The Complexity of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience: A Review of Nancy Au's Spider Love Song and Other Stories

““After a long frigid winter, she’d been craving jasmine blossoms, which is the scent of dragons in love.””

— "Anatomy of a Cloud"

Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Nancy Au’s remarkable debut collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, explores the Asian American diaspora. Simultaneously modern and ancient, quirky and compelling, the seventeen short stories, flash and fables reveal the complexity of the immigrant and refugee experience. How that experience changes and morphs with each successive generation and yet carries the ancestral DNA, threads of culture and tradition, legend and mythology. Dynasties insisting to be sewn into the fabric of the now.

In this collection, Au humanizes the newcomer. In so doing, she invites us to sumptuous feasts and day-long meal preparations. Oven baked frog thighs, “pearlescent moon slivers with pungent garlic, tiny onions” served on a bed of arugula.  Appreciated with loud croaking burps. Plates of “gingery fish and scallops, pickled duck web and salted squid, and a bowl of steaming rice.” Slurping of fish-ball soup. Serving the duck head to the honored guest. 

Au reveals their struggles, from finding friends and community to finding employment consistent with education and background. Making do, making ends meet. The hard work, the physical and emotional toiling of non-white America. Where families labor in an orchard hand dusting blossoms with pollen sticks in “Lincoln Chan: Pear King” and a former veterinarian is reduced to dispensing meds at a nursing home in “Odonata at Rest.”

The stories are told mostly from a youthful point of view. Ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds, young enough to believe in dragons and damselflies, young enough to believe the stories their elders tell. But this is an age of constant observation. Because the world is still a wonder, they take it all in. They are at the dawn of understanding. They puzzle together white lies and omissions. They see, for the first time, their parents’ deficiencies. They feel acutely their displacement, their otherness.

In “The Richmond,” a daughter wins a lottery to attend a private school. The new school, the mean girls, the other side of town complicates her relationship with parents’ history and her new divergent path. She tries to understand the pain of fleeing Communist China– the cruelty and sacrifice it took to survive, but she can no longer tolerate the neighborhood in which they live. A place that’s not Chinatown. A place that’s not white suburbia. She tells her parents that she is not like them. She is not an immigrant. Why are they punishing her?

“I wanted to say that I understood Baba’s crude jokes with the Wans, about how they escaped genocide by pointing to their neighbors then playing dead. But at eleven, I couldn’t interpret their birdsong and thought it a sweet uselessness. I couldn’t grasp my parents’ twisted refugee humor or that their laughter was a sparrow song of sorrow, of disloyalty, of survival—a savage happiness. I couldn’t picture Mama’s childhood friend on her knees, hands tied behind her back, hair spilling over her shoulders, tears pouring from her eyes as a soldier towered over her. I could not picture the explosion of a bullet fired from the rifle, the pierced skin, the shattering skull, or Mama’s grief.”

Throughout the collection, Au underscores the tradition of Chinese storytelling. Au finds stories everywhere: in math and science, in trashy romance novels, in death. Where people can “stand next to each other on the slippery wet edge of their story, holding up each other’s glossy dime-store dreams.” 

In “Wearing My Skin,” a single mother Cynthia earns a living as a phone sex worker, spinning erotic tales while she shuffles around her apartment in airplane slippers. 

In “How to Become Your Own Odyssey or the Land of Indigestion,” a father recounts nighttime travels after he is found sleeping on top of the family’s old station wagon or sprawled on the kitchen floor amongst the remains of his sleepwalk-gorging: tofu blocks, raw cabbages, sesame oil. He tells glamorous sleepwalking stories where his dreams take him to grand forests with golden-winged creatures resembling seahorses and prisons, churches and schools “built out of bright vermillion pomegranate skins.”

There is a hopefulness embedded in this collection. Throughout, spiders and spider webs, pear trees, peaches and peach pits, the color red, and ducks, symbols of good omens, prosperity, abundance and luck, signal an optimism for the future, long and happy marriages and cures to relationship problems.

In the laugh out loud, riotous “Louise,” a married couple, wife and wife, May Zhou and Lai, both accountants, are having their traditional Friday picnic lunch when a mangled, one-eyed, one-toed, bald-headed duck wanders over. Lai scoops up the duck in delight, names it Louise and insists on adopting it. She tucks Louise into their lunch cooler, using a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich as a duck mattress. She’s already picturing the domestic scene, Louise greeting them at the front door after work, nipping at their pant legs, wiggling her feathery tail until they pet her bald spot. They’d be a family. “You don’t know love ’til you have a duck.” They are arguing over the practicalities of having a duck (it can’t bury its own poop, duck-proofing the house) when a ranger enters the scene commanding Lai to hand over the bird. A melee ensues. Lai believes the duck will bring magic into their lives, she refuses to give up hope.

Despite the psychological hold of the past, Au challenges stereotypes and traditions. Women marry women. Daughters are adored. A mother refuses to honor the birth spirits that would have diminished her daughter. “Math is an asshole.” An eighty-year-old woman, “in her own true myth,” is not “a corny grandmother.” “She is useful poison.” Women are the breadwinners, holding their families together with their wages while husbands/fathers are left behind, lose jobs, or disappear.

And with a slight of hand, Au uses an ancient tale, a retelling of Chinese mythology to comment on the future. Her lush poetic prose illuminates the truth of climate change and the truth of building a new life in an inhospitable land. In “Anatomy of a Cloud,” a story of love, ingenuity and grief, Fei tends to last dragon god of rain.

“Fei uses the chicken claw to comb YingLong’s coarse beard, and recites stories of the afterworld, a place not deadened by drought, with oil slicks for oceans, black and mystery deep. Fei shakes the sand dollar to hear inside. She puts it to her ear and listens to grains slide over themselves, washing over rocks and sea ledges the way water once washed over the long dead sharks and penguins, seaweed and jellyfish. The sand dollar lets her see underneath the beach. And there she finds millennia before the Anthropocene dried up the planet. She finds buried treasure, gold booty and purple gemstones, lost eyepatches of pirates. She finds the footsteps of every creature that has ever walked the beach, every bird, every warrior. She finds every seal and every whale and dragon skeleton. She finds broken kite strings, lost tennis balls. She finds the ocean that was once glacier and once in Africa and on the cap of the earth.”

It is difficult to sum up the experience of reading this collection, a journey through time, a dance with people you may have seen from a distance but never bothered to get to know or understand. In a place as vivid and inviting as your own backyard. These stories linger long after the last word is read. Like an ornamental shawl embroidered with the finest silk thread.

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.

Blurring Lines, Fraying Edges: A Review of We Might As Well Light Something On Fire by Ron MacLean

“There is something particularly compelling about a detached foot, he says. Something sad. Almost Lonely.”

—from “Unfound”

Remember silly putty? Back in the day. When you kneaded the polymer dough into a pancake, pressed in headlines and comics from the Funny Pages. Doonesbury, Garfield, Peanuts. After you peeled away the newspaper revealing your new creation, you tugged and pulled, twisted the words, distorted the images. It was like having a fun house mirror in the palm of your hand. Then you rolled the political commentary, the cat’s ponderings and Charlie Brown, all that existential angst into a ball. If you pulled the sphere apart and peered inside, you could still see the essence, the infinite possibilities, amid the swirl of ink.

This is what it’s like to read Ron MacLean’s short story collection We Might As Well Light Something On Fire, published by Braddock Ave Books, where he stretches the boundaries of storytelling, plays with form, presses his thumb into the life of his imaginings, blurring lines, fraying edges, playing with time and space, following threads of energy, but always with the intention to question what it means to be human, to search for political and social justice, to expose our feelings of alienation, to illuminate the never ending quest for connection.

The sixteen stories divided into three sections are often off-kilter, zany and absurd. Consider: A quinceañera for a cat named Egg in “Quinceañera.” Or, dancing goats clad in tan raincoats, porkpie hats and Ray-Bans hiding in plain sight from their executioner, a theoretical physicist turned butcher in “Lesser Escape Artists.” Or disarticulated feet washing ashore in British Columbia, five in total, wearing size 12 running shoes in “Unfound.” Or a friendly haunting by turn of the century Wisconsin politicians in “What Remains” where a former Assistant US Attorney finds a father/son duo hiding in her bathtub. They hang around fixing her plumbing, cooking dinner, enjoying cable TV and facilitating the donation of food to Occupy Wall Street protestors while she battles the Lockport, NY police department over custody of her father’s ashes.

MacLean interlaces excerpts of recipes, musical refrains, travel guide books, historical anecdotes. He spins time in a blender, scrambles sentences like refrigerator poetry magnets. “River Song,” a prose poem like song lyrics, recounts again and again the saga of a dead girl, a doctor, a bridge, Blinky and Ray Ray and a freezer full of tinfoil wrapped money. With each retelling, the truth like memory becomes malleable, more elusive; it erodes away like the banks of a river.

Despite its unconventional underpinnings, the collection begins with and disperses throughout realistic straight forward narratives, in an earnest voice that’s like a conversation. A confessional. Grounded in the here and now — with keenly observed details — leaving head space for the surreal complexities to come. MacLean crafts dialogue and interior musings that are clipped and fragmented, proffered in inhospitable environs, highlighting an acute sense of dislocation.

In the opening story, “Toilet,” the narrator attends a birthday party for someone he doesn’t like enough because she has no need to shine. His thoughts ping pong off the concrete columns in the large industrial open space, a former toilet paper manufacturing concern, now an apartment. He’s not where he’d like to be in his career. He opines that he’s recently lost his context. Confides that he keeps a goat to clean his yard, to make conversation at parties, but mostly for the company. He’s connected to all of these people, he’s friends with them in one way or another, but feels alienated, disjointed. He’s so desperate, he’s willing to go home with a woman whether she’s “sexy or sick as a dog.” The partygoers are reduced to body parts in his mind: the mustache, the sexy clavicle, an ear. Everything is out of context. Even the party food doesn’t makes sense in this hipster Northeast enclave, in which the hosts serve biscuits and gravy.

In a triptych of stories “Prostate Frank Finds True Love,” “Bounce Goes Kissy-Kissy,” and “The Hemorrhoid Holds Court,” a group of mostly middle-aged men meet for their weekly Friday morning coffee klatch. Reduced to nicknames, Bounce, Max the Grabber, Hemorrhoid, Alter Boy, as if a person’s entire being can be summed up in a word or a phrase, they chat, each man assuming his roll, but no one is really listening.

MacLean’s musings of isolation are most profound in the “Night Bus” a travelogue of a tourist excursion to see the uppermost reaches of Northern Finland, the barren tundra, and the constellations. Initially the narrator is optimistic, energized by the crisp cold air.

“And the air. I can’t get enough of it, It’s so, I don’t know what. Cold. More than clean. Something that makes my pores sing Buddy Holly. Bjork. Like mountain air poured through a trumpet filled with lake water.”

He feels boundless love for the communion of parkas, mittens and boots, bib pants and balaclavas. He tries to communicate, practices in his head the sentences he parses together from his translation phrase book, but he never quite hits his mark. He tells a young woman she looks hot in her coat. A fellow traveler, “the Talker” is everywhere chatting everyone up from the bus driver to passengers, to the snack man. The Talker rhapsodizes: “I want to get closer and closer to unadorned yearning.”

There’s a disorientation that comes from long trips, the rhythm of miles lulling the brain to sleep. As the narrator clenches his frost bitten fingers (result of a failed college romance) he contemplates the polar night when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for 51 days. The Talker wants him to admit, “I have been lost in this night before.” The narrator refuses to voice the Talker’s directive but his despair is palpable.

I was frustrated at times with my inability to decipher the meaning, the author’s intent in some of these stories such as the madcap “Lesser Escape Artists.” I didn’t mind searching the dictionary or questioning the Googleverse. I desperately wanted to unlock the mystery of string theory and its connection to Mailer and Mahler and string cheese and goats shuffle stepping to what I presumed was Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.” How was all that connected to the couple who bring a philosophizing rabbit of the wrong sex to a butcher shop to determine the state of the woman’s womb?

But perhaps that’s the point, the pondering and not knowing with certainty is what it’s all about.

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. 

Language and Laughter: Two Writers in Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MacLean: What makes an Andrew Farkas story a story?

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

MacLean: What makes a story an Andrew Farkas story?

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

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

Farkas: 42

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

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

MacLean: What is your perihelion?

Farkas: Closer than you think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

MacLean: What are you working on next?

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

"Catch it and Punt": On Wendy Rawlings's Time for Bed

Here’s what I like best about Wendy Rawlings’ latest short story collection, Time for Bed: the way she doubles down on her characters. What I mean by this is Rawlings doesn’t simply provide a character with some odd ornamentation, some tangible something for the reader to attach to; her character’s tics quite literally become the story. Take the story “Tics” as an example. Glen, the seventeen-year-old, too-young-for-the-narrator, boy-with-Tourette’s makes clicking and hitching sounds in his throat but says, “I think it drives everyone crazy but me. I don’t notice.” After awhile, I don’t notice either, and this is what amazes me about the story. It’s not until I read the last, Great Gatsby-ish line — “We walk. We walk. We keep walking, until everything catches up with us.”— that I realize, while I was reading, there had been a ticking in my brain like a clock counting down the time, like I knew the two characters’ time together was coming to an end, and I was running uncontrollably forward alongside the narrator. Rawlings manages to create authentic characters in her stories whose actions, thoughts and, perhaps most importantly, appearances give consequence to the story they live within.

These stories also confront difficult, tragic and often verboten territory. “Love in Wartime,” one of my favorites, takes on 9-11. “Coffins for Kids!” describes a mother’s journey through grief after a school shooting takes her child from her. In “Portrait of My Mother’s Head on a Plate,” the narrator is openly embarrassed by her mother’s coming out and relationship with the school lunch lady. Combining character-driven narrations with punch-in-the-gut incidents, in an often tell-it-like-it-is tone, Rawlings beautifully illustrates individuals’ struggles for permanence and stability in our current world.

Other themes that run through Rawlings book include character’s sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic relationship to weight (the too-fat lady who swaps bodies with a Nigerian ex-runner, the anorexic sister, Joan, who literally fades away to nothing), as well as mothers who leave their husbands for other mothers, and Irishmen with communication issues that give way to deeper issues. While these themes run throughout Rawlings’ book, making for a cohesive read, each story is distinctive in it’s own way. In “Portrait of My Mother’s Head on a Plate,” the bourgie teenage sisters make lists that quicken the reading pace and brighten the subject matter, in “Omaha,” the Irishman prepares himself for University dinners so, “no matter what he was hit with, he could catch it and punt,” perfectly subtle phrases that capture character. In these ways, Rawlings’ slips social and cultural personifications seamlessly into stories that are an absolute treat to read.