An Interview with Matthew Thorburn, author of The Grace of Distance

Marcene Gandolfo: I read The Grace of Distance in the summer of 2020, and your poems, which meditate so eloquently on the very nature of distance, spoke to me with a profound immediacy and relevance. Of course, I know that you composed these poems long before you knew of the impending pandemic or the social distancing that would ensue. Still, can you speak to the collection’s current relevance? From writing these poems, have you acquired insights that help you face challenges in these uncertain times?

Matthew Thorburn: Thank you for asking—that’s a very timely question, and something I’ve thought about too. The poems in The Grace of Distance have to do with a variety of distances—between people, between cultures, between different physical places in the world, between faith and doubt—as well as the sense of perspective and understanding that can come with distance, whether it’s a matter of physical distance or time passing. That’s what I was thinking about as I wrote these poems over quite a few years, and certainly when LSU Press published this book in August 2019.

But it is strange, isn’t it, to think about how the word “distance” has taken on such a different meaning this year? So many people are enduring all kinds of terrible hardships right now—whether it’s sickness, caring for a loved one who’s ill, financial hardships, loss of employment, or other personal difficulties. I can’t help thinking of distance in terms of the loved ones who I’m not able to see right now, such as my parents and aunts and uncles, as well as many friends. Spending time by yourself has its virtues and can lead to a kind of grace, I think—as a writer, or even as a reader, this seems especially true—but being separated from family and friends is a hard (though right now very necessary) thing to do.

However, I also know I am immensely lucky that my parents and other loved ones are healthy and doing okay, and I am very fortunate that I’m able to do my work from home. Spending most of this year working from home has meant much more time with my wife and son—the opposite of distance—which has been an unexpected gift. I try to keep that front and center in my mind and just take things day by day.

MG: Can you say something about your composition process?  Do you write daily? Do you engage in writing rituals? In particular, what role did this process play in the construction of your book? In particular, how did the theme of distance emerge?

MT: Prior to the pandemic, I did most of my writing on mass transit, during my commute from my home in New Jersey to my office in New York City, and back. I also had a good routine of working on poems during my lunch hour. Each day I would carry printed copies of poems I was currently working on, and I’d mark these up with edits during those times. Then I’d type in my edits at home, print clean copies, and do it again the next day. Or if I was working on a manuscript, I’d carry a copy of that in my briefcase to reread and mark up. It might not sound ideal, but this writing practice worked very well for me. It’s how I wrote many of the poems in this book—and these days I sometimes daydream about my favorite spots in midtown Manhattan where I could sit outside to eat my lunch and work on my poems.

The Grace of Distance originated in a file folder where over the years I saved poems that didn’t make it into my previous books—mainly for thematic reasons—but that I thought were still very good poems and wanted to keep. (There were also a handful of shorter poems I’d written while working on my book-length poem, Dear Almost.) Eventually, as that folder grew thicker, I read through these poems again and came to see that they hadn’t fit into those other books because almost all of them were about something else—those different kinds of distances. Once I recognized that, I continued writing new poems with this theme in the back of my head.

MG: In “A Poem for My Birthday,” you write, “ . . . “Whatever happened / to longing, you ask, but I long for that / red barn town where I was born . . . ” As these poems continuously travel, do they unremittingly search for home, escape from it, or simultaneously do both?

MT: I think they probably do both. As someone who grew up in one place (the Midwest), then lived for nearly two decades in a very different place (New York City), and now lives in still another different-feeling place (small-town New Jersey), my sense of “home” is complicated. I find myself looking back to Michigan, as in the poem you quoted, as well as writing poems that are set in and focused on the landscape where I live now. When it comes down to it, if you said “home” to me I’d probably picture Lansing, Michigan, where I grew up—though I have to tell you, after nearly three years here in central New Jersey, I feel very much at home here too.

Having said that, though, I find that it often works best for me to be somewhere other than the place I’m writing about—to be looking back at where I’ve been, to have that distance. And certainly, as I get older, I find myself writing more about the past and childhood memories. This is probably why this theme of distances came so naturally to me—why I discovered I’d actually been writing poems about it for years!

MG: In the collection, several poems explore the role of art in bridging interpersonal distances between time and space. Could you elaborate your thoughts on this subject?

MT: I love writing poems about visual art, especially paintings, as well as about music. I’m really drawn to the stories that works of visual art can suggest. And it amazes me to stand in a museum and look up close at a painting and think about the fact that Vermeer once stood in a similar position and put this paint on this canvas. To me that suggests a distance that expands and contracts all at once. As I describe in my poem “Forgotten Until You Find It,” seeing the Girl with A Pearl Earring at the Frick Collection was a powerful experience for me.

In writing a poem I want to share something—to try to enable the reader to see what I’m seeing and feel what I’m feeling (even if those sights and feelings are ones I’ve imagined). I think it was Philip Larkin who said a poem is like a river you can step into in the same place again and again. There’s a sense of connection I feel in reading the poems I love best, or looking at paintings I love, and I hope I am able to create something like that in my poems too. Paintings are made to be seen, usually, just as poems are usually written with the intention that others will read and hear them—so I think that’s something we have in common.

MG: In a number of the poems, you speak of language in relation to space and travel. For instance, in the poem “No More,” you write “As though many little doors, slow to close, / are closing now: how the doctor speaks of her dying. / Stepping over the puddle of each period / the reader lets each sentence slip away . . . ” Could you comment on this metaphorical connection?

MT: Well, language is one of the main things that connects us, one of the ways we make connections with other people—and I see metaphors like those as not only elements of poetry, but also one of the ways we can understand complicated aspects of life—or in this case, of death. In “No More” I was writing about my grandmother, who had a stroke and lost the ability to communicate verbally. Over time she regained quite a bit of her speech but was never able to talk the way she once had. I think that’s a metaphor—those closing doors—that I came up with in thinking about her last days in hospice and how the human body can go through a process of shutting down. Turning off the lights in a house, room by room, is another way I pictured this, though that didn’t end up in the poem.

MG: What is next? Are you engaged in any new writing projects? If so, would you like to share a bit about your current work?

MT: Thanks for asking about this. Right now, I’m working on two projects I’m very excited about. The first is a book-length sequence of poems about a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family, friends, virtually everything, but somehow survives to tell his story. This book is a real departure for me, stylistically, because the poems are written almost entirely without punctuation—except for a period at the end of each poem. “Go Together Come Apart,” my poem about Matisse’s collage “The Swimming Pool” in The Grace of Distance, is a preview of how this mode of writing works for me. For years I was resistant to poems without punctuation and didn’t like reading them. But then the experience of reading my friend Leslie Harrison’s amazing second collection of poems, The Book of Endings, completely changed my mind. Seeing what she did without punctuation—the possibilities that open up when you remove punctuation—inspired me to try writing this way. (You can read a couple of poems from this manuscript online here and here and here.)

The second project, which is still taking shape, is turning out to be a book of elegies—looking back to childhood, as I mentioned earlier, as well as trying to remember loved ones and hold onto memories of them in words. The manuscript is anchored by two sequences of poems—one about my grandmother, Majel Thorburn, and one about my mother-in-law, Fong Koo. This manuscript is also somewhat of a formal experiment. For years I’ve thought about trying to write more prose poems—and in fact quite a few of these poems are prose poems and Haibun. I’m still writing and revising these poems, so I’m excited to see how my imagining of this book will gradually come to life over the next few years. I find with each book it’s a little different, but always a process of discovering.

An Interview with Katie Nolan, Author of Confessions of a Hobo's Daughter

Deborah Woodard: Congratulations on the publication of your memoir, Confessions of a Hobo’s Daughter, Katie. This is such a multilayered remembrance, and it’s a real page turner! It features family secrets, tales—some of them hair raising—of riding the rails during the Great Depression, an ongoing query into how to live one’s own love story, and even phone calls to your writing teacher. How did you come to write Hobo's Daughter?  Was there a moment when the book clicked into place for you?

Katie Nolan: I carried my father's hobo stories, both written and in my memory, for years. So the idea that I ought to write them in a book form was there as well. Some of the stories were poignant, like the one where my parents, after retirement, were traveling with my nephew. My father gestured to the town jail as they traveled through and exclaimed, “I was jailed there once.”  My mother immediately said, “Don't say that in front of your grandson!”  There was always this tension in the family as to whether his story should be told, or not. I felt that telling his story completely would vindicate him, create empathy for his plight, and that of many others, of being forced into a life on the rails due to the Great Depression.

DW: You tell the parallel stories of Bud and Katie, father and daughter. Both of them ride the rails, but in different ways. Bud never buys a ticket, for instance. Did you ride the rails to prepare for writing the book?  If so, what stood out for you as illuminating moments?  Did this journey make you feel closer to Bud?

KN: I rode the rails along the same routes that I knew my father took; I was in search of my father, someone who had always seemed bigger than life and heroic to me, in the way that he sacrificed, first for his parents by helping them with his meager earnings, then for our family of five, as he worked full time as a logger along with his second job as a dairy farmer. All of this labor and he was still able to spend lots of time with us on camping trips. I think what dominated my thoughts during my thirty-day train trip was how amazing it was that my father was able to be the most optimistic person I'd ever known in spite of hardships that would turn another person despondent. By his hobo stories and his everyday joviality, he taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my life—how to be positive and optimistic in the face of darkness. His joviality took the form of singing silly songs on his way to the woodshed every morning, and of tickling the feet of his children to wake them up. My childhood friend, who often stayed with me, remembers the latter and the memory always makes us laugh. I have always felt very close to my father, but the journey and my writing of the book brought insights into him as an exploited human being. My admiration of him took on a new form, a new understanding, beyond those early memories of daughter and father.

DW: You write a lot about the Great Depression in your memoir. Were anecdotes of those years passed down to you by your parents and grandparents, or did you rely on research. Or both?

KN: My parents and grandparents did often speak of living through the Great Depression. To this day, I learn some new stories from cousins who had their father, and my father's brothers, tell them similar tales. Each of the brothers, except for the youngest, was told that they “better get on the road and find work, so that they could feed the girls.”  From my earliest memories, my grandparents lived in the schoolhouse that they had bought at auction when they arrived in the northwest. We visited there often, as they lived less than a mile down the road from where I grew up. My grandparents came as many others did after being blown out from the dust storm. They lost all they had in the dust bowl, except for the few things they could tie onto their old jalopy. I recall the wood cook-stove that they brought with them, which looked huge and imposing to me as a child, and the story was told that grandpa didn't want the burden of bringing the stove along, but grandma insisted. Walls and rooms were built into the schoolhouse over time, but they never changed the porch where students had hung their coats on their way into the schoolroom. In bold red paint it said “Play Ball!”  Because my grandparents spoke often about coming to the northwest, I definitely felt the history they described. I did some research, including verifying that Nebraska also suffered from the dust bowl, something that is not always mentioned in the history books. I also researched the resistance of workers to the injustices of that time, including the famous “hunger marches” of the unemployed. On March 6, 1930 there were hunger marches all across the country, including the one mentioned in my book at Union Square in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers marched in major cities throughout the United States, demanding relief from joblessness and hunger. Marchers were generally met with brutal repression; however, after the marches public sympathy for the plight of the workers increased. Unemployment insurance eventually followed.

DW: Despite the hard times that Bud endures, the book is full of moments of keenly-felt joy and companionship. I'm thinking in particular of some of the scenes in the hobo camps, for instance when Bud scores a chicken and they all make hobo stew. And also of Bud's friendship with Harry, his fellow former convict, which is every bit as satisfying as Thelma and Louise. Do you feel that extreme circumstances can give rise to joy?  If so, what characterizes this joy?

KN: There is joy and companionship in hard times. Perhaps there is a relationship between extreme circumstances and tight bonds between human beings. Relationships deepen when you see that you can trust someone with your life. This is revealed when you face life threatening circumstances together. But I'd like to believe that we can experience the same deeply trusting relationships without going through starvation or war.

DW: I understand that you are a former philosophy professor. Can you share a bit from a philosopher you find more relevant?

KN: One of my readers stated that I had “bared my soul” in the book and that was part of what she liked about it. Well, opening one's soul can leave one feeling both embarrassed and vulnerable. But my embarrassment is also related to a recent epiphany that I, as the daughter, perfectly exemplify the Buddhist philosophy of grasping, aversion, and delusion, otherwise known as the wheel of samsara (basic and universal human suffering). I see myself as this very confused, deluded person grasping for love in all the wrong ways, then expressing an aversion to the project of love. It should make me blush, and does, that I was so blind.

There is a great deal of depth to the concept of delusion that I am not addressing here. Nonetheless, the basic idea that delusion, as it is related to reality, ontologically and epistemologically, and as it drives our grasping and our aversions, seems to be something I totally missed when grappling with my failed romantic relationships. This perhaps adds substance to the opinion that we do have to deal with our emotional blind spots, use psychological tools such as counseling if needed, before we can successfully embark on a spiritual path that promises to remove suffering. I can only hope that my epiphany will help me install a bit more wisdom into my next book!

DW: That’s fascinating! More love stories should be written by philosophers. I just have a couple more questions for you. Katie reminisces about her past relationships while on the train. Without giving away the revelation at the end of the book, could you draw any parallels between what Bud and Katie experience and come to learn?

KN: Since I was raised poor, perhaps I have an inherent understanding of how economic injustice creates barriers to healthy intimate relationships. In this country, propaganda has convinced many that being poor means you are a flawed human being, perhaps lazy or stupid. I found that many potential partners I met were either true believers in this myth—this was always painful when I realized their view—or subconsciously, perhaps, judged me as inferior somehow. I couldn't help but take it personally.

DW: We may be facing another Great Recession. What lessons can we learn from Bud's story?

KN: Dad's life is an example of economic and social injustice. With minimal research it becomes evident that very few wealthy people go to prison. Or in street talk “We get the best justice we can buy.”  Bud was put on a chain gang because he had less than a dollar in his pocket—at that time this was the result of a vagrancy law. Massive imprisonment of the poor seems to me to coincide with economic instability and its creation of the poor, the majority of whom are women and children. It is still true that approximately 80% of the world's poor is composed of women and children, while women continue to do 80% of the world's work!  This creation of the poor, which increases with each recession, is also complicated by institutional racism.

Laws and policies are intimately connected to the specter of another recession. Laws favored the banks when my grandparents experienced the loss of the family homestead in Nebraska. During the Great Recession of 2007 onward, policies favored the banks and the 1% of the wealthiest. Or as a friend put it when I lost my house and life savings in the 2007 recession, “You didn't lose your house and savings. That money is in someone’s pocket.” 

Unless we strengthen democratic institutions, history will repeat itself.

Sense of the Strange: An Interview with Chloe N. Clark

Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment. Her chapbook, The Science of Unvanishing Objects, was published by Finishing Line Press and her debut full length poetry collection, Your Strange Fortune, was published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Her poetry chapbook, Under My Tongue, was published with Louisiana Literature Press in early 2020. She is founding co-editor-in-chief of Cotton Xenomorph. She teaches multimodal composition, communication, and creative writing. Her poetry and fiction have appeared such places as Apex, Bombay Gin, Drunken Boat, Gamut, Hobart, Uncanny, and more.

In Chloe Clark’s new short story collection, Collective Gravities, published with Word West, she takes us to the stars. She takes us to the zombie apocalypse and to mysterious research facilities. She frequently bends genre, putting horror side to side with sci-fi. It was a true joy to read Chloe Clark’s new collection, and I was privileged enough to have the opportunity to chat with her about the process of writing the book.

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Dana Diehl: Please tell us a little bit about how this book came to be.

Chloe Clark: On one level, there’s the simple answer: I had a lot of stories and wanted to collect them up. On the truer level though, I kept finding that I’d circle back to similar themes and ideas, often seeing them in different ways, throughout the course of my writing and so I began to see a collection taking shape based on those qualities. 

This collection spans ten years of writing: the oldest story in the collection was originally drafted while I was still an undergrad. Which is weird to think about because I now teaching writing to undergrads. So the stories in this piece have gone through a big, important chunk of my life.

DD: I see images repeat themselves in several your stories. The image of the bruised woman. Space travel. Mysterious illnesses. The images have different significance in each story. It was fun for me as a reader, because I felt like I was seeing alternate realities play out. It was also fun looking for the ideas that strung your stories together. How intentional were the similarities between your stories? How do you think reoccurring images might strengthen a collection?

CC: Often the similarities were very intentional, in my mind a lot of my stories exist within the same universe (or slightly altered versions of it). I’ve always loved writers whose work invites conversation between pieces (it’s a bonus for people “in the know” who have read the other stories and see the connections, and it also feels like a reader can see the world of the stories more fully). Sometimes, they were less intentional when I was writing the stories, but then when editing I’d see that I’d done it and it was because I had felt that the stories shared some connection. 

I’m a huge proponent of novel-in-stories, so I think that continuity strengthens and redefines the way we read the pieces when we notice the connections or when we go back for a reread. They feel somehow “truer” when there are those connections that help us see the story beyond just the one frame.

DD: Another prevalent theme I see in your stories is isolation. One of your stories, “Bound,” explores a plague that sweeps the planet and forces the speaker into isolation. As we do this interview, we’re approaching the third month of quarantine in the US. When I read “Bound,” I found it to have chilling similarities to what we are experiencing today. Have recent events changed the way you view these stories? Has quarantine changed the creative work you’re doing now?

CC: This is a multilayered question to me. I’ve always been fascinated by isolation and how it affects people. Many of my favorite writing and movies, growing up, dealt with this. In some ways, I think isolation is one of the ultimate human fears.

I think recent events have, if anything, made me feel more strongly about the need to deal with isolation in writing. I think voicing the fears and anxieties of isolation, for people, is important. Writing and reading help us feel less alone.

DD: So many of these stories take us into the stars. What draws you to outer space as a setting for your stories? 

I’m not sure I have a great answer for this. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved space. The unknown and the thought of all that exploration that has yet to be done is so compelling. Plus, what has been discovered through the reach for space has been so important and profound.

In my heart, I’m a wanderer and what better to go towards than the stars?

DD: Is there a movie or novel that has especially fueled or inspired your interest in space?

CC: Oof, that’s hard to narrow down. But I think the main media of my childhood were three distinct space pieces of art: Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, the BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the film Aliens. I think that mix actually kind of perfectly sums up my writing about space: A lot of hope and exploration, a distinct sense of delight, and a dose of fearing the unknown.

DD: In Collective Gravities, you explore a huge range of genres, from realistic fiction to science fiction, horror, and even zombie apocalypse. What do you like about playing with speculative fiction? What genres are your favorite to consume in your everyday life?  

CC: I think I think in multiple genres. It’s very hard for me to stick in one, even within the scope of a single piece. I’ve said before that I think speculative is how we live our lives—everyone has a sense of the strange about how they view the world and it makes sense to imbue our stories with that, too.

I read pretty widely. I’ve always had a love of sci-fi and horror, but I also read tons of domestic fiction and literary fiction. My favorite writers tend to be the ones who have feet in every genre like Colson Whitehead, Helen Oyeyemi, and China Mieville.

DD: In your bio, you mention that you have an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment, which is a degree I didn’t even know existed! What is your relationship with the environment and space as you’re working through a story?

CC: It’s a very cool and unique degree, from Iowa State University, that I wish more people knew about!

I think environment is extremely important to every piece I write—because environment encompasses so much: it might be a small town, but it also applies to the reaches of outer space or a haunted apartment building. Place influences character and story as much as any other element. 

We all have places that center us—be it our homes or a spot that makes us feel something. And I think that’s true of most good works of fiction too—there’s some distinct sense of place that makes the reader understand or feel the piece in a way. 

Because I’m a very visual writer, I usually know exactly what a story’s environment looks like. But I also hate describing that stuff in too much depth—because I want the reader to have input in the place they conjure up as they read. So one thing I always try to be cognizant of is finding the key detail that brings me into an environment and that’s what I’ll include. Sometimes I know that key detail right away, but it’s often one I eventually find in revision and pull into the forefront as I strip the other details away.

DD: One of my favorite lines in this collection can be found in “The Collective Gravity of Stars”:

“’Well, everything will be better now,’ her mother said. Callie wondered if anyone had ever said that and watched it come true.”

For me, this line captures the way your stories seem to pendulum-swing between pessimism and optimism. However, they tend to more often than not end in a moment of hopefulness, of light. Can you speak to this

CC:  I often describe myself as an optimistic pessimist. I think there’s a lot of importance to knowing and understanding how much is flawed and terrible about this world. But hope is equally as important, because that’s what helps us strive to actually make change.

And from a storytelling perspective, I think pessimism has its place, but it’s a lazy device. Hope is an active choice to be made and that’s far more exciting to me.

DD: If you could take off into outer space with your characters, where would you most like to go?

CC: Honestly, I’d be overjoyed just to go to space at all. But if I had the means to go anywhere, I think Mars would be a good start. There’s such a build up of Mars in my head from all of the sci-fi of my youth that imagining feeling the ground of Mars beneath my feet would be as close to living inside my dreams as I could get.

An Interview with John Reed, author of A Drama in Time: The New School Century

Kristina Marie Darling: Your newest book, A Drama in TIme: The New School Century, just launched from Profile Books Ltd. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

John Reed: Well, I'd like people to know about The New School and its history, and coming to the book with a very basic outline of The New School is something I'd hope for. There's nothing like writing a book about a submarine and having someone ask you, "but what's a submarine?"

I'd also love for people to know that it's a reference book, with many pictures, and that it was designed to read through or to just peck at, reading now and then and going back to for information. That would make me really happy, knowing the book lived that kind of life on people's shelves.

The last thing, hmm. I'd love for people to know that there are many mysteries to solve here. 

KMD: In addition to your achievements in nonfiction, you are an accomplished poet and novelist. Why is it important for writers to allow themselves to move fluidly between genres? What can nonfiction writers learn from poets? And from their colleagues working in fiction? 

JR: When I was in graduate school in the 90s, this idea of writing across genres was actively discouraged. It may still be discouraged at some schools. I was often challenged: what are you? Would I be writing cultural criticism, non-fiction, poetry, fiction? My first novel was historical fiction, which seemed at the time the only way to marry a fictive sensibility with an historical one. Now, many of those distinctions have gone away, which is as it should be. This is partly, I expect, a result of the use of fiction techniques in non-fiction, and vice versa. And this isn't only in the literary space, but in the media space. Reality television, the internet, etc etc, all this is old hat now. We understand that narrative design is a skill apart from the writing itself. It seems to me, and I'm sure people would disagree with me here, that there are really only two forms of text, prose and poetry, and that even those two aren't that different. If you can write a line of poetry, and you understand to limit your metaphorical values and employ extended metaphors rather than multiple metaphors, you can write a line in any form: film, television, advertising, essay, journalism, anything. And the great lessons of prose—narrative structure, tense, interiority and POV—will take you into any textual terrain, line to line, scene to scene, paragraph to paragraph.

KMD:  Relatedly, How did your cross-genre sensibility equip you for the rewards and challenges of writing A Drama in Time: The New School Century?

JR: The problem of a centennial book about The New School was a sophisticated one: how could I make it a single compelling story? The fear was that it would be: a giant block of prose that was dry as dust; a nearly as boring timeline; a seemingly random series of callouts. The solution was to layer an epic structure onto a journey structure: there are many individuals and points of the story, but the story as a whole is a characterization of The New School. That's what justifies the non-chronological telling. I wanted to put the internal experience of the school before the external experience of the school. I was quite pleased with the solution; it came to me as an aha revelation.

KMD: In addition to documenting the New School’s history, you also teach in the MFA in writing program there. What has teaching opened up for you as you embarked on this project?

JR: The project has been extraordinarily humbling. I've had the chance to research—not nearly enough but still I'm grateful—the lives and visions of an amazing cohort of artists, writers, creatives and thinkers. There's so much more to do; I can only hope I'll keep finding ways to go back to this history. As faculty, I'm humbled and honored to work with the New School artists, writers, creatives and thinkers of today—all of the community that upholds the New School tradition. The people at The New School impress me every day. Everyone. 

KMD: As you promote A Drama in Time, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

JR: I'd love to work on some narrative design seminars: look at narrative structure as it's utilized across media and throughout culture. I do things like that in my teaching at The New School but I enjoy the more open forums sometimes.  

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

JR: I'm finishing up a long term historical novel project: very much in keeping with my first novel. Civil War, a bit of romance, history and sadness. I've also been working on a quick novel project, through this COVID moment: another romantic project, an apocalyptic love story. I have these sonnet videos I'm playing with. I don't know. I'd be curious to know what people think about those. Not really officially anything yet but I was thinking of doing a "season" of them.

An Interview with Chris Wiewiora, Author of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean

The Distance Is More Than an Ocean is a recounting of Chris Wiewiora’s experience coming to America from Poland, his father’s home country, as a child and then returning as an adult, forcing him to reconsider the homeland that framed his childhood and wrestle with the tenuousness of memory. The moments of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean are situated distinctly in place, but also in places: from a Polish elementary school classroom to an imagined Mississippi River, from Florida’s Coco Beach to the gray, rainy streets of Warsaw. Set against varied landscapes, these reflections on travel, memory, and childhood show the complex ways in which our environments both shape us and are reshaped by our recollections of the people we were in those places—and by the people we became when we left them.

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You chose specifically to subtitle/categorize The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a “travelogue memoir.” Where do you see the line drawn between those two genres? Why was it important to you to have readers consider this as both?

I wanted to label my chapbook with the genre of nonfiction, since the publisher Finishing Line Press’s books and most chapbooks are poetry. I wanted to make sure that readers knew that my chapbook, while lyrical, isn’t poetry. Still, nonfiction contains so many sub-genres.

Nonfiction is the only genre defined by what it isn’t: not-fiction. Who knows why it isn’t labeled non-drama or non-poetry; perhaps since it contains both? Anyway, I wanted to define my chapbook by what nonfiction it is—not just that I didn’t make it up like fiction—and so I used the subtitle of travelogue and memoir.

Both a travelogue and a memoir follow records. A travelogue is a record of travels, while a memoir is a record of memories. I wanted readers to know where I was going in my writing: traveling from the United States to Poland, but also traveling from my adulthood to my childhood.

In The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, I switched between present tense for my travels back to Poland and past tense for my travels back to my memories of Poland. I used tense as a line between the two sub-genres. I saw the line between them as what happened (travelogue) and what I remembered (memoir), but the chapbook walks that line between the sub-genres like when I returned to my family’s Warsaw neighborhood and I was confronted with mis-remembering our duplex, which could serve as a metaphor for the sub-genres under nonfiction: a house split in half with two entrances but under the same roof.

There is also a relationship here between prose and poetry. A poem by James Seay serves as an epigraph to the book, and these pieces reflect the way poetry thrives on compressing, fragmenting, and extending beyond singular moments. What roles do the processes of compressing and fragmenting memory play in writing about the past?

Ten years ago I began The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a poetry collection titled Side by Side. The poems explored my mother’s West Virginian family as well as my father’s Polish family. My poetry sprawled and swelled and contained multitudes. Side by Side contained much too much!

Seay’s poem “Patching Up the Past with Water” gave me a colander to strain through the flood of my writing. I wanted to sift through my past. I wanted to find the quicksilver. I needed to find a way to contain what mattered, but it felt so slippery.

Six years ago, I began to write the poems into essays that became The Distance Is More Than an Ocean. First, I wrote an essay titled “Welcome Back”—where I visited my family’s old duplex on a beautiful summer day in Warsaw, while I remembered the cold and gray and cramped other seasons there. The walk through the neighborhood made me confront what I had remembered with what I then experienced.

I felt like my memory was being rewritten. My memory was fragmented and so my writing needed to reflect that. About three years ago, I began to distill those essays. I compressed them from my mother and father’s family to only my father’s family, and then from the United States to only in Poland, and then within Poland to only Warsaw, and I continued to compress my travels and my memories until I could contain them in a chapbook.

When we write about a place from our past, I think we’re not evoking so much as recreating what we remember of that place. How did you negotiate Poland as both a historical space and a personal one?

If the past is prologue, then place is the past’s foundation for the present. I read some Polish history and travel books, but I didn’t use any of that in my chapbook. I wasn’t writing about the historical past and place of Poland, but rather I was rewriting the personal.

I started the chapbook with flying back to Poland—to the same airport, but renamed—and I finished it with my walk through our Warsaw neighborhood. At the end of the chapbook, I considered how the Nazis destroyed the capital’s Old Town area but after the war the Poles rebuilt it from preserved paintings. I had written a personal way from my own history: I had my poems from ten years ago and I had my memories from decades before that—both served as foundations for me to rebuild Warsaw from my return trip and from my childhood.

As a child you viewed yourself not as Polish, but as an American growing up in Poland, longing for the country you considered your real home. But your father was a Polish immigrant, making Poland, to an extent, your family’s homeland. How has writing about these places allowed you to explore the personal/internal tension of being pulled between them?

I used to only say, my last name is Polish. Now, after writing about my past, I say I’m half-Polish.

I want to specifically thank an editor, Tina Schumann, who anthologized my essay, “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I,” in Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents. That essay served as the undercurrent through my childhood in The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, where I had moved from a Polish kindergarten to the American School of Warsaw and when I had refused to learn more Polish while also not fully knowing English. Tina welcomed me to claim both places.

However, both places don’t exist anymore. The United States that welcomed my father’s family after the war doesn’t philosophically exist anymore, but also the Poland of my family’s homeland doesn’t literally exist anymore. When my grandmother was dying, my father showed her Google Maps and she traced a river back to the valley where her father had been a sort of border patrol agent. However, their village is now in Ukraine.

More recently, my father found out from his cousin that his grandfather’s wife’s family name might be Ukrainian! Some of my father’s family refuses to accept that. However, my first thought was, what Ukrainian writers do I know?

Language itself is a part of this tension as well, as the child version of Chris Wiewiora rejects the language that makes him less American. In one vignette, you’ve returned to Poland as an adult and, as you observe your father and a family friend converse in Polish, narrate that you “don’t remember enough of the language to follow their conversation.” “Remember” is a conspicuous, telling word to apply to language.

Could you talk about how lacking (or losing from memory) a language creates a barrier between a person and a place in which that language is spoken? In what ways would knowing that language allow one to access that place differently?

Language makes us human and allows us to connect to other humans. Language accesses history and thoughts and dreams. Language allows us to remember.

We tell ourselves stories. As Joan Didion would add, “In order to live.” We retell those stories so we continue to live on. But if you don’t know a language—can’t speak it, can’t hear it—then you can’t tell stories and those stories die.

During my return visit, the way I “heard” Polish was my Dad translating it into English for me. At the same time, I had been immersed in the language of Polish while growing up in Poland. I had grown up hearing it and speaking some of it, but thinking I forgot most of it. However, when tapped memory seeps and then trickles and then flows. By the end of our return visit to Poland, I found myself babbling small phrases and then the concepts of what people said formed like shapes in clouds, readying to rain understanding.

The Real United States: A Conversation with Matthew Baker

Named one of Variety’s “10 Storytellers To Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures and the children’s novel Key Of X, originally published as If You Find This. His stories have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best Of The Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center Of The Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. His other projects include Early Work. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City.

I’ve been a fan of Matthew Baker’s work since 2013, when, as an editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, I was introduced to his story, “Goods.” A year later, the journal published another of his stories, “Html,” a story partially written in code.

When I read “Goods” for the first time, I was a first-year MFA student, writing a series of unsuccessful stories and struggling to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be or could be. Baker’s stories were playful and idea-driven, but simultaneously had heart, had the ability to move me. He provided me with an example of the sort of writing I might want to do.

I jumped at the opportunity to read Baker’s new collection, Why Visit America, forthcoming in August, and I was not disappointed. The stories he tells are funny and heartbreaking and familiar and surprising all at once. In this interview, Baker discusses writing high-concept narratives, how speculative fiction can allow us to grapple with controversial topics more genuinely, and the films that inspire his writing.

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Dana Diehl: Many of your stories seem to be driven by “What if…?” questions. What if men became obsolete? What if children were raised by the government instead of parents? What if people could become data? I love how deliciously high-concept this collection is. Did all of your stories begin with a concept? Did any of them begin instead with a character or image, for example?

Matthew Baker: I’m embarrassed to say that every story began with a concept. The book itself began with a concept: thirteen parallel-universe stories (one for every stripe in the flag) that would span all fifty states of the country, and that together would create a composite portrait of the real United States: a Through The Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

I once submitted a story to a prestigious literary magazine, and the editor rejected the story with a note that said: “too high-concept for us.” For a writer like me, what that note actually said was: “don’t submit to us again.” I can only do high-concept.

DD: What was it like to write a short story collection with an overarching concept already in mind? Did it make it easier? Did it ever feel restrictive?

MB: It was a tremendous challenge. I loved that about it though. That was what made the writing fun.

DD: Despite these stories being very high-concept, they are also movingly character-driven, grounded in an individual human experience. Do you think character is key to writing narratives that move beyond a concept and become stories? What advice do you have for writers working in a similar genre, who struggle to move beyond their initial concept and develop character or find their inciting incident?

MB: I think about storytelling less in terms of “plot” and “character” and more in terms of “idea” and “emotion.” Strategically, I don’t approach a story thinking “how can I develop a plot?” or “how should I develop this character?” I approach a story thinking, “Given this premise, what combination of events and desires will maximize its emotional impact?” In my experience the nature of the work becomes very clear very quickly when plot and character are viewed as ingredients in an emotional reaction in the reader, rather than simply as necessary elements of a story.

DD: Was there a story in this collection that especially challenged you? What do you do when the right ingredients are difficult to find?

MB: “To Be Read Backward” was the greatest challenge conceptually—trying to imagine the physics of that universe accurately, and to be consistent in how the narrator uses language, especially verbs, to describe the events of the story. But the story that was the greatest challenge narratively was “Testimony Of Your Majesty.” I wrote about half of the story and then got stuck. I knew the emotional reactions that I wanted to synthesize, and I had assembled some reliable ingredients, but I still couldn’t quite figure out how to achieve what I wanted. I set the story aside for a couple of years, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again. That was the process. Years of failed experiments. That story was a work in progress from 2013 through 2018.

DD: Were there any concepts or ideas or stories or experiments written for this collection that ultimately didn’t make it in?

MB: There were a number of concepts that didn’t work on the page. And there’s one story that I actually completed and even published—a story called “The Eulogist” that appeared in New England Review in 2012—that I was still planning on including in the collection as late as 2018. Ultimately, though, I decided the story was just too rudimentary and clumsy. Also, I wanted the collection to have a neutral emotional pH—there could be stories that were depressing and there could be stories that were uplifting, but I didn’t want the collection overall to register as depressing or uplifting—and “The Eulogist” would have given the collection an overall unneutral pH. So that story got replaced by “The Sponsor.”

DD: The issues tackled in these stories are painfully familiar. You explore violence against women, parents struggling to accept their transitioning child, and flaws within the justice system, just to name a few. But by placing these issues within parallel universes or dystopian (or utopian) futures, you allow readers to see them with new eyes. Why do you prefer speculative fiction for these stories instead of straight realism?

MB: In any human society, having a constructive conversation about social or political issues can be difficult, and we live in a country so radically polarized that at times it seems to be on the verge of a civil war. If you try to have a conversation with somebody about a topic like climate change or gun control, immediately these walls come up, these psychological barriers as thick as brick. It’s become impossible to talk about anything important. There’s no way to do it—unless you disguise what you want to talk about, cloak the topic in a seemingly harmless form. I turned to speculative fiction in hopes of giving readers a space to genuinely grapple with the ideas behind these issues and to genuinely access the emotions involved.

DD: If you had to live inside one of these futures you’ve imagined, which one would it be? Why?

MB: “A Bad Day In Utopia.” I wouldn’t mind having to live in a menagerie, and I honestly do think the world would be noticeably improved.

DD: How would you spend your time in this hypothetical menagerie?

MB: Probably reading, writing, napping, and trying to convince the guards to play chess with me.

DD: You’ve also written a really wonderful children’s book titled If You Find This. Can you talk about the experience of writing this novel and how it differed from your experience writing short stories for adults? Were the experiences surprisingly similar in any ways?

MB: Well, If You Find This was also high-concept: a children’s novel narrated partly in music dynamics and math notations. And like Why Visit America, If You Find This is a book that’s about place. It’s a Michigan novel, a Great Lakes novel. But If You Find This was also a very personal book for me. It’s not autobiographical, but in that book I was writing about my childhood and about my family and about my friends back home. Why Visit America is different in that I wasn’t writing about my own life in any of the stories in this book. In Why Visit America, what’s personal are the issues.

DD: Who or what are your inspirations outside of the literary world? Are there any filmmakers or artists or musicians who influenced the stories in this collection?

MB: The films Her and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind had a tremendous influence on the book, as models of emotionally rich sci-fi. The anime Sword Art Online, which for me was a master class on sincerity and vulnerability and the virtues of sentimentality. The video games BioShock and BioShock Infinite, which deliver social and political commentary with such supreme grace and skill.

But—I hadn’t thought of this until just now—maybe the biggest influence was an old VHS tape that I discovered at my father’s house when I was a child. Written on the tape in my father’s handwriting were two words: “The Wall.” I distinctly remember watching that tape later that afternoon, alone in the basement, lying on the carpet, gazing up at an old cathode-ray television. It was Pink Floyd — The Wall, the film adaptation of the rock opera by Pink Floyd. Seeing it was a revelation for me. I hadn’t realized until that moment that a music album could be more than a collection of random songs—that together the songs could tell some larger story. From the beginning I’ve thought of Why Visit America as a concept album, and that old VHS tape is what taught me what a concept album is.

DD: Is there a short story collection that you feel like does this especially well?

MB: Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, although that’s composed primarily of nonfiction. And Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, along with Invisible Cities, although that’s technically considered a novel. I especially adore The Periodic Table.

DD: Who should read Why Visit America? Who is your ideal reader?

MB: All true Americans.

Speaking of The Pelton Papers: A Conversation Between Margot Livesey and Mari Coates

Margot Livesey and Mari Coates first met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. At the time, Margot had published one book of stories-plus-novella, Learning by Heart, and one novel, Homework. She was “assisting” the famous writer Mari had signed up to work with, who had disappointed Mari by not offering comments on the short story she’d brought. Mari then turned to Margot who provided Mari with her first serious critical evaluation. Mari had read the stories in Learning by Heart during the conference, saving the title novella for later. Reading this at home in San Francisco, she was stunned to see that here, Margot was accomplishing with ease what Mari aspired to: fiction based on real life. She wrote Margot a note, extolling the novella and thanking her again for reading her story. Margot wrote back and they began a correspondence. It was Margot who suggested Mari apply to the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, in which she was teaching. They worked there together and have remained friends.

This interview—a conversation, really—comes out of that association and was conducted via email, before everyone was ordered to shelter in place. Along with Margot’s warm and generous friendship, she has provided Mari with literary shelter for more than twenty years, which Mari calls “above and beyond anything I had a right to expect.”

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Margot Livesey: I’m delighted to be talking about your wonderful novel, The Pelton Papers, which follows the life of the early twentieth-century modernist painter, Agnes Pelton. Your novel is so beautiful and atmospheric that I couldn’t help feeling that Agnes’s story had just sprung onto the page, but I know it has been in the works for a while. How did The Pelton Papers come to be? Can you tell us the origin story?

Mari Coates: I think there were a couple of origins, if that’s possible. First, I was interested in Agnes Pelton because I grew up with some of her paintings—the more conservative realistic ones. My grandparents were friends of hers, and she was a presence in our house with portraits of our family and a couple of lovely landscapes. Years later, after I moved to San Francisco, I discovered that she had also painted abstracts. A retrospective exhibit, the first major curated study of her art, was taking place just across the bay. When I saw those pictures, which are luminous—I don’t know how she did that—I was stunned. There were so different from the work I knew! I was enthralled and wanted to know everything about her. Once I started reading the exhibition catalog—Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature, a brilliant rendering of her life and work by curator Michael Zakian—I was amazed at who she was and how difficult it must have been for her to make a life in art. I was very moved, awestruck actually, at her persistence in spite of a difficult family history, her delicate health, crippling shyness, and constant worries about money.

ML: But why fiction? Why not a biography?

MC: As I was beginning my research—the exhibit took place in 1996—there was nowhere near as much information on her as there is now—I found a few other short publications and brief mentions of Pelton in other exhibition catalogs. I was struck by a recurring phrase— “We don’t know this, or we can’t know that…”—things I wanted to know. Did she have a partner or love interest? Was she gay, as many have suggested? I spoke to Michael Zakian and asked him, and he said there was no evidence to substantiate that claim.

ML: So, Agnes’s romantic feelings, which you portray so intensely at various junctures in her life, before her time in Europe and later back in America, are all invented?

MC: They are.

ML: She did have a fraught background, though, and a lot of discouragement, didn’t she, even as she made a name for herself early on with the Armory Show in New York in 1913, and then later in Taos with her patron Mabel Dodge. But I also was touched by the novel’s account of her childhood in Brooklyn, with her mother, a piano teacher, and her grandmother.  You describe the household in a very intense, almost gothic way—a house of secrets.

MC: Yes, that’s exactly right. It was a house of secrets, and also, sad to say, a house of shame. But I was captivated by the idea of three generations of women, all living together and caring deeply for one another. It could not have been easy growing up there, but it is a fact that Agnes did not move away until after the deaths of first her grandmother and then her mother.

ML: You mentioned your grandparents were friends of hers? How did that connection come about?

MC: As a student and young man, my grandfather had been her neighbor in Brooklyn, and both their families were members of a religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren. In reading Zakian’s book I learned about the 1875 scandal that had led to this family connection. Agnes’s grandmother was Elizabeth Tilton, who admitted to an affair with her pastor, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a famous abolitionist in his own right. This affair led to a lawsuit by Elizabeth’s husband Theodore and a six-month trial that the tabloids covered with great enthusiasm. The notoriety devastated Elizabeth. She was banished from Beecher’s church, Theodore divorced her and exiled himself to Paris, and she was left abandoned. The Brethren welcomed her, and she spent the remainder of her life as a member. Elizabeth was modest, shy, and deeply religious, and refused to allow visitors or newspapers into their house. I believe that Agnes was permanently scarred by all of this.

ML: I suppose that is why the novel’s near romance with her friend Alice is so poignant. And you hint at something along those lines with her friend Dane Rudhyar. Both of these characters were actual friends of hers, right?

MC: Yes. Alice Brisbane, later Thursby, was herself a Paris trained artist, but then she married and gave up her art. After she was widowed, she moved to New York and established herself as a socialite—there’s a fantastic portrait of her by John Singer Sargent—and did indeed decide to take on Agnes Pelton as a project. It makes total sense to me that one could fall in love with a patron like Alice, who firmly believed in Agnes and did everything possible to further her career. She met Dane Rudhyar on her first stay in California. He was a composer who became a famous astrologer and wrote many books on the subject. He struck me as almost feline in nature, which I thought would be attractive to Agnes.

ML: I know that this book took a long time to write and I admire your persistence in figuring out Agnes’s story and the best way to tell it. Can you talk about the difficulties you encountered?

MC: Well, it did take a long time and I tried to quit more than once, but somehow Agnes would come back into my consciousness and I would pick it up again. I was inspired by how she herself persisted in painting her abstracts no matter what else happened. I wanted to do likewise. Some of the difficulties were entirely self-inflicted. For instance, the decision to cover her entire life. I felt a sense of obligation about this, that what I was learning about her life simply demanded inclusion. It seemed that Agnes herself was insisting on this. She also had very clear ideas about what I could and could not say! When I was given a month at Ragdale, I was elated about the unrestricted time and the freedom it implied. I reminded myself that this was fiction, and therefore I should be free to turn the story in any direction. But my fumbling attempts did not lead to anything. I was also using my time there to read and absorb the research material I had brought. I had heard Agnes’s voice in solitude and had thought of the project as just me and Agnes, communing with one another. But so many others came into it! Every time I dipped into another reference, it felt like I was opening a door to a room crowded with laughing, chattering people, and it was all overwhelming and terrifying.

ML: But like Agnes herself, you persisted, so you must have been enjoying the work even though it felt daunting.

MC: Oh, I was. I loved seeing the places where she had lived and traveled. I loved learning about the Armory Show. I read Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs and loved the bristling excitement of the 1910s in New York City. And we, my wife Gloria and I, did things like travel to Cathedral City and Taos. We also flew south for the day to Orange County from San Francisco to see a marvelous exhibition that paired Agnes with Georgia O’Keeffe—seeing her paintings up next to O’Keeffe’s was a complete thrill. And made us ponder yet again why O’Keeffe was so successful and Pelton was not.

ML: Did you come to any conclusions about that?

MC: I did. The obvious one was that O’Keeffe had Alfred Steiglitz championing her in his 291 Gallery and then marrying her and taking care of the business side of things. Also, I think temperamentally O’Keeffe was always absolutely confident about her talent, whereas Pelton suffered anxiety about hers and stopped painting for years at a time. There’s also that background of growing up with two women who had retreated from life. And lastly, she treated the making of art as a spiritual practice, which meant she needed solitude and inspiration, and she took all the time she needed with each painting. Many of them took years to complete.

ML: And now she is again the focus of a major museum exhibition.

MC: She is! It’s so exciting. It was put together by the Phoenix Museum of art, traveled to Santa Fe, and will open in March at the Whitney in New York before returning to her desert and ending at the Palm Springs Art Museum. I cannot wait to see it.

ML: And how fitting that The Pelton Papers is being published in this year of Agnes’s rediscovery. For me, one of the deep pleasures of your novel is how beautifully you write about both Agnes’s life and her work—the two deeply intertwined. Reading your pages, I felt I could already see her work, but I am very happy that I will now be able to see her paintings not only in your words but in the world. Many congratulations on this wonderful accomplishment.        

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MARI COATES lives in San Francisco where she has been an arts writer and theater critic. Her regular column appeared in the SF Weekly with additional profiles and features appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Monthly, Advocate, and other news outlets. Her first novel, The Pelton Papers, is due out in April from She Writes Press, and she holds degrees from Connecticut College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Find her on Facebook (Mari Coates Author) and at maricoates.com. 

MARGOT LIVESEY is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street (winner of the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award), Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, Homework, and Mercury. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was born in the Scottish Highlands, currently lives in the Boston area, and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.