The New Book Trailer: An Interview with Adam Cushman

Popular wisdom holds that the movie is never as good as the book (with allowances, perhaps, for the adaptations of Stanley Kubrick and a few others). But an emerging genre is challenging and re-imagining the relationship between film and literature. Red 14 Films, founded in 2011, makes “literary short films. They also call them “cinematic book trailers,” to distinguish them from the low-end, slideshow-style trailers currently in vogue in indie circles.

The films capture the core of a book in just a few minutes. They are often used as part of an online advertising campaign, but they also stand as artworks in their own right. “Through film,” the company says on its web page, “we offer the chance to spread the idea of your book in a way that’s engaging to readers and expresses the plot and tone of your book without compromising the reading experience.”

On July 15, Red 14 Films will launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund films for Jason Ockert’s Neighbors of Nothing, Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Scott Dominic Carpenter’s This Jealous Earth, and Monica Drake’s The Stud Book.

Co-founder Adam Cushman was kind enough to answer some of my questions over email.

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Nathan Goldman: What inspired the founding of Red 14 Films?

Adam Cushman: It was entirely accidental. My background is in fiction writing and filmmaking. About two years ago, a friend asked me to direct a book trailer for his new novel. I had no idea what he was talking about. So I researched online and found they’d been around for a few years, but were universally, maybe even intentionally bad. My partner Mike Sandow and I enjoyed the creative freedom of working within a new form. So we did a few more book trailers for friends with novels. Pretty soon we had writers asking to hire us, and the company was born.

Nathan Goldman: The Kickstarter campaign video defines the “literary short film” as “a 1-3 minute film that spreads the idea of the book much like a music video.” When making one of these films, what’s the process like for determining “the idea of the book”?

Adam Cushman: It depends on the book, really. We read the book and come up with an approach. Very often what we shoot is informed by a passage from the book or the back cover synopsis. Other times the writer has a solid idea of what they want, and if that vision is realistic, we adapt it that way. It’s similar to a film adaptation in that sense, because you’re translating one medium to another. The question becomes how much do you translate? How much plot is necessary to include in the trailer in order to interest readers in the book and the author? My feeling is these films are better as sense impressions than direct film adaptations, giving readers just a taste.

Nathan Goldman: The Red 14 Films website describes the literary short film as an art form in its own right, as well as a part of an advertising campaign for a book. How do these two aims work together? Do they ever come into conflict, and if so, how does Red 14 Films negotiate between them?

Adam Cushman: They haven’t really come into conflict. There are three strains at work here: cinema, literature, and advertising. To me these literary shorts are most closely related to music videos only in the sense that we’re not using them as direct ads. Music videos, for example, don’t feature the album cover at the end or ask you to buy the album. They use the song as a vehicle for a new work of art that hopefully creates an interest in that album and that band. To me direct advertising is dead. No one is going to share a spammy “book trailer.” No one’s going to click on your banner ad. So you have to give people something that spreads. You can’t do that by talking down to people. You can ask them to buy the book, and who knows, some of them might. But why not give them something that’s visually and emotionally pleasing?

Nathan Goldman: How do you think book trailers fit into the changing publishing industry?

Adam Cushman: Well, it’s an interesting time. Book trailers are everywhere. And they’re for the most part really terrible. Most publishers have gone along with using them begrudgingly, and that’s evident when you watch the trailers. It’s clear from the work that publishers wish they didn’t need book trailers, so they throw a slideshow together and say, “It’ll do.” But it won’t do. And this gives book trailers a bad name (rightfully so). There’s no doubt that you need online video as part of your marketing plan. So why not make it awesome? I hope, if we’ve accomplished anything in two years, we’ve proven that these trailers can be high quality and affordable at the same time. And there’s no doubt that book trailers are here to stay. So the question becomes, do big publishers prefer mediocrity? I think the answer is no. Over the last year I’ve seen a bunch of amazing book trailers pop up. So it’s definitely beginning to get better, although the really bad ones still make up most of them. Right now it’s all still new, and the typical response from publishers is, “Well, the numbers haven’t been proven, so….” But there’s no way to measure the numbers. Music videos have no way of measuring how many sales a video generates. And that’s really not the point anyway. The point is to increase the interest in books and in reading. The success of the eReader ought to tell you that people want to read. How you compel them to do that is a different story.

Nathan Goldman: The Red 14 Films website says, “We’re not creating typical ‘book trailers,’ amateur slideshows using an iMac, still frames from the web, and maybe some scrolling text. This is neither our product nor something we are interested in being involved in.” What do you think high production value contributes to this emerging art form?

Adam Cushman: I think what it comes down to is quality and care. The bottom line is that most authors spend one to two years writing a book. That anyone would then advertise the book with one of these still frame montages or anything less than stellar makes no sense to me.

Nathan Goldman: What inspired this Kickstarter campaign?

Adam Cushman: Two things. First, we want to use Kickstarter the way Kickstarter was meant to be used: collaboratively. We feel that the Kickstarter platform is a way to bring legitimacy to this new form and for people to feel like they’re involved in creating it. Second, we’re hoping to create a platform that indie publishers can use in the future. The idea being that if you take four of your titles and create a campaign, offering books, eBooks, workshops, etc., as rewards, everybody wins. The authors and publishers get a cool book trailer. The supporters get awesome and affordable rewards and a chance to connect with authors. Plus, you’re automatically building your fan base and marketing your titles. The best Kickstarters are ones where everyone wins. I hope that our campaign lives up to that. I think it will.

Nathan Goldman: If someone hired you to produce a literary short film for any work you wanted by any author, living or dead, what work would you choose?

Adam Cushman: It’s my dream project to do a series of these for the classics.

Nathan Goldman: What classics do you have in mind for that series?

Adam Cushman: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, the Black Rider poems, Walden, Last of the Mohicans, Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, to name a few. I imagine doing them in a similar vein as the Criterion Collection covers, just with video.

Nathan Goldman: Does your background in fiction writing inform the process of making these films, since they’re inspired by and tied to texts? If so, how?

Adam Cushman: I don’t think my fiction background informs the filmmaking so much as it makes me passionate about finding and filming awesome stories, and often getting to work with fiction writers I admire.

Nathan Goldman: You’ve made films for many kinds of books, from novels to short story collections to a book on writing. Does your approach vary according to these different genres? What different challenges do the different genres present?

Adam Cushman: The non-fiction books are trickier because you have to find different ways to communicate the idea of the book than you would if you were filming a novel. With a story collection we focus on one story, usually the title piece. With the book on writing, we had to express the idea of the book using imagery that isn’t necessarily in the book itself, so that was a different process as well. But the truth is every book presents its own challenges, and the fun part is figuring out how to use those challenges positively. For example, we did a trailer for a book called Executive Command. It’s a political thriller with lots of characters and action. Every time we sat down to figure out the approach, it ended up being too expensive. That’s the thing with these, they’re not actual film adaptations and there’s often the temptation, either with the writer or the filmmaker or both, to treat it as such. This can end up being prohibitively expensive. With Executive Command, we ended up shooting a small scene from the book as a found footage piece, a scene that happens to encapsulate the plot and conflict of the novel. So sometimes it’s about finding new and creative ways to say more but show less.

Nathan Goldman: Would you be interested in working with wildly different kinds of books—cookbooks, textbooks, coffee table books, doctoral dissertations—or do you think that there are certain genres for which this medium doesn’t make sense?

Adam Cushman: I can’t think of any genres that we wouldn’t take on. I’m not particularly interested in religious fiction, but that’s me. So the answer is definitely yes. I think the difference is that with a cook book or a coffee table book you’re limited in the sense that it will serve one purpose, and that purpose is to be a book trailer. With the literary shorts we make for novels. they exist as a film first and happen to make for good book trailers as well. With the novels and collections there’s also the opportunity to use the films to promote the movie rights, something you wouldn’t really need to do with a cookbook or dissertation.

Nathan Goldman: Who are some of your favorite living writers? Filmmakers?

Adam Cushman: Aside from the four brilliant writers in our Kickstarter campaign? Right now I’m into Alissa Nutting, Denis Johnson, James Ellroy, and Patrick Dewitt to name a few. My favorite writers change all the time though. On the film side, I really like some of the Australian filmmakers like David Michod, Andrew Dominik, Cate Shortland, and Justin Kurzel. I could go on.

Nathan Goldman: What would you say to someone considering contributing to the Kickstarter campaign?

Adam Cushman: That apart from the rewards, you’re helping pioneer a new art form that can benefit established writers, new voices and filmmakers worldwide.

An Interview with Deborah Crombie

A Texas woman with a British soul, Deb Crombie, deftly weaves wonderfully tangled webs of mystery around Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. Both are employed by the London Police and find themselves solving one complex crime after another while becoming hopelessly personally involved. In The Sound Of Broken Glass, Gemma is challenged by the salacious death of a respected London barrister in a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. An unsavory accident or murder?

* * *

MaryAnne Kolton: When you were little, what did you dream of being when you grew up?

Deborah Crombie: Such fun to think about this, MaryAnne.

I think the very first thing I wanted to be was a cowgirl. I have photos (somewhere—the childhood album is missing . . .) of me at six in my cowgirl outfit, complete with six-shooter. Then a horse trainer and breeder—I was horse mad. King of the Wind, the Black Stallion books—loved them!

And then came the “ologists.” My grandmother, who lived with us, was a retired schoolteacher. She had a subscription to National Geographic and we read every issue together, cover to cover. I had a rock collection and wanted to be a geologist, then an archeologist, a paleontologist, a marine biologist, a zoologist, a botanist . . . you get the picture. I think “world explorer” figured in there somewhere. And I wanted to climb Mount Everest.

Later, I started college as a history major, finished with a degree in biology. The one thing I never imagined I would do was write novels.

(And Charles Darwin is still my hero.)

MAK: Do you see these childhood dreams resonating in your writing in some way?

DC: Obviously, I liked learning new things, and that’s certainly carried over into the books. Not only do I tend to research new geographical areas, but most books throw me into new subjects, such as rowing in No Mark Upon Her and rock guitar in The Sound Of Broken Glass. You could say that writing satisfies my magpie instincts.

But even more than that, I see the thread of curiosity, and I think that curiosity—about people and places and life in general—must be the driving force of the novelist. We are, most of us, the elephant’s children. We always want to know WHY.

MAK: You’ve said you have felt that the UK is your “real” home for most of your life. So many Americans are Anglophiles to some degree. How did this feeling you have come about?

DC: This is hardest question to answer, and I’m not sure I’ve become any better at it over the years. I no longer trust what is actual memory and what I’ve spliced in, trying to find some logic in my own life. . . . Did it really start with A.A. Milne? I still have my treasured first editions, so perhaps that is true. I’m sure there were other children’s books, and then there were Tolkien and CS Lewis, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and on to Sayers and Christie, Mary Stewart and Josephine Tey, Dick Francis and James Herriott. But it was more than stories—there was always landscape, even in my dreams as a child.

I’ve said this often, but it remains a lodestone in my perception of my life: I didn’t actually visit England until I graduated from college (my parents took me as a graduation gift.) And on that first bus ride between Gatwick Airport and London, I looked out at the rolling hills and fields and red rooftops of Surrey, and felt I had come home. That feeling was profound, heart-deep, and has never gone away.

MAK: There is such a sense of interiority about your characterizations. It tends to give the reader permission to care a great deal about Gemma and Duncan. How do you do that?

DC: Some of it is instinctive, I think. I heard Duncan’s voice in my head so clearly before I ever began to write him, and that’s how many scenes and characters begin for me — with a line of thought or a line of dialogue.

Then there is that perpetual writer’s curiosity. Even as a child I looked in the windows of houses in the evenings, wondering about the families that lived there — What were their names? Did they have pets? What did they eat for dinner? What did they talk about? So I think this fascination with detail carried over into — or perhaps spurred — my writing. And these details do tell the reader things about the characters.

And the third thing—I’m viewpoint obsessive. I never, never write omniscient viewpoint. I never shift viewpoint within a scene. And I always try to make it very clear at the beginning of a scene whose head we are inhabiting. I think this gives the readers a very strong sense of identification with the characters—and of course we are in Duncan’s and Gemma’s viewpoints most often.

MAK: Are you more like Duncan or Gemma and in what ways?

In the beginning I would easily have said Duncan. I understood how he thought and how he reacted to things. And although I very deliberately made Gemma’s personal situation one that I understood very well—a young woman trying to meet her responsibilities as a mother AND get ahead in a job that she cares passionately about—I saw her as much more assertive than me, and perhaps more emotionally open.

DC: But the characters have grown into themselves, sometimes in ways that surprised me. Duncan turned out to be the more willing to take emotional risks, while it was Gemma who was reluctant to make a commitment. It’s a journey of discovery these days. And interestingly, the character that I identify with most strongly might be Kit.

MAK: It might be helpful here to give a brief background summary of the story of Gemma and Duncan. Then tell a bit about why you identify so strongly with Kit?

DC: Duncan and Gemma began the series as professional partners. I set out with the idea that I wanted to write characters that experience growth and change, whose lives evolve. Even so, I think it was as much a surprise to me as it was to them when Duncan and Gemma’s
relationship moved into the realm of the personal. That’s a very dry way of saying they fell in love . . . but that’s what happened, as it does in real life, no matter how inconvenient.

Kit, who came to Duncan when he was eleven, is now fourteen, and he is so like me when I was that age. (I should say here that I was never a very “girly” girl.) Kit wants to be a biologist. He loves animals. He likes to collect bits and pieces of things, rocks and plants and insects, as did I. Kit is a noticer, very aware of atmosphere and other people’s emotions. He also has a tendency to feel responsible for other people’s safety and emotional well-being, which can be a dangerous trait. And Kit is a dreamer. He sees stories in things, and in people. Who knows—he might even grow up to be a writer…

(Gemma) “Did you ever see any indication that Mr. Arnott was into anything . . . kinky?”

“Vincent?” Kershaw looked astonished. “Kinky? I’d say you couldn’t have found anyone more sexually straight ahead than Vincent.” . . . Kershaw went on, thoughtfully, “I never thought he liked women.”

You mean he liked men?” asked Gemma, wondering if they’d got the whole scenario wrong.

No. I mean he didn’t like women. . . . I learned years ago that he would never make a real effort to defend a woman. It was as if he made an automatic assumption of guilt.

—from The Sound Of Broken Glass

MAK: Your fans are quite anxious to read your newest book, The Sound Of Broken Glass, if their Internet posts are any indication of their loyalty to you and love of Gemma and Duncan. I don’t want to talk too much about the book itself so as not to give away any tense-making plot maneuvers. But I am wondering how far ahead you are plotting when you are writing the book you are working on? One book, two?

DC: I’m usually thinking at least two books ahead with Duncan, Gemma, and their family’s continuing story arc. And with the particulars stories for each novel, sometimes farther back than that. I introduced Andy Monahan, the character who is the focus of The Sound Of Broken Glass, three books ago, in WHERE MEMORIES LIE. He had a walk-on part as a witness to a murder, and I found I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I gave him very brief cameos in the next two books, and a personal connection to Duncan and Gemma, knowing I wanted to devote a
book to his story.

MAK: Melody is another character that seems to have found a place in your heart and is gaining more page space.

DC: Ah, Melody. One of the most fun things about writing a long-running series is the evolution of characters. When Gemma took that promotion to detective inspector and could no long work with Duncan, I knew they would both need new partners. Melody showed up in the first few books as a bit of an eager-beaver, always bringing Gemma coffee. She still likes to bring Gemma coffee, but she’s a detective sergeant now, and she’s turned out to be a very complex and interesting character with an unexpected background (no spoilers!) She’s a mass of contradictions, very sure of herself in some ways and lacking confidence in others.

Melody’s rather prickly friendship with Doug Cullen, Duncan’s sergeant, is now one of the driving story arcs of the series for me. Neither of them is quite sure who they are, but in trying to build a relationship they learn things about themselves as well as each other.

MAK: In addition to your excellent characterizations, which make the reader want to check in with Gemma and Duncan on a regular basis, the novels also contain a splendid sense of place. How much time do you actually spend in the UK gathering details?

DC: I usually go to England (most often London) a couple of times a year, for about three weeks at a time. That’s about as long as I can manage to be away from home without complete domestic chaos!

I usually stay in a flat in London, most often in Notting Hill. That’s the best way to really get the flow and rhythm of my characters’ lives, and I especially love being on Duncan and Gemma’s “patch.”

MAK: What are your feelings about touring and all the promotional work that’s required in today’s very competitive world of selling books?

DC: It’s a necessity except for the very top of the list authors — and perhaps even for them. In a way, it’s nothing new. Authors have always had to sell themselves. I organized my own book tours with other writer friends in the early days. But the social networking certainly takes up more time than anything we did in the past. On the downside, that’s time that could be spent writing. On the upside, it keeps you connected with readers and the reading community in a way never before possible. And it’s fun. You can’t do everything and I think each author has to find the niche that suits them. I’m better at Facebook than Twitter, for instance.

As for touring, I love it. It’s such fun to meet and visit with readers. And the best thing about touring — making connections with the booksellers, hasn’t changed.

An Interview with Rachel B. Glaser

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Rachel B. Glaser (author of Pee on Water and MOODS) about I Am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy.

Colin Winnette: Some books we love and would recommend to anyone because we just deep down believe that everyone should read them(!), other times our recommendations are tailored to suit the individual receiving the recommendation . . . but then there are books we love in a selfish way, that we hesitate to recommend to anyone, as if they need our protection. Where on that spectrum does I Am Elijah Thrush fall for you? Is there, in your mind, an ideal reader for this book?

Rachel B. Glaser:  I know what you mean about “protecting” the books we love. I think I Am Elijah Thrush should be reprinted and read again by many, but I did enjoy the way the book made its way to me, as if by mistake.  It feels great to “uncover” a book.  There is an idea that it’s rare to come upon a great book that you haven’t heard recommended many times before, but it keeps happening, which is encouraging to me, though it means that there are great books out there, lonely from not being read!  Though I felt precious about this book, I did the opposite of keeping it to myself, and have been regularly buying it online (bookstores never have it, though they all have tons of Purdy!) and distributing it.  In terms of an ideal reader for this book—someone who enjoys the absurd?  I feel that Jane Bowles has a lot in common with Purdy, so anyone who appreciates her writing should seek out I Am Elijah Thrush.

CW: It’s true. It’s a little depressing to think about how many great books are out there, going unread. Without your recommendation, I never would have heard of this one. In fact, it was sort of a difficult title to get my hands on. But I’m thrilled to have had this opportunity to read I am Elijah Thrush, because it’s a fantastic book, wild and funny and moving and super strange. What brought you to this particular book originally? And, if you can remember, what were some of your initial reactions?

RBG:  I’m so glad you enjoyed it!  My boyfriend, John Maradik, picked this book up off the shelf while at Grey Matter Books (in Hadley, MA) with the poet/our friend Christopher Cheney.  John read it and loved it and then Cheney read it immediately after, and they were both so enamored and entertained with it that I felt there was no way I could feel the same, but when it was my turn I was just as surprised and delighted.

From the first line you can tell it’s going to be good:

Millicent De Frayne, who was young in 1913, the sole possessor
of an immense oil fortune, languished of an incurable ailment, 
her willful, hopeless love for Elijah Thrush, “the mime, poet, 
painter of art nouveau,” who, after ruining the lives of countless 
men and women, was finally himself in love, “incorrectly, if not 
indecently,” with his great-grandson.

That first line is like a book in itself!  Each word is so forceful in creating a story and defining the characters.  When I read Purdy, especially this book, I am consistently deeply surprised.  In some ways, a first line like this could deflate surprise.  For instance, we already know Elijah Thrush is in love with his grandson.  It is not revealed in some suspenseful way.  The surprises happen on a smaller level, in the sentences and the moments of the book.  So, my initial reaction was disbelief and joy.  Since I knew that Purdy had written many books, reading and loving IAET felt like the beginning of a long life with Purdy.

CW: That opening line really is something. It’s almost as if, for Purdy, love and obsession are givens. It’s how those states are expressed that occupies him most. We learn that the narrator is “in love with a bird” long before his “habit” is revealed, and with far less ceremony. Purdy presents the object of the narrator’s affection as if there is nothing potentially strange about it. It’s the ‘habit,’ the form that the narrator’s love takes, that interests Purdy. What do you make of the way these characters love?

RBG:  I think their love drives this whole plot home.  “Make your characters want something” is the well-worn phrase in fiction classes, and I’ve never agreed with it as much as when I read Elijah Thrush.  I used to think of characters wanting in a more traditional way, like character A just wants to become a famous musician.  Character B is really hungry and hasn’t eaten in days.  Purdy creates love triangles among two elderly white enemies, a black man hired as a spy, a child who speaks in kissing sounds, and an animal that lives locked in a room.  Love is written about in a great, new way.  It feels good to watch these loves like an outsider, to not immediately relate.  I also enjoy how all these loves are hopeless.  No character in love falls out of love.  All the loves have barriers keeping them complicated.

CW: That’s a good point. These are all perpetually frustrated loves. It’s all messy and there’s no way out of the mess. It’s a tragic kind of farce. A huge part of the joy of the book for me was watching these characters navigate those “barriers” you mention. So, rather than just making his characters want something, Purdy keeps his characters wanting, and in a major way.

RBG: Yes, I think you’re right. The characters in this book are in an almost constant state of wanting. They have much anxiety, pain, and sorrow over their love. Love is a cruel torture in this book. Moments of joy, surprise, and friendship, ease the mood, but do not erase the pain. So much of Purdy’s work feels exaggerated, but he’s just exposing the ridiculous, unrelenting, human parts of ourselves.

CW: Let’s talk about the weirdness here, and how Purdy manages to maintain an unpredictably bizarre world with emotional consequences that are acutely experienced by the reader. The various frustrated loves and emotional sacrifices all have recognizable and sympathetic emotional content, but are presented in somewhat alien packages. Again, I think of the example of the narrator’s “habit”. It is simultaneously horrific and bizarrely tender. It presents an emotional state I relate to, though the physical reality is like nothing I have ever seen or experienced before. Could you talk a little about Purdy’s tactics in this regard? Did you have a similar reaction?

RBG: While trying to find other people writing about Purdy online, I once came upon a review (I think on Amazon) where someone referred to Purdy’s writing as “Social Fantasy.”  I had never seen this genre referred to, (and have not since), but it accurately described Purdy’s work to create unexpected, heightened (often absurd) interactions between characters that create a tension of possibility and show human existence to be inane, dramatic, and incongruous.  The characters of Jane Bowles and James Purdy are capable of anything, nothing is “out of character” for them.  Ascertains are reversed, logic is dismantled.  This is how I’ve come to think of the term “social fantasy,” which has been a continual reference point when working on my own work.  I think this feeling might be what you are getting at too.  The way Purdy writes human emotion so beautifully and true, even in the most (especially in the most) unfamiliar relationships.

CW: “Tension of possibility,” that’s perfect. (The book is always one or two steps beyond believability, which is not to say we don’t feel for the characters, but their lives are, as you say, pointedly absurd. So while it begins to feel that nearly anything could happen, there are still identifiable consequences to the absurdity, and we feel for the characters, so we’re invested in that “anything”.) I also think “social fantasy” is a great way of talking about your and Purdy’s work. I’m always curious when I hear a writer talk about personal points of reference in their own work. Could you list specific examples of how you’ve applied that reference point in your writing? Is it a conscious thing applied during drafting/editing or a just useful way of talking/thinking about your work in general?

RBG:  Twice in my life I have stumbled upon an author that I feel has pre-inspired me. The first time it was with Barthelme, the second with Jane Bowles. Both times it felt I had been channeling them before I’d ever read them. Barthelme gave me extra confidence to let my narrative voice go wild, and allow my characters to talk in an unrealistic manner. Bowles and Purdy encourage me to write characters that act and want unusually. Sometimes I am writing a story that is very strange, and no matter how typical the characters act or talk, the story is still going to have a weird, intriguing undercurrent. Other times, as with the novel I am working on, the situations are familiar to me, and I need to picture Bowles and Purdy and find the inspiration to make it “bristle with impossibility” (as Purdy once said).

CW: Are you far enough along in the new book to talk about it? If so, would you tell us a little bit about it?

RBG:  Sure, Colin!  It’s my first novel and currently called “Paulina & Fran” (or alternately “Careers in the Visual Arts”).  It’s about the complicated relationships between girls, the culture of art school, artist/career disappointments, and the power of nostalgia.  It’s a love triangle at art school in the early 2000’s, but I’m hoping to transcend some of the conventions of the kind of book I just described!  I’ve got some crazy sentences in there, but recently I realized my female characters are not insane enough.  I was somehow reading a summary of what had taken place on a reality tv show I have never seen (Real Housewives of Somewhere) and I saw that the ladies on this show were acting far more ridiculous than I had arranged for my characters to act.  So I am I taking this as a challenge.  Here is one of my favorite sentences from the story:

“Libraries!” Paulina cried, “What a trap for youth!”  One did not 
become realistic in libraries.  One filled their head with mold 
and ideas, and left their sexuality in a coil near the stacks, 
where it turned to nothing and joined the dust on the floor, 
swept by losers. 

CW: Could you talk a little about your attraction to absurdity? I know you’re a die-hard Bowles fan, and we’ve talked about Gaeton Soucy in the past, but who are some others and what draws you to them?

RBG:  In Junior High I was reading Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and the plays of Christopher Durang.  I went to public school in New Jersey, and I think I was partially attracted to absurdity because I was surrounded by a lot of conventions.  Art seemed like an escape out of the ordinary.

CW: You’ve also got a new book of poems forthcoming on Factory Hollow Press. Is your poetry equally influenced by the writers you mention? How does your approach to poetry differ from your approach to writing fiction, if it does at all?

RBG:  The influence of Purdy and Bowles might be even stronger in my poetry, though I wrote most of the poems in MOODS before I’d read either author.  I love making bold declarations and those occur in a higher density in my poems.  When I’m writing a poem, I feel like I’m prancing alone on a stage.  When I’m writing fiction, it feels like I am organizing my closet, bidding on things at a massive auction, or strategically planning a war.  These sensations are partially a reaction to the number of words on the page, but not entirely.  A poem distills things.  I think I am more accepting of my poetry.  I write it with immediacy and don’t mess with it, bemoan it, and cart it around the way I do with fiction.

CW: Any final thoughts on I am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy? Anything you want to make sure gets said before we say goodbye?

RBG: I want to comment on the bravery and nerve of Purdy. People who read this book often assume that Purdy was African American, because few white writers write so boldly about African Americans. The racism against Albert is a constant force and pain in the book. I think what I find so complex, interesting, and troubling, is the way the characters Millicent and Elijah are racist and loving at the same time to Albert — both in the same sentence and in the same feeling. In many books, racism is implied or alluded to, but in Purdy’s book it is bared and explored. Purdy’s narration as Albert is so thoughtful, bizarre, and intimate. It is important to see from Albert’s point of view, to experience his pain and his love, and there is so much of both.

Thank you, Colin, for your great questions!  I feel I understand Purdy on an entirely new level!

An Interview with Matthew Dickman

MATTHEW SHERLING: What is your favorite meal & why?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: One of my favorite meals is a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. My twin brother, Michael Dickman, and fellow poet Carl Adamshick used to order that classic at a wonderful bar in Portland called Cassidy’s when Carl worked downtown . . . it is a perfect meal!

MS: What is currently your favorite album?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: My favorite album right now is 10,000 Maniacs “In My Tribe” (don’t judge me!).

MS: If you could wrap up your worldview in one sentence, what would it be?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Worldview (at the moment) = “Lispector”

MS: How long have you been writing poetry and what draws you toward it?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have been writing poetry since High School. That’s about twenty years. One of the things that draws me to poetry is that through poetry (through art) I better understand myself, I better understand the world I live in. It’s also fucking awesome making something out of nothing! When we sit down (or stand up!) with a pen and a blank page it’s one of the only moments when we are absolutely free.

MS: That’s a powerful way to look at the practice of art. Can you describe your process when constructing a poem? How much editing / spontaneity is involved?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Years ago, when writing poems, I would have complete control over the moment of a first draft. That is to say I would think of something to write about, do some research, and then write. Now it’s a more reckless experience. I sit down and begin to write with, often, no idea of what will be written. I’m moved to make something. I’m in love or sad or hopeful or have had too much coffee and so I want to let it out. What happens feels up to the moment. After that I redraft, I share it with friends and listen to what they have to say. Some poems go through numerous drafts. Others only one or two. The spontaneity is in deciding to build a boat. The editing is making sure the boat will actually sail. Though sinking sometimes feels good too!

Are there any poets who particularly inspire(d) you now or when you first got into the craft?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: YES!

Andre Breton
Dorianne Laux
Joseph Millar
Marie Howe
Yusef Komunyakaa
Dorothea Lasky
Pedro Mir
Diane Wakoski
Eileen Myles
Frank O’Hara
Bob Kaufman
Anthony McCann
Dunya Mikhail (sp?)

…to name only a couple that comes to mind today while the sun falls and night walks into Portland, Oregon…

MS: Cool! Your work seems to be considerably accessible. Is this something you shoot for? also, what is it that draws you to more ‘surrealist’ writers Breton and Haufman?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I think the only thing I shoot for when writing is something that engages me. Of course it might not engage anyone else! Also, I believe all art is accessible, expecially if you accept a certain amount of mystery in your life…Writers like Breton and Kaufman remind me that the landscape of poetry is not the landscape of earth with fences and continents but outer space… way outer space!

MS: Can you say a bit more about your use of ‘landscape’? Also, how do you feel about ‘Objectivist’ or ‘Imagist’ poets who place heightened emphasis on the ‘thing itself’ // the “real”?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Landscapes, for millions of years, have been both inner and outer (like belly buttons!) and our inner-landscapes affect the outer-landscapes we walk around on–as does our physical environment affect our emotional environment. Sometimes I can’t tell the two apart. The “thing itself” is never, of course, actually the “thing itself” once it’s placed into a poem or another piece of art. It has been translated, managed, slightly tuned to another frequency. A choice has been made by an entity outside of the “thing” or the “real” object removing that object from it’s (let’s say) first truth and placing it in another truth… the truth of the meaning-making artist using it or applying it in some way or another to her work.

MS: Can you tell us about your current project?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have a new book out this month, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and am working on a chapbook with the poet Julia Cohen. The poems in the chapbook came out of seven days of writing together in Brooklyn. The writing based on questions we asked each other and random words.

It Was Not Something I Would Do Again, Except that I Probably Would: An Interview with Gabriel Blackwell

Shome Dasgupta: Wonderfully, you have two books coming out in 2012 — Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer (CCM, 2012) and Critique of Pure Reason(Noemi, 2012) — what’s going on behind the scenes? Is it hectic managing the release of two books?

Gabriel Blackwell: It’s maybe appropriate that these two books are both coming out at roughly the same time; I wrote them more or less in parallel. Still, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with them now that they’re almost here. I really have no one but myself to blame. I make my own work — nothing that I’m doing now is “required,” and I could probably just be taking it easy and letting things play out the way they’re going to anyway. But I can’t bear leaving things entirely up to chance. I don’t know if there is an ideal reader for either book, but if there is, I want the book to find her, somehow. I only know how I find books to read, so I’m trying to do the kind of things that would get my own attention; presumably, I’ll find other readers like myself. You can see the problem — doing things in this myopic kind of way is very limiting. Fortunately, I’ve had a number of really kind, really generous people help me out and offer opportunities that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for, and maybe together we’ll get the books into people’s hands.

SD: Did you find any similar obstacles while working on both of these books? Was one harder to write than the other? What were the differences or similarities in the experiences of working on one book compared to the other?

GB: Critique of Pure Reason seems the easier of the two now because it was mostly done by the time that I realized that it was an it. At that point, I had been working on what it would be for four years, and all but three of the pieces had been published or accepted for publication. My work on it last spring leading up to me sending it to Mike Meginnis at Noemi was a matter of putting the various parts together in a way that made meaning out of the whole. But thinking about it in that way discounts the four years of work that went into its components. It’s deceptive, I mean, but when I think about Critique as a book, that’s usually what I think about — the process of ordering it, rather than the process of composing it.

Shadow Man was very different. It felt difficult throughout because of how complex it ended up being, and because of how concentrated my work on it had been by comparison with Critique. By the end of my revision process, I was reading through the entire book each time I changed a line, just to make sure what I was changing wouldn’t disturb something earlier on. I sat at my desk for ten, eleven hours at a stretch. I gave myself acid reflux. I had to sleep sitting up for weeks. It was not something I would do again, except that I probably would.

SD: While writing, editing, and revising — what did you learn about the process? What stuck out to you that you hadn’t thought about before?

GB: I learned as much in the two years I worked on Shadow Man as I did in the two years I spent in graduate school. Maybe more. There’s no substitute for creating and revising something so sustained. It is its own pedagogy. But, because I finished it very early in 2011, and because I’ve since finished another book (The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men), I’m not sure that I can remember specifically what I learned while writing Shadow Man. I learned how to write Shadow Man, and I would guess that all of what I learned is on its pages somehow. Very little of that learning carried over to NDFIM. Even the processes of composition were radically different — I wrote my first draft of Shadow Man in three weeks or so; it took me more than a year to complete a draft of NDFIM.

SD: Just by reading the excerpts of your upcoming works, it looks like there was some heavy research being done (in particular, Shadow Man) — how did this play a role in your works?

GB I’m not a big fan of hermetic stories or novels, honestly. I prefer work that has something to say to the world around it, that acknowledges that it will never really get its readers’ undivided attentions. I try to create parasitic works, building on others’ creations—not just acknowledging the reader’s life outside of the book but (so I hope) pointing in fruitful directions for his or her distraction. Obviously, I have to know something of those other creations if that’s going to be successful, so I do research.

SD: You have so much going on — your own writing, teaching, being the reviews editor for The Collagist, writing for Big Other, and you do so much more — how do you manage your time? What is your schedule like when you’re writing?

GB: This isn’t a life that I would have wished on my younger self, but it seems fine for now. I learned late how dedicated I needed to be to be a writer I’d want to read, and I feel like I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. There is no substitute for working with language on a daily basis, even if it isn’t your own; honestly, it seems better to me that it isn’t my own, often. I don’t need to be more prolific (though there are plenty of writers who are, and who are fine writers), so, even though my work for The Collagist or Big Other takes away from my typing time, I don’t necessarily think of that as a bad thing. I think I’d prefer that I was different from story to story, and that seems to me to require that time passes. If I can spend that time working with language, all the better.

As for my schedule, it varies a little. When I’m typing something, I usually get up early and write before work so that I can spend the late afternoon / evening taking care of my other responsibilities. If I put those off for too long, they take over my schedule and it becomes difficult to find time to write. So I have to be very disciplined. I very rarely take a day off, but I don’t think that makes me different from most of the writers I know — like I said, it seems necessary to be working with language in some way every single day. The few times I’ve tried to “do nothing” for a day have been disasters.

SD: What’s it like being a reviews editor?

GB: There are substantial rewards — I get to work with some really smart writers, find out about books and publishers I never would have known about otherwise, and help get the word out about some really great books. I don’t know if it’s perfect for me or if I’ve perfectly adapted myself to it, but either way, it feels completely natural now, two years into it.

SD: Do you have any book recommendations? What have you been reading lately? What are you looking forward to checking out?

GB: I’ve been so pressed for time lately that I read while walking the dog — I read Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies, and Brian Carr’s Vampire Conditions walking around my neighborhood—and I’m doing research for a new book, so most of what I read at home isn’t exactly by choice. But I’m trying to make time for Michele Disler’s [Bond, James], Mike Kitchell’s Variations on the Sun, Kellie Wells’s Fat Girl, Terrestrial, Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat, and Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones.

SD: Who are some authors you find yourself admiring? Why? What is it about them or their works that appeal to you?

GB: This seems like a question whose answer would get out of hand in less than a sentence, so I’ll just say that I seem to have totems for each book I write, and for this latest one, those totems are David Markson and Christopher Priest. I’m not sure what that means or if it means anything at all.

SD: What about journals? Which ones do you find yourself reading regularly?

GB: I read Conjunctions cover to cover. I also look forward to new issues of DIAGRAM, [out of nothing], Puerto del Sol, Tin House, Black Clock, and Artifice. And I’m really looking forward to the second issues of two new magazines, Uncanny Valley and Unstuck. I’m sure I’m forgetting dozens of others.

An Interview with Roxane Gay

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Roxane Gay about Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, NOON, Salon, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and many others. She is the co-editor of [PANK]. She is also the author of Ayiti. You can find her online at http://www.roxanegay.com

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Colin Winnette: I’m interested in why we read what we read. Why we pick up the particular books that we do, and why we keep at them. What brought you to Battleborn? What led you to read it for the first time, and why did you want to talk with me about it here?

Roxane Gay: This book was sent to me by a publicist at Riverhead. I hadn’t even heard of it, but once I started reading, I couldn’t put the book down. I was excited to discuss the book with you because it has been, by far, my favorite book of the year in a year of great reading.

CW: Most, if not all, of these stories focus on characters who are struggling with the past, and who will likely continue to struggle after the story’s end. In your opinion, what is the function of a book like this? To observe and report? To capture a state, or states, of being? Are there therapeutic efforts here? All/none of the above?

RG: I’m sure writing is therapeutic for many writers but I think there’s a lot more than that going on here. This is a book about how strength is forged and how sometimes, we cannot help but succumb to our weaknesses. The collection’s title really shapes how the stories are read and really helps each story capture this sense of what it means to be battleborn.

CW: Or, more specifically, what did the book offer you?

RG: As I read these stories, I wanted nothing more than to keep these stories near me, always. There is such control and grace in each story. Watkins tackles complex and intense subjects but there’s no melodrama here. Not only did I derive an immense amount of pleasure from reading Battleborn, I learned so much as a writer.

CW: What is a story like “The Diggings” doing in a collection like this? It was one of my favorites, but it’s certainly an outlier.

RG: I don’t really think “The Diggings” is an outlier. On the surface it seems like that because it’s set during the Goldrush and it’s a story about brothers but it’s also a story about desire and desperation and suffering and you can see those themes in most of the stories in this collection. I tend to think of this book as a masterclass. The range of stories is simply amazing and so when I consider Diggings within the context of the rest of the collection, I think, “Of course.” Not only does it fit thematically but it also fits with the diversity of the overall collection.

CW: I recently drove from Texas to California. We passed through Las Vegas on the way and eventually began to see the brothels in the small towns that surround it. It was a peculiar sight: rows of 18-wheelers and compacts alongside a few double-wides marked with a sign that read something like “Shady Ladies Ranch.” Watkins takes on one of these brothels in “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous.” A lot of us have images of the places written about in the book — Vegas and the surrounding desert are iconic images — but few of us have experienced the intimacy of a life lived there, or even an extended visit. Watkins gives us insight into these intriguing places, or helps us imagine them a little more fully. How did you react to the function of place in this book? In many ways, the book is its setting, and those who populate that setting.

RG: Place is everything in this book, an inescapable gravity for the stories. I felt totally immersed in the stark beauty — both natural and manufactured — of the West and how that starkness shapes the people living within that landscape.

CW: Which story sticks out to you as best exemplifying what this book has to offer? If you could only recommend one story, rather than the collection, which would it be, and why?

RG: My favorite story is “Rondine Al Nido,” but my first instinct was to say that every story is the best in its own way. “Rondine Al Nido,” though is something else. The narrative frame intrigues me because it keeps you sort of off kilter. The story is disturbing but we see these rather unpleasant moments unfolding in really subtle increments. The horror, for lack of a better word, builds so slowly that it becomes almost bearable. The elegance of how this story was told takes my breath away.

Hush Up and Listen: An Interview with Ken Sparling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MG: What advice do you have for young writers?

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