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.

An Interview with Gabriel Brownstein

Gabriel Brownstein and I conducted this interview by e-mail, using the addresses provided us by St. John’s University, where he is a professor and I was once a student. During my years as an English major and a grad student, I took a handful of fiction writing workshops with Professor Brownstein. His classes were immensely popular — four or five of my peers and I comprised a cohort who registered for any class with Professor Brownstein’s name attached to it. During workshop, we’d write down the names of authors and books he gushed about; we’d jot down writing adage after writing adage, some of them his own (“What happens next in your story? The worst thing possible.”), some of them borrowed from others (Flannery O’Connor: “Dramatize, don’t report.”).

But class was not enough for me. I would visit his office hours regularly. We talked about my work, we talked about what we were reading, the steam from his Lipton tea drifting between us. And I would leave his office trying to decide which I would do first when I got home: read or write.

After conducting this interview with Gabe — which felt a lot like a written version of the sort of conversation we used to have in his office — it was easy to see what I’ve always found so inspiring about him, which is that while he is professorial in his depth and breadth of knowledge, he is also amateurish in his giddy enthusiasm. When he talks about anything literary, the subtext is always: I just love this stuff, don’t you?

*

STEVE WILLIAMS: Maybe you could start by talking a little bit about the new book.

GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN: There’s not really a new book. There are new stories, and they’re coming out here and there in quarterlies. I’m not sure where they’re going, collectively, but they’re going somewhere. I think.

SW: Your first novel, The Man from Beyond, tells the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini’s Spiritualism debate from the perspective of reporter Molly Goodman. In one of your more recent stories, “Occupations, Settlements, Territories” — which was published in the Spring 2010 issue of the Harvard Review — the young, male narrator works at a socialist Zionist summer camp and converses with the spirit of his father. What about the subject matter of spirits interests you?

GB: I once read an interview with Robert Stone, where the interviewer asked why his characters drank so much and did so many drugs and he said something like, “I don’t know, but they keep doing it.”

I think that everything I’ve published has something to do with ghosts, something to do with haunting. And I like books with ghosts in them. I think ghosts work in stories when they make the ineffable into something dramatic and ironic and maybe even comical. But there’s a limit to this: as soon as you make the ineffable a ghost it becomes, in terms of the story, pretty effable. So it’s a ham-handed move in a way. But it’s my move.

SW: What, for you, are the differences between novel writing and story writing? What different challenges and pleasures does each form offer, and is it always a conscious decision to write one and not the other?

GB: I’m finding that right now stories suit me temperamentally, and I’m not sure why. I feel a little looser in the short form, a little more at ease. I don’t think I can imagine myself ever going 500 pages for a novel, I’m not that kind of guy. At the same time, there’s pressure in story writing — stories demand a kind of perfection. As they say, a novel with a flaw can be a great novel, but a flawed short story is a dud.

SW: It seems fair to say, though, that our literary culture favors and even has more respect for the novel form. Just to give one example of this, a quick Google search reveals that since 2000, only two story collections have won the Pulitzer, and none have won the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Which brings us back to the old question: is the short story dying?

GB: My favorite book of 2010, the one where I discovered a writer who blew me away, was Memory Wall, by Anthony Doerr, a knock-out of a short story collection. There were two collections this year by favorite writers of short stories, Jim Shepard and Steven Millhauser, plus the National Book Award-nominated collected stories of Edith Pearlman, a short story writer who, I’m embarrassed to say, I had never heard of until this year. None of these books, I believe, were listed in the NY Times Best Books of the year.

So is the story dying? No. Is it undervalued? Oh, yeah.

It’s tough to argue that contemporary novelists are more serious artists than story writers, or more successful artistically. What is true is that the markets for short stories are vanishing, fast. The Atlantic has (I think) moved its story publishing on-line. Even the Paris Review has, over the last decade, geared itself a little more towards non-fiction. It’s just about impossible for a writer to get a collection of stories published by a mainstream press, without promising said press a novel. There are lots of good new story quarterlies, but these don’t get much attention.

Funny thing: The last three stories I published, all in very high class quarterlies, did not have on-line presence (the magazines did, but not the stories), which means in certain ways that for most readers the stories did not exist. I have a feeling e-reading may change the relationship of short stories and readers. A short story seems a very natural thing, to me, to download on an e-reader. More so than a big fat novel. But maybe I’m dreaming.

SW: I’d like to open up my last question about the state of the story to the state of American fiction in general. Alexander Nazaryan recently wrote a piece for Salon in which he suggested that the reason an American hasn’t won the Nobel Prize since Morrison in 1993 is that America’s great writers exist in “self-enforced isolation” from the rest of the world — their work is too insular.

The writers many Americans see as deserving of the nod — Roth, Oates, DeLillo, McCarthy — are all, according to Nazaryan, what David Foster Wallace once called Great Male Narcissists (even Oates). And things are not getting better: many of the great writers of this generation, he says — naming Franzen, Foer, Tan, and Lahiri — are guilty of the same insularity.

In what direction do you see American fiction going, and is this a direction you’re pleased with?

GB: I haven’t read the article, so I can’t respond to its particulars. But there are real problems with translations coming into America. Go into any good bookstore and ask for new books of European stories in translation — books from anywhere but the US — and outside of the classics, you’ll be lucky to get three. It’s true that other nations read American books, and US readers don’t read much in translation. It isn’t a good thing.

I have a hard time, though, with the suggestion that American writers are more insular than they were sixty or seventy years ago. It seems just basically true that more US writers come from more places and backgrounds than they used to. You mention Lahiri and Morrison, I’d add Junot Diaz, Edward P. Jones, and without even going further note that these are all writers with huge historical and political concerns. And the force of multiculturalism has been a good thing for writers who are as you say, Great Male Narcissists.

Operation Shylock, my favorite book by my favorite living writer, is supersonically engaged with the issues of Zionism, history, identity, imperialism, racism, antisemitism, and (yes) narcissism. I mean, it’s not like men’s tennis: American writers are not getting beaten by European writers.

The Nobel is a lousy measure. If the Swedes had gotten to vote on the number one player of my youth, they would have always picked Borg over McEnroe. On the other hand, when you get to the most celebrated youngish novelists right now, there is this strange phenomenon of the massive novel about a few friends from college — Freedom, The Emperor’s Children, The Marriage Plot — and without dissing any of those writers or books — I am a big, big Jeffrey Eugenides fan — it’s just notable that the characters are quite likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools as the reviewers and editors and publicists hyping the books.

I’m not saying there’s no insularity going on in the world of US marketing and publishing. But the Nobel — or any prize — seems a lousy way to gauge the work of writers. I’d give the same answer about US novelists as I did a while back about US story writers. Every year, there are more good writers writing more good books than I can find time to read.

SW: That leads nicely into my next question, which is about an article you wrote for The Millions called “The Big Show: Franzen, Goodman, and the Great American Novel.” In the article, you explore why Franzen’s Freedom gets dubbed The Great American Novel and Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector does not. You examine — among other things — how this difference in reception is related to the formal differences between these works, and one of the comments you make about Freedom is that it “sometimes feels like a guy at a dinner party who’s talking very, very loudly.”

How and to what extent does a novel “talking very, very loudly” relate to that novel being narcissistic and/or insular? Because in your answer to the last question, you sort of set up a dichotomy: writers with political and historical ambitions, and writers who write about old friends from school. I’m not saying these are rigid or mutually exclusive categories, but I am wondering to what extent you think Freedom being insular (although it does have political ambitions) relates to it being so loud.

GB: Look, Franzen is a great writer. Freedom is (to my mind) his second best book so far. But it’s really, really good. And sweeping, and large. And though sometimes his sympathies can seem pinched, in the end he reveals himself as a big-hearted writer. Reading it side by side with The Cookbook Collector — another really good book that is really similar in form and theme — I began to wonder, why all the attention for one book and not the other?

The disparity seemed extreme given the quality of the books. So I stumbled to my answer to that question as best I could. One thing I noticed is that Goodman is, as she said in a response to my article on the excellently named website Bookslut, interested in invisibilty. (I’m not quoting her exactly.) Franzen, to put it mildly, does not seem so interested in invisibility. He’s interested in showing off — not a bad thing in a novelist. (It’s a thing you could say too about James Joyce. Big show off.)

I don’t think Franzen is at all an insular novelist. People love to take swipes at “American fiction” and usually when they do they take a swipe at Jonathan Franzen — I saw a panel where a British novelist of Pakistani extraction kept talking about the failure of the American 9/11 novel—she had written a 9/11 novel too. And privately, I thought: really? You’re going to say that all the writers in the US are all writing badly about 9/11 and that poor writing is because they’re American?

There’s such a diversity of writers in this country, such a diversity of outlooks among them. I think writers do what they can. And I think sometimes writers who seem “insular” are, on close inspection, working at very intricate complicated powerful stuff. It’s an easy way to dismiss writers, and it’s a charge that gets leveled mostly at domestic, female novelists. Who’s more insular than Jane Austen? Who’s a better novelist?

I do not think that the Big Subject results in a Good Novel, and a lot of my favorite readings can seem small and domestic at first blush. What I was saying about the bunch-of-friends-from-school novel wasn’t intended as a dig at the novelists — I think theirs is a real way of describing current middle class existence in this country. The insularity might be more in the marketing and the publishing world.

But I’ll make a stab at a big idea here: writers are insular. They sit at the island of their desks, alone. Many of my favorite books are about that kind of insularity. Borges? Bernhard? Are they “insular”?  They write a lot about being stuck in their own heads.

SW: You teach in a department that features M.A. and D.A. degree programs, but no M.F.A. program. Yet your fiction writing courses are consistently filled with students used to writing critically who are eager to try their hand at — for lack of a better term — creative writing. What’s your understanding of the relationship between creative writing and literary criticism? Does the study of one enhance the study of the other?

GB: I like to quote the poet William Matthews, “Poetry is not criticism backwards.” But literary criticism and creative writing classes intersect around an easy point, which is reading. I think in both kinds of classes, if they’re taught well at the undergraduate level, the teacher’s not trying to turn to room into a bunch of critics or a bunch of poets — but getting people to put their attention on language, and on literary language.

I do wonder, at the doctoral level, what a student gets out of my class — I can’t imagine that writing a short story in any way helps them pragmatically with their dissertations or their contemplations of Derrida. But maybe it allows them in the face of literature to be completely amateurish, which, if you ask me, is the best way to approach a good book, out of love and not professionalism.

In that way, I particularly like my students. I like that it’s not my job, as it would be in an MFA program, to kind of move them toward getting an agent, toward thinking about publication. I don’t have to pretend that my class is much more than an intellectual play pen.

SW: Could you talk a little bit about your process and your habits as a writer?

GB: Two or three good hours every day without interruption is the idea in weeks when I have lots of time. When I don’t have time, I try to fill all the time I can get. Which can mean a six hour writing day and then a half-hour writing day. I write the same thing over and over and over again for a really long time. I go back and forth from draft to draft between computer and long hand. I usually have more than one project cooking at once. I wish all the time that I were better.

SW: You mention that you write longhand. What about writing longhand appeals to you?

GB: It’s just my habit, I guess. I mean, I can give justifications: mostly that I go more slowly writing than I do typing, and so my brain is always a little ahead of my hand when I write long-hand, and so the length of my attention is stretched a bit.

Also, I don’t have the distractions of the computer when I write in a notebook — I don’t go back and polish my sentences as I write them. But I think what helps me most is going back and forth from the notebook to computer to the printed page, to the notebook, and so on. I see the work a little bit differently each time.

I used to suggest that students write longhand, but my guess is that it’s very foreign to lots of people these days. I do find, for me at least, that writing only at the computer tends to make me focus on tiny perfectionist details of words and sentences in a way that’s not always good.

SW: What have you been reading lately? Are there certain works or authors that you find yourself rereading, works you return to for some type of guidance in your own writing?

GB: My reading of fiction the last few months has been all over the place. The stand-out recent literary work has got to have been Denis Johnson’s novella, Train Dreams, just a beautiful book by one of the great living US writers. I reviewed it, which gave me the opportunity to reread a lot of Johnson. Fiskadoro and Jesus’ Son are both astounding works.

I also recently read the Fire and Ice books, George R.R. Martin, which I just could not stop reading. I went through all five books in a row. And — since I can — I’ll just put in my two cents about those: Everyone is comparing him to Tolkein, but I think the more appropriate, immediate influences on him are probably Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock — favorite writers of my teen years.

Who do I go back to most often? I’m a big re-reader. Over the summer, I reread a lot of stuff from my childhood — Salinger and Le Guin and Hammett. And, yes, I recently reread Anna Karenina, but every writer says that, right?

A Conversation with Dorothea Lasky

When we asked Dorothea Lasky for five books that were similar to Black Life, her second collection of poetry from Wave Books, she immediately mentioned the late, great Biggie Smalls. As a native New Yorker and obsessive hip-hop fan, I felt like I needed to get to the bottom of this. I sat down with Dottie for a couple of minutes and asked her a couple questions about the black Frank White.

* * *

Mark Cugini: First and foremost, I think it’s worth mentioning that you said if someone liked Black Life, they’d probably like Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death. I couldn’t agree more, but I’m sort of curious — how do you think they’re similar?

Dorothea Lasky: I would say the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die is more like Black Lifethan Life After Death. Life After Death, for me, is more like my next book, Thunderbird. Nevertheless, Black Life is indebted to Biggie’s album because in both the speaker is a “Born sinner, the opposite of a winner.” And also, in both, the speakers give you the sense (I hope) that it was not a choice to be so, but more a condition thrust upon them by life itself. On a formal level, I am interested in how Biggie folds all kinds of language and voices (some so not his own that they can’t help but become so) into short, clipping lines. They have a casual air, but of course, they couldn’t be farther from casual if they tried. The essence of coolness.

MC: Oh, ok, that makes a lot more sense — especially the “born sinner” line. Not to get too liberal-arts-school here, but Biggie was raised by a single mother in a low-income neighborhood that was overrun with gang violence and drug use. I do think it’s obvious that the speaker in Black Life was thrust into situations where she lacked control, but those are instances of a different nature: it seems as if she’s addressing interpersonal relationships instead of class issues. If that’s the case, how does it end up that both speakers end up with such swagger? Does it maybe have something to do with owning their personal tragedies?

DL: Thanks for saying that about swagger! What an important word for what we are talking about. Of course, content and the socioeconomic background of poets affect how they craft their personae and what those voices say. I do think, however, that class issues and interpersonal ones are inextricable. Class is rife with everything we do and vice versa. Biggie, to me, is like any poet who takes pieces of life and weaves it into his work. He includes the people he meets and how these people affect him and what they say. I think this is where swagger comes from. It is the craft, the skill, the flow, that connects all of us as poets. The ability to take the muck of the everyday and make it beautiful.

MC: I completely share that sentiment about Biggie, and I think you’re absolutely right. Let’s talk a little bit about where your swagger is coming from: one of the threads that runs through Black Life is the deteriorating (mental?) health of the narrator’s father. Is this something that you had to were pulling from your own experiences? Do you think that makes your swagger similar or different to Biggie’s, and in which ways?

DL: A lot of the experiences in Black Life are from my own personal experience and I think this is like Biggie. But isn’t that true for all poetry? Or all writing and all art? Or all thought? Science is a set of ideas made by people. What poem isn’t at least in part based on the poet’s personal experience, even when we know that I in a poem is not always the I of the poet? I as a person haven’t done everything in the exact way the I in my poems does things, but he/she/it still comes from me. The mask is there on the face of the poet with the reading of the poem, but the eye come through however disfigured and distant the costume.  I don’t know, just yesterday I visited a friend’s poetry class and one of the wonderful students there asked if I ever felt embarrassed by the personal details I put in my poems. I told her that I wasn’t embarrassed, because for the most part there was a lot of mediation and craft there — a lot of control. Maybe the control has to do with swagger. To feel the pain or joy and hold it transfixed. To transfix a reader with the dead emotion, somehow alive and always alive with the listening/reading. That’s how I feel when I listen to Biggie. When I hear his voice, I know he is in some way still alive. Do you think this has to do with swagger, too?

MC: Oh, totally. It’s funny, I was listening to “Things Done Changed” (my favorite “first-song-on-an-album” in hip-hop history) and the last line of that song is “my momma’s got cancer on her breast / don’t ask me why I’m motherfucking stressed.” I always found that to be such a beautiful deviation: rappers are supposed to be cocky and full of bravado, yet here’s this incredible admission of weakness and self-consciousness. Do you think that’s the definitive difference between rappers and poets — that rappers are supposed to control this concept of “swagger,” while poets are taught to operate within their self-consciousness?

DL: That is probably my favorite Biggie line ever. That and “Girls used to diss me / Now they write letters ’cause they miss me.” The way he wraps the rhyme around to give us something so sweet and sad. I think that the admission of weakness and self-consciousness amidst swagger is what makes rappers and poets the same. There might be some places where we are taught to operate differently, but when we are writing poems, we operate language for exactly the same purpose. And I think that whatever places there are that make us feel as if we are not doing the same thing should be obliterated.

MC: If Black Life is Ready to Die and your next book is Life After Death, does that mean Puff Daddy is going to take all the poems you’ve cut and make a Reborn album? If so, is there anything I can do to prevent that from happening?

DL: If there is anything we can do to *make* this happen, then I would be very happy. He is a saint that Puffy.

Q&A with xTx

Where did the name xTx come from?

It is a shortened form of a longer name I used to blog under. It is the alphabetic version of a dick and balls. It is the stupidest pseudonym ever. It is a fortunate mistake. It is a shield.

Why do you call your pen name a "fortunate mistake?" This intrigues me. After all, your name is a "dick-and-balls.”

My pen name is "fortunate" because it seems to get attention/stand out and it's a "mistake" because I never expected it to become "something" and now it's more well-known than my real name is or will ever be (maybe) as it pertains to the online lit scene.

The "cock and balls" likeness was something I just recently realized it sort of resembles -- in my twisted mind, anyway. Maybe I subconsciously equate being powerful/having a protective shield with the strength of a male, i.e. the cock and balls imagery. Maybe not. I dunno.

I'd like to know more about you. How old you are. What you look like. If you're a mom. Were you sexually abused a child? What else do you do, aside from writing? Are you in school?

Those are the lots of things that lots of people want to know about me. If you want to know what I look like there are a handful of people that met me at AWP who can do some artist renderings. For the other things, well, when I finally meet you for burritos and margaritas at that place you mentioned, I will tell you all about them.

Have you discovered a particular freedom in anonymity?

Of course. I don’t (often) have to worry about what others think. I don’t have to censor myself. My tits out, paper bag over my head, sitting on a sidewalk.

Honestly, if I stepped out from behind the shield I would feel vulnerable as hell. I mean, sometimes I already do. This year I met a bunch of "online people" at AWP and kept thinking they were thinking, "She's the one that writes all that fucked up shit all the time," and then I think maybe they are judging me. I don't know. Either which way, it's nobody’s fault but my own.

But maybe eventually I would feel empowered, like, finally own my shit and be proud of it and be like, "YUP, THIS IS ME TOO!" Maybe that would be a huge relief. Maybe that would be a Sybil-like, multiple personality integration party in my soul. Double-lives are hard.

Do you think writing anonymously is one way to keep art and the artist separate? Should art always speak for itself regardless of the artist, like who he or she is and what personal stake he or she has in the material?

I do think the art should speak for itself. When I read a story or love a painting that is all there is. I wonder about the creator, but, really, the creator is separate. Sort of how a baby is born; first one with the mother and then separate into the world. They are always together, but yet, they are individuals. It’s interesting to know the parents, to get some background or perspective on the child, but in the end, the child is its own thing. I hope that makes sense.

Name three writers who've lent you courage as a writer.

Roxane Gay, Ethel Rohan, and Lidia Yuknavitch just because of the very personal and intense subject matter they write about USING THEIR OWN NAMES. Reading them makes me feel ashamed of how I hide. Their courage gives me courage. One day I hope I will act on that courage.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? An anti-feminist? What?

I’ve never classified myself as much of anything. I don’t think I’m either of those things. I hope I’m not a let down to my sex for saying so. Please let the record reflect that I’m a huge fan of boobs and vaginas and the owners thereof.

If you described Normally Special in one sentence, compound but not complex, how would you describe it?

A tiny, hardcore collection of brutal, ugly, and beautiful.

"Normally Special" is an oxymoron, isn't it? Talk to me about that.

Normally Special is taken from the last story in the book which is a story about a woman obsessed with a man but who is trying to convince him that her obsession is a safe one, but in the convincing she is making it obviously clear that it is not safe at all. The full sentence is, “I did not Google Earth you, so none of these thoughts took place and you can go on speaking to your neighbors who think you are only normally special.” I love the contradictory nature of the term, “normally special” because how can one be both?

On the cover for Normally Special we see a man first and then in the distance a small girl. The photo seems to represent a power dynamic going on in the book, between men and women. Talk about that power dynamic and why it became so central to your stories.

I love the cover shot. I can’t get enough of this photo which is why I chose it. (“Little Girl in Yellow in SoHo” taken by my friend, Robb Todd.) The tininess of the girl, the way she is framed in that huge doorway making her appear even more tiny and vulnerable, the faceless man in the foreground wearing a color that makes bulls charge, the contrast between them that evokes a subtle feeling of danger, the fear of the obvious vulnerability of the little girl. How I worry about her. This cover does sort of capture a lot of the themes of Normally Special.

I can only speak from my experience of being a girl and a woman, but I think I am drawn to the men/woman power dynamic because of how much shit women are subjected to along the path of their lives by boys/men. I think we have a lot of stuff happen to us because of our sex. I just think that’s how it’s always been and how it always will be and I like to “look at it” by writing about it.  I wish I could protect all the little girls in the world so they don’t have to write stories like mine.

But this power dynamic in the stories. "The Duty Mouths Bring," for instance, has a great deal of this going on, a competition between the sexes. When I read your stories I feel like being a woman is a slippery slope, fucking precarious. What about this attracts you as an artist?

I guess I am drawn to writing about the woman as a victim in a lot of different ways; a victim of circumstance, a victim of a man, of herself, etc.  I’m not sure if this is considered a “power dynamic” or if it’s just showing how someone might struggle when faced with dealing with different life events/experiences. One woman is forced by her husband to fold towels “properly,” one woman is abused by an “uncle,” one woman gets almost taken advantage of in a bar bathroom, one woman struggles to feed her son, one young girl gets abused by her brothers; I like to explore the ugly most of the time. It just always seems to be man vs. woman in most of the cases.

You tackle a taboo subject in Normally Special, incest. The story "I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me" opens with, "It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out," and walks a thin line between titillating and horrifying readers. Talk to me about the genesis of this story.

Incest is a horrible thing. It’s disgusting. It’s probably one of the hugest betrayals that can be perpetrated on another. It fascinates me. It’s probably ugly to say that but I am hiding behind my fake name so it makes it easier. The inner workings of a parent who uses their child as a thing for sex is crazy fucked up shit. I don’t understand it. I think that’s why I have written about incest, in various forms, from time to time. Especially the aftermath. How does a child “go on” from something like that? How does that affect them later in life? The confusion of loving a dad despite what you know he did was wrong and that you might even hate him for it but the child’s voice still whispering to you, “but he’s my daddy” and “but I love my daddy, my daddy loves me.” How the desire for a father’s love can make a little girl/woman’s voice of denial so loud that she chooses to believe nothing ever happened, even when she goes looking for it and maybe even thinks she finds it. It’s easier to cope with what we tell ourselves.

I won’t talk about the genesis of this story.

What are your thoughts on "Writers should write what they know?" Does an artist have to be or come from a place in order to write about it? Or are you able to relate to characters unlike yourself because you're able to identify with like emotional experiences?

I guess we are all a bit limited to the things we know but I don’t know if that means we don’t write about the things we don’t. Maybe they won’t be written as well as if we did, and if a writer wants to take that chance, go for it. I stay within whatever I feel comfortable writing about. If it begins to extend into unfamiliar territory, and I feel the story needs it, I’ll do my best to learn as much as I can in order for it to be as “true” as it can be.

Dads show up a lot in your stories, don’t they?

Well, now that you mention it, I guess (they do.) I probably will never show my dad this book.

I've been rereading stories and decided my favorite is "An Unsteady Place." Where did it come from? When did you write it? What was going on at the time?

I wrote this story while in a beachside vacation rental house on the Oregon coast. I wrote the first section longhand, in a notebook, sitting in a sunroom on the top floor. Man, I loved that sunroom! I could’ve written there for a month! The first paragraph of that story is basically what I wrote in my notebook, no revisions. The décor of that house really was ridiculous. You couldn’t get away from the seaside imagery. It was literally everywhere. The ridiculousness made a feeling in me that had to get out which is my “writing feeling” and so that’s where I started; the décor. When I got to the part about all of the little instructions everywhere -- notes on how to use the microwave, the oven, where to put the trash, etc. -- and I wrote the line, “There is no way you can make a mistake here.” I think that set me on the path of, “What IF you could make a mistake here? What would that look like?” and that’s when I think I knew the story would be a dark one. I love the contrast of what is supposed to be this happy, family getaway turning into one woman’s unraveling. I love how the rest of the family just goes on like nothing is happening and still expecting her to be a mother, a wife. As I said before, so much is put upon that dual role that people who depend on that dual role forget the person is breakable, can be broken. And, quite often, the mother/wife feels obligated to her duty so much so that she sacrifices herself in the process.

Were you and I discussing "unreliable narrators" on Twitter? The narrator of "An Unsteady Place" is certainly unreliable because she's going crazy. Did you consider allowing readers to see around her as a way to reveal the validity of her perspective?

It wasn’t me you discussed that with on Twitter. I think if I let readers “see around her” to really know if she was going crazy or not, the story wouldn’t be the way it is. It would be an entirely different story. I like the not knowing. I like how it isn’t grounded all the way. I think we all feel a bit unsteady in our lives even when beautiful things are all around us. Sometimes we are living her without the imagery. I wanted the reader to be able to feel that/relate to that.

Ernest Hemingway once said the best writing happens when emotions run high. Talk to me about tapping high emotion. Do you find power as an artist in anger? Is it a traditionally impolite thing for female artist to do, get pissed off?

Emotion is imperative for writing. Dead cannot write exciting. I frequently have to put myself into an emotional place in order to get what I need to get for certain stories. If I am losing a vibe in a story, I have to stop, sit, and put myself in the proper feeling and write from there. I have to feel what the narrator feels so I can tell the reader properly. I like showing my readers my guts. I want them inside my skin.

Anger is good. Anger is impolite if you are a woman, which is stupid. Which is why I would write about something like that. I like making people look at things they don’t want to look at. Car crash, eye surgery, aborted fetus.

A couple stories in Normally Special come across as letters, don’t they? Talk to me about how this worked for you as an artist, writing stories addressed to a "you." How do you think they work on readers? For instance, does it create intimacy between writer/reader?

Ha, I do that all the time -- writing to a “you.” Anytime you see a story I’ve written addressed to a “you” know that it was an easy story for me to write. I have a lot of “yous” in the world who I (insert strong emotion/feeling here) and those pieces usually start with one of those feelings and move on from there. I’ve never thought of them as letters, but I guess maybe they are. I could probably print them out, fold them three times, stick them in envelopes and mail them to the people who inspired them. Some would be happy to receive them, some would be horrified and some would be scared. A lot of times when I write them, I am glad I use “you” because I know a lot of people will think, “Me?” and I  like having thin walls between us -- me and the reader. I want people to want to be the “you” in my stories. I usually want to be the “you” in other people’s stories. I like the intimacy of it. I wish I could do one on one readings with each of my readers in dark rooms with thighs touching, both of us with nervous hearts.

Who did you picture as your audience while writing Normally Special?

Honestly, I am a pleaser. I have a huge problem with wanting people to like me. When Roxane (Gay) asked me to do this book, all I cared about was impressing her. The mantra of, “I hope she likes this,” was always humming away, always in the back of my mind pushing me to do my best. I didn’t want to disappoint her. If she was happy with my stories, then I knew everyone else would be. I don’t write with an audience in mind, unless, of course, I’ve been asked to do so. I just write. The audience will come.

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.

Cut Through the Bone: An Interview with Ethel Rohan

I feel like at this point, Ethel Rohan needs no introduction here at The Lit Pub, so I'll just make with the love here and give you the interview, raw and uncut.

You write as someone who seems pretty intimate with loss. What’s your relationship with loss? Are there specific moments in your life you use to fuel the imagery and pathos in these stories in Cut Through the Bone?

I don’t consciously write about loss or any other subject matter. When I write, I don’t structure or plot and never know where I’m going. I follow the words and am always grateful whenever those words lead to a story I feel good about.I’m constantly surprised by the stories that come out of me and in awe of the writing process and creativity in general. At some point in the revision of every story, I ask of the work, “why would I write you?” It isn’t until I realize why each story matters to me personally that I can even hope to ‘finish’ the work and make the stories matter to others. I do feel intimately familiar with loss and have come to realize I’m everywhere in Cut Through the Bone in that I “know” what it is to have lost loved ones and lost parts of myself.

Obviously there’s lots of talk about the themes of loss and absence in this collection, but as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve taken from it more a theme of what is gained in the space left by that absence, space as a metaphor for possibility. Do you feel there’s too much focus on the loss and not what there is to gain?

The insistence on the loss and darkness in this collection was at first intriguing and instructive to me. Now I feel somewhat frustrated by the narrow focus on loss and darkness in the collection. I think the best writing goes into a dark place and brings out some key knowledge and meaning into the light. Readers’ resistance to suffering in fiction fascinates me. It can’t be that we’re so fragile or unconscious? So why does it seem that many can’t handle the truths—however hard-hitting—that fiction can deliver?

I’d go so far as to say the reluctance to acknowledge darkness and suffering in life and in literature angers me. What’s to be gained by denying truth and turning a blind eye to what’s difficult and painful in the world? Why, I wonder, is darkness and suffering so much easier to accept, even revered, in film and on TV versus in writing? I’m confounded by that. It’s one thing if someone feels traumatized by what they read, or there’s some fault with the work, then by all means stop. But to turn away and give up on stories only because they look hard at pain, suffering and life’s difficulties, I don’t understand that. Too many look away from sadness and suffering in literature and in life, and it’s wrong. Yes, absolutely, reading for escapism and entertainment has its value and its place, but our art cannot be limited to such narrow, irresponsible lenses. Art should mirror life and we shouldn’t look away from its harsher images and truths. There can be no change without disturbance and no gain without struggle.

We live in dark, difficult times and I don’t want my work to add to the suffering, I want my stories to acknowledge, confront and examine suffering in the hopes that we can alleviate it.

I love the idea, thank you, of “what is gained in the space left by that absence, space as a metaphor for possibility.” If we’d only look into the dark more often so we can set it afire and try to recover the missing more often, the world would be a better place.

I tried to start a community collaborated interview with you earlier this month, but it didn’t really take off. Molly posed a great question though that I wanted to be sure was asked here: “Ethel blogs a lot about her mother. If she’s willing, I would like to know more about what’s happening in her life. She is so willing to share a touch of the detail, the suffering her mother is going through, but I really want to know what Ethel’s going through . . . maybe for no other reason than to send her virtual hugs.”

At some point, I accepted that everything I write leads back to my mother. I resisted that truth for a long time and it’s something I tried to rid my work of. However, my mother and our complicated relationship both feed and haunt my imagination. When I was a child, my mother and I warred much of the time and we both hated and desperately loved each other. She was mentally ill and I was angry and scared and wanted nothing more than for her to be well, but she never recovered. My mother’s still alive (in her twelfth year of Alzheimer’s and recently diagnosed with uterine cancer) but she’s been long gone. Her absence and great suffering are among my demons and it’s because of her I write. Writing gives me somewhere to put the pain and fear and yearning. Writing offers me opportunities to heal.

It’s been interesting to have read first these stories in Cut Through the Bone, which no doubt had plenty of editorial review during the publishing process at Dark Sky Books, and going back to find earlier versions of these stories published online so I can link to them from my Story Focus posts here, allowing people who haven’t gotten the book yet to read the story. Particularly, I noted a lot of changes in “More Than Gone,” where you were a bit more liberal in your word count and description, whereas in the collection, your language is a lot more sparse. What has your growth been like as a writer, developing this bare-bones language that’s prevalent in your work now? Has the editing process at Dark Sky contributed to that voice?

I think my publisher, Kevin Murphy, would agree that there was little editorial input from Dark Sky on this manuscript. When I first submitted the collection, Kevin rejected the manuscript, essentially saying, “it’s not there yet.” Kevin encouraged me to work more on the stories and to resubmit. Thus motivated, I tried to be merciless with the work and studied every story and word for its worth. Over the course of months, I re-worked the collection and then sent the manuscript to Kevin O’Cuinn, my compatriot, fellow writer, and fiction editor at Word Riot, for his input and feedback. In response, Kevin provided excellent comments and edits that helped me get these stories where they needed to be.

During my MFA at Mills, Victor LaValle always said we should, “know our weaknesses as writers and police against them.” Some of my writing weaknesses are repetition, over-writing, flowery language and sentimentality. These bad habits appear in my first drafts and in revision need to be eradicated. Sometimes, butchering my stories and getting them to that better place can be especially hard because I love description and emotion. I’m still struggling with knowing what are bad habits and what are my style and voice. I want to rid my work of the former, but not the latter. Just as recently as this week, Matt Salesses of The Good Men Project hacked away at a story I submitted and made it so much better. This was an important lesson and reminder that those weaknesses are still clear and present dangers in my work and I need to be ruthless against them. As writers, we are forever students.

You had some really fantastic things to contribute to the discussion regarding men’s vs. women’s literature. Where do you see the future of literature in this regard? What would your ideal publishing/literary atmosphere be in regards to gender?

I’m very optimistic about the future of gender and race equality in literature. Thanks to the excellent marriage of the internet and the printed word, we live in exciting literary times and things are only going to get better. As women writers, readers, and buyers we’re raising our voices and harnessing out collective power. Some of the direct results of that activism and clout are increased visibility for, and accessibility to, the widest and most equitable range ever of writers, voices and works. We also have independent publishers to thank for the exciting state of literature today. Indie publishers are proving to be innovative, risk-takers with their fingers very much on the pulse of writing and works that matter. Indies are committed to excellence and inclusivity in writing and are fast becoming industry leaders and groundbreakers.

You just recently had a new book released by the illustrious PANK, Hard to Say. Can you tell us a bit about this book?

Hard to Say is a tiny collection of fifteen linked stories set largely in Ireland. I’m heartened by the excellent response thus far to this little book because these stories are personal and painful, and I agonized over whether or not I should publish the book. Unlike Cut Through the Bone, where I feel very much hidden inside the stories, in Hard to Say, I feel very much exposed and it was difficult to find the courage and get the necessary distance to tell these stories right and well. Only time and readers will tell if I succeeded in the latter.

Hard to Say is an apt title and I’m still coming to terms with the little book being out in the world. It’s deeply encouraging and rewarding that readers are moved by these stories and I feel buoyed by how many readers and fellow writers have found the work meaningful and worthwhile. To expand on the idea above regarding the opportunities in spaces, I’m excited about the new spaces that have opened up inside me now that I’ve gotten the stories in Hard to Say out of my insides and onto the page, and I look forward to finding out what can be gained in their absence.

Lastly, what’s next for you/what are you working on now that we can look forward to? Have you had any recent publications you’d like to share that our readers can check out?

I have a third story collection I’d love to see published, one that both my agent and I agree is best suited to an indie publisher. I’ve also finished a novel manuscript that I’m about to send off to my agent. It’s a novel I’ve worked long and hard on now over the course of nine years and I’m crossing every body part I can, hoping it’ll at last get to be in the world.

*   *   *

You can find more of Ethel's recently published work in the Highlighted Stories section at her website's Published Works page.

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.