In their Own Rivers: A Conversation with Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

I met Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes when I was nineteen. We were both Creative Writing students at Susquehanna University, a small college in a hilly, rural, rivered part of Pennsylvania. The first times I met Liz, she kind of intimidated me. She was outspoken and smart and hugged easily and would kiss her friends on the top of the head. I'd never met anyone like her.

Over the next few years, Liz would come to be one of my closest friends and favorite poets. I was thrilled to learn, a few months ago, that Liz’s debut poetry collection, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, would be published by Mason Jar Press in April 2020. As anyone who has met Liz knows, she is all magic and warmth, and so are her poems. However, they are also ferocious, bold, and biting.

Following is a conversation that Liz and I had (through a shared Google Doc!) in early January. We chat about wolf mythology, song lyrics, and the challenges of writing about violence. Fittingly, our conversation starts with Pennsylvania.

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Dana Diehl: Let’s start at the beginning. Where and how was Ashley Sugarnotch born? Where did she come from?

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes: When I started dating my now husband, I would drive from Harrisburg, PA to Moscow, PA, mostly along 81 North. Just south of Wilkes-Barre, there is the Ashley / Sugar Notch exit. They are two discrete towns that get to share a sign. I loved that name. I knew I wanted to write something about her—I didn’t know what yet—so I held it with me. I remember saying to my husband, “All I know is Ashley Sugarnotch is a bitch.” She’s not—not in the end—but you can see how annoying she is in the first poem I wrote for her: “Ashley Sugarnotch & the Big Red Bow.” This poem is partially ekphrastic to Bob Diven’s painting “Red Bow” which was displayed at Susquehanna University’s art gallery in the fall of my senior year. I remember seeing that painting and thinking, “That’s her! That’s it!” 

This other character showed up in one of the first seven or so poems I wrote, but at the time he didn’t have a name. I think I originally even thought of him as me! But then I had a dream where I was in a room with a dear friend filled with books and warm light and dust. He was reading to me, and I pulled his mustache off and plopped it on my forehead. And then I was like: Oh. Here’s this other person. I think this person is more sinister than I am. I think he’s a wolf. So I read everything I could find on mythic wolves. 

DD: Have your dreams inspired your poems in the past? How big of a role does your unconscious play in your writing?

EDML: Yes! I dream pretty intensely almost every night and have for most of my life. From the ages of 19 until I got pregnant at 27, I had a dream about once a month where I had miscarried a pregnancy or given birth to a stillborn child. Sometimes fetuses would bloom in my tea. In one of the dreams I miscarried in a birch wood in fall and buried the child under the only oak tree and wept, “Alison Dubai, I'm so sorry.” That was the main one that became poems. I wrote a series of epistles to Alison Dubai in some alternate timeline where I had gotten pregnant as a 21-year-old. I even wrote a poem from the perspective of Kenny! It got published as a very short run chapbook, Letters to Alison Dubai. At the reading, I read the first and last poem and had people in the crowd read the other poems. Kenny read his! Truly weird and beautiful.

The thing about dreams is they feel like something has happened in your sleep. I know that some of the more nonsensical parts are maybe less-than-interesting, so I usually wait until something very beautiful or pertinent to put in a poem.

One of Kenny's dreams makes it in the book too! The beginning of “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested” are words he said to me as soon as he woke up one morning: i died on a ship / last night in my dream. // the ship had sunk i / was in the only unsunk room.”

DD: Fairytale retellings and adaptations are so prolific in our modern-day culture. Why do you think these old stories are still so accessible and irresistible to us? In Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, you play with the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Why were you drawn to this narrative? 

EDML: You’re not wrong to bring up Little Red—I bring her up in that first poem! But Ashley isn’t explicitly Little Red. I think it was Ian Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief (and cover designer!) at Mason Jar who said Ashley was more like Red’s older cousin who teaches her to smoke cigarettes. When I was doing all of that research of wolves in folklore, I came across a bunch of versions (old versions!) of that story. What was most striking to me was that the version we know best was in fact not the most common version. Often times the Wolf won. (In fact, Kenny just read our kid a version of it where the Wolf eats her and it just ends there!) Occasionally, Red saved herself. But seeing the story over and over like that made me start thinking about cycles of violence. Why did Red survive sometimes but not others? Or, why was the Wolf sometimes successful? And how does the moral tale change depending on the outcome?

Ashley and the Wolf live in modern times but they are Big Picture characters. I knew of three different stories where, for example, a daughter was left orphaned because her father killed her mother. One of the mothers, Trisha Edelman, was someone I went to elementary school and junior high with (she has a poem at the end). Is what I write about specific? Of course, to the point that I actually created an annotated version of my own book so I could keep track of everything I’m referencing. But are Ashley and the Wolf stuck in their own cycles—are they bigger than themselves? Yes. 

DD: Please tell us more about the wolf mythology you discovered through your research. Is the wolf always the bad guy? Did the wolf as a symbol change based on where or when the myth originated? 

EDML: I could have told you so much about this during my second year of grad school, but yes—the Wolf is always the bad guy. I read all the Grimm Fairy tales I could find (a very nice collected that the library had). I also read everything I could from this website, D.L. Ashliman’s Folktexts. The Wolf is intrinsically bad in folktales. That’s one of his characteristics. He’s never redeemed or redeemable. In fact, part of the moral of these tales is that people should know better something that on the one hand seems obvious (if fire is always hot, don’t be surprised when you’re burned) and yet also put the blame back onto the victim of the Wolf’s crimes. The last Wolf poem, the one where he’s killed Ashley, was written fairly early in the process. Later, I had peers suggest (as I mention in “Statement”) that I would be contributing to this negative cycle if I explicitly wrote about it happening. So I tried writing some alternative endings where those poems just stopped short of the murder itself. But I never, never wrote an ending where the Wolf redeemed himself or where Ashley got away. Of course that can happen, but that’s not the story these characters are telling.

We love highlighting narratives where someone overcomes adversity against all odds. Even less violent things: I’ve read more than one article on this woman who got some weird loan/grant situation, without a huge down payment, and bought a house in D.C. in such a way that her mortgage is under $1,000 dollars a month. Housing prices are so high here that, for example, even if I had a $100k downpayment, I’d still be paying $400 dollars more a month than I do in rent, and my rent is already more than double that woman’s mortgage. Sorry for all the numbers! My point is this woman is the exception, in fact nearly an impossibility, and yet people write about her like: see! It’s possible! It’s possible for you to climb into homeownership if only you know the tricks! If only you work hard enough! Ashley, Little Red, the kittens that the Wolf eats in one of the stories—it’s not their fault. And while it would be nice if they could break out of this cycle, they aren’t the ones that can do it. 

DD: One of the most challenging aspects of this book is that it asks us to engage with the aggressor. In “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself,” there’s this lovely and startling passage, in which the Wolf laments Ashley’s inescapable death and his part in it:

[…] the last thing / i want is to find you in my dreams tonight / and crack open your ribs and rid your body / of its organs. is it so unreasonable to want a justice / for myself? a new ending where i justify / i’m not a wolf inevitable. finding you in the water / of the river and holding you down your body / putting up a fight because that’s human ashley

When we talk about cycles of violence, our first instinct might be to silence or look away from the perpetrator. Why was it important for you to include the Wolf’s voice in this story? What was the experience like of going inside his head?

EDML: I want and need to start by saying I don’t think the Wolf is excusable. And I don’t think you should side with him. I also think it’s worth noting that Ashley and the Wolf are both white. That’s how both of them can survive for as long as they do—the privilege of their whiteness. That’s also largely what Ashley’s first poem is about: how she was so privileged, even if she felt so destroyed. 

I wrote all of these poems before #MeToo. I think it’s incredibly important for us to call out the people who have done terrible things, even if the justice can only be a public record (See: my poem “Statement”). But, I think going forward we have to consider how we can prevent these cycles from happening. I had a friend (mentioned in the “Be Kind” poem) who raped someone. I haven’t actually spoken to this person in more than half a decade now, but I still remained friends with him at the time. What he did was inexcusable. But I also know he was incredibly sick for months leading up to the choice he made. He did not have resources to get help. He tried on more than one occasion and was either waylaid or outright rejected. I was there; I saw this. It was not my job or my other friend’s jobs to take care of him more than we did, which was the most we could. But I wonder: what would have happened if he had gotten help in all of those moments before? What if he had been able to utilize the resources that would have stabilized him? There’s a graphic memoir (and now a movie, apparently) called My Friend Dahmer about a dude who went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer before he committed all of his terrible acts. He also muses here—what structures could have been in place to prevent him from murdering? The story about Pinegrove, the band, and how the lead singer was accused of some misconduct is, I think, a good example of something that could happen. An intimate partner of his called him out, and he took a full year to reflect—including taking time off from touring and being in the public. He only returned after, through a mitigator, his accuser gave her blessing. If that hadn’t happened, he might have ended up like Jesse Lacey, lead singer of Brand New, who spent years abusing women, some of which were minors! 

None of this is a full solution, but I wanted us to be with the Wolf in the moments before he acted. He fails, but he’s also in a system that lets him fail. Ashley and the Wolf are both walking upstream their own rivers.

DD: You’re open about the importance of music in your life. In fact, your poem, “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested,” is written after a mewithoutYou song. What has music taught you about poetry? Are there any other musical artists who influenced this book?

EDML: Truly, the music I love the most is music that makes me feel like I’ve been torn apart and put back together. I want and hope my poems make people feel that way too.

There are a few sneaky lines that I added that were misheard lyrics, if I’m being honest. “you knew / hate is defined / as spitting out / each other’s mouths” is from the song “Still” by Daughter. She means that two people are fighting and spewing hate. I misunderstood it as people turning an intimate act, like kissing, into chewing each other’s faces off and then spitting them out. Yikes, Liz. 

The poem about the Ashley having windmills in her chest instead of lungs is also an actual dream I had, but the line itself is from “Almost Crimes” by Broken Social Scene. The actual line is, “You’re like a messiah, pal. Little kingdoms in your chest.” I thought he was saying windmills for years! Ironically, “little windmill” IS in a song, just not one I found until much later: in the Blink-182 song, “All the Small Things,” they end by singing, “The night will go on, my little windmill!” A term of endearment!

Another tiny note: I have a line about dragging a lake because it shows up in two songs: “Cicatriz E.S.P.” by the Mars Volta and “Floater” by Every Time I Die. No one else, when I workshopped that, knew what that phrase meant! 

So I guess music has mostly taught me weird words and turns of phrase, intentionally or not!

DD: If your book was a band, what genre of music would it play? Where would it perform?

EDML: They would play mid-aughts punk rock. No, actually—it would probably just be my favorite band, Roof Beams, which is folk rock. And because it was my book, and not the actual Roof Beams, they would play in my living room whenever I pleased. And sometimes outside in the summer in the grass. And sometimes next to my bed as I fell asleep. 

DD: Something people in the lit world might not know is that you co-host a podcast, The Smug Buds, with author and editor Will Hoffacker. So, I have to ask. What are you most smug about in your book?

EDML: Two things: the first is the sestina, “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself.” I had a teacher in a workshop setting tell me, “Well, it got pretty close to succeeding, too bad it won’t.” Basically, saying I had made a good effort but that the poem was impossible to fix. Well, considering it got published on its own and is now in this book, I feel pretty smug about that. 

The second is general, but: it’s the book itself. I had a lot of support writing this book, but very few people got really excited about it. Workshop, something that I am not super precious about, was mostly grueling. So often it seemed like people didn’t understand what I was saying/doing. I thought it all made sense in my head, but sometimes I would explain myself into circles. I didn’t think I needed to revise the book more (by the end of the writing process) but most of the feedback I got back was pretty lukewarm. But I knew the book was there, I knew all of its intricate parts, so I just went for it. The most gratifying part of getting this book published is—starting with my press, Mason Jar, and then onto the many people who so graciously blurbed my book—they all get it. At first it was relief. And now I’m just hella smug about it.

DD: Who should read Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf? Who would you like to read it?

EDML: You know, I have a lot of coworkers who have told me that my writing is too sad. To one of them I actually said, “But aren’t you concerned with the human condition!?” And she said, “NO!” One of them, who read my essay, “Touch Me,” told me it was just so sad. I said, “Oh no! That’s the warmest thing I’ve ever written! No one dies!” (I then followed this up, after a pause, with “There are some things worse than death, though,” and wow did he roll his eyes!)

Which is to say, if you just want to escape, like maybe not my book? But if you like stories, if you like poems, if you like things that aren’t exactly one thing or another, please read my book. I feel like I’ve always been in all places at once. I’m pansexual, neither here nor there. My poems tell a story but also have very specific forms. I sewed a man’s dress shirt to a skirt and wore it to a wedding this spring. If the things you like most you have trouble explaining because they seem to wimble-womble—then you. You should read my book!

An Interview with Robert Glick, Author of Two Californias

Robert Glick is an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. His work has won competitions from The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Diagram, Summer Literary Seminars, and New Ohio Review; other stories have been published in the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Two Californias, was published by C&R Press in 2019.

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Kristina Marie Darling:  Your latest book, Two Californias, was recently launched by C&R Press.  What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?  

First, thanks for reading! There are so many great books out right now. I hope you find something meaningful and pleasurable in these pages. I hope that the stories don't land too neatly—I'm one who wants a bit of visible messiness. Making treasure from trash, so to speak. 

Speaking as a native Californian, the book is less about California (though all the stories take place there) than it is about, through variation, collapsing overly simplistic boundaries—north and south, etc. While by no means autobiographical, it is more personal than I had originally realized, its spotlights drawn to the unorthodox, sometimes funny, often diversionary ways we deal with loss.

KMD:  What drew you to C&R Press for this particular project?  

They liked the book! It's so important for a press, with the complexities of media economies, to have your back, to support you and the work. I liked C&R's catalogue, their design choices, and the ways in which they wanted to collaborate. It felt ethically as well as aesthetically right, and I'm very grateful to Andrew Sullivan, John Gosslee, and the entire team.

KMD: Your fiction makes innovative use of white space, interruption, and rupture.  What does silence make possible for you as a storyteller?  

Everything. Can noise exist without silence? 

From the standpoint of lineage, the influence of white space came to me from Marguerite Duras, especially the way her blocks of text just sort of hang in air, smoke rings of meanings. For me, silence (and its physical analog, white space) is material, metaphor, tempo. Most of my stories are written modularly, with gaps, often without linear transitions, notated by white space. The reader enters this open space (well, this space is always there, but in Two Californias, it's foregrounded and encouraged) to think, to pause, to insert their consciousness/imaginations. 

The silence also reminds us that the writing, the words, the syntax: nothing but one n/mote, pointing to the more infinite possibilities. The book is not fully closed, can never be fully closed (though one might try). While white space isn't exactly an iceberg, it nonetheless points to everything unsaid. 

KMD:  In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are an accomplished educator. What has teaching opened up within your creative practice?  

Lately, teaching has taught me about the openness and possibility of process. We do a lot of collaborative brainstorming: what could happen in this situation? In what ways can X connect to Y? Writing, for me, represents what Barthes calls a "tissue of citations"—a network of meanings. In this respect, and without dismissing craft, I think about teaching as a means to work with students to be brave and critical in building their own networks. Working with the students has reinforced my own desire to slow down when writing, to pursue possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to me. Then I sneak on to campus late at night, when the classrooms are empty, to make use of the white boards :.)

KMD:  With the recent launch of Two Californias, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?  

I'm on sabbatical(!), so mostly I'm holed up here in Rochester, waiting for the deer to cross the backyard, finishing up The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane. In the short run, I'll be doing a reading/workshop at the wonderful Writers & Books here in Rochester, followed by what I'm sure will be a fabulous University of Utah reading at AWP in San Antonio. Then I head off to the MacDowell Colony in March and April, where I'll visit the oracle each day, and revel in thermoses of soup. I finish off the semester working with the smart, engaged students at Hobart and Smith College in Geneva. 

KMD:  What are you currently working on? What’s next?  

I'm finishing a hybrid print/digital novel called The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane—it should go to agents by the end of the year. 

Set in Kansas City during the 2016 presidential election race, Paradox traces the unorthodox pathways we take through individual grief, collective trauma, and social awareness. After a miscarriage, Grace, a 40-year-old anesthesiologist, must decide whether she wants to have another child, weighing her own desires and her growing political awareness against the constricting biases of suburban life. Her husband Chuck urgently wants to be a father once again. While he waits for Grace to make up her mind, he falls prey to his self-destructive impulses; his imaginary friend, whom he calls The Reckless, forces him to steal a rare, expensive model of Wonder Woman’s airplane. Meanwhile, their two teenagers stumble into dangerous intrigues with Bosnian art saboteurs and rapture-obsessed veterinarians. 

The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane is written as a set of discrete, interlocking sections. Family members and minor characters contribute their distinct voices to the collective narration. The novel also contains non-diegetic chapters, including an MFA thesis in art history (with performative scores) and characters' own creative writings (such as an imagined history of a mysteriously disappeared grandparent). As a general thematic, the novel explores versions of visibility and invisibility (technical, psychological, linguistic) exemplified by the figure of Wonder Woman’s airplane, which, in drawings and animations, requires white lines to make visible the boundaries of the plane’s invisibility. In line with my artistic vision, each section attempts to intensify the emotional and intellectual power of the novel by expressing character-based story through innovative forms of language, voice, and syntax.

Chapters of Paradox have won the Summer Literary Seminars Center for Fiction Prize and the New Ohio Review Contest in Fiction. Other chapters have been published in The Masters Review Anthology. You can read online chapters at The Collagist and The Los Angeles Review. 

While Paradox will primarily take shape in the print universe, some sections of the novel will only be available in digital form (beta).

An Interview with Cris Mazza, Author of Yet to Come

Kristina Marie Darling: Your novel, Yet to Come, will launch soon from BlazeVOX Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Cris Mazza: I’d like readers to assume that Yet to Come can provide different gratifications or provide different responses from different kinds of readers . . . and that any kind of response or take-away is interesting to me. Among the various elements — for example the “setting” of the characters’ mid-lifespans being from the 80s to 2010, the aspects of male-victim spousal abuse, or the subplot of female sexual dysfunction — will come to the forefront in different orders for different readers. I wish I could hear from every reader to see which parts, characters, or story-lines spoke loudest. Basically, I always tried to write books that my mother could read and also my English professors could appreciate.

KMD: You’ve worked with many outstanding literary publishers over the course of your distinguished career.  What drew you to BlazeVOX Books for this particular text? 

CM: First, one of my former PhD students had a recent novel from BlazeVox, so I knew there was an appreciation for literature-off-the-beaten-path. Also, when I looked at the books, they each had a personalized size, shame and design, appropriate for the book itself and not a standard for all of their books.  I knew I would need a publisher sensitive to the repeated postcards in the book, which required the use of different fonts, an image of a postcard, etc. BlazeVox is open to a writer having a mental image and actual production input for what a book looks like as a finished product.

KMD: I admire your experimentation with form, which frequently encompasses templates that are not germane to literary texts:  postcards, lists of problems, handwritten notes, and more. What do these non-literary or found forms make possible within a given narrative? 

CM: I began doing this in earnest in my 2014 memoir Something Wrong With Her because my college journals were essential to the book containing a “me-then” who was not the same person writing the “real time” text. I realized I had to use images of the journals rather than retype the passages I wanted to use — to prevent myself from editing the earlier me. While researching my own cache of artifacts for that book, I found more: the handwritten notes, yearbook inscriptions, hand-drawn cartoons, etc., that I knew had to be seen and not just described. I think the book was able to be urgent and alive in more than one time-zone, from the “real time” text to 40 years earlier.

KMD: Relatedly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the gender politics of genre. Is experimentation with — and challenging — received forms of discourse an inherently feminist act? Why or why not? 

CM: It traditionally largely hasn’t been. In the 70s and 80s when so much literary prose experimentation was disproportionately by male authors, a simple explanation was provided (I can’t recall the source): these men were rebelling against the established canon; but that canon, being predominately male, was not what women writers were moved to rebel against — they had to create their “canon” first. Instead, the mere act of speaking out at all, having a published written voice, was the initial “rebellion.” Then when I co-edited the “chick-lit” anthologies in the mid-90s, the publisher launched the project as a talent search for unknown or emerging women writers who were beginning more and more to challenge popular expectations of writing-by-women.

It’s difficult for me, personally, to say how the forms in my own writing is or might be a feminist or gender-related gesture because most of the writers who influenced me in terms of form were male since most of the writers taught to me in college were male; and yet the work of one of the female inclusions, Kathy Acker, for whatever reason did not speak to me. Female writers who later participated in my development, from Erica Jong to Alice Munro, were not experimenting so much with form.

KMD: As you promote YET TO COME, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

I plan to be in my car heading west, to California where the novel is set, and making as many stops along the route was I can manage to arrange. Anyone interested in an event can feel free to contact me. 

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next?

CM: Related to my answer about the insertion of image-artifacts in my work, I’m working on a series of linked essays that make further use of this technique, or using form to “concretize” what the essay is saying. This concept is best characterized by “Ask The Depot Commander” in which the narrative of my father’s recollections of his experience in 1946 Nuremburg, Germany — plus original photos he took there — is formatted to lie side-by-side with researched historical details that correspond to the substances of his memory. For example, he described giving an orange from the Army mess to a German man, whose wife and child ate one segment a day and made the orange last two weeks; this personal anecdote is juxtaposed beside original text of a different tone, explaining U.S. occupation policies that stipulated sharing food with German citizens was against military orders.

Each essay, with a different topic but involving my family, will have a form that suits its needs.

Be Prepared to Travel: An Interview with Clifford Garstang, Author of House of the Ancients and Other Stories

Kristina Marie Darling: Your new book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, will be launched by Press 53 in May. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Clifford Garstang: First, be prepared to travel. While about half of the stories in the collection are set in the United States, the rest have settings all over the world, including Mexico, Europe, and Central and Southeast Asia. Second, while the stories are mostly grounded in realism, a few of them take a decidedly unreal turn, which I hope readers will find interesting. They’re something of a departure for me.

KMD: You’ve worked with many excellent presses over the course of your career. What drew you to Press 53 for this particular project?

CG: I have a great relationship with Kevin Morgan Watson, the publisher at Press 53. The press also published my first two collections as well as the anthology series I edited, and I worked closely with them on the literary magazine I co-founded with Kevin, Prime Number. The press really understands short story collections—in fact they only publish short fiction and poetry—and when this new collection was ready I knew I wanted them to publish it. Some publishers are all about the novel and short story collections are an afterthought, at best. Not so with Press 53. 

KMD: On the whole, your fiction has a distinctly international sensibility. Tell me what travel has made possible within your creative practice.

CG: Living outside the United States—first in South Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then for a long time in Singapore and later in Kazakhstan—plus extensive overseas travel for work and pleasure has, I think, opened my eyes and strengthened the empathy a fiction writer has to have. Because of that, I’m able, within some limits of course, to write sensitively about people who are different from me. To some extent, I’ll always be writing “what I know,” but pushing the envelope of what that encompasses has meant, for me, looking beyond America.

KMD: In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are well-known for your literary citizenship, making resources available to writers who seek to navigate the ever-expanding landscape of literary journals. I’d love to hear more about what this has opened up within your writing. What has being part of a community made possible for you as a storyteller? 

CG: Years ago, when I was considering a career transition that would allow me to focus on writing, an old grad school professor of mine advised me to enroll in an MFA program because, he asserted, writers need to find a community of other writers. Most of us do our creative work in isolation, but I have found it both comforting and encouraging to emerge from time to time and connect with the community. And the community grows for me as I interact with it—starting with my MFA program, continuing with workshops, conferences, and residencies, and sometimes more remotely such as through the annual literary magazine rankings I’ve been doing now for more than a decade. Being part of the larger community exposes me to different ways of doing things, of telling stories, and relating to readers.

KMD: With the upcoming launch of House of the Ancients and Other Stories, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to? 

CG: The book comes out in May, so I’m planning launch events in Virginia, where I’m based, and North Carolina, where Press 53 is located. We’re still working on setting up readings and other appearances, and I regularly update the Events page on my website, which is cliffordgarstang.com.

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next? 

CG: I have a novel coming out in 2021 called Oliver’s Travels. As the name suggests, it’s about a man named Oliver who travels, and he’s traveling in search of answers to a question his family can’t or won’t answer for him. And I’m currently working on another novel, this one a blended contemporary and historical novel set in Singapore. It’s been fun to do research for that one.

Music and Connection: A Conversation with Ron MacLean

I first met Ron MacLean as a student in the year-long intensive Short Story Incubator program he teaches at Grub Street in Boston. His enthusiasm for the process of revision and the short story form proved inspiring and transformative in my own work.

Ron MacLean's short fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, and Fiction International.  He is the author of the novels Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies, and the story collection Why the Long Face?. In his new story collection, We Might As Well Light Something on Fire no two stories are alike. These diverse narratives, from the traditional to the experimental, span a vast range of emotional experiences. What unites these stories is an expert rendering of the complexity and connotations of what it means to long for a connection with others.

Ron and I met in person to chat about We Might As Well Light Something on Fire, the intersection of music and language, the creative tension between tragedy and hope, and the role of longing in fiction. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

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Jennifer Marie Donahue: Music is everywhere in this collection and played an integral role in my reading experience. I would love to hear about the link between your writing and music. How do these musical choices and references create meaning and unity in this collection?

Ron MacLean: I was completely unaware of it as a theme or a thread until I started putting the collection together. Music is very important to me. I love music. This feels self-aggrandizing to say and I don't mean it in a highfalutin way, but I pay great attention to the music and rhythm of writing. I'm thinking about the sound, the patterns, and the rhythms that I'm creating and I think of it as music rather than as text. That's how I think about the language. When I started noticing all the music in the book, I was thinking about how music matters to each character. My ambitions were simple. I wanted to make sure it wasn't simply my love of music getting on the page but instead to say everywhere it comes up does it matter to the characters and the situation. I trusted that unconsciously whatever I knew and felt about music would make connections between stories.

JD: I think it was very successful. In the first story of the collection “Toilet” when a Michael Jackson song starts playing our narrator reveals: “I have expectations I can't escape. I want to eat my own flesh. I want to shout, “Run!”  This critical moment of the story reveals an emotional vulnerability that we felt but that had not yet been articulated. Then there is the juxtaposition of Michael Jackson's music, since he represents a music superstar, with the character of this story who in his own words says, “I have recently recognized I'm a failed actor.” To me, that was powerful. Was that organic? Did that come through revision?

RM: Almost everything good in the book came through revision. That came through revision. The presence of the Michael Jackson music in the story ended up giving me the space to work in the narrator's revelations.  “Wanting to be Starting Something” is the first song. I chose that consciously because it's the beginning of something and for the narrator, the juxtaposition is the narrator beginning to own who and where he is in his life.  The trigger is this Michael Jackson music. Who doesn't love dancing to Michael Jackson music, pre-scandal? That factor, that I bring out later at the end of the story, is part of what allowed me to have the narrator reveal himself.  Here's this song, it's just a party song, except, oh no, it's more than that. It gave unconscious permission for the narrator to say: here's the truth – “I want to eat my own flesh. “

JD: I felt like music also informed my reading of the next story in the book, “Lesser Escape Artists.” The bridge sections callback to musical structure but subverts my expectation because in songs bridges reflect back on earlier material. These sections seem to open up the story world. And then we have Mahler and his Symphony #6!  How much of these story elements are meant to guide the reader?

RM:  What you say you read, in terms of the bridges opening up rather than providing callbacks was exactly what I intended.  I did not start out with those as part of the original structure of the story. The structure of the story came pretty late. What I had initially was a story that embodied chaos theory,  fractals, and some esoteric stuff that felt like an interesting intellectual exercise. So, it took me a few drafts to pry my fingers off of how proud I was of having a brilliant idea. There's emotional material happening here and while the chaos theory is really interesting it's not the heart of things.

JD: It's just one layer but a compelling one.

RM: Thank you. It is definitely there. The butcher makes it pretty explicit. The way the bridges came up was I had material I felt belonged in the story but kept landing on the cutting floor. I trust my intuition a lot as a writer. I would try to shoe-horn this material somewhere and my writing group would say, the story is getting better but what the hell is this? Why is Dorothy Dietrich catching a 22 bullet in her teeth? I knew it belonged in the story.

JD: So, rather than slip it in, you decided to call it out?

RM: After a bunch of failed drafts, I stepped back and thought about the story as a symphony. Because Mahler was one of the pieces that was not making it into the story but I knew I wanted. That started, I will admit, from the sheer joy it gave me to throw Norman Mailer and Gustav Mahler into a conversation together, inadvertently. Most of the time for me, those things are draft delights that I think, okay, I've had my fun now it's time to go away. But that one I felt like it was speaking to the story in a larger way. It doesn't directly relate to the rabbit who is trying to get off the chopping block at the butcher shop, nor does it relate necessarily to the couple. But then I started to think about one of the Mahler lines, “I want it to fall like an ax.” I realized late in the story that it absolutely does relate to what the couple is going through and what the rabbit is going through. That was when I stepped back and said, what if I think about it as a Mahler symphony?  That didn't work directly, so then it was: what if I think about structuring it as a piece of music? That is when the bridge idea occurred to me. I will also confess, I was also thinking of my mentor and his question he often asked: “How do you build a bridge to readers?” I decided I was going to build a bridge.  It was a goofy and literal idea in a story I was lost in and it became a way to open it up and create connections that wouldn't have been there without it.

JD:  The first line of this story “There is blood in the end. I'm not going to toy with your emotions by keeping you in the dark about that” is ominous.  While we are reading the story we are striving against that darkness, looking for that victory or win. Rooting for the blind rabbit, the couple, the narrator to push against the idea that “desire fractures us all.”  The final line of the story leaves us in a complicated emotional place: “In a world this chaotic, I choose to believe.”  Can you talk about the inherent narrative tension between the tragic and hopeful? 

RM: I think for me, the tension between the tragic and hopeful, or between the dark and the light is a pretty central thread in everything I write. I don't experience simplistic victories in my life nor simplistic defeats. When I think back on some of my best days, they are punctuated with some awful moments. Maybe not awful moments, but the good and the bad it's all there at once. Most of us don't get to choose ecstasy alone. That to me is really important to reflect in what I write.

JD: This calls to mind the quote by John O'Donoghue that I shared with you not long ago, “the human heart is a theater of longings.” This idea crystallized for me why I'm drawn to certain stories.  Many of the stories in your collection evoked this sense of longing, the permutations of this feeling and all the ways it can manifest in life. You render this longing so beautifully on the page.  How are you able to tap into this emotion so successfully?

RM:  The easiest answer is, how am I able to recognize it and tap in, I am filled with longing in my own self.  It's a pattern that I recognize in my life and its one of my obsessions in fiction writing as a result. Whenever somebody asks me -- what's your subject in fiction?, my answer is the attempts we make as humans to connect with one another and the imperfection that is inherent in that.  To me that is very tied to desire.  I have a really deep longing for connection with other humans and I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of connections but it is always imperfect. I think that the relationship of desire and fulfillment, partial fulfillment, occasional fulfillment – the slippage of good intentions that don't quite connect because of the various pressures on us is something I'm endlessly interested in. I have massive compassion for it. Because I think we are all looking for it, in one way or another, even if we are building walls so we can hide from it. 

Death, Women, and Dead Women: A Conversation between Cathy Ulrich and Lindsay Lerman

Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere (Clash Books), and Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You (Okay Donkey Press), recently talked writing, intent, and audience.

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Ulrich: My first question is (kind of an obvious one!): This novel focuses on a woman grieving her husband. What led you to write a book about this topic?

Lerman: Okay, so, what led me to write a book about a grieving woman? The simple answer is that I found a character I liked and she happened to be a woman whose life was pretty suddenly devoid of meaning. The more complicated answer is that I’ve always been fascinated by grief and how it suspends our ability to do the work of following social rules and norms. We just get consumed by it — it takes over — and overnight we can go from being someone who is always polite and mild-mannered and self-sacrificing to being someone who just can’t do it anymore, who wonders what all those niceties really do, what they’re for, what the cost of adhering to them might be. A grief story like the one I wrote also opens up questions about identity and meaning and purpose. It’s no accident that my book features a hetero (or presumably hetero) woman who no longer has the one thing good girls and women are supposed to have — a man — and that this fact results in her realizing that she no longer has scripts to follow. (I think this is compounded by the devastation and destruction of the natural world around her — the sense that we’re on the brink of something that is making all scripts suspect and possibly useless.) She tries to follow other scripts throughout the book, but they don’t seem to be working for her. She’s adrift. She has to ask herself why she has been who she’s been. Mourning and grieving are natural opportunities for this, and we can take them if we see them for what they are.

Now I want to ask you: what led you to writing about dead women and girls?

Ulrich: I love this answer — about how grief changes people and what society expects from women are really interesting kicking-off points for a story like this!

What led me to writing what I’ve been calling (for lack of a more clever name) the Murdered Ladies stories was basically this whole trope of “a woman’s death sets the plot in motion.” You see that in fiction a lot, and it’s a good trope, don’t get me wrong! Starting a story with a murder is a really powerful way to hook a reader and really delve into things like grief and crime and societal expectations. But a lot of things focus on the killer, whether it be finding the killer or understanding their motivations, and that, just, to me, isn’t interesting. I’ve never found killers interesting. They just take things away; they don’t create. I’m much more interested in creation, in finding lost things, in stories that have been left untold. So these stories are a way for me to do just that: find lost women, tell their stories, “create” them, as it were.

Your answer brought up an interesting point for me. In your book, Claire turns to two old friends, it seems, for comfort, but perhaps she is also looking for a way to become — again — the woman that society expects her to be. Do you think she completely understands her motivations here?

Lerman: I love that you thought of your book as an opportunity to “create” the murdered women who are often erased (or simply absent) in murder stories. In the book, I can feel how seriously you took them as individuals, as actual protagonists with complicated lives, not just plot devices. I tried to make sure the men in my book were taken seriously as more than mere plot points (to begin answering your question), but Claire needed to be the focus, so there was only so much space I could give them. (Funny to think that I use a dead man to set the plot in motion for my book.) I don’t think Claire fully understands what she’s doing when she turns to men in the book. Her life is suddenly devoid of meaning (or at least it seems this way to her), and it makes a kind of sense that she would turn to men to find meaning. It’s so complicated being constituted by others’ understandings of us. It can be positive — I can feel and understand that people think of me as kind and smart and self-sacrificing, and that can help me continually reshape myself to be those things (smart, kind, etc.). The darker side of that, especially for girls and women, is the possibility of only being “real” in relation to male desire. I think this is something that Claire slowly comes to understand throughout the book, but at the beginning, when she’s letting herself be drawn in by them, she doesn’t see it clearly, can’t articulate it, but I think she feels ill-at-ease about it.

Now that I’ve realized that I used a death to set the plot in motion (though my dead person doesn’t really disappear), I wonder if you were ever tempted to fall back on the conventions and write a few sections or chapters that featured the surviving loved ones or friends of the murdered ladies in bigger ways. Or did you always know you wanted to focus on the erased, the invisible, the dead? 

Ulrich: These stories were each written as stand-alone flash fiction pieces. Though some were intentionally written to be part of this collection — once I knew it was going to really exist — I still went in to every story thinking of it as its own separate thing. So each story has its own focus, unconnected with the others. Some do focus more on this or that person, whether it be a family member, or a girl at a frat party, or a queen, but I think (I hope!) that focus works in service of each piece on its own merits.

Your book, speaking of focus, really sticks to the three main characters: Claire, Andrew and Luke (and the specter of John that haunts them all). Other characters make appearances, but the focus stays with this trio. Had you ever considered enlarging the cast of characters, or did you always want this connection between them to be the spotlight of the book?

Lerman: I did have another character in the book, early on in the book’s life, but I ended up cutting him out. It felt too crowded with another life in the book. I realized it was best for the book to have a tight focus, for the narrative to have an almost bottled quality. I was kinda sad to let that character go — it sort of felt like I was killing him off, haha — but ultimately, just having the trio felt right.

I was re-reading some parts of your book today and thinking about place. My book has only just come out, but people are starting to notice the attention I pay to climate (and ecological catastrophe) in it, and although the desert — the place — is crucial, I think I understand the book to be kind of place-less. What about your book? There’s no clear “setting” for yours. Was this intentional? Is it a result of the book growing out of flash fiction?

Ulrich: These stories take place in all sorts of different locations. Some are technically set in Montana — one in particular is based on a real-life murder that happened in a nearby town — but “place” in these stories isn’t important because they really are things that could happen anywhere. I do think of them, though, as being American murders, if that makes sense. I keep thinking of writing a “murdered tourist” story and having it set elsewhere, but I haven’t found the words for it yet.

I don’t really focus on place much in any of my writing. I’ve lived in Montana my whole life, but I love traveling, and I’ve never felt as connected to the land as I know some of my fellow Montanans do. So for my writing, I think, connecting it to “place” would be really unnatural, because I don’t feel that connection myself!

And I was planning to follow up with the climate catastrophe aspect of your book — I love how the characters go on like usual, because what else can you do, but sometimes they stop and think about the awful situation they are in. How dire is the situation for them? 

Lerman: What a complex question! I think the characters in my book don’t know how dire the situation is for them, like the rest of us. They let themselves believe they’ll keep being as lucky as they’ve been. (They can still afford to eat, they have roofs over their heads, and though they know it likely won’t last forever, they don’t let themselves really KNOW this.) This echoes what we see happening now. Those in power have no reason to believe they’ll be forced to go without anything, those of us barely managing to hang on know we might have to go without, maybe even soon, but we don’t know how to convince those in power to do something about it, and the many who are forced to go without (food, shelter, health care, safety) are pushed aside. We are really resilient creatures. We can carry on like normal in the worst of circumstances. This is both a tremendous strength and a devastating, terrible weakness.

I’d like to ask you kind of a meta question, if you’re up for it. I can think of a lot of people I’d like to give your book to, people who’ve never stopped to ask why they are offered the stories they’re offered — stories in which the women and girls are murdered and disappeared and otherwise tossed aside — and I wonder what they would think of your book. Are there people that you hope your book reaches? People who you hope will find it meaningful or challenging?

Ulrich: This is a great question, and I’m not sure I can answer it without getting myself in trouble! I can think of, specifically, a person in my family who tends to blame women when they have been victimized (“if she hadn’t been wearing that,” “in my day, girls didn’t go to bars alone,” “why did she get in the car with him,” etc.) who could really benefit from reading these stories, but 1) they won’t read them; 2) even if they did, they’d miss the point anyway. So I would love for my book to reach people like that and get them thinking, but … I don’t know that it would.

And to turn that point back on you — Claire, I’ve seen you mention in interviews, has really bought into that “disappearing into a relationship” standard. Are there people you would like to have read your book and take a second look at themselves and their ideas on women and relationships?

Lerman: It’s a rough truth, I think, that the people who might need access to a work of feminist art (to really broadly categorize what we “do” in our writing) might be some of the least likely to have access to it. Next week I have a meeting with a translator who has expressed interest in translating my book into Turkish, which is really exciting (I used to live in Turkey), but also deeply depressing. Turkey has atrocious female literacy rates. The people who might need a book (and not just my book — any book) to help them think through the conditions of their existence simply cannot read them. But that said, I worked hard to make my book feel accessible and approachable, despite the heaviness. And it was important to me that it reflected real life for more than just the bourgeoisie, though certainly some of the characters in the book might be approaching petit-bourgeoisie status. I hoped that its brevity might attract some on-the-fence readers who could be lured into thinking about identity, ecological catastrophe, feminism, etc., even if they don’t typically find themselves thinking about those things. All I can really say is that I hope people who sit with it find it meaningful in some way. 

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A Conversation with Poet and Translator Deborah Woodard

Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star, 2006) Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks, including Hunter Mnemonics (hemel press, 2008), which was illustrated by artist Heide Hinrichs. Her poetry has appeared in Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013), Filter, Handsome, Gargoyle, Shake the Tree, Zoland Poetry, and elsewhere. She has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from Italian in The Dragonfly, A Selection of Poems: 1953-1981(Chelsea Editions, 2009), Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015) and Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018). Deborah teaches at Hugo House in Seattle.

In this interview, Deborah Woodard discusses her recent translation of Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary, a collection of the Italian poet’s early experiments in prose, as well as her own practice of poetry that often engages in oblique forms of translation.

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In Obtuse Diary, Amelia Rosselli refers to clarity as “a fake lake.” For me, the term “obtuse” conjures high school geometry, and I picture an angle moving toward the horizontal. The common use of the adjective is dull or slow, so the very idea of an obtuse diary is curious. How do you understand Rosselli’s use of the term?

The persona Rosselli develops in Obtuse Diary is obtuse, or slow-witted, in the sense that her development has been delayed by personal trauma that also had a distinctly public side. Rosselli was born in exile in Paris in 1930 to anti-fascist activist parents, Marion Cave (British) and Carlo Rosselli (Italian) who had fled Mussolini’s Italy. In 1937, her father and her uncle (Nello Rosselli) were assassinated by Mussolini’s operatives. Although Amelia’s time in Larchmont, New York, where Marion and her children eventually found refuge for the duration of the war, was stable and even happy, the trauma of her father’s death was a wound that never healed. When she settled in Italy after the war, first in Florence and then permanently in Rome, Rosselli was starting from scratch. She was the daughter and niece of heroes of the resistance, but she was also a rather isolated young woman, the ugly duckling who was, in truth, the swan.

In my view, Rosselli’s obtuseness was her way of resisting a post-war world that’s broken, but also shallow and materialistic. Coming up against these corrupt veneers renders her dim. “Clarity is a fake lake.” No way to see oneself clear through this mess. So instead, she envelops herself in protective dullness, or numbness. At the same time, she comprehends all too clearly: “She didn’t want to know that she was the target of many, and of the laughter of so many: she was unable to discern in the silence of other hidden ones a too-real furor of her own.”

You’ve been translating Rosselli’s poetry over the course of many years. What draws you to her work, and to the practice of translation? Your own work as a poet is often engaged in oblique forms of translation, moving among different discourse worlds or inhabiting borrowed texts.

Yes, I agree that I’ve always tended toward oblique forms of translation in my own work. That’s a really good insight, Eva. I feel fortunate that I also was able to be an actual translator, thanks to Rosselli. I stumbled upon her work, more or less by accident. I pulled her first collection, Variazioni belliche (War Variations) from a bundle of books a friend sent me from Italy, discards from her own library, that I’d stowed in a sideboard. I was looking for a translation project. Initially, I put the book back under the sideboard, but then I gave it a second look, and felt drawn to its extreme hermeticism. What made the poetry difficult, was also its allure. I never solved the mystery of Rosselli’s verse, and so I never moved on from translating her. Roberta Antognini and I have recently started work on Documento, Rosselli’s longest collection. After that, who knows?

Your most recent book of poems, No Finis; Triangle Testimonies, 1911, uses transcripts of the trial in which Triangle Shirtwaist owners were ultimately acquitted of murder. Your focus is on the aggressive cross-examination of workers, most of whom were young women who were not native speakers of English.

Each poem is a set of interrogations, fixated on details of doors and windows, keys and locks, a relentless questioning broken only by the workers’ own muddled recall of trauma. The poems are quite moving, the difficulty of speaking contrasted with the defense attorney’s insistence on answers. What drew you to evoke this horrific event, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire that killed 146 workers, from the standpoint of the trial?

I’d been trying to write about the American labor movement. My mother had worked as a labor organizer, and both my parents were socialists. I’m still trying to figure out the labor book, if, indeed, it’s a single collection. I mean, I say American labor, but part of what I’ve written so far takes place in Denmark, as I was attempting to collage and reconstitute an unfinished manuscript on economics by my father. The juiciest bits for my purposes took place in Denmark, oddly enough. Anyway, I was always somewhat aware of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, as a touchstone, and I started reading about it. Then, in 2011, I was in New York City—actually, for a Rosselli conference—and I went to NYU’s centennial exhibit on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. It was held on the first floor of the Brown Building, the site of the fire. At that exhibit, I learned of Cornell’s online archives of the fire, including the transcript of the trial of the factory owners. I considered other ways to address the tragedy—but the transcript pulled me in, and I ended up focusing on that. Then, with illustrations added by John Burgess, the sequence became a book. The poems, or playlets, as I think of them, seem to be a good length for bookstore and pop-up performances.

The trial revolves around a locked door and whether or not a key was hung beside it. Hence, the focus on locks and keys. I see the witnesses as empowered, despite the manipulations of Max Steuer, the defense attorney—himself an immigrant, though from an earlier wave of migration—who was able to adroitly switch up and manipulate linguistic registers. Though not likely a conscious strategy, and certainly erratic in nature, the witnesses’ linguistic glitches and digressions become a mode of resistance. They can delay answering questions and, at times, avoid them altogether. They aren’t reliable or helpful witnesses, as they’re befuddled (obtuse, like Rosselli’s narrator). My hope is that the playlet-poems can be performed in more than one way, and that the witnesses can win some of the time.

Borrowed Tales is a collection of prose poems that, while pilfering from diverse sources, including McGuffey Readers, case histories, biographies, and art installations, are not retellings but new and strange narratives.

I’d love to hear how you work with sources, using the sequence Gordon and Martha as an example. In this work, Gordon and Martha are siblings, and Martha is a quite daring graffiti artist. It’s a marvelous sequence—dizzying and inventive in its conjuring of Martha’s creative flamboyance and her “iridescent ambivalence.”

The names of your characters, Gordon and Martha, are nods to the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, known for his practice of removing sections from buildings slated for demolition, and documenting his interventions in photographs and films. Your work, though, is not about the artist, although images of abandoned buildings abound as we follow Martha marking space: her “arrows directed the eye, embedded themselves in sinking doorways.”

I am trying to figure the relation between Matta-Clark and your fictional graffiti artist Martha, and I am tempted to make a connection between Matta-Clark’s cuts and the graffiti artist’s ‘burning’ of walls – or between cutting and tagging. (“Tags covered what they did not own.”) Am I overreaching? How did you arrive at the character of Martha?

Well, though this wasn’t the plan, Borrowed Tales teems with children and young adults. Even Hamlet and Ophelia are probably rather young. Gordon and Martha radiate a light-hearted sunny energy, despite their trafficking in the grimy art of graffiti and Martha becoming a vampire at the end of the sequence. (I had a dream about vampires on the subway.) Gordon and Martha speak to my positive feelings about the brother and sister bond. There’s great loyalty between them, and I love it when Gordon says that “He knew his sister Martha was a genius.” Martha is the prime mover and principal artist and Gordon readily accepts this.

Glad that you like “iridescent ambivalence,” and please do overreach a bit when it comes to Matta-Clark and his techniques! I had already settled on the name “Martha” as I’d had a dream about one of my godson’s younger sisters, Martha, being pushed in her carriage over a little bridge, in, perhaps, Central Park. Given that dream, when I scissored apart “Gordon” and “Matta,” “Matta” was destined to become Martha. Under other circumstances, those syllables could have turned into, say, Mattie. But the die was cast. I must say that it was odd to learn, down the road, that Gordon Matta-Clark had a twin brother.

In the cosmology of Borrowed Tales, Gordon and Martha are the children of a woman named Lorna. I based Lorna on an actual person, a student of my father’s at Goddard College and, later, my sometimes babysitter. Lorna had given up a baby for adoption. After the death of my mother when I was ten, I moved to New York with my brother, to live with my father and stepmother. Lorna was in New York, working as a waitress. She brought me packets of Saltines from the diner where she worked. I felt that we had each suffered a loss, and that these losses couldn’t be talked about. They were taboo. I always wondered what happened to Lorna, and so she landed her own section in Borrowed Tales. She has given up Gordon but appears to be raising Martha. Somehow, Martha finds Gordon and they form an allegiance, but they never speak of Lorna, their mother. That’s taboo, though we don’t know why. What Gordon and Martha have in common beyond their sibling status is their penchant for creating and inhabiting imaginary worlds. They do so with considerable panache.

There are many wonderful moments in “Gordon and Martha,” but I’d like to ask you about one particular passage. At a certain point in Martha’s evolution as a graffiti artist, she ceases to tag. You write:

Martha’s early tags had influenced the hands of other writers. The tags were like cups of tea made up ahead of time that had grown cold.

The image of pouring tea—so cozy, domestic, a small gesture—is in stark contrast to the practice of tagging, often done in harrowing circumstances, and so central to the graffiti artist’s identity.

Martha seems to have come to the limits of what she could accomplish with tagging. So she turns exclusively to burners, or murals. As for the tea, it’s an odd image, I agree. It was probably my tea, to be honest, as, when one cuts images and notation into a poem, who knows what will persist. Such as a cup of tea grown cold. However, if I’d tried to think about what a young graffiti artist’s beverage of choice might be, it could have been cliché. Red Bull? Let me digress by saying that I love seeing hardboiled detectives in U.K. police procedurals put up the kettle for tea.

Graffiti art is also considered defacement and “bad” writing, so this brings me to your collection Plato’s Bad Horse. The book’s title alludes to Plato’s image of the soul as a charioteer trying to steer a pair of horses, one sensible and one impulsive.

The title poem raises the question of unreliable or ill-formed memories: “My memories have become too burred / to be of use, like horses that cannot be ridden.” In a later section of the book, you reflect on “mnemata-driven recitations,” spurred by the discovery, after your father’s death, of a manuscript in which he discusses memory devices and argues that they played a role in the writing of the gospels. You write: “Poems that had remained in draft for more than a decade, stalled by the gaps in my memory, began to emerge as I opened myself up to the repetition and variation of a few key images.” 

I am fascinated by this attempt to transform memory fragments into memory devices. I’d love to hear about your process of working with memories – described as “useless” in the title poem but in later poems appear and reappear as support beams.

In the following passage, you refer to the search for mnemata:

I had my own notes: guideposts, ditches of dark water in the snow.That day, I was going to buy some blue teal silk,so perhaps the mnemata could be bolts of cloth as well,……or in the basement,the wicker basket of gray clothespins….

The clothespins took on the gray of temple pigeons.  

Did your exploration of mnemata-driven structuring devices in Plato’s Bad Horse influence later poems? I’m thinking, for example, of your repetition and re-purposing of images in Borrowed Tales.

As a collection, Plato’s Bad Horse includes older ways of composing while ushering in the new. You’re focusing in on the most important aspect of the collection for me—namely, the start of collage in my practice.

My father, a professor of psychology and the son of a Presbyterian minister, had been writing a book about the gospels for some time. I learned what a book meant emotionally and materially through his living within the promise of his evolving work, a psychological study that wove together what he’d learned as a child with what he’d dedicated himself to as an adult. After his death, I kept rereading his unfinished manuscript. However, though my father wrote quite lucidly and directly, I found it hard to track the text, no matter how many times I read it. This went on for a number of years. It was quite frustrating.

What did sink in for me was that a mnemonic was a memory device. It could have been something like beads on a string that a story teller would finger, rather like rosary beads, in order to jog his memory, or he could click his fingernails together, or something like that (reminiscent of what people are doing at poetry readings these days!). I hypothesized that anything could function as a memory device: as a series of guideposts.

Consequently, I took up a pair of scissors, photocopied my worksheets so as not to destroy the originals, and put everything through a simple slice-and-dice collage process that I’d learned from the late Kathleen Fraser, with whom I studied for a brief but influential time at a writing conference in Santa Cruz.

Here’s the exercise I learned from Fraser. Take a piece of writing, generally typed, fold it in half and then scissor down the central fold and between the lines. Turn over all the half lines, so you can’t read them. They’ll resemble the little strips of paper one pulls from fortune cookies. Next, take a new sheet of paper and, selecting two half lines at random, tape them together to form a new line. Continue until all the half lines are taped to the paper. Then type up your new piece. Voila!

I remember Kathleen Fraser saying that she wanted to go home and put all the poems of hers she’d “never liked” through this process. This is what I did with my drafts. Paradoxically, splintering the drafts enabled ideas to cohere and psychic material to take more fully embodied form. I’m so grateful to my students, my second teachers, in respect to collage. Unbidden, they started revising their cut-ups, carefully teasing out narrative, shaping lines, and refining imagery. Revision was the missing link.

The mnemonics in the latter half of Plato’s Bad Horse and all of Borrowed Tales were created through this collage plus extensive revision. I also used it to compress and augment the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire trial transcript; though I didn’t cut lines in half, I added in my own material more sparingly, and I often restored narrative sequences. One thing that I haven’t mentioned in regard to this practice is that it tends to shorten and tighten texts. When I type up a worksheet of taped half lines, I select from it, going fairly quickly so as not to overthink. The trial runs to hundreds of pages, so condensing was key.

My last question is about your poem “Ghismonda in Calabria: A Tentative Libretto.” Ghismonda is a figure from Boccaccio’s Decameron, but you’ve placed your characters, including a reader and a translator, in contemporary Calabria. The narrator says, “Translation, my mind wandered, was not / that different from the stop-start of the Metro.” In this poem, are you reflecting on your own experience as a translator of Italian? A frequently quoted line from George Steiner is “Every language is a world.” How has your experience of Italian shaped your own creative work in English?

Overall, translating Rosselli has made me a more experimental poet. She writes in Hospital Series: “Life is a vast experiment for some, too /void the earth the whole into its knees / piercing lances and persuaded anecdotes, I sow you / world clasped by the laurel.” Lances are pierced and anecdotes persuaded. This opens up possibilities right there. Rosselli’s oddities have a certain heft. In one of my mnemonic poems in Plato’s Bad Horse, I wrote: “Some haystack it was, munching hay.” It never occurred to me before, but that line may be indebted to Rosselli’s. Both her lines and my own here give me a certain boost, though I can’t really tell you why.

Yes, I took a stab at writing about translating in “Ghismonda in Calabria.” The poem—which is not collaged, but which works with fragments found in my worksheets as another approach to accepting fragmentation—translates Boccaccio’s Ghismonda into a modern Ghismonda, or “G.” I was, in fact, helping the actual G (not her real initial) with a translation of an article. It was so much fun working with her in her airy study in Piazza di Bologna (which is in Rome, not Calabria. The place names make the poem challenging to track, I admit). I hadn’t been translating all that long at the time. To be able to work with “G” to bring a few paragraphs into focus in English did open up a world to me. As we were working, G’s daughter, darted into the room to model a series of bathing suits: “When we’re done, we crack the blinds, / we shift our chairs. We watch her daughter’s / rapid-fire change of bathing suits.” The translator is always auditioning new garb, seeking new ways to tweak the target language and to let the original text shine forth.

Rosselli is an incredible mentor. She can make a bank shot and yet somehow she is completely lucid, too. And she can write about the same themes over and over again without getting stale. How does she accomplish this? These are the questions that keep me translating her.