A Variety Show in Two Acts: Terese Svoboda's Theatrix

Mary Pickford once called acting an “emotional exercise.” The audience also undergoes this wringing-out, a process that allows our emotional centers to react to imagined scenarios without consequence. Certainly we could apply this to the act of writing, as well as the act of reading. Research indicates that the tears we cry when watching a sad movie are chemically distinct from those that we shed in reaction to internal sadness. It is a dress-rehearsal, so to speak, for the real thing.

While I haven’t seen a live production in quite some time, reading Terese Svoboda’s latest poetry collection, Theatrix: Poetry Plays brought back so many of the sensations of witnessing live performance: the giddiness of the curtain rising, the suspension of disbelief granted the actors, and our activated empathy when they succeed. With her playful manipulation of language and knowing winks at our voyeurism, Svoboda draws us into the emotional peaks and valleys of her acts.

The cover art alone is arresting, featuring what appears to be a clay, humanoid model with mask-like face and gaping mouth, the torso buckled over withered, misshapen legs. The red right hand (apologies to Nick Cave) clutches the right leg, the left hand gripping the neck as though in pain. Through the nose protrudes a long tree branch. Most unsettling, though, is the right eye; the only one visible to us, it fixes us with an uncannily human, blue-eyed stare. Pinocchio comes to mind, a knowing wink at the possibility for untruths, our humanity rendered imperfectly, even primitively. What are plays, after all, if not artful lies? Acting an uncanny reflection of humanity?

In a collection punctuated with positively vaudevillian acts of drama and drollery, it is fitting that the title should be so rich and varied in meaning; are these “Poetry Plays” hybrid forms, ie. poetry/plays? Or does poetry play? I imagine Svoboda answering, “Yes.” In fact the poet is playing on every level, using props and ventriloquism to challenge our notion of knowledge and self. She works within a wide range of settings and modes, from HBO documentaries to the silent dramas of silverware. In variety show style, the poems shift from the tragic to the jocular.

The literal meaning of the collection’s title is supported by the appearance of a cast list, which preludes the collection. The first listed name is Stage Manager, as if the tech hands are in front of the curtain. Other entities include familiar faces and names: comedian Jack Benny, Debussy, and the corpse of Emma Goldman. At the bottom is a note: “Many non-speaking parts, or parts that can’t speak, or parts speaking inaudibly.” Svoboda uses brackets liberally, suggesting stage directions, asides, intrusions of outside voices, or even the whispers of prompters in the wings.

The collection is divided in two sections, with the first feeling more outwardly performative and the second more intimate. It is as if we, the audience are traveling from a proscenium to a black box theater, a theater-in-the-round, and even the red brick of the standup stage. Appropriately, the first poem in the collection is titled, “STAGE MANAGER: LIGHTS UP.” Nervous energy bubbles as bracketed lines bear the urgency of stage directions, and a voice asks, “What about this is false: the scale, the alien plastered to the wall in a green/you can’t see? the trust you place [like an acorn] in the seat?” The first question, “What about this is false” could be a sincere invitation to criticism, or a peremptory challenge, as in “how could you say this isn’t realistic?” It takes on a tone of irony with “the alien plastered to the wall,” as I’m picturing the inflatable green aliens we bring out at Halloween in my home. Who else is alien, but the audience member, the outsider who watches the simulation of human experience from a removed vantage point? Our trust as the audience is fragile, though offered willingly, bolstered by the careful attention of actors and stage hands, and sprouting under the blaze of immersive stage design and engaging acting. Svoboda, of course, occupies all these roles simultaneously, allowing these curiously selected voices to dance the dance of suggestion.

Svoboda is one of those writers whose work you just cannot skim. Whether it is her fiction or poetry, her writing rewards careful reads and re-reads. Like any script or play, one is advised to slow down and read the poems in Theatrix out loud, so as not to miss her wordplay and double entendres:

Waves of light breakfast glamorously/with English spelling,/a woman/peeling hair from her face,/waves turning [away] wet, lapping/lapis [humid],/a shore where hair sticks blue.

Under Svoboda’s nimble hands, poetry is as much a visual art as a literary one. Take “Silverware Dialogue,” which begins: “A fork and a spoon lie together/to spoon and to fork.” There are no knives here to abscond with said spoon, however, in fact neither utensil poses a flight risk; “It is as if we lie on a vast table/says the fork. Useless.” Though inert, the fork has needs, and pride to be hurt:

The table was laid, says the spoon/not me. Tines, my dear, are everything,/says the fork. My tines are retired./They spoon through course/after intercourse, the hunger being/incurable, inconsolable.

If I hadn’t read this out loud, it might not have occurred to me that I was reading a love poem. In fact, the more I read it, the more I pictured a married couple in mid-life, saddled with ailments, contemplating their purpose after years of “usefulness.” And suddenly I’m wondering if are we no more than implements, simple tools created to feed the consumption of others?

Block quotes do no justice to Svoboda’s attention to aesthetics. “Silverware Dialogue,” for example, naturally appears in couplets. “Scatter Force Two,” which opens, “We’re two girls and we’re left/and we’re right” makes liberal use of line breaks and white space. The first line is left-justified while the second, beginning with “and,” fits directly beneath “left,” with “we’re right” extending beyond the line above. This structural effect mimics the image of two girls walking side by side, but also emphasizes the double-meanings of “left” (abandonment or simply directional?) and “we’re right” (as in, “correct,” or simply standing to one side?). Certain repeated words, like “pink,” throughout the poem take on holographic significance, as turned this way a word like “bars” signifies a pub where you’d have a drink, and turned that way it makes us think of imprisonment. I’m suddenly thinking of the “prison” that some might consider femininity or gender identity generally, the “pink fools” that a woman might meet and abandon in a bar, and the way in which young girls lean on each other for support in the world.

As I read (and reread, and reread, and reread) Theatrix, I reminded myself that theater—indeed all live performance—is experiential. We may not glean every line’s full significance, or catch onto Svoboda’s particular cleverness and lightning-quick wit the first time. But like performance itself, this collection is astonishing, if occasionally befuddling. These poetry-plays are worth each and every read, allowing them to stretch into the stages (pun intended) of our lives.

I am reminded of Heraclitus, who stated that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Like gazing at the surface of water, the poems in this collection may reflect my current sense of inadequacy as I wrestle meaning from each line. But where there is a preponderance of questions, one is assured there is vast depth. Next year, the poems will likely take on brand new significance for me. And perhaps this is the point of performance, the way in which we should approach it: as demonstrative of life’s complexity, an unearthing of wonder, and a startling realization of the contents of our own consciousness.

[Scene Change] Good Job: A Conversation between Terese Svoboda and China Marks

The grotesque Pinocchio-nosed image on the cover of my new hybrid text Theatrix: Play Poems was made by China Marks. We met at a wild 70th birthday party. She was part of a friend's study of geriatric artists — ha! laughs purple-haired China, geriatric? Recent exhibits are accurately titled: “China Marks, Not Quite Human” and “China Marks: Time Traveler”. Although I found this sculpture most appropriate for my title, it is her more recent work, primarily “sewn drawings” and “sewn books,” that has most inspired Theatrix. We share hybrid forms, the seductive line, visual wit, an interest in patterns, appropriation of found objects and images,  narrative drive, idiosyncrasy and flamboyance. Here is an excerpt from Theatrix: Play Poems published by Anhinga in March.

What? is your line

I think I’m panicking
I think I’m panicking
etc.
crying practice

[windowless]

quick, a dream:
one of you accuses the other

What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

and rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn’t like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then

WE

the chorus     too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: even the building is burning

[insert choreography]
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

Men and Their Ways

As ornery and subversive as a video by Matthew Barney, Marks' broadsides, books, and text-based drawings both invite and repel interpretation. Some pieces exercise Oulipian restraint, using only text found on the fabric itself, but more often texts appear in bubbles, titles, commentary and dialogue that she sews into the image by a computerized embroidery machine. Her visual iconography is often  found re-imagining 14th to 19th century tapestries in the style of Max Ernst meets Donald Barthelme. Part of the fun is trying to decipher the original. She's rethought a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens of “The Battle of Anghiari” and a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and she doesn't hesitate to acknowledge her sources, providing a link to the original. But it's hardly an imitation or even “in the style of” — the original is the springiest of springboards.

Winging It

“I don’t know if the fellow on the left really wants his wings washed,” writes Marks, “or has something else in mind. But their eyes have met. The one bent over her laundry, who answered his question with another question, is waiting for his answer. Something deliciously fraught is going on. Whatever it is, we have a ringside seat.”

To me "deliciously fraught" suggests play. And there's theater in "ringside seat” that depicts situations of tension and conflict, like a circus, play, film or novel. Like me, she is in the audience as well as on the stage, often, as China says, “surprised, sometimes thrilled at what I see, or so bored and restless or unhappy that I make drastic changes, until my own jaw drops….”

Terese Svoboda & China Marks

T: Theatrix: Play Poems is not so easy to appreciate read aloud as my other work, although there's still sonic considerations. More of the play in these poems occurs visually, in the spacing and typography. I make visual decisions that are not completely foreign to yours. My choosing where to place a piece of text is similar to your positioning text where it sometimes "rhymes" with a brush stroke of sewing.

C: Of course there’s drama in my work, because I tell stories. I am a compulsive story-teller, ask anybody who knows me because I answer questions in the same way. Though I suppose there are other ways to do it, I not only draw, but also must draw attention to my art. Story-telling is a useful strategy for women, to get children to go to sleep or eat their vegetables and to keep men from killing us and to get people to spend some time looking at at my latest drawing, maybe even buy it. Women who lived to tell the tale were probably the best story-tellers.  It must be built-in to at least some of us by now. Look at you.

T: Are we engaged in Q & A?

C: We are engaged, darling, kiss me.

T: I'm puckered.

C: How/why did you come up with Theatrix? I mean, there’s theatrics, but capitalizing it and changing  cs into an x changes everything.

T: Best to cap a title anyway, and it's all about play: “trix” as “tricks:” and even the multi-colored breakfast food. It's also a portmanteau of “theater” and “-trix" — the suffix that turns masculine agent nouns ending into feminine. You get to re-hear the last syllable of “theater” and gender-switch it, a performance all on its own.

C: Didn’t notice the gender switch, very nice! And why do you think you were able to “cut loose” with Theatrix?

T: You, dear. All the sotto voce's, those mutterings, lie at the core of what's important. In that, I believe, we are joined. I no more put down two words on paper and I see sparks between them and the page and the space and sometimes each letter, yet I endeavor to thread a story through, with bits that remind the reader of his own story. Your storytelling is never straight-forward narrative either.

Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans

C: Never straight-forward. A curator said she’d recently noticed (after 7 years) that the man sitting in the flower in “Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans” had a black eye and wondered why. I said I didn’t know why. The characters in my drawings live their own lives. As I keep saying, I am only part of the process, a process that wakes me up in the middle of the night with suggestions, concepts, apercus, most recently to reset the direction of something I’d already been working on weeks, but it was right to do so. The drawing is much better already.

Then also, seduction, to pull the viewer close, using the dynamics of the plot, if there is one, decorative elements, workings of the stitches and sewn lines, textures, what’s matte and what shines, the very plasticity of my figures. I make these drawings to have access to this material.  I am the first to be engaged and then my drawings pull viewers in. But I make it up as I go along, revising endlessly, simultaneously making it and watching it happen under my hands. I give myself over to the process and it all comes from that, the interminable process..

You mentioned the spacing and typography in Theatrix. Made me think about the charged spaces between elements in my drawing, my decisions about grounds, possible colors and patterns, what typefaces to use for certain texts but not for others. Text can take forever, re-written as the drawing changes. I draw the more-or-less human figure. I believe that there is an intuitive homologous knowing when human beings look at drawings of human figures and a need to see such things.

T: The cover image on my book, although singular, evokes a multitude of animalistic and human identifications, crippled, deceitful, yet innocent. Is that complexity evident early on in your work? Monochrome you are not.

C: I am after as complex a truth as possible. Your play begins before it begins and begins several times more in Theatrix. And it is as if there is a giant hand (the artist’s mind?) manipulating the characters and speaking for them. Simultaneously cozy and strange. Reminds me of when I was a child and we used the back of a sofa as a stage, with stuffed animals as the actors…. moving them and speaking for them as we liked….

T: That's exactly it. I have used my own tiny theater experiences, the ghost-texts of Shakespeare, Beckett, and downtown experimental theater and “sewn over it,” with some animation (see “Cast”) of characters that are not usually animate because why — animists are pre-animatronic.

C: Theatrix, the morphing, the high-jinks, the this-into-that, compression and expansion of time, etc.

T: All those things you do as well.

C: The only thing is, it goes both ways: my current drawing is derived, not literally of course, but formally, from Theatrix, which is crammed with tricky bits. The little drawing I began to work on a while ago, has been punching well above its weight, requiring many revisions, waking me up in the middle of the night to work on the text and title, insisting I get up at 4 this morning to finish the sewing, maybe. Have to look at it again, but I think so… Still must write the text file, sew it out and sew it on, clean up the edges, make and sew on the hangers. Another day or two… But I need to know.           

My title is a cue for applause, but of course this isn’t a theatre.

Will this do? “Applause” Or does it need parentheses ? Or should I put it in parentheses but without italics? Please advise.

T: Brackets.

[Applause]

Water and Life and Death: Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda

“He gave us life,” the people of a western settlement earnestly say about the man—Dutch Joe—who digs wells or maybe divines water in the Great American Desert they have chosen to try to settle. He gave them water, and so who is a kind of spiritual leader or variety of folk hero in a story—neatly called “Dutch Joe”—in Terse Svoboda’s new collection Great American Desert which holds inside of it all of the work and boredom and ambition and helplessness and the fear and the monotony of settler life. “I have it on good authority that you can tell the future by looking up from those holes,” Dutch Joe tells them and us. “It has to do with those stars you see that way. But you don’t want to look up too often. If the sky comes down, we’ll all be wearing a blue cap.”

The whole collection occupies a wild but familiar American West then and now and maybe someday. It is connected by the space—the Clovis in what we know now as New Mexico (“Camp Clovis”), explorers chart the “great American desert” (“Major Long Talks to His Horse”), the settlers break ground on the land with their water guru Dutch Joe, desperate dut bowl farmers try to eke out a kind of existence and live a kind of life on the disappearing land (“Dirty Thirties”), citizens in a cold war atomic town live and lose their lives in the shadow of The Bomb (“Bomb Jockey”), and so on, and so on.

Water and life and death soak the pages. I come from a place full of ice and rivers and many lakes; I have spent very little time in deserts. It is only after I am several stories in to the collection that it occurs to me how large a space water must occupy—metaphorically, spiritually, mortally—in a place as dry as a desert. Having it, polluting it, searching for it, its lack, the desire: these energies pulse under every parched story.

The collection is eerie, touching, speculative, reflective, funny, tragic, and bittersweet. “Ah civilization” one of her characters reflects, and this may be the second thread in the braid: living and dying and doing it all with other people in human society. The stories unearth what is good and what is ugly and what is futile in us. For me there are several other stories which particularly stand out, but each is individually strong and worth the reading.

The very first story—“Camp Clovis”—is a dreamy, shadowed, bittersweet story told in “we”s which starts as if a familiar summer camp story and flows silently into an extinction tale about the Clovis people. Even without obvious magic, it has a hard-to-place flavor of something mystical.

Her story “Hot Rain” has worked its way in to my brain and my heart and seems likely to stay there. It has a fractured, disorienting story about an elderly man, his suspicious caregivers, his adult children, and the lack and decay of parental love. Everyone is a little awful and a lot human and certainly hurt and vulnerable. Tenderness and anger and generosity and selfishness and grief permeate each paragraph. It is such a clear sketch of a family, of desperate and damaged people, of being angry with someone who is dying. At one point the group goes to a restaurant for a meal together and it goes achingly awry: ” “We are ungrateful and unworthy, Dad is telling us, beaming as if he’s just discovered the true meaning of being a parent. At our age he figures we don’t need to be coddled, protected from the truth the way we were in our upbringing, not acknowledging all his years of upbringing-neglect, the true truth.” And yet it still pulls a few laughs from me.

“The Mountain” is a strange and disturbing fairy tale. It unfolds in a city-village that exists then-now-always in which all the children have been lured into the mountain by a pied piper—or perhaps sacrificed to the mountain—except for but one girl. She has a limp and fell behind and so was saved; subsequently the parents beat for being free. She suggests that the town may pay to get their children back, but this suggestion instead of calming the distraught parents enrages them as they descend into absurd, banal infighting about who should pay more and why. They decide to sacrifice the kind and queen to the mountain, who do not like hits idea at all and suggest that the people simply have more children, and who thwart the plan by murdering the girl at the doorstep of the mountain and either chaining, deporting, or promoting the parents into acquiescence.

Finally, the collection closes with what is for me the strangest and most evocative story: “Pink Pyramid.” In a dark, bizarre, and isolated dystopian past/present/future a man and a woman live in a travel home in the glow of a huge pink pyramid. What has happened, and what is happening, and what will happen outside of the immediate events of their interactions is shadowed; what matters is the emotional energy between the two, and it is heartbreaking and beautiful. With no explanation of the pyramid, the gas, the work, the shadowy threatening “they” who had sensors supposedly everywhere, the cataclysmic war, or anything else, the reader is forced to read only the immediate reactions of the two. But is he a ghost? A figment of her imagination? Is she? We are suspended in curiosity.

This is a wonderful, and fiercely original collection for anyone who enjoys fiction in any genre—literary, speculative, horror, romance. It ticks all of the emotional boxes. Even still disoriented by and under the spell of what I read, I can confidently recommend it.

"I think Truth is a kind of purpose": Elizabeth Powell & Terese Svoboda in Conversation

Terese Svoboda: Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of J. Crew Catalogues has Wolfgang, a failed photojournalist-turned-fashion-photographer; describe the motivations of the two models in great sensuous detail for a shoot he is conducting. “Perhaps this is your first kitchen together, the first time you’ve ever shared a kitchen, and you’ve just made love while cartoons played in the background.” Meanwhile the male model has an erection, one of the women is thinking about hunger — and sex — while the photographer conjures up another scenario about smoking endless joints with the women in a cabin. Thus begins this piercingly accurate confection of a novel about desire. Did you write short stories as a warm-up to this, or were your books of poetry preparation? If so, how?

Elizabeth Powell: At one point in time all of the fiction I was writing was determined to be something else, something hybrid and poetic. The novel was all my poetry’s idea. My poetry is always right there looking over my shoulder. The lyric is mighty. But, yes, the novel started out as a short story that I published in Black Warrior Review. I couldn’t let go of the characters, they still had some investigating into the human heart and soul to do. Wolfgang, in particular, was insistent, and kept turning up in my prose. He is very roughly inspired by a photographer cousin of mine who passed away. I tried to continue my conversation with my cousin about image after his death in my own writing, not only as a way to grieve, but to continue on the relationship beyond the constrictions of time.

*

Elizabeth Powell: Your prose is so gorgeous, so resoundingly meticulous, lyrical. How does your work as a poet inform your prose writing? You are so prolific in many genres: What do you think it is about your creative process that feels so comfortable in many different genres?

Terese Svoboda: Fearlessness. That’s the prime requirement for all poets, the strength of mind to know that not every inspiration is going to thrive in a quatrain, that you need a lot of tools for the myriad of materials that arrive. The requirement for genre-switching is that whatever the material, the words will need a lot of pushing around, something that the poet is used to. I’m always satisfied, I’m always failing.

*

Terese Svoboda:  “Beauty, Helene thought as she tapped on Wolfgang’s window, was a measure of some sort of purpose.” Is this a belief the author shares?

Elizabeth Powell: I’m interested in what beauty’s purpose is, why we use beauty as a way to get what we want or make others do what we want. Of course, there are cultural ideas about beauty. The natural world of flowers, for instance, has much to tell us about beauty and its uses. I’m interested in that in general, but here I’m more interested in what does beauty with a capital B have to say, that old fashioned cousin of capital T truth. I was thinking about Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I think Truth is a kind of purpose. I was also thinking about Keats’ poem “Endymion,” about the quandary that human beauty does pass into nothingness and ashes and dust. I was thinking about the idea of beauty being as Keats’ says “Full of Sweet Dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

*

Elizabeth Powell: Why the American West? The desert over time? What was the creative spark that inspired the book’s breadth and intensity of subject?

Terese Svoboda: Written over 25 years, the book’s spark was slow in coming. I wrote only two stories after I found the title about ten years ago, one of which was “Major Long Talks to His Horse,” which explains how the region became known as the Great American Desert. My formative years were spent in that desert, near the mysterious Nebraska Sandhills where water was always a topic. The pivot sprinkler came into use in the 1960s and revolutionized the climate and what could be grown. I have land there now and I’ve seen the corn turn blue and disappear back into the earth during a drought. Farmers think a lot about the future.

*

Terese Svoboda: You mentions Pessoa, and Pound — a send-up of Pound as the subject of an Apple Think Different ad. These are not references that bestsellers evoke. We poets applaud this, but so many won’t understand. Does that matter?

Elizabeth Powell: I think it is incumbent upon people of all stripes to look up things they don’t know. I think Pessoa and Pound should be part of a general knowledge, and if not, then should be obtained through looking up. Does looking up stuff you don’t know matter? It depends upon what kind of world you want to live in and create for the future generations. When I wrote that, I was thinking about the Apple Think Different campaign where they use revolutionary thinkers like Gandhi and Einstein as a way to peddle their wares. That happens all the time in America, this capitalistic thievery of ideas as a way to make money or deceive someone into a desire that comes from a place of insecurity and emotional deadness. If you recall, part of that Think Different campaign was “To the Crazy Ones”, meaning if you want to think outside the box and become a legendary and revolutionary thinker, you should buy Apple products, which are ways to produce work, not ways to think in original terms. The novel references Pound and Pessoa as a way to mimic what the campaign itself is doing: Look at how you might become a crazy, brilliant person if you buy some shit that is very expensive, but will supposedly make you a better human. That desire, to be part of an equation that is trying to pull you into a magical place that is really a void.

*

Elizabeth Powell: Did the ideas of Westward Expansion and the so-called American dream figure in at all?

Terese Svoboda: Whatever group overcame the Clovis people surely had a dream of expansion. Manifest Destiny warranted Major Long’s expedition, even if he denigrated the area with his nomenclature. Homesteaders exchanged the dream of riches in owning free land for the reality of its almost unimaginable difficulties. By the time the Dust Bowl descended, the homesteaders had endured enough. The land blew away and with it, the dream. Now, despite market forces and pollution, the very poor farmers left hold on to the dream that they live as their parents did, close to the land.With regard to the Anthropocene future of America — we need a better dream. After all, that’s not a rising sun in the West, it’s one that’s setting.

*

Terese Svoboda: “Wolfgang continued to mine for some image of Helene that would express all the lingering beauty of the past as it incubated into the present.” This being a Rilkean ambition, what are you writing now?

Elizabeth Powell: I love how Rilke, in Letters to the Young Poet presses us as writers and humans to live the questions fully. Living the questions is the life and is the art, both of which use the past as a kind of incubator for the present. The past is beautiful because it is part of the question that reveals the present, the future.

I have just completed my third collection of poems and hybrid essays called “Atomizer”, which will be coming out in 2020. That book addresses questions surrounding love in the age of technology, online dating, and movement toward oligarchy. The work is in discussion with a favorite book of mine by French philosopher Alain Badiou called In Praise of Love. And because it is about love it is about the senses, the sensual. Scent looms large in the book vis a vis perfumery and my long history with perfume.

*

Elizabeth Powell: Place is often a character in a work of fiction. In what ways do you see place as emblematic of character in your book?

Terese Svoboda: Water, and its lack, is central to nearly all the stories. Having something immoveable at the heart of a collection, a protagonist or at least a minor character that is silent, like the old man and the sea until the shark shows, best chiaroscuros the petty human endeavors that play out against it. But place in the book, that is to say, environment, is actually not immoveable, it is just as permeable and malleable and poisonable as our varying relationship to it, especially with regard to how it is shared. I have the characters reacting to what becomes a dynamic environment, a character. People forget that and think the earth’s always the same, no matter what they do to it.

*

Terese Svoboda: I’ve directed a little, and worked on commercials, and I was very impressed at your ability to capture the experience. You have the actors in a sort of repertory model, so they appear in a series of shoots, each with its own narrative, a kind of lyric poem really in which many elements are left open yet are linked. Have you been involved in commercial film shoots?

Elizabeth Powell: I have not. My daughter, however, is a commercial model and television host, and I have appeared on her show and observed all the camera operators. Her work in the fashion industry comes from a family interest in image in poetry, art, life.

*

Elizabeth Powell: Both my novel and your last story, “Pink Pyramid,” broker in the idea of dreams and their effect on not only the individual, but also the collective consciousness of history and with the present moment of now. What role/effect do you think dreaming has on history and place?

Terese Svoboda: I believe Trump never dreamt of being President — but Putin did. Without someone standing in a field envisioning a plant, nothing gets grown or built. Dreaming your sweetheart pulling up her blouse engenders population. But dreams are meant to fade and be replaced by others, hence their mark on particular times and places — except for prophetic (inspirational?) dreams, e.g. Vladimir Klebnikov’s dream in “The Radio Wall” that imagines television in the 1920s. But that is falling into the tech trap that dreams are all about enlarging our material footprint on the planet. Other dreams – our collective unconsciousness — of talking to animals or of breathing like a tree help us rethink our present and our relationship with other life. In my own writing, I’ve heavily invested in dreams. Tin God began as a persistent dream that I used in a poem, then a short story, and eventually a novel, pitting the 16th century against the present, in alternating chapters.

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Terese Svoboda: Did you start with the literal image of a catalogue page and enlarge it, or you discover the imagery through the characters?

Elizabeth Powell: I started out by thinking about what it meant that I liked looking at catalogues so much. Was it the image of the person or the image and how it related to the surroundings in the photograph? One of my grandfathers was a freelance photographer for Life magazine, and I spent a lot of time during my childhood studying books of photography, especially The Family of Man a book from a 1955 photography exhibit curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art department of photography. It was a seminal book for me, very influential to me as a poet and a person. Since then I have always loved the interchange between image and narrative that occurs in the photographed. Catalogues are narratives used to sell something. I wanted to co-opt that device as a way to let the spiritual and material worlds collide. Creation is in some ways the action of the spiritual and the material colliding, which then goes on to create narrative. It’s a commentary on the idea of taking pictures of things that don’t really exist to make them exist. That idea is a cousin to the idea of photographing something that exists mostly to be photographed. I’m a huge fan of Don DeLillo’s work. Your question makes me think of a section of White Noise that discusses this idea, a section that heavily influenced my writing:

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

*

Elizabeth Powell: “Camp Clovis” seems to me a kind of cousin to “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Have you been influenced by her at all?

Terese Svoboda: Not particularly, although as the eldest of nine children, I adored her stories about family life and the mundane horrors of motherhood. “Camp Clovis” came out of a belief that a child’s preoccupations in the summer must be universal and timeless, and from living in South Sudan for a year, relegated to the status of a child in a materially-challenged environment.

*

Terese Svoboda: I was certain that Wolfgang would have a heart attack chasing after the model on the beach. Was it hard to determine an end point for the book?

Elizabeth Powell: The end point always had the beach in mind. The beach as an image is always representative of leave taking and arriving from a destination. There is a kind of violence that the beach represents, who is coming? Who is going? Are we safe in this terrible, wonderful beauty? And then sometimes one looks at the sunrise and the sunset from the beach as a meditative stance, as a way to understand the opening and closing of the day, beginning and end. Moreover, the beach is part of the photoshoot narrative, so the conclusion logically leads imagistically back to the beach.