An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling

Leah Umansky: Reading Vow, is like peering into someone’s secret past. A woman is said to be married. Her fiancé dies. She is left, bereft and almost-helpless. It reminds me much of Jane Eyre (for what would Jane be without her Rochester?). On the other hand, it reminds me of Charlotte Bronte herself and the way the Bronte Parsonage was both her home and her fortress. She died soon after she was married, too. With this said, how does your poetry lend itself to allusions? Do you find these books and stories are intrinsic to your life as a writer, or do you seek out these connections?

Kristina Marie Darling: That’s a great question. Most of my poems arise out of my life as a reader. I’ve always been intrigued by Marianne Moore’s use of the term “conversity,” a word she coined to describe the dialogic nature of poetry. With that in mind, I envision my poems as a response to the work that came before my own. By that I don’t just mean poetry, but also fiction, visual art, and literary theory. I’ve always thought it was the writer’s job to not only revise and modify earlier texts, but to forge connections between different texts. With Vow, I definitely sought to explore the relevance of these nineteenth century women’s texts to contemporary debates about language, gender and received literary forms.

For me, Vow represents a corrective gesture. In much of nineteenth century literary culture, women’s writing occupied a marginal space. For example, the sketchbook – which consisted of songs, notes, poems, diary entries, and a mixture of many other types of writing — was considered a predominantly female literary form. More often than not, literary forms that were marked as female were relegated to a private space. When writing Vow, I was interested in taking this marginal space, which women’s writing so often occupied, and making it a focal point.

LU: I’m interested in the speaker of these poems. I know you just founded your own feminist press, Noctuary Press, so I know you have a clear relationship to gender in writing. What is her connection to the self? She’s strong, yet impressionable. She wants answers. She wants direction. She wants. What governs her? Is it desire? Is it loneliness? Is it the story inside being the bride? Women are expected to be so many different roles, besides being a woman.

For example: She “doesn’t know how” to use her wings.

                        She “doesn’t know how” to wear the dress.

                        She tries “ascending,” but says “it’s hard to know.”

                        She says,“a locked room, but what else?”

KMD: I’m very interested in the notion of the palimpsest, a text that is written, erased, and written over again and again. This is exactly how I envisioned the speaker of the poems in Vow.  She is inscribed and reinscribed with many different roles, expectations, and normative ideas about gender. These range from the complex culture surrounding weddings — the white dress, the ceremony, and the other accompanying rituals — to the myriad beliefs about what a wife should be, and what constitutes failure as a wife. The speaker of these poems definitely feels that she has failed as a wife, and as a result, she has been buried alive by the many normative ideas about marriage that have been inscribed onto her. She is motivated by the desire to erase this palimpsest, and find out what’s underneath the words and beliefs others have imposed upon her marriage and her identity. With that said, she is also interested in carefully documenting everything, for herself and for other women in her position.

LU: Also, why is the speaker so compelled to the “other” versions of herself. First, these versions are human: “I dream another me exists in the burning house, reading aloud from what I have written” (16). Then non-human and storied: “I am a broken mirror. Shattered glass. . . . But somehow in the dream I’ve grown wings. Tell me, does this change everything” (21)?

KMD: When writing Vow, I was very interested in the instability of the individual self. For me, this question is inextricable from the other concerns that the book addresses — questions about gender, identity, and marginal spaces. Throughout the collection, the speaker of the poems is haunted by other potential or possible versions of herself, that for one reason or another, were never fully realized. I was very interested in exploring why some of these possible selves remained mere possibilities, relegated in the end to marginal spaces. In the examples you cite, the speaker has been unable to actualize these truer versions of her identity, because they remain incongruous with the rhetoric surrounding marriage, womanhood, and femininity. 

LU: With that said, there is also a modern spin in this book, especially in how the speaker discusses film, which is clearly an anachronism.  Why does she focus on films?  Are films something you think about a lot as a writer. (Films are one of my favorite things next to books because they too are a story). She says, “In a film version of this story, I wandered a corridor filled with locked rooms:  endless foyers, a nursery, the master suite” (14).

KMD: Is it connected to the story we tell ourselves. The way we long for the movie version of life — the costumes, the soundtrack and love in its the purest, unadulterated love. What is your favorite movie? What do you imagine would be the speaker’s favorite movie?

You’re absolutely right that the films the speaker imagines in the book are “movie versions of life.” I thought of the films that the heroine imagined as a kind of daydream. I’m fascinated by dreams that function as projections — of emotions, of personal identity, relationships, or interior transformations that often go unnoticed by others.  I’m very interested in how individuals choose to represent purely interior events, often completely intangible and abstract in nature, through concrete visual means. More often than not, the laws of physics or time no longer hold, as this is what feels most true to the experience. In this respect, the work of dreams and film is much like the work of poetry.

With that in mind, I think the speaker’s favorite movie would likely be What Dreams May Come. My favorite, however, will always be The Royal Tenenbaums.

LU: I LOVE THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS!! Okay, let’s detour into literary theory, something I rarely say, but I feel Vow has a sort of voyeuristic element to it, in which the reader watches this woman deal with grief and loss. She sees herself. I see myself, and it makes me remember learning about Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory and her focus on “the male gaze.” Here, this speaker, this woman, is someone to feel sympathetic towards, but she can also be argued as being a spectacle, or an object of desire for the opposite sex.  Do you see a connection to Mulvey at all ?

KMD: Yes, absolutely. But I was also heavily influenced by feminist models of psychoanalysis, particularly those that seek to create a more egalitarian model of psychoanalysis. I think that, in addition to being seen as an object of desire by others, the woman in the poems is experiencing herself as another. And for her, this ability to see herself from another’s perspective becomes a tremendous source of insight and personal transformation. Sigmund Freud described the mind as a text, and for him, the process of analyzing the patient was like literary interpretation. The speaker of the poems in Vowseeks to take power from the hands of others who seek to interpret her grief, her femininity, and her trauma, and become both analyst and analysand.

LU: Every story is based on another story. This is a vow us writers secretly take. We may not be aware but in every story lies archetypes of another. In Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, a fantastical story about love, loss and myth, she discusses fate: “perhaps I could’ve changed our fate, for fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. I should have killed her and found us a different story” (7). Would your speaker have changed her fate if she could? Would she lived a different story? So much of our life as women is dictated, but the power we have is in choosing. Every decision opens a door, or room. In every decision, we take a vow.

KMD: I love this question. In spite of the book’s feminist stance, and my interest in received literary forms, language, and gender, I don’t think that a different narrative arc would solve the speaker’s problems. I say this because the traditional roles of wife, mother, and bride are so inscribed into the culture, that women are still haunted by them. Even if the speaker had taken a path of resistance, she would have still been plagued by other possible selves. What if she had acquiesced to the demands of culture? Would she be happier? There’s only so much an individual can do. At some point the culture needs to change as well.

A Conversation with Kate Southwood

This splendid and profound debut novel is set in 1925 in fictional Marah, Illinois. Falling to Earth swirls its way into a violent tornado that leaves the town in total destruction – with the exception of one man, his business, and his family. The author’s story of the town’s reaction to his circumstances will stun you with its elegant prose, artful construction, and emotional investment. The conundrum regarding ethical choices friends and community make in a time of crisis will supply food  for thought long after you have read the last page.

*

MaryAnne Kolton: Talk a bit about your childhood, please. Happy family? Books you loved? Who encouraged you to read?

Kate Southwood: I was an oddity from the start: an only child in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, surrounded by classmates who had two, five, even ten siblings. There seemed to be an endless list of things isolating me, turning me inward: we lived a block away from Lake Michigan, but I wasn’t taught to swim; our home was the furthest away from our parish church and school of all of my friends, and so there was no one nearby to play with; and my parents divorced when I was ten, which was still highly unusual at the time.

My parents were both professional writers and they encouraged my reading. We often read together, my parents on the couch and me on the floor in front of them, each with our own book in one hand, rummaging with the other in a big shared bowl of popcorn. We did have a small television, but it was rarely turned on. My mother, always freezing, wrapped up in her big Irish sweater and the afghans my grandmother knitted and read book after book from the heavy canvas bag we carried to and from the public library every week. My father rarely went anywhere without a paperback in his pocket, something to pull out on the bus or the “L” or while stuck standing someplace in line.

The result of their example was that I read constantly, too. I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder and C. S. Lewis, both of which allowed me to escape city life, which for me then was dreary. I read novels, fairy tales, and mythology, and when I had exhausted my own shelves, I read my parents’ childhood books and borrowed stacks of books from the library. I was even able to read in bed at night without the customary flashlight, the Chicago streetlights outside my bedroom window were so strong. I started reading English history and Shakespeare’s plays while still in grade school, and somehow managed not to stop or to pretend that I didn’t read these things when I was inevitably taunted for it in the schoolyard.

I realize now in writing this that my parents and I rarely, if ever, discussed what we read with each other. When I finished something my father had already read that he’d thought I’d like, too, it was enough to exchange a look of pleased understanding with him; meeting his eyes, already smiling with childlike excitement was its own discussion. Reading for the three of us was solitary, and as necessary as breathing. So, a happy childhood? No, I was different and my peers never missed a chance to let me know it. But in my case the cliché was laughably true: an unhappy, largely solitary childhood spent reading turned out to be the perfect foundation for becoming a writer.

MK: What led you to write Falling to Earth?

KS: The idea came to me piecemeal, the first part coming as a total surprise while I was surfing the Internet. I would love to go back to that moment and see what it was I was Googling, because somehow (and I truly don’t know how) I landed on information about the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. I started reading out of curiosity and was staggered that I had never heard of the Tri-State before. I lived just a few hours north of the path of that storm in downstate Illinois for many years, and although I’ve thankfully never been through a tornado, I have hidden from my share of them passing nearby–afternoons when the sky turned green, the air got eerily still, and suddenly I was stuffing the cat in a pillowcase and heading for the basement with a battery-powered radio.

Initially, I read about the Tri-State out of sheer astonishment, but then found myself returning to the Internet to look at archival photos taken after the storm. I also read several survivor accounts and was saddened to think that the storm had disappeared from popular memory. I remember thinking, This would make a great story, and then sort of shelving the idea because I still had a preschooler at home and didn’t have enough time to write. But the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. Around the same time I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement and was just devastated by it. I kept coming back to the idea of preventable tragedy and found myself thinking about the tornado again. By the time my youngest daughter had started first grade, I was ready to start writing: I didn’t know everything about my story yet, but I knew that I wanted a preventable tragedy to follow the unavoidable disaster of the tornado itself, and so I settled on the Graves family who lose nothing in the storm, while all around them their neighbors and friends lose something, someone, or everything.

MK: In a New York Times review, it is said of Falling To Earth: “Southwood’s beautifully constructed novel, so psychologically acute, is a meditation on loss in every sense.” Is that what your book was meant to be?

KS: I would say absolutely yes to the psychology. I’m always interested in characters’ psychology in books and movies, in what they reveal about themselves when they speak, when they are silent, when they can’t stop themselves from looking in a certain direction. I didn’t make things easy for myself in terms of my characters’ psychology in this novel, but that was part of the fun; nut after difficult nut that had to be cracked precisely and carefully. As for the novel’s being a meditation on loss, that was perhaps less consciously planned, but equally inevitable. I moved to Oslo fifteen years ago to be with my Norwegian husband, and I’ve been homesick for the States every day of those fifteen years. Obviously, I remain in touch and visit when I can, but I’m separated from family and friends, from my country, and even from my language every day. Also, the older you get, the more you end up dealing with death. I’ve lost several close family members over the last several years, and I made free use of my own pain in writing about my characters’ losses.

MK: In stark contrast, a Kirkus reviewer states: “By the time Paul finally realizes that he can’t reverse the senseless scapegoating, it is too late: His family’s sheer politeness and unwillingness to confront their detractors or one another will be their undoing. Unfortunately, all the conflict avoidance saps the novel of forward momentum, not to mention that essential ingredient of drama: the struggle against fate.” Do you care to comment?

KS: The only possible answer is that book reviews are necessarily subjective, not everybody can like every book, and I never expected everyone to like this one.

MK: Within this story, there is a confounding, almost frustrating, inability of the protagonist to see clearly what is going on around him: “It seems I’ve done absolutely everything wrong. I hauled what wreckage I could out to the burns along side the rest of them. I hardly slept those first days. I just cut wood and cut wood for coffins, I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Cut wood because people needed it. Look them in the eye and do business with them and help them to keep their dignity. I was only trying to be mindful of their pride, and now they’ve got it figured as greed.” How did you come to this?

KS: Alongside the idea of preventable tragedy, I was also interested in using Greek tragedy as a framework. In classical Greek tragedy, the protagonist suffers a downfall, which is the result of a combination of outside circumstances and personal failing, or a tragic flaw. Obviously, the tornado is the outside event that changes everything for Paul Graves, but his flaw is more complicated than that.

Part of Paul’s inability or unwillingness to see what is truly going on is simply the result of inexperience. He’s only 33 years old at the time of the storm: old enough to have established himself as a businessman and family man worthy of the town’s respect, but still mostly naïve about the unpleasant sides of human nature.

It’s important to remember that Paul is a really good guy who is universally liked before the storm. He in turn likes to be liked—who doesn’t—and can’t believe that the town’s esteem has been taken away from him. Perhaps as a way of grappling with this loss, he tries to find meaning in having been spared, and decides that because he is a good man who happens to own a lumberyard, he’s the perfect candidate to help the town rebuild, thereby regaining the town’s esteem. In the end, his inexperience and goodness conspire against him, and he simply can’t see that waiting out the town’s collective temper tantrum is not enough.

MK: A certain luminous precision defines your voice, and a cadence, if you will, that show themselves particularly well in every descriptive passage: “Lavinia thinks it will likely snow. She’s regarded these very fields often enough in winter, but always from the inside. When there was outside work for her to do on the farm in winter, she’d always hurried along and done it and saved staring into the distance for the window over the kitchen sink. The white, sleeping fields reaching out endlessly from the house, the sleeves of her old, blue cardigan pushed up for work, the click of the vegetable peeler on the slick, white ball of potato in her hand, the coffee pot and her cup still left to wash. A glimpse of Homer from the window.” Is this effect studied or do you access it naturally?

KS: This is a very hard question to answer, actually. A sort of which came first, the chicken or the egg for writers. The short answer is that this is the way I always wanted to write when I was younger, and through years and years of reading good writing, paying attention to details around me, and working hard at my own writing, I can now do it. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that the way I always wanted to express myself is within my reach. If an image or a scene comes to me, I know that I will be able to render it on the page very precisely (to borrow your word) if I give it enough time and all of my attention.

MK: In your opinion, and without giving too much away, what role does Lavinia play in this tale.

KS: In the broadest terms, Lavinia represents the past, both of the Graves family and of Marah, the town they live in. When she recalls her grandfather’s stories, she serves as a link to the time the first white settlers came to Little Egypt in Southern Illinois. She also functions as a complement to Paul’s character in that they both misread the resentment growing around them and, for their individual reasons, believe that they’ve earned better treatment than they’re getting.

Lavinia also functions as a warning about the lure of the past. She realizes it too late, but she does come to understand the harm inherent in allowing the past to get a grip on you, in elevating the past as an idyllic time, and forgetting to live in the present.

MK: What are your writing habits like? A special time and place? Music or silence? Do you carry a notebook to jot ideas in or are you the type of writer who scribbles notes on paper napkins to incorporate later?

KS: My writing habits are dictated by my daughters’ school days. Once everyone has left the house, it’s just me and the laptop. I do need silence and I have a hard time writing if anyone else is home. I often listen to music, but that seems to function as part of the silence for me; a sort of white noise that I choose according to my mood.

I always carry a small notebook, but generally prefer to just duke it out with the laptop—I find that ideas can sometimes be spoiled if I write them down before they’re fully formed. The most important ingredients for me are time and solitude. After that comes persistence. There’s no point in having a time and a place to write if you don’t show up.

MK: Are you working on a new novel?  Any hints as to subject?

KS: I am working on a new novel—the main character is a widow at the end of her life, giving her marriage a good hard look and asking herself about the life she created when, as a young woman, she made a choice between two proposals of marriage: one from an arrogant, passionate man, and one from a tender, safe man.

An Interview with Sara June Woods

Sara June Woods is one of what I consider to be a small group of “magic” writers – someone able to take an ordinary moment (or a line) and then transform it into something else, something desperately, beautifully tender. In case you’re unfamiliar, in the best cases of leading by example, here’s a short one (originally published in jmww):

 We Woke Up Neck Deep in Cherry Blossoms and the World

We woke up neck deep in cherry blossoms and the world
was spinning around us. You were mouthing a phrase to me,

something like I am sorry for this but the blossom smell
was in my nose and clouds began to form over us s p i l l i n g
l i t t l e  s t i c k y  d r o p s and they tasted like a sweet
vinegar on my face.

You are a bird in the crook of my arm and I want you
to have this spice rack our daughter
made in woodshop.

These clouds
have come          here to
save us.

Sara June Woods’ new book of poetry, Wolf Doctors – released by Artifice Books in March – may be her first full-length collection, but really, she’s one of those people who seems like they’ve been around forever. I had the opportunity to talk with her, below, about Wolf Doctors, revision, sweetness, and of course, the lurking specter of death.

Simon Jacobs: One of the first things I noticed upon opening up Wolf Doctors is the visual differences in how some of the poems are presented now from the form in which I originally read them – i.e., you’ve shifted a bunch of them from stanzas into prose. What inspires these kinds of decisions? Is it an aesthetic thing? How does a poem dynamically change, in your estimation, when it goes from one format to another, if at all?

Sara June Woods: I think a lot of those got switched around because I had a vague sense of “not totally happy with this” and just started trying things. I think at the time I was feeling a lot more picky about how exactly things appear on the page and was super drawn to making those rectangular blocks of words. In some of those I was still attached to the idea of line breaks, though, and that’s why the slashes ended up in a handful of them, even after I switched them to prose poem style blocks.

I think it changes the way you read the poem. On the page and in your head-voice and out loud. Generally now I know what kind of poem I’m going to write before or as I’m writing it. Usually because it’s in the style or voice of something I’ve written before. I’m usually working on projects or series now, but when I was writing Wolf Doctors I ended up doing a lot of trying to reinvent what kind of poem I thought I could write whenever I sat down to write a poem.

SJ: When I started reading your poetry a few years ago, I was enamored by the tone, which is very specific – your poems feel very intimate and sweet, borne by sort of casual and unfussy language and, I don’t know, something like wonder. What I mean to say is, sometimes I think to myself when reading your poems, “russ woods house style.” I know this is kind of a tricky thing to ask about and possibly explain, but can you talk about tone in your poetry? Is this tone something you’ve worked at crafting over time? Has this always been the way you write poetry? Let’s talk about deliberation.

SJW: I do know what you’re talking about. I think it’s a way of communicating that a) comes very naturally to me, b) is more or less consistently interesting to me and c) I’ve developed over a long period of time. Before I was writing poems I was writing and performing songs and before I was writing songs I was writing & drawing these little gag webcomics and before I was doing that I was writing poems, and I think the style I write in now is something I’ve slowly cultivated through all those different forms. I think it has something to do with my sense of humor and what I think is a fun or interesting way to say something, even if it’s a really sad thing. I think I am in wonder a lot. At least the side of myself I like the most is always in wonder. I have always been a strong believer. When I was younger I believed in God (which my phone just tried to autocorrect to Godzilla). Now I believe in the universe, in beauty, in magic, in poetry, in love. Not separately, but maybe like the thing that ties all those things together. I think things connected to that belief in some way, whether it’s reaffirming it, or wallowing in it, or questioning it, or screaming at it, are what inform all the poems I write. Or at least the ones I finish.

I think this has always been the way I’ve written poetry, but it’s gotten a lot more refined, more distilled. If you were to go back and read my song lyrics, for example, you’d probably find plenty of examples of that voice you’re talking about. Some similar “moves” to ones I do now. But you’d also find a lot of me trying to write like other people and kind of giving up halfway through and then performing this kind of half-song like it was finished. Poetry taught me how to revise, and I think that’s been really important.

SJ: Let’s take this a little further. Would you be willing to share a bit of your revisioning with us? Maybe a part of a poem and what it was tempered into, and how it got there? I am all about demystification, and this is process, process, process. Show me your seams.

SJWW: Yeah, I’d like that. Here’s one I changed a lot. I will say it’s super rare anymore for me to revise things quite to this extent, as I think I know a lot more how I want to write poems and how to make them get there than I did then. I think this is interesting though. Here’s the earliest version of the poem I can find:

SOUTH FORK

I’d like to begin this poem by giving a shout out to all my people.
Hello people who think they can make their lives better  by balancing
the amount of time they are productive, amount of time they are lazy,
amount of time they are at home, amount of time they are with friends
and amount of time they are out and the various combinations of these
states. You are my people.

When I was about seven years old one time I was walking down the
stairs to my parents house and said to myself After all these years I
have finally found a body! This might be the most important thing you
can know about me, but we are always navigating original doubt.  I
know that our parts can be fit together in a certain frantic way but
more and more I am questioning the importance of that.  Maggie Nelson
says that fucking doesn’t affect anything, that it is no foundation
and I want to be clear that I am talking about fucking here.

I want my last meal to be a live bear. I want him to be delivered to
me on a platter that is comically small for him to be sitting on, and
I want to go up to him and try to take a bite and just get mauled to
shit. This would be totally acceptable. Ideally, though, he would lay
there and let me try to eat him for a minute first. In the best case
scenario I would walk up to him, pretend to shake his hand, say I
finally found a body and then he would lay down and I would settle in.
I would even get through the fur and get a bite, get to taste what
living bear flesh tastes like before his enormous paw comes down,
crushing my skull. What a saint.

This is one of those poems that you see in an online literary magazine
and you skip, because there are too many words in a little space and
it seems like it would take a lot of effort to read. Don’t worry, I
do it too. It’s okay.

I am now talking to the people who did not read this poem.

People who did not read this poem: I want you to go outside the
building you’re currently in  I want you to smoke a cigarette. If
you do not have a cigarette, I want you to go buy a pack and smoke it.
I want you to then keep smoking them whenever you have free time. I
want you to become addicted to cigarettes so you become a little more
like me because I am addicted to cigarettes. I want you to curl your
fingers around each new one like something great is about to happen,
and to feel sad about each one you throw out your car window. Not for
the environment. NOT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. But for the sadness that
comes with seeing that little white tube go. This addiction is
something you can treasure, and I feel slightly less bad about
encouraging you in this because you are the people who did not read my
poem.

Lately I haven’t been getting enough sleep. Not because I’m busy or
doing work or whatever because I’m not. It’s just one of those things.
Either I can’t sleep or my dog can’t sleep and if my dog can’t sleep
then I can’t sleep and if I get up then my dog gets up so usually
we’re both up, with us rotating from sitting on the couch to him
peeing and me smoking to me peeing and him watching me. This is how I
spend my nights.

Yesterday you were sleeping and I tried to get back in bed and I put
the dog in bed and then I got in bed and you said No stop dusting me
and I said dusting you? and you said there’s just all this
and I said tungsten? and you said that was a joke and I didn’t get
that joke, but I kept looking for the tungsten because I realized I
didn’t really know what tungsten was and maybe it would help me get to
sleep and maybe it would be the thing that would make every damn thing
stop feeling like a circle, like I am going around and around and
around I’m the kind of person who feels like they forget everything
when their life isn’t repetitive but I’m the kind of person who gets
tired of that repetition too fast.

And here’s the version in Wolf Doctors. It retains a few things, but it’s really a whole new poem:

I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT

and I know that our parts can fit together in a certain frantic way. 700 million years ago there were no eyes. This whole light dimension of seeing and being seen of me seeing you and you seeing me was exactly null. Nature seeps new inventions. Solar flares have been known to cause heartache. Our species is founded on original doubt. This is the beginning of the poem.

I want my last meal to be a live bear. I want him to be delivered to me on a platter that is comically small, and I want to go up to him and try to take a bite and just get mauled to shit. In the best case scenario I would walk up, pretend to shake his hand, and he would lay down and I would settle in and he would let me start gnawing his leg. But just for a minute. I would even get through the fur get a solid chunk of his meat get to taste what living bear flesh tastes like before his enormous paw comes down crushing my skull. What a saint, that bear. This is the poem’s middle.

This is one of those poems that you see in a literary magazine and you skip because there are too many words. Don’t worry, I do it too. It’s okay. I am now talking to the people who did not read this poem. People who did not read this poem: I want you to go outside the building you’re currently in. I want you to smoke a cigarette. If you do not have a cigarette, I want you to go buy a pack and smoke one. I want you to then keep smoking them whenever you have free time. I want you to become addicted to cigarettes so you become a little more like me because I am addicted to cigarettes. I want you to curl your fingers around each new one like they are these tiny miracles, to feel sad about each one you throw out your car window. Not for the environment. Not for the environment. But for the sadness that comes with seeing that tiny miracle disappear. This addiction is something you can treasure and I feel a little less bad about encouraging you in this direction because you are the people who did not read my poem. This is almost the end of the poem.

I made a Facebook status update that said I wanted to drive my car into the south fork of the Chicago River and jump out at the last minute. Or maybe even not jump out. I was in a bad mood. They call that part of the river bubbly creek because there are rotting pieces of dead animals from the stockyards of the industrial revolution still decaying, releasing gas that makes the water bubble. Three days later I read on the news that they found a car in the south fork of the Chicago River. There was a body inside. Part of me was afraid afraid that the police would call up my wife and start calling her ma’am and tell her the body was mine.

SJ: Fascinating – I love how “south fork” reappears in the revised version, like a gesture towards the poem that it once was that only you (and now, all of us) would know about. How long ago did you write “SOUTH FORK” vs. when you revamped it into “I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT”? Do you allow a kind of “settling time” while you’re writing poems before you determine that a poem is “done,” or is it a gut thing?

SJW: It’s totally a gut thing. There was another version of that poem that was published in Ilk, much closer to the final version, but I still wasn’t totally happy with it and ended up revising it again before the book came out. I think the original “South Fork” was written a few months before the version that was published in Ilk, and then at least a year went by before I revised it again into the version that went into the book. Usually if I’m not happy with a poem I’ll either work furiously to revise it over the next couple weeks or else I’ll just set it aside indefinitely until I am putting together a chap or collection and then will see if it’s salvageable.

SJ: Do you take poems on an individual basis, or would you say you’re more project-focused? Has that changed over the years?

SJW: I think Wolf Doctors was the last time I focused mainly on working on standalone poems without having a kind of project in mind. Outside of the poems that went into the making of Wolf Doctors I’ve written a chapbook about mole men, a chapbook-length poem in eight parts, a chapbook-length poem in sixteen parts, various collaborative projects, a book about a lady named Sara and a series of letters to people and things that either do or don’t exist. So yeah, definitely more project-focused these days. Even within Wolf Doctors I sort of have mental groups all of the poems fit in, some of which are reflected in the sections divided by the writing prompts in the book. A good portion of the poems in Wolf Doctors are some of my earliest poems, or later poems I wrote when I was taking breaks from more specifically designed projects.

SJ: I’ve started going back through Wolf Doctors with a mind towards transformation – I feel like, beyond the sweetness and intimacy and playfulness of these poems, there’s a certain fear, a kind of death-theme that resurfaces. Looking at a poem we talked about earlier, “I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT,” it seems to be about loss, about how tiny we are and all the things that end – the central image is of driving a car into the Chicago River, of pulling up a body that is/isn’t yours. Is it accurate to read this dread, or am I just imagining it? (Keeping in mind that we are all tremendously unhappy with our bodies.)

SJW: Hahah I love how much you get me. Yes absolutely (keeping in mind that we are all tremendously unhappy with our bodies) there is some death in here. I think it’s one of the things I think about in writing a lot because it adds perspective. When you juxtapose something with death you immediately can tell how important or silly it is. It’s terrifying in the concrete, but kind of freeing intellectually when you’re someone who tends to get wrapped up in anxious thought spirals. To remember that none of the stuff you’re worried about really has that much weight to it in the long run. There’s a kind of downer stretch of poems in the book that come after the second writing prompt that are all about this, but I like that they come so early in the book. It’s like, okay, death, yeah, but we have to keep living still. So then what. You can’t just check out mentally forever. I’ve tried and it sucks. I think more than anything I’m always trying to figure out that “so now what.”

SJ: Ah yes, the “death suite” of Part II. The death-aspects of the book I think, though, do remain “lurking” for the most part – overall, the work feels very optimistic and wrought with a love that – while occasionally crushing – is for the very best. (Your poems have always made me really happy to read; the tacit acknowledgment of their dark aspects – “hugging isn’t / even the word for what i want / to do to you i will break / your bones” – is, in my personal experience of your poetry, a part of that.) 

That wasn’t a question. What are you working on now?

SJW: Well, I finished my third book a few months back and it’s out at publishers, it’s called Careful Mountain. I’m working on some more collaborative work: doing a sequel to rootpoems with Carrie Lorig that will be called stonepoems. Writing more Love Stories/Hate Stories with Brett Elizabeth Jenkins. Other than that, I’ve started and put down a couple of new project ideas. The most recent is I’m trying to write little journal entry poems. Just to capture brief moments. I always try to plan these new projects and sometimes they gain traction and I write a ton on them and sometimes they don’t.

SJ: “the universe, beauty, magic, poetry, & love,” as it is.

SJW: Can I close this with a song? Can the song be this?

An Interview with The Fog Horn's Quinn Emmett

LaTanya McQueen: What was the impetus for starting The Fog Horn? Who else makes up The Fog Horn and what do each of you do for the magazine?

Quinn Emmett: I was lucky to be raised in a family where reading was a fundamental part of everyday life. My parents, brothers and sister were the original Goodreads community, if Goodreads was like Fight Club and you were willing to bleed to get your hands on a novel before anyone else. Flash forward twenty-plus years, and I found myself doing digital product development, and then becoming a working screenwriter. I wanted to find a way to merge the two worlds. I worked at ESPN for a number of years and they do a great job of hiring folks within their demographic. We were the first to use a new product, and were tougher than anyone else on it. In tech, it’s called dog-fooding. So last year I considered the growing pile of New Yorker mags in my home and decided to build a reading experience I would use: curated, consumable, no murdering of the rain forest.

Next thing was finding great help on the tech and creative side. So we have Conor Britain, a young, smart, SUPER attractive developer who built our app on top of the TypeEngine platform, and Bryan Flynn, our art director. Bryan drew our masthead, creates all of our covers and handles our images. He and I worked together previously on other, more inappropriate (but charitable!) projects, and though we’ve never met or even talked on the phone, I trust his eye and instincts completely. Lastly, Chris Starr (one of our original writers) contributes with a careful and thorough copy edit that gets things up to snuff and preserves the author’s intention.

LM: How are you distinguishing yourself from not just other literary magazines, but also from similar digital platforms like Kindle Singles, for example, or Narrative that use a subscription model?

QE: It’s not easy. There’s a boat load of websites, magazines, journals and other writing outlets out there. Which is awesome for new writers. The issue is, very few of those places pay writers, or pay writers well. Maybe readers don’t care about that as much, but it does affect quality, and we wanted to both pay writers really well, and find a way to stand out. So we offer $1000 a story, and we accept submissions from both Hollywood screenwriters and the general public, and then we publish them together like some sort of crazy literary pro-am.

We can never offer the volume that an Amazon best-seller does, but it’s also getting incredibly difficult to make a dent in those ranks. Look at the top ten right now: David Baldacci, Sarah Dalton, Lee Child, Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, etc. I’m positive that a well-reviewed Kindle Single could fetch more than our $1000, but we guarantee that dough, a small but growing audience and a fun publishing experience. We’d love to become a beacon for quality short fiction — for writers and readers, the same. That said, anything that gets writers paid and readers interested is a positive for us, and the new world order. Traditional publishing (like TV and movies) is broken. You’re a blockbuster, or you’re nothing. Viva la Revolution!

LM: Can you explain a little bit more about how The Fog Horn works (someone downloads the app then purchases the subscription? If someone subscribes can they get back issues as well? Do all four stories each month come at once or once a week over the course of a month?)?

QE: Absolutely. We’re actually very similar to Netflix (name dropper). You download our app for free, and then after a 7-day free trial, you pay $3.99 a month for access to both new and back issues. We publish four original stories a month, and twelve issues year. Sometimes there’s a theme (like our Valentine’s Day issue), sometimes less so. But we spend a lot of time curating a quality reading experience — always our number one goal. Everything we do — the app, the website and the content — serve that objective.

You didn’t ask, but the business is very transparent and tied into the model above. We treat The Fog Horn more like a bootstrapped tech start-up than a literary journal, because that’s what it is. None of the three of us gets paid until we get into the black. More subscribers equals more revenue, and with more revenue we can keep paying for original stories. We keep our costs streamlined and predictable and say no more than we say yes. Hopefully that gets us to sustainability.

LM: Your submissions system is a little different than from literary magazines. Along with a few questions, you ask for a pitch of a person’s story. Why the decision to have writers submit pitches and not submit the story itself?

QE: You can usually tell if someone can write pretty quickly. But yes, it’s a bit strange. More than anything, it lets us really get to know the writer and see if they’re a good fit for The Fog Horn. We’ve received very few complaints, if anything just a little confusion because it’s not standard practice. But we don’t want to be a story factory or just a mysterious email address on the world wide web. It’s impersonal. Nobody actually expects Santa Claus to respond to their letter. But if you knew he was checking out your cooking blog and getting to know you from afar, you’d feel like maybe he was gonna bring you that lizard for Christmas. . . . What was the question?

LM: Based on the pitches how do you decide if you’re interested in the story or not?

QE: More than anything we look for voice. It could be a well-developed voice, or a kernel of something special, but short stories leave very little room for heavy plot. I want YOU to tell me a story, and I want it to burn a hole in the page. Which isn’t to say it needs to be horror or action; those are, in fact, two of the hardest to pull off. It can’t just be about scaring people or writing gore — that doesn’t work quite the same as it does on the screen. You need compelling characters, and what’s what we want. Otherwise, there needs to be an unpublished, existing draft, and it’s gotta be good writing. We typically do one or two passes of my notes, and then it’s off to copy edit. If it doesn’t seem like two passes will get it done, we’ll pass. We don’t have a full time editing staff or the resources to develop stories for months on end.

LM: What kinds of stories are you hoping to publish in The Fog Horn? For writers looking to submit what do you suggest they do to get a sense of what The Fog Horn is looking for?

QE: Again — we’re looking for a voice. Be your own voice. If nothing else in the story works, make sure it has an opinion. Whether you’re established (you wrote a movie or write for a TV show) or not doesn’t matter. Sure, big names help sell subscriptions, but those people are extremely busy making actual money (haha), so they’re much more difficult to wrangle. That said, writing screenplays is a fairly miserable existence and the format blows, so we provide a nice alternative to endless studio notes. I’m a huge sci-fi nerd, so the classics do it for me — they say something about present day, the future and society. But when you read George Saunders, you realize the devastating potential in a very personal short story. The potential to live in the life of a person (or animal, or vegetable — anything goes!) for a very brief moment and experience their love, or pain, or terror, or even a downward spiral. It’s incredible. For examples, I’d read what we’ve put out so far. Read the greats. And then say something.

LM: How do you curate each issue? Do you imagine each story working together thematically or are they meant to play against each other?

QE: We generally work 1-2 issues ahead. It’s none of our primary jobs, and we don’t have a crack team of editors, so we work with the bigger writers that are interested and the public submissions we receive and try to think about what fits together, or what makes for a compelling contrast. If a theme emerges or makes sense on the calendar, great. Otherwise we look for a variety of lengths and try to keep making sure it’s a magazine you’ll look forward to every month.

LM: You’re one of the few literary journals that pay for work accepted. How do you imagine keeping that model sustainable in the future?

QE: We definitely make it harder on ourselves by paying so much for content. But we wouldn’t have such great writing if we didn’t. And nobody wants to pay for subpar writing. We also don’t have much of a marketing or advertising budget, so quality and word-of-mouth are going to be our biggest helpers. We’ve done some selective advertising on Facebook and with a few podcasts (totally different audiences, and totally different measurability), but it’s hard to make a real impact with the equivalent of your lunch money.That said, we’re converting downloaders-to-subscribers at over 40%. The digital mag standard is about 3.3%. So people are loving what they’re reading. They’re choosing to stick around. We’re super proud of that. We just need a push for downloads. More downloads = more subscribers = money to pay the bills. There’s nothing better than publishing someone’s hard work, except sending them a check.

LM: Do you foresee opening up The Fog Horn to other genres in the future?

QE: Not right now. There’s other great mediums for non-fiction (Epic, Longform, etc) and we love this format. If people know the structure of what they’re getting every month, they can better imagine themselves spending time and money to fit it into a busy lifestyle (and busy home screen).

LM: Are there any other features for The Fog Horn that you’re working on?

QE: We say no more than we say yes, but I’d say our next goals are web subscriptions and audio versions of our stories. Web subscriptions enable us to be a little more device agnostic, and allow people to read more discreetly at work. I’ve got a lot of friends that haven’t read a page since kindergarten, but they listen to a book a week on tape. Commuters, our bread and butter, are part of that group. Audio reads are easier to implement technically, but the actual recording requires a little more effort and money. Nobody wants to listen to me hack and cough my way through a robot love story. It’ll ruin it.

LM: So are you the only reader that goes through all the submissions?

QE: We have some volunteer slush readers, but it’s fairly manageable at this point. We considered hiring an editor early on, but to keep the business streamlined and efficient, I retained most content curation and editing duties. Once the stories are in our development queue, we all read them and talk about how they fit the overall scope and design of what we want.

LM: Once someone subscribes to The Fog Horn which of the stories do you suggest they check out first?

QE: I just want to preface this answer by saying it’s like picking among my children. So the blood’s on your hands. We love every one of the twelve stories we’ve published to date, and the four we have coming up soon. I think any reader will love NOISE (Issue #1), THE RED WHEELBARROW (Issue #2), or DREAM ME (Issue #3). They’re not similar, but all feature killer new voices. That said: because the stories and issues are so consumable, we feel like new readers can start with either Issue #1 or the newest issue and enjoy the same awesome experience.

LM: What is the average response time for those thinking about submitting a story?

QE: We say on our submission page, and in a message after you submit that if you haven’t heard from us in 30 days, consider it a pass. We feel like that’s fair. We’d love to process submissions quicker, but extra staff is expensive. And I’d rather keep paying for great stories, instead.

LM: Do you think you’ll ever in the future do a print version (like a print anthology or a special print issue) of any of your content?

QE: Great question. We’ve got the ability through the app to produce single issues that are Best Of, or themed, and we definitely have plans for that, once the content builds up and it becomes appropriate. I have a very special place in my heart for print and would love to put something out there, but it’s not cheap. Our first goal is keep the business alive and profitable by providing a killer core reading experience. Once we’ve done that and hit our subscriptions goal, the world’s our oyster.

More Than Ephemeral Flashes of Light On A Screen: An Interview with B.J. Best

B.J. Best, seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of previous poetry collections State Sonnets and Birds of Wisconsin, takes a step into the risky literary unknown with his new collection of prose poetry, But Our Princess is in Another Castle. Drawing heavily from the kaleidoscope imagery of videogame worlds, But Our Princess is in Another Castle explores not games themselves, but the real lives of their human players. Journeying from “Beginning World” to “Heart World,” “Do World,” “Mind World,” and many others, Best’s collection traverses romantic relationships, childhood friendships, fear, death, and love – all the best things about our truly strange real world.In this interview, we discuss not just the craft of writing itself, but also the difficulties of producing serious literature around the pop-culture theme of videogames.

ELS: Your website says that But Our Princess is in Another Castle is “a book of prose poems inspired by videogames.” Did you go into it knowing that it would be centered on videogames, or did a pattern in your writing give you the idea to write about them?

BJB: I did go in thinking that’s what I wanted to do. I took a long writing retreat weekend and I wrote ten of them (something like that) up there as a means to explore and see if it would actually hold together. I liked the process and the ideas enough that I thought maybe it could work. You know, of those first ten, maybe two made that final cut into the actual book. In fact maybe it was only one. So obviously my writing changed a lot. I thought a lot about what it should actually be. I actually prefer working that way, because it helps eliminate some of the choices you need to make early on. If you told me to sit down right now and write a poem, I would be terrified by that because I would have no idea where to go. But if you said “Okay, well, write another videogame poem,” I would have at least some sort of grounding to base what I’m thinking about, and it would give me a much clearer direction to get that poem, especially in that poem-a-day kind of thing, as opposed to “Well, now I just have to sit around and think about something completely unrelated to anything else and see what it turns into.”

ELS: How and when did you get that idea to write a poetry book about videogames?

BJB: Those first poems were written in November of 2004. I don’t know where the original idea came from. They’re all prose poems, and they started life as prose poems, too. I think part of it was just that I wanted to explore that form because I hadn’t written many of them up until that point. My main thought (if I can even recollect what it was) was that it was something worth writing about (and at the time not a lot of people were writing about it) and there might be some possibilities for turning something that’s mass produced and very pop-culture-y into a different art form. I saw the opportunities there so I thought that would be a cool area to explore because I didn’t see it happening. When I started in 2004 I think I could point to two books that I had that were using videogames in a literary sense. There have been more since then, but that was the main genesis of the project.

ELS: It seems like a risky move to publish a serious work that openly admits to being about videogames. Were you afraid that the literary community (especially) would ignore your book?

BJB: Definitely. There were several times during the process where I just threw up my hands and asked myself, “What on earth am I doing?” The idea that it may very well be 100% frivolous was never lost on me. But the poems are serious; they’re not intended to be frivolous, so one of my goals with the book was to show that videogames can be treated seriously and to show how they can move into other aspects of people’s lives. So I knew I had that much to stand on, because it wasn’t about how much I love Pac Man or Tetris. But I knew it wasn’t a typical, serious university press kind of book, so my gut said I needed to approach more indie publishers with it. That’s where I wound up going because I didn’t figure I would win a contest judged by some other eminent poet, but I figured there would be enough people out there who would find it to be an interesting approach. The small press thing seemed like a more logical place to make that happen.

ELS: You mentioned a couple of times in your blog that it was important to you to make the book accessible to people who don’t play videogames or didn’t have experience with them. Don’t you think they lose some of the richness of the references, or was that not the point?

BJB: I’m not entirely sure, and it’s hard for me to answer because I know exactly what I’m talking about in all of those poems, but really my goal was that to not get any of the references wouldn’t matter, and it would still be a good poem that would hold up on its own. I definitely think you could argue that it’s just like any other ekphrastic work: If it’s about a work of art, it’s useful to be looking at the painting, photograph, or whatever. All of a sudden the connections start to make a little more sense. So there is an advantage to knowing the games themselves, but the actual details are pretty small – they’re in the poems, but they don’t necessarily influence the poems very much. So someone who knows the particular games could go through and say “Oh, I know where that’s from, and I know where that’s from,” but I’m not sure (with the exception of a very very few cases) that actually knowing the game inherently enhances the understanding of the poem, because one of my goals with the poems was to take them to places other than where the games happened to lead.

ELS: Why was that one of your goals?

BJB: I didn’t want to write a book gratifying for people who know all this arcana about classic video games. I did want it to appeal to as large of an audience as possible. There’s already a lot of writing out there on the web about the games: what they are, what they do… There’s enough commentary on the games as they currently exist, and to me that operates more in the review world, which is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t really transform the material into anything new.

ELS: What was your writing process with But Our Princess is in Another Castle? Was it different or similar as for your previous works?

BJB: Well, I mean, this was different because it was ekphrastic. Basically, I made several lists of fifty so videogames I would conceivably want to write about. Halfway through the project I made another list, and I have a feeling I maybe even made a third one. And then it was just brainstorming to settle on one that maybe seemed interesting, and literally I would go and play the game. It’s weird to think about playing video games for research, but actually that’s exactly what I did.

Most of the games in the book are small, especially compared to modern games, so it didn’t take long to do it. It’s not like I played any of them through to beat them. I played them long enough to get a sense of details that interested me. I would literally keep my eyes open and try to pay attention to things that simply seemed weird about the game, or unusual, or things that even though I’d played this game a million times, I’d never noticed before. Those were the details that were impressed on me, and those are often the ones that wind up showing up in the particular poems. Because ultimately, videogames are weird. If you sit back and objectively look at them, the things they ask you to do, and the worlds they create are just strange. I really like that, I think that’s really interesting. Compared to other books I wrote, I had to sit down and get the videogame in my head enough so I knew I could pull from that wealth of images that the game happened to have, while also limiting myself by not playing it over and over again, because I usually find if I know something too well it actually makes it more difficult to write about. You lose the sense of wonder and the idea of what makes it interesting and important versus “Well, here’s my encyclopedia of knowledge about something.”

ELS: Had you played all of the games before, or did you try some new ones also?

BJB: Most of them I had played before, from what I remember. I think there were some that I had never played before or some that I had always wanted to play that seemed interesting that I had never gotten around to, but no, they’re not inherently my favorite games, or anything like that. I cast a pretty wide net in thinking about what was valuable and what was intriguing. And there were also plenty of games that I wanted to write about, but just didn’t work for whatever reason. I wish Sonic the Hedgehog was in the book, but I tried three different times to write a Sonic the Hedgehog poem and they all blew up in my face, so I’m like “well I guess that’s the way it goes.”

ELS: You published a Sonic the Hedgehog poem on your WordPress blog that I really liked, and I was actually wondering why you didn’t include that one in But Our Princess is in Another Castle…

BJB: I published three: that one, “Minesweeper,” and “Mappy.” What I realized about those three particular poems is that they just seemed a little stranger, and that they didn’t quite seem to hit the same notes as far as the overall tenor of the book. You always have to draw lines. Those three were just on the edge and fell.

ELS: That’s unfortunate for Sonic.

BJB: Yeah, that’s right!

ELS: Did you have a problem poem when you were writing But Our Princess is in Another Castle? One particular poem that gave you more trouble, or something that you worked on longer, or edited a million times…?

BJB: Many of the ones that I did have problems with wound up not being included in the book to begin with. There were a couple that flat-out got rewritten because the first time they made it through, they did not work very well. The first one’s in the first section of the book. It’s called “Gauntlet” and it was actually one of the first ten. What I remember about that poem is that it was mostly an exercise of seeing how often I could alliterate words that began with the letter Q. I distinctly remember that because Gauntlet is this game in which you die very frequently, so if you’re playing this at an arcade you just keep pumping quarters into the machine. I don’t think that version of the poem even made it to the very first draft of the book.

ELS: Not sure you could have gotten too far with Qs.

BJB: Yeah, exactly. Once you’ve got a version of a poem, it’s difficult to go back and say “I’m going to write about this game again” and do it completely differently, so the version of “Gauntlet” in the book was written in 2010-2011. I tried again once enough time had passed that I honestly could forget about what that first poem was about.

ELS: Do you keep copies of your first drafts?

BJB: Oh, I’ve got them somewhere. I’m not quite sure what draft of the book finally got published, but I’ve got a feeling it was draft number twenty or something like that. Just out of curiosity one day, while I was going through the final edits, I pulled up draft #1 and it was fascinating to see how completely different the book was compared to what was finally there. My first draft was written in 2005 and I thought there was a book there, but it’s very clear there was not.

ELS: Did you include any favorite childhood games?

BJB: A lot of them were favorites. My first videogame system (that I remember) was the Nintendo. I played Super Mario Brothers until all hours of the night. I was so proud when I finally beat Super Marios that I took a picture of the screen with my mom’s camera (this was just before digital cameras), and I went up to tell her that I’d just beaten Super Mario Brothers. At this point I’m eleven or twelve. She just looks at me, and all she says is “Go to bed,” which in retrospect was a completely reasonable suggestion at the time…

So the system I’m fondest of, because it was my first, is probably the Nintendo. There’s Mario in there, and Legend of Zelda in there, and Kid Icarus in there… I tend to have more nostalgic memories with those particular games, but I tried not to let that influence what I chose for the book.

ELS: What was the editorial process like?

BJB: The book was accepted in 2011 and actually I was still writing some new poems at that point. I had sent off a copy of the manuscript even though I had some new poems I was working on, and they accepted the manuscript, so the first thing for me do was figure out which, if any, of those new poems were going to belong. I went through about nineteen drafts on my own – when I say “on my own,” I mean me and a couple of trusted readers that I give virtually anything tobecause they give me all sorts of good feedback. But then we went through three rounds of edits with the editors. Very detailed, very thorough, and very much appreciated. We worked back and forth up until the last draft. In the final draft I actually cut four poems out of the manuscript, “Mappy” being one of them, just because I didn’t think at the time that they quite fit. Even up until then we were still making major changes to it to make it as strong as possible.

ELS: Poor “Mappy”! Almost made it.

BJB: Exactly.

ELS: What kind of edits did the publishing house make – mostly stylistic, or…?

BJB: It was everything and anything. Sometimes it was making sure things were spelled correctly, sometimes it was suggesting cutting poems, sometimes they recommended a new ending, definitely a lot of trimming of language, which I almost always agreed with, like extra adjectives, adverbs, some details that didn’t seem like they went anywhere or were needless at that point.

ELS: You had two “Heart Worlds”; was there a reason for that?

BJB: Yeah. The first one is not a very positive “Heart World,” and in fact talks mostly about a relationship breaking up, all negative falling apart, whereas the second one is more a positive, developing, lasting relationship and in many ways autobiographically based on me and my wife. I like the idea of two “Heart Worlds” because it’s mnemonic of videogames in a certain way. Videogames (either because they were lazily designed or cleverly designed, one of the two) often have you go back to a place where you’ve already been and make you do something else with it. But the goal was for each poem to stand on its own, even though together they’re thematic. I tried to be pretty clear about the themes, by virtue of the different worlds that each poem winds up in, like “Heart World” or “Map World.” The goal was to keep them apart and not try to necessarily rely on narrative, or for one to rely on another one, because that becomes one rickety house of cards pretty quickly.

ELS: Is there a specific line or image that you’re particularly proud of in this book?

BJB: Oh jeez, that’s a tough question.

ELS: I figured it might be.

BJB: What I like – and it almost becomes my own little cliché during the book – is poems that close strongly. I have so many poems that end with basically a single-sentence paragraph at the very end. For example, the end of “Mega Man”: “Being an electrician is different than being a doctor of light.” It even includes a reference to the game, because you’re fighting on behalf of the character Dr. Light in there. Another one that I really like is the end of “Legend of Zelda”: “We become the stories we tell ourselves.” That carries throughout the book too, and it’s also true about videogames. You’re the one enacting the story, so you become the story as you go through it. That strategy particularly does it for me. I don’t know if it winds up irritating other people because it happens so often, but I feel that they’re like daggers at the end.

ELS: Did you pick the title at the end or did you have it in mind from the beginning?

BJB: No, I had that from the beginning. The old manuscript in 2005 had that as the title. It just seemed to me like it was a pretty famous videogame phrase and that no one at the time was using it for anything, and honestly since I’ve been doing this and talking about the book, I’ve had several people either tell me or it gets back to me that they think it’s a great title. But I was terrified that between then and now someone else would come out with something called precisely that and I would have to change as a result. There is a “Mountain Goats” song called “Thank you Mario, But Our Princess is in Another Castle,” but I figured I was just far enough away from that that it would still hold up. I chose it because it’s a videogame phrase and I like the idea that it suggests, what so many videogames suggest: that you need to keep trying, you need to keep searching, you need to keep working, because you’re not quite done yet, and I think thematically that addresses a variety of the poems in the book, too.

ELS: The phrase has become a pretty popular meme; not sure if was back in 2005.

BJB: Memes didn’t really exist in 2005. It was one of those things that was sufficiently familiar that I hoped it would pull people in. It definitely has become meme-ified.

ELS: Do you still play videogames, or was this a thing of the past that you revisited for this project?

BJB: It’s weird. I began this project in 2004, almost ten years ago. I had no kids then, so I had time to play games and do what I wished. Now I’ve got a son – he was born in 2010 so he’s three and a half. Honestly, playing videogames is one of the things in my life that has fallen by the wayside. I still enjoy doing it, but I have a hard time justifying it, especially since so many modern games take up so much of your time if you actually play them. So I don’t spend much time playing games anymore, and I’m actually fairly comfortable with that idea. I balance that out by saying that I actually teach a videogame course at Carroll University in Wisconsin, so I get my fix that way. I assign all sorts of games: some classics, some contemporaries, and a bunch that the students have never heard of. So I’m still playing and thinking about them, just in a more academic context these days. When it comes down to it, my free time is fairly small, so when it gets to 9:30 at night, I would rather read or do something else than spend half an hour playing a videogame.

ELS: Does your videogame course focus on literature, mechanics, design, or…?

BJB: It’s called a “Cultural Seminar” – that’s the big touchstone for many of the general education courses. We want our students to learn about culture through different lenses, so mine is videogames, and believe it or not there is actually a textbook about how to study videogames. We talk about the academic theory of videogames, how they reveal culture by what they reveal within the games themselves, and how they impact the larger culture. We look at why Pac Man was so popular, why Tetris was so popular, and we also deal with the question of “Do violentgames cause violence?” We look at how the games are situated within American culture as well to see what their impacts are.

ELS: Do you think some of that came through in your book?

BJB: I don’t really think so. It wasn’t something I was necessarily thinking much about during the writing. So many of the poems are not inherently autobiographical but they’re autobiographically based, so I was writing more from personal perspective than from a broader perspective. It’s definitely more of a lyric voice in this particular book as opposed to trying to teach– because the poems are ultimately about experiences other than the game themselves and the comment is the game itself.

ELS: So you don’t think you had any messages about video games in mind for your readers when you wrote?

BJB: Other than that they’re worth serious inquiry. And I think that’s important. That they can be treated seriously, that they’re more than ephemeral flashes of light on a screen, that they do have meaning and can have artistic meaning either through transforming them or even in and of themselves. The question I’ve been asked a couple of times is “Are videogames art?” People wrestle with it, so it’s something I’ve tried to comment on. My answer is very clearly yes. More specifically, it’s my goal to show that videogames can be a generative source for other artistic endeavors.

An Interview with Joseph Michael Owens

Recently, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to read Joseph Michael Owens’s short story collection Shenanigans! and I must say that I’m really into his style! For those of you who don’t know, Joe is also the Web Content Manager here at the Lit Pub, and once I had read his work, I was really happy to know that I was working with some highly talented writers here. Joe was very gracious in his allowing me to interview him, and his intelligence and generosity definitely shine through in his writing and in his discussion with me.

I hope you all enjoy learning about Joe as much as I did!

Sam Song: It was a pleasure to read Shenanigans! What were your major inspirations for writing this piece?

Joseph Michael Owens: Shenanigans! was a collection that began its life as my MFA thesis and turned into something more. The inspirations are probably too many to count, but the most prominent books that influenced it were Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End. These books all have the ability to sort of charm their readers with closely examining what’s happening in their characters’ lives. I think Shenanigans! provides a little slice of slice-of-life writing. It’s almost like an appetizer sampler platter. You sort of get a taste of the various things that take place in a couple characters’ day-to-day lives that may seem uninteresting at first but becomes interesting (I hope) by humanizing them in a relatable way; but at the same time, you also never spend too much time on one thing in order to prevent it (again, I hope) from getting boring.

SS: What were some of the influences for Ben’s and Anna’s characters? Do you know people like them in real life?

JMO: Half of the answer is likely predictable; the other half might not be. Originally, the characters were actually based on Jennifer, the woman who I’d eventually marry, and I. However, I saw a lot of potential in other couples whose relationships I admired, as well as stories I’d read with characters who were genuinely likable. I feel like there is so much fiction being written right now where characters are either unlikable or unrelatable (by design) that I thought it might be fun to give a glimpse into people’s lives where the worst things that were happening were trivial, mundane things. Eventually, the characters became less and less Jenni and I and more themselves, which I loved. I’m leaving it up to the readers to figure out which parts are based on real events and which are completely made up.

SS: Why did you have what happened to Ben happen? For instance, why did you make Ben bike up a freezing cold mountain or have him spill scalding coffee all over himself?

JMO: One of those events may or may not have happened to either me or someone I know. I think with Ben’s bike ride up the mountain, it was sort of a way to show how people can do these amazing things when they don’t know they aren’t supposed to be able to. Ben basically sets off riding a distance he’s probably covered many times but isn’t really thinking about the fact that it’s nearly all uphill, which, having ridden a bike my fair share of miles, I can tell you, there is a big difference. He dresses for the weather at the base of the mountain, not considering how cold it’s going to be at the top. He just knows he wants to ride up the damn thing and so he does it. It’s only later he realizes that it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to “just do.”

The coffee story is, in some ways, an homage to shows like The Office and movies like Office Space. A fun fact is that the story is actually the first chapter of a novel I’ve been working on set in the same office with the same characters. Now that it was published in Shenanigans!, it might get cut from the final draft, but there’s certainly going to be more of Ben and Anna because why not, right? I really think the coffee scene is mostly indicative of the chaos and insanity that sort of defines most professional office settings. I work/have worked in them since I was eighteen, and this just seems like something that could (basically) happen. People are rushing around; the break-rooms and kitchens are often small but see heavy traffic; it’s the minutia of the day that really tends to get under people’s skin. I just set out with the hopes of recreating a sense of that.

SS: Is the idea of “just doing” an aspect present in other chapters in Shenanigans! as well?

JMO: If not for the characters, then it definitely is for the writing part. For example, “We Always Trust Each Other…” and “Ninjas! . . . (In the Suburbs?)” were both stories I started sketching out with no real idea of what they’d be or even if they’d be anything at all. One thing I really like to do is include free associations in my writing. I think the finished product stays a step or two short of becoming fully absurdist — e.g. in the vein of Mark Leyner or Jon Konrath — but it allows me to sort of take things to their strangest- and most extreme conclusions (i.e. ones that could feasibly happen).

SS: It seems pretty clear that Ben indeed cherishes his dogs. Why did you decide to let dogs be a huge part of his life? Are you a dog person yourself?

JMO: One thing I can say is that the dogs in the book were based on real life. I’ve always had dogs. Right now, Jenni and I have four total, but we’ve had as many as five. I thought it might be kind of fun to have a couple who don’t have kids but instead, a rowdy pack of dogs that keep them more than busy. We’re animal lovers, in general. I think it’d be hard to write a book without having some furry companions in it.

SS: Continuing the topic on Ben’s and Anna’s dogs, I notice that you even give them distinct “voices” and personalities. Mish and Brock are notable examples, in that they “speak” directly to Ben. Can you elaborate as to what this reveals about Ben’s relationship with them?

JMO: Dogs are so hilarious. I’ve always sort of had different voices for dogs in my head based on their mannerisms and expressions. It’s easy to forget that they aren’t actually human and responding in that way. I think this is something a number of people probably also do, but it adds an element that is new or weird to readers who perhaps aren’t “animal people.” That being said, non-animal people would probably get annoyed with the number of times dogs or horses or wildlife appear in my stories.

SS: Boxcars and Bomb Pops is different from the other chapters in that it isn’t so much about Ben’s present experience as it is about his flow of thought. In this chapter, Ben arrives at this epiphany that in society, “there is something wrong with or different about them if they find themselves not wanting, if they find things and stuff somehow unappealing”. What moved you to acknowledge this idea? Are these your own thoughts, someone else’s, or ones you fabricated for Ben’s introspective character?

JMO: There is this sort of unsaid and overarching idea in the book that people are (of course) incredibly multi-faceted and even go as far as to have different voices, depending on the situation they find themselves in. Ben is kind of a goof, but he’s also hyper-analytical at work as well as kind of introspective in ways that many of those that know him perhaps don’t recognize when he’s by himself. Ultimately, I think, when people are all alone and spending time with their thoughts, everyone is introspective. I liken it to wizened older people who don’t talk a lot but say almost profound things when they do talk; people who might not have a formal education, but are more in touch with the way things work than “book smart” people who’ve never really experienced much of the world outside of a classroom. These are two extreme examples of course, but the idea is that people are smart, in general, especially when they are allowed to sit down and just think about things outside of the hubbub of society.

SS: Do you yourself perceive this idea to be true?

JMO: I think it was something I first noticed in myself, certainly. It seems like when it comes to wanting something, the process of wanting is the driving factor, not actually acquiring the thing was that was wanted. This is really evident in hobbies that involve a lot of tinkering. When the project is finished that someone spent “X” amount of time tinkering with or upgrading or modifying, the person usually moves on to a new project. There are even commercials now about upgrading cell phones before the typical two years a person waits between new phones because there is always something newer and shinier on the market or just around the corner. All of this isn’t really what’s surprising. What’s surprising is that we really don’t like our bleeding edge device (e.g.) being rolled out with planned obsolescence in mind. (But that’s just my two cents.)

SS: The final and arguably most complex short story of Shenanigans! is The Year that Was…And Was Not. So much happens in this chapter, and instead of merely a glimpse at a moment in Ben’s life, we are presented with a dire prospect of his future. Why did you decide to make this chapter such an emotional roller-coaster for Ben and his family and Anna? Why the interplay of the good and the bad?

JMO: A lot of the motivation behind the last chapter was selfishness on my part. It was kind of my way of not wanting to let go of the characters, so rather than have everything tidied up in a nice complete package, I wanted to show that the young couple still had most of their lives together ahead of them. Life is a bit of an emotional roller coaster, regardless of how exciting a person’s life is – or is perceived to be, and nothing is either 100 percent terrible or 100 percent awesome. What is a huge crisis to some of us may seem like no big deal to others. Ultimately, we’re all just here on the planet trying to do the best we can within the situation(s) we find ourselves.

SS: I’ll end my questions about the plot of Shenanigans! here; I don’t want to spoil it for all the lovely people at The Lit Pub! Why don’t you share with us some of your upcoming projects?

JMO: I’m currently working on two very different novels. One is a sort of spin-off of Ben’s character in Shenanigans! called Human Services where it focuses on the people who work at The Agency and all of the insanity that occurs in a professional office setting. I would say it’s pretty much solidly in the literary fiction camp.

The other thing I’m working on is a project I’ve been kicking around in my mind for a few years now, which is a sort of literary epic sci-fi/fantasy novel tentatively called “Of Gods and Men.” I grew up reading lots of sci-fi and fantasy — especially the latter — and always kind of wanted to do something in the genre that inspired me to be a writer. It wasn’t until recently, with the popularity of the A Song and Ice and Fire series (aka Game of Thrones) that I sort of realized that this was a viable option for me. That is to say, I’d really been wanting to use the skills I’d picked up writing literary fiction the past seven or eight years and apply it to something more genre related. Perhaps the work most responsible for this epiphany, even more so than Game of Thrones, is M. John Harrison’s unbelievably impressive Viriconium omnibus. The prose is awe-inspiring and the way he includes elements of surrealism and bits of magical realism is something I can’t begin to do justice here. You’d simply have to read it yourself.

SS: Is there a particular writing process you go through?

JMO: My process is pretty un-process like. I’ve got severe ADD, so it’s almost impossible for me to get into anything that resembles a regular writing schedule. I basically write when I can and/or when I’ve got an idea that’s begging to be put down on paper. Though when I do, I typically draft longhand first; it’s always been that way for me. I find it easier to compose with a pen than I do with a keyboard. Then I’ll type out a first draft, print that draft, and proceed to edit the printed copy with a pen. I know there are a lot of steps, but this has always been the best method for me, personally. There seems to be a number of established writers who do this too, so I don’t feel quite so weird about it. I feel like I could probably write more if I decided to skip the longhand and type everything — editing it solely within the word processing app — but my current method feels to me like what I do write is better; quality over quantity!

SS: People have often told me that if I want to write, I must first ask myself why I want to write. So, Joe, why do you write?

JMO: I think a lot of people describe their reasons in terms of zen sayings or for their sanity or they profoundly muse on their destiny or life’s calling as writers, but for me it’s really so much simpler than that: I just really like to do it! Admittedly, I feel bad — or maybe guilty is the right word —  sometimes when I don’t write, but there can be significant gaps in my output during a given year. I think I feel worse because I know it’s easier to stay in a kind of writing flow than try to repeatedly build your momentum back up, but it also comes down to your own personal capacity: write as much as you can within the amount of time you feel like you want to spend doing it.

SS: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

JMO: Part of this can probably apply here, but the most important thing people who are aspiring writers can do is read as much as they can. Stephen King said you have to read a lot to write well, and I think that still holds true. I think it’s especially important to read books you like, which may seem obvious, but often students will get bogged down reading stuff they are assigned to read or reading stuff they’ve been told they should like. I’m sorry to say, but not everyone is going to love reading Faulkner (e.g.), especially if their style is more similar to, say, Barry Hannah, to compare two Southern writers. Maybe you’d be better off reading George Saunders than John Updike, or Zadie Smith instead of Margaret Fuller. I’m just throwing names out there, but the point is, find something you love and read as much of it as possible.

SS: What are some of your own aspirations as a writer?

JMO: I think my biggest aspirations as a writer start simple: #1, to finish projects! People with ADD tend to start a million projects and finish a few, if any, of them. So for now, my priority is to finish both Human Services and Of Gods and Men. Beyond that, I just want to write books that at least a few people really like. It’s an incredibly humbling thing when someone tells you that your work really resonated with them. It makes you want to write a special book just for that person because they took the time to read your work that they could’ve spent doing any number of other things. Time is a hot commodity in 2013, and people never seem to have enough of it. My biggest aspiration is that I’d really love to write for a living. I don’t even mean becoming rich and famous because of my work — though I’d certainly not turn it away. I just mean I’d give almost anything to spend each of my days with my imagination and churning out ideas on the page, and through that work (because make no mistake, writing is work!), be able to support/contribute to supporting my family. I think that’s a pretty kickass definition of “happiness!”

Jon Konrath Interview Extravaganza!

I recently got a chance to interview probably one of the best contemporary absurdist writers today, Jon Konrath.

My thoughts were that Jon and I would keep a single Google Doc and basically riff off of questions and answers as much as possible, trying to keep the interview style in a somewhat similar vein to his writing. I love free associations so, admittedly, I just tried to keep up. I definitely tried to ask specific things about his books that I wanted to know for my own edification, and I figured the readers would want to know, too, by-proxy, etc. but the conversation tended toward the strange more often than not. In the best possible ways.

Buckle up, because the entire behemoth, unabridged interview follows!

Joe M. Owens: I’m really digging Thunderbird so far. I honestly think it’s as good as anything else I’ve read of yours. Given that all your books ultimately have an overarching theme that knits them together, what do you feel Thunderbird’s is and was the spark that ignited the project?

Jon Konrath: The big spark this time around was watching the Louie show all in one clip on Netflix. I like how he creates these almost plotless episodes that explore some point by showing it in an overblown, absurdist fashion. One of the things he constantly shows is the general absurdity about how the social contract of our society has completely disintegrated.

Like there’s an example in one of his episodes where he’s babysitting this completely undisciplined kid of his neighbor’s — one of these “I let him be free to do whatever he wants” juvenile delinquents — and the kid immediately rolls up Louie’s rug and throws it out of the apartment window.

I wanted to create this world in the book that depicted this exaggerated “I’m the center of the universe, and I’m going to get mine” mentality that you see all around us right now. The book is set a couple of years in the future, so for all I know, my absurdity in 2013 could become commonplace in 2015.

Like, it’s probably a little over the top to write about running into someone at Wal-Mart that’s masturbating to amputee porn in the computer section. (Then again, people are getting caught making meth inside Wal-Mart all the time, so who knows.)

JMO: Louis C.K. is great! I’ve held the belief for a few years now that he’s one of the best comics and social critics alive today.

Jon Konrath: He’s definitely up there on my list. There are a couple of things that I like about him. One is how he’s a monster writing – he pretty much writes a new hour of material a year, then does a special to capture it and retires it. That’s on top of everything he does with his TV show, which even included all of the editing in addition to acting, writing, and production. And he’s also writing another chunk of stand-up that’s getting used in the show, the beginnings and bumpers of him doing comedy within each episode. That is a phenomenal work ethic.

The other thing I really admire about him is how he completely changed the delivery model of comedy videos. Instead of going to HBO or whoever to produce a special, he completely cut out the middleman, paid to produce it himself, set up his own web site, and then sold it for five bucks. The site was easy to use and he was very cool about piracy and just wanted to get the work out there as painlessly as possible, and try to recoup enough so he could buy a house and not have to worry about bills and do more work. And then when the special blew up and went viral, he made over a million dollars and gave away half of it, both in bonuses to his crew and to charities. And now that direct, $5 model is the standard, and other comedians are doing the same. It’s a lot like the self-publishing world, and it’s made good work a lot more accessible to people. I’m not going to subscribe to HBO to see a Jim Gaffigan special, but I’ll gladly give him five bucks to download it.

JMO: It seems like there’s a certain type of person, particularly/possibly one with a significant case of ADD (like me) that your writing particularly appeals to because there is so many things going on and so many trains of thought and ideas. A lot of your work reminds me of having a random thought and just taking it to its logical-but-extreme conclusion, which feels cathartic when you read someone else doing it.

Does this almost “stream of consciousness” type of writing just happen for you spur-of-the-moment, or do you map out the way your characters’ zaniness progresses in advance?

Jon Konrath: I have written linear, plotted stuff that followed an outline, and I don’t do it as much anymore. Part of it is that I’m not as interested in strongly plot-driven novels anymore, and part of it really kills my ability to create. Like if I had the wise idea to start writing a novel and said “okay, three-acts, and it’s Apocalypse Now but about a garbage collector, and it’s in space,” I would spend all of my time thinking about if my writing was too much like the movie, but also obsessing about if it would work if it was too dissimilar, and I wouldn’t actually write. I think most creation is the ability to shut off your conscious mind and channel your subconscious to the page, and the battle is that you need enough of your conscious mind to be able to work a keyboard and write in complete coherent sentences.

There are two parallel things going on as far as the writing process. One is that I need to diligently take notes on everything around me. So when I’m watching TV, reading a book, or poking around the web, anything that sticks out as a potential idea gets written down, as do any phrases or quotes or word combinations or recollections of bits of the past that could evolve into a story. [ed. note: I also do this, especially with documentaries!]This used to involve a lot of post-its and legal pads and backs of receipts and whatnot, but the iPhone’s notes app has streamlined this. The other part is that I free-write religiously, daily, just dumping whatever riffs into a buffer. The output from both of these goes into a giant Scrivener project, and slowly gets picked at and sorted, until logical chunks start to form. Here are some Scrivener tips for you.

The last few books have been more like story collections, although there are usually cohesive threads through the whole book, and the pieces will start to arrange themselves until they have a structure. It’s more like songwriting, and I’ll sometimes think something is a good “chorus” and it just needs a couple of “verses” around it to frame it. And then these loose little riffs get dropped into place between those. Or I have these huge buckets full of people, places, and things, and I start swapping objects out, like I’ll decide the guy at the porn shop should be Konstanin Chernenko, after pulling his name from a huge list.

The thing that always burns me on this approach is coming up with the overall “container” that holds this mess, and keeps a reader moving forward through the pages. Sometimes, that happens before anything else, but a lot of times, I’ll be 90% done with a book and have no idea what it will be, and I’ll drive myself mad thinking I have to solve the problem before I’m done, and maybe I should just tear the whole thing apart and start over, write new stories with all of the pieces.

JMO: You were born in North Dakota and raised in a small town in Michigan. How do you think that affected the development of your writing style?

Jon Konrath: I actually left North Dakota when I was six months old, so that probably didn’t do much, except it sort of broke the curse of being born in my hometown. And I was born on an air force base in the middle of nowhere, with a lot of weird cold war goings-on, which may have left the seed for some of my obsessions for strange military technology. This was Grand Forks AFB, which was the home of some fifty megatons of Minuteman II missiles aimed at the Soviets, and my dad used to work on the B-52 nuclear bombers that would take off in sixty below zero weather and fly giant loops over Canada and the arctic circle, waiting to get the phone call from Nixon to make the Dr. Strangelove run into Russia. There’s also a huge ABM facility they built a few miles from there that has a radar tower that looks like a giant Egyptian pyramid in the middle of nowhere. They spent half a billion dollars building this massive system and then it was only operational for a few months. The buildings are still there.

I obsess about this stuff, and spend far too much time reading about it, looking for these things on Google Maps, and so it ends up in my writing. (It also means Google Maps is in my blacklist. You really need to go to http://selfcontrolapp.com and get a free copy of their timed internet blocking software.) I haven’t even been back to North Dakota since 1971, but I probably should visit again and see what’s left. I know they imploded all of the missiles and moved all of the B-52s from Grand Forks, but I’ve gotta find that giant pyramid.

JMO: I’ve either lived in Omaha, NE or Ames, IA my entire life. A mutual friend of ours — and Lit Pub contributor — David Atkinson, is also from Omaha and now lives in Denver. Is there something about growing up on/in the Plains that causes one’s writing to tend toward the strange or bizarre?

Jon Konrath: I think there’s two parts two it. The first was that I spent a lot of my childhood isolated. I lived in a village (Edwardsburg, Michigan) that had one stoplight when I was there, and it was a flashing warning light. One of our neighbors had kids in high school when I was in preschool, so playing with other kids my age involved parental chauffeuring. I learned to read before Kindergarten, and spent a lot of time in my own head, reading everything possible. I spent hours going through a kiddie encyclopedia I got at a garage sale, and then we got a real encyclopedia — I think it was a Funk and Wagnall’s — that you bought book-by-book at the Kroger grocery store. I think getting lost in reading at an early age instead of football or Donny and Marie or whatever probably got me started on the journey.

The other thing is that there was a lot of absurdity in general in the Midwest. I moved to Indiana in the first grade – right across the state line, really – and this was a state that tried to set the value of Pi to 3.2 in legislation. It was the home of Michael Jackson, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Dan Quayle. . . . There were always small-town absurdities and contradictions that, as I got older, seemed to get more insane. Like until very recently, the state refused to acknowledge daylight savings time, and pretty much every phone interstate phone conversation I had started with a twenty-minute explanation of what time it was in Indiana. It’s the last state to ban alcohol sales on Sundays, but up until recently, there was no open container law, so you could drive around with a beer in your hand, as long as you weren’t drunk. The combination of fundamentalist religion, small-town politics, and an economy almost entirely based on manufacturing created a bizarre place to grow up, and it got worse as all of the jobs vanished to China and retail got shuttered and replaced by Wal-Marts. It’s a completely post-apocalyptic environment now, so it’s easy to tap into that for weird writing.

JMO: For what it’s worth, I think The Earworm Inception might’ve ruined Mongolian grills for me, i.e. specifically, “The Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test Manifesto,” ruined them for me. Shit, man. . . why’d you do it? I mean, the Human Asian BBQ cannibalism . . . but then it probably smells incredible and you eat it [if you haven’t been told – e.g. just savoring every chewy “Jeff McNugget,” sampling him in the varieties of sauces like black Thai peanut, Burn-Your-Village Barbeque®, Five Village Fire Szechuan™, et al. laid upon a bed of sticky rice noodles.

Jon Konrath: The cannibalism bit comes from two things. One is a conversation I was having with another writer a while ago, about how he had some relatives that latched onto every crazy new-age food trend, and were talking about raising chickens in their apartment. He postulated that the next big trend, after raw milk and placenta eating, would probably be cannibalism. And I think when that happens, there’s going to be food trucks involved, or maybe Guy Fieri going to all of these diners across the country where if you eat an entire human head in 20 minutes, you get your picture on the wall and a free T-shirt.

I was also obsessed with cannibalism about twenty years ago when that Alive movie came out, about the soccer players in the plane crash that ate their friends’ dead bodies to survive. I remember killing time in a K-Mart in Indiana and reading the entire straight-to-paperback true-crime book about the crash in the store, poring over the grainy black-and-white photos. The summer before, the fascination was the Dahmer trial, and it was similar – I’d go to the newsstand at the Osco drug store and read every magazine about the grisly scene at his apartment. It’s very easy for me to lock into fascinations like that, which means I pretty much have to block Wikipedia to get any writing done, or I’ll go to look up what year Leon Czolgosz was executed, and two hours later, I’m reading about Soviet rail disasters in the 19th century.

I don’t know where I got the Mongolian connection, although I used to go to this place in Denver – I think it’s part of that BD’s chain – and every time I left, my coat would smell like charred flesh for a week. I think if you were going to eat human flesh, there would be a certain allure to scooping out pieces in little bowls and then watching a guy stir it on the open grill, as opposed to just ordering a #3 and having a clerk hand over a cardboard box filled with nuked nuggets that had been breaded, fried, and flash-frozen in a giant factory in Arkansas.

JMO: Also, for what it’s worth, that question was written under the influence of Ambien — I nodded off 45 seconds or so later.

Jon Konrath: In this giant pile of junk on my desk that will eventually be assimilated into writing, I just found the Zolpidem medication guide, which has an entire page of warnings about stuff you may accidentally do in your sleep without being aware of it, including driving, talking on the phone, eating, and having sex. It does not mention interview questions, though.

JMO: Hunter S. Thompson used to say, “When the going gets tough, the tough get weird.” Your writing shares a lot of the manic energy of HST’s as well as style that would appeal to fans of Mark Leyner (The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, The Tetherballs of Bougainville). Can you talk about your writing influences at all?

Jon Konrath: Leyner was a huge influence. Before him, I got started on Henry Miller, Bukowski, and Orwell. Vonnegut and Heller cracked open the door to the absurd world, but Leyner really broke it open for me. That brief window of postmodernist rockstar writing happened in the mid-90s, right around when I started writing, and it majorly influenced me, stuff like Leyner’s core works Et Tu, Babe and The Tetherballs of Bougainville, and David Foster Wallace with Infinite Jest. That movement quickly collapsed though, and I spent years digging for interviews so I could trace back their influences and find more. I got turned onto the other FC2 writers that way, like Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick.

Leyner really clicked with me because his outrageous sense of humor was close to mine, but also because he’d wander off in random directions with references to pop culture or scientific technology, and then bring it back again. I felt like his hyperactive structure matched the randomness in my head much more than traditional storytellers. When I tried to write “straight” fiction, it felt like I had to confine myself, like I was on a first date or trying to act normal around someone’s parents, and it wasn’t until I recognized the potential to do whatever I wanted that I really started writing. Leyner’s work really encouraged me to follow that path.

Hunter S. Thompson was also a big influence. The energy is certainly a big part of it, but the structure of his essays or articles is something I frequently use, along with the concept of melding fiction and reality, the Gonzo aspect. An example of that is “Ten Reasons Rick Perry Isn’t Getting the New Amazon Tablet.” I started writing a blog post about the downsides of the Kindle Fire, just straight technical observations, but decided it would be more interesting to invent a relationship with some newsworthy figure. I’ve had some weird coincidental connections to a few news stories in the last decade and I thought I’d invent a new one by having Rick Perry, then a Presidential contender, call me up in the middle of the night asking me about tablet computers. And in true HST style, it’s not the real Rick Perry, but this caricature of him that’s into hardcore pornography, snorting crank, and listening to Rebecca Black before executions. I must have been in the middle of a reread of Generation of Swine or Better Than Sex when that came out.

I think my biggest lament about Thompson is that he had so much trouble getting it together to write, that his output dwindled, and he eventually put a gun in his mouth. Like I said, it’s all about that delicate balance between the id and the ego, and I think in his case, he went down this dark path of substance abuse as a shortcut to shut off the ego and let his subconscious run free on the page. It works, but you have the side effects to deal with, and you hear these crazy stories about the insane regimen of various drugs and drinks and foods he needed to get functional, and it seems like that worked less and less over the years.

[Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas], to me, was the pinnacle of his work, in the way it was structured and how he managed to mate the Gonzo element with this overarching mission, to find the American Dream, and he was able to channel this all into a very cohesive book. And if the stories were true, this was largely automatic writing, just typing, Kerouac-style. I think he spent the rest of his life trying to get back into that zone, and you saw fits and spurts of it, but nothing as solid as that. I always wish we could have seen more like Vegas. But then I don’t have any answers on how that is possible; I struggle every day to find the right balance between life and writing to get anything done.

JMO: Let’s go a little further with respect to style — who are some contemporary authors you think are currently writing great stuff?

Jon Konrath: Even though I don’t write “straight” fiction anymore, I still read a lot of it. It’s something I have to time carefully, so I don’t start reading it when I’m looking for a new project, because I’ll start thinking I need to write this coming-of-age novel and I need to avoid that. But I really liked David [Atkinson]’s book Bones Buried in the Dirt, and I’m a big fan of John Sheppard’s stuff, and helped him publish his last book, Alpha Mike Foxtrot, which was excellent. I’m also a fan of Ryan Werner’s stuff, which has an amazing voice, but still works in enough professional wrestling and thrash-metal references for me.

As far as stuff like mine, Leyner finally came out with another book, Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and I hope that means he’ll do more in the future. I’ve been on a big Sam Pink kick lately, and read almost all of his stuff back-to-back. He’s an incredible observationalist, and can write a book like Rontel, which is basically a guy doing nothing all day, but still make it a page-turner. And although I can’t keep up with his critical and nonfiction writing, I really like what Jonathan Lethem’s done, especially his last one, Chronic City. He’s basically doing a realistic science fiction by depicting a New York that’s just a couple of years from now, a lot like the near-future predicted in Infinite Jest.

JMO: Is there ultimately any one or two specific reason(s) you tend not to write “straight fiction” like Summer Rain much/at all anymore?

Jon Konrath: It’s hard for me to write straight fiction that isn’t somehow based on my life, and my life is terminally boring at this point. I think I’ve cherry-picked a lot of good stuff from college when I wrote Summer Rain, and everything since then is getting squeezed through this distortion filter to become more absurd fiction. It’s also hard for me to be funny when I’m writing straight-up Raymond Carver fiction.

It’s something I always struggle with, because sometimes I’ll read a really good piece of straight fiction, like I’ll do my annual reading of Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool and I’ll think it would be no problem to belt out some nice linear autobiographical fiction like that. It’s not that easy, although someone like Russo does it so well that it might look easy, and I’ll often get stuck in a project and then realize I’m burning too many cycles writing something that’s not funny and not in my voice and is pretty much the same thing that the other twelve million people currently in MFA programs are banging out, except probably not as good. So I try to stay clear of that whenever possible.

JMO: You’ve mentioned MFA programs before. What are your thoughts on them, generally? Specifically, do you think they are better or worse for the current writing landscape? Or do you think the good writers will churn out good material regardless of an MFA?

Jon Konrath: I don’t know. I oscillate between wanting to finish an MFA, and shitting on them, and neither of those is the correct opinion. I think there’s value in what you learn in an MFA, but there’s also a worry that true art gets killed by committees. And the sheer number of people in MFA programs, when coupled with the rapid demise of publishers and markets is disconcerting, along with the general cost of tuition these days. I think the real value of an MFA (and this is a grass-is-greener observation) is that for non-genre writers, the academic world offers a huge networking opportunity for writers, especially if you teach. I never interact with writers except when I actively seek it out. If you’re teaching, you’re interacting with twenty, thirty people, times however many classes you teach, times a couple of semesters a year. It seems like the people I know who have gone to grad school have a better network of readers than I do. I didn’t even get an undergraduate degree in English – I took a few classes, but I can’t think of a single person from them who has actually read any of my stuff since then.

As far as whether or not good writers need an MFA, I think that it might provide a good writer the time to write, and some input that might help speed up their process, but good writers will write regardless. I mean, Salman Rushdie didn’t have to finish an MFA to turn out great work.

JMO: I basically agree with most of what you say there, though my mood vacillates from tepid ambivalence (toward traditional MFAs) to gushing adoration for my alma mater’s low-residency program (University of Nebraska Omaha!). They basically said to me, “Hey, this is what you seem best at:____________; let’s just work on making you even better at it. Pick your own reading lists too!” I met some of my best friends of all time there. [Low residency programs are like (insert your happiest place on earth here:_______________) for writers.]

But to move backward a little, before reading Earworm, I’d never heard the word “ileostomy” used before. I applaud your ability to use it in reference to Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller and speed metal. My hat is off, sir!

Jon Konrath: A note to readers: DO NOT go to the Wikipedia page of ileostomy if you are eating.

RE: Abraham Lincoln, I got this book over Christmas called The Physical Lincoln that was written by a pathologist named Dr. John Sotos. I got horribly sick while away on vacation, and had to fly from Milwaukee to Oakland with a 105-degree fever, and read this book while completely delusional. Sotos tried to reverse-engineer Lincoln’s medical history based on third-hand accounts and grainy photos, and came to the conclusion that he had a rare genetic cancer condition (not Marfan’s syndrome, as often speculated) and that he probably would have died in office even if he wasn’t shot. I’d recommend the book, but not the fever or the cross-country flying.

JMO: David Foster Wallace is probably my favorite author of all time. I use footnotes sometimes and occasionally people think it’s a DFW ripoff, but it was actually Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine that introduced me to using footnotes in fiction. Are there any stylistic devices you’ve either adopted or appropriated from other authors in an attempt to make it/them your own?

Jon Konrath: I’m a big fan of footnotes and endnotes too, although I haven’t fully used them yet in a book. I read an essay somewhere about DFW and footnotes and how it’s almost a form of hypertext, where you can drill away on a tangent and keep it away from the actual body of the work. I did an annotated version of Rumored to Exist a while ago, a reissue that had 500-some footnotes explaining where a lot of the references came from, but the footnotes weren’t part of the work itself. I think I first got that from Nabokov’s Pale Fire and hope to someday do that in a book. [ed. note: I’d read that!]

I think one of the stylistic devices I use a lot is conglomeration of completely different pieces of work, but I picked that up from Kentucky Fried Movie and other Zucker Abrams Zucker comedy. I’m really big on having characters turn on a TV and then dumping into a completely different level, going into the show for a bit, changing channels, and so on. I’m big on books within books; characters reading emails or warning labels or movie reviews that are their own story.

The titular story of The Earworm Inception was an attempt at doing a fully recursive story, something I would want to do with an entire book. (A good example, and another author worth mentioning, would be Arthur Graham’s Editorial.)

Back in a previous life as a computer science student, I was in a program that was mostly taught in Scheme, which is a really theoretical programming language like Lisp, used for AI and teaching algorithms. [Side note not to put in: Scheme’s a “real” language, but it’s a really minimalist one primarily used for teaching or theory. It’s great for education, but you wouldn’t want to sit down and write an iPhone game with it.] Scheme is really heavy into recursion, which always turned my brain inside-out then, and I’ve always wanted to structure a book like that. Instead of having a linear A-to-B-to-C-to-D plot, you’d have plot A really be A plus plot B, which would be B plus plot C, etc. and then you’d reach a crucial point where the plots would then pop back through all of these layers of stacks.

JMO: Tangentially, ultimately, etc. anyway, &c. Seriously: Why the Fuck are We Back on the Planet of the Apes?

Jon Konrath: I really thought that Marky Mark version with the love story between him and Helena Bonham Carter was going to be the big icebreaker on a new trend toward bestiality in big Hollywood films, but I think everyone collectively forgot every detail of that movie. It’s sort of amazing how that works – 2001 seems like it was about 15 minutes ago, but Hollywood has rebooted the Spiderman franchise at least nine times since then, because they can count on us completely forgetting everything about it in three months. If I told ten people that the 2002 Spiderman had a scene in it where Tobey Maguire killed Santa Claus with a machete, five of them would say they sort of remembered that, and the other five would have to go check Wikipedia. (Actually, I had to go check Wikipedia just now.)

JMO: I’ve heard there are some weird coincidental connections to a few news stories in the last decade. Care to share any?

Jon Konrath: In general, there have been some weird instances where I’ve written about something absurd and it has later happened. One of the worst ones was that as I was writing Rumored, one of the first bits in it involved lower Manhattan getting destroyed, and then after watching all of 9/11 happen from a few blocks away and walking home five miles, there was a moment a few hours later when I thought, “Oh shit, I need to rewrite the beginning of the book now. . .”

I have this friend that always calls me “bong boy,” based on the Upright Citizen’s Brigade character that always appears in the background of disaster footage, sort of a common thread connected to all news stories. The biggest one was that this guy that used to write for my death metal zine ended up joining Al Qaeda and becoming one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists. [ed. note: That’s F’n intense!] So I spend months getting bombarded by interview requests from pretty much every news organization in the world.

Another weird connection is that I had a really good friend back in high school whose kid crawled into one of those crane vending machines in a Wal-Mart and was all over the news for a second in 2005. I’m waiting for someone from my high school to end up the next News of the Weird headline.

JMO: Because it plays such a large part in what you write, what do you think the function of absurdism in fiction is? David Atkinson’s idea that you can’t see the everyday clearly because it is too familiar and have to exaggerate it to be able to see it clearly, and he also sees some of the mixing of absurd cultural elements performing some exploration of how these things take on their own life in our collective unconscious.

Jon Konrath: That’s a pretty good explanation, actually. When you take a step back from it, our world is pretty absurd anyway. So when you write a story where you can buy a time machine at Wal-Mart but the Lite version shows you five minutes of ads for every two years you go back in time, your first reaction is “yeah, that would probably happen that way.”

Another big function of absurdism in my writing is that I always want to capture the randomness of your dream state, how you can dream about fat bearded Jim Morrison working at a car wash, and when you wake, it seems completely plausible. Part of the main device behind Sleep Has No Master was that wandering between life and what happened during REM sleep, and not being able to tell the difference between the two.

Right before I started writing, I worked two full-time jobs for a summer, sleeping in two shifts of two hours a day. Both jobs were mind-numbing menial labor; the day job involved unloading semi trailers at a Montgomery Ward starting at 6:00 AM, and the night job was working a 200-ton press stamping out RV parts. I spent all summer in this bizarre mental state, unable to tell if I was asleep or awake, daydreaming about riding my bike across the country as I drilled holes in the same bracket 900 times a shift, and then riding my bike home from work. I could never remember if I packed my lunch or had a lucid dream about packing my lunch. And then I’d see everything as absurd. I’d buy one of those Lunchables things off of the break truck and stare at it for ten minutes and think: “Holy shit, is this really happening? Why the hell do they have little pieces of ham in a plastic compartment like this?” For years after that summer, I’d enter that state, like when you say the word “orange” a hundred times and then think: “What the fuck is orange?”

I later drove across the country in a U-Haul and after a thousand miles, started wondering if the whole thing was a video game or how the concept of gas stations would look to aliens. At some point, that transferred over into the writing, where I’d look at something like a relationship and try to poke at the edges of it, and it was much easier to deconstruct if I took some absurdist angle, like that instead of some standard trope about her being upset with me because she wanted kids and I didn’t, I made her obsessed with a TV show about competitive grave robbing and took it from there.

JMO: You have some pretty fantastic fans on Goodreads who really just love your work and seem to spread the word via recommendations to any-/everyone who might be interested. What do you think of the Goodreads community? What are your thoughts about it getting bought by Amazon?

Jon Konrath: I really like a lot of the people on Goodreads — the folks I interact with are great, and I’ve had a positive experience with them. I waste a lot of time on Facebook, which is a great way to keep up with friends, but not all of my friends read, so posting stuff there is much more of a crapshoot. People on Goodreads are there to read, talk about what they are reading, and find new books, and that is awesome.

And as a reader, it’s a good tool too, and I burn a lot of cycles on there finding new books. Amazon’s machine-generated recommendations are pretty useful for me, but it’s nice to get human-generated recommendations from friend, and see opinions of actual readers instead of just links produced from sales data.

My main complaints about Goodreads were the clunkiness of the site. Sometimes page loads took forever, and the UI was not always intuitive. Maybe the move to Amazon will fix that. The real question is how Goodreads will be integrated into Amazon. Will it somehow replace the review system, or vice-versa, or neither? I like the longer format reviews on Goodreads, and hope those don’t go away. If it’s anything like IMDB’s integration with Amazon, it will just be a bunch of buy-it-now links and ads in the sidebar, and I’m mostly fine with that. I think there were a lot of fears coming from people who are anti-Amazon, or sell more books in other places, that Goodreads would become an entirely Amazon-centric site. Really, 99% of my sales come from Amazon, so I’m not too freaked about that, but I know people who are.

JMO: Jon, on a serious note, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about your thoughts on the McDonald’s MCDLT. Do you agree with Jason Alexander? I’ve provided a refresher in case you — or the readers — need it here.

Jon Konrath: There are two things that really piss me off about the McDLT. First, it was discontinued when McDonald’s stopped using polystyrene, which I think was short-sighted and PR-driven. Polystyrene had been made without CFCs for years, and MCD did a lot of test runs of recycling programs that economically converted used PS into other internal products like chair backs and trays. But because polystyrene had a bad rap among armchair environmentalists, and MCD was the big target, they switched to coated paper products, which caused more landfill waste. And the whole issue is as stupid as arguing if the plastic used in your SUV is post-consumer recycled or not. If you care about the environment, don’t buy an SUV or eat at McDonald’s.

The other thing that really pisses me off is that if you look up McDLT on Wikipedia, it’s a page redirect to the Big N’ Tasty, which is a completely unrelated product, and that’s the perfect example of what’s wrong with Wikipedia. It’s like how if you look up the Yugo, it redirects to the Zastava Koral. Why? Just write another article on the American Yugo. And if I asked a hundred people if they knew about the McDLT, a good number of them would probably remember it. I don’t even know what the hell a Big N’ Tasty is.

JMO: Speaking again of writers showcasing absurdity, have you ever read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America? I think you totally should if not!

Jon Konrath: I’ve got a copy of it staring at me from the to-read pile and I need to get on it. My local bookseller (Spectator Books in Oakland) also forced me to buy this huge, Infinite Jest-sized biography of his, also still on the pile. I’ll get there.

JMO: Now that Thunderbird is out, do you have any inkling where you want to go with your next project, or are you letting your creative juices simmer and marinate for the time being?

Jon Konrath: The worst parts of my life are right after I finish a book, because I go into these huge postpartum depressions and don’t know what to do next. Sometimes I try to find something else creative to do. When I finished Fistful of Pizza, I went out and bought a bunch of iPhone programming books and tried to write a Tetris ripoff for the iPad. After Sleep Has No Master, I went back to playing bass guitar, which I hadn’t done in twenty years. But I lose momentum and it’s hard to get going again. And when I don’t write, the depression gets huge. This time, I forced myself to keep writing, and it’s been better, but it’s still a massive struggle.

It’s also hard for me to start another project without knowing how the last one was received. I feel like I could probably belt out another book similar to Thunderbird in quick order, but I don’t really know how it did. It’s also hard for me to just do another book like the last one. It reminds me of bands like AC/DC – whom I love – but who basically put out the same album every year. I’m my own worst critic, and a glass-half-empty guy, and it takes me a couple of years to go back and look at something I wrote and think it’s good, especially after I read it nineteen times a week for two months during editing. So there’s always a feeling that the last project wasn’t great and I need to do more next time. (Of course, if you haven’t read the book yet, it is awesome, and you should go buy multiple copies.)

My favorite book I’ve written was Rumored to Exist, and I think after every project, the first thing that comes to mind is to write another book like it, only better. But that book was a seven-year process, and when I was well into year six, I still didn’t know where it was heading. I’ve been writing these ultra-short flash sketches, and I’m like 50,000 words into a collection of them, but the whole thing has no form or theme. So one has to emerge, or I need to think of some way to tie it together. Or maybe one of the pieces will slowly expand and become a book. All I know now is that I can’t plan this, and I need to keep moving and not lose momentum, so I’ll keep at it.