Degrees of Difficulty: An Interview with Julie Justicz

Jan English Leary: I met Julie in 2011 in a novel workshop we both attended and since then we have continued to exchange manuscripts. I learned that years earlier we’d just missed overlapping at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we both received MFAs. Over these past years, I have watched this novel grow and deepen. Julie is a brave writer, who throws out pages I would be proud to claim as mine, someone who digs deep, always challenging herself to find rich insights, compelling situations, and beautiful language. Her work is both dynamically plotted and psychologically complex, her characters appealing yet flawed, utterly believable. I am thrilled that her beautiful novel is at last coming out. It is all the more rich for the long gestation.

Your novel brings to mind the Tolstoy line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This book is about a family coping with the very specific challenge of a disabled child and also about how all parents struggle to raise children and allow them to grow up and individuate. I know that you originally wanted to focus on the four humors of the blood: air, fire, earth, water as indicators of personality. How did this concept inform your novel?

Julie Justicz: Jan, thanks so much for your kind introduction here. Our friendship, as you note, started in a novel workshop in 2011 and has continued over the past eight years in our own small writing group. Most of our time together has been spent discussing manuscripts and/yet I feel so close to you! In sharing our writing—especially early work that is vulnerable and raw–we serve a part of our soul. Thanks for being a caring and smart editor and a trusted friend. And thanks for doing this interview.

The early version of my novel was, as you remember, structured around the Four Humors—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—which according to Hippocrates and his heirs governed a person’s temperament—sanguine (upbeat, adventurous), phlegmatic (calm and unassuming), melancholic (quiet, depressive), and choleric (angry), depending on the balance/imbalance of humors. I’d started my novel in the first-person perspective of Ivy, the only daughter and oldest child in the Novotny family. But after writing several chapters in her voice, I found she came off rather angry, a bit brash and dismissive of her family. I wondered about her parents, her brothers . . . how would their experiences differ from Ivy’s? So, I experimented with the humors: that is, I wrote through four point of view characters, each dominated by a particular humor. That helped me complicate and then complete the story. In the end, I kept the four different voices—two parents and two kids—but tossed out the Four Humors as a structuring tool; they’d become unnecessary scaffolding by the time I finished the novel.

Leary: Your novel has four points of view: the two parents, Perry and Caroline, and two of their children, Ivy and Hugo. You did a great job of balancing the points of view, of making the novel focus on a family’s response to having a child with severe developmental issues. Was it hard to find that balance? Was one point of view harder to find and to maintain? Did one character fight to take over?

Justicz: I wrote in Ivy’s first-person perspective in the beginning; I had several chapters in her voice before I tried any other point of view. So, it’s probably understandable that she dominated the narrative through three or four drafts of the novel. I had to push her back, toss out some of her scenes, even a few chapters, and then rewrite her sections in a third-person perspective to get the balance I was seeking. Perry, the father, came quickly; I understood his “game face on and best foot forward” attitude. Caroline, the mother, and Hugo, the middle child, were harder for me to capture and to give full expression. I needed to find a way to show the mother’s melancholia, thwarted career desires, suppressed anger and still make her sympathetic. I felt judgmental about her and I had to go deeper into her character to find empathy and fully humanize her. And Hugo remained a cipher through many rewrites—the quiet middle child, not rocking the boat, perhaps a little too perfect to be true? How then to make him real? That took some time.

Leary: There are four points of view but five major characters. Benjamin, the youngest child, being almost completely non-verbal, appears on the page but doesn’t have a point of view. You do a beautiful job of describing him, giving him humanity and beauty. What were the challenges of creating this character?

Justicz: Benjamin, a boy born with profound disabilities, only makes one sound—“guh,”—which he uses to communicate with his family. I experimented with finding a narrative voice for him but what I wrote seemed too lyrical and didn’t jibe with his lived experience. Nonetheless, wordless Ben is the heart of his family and the needle in the heart of his family. I tried to show his needs, idiosyncrasies, desires; he is someone who literally jumps for joy, screams with delight, and gets frustrated when he cannot share his excitement or express his anger. He also feels happiest when he is with his beloved brother, Hugo. Because he doesn’t speak, I had to use Ben’s family–the four point of view narrators–to reveal his complexity. Ben’s parents and siblings live with him, care for him, and love him. They also have the responsibility of finding their own way in life, fulfilling their wants and needs and dreams, apart from Ben. If they can. What does this cost?

Leary: Having seen earlier drafts of your novel, I know that you wrote and then discarded some really wonderful material. I admire that nerve to shed what is both beautifully written and compelling. Is your process generally one of writing big and cutting back or was that particularly true of this novel?

Justicz: Because this is my first novel, I was learning a great deal as I wrote—through trial and a lot of error. I didn’t know anything about structure—I was putting ink on paper and persevering. I needed a lot of material to make a book and I plugged away. Turns out that many of the pages did not do much to advance the story. But I didn’t know what story I was telling—and what I could chuck out—until I reached the end. I also had the privilege of working with a smart editor, Marc Estrin at Fomite, who told me several times to rework the final section of the novel. I kept offering him minor changes that were not enough. Keep at it, he’d say. When I finally lopped off the last 100 pages and rewrote the ending entirely, I had what I needed.

Leary: I love the title Degrees of Difficulty. Everyone in that family faces a very specific level of difficulty. I also know that you considered other titles. How did you come to choose this one?

Justicz: I decided on Degrees of Difficulty after living with another title for several years. My editor pushed me to find a new title that referenced diving and somehow referenced the family. “Degree of difficulty” refers to a rating scale of the complexity of an athlete’s maneuver. Hugo is a champion diver, who channels his emotions into a strict and rigorous training regimen. So, the title is a direct reference to his sport and his physical achievement. The title is also a play on words, referring to the various struggles that every member of the Novotny family encounters. I like the notion that a degree of difficulty in athletics—a quantitative rating—is always multiplied by another number . . . a qualitative assessment of performance. So how hard are the various challenges each family member faces—and how do they manage these challenges? With humor? With anger? With grace?

Leary: Not to dwell on the influence of your own life, but I know that there are similarities to your family of origin, that you had a brother with disabilities. What are the challenges of writing fiction that is based, in part, on your family? Did you feel that the desire to tell a good story competed with a need to get the facts straight? How did you free yourself to write about people you know? Is it in the act of embellishing that you find the freedom or are you anchored by the kernel of truth?

Justicz: Wow, there are so many thought-provoking questions you’ve raised here. Yes, the novel had its roots in my family of origin. My fictional Ben has the same disabilities as my youngest brother Robert, who was born with partial monosomy 21. One of the first stories I wrote for my MFA program was about a young boy with disabilities and his relationship with two siblings. I tapped into some of my own feelings as a sibling—namely a profound sense of family loyalty, an incredibly deep and abiding love for my disabled brother, and, to be honest, a good deal of resentment, too. The resentment shone brightest in that story. Coming back to it years later as a starting point for my novel, I realized that I would need to add the voices of the other family members to give the story more breathing room.

Apart from Ben—who was based on Robert, the other characters in the novel are amalgamations. I used personal experiences and emotions to feed the fiction, if that makes sense. I had to give myself permission to embellish, exaggerate, make things up—and I had to ask my family to try to understand that my writing is not about recreating our experience or laying blame; it’s about me exploring the emotional truth that I carry, that may be nothing like their truth. What’s that saying? All of it is true; none of it happened.

Leary: How did you decide to have diving be a major activity for Hugo? And when did you land on the idea that Ivy would become an endocrinologist? You do a great job of showing people at work, a builder, an academic, a physician, a lifeguard. What is the importance, for you, of showing work in a character’s life?

Justicz: I knew I wanted Hugo to be an incredibly skilled athlete whose physical appearance would differ dramatically from Ben’s. I’m not sure why I settled on diving except that I swam in high school and I remember being fixated by the incredible feats of our divers. We swimmers were all about endurance, a group of knuckleheads packed into six lanes and churning out lap after lap after lap while staring at the black line. The divers, though, were athletes and artists.

You asked about jobs. I suppose I wanted/needed each of my characters to have a gravitational pull away from homelife. I made Ivy a reproductive endocrinologist because I liked how it would highlight her reluctance to have children of her own even as she spent every minute of her day helping other people conceive. For Caroline and Perry, I found jobs that were, I suppose, inapposite—one deeply cerebral, one much more physical. I analyzed late Shakespearean plays for Caroline and explored new home construction for Perry. That part of writing fiction is fun for me. . .it allows for digression and exploration and yes, procrastination.

Leary: Could you talk about what you’re working on now?

Justicz: A second novel—I’m thinking of calling it the The Time-traveling Crawdad’s Wife.

Change: Wisdom from the Acients—and from Chinese Teens

Dr. Martha Franks, professor at St. John’s College, taught Western historical literature abroad to Chinese high school students, from 2011-2014, in a course with the theme of ‘change.’

She worked through a Socratic method of engaging the students in conversation and carrying out the entire semester through class discussions. This was somewhat of a challenge as the students in her classroom were not used to speaking up in class. She also simultaneously educated herself by reading several classic works from Chinese history, so she was learning cross-culturally along with the students.

Here’s my interview with Dr. Franks about her experience.

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Cristina Deptula: What is St. John’s College’s educational philosophy? Why does it focus on discussions and questions? What sorts of academic programs is it known for? 

Martha C. Franks: St. John’s College believes that we learn by talking together about the great creative works of the human spirit. The college is committed to the idea that classic original texts offer foundational insights about ourselves and our society and that students should form their own opinions of these works rather than being told by textbooks and lectures what to think about them. Discussions and questions are the way to enter these works because the conversation among human ideas is not something to absorb from a distance – it should be joined with the passionate interest the comes from listening and responding to the original voices of inspired minds. Having joined the conversation that brought us to where we are, students can contribute with confidence to the further conversations that are likely to shape our future.

St. John’s has only one program of teaching; that is, discussions about great works. Under this broad program, undergraduates concentrate on the great books of the Western world. There are two graduate programs at the College. One, the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, looks at the same works as the undergraduate program, while another, the Eastern Classics program, takes the St. John’s approach toward classics of China, India and Japan. Non-degree offerings in the summer offer occasions to apply the St. John’s approach in looking at film, fine art, music (including opera) and at books that have not always been recognized as part of the canon, but may deserve such recognition.

The St. John’s College program grew from radical criticism of the structure of liberal arts education in the early 20th century. The concerns that the College sought to address then are perhaps even more relevant today, when liberal arts education is challenged by exclusively STEM-based or narrow vocational education. Anyone who wishes to learn more about the St. John’s program can, of course, consult the College’s website.

CD: If you could do the semester in China over again, what would you change? 

MCF: Not much. I might have a few different choices of exactly what books to read. The only real difference is that, if I were to return, I would be able to show more confidence that an approach that I loved myself was something that Chinese students would also love. Conversation is a human thing. It’s how many of us learn best. It was wonderful to be part of a conversation that, while sometimes surprising because of the different backgrounds of the participants, was like all serious conversation in the delight of exchanging ideas.

CD: Could you describe classroom etiquette and culture in China vs. the USA (what you’ve experienced and where you teach)? 

MCF: Chinese students were not used to talking in class. They had a hard time believing that I genuinely wanted to hear what they had to say. Although they did not complain, they also doubted that expressing their ideas would lead to learning. It took some time before they entered into conversation without being self-conscious. Once that began to happen, however, they were quick to feel the curiosity and joy of their minds at work, taking them places that they could only go on their own. It was lovely to see. American students sometimes come at conversation from the opposite direction. They are familiar with raising their voices but must get used to the skill of listening to responses and building on them. After a while together, though, I did not see a difference in the conversations that developed in China and America.

CD: What did the students relate to the most in the books you all read, and what confused them the most? 

MCF: The students were quick to feel and empathize with human beings in the situations that the great books address—war, matters of friendship, loyalty and love, the search for justice and the endurance of pain. They were deeply interested in how to understand science as a human endeavor—what difference do science and technology make in the experience of living a life?

The most puzzling topic for Chinese students was religion. They did not know what to make of struggles over religious doctrine. That conversation will take some work.

CD: Should we teach a traditional canon? What would a ‘global literary canon’ look like? Who would decide what’s in the global canon, and how would they make those decisions? 

MCF: The experiment of St. John’s College’s great books program, which has been going on for almost eighty years, has shown that an education based on conversations around great works of the human spirit can open and free minds, as well as being amazingly fun. It’s a harder question to try to identify exactly which books belong on a great books list. A few are always at the center of a Western canon—Homer, Euclid, Plato, Shakespeare—but most of the rest have their advocates and opponents. Conversation about that list is always going on and the list changes with different sensibilities, especially as one comes to more recent works. It has been wonderful to be part of the evolution of the St. John’s list to include the voices of women and minorities speaking to the human experience from points of view that were for too long too often missing from the conversation. When a global list comes about the conversation will grow again. The dream is to include all points of view so that humanity is fully heard from.

CD: How are our societies influenced by our culture’s foundational literature, even when many of us haven’t read our traditional books? 

MCF: Attitudes and ideas fill the air we breathe, whether we are aware of them or not. For example, in America it seems obvious that the goal of society is to promote freedom. That attitude didn’t come from nowhere. It was proposed and articulated by particular people—John Stuart Mill, for one – who were contributing new ideas to a conversation about human purposes. For many centuries the participants in that conversation had seemed to agree that the goal of society was not to promote freedom but to uphold virtue and order even at the cost of freedom. We understand our present debates between liberals and conservatives if we have in mind the earlier conversation that shaped our shared traditions. Only then can we see what has been at stake in that clash of ideas and form a personal opinion about why we have chosen as we have.

In cultures with different traditional conversations the focus on freedom that Americans take for granted looks different and can seem dangerous, even though the impulse toward freedom is something that is present in every human community and is not strange to Eastern thinkers. That situation is another reason why working to create a single, global conversation is so important. Attitudes and ideas that have been unconsciously absorbed and never examined can result in misunderstandings and distrust, whereas listening to each other’s conversations can show how the same human problems are always present. We must work to understand our own foundational ideas better, which will make it possible to feel the human reasonableness of another culture’s foundational ideas.

CD: Did you think that Chinese society was influenced by their foundational books? More so than the USA? What surprised you the most about their foundational works? 

MCF: Yes, I believe that Chinese society has been influenced by its foundational books. Students are taught to read Tang era poetry and are aware, but often not really familiar with, classical authors such as Kongzi (Confucius) and Mengzi (Mencius). However, China’s relation to its own literary tradition is an especially interesting case because of the overlay of the Western ideology of Marxism. Nevertheless, as China grows cautiously away from a Marxist economy, it has been developing what it calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Those “Chinese characteristics” are not defined but they must be related to China’s pride in its five-thousand-year history of civilization, a pride that is deeper than any political dogma. Confucius has been increasingly re-established and celebrated in China, with his emphasis on ritual and humaneness. No doubt there will be hesitations along the way, but I believe that China will find its way into a modern, uniquely Chinese re-assertion of Confucian humaneness that will be in conversation with the Western notion of the humanities.

It’s hard to say which culture is more influenced by its foundational works—that would be a lifetime’s study. If there is truth in the sketch I have offered here, that the canon of Western culture has developed into a focus on freedom, whereas Eastern culture has more often emphasized virtue and order, then both are pointing to fundamental human impulses that will continue to converse in all and each of us.

What surprised me most in studying Eastern classics was recognizing this struggle that I had seen in the Western canon too between the desire and need for freedom, especially in the mind, and the necessity of discipline. It’s a human problem and we can help each other with it.

CD: What sorts of ancient Western concepts did the Chinese students relate to, and which were mystifying to them? 

MCF: The students related to all matters of our common humanity, which was wonderful for all of us. It was great to feel that we were people together, trying to figure out how to live in this bewildering world. We could converse and understand each other.

Some of our cultural prejudices were different. In America, there is a saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”  In the East, there is a saying “it is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered.” So the students were more reluctant to talk than their American counterparts (although some of this was due to second language issues), and disliked disagreement more.

Religion was mystifying to them.  They had no experience of it and did not know how to understand what it was in the West.  When we read the Iliad they wondered if the gods of Greece were what religion still looked like.  When we tried to read some of the texts of early Christianity they were simply bewildered and did not talk at all.

CD: What would you say you learned from Chinese culture and history? What do they emphasize that the Western world could learn from? 

MCF: As I gave my Chinese students Western classics to read, I also read Eastern classics as a way of empathizing from the other direction with their exploration of an entirely different culture. The picture in China is complicated, in that Marxism is a Western idea, and the desire to catch up with the West technologically is a powerful force in China, which means that Western ideas can generate a mix of desire and resentment.  Many of my students did not know very much about their own cultural past, although they were proud of China’s five thousand years of civilization.

The chief thing that I learned, or at least meditated on a great deal, was this picture of Chinese identity arising somehow from those five thousand years, even though governments and cultural sensibilities evolved and changed enormously in that length of time. It is a vision of identity that has less to do with particular ideals and ideologies, and more to do with a sense of living within deep time.

I also came to appreciate and admire the combination of delicacy and strength in Chinese art and poetry. Classic Eastern texts like The Dream of the Red Chamber are gentle and sensitive to a degree that a person can feel lost in fragile beauty.  The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by contrast, is a warrior tale of relentless war, although it too contains moments of gentleness and sensitivity. I think the West, and perhaps all of us humans, could spend more time seeing beauty.

CD: What makes a literary work a classic? Why should we still teach the traditional canon? What about efforts to update or diversify it?

MCF: A classic work is one that can be read again and again and never be exhausted of meaning and engagement. As member of the faculty of St. John’s College, a school that reads great books as the center of the curriculum, I have read Homer and Plato and Augustine and Shakespeare many times. Every time I read these books I find more in them that speaks to my present life as well as to my mind and heart.

We need to teach these books because of that experience of how inexhaustible they are.  As I watch college students reading them, I am glad—sometimes thinking of my Chinese students—to offer them the proud, compelling gifts of their human heritage.

Greatness is certainly not confined to any particular culture, gender or any such false separations of the human experience. Sadly, the practical reality of the dominating tendency of our species is that women and many cultures were not allowed to produce the works of profound beauty that we needed from them. When such works are found, either in the past or the present, they become part of the canon.

CD: Do you feel that modern Chinese people are still influenced by the values in their classic literature? What about modern Americans, is our culture and literary world still influenced by thinking in the traditional Western ‘great books?’

MCF: Yes to both questions.  Even when people are not aware of how these deep structures to their culture influence them, the influence is there. Part of the value of reading the canon is to notice those influences working. A reader discovers in their original form as new ideas things that the reader realizes s/he had previously unthinkingly accepted as if obviously true. From that changed relationship with these ideas, the ideas can be reassessed.  The reader may continue to think them true, but now they feel true in a fuller, surer way.

In my class on American law in China, for example, we discussed the line in the American Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal….”  The conversation ranged fearlessly over questions of gender, creation and the definition of equality.  By the end of that conversation there was both agreement and disagreement, but both were articulated and could be considered in the open.  The conversation will undoubtedly continue for all of us.

CD: Would you recommend teaching abroad in China? Do you feel that you grew through the experience? 

MCF: Yes again. Physical distance and the change of culture has a similar effect of allowing a person to look carefully at themselves and notice the things that they might previously have accepted unthinkingly. Reading great books is like traveling to the past, while traveling more literally provides a different kind of dislocation. Both are valuable to understanding who you are.

CD: Could you teach this way in the US? How much freedom do teachers have in other countries to create and influence curriculum? 

MCF: I was very lucky to have gone to China exactly when I did, when there was a flowering of experiments in progressive education. We had a good deal of freedom to create a curriculum. Some of those experiments are still going on, but China, as I describe in my book, is conflicted about the value of a liberal arts education. For decades, China concentrated on a STEM education, that is, one focused on math and science. Recently that has changed, as some have argued that the liberal arts should be taught as a source of creativity for China. Others, however, are against that change, concerned that the liberal arts are foolish luxuries and can also be subversive politically.

The same conflict is going on in the United States, as many liberal arts colleges are struggling. It would be a shame if liberal arts declines in the United States just as it arises in China. For me, the liberal arts display the full range of what it is to be human.  We all need that.

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Dr. Martha Franks’ Books Without Borders is available here from Respondeo Publishing.

The Shock of the Election: Ruth Danon and Martin Ott in Conversation

Ruth Danon and Martin Ott engaged in a cross country conversation about their new books, which, quite coincidentally both took on the difficult period before during and after the 2016 election.

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Martin Ott: Ruth, I have now read Word Has It a couple of times and I marvel at the apparent simplicity of some of poems but the complexity of the layering in them and strands that weave throughout, along with the structure of the different sections of your book. Would you mind providing insights into your narrative strategy for Word Has It?

Ruth Danon: Thank you, Martin, for such a good question. I’m not sure that “strategy” is the word I would use. In my work almost everything is a discovery – that is to say I don’t plan in advance. Some of what happens is a consequence of the working method I’ve adopted in the last 5 years or so. I try to write a small piece every day. Sometimes I’ll write a whole series of little texts that connect. The “word” poems were like that. Sometimes a poem will lead me to something I want to pursue. That explains divination in the last section.

The narrative structure emerged after Yuyutsu Sharma, the Nepali poet, who scouts for Nirala, asked me for a book. I headed to my house in the country, with a pile of poems and no idea what to do with them. I sat on the enclosed porch with the printed-out poems, and tried to understand what I had. This was summer 2016 and we were in the anxious period before the election. Many poems had a kind of foreboding in them. Other poems had a focus on the domestic. Bird poems seemed connected to the foreboding poems. I began to feel that I had been tracking something, not fully aware of what I was doing. I made piles that suggested a narrative progression. Then came the shock of the election. I had been moving poems around and writing new ones, struggling with what they implied. I saw that I was tracking what it was like to live through events as they unfolded. The poems were pushing towards the violence that erupts in the two final pieces about the Pulse nightclub massacre.

RD: That leads me to my first question. In your book, Fake News Poems, you operate, it seems, from a similar need to bear witness to what has been happening during this terrible time in our history. I’m curious as to whether you determined your constraint ahead of time or whether you found yourself writing these poems based on headlines and then just kept at it. I’m also curious about your working method and the state of mind that governed the way you approached the problem of writing political poems without succumbing to polemic, one of the many aspects of this work that I admire.

MO: Fake News Poems was an idea I had in a time when I and many other writers were having difficulty finding their voices just before the inauguration of President Trump. The concept of 52 headlines, 52 weeks, 52 poems was something I had at the beginning but I was also hyper-aware that the book needed to cover a range of topics: social, cultural, scientific, and political in order to not be one note. I also integrated parts of my life and my own struggles even I tried to capture the temperature of our country. The book explores the subject of truth more broadly than Trump, and he pops in and out of poems like a mythical creature almost. The best political poetry is like the best poetry in that it explores topics and uncovers mysteries in the muck instead of trumpeting certainties. In these poems, I also learn a little bit about the world and myself.

MO: Both of us have been writing for a number of years with multiple books. What challenges do you face as a mid-career poet in a landscape that seems to reward and celebrate new poets and their work?

RD: I admire and envy the new voices coming along who garner so much attention. I also welcome the opportunity to reflect on my own long relationship to poetry. I cannot think of a time in my life when I did not write. But until recently it did not seem to me that it was a “career.” Writing was something I did. I couldn’t live happily without writing. But it wasn’t a “profession.” Teaching was my profession. I did it well and I loved the methods I created. Developing those method felt like creating a living poem.

In grad school a number of people had told me to take my writing “seriously.” That was hard for me. In so many ways I did everything wrong. My first book came out in 1990. Then no book for a long time. In 2000 I got very sick and when I emerged from 8 years of illness and complications I had a different attitude. I knew I had to take writing seriously. I finished what became Limitless Tiny Boat. Soon after I was asked by Nirala for a book. That’s how Word Has It came into being. So now what? The next book concerns me more than competition from the young. The writing is what’s important. The challenge is to figure out where to go next, how to write something that genuinely matters to me.

RD:I wanted to return to your previous answer and ask you what did you learn about yourself and the world by writing Fake News Poems?

MO: My previous three books of poetry were similarly constructed and I wanted to take a departure from the work I’d done before, to take a few risks and push myself outside of my comfort zone. After the 2016 election, I found it near-impossible to write poetry without the anger ebbing through my work and I decided to use Fake News Poems as a way to navigate through my emotions, to open myself to the possibilities of headlines, instead of seething for an entire year. My own personal life also came into focus as these dynamics leapt into these poems, almost unbidden.

Freed of my normal writing process, I also discovered that wordplay and humor that I readily deployed in my personal life was accessible in this book of poetry. One news headline, “It’s Time to Do Nothing About Guns” from The National Review, I decided to transform into a surreal homage to guns and gun culture, replacing our children with firearms. I also explored my love of reading and writing science fiction, imagining workers trapped in large vending machines of multinational corporations, the tragicomic impact of technology in our loves, and a robot president finding his place as an entertainer in a Disney theme park.

One thing I struggle with as a writer working outside of academia is community. I’ve tried hard to build long-distance relationships via social media and attending conferences such as AWP as a way to feel closer to writers I admire and their work.

MO: What has teaching done for you to connect you more closely with poetry?

RD: I’m taking the question in two ways. I think you’re asking how teaching and poetry intersect. You are also asking about the relationship between teaching and the world of poetry. In other words, has academia provided me with a writing community?

Teaching has taught me a lot about poetry. I first taught creative writing at a community college in Connecticut. My students were Vietnam Veterans and mothers on welfare. I gave them an assignment. They went home and did it and came back with the most awful cliché ridden productions. I was in despair. I was reading Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and I decided to have students write in class using the simple constraints Koch used with children. It worked! The students wrote wonderfully. I learned the usefulness of language and time as constraints. I’m now out of academia (a forced exit) and teaching completely on my own terms. I can focus on what interests me. Lately I’ve been thinking about lineation and its relationship to meaning. I recently re-discovered the brilliance of Robert Frost’s poetry. I hadn’t studied him since graduate school and never focused on the tricks he plays with line breaks and caesura. Teaching takes me outside of my usual paths of literary influence.

About community. Whatever community I have has come outside of academia, often through private teaching, informal writing groups, or social media. When my NYU job ended I had the good fortune of moving to Beacon, where community seems a bit easier to find. It’s easy to imagine that elsewhere writers are living rich lives involving endless gatherings of like-minded people drinking sherry at academic gatherings. Maybe there are happy writers living perfect lives. My academic life wasn’t like that. Life outside of academia is far richer than life inside.

A conversation like this makes me want to invite you to dinner right away. How about a little cross-country vacation?

Now, seriously, one last question.

RD: One aspect of your work that I admire (you allude to it in your last response) is how much of the world you bring you bring into your poems.. In your work you refer to your military experience. I wonder how the military prepared you (or not) for poetry. I expect you were quite young when you entered the military. Did you have ideas about writing or being a writer before then or was it something that came later?

MO: Thanks for allowing me to reminisce about my time in the Army. My experiences in the military were not common, I think. I was a linguist and interrogator. My friends in military intelligence discussed books and music, and one, Peter, provided me a reading list, like an instructor, when he saw the gaps in my education from growing up in a small town in Michigan. These books I devoured during these transformative years changed my life for the better, and opened up many doors and windows to a larger world.

When my active duty ended, I weighed several options in the intelligence community, and decided, ultimately, to attend the University of Michigan, where I got a BA in English and took my first creative writing classes. I’ve been blessed to make my living writing, as a copywriter and marketing communications professional, along with a colorful second career writing projects for film and TV, publishing novels and a short story collection, and always poetry, the medium I return to time and time again.

Ruth, I adore road trips and I may end up on your doorstep one night for dinner. Please look me up if you are ever in Los Angeles. It’s been a pleasure to get to know you and your writing better.

The Light Source: An Interview with Kim Magowan

I met Kim Magowan in late 2014. We both entered a Sixfold fiction contest. If you don’t know it, it’s a contest in which the winners are selected by the various writers who enter work into the contest. Stories are submitted anonymously, and voting takes place over three rounds, each writer randomly assigned six stories per round. Kim was assigned my story during one of those rounds. Kim was one of the few readers who left me detailed feedback, and her comments were insightful and generous. If you’ve never submitted to Sixfold, let me tell you, this is a rarity. Somehow, despite all the voters who said things like, I kid you not, that they wished the protagonist of my story would drive off a cliff and die, I ended up winning that contest, and I emailed Kim after to take her up on reading an edited version of the story. We hit it off, and we’ve been sending each other our drafts ever since. Since July of 2017, we’ve been collaboratively writing a short story collection together.

The story Kim submitted in that Sixfold contest was the opening chapter from her debut novel, The Light Source (7.13 Books). Kim is also the author of the short story collection, Undoing, which was winner of the 2017 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Indiana Review, New World Writing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many other venues. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019. She is fiction editor of Pithead Chapel. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. www.kimmagowan.com

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Michelle Ross: The Light Source began as a few individual, but linked, short stories and at some point you made a conscious decision to expand the grouping with the intention of shaping them into a novel. Which stories/chapters had you written already when you made that decision? What was the first chapter you wrote after you decided you were working on the novel? And how did knowing it was now a novel change the writing process or did it?

Kim Magowan: I feel like my process with the novel is textbook “what not to do”! I wrote the book all out of order. The first section I drafted was the Beth chapter, Chapter 3, when I was in graduate school, around when the chapter takes place (1994). I saw it as a stand-alone story. Soon after, I wrote the Heather chapter (Chapter 2). In 2011, when at long last I became serious about writing, I dusted off those two stories and substantially revised them. That same year I went to my 25th high school reunion, and afterwards wrote the Mamie chapter (Chapter 6). Once that was drafted, I wrote the Porter chapter (Chapter 4)—he was my villain, he needed to tell his side of the story. All this time I believed I was writing a bunch of linked short stories, along the lines of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, but I was becoming increasingly uneasy. For one, both the Mamie story and Porter story are really long, and for two, the Porter story was too profane to publish. It was my favorite thing I’d written to date, but I knew it didn’t really work as a stand-alone story. Around this time (2012), an agent contacted me to ask if I was working in a novel, and I realized (duh!) of course I was—kicking and screaming, denying it all the way. So in the next 5 weeks, when I was in New Orleans with my family, I slapped together a first draft of both the Julie chapter (Chapter 7) and the Ian chapter (Chapter 1). It was the most intensive writing experience of my life—I wrote about 70 pages in 5 weeks. In the next few years I added material, mostly to the Julie chapter. I cut a chapter that seemed too Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the others,” though that’s the opening story to my Undoing collection (and if you read “When in Rome,” you’ll see I never bothered to change the character names, so Julie has a cameo appearance). The Pam chapter (Chapter 5) came last. Unfortunately I suspect the only way I can write a novel is in this Homer Simpson “Doh!” backdoor way. I am too intimidated to write a NOVEL (oh my) unless I fall into it accidentally.

MR: Probably my favorite chapter is the Heather chapter. A lot of that chapter is Heather strolling through memories—of Julie over the years, but also of Heather’s family and her own life—but at the same time, the chapter/story feels grounded in the present because Heather is physically strolling around Amsterdam as she broods and you do such an amazing job of bringing that place to life. Writing that particular chapter in the way you did seems now like such a natural, inevitable choice. How else do you pull off so much meandering into backstory unless the character is presently meandering through space, right? Is this something you were thinking about as you wrote the chapter?

KM: Thank you! I like that chapter too. Heather is my favorite character. She captured my imagination early on. I got loads of nice rejection letters for that story before The Gettysburg Review published it, and I think it kept getting rejected because nothing really happens—Heather writes a letter and ruminates. Amsterdam, for me, is the perfect setting for deep-dive introspection that isn’t necessarily productive. It’s a beautiful city and also a decadent city. My memories of Amsterdam are a weird combination of precise and smeary. I needed Heather to be in a place where she felt lost, far away from Julie, trying to get her bearings, sifting through a past made complicated because of Julie’s denial and Heather’s collusion. Heather feels alone, even when she isn’t physically alone (she makes a friend but a friend who doesn’t speak her languages). A lot of my novel is about watching—characters are always watching each other, particularly observing Julie. Amsterdam for me is the essence of a voyeuristic city.

MR: There is a lot of voyeurism in your novel, but it’s largely a kind of claustrophobic voyeurism in that this is a group of friends studying and commenting on each other over the years, much in the way that families often do. There are quite a few moments in the novel when one of them says something about Julie or Heather to others in the group along the lines of “You know Julie…” or “You know Heather…” There can be something comforting in people thinking they know you, but on the other hand, it can be stifling and annoying as hell. While this novel is on one level a love story between two people, on another level, it’s a story of the dynamics between a large group of friends, the kind of group that operates much like a family, yes?

KM: Yes, absolutely—when I (inarticulately) describe my book, I say it’s about love and friendship. I went to boarding school, and your point feels absolutely true to me—one’s friends are like family, in both positive and negative ways. There’s this kind of intimate knowledge boarding school friends have of each other, and like family members, they know exactly how to wound. Beth refers to this precision wounding in her chapter as “many small splinters that embed themselves under our skin.” I tried to capture their intimacy by shorthand—for instance, through the obnoxious ways they “tease” each other, and the nicknames they have. They love each other but annoy each other. They think they have each other entirely figured out; they get a lot wrong. In different ways Heather and Julie both experience that group knowledge as stifling. Heather is regarded as the cavalier slut (for years none of them realize she’s deeply in love), and Julie is the good girl/ homecoming queen (if boarding schools had homecoming queens; they’re too patrician). It’s very hard for outsiders to break in to this kind of closed loop. Porter legitimately sees Julie’s friends as exclusionary.

MR: The Pam chapter is another favorite of mine. It’s tiny compared to the other chapters/stories, but Pam is no less realized than other characters in the novel, and it’s a perfect little story that reveals much about Heather. In choosing peripheral characters for the novel, did you plan out in any way what you thought these chapters needed to accomplish within the novel? Or did these characters and their stories come about more accidentally?

KM: I wrote the Pam chapter after I cut the Emily chapter (and threw that one into my Undoing collection). I decided Emily was too peripheral, but I wanted to insert a character who was an outsider, not part of this incestuous, warm knot of boarding school friends. Also, I wanted a tempering perspective on Heather. Mostly the reader experiences Heather as lovelorn, so I wanted an example of her treating a partner cavalierly. Heather is honest with Pam, but nonetheless she hurts her badly (even if Heather points out later that heartbreak is an inevitable risk of falling in love). Pam is my way of showing that Heather also has some blood on her hands.

MR: Was any particular character easier or more difficult to inhabit than the others?

KM: Strangely enough, Porter was very easy for me to inhabit. He’s the bad guy of the novel, but I felt like I completely understood him—I was channeling his voice. That chapter was the most fun to write. I needed to lay out clues that Porter was ignoring or misinterpreting. He’s a smart guy, but he misconstrues what he sees.

MR: We don’t hear Julie’s voice until the end of the novel. All that time we’ve gotten all these different characters’ versions of Julie, so when she finally speaks, it’s a little bit startling, in a good way, to finally get into her head. What’s more is that you do something different in Julie’s chapter with time. The other chapters in the novel move chronologically through time, each chapter occupying a distinct moment in time somewhere from 1994 to 2013. Julie’s chapter is composed of slices of 1994, 1997, 2006, 2012, and 2013, so we’re not only getting a present-time Julie, we’re getting the various Julies of the past as well. Would you talk about this choice to break the pattern of time in this way and to save all of Julie’s sections for last?

KM: Along with Heather, Julie’s the main character, but Heather is so open, and Julie is the opposite: closed and guarded. I needed her story to come at the end. I knew that choice was risky. She is not someone the reader is inclined to sympathize with by that point in the novel. My goal was not to make Julie likeable (frankly, I get very impatient with that adjective! I could give a crap about “likeable”), but to make her comprehensible. There are, as you say, various Julies, so I didn’t feel like I could write the 2012-13 version of her and leave it at that. I needed to show what she was thinking and feeling at earlier stages in the novel: why she chooses Heather, why she bails. The Julie chapter begins right where the Beth chapter ends—Beth sees Heather and Julie talking on the beach. I wanted to dramatize that conversation. Again, that was a chapter I wrote all out of order. I feel like I should attach a warning label: do not follow my madwoman, counter-productive process! The first part I wrote was the kitchen scene where Julie talks to Heather and their twins. Then I wrote the section where Julie has coffee with Porter, then a first section I later cut, then the ending. But I had to keep going back to that chapter and filling in more material, trying to flesh out Julie’s character, to clarify why she made her often problematic choices. I made her suffer more: the scene with her husband Rob was a later addition. So was the trampoline scene, because my novel was a love story missing a scene of Heather and Julie actually being a couple, in love, but struggling and at odds. The chapter originally began in 1986, when Ian, Julie, Heather, and Beth are in high school. I cut that section (it was leaden) late in my revision process, after Leland Cheuk had accepted the novel and I was doing a final tighten/ compression.

MR: Your story collection, Undoing, also contains several linked stories and you’ve written a few more linked stories since then. Why do you think you find yourself returning to particular characters again and again? Are you thinking about them between writing those stories or do they come back to you out of the blue?

KM: Ha! This goes back to what I said regarding your first question—the only way I can write a novel is to back into it, unawares. Either of those linked sets of stories (the Laurel ones, the Ben and Miriam ones) could have easily turned into a novel. This year I wrote yet another Laurel story and yet another Ben and Miriam story. Those characters have a hold on me; I know a lot more about them then I put on the page. But who the hell has the time to write a novel? And yes, I think about them in between writing about them, and I write about them when those thoughts get so brim-full they overflow. I may well end up writing a novel about them, but it will be entirely against my will.

MR: How would you compare the process of putting together the novel versus the story collection? Is there some metaphor that suitably encapsulates the different experiences?

KM: Oh man, the processes for me are so entirely different! With the short story collection, the big challenge was getting the story sequence right (though of course, as you and I have laughed and wailed over, no one seems to read short story collections in sequence, so so much for all those hair-tearing hours!). But I could yank any story I had doubts about, so the short story collection process appeals to the perfectionist in me. With a novel, you can’t just toss a chapter, because it holds up scaffolding. Revising novels is more frustrating and laborious. I kept imagining Tim Gunn from Project Runway, when he’s shaking his head over some godawful jumpsuit or ball gown and dictates, “Make it work.” A metaphor? I’d say putting together a story collection is like curating a museum show, figuring out which paintings belong in which rooms and how to light them. Putting together a novel is like being a 15th century cartographer who constantly has to adjust the map of the globe: “Oh shit, there’s a continent there. Must move everything around to make room for that new continent.” There are lots of smudgy eraser marks all over the novel map; it’s much less pristine.

MR: I asked you this question before in another interview when your story collection, Undoing, was published. Will you list ten words that encapsulate The Light Source?

KM: Friendship

Voyeurism

Denial

Betrayal

Trojan Horse

“Addiction”

Charades

Forgiveness

Circles

Light

MR: Why did you put addiction in quotation marks?

KM: I was thinking about one of my characters who identifies as a sex addict, and another character scoffs— she has no patience for that characterization, she believes it’s a way of letting himself off the hook. And I suppose the scare quotes represent for me a broader theme in my novel, a complicated relationship between abjection and accountability. Addicts are under a compulsion, whereas “addicts” persuade themselves they are under a compulsion. Sidenote: when you asked me for ten words, I resisted the urge to look up our last interview, but I bet Addiction was on my list for ten words about Undoing, and I bet there were no scare quotes around it. In an interview George Saunders said he consistently writes about class struggle, and that he doesn’t feel like he chooses that subject: it’s hardwired. There are certainly themes and plots I find myself returning to again and again.

MR: Finally, what’s one of your favorite lines from your novel?

KM: The Heather chapter is the prettiest, I think—the most pull-quotable. This bit is the essence of that chapter, because it shows Heather’s longing for Julie but also her frustration: “Last summer I read my little cousin Lucie a myth about a Greek girl who, unable to settle for having her god-lover only at night, against his warnings burns his fur cape and consequently loses him. ‘Why are you crying?’ Lucie asked me, and I couldn’t say, because I know how Psyche feels; because I want to burn that fucking cloak of fur.” Sidenote: I’ve always been fascinated by the Psyche myth, because it shows what is sexist about quest stories. Male characters go on quests and receive a reward—the princess, the crown. Female characters quest to retrieve what has been lost or stolen from them. On that note, I also like this line from the Porter chapter: “To some degree, all lovers are time machine conjurers, seeking to recover and to repair the past.”

The Jaguars that Prowl Our Dreams: An Interview with Poet and Novelist Mary Mackey

New York Times best-selling author Mary Mackey became a poet by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, being caught in volcanic eruptions, swarmed by army ants, stalked by vampire bats, threatened by poisonous snakes, making catastrophic decisions with regard to men, and reading.

Here is my interview with her, focused on her decades of writing, particularly her latest poetry collection The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams.

How were you able to write in such a dream state, with such a flow of superimposed dreamlike images, completely sober? How do you get into the state of mind that prepares you to write this sort of poetry? 

In the mid 1970’s, I decided that I needed some way to access my unconscious that did not involve drugs or alcohol (none of which I use) or exceptionally high fevers. Running a fever of near 107 degrees is too high a price to pay for anything, much less poetry. I knew there had to be a better way, and gradually I found it.

After exploring various possibilities, I put together a method which permits me to go deeply into my unconscious, access the nonverbal parts of my mind, and come up with images, metaphors, plots, ideas, and other materials. Put in simple terms, I stand on the threshold between dreaming and waking. This is very much like the state we are in in when we first wake up in the morning. Usually we forget our dreams almost immediately. I have figured out a way to remember unconscious material long enough to go to my computer or one of my notebooks and write it down.

To what extent are the places you visited still wild? How do the people in Costa Rica, Brazil and everywhere else you visited feel about economic development and ecological conservation? Is it possible to accomplish both goals? 

Although Costa Rica has one of the best national park systems in Latin America, much of the rainforest that I lived in when I was in my twenties has been cut down. I was told a few years ago that 90% of what I saw in the late 1960’s no longer exists. I don’t know if this is true and I haven’t gone back to look because it would be too heart-breaking.

As for Brazil, the Amazon is still vast. When you fly to Rio from the US, you fly over it for four hours. In 2004, my husband and I went up the Amazon starting at Manaus on a boat usually used to carry botanists and other scientists into the jungle. We traveled 2000 miles in all and saw only 3 small villages and two towns, neither of which had populations over 14,000. There was nothing else except jungle and water and sky. Unfortunately, all of that is now changing at a terrifyingly rapid pace. The new President of Brazil has opened formerly protected parts of the amazon to logging and mineral extraction. I have no idea how much of that vast, species-rich jungle will survive, but I think we should all be alarmed by its destruction.

As for how the people of Brazil feel about economic development and ecological conservation, I’m not equipped to say. Personally I feel that it is possible to feed the world’s population and protect biodiversity at the same time. A new book entitled Nature’s Matrix describes this positive scenario better than I ever could. I recommend checking it out.

How do you decide which poems should go in each book? Do you just write poems until you have enough for a book, or do you link them together by themes? 

Arranging the poems in a collection is an important process. My poems naturally fall into groups. I write until I have more than enough for a collection. Then I cull out all but the best poems and put them into their groups. When I started selecting the poems for The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, I came up with 248 poems. Clearly that was far too many, so I went back and selected the best of the best. Jaguars now contains 132 poems, each­ selected with a great deal of thought about how it fits the whole.

I believe that my attention to arrangement was one of the reasons Jaguars won a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award and the 2019 Erich Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press.

How would you describe the main themes of your collection? 

If I could simply describe the themes of Jaguars, I wouldn’t have needed to write the poems. Good poetry exists in a realm beyond logical prose description. It’s evocative, touching the mind and the emotions and the human unconscious all at the same time. So let me answer this question by asking a question in return: The title of my recent collection is The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams. The jaguar is the jungle’s top predator. When the shamans of the upper Amazon do their vision quests with Ayahuasca, they believe that they become jaguars prowling through the dream world. But we aren’t shamans from the upper Amazon (at least most of us probably aren’t). So let me ask you: what jaguars prowl your dreams?

How do you reconcile celebrating all of nature, all its wild ferocity and predation and death, and then celebrating kindness? 

That’s the great question, the one religious leaders and philosophers have tried to answer for thousands of years. It’s the question William Blake asks in his poem “The Tyger.” I can’t answer it. I’m a poet, not a philosopher. As poet, my duty is to bear witness to what is, not what might be. Wild ferocity, predation, death, kindness, love, beauty, tenderness, anger, greed, generosity, timid grass-eating deer and stalking jaguars all exist; and I see myself as describing, celebrating, and in some sense preserving them, for future generations in all their contradictory complexity.

Language and Laughter: Two Writers in Conversation

Peg Alford Pursell and Nancy Au first met at the College of Marin (in Northern California) over nine years ago, when Nancy enrolled in her first writing class, a flash fiction class taught by Peg. Deeply inspired by Peg’s teaching, Nancy began attending North Bay Writers, a writing workshop Peg founded and facilitated in Sausalito. During this time, Peg also founded the award-winning literary reading series Why There Are Words (which since has become a celebrated national series and also inspired Peg’s founding and directing WTAW Press, a nonprofit independent publisher of books). Peg could see that not only was Nancy an original and talented writer, she was also interested in literary community building, and asked Nancy to become in involved with the series. Nancy began interning for WTAW in its second year. Nancy went on to earn her MFA from San Francisco State University, where she teaches creative writing. She is also an instructor at California State University Stanislaus and, in the summers, she teaches creative writing to biology majors! Nancy co-founded The Escapery, a collective of teachers who are dedicated to diversity, and to writing and art as a form of resistance. Of all the writing workshops Peg has attended in her lifetime, one of her favorites, one of the best was led by Nancy at The Escapery.

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest, just released July 16, by Dzanc Books. She is also the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. 

Nancy Au is the author of the debut story collection Spider Love Song and Other Stories, forthcoming from Acre Books in September. Of the book, Peg wrote: “Foxes, turtles, ducks, oysters, fish, badgers, beetles, damselflies, bees: all manner of creatures scratch, swim, thrum, and shimmer through these tender and fantastic stories. Characters struggle with the entanglements of the living and the dead, like the ‘spiders’ webs [that] can wind around anything that doesn’t pay attention,’ while they long to be out in the world that both compels and terrifies. I was spellbound by Au’s unique vision and language that pay attention to the many wild, rich worlds that hold us.”

The following conversation between the two writers took place long distance while they were traveling, Peg promoting her new book, and Nancy taking her creative writing/biology major students on a week-long camping field trip on Mt. Hamilton.

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NANCY AU: I think about the generative Tzara’s Hat exercises that we did in North Bay Writers Workshop when you taught me to draw inspiration by pulling a word from a pile, and digging into stories utilizing that word or the image it evoked. This is still something that I do on a regular basis, both for my own writing and in my workshops!

Note: The Tzara’s Hat exercise derives from Tristan Tzara, who, during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, offered to create a work on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat.

PEG ALFORD PURSELL: Not everyone enjoys exercises when it comes to writing, so it makes me especially happy that you do, too. Doing something like “Tzara’s Hat” can make generating new work feel playful, and that sort of approach is really helpful if one is experiencing anxiety about getting something down on the page. It’s interesting that creative anxiety is thought to be a crucial step of the creative process: the anxiety builds until the creator begins to make something, relieving that pressure. A kind of necessary evil, it seems. But some can find that anxiety intolerable. An exercise, a game can help a writer out of their own way.

I would love to know if any of the stories in Spider Love Song and Other Stories had their genesis in this Tzara’s Hat method. And if not, how did you begin your stories?

NA: For SLS, I loved using “Tzara’s Hat,” which helped me to begin writing both stories, “The Unfed” and “Mom’s Desert.” I also experimented with different poetic constraints, such as variations of abecedarian exercises and, my favorite, using word cut-ups (with science textbooks, bird field books, recipe books, books about mammals, etc.) The cut-ups helped me to generate material for dialogues between characters, to use words that are not part of my everyday vocabulary, to find unique word pairings, and to use words in strange and new ways. I also used ekphrasis exercises. At museums, while studying the art, I wrote in my notebook using words to describe what I saw. Ekphrasis helped me to envision colors, settings and composition, textures, lighting, clothing, facial expressions, physical movements, and gestures for my characters.

I love your description of the playfulness of writing exercises, and how this can alleviate a writer’s anxiety. I carry a lot of anxiety, both within my writing/professional life and within my everyday life, and I often struggle with feeling confident about finding my words, using words, even in the context of just speaking with others …. With exercises, like cut-ups, it helps me to feel like words don’t have to be so serious, that language can be malleable and forgiving and funny. I think this is the reason why the writing exercises that you taught me at North Bay Writing Workshop have been so invaluable and inspiring and generative for me.

I want to talk about A Girl Goes into the Forest. In the story “Iguana,” there is a moment that took my breath away, when the protagonist “lifted her face to the sky. She wanted rain to mist her face, wash down her neck, thrum on her throat. Water she would wipe away.” This moment, like so many impossibly beautiful and heartbreaking moments throughout AGGITF, feels like we are witnessing a person’s dreams, in the way that a person wakes with their heart still pounding, the scents and tastes so real they keep their eyes squeezed shut, afraid to lose the dream.

I was heartbroken by the intensity of the character’s desire to reach her daughter, to be seen, heard, to hear her daughter speak before disappearing into the van. I wanted the dreams, these stories, each one, to go on forever. I believe that this intensity, the hyper-realistic, fully immersed, fully felt dreams, are what makes flash so magical. In a related sense, I wonder if there a catalyst/impetus for your book? Was it a vision? A dream? An image?

PAP: I need to make up an exciting story about how this collection came into being! If I were to do that, I’d say I’d had a sort of vision, one that came to me in a dream in the middle of the afternoon while I was in a liminal state, perhaps lying on my back in a meadow surrounded by buzzing bees and nattering squirrels, excited songbirds, catfish jumping in a nearby stream, while the cumulus clouds scuttling overhead formed the catalytic images. But the reality is, I almost never have any idea what I’m setting out to write. I plunge in, going with some impetus or another, most often the sound of a phrase that came from who knows where. I write early in the morning and often wake with words in my head that I need to set down on the page. Sonics are important to me, and in revision I’m careful about preserving and building upon the sounds of language.

A related question for you, Nancy, about revision: Throughout your stories certain motifs appear and I’m curious about whether they appeared organically in the individual stories, or if it was a matter of revisiting the stories after they were collected and then injecting the motifs into them—or a combination? For example, all the creatures in your book! Have you compiled a list of all the animals that show up in your stories? “The Fox Spirit” contains, besides foxes, a woodpecker, beetles, an orange tiger, hoary goats, dying fish, just to name a few. Can you talk about the significance of the animal world in this book?

NA: I love that you ask this because I love how in AGGITF, you dove so beautifully into the natural world, the “arched sky… so blue,” the “closer to earth darkness churned like sea reeds,” the excitement of animals lurking … in the surrounding darkness.” Each piece in the collection reminds your reader that this entire world and our experiences through it is a wilderness. A wilderness surrounds the teenage daughter who travels alone across the country to live with her father, and another daughter when she secretly marries and proclaims that she is moving to Chile to raise horses with her new husband. There is a deep and beautiful wilderness within the protagonists themselves, within the complexities of parenthood, of daughterhood, of love, of marriage, of separation.

With my use of the natural world in SLS and for much of my writing, I am inspired by my husband who is an educator and a biologist who deeply loves the insects that he studies. I often think about the time when he and I were on a hike, and he suddenly shouted out, terrified, “Watch out!” to a mayfly just as it was eaten by a dragonfly in midair. I know that he loves dragonflies just as much as he loves mayflies, and I always imagine the turmoil he must have felt in this moment, rooting for one bug who has captured another bug as its meal, and simultaneously wanting to save the bug from being eaten. I think about the tenderness, the awe, and concern. And, the science! I’m a science lover (aka a science nerd without a science degree), and I love to read about birds and animals and insects. I use my fiction writing as an excuse to spend hours wiggling my way down the endless Wikipedia informational wormhole, to learn about anything ranging from the mating habits of lions, or the flight patterns of damselflies, or the origins of television static.

One of the guiding principles that I’ve lived by, with regard to publishing as a short story writer, was something that you taught me early on: write stories, publish stories, work on building a collection this way. Was this something that you did for AGGITF? Was AGGITF always envisioned as a story collection? Or were the individual stories written over time, and a theme began to show up?

PAP: Many of the stories were written over time. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t usually know what I’m creating, and that’s particularly true about a book, a collection. I wouldn’t have it any other way! The mystery is essential. It takes time and stories before I can discover what my obsessions are about, what they may be adding up to. Once I have an idea, more stories flow, though, in the end, I will cut quite a few that don’t enhance the overall collection. Also, once I have a sense of the overall project, I’ll realize that there are other stories, stories written earlier that already held the seeds, and with my eye and ear trained on them through the new focus, I’ll look into how I might tend to them in such a way that they can take their place in the collection. I really love that process of investigation and discovery and of culling and assembling.

Will you talk about your process in writing your book? Many of the stories have been published individually, too. Did you have a larger idea about writing this particular book before writing the stories? And then set out to publish each? Or did you assemble that book after you felt you had enough stories to form a collection? How did you develop such a wonderful cohesion between these stories?

NA: I love that your process involves this wonderful mystery, this incredible discovery! I think that the entire process—beginning with my very first writing class that I took with you at the College of Marin, and later with our NBW workshops—has been such a beautiful discovery and adventure! I didn’t know, when I first started writing, that I wanted to be a writer. I knew that I wanted to express myself creatively, and I knew that I wanted to connect with others, but I wasn’t sure how. I’ve been a visual artist for years, and writing creatively was something that felt new and exciting.

For SLS, a few of the early drafts of the stories were first written during my time in the workshop. I remember when I wrote my first story, that I wrote my story to you and my wonderful workshop peers. I think that this was because I loved all of my workshop peers so much. And, because before the workshop, I didn’t know how to write knowing/imagining that someone else would read my work, and at the same time, I didn’t know how to write to myself, for myself. I loved being a part of that wonderful group of writers, I loved each week when we met, (even though I was so nervous about sharing my work and receiving feedback), to know that my words and my imagination were being heard, seen by others. I felt connected and alive.

The stories in SLS include ones that I wrote and published individually over the past several years while at both the workshop and at my MFA program. It was when I wrote the title story (during an Oregon State University-funded writing co-residency with my friend, Carson Beker), that I began to see the possibility of putting together a collection. The cohesion might come from my constant interest in (aka obsession with) writing stories about Chinese heritage within multi-generational immigrant families, death, and daughterhood.

My dream is to write a story collection as taut and meaningful as AGGITF. I’m working on a linked flash fiction collection. What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about writing a linked flash fiction collection?

PAP: That’s so exciting that you’re working on a flash collection! You’re one of my favorite flash fiction writers, and I still remember discovering your flash with its unique vision when you came to my class. Your fresh way of seeing and originality of expression was so thrilling and invigorating. I hardly need to give you any advice about writing a linked flash collection. You are teaching me.

If pressed, however, to share my thoughts about collections of flash and other hybrid forms like those in AGGITF, I’d say that it’s important to consider how the reader will experience so many distilled stories one after the other. What is the nature of each flash? When you’ve got highly compressed and condensed stories—and here I mean stories, not anecdotes or vignettes—which, arguably, is what defines flash and/or sets apart those stories that best deliver—it’s worthwhile to think about the demands on the reader. How to adjust pacing? How to allow the reader to take a breath when needed? How to create the larger rhythm? These are the kinds of problems each flash fiction writer will need to solve for themselves, according to the kind of book they’re hoping to create, whether the flash stories are linked or stand alone.

Is this your next writing project? Or are you working on something different? Maybe more than one project at a time?

NA: You are one of my most favorite flash fiction writers, one who’s had such a tremendous influence in so much of what I write. In answer to your question, I think completing a linked collection of flash will challenge me as a writer and artist, to think about pacing, rhythm, and breath. I love how you described earlier the culling and assembling of AGGITF. That was something that I felt so strongly while reading your gorgeous book—the way you dove so deeply into the minds of your protagonists, into their desires and uncertainties, especially those uncertainties with family members, partners, and selves—while simultaneously opening up space for the reader. You did this with the brilliant use of titles, of spacing, of moving into and then later outside of the protagonists’ interiors, your shifts in point-of-view.

I am still in the discovery and mystery phase of writing the linked collection of flash. I agree with you that “mystery is essential.” As a writer, I love structure (deadlines and assignments), but I also thrive in the unknown, in the experimental nature of writing exercises that allow me to laugh at myself, at language.

I’d also love to know about what you’re working on next! Are there pieces of another collection that you’ve been working on? A novel?

PAP: I have two nearly complete manuscripts I’ve been working on over the years. The one that feels most ready is a novel told in flash, “Blow the House Down.” The second is also a novel—I think—though it may revert back to its original form of a linked story collection, stories of a traditional length. I’ve also started a long essay about laughter, with over 63 pages of single-spaced typed notes. Like you, I love to research, and it’s been the best part about the essay. Writing nonfiction is an extreme challenge for me, and I’ve published exactly one essay to date! Meanwhile, in my daily practice, I continue to write occasionally more of the hybrids that you find in AGGITF, and we’ll see what comes of them.

Energy, Entropy, and the Sunsphere: An Interview with Andrew Farkas

Andrew Farkas’ story collection Sunsphere is a funhouse of energy and potential energy revolving around the Sunsphere, a former World’s Fair tower that is now a derelict tourist attraction in Knoxville, Tennessee and to which Farkas brings iconic status. These nine stories engage and circle the mysteries of human relationship, the fine points of entropy, and the classic automotive joys of the Mercury Comet, among many other things. I was motivated to talk with Andrew because he and I share an affinity for story collections with broad scope and ambition.

Ron MacLean: What is the origin story or creation myth of this collection called Sunsphere?

Andy Farkas: In 2002, I was accepted to the University of Tennessee’s M.A. program in English. Beforehand, I’d never been to Knoxville and knew nothing about it. When I arrived, wandering through the city, I ended up seeing the Sunsphere for the first time. Since it’s kind of down in a little valley, this World’s Fair tower isn’t the imposing, awe-inspiring structure that you’d expect (like the Eiffel Tower or the Space Needle). Instead, it’s honestly kind of ugly and dwarfed by the buildings up on top of the hill. At the time, the park surrounding it was a wreck because it was at that stage of remodeling that makes me think it’s all been a lie, we’re not actually trying to fix anything, we’re just having fun breaking things. Looking at this kind of ugly, not particularly awe-inspiring structure, I immediately knew that I liked it more than any other World’s Fair tower because it seemed like a parody of all of them. And so I began doing research on the Sunsphere and the 1982 World’s Fair. Once I learned that the theme for that exposition was energy, I instantly connected that to the way the place looked now (having reached entropy), which led to me researching energy, entropy, and quantum physics (with a big thank you to my friend, Jim Westlake, for helping me out with that research). The stories mostly sprang from there.

MacLean: In Sunsphere, the narrative grounding is very different from story to story — with “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” or “Everything Under the Sunsphere” at one end of the spectrum, and “I Don’t Know Why” or “No Tomorrow” at another. Others fall in between. What for you is the core of a story? The fulcrum on which it balances, the nucleus that gives it energy? And how do you find/build/grow what surrounds it?

Farkas: Experimental work can be more idea-based, so I normally start with an idea instead of, say, a character or situation. “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” started with the idea of potential energy. There’s a ton of potential energy all throughout the story. The problem for Trevor is that he thinks there’s no way to access that energy because everything he tried in the past led to ruin. Now, whereas this story is a little more realist, I still started with an idea (potential energy) then expanded the idea (potential energy that can’t be accessed). So, I didn’t decide I wanted to write a more conventional story, I just followed where the idea took me. “I Don’t Know Why” is the same. Entropy is all throughout Sunsphere, but “I Don’t Know Why” is the entropy story. I knew I wanted to pack in as much entropy as possible. That led to the post-apocalyptic city of Knoxville being filled with white noise (for communication entropy) and chaos (the Sunsphere being deconstructed, the city impossible to navigate). Since it seems like everything is truly over, I thought, “Well, it’s the end of the world,” and so I started looking up potential ends to the universe (which is how each section of the story ended up with a subtitle that describes a different end to the universe). From the original idea, then, everything else springs. Since I’m not working in realism, I have no problem creating characters who represent ideas themselves. Though I would say normally these idea-characters of mine are critiques of the ways we turn others into paper cutouts of themselves, or turn ourselves into two dimensional robots.

MacLean: I’m smitten with Kat and Trevor from “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” What would Kat say about Los Angeles? What’s her take on “No Tomorrow?” What would Trevor say about Knoxville? Did he ever get confused by the many names for a single street?

Farkas: Kat needs to keep moving, so she’d probably kick the driver out of the Mercury Comet in “No Tomorrow” because he’s going too slow. And plus, he’s in Knoxville, and she’d definitely rather be in Los Angeles, weaving in and out of traffic, finding the next power source. When we see her in “Do Kids in California,” though, she’s burned out because she was trying to channel all of the energy of not just L.A., but all of California at once.

Trevor might be attracted to Knoxville because of the Sunsphere, which he could end up seeing as the center of energy he’s looking for. As for a guy like him, he wouldn’t get confused by the street names because he’d convince everyone else to call the streets by the names he uses. Gene, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” however, can’t even convince himself what they should be called.

MacLean: What is an example of an uplifting, aphoristic billboard that would describe your best life?

Farkas: When I wrote Sunsphere, I was sitting between two very large pieces of paper, each with a very small sentence printed in the center of them, that came from the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. One said, “Somewhere better than this place,” while the other said, “Nowhere better than this place.” I think that space in between fits me no matter where I am. On the other hand, I also thought of a movie poster for Being John Malkovich (1999) that I had on my wall for a long time. It said, “Ever want to be someone else? Now you can.” I feel like writing, whenever it’s going well, allows me to be someone else.

MacLean: What makes an Andrew Farkas story a story?

Farkas: Since my stories are rarely about plot, I instead look for when the material has reached critical mass (as Michael Martone puts it). This is particularly the case in a piece like, “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit.” There are lots of different sections, most of which don’t connect to each other, except that they take place in a bottomless pit, or are about the bottomless pit. Once I build up all of this material, I look for the moment when it feels like I’ve explored this idea enough. Call it the Goldilocks moment. But even though there’s no real beginning-middle-end, when the story’s over, you have that satisfied sensation you get at the end of a Freytagian piece. The difference is, instead of riding the rollercoaster, you’ve been let loose in the funhouse and experienced all there was to experience there. If I’ve done my job, you look forward to going through the funhouse again.

MacLean: What makes a story an Andrew Farkas story?

Farkas: Definitely the voice. People who know me and who’ve read my work always say that they can hear my voice when they’re reading something I’ve written. People who don’t know me, but have read my writing, when they meet me, they always seem to say I sound like my writing. I think that happens for two reasons: 1) I am not at all a fan of “invisible style,” writing that works hard to make you forget about it so you only focus on the plot or characters. Plot and characters are interesting, but I want people to think about the language and the voice too. 2) When I’m writing, I constantly read my work out-loud. It isn’t done to me until I like the way it sounds from beginning to end. If I trip up at all while reading, I know I need to rewrite a sentence or a section.

MacLean: I am deeply concerned about Mr. Yang from “The City of the Sunsphere.” At this writing, what is Mr. Yang’s condition, and/or his proximity to James Agee, expressed in terms of Knoxville City Hospital room numbers?

Farkas: 42

MacLean: Can we discuss Freytag’s triangle and the obsession with classic story structure? In particular, can we find a way to undermine its dominance?

Farkas: I think the way you undermine Freytag’s dominance is by introducing people to work that doesn’t follow the triangle and hope it clicks with them. That’s what happened to me. When I was an undergrad, I had to read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). At the time, I hated it. I also watched Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). I hated that too. But I’d been exposed to them. And they stuck with me. I found myself thinking about them, telling other people about them (usually how much I couldn’t stand them, though they perhaps were thinking that I, you know, doth protest too much), until finally I just had this compulsion to go back to them. Now, I love both works. And I’m really into work like Dead Man and Endgame (and pieces that fit into this outsider category). I expose my students to this kind of art all the time. One of the best compliments I ever received about my teaching was when one of my students asked if all the movies in the class were going to be weird, and before I could answer another student, who’d had me before, said, “Everything you read or watch in an Andy class is weird. But then you discuss it afterwards and it doesn’t seem so weird anymore.”

MacLean: What is your perihelion?

Farkas: Closer than you think.

MacLean: Given that your stories are structured non-traditionally, on what basis do you revise, and how do you know when a “story” is “finished”?

Farkas: Revision is actually my favorite part of writing. The most difficult thing for me to do is look at a blank page. So, at the beginning, I hate whatever it is that I’m writing because it doesn’t conform to how I see or hear the piece in my head. The worst thing for me to do, then, is to revise along the way. Unfortunately, all too often I do just that. At some point, however, I finally have to pound on my keyboard (I write on a computer mostly, with some handwritten notes on the side) until I have as many of the ideas out on the page as possible. That draft is horrid. I then print that draft out and pound on the keyboard while looking at the horrid draft, rewriting and normally adding more (though sometimes subtracting, but I find it’s mostly adding for me). I keep doing this until I get to the point where all I have to do is think about how to craft the sentences. This is my favorite part because the piece mostly looks the way I want it to look, it just doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound yet. I guess it’s rather like sculpting, if sculptors first had to collect the atoms to make marble, then they made a block of marble, and then they made the statue. I’m only exaggerating a little there. I then know the story is finished when I read through and everything sounds exactly right. Ideas and style/language are more important to me, I suppose, than plot and suspense. It’s probably no surprise that, in a culture full of people saying, “No spoilers,” I say, “Give me all the spoilers now and don’t dally.”

MacLean: “There is a way to battle the torrid world, a way to understand it. But somehow, I’m on the outside.” This line, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” is one of the most moving things I’ve read in a while. Why? And what is the way, for us hungry readers?

Farkas: At one point in “Everything Under,” Gene is trying to get into a shindig and he can’t find the way in. Later, when he’s describing this experience, he says he isn’t sure if he wants to be on the inside or stay on the outside. So not only is he alienated throughout the story, he has no idea what he wants. He blames the torrid world for this because as you raise the heat in a system you create more disorder. Gene thinks if the world were completely organized, then he’d know what he wants. This, of course, will never happen. But since Gene is constantly trapped in between, he’s not only alienated from society, he’s alienated from himself. Strangely, this makes it so he can battle the torrid world because the way to battle the torrid world is to be outside of everything. He’s in the ideal position, but can’t see it because he’s bought into the idea that alienation is bad. I think that’s why you find that sentence to be so moving. It’s tragic that Gene can’t see what position he has and use it for something because, in a lot of ways, the outsider is often seen as a loser. With this discussion, I also wonder if Gene might represent the position of narrative art that isn’t quite conventional.

MacLean: What is the most dangerous condition a human can contract through (accidental) contact with the Sunsphere?

Farkas: You might get proselytized by the Cult of the Great Golden Microphone. If you allow yourself to be blessed by the adherents, you will end up covered in glitter.

MacLean: What are you working on next?

Farkas: Right now, I’m working on a collection of essays called The Great Indoorsman. In each piece, I explore some indoors space (since I’m not outdoorsy at all), but I also connect my experience to something in the world. For instance, my essay, “Filk,” that appeared in The Iowa Review, is about old video rental stores, but it’s also about filk music (folk music inspired by the science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror genres) and the cult film Dark Star (1974). Just recently, 3:AM Magazine published “Wait Here?” an essay that’s a metaphysical investigation of waiting rooms.