Violence and Kittens

Tornadoes are gone, Megabus drivers are friendly, and here we are in America with NPR and ESPN and Powerpoints and naked deck lounging and kittens. Let's talk about the first chapter of Today & Tomorrow, which introduces us to the hypnotic narrative voice we've been talking about.

J.A. Tyler, in a review of T&T over at Monkeybicycle talks about birthdays and violence:

Today & Tomorrow begins with the narrator’s twentieth birthday, an occasion for excitement and yet laced fear, focusing on how we attempt to let go of our youth, how we try to embrace our aging, a journey that the book violently pulls us through like an uncontrolled body over coral reefs, a juxtaposition of beauty and limb-scarring.

In the first chapter we're introduced to this youth and violence that Tyler is talking about. We listen to the narrator imagine her neighbor catching her naked, and we get clued into her tangential daydreaming propulsion. We learn that she hasn't spoken to her sister, Merna, in four years. We drift back in time to a kitchen with Merna, where the narrator admires Merna's kitten (“Your kitten’s so pretty I could just pull her eyes out and roll them along the kitchen floor”) and watches Merna dry dishes. And the narrator can't seem to settle on whether she likes the kitchen or not. On one hand, she can imagine "days of lovely waiting in the kitchen, drying dishes, stacking them in cupboards, lining cupboard-shelves with rose-scented shelf-paper." On the other hand, she sees some sort of violence in the way Merna dries, and she doesn't like it:

"The plates were white and clean with the tiniest bubbles of water huddling away from her rag and my sister was merciless as she carefully wiped every part of every plate and obliterated each tiny perfect bubble and slowly set each plate in its proper stack in the cupboard next to the refrigerator. I hated her plates then, her bubble-obliterating rag, her stupid silly kitten."

At the end of the chapter, after we've been lulled by the voice, we are startlingly introduced to this narrator's brutality and wobbly sense of reality:

"I cocked the kitten. The kitten was heavy. The kitten was cocked and I flung it and it moved slowly, sprawl-legged toward the window and the window shivered in anticipation and Merna and I gasped and there was a loud sound I can’t describe but was both wonderful and terrible and the kitten bounced and moved slowly toward the sink, its tiny legs stretched out oddly, at angles, as though disconnected from its round furry body."

One funny thing about T&T is we never learn the narrator's name, but we unmistakably experience the world through her. Even when we're aghast and want to pull back, she's our only way in. One thing that seems true is that everybody needs to tell their story, and another thing that seems true is that the more stories we hear the less the world is apt to swallow us with its strangeness, its distances and indifference. Right away, from the strange phrasing of the "sun’s sunlight’s" to the "little bits of dust moving and interacting with other dust-bits," to the "tiniest bubbles of water huddling away" from Merna's dishrag, and finally to the kitten's "tiny legs stretched out oddly, at angles," we meet a narrator obsessed with the intricate holding together that goes on.

It might be a cliche to throw out the idea that violence reminds us of fragility, and that an obsession with violence is really an obsession with testing, a fascination with finding breaking points. One thing about cute things is that they are often defined by the damage we could do to them (e.g. "you're so cute I could eat you up!"), and one of the things I find so fascinating about T&T is the way this unnamed narrator navigates her own desire to be both fragile and terrible.

Do I "relate" to this? Do I "relate" to the violence? I'm not sure I know what that really means, but I know I feel something. I know—right away from the first chapter—that this book is going to open me up to the world in a way I don't usually—you know, for safety's everyday sake—allow myself. It's funny to remember—even when we're talking here—that we read by ourselves, and it's interesting to picture yourself nestling into your eyes and holding the book and reading about kitten tossing on the train, in a park, where somebody might glance and see Bill Murray's face on the cover but have no real idea the kind of re-wiring you're privately allowing yourself to experience.

So what do you think of this violence in T&T? What did you feel when you read how the kitten came apart? Did you find yourself alienated by the description, did you find yourself re-calibrating? Has reading ever really shocked you? Isn't shock more about framing than body count? Why is a kitten "cute?" Why do I think "hypnotizing" is such a good word to describe T&T? Does T&T remind you of Kathy Acker? Do you want to see a really terrifying clip from Ofelia Hunt's favorite movie (warning, strange and R-rated)? What does it mean to be "de-sensitized?" Is sensitivity a matter of realization? To be surprised by what we're capable of sensing? Those lovely different bubbles and the wonderful and terrible sound of the pop.

What Is a Man's Literature?

There's much ado right now about the books I should be reading. I say this particularly as a man, having all the proper parts and such, whatever that has to do with my reading preferences.

You see, evidently, Esquire Magazine seems to think it does, having recently released their list of 75 Books Every Man Should Read. It's chock full of what you'd expect it to be chock full of: Bukowski, Carver, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Vonnegut, Hemingway, et alii. And what's really making news is that it is particularly devoid of names like Woolf, Shelley, Atwood, Plath, et aliae. Not even Harper Lee made the list. In fact, the only female on the whole damn thing is Flannery O'Conner.

I was glad to see Jezebel respond with their own list, but just as perturbed that it was titled 75 Books Every Woman Should Read. While not quite as devoid of male writers as Esquire was of females, still only 3 males made their list. And, I know, I know. Jezebel's list was made in direct response to Esquire, so there should be some expectation that they'd offer approximately 75 amazing female writers to provide some balance, but I think Brian Carr puts it best of at Dark Sky Books's blog:

"Why the polarization? Why the exploitation of emotions? Attention: as long as people pander to the edges there will be no advancement. It’s as American politics works today. Affirmation less than information. Enrage rather than engage."

Which is exactly what happened. Over at HTML Giant, Roxane Gay came out swinging.

"Esquire is a men’s magazine so it makes sense that a reading list they curate will reflect certain themes and biases. What’s troubling though, is the implication that men should only read literature written by men, that men don’t need to bother with books written by women, and of course, that the only great books are those written by men. What other message can we take from a list where seventy-four books are written by men and only one is written by a woman? Women writers are being done a disservice but the far greater disservice here is to men. This list not only perpetuates the erasure of great writing by women, it cultivates the erroneous and myopic notion that men only want to read a certain kind of book. If I were a man, I’d find this list insulting."

And, she's right. I probably would feel insulted, but somewhere along the way, I've developed some sort of thick skin. I'm not easily insulted, and to be honest, rather than rage, I felt a sadness. I supposed what I see in this list, in a disheartening and probably naive way, is a reflection of myself, an ease of forgiveness. Just last January, after putting on a reading here in Indy that included a line up of all males, I took a good, hard look at the titles on my Vouched Books table: 23 titles in all, only 2 of them by women.

I didn't even realize it while it was happening right in front of me.

I guess I'm saying I can relate, and what saddens me most is Esquire probably won't do what I did and make an attempt to balance the scales. It was easy for me to replace some of my titles with new titles by female writers. But, even if there are people working at Esquire who would like to, there's likely too much hubris throughout the editorial staff to do anything to make this right.

Of course, I don't even have the answer of how to "make this right?" Sure, they can re-release a more balanced list, but there are greater issues at stake here, to which I can't begin to pretend I have any answers.

I wonder if Esquire knew, whether it was their intention to have an all male list sans Flannery. I assume it's in large part pandering to their audience. I mean, their teaser description for The Grapes of Wrath is simply, "Because it's all about the titty." I assume it's in large part the intention to get men to read at all, to provide something of a starter list for a man who doesn't already love the word, and should that man choose at random, he's much more likely to develop a taste for books starting first with one of these more brutish books, and maybe it's their hope these men would branch out from there. But Roxane is right: whether intentional or not, it is sad and unfortunate the implied assumption that it is not necessary for a man to read female writers (except Flannery), that a man wouldn't fall as much in love with reading were he to first read The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood) or To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee).

I guess what bothers me most is the idea of "a man's literature." That a man would (should?) be most drawn to a literature that is tough--literature that might contain the phrase "muscular prose" on its jacket copy, literature about fishing, drinking, blue collars, hunting, etc.

I think about Cut Through the Bone, written by Ethel Rohan who is very much a woman. Of course it's not going to be on this list. It's less than a year old, too untested to list among so many classics, and well, let's be honest, I'd be surprised if anyone at Esquire has even heard of Cut. But, I wonder how the Esquire-man might respond to a book like CTTB. I would be talking out my ass if I tried to guess; I am not an Esquire-man, nor am I particularly interested in becoming one.

I want to believe Cut would be welcomed like a prodigal child. I want to believe in the Esquire-man, that maybe a book like Cut could speak to him, that he could see something of himself in these narrators similar to what he could see of himself in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Mostly, I want to believe this man, or any man, doesn't need a fistfight to find himself.

Reviewing a Review: Amber Sparks at Vouched

Every Friday, my plan is to reach out into the small press community and highlight writers/readers/bloggers who are writing about Cut Through the Bone. Because I want to be honest here, I'll admit that there is some cross promotion between my internet tendencies with today's post, since I'm reviewing a review of Cut Through the Bone by Amber Sparks over at Vouched, my other baby.

In my intro/launch post this past Wednesday, I mentioned briefly how Rohan doesn't just leave her readers with loss in her stories, but allows readers a space to grow in the absence of what was lost. And what I loved about Spark's review was how she focused on that aspect of these stories:

"I feel that many of the reviews I’ve read of Ethel’s book have focused mostly on the loss. With good reason: the characters that walk through these pages are all missing something, whether it is a leg or breasts or a child or love. They have all suffered a great and scarring rending away of some kind. Yet to me, the real wonder, the bright discovery made within these stories was not so much the losses sustained, but what was gained with some uneasy grace, after the initial shock."

One of the aspects of Cut Through the Bone I love so much is how Rohan doesn't provide her readers with some epiphany brought about from the loss in these stories, but allows us to find it for ourselves, or perhaps in ourselves. I've always been wary of stories that try to wrap these themes up so neat and tidy with some, "All of a sudden, s/he realized," sort of moment, because anyone who's dealt with loss, whether the loss of a pet or the loss of a close friend/relative/loved one, knows it just doesn't work like that.

Dealing with the grief of loss takes work, dammit, and that's what Rohan lets us do: work. She doesn't patronize or coddle us. She trusts us to have the strength and courage necessary to make our own bright discoveries.

I strongly believe how you respond to Cut Through the Bone will reflect how you respond to loss in your own life. If you read these stories and respond with the simple, classic classroom question, "Why is everything we read in this class so sad?" then I'll be frank with you: you're either ill-equipped to deal or inexperienced in dealing with grief and loss.

Sure, loss is sad, but it doesn't end there unless you let it. And of course some people give way to that, and a collection of stories centered around this theme wouldn't be complete without recognizing that, which Rohan does, as Amber writes:

"This description may be too pat, may make it seem as though this was one of those books, where the women are strong and the men are weak, where the women are good and the men are all assholes. Not so. Ethel is far more of a complex, nuanced writer than that. True, her men are more often than not in need of help, morally weak, or just the less able of the partnership; but there is not too much bitterness in the extra help the women lend. Instead this seemed to me a deep understanding Ethel has of the weight and balance of love, and the special kind of strength women have always had to possess. Sometimes, too, the women are fragile, are weak, break under their burdens. In “Lifelike,” and in “Make Over,” the women collapse into their own fantasy worlds, unable to cope with life as it is."

I don't remember much about the week after my mother died. I didn't shave and I slept little, but I only know that from a picture my uncle took after the funeral, a tired sag in the skin around my eyes and my face buried beneath a brush of stubble.

My body moved apart from me. There were things necessary to be done, and my brother and I moved about doing them. I let my girlfriend empathize, let myself cry against her chest, because I knew how she needed to be needed. I let people hug me, give me their condolences. I didn't argue when people told me Mom was in a better place, that I'd see her again. They needed that.

What I needed was a book like Cut Through the Bone, a book that would show me how to respond with grace to what had been so unexpectedly amputated from my life, and wouldn't try to tell me how it would be all right, wouldn't try to sell me on an epiphany or a grand scheme of things. I needed a friend who trusted that the turmoil beneath my skin could be contained there, who didn't start every conversation with, "How you holdin' up?" as though I was some sort of staggering Atlas, who gave me stories other than my own for awhile, stories that made me work a little to find the hope and joy in them. If this sounds like the story of a life, okay.

Let's Collaborate on an Interview

My plan for posting here at TLP is to post every MWF, but whenever something feels pertinent, you'll see me pop up here on a Tuesday or Thursday. Like today.

I have an idea I want you to be a part of.

I intend to interview every author I feature here at TLP, but I wanted to involve the Lit Pub community in some way, so I thought, "What better way to involve the community than to solicit questions from them?"

So, TLP community, what is a question you've been dying to ask Ethel Rohan, about Cut Through the Bone, about any of her other work, about her life (no marriage proposals--I think she's already got one), her writing ethic, thoughts about the lunar landing conspiracy?

Leave your questions in the comment section. I'll do some curating of them, send them along to Ethel, and post the resulting interview here at TLP.

Stay classy, internet.

100% Real Ice Arena: Who Is Ofelia Hunt?

When we think of famous Ofelias, we first try to remember how Shakespeare spelled it, then we realize that isn't going to help. As we start talking about Today & Tomorrow, there will be a lot to dive into: zambonis, grandfathers, violence, trauma.

But first: who is Ofelia Hunt?

True, she blogs and she seems to like the poet Kenneth Koch a lot, but is she even real? Several people who are familiar with her work have contacted me and asked me to spill the beans.

Here, in a Lit Pub exclusive, I'm prepared to tell you this: get a copy of Today & Tomorrow, look carefully at the copyright page, and then think about those times when you were a kid when you put on your favorite holster and smudged your voice. Or, if you played role playing games, how you made up the best names you could think of. Or how before high school tennis matches, the coaches had to formally introduce each player: "Blurgity will be playing #1 against Blurgity, Glurgity will be playing #2 against etc." And sometimes I convinced my coach to introduce me as Xavier Damocles or Daradamand Fashuga, and I would pretend to be a foreign exchange student. All of which goes a little way toward the idea of how our imaginations construct their own ways of self-understanding, and the way writing a novel turns you into someone somewhat beside[s] yourself.

* * *

In an interview with NOÖ Journal's Alicia LaRosa, Ofelia Hunt playfully talked about how being Ofelia Hunt is a process:

AL: Do you take on a specific persona as Ofelia Hunt? Do you dig deep within yourself to find this person, detach yourself from reality this way by projecting this personality, or do you simply act au naturale?

OH: I'd like to say I put on a special bathrobe and eye makeup and kitten slippers. But I'm far more boring. I decided Ofelia liked a number of specific things and typed them out: 11 point Garamond, hyphens, repetition, trickery, 'math rock', parking lots… I made a list of writers Ofelia admires: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Stacey Levine, Franz Kafka, Lydia Davis, Kenneth Koch, Kurt Vonnegut, Lisa Jarnot, Diane Williams, Joy Williams, etc... Ofelia Hunt does not like or understand plot. Her favorite move is Suicide Club (a Japanese movie sometimes called Suicide Circle). I woke every day for about two years at four a.m. to write and revise for sixty to ninety minutes before work. This may have detached me from reality. I remember feeling tired a lot, and listening to a lot of hiphop. Ofelia often writes about the kinds of things I muse about throughout a day, the things I find funny or strange. I think of Ofelia as both the "I" in the novel and the writer of the novel, so the novel may be a memoir.

AL: Are any of the characters in the novel based off of people you know personally? Related to?

OH: No, or not really. At most, certain moments, memories, instances, are based on reality. I grew up near Highland Ice Arena, and throughout middle school the Friday night skate was the place to be. I'd like to say that every character is a composite of every person I've ever met if that composite had been born me. The grandfather character is probably the parent I wish I had, and to some degree, has a sense of humor very much like my mother's.

* * *

As June continues, we'll be having more interviews with Ofelia and more discussion about identity and more talking about how who we are copes with who we imagine we are.

Before you start the novel, I think it's interesting to think about notions of authorship, and to try imagining Ofelia Hunt less as an "author" and more as an identity for testimony. After all, there is a long and rich literary history of pseudonyms, anonymity, authors putting themselves into their books, and other such identity shenanigans.

So what do you think of all this? What books have you read by pseudonymous authors? What do you believe to be the author's role in claiming their voice? What exactly is a "voice" anyway?

The Chronology of Water: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch

1.

WHO IS LIDIA YUKNAVITCH?

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Lidia, thank you for allowing me to showcase your incredible memoir, The Chronology of Water, as one of The Lit Pub’s inaugural Book of the Month features. I think the first thing a lot of readers would like to know is: Who is Lidia Yuknavitch? Why did she write this memoir?

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: Well I think in most ways I’m like anyone who lives a rather fragmented, speed oriented, media saturated existence right now. . . . I’m a global citizen! Ha. But more to the point of this book and why I wrote it, I’m a body. Something that has always bugged me about mainstream and conventional literature is that the body is in the background and the personality or psychology is in the foreground. In my book, while I was chafing at the confines and conventions of “memoir,” I decided to write a body story. So you could say the body holds the point of view in this book.

But I also wrote this book to get what was inside of me out. I had a hunch there were others like me out there. Some people sing or kick ass on an instrument, some people paint or dance or make films, I write. . . . It’s all I’ve got.

MG: If The Chronology of Water is a book about “the body,” then who should read it? Who is it for?

LY: Anyone. I say that because I am moving from ordinary experience through the body. We all share in that story. It’s a Whitmanesque desire -- to contribute to the poetics of bodies. Only in my story some of the bodies ordinarily hidden or repressed or transgressed or ignored or made to feel ugly or bad or wrong, get a voice. People who share that experience might want to read it, and people who don’t share that experience might learn something about the rest of us.

MG: I agree with you that anyone who has been “ignored or made to feel ugly or bad or wrong” should read The Chronology of Water. This is one of the reasons I’m so in love with what you’ve done here. Was it difficult to write a memoir? To expose yourself? Do you feel vulnerable? What are you feeling now that this book is available to readers worldwide?

LY: Like my vagina is on my head. The writing didn’t make me feel exposed. The process was one of the more important artistic productions of my life. But the letting go of the book . . . the putting it into the hands of others . . . that part is terrifying. What if someone tells me it smells of poo? Or that I suck?

Still, I’m one of those people who holds no territory in terms of my own books . . . once they are written, they are not “mine.” And since I wrote them I must want to tenderly hand it over to an other, so maybe that’s the important gesture.

It does feel different from other books I’ve written because in the past I’ve inhabited a sort of alienated place as a writer and projected a playfully antagonistic voice out to the reader. In this book I felt an overwhelming sympathy for whoever my reader is, since she probably understands some of my story, and so a little bit I want to tell her I love her.

Him too.

MG: Nobody is going to say your book “smells of poo.” I’ll see to that. Now that we’ve covered that, what is your greatest fear related to this memoir?

LY: I suppose that some critic of note will slam it and forever relegate it to the shit pile. But when I really consider that, it seems like a silly fear. So that leads me to believe it isn’t real. I didn’t write the book for any critic who may end up slamming it. And I’ve been slammed by some heavy hitters in terms of male authority (the critic’s symbolic place in society), so who cares? If I survived this life, I can survive a surly critic.

I’m guessing the fear under all fears that I don’t particularly want to name is already named in the book. It’s the fear of standing up. It’s the fear of having heart.

MG: What is your greatest accomplishment, related to this memoir?

LY: The cover! Ha. Seriously though, the cover is a big deal. You know the story. But something I’m proud of in terms of how I structured the story is that I THINK readers can enter and exit it without feeling bound to my personal saga. I THINK the structure has fissures where any body can slip in to the water or leave with their own stories. At least that was the aim of breaking all the conventions down.

MG: What is your greatest hope for The Chronology of Water?

LY: That someone will hold it in their hands, read it, and feel less alone.

2.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WOMEN

MG: The Chronology of Water incorporates a number of themes that seem universal to so many young girls’ and women’s lives. Do you see this is a book for women?

LY: Well I do, but not exclusively. I think I’ve attempted to give voice to some things in the lives of girls and women that get repressed by culture. No doubt. For example, our sexual development. Our emotional intensities -- particularly in the areas we are not supposed to talk about like rage or violence or sexual excess. Our power(s). The fucked upedness of some of the models of “empowerment” that are options for us that are really big fat booby traps.

But I do not think it is a book for women exclusively. In fact I know it’s not. I know it because my close male friends whose bodies have also been transgressed, or men I know who have suffered prison time, or gay, bisexual or transgendered men I am close to, or hunky heteros like the guy I’m married to, or fathers, brothers, sons, junkies, musicians, artists, filmmakers who are men -- they all seem to find themselves in these stories too.

I think that is because the culture crushes all of us in terms of our best selves and bodies and spirits. So that I use a woman’s body as the metaphor for experience should not be read as an exclusivity.

Besides, that male body used to universalize experience, that jesus dude, turns out his body story just doesn’t cover everything. So I’m aiming to get the bodies of women and girls back into the line up to cover the rest of us.

MG: I like that you say this book is bodies, not just women or women’s bodies. While we’ll get to each of these many kinds of bodies later in this interview, I want to talk about women and the bond they often share. I’d like to talk about sisters -- yours, yes -- but also about sisterhood in general. First, let’s talk about your sister. She appears quite frequently in The Chronology of Water. One of my favorite passages follows:

“One morning my sister heard me sobbing in the shower. She pulled the curtain back, looked at me holding my empty gutted belly, and stepped inside to embrace me. Fully clothed. We stayed like that for about 20 minutes I think. Possibly the most tender thing anyone has ever done for me in my entire life.”

Please tell us anything you like about this moment.

LY: It really is a big moment in the book for me because it was a pivotal moment in my life. A life or death moment, to be honest. I was thinking of calling it quits that day in the shower. It was a simple thought, and for those who read the book, a recurring thought, but that day it was particularly stark. I just thought, I can’t do this. I don’t know why or how she did what she did except that she says it was what to do. That tells you something about her and why writing about her should be its own book. The kind of “love” born between our two bodies and lives in the shower is not one I’ve ever heard of or read about or seen in a movie. You are just going to have to trust me when I say it was an altered state. Or one of those lifedeathbeingnotbeing horizons.

MG: This is one of the hidden joys of reading The Chronology of Water. So much goes unsaid, and it’s up to the reader to make connections. I didn’t know this about that moment in the shower. All I knew is that the power of your words blew me away. I am thankful to your sister for being there for you then, because I believe this book has the potential to keep a lot of others from “calling it quits.” I believe this book is a sister for all of us -- a sister who will come along at just the right moment and save our lives . . . because you survived. And this book is proof. And people need proof of others’ survival to know that they, too, can get back up and try a little harder today. And tomorrow. And the next day. One day at a time. Should anyone come here in need of such reassurance: What would you like to say to that person?

LY: I’d say art is with you. All around you. I’d say when there doesn’t seem to be anyone else, there is art. I’d say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I’d say art is a lifeline to the rest of us -- we are out here. You are not alone. There is nothing about you that scares us. There is nothing unlovable about you, either. Let’s make some shit up.

I think too you are right -- that I was secretly trying to make a sisterbook.

MG: Let’s get back to your sister. What questions did you ask yourself or struggle with when it came time to depicting her on the page?

LY: With my sister -- this is kind of funny -- I have about nine chapters about my sister. They are not in the book. Writing about my sister quickly turns into a big fat HOMAGE because my love for her is so intense I immediately start writing her story instead of my own. If you saw us together you’d see -- it’s the intimacy and iron bond of sister survivors, certainly. But it’s more. She was my first love. My other better mother. She was my first loss when she left home. She was who I fled to when I left home. Ocean and shore and beautiful other.

My mother and sister are not depicted fully or even authentically on the pages. Though my sister seems to think I got my mother pretty well pinned/penned. In the end I could only tell a certain part of a story in which they figure.

So I decided to write another book someday about this sister experience. And ALL the HUGE VARIETIES of ways women are in relationship to other women. It’s ungodly and someone needs to write about it properly. Hope I survive it.

3.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and MOTHERS

MG: Here’s an excerpt you wrote about your mother:

“Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper. I had a journal I hid under my bed. I didn’t know what a journal was. It was just a red notebook that I wrote pictures and true things and lies in. . . . I wrote about my mother . . . the back of her head driving me to and from swim practice. Her limp and leg. Her hair. How gone she was, selling houses, winning awards into the night. I wrote letters to my gone away sister that I never sent. . . . When I was 11 I wrote a poem in my red notebook that went: In the house/alone in my bed/my arms ache. My sister is gone/my mother is gone/my father designs buildings/in the room next to mine/he is smoking. I wait for 5 a.m./I pray to leave the house/I pray to swim.”

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you read this passage?

LY: How I was, even then, trying to write a counter-story to the story of family. I also think about how daughters inherit the pain of their mothers. . . . I first thought and read about that with true understanding when I read The Lover by Duras. The mother’s pain drifts down the DNA into the daughter in a maternal line that I understand. My mother’s depression and anger and pain crept down genetic lines to my sister and I and embedded into our very bodies -- though differently in each of us. There is a grief reserved for mothers. Something about bearing children corporeally leaves a trace of sadness that is never quite sutured.

When I look at that passage I can see all three of us -- little women -- doing what we each had to in order to stay alive literally and figuratively. And then I see and feel the “weight” of father, literally and figuratively. There is the whole symbolic order. The difficult version. Not the loving possibility of family but the wounded one.

I also see a violent hope though. Is that weird? My sister and I are alive. We are both writers. My sister is a poet. She is also a healer, and I am a teacher. We are choosing to give of ourselves in spite of what was taken.

MG: In terms of “what was taken,” you share in your memoir that your father would not allow you to go away to college, that offers came in the mail but he refused to let you leave. However, your mother intervened:

“A week later, when the papers came to sign, my father was at work. My mother signed them. I remember watching her hand, a little stunned. She had beautiful handwriting. Then she put them in the envelope, grabbed her car keys, and told me C’mawn. In her southern drawl liquor voice. In her real estate station wagon. Driving to the post office with her and watching her drop my freedom into the blue metal mouth of the mailbox -- I almost loved her.”

What does it mean that you “almost loved her”?

LY: My mother and I fought a lot. I’m actually grateful for it -- we had a very real relationship partly because we fought. But at the time those letters about college -- or my impending possible leaving -- were coming in the mail, I was caught in a deep feeling of anger, mistrust, and betrayal where she was concerned.

Why hadn’t she taken her daughters out of his house as children? Why didn’t she save us? Why was she so busy building her career in Real Estate and creating a life outside her home that the pain of her daughter didn’t signify? That part of her I hated.

Much later of course I came to understand her story.

And I came to know the women at the door: pain, depression, loss, despair.

When other women tell me how much they loved their mothers, I am filled with a strange wonder. I stay quiet, because I know my “love” was different. It was fierce and loud and the moments of tenderness were quiet, something between our eyes, something in the way she called me “Belle.”

MG: What sorts of challenges did you face as you were depicting her on the page?

LY: I could write a book about that. Wait. . . . I just did! Ha. I know what you are asking though. What I had to deal with as a writer confronting the page in terms of my mother was the vastness of her pain (physical and emotional), and how to get her unbelievable imagination and joy to surface. Pain was the overriding presence in her life. And yet she had moments of joy that I witnessed that could not be outdone by even the happiest child. And in the tiniest of moments she could muster a strength that could shatter a world. A strength that could free a daughter from a father’s house.

MG: You write several times of your mother’s body, about how one leg is shorter than the other and how she shouldn’t have had children. But she did. Why do you think she did?

LY: Yes it’s an interesting question to me, still, since Dr.’s told her if she carried to term she risked injury to the infant or even death. Because of how tilted her hips and birth canal were. So was she doing something loving and miraculous and wonderful? Or something sadistic? I know that’s an odd thing to say but I do wonder sometimes, you know? WHAT was she thinking?

But maybe I know what she was thinking. She was thinking what they told her didn’t signify. Like when they told her she was crippled, she danced. Hard. In high school. She danced her heart out she danced her leg right she danced her sexuality.

And when they told her no one would want her or marry her so she should become a librarian and shut the doors of woman she hot night seduced a rodeo boy and an artist and a musician.

And when they told her she couldn’t run or swim or ride a bike she became the “could not” -- she shattered it like broken bone piles -- she remade meaning in the image of her imagined body.

So I guess what I believe is that she didn’t think the regular lexicon on rules or realities applied to her. Until the day she died she swore she saw a sea serpent over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a UFO in Port Arthur, Texas, and she swore she loved her children.

MG: If you could say anything to your mother right now, what would that be?

LY: What I said in the endlines. Mother, rest. I am home.

4.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and STILLBIRTH

MG: What is the greatest sorrow you have experienced?

LY: The death of my daughter, Lily.

MG: How do you live with it every day? I mean, how do you cope?

LY: Well I have learned to let grief live with me like a little girl in the house. And I am a writer, so storytelling is how to keep going. To open my self up, my grief, my love, my difficulties, my joys, to share my life and body and words so that they join the human story greater than my own.

MG: Why does this book open with the birth and loss of your daughter?

LY: Because that is the body event that “opened” me. I mean it broke me. Utterly. But it broke me OPEN. I became a writer from that experience. Not instantly, in the moment I went fairly insane, as I wrote about. But later. The first thing that came out of me when my wits and emotions settled back toward something bearable was writing. As it turns out, there was a lot in there. . . . I think I have many, many books to say.

I also opened at a birthdeath moment because I no longer believe in the idea that birth is a beginning and death is an end. In terms of life or narrative. They are merely continuations and changes in matter and energy. Energy never dies. It just changes form.

Lastly, because of what I know about how memory works from reading about biochemistry and neuroscience. There’s nothing linear about it. At all. That’s just a comforting conceptual shape we bring to the chaotic processes of memory that are generated in our bodies from a variety of sources and systems.

MG: You share that you lied to people when they asked about your daughter:

“I lied without even hesitating an instant. I’d say, “Oh, she is the most beautiful baby girl! Her eyelashes are so long!” Even two years later when a woman I know stopped me in the library to ask after my new daughter, I said, “She’s so wonderful -- she’s my light. In day care she is already drawing pictures!” I never thought, stop lying.”

Where did this urge come from? Is it with you still?

LY: The urge to lie? Aren’t all writers liars? Maybe all humans? Lying has gotten a bum wrap. Narrativizing, storytelling, those are human qualities that are amazing. The urge to make stories up. If I hadn’t made stories up my whole life I’d be dead I think. I think that’s an admirable quality, if by “lying” we mean creating fictions beautifully against the grain of culture’s physical and psychic atomizing tendencies.

I don’t like lies that come from places of power and oppression. I don’t like politicians or cultural “authorities” who lie. I don’t like the lies born of “gender” or “religion” or “family” or “criminality” or the cult of good citizenship that cause an individual to believe there is something wrong with them. I don’t like the lie called power, or the lie that some people are inferior to others, or the lie that humans are superior to the environment or animals.

The best liars I’ve ever met or known are my favorite writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers. They are of the first variety. I hope they lie their asses off.

5.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

MG: Is it true that you had three abortions before you were twenty-one?

LY: Yes. And I am not in the minority here. But it isn’t a story women are particularly allowed to tell. Certainly not truthfully. It is a story entirely unsanctioned by culture and it points to one’s fall from the cult of good citizenship, the cult of the clean and proper body, and a certain definition of “ethics” and “morals” that, coincidentally, relegates the body of a woman to an inferior and powerless position inherited from patriarchal religious mythology.

I know this is not a popular position to express but our bodies, like all of nature, energy and matter, are killing and reproducing all the time. The union of sperm and egg is a process generative of new life and yet lethal to both sperm and egg. Compost piles breed life. Study quasars. Black holes. Cosmic string. Study ecosystems. Animal populations. Chemistry. Even the cult of Christianity is based on a lifegiving death.

On the other hand, I feel like RIGHT NOW is also an important time to discuss precisely and openly how important women’s reproductive rights, women’s health, and women’s control over their own bodies are. I don’t want MORE abortions. No woman is happy having an abortion. It’s an emotionally wrenching decision. But from my point of view it is not a scientifically wrenching decision.

But I also don’t want old white male corrupt legislation crawling up the cunt of a woman’s being, nor do I want women’s bodies to be the “site” of political battles as if we were breeding livestock, slaves, or meat sack commodities. So fighting (again again again) for women’s reproductive rights, rights to health care, and the right to be self determined bodies free from economic and morality fictions is (again again again) violently vital.

6.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and BISEXUALITY and MEN

MG: Can you tell us about your first experience with another woman?

LY: Yes. I think you mean sexually though. Do you? If you do, then I’d say my first sexual experience with another woman was with my mother. Specifically at the pre-linguistic stage with her breast and body, and later, post-language acquisition, I’d say the the erotic object attachment to the scar on her leg.

When she would get out of the bathtub or shower and dress, I was often in the bathroom with her. And the great white pearling scar railroading up the side of her leg mesmerized me. I’m positive I experienced erotic feelings, though I hadn’t an understanding of it of course. But I remember sweating. And feeling very antsy. And being unable to keep myself from reaching out and touching it. I remember my hand on her leg and I remember shaking. Dizzy. Almost passing out. I think she’d just laugh, say “Oh Belle,” and sort of brush my hand away, dry off, and get dressed.

Then I suppose it’s true too that I was attracted to my sister -- she was eight years older than me and she looked a little opposite to me -- she had long, auburn hair and a full figured body. I had white non-hair fuzz from swimming and a boy body. Her distance in age made her mythic to me. Her bedroom was mythic to me. Everything about her -- mythic. When she left I had nowhere to put any of those feelings about my body and my love and devotion, and she left when I was ten, so puberty was just around the corner.

But I’m guessing the question is more about my first experience OUTSIDE of or beyond my mother and sister. I just feel it’s important to name those before I move on.

And here the answer is easy.

I was competing with a poolful and lockeroomfull of girls and women from the time I was six years old on. All that gorgeous naked flesh in steamed up or watery places nearly made me faint on a daily basis. I was probably oversexualized at a young age because of my father, so my drives -- my pistons were firing way before I understood what they meant.

I was attracted to my two best friends when I was five. Six. Seveneightnineten.

I was in love with my teacher when I was eleven.

I wanted to be Joan of Arc at twelve -- I cried in bed thinking about her body while humping pillows.

In seventh grade, my childhood best friend and I took to soaping up each other butt to butt in lockerroom showers. And liking it. A lot.

I had my first orgasm WITH another girl when I was thirteen. There was lot of . . . hmmm. Twinkie mashing. And finger-fucking. We had no idea what we were doing. I’m not even sure we knew what “orgasms” were. But it was hot, and wet, and slippery, and very, very good.

And nothing about my father.

MG: Of the many men in your memoir, who was (or is) the most influential in your life? Why?

LY: My father, because he gave and took everything simultaneously, and my son Miles, because from him I know what being alive is for.

MG: I totally expected a different answer. Can you elaborate? Perhaps you could offer a representative excerpt from The Chronology of Water that best captures how your father “gave and took everything simultaneously” and how Miles teaches you “what being alive is for”?

LY: Yeah I can see why that answer is counter-intuitive. But as I write about in the book, the fact of the matter is that my father showed me art. He introduced me to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture -- to the seriousness of space and light and form. He introduced me to classical music. To painting. To film. He spoke in sophisticated ways about aesthetics and themes and archetypes and the power of artistic production. He explained to me what the Guggenheim and the Tate were. He took me to see Shakespeare’s plays in Ashland, Oregon from the time I was eight until I left the house.

I saw The Deer Hunter and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apocalypse Now and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Silkwood, with him.

He bought me a Selmer Series 10 clarinet.

He gave me my first typewriter, my first drawing pad, my first set of sophisticated pens.

MG: You know I expected the answer to be Andy, right? Can you give us a representative excerpt for how you feel about him right now?

LY: Who, my father? Or Andy?

Miles is my lifesource, and Andy is my being equal. It’s a little Jungian to me -- his masculinity stands up to my feminine, but his feminine also draws out my masculine -- I don’t know how we found each other but it’s like an energy loop. That doesn’t sound very romantic I suppose but in lidiaworld it’s a lot bigger deal than a Hollywood romanticism.

You know it’s true though that I don’t think I’d be alive if I hadn’t met Andy and Miles. And I mean that both literally and symbolically.

MG: What can you tell us about divorce? It’s not uncommon, but it is definitely a scary and unique experience for anyone going through it for the first time. Screw it. Let’s not call it divorce. Let’s call it “breaking up.” What can you tell us about that?

LY: It’s death. It’s exactly death. But the thing about it is, you can’t get through a life, and by that I mean a rich, fully lived life, without experiencing deaths of all sorts. The death of a relationship the death of an idea the deaths of people the death of truths the death of desires the death of animals the death of planets and stars and, well, everything.

Divorce or breaking up is particularly hard on us because loving is such a huge risk. You risk everything, loving all the way. You risk your world. Your selfhood. Your ability to know. Your individual being. Your reality.

I don’t really give a hootie about the part of “divorce” that is attached to the marriage contract. But our hearts and bodies and thoughts. Our being. Breaking up is a death. The hardest part is to admit it’s worth it. To experience a full love, even unto death. It’s worth it.

There’s no such think as a fully lived life without pain. Honestly I could another book about how clusterfucked American culture is on the topic of pain. Talk about an undiscovered continent. We’ve coded pain in ways that keep us from learning jack shit from one of the most profound experiences available. Wish we could undo or redo that.

MG: How were your marriages different from each other?

LY: In my first marriage I was a confused ball of nuclear rage and creative fire without a form. In my second marriage I was insane with grief and numbed myself with laughter and every excess imaginable, including writing. In my third marriage I am learning what being is.

I can’t speak for the three men. I loved them. I loved them differently. I would not change anything about them. But my relationship with Andy is the most real to me. It changes and grows. It’s alive. And I’m fully present.

As for marriage, I’m for it!!! Get married as many times as possible!!! I think anyone who wants to, should GET TO. NOW. And I think it is possible to invent it from the inside out, rather than live it from the scripts we’re handed.

MG: Will you tell us something uplifting and wonderful about your current marriage? About a moment that you’ve experienced recently, that you wouldn’t mind sharing?

LY: With the Mingo, it’s perpetually epic. He’s better than your favorite novel or film.

7.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and PROMISCUITY

MG: Kerry Cohen blurbed The Chronology of Water, and I love that she did. I remember reading her memoir and thinking how incredibly brave she is for writing it. I feel the same way about you, though in many ways I think Chronology is a different kind of memoir. Let’s do some one-word answers. Are you ready? Just give me the first word you think of.

Sex is ________.

LY: exploration

MG: Sex can be __________.

LY: revelatory

MG: The first time I had sex, I ________.

LY: exploded

MG: When my son has sex for the first time I hope he ___________.

LY: supernovas

8.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and DRUGS & ALCOHOL

MG: Why drugs? Why alcohol?

LY: To leave planet Lidia, to anesthetize, to dream, to discover.

MG: I am positive that people -- young and old alike -- will find this interview on the Internet, perhaps in times of pain and in need of guidance, particularly where drugs and alcohol are involved. I don’t doubt that parents, too, might find this site. What would you like to say to them now -- either to the individual who is looking for help or to parents?

LY: I can’t parent anyone’s children but my own. I am not a parent of anyone else’s children. I am a writer. But my stories are not unique, and so by reading them, perhaps there is some insight for someone moving through life with difficulty about how not to give up. Or how to get hold of your own story. But too, my parents failed us in some important ways. And if a parent can “see” the me’s that were struggling, and how I needed some help, maybe they can admit that we are all living out stories of ourselves.

I have a close friend named Cheryl Strayed. Her mother saved she and her siblings -- meaning she got them away from an abusive father. My mother did not. But Cheryl’s mother also died at the age of 46, and left such a tremendous grief inside her daughter; Cheryl loved her mother deeply. I don’t any longer blame my mother for not getting us away from my father. I can admit she had a story too, one that came before me. I can admit her story.

Cheryl and I both turned out to be writers. And mothers. And people who can feel and receive and give compassion. Love. So maybe part of what I’d say is about stories. Find the stories you identify with. Find the stories that challenge your world view. Tell your story to anyone who will listen. Never suppress an other’s story. Let lifestories exist alongside one another. Bear witness to them. Do not ever let your own story drown out someone else’s. Find the people whose stories make good companions to your own. Make a braid.

9.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WATER

MG: What does water mean to you? I know it took a whole book to answer this, but if you can give us an excerpt or a short answer here, that would be fantastic.

LY: Water provides me with a central metaphor for my life. I guess I think that’s kind of important. To explore and discover metaphors that help you live with your life and how it is and what it was and what it might be. I like metaphors a great deal more than sentences. Within metaphor there is still the resonance of image, play, varied meaning and interpretation. Never only one meaning.

But there is a literalness to it too. In water I am without physical pain. It’s the only way to be pain free at this point in my life without medication. I have a 22% scoliosis -- chronic back pain, also hip pain. So being weightless is freedom from pain.

It’s also a meditative space for me now. The MOMENT I enter the water, I mean it’s almost Pavlovian -- I can enter a trance or meditative space. Which is why I like to be in it as often as possible!

And even though it smells way to poo poo Christian to say this, there is a baptismal feeling you get from entering and leaving water. So maybe I can say I am FOR the secular baptism. May it bring you love. May it wash you clean of cultural scripts and religious mumbo jumbo. May it carry us like the sediments that rocks become.

MG: You share in your book that you sort of collect swimmers. Who is your favorite person to swim with?

LY: My sister. But hardly anyone agrees to swim with me . . .

MG: When were you last in the water?

LY: Yesterday.

MG: Tell us about the first time you were in the water.

LY: Well like you, I was in amniotic fluid. Flip turning, no doubt, in the womb of my then world. They tell me when I was two I would jump in pools or off of the side of lake docks. I think something about water always drew me. I’ve yet to locate something genetic about that . . . but I do believe quite firmly in mermaids. And seals and whales are very magical to me.

MG: How has water changed for you over time?

LY: As a child I played in the bathtub with my sister. At the pool I swam laps, but I also goofed off, like kids do. The pool -- its colors and smells and sensory reality -- its Whitmanesque community -- the “I” in the “we” -- a body alone in water and all the otherness -- swimmers -- is more familiar to me than any other sense of “place” in my life.

Water was my space of joy, freedom, play. My sense of self, competition, surrender.

I still go to the ocean or rivers to both complete my self and let it go to everything which is larger than self. It takes about ten second of staring and listening and smelling for the ocean or rivers to remember me.

For me, water is the perfect metamorphosis environment. It’s life giving. Macro and micro. Water has changed me like the great waters made paths into earth and mountain. Water has rebirthed me hundreds of times. I go to water to feel the truth of things beyond a self. All the colors of water arrest and open me. I hope everyone finds what it is that makes them feel the way water makes me feel.

MG: Can we go swimming together when we finally meet in person?

LY: It would be my distinct pleasure. 

Sunglasses For Your Brain: Ofelia Hunt and How Reading Changes Seeing

When movies show you how flies see, they always like to focus on the fractals. How, supposedly, insects see like kaleidoscopes: lots and lots of tiny windows, all showing duplicates of the same image. Of course, this isn't how insects actually see, but it's fun to think so. What's even more fun about being a fly is: flying. You get to fly. And flying, of course, is a way of moving that's also its own way to see.

In 2006/2007, I first discovered Ofelia Hunt through her blog and later her Bear Parade e-book My Eventual Bloodless Coup. You've probably already guessed this, but now I'm going to try making an analogy that Hunt writes like a combination of the way Hollywood thinks insects see and the way insects fly into thinking. Here we go: Hunt's narrators see the world divided into fantasies, daydreams. A girlfriend tells a boyfriend that she wants her "left eyeball and right ear removed while you watch through a two-inch glass panel," and then she proceeds to keep telling him every intricate detail she can make up because he doesn't stop her. Finally her boyfriend looks at her forehead and says:

"Why do you say things like that?"

"I was joking."

"I don't think you're joking, you're always saying stuff like that."

"I'm just being funny because I'm bored and tired of watching TV with you and I wanted to know how long I could talk without you stopping me but you didn't stop me because you don't care about anything and are a nihilist or something."

The lies and delusions and whimsy of Hunt's narrators are undercut by concrete realities of violence and trauma, the reasons and results of too much making up. People are kidnapped and stuffed into refrigerators. Sisters punch their eight-year old sisters and apologize by saying "I thought your face looked kind of like a speed bag or something, and I thought I could be a boxer, and boxers need to practice." A masked man waves a knife and tells the world to admit that he's a sloth bear, that his genes were spliced. This exploration of how imagination intertwines with violence, how the imagination makes objects of everything, runs through all of Hunt's work, and gives it an existential awareness and a contemporary significance that I find hypnotic and true, true as any buzzing daydream that seems incapable of landing.

Her language, too, flies and divides. The physical world is rendered through repetition, the world boring as the world. Station to station, parking-lot to parking-lot, the world wheezing along like a strip mall of hyphenated connections, temporary sidewalks. No wonder we imagine ourselves away, into flights of imagining Bill Murray driving a giant robot in the Carlsbad caverns and then the next thing imagined and the next, because any stopping of the "ands" means the attention is no longer suspended and we have to get back to paying attention to a world where—as one boyfriend in a Hunt story says— "One baby is like any other baby so who cares what baby you brainwash or whatever?"

After I read My Eventual Bloodless Coup, I started reading Ofelia's blog, where she was posting excerpts of the novel that would later become Today & Tomorrow. I emailed asking if I could publish one of the chapters in this literary journal I co-edit, NOÖ Journal, a chapter about the narrator as a child at the zoo with her grandfather. This was about a year before I started Magic Helicopter Press. Later, when I decided I wanted to start the press, I knew I wanted to publish chapbooks and books by writers whose voices rendered an uncompromisingly honest and singular worldview, but whose work challenged that voice, put it through the ringer of a world that doesn't care about any view at all.

That's what I say now, anyway. That's me trying to describe a feeling without just turning the feeling into a description.

In high school, I read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and then I walked around thinking everyone had a secret phone number, that the world was basically a Thomas Pynchon novel. This, I realized, was the benchmark of a certain kind of great book. It takes over. When I read T&T, I walk around seeing the way Ofelia Hunt's imagination swoops. Reading certain great novels is like wearing sunglasses for your brain, and Today & Tomorrow has frames shaped like anarchist penguins.

Many thanks to Molly and Chris for hosting me in the Lit Pub's inaugural month to talk about T&T and other great books. Thanks to you for tuning in, and please feel free to join the conversation with any thoughts you have about insects, small presses, novels-as-ways-of-seeing, and whether you yourself are actually Bill Murray.