Hush Up and Listen: An Interview with Ken Sparling

Ken Sparling is the author of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers, Untitled: A Novel, and Book. His recently re-released novel Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt is what we’re here to talk about today, and you should check out Amazon to find out about buying the book, and to see some reviews and interviews. Sparling’s writing has regularly appeared in New York Tyrant over the past few years, and his new book, Book, just came out with Pedlar Press and is available at indigo.ca. Additionally, Mud Luscious Press has contracted to re-issue Dad Says He Saw You At the Mall, probably in 2012. Look for it!

*This interview originally appeared in Keyhole Magazine. And Dad Says He Saw You At the Mall is available from Mud Luscious here.

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MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Ken, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions about your recently re-released novel Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt. Let’s dive right in. What can you share about your use of dialogue and how it functions here?

KEN SPARLING: The dialogue functions as a recommendation to the reader for a way of being in the world, and it calls upon the reader to be in the world in that way while reading the book. It calls upon the reader to treat the reading of dialogue as an example of what it might mean to read well. The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Buttfunctions as a request to the reader be open to an approach that might not be something she is used to encountering in her reading, to be open to an approach that calls upon her to be active in her reading of the book in a way that turns the act of reading itself into a form of dialogue, a dialogue between the reader and the writer, rather than a form of passive reception.

The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt also functions as an opportunity to recommend a kind of talk that gets forgotten, the kind of talk kids engage in until they get to a certain age. It functions as a recommendation to resist abandoning the impulse that leads to childlike dialogue. It’s a recommendation to resurrect the impulse for childlike dialogue.

The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt is a recommendation to trust. The dialogue inside the book looks outside the book for a reader who will listen to the impulse that makes the sort of talk that is happening possible, and who will embrace that impulse and respond to the book as though reading a book were itself an opportunity to participate in a dialogue that could function as a recommendation. The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt functions as a recommendation that the reader make of her reading a recommendation.

MG: Would you call this a semi-autobiographical novel?

KS: The idea of autobiography, as I understand it, is that something happens in a person’s life and then it happens again in a book. For me, the creation of a book can never be the representation of something that has already happened. The creation of the book is itself the thing that is happening. I make my life happen when I write, in the same way I make my life happen when I read a book, or walk to the corner, or have a conversation with my wife or kids, or eat a taco. I understand the notion that a page of words can somehow represent past events, but I don’t think I want to participate in that notion.

MG: Will you offer a few thoughts about the difference between the way you released this book the first time — out of your home, bound with duct tape inside retired library books, with cover illustrations drawn by your children — and its re-release form?

KS: I remember that I was very excited about the idea of making things by hand around the time I decided to make Hush Up myself. I was buying all kinds of used books from the used book store at the library, especially children’s picture books. And there was a place down in the basement of the Toronto Reference Library (where I had just been relocated) where they had a couple of huge recycling bins that were used by the Friends of the Library, who run the bookstore, to dispose of books and magazines they couldn’t sell, and there were often a lot of magazines in these bins, like National Geographic, or fine art magazines. I wasn’t a very happy guy right after I got relocated and, wanting to get away from my desk and the crappy work I didn’t want to do, I would go down and fish around in the recycle bins and get magazines with pictures I liked. I’d cut the pictures out, or tear them out, and glue stick them into the children’s picture books, usually covering up the words.

At first, my intention had been to cover up all the words in the books and put my own stories into these picture books. I even took one of the altered books to a reading and did a kind of variation on the story programs they do at the library for kids, where I read a page of my story and then held up the picture book so people could see these pictures that actually had nothing to do with my story. In the end, I didn’t do very many books where I put my own story in. I ended up mostly just obliterating the stories that were there, so that the books were all pictures – the pictures the children’s book illustrator did, and the magazine pictures I’d ripped out and glued over the words in the book.

I’m not sure what the impulse was here. I would spend an awful lot of time at work gluing pictures into books. It might have just been that I didn’t want to do my real job. It might have been that I hated words at the time and wanted to find a way to obliterate them, to shut people up… I’m not sure. Around the same time, I was trying to figure out how to make Hush Up into a book without simply handing it over to someone, like I’d handed Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall over to Knopf, and I was talking a lot about this problem with Derek McCormack – my writer friend who wrote the brilliant intro for the Artistically Declined version of Hush Up. I remember asking Derek about what it would cost to get the book printed, and at the same time I was working on defacing these children’s books, and at some point I realized I could buy old hardback novels from the used bookstore and rip the guts out and put my book in. I figured I could create the inside of the book myself using a photocopier and a sewing machine and duct tape, and stuff the book inside the covers of these old, used library books. So the difference between the experience of making the book myself and publishing it with Artistically Declined is vast. When you get a book published by a company – even the greatest publishing company in the world – all you really do is hand it to the publisher and wait. At the time that Ryan asked if he could publish Hush Up, I hadn’t handmade any copies in a while and I thought, sure. It was kind of weird, because I had no idea who this guy was, he just emailed and asked for copies of some of my books, then a little while later emailed to ask if he could publish something by me, maybe Hush Up, which he’d calculated I started making ten years ago. Somehow I thought he’d read the book before he asked for it, but then he asked for a handmade copy, so I knew he couldn’t have read it.

MG: How has your experience been with Artistically Declined Press? 



KS: Great. Ryan Bradley, who initially contacted me, has been amazingly enthusiastic and industrious about getting the book into print, about making a great cover, and about promoting the book. He made a website called stinkypoobutt.com dedicated entirely to the book and trying to get it out there into people’s hands.

And the other half of Artistically Declined, Paula Bomer, had me and my son, Mark, staying at her house in Brooklyn for four nights last weekend while I was in New York for a couple of readings, one of which Paula orgainzed and hosted at KGB.

You know, in the end, I think it really comes down to the people you deal with in the projects you decide to engage in and the people I’ve had a chance to work with because of my association with ADP have been incredible, they have such an amazing work ethic and are completely dedicated to creating beautiful things.

When I first started hand making Hush Up by myself, I guess I didn’t want to have anyone else involved. I wanted to go solo. Again, I don’t know if it was that I hated having to rely on other people, or I hated what happened when you just signed up for some experience and then waited around for other people to decide what was going to happen next. This was a hard thing for me to get over, this waiting for other people to take care of things. My first attempt to stop handing my life over to other people was to just wrench the whole thing away and do it all alone. This satisfied me at the time, but it made me kind of cranky, and I’m trying to get over that, and it’s taking some time.

With ADP, I’m really reveling in the opportunity to get to know and work with a bunch of wonderful people. The trip to New York was great because I met so many great people and great writers and participated with many of them in readings – Sasha Fletcher, Shya Scanlon, John Madera, Giancarlo from New York Tyrant, Jennifer Knox, and I got to see Greg Gerke and read with him again (we read together in Toronto a few months back) – but most especially it was great because I got to stay with Paula and her partner Nick and their two kids, Hal and Jack, and they are such a great family. A lot of what I think I’m about, and what Hush Up is about, is the problem of doing good family. So this was cool, to see this amazing family working together, dealing with conflicts, sorting things out, getting meals taken care of, and to be a little part of that for a few days.

Also, Paula put me and Mark in her basement, which is a big room with massive bookshelves on a couple walls, and these bookshelves are loaded with incredible books and journals. When I wasn’t out with Mark at the jazz shows he took me to, I was in Paula’s basement reading. Some of the stuff I read was stories by Paula, which are beautiful, heartbreaking stories. She’s such a great writer, with this unbelievable ability to write utterly convincingly from the male perspective, and I didn’t know this until I found myself in her basement and read a few of her stories in journals she’s got down there. She’s got a book of stories coming out in the fall and I’m really looking forward to it.

Honestly, from my perspective, the experience of working with ADP hasn’t had as much to do with the project of making an object called Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt as it has with working out together ways of making me and the book and ADP more visible, sort of leveraging the strengths and positioning of a bunch of people to create something that swirls with life.

MG: What are you working on now? What’s next?

KS: I’ve been taking passages that I cut from other pieces of writing, writing that I did years ago, or passages that I’ve transplanted wholesale, passages that I’ve saved over the years, handwritten notes I wrote ten, twenty, even thirty years ago and put in a drawer and forgot about, passages in old computer files on computers that still have floppy drives, and I’ve been bringing all these passages together in a single document, and then going through the document looking for a way to unite the material in a manner that makes it seem as though I intended for these bits and pieces to be together all along, but without losing the sense of discontinuity I reach for when I bring together a bunch of bits and pieces and toss them into a single document. The process of working through the material to develop a kind of unexpected unity, or unity through a common call among the pieces to be unexpected, often transforms the original bits to the point where they have no relation to what they were when I started out with them. But I want to believe that where they started, as bits forgotten in drawers, somehow informs what they become. So far, how that happens is a mystery to me.

This way of working happened accidentally, much as the process for Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall happened accidentally as I worked with Gordon Lish to try to figure out how to make a book out of all the little bits of writing I was producing back then.

The evolution to this more recent process, where I mix bits of old writing together into a single document and then work through the material again and again, re-encountering, rearranging, stirring, moving, culling and recreating, began when I decided to try to straighten out my mess a bit. My wife, Mary, finds it very frustrating living in amongst the mess I leave behind wherever I go. So I thought if I could clean out old files, condense things a little, I might be able to get some things off my desk, and off my bedside table, and off the floor beside my bed, and at least get a bunch of stuff hidden away in drawers. I was just trying to tidy up. I took files full of old handwritten stories, and notes, and little inspirations I’d had over the years while riding my bike or travelling to meetings for work on the subway, and I sat out in the backyard and read through these files looking for bits worth saving, bits I could use – although what I was going to use them for was never clear. I was just listening to the sound of what I’d written echo in my head, trying to hear if any of it was musical. So I might tear the bottom off a sheet of paper that had a sentence or two that struck me as worth saving, and recycle the rest of the sheet. At some point, this changed, and I started inputting everything I came across into a single document – without passing judgement on anything I’d written – until I had enough words for a book. When I had enough words for a book, I started going through the document, trying to make something happen with any of the stuff where it felt to me like nothing seemed really to be happening. This process was accelerated when I got a laptop for the first time, and I could take it out to the backyard, and I no longer had to save up scraps of paper with bits of writing on them, and then take these bits of writing into the house later to input them into the computer. I’m at the stage now where I try not to be judgmental about anything I encounter when I’m first putting a document together. I try to trust that, even if the writing seems off, the impulse is good and it’s a matter of staying with the material and being patient enough to wait until the impulse uncovers itself through my working and reworking the material.

MG: Why do you write? How long have you been at it? When did you decide to write books and why?

KS: I write because it excites me. It excites me to read certain combinations of words in a way that no combination of words should be able to excite anyone, and I want to figure out how it is that a bunch of symbols that are meant to function as pointers to more substantial bits of the world can come to excite me in this way. A good way to explore these symbols is to produce my own combinations. Certain other writers have created combinations of words that compel me in ways I don’t understand. I write partly to try to demystify this process, but more and more these days I write to participate in the mystery.

I’ve been writing since grade school, which is when I first decided I was going to be a writer. Over the years since I made the decision to become a writer, even though a lot of times during those years I wasn’t actually doing any real writing, I was always working on the plan in one way or another, exploring strategies to make it happen, acting like I was a writer, even when I didn’t feel like I was a writer, waiting for a time when it wouldn’t feel like I was acting anymore, when I would feel like I was really a writer.

MG: What advice do you have for young writers?

KS: The only way I’ve ever felt at all comfortable giving advice to another writer was by marking up a manuscript of their writing, and I haven’t always felt entirely comfortable doing that. I always felt most comfortable marking up a manuscript that I already found compelling, where the marks I made seemed inevitable, in the sense that the work itself yearned to find the sort of release that was possible through the deletion or rearrangement or re-visitation or reconsideration of certain words in the work. Any advice I give would have to come in the form of a recommendation, and the only way to recommend something to another writer is through writing, either by writing something yourself that stands as a recommendation for a way of writing, something that attempts to make visible an approach; or by marking up the other person’s writing, in which case the act of marking up stands as a recommendation for a certain approach to engaging an existing combination of words, a recommendation that would stand as an example of excision, recombination, resurrection, reconsideration. . . . In other words, a recommendation to practice a certain approach to writing that involves a particular manner of editing.

Bring Down the Little Birds: Carmen Giménez Smith On Mothering Art, Work, and Everything Else

The first thing I need to say is that after reading this book I felt like I totally needed Carmen to be my best friend. Not in a silly BFF way, but in a professional way — because it is really, really difficult to make 30-year-old life decisions (dating, marriage, children) when all I’ve got so far is an MA and one book from a small press (not that I’m complaining). Still, if I were to apply next year to PhD programs, I’d be in my mid-thirties by the time I even thought about going on the job market — and even if I did get a job, I feel like those first few not-tenured-yet years are no time to have babies. So, my first question for Carmen is below:

Molly Gaudry: What’s a woman to do?

Carmen Giménez Smith: A woman should do what she can to ensure that she achieves her ambitions, and ensure that she has agency in the world. My life often requires nips and tucks to achieve this, but I’m a much happier person than I would be if I operated under the cultural assumptions about womanhood and motherhood. I find fulfillment in the insane range of experience in my life, including my job, my creative work, my curatorial work and my mothering. I can’t say there are tried and true strategies for fulfillment though. I try not to compromise and I try to compromise. I try not to do too much and I do too much. I try to be mindful, but I am often mindless.

Ugh, but I don’t want to seem like I have some kind of answer because in so many ways, my life constantly feels precarious. At the moment, I owe two essays that I can’t seem to end, I’m waiting for an important phone call that’s stressing me out, my daughter might be coming down with a cold, my house looks like it’s been robbed and I have a lot of grading to do. I still wouldn’t trade it. I think you probably know what to do, in fact, you have a plan. When I was in my early 30s, I was a hot mess. I didn’t have a book, and I was phoning it in lifewise. I think you’re doing quite well!

MG: “Hot mess” is awesome. Also awesome is your book, and the language you use, the moments of meditation and revelation that unfold and unfold as your narrative progresses. While we’ll definitely talk about language more, I wonder if you would be willing to unpack the following excerpt for us and maybe also tell us more about these specific (or abstract) dreams:

“The days divided into two: working and mothering. The third part, which is me, lives in my dreams.”

CGS: I think there’s a weird thing that happens to time when you don’t have much time to yourself. I feel like I’m constantly writing and thinking about writing throughout the day, and that’s the third part of my day, and it’s simultaneous.

MG: What role do notebooks play in your daily “writing and thinking about writing”? And when did you start keeping them?

CGS:  I have tons of notebooks, and I use them a lot. I started keeping them about ten years ago. I write whatever comes to my mind and I do a lot of revision in them, but I also write directions and to do lists and recipes in them, so they don’t have any clear narrative or system at work. In fact, I carry three notebooks at a time, so I’m often digging around looking for where I wrote something down. The reason I carry three is that they each have a nature or a quality. I guess I don’t want to not write something down if the notebook isn’t right for it. Unfortunately, that’s not the weirdest thing about me.

MG: Structurally, your book reminds me of Carole Maso’s AVA. I’m interested to know what books or writers influenced, inspired, or otherwise impacted Bring Down the Little Birds. 

CGS: I love Carole Maso, and I think she probably was in the backdrop of influence, but also Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, Lia Purpura’s Increase, Jenny Boully’s The Body and John D’Agata’s Halls of Fame. Another big influence was Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. Her frankness about the complex feelings she had about her mothering gave me the courage to really put it all out there.

I read so many books about mothers, mothering, but every book that I read ended up through the filter of my mothering, of the book. I have pages and pages of notes from other texts that I read at the time that didn’t make it into the book.

The book started as a lyric essay, my first real attempt, and I realized that I wanted to keep going with it, and I wanted to write about my mom and everything she was going through. The book was very much written in the moment, so it was cathartic. I had notebooks and notebooks of stuff that I thought might end up in the book. I have a file on my computer called “Mothering Fragments (the original title of the book) Orphans,” and its pages of passages that I cut out of the book.

At a certain point, I began to juggle the different fragments so that there was resonance within the shorter moments and in order to create more chronology and more arc. The idea for the imaginary notebooks was a suggestion from both my husband and from Kevin McIlvoy.

I learned a lot about structure writing that book, and there are a few things I’d have done differently, but I suppose that’s the life of a writer. I’ll do it better the next time.

MG: Can we talk about lyric essays? It seems that they’re a sort of hybrid form, in that they are both poetry and essay. Do you consider yourself a poet mostly? Will you write more lyric essays in the future? 

CGS: I’m at work on a couple of projects with a lyric essay component, although I’m also trying my hand at straight NF. I’m trained as a poet, so I think of myself primarily as a poet with a deep curiosity and respect for what can happen in NF. When I was young, I wanted to be a journalist, and I got derailed into this stuff!

One of the books I’m working on is about television and the other is about failure. There’s a lot of intersection there. I also want to write about body weight, like an Arcades Project about fat asses, but that’s in the conception phase.

MG: What about the structure? What did you learn? Or, what did this book teach you about structure that your previous titles didn’t? 

CGS: Bring Down the Little Birds was the first book with a large-scale structure I had to deal with, and after I wrote it, I was able to return to a book of linked poems that I had been working on for ages and knew a lot more about how to order it.  I can’t describe exactly what it is I learned except maybe being very aware of how a writer gives and withholds and how this pattern can be really exciting and dynamic. The first book I wrote was a collection of poems, and I really relied on other people to help me order it, but BDTLB was such a huge undertaking, I really had to do a lot of the work on my own. I had to learn to define what felt instinctual so I could apply it throughout the book.

Although each book is unique, I do find myself, as I’m working on new NF books, returning to some of the strategies for writing that I used in writing BDTLB. I really resisted the fragment, but now I’m going with it because I can remember that the fragment was a great drafting strategy. I’m writing shorter passages or sections that may or may not become longer because this can be generative. And I’m trying not to worry about structure or redundancy at earlier stages, which helps me just generate, something I really struggle with.

When all is said and done, the book is chronological, a really traditional narrative form. Maybe the chronology has a little more in common with Mrs. Dalloway than with War and Peace, but by laying down that structure as a scaffold, I had latitude.

MG: You have a new book that has just been released, right? Can you tell us about it? 

CGS: My book, The City She Was, was recently published by the Center for Literary Publishing. I’ve been writing nonfiction lately and thinking a lot about the books that make a book, and The City She Was’s bibliography contains Ovid, Mandelstam, Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines, Grimms’ fairy tales, Francesca Woodman and Allen Ginsberg. The book began as an homage to Ovid’s poems of exile. Later, I began to think about an exile within an exile, about what living in a city can be like and how much I miss living in the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, so it’s a bit of a love poem to home.

I just received the galleys for my next book, which won the Juniper Prize last year. It’s called Goodbye, Flicker, and I’d been working on the book for ten years before I sent it out, so it’s surreal to see it finally come together. University of Massachusetts brings it out in April of this year.

MG: What’s next for you? 

CGS: Right now, I’m working on two nonfiction projects, a collection of essays (many of them about squander and decision theory) and another one about TV. Poetrywise, I’m working on a final draft for a book of poems University of Arizona is publishing in 2013, a bit of a tribute to second wave feminism called Gender Fables. I’m also starting a new book about memory and family, and Alzheimer’s.

Happy Thanksgiving from The Lit Pub (with James Herriot)

I’d like to begin with a little confession: I had no idea what book I was going to write about for today’s post until about 5 p.m. yesterday, on Thanksgiving eve. It wasn’t the end of the world — my backup plan was to publish any of the 50+ posts we already have scheduled for the weeks ahead, but I wanted to write up something myself, a personal message from me to you, something special befitting the holiday (and no, the irony is not lost on me that I settled on a European author, but bear with me). In particular, I wanted to provide a bit of an update about where we are now with The Lit Pub, and of course, as ever, I wanted to write about a very special book, a book I love. The problem was, I just wasn’t sure what book it should be; all I knew was it had to be the right book, a book that means something to me, a book that perfectly captures the nostalgia for all the warmth and loveliness that I think Thanksgiving — insofar as it brings families together — is supposed to inspire us to feel.

With time ticking on and my fear growing greater that I’d have to post something by someone else — a disservice to her or his efforts, I thought, due to the high probability that traffic would be slow on the holiday — I took my dilemma to Team TLP. I thought, Hey, maybe I can just run a Happy Thanksgiving post. I asked everyone what they’re thankful for and here are the responses I got:

Josh Denslow wrote: “I’m thankful for electronic submission managers because now I barely ever have to go to the post office.” A minute later, he added: “I’m also grateful for this community. I’ve had a really fun year.”

Samuel Ligon wrote: “I’m thankful for meats and cakes and pies and tax incentives.”

Alex Pruteanu wrote: “I’m grateful for reasonably priced gin and reasonably priced dry vermouth. I’m grateful for Submishmash and for zines that allow simultaneous submissions. I’m grateful for editors who make concrete, quick decisions — no matter whether or not I agree with them.”

Brian Contine wrote: “I’m thankful for paper over board, fair use, and brief nudity in graphic novels.”

I wrote: “I love yr resistance to sentimentality. I will more than make up for it with my own thanks-givings.” (And I will, I will.)

Then Dave K. wrote: “I’m just thankful to be alive and still creating. This year has reminded me that, while my blessings might be extremely basic, they are nonetheless important and more than many other people have.”

(Thank you, Dave K., for being so sweet. And while I’m sure the others were being no less sincere, I still wanted to tsk tsk them, Mother Hen of The Lit Pub that I am.) Then I got really worried because time really began to run out. I wrote:

“I have no idea what book to even write about. I’m either totally screwed or will pull something out of the depths of my soul by midnight. Or, much easier, I’ll run someone else’s post, which sucks for them because nobody reads the Internet on holidays. Sorry gang. I totally suck.”

But that’s when Brian Contine came to the rescue with: “Thanksgiving is about food. Any favorite foodie books?”

There it was! I immediately thought of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small — no, not because I thought of all the tasty creatures great and small (tsk tsk!). Seriously, there isn’t another author out there that can make me as hungry as James Herriot. The way he writes about farming life, working up an appetite, and all those Yorkshire Dales farmers who invite him into their homes after a calving or a lambing or a foaling for a bit of their wives’ home-cooked meals is mouth-wateringly delicious. Furthermore, the BBC series on-demand at Netflix does a fine, fine job of showcasing housekeeper Mrs. Hall’s 3-square-meals-a-day philosophy. . . .

But there are other reasons that make James Herriot’s memoirs so perfect for today’s post. Before I get into all that, though, how about some background information? All Creatures Great and Small is the first of five semi-autobiographical novels / memoirs by Alf Wight, who wrote under the pen name James Herriot. The first four in the set are titled after lines from Cecil Frances Alexander’s quatrain:

“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”

The fifth, titled Every Living Thing, has this on its back cover:

“Herriot’s last memoir, Every Living Thing, is a truly heartwarming read, breathtakingly full of his deep joy in life, sense of humor, and appreciation of the world around him.”

I don’t think any other blurb can sum up these books as well, though not for lack of trying. You should certainly turn your attention to the far left column and read the other blurbs (go on, just skim through them over there), which are incredible — not to mention, for the first time ever, I’ve also felt compelled to include the links to reviews on Google Books, Goodreads, and Amazon, if for no other reason than the sheer volume of fans’ responses is emotionally and staggeringly overwhelming.

These five books are probably sold as a set, though, to be honest, I didn’t even know about the fifth until last night, when I dashed out to my local Barnes & Noble to snag a fresh, clean copy of All Creatures Great and Small, which I would like to give away to one lucky winner. (All you have to do is leave a comment here about what you’re thankful for between now and midnight EST Sunday, November 27, 2011. Multiple comments earn you multiple chances to win, so if you’re thankful for many things, leave several comments! The more the merrier, and the winner will be selected at random and announced on Monday, November 28, 2011.)

My personal history with these books goes all the way back to high school. I randomly stumbled upon All Things Wise and Wonderful in the lending library of the condo association my folks lived in. I pulled it off the shelf and headed for the pool. That night, I broke the lending library’s rules and took all four books back to the condo with me (on the honor system, we were only supposed to take out one book at a time, and we were supposed to return them promptly). All four books, completely and totally worse for the wear, are now displayed on an end table in my living room. One, I’m not sure which, is missing half a cover, due to a very hungry dog’s very sharp teeth. And yet, those four books are very special to me and deserve their elevated status — not on the bookshelf, no, but on display where anyone can see them when they come into my home.

Every time I look at them, which is just about every day as they’re in plain view of the couch I sit on and the dining table where I eat, I remember how I left Florida with those books a changed person. I returned to my high school (I lived away from home) with those four books and began writing about them. My English teacher, Sara Berry, at the School for Creative and Performing Arts (now the nation’s only K-12 school of the arts), is someone I am extremely grateful for today. She changed my life, and I was lucky to have her for two years. My 11th grade English teacher, she was also my 12th grade English teacher because that year the former 12th grade teacher retired and Mrs. Berry moved on up with us. And it was for her 12th grade AP English class that I was required to write one reading response a week. They didn’t have to be long — only four pages, if memory serves — but on this particular week after that break, I turned in a 25-page research paper on James Herriot’s tetralogy.

For the first time in my life, I had gone to the library and researched postmodernist, feminist, and deconstructionist perspectives on the works of an author (and although I may not have understood the terms and the quotations I found, I pulled and cited them like it was my one and only job on earth). I turned in the essay, worried that Mrs. Berry might roll her eyes at the sight of so many broken staples in the upper left corner (she was a sarcastic one, that woman), but when it finally came back to me, she had written only one word in her recognizable red scrawl: “Amazing!”

At the risk of even further digression, I should go back in time a bit. In the 10th grade, I wrote essays for English class, sure. I did all right. Got A’s and B’s. In the 11th grade, I turned in my first essay and Mrs. Berry wrote on it: “Oh please!” I revised it and she wrote: “See me.” It was the first time anyone had ever challenged my writing. She inspired the best out of me, and it was a painful year of excruciating “See me” and “Oh please!” responses. But when 12th grade rolled around, she accepted me for her AP class, and I was writing pretty decent essays. And, to no one’s great surprise, that was the year I bailed on my long-term major, Jazz Theory and Music Composition, and headed upstairs to the 3rd floor, where I auditioned for the Creative Writing teacher and became a creative writing major. I wrote awful poems, plays, and stories, but at least my essays for Mrs. Berry had shaped up by then. I probably knew MLA better then than I do now. By the time I graduated, I didn’t even consult my Hacker.

In any case, James Herriot has been with me for the long haul. I’m 30 now. I was only 17 then. It’s strange to think that these books have been with me for nearly half my life. But it’s comforting, too. I’m thankful for these books, the stories in them, the memories that Herriot shares. And I’m so grateful, too, that I’ve got this opportunity to write about his books again now, if for no other reason than I am currently working on a memoir and there is something very special and unique about Herriot’s light touch when it comes to the sentimental. Further, as his books are “semi-autobiographical,” and somewhat fictionalized, I’m thrilled to have this revelation today that they qualify as being hybrid in nature. As I like to fancy myself an expert-in-training when it comes to hybridity, I couldn’t be happier that I can add Herriot to my list of genre-blurring authors.

Yet I digress, more and more it seems, with every new paragraph. Here I was worried I wouldn’t have anything to write about, and now I’m writing too much. I haven’t even told you about what he writes about. In a nutshell: his life as a veterinary surgeon in the Yorkshire Dales, taking care of small animals in the surgery on-site and taking care of large animals like horses, cows, sheep, and pigs, on the farmers’ properties. His cast of characters includes his boss, Siegfried Farnon; Siegfried’s younger brother, Tristan; their indomitable housekeeper, Mrs. Hall; James’s wife, Helen, and their children; and, of course, the many farmers and animals they all tend to at any time of day or night, “rain, snow, or blow.”

The books, plain and simple, are heartwarming. The BBC series on Netflix captures them perfectly, I think, and I’ve spent the past many months making my way through the various seasons and episodes. (If you watch only one, make sure it’s Season 2, Episode 7, “Tricks of the Trade.” Granville Bennett is one of the great and classic characters of the series, and Christopher Timothy, the actor who plays James, is probably at his finest as the “straight man” that he generally always has to be, given the eccentricities of everyone else around him. Additionally, I think the entire cast is perfect, and so there’s no need to fear watching an episode, seeing the actors, and worrying about not being able to imagine the characters if you were to go read the books. When I read the books, I see the actors, but they do such a damn fine job of it, nothing’s lost, only gained. In fact, many will recognize Robert Hardy, the actor who plays Siegfried Farnon, for another of his more well-known characters: Cornelius Fudge.)

Obviously, then, I absolutely recommend these books. You could read them at bedtime to your youngest children they’re that “good” and “clean” and “fun,” although there are sometimes bad people, dirty animals, and sad cases too far gone for any cure. But I couldn’t think of a better way to break such truths than with these books, and, really, they offer a bit of an escape, to a simpler time and a distant past when hard work and neighborly kindness were what got us through the days. It’s an important message, and one I’m thankful to have at my fingertips any time I need it. To be able to say that these books have been with me for the long haul is my privilege, really — I mean, of course they have; quite simply, I love them.

It is this kind of love that I hope all of us at The Lit Pub will continue to bring to our recommendations and consistently share with you all — love of reading, love of good strong characters and the great stories they live, love of authors who touch us each individually for those tiny little reasons that make us the unique human beings and readers that we are.

Finally, and to close, I would like to take this moment to thank everyone at The Lit Pub for doing what they do — all the Staff Writers, Assistants, Data Gatherers, Interns, and, of course, all of our readers who make their way to this website whether randomly or via links from all of the bloggers and web editors out there who have been kind enough to tell others about us. We couldn’t do it without you, and for this I will most certainly raise my glass to you tonight at my own table; until then, let me tell you here how much I appreciate all that you have done. Thank you, all of you, and have a very, very happy Thanksgiving.

Blake Butler's Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

This story is old; I’ve told it before but I’ll pinch it to this: In the spring of ’08, I read his story “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach” in Ninth Letter and felt a hard hurt in my throat. I flipped to his bio, discovered his blog, and for the next days I systematically clicked and read my way down the entire list of his online publications. I discovered journals and writers I never knew existed. And fell in love — deeply, head over heels — with this world that he had led me into. It dawned on me that maybe it didn’t take a story in The New Yorker to become a real writer. I even wrote him fan mail and he wrote back! Encouraged, I submitted to Lamination Colony. He responded, Yes. And there it is, my not-so-well-kept secret: Blake Butler was my gateway drug to the Internet — into the online scene of writers and readers and editors and publishers for which I am and will never stop being grateful. Every day I wake and check it still exists when I open my laptop to make my rounds: email, Facebook, Twitter, Reader, etc. This is, I realize, what I am doing every day when I go online — I am making sure the Internet didn’t go away in the night.

Or, in my case, in the morning hours. Like Blake, but not at all like Blake, I have trouble falling asleep. These days, because my job and schedule allow it, I usually work until 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning (it’s 4:28 right now, hello) until my eyes close, until suddenly I’m asleep after hours of agitation and thoughts that will not stop unless distracted by “work,” by which I mean staring or reading or Interneting or Netflixing or whatever else I do in the company of dark rooms lit by lone lamps and probably mostly I just waste time thinking nothing then sleep the sleep of the dead as if drugged until 10 on work days or noon on non-work days and two on days it doesn’t matter. Whenever it is though, I always wake and reach for the laptop. Something that now, after reading Nothing, seems maybe like a problem. Or addiction. Something not quite right yet comforting all the same. And the only reason why, for me, is because it’s there.

Those who follow, or have ever followed, Blake’s blog will know that he is an insomniac. I knew this about him early on, probably from the first blog posts of his I read. Perhaps this is one reason beyond his fiction that I gravitated toward him. It was his blog that kept me coming back, that drew me in. I’m not sure if he’s doing much with it these days, but there are many who will remember how his blog could become, in minutes, a hot-spot, a place where it seemed like everyone who was anyone and everybody else who was interested could pop up in the comments and party, a place where, suddenly, five comments could explode into a hundred or more. I came late to this, as I only ever got to witness it once or twice, and of course it had been going on for who knows how many years before I found it. But even so, it was exciting to be around Blake. To be in the presence of him, online, immersed in the buzz and hum surrounding him. And then, on slower days, if you were paying attention to his posts, he would write something true and heartbreaking, or something you felt or wanted to believe was true and heartbreaking — you never could be sure — and if you were me you would leave a comment that usually had the words “big” and “hug” in it.

I have been waiting for this book, for Nothing, since “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach.” I’ve known it was coming, without question, since the blog days. I hoped it would be readable, or comprehensible, or that it would show an extreme amount of care and love or trust — in you, in me, in us. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I doubt. Scorch Atlas is one of those books that will stay on my favorites shelf forever. I’ve taught it, I’ve bought it in bunches, and I still seem to keep running out of copies because I loan it out and never get it back. But I have one copy, sent to me by Blake himself, that I will never give away. It is signed, of course, and tucked inside is a strip of denim fabric. It is the book’s bookmark. I don’t know exactly where the fabric came from but I think I have a guess. If that guess is correct, then I feel special. If not, it doesn’t matter; I’ll still treat the fabric as if it’s special, because it is anyway, because I make it so. Ever, I struggled with. There Is No Year I couldn’t read, but not because I didn’t want to or didn’t like it; no, but because that book begins with such heavy iambics I couldn’t make sense of the words making sentences — I could only hear their sounds, their syllables. It was distracting. It also felt too big, too wide and heavy to hold or read comfortably. I put the book on the shelf and told myself I’d come back to it. I never did. But I will. It waits.

Nothing is different. Nothing is Blake, is like Blake’s blog back in the day and like Blake’s Scorch Atlas stories about mothers and fathers and children — like the free-throw father and the gown mother. There is love and pain and sadness and love and suffering and confusion and love and words toward sense-making all throughout these pages, on every page. There are also brackets and all caps and footnotes, but none are used to distraction.

There is this:

“ ] SAY MY MOTHER’S NAME, MY FATHER’S”

And there is this:

“I go to get a glass of water. I’m watching my dad again today so Mom can go to quilt guild and get out of the house. Dad in time has gotten stranger, more far gone from knowing who or when or where he is or was. Around the house he walks and knocks on glass and punches his own hand, in endless iteration. He seems continually waiting for something to happen, though when things do happen, it’s not the thing. In the late years of his life, he seems newborn in certain ways, definitionless, no longer knowing where to aim, though in his eyes and in the knocking and the skin around him, you can see that he has lived. None of this is his fault, or anyone’s. It is days.”

And this:

“Here I am not asking, not saying, moving past, for how these hours, new to him, for me repeat. That how, in my father’s blanking and often disoriented, disturbed flesh, in his forgetting, confusing ways he’d walked inside of so long now every day — how underneath that, in the moment, in the sheer bulk of his frustration, the bulge of his tongue pressed in the fury behind his bottom lip, same as mine in the same spot — how in the deliberate way he chews, in all his pacing, staring, seeing, I see him still right there — caught or clogged inside a self of other self, a fully breathing body mask — how underneath that, at its center, beyond the fluttered veils, and no matter how gone — he is there.”

I worked my way backwards with these quotes. This section of the book, which comes at the end, this section or chapter from which I have quoted all these moments, actually begins like this:

“Somewhere in this sprawl of hours is my father, and the destruction of his aging brain.”

Other, previous sections of the book seem to offer separate things, and function in different ways. An early section builds and builds to its conclusion with constant footnotes. A middle section reads vast and encyclopedic, researched, and structured upon a timeline of facts of sleep-related history. And other sections, too, provide brief glimpses of a mother — Blake’s mother, yes, but here, as ever, he paints her not as his own but as anyone’s. Always distinctly his mother. Yet somehow, also, everyone’s:

“To keep me calm or to recalm my internalizing terror in the fake light the house held to keep the night out, my mother read to me aloud. She read me books beside my bed about boys or men who, waking, moved — through forests to find fathers or ride on rivers, men who walked because they could. Her voice gave a calm and even glove of warming, one like an endlessly played album I can in my head alone invoke: a soft pocket right there all through the veils of junk recorded on my brain’s ends. With her there nearby, projecting softly aloud, the larger world felt far away — the crushing veils of silence in which the evil things could hide and approach suddenly filled with protection, an eye. She would stay there, predicting end points for our evening when she would need to leave me and always staying when I asked for further, more.”

And then, even earlier, near the beginning of Nothing:

“ . . . my mother goes to look more for the baby books in which throughout those years she wrote us down — sentences rendered in her looped handwriting, making claim of what she’d feed me, how I’d laugh. It’s a practice she still has not given up — each evening before bed now ends with her writing out the full day of her life, word by word. She is often up late into what is called the witching hour, sewing, singing, awake alone in the house, as my father has always been prone to nodding out early. My sleep complications, as is so much of me, are likely sewn from her: aura transferred into flesh in bridging time — a pattern printed on the lengths of lymph that make my brain and lung meat, which, if I decide to mate, I may too funnel into another body, here, a child. My mother’s journals — there must be a dozen of them now, each fat with ink and clippings from her hands — I already feel my skin tightening against me at their presence, as my incessant selves insist on realizing how one day, under the event of a thing I will not name here, those pages will become a tunnel back through and into her, her own sleeplessness, her longing, her days in step and click — the words the image of her thoughts and ways and ideas given from her as each day passes, written into text instead of me — as for every instant I am not there, her child, or anything I was not there for her to say, will be another wall that breaks my body in a maze that will not end.”

My final quotation, which I debated including, seems especially impossible not to include, though I worry I’m quoting too much, or that if allowed I’d keep on quoting, but, OK, here is the one I’ll end with:

“That I am writing these sentences in the same bedroom where this dream came for me seems only fitting — that old bedroom now converted in my parents’ house to a makeshift office where I come most days to be around to help my mother care for my father in his dementia — a constantly degrading state in which he less and less can recognize his surroundings or himself and how to move within it as he had — though no matter how hard I try, the ceiling of the room here now is just short and flat and white. There is nothing visibly disrupted in it. The nightglow stars have been removed. The walls, having been painted over purple and populated with my mother’s things, are different enough that the room itself seems not that room from back then here at all — though in the air, the presence, I can feel it, I’d rather not let it know I do.”

There is more. There is so much more I want to say. About this book and about my own parents — my mother, my father — but I won’t. Can’t. But I will say this. For the past four or five minutes I’ve been scrolling through old emails I sent to Blake. They reveal back to me a very young, often gushy, mostly exuberant me that is recognizable but not. I’ve grown up maybe a little since those early emails. It seems I used to share all kinds of news; it seems I maybe used to direct a lot of excitement his way. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Since before December 2010, which Gmail indicates was our last correspondence — a PayPal exchange for books, the one that got me that mysterious denim bookmark. So much has happened since December 2010, since that spring of 2008 when I first discovered him in print, and online, and followed as best I could his lead, inspired and optimistic. In some way, this post feels very much again like one of those old emails, transmitted across space and time unseen, but meant, very much, to be read and hopefully heard and understood.

It is 5:00 now. It is Monday morning. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I’ll post this to the site. It will be a very happy day, a cause for celebration and excitement about this book, about Nothing, about what seems though, really, to be about everything and everyone that matters. Congratulations Blake, and big hug.

An Interview with Blake Butler

Blake Butler needs no introduction, which means all I need to say here is that the following interview was conducted using Google Docs between August 10, 2009 and October 18, 2009, and it originally appeared in Keyhole Magazine in October 2009.

1. Scorch Atlas

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Blake. Thanks for doing this. What would you like to say, right off the bat, about Scorch Atlas?

BLAKE BUTLER: I would like to say that the first thing I wanted to do when I had the book in my hands is eat it. So I am going to. My plan is to eat one page of the book every day or thereabouts until it is all gone. Page by page, with sauces, maybe some candles. A bubble bath. When I am done maybe I will start with a second copy, if I'm still hungry. I am always very hungry. This book had been a long time coming in a way, and so now that it is here I just want it back inside me. I mean that in the best way.

MG: What would it mean to be "back inside" you, not literally?

BB: It would mean that now that it is an object and having removed itself from me it is a picture of my brain and shit and mindstate of that period, if not fully even back then controlled by me. It would mean that having seen the thing come out of me I would have as just as much relationship with it existing if I were (and am) to eat it and have it come through in my flesh, but even then it would shit right back out of me again if not quite resembling what it did the first time. At least then it would be a thing I could fully wipe away. All of this said I am very happy with the object as an object and my relationship with it is the same as it would be with my bed, which is equally to me known and unknown, ruined and not ruined, soft and full of bugs.

MG: There are some videos of you actually eating your book; the first page you ate raw, and the second you drowned in ketchup. I believe you've eaten a few more, though the videos aren't up yet. So far, which pages have been the tastiest? Do you have ideas for future recipes?

BB: The tastiest was the most difficult one, which was the first. The very first page in the book is pure black on both sides, all ink. I didn't think about it when I started with that one. I didn't think about water making it easier either, so choking was involved. It was pretty good to taste that way. Since then I've gotten lazy. I've done some more but yeah, none have made it matching with that first black mass. I'd like to make one with a fruit cocktail and a tube of icing. I'd like to wrap some inside veal saltimboca and maybe one with human flesh fritters (I really do want to try human). When I get serious I'll just take a straight up bite out of the book and break my teeth.

MG: Tell us about the design. It is a beautiful book -- perhaps what I consider the most beautiful book on my shelf. Usually, one wouldn't think that things of beauty should be destroyed, but in this case it makes perfect sense. Why?

BB: That's all Zach Dodson. I'm still amazed by what he did. I had high hopes for the way this object would appear when it was finished, and he far exceeded those hopes. I've really never seen another book that looks like this one, and that is a blessing I can only continue to be thankful for. Each page in the book has a unique texture to it, handmade and scanned in. I feel grateful that even if the words in the book were shit, one could still sit and stare at this book and see something in it. It's like batting with a quadrupled sized bat.

We wanted to destroy these books because they were designed to look as if they'd suffered through their contents, the rains and bugs and bloated babies and weird fire. It seems interesting that the books themselves appear destroyed in their freshly-printed state, and in going on and destroying them physically, they really take on that aura in full. If bookstores would stock books that were bloated triple sized with slick water and covered in dust and burned some and smelling of rot, they would all be like that, I imagine. I like the feeling of something that's been beat. Some of the books I most remember in my life are ones I snuck wet out of ruined houses. One year when my friend's neighbor's house burned down, there was a bag of books out on the lawn. I fished a picture book out of the pile that had a shot of a nude woman on it. I had never owned a picture of a naked body. The book was covered in bugs and mottled and made mushy. I took it home. I think I hid it underneath some junk deep in my closet, and I would take it out and look at the woman's hair and I would sweat.

MG: Without giving too much away, I love how your DIAGRAM piece functions, spatially, in this collection. This is an odd comparison, but I was reminded of the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. I'm not sure I've encountered the structuring device in many other books. What led to that decision? Or, which came first: the DIAGRAM piece or the idea for Scorch Atlas?

BB: The layering of the storms from the DIAGRAM piece actually came about as a design element, thought up by Zach. His idea was to put one of the storms before each story so that the story itself could then be designed to look as if it had suffered through that storm. Though we ended up keeping that idea contained to the paper that the storms appear on, rather than throughout the book, but the effect I think was even more provocative in how it played out as an intermediary for the mood of the whole book. Because of the nature of that piece, as a series of storms that continually worsen in breadth and horror, it really for me added a sense of continuity and gradation that brought the book together that much more as an object than if the storms had appeared as the singular story, as it was in my original manuscript. I am really lucky that I had Zach and Jonathan on this project, as it was ideas like that that really took the book as a whole to a whole new level, beyond what I'd even imagined for it during its becoming.

As for which came first, I didn't really intended to write Scorch Atlas as a book as it was going on. I simply was pounding out these stories, one after another, and only after I'd finished them all, the DIAGRAM one included, did I realize I had a full on manuscript. I think the only story written after I had assembled the book is 'Want for Wish for Nowhere,' which oddly might be my favorite in the book.

MG: I often ask writers to name their own favorite pieces, and many kindly refuse. Why is "Want for Wish for Nowhere" your favorite? And why did you write "oddly"?

BB: Yeah, having a favorite seems hard, and kind of stodgy. I probably change my opinions on how I feel about certain bits regularly, based on the way the mind changes and like if I happen to open the book and be in a bad mood and see it shitty, or find some error in how I'd phrased it, how I'd do it differently now. I kind of don't like reading things in print I've made as I always want to edit them some more, which is less a result of not having edited it fully in the first place, and more of how flesh morphs the more you eat and listen. Then there's the problem of going back and editing something you made a while back and then coming back even later and finding the edits you made ruined the original voice. I like concentrated phases of writing, concise eras: it's got more value to me than the constantly affirmed 'love labor' of writing something over years and years. Why not get a picture of yourself in a moment? You have a lot more time to get old.

I realize none of that answered your question, which points to that favorites are fucked.

MG: Do you have a least favorite from the collection? Why or why not?

BB: Everything I write is my favorite and least favorite. I don't think about it past that. Thinking too hard about one's own writing as a mantle is asking to be shit on in the hair.

MG: I think Matt Bell and I are agreed that "The Gown from Mother's Stomach" is our favorite. Have you received much feedback on this story? I'd be interested to hear some of it, if you'll share.

BB: That tends to be the one I hear the most about, which kind of confuses me, honestly. I shat that story out in a few hours. Actually, I wrote the first sentence down on a scrap while I was asleep once, and found it, and sat down and wrote the first half of the story from it in about 45 minutes. Then that sat on my hard drive for about 4 months, and I came back and added the bit about the bear, then added the second half, about another 45 minutes. Then I edited it a few times. I think people like it because it seems to me the most contained. I'm not sure what else it is about the story that people respond to any more than the others, but I am glad people like it. Maybe it also kind of comments on how sometimes the least amount of work you put into something, the quicker it comes out as it is supposed to be, the more aura it has about it, and the more immediate light, maybe. I don't hate the story, but if I had to go back to the above question, it might be my least favorite now simply because I am a contrarian.

MG: I feel compelled to share with you that I'm teaching Scorch Atlas in a sophomore-level Introduction to Literature course. I've learned that in this setting, as opposed to a creative writing workshop, it is absolutely necessary to facilitate the students' discussion. To this end, I've given them handouts on plot, character, setting, tone, style, etc., and I was really pleased to discover that your book really works alongside these sort of generic questions (e.g. Who is the protagonist? What does s/he want? How does this complicate the plot?). How do you respond to this--the idea that your writing, which I think is so stylistically brilliant, also satisfies, or fits into, these rather traditional constraints? (If the stories didn't do so, I think my students would be absolutely lost. I, and they, are grateful!)

BB: That is nice, that they respond well. I think everything has these elements. Even the most obscurist, language-oriented, symbol-laden text you could conjure would have these things in them, particularly if you are scrounging for them. Story architects itself. This is why I find it amusing when people, as authors, are so concerned about roadmapping these kinds of elements during the creation period, as if it has to be something they set up and intone, like some kind of wizard, instead of just letting it generate itself naturally, out of ideas, the way most days do, in life. I don't understand, or rather, don't buy, the notion that any one person can be so in tune and ahead of every reader that he or she must design and present these elements, however covertly, to their audience. It cheapens the fun, and you can smell it usually a hundred pages away, this kind of furtive bending, implanting. "This story has fake tits!" There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, I'm sure, but I'd rather not know about them. Let the magic be the magic.

MG: One of my academic interests is ecocriticism: the study of literature and the environment. Do you consider Scorch Atlas to have an investment in fate of the natural world? To what extent are the characters responsible for the downfall of their habitat?

BB: Honestly I've never been much of a nature person. I hide inside a lot. The dirt and air confuse me. Maybe I'm a bitch. I like clean pants. More than that, I think I am afraid of water and of mud. I am afraid of being ripped up into something. At the same time, I am fascinated by it. A lot of my natural interaction comes from dreaming: the way that water and mud is embedded in my blood.

I wouldn't say particularly that the characters in Scorch Atlas are 'responsible' for the destruction of their surroundings any more than they are responsible for the destruction of any other element in air. Rot is natural. People are rotting. It breeds itself. It's what comes. You can be as clean and progressive and protective as you want. Still. It does.

* * *

2. The Internet and Year of the Liquidator

MG: What is your relationship to the Internet and what was your introduction to online writing?

BB: My relationship to the internet is when my house's computer started being able to talk to buildings outside of our building I began to masturbate using information that those other places would sent to our house's computer. I am from the BBS land where I would use dial up to make my mother's phoneline interact with adult servers so I could see women remove their clothes. Now the nudity on the internet is so clear you don't need to look at it anymore.

My introduction to online writing was with what I think of as the first wave of strong independent publishing personas, including Eyeshot, Pindeldyboz, Haypenny, the Glut, McSweeney's, and some other places. Part of me misses the days when that community was very small like that and yet seemed larger than it is now, as large as it is now. Without finding that, I might be still using computers to talk to other computers but they would talk about machine languages and databases. Jesus christ.

MG: Do you believe in Internet personas? Or do you think people are as they really are? Who are some of your favorite Internet presences?

BB: I do not believe in internet personas, I believe in personas. I don't think people are what they really are. I do not believe people believe in their personas. I do not believe people are personas. I believe people are a mash of things mostly shit and a little bit of tickle and some candy if they are good people and I guess a little light. My favorite internet presence is Lorf Ben Undwadsensen who lives inside a subnet of Google and delivers the mail with his teeth.

MG: From personal experience I can say that you are very generous with your time. I had stumbled upon an issue of Ninth Letter, read your story "The Gown from Mother's Stomach," loved it, pulled up your blog, sent you fan mail, and you responded! And it was your blog that introduced me to online journals. I read your stories, I stayed at those sites, I read others' stories. A world unfolded. I've always wanted to thank you for that. If not for you, there wouldn't be me. Such a strange thing to say, but I know it's true. Do you feel an obligation toward other writers? Or, why are you so nice?

BB: It's not that I am nice. I am not nice really. I just really do enjoy words, and I get such pleasure out of words that I want to see more words and I want to do what I can to extend the pleasure I receive in the form of words to other people who also have the receptors for that pleasure and who have the same want in them to make words that I do. I get a bigger kick I think out of publishing and hyping other people's work than I do spreading my own. Ultimately though it is about the reflex and the condition and I exist inside that condition more than I exist anywhere else, and so it is very natural for me to breathe and eat inside and around it, it is a thing I could not change if I wanted to. Not nice, a blood obligation. It is nice though maybe that it seems nice because that maybe means that it feels true what I am saying and I am not just a mouth.

MG: Tell us about Year of the Liquidator. I think we're all interested in the long version.

BB: I'd always wanted to start a small book press. It was a matter of inevitablility. I think I get more pleasure out of working with other people's ends than my own, outside the hemisphere of just writing. I was just waiting for the right time. When I found Kristina, I knew immediately her book had to be the beginning. Shane and I had thrown the idea of working together around for a long while, and when I sent him K's manuscript, he had the same reaction: this is the one. So we committed to it, and the commitment pressed the birth. I am really excited about the prospect, and hope that things go smoothly enough that we can do a couple of titles a year. We are approaching it very calmly, and yet with great excitement, as we want it to go exactly right, to be a small, good thing that has an aura, and in the tradition of my favorite small presses: making book objects that might not appear anywhere else.

Not sure yet what we will do after the first book is finished. We're kind of waiting to see how things go, and moving from there. Hopefully one day we can read submissions openly, but for now we're moving one nidge at a time, and there's already so much I want to do. Time is hard.

* * *

3. The Book Deals

MG: It's no secret by now that you've landed yourself a two-book deal with Harper Perennial. How far along are you in these two manuscripts? And do publishing companies often sign deals for unfinished books?

BB: The novel is finished, other than minor tinkering and copy edits, and has been for some time. The deal was initiated around the novel, and the addition of the second book, which came up in discussing the contracts, was sold on a proposal for the idea of the book. I think that's pretty standard, actually. I've heard of many deals where the second book was on spec. And especially for nonfiction, which is often I think sold on proposal. As for how far along the nonfiction is, I started work on it a couple of weeks ago, and it is coming very fluidly. It's a book I've had in me for a long time. I feel excited for it.

MG: You now have an agent and a major publishing company behind you, which I'm sure includes a publicity department and such -- possibly even eventual tour money. Does this relieve you of any burdens? Do you feel you have more time to write?

BB: I haven't gotten too deep into feeling how it feels to be with a major house. So far it's been as good as I could ask. My editor, Cal Morgan, is wicked smart and knows what he's doing. I've felt nothing but encouraged in my vision, as surprising as it might be for such an odd book at a big house. I think Harper Perennial is really interested in pushing boundaries and getting new, interesting books out there. I feel blessed and excited to be a part of that. Still not sure about publicity matters, or touring support, etc., but that's always been a backseat concern for me. I'm just happy to have a wonderful publisher for the books, one that will surely help me get my work to a larger audience, I believe, without compromising its essence in the slightest.

As for having more time to write, I've always had a lot of time. I make it my priority, and my freelance jobs have allowed me a great deal of fluidity. I'm lucky in that regard, that I've been able to maintain such a loose schedule for moneymaking around what I really love. Everyone should look into freelance writing online: there's just so many ways to make a moderate amount of money that clears your work week enough that you can write from home. It's much easier than it seems.

MG: What, if anything, is different?

BB: Well, for one, writing a book that has been already sold feels interesting. I've certainly never done something like that before, and while at first I was afraid it might feel weird having that looming, it's actually been very freeing. I've always worked best with deadlines and schedules, and if anything it really is motivating me even more to be focused and rigorous and push myself to make something wild and good. It's been especially nice in that up until a few months ago I felt like I'd wasted a lot of this year spinning wheels and slightly off-focused. I'm getting more done on the actual work than I have all year. Things feel strong.

MG: Your non-fiction is about insomnia. Is it about your insomnia? 

BB: It is about my insomnia, and insomnia in general, and also about obsession, and obsessing, which I believe has been the cause of a lot of my sleep trouble since I was very young. It is also about tunnels and masturbating and weird light and encryption and video games and film and fear.

MG: When did your insomnia begin? Is it constant or does it come and go? Any relationship to your creative output?

BB: It is a thing that has been inside me since before I was born and is still inside me now even though I sleep rather well most nights, this year. It had been unrelenting in the insomaniac form through various periods of my early childhood and especially in my midteens to late twenties, if studded in different places by errors in speech or moving or other brainwaves. It has an influence on creative output in that it is all through me at every moment and when I can control it best I am at my best, and when I can not control it it makes me feeble, but it is always in my flesh and I am always breathing it and without it I would not exist. In all of this I mean insomnia as an understanding more than simply the medical condition of not being able to sleep. I'm pretty deep in the midst of all this thinking right now as I am writing a full length text about the condition.

MG: What can you share about the fiction manuscript?

BB: It's a full length novel in segmented scenes about a family who comes to live inside a new house and finds copies of themselves already there. There is also a black box on their new neighbors' lawn that continues to grow in size. There are strangers who come to the house to visit wearing gloves. I think I thought of it as a novel in a David Lynch kind of mind while I was writing it, though it might feel totally different than that overall. It is also about consumption, young death, sleep action, tunnels, creation, weird light, haunting, disease, and death. It is a book I have been trying to get out of me for years and years now, and feels like the best thing I've ever written. I hope people like it.

* * *

4. Who is Blake Butler?

MG: Take a look around. Describe something about where you are, right now, that you haven't really noticed before.

BB: There are patches of weird sparse hair on the skin below the knuckle of my pointer and middle fingers of both hands, but not on the other fingers or the thumbs. As much as I see my hands, I'd never seen that until you asked. I can almost count the follicles. Is it true that each hair is held into your body by little microscopic insects? Did I make that up or is that common knowledge? Those four fingers are the fingers I type most with. Maybe those insects wrote this book. If not, they should have. I'll say they did.

MG: Tell us about Blake Butler as a kid. And as an adolescent? A high schooler? College boy? And now?

BB: I think I've always been the same person. People too highly rate the idea of mental change. I feel like the melding of an 8 year old and and an 80 year old, in a body of whatever age I am at any time. If I could have changed I probably would have done so by now. I will probably spend the rest of my life saying the same thing. I will get older. I will eat more. Hopefully I will go deaf.

MG: That seems an odd thing to say. You tend to be full of odd things to say. What are some of the oddest things you've ever said? (Maybe not odd to you, but odd to anyone listening in.)

BB: What's the oddest thing I've said. I durno, man. Send me a tape recorder, I'll give you hours of what I say inside my sleep.

MG: Where do you see yourself a year from now? Five years? Twenty-five?

BB: Hopefully I will go deaf. Other than that, I don't see myself anywhere, even tomorrow. I don't mean that morbidly, I mean that I don't know and I don't want to know. If I knew where I was going to be, even if I loved where that was, I would probably do everything I could to make that not occur. Again, I am a contrarian by nature, and yet when mostly around strangers I give in to others' wills. The more I love a person the more mean I am to them often, I fear. A lot of the time I just want every day to be even more exactly the same as every other day than it already feels they are. What am I talking about? I have no idea.

MG: What are you talking about? I have no idea.

BB: Glorbbenbit pu-sis londum difdong, queebibbit andit ressmonblerrib.

MG: Do you have any pets? If not, why not? If so, what do you call them/it? 

BB: I'm not good at pets, I get bored, impatient. The same reason I'll likely never have kids. My one true love as a pet is my Margot, a chihuahua, who now lives with my ex-girlfriend who gifted her to me. I miss my Margot.

MG: How about some more favorites? Favorite liquid?

BB: Urine while it's coming out. Coffee in my mouth.

MG: Favorite vowel?

BB: o

MG: Favorite consonant?

BB: b

MG: Favorite air?

BB: Whatever air is inside my mother at any minute.

MG: Favorite human shape?

BB: Pleased

MG: Favorite sound?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite hue?

BB: Black or fire engine red

MG: Favorite digestable?

BB: Money

MG: Favorite texture?

BB: Beckett

MG: Favorite shelter?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite "recipe" of "ingredients" [that make up anything]?

BB: Masturbate in the shower until you are about to come then stop. Go wet into the bedroom and wrap yourself in a bedsheet, constricting just your arms and head. Lay down in the floor for 45 minutes.

MG: Is there a single book you've read more than any other? 

BB: I used to read Donald Barthelme's Snow White once a year. So like 8 times of that, but I haven't read it the past couple years. In terms of quantitative time spent with one book in hand it might be Infinite Jest, the book that made me want to work. I have read that book through fully twice and in bits and pieces many times and certain sections of it more times than I have read Snow White in full. In my mind I've been reading the same sentence in the same book for my entire life but it's been a whole life figuring out what that sentence is and I still haven't got it right.

MG: If you could have any combination of three superpowers, what would they be, and why that particular combination?

BB: I would like to cry money; I would like to be able to turn off sound and turn on sound, and make the sound into what I want the sound to be; I would like to be able to shrink people and grow people and throw people in the air largely and touch them and make them laugh. That particularly combination because it's the sounds that just came out of my hands when I did not think at all about the question, which is my greatest respect for the question.

The Chronology of Water: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch

1.

WHO IS LIDIA YUKNAVITCH?

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Lidia, thank you for allowing me to showcase your incredible memoir, The Chronology of Water, as one of The Lit Pub’s inaugural Book of the Month features. I think the first thing a lot of readers would like to know is: Who is Lidia Yuknavitch? Why did she write this memoir?

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: Well I think in most ways I’m like anyone who lives a rather fragmented, speed oriented, media saturated existence right now. . . . I’m a global citizen! Ha. But more to the point of this book and why I wrote it, I’m a body. Something that has always bugged me about mainstream and conventional literature is that the body is in the background and the personality or psychology is in the foreground. In my book, while I was chafing at the confines and conventions of “memoir,” I decided to write a body story. So you could say the body holds the point of view in this book.

But I also wrote this book to get what was inside of me out. I had a hunch there were others like me out there. Some people sing or kick ass on an instrument, some people paint or dance or make films, I write. . . . It’s all I’ve got.

MG: If The Chronology of Water is a book about “the body,” then who should read it? Who is it for?

LY: Anyone. I say that because I am moving from ordinary experience through the body. We all share in that story. It’s a Whitmanesque desire -- to contribute to the poetics of bodies. Only in my story some of the bodies ordinarily hidden or repressed or transgressed or ignored or made to feel ugly or bad or wrong, get a voice. People who share that experience might want to read it, and people who don’t share that experience might learn something about the rest of us.

MG: I agree with you that anyone who has been “ignored or made to feel ugly or bad or wrong” should read The Chronology of Water. This is one of the reasons I’m so in love with what you’ve done here. Was it difficult to write a memoir? To expose yourself? Do you feel vulnerable? What are you feeling now that this book is available to readers worldwide?

LY: Like my vagina is on my head. The writing didn’t make me feel exposed. The process was one of the more important artistic productions of my life. But the letting go of the book . . . the putting it into the hands of others . . . that part is terrifying. What if someone tells me it smells of poo? Or that I suck?

Still, I’m one of those people who holds no territory in terms of my own books . . . once they are written, they are not “mine.” And since I wrote them I must want to tenderly hand it over to an other, so maybe that’s the important gesture.

It does feel different from other books I’ve written because in the past I’ve inhabited a sort of alienated place as a writer and projected a playfully antagonistic voice out to the reader. In this book I felt an overwhelming sympathy for whoever my reader is, since she probably understands some of my story, and so a little bit I want to tell her I love her.

Him too.

MG: Nobody is going to say your book “smells of poo.” I’ll see to that. Now that we’ve covered that, what is your greatest fear related to this memoir?

LY: I suppose that some critic of note will slam it and forever relegate it to the shit pile. But when I really consider that, it seems like a silly fear. So that leads me to believe it isn’t real. I didn’t write the book for any critic who may end up slamming it. And I’ve been slammed by some heavy hitters in terms of male authority (the critic’s symbolic place in society), so who cares? If I survived this life, I can survive a surly critic.

I’m guessing the fear under all fears that I don’t particularly want to name is already named in the book. It’s the fear of standing up. It’s the fear of having heart.

MG: What is your greatest accomplishment, related to this memoir?

LY: The cover! Ha. Seriously though, the cover is a big deal. You know the story. But something I’m proud of in terms of how I structured the story is that I THINK readers can enter and exit it without feeling bound to my personal saga. I THINK the structure has fissures where any body can slip in to the water or leave with their own stories. At least that was the aim of breaking all the conventions down.

MG: What is your greatest hope for The Chronology of Water?

LY: That someone will hold it in their hands, read it, and feel less alone.

2.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WOMEN

MG: The Chronology of Water incorporates a number of themes that seem universal to so many young girls’ and women’s lives. Do you see this is a book for women?

LY: Well I do, but not exclusively. I think I’ve attempted to give voice to some things in the lives of girls and women that get repressed by culture. No doubt. For example, our sexual development. Our emotional intensities -- particularly in the areas we are not supposed to talk about like rage or violence or sexual excess. Our power(s). The fucked upedness of some of the models of “empowerment” that are options for us that are really big fat booby traps.

But I do not think it is a book for women exclusively. In fact I know it’s not. I know it because my close male friends whose bodies have also been transgressed, or men I know who have suffered prison time, or gay, bisexual or transgendered men I am close to, or hunky heteros like the guy I’m married to, or fathers, brothers, sons, junkies, musicians, artists, filmmakers who are men -- they all seem to find themselves in these stories too.

I think that is because the culture crushes all of us in terms of our best selves and bodies and spirits. So that I use a woman’s body as the metaphor for experience should not be read as an exclusivity.

Besides, that male body used to universalize experience, that jesus dude, turns out his body story just doesn’t cover everything. So I’m aiming to get the bodies of women and girls back into the line up to cover the rest of us.

MG: I like that you say this book is bodies, not just women or women’s bodies. While we’ll get to each of these many kinds of bodies later in this interview, I want to talk about women and the bond they often share. I’d like to talk about sisters -- yours, yes -- but also about sisterhood in general. First, let’s talk about your sister. She appears quite frequently in The Chronology of Water. One of my favorite passages follows:

“One morning my sister heard me sobbing in the shower. She pulled the curtain back, looked at me holding my empty gutted belly, and stepped inside to embrace me. Fully clothed. We stayed like that for about 20 minutes I think. Possibly the most tender thing anyone has ever done for me in my entire life.”

Please tell us anything you like about this moment.

LY: It really is a big moment in the book for me because it was a pivotal moment in my life. A life or death moment, to be honest. I was thinking of calling it quits that day in the shower. It was a simple thought, and for those who read the book, a recurring thought, but that day it was particularly stark. I just thought, I can’t do this. I don’t know why or how she did what she did except that she says it was what to do. That tells you something about her and why writing about her should be its own book. The kind of “love” born between our two bodies and lives in the shower is not one I’ve ever heard of or read about or seen in a movie. You are just going to have to trust me when I say it was an altered state. Or one of those lifedeathbeingnotbeing horizons.

MG: This is one of the hidden joys of reading The Chronology of Water. So much goes unsaid, and it’s up to the reader to make connections. I didn’t know this about that moment in the shower. All I knew is that the power of your words blew me away. I am thankful to your sister for being there for you then, because I believe this book has the potential to keep a lot of others from “calling it quits.” I believe this book is a sister for all of us -- a sister who will come along at just the right moment and save our lives . . . because you survived. And this book is proof. And people need proof of others’ survival to know that they, too, can get back up and try a little harder today. And tomorrow. And the next day. One day at a time. Should anyone come here in need of such reassurance: What would you like to say to that person?

LY: I’d say art is with you. All around you. I’d say when there doesn’t seem to be anyone else, there is art. I’d say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I’d say art is a lifeline to the rest of us -- we are out here. You are not alone. There is nothing about you that scares us. There is nothing unlovable about you, either. Let’s make some shit up.

I think too you are right -- that I was secretly trying to make a sisterbook.

MG: Let’s get back to your sister. What questions did you ask yourself or struggle with when it came time to depicting her on the page?

LY: With my sister -- this is kind of funny -- I have about nine chapters about my sister. They are not in the book. Writing about my sister quickly turns into a big fat HOMAGE because my love for her is so intense I immediately start writing her story instead of my own. If you saw us together you’d see -- it’s the intimacy and iron bond of sister survivors, certainly. But it’s more. She was my first love. My other better mother. She was my first loss when she left home. She was who I fled to when I left home. Ocean and shore and beautiful other.

My mother and sister are not depicted fully or even authentically on the pages. Though my sister seems to think I got my mother pretty well pinned/penned. In the end I could only tell a certain part of a story in which they figure.

So I decided to write another book someday about this sister experience. And ALL the HUGE VARIETIES of ways women are in relationship to other women. It’s ungodly and someone needs to write about it properly. Hope I survive it.

3.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and MOTHERS

MG: Here’s an excerpt you wrote about your mother:

“Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper. I had a journal I hid under my bed. I didn’t know what a journal was. It was just a red notebook that I wrote pictures and true things and lies in. . . . I wrote about my mother . . . the back of her head driving me to and from swim practice. Her limp and leg. Her hair. How gone she was, selling houses, winning awards into the night. I wrote letters to my gone away sister that I never sent. . . . When I was 11 I wrote a poem in my red notebook that went: In the house/alone in my bed/my arms ache. My sister is gone/my mother is gone/my father designs buildings/in the room next to mine/he is smoking. I wait for 5 a.m./I pray to leave the house/I pray to swim.”

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you read this passage?

LY: How I was, even then, trying to write a counter-story to the story of family. I also think about how daughters inherit the pain of their mothers. . . . I first thought and read about that with true understanding when I read The Lover by Duras. The mother’s pain drifts down the DNA into the daughter in a maternal line that I understand. My mother’s depression and anger and pain crept down genetic lines to my sister and I and embedded into our very bodies -- though differently in each of us. There is a grief reserved for mothers. Something about bearing children corporeally leaves a trace of sadness that is never quite sutured.

When I look at that passage I can see all three of us -- little women -- doing what we each had to in order to stay alive literally and figuratively. And then I see and feel the “weight” of father, literally and figuratively. There is the whole symbolic order. The difficult version. Not the loving possibility of family but the wounded one.

I also see a violent hope though. Is that weird? My sister and I are alive. We are both writers. My sister is a poet. She is also a healer, and I am a teacher. We are choosing to give of ourselves in spite of what was taken.

MG: In terms of “what was taken,” you share in your memoir that your father would not allow you to go away to college, that offers came in the mail but he refused to let you leave. However, your mother intervened:

“A week later, when the papers came to sign, my father was at work. My mother signed them. I remember watching her hand, a little stunned. She had beautiful handwriting. Then she put them in the envelope, grabbed her car keys, and told me C’mawn. In her southern drawl liquor voice. In her real estate station wagon. Driving to the post office with her and watching her drop my freedom into the blue metal mouth of the mailbox -- I almost loved her.”

What does it mean that you “almost loved her”?

LY: My mother and I fought a lot. I’m actually grateful for it -- we had a very real relationship partly because we fought. But at the time those letters about college -- or my impending possible leaving -- were coming in the mail, I was caught in a deep feeling of anger, mistrust, and betrayal where she was concerned.

Why hadn’t she taken her daughters out of his house as children? Why didn’t she save us? Why was she so busy building her career in Real Estate and creating a life outside her home that the pain of her daughter didn’t signify? That part of her I hated.

Much later of course I came to understand her story.

And I came to know the women at the door: pain, depression, loss, despair.

When other women tell me how much they loved their mothers, I am filled with a strange wonder. I stay quiet, because I know my “love” was different. It was fierce and loud and the moments of tenderness were quiet, something between our eyes, something in the way she called me “Belle.”

MG: What sorts of challenges did you face as you were depicting her on the page?

LY: I could write a book about that. Wait. . . . I just did! Ha. I know what you are asking though. What I had to deal with as a writer confronting the page in terms of my mother was the vastness of her pain (physical and emotional), and how to get her unbelievable imagination and joy to surface. Pain was the overriding presence in her life. And yet she had moments of joy that I witnessed that could not be outdone by even the happiest child. And in the tiniest of moments she could muster a strength that could shatter a world. A strength that could free a daughter from a father’s house.

MG: You write several times of your mother’s body, about how one leg is shorter than the other and how she shouldn’t have had children. But she did. Why do you think she did?

LY: Yes it’s an interesting question to me, still, since Dr.’s told her if she carried to term she risked injury to the infant or even death. Because of how tilted her hips and birth canal were. So was she doing something loving and miraculous and wonderful? Or something sadistic? I know that’s an odd thing to say but I do wonder sometimes, you know? WHAT was she thinking?

But maybe I know what she was thinking. She was thinking what they told her didn’t signify. Like when they told her she was crippled, she danced. Hard. In high school. She danced her heart out she danced her leg right she danced her sexuality.

And when they told her no one would want her or marry her so she should become a librarian and shut the doors of woman she hot night seduced a rodeo boy and an artist and a musician.

And when they told her she couldn’t run or swim or ride a bike she became the “could not” -- she shattered it like broken bone piles -- she remade meaning in the image of her imagined body.

So I guess what I believe is that she didn’t think the regular lexicon on rules or realities applied to her. Until the day she died she swore she saw a sea serpent over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a UFO in Port Arthur, Texas, and she swore she loved her children.

MG: If you could say anything to your mother right now, what would that be?

LY: What I said in the endlines. Mother, rest. I am home.

4.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and STILLBIRTH

MG: What is the greatest sorrow you have experienced?

LY: The death of my daughter, Lily.

MG: How do you live with it every day? I mean, how do you cope?

LY: Well I have learned to let grief live with me like a little girl in the house. And I am a writer, so storytelling is how to keep going. To open my self up, my grief, my love, my difficulties, my joys, to share my life and body and words so that they join the human story greater than my own.

MG: Why does this book open with the birth and loss of your daughter?

LY: Because that is the body event that “opened” me. I mean it broke me. Utterly. But it broke me OPEN. I became a writer from that experience. Not instantly, in the moment I went fairly insane, as I wrote about. But later. The first thing that came out of me when my wits and emotions settled back toward something bearable was writing. As it turns out, there was a lot in there. . . . I think I have many, many books to say.

I also opened at a birthdeath moment because I no longer believe in the idea that birth is a beginning and death is an end. In terms of life or narrative. They are merely continuations and changes in matter and energy. Energy never dies. It just changes form.

Lastly, because of what I know about how memory works from reading about biochemistry and neuroscience. There’s nothing linear about it. At all. That’s just a comforting conceptual shape we bring to the chaotic processes of memory that are generated in our bodies from a variety of sources and systems.

MG: You share that you lied to people when they asked about your daughter:

“I lied without even hesitating an instant. I’d say, “Oh, she is the most beautiful baby girl! Her eyelashes are so long!” Even two years later when a woman I know stopped me in the library to ask after my new daughter, I said, “She’s so wonderful -- she’s my light. In day care she is already drawing pictures!” I never thought, stop lying.”

Where did this urge come from? Is it with you still?

LY: The urge to lie? Aren’t all writers liars? Maybe all humans? Lying has gotten a bum wrap. Narrativizing, storytelling, those are human qualities that are amazing. The urge to make stories up. If I hadn’t made stories up my whole life I’d be dead I think. I think that’s an admirable quality, if by “lying” we mean creating fictions beautifully against the grain of culture’s physical and psychic atomizing tendencies.

I don’t like lies that come from places of power and oppression. I don’t like politicians or cultural “authorities” who lie. I don’t like the lies born of “gender” or “religion” or “family” or “criminality” or the cult of good citizenship that cause an individual to believe there is something wrong with them. I don’t like the lie called power, or the lie that some people are inferior to others, or the lie that humans are superior to the environment or animals.

The best liars I’ve ever met or known are my favorite writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers. They are of the first variety. I hope they lie their asses off.

5.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

MG: Is it true that you had three abortions before you were twenty-one?

LY: Yes. And I am not in the minority here. But it isn’t a story women are particularly allowed to tell. Certainly not truthfully. It is a story entirely unsanctioned by culture and it points to one’s fall from the cult of good citizenship, the cult of the clean and proper body, and a certain definition of “ethics” and “morals” that, coincidentally, relegates the body of a woman to an inferior and powerless position inherited from patriarchal religious mythology.

I know this is not a popular position to express but our bodies, like all of nature, energy and matter, are killing and reproducing all the time. The union of sperm and egg is a process generative of new life and yet lethal to both sperm and egg. Compost piles breed life. Study quasars. Black holes. Cosmic string. Study ecosystems. Animal populations. Chemistry. Even the cult of Christianity is based on a lifegiving death.

On the other hand, I feel like RIGHT NOW is also an important time to discuss precisely and openly how important women’s reproductive rights, women’s health, and women’s control over their own bodies are. I don’t want MORE abortions. No woman is happy having an abortion. It’s an emotionally wrenching decision. But from my point of view it is not a scientifically wrenching decision.

But I also don’t want old white male corrupt legislation crawling up the cunt of a woman’s being, nor do I want women’s bodies to be the “site” of political battles as if we were breeding livestock, slaves, or meat sack commodities. So fighting (again again again) for women’s reproductive rights, rights to health care, and the right to be self determined bodies free from economic and morality fictions is (again again again) violently vital.

6.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and BISEXUALITY and MEN

MG: Can you tell us about your first experience with another woman?

LY: Yes. I think you mean sexually though. Do you? If you do, then I’d say my first sexual experience with another woman was with my mother. Specifically at the pre-linguistic stage with her breast and body, and later, post-language acquisition, I’d say the the erotic object attachment to the scar on her leg.

When she would get out of the bathtub or shower and dress, I was often in the bathroom with her. And the great white pearling scar railroading up the side of her leg mesmerized me. I’m positive I experienced erotic feelings, though I hadn’t an understanding of it of course. But I remember sweating. And feeling very antsy. And being unable to keep myself from reaching out and touching it. I remember my hand on her leg and I remember shaking. Dizzy. Almost passing out. I think she’d just laugh, say “Oh Belle,” and sort of brush my hand away, dry off, and get dressed.

Then I suppose it’s true too that I was attracted to my sister -- she was eight years older than me and she looked a little opposite to me -- she had long, auburn hair and a full figured body. I had white non-hair fuzz from swimming and a boy body. Her distance in age made her mythic to me. Her bedroom was mythic to me. Everything about her -- mythic. When she left I had nowhere to put any of those feelings about my body and my love and devotion, and she left when I was ten, so puberty was just around the corner.

But I’m guessing the question is more about my first experience OUTSIDE of or beyond my mother and sister. I just feel it’s important to name those before I move on.

And here the answer is easy.

I was competing with a poolful and lockeroomfull of girls and women from the time I was six years old on. All that gorgeous naked flesh in steamed up or watery places nearly made me faint on a daily basis. I was probably oversexualized at a young age because of my father, so my drives -- my pistons were firing way before I understood what they meant.

I was attracted to my two best friends when I was five. Six. Seveneightnineten.

I was in love with my teacher when I was eleven.

I wanted to be Joan of Arc at twelve -- I cried in bed thinking about her body while humping pillows.

In seventh grade, my childhood best friend and I took to soaping up each other butt to butt in lockerroom showers. And liking it. A lot.

I had my first orgasm WITH another girl when I was thirteen. There was lot of . . . hmmm. Twinkie mashing. And finger-fucking. We had no idea what we were doing. I’m not even sure we knew what “orgasms” were. But it was hot, and wet, and slippery, and very, very good.

And nothing about my father.

MG: Of the many men in your memoir, who was (or is) the most influential in your life? Why?

LY: My father, because he gave and took everything simultaneously, and my son Miles, because from him I know what being alive is for.

MG: I totally expected a different answer. Can you elaborate? Perhaps you could offer a representative excerpt from The Chronology of Water that best captures how your father “gave and took everything simultaneously” and how Miles teaches you “what being alive is for”?

LY: Yeah I can see why that answer is counter-intuitive. But as I write about in the book, the fact of the matter is that my father showed me art. He introduced me to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture -- to the seriousness of space and light and form. He introduced me to classical music. To painting. To film. He spoke in sophisticated ways about aesthetics and themes and archetypes and the power of artistic production. He explained to me what the Guggenheim and the Tate were. He took me to see Shakespeare’s plays in Ashland, Oregon from the time I was eight until I left the house.

I saw The Deer Hunter and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apocalypse Now and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Silkwood, with him.

He bought me a Selmer Series 10 clarinet.

He gave me my first typewriter, my first drawing pad, my first set of sophisticated pens.

MG: You know I expected the answer to be Andy, right? Can you give us a representative excerpt for how you feel about him right now?

LY: Who, my father? Or Andy?

Miles is my lifesource, and Andy is my being equal. It’s a little Jungian to me -- his masculinity stands up to my feminine, but his feminine also draws out my masculine -- I don’t know how we found each other but it’s like an energy loop. That doesn’t sound very romantic I suppose but in lidiaworld it’s a lot bigger deal than a Hollywood romanticism.

You know it’s true though that I don’t think I’d be alive if I hadn’t met Andy and Miles. And I mean that both literally and symbolically.

MG: What can you tell us about divorce? It’s not uncommon, but it is definitely a scary and unique experience for anyone going through it for the first time. Screw it. Let’s not call it divorce. Let’s call it “breaking up.” What can you tell us about that?

LY: It’s death. It’s exactly death. But the thing about it is, you can’t get through a life, and by that I mean a rich, fully lived life, without experiencing deaths of all sorts. The death of a relationship the death of an idea the deaths of people the death of truths the death of desires the death of animals the death of planets and stars and, well, everything.

Divorce or breaking up is particularly hard on us because loving is such a huge risk. You risk everything, loving all the way. You risk your world. Your selfhood. Your ability to know. Your individual being. Your reality.

I don’t really give a hootie about the part of “divorce” that is attached to the marriage contract. But our hearts and bodies and thoughts. Our being. Breaking up is a death. The hardest part is to admit it’s worth it. To experience a full love, even unto death. It’s worth it.

There’s no such think as a fully lived life without pain. Honestly I could another book about how clusterfucked American culture is on the topic of pain. Talk about an undiscovered continent. We’ve coded pain in ways that keep us from learning jack shit from one of the most profound experiences available. Wish we could undo or redo that.

MG: How were your marriages different from each other?

LY: In my first marriage I was a confused ball of nuclear rage and creative fire without a form. In my second marriage I was insane with grief and numbed myself with laughter and every excess imaginable, including writing. In my third marriage I am learning what being is.

I can’t speak for the three men. I loved them. I loved them differently. I would not change anything about them. But my relationship with Andy is the most real to me. It changes and grows. It’s alive. And I’m fully present.

As for marriage, I’m for it!!! Get married as many times as possible!!! I think anyone who wants to, should GET TO. NOW. And I think it is possible to invent it from the inside out, rather than live it from the scripts we’re handed.

MG: Will you tell us something uplifting and wonderful about your current marriage? About a moment that you’ve experienced recently, that you wouldn’t mind sharing?

LY: With the Mingo, it’s perpetually epic. He’s better than your favorite novel or film.

7.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and PROMISCUITY

MG: Kerry Cohen blurbed The Chronology of Water, and I love that she did. I remember reading her memoir and thinking how incredibly brave she is for writing it. I feel the same way about you, though in many ways I think Chronology is a different kind of memoir. Let’s do some one-word answers. Are you ready? Just give me the first word you think of.

Sex is ________.

LY: exploration

MG: Sex can be __________.

LY: revelatory

MG: The first time I had sex, I ________.

LY: exploded

MG: When my son has sex for the first time I hope he ___________.

LY: supernovas

8.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and DRUGS & ALCOHOL

MG: Why drugs? Why alcohol?

LY: To leave planet Lidia, to anesthetize, to dream, to discover.

MG: I am positive that people -- young and old alike -- will find this interview on the Internet, perhaps in times of pain and in need of guidance, particularly where drugs and alcohol are involved. I don’t doubt that parents, too, might find this site. What would you like to say to them now -- either to the individual who is looking for help or to parents?

LY: I can’t parent anyone’s children but my own. I am not a parent of anyone else’s children. I am a writer. But my stories are not unique, and so by reading them, perhaps there is some insight for someone moving through life with difficulty about how not to give up. Or how to get hold of your own story. But too, my parents failed us in some important ways. And if a parent can “see” the me’s that were struggling, and how I needed some help, maybe they can admit that we are all living out stories of ourselves.

I have a close friend named Cheryl Strayed. Her mother saved she and her siblings -- meaning she got them away from an abusive father. My mother did not. But Cheryl’s mother also died at the age of 46, and left such a tremendous grief inside her daughter; Cheryl loved her mother deeply. I don’t any longer blame my mother for not getting us away from my father. I can admit she had a story too, one that came before me. I can admit her story.

Cheryl and I both turned out to be writers. And mothers. And people who can feel and receive and give compassion. Love. So maybe part of what I’d say is about stories. Find the stories you identify with. Find the stories that challenge your world view. Tell your story to anyone who will listen. Never suppress an other’s story. Let lifestories exist alongside one another. Bear witness to them. Do not ever let your own story drown out someone else’s. Find the people whose stories make good companions to your own. Make a braid.

9.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WATER

MG: What does water mean to you? I know it took a whole book to answer this, but if you can give us an excerpt or a short answer here, that would be fantastic.

LY: Water provides me with a central metaphor for my life. I guess I think that’s kind of important. To explore and discover metaphors that help you live with your life and how it is and what it was and what it might be. I like metaphors a great deal more than sentences. Within metaphor there is still the resonance of image, play, varied meaning and interpretation. Never only one meaning.

But there is a literalness to it too. In water I am without physical pain. It’s the only way to be pain free at this point in my life without medication. I have a 22% scoliosis -- chronic back pain, also hip pain. So being weightless is freedom from pain.

It’s also a meditative space for me now. The MOMENT I enter the water, I mean it’s almost Pavlovian -- I can enter a trance or meditative space. Which is why I like to be in it as often as possible!

And even though it smells way to poo poo Christian to say this, there is a baptismal feeling you get from entering and leaving water. So maybe I can say I am FOR the secular baptism. May it bring you love. May it wash you clean of cultural scripts and religious mumbo jumbo. May it carry us like the sediments that rocks become.

MG: You share in your book that you sort of collect swimmers. Who is your favorite person to swim with?

LY: My sister. But hardly anyone agrees to swim with me . . .

MG: When were you last in the water?

LY: Yesterday.

MG: Tell us about the first time you were in the water.

LY: Well like you, I was in amniotic fluid. Flip turning, no doubt, in the womb of my then world. They tell me when I was two I would jump in pools or off of the side of lake docks. I think something about water always drew me. I’ve yet to locate something genetic about that . . . but I do believe quite firmly in mermaids. And seals and whales are very magical to me.

MG: How has water changed for you over time?

LY: As a child I played in the bathtub with my sister. At the pool I swam laps, but I also goofed off, like kids do. The pool -- its colors and smells and sensory reality -- its Whitmanesque community -- the “I” in the “we” -- a body alone in water and all the otherness -- swimmers -- is more familiar to me than any other sense of “place” in my life.

Water was my space of joy, freedom, play. My sense of self, competition, surrender.

I still go to the ocean or rivers to both complete my self and let it go to everything which is larger than self. It takes about ten second of staring and listening and smelling for the ocean or rivers to remember me.

For me, water is the perfect metamorphosis environment. It’s life giving. Macro and micro. Water has changed me like the great waters made paths into earth and mountain. Water has rebirthed me hundreds of times. I go to water to feel the truth of things beyond a self. All the colors of water arrest and open me. I hope everyone finds what it is that makes them feel the way water makes me feel.

MG: Can we go swimming together when we finally meet in person?

LY: It would be my distinct pleasure.