When I Arrived, The Music Changed: On Brian Oliu's Level End

A long time since I — Player 1 — last played games (depending on who you ask) and I sigh to steady my hands. I’m the boy who gave up games for the broken belle who babbled something about “growing up;” I am the old gunman who incorrectly believes it is a time of rest, that retirement is a save point, that my season has passed as opposed to the truth: a season’s end is flagged by transition — call it “death” — but until then —

Fight!

Level End loads. 8-bit pixilated backdrop of a mountainous desert, a pyramid with spires, a cliff in the foreground, the hero — Brian Oliu of So You Know It’s Me fame — on said cliff, staring, preparing himself; he stands as a stocky, broad block in a red track jacket, the letters “RTR” on the back.

When I arrive as Oliu arrives, the music changes — changes much too soon, much too fast. I remember my youth; I remember the proving grounds: Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo; I remember easing myself into the new world. The first level should be filled with third-rate henchmen or goons or robots ready to be pulverized into coins or points.

Level End begins with a Boss Battle — The One With the Long Neck — and I quickly scan the HUD to ascertain Oliu’s status: six full hearts indicating maximum health; one life, no extra man.  He rocks back and forth, knife in hand.

I take my knife and start cutting–your neck breaking in sections and vanishing, tendons unraveling like our time away from this room, your neck growing shorter by the second. Your face shrinks back toward your shoulders, shoulders I remember but cannot place. [ . . . ] This is where you disappear. This is where the door opens. This is all that I have wanted.

Victory. Gold coins rain down into Oliu’s body. I breathe and select “Continue.”

When I arrived, the music changed —

Again, no henchmen or goons to use as punching bags and cheap power-ups to hoard before the Boss Battle. A Woman Made of Feathers.

If I could fit your body inside my mouth I would, you said, and I believed you: to be swallowed whole like a fish is a noble way to lose one’s way — out of breath, crushed to serve a purpose. As you spin your feathers come undone — they crash into the walls, they spin in reverse. I can catch anything you throw at me: grasp it between my fingers; snatch it as it floats to the ground.

*

By the time I move Oliu, limping and sluggish, to the Save Point: Inn so he may rest and contemplate a more tranquil setting — the northern coast of France, perhaps — I figure out Level End. Or at least, I get the gist.

One life; Oliu’s pixelated knife looping, swirling, slicing, re-arranging the Bosses and the rooms, which hold them: our hero knows each Boss. Or knows that each Boss is a composite of known people. The Bosses stand before him, each with his or her own special ability, supernatural body, and hidden reason to strike him down.

Level End is a game of recollection. Based on events true to the main character, Level Endis a saga through memories — those undependable images in our brains, chopped and screwed out of sequence and shaded with our perspectives, our version of what really happened.

The Boss Battles are as surreal as any level in any game I once played during my younger days: worlds which are frightening and wondrous and against the laws of physics; Bosses that can only exist in a young boy’s mind or on a television screen in a living room in New Jersey, volume turned up to push down his — my — parents’ shouts and swear words.

*

Oliu and I are exhausted; Level End’s diminutive size belies the weight, the pressure, of each battle. This is an old school game, before the days of memory cards and hard drives; you press Pause to catch your breath, to get a snack, while Oliu stands frozen in place. We began early in the morning; it is now night and I haven’t showered, haven’t called my lover, haven’t eaten.

Game players can feel the last level approaching, the story near its end. Showers and lovers and food can wait because I feel it in my bones — that stinging sadness mixed with an adrenaline rush, my thumbs sore from button-mashing madness — we are here, Boss Battle: The Final Boss.

There is nothing romantic about the idea of final when final arrives like this: not with an arrow in the eye, not with a body losing grip on the floor and disappearing in the dark with a sparkle and a wink, not with a final blink after turning magenta, a red not found in nature, a red not found in your face, not even while choking, not even while gasping for breath. What you have imagined the final stage to be is not what it is — here is a list it is not.

I know how this will end because of my history with games — each preceding Battle gave me clues to the climax — but I cannot share my knowledge. True gamers do not reveal spoilers; to do so would ruin the laughs, the claps, the excitement shared between those who faced each Boss and lived to talk about it.

Each of us who load Level End become, for a time, a version of Brian Oliu. We bring our own Boss Battles to Level End, a video game transformed into art.

Which of my bosses, then, do I — Player 1 — bring to Level End? Only one. A fight to the death, I can assure you.

Roll credits. Play inspirational music pecked out on a keyboard. Shut off the game. Breathe.

Brian Oliu On Reading

"My mother was a librarian and so after school each day I would get dropped off at the library. After finishing my homework and eating a snack bag of Doritos, I would start to read -- it started off with all of the children’s books, before I progressed to the teen books, designated by a small black bookcase that was relatively low to the ground where one would find your Sweet Valley Highs, your Christopher Pikes. I moved onto the 'grown-up books' -- first starting with the non-fiction books; favorites were ones that were about places and people: Sally Ride, Oregon, San Diego.

"As I got into my pre-teens I began reading the best sellers -- the library was the smallest in the state of New Jersey and would often get only one copy of the book, which would be reserved well in advance by one of the patrons. This meant I would have between the time the book arrived and the time the person would come in to pick up the book to finish reading it, often sneaking into the back room to read as I suffered from horrible night terrors after reading Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness when I was eight and I did not want my mother finding out that I was reading something I shouldn’t. Most of the time I wasn’t able to finish the books in their entirety -- I’d get a small snippet before someone came to pick it up, but it was enough to get a small sample of the plot and the language. Considering the majority of best sellers were thrillers or murder mysteries I would manage to scare myself half to death; not because of what was written, but because what I would imagine what happened next: a consequence of not 'drinking deep' and instead having my imagination fill the gaps with whatever horrible thing I could dream up.

"The most memorable instance of reading what I wasn’t supposed to was when the summer reading lists would be sent to the county libraries in order to help students pick out what book they would most enjoy and to be prepared for a sudden surge of requests for Lois Lowry. There was a huge uproar because the books that were selected for the 7th going on 8th graders were considered to be highly inappropriate for the age bracket. Not yet 12 years old, I would overhear these conversations and immediately track down the books in question: A Clockwork Orange, 1984, A Handmaid’s Tale. These images of dystopian futures, oppression, and, especially in the case of Atwood, issues of gender and sexuality, shocked and terrified me. The nightmares became more vivid, and now they had subtext!

"As a result of this, my reading habits have not changed much since I was younger: I look for writing that informs, that introduces me to concepts and worlds that I can think about and pretend to exist within. I also look for writing that will shake me to the core, that gives me a visceral reaction: of language that causes my face to scrunch up, or to nod my head, or to cringe or smirk. To me, words are some sort of magic code -- a series of letters that when put together in the right order cause someone to feel something. I think that is an absolutely amazing thing: that a series of words will give me chills or alter my thoughts. It’s a powerful and wonderful thing, and something I always keep in my mind when I do my own writing.

Manipulations of the World: On The Lyric Essay

For something that should not be tricky, non-fiction is tricky. Of course, there’s the issue of telling the truth -- a contract that is signed the second that something is described as “non-fiction” or “memoir”:  that the author will not steer you wrong, that the story being told is as close as humanly possible to what actually happened, that the feelings felt are accurate.

This is what we expect from our non-fiction and it is why many protect the sanctity of the genre vehemently -- the truth, simply, is more valuable. Horror films gain credibility and add an extra element of terror when the phrase “based on true events” is put before the cold open of a family peacefully eating dinner in a lake cabin. We are more emotionally stirred when we believe that someone has gone through something, has “lived to tell”, can speak from experience.

However, the concept of non-fiction is flawed in this way as well: thus the birth of the phrase “creative non-fiction,” which if you mention to anyone who is not in the writing community (I’m looking at you, family friends and clever uncles) they will believe it to be an oxymoron -- that things that are true cannot be creative, that truth is the direct opposite of creating something new of value.

This, of course, is laughably false: even by providing a timeline or a list of facts one is presenting the truth in a scripted form -- the choice of font, the decision of spacing, the way everything fits on the page. Yet at what point does the piece gain the distinction of being a “lyric essay”?

David Shields’ Reality Hunger has become the ur-book for the modern-day lyric essay: a blur of quotations and insights into writing, technology, persona, our relationship with the other with brief sprinkles of narrative intertwined. When we choose to enter a piece of fiction or when we read a poem, we are asked to suspend belief in order to find ourselves entranced in the language as well as the narrative:  we are certainly still in our chairs or couches reading, but we will allow ourselves to get caught up in what is being weaved.

The lyric does this as well -- the reader is immersed in language and synthesis: the knowledge that what we are being told is true, yet the way we are being told these truths are masked in some sort of artifice -- that instead of being immersed in narrative and plot, we are immersed in structure: what words repeat themselves, the speed of the language varying, phrases meant to express the intangible in a tangible way.

The beauty of the lyric essay is in its playfulness and manipulation of a world -- it is play at its most primitive level: the idea of vertigo, in which sociologist Roger Caillois defines as “an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness."

To me, the lyric essay exists in a lucid world but it is being presented in a way that one is uncertain of, in the same way when you have a dream about your house: you know it is your house despite it not looking anything like your house looks, despite having dead relatives and ex-girlfriends and people from across the country all living underneath one roof.

And yet it makes sense while you’re in it: you sit at the counter and eat a slice of pizza, you listen as faces melt into other faces, as the walls change around you. It isn’t until afterward you realize the oddness of it all: the craft and attention to strange detail the dream took to make you feel these things -- sadness for those past, homesickness for a version of home. It might only be a version of the truth, yet it was presented so beautifully and honestly, you can’t help but feel and live it strongly.

Find the Open Door. Fill the Open Arms.

Along with many of Brian Oliu’s fans, I first read the pieces collected in So You Know It’s Me during their original appearance on Craigslist over a six-week stretch last fall. In that initial iteration, the narrative unfolded with a poignancy that seemed connected to the ephemeral nature of its presentation. (As Oliu knew, the posts would be deleted after forty-five days, in accordance with Craigslist policy.) It’s always perilous to divorce a work of art from its original context, and the pieces in this collection—designed for impermanence—were particularly susceptible to corruption from a new medium. Fortunately, Oliu and the savvy folks at Tiny Hardcore Press have created a text that accumulates, rather than sheds, nuance and richness from its single-volume presentation. So You Know It’s Me offers an unflinching portrait of devotion and desire, of relationship and revelation. It is smart without being a smart-ass. It is genuine but not cloying. It deserves attention.

It demands attention, too. From the opening pages, this book proves as playful as it is provocative, and it resists easy assimilation. So You Know It’s Me wears many hats. It synthesizes missed connection and bildüngsroman. Its dense references—which range from obscure college football coaches to the process for making hounds tooth fabric, from the The Little Prince to the Odyssey—reward careful probing. It offers a loving chronicle of Tuscaloosa, Alabama—not a store-bought map bound by the rules of cartography, but the kind of sketch someone would draw on the back of a paper bag. It weaves together the stories of many women in an attempt to recapture the story of one woman. It presents a narrator talking his way into relationship and self-awareness. It warns you that intimacy is a gem so lovely as to be nonexistent, then leads you to a quarry and asks you to watch as it chips away anyway. It promises jewels, then brandishes “your heart where a rock once was.” It takes hold, holds fast.

It arrests us, but the book itself keeps moving, subverting genres and disrupting formal expectations. Attentive to every detail, Oliu even employs the book’s headers as fields of play. While the even-numbered pages conventionally state the author’s name, the odd numbered pages cleverly invert the book’s title, transforming So You Know It’s Me to So I Know It’s You and thereby further implicating readers in the narrative. We are simultaneously the ones searching and the ones sought, the missing and the missed. This is not just a narrative of one man seeking one woman. Rather, as the narrator tells us, “this is about you.” We readers are not that you, of course, in any literal sense. We know we have never eaten yogurt while fearing our brother’s death, never been wounded by wire. But words are seductive, and despite what we know, we begin to believe.

The book’s conclusion rewards our faith. Each of the its first twenty-two entries has been introduced with the same convention: a number indicating the day of its posting, a title, a location, and a description of who is looking for whom. These entries are all set in Tuscaloosa—on the university campus, at a local bookstore, in a park by the river—and the search is always described as M4W.

The book’s final section ruptures that pattern. Gone are the titles, the descriptors of the narrator and his beloved. This final section gives us only a location, or, more accurately, an anti-location—“45 Nowhere.” Fittingly, this section contains no content. On one level, of course, this gestures toward the fact that on the forty-fifth day, Craigslist began deleting Oliu’s original posts. Forty-five days after the last one was posted, they had all disappeared. More significantly, this also reminds us of what we’ve suspected all along: this story is ours as much as it is the narrator’s. As the narrator points out earlier in the text, we know who we are and where we have been. We also know who we have missed. Rather than being a clever gimmick, then, Oliu’s blank page serves as a testament to his own generosity, his knowledge that although this narrator is a single person in Tuscaloosa, this story belongs to each of us. We remain unmapped, unmoored, undone—ravished by this author, his words, his search for what has been missed, his faith that lovely things remain within our reach.

So You Know It’s Me is one of the loveliest texts I know. Read it. Reread it. Send it to the first person you ever loved. Stash a copy at your favorite landmark. Take a photo of it there at your favorite landmark. Deliver that photo to Brian Oliu. To find him, go to Tuscaloosa. Drive down the street that you saw on television when the tornado hit. You will know it for its lack of landmarks. Turn toward the florist’s that used to house the best butcher in town. Keep going until you reach the road where the first grade teacher used to live. When you get to the house that is no longer her house, turn left. Look for Alabama’s colors—white siding, a red porch. Find the open door. Fill the open arms.

A Conversation with Brian Oliu

How did So You Know It's Me come about?

So You Know It's Me came about as a writing project over the summer / fall of 2010. I'm a firm believer in having writing projects, which means I'm a firm believer in having side projects: I had been working for the past year on my collection of lyric essays based off of 8-bit Nintendo games and I felt the need to write something else for a change. The Craigslist pieces were perfect:  small things I could write every day (technically one every two days) and place them immediately into the world.

Why did you choose Craigslist as the medium for this project? What is it about Craigslist?

I've always been fascinated by Missed Connections; even the name holds some magic to it: it insinuates that if only things went differently, the missing / missed would be in eternal bliss forever. The Tuscaloosa ones are especially sad:  clandestine male for male ads, taking place at Hardees / Dollar General, a lot of 'too shy to talk to you at the bar' posts from frat guys. To me, there's nothing sadder than a 'missed Missed Connection' -- every once in a while you'll see someone post the same one a few times just in case it might get passed over. There's always an air of desperation as well: many of them start with 'I know this is a long shot...' or 'you'll never read this but...' and those are the ones that fascinate me. They turn into open letters that will probably never be read, but for some reason they need to be said -- and unlike e-mails we've written and then deleted or diary entries to people long gone, they're all public. And so you get these heartbreaking and honest confessions that are completely anonymous. When I originally posted the pieces to the site they were always anonymous -- obviously people started to gather through Facebook or Twitter that I was the one posting them, but I still wanted them to seem anonymous in order to keep that desperate starkness alive.

Is this about you?

It is about me in the sense that you cannot write about an other without writing about oneself. The narrator is me; at the very least a version of me, as is the "I" in any nonfiction. I tend not to use the fiction/nonfiction terms, but I consider it nonfiction with a suspension of belief. The stories are all true, as are the feelings. Metanonfiction? Maybe. Of course, I'm skirting the actual question which is being asked, which is 'who is this about?', and in that regard it is about a first love whom I hadn't seen in years who passed away. I found this out online, and so I feel as if the connection to something online is important. As with anyone you love who is now gone, you start seeing glimpses of them in other places and other people. The book, I feel, is about seeing someone in someone else and what that means.

You wrote the essays in SYKIM in dense paragraphs, using gorgeous, rambling sentences. Was that a deliberate stylistic choice?

I knew I wanted the pieces to resemble posts in a way -- I wanted them to look dense with little stylistic alterations in regards to how they looked on the page. I find repetition very exciting and I feel as if the medium of a Missed Connection is perfect for that, as they all seem to say the same thing, regardless of what one is looking for or who posted. I feel as if the rambling aspects also encompass the desperation of the post -- Craigslist deletes each post after 45 days and so there's a need to get everything out into the world as quickly and as honestly as possible.

In “21,” you write, " you are encased in glass like a sad flower, like you are closing your eyes so that the sheep will not see you." I loved that line and thought about how the girl in this story really does seem like is encased in glass because she is encased in your words. Writing allows us to do that, to capture people, or parts of people or maybe the ideas of people. Do you try to do that in your writing? Were you trying to hold on to something in these essays by capturing it?

Oh I totally believe in that:  writing to own things. Most of the time I try to write to own something that happened or to figure things out. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, yeah? I write about these things because I need to: it is catharsis. Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you didn't make art? Like you go to work, come home, and have nothing to work on? Man, that is strange. Sometimes I think that'd be nice, to not have the 'I should be writing' bug hit me when I'm playing videogames, but I am thankful for the pull.

Who are some of your influences? What books do you love most?

I'm a huge proponent of the lyric essay, and so I love John D'Agata, Christian Bobin, pretty much anything on Brevity, Lyn Hejinian, Jenny Boully, etc, etc, etc. Joan Didion, Joy Williams, and Olena Kalytiak Davis made me want to write / make me want to write / make me want to write better. I've been incredibly fortunate in terms of my writing teachers and I am very much in debt to them: Lia Purpura taught me how to synthesize the world and the self and to do it effortlessly and stunningly, Michael Martone taught me how to take chances in writing and form, to work towards a larger idea and project, and to always 'whole-ass' everything, Kate Bernheimer taught me how to channel memory into something sublime and terrifying and beautiful. Friends here in Tuscaloosa too: Lucas Southworth, Colleen Hollister, and Tessa Fontaine are just a sampling of gorgeous and at times 'perfect' writing. I am obsessed with the Odyssey; my first novel/memoir/whatever is a retelling of Odysseus' story if it were a computer virus. Dear Sugar! Wikipedia articles! Anything that is beautiful and has heart and feels toiled over yet flows naturally and passionately. Writing that sounds good out loud.

I know you also deejay. What set list would you create to accompany your book?

Ooh! I was asked this by the lovely folks at Artifice who published the first three Missed Connections. It was entirely sad dance music, which is the best. It'd be one of those dance parties where everyone would get sloppy drunk, sing / shout all of the songs, and take breaks to sit on the curb and have heart-to-hearts with people.

While some people are bored by process questions, I'm increasingly interested in how people write. How do you write?

I love process stuff! I type everything. I don't turn off browsers/Facebook/Twitter/chat because that seems like I'd be in 'high pressure / I AM SO SERIOUS RIGHT NOW' writing mode and I wouldn't get anything done. I don't really have a writing time of day, nor do I write every day. I like to move around; I wrote all of So You Know It's Me from my desk in my room, but I haven't written from that desk in at least 6 months. I was writing on the futon for a while, but that broke, so I've been writing on the couch in the room that no one sits in. I've been on a book / eating / spaceship tour the past two weeks and so I write something from my hotel bed which I'm really intrigued about. I'm heading home to New Jersey for a few weeks and I'm excited to see what happens when I write back at home (it usually turns out weird? and dark? and ornate?). I read everything aloud when I write. If I'm working on a project, I'll read all of the pieces of that project aloud in order to get me into the language / rhythm of writing. When I am done, I'll read it aloud:  if anything gets stuck in my mouth, it's gone. I'll do this multiple times. If I feel something is done, I need it out of my computer as soon as possible -- meaning I'll send it out for publication immediately or I'll send it to my friends Elizabeth Wade & Jeremy Hawkins who are the best editors / readers of my work on the planet. I write pretty well on Thursday late afternoons. No music, but sound is okay. Usually with a Coke Zero or Diet Dr. Pepper.

How are you doing as Alabama rebuilds from the tornado? How is Alabama doing?

I am doing fine -- my house & car did not receive any damage. The tornado made a straight diagonal line through town about two miles south of where I live. The town is shocking to drive through still. Some days you'll take a different street than you're used to and you'll see the destruction from a different angle and it'll hit you hard. It is really dark at night. It's been really hot this summer because there aren't any trees. For a while the debris was everywhere, but the cleanup has started. The buildings beyond repair have been knocked down. Taco Casa, a local chain of absolutely horrid Mexican food which is dearly beloved by local Tuscaloosans posted on Facebook a photo of them starting to rebuild and everyone went bonkers. Most impressive to me are the 'We Are Coming Back' signs that popped up almost immediately after the storm. My friend & local photographer David A. Smith has documented a couple of the signs which really capture the spirit of the town. Obviously those first few weeks were tough, but we were all ready to help -- I challenge another group of writers to wield a chainsaw or stack pallets of water better than us. Many folks would spend the day cutting tree limbs and answering phones at the courthouse or Emergency Services and then we would all meet at my place and we would eat/drink/cry together. One of the mantras during late April / early May was 'play to your strengths. I put together an eBook of Tuscaloosa writers called 'Tuscaloosa Runs This' that had over 800 downloads and raised about 1000 dollars for the recovery effort.

A friend made a letter-pressed book that raised $1,000 for an elementary school in the area that had been destroyed. I've been on a two-week tour with friends where we've raised over $1,500 for tornado relief, some of which will go towards those affected in Joplin, Missouri. People have been incredibly generous, especially the writing community -- I had folks I had met once at AWP or writers / editors I had never met face-to-face sending messages and asking where to donate and where to send food.

Isn't writing fucking awesome?

How did you end up in Tuscaloosa? What do you do there?

I'm originally from New Jersey and went to undergraduate at Loyola-Maryland in Baltimore. I took a year off, worked in a mental health in-patient unit at a hospital in NJ, and started applying for MFA schools in 2005. I e-mailed Lia Purpura, who was my undergraduate advisor for suggestions: I knew nothing about MFAs, or writing, or what a chapbook was, or how literary journals work, or what-have-you. Michael Martone had just visited and read at Loyola, so he was fresh in her mind. She suggested I apply to Alabama, and so I did. I had offers to other schools in the northeast, but Alabama offered me the opportunity to teach (which is what I wanted) and it also was a three / four year program, which was extremely enticing. I came in off the waitlist, and so I had about 36 hours to give Alabama an answer. I took the offer and it was the best decision I've ever made. I graduated in '09, and they hired me as an Instructor, which means I teach composition and creative writing. Furthermore, I am a partner in Slash Pine Projects, which is an undergraduate internship where we go on reading exchanges with other colleges, put out chapbooks, and put on various readings in Alabama. Those students are spectacular talents -- whether it's organizing, writing, book arts, fundraising, grant writing, they somehow manage to blow me away every time. It's an honor to work with them.

Why are U of A students and graduates so fierce in their loyalty to their school?

Oh man. You are going to get me all fired up! First, we're a football school, and a good one. Alabama fans are loud, obnoxious, brash, and accustomed to winning. So there's an element of pride that comes with that which trickles down to just about everything. It's overblown, it's a carnival, and it's just football, but it's also the identity of the town. There's not much happening down here outside of football, and so that is part of our culture. On the flipside of that, one of the beauties of being in a town like this is that you can pretty much do anything / start anything. You can start a reading series. You can start an art kitchen. You can start a small press. You can form a band for one-night-only and play at the local bar. And people will show up! And be supportive! It's the best.

Now, when it comes to the MFA program and the writers that come out of it, we perceive ourselves as underdogs. We're not Iowa. We're not Columbia. We're not in a hip place, therefore so many people are hesitant to move to Alabama. I remember a potential student e-mailing me and saying that she's originally from New York but now lives in Philadelphia and hates it because there's nothing to do there. It was clear that folks like that are not 'Roll Tide material': you come to Alabama to write -- there's a "diva check at the border," as Kellie Wells says. As a result, all of the writers in Tuscaloosa are extremely close: the majority of us are not from here and so we stick together, go to the same bars, hang out at each other's houses. I always find it funny when writers / editors ask 'do you know so-and-so? They live in Tuscaloosa too.' These are the people I play darts with, eat barbecue with, watch football with, dance with, kiss while drunk, help move. Our individual victories are everyone else's victories, and what's good for one of us is good for all of us. We're the cool kids at AWP who have buttons with secret meanings. We produce one of the coolest journals on the planet in Black Warrior Review. You'll be hard-pressed to find a lit journal out there right now without a mention of Tuscaloosa or University of Alabama in the Contributors Notes. And goddammit, we're nice too! RTR here we are, holler at your litgroup.

How is the track jacket collection?

Fantastic! Thanks for asking. It is way too hot in Alabama for track jackets most days. I just bought a new one the other day. It's an Alabama one that I had never seen before. That brings the total up to 34, which, of course, will make 33-obsessed xTx unhappy, but I'm sure I'll retire one come fall. I can go an entire Monday / Wednesday / Friday teaching schedule without repeating once. It melts my students' brains. The one I am wearing in my author photo over there is probably my favorite.

What do you love most about your writing?

I'll say what I love most about writing & what I hope to achieve. I love the fact that you can string together a bunch of words, and at a smaller level letters, and at an even smaller level black lines on a page and make someone feel something. That blows my mind every single time. That the dude who goes 'mmm' at a reading (you know that dude!) is going 'mmm' at a reading! That you can read something and get excited or all fluttery. So cool. I will say that everything I publish is going to be part of 'something I have written', so I have to make sure that it is something that I am incredibly proud of. I like knowing that, and I like that it pushes me to not take any shortcuts and to be a fierce editor of my work. I like the amount of time I spend on things and I like the emotion that I put into it. It warms my heart when people recognize that. I love how much fun I have while writing: the crafting of something, the tinkering.

Uncommon Ways of Seeing the World

I like giveaways. Anyone who comments on a Tiny Hardcore post during the month of July will be entered into a drawing to receive a lifetime subscription to Tiny Hardcore Press. That means you will receive a free copy of every book we publish as long as we are publishing books and there are some awesome, awesome books on the horizon. You want to get in on this.

I love interesting, intimate, and unexpected descriptions when I read because in the hands of a great writer, I see the world in different ways. Today, I want to talk about Brian’s uncommon ability to work with description throughout So You Know It’s Me. This book probably affected me most in how it showed me the world in different ways. The narrative that emerges from these essays takes place in a college town, Tuscaloosa, Alabama but the way this story is told and the kinds of descriptions Brian uses make you think that this story, this mystery, is taking place in a whole new world.

Brian’s finest descriptions come when he is speaking directly to the unnamed woman he is writing to about how he sees her. There is such tenderness and generosity of spirit and at times even eroticism in how he sees her and understands her, probably in ways she is unable to see or understand herself. The longing in those descriptions pulls at me terribly. That is not a bad thing.

When he sees her at the UA rec center, Brian writes:

It is because you believe in movement without movement. It is because you want to move your legs up and down like pistons -- no, not pistons, as that would conjure up images of machinery and mechanism and you are neither of these things: you are human, toned. You are not of the machine: you are its operator. You are the one who makes the sloping roller ramps beneath the pedal links slide back and forth like marbles down a chute of a game I played as a child, when exercise was part of existing, throwing my body into leaves, chasing my neighbor around the backyard because that was the game that we played, because that is what was expected of us.

There is so much going on in that passage -- the body as a machine, the elliptical machine as a childhood game, these descriptions evoking a memory that not only reveals how he sees her but how she makes him see himself, what she makes him unearth from within himself.

Then, at Barnes and Noble, the unnamed woman is sitting at a table in the café.

I would’ve come over to you, to the table near the window where you sat, but I would have no place to put my drink­ -- it would’ve left a watery broken ring on the table, and I could not put you through that again: those nights where the boys with their parents’ bank cards bought you drinks they thought you liked because they were drinks you pretended to like­ -- they were too red, too sweet, they curled your tongue like a thin paperback in a back pocket, though I would not describe your tongue this way: you know the story of Lennon and Chapman and Salinger and that is something I don’t want you to think about: about blood, about The Dakota, about autographs.

I love this passage for the tone, the cadence of it, the way it works at the language level with each word connecting to the next in an unexpected way. I’ve never thought of a curled tongue as a paperback book but when I read this passage, I find it to be a lovely, apt description. I can see the pink curl of flesh as clearly as I see the curved pages of a book in a back pocket. This book contains many such gorgeous images.

Later in the book, Brian sees his unnamed woman at an intersection:

My view of you was blurry­ -- the type of blur evident when all is in motion: mothers moving in quickly to place kisses on the cheek, everyone quickly turning their heads when hearing the word ‘sister’, hearing a song, hearing a name that is similar to their name.

These essays originally appeared on Craiglist so the words, themselves, were fleeting, a blur. As I read this description, I thought about the glimpses we catch of people, the blurs of human bodies in motion. What Brian captures here is everything that can go through your mind when you see someone you long for from a distance. This passage put me there on the street corner, holding that same gaze. I love when writing makes me feel immersed in a scene.

In a parking garage, Brian thinks about how she once said his name:

You said my name once, before you knew it was my name. You knew the weight it carried, the touch of the tongue to the roof of your mouth briefly, pausing for a second before forcing the hot air out.

The physicality here and the perfect description of the tiny moments that go into the saying of a name are what captivated me. As a writer, Brian’s ability to see the world in such an intimate way has really helped me think about how I can break down anything from a breath to the speaking of a word to an affection shared by two people in more beautiful, unique ways.

Toward the end of the book, Brian thinks about cooking with his Missed Connections woman in his kitchen.

If I told you that they took handfuls of soil and cupped them in their hands like water and spread them out in empty gaps, would you think of the time we made dinner together, rolling the dough into circles, flattening everything yet being mindful of the spreading out, the melting together. Would you remember the cutting of the city into cubes, the streets into lines­ -- would you remember spilling the oil, spilling the white of a cracked egg, watching it slide across the vinyl like a ghost, like our bodies if we danced while the yeast rose and the edges burned.

This is another passage where I thought about cadence and the unexpected transitions from one word to the next as well as the images those words evoked. There’s a scene at the end of the short film Logorama where the city is overtaken by oil and the black stuff starts flooding the street grid almost exactly the way Brian describes the spilling of oil and egg here. I was also drawn to the rising yeast and burned edges because these are such specific choices. To take the breaking of bread and make that into something so poetic, almost musical, is what makes the whole of So You Know It’s Me so entrancing.

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What descriptive moments did you enjoy most in So You Know It’s Me? What are some of your favorite descriptions from other books? What is a good description for you? Talk to me. Let me know it’s you.