the closed adoption stories of people just really needing to know who they are and not having access to that. Then the next part of the story is if you do search we all seem to have the same fears and hopes, that they (our biological parents) might be dead, they might reject us, they might be the most amazing person… Or we might have the Kunta Kinte “I have found you!” moment.

We all have that range of fears and hopes around reunion, but then she had a completely different experience with finding her natural mom than I did. They were really into each other at first, and now they're estranged. Mine has been much more even keeled than that. I never felt like, “Oh now I understand why I am who I am.” I didn't and I don't really see myself reflected in my natural parents so much, but nonetheless even though we're super different and have really different politics and values, they're all really committed to being in relationship, even though it's not super close.

I get envious when I hear stories of people who were like “I look just like them.” But in terms of the best possible outcomes, I think I lucked out. I've been in reunion with my natural mom for 20 years. That's pretty unusual. Often reunions run their course in less than 10 years, partly because there's no map charted for that relationship and so it's just really hard to figure it out. I think a lot of times somebody just kind of drops off. It's probably not unlike what happens with some open adoptions these days where people go into it with good intentions and wanting to do the right thing for the child by keeping everybody in contact, but then it gets hard because you're parenting somebody else’s biological child, or you are the biological mom and you are coming to grips with, over and over again, the fact that you have relinquished your child. I think it's similar in an inverse way.

KFK: There’s trauma in both staying in touch or being apart. “Adoption is trauma.”

AR: So much trauma.

KFK: That’s still considered “a theory.”

AR: How's that for those of us who have lived it? We know that it's not just a theory.

KFK: Did you see the documentary Reckoning with the Primal Wound? Are you part of The Adoptee Army?

AR: Yes and yes. Did you get your name on The Adoptee Army list at the end of the film?

KFK: I was late to the game, but when the film gets fully released, I'll be on The Adoptee Army list.

AR: It was so gratifying to see my name and to see so many names on that list.

KFK: It's growing and growing.

AR: Such a good idea that she (director Autumn Rebecca Sansom) had to just make that list in the credits. I was telling a friend of mine about it recently. She said, “It kind of gives me chills… it sounds like the Vietnam memorial, except that was everybody who died and these are the people who lived, but are lost…” So it’s a different kind of reconnection…

I found out about that film because I was asked to be on the podcast called Adoption: The Making of Me, which has been going for about a year. The premise is it's two adopted women who are about my age, mid 50s, who have been friends for a long time and they decided to do a podcast in which they would each read a chapter of Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, discuss it on their podcast and then bring in a guest whom they would interview.

They brought me on and said, “We saw that Nancy Verrier blurbed your book. How in the heck did you do that because we want to contact her!” I totally cold called her and she was just so generous. They're like, “We want to bring her on because we're reading her book!”

They contacted her and she got back to them eventually and she told them that this Reckoning with the Primal Wound film was happening, and they told me.

Just like you mentioned in your email, something is afoot. I don’t know what it is yet, I am really looking forward to finding out, but something is afoot with the adoptee community and just with adoption in general and the way that people are talking about it and exposing things.

KFK: My thesis or theory is the idea that The Primal Wound was published in 1993. It was such a groundbreaking book, to acknowledge that infant adoptees had suffered a loss, that we are not blank slates. I started going to Joe Soll’s Adoption Healing Network support group in New York City around that time. I think it's taken us this long to get well enough to tell our stories, to make art, to be open enough. I’m also not sure what it is, but it seems like since the last generation did this work that helped us get well, that's its now our time.

AR:  Megan and I are exactly the same age, and the podcast women…

KFK: Me, too.

AR: There's something about this coming of age, into the age of “no fucks left to give.” Like fuck all y'all, I'm gonna speak my truth! There's something about being over 50. Just suddenly, not suddenly, but gradually, we've matured and learned that we just have to live our lives the way that we want to live them and if that means telling hard truths, then so be it. That is really interesting, that we are all the same age.

KFK: The Summer of Love, right?

AR: I thought maybe that was my genesis but my natural mom was so conservative she couldn’t have even known what that was, but she was having sex anyway as people do.

KFK: Surprising who has sex!

AR: Almost everybody, turns out!

KFK: You handled that so well in your book. You left a lot off camera, but we knew you were being pretty wild in many ways. I like that.

AR: People always ask me, “What's it like to have people know this really intimate stuff about your life?” And I’m like, “You don’t know the half of it.” I didn't really want it to be about my sexuality, but part of that was about the search for self, trying to be fulfilled through in relationship with other people, especially dudes, yeah, a lot of bad boyfriends…

KFK: A powerful scene in the book was when you found the wounded hiker. I thought that if this story couldn’t get any more wild and dangerous…

AR: The more time you spend out in the wild the more likely you are to come across the extraordinary, whether it's something really scary like that or something really beautiful… I was squatting to pee in Alaska when I was out backpacking and I looked up and there was a wolf standing there, the only time I've ever seen a wolf. The wolf checked me out and walked away. I never would have seen that if I hadn't been out backpacking in the Alaskan tundra. That happened one day out of the hundred days that I was out there.

KFK: You are so courageous to do these things! I love the outdoors but…

AR: Some of it is recklessness, the recklessness of youth, and also the adoption loss of self. I felt like I needed to pitch myself against the elements (snaps her fingers) to feel alive, to prove that I was worthy of walking the earth, so that was a big part of it, like testing myself against the elements, what can I do, how far can I go with this till I feel like I am deserving, like I'm worthy somehow.

KFK: A great line in the book is, “Participate in your own rescue!” That’s a sticky note on the refrigerator line.

AR: (laughing) That one just got handed to me. The river rafter really did say that and I remember being just puzzled at the time, like how can I possibly participate in my own rescue? I'm sitting here in the Grand Canyon in this freezing cold water, I just got flipped out of a boat. I can't participate in my own rescue and then of course it's just such a direct metaphor for what we do as adopted people as wounded people, people who have gone through traumas. How much do we have to freaking participate our own rescue? Well turns out a lot. Like you were saying about going to the adoption groups and healing yourself, like it doesn't really happen unless we do it ourselves.

KFK: I think if Reckoning with the Primal Wound gets picked up on Netflix or Hulu or HBO then people scrolling will actually learn something about themselves or their adopted family members. It's hard to get someone to pick up a book.

AR: I found it so powerful the way that she was able to field the perspectives of so many different parties involved in the adoption constellation. Just to see a sibling, her bio sibling, grappling with what that meant. To be like, “suddenly I have this sister.” I had the same thing with my half-sister and it's hard for her. I think getting that validated is really important, just as much as it is for our experience to be validated.

KFK: Somebody in the chat room after the Zoom film screening said, “I had a failed reunion! Why do you have to keep telling me Cinderella stories?” That felt like “ouch.” We have to acknowledge our privilege that this reunion worked out.

AR: There has to be ways for people to deal with that. Like what Megan is dealing with. That’s got to hurt. A lot.

KFK: The empty picture frame is in the book more than once. It's very interesting it wasn't just to end the book.  She wrote, “I was not allowed to use this photo” under it.

AR: It's so emblematic of the rest of our lives before reunion. We aren't allowed to use that because we're not allowed to have access to our own stinking birth certificate. I just got mine four months ago. I was doing an article about how it's done on a state-by-state basis. It’s a giant mess and up until only like five or six years ago Colorado where I was born did not allow it at all and then the law changed. I was like, I haven't been keeping up on my homework and so I just went ahead and sent away for it and got it. It was weird.

KFK: Did the article find a home?

AR:  It was published in The Conversation. What's cool about it is that it gets picked up by lots of other outlets so when I Googled my article after it was published on The Conversation and all these other outlets had picked it up, so it goes out into the world in a way that it's hard for writer of my platform to otherwise do.

KFK: Congratulations on the book and now your article! What’s next for you?

AR: My next book is more joyful and it's about women and friendship and the outdoors, so my target audience is people who want to experience that joy.

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Andrea Ross did send me two unpublished poems that later became chapters of Unnatural Selection. Here is an excerpt from one, and an excerpt of the chapter of the memoir after it.

The Skull

(This event is referenced in Unnatural Selection’s chapter called “Ruins and Ladders”)

A gratefulness.

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         Nothing exists except the present.

A foothold—

         We’re always experiencing a present moment.

sandstone, the Navajo sandstone.

         The past and the future are simply ideas.

Footholds in the sandstone’s face: each a fist-

shaped niche, deep as a toe, a couple of knuckles;

         We are not subtle enough to have a science of becoming.

a foothold is a handhold.

         Nothing is ever one thing or the other.

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Excerpt from Unnatural Selection: “Ruins & Ladders: Navajo National Monument”:

“In my little tent that night, missing Don, I distracted myself from my preoccupation with the cattle by envisioning the footholds and handholds I’d seen chopped into the gritty Kayenta sandstone during my descnt into the canyon that day. Known throughout the desert southwest as Moqui steps, they are prehistoric pathways, climbing routes carved by the Ancient Puebloans. I knew it was important to leave any archeological artifact alone so that it might be preserved and appreciated by future generations. But were the steps artifacts? All I knew was that they called to me. I desperately wanted to put my hands and feet into their small recesses to see how they fit, to find out where those hanging cliff trails would take me.”

Love, Graffiti, & Audacious Sentences: An Interview with Jackson Bliss, Author of AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS

Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb, interviews Jackson Bliss, whose debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs, was released recently.

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There are so many things I love about Jackson Bliss’ debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs. In the first place, there is no voice like his voice, which is totally outrageous and utterly unapologetic in its audacity. In the second place, the content is as unexpected as the form: a Chinese American NYC graffiti revolutionary and his mixed-race partner (a tender elementary school teacher), painstaking level of description in every punk rock gastronomic feast, and the ruthlessness of Jackson’s embedded love stories, which always slay me. Finally, and maybe best of all, there is a tremendous, fundamental act of rebellion in this story’s formal experiment.

One of the curses of modern technology is that every single experience of beauty must be offered up to the great digital ledger—fixed in time and space, gathering data—as if the stutter of experiencing that moment a second (and third, fourth, fifth) time, wherever it lands online or in our devices, becomes the only thing that matters and makes us human. Jackson Bliss takes one such instance—one snapshot in time, as it were—and explodes the frame slowly, one page at a time. This novel is really an endlessly arising and endlessly unfolding human story that, for all the suffering at its core, remains one of community and empowerment. These are individuals who are as present in their joy as they are in their suffering, which made me curious about their author, whom I’ve still not met in person. Someday. And we’ll post no pictures of the event. In the meantime, here are my questions for, and responses from, an artist I respect and am grateful for.

Why graffiti? Why is this the necessary and only artform for our protagonist? 

I've always been fascinated with graffiti since b-boying (i.e., breakdancing) was hot. From my first trip to Chicago as a boy to my first trip to New York City as a teenager, I've been mesmerized by the way that graffiti tells stories about its people, its cultures, and its communities in a common visual field, not to mention the unique ways that BIPOC communities are represented but also reimagined in colorful caricatures. After I'd moved from California to Chicago when I was seventeen, I began studying graffiti in my neighborhood (Little Vietnam): they were full of these secret codes (numerical codes, visual codes, esoteric tags) I was dying to understand. During my MFA, I studied culture jamming and became obsessed. The basic idea of culture jamming is graffiti added to a billboard or advertisement that critiques market capitalism, that makes the advertisement self-destruct by using the ad against itself. Culture jamming is a cultural x-ray to viewers, showing them the truth behind the ad. Whether it's the squalid working conditions of factory workers making textiles in sweatshops in a FEZ (free economic zone) in South Asia for a Gap t-shirt, the starvation, anemia, and dangerous weight expectations of the modeling industry in a high-fashion billboard, or the inhumane living  conditions, abuse and destructions of animals, the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, the environmental degradation, and the toxic runoff of animal waste, all of which are part and parcel of factory farming, in each instance culture jamming attempts to sabotage advertisements, hijack their message, and expose the hidden moral, economic, and cultural costs of those products and industries to the public. In that way, I guess you could say that culture jamming is sort of a declaration of war against advertising but also a wake-up call for consumers, many of whom would rather look away. Ever since I started studying it—thanks Naomi Klein—I’ve always appreciated how political, ideologically informed, and culturally incisive culture jamming is. In Amnesia of June Bugs, I wanted culture jamming to be much more normative than it is. Unfortunately, it has mostly died out. Maybe this novel will start a culture jamming renaissance!

Do you have any personal connection to or experience with the art form?

Not personally, but I have been faithfully taking pictures of graffiti in Chicago from 2004-2008, in New York from 2005-2006 when I lived in Bed-Stuy, in Buenos Aires from 2008-2009, and in LA from 2009-2019 because that's one of my things. I've also taken pictures of international graffiti in Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Bratislava, Vienna, London, Madrid, among other cities. If you scan my IG feed, you'll see a good amount of graffiti. I like to capture street art before it disappears because lots of graffiti is intentionally ephemeral. One minute it's there and the next something else has taken its place. Our collective memory fades so quickly, but pictures tend to linger in the cultural imagination. Graffiti, like many murals, is street art with an expiration date and in this novel, you can see my fascination for the way that artists see themselves and their own cities, the way they create their own cultural spaces using their own distinct visual vocabularies of reality and their own unique perspectives of graphic narratives. I guess this is why I think of graffiti as a unique narrative modality that locals can use to tell their own stories about themselves to their own people in their own way. That’s powerful shit! And maybe that's one important reason why Winnie, the culture jammer in Amnesia of June Bugs, feels so important to this novel, why his Buddha Maos show up all the time in this book. Even though Winnie is deeply in love with Ginger and would do anything to be with her, that tenderness and devotion he has for her is matched by the intensity and the righteous fury he has for his art (and his frustration with the incessant economic exploitation of capitalism that exploits AAPI workers). Dude is not playing around with love or politics! Interesting aside: when I lived in Chicago, quite a lot of teenagers I met thought I was a graphie (i.e., graffiti artist) because I was a mix of preppy and hip-hop and I went everywhere with my backpack. The backpack, as it turns out, was one of the most important accessories for graphies because they used them to store their spray-paint. So, every time someone asked me if I did graffiti, I became more and more fascinated with it. Truth was, I was just another nerd with a sensitivity to language, music, and love who read novels and wrote bad prose and did my homework at cafés and started smoking.

The story of the novel unfolds during 2012, but it is so much a novel of the current moment. It's a world that seems both on the point of collapse and on the verge of transformation. Which does the author think it is? 

I hate the answer I’m going to give you, but I actually think it's both. I think both regionally, nationally, and globally we are are at an inflection point as a species where we are either going to cross the Rubicon and sadly say goodbye to this beautiful planet that we failed to be good stewards of, or we will be forced to make a series of radical decisions over the next decade that will fundamentally change our relationship to this planet and to each other and to the economic systems that we work in. As awful as the pandemic has been (and it's been atrocious for so many people), it's also been a unique opportunity to reimagine and question reality too, which crises give us permission to do uniquely. Questions Americans normally don't ask themselves like, do I actually like my job? Is this how I want to make money? Am I willing to work in these conditions? Am I being paid my worth? Was I ever? Is anyone? Is this horrendous world all that there is? Is there even a point of starting a family when earth is a giant fireball? What's the point of human existence? Why are Americans so goddamn selfish? Is this really the life I want to live? All of these questions have sprung up everywhere and I think that's a good thing. And I feel like in its own way, Amnesia of June Bugs wants readers to know that love, rage, hope, and hopelessness don't cancel each other out. They're part of the emotional counterpoint of being alive in 2022. This world damages us so much of the time, but it doesn't have to be that way. We live in a dysfunctional, violent, greedy, and myopic reality, but we could code reality differently if we really wanted to. In fact, we'll have to if we want to survive and not lose hope. So, Amnesia is both a scathing critique of the damage we cause each other (e.g., racism, sexism, violence, historical amnesia, classism, xenophobia, numbness, dehumanization) but also a love song for the endless beauty of this world and the importance that love can play in protecting, nourishing, and saving ourselves from ourselves. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Why are your characters vegan? Did they emerge that way or was it a point the vegan author wanted to integrate? How do you manage this formally, giving the characters space to develop and surprise you while discovering or even insisting that they share some of your values? 

Not all of them are vegan! I’m not even vegan, lol. Ginger and Winnie’s younger sister, Tian-Tian are, but Winnie is a pescatarian, Suzanne is a vegetarian (paneer and daal give her life), and Aziz is an ecotarian, so he'll fucking eat anything that’s locally available, the little food slut. But this is such an interesting question. I definitely have omnivorous characters in other books of mine, but the more I construct characters, the more I need some of them to understand the value in living and eating consciously. That doesn't mean they have to be like me because that shit would get boring fast, but I do want some of my fave characters to have considered the impact that meat eating in the form of factory farming has on the environment because it's environmentally unsustainable and bioethically harder to justify in 2022 unless you raise your own livestock. The reality is, not only are we cutting down hectares of forests to create farmland for livestock (that purify the air and give us a tiny security blanket against global warming) but then there's all the pollution of groundwater, the recombinant bovine growth hormone, the use of grains (which could be used to feed humans directly), the methane emissions, the inhumane living conditions for the animals, the dehumanizing working conditions for workers, and the medical and financial consequences of red meat consumption. It's literally a predictable but avoidable catastrophe. But I don't need—or even want—my characters to be morally perfect in any way because flawed characters are real characters as far as I'm concerned. I do want some of them to embody a spiritual, moral, and bioethical value system in some way that aligns to my own as a (admittedly terrible) Buddhist. I don't care if the shitty characters in my work eat hamburgers because that's what I expect asshole characters to do, to not give a fuck about anyone or anything, but I want some of the main characters to have considered these issues much more deeply, whether or not they eat meat, because those are the type of people I want to center in my fiction. At the same time, I intentionally don't make all of my characters straight-up vegan because vegans can be hella obnoxious and also, veganism can be incredibly ethnocentric, a surefire way of erasing your or another person's cultural, racial, and culinary histories, which are so often embodied in the food they eat. My wife and I are both mixed-race and both 90% vegan and 10% pescatarian, so the instant we got fish back, we felt like we got our families’ cultures back. I'd like to believe that's one reason why Suzanne (the Indian American character in this novel) eats dairy and why Winnie (the Chinese American character) eats fish, and Aziz (the Moroccan French character) eats lit everything is because these flexible eating strategies allow them to eat so much of the food connected to their own histories, identities, and cultures. Last thing, most of my characters do end up making some big choices for themselves that I didn't predict, want, or intend, and I'm cool with that. Once I have a strong idea of who they are, I usually let them decide for themselves what they end up doing. Not every decision, mind you, but some of their biggest decisions were their decisions and I felt like they just made more sense than what I'd planned for them.

This book includes a few of the most unbearably beautiful, heart-breaking love stories I have ever read. And that's saying something. How do you tell a love story? If you had a 10-step process—like a recipe—what are the necessary ingredients? 

That’s such a huge compliment! I'm trying not to cry right now, but it's kinda hard not to! Thank you so much for saying that. That really means the world to me. Tragically, I have no idea. I really don't. Mostly, I just focus on the humanity of my characters first and foremost and then let them kinda take it from there. Because I do give them leeway with their own decisions and because I value and fight for their humanity, above all else, I feel like the love that's sparked between them mostly happens organically. What’s interesting is that in Amnesia of June Bugs, half of the love is counterfactual (i.e., it doesn’t actually happen, but it could have happened under different circumstances) and the other half is real, but comes with tragedy, heartbreak, and disappointment.

The only rules I have for my characters with love stories is that at least one character must be capable and/or willing of falling in love. They might not make great life choices, they might have shitty taste in partners, they might make the same damn mistakes over and over again because human beings, but at least one person must be in a space where they're willing or capable of being vulnerable in some way. Otherwise, love can't happen. It'll just bounce off the characters if they're not in the right place. I think love becomes self-destructive if it’s offered to someone who is not self-aware, courageous, empathetic, and vulnerable enough to value and reciprocate that vulnerability. Interestingly enough, this is also why I don’t believe in falling in love with someone who isn’t ready to fall in love. You can't make someone love you and they won't value your vulnerability either if they're in a bad place. Other than that, I don't have rules for love. I think love defies, contradicts, and resists most rules, whether inside our heads or inside books, so I try not to use them in my life or in my writing.

Your sentences are outrageous. Over and over I'd read one and think/feel: How dare he? How does he get away with this? Tell me about your influences at a sentence level?  

Lol, this is like, one of the kindest things anyone has ever told me before. Considering how much I loved and admired Lamb, this is an even bigger compliment than you can imagine. My influences on the sentence level are Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, John D'Agata, Leslie Jamison, Jamaica Kincaid, Kendrick Lamar, Noname, Jay-Z, and Rick Moody. My influences on the conceptual, cinematic, and macrolevel are Wong Kar Wai, early Sofia Coppola, Haruki and Ryu Murakami, Life is Strange, Fallout, Mass Effect (all video games), and movies like Run, Lola Run, City of God, Amélie, Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Coffee & Cigarettes, Les Trois Couleurs trilogy, and Pulp Fiction.

What are you working on now? And why? 

Ugh, so many things! In addition to doing PR for Counterfactual Love Stories and Amnesia of June Bugs, which takes up so much time, most of it leading to absolutely nothing because I'm not famous and I don’t have a publicist, I have a choose-your-own-adventure memoir coming out in late July called Dream Pop Origami about mixed-race/hapa identity, AAPI masculinities, love, travel, and metamorphosis, which I'm kinda proud of. Mostly because it took me over ten years to write and rewrite. I'm also working on a couple screenplays. The one I'm most excited about right now is called Mixtape. It's about two mixed-race/AAPI/BIPOC almost-forty-something friends and fiction writers who meet up after ten years in Silverlake. They've had divergent literary careers after graduating from USC where they’d worked with all the writers you and I know from our time there. There’s always been a spark between Misha and Taka that was never explored. Mostly, they just talk and reminisce for ninety minutes, slowly making their way to Venice where they eventually say goodbye.

Beyond that, I'm working on a novel about a family of mixed-race/hapa/AAPI prodigies and a literary fiction trilogy about Addison (formerly, Hidashi) who makes three major life decisions, each decision becoming the premise of one novel. So, in the novel you read, Ninjas of My Greater Self, which is a postmodern novel about racial self-discovery, Addy breaks up with his girlfriend, moves to Japan, and discovers that he's part of an ancient ninja clan. In We Ate Stars for Lunch, Addy stays with his girlfriend and moves with her to Argentina where he realizes that she used him to start her new life without him. He moves back to Chicago where he meets a mixed-race/hapa daughter he didn't know he had from his ex in Argentina. They move to LA to help her acting career where Addy eventually publishes his first novel. And in the third novel, The Light Which Slices Through Me is a Lost Dream, Addy breaks up with his college girlfriend, gets his PhD, abandons his literary career to adjunct, and eventually searches for clues of his best friend who was killed by her partner. This novel will be in epistolary form. Don't hold me to the plot structure in the last two books because I might change them both in a heartbeat, those are just the plot lines I've been considering. So, yeah, I guess I have a lot of shit going on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you're not part of the creative writing teaching circuit anymore. What's it like out there in the wild as a poet and fiction writer in an expensive and sometimes unforgiving city? How do you make it work? 

Word. After the pandemic hit, LB (my wife) and I kinda re-evaluated all our major life decisions and decided that we were much happier in LA and that living in California for over a decade had irrevocably Californicated us. We didn't fit in the Midwest the way we used to. And we missed our Asian, Black, Latine, queer, and indigenous friends so much. We missed the food! We missed the cafés and restaurants. We missed the style. We missed the beach. We missed the endless flow of creative energy here. I told LB to follow her heart and center her needs. I said I'd figure my shit out eventually. This is me still figuring my shit out, by the way. She wanted to return to LA, so we made that decision together and I decided to leave my tenure track job, so now I'm trying to break into TV writing, trying to get my books optioned by a production studio (I just had lunch with Aimee Bender today where we talked about this very thing!). I'm considering doing some extra work because LA, applying to a bunch of writing jobs that actually pay real money, and oh, also investing in cryptocurrency and the stock market too. I've become such a stock market/crypto geek and I kinda love it. So, I'm considering all of my options right now because money gives you freedom and in my case, money helps me help those I love, which is probably my biggest motivation right now. I'm not sure what my next job will be yet, but I have faith something is gonna work out. I always do. Maybe that's one of my problems.

That said, I've always felt like LA is the best place to live in when you're rich AND poor. When you've got money, it's so easy to drop it like it's hot and there's so many places to drop it, but when you're poor (as all of us were in grad school), many of the best parts of LA were and will always be free: the beach, the blue sky, those 70º days in the spring, those indescribably beautiful drives through picture-perfect weather, the sun pouring into your office window, the bleeding sky after sunset. And for seven bucks, you can get a vanilla oat latte and it will be so damn good. I might be fashion conscious, but so many of my fave things here are free. It is true that LA can be such a tough city to live in because it's fast, rich, dirty, and it seems like everyone is doing it better than you are. At the same time, this might be the only city left in the whole country where it's possible to live off of your art if you make the right connections. You can’t do that shit in New York or Chicago for different reasons. You def can't do it in SF. But LA has a range that I appreciate. There's literally something for everyone here. You just have to find your muse, your mundito, and your medium.

Poetry Is All That Wires Us Together: A Conversation with Garrett Caples about LOVERS OF TODAY

Garrett Caples is a poet and writer. He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco. Lovers of Today feature poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining.

Tiffany Troy: Why name your collection after a bar? How does the title poem, “Lovers of Today” open the door to your collection?

Garrett Caples: Ultimately, it’s really naming it after a poem, because that’s the title of the poem. And that was probably the first thing I wrote in the book because my last book came out in 2016, and I wrapped it up maybe a year before. “Lovers Of Today” is the newest of the new batch.

It’s a cool title and that’s a title of this poem and it was an exciting poem to write. But the poem got the title from the bar, and the bar—ultimately, it’s from a Pretenders song. At a certain point, I listened to the song to make sure everything is okay. It’s a good song.

There’s a reason why you can’t copyright titles, because they circulate in these different ways. It’s kind of more of the poem, but it was an earlier part of the book. I get married in the middle of the book. So the early part of the book is certainly about a type of bachelorhood.

It’s just a good title. I tried some other titles, and it didn’t really come off. It’s the first line of the first poem, too. I used to be very against that idea of having the first line of a poem be the title. But when I come up with these little prejudices about poetry, I try to break them. I make myself do things that I don’t like and ask what do I do with that.

I always didn’t like taking a book title from a poem. It’s just more real estate to have fun with. None of my other books had a title poem. This is the first one. I did that partly to push against my own prejudices.

Tiffany Troy: I think that’s so cool and wonderful. Especially with the epigraph by Alli Warren: “I enjoy my drink, but not enough to name a book after a bar!” Right after, you have your title poem. Sometimes you really can believe two things at once, which really goes to how you go against your little prejudices.

I loved how your poems are rooted in place, in New York, California, Russia, and travel to these places. I see the surreal and how everyday observances in your poems become strange and beautiful, like with the onion-shaped dome or your dream about Ra. Could you speak to your writing process?

Garrett Caples: I am very much of a collect-the-poems-when-they-are-done type of poet. I don’t worry about having enough poems for a book in advance. Inevitably, books have their own personalities to them. It’s neat in a way because on the one hand, putting out a book artificially stops whatever you are doing. You might be on a roll in this way, and just out of necessity, tie a knot. There is something kind of artificial about that process vis-à-vis your own creative processes, so sometimes you like think a book correspond to more natural rhythm of where you’re like.

In terms of how the poems all relate to each other, it’s just where I’m at in a given point. But I keep on changing. If I start to get into a thing, where I’m like a certain sort of poem, I just get bored. I don’t want to have a style. In a way, the poems declare their own style and their own form. In my earlier books, there was a lot of formal striving that’s all gone now. I just figure it out as I go along and it declares its own format. I never have to think about it too much anymore, which can be good or bad. I look at some of my early books that I find kind of amazing. But because they were so formally driven and that’s relaxed, I just become more of a human being, I suppose. I just am a poet now so I just don’t worry in making individual pieces of art.

Tiffany Troy: My next question is directly tied to being attuned to being a poet. Do your poems find their form or vice versa? I am wondering if you could describe how the poems find their form?

Garrett Caples: It’s one of those things that’s almost different every time. Discussions of process break down because I don’t think I have a process. On some level, each poem has its own thing. Each one feels like a painting. It has its own life. I don’t have a process as such: a lot of it is that I just get irritated with myself.

My poems tend to hew to the left-hand margin. Ultimately, as creative as you can be with layout, ultimately you should be able to do it with no layout. The form of the poem “Lovers of Today,” is ultimately about forcing myself away from the left-hand margin. The way it came through with that poem, in a certain way it’s the feel of the trip I was on in New York, which lent itself to it. I went to New York a million times, but it was a particularly exciting trip.

There is a line from a John Lennon song “New York City.” “Que pasa New York” is a line from that song. That song had that kind of feel too. A London guy in New York and loving it and being blown away. It wasn’t a new thing, just like it wasn’t new thing for him either. He wrote the song in the 1970’s, and he’d already been to New York a bunch. But you can be there and suddenly the city just opens up in great ways. I was trying to get some of that headiness into the poem and have it swirl in that way.

There aren’t that many of these types of poems in the book. Ultimately, though, poetry shouldn’t depend too heavily on layout. I’m trying to get the words down and not worry about the layout so much.

That said, layout for me is a lot about line breaks. There’s so much action in my short line poems, that I do not feel the need to scatter words all over the page. The break itself is doing the work. That got weird on me in this book. In the poems, “Emotional Rescue” or “Hairy Sniff,” some lines started breaking in the middle of words. It sounds silly but it wasn’t a conscious decision, but that’s how it came whenever I tap into when I am writing poem. For those poems, I would practice reading them to make sure I remember how the syntax goes vis-à-vis the line breaks.

The way I became a poet ultimately was realizing that poems are just sentences laid out a certain way. I’m always working on setting the syntax against the line break. I’m not reinventing the wheel there, but that’s how I figured how to be a poet at all. Realizing that I knew how to write good sentences and use that against line breaks what you’re doing for line break. Sometimes, the line breaks are just deeply motivated and sometimes it’s just size, and you are just making a column of some sort.

Tiffany Troy: Thank you for sharing that eureka moment with us, the idea of writing sentences and tapping into the poet inside of you and doing the line breaks as they go. Something that I love about your collection is the rambunctiousness of your voice that is at once complex and wry with humor. Could you speak about how you construct and maintain this voice?

Garrett Caples: The voice is the whole thing really, on a certain level. I don’t have any problems with that. Maybe I should have greater ambitions.

I write a great deal of conventional, exposition prose, like for let’s say the New York Times. But unless I’m not allowed to, I have to write in first person.  It’s not like it’s one voice either. You make different voices with it. I realized that so much of what’s compelling about the literary experience is ultimately not the stories or the plot or anecdotes or the sentiment even of poetry, it’s the way of talking and finding a compelling way to put things.

We’re in a cultural movement where there’s not much to do in terms of formal innovation even though I studied a lot of modernist poetry and it’s all modernist innovation. But it’s almost all been tried at a certain point, and so, what’s the next thing after that? I don’t have an answer to that, except I know as an editor of poetry as well as a writer and reader, I just need the poetry to not sound like everyone else. There’s a lot of poetry that is pretty good and accomplished, but it all sound the same. I’ve heard that sound before.

It’s probably hard to have any kind of real perspective on your own poetry, but I don’t think anybody’s poetry sounds like mine. And I feel that in this cultural moment, that’s the measure of becoming a poet, if it sounds like you and there’s no other person you can slot in there. For the poets that I really admire, that’s just the case: you won’t be able to mistake one poet for another poet.

Tiffany Troy: I think that is exactly right. And that’s what community building, gathering, and celebration are all about, which are the different voices and what makes us different.

Garrett Caples: But there’s a lot of pressure to conform at the same time. The poetry community tends to favor a certain range of individuality and so you’ve got to push back against that. Because of the MFA system, so much poetry comes through that system. So inevitably, there is certain amounts of homogenization that goes on. I’m not knocking that world because many of my friends and people I admire come through that. But you’ve got to figure out how to get through it and break out of it.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I became a poet. I just knew I wanted to be a writer, and I found myself studying to become a professor at Berkeley. I wasn’t really interested in becoming a professor, and I just didn’t know how you can become a writer at all. So even though I did finish the degree but I abandoned the profession. But I don’t regret getting this PhD, because it got me out to San Francisco, you know, and put me in a writers’ town. For poetry, I feel like, besides New York, it’s the best town to be a writer in. San Francisco’s got such a center of gravity and literary tradition to it, and it still maintains that character even in this Silicon Valley age. So much poetry of great import of the second half of the 20th century originates here.

I was lucky because I didn’t really know this and went to Berkley because it was a highly-ranked grad school. I went to Rutgers as an undergrad, but they were all very bad. They wrote mainstream, hip stuff, and I just wasn’t hip enough to know where in New York you could get some good poetry. I stumbled through the English department at Berkley and that led to the rest of my life.

My other poet friends, like Jackson Meazle from Little Rock, Arkansas went to San Francisco State and Micah Ballard went to the University of Louisiana in Lafayetteas an undergrad but used that to become a grad student at New College of California. Both of them came to San Francisco because San Francisco is the poetry mecca, and they already knew that. I just stumbled out here and got lucky.

Tiffany Troy: I really love that story and isn’t everyone so excited about San Francisco. Your poems have this specific sense of humor that also cuts against yourself. It’s self-deprecating but at the same time you also glow.

What are some themes in your collection in your collection? What do you want the reader to get out of it?

Garrett Caples: This book is a funny book because part of is I’m pushing 50 and people start to die on you, especially if you are in the arts. You meet people at the top of the mountain, they are old people, and they die. Philip Lamantia was like 71 when we met and I was probably 26 or 27. But it’s what I love about poetry: there is so much intergenerational hanging out that I find very stimulating among the poets in San Francisco, Some of the people who I’ve met have been the most important and the greatest experiences of my life.

But if you’re any good at all, a real poet can see that. You get access to the top people in poetry quickly in a way that doesn’t happen in other more money-driven art scenes, because there’s no money in here. You get to hang out with Ashberry and Creeley as a young man. I was good enough that I could do it.

There’s a lot of deaths in the book, and at one point I thought about calling the book, Death. But it didn’t quite fit. The death material is fairly celebratory, and I try to speak of the people who meant the world to me. Some of the people are very old too, but it almost makes it worse when someone really old dies because you just get so used to relying on them being there. It doesn’t feel better when the person is in the 70’s or 80’s when they die than if somebody younger dies. It’s not a book about COVID, but it fits this time because it has this undercurrent of dying to it.

The last piece in the book, “Soul Book” is a poem I wrote for an art book called People Are a Light to Love: Memorial Drawings, 2004–2016. The artist, Veronica DeJesus, was a San Francisco artist who is now in LA. She worked at a well-known bookstore called Dog Eared Books. When somebody personally connected to her or a famous person that she was interested in would die, she would do a memorial drawing and stick them in the window. Over the course of several years, Veronica ended up doing around 300 drawings. She was looking for someone to write a text for her art book that wasn’t essay, but creative. So I wrote a sample, the first two or three paragraphs based on her drawings. It’s a first-person sentence for every drawing. The piece appeared as prose paragraphs in People Are a Light to Love. Then, for Lovers of Today, my editor at Wave, Joshua Beckman, suggested splitting the paragraphs into individual lines, which gave a second life to the piece as a long poem. It’s all about death, because all the photos are based on someone dying.  

There’s obvious overlap in our tastes. But Vernoica and I come from very different places and with different lives, so she had plenty of figures in there I knew nothing about. I would read around about X, Y or Z person until like some sort of luminous detail emerged and put it in the poem. That was a years’-long process of hers, and we published our book pre-COVID. But it feels like for this time because it feels like we’ve gone through so much death.

The book’s last poem or two before the long poem were from the very beginning of the pandemic. I was actually in France when the pandemic happened, doing my first and thus far only writing residency. I was in France at the time, in February and March of 2020. In mid-March 2020, I had to leave very suddenly. The last few poems are set in France and then ends in San Francisco.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today and do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: I’m always working on something. I’m an editor at City Lights, so I do a lot of other people’s books. To me, being a poet gives you permission to apply yourself to any literary endeavor. Sometimes that means editing somebody’s book, and sometimes that means writing your own book.

Since I finished writing the collection, I’ve done a McMclore book at City Lights. During the pandemic, I wrote around 7 prose pieces that I’m trying to see if I can turn into a book. I don’t want to think of it as a book of commercial fiction, because it doesn’t have anything to do with that. I think of them as fables or parables. I would like to publish with a poetry press and not worry about that.

Tiffany Troy: Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: What I’m trying to do as a poet and editor of poetry as I do a contemporary poetry series in City Lights is to try to maintain the integrity of collections of lyric poetry. There’s at least one school of avant-garde thought that lyric poetry is retrograde, and they are incorrect. The books I publish at Spotlight are hard to market, because I pick poets who can write good poems, and I avoid project-oriented poetry for the most part. Project-oriented poetry is easier to market and come up with clever things to say about them. There are a lot of poets out there, but ultimately you are only as good as a one-page poem. If your poem depends too much on sequential, serial stuff, I’m skeptical. There’s plenty of great poetry like that, so I’m not trying to make a blanket announcement.

What I’m trying to do is to carve out a space for real lyric poetry. I still feel like I publish avant-garde poetry. There’s no contradiction between lyric and avant-garde. That’s the type of thing I’m up to. The great bits of poetry are microscopic, so you want to preserve the arena that happens in versus all the pressures to write a book. It’s all ambition-driven, and not driven by the poem. I’m trying to do things where the poem is driving everything you do. It might hurt you career-wise, but you have to not care about that and think about the art.

The Letters In Your Novel: An Interview with Brooks Sterritt, author of THE HISTORY OF AMERICA IN MY LIFETIME

Stuart: I think about our conversation in San Antonio after the Clementine Was Right show. We were talking about how realism can sometimes mean what people don’t do anymore. Tao Lin & etc. used g-chats in their writing when people were still g-chatting. Those writers were, in many ways, mocked for their realism. But by the time Sally Rooney & etc. write g-chats into their fictions, nobody uses g-chat anymore. Because it’s over, it somehow seems realer in the novel than when it was real in real life. Is Realism the future, or is Realism a memory?

But I really want to start with a personal incident. It happened after I finished your book. There are so many letters in your novel. So many glyphs. They are a source of comfort and anxiety for your Subject. They move the plot along. You write about the backward C, the Claudian letter. You write “again, a connection to previous symbols was apparent, though the logic of their transformation escaped me.” Or, “the shape of the driver’s name calmed me.” How does the shape of a name calm you…

Brooks: …speaking of letters, your title is great. Jenny in Corona. The four Ns. I’m sure you’ve thought about that.

Stuart: Your title is great, too. The History of America in My Lifetime. One of those titles where you feel like you had it early on.

Brooks: I had it early on. It was a working title for so long that I ended up keeping it.

Stuart: So I was walking in Andersonville thinking about the Wallace Stevens poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” I stopped at one of those Free Libraries. Inside the library was a book called Criticism of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ and I was like, holy shit! I looked up. I looked around and over my shoulder. Who was watching me right then? Who is watching me right now? Am I, too, a Subject from Bevacqua’s film in Brooks’ book? Are we in the same film? I won’t soon forget that moment. Or answer these questions. And then I was thinking about how coincidence…

Brooks: …synchronicity…

Stuart: …exactly, yes. This is always happening to the Subject. Letters seem to cover him, in the sense they both cover for him and they are the raw materials of his impersonation. Like one of those old definitions of film. The film of death: “a layer of skin covering the eye and obscuring the vision of a dying person.” Used in Tristram Shandy: “The film forsook his eye for a moment.” So here’s my first question: are we being followed?

Brooks: The feeling of being monitored has been my experience for many years. Films like Gene Hackman’s The Conversation, or that moment in Enemy of the State, with Gene Hackman and Will Smith. The satellites that can read the language off a dime. That was made up at the time, but now it seems quaint. We’ve assumed for a long while our phones are being tapped. Not that anyone’s watching me specifically, which could happen at any time, of course. All of this seems negative, perhaps, but I like to think about the spiritual side to being watched, too. Encountering a book in a Free Library, like you did, or a person, at the right time. Maybe in that sense, we hope we’re being watched. We hope someone’s looking out for us.

This reminds me of the ending of Jenny in Corona. Your idea of “another person” who is just like me. You write, “remember that time I told you not to meet another me? I think I’m another me now.” Imagine yourself being watched. It turns you into another you.

Stuart: Did you ever think your Subject was anything but another him? As a reader, I sometimes felt like he didn’t have his own agency. “As a film subject he was one of the best I’ve ever seen.” He was ready to be in his film, ready for the novel’s structure, ready for the novel’s letters.

Brooks: Well, I don’t think anyone sets out to write a novel where the protagonist has no agency. I wanted it to be propulsive and if anything keeps him going it’s the search for truth, for mystery. In the end, he’s not just one guy. I’m not one guy. I mean, obviously I’m one person. But depending on the situation, we’re multiple and competing subject positions and desires. Why do you think he didn’t have agency? It feels like we must, right, otherwise we’d give up.

Stuart: The Subject starts off with friends, the relationship with Blanche, day-to-day stuff. But then his journey gets exponentially stranger. What does lived experience feel like today? We know multiple collapses are always already happening, but we still tweet, or boil water for tea. Climate change isn’t really happening anymore, it’s over. So climate change fiction is Realism. I think of this Elizabeth Bruenig-ish line when I’m on Zoom: everything will be OK, just worse and worse.

Brooks: I think that’s really perceptive. How the novel starts from real life, and then drifts. What happens to you, when you set out. How much of your life are you using. How bound do you think you are to yourself?

Stuart: Were you bound to yourself?

Brooks: Not really. There are memories I dig through. But then on the page I change it so it’s not mine. Reading your work, I think this is different for you. Like your setting, your Queens, you can’t have it start raining frogs. I mean, you could.

Stuart: They’ve rained a lot of stuff on Queens, so why not frogs. Makes me think of something Poirier said about Dreiser in A World Elsewhere, that no matter how much you write “Chicago” you can never really write down “Chicago.” As a writer deeply connected to place, I love that challenge, a pillar of failure to ascend. A History is different because you’re not in Queens, or Los Angeles, or Chicago; or you’re in all those places. You’re everywhere because they’re watching.

Brooks: Surveillance is a social problem, but it’s also now just part of our place. There are novels by some chance that manage to cause social change, which is great. There are novels which expose evil, which is great. There are novels that through their perfect form reveal how messy the world is by contrast. I try to connect the strands and deliver an experience. I believe in truth. I think it exists. But in the novel it’s pretty hard to find it. What do you find yourself driving toward. Epiphany, conclusion, growth, change?

Stuart: To me, Jenny has a very ambiguous ending. Some readers told me otherwise, even took other sides, which I found so inspiring. I’ve always been interested in human relationships being endless. You’re never going to get resolution, or if you do, the other person might not. Why would a novelist be interested in resolution. In The History, the movie is over, in some way, but also not resolved. You feel like the Subject could star in this film again. Have you seen Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere? He’s riding the sports car around in circles. He’s made it. I thought about that at the end of your book.

Brooks: You might be on to something with Somewhere. Or in Even Dwarfs Started Small…

Stuart: …now that’s a title…

Brooks: …this early Werner Herzog film. They tie the steering wheel of this old jalopy to one side and a bunch of people are chasing it and it goes round and round, makes a rut in the dirt. Do you believe in Realism?

Stuart: I do. I don’t know about raining frogs. Which I think is a pretty good benchmark. I can’t write a traditional magic realism sentence. I don’t think you can either.

Brooks: You just write: It’s raining frogs.

Stuart: But what about your second sentence. You know that Didion thing. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. By the second sentence, it’s all over.”

Brooks: Do you want it to be over after raining frogs? Or does something happen next. Before I could define magical realism, I’d have to know what realism is.

Stuart: Realism is getting a turkey from the bank on Christmas.

Brooks: I think you’re more magically realistic than you’re admitting to. You wouldn’t make it rain frogs, okay, but what about in Kafka’s Amerika. The Statue of Liberty holds not a torch, but a sword. Taking liberties with the Statue of Liberty. That’s Realism. What are you bound to? What are you willing to shake up?

Stuart: I can’t start with a straight world. To me raining frogs is a straight world. I must start in the wrong world, where it rains rain. I hold close this idea attributed to Hemingway or Stein, that after the horrors of the First World War words like truth and beauty and honor and especially hope didn’t mean anything as words anymore, as concepts. And I feel that way, right now, I think most of us do. Hope is for the prizewinners, and more executive power to them, but leave me in the ruins of legislative gridlock.

Brooks: Your book conveys a sense of love and hope and truth, without using those words. There’s emotional heft. I think you’re tied up in all these things you think you’re refusing. A lot of writers I love, Lydia Davis or Don DeLillo come to mind, are accused of lack of emotions. Wry! Arch! Cerebral! Cold! I don’t find them cold. There are certain emotions we think we’re avoiding in contemporary writing, but our devotion to the writing means they come through whether we want them to or not.

Stuart: I want to quote a block of text from your novel.

“Bevacqua’s words produced the effect of a puzzle piece fitting into place. Not the final piece, not the penultimate, not even close, but the puzzle piece whose arrival suggested what part of the final image might look like. A single vast, expanding text, consisting of all language produced in America—this text, in a sense, was America itself. America, its history, its language would be unreadable, at least to an individual.”

That’s very moving. Whitmanesque. And it reminded me of the spiritual exit available, what you hinted at earlier, from the doomsday message effortlessly rerunning in our brains. It also reminded me of something we once talked about at the Hopleaf, how Twitter is an endless scroll that can never have the same two eyes on it at the same time.

Brooks: Bulk data collection.

Stuart: I got this hopeful feeling from the block text.

Brooks: I hope so. If it’s all there, there’s possibility there. Call me crazy but we could use data for helping people instead of exploiting them, not only to sell stuff but to deliver what’s actually needed. There’s this line of Francis Bacon’s I find fascinating: at one point he claimed his goal was to capture “the history of Europe in his lifetime” in a single image. Impossible, obviously.

Speaking of raining frogs, I have to ask you about the DeNiro passages in Jenny in Corona. Here is the line: “A co-worker who is obsessed with the 200 movies DeNiro may or may not have filmed between 1974-1976.” Please elaborate.

Stuart: Maybe that’s my theory of Realism.

Brooks: It’s the kind of Realism I can get behind. It sort of reminded me of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville, featuring a guy in Hollywood who discovers something hidden in every film. Or earlier in your book, when the grandmother says, “this is the oldest church in America,” and Ty says, “she was wrong, but I still believe her.” That’s Realism. The 200 films he may or may not have filmed, that’s realism. So why DeNiro?

Stuart: Why not?

Brooks: What resonates?

Stuart: Someone said to me once, “you remind me a lot of a young Bobby D” and that person went on to do a series of horrible things to me. But I still love them. They were always surprised I thought they were hurting me so much.

Brooks: They’re always surprised, aren’t they. I’m reading Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, and the first half is a lightly fictionalized account of her relationship with Philip Roth. It’s neutrally delivered—she’s going along with it—and there’s a moment where she says, “I don’t know if this is good for me.” And the Roth character says, “do you think down the line this is going to damage you?” Love and pain are obviously concerns of yours, and I like the way they’re handled. It’s emotionally hard to read some of your stories. They’re really well rendered. But DeNiro…

Stuart: Bobby D.

Brooks: What would it take. The 200 films.

Stuart: I want to see those movies.

Brooks: It reminds me of Fassbender, who did 40 films in 40 whatever, drug-fueled years. He died young. It’s an alternate history. The lost films reveal something about the films DeNiro could have made.

Stuart: We have nothing. But at least we also don’t have the lost films.

Brooks: It’s something, isn’t it? Lost films have always interested me.

Stuart: They’re so important in The History…

Brooks: Maybe those 200 films gain their potency from the mere fact of being lost.

Stuart: Blanche leaves the Subject, but she also leaves him Glenn Gould’s recording of Brahms’ late piano pieces. They had a kind of one-night-stand, the Brahms was playing, and that’s what he was able to hold on to. He wasn’t able to hold on to her.

Brooks: Your reading makes me see that section in a more positive light. He takes the record away.

Stuart: In other places you write:

“a fragment isn’t merely something that appears unfinished. The very idea presumes the existence of some sort of whole. Choosing to stop therefore meant the work had arrived at completion.”

And this related moment, about paper shredding:

“The next time I fed a piece of paper into the shredder, it hit me. Shredding felt nearly as good as watching a Bevacqua fragment. What I did was mindless, but it accomplished what I was sure the creation of art accomplished: it allowed me to stop thinking.”

How many films did Bevacuqa make?

Brooks: More than the lost films of DeNiro?

Stuart: I don’t feel like fragments are having a very good run right now. Lauren Oyler picks on this really well in Fake Accounts. Anything can be a fragment, sugar! Just type something half-baked, hit return a few times and, voila, fragmentary writing. But that’s not what a fragment is.

Brooks: No, it’s not. Really, it’s the opposite of that. That’s like a whole and taking pieces out. For me fragments go back to German Romanticism and ruin obsession. Making a “whole” fragment is a cool thing. Like the Brahms pieces. Intermezzos. Ten in-between things. I mean, if you found an arm at the bottom of the ocean, yeah, there’s your fragment. But you have to be dedicated to the form. You have to sink that low.

Stuart: I want this popular idea right now to go away: the world is screwed, therefore my work is a fragment.

Brooks: In that sense fragment is just a synonym for choppy. Which is not the same. For me it comes down to being pro-form or anti-form. Formlessness has to be patterned and arranged. Even chaos is ordered.

Stuart: I wanted to read one more passage, keeping in mind your “single vast expanding text that would be unreadable.”

“Things must circulate—the interstate highway system, the blood in Eisenhower’s failing body—circulation, but no conclusion: once you’re a star of a Bevaqua film, there’s no way out.”

Circulation, the circle, the record on the turntable…

Brooks: …I’m fascinated with those movements. The highway system is tied to surveillance, and of course the circulation of capital. It must flow. A Cosmopolis thing. After 9/11 there was a huge panic and Bush came on TV and said, please go shopping. In the pandemic Trump and Biden said, please go shopping.

Stuart: And there’s no way out. You can’t square the circle, unless you’re on television.

Brooks: We’ve talked about Lauren Binet’s book HHhH. He calls it an infranovel, infared meaning “having a wavelength just greater than the red end of the spectrum.” He says he uses all of the resources of the novel except for one: fiction.

Stuart: That feels like exactly where I want to go.

Brooks: When you use your life as material, is it material, or is it different?

Stuart: Paul Valéry’s confession that he couldn’t write a novel because he couldn’t write the sentence: “The Marquee went out at 5.” Do you want to write, “Last year, they went out for an hour,” or does it get better if you delete last year, if you delete an hour, and you just write, They went out.

Brooks: IRL, deleting last year would be a great idea. 

Stuart: Everything becomes exact when you forget about time.

Brooks: In fiction there’s an obsession with giving information. Why not 4:58? Why not 5:02. Blue eyes, green eyes, 5’8, 6’3.

Stuart: It needs to be said that “taking all of the fiction out of your fiction” takes time. It took me a long time to write Jenny in Corona, it took me a long time to finish my new book.

Brooks: Took me too long to write mine.

Stuart: The next one will be faster.

Brooks: Let’s tell ourselves that.

Stuart: You write, “I never had a master plan, or any other kind of plan, really. I had merely embarked upon a course of action whose every contour pushed me forward in a way I couldn’t control.”

Brooks: When I hear you read that, it sounds like it’s about writing.

Stuart: Usually true of true sentences.

Brooks: For sure.

Stuart: I’ve noticed this funny yet profound thing that as I get older, I must write more about the lived experience of writing, because I’ve just spent so much time living the experience of writing.

Brooks: There are authors who write about being a writer, but then others who write about the process of creation. I’m interested in the latter.

Stuart: Roth feared, or maybe he was happy about it in his retirement, that the novel would become more and more specialized. So why not write about being a writer. Do it for the other writers. There aren’t a lot of them out there. Contrary to the received opinion there are more writers than ever.

On Influence: A Conversation with Edward Schwarzschild

Brian Phillip Whalen: You were such an influential mentor to me, so naturally I’m thinking about things my mentors and teachers have said to me over the years. You always told me, “no news is no news,” which kept me in balance as I was submitting work, waiting to hear from editors/publishers, or applying for academic jobs. Of all the things we talked about over the years that probably doesn’t seem like the one that would stick with me. As teachers I think we never know what our students will remember, what will help them—and when. Is there any advice your own mentors told you that has stuck with you?

Edward Schwarzschild: I feel blessed by the teachers and mentors I’ve found—or did they find me? The circumstances seem so improbable. I was fortunate to meet Grace Paley several times, to study with Tobias Wolff, to teach alongside John Gregory Brown and Carrie Brown. The wisdom they offered almost always applied both to writing and living. Paley saying, “You know more than you think you know, you know?” Wolff speaking of how you don’t get over certain struggles; instead, you learn how to carry them with you. The Browns demonstrating daily how two writers can get married, build a family, and continue to craft beautiful fiction.

Even when you were a student, you struck me as a teacher. You were already teaching me, that’s for sure.  What have you discovered about the subject of mentors now that you’re leading more workshops full-time?

BPW: I still get a magical feeling in the workshops I teach, if there's a particular quality to the light one day or if it's raining and we're all wet and drinking hot coffee, huddled together around a workshop table, reading and sharing stories. I tell my students, "This moment is something you'll remember 20 years from now." I don’t recall what I learned from any particular workshop I’ve been in—nothing I could put my finger on, I mean—but I still feel the camaraderie and support. I often think about Paul Cody, my first writing teacher, sitting at the head of a conference table with a scarf wrapped around his neck, on the second floor of Demarest Hall in college. Paul once had us sit on the floor in a circle, and he read us a fairytale, pausing to show us the pictures like a kindergarten class. It sounds ridiculous, but it was amazing, an homage to the way we first hear stories. That experience was more powerful than any writing lesson. The magic of story-telling.

ES: I was a pre-med student at Cornell. One of my friends was taking a creative writing workshop, so I signed up for it, too. The professor, Dan McCall, saw something in my stories and I saw something in him—a kind of life, a devotion to writing, a way to be in the world that wouldn’t involve medical school. More than particular words he said or wrote, I remember the encouragement he offered at a crucial time in my life and the reverence in his voice when he talked about the books—Melville, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Hemingway— that had changed his life.

BPW: That passion is contagious. I still teach authors I first read back in Paul’s workshops. There’s something special about that cycle. Sharing the gift of life-changing stories that were once shared with us.

ES: I remember a seminar during your time at UAlbany in which we wrestled with the poetry and memoirs of Nick Flynn. It was an inspiration to see his influence on your writing unfold in that space. When I think about my own responses to Flynn—especially Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking is the Bomb—what I’m drawn to is how powerfully his work shaped my writing of nonfiction. I found something in his fragments, his swirling chronology, his weaving together of voices that I couldn’t help but incorporate in the essays I wrote about myself, my family, and, in one instance, about Flynn himself. It was the kind of influence that felt conscious—I was very aware that Flynn had inspired what I was doing—and unavoidable. Finding him and being influenced by him was very much a joyful experience. It felt like a gift that you and I shared.

And yet I don’t feel Flynn’s influence on my fiction, even though I was writing fiction while reading him. It feels to me when I’ve tried to draw upon Flynn’s work in my fiction, it hasn’t worked out so well. In those instances, I’ve had to retrace my steps and return, in a somewhat mercenary way, to other voices. In the case of my latest novel, In Security, those voices came from various genres and forms, from Richard Russo to Ted Conover to Franz Wright to Peter Orner to Elmore Leonard and on and on. It wasn’t that I needed to be influenced by fiction writers in order to write fiction, but the qualities in Flynn that fed my nonfiction—the nonlinearity, fragmentation, and polyvocality—stymied my fiction, at least so far.

BPW: You have such a wonderful ability to tell a linear story in your fiction, weaving in backstory to achieve the depths and multi-vocality you mention in Flynn’s nonfiction. I think there are writers of fiction who certainly play with form and time in successful ways, but it seems to me that Flynn’s distinctive style—fragmentation, collage, achronology—lends itself especially well to the telling of true stories. Rita Dove once wrote that life is “ragged” and “loose ends are the rule”—which is to say, there’s often a lot of stitching and sense-making to memoir because the material is endless, endless ways to put it together. And often not putting it together beautifully—ragged ends, visible seams—can be the most evocative way to tell a true story. I learned that from reading Flynn.

But Flynn’s influence on my own writing is less about imitating him than it is about the ways in which reading his work has allowed me the courage to experiment with my own voice—to take risks in my writing. He gives me the courage to “follow my own weirdness” (to borrow a phrase from Annie Dillard) because of the risks he took—and continues to take—in his writing.

ES: What you say about my ability to tell a “linear story” cracks me up a bit. I mean, yes, it seems that’s what I aspire to do, yet the process couldn’t be less linear. How did you go about making the structural decisions in your collection Semiotic Love [Stories]? What do you see as the chief influences for those risky, brief stories?

BPW: For the micro fiction in the book, it was Lynne Tillman telling me to “start small again” after I wrote a few short-shorts for her workshop. I don’t think I’d have tried those shorts if I hadn’t been reading Lydia Davis (who taught my first PhD workshop) and Michael Martone, whose work returned me to the pleasures of re-reading Borges and Barthelme and certain Oulipo writings—and Yasunari Kawabata, who I read in college. I think of Jim Harrison’s prose poems, too, and Mary Robison’s hilarious, and devastating, novel Why Did I Ever, composed of mini chapters/fragments that she originally wrote on postcards (to overcome writer’s block).

Anne Carson’s book Short Talks was influential on the book, structurally—and formally. Her way of taking something singular, small, and turning it, like blown glass, into something so deeply meaningful, and how all her prose poems stand on their own while thematically binding the book as a whole. Semiotic Love [Stories] opens with a story called “The Father Bell,” about death and memory. The rest of the book explores a variety of losses and regrets—but it’s the ringing of the bell in the first story, the incipient loss, that sets the tone for what follows, that resonates with the themes and storylines in the rest of the book. I’d like to think my reader still hears the echo of that opening bell when they read the final line of the last story in my collection.

I know you have a manuscript in the works, and that you’re doing extensive research for it. How’s it coming?

ES:  I can’t talk in detail about the new novel-in-progress (superstitious, I suppose). I’m more than a few years in and the work doesn’t feel linear at all, though I wish it were and hope the final product will be. It’s at a stage now where it feels capacious enough to include everything—black hole science, World War I history, the trauma of exile, whatever I see at the dog park in the mornings, and more—but, at its heart, it’s inevitably a novel obsessed with brotherhood and loss, as I am these days.

Some of the writers who inspired my foray into somewhat immersive research were Ted Conover (Newjack), Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), James Agee and Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), and maybe most of all John Berger and his Into Their Labours trilogy (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag).

BPW: Your inclination to do research is inspiring—and what you consider as research, letting dog parks and your brother’s death influence your work. Your essay about moonlighting as a TSA agent to research In Security is delightful, and other autobiographical elements worked their way into that novel (like your tennis hobby). Are you going to do some radical thing with the new novel, or a future book, like Denis Johnson did in Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond, and become a literary investigative journalist?

ES: I definitely like that idea—but at the moment, the answer is no. Aside from a fellowship I did in Germany that made important research for the project possible. Would I take a parttime job in an observatory for a while if I could? I’m sure the answer is yes, but there aren’t too many functioning observatories around Albany these days, and I’d really need to spend time in an observatory from around 1910, not 2021. I wouldn’t mind working in a painter’s studio for a while. That might actually be do-able.

BPS: You and I are both comfortable allowing our experiences, and our fascinations/obsessions, to influence our fictive imagination. I wonder if that’s another reason we got along so well as mentor and mentee, even though our prose, the way we tell our stories, is so different. The novel I’m revising takes place in a homeless shelter in the Midwest. It’s based loosely on my time working with AmeriCorps, after I got my MFA. There’s also stuff about the arctic in the book, because I’m obsessed with the far north (maybe because I moved not long ago to the deep south, a kind of reactive longing) and what it would be like to be an explorer or a scientist, to live that life. I recently read Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. I’d gladly hop on a schooner and sail to Melville Bay with you if you’re looking for your next research adventure.

ES: We all know on some level that an understanding of working lives is essential to so much great art. Working for the TSA at Albany International Airport as a Transportation Security Officer-in-training was fascinating, and inspiring. I may not have appreciated work experience when I was younger, taking odd jobs that ranged from gardener to gravedigger to kennel cleaner to file organizer to knife salesman. Later in life, with a stable career in place (fingers crossed), it’s a blessing to step into another work space for a while. It offers extraordinary material, day after day of telling details. Such experiences might also function like meditation. For me, stepping into another job lifted me outside my patterns of thinking, encouraged me to focus on and appreciate anew the present moment. Of course, a job in the security realm heightens one’s attention to the “now” to an extreme extent, but I think stepping into other jobs would still have a similar meditative effect. 

In other words, I’ll keep you posted about the schooner.

Goals, Detours, and Persistence: A Joint-Interview with David Borofka and Caitlin Hamilton Summie

Caitlin Hamilton Summie: David, we have known each other a long time, meeting when I was handling your publicity for your novel, The Island (MacMurray & Beck, 1997). Before that, though, you had published a story collection called Hints of His Mortality (winner of the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award). Now your latest collection of stories, A Longing for Impossible Things, will be published in March 2022 as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series. We both can take a lot of time to write our stories and novels, something like 25 years. I know why I end up working at a slow pace, but what in your process takes you a long time to complete your projects?

David Borofka: I don’t know if I really work that slowly… Sometimes, I feel as though I’ve been a victim of my own laziness and sloth, and other times, subject to life interruptions—parents who were dying, children who were growing, a teaching schedule that became more demanding. Maybe I was subject to a mind less able to juggle disparate obligations and assign them their proper place. There were too many days, weeks, months, and years when the writing wasn’t being done at all, at least not on paper. Thinking, yes; writing, no. (Sometimes even that thinking made me preoccupied, much to my daughters’ or my wife’s frustration. Then again, my wife named the upstairs room where I work “Clarissa” [after Clarissa Pinkola Estés], as though every time I climbed the stairs, I was going to visit a mistress. Maybe I was…) I also know that I’m not the most fastidious writer in the world. If it’s a question of sending something out before it’s ready or revising overmuch, I’m guilty of the former more so than the latter.
You have a collection of stories that came out in 2017, and now you have a novel, Geographies of the Heart, coming out in January of 2022. That’s a gap of only five years, but before the collection came out, you were a student in an MFA program and you were working in the publishing industry before you branched out as owner of your own publicity and marketing agency. Were you writing that whole time? How much of your time was spent in your various “day jobs” or family obligations as opposed to writing? What about your MFA experience—was it solely dedicated to writing fiction, or did you find you were distracted by other obligations there as well?

CHS: I began writing pieces of this novel in my MFA days so with breaks and years spent doing other things, it has been a twenty-seven-year journey to see this novel into print, if my math and memory are correct.
I wasn’t writing that whole time. I was writing between work and parenting, all of which I celebrate. Even during my MFA, I couldn’t write the whole time because we students had to pass a comprehensive literature exam before defending our theses, so I was taking literature courses and reading.
The MFA at Colorado State is three years long, and it was a wonderful three years. I’d majored in Middle Eastern History in college and was not as well read as some of my colleagues in the program, and I’ve often thought that I landed at exactly the right school for me, pursuing the best MFA for me.
Also, during my MFA, I made time for fun, hiking or eating Sunday brunch out at one of the lovely small restaurants in Fort Collins on the weekends. Things like that. A favorite memory is riding down Poudre Canyon on the back of my friend, Dave’s, Harley.
Do you think our work benefits from our pace? If so, how?

DB: Seeing one’s work from a distance of time is an odd experience. That telescopic perspective can be a reminder of how much historical as well as personal time has passed; it can also be a reminder that the writing that one did so many years earlier had something of value, a little like looking at a snapshot of yourself from twenty years ago and being shocked to realize that you thought you were fat then. I like some of the writing I did twenty-five years ago. I like it much better now than I did then. All that stuff that went into the drawer? Pull it out… It may not be as bad as you once thought, just written by a younger you.

CHS: Would it bother you if, after spending decades working on a book, it was not published? I ask because the marketplace is so tough, even tougher lately, and it is a real possibility that some beautiful books may not see print. I know it would disappoint me if my dedication and time did not merit publication.

DB: My honest answer? I know myself well enough to admit that I’m craven. I want publication and I like (no, love, who doesn’t?) external validation; there’s nothing like the thrill of someone else telling you that your work has value. However, I also know how cringe-worthy it can be to see something in print that is not one’s best work.
I had a novel manuscript that I finished around the year 2000. On the strength of that manuscript, I got the attention of an agent with an outstanding track record. However, I don’t think we were a particularly good match. She liked the novel well enough to take me on, but she didn’t like it as it was; she wanted the book to resemble another recent bestseller. Without getting too much into the specifics—the agent’s name, the subject of the book, etc.—I will say that I never felt comfortable making the changes that she suggested, nor do I feel that I was very good at turning the story from what I had originally envisioned into the story that she felt would be more marketable. After about a year and a half of mutual frustration, we parted ways. But for several years after that I kept trying to repair it. I took what I thought were the best parts of the revision and the parts of the original story that I was loathe to discard and tried to stitch them together. Did it ever work? Not according to the publishers that she sent her version to and not according to the small presses to whom I sent my cobbled-together version, subsequent to our divorce. Finally, I stopped tinkering and submitting, but it was a tough project to let go and let die. Was it “beautiful”? I don’t know, but I am still fond of the story I was trying to tell, and I still grieve the fact that it didn’t see the light of day.
That’s probably the biggest reason why I’ve continued to churn out stories as opposed to working on novels. I’m a chicken at heart, and while I can stomach the cost in time of a story that goes sidewise, the thought of investing a decade in another novel that turns into quicksand scares me to death.

DB: How quickly do you send your work out? When do you know it’s time? What does it take to convince you that a story is ready to be sent out to journal or a novel manuscript out to an agent or publisher? Have you ever talked yourself out of submitting work that you later decided was publication-worthy?

CHS: I don’t send much out anymore because I don’t have stories I want to share right now, but when I was younger I talked myself out of sending out some pieces. Later, far later, I decided life was short and if I was going to try to publish ever again (I had had some acceptances in my twenties), I needed to try again. I started submitting and had a handful of stories accepted, which inspired me to revisit my invitation from Marc Estrin at Fomite Press to send him a story collection for consideration.

DB: Given the length of time before you published To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, what is the time span of your writing life that the stories represent? What do you think of the writer who was responsible for those earliest stories?

CHS: I spent 25 years on To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, from beginning to end, with breaks and distractions (all happy ones). I think the writer who was responsible for the earlier stories unwound her stories faster, but then again, they had clearer conflicts as well. I think my later work shows more clearly the messiness of life, the way conflicts can multiply.
After such a long time away, how do you feel about the publishing industry of today?

DB: Gosh… after being away from book publishing for twenty-five years, it feels like an alien world to me. Does it seem that way to you as well? In the early- to mid-1990s, most everything was printed manuscripts, snail mail, and postage for return envelopes. Now nearly every facet of the submission process is conducted online, which is easier but also even more impersonal. What we don’t have to pay to the post office or Kinko’s, we’re paying in contest fees and Submittable charges. I have to confess to a slight case of masochism; I miss going to the mailbox and seeing what’s there. Emails are not the same.
The marketplace that writers, editors, and publishers are collectively facing also feels significantly tougher to me, and it’s not as though the 1980s were a book paradise. Forty years ago, we were bemoaning the dwindling numbers of readers and the nearly impossible business model of publishers and booksellers. Has that improved in any way?
You, on the other hand, know publishing from several perspectives: author, a small publisher’s marketing/publicity director, a Big 5 imprint’s marketing/publicity director, and for eighteen years as owner of your own marketing agency. What do you think of the publishing world that first-time authors are hoping to enter? What about the grizzled veteran, who is hoping to rejoin the party after some time away?

CHS: I think in some ways this industry is harder to be a part of than ever before, and in some ways it is more welcoming than ever before. I’d tell any writer to be strong. Publishing a book is not easy and takes a lot of perseverance and grit and hope.
As a former writing professor, what advice did you give to students who also wrote at a slower pace?

DB: For about the last twenty years of my career at Reedley College, I taught mostly online. (It is an abiding irony to me that I retired and then a year later the entire world was online.) I told students in my online classes of the past that they had the opportunity to know truly what writing is like—you’re alone in your office, nook, carrel, or closet, and you only periodically come up for air. The real world does not give a shit if you can crank out a 500-word essay in forty-five minutes—that’s an artificial skill that only academia seems to care about—but readers do care about whether or not you are willing to think hard. In an online class, the students had the opportunity to manage their time in the way that was most workable for them. Life always hands us deadlines of one kind or another, but you have the autonomy to do the work that needs to be done and the timeframe in which it must be completed. If it takes sitting at one’s desk for three weeks in six-hour chunks, then do it.
During our grad school years, my wife made cross-stitch samplers as a way of relieving stress. She made me a small one that still hangs over my desk; the message is simple: “Never work quickly but always work.” It seems as true now as it did then, maybe more so…

CHS: Your new book is due out in March. Can you tell us a bit about it? How long have you been working on it?

DB: In one form or another, I’ve been working on A Longing for Impossible Things for about twenty years. A collection of thirteen stories, Longing has gone through several iterations. Under the title My Life as a Mystic, it was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and under the title Christmas in Jonestown, it was a finalist for the inaugural Donald L. Jordan Award. That last near-win forced me to reconfigure the book one more time. I took out several stories and added several others. Rather than taking the title from one of the stories, I found a passage from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet to use as an epigraph and took the title from that. The passage is as follows:
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
In one form or another, it seems that I keep coming back to this notion: that sense of longing for, yet never finding, that transcendent “thing” that hovers on the edge of perception. The word that refuses to swim to consciousness.
When did you begin writing Geographies of the Heart? Before or after the publication of Ghosts? What was the gestation process for the novel? Do you feel as though you have a better idea of navigating the publication process now as opposed to when you were writing the stories in the collection?

CHS: Three of the stories in the collection inspired the novel, made me want to finish the character’s stories, but one chapter was written long before the story collection. “Cleaning House” was written in 1994 or so, and I revised it to be chapter two in my novel. A number of other pieces not included in the collection were written before I decided to pursue the novel. I’ve spent half of my lifetime to date writing Geographies of the Heart. A heck of a long time, but I was compelled by these characters.
The novel is about how much of an anchor family is in the life of my main character, Sarah, and what happens when family stress and loss develop. It’s about how our hearts guide us, and fail us, literally and figuratively. It’s also about getting overwhelmed and resentful and learning to let that go, to forgive others and oneself.
I think what taught me about the publishing process has been work more than publication. I have been a book publicist for nearly two decades. That experience has certainly helped me navigate publication. My publicist is my husband and business partner, Rick, and that has been wonderful, having someone else handle my campaign. It lends perspective and also is a great support.

DB: What new projects are you working on currently? Do you set yourself anything like a timetable for a project’s completion? How do you measure a good writing day’s work?

CHS: I’ve never had the privilege of having time to write each day, and because my writing takes ages to complete, I never have a timetable. Right now I have a middle grade novel which I have worked on for ten or eleven years that I hope to revise again and send out. But other than that, there is nothing in the hopper and nothing in my mind, and I am enjoying the silence. We are finally getting some household projects done. That feels great.
How about you: what's next, and, if I may, how long do you think it will take to complete?

DB: What’s next may be a relative thing… Since my retirement in 2019, I’ve written another novel (Wanting) and a slew of other stories, all of which are currently making the rounds. Who knows what will become of them? Now, I’m starting to dance around the next novel idea. I have to be careful though; I’m Medicare eligible, and I don’t have the time (nor do I have the energy) to extricate myself from the sinkhole of any further failed projects.

Place Births a Braided Novel in Erin Flanagan’s New Book Deer Season

Of all the starting points available to writers of fiction, setting has always confounded me the most. Landscapes and cities have always felt neutral. There’s a cliff, a river, a mountain. There are buildings and streets. But they have no meaning compared to cliffs, rivers, buildings, and streets elsewhere. And a place’s inhabitants have always felt too varied and complex to ascribe them meaning. Thus, I was thrilled when the opportunity arose to talk to author Erin Flanagan, whose new novel Deer Season began with setting. I was eager to find out how place drove Flanagan’s imagination and how she used it to populate a novel that still felt character—not author—driven.

A quietly subversive story about a small town in Nebraska in 1985, Deer Season features three perspectives: Milo, a twelve-year-old boy whose sixteen-year-old sister Peggy has gone missing; Alma, a native Chicagoan in her mid-fifties who now drives the local school bus and works begrudgingly on her husband’s family farm; and Clyle, Alma’s husband who convinced her to move to his hometown to take care of his ailing mother, then pressured her into staying. After Milo’s sister Peggy goes missing, an employee of Alma’s and Clyle’s on the farm comes under suspicion, ostensibly due to blood in the bed of his truck and evidence of damage to his fender. Hal is intellectually disabled, though, and Alma and Clyle come to his defense, feeling him vulnerable to scapegoating.

But without Peggy’s body, no one can say for sure what happened. Milo and others wonder if she ran away. And so we arrive immediately at how place can drive a novel. Why would Peggy run away? Because she lives in a small Nebraska town and feels stifled by it. Immediately place has become both motive and stakes. If Peggy stays, her life will be about local football games, school plays, and weekend parties in cramped basements. If she goes, her life will be about very different things. What exactly those might be her brother Milo can’t say, but he does know that he too feels like he belongs somewhere else.

For her part, Alma feels like she needs to be someone else—namely a mother, a role that is the organizing principle of her neighbors’ lives. Not taking part in high school sports, bake sales, and PTA meetings leaves Alma firmly on the outside of everything meaningful in Gunthrum, Nebraska, and while Clyle recognizes that not being able to have children has been a big disappointment for his wife, he can’t see how living where they do—a place which is so familiar to him as to be invisible—makes it far worse.

Deer Season, like its writer and its setting, has no pretensions. The language is clear and precise. The pleasures and difficulties of small-town life are looked at straight on, with neither exaggeration, romanticism, or arch judgment. Instead, this is the perspective of an insider, someone who knows this place and these people at this time and has the great skill and compassion to let us sit beside her and watch how life happens to them—and how they make it better or worse for themselves.

Now Flanagan lives in Dayton Ohio, where she teaches writing at Wright State University, but she grew up in a small town in Iowa, and when I talked to her, she identified place as her starting point immediately.

I had always wanted to write about small-town life in the 1980’s, so I started with the setting, then moved to characters. Some of that came out of my parents’ experience. When I was four or five, we were living in a suburb of Chicago and my dad was taking the train in for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. For a while he had a room at the “Y” he’d stay at during the week. He decided he had a farm in the family and would like to move there. My mom was like, “Say what?” It ended up being the best thing they ever could have done.

Though Alma and Clyle were based on Flanagan’s parents initially, the characters quickly diverged to serve her interest in portraying the darker side of small-town life. Shut out of community concerns because she’s not a parent, Alma has closed up into a hard shell, and in response, Clyle has turned to other sources of connection.

I’ve looked back and realized that Sanborn was not what I thought it was as a teenager. There were a lot of affairs and drama I wasn’t aware of. There was also a grisly murder about an hour and a half away from my dad’s farm. The murdered woman had been emailing with a man my father knew. The police came to talk to the man and found blood in his truck, but he had an intellectual disability like Hal and couldn’t easily communicate that it was from a deer he’d shot.

The novel might be mistaken for a mystery when described this way, but Flanagan takes it in a psychological and emotional direction, exploring how Peggy’s disappearance and the suspicion Hal falls under drives the characters to face uncomfortable truths they’ve been ignoring for years.

Setting also drove Flanagan’s structural choices. All three point-of-view characters represent different aspects of the rural/city divide. Milo grew up in a small town and longs to leave. Alma grew up in a big city and feels (at best) ambivalent about small town life. Clyle was raised in a rural community, tried a big city, and ultimately chose to return home.

I wanted the town to be central to the story, so I wanted more than one point of view. Milo is closest to who I would have been in Sanborn at the time. He’s shadowed by his sister, who’s hitting a lot of the markers for what makes a successful teenager. My sister was like that, very popular, beautiful, athletic, honor roll. I always felt in her shadow, had the sense that I wanted to get out of that town, but no idea how that would happen.

Flanagan didn’t consciously switch the gender though. Like many aspects of writing, instinct took over, and she only understood in retrospect how Milo being male benefited the story.

A sister is more mysterious to a boy. Throughout the novel, Milo wonders what Peggy’s been up to when she sneaks out of the house at night, and what makes her tick. He ruminates on it, but he’s not thinking, “That’s what I’m going to be in four years.” There’s tension because she’s athletic and he’s not, so even the things he’s supposed to excel at, she’s better at, but there’s also distance.

Creating distance so that the novel remained focused on the town’s culture is also why Flanagan chose not to use either of Peggy’s parents as point of view characters.

If your child goes missing, that’s all consuming. I wanted Milo to have his own life still going on so that he’s processing in that self-centered twelve-year-old way.

Place also drove subtler aspects of the plot and characters’ personalities. Flanagan was aware that Alma and Clyle are limited by the culture of the rural Midwest at that time, and it shows as much in what they say as in what they don’t say. Neither Alma nor Clyle seems to recognize how big a sacrifice Alma made in moving to Nebraska from Chicago, and neither entertains the idea that it might be time for Clyle to return the favor and move back to a more urban environment.

That’s one way that my mother is very different from Alma. She would not have put up with that sexism, not even in the 1980’s, but in the town I grew up in, what the men said went, and people didn’t question it. I didn’t question it. I remember when I was nineteen someone asked me what my future looked like, and I said get married and have five kids. It was a long time before I questioned that.

It’s not just Alma and Clyle who demonstrate embedded sexism. As everyone tries to figure out what happened to Peggy, she is refracted through their speculations, viewed as a temptress and troublemaker while the men who orbit around her go uncriticized. And in a spectacularly deft, quiet series of scenes, Flanagan shows how Peggy’s mother is crushed by the old trope that it’s always the mother’s fault. She went back to work, leaving her children unsupervised, and when Peggy went missing, she deferred to her husband’s desire to keep up appearances and waste precious time carrying on as if nothing were wrong—thus whatever harm Peggy may come to is laid at her mother’s feet.

To me the novel is about how people don’t get the life they sign up for. Every single character is dealing with the question of what you do when this is not how you thought it was going to go.

Another way the place and time drove the story was in Hal’s drinking. Much of the suspicion and confusion around where Hal was the night Peggy disappeared and whether or not he intentionally or unintentionally may have hurt her centers on his habit of drinking to excess, driving under the influence, and not remembering all his actions while drunk. This too spoke of small-town habits and attitudes in the 1980’s. No one, including Alma and Clyle, considers that driving while intoxicated is wrong, or that Hal in particular may not have the good judgment necessary to drink.

Small towns are weird that way. Hal hangs out with guys in their twenties, and they do look after their own, but also, they might make fun of him. It turns on a dime in small towns, especially in the 1980’s.

I won’t tell you anymore about the surprising ending of this lovely novel about disappointment, compromise, tragedy and new beginnings. It’s too subtle, surprising, and complex to summarize or spoil. It’s also a useful lesson on the interconnectedness of people and their place, proving that story can begin with setting and blossom from there to contain the whole world.