Find the Open Door. Fill the Open Arms.

Along with many of Brian Oliu’s fans, I first read the pieces collected in So You Know It’s Me during their original appearance on Craigslist over a six-week stretch last fall. In that initial iteration, the narrative unfolded with a poignancy that seemed connected to the ephemeral nature of its presentation. (As Oliu knew, the posts would be deleted after forty-five days, in accordance with Craigslist policy.) It’s always perilous to divorce a work of art from its original context, and the pieces in this collection—designed for impermanence—were particularly susceptible to corruption from a new medium. Fortunately, Oliu and the savvy folks at Tiny Hardcore Press have created a text that accumulates, rather than sheds, nuance and richness from its single-volume presentation. So You Know It’s Me offers an unflinching portrait of devotion and desire, of relationship and revelation. It is smart without being a smart-ass. It is genuine but not cloying. It deserves attention.

It demands attention, too. From the opening pages, this book proves as playful as it is provocative, and it resists easy assimilation. So You Know It’s Me wears many hats. It synthesizes missed connection and bildüngsroman. Its dense references—which range from obscure college football coaches to the process for making hounds tooth fabric, from the The Little Prince to the Odyssey—reward careful probing. It offers a loving chronicle of Tuscaloosa, Alabama—not a store-bought map bound by the rules of cartography, but the kind of sketch someone would draw on the back of a paper bag. It weaves together the stories of many women in an attempt to recapture the story of one woman. It presents a narrator talking his way into relationship and self-awareness. It warns you that intimacy is a gem so lovely as to be nonexistent, then leads you to a quarry and asks you to watch as it chips away anyway. It promises jewels, then brandishes “your heart where a rock once was.” It takes hold, holds fast.

It arrests us, but the book itself keeps moving, subverting genres and disrupting formal expectations. Attentive to every detail, Oliu even employs the book’s headers as fields of play. While the even-numbered pages conventionally state the author’s name, the odd numbered pages cleverly invert the book’s title, transforming So You Know It’s Me to So I Know It’s You and thereby further implicating readers in the narrative. We are simultaneously the ones searching and the ones sought, the missing and the missed. This is not just a narrative of one man seeking one woman. Rather, as the narrator tells us, “this is about you.” We readers are not that you, of course, in any literal sense. We know we have never eaten yogurt while fearing our brother’s death, never been wounded by wire. But words are seductive, and despite what we know, we begin to believe.

The book’s conclusion rewards our faith. Each of the its first twenty-two entries has been introduced with the same convention: a number indicating the day of its posting, a title, a location, and a description of who is looking for whom. These entries are all set in Tuscaloosa—on the university campus, at a local bookstore, in a park by the river—and the search is always described as M4W.

The book’s final section ruptures that pattern. Gone are the titles, the descriptors of the narrator and his beloved. This final section gives us only a location, or, more accurately, an anti-location—“45 Nowhere.” Fittingly, this section contains no content. On one level, of course, this gestures toward the fact that on the forty-fifth day, Craigslist began deleting Oliu’s original posts. Forty-five days after the last one was posted, they had all disappeared. More significantly, this also reminds us of what we’ve suspected all along: this story is ours as much as it is the narrator’s. As the narrator points out earlier in the text, we know who we are and where we have been. We also know who we have missed. Rather than being a clever gimmick, then, Oliu’s blank page serves as a testament to his own generosity, his knowledge that although this narrator is a single person in Tuscaloosa, this story belongs to each of us. We remain unmapped, unmoored, undone—ravished by this author, his words, his search for what has been missed, his faith that lovely things remain within our reach.

So You Know It’s Me is one of the loveliest texts I know. Read it. Reread it. Send it to the first person you ever loved. Stash a copy at your favorite landmark. Take a photo of it there at your favorite landmark. Deliver that photo to Brian Oliu. To find him, go to Tuscaloosa. Drive down the street that you saw on television when the tornado hit. You will know it for its lack of landmarks. Turn toward the florist’s that used to house the best butcher in town. Keep going until you reach the road where the first grade teacher used to live. When you get to the house that is no longer her house, turn left. Look for Alabama’s colors—white siding, a red porch. Find the open door. Fill the open arms.

A Conversation with Brian Oliu

How did So You Know It's Me come about?

So You Know It's Me came about as a writing project over the summer / fall of 2010. I'm a firm believer in having writing projects, which means I'm a firm believer in having side projects: I had been working for the past year on my collection of lyric essays based off of 8-bit Nintendo games and I felt the need to write something else for a change. The Craigslist pieces were perfect:  small things I could write every day (technically one every two days) and place them immediately into the world.

Why did you choose Craigslist as the medium for this project? What is it about Craigslist?

I've always been fascinated by Missed Connections; even the name holds some magic to it: it insinuates that if only things went differently, the missing / missed would be in eternal bliss forever. The Tuscaloosa ones are especially sad:  clandestine male for male ads, taking place at Hardees / Dollar General, a lot of 'too shy to talk to you at the bar' posts from frat guys. To me, there's nothing sadder than a 'missed Missed Connection' -- every once in a while you'll see someone post the same one a few times just in case it might get passed over. There's always an air of desperation as well: many of them start with 'I know this is a long shot...' or 'you'll never read this but...' and those are the ones that fascinate me. They turn into open letters that will probably never be read, but for some reason they need to be said -- and unlike e-mails we've written and then deleted or diary entries to people long gone, they're all public. And so you get these heartbreaking and honest confessions that are completely anonymous. When I originally posted the pieces to the site they were always anonymous -- obviously people started to gather through Facebook or Twitter that I was the one posting them, but I still wanted them to seem anonymous in order to keep that desperate starkness alive.

Is this about you?

It is about me in the sense that you cannot write about an other without writing about oneself. The narrator is me; at the very least a version of me, as is the "I" in any nonfiction. I tend not to use the fiction/nonfiction terms, but I consider it nonfiction with a suspension of belief. The stories are all true, as are the feelings. Metanonfiction? Maybe. Of course, I'm skirting the actual question which is being asked, which is 'who is this about?', and in that regard it is about a first love whom I hadn't seen in years who passed away. I found this out online, and so I feel as if the connection to something online is important. As with anyone you love who is now gone, you start seeing glimpses of them in other places and other people. The book, I feel, is about seeing someone in someone else and what that means.

You wrote the essays in SYKIM in dense paragraphs, using gorgeous, rambling sentences. Was that a deliberate stylistic choice?

I knew I wanted the pieces to resemble posts in a way -- I wanted them to look dense with little stylistic alterations in regards to how they looked on the page. I find repetition very exciting and I feel as if the medium of a Missed Connection is perfect for that, as they all seem to say the same thing, regardless of what one is looking for or who posted. I feel as if the rambling aspects also encompass the desperation of the post -- Craigslist deletes each post after 45 days and so there's a need to get everything out into the world as quickly and as honestly as possible.

In “21,” you write, " you are encased in glass like a sad flower, like you are closing your eyes so that the sheep will not see you." I loved that line and thought about how the girl in this story really does seem like is encased in glass because she is encased in your words. Writing allows us to do that, to capture people, or parts of people or maybe the ideas of people. Do you try to do that in your writing? Were you trying to hold on to something in these essays by capturing it?

Oh I totally believe in that:  writing to own things. Most of the time I try to write to own something that happened or to figure things out. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, yeah? I write about these things because I need to: it is catharsis. Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you didn't make art? Like you go to work, come home, and have nothing to work on? Man, that is strange. Sometimes I think that'd be nice, to not have the 'I should be writing' bug hit me when I'm playing videogames, but I am thankful for the pull.

Who are some of your influences? What books do you love most?

I'm a huge proponent of the lyric essay, and so I love John D'Agata, Christian Bobin, pretty much anything on Brevity, Lyn Hejinian, Jenny Boully, etc, etc, etc. Joan Didion, Joy Williams, and Olena Kalytiak Davis made me want to write / make me want to write / make me want to write better. I've been incredibly fortunate in terms of my writing teachers and I am very much in debt to them: Lia Purpura taught me how to synthesize the world and the self and to do it effortlessly and stunningly, Michael Martone taught me how to take chances in writing and form, to work towards a larger idea and project, and to always 'whole-ass' everything, Kate Bernheimer taught me how to channel memory into something sublime and terrifying and beautiful. Friends here in Tuscaloosa too: Lucas Southworth, Colleen Hollister, and Tessa Fontaine are just a sampling of gorgeous and at times 'perfect' writing. I am obsessed with the Odyssey; my first novel/memoir/whatever is a retelling of Odysseus' story if it were a computer virus. Dear Sugar! Wikipedia articles! Anything that is beautiful and has heart and feels toiled over yet flows naturally and passionately. Writing that sounds good out loud.

I know you also deejay. What set list would you create to accompany your book?

Ooh! I was asked this by the lovely folks at Artifice who published the first three Missed Connections. It was entirely sad dance music, which is the best. It'd be one of those dance parties where everyone would get sloppy drunk, sing / shout all of the songs, and take breaks to sit on the curb and have heart-to-hearts with people.

While some people are bored by process questions, I'm increasingly interested in how people write. How do you write?

I love process stuff! I type everything. I don't turn off browsers/Facebook/Twitter/chat because that seems like I'd be in 'high pressure / I AM SO SERIOUS RIGHT NOW' writing mode and I wouldn't get anything done. I don't really have a writing time of day, nor do I write every day. I like to move around; I wrote all of So You Know It's Me from my desk in my room, but I haven't written from that desk in at least 6 months. I was writing on the futon for a while, but that broke, so I've been writing on the couch in the room that no one sits in. I've been on a book / eating / spaceship tour the past two weeks and so I write something from my hotel bed which I'm really intrigued about. I'm heading home to New Jersey for a few weeks and I'm excited to see what happens when I write back at home (it usually turns out weird? and dark? and ornate?). I read everything aloud when I write. If I'm working on a project, I'll read all of the pieces of that project aloud in order to get me into the language / rhythm of writing. When I am done, I'll read it aloud:  if anything gets stuck in my mouth, it's gone. I'll do this multiple times. If I feel something is done, I need it out of my computer as soon as possible -- meaning I'll send it out for publication immediately or I'll send it to my friends Elizabeth Wade & Jeremy Hawkins who are the best editors / readers of my work on the planet. I write pretty well on Thursday late afternoons. No music, but sound is okay. Usually with a Coke Zero or Diet Dr. Pepper.

How are you doing as Alabama rebuilds from the tornado? How is Alabama doing?

I am doing fine -- my house & car did not receive any damage. The tornado made a straight diagonal line through town about two miles south of where I live. The town is shocking to drive through still. Some days you'll take a different street than you're used to and you'll see the destruction from a different angle and it'll hit you hard. It is really dark at night. It's been really hot this summer because there aren't any trees. For a while the debris was everywhere, but the cleanup has started. The buildings beyond repair have been knocked down. Taco Casa, a local chain of absolutely horrid Mexican food which is dearly beloved by local Tuscaloosans posted on Facebook a photo of them starting to rebuild and everyone went bonkers. Most impressive to me are the 'We Are Coming Back' signs that popped up almost immediately after the storm. My friend & local photographer David A. Smith has documented a couple of the signs which really capture the spirit of the town. Obviously those first few weeks were tough, but we were all ready to help -- I challenge another group of writers to wield a chainsaw or stack pallets of water better than us. Many folks would spend the day cutting tree limbs and answering phones at the courthouse or Emergency Services and then we would all meet at my place and we would eat/drink/cry together. One of the mantras during late April / early May was 'play to your strengths. I put together an eBook of Tuscaloosa writers called 'Tuscaloosa Runs This' that had over 800 downloads and raised about 1000 dollars for the recovery effort.

A friend made a letter-pressed book that raised $1,000 for an elementary school in the area that had been destroyed. I've been on a two-week tour with friends where we've raised over $1,500 for tornado relief, some of which will go towards those affected in Joplin, Missouri. People have been incredibly generous, especially the writing community -- I had folks I had met once at AWP or writers / editors I had never met face-to-face sending messages and asking where to donate and where to send food.

Isn't writing fucking awesome?

How did you end up in Tuscaloosa? What do you do there?

I'm originally from New Jersey and went to undergraduate at Loyola-Maryland in Baltimore. I took a year off, worked in a mental health in-patient unit at a hospital in NJ, and started applying for MFA schools in 2005. I e-mailed Lia Purpura, who was my undergraduate advisor for suggestions: I knew nothing about MFAs, or writing, or what a chapbook was, or how literary journals work, or what-have-you. Michael Martone had just visited and read at Loyola, so he was fresh in her mind. She suggested I apply to Alabama, and so I did. I had offers to other schools in the northeast, but Alabama offered me the opportunity to teach (which is what I wanted) and it also was a three / four year program, which was extremely enticing. I came in off the waitlist, and so I had about 36 hours to give Alabama an answer. I took the offer and it was the best decision I've ever made. I graduated in '09, and they hired me as an Instructor, which means I teach composition and creative writing. Furthermore, I am a partner in Slash Pine Projects, which is an undergraduate internship where we go on reading exchanges with other colleges, put out chapbooks, and put on various readings in Alabama. Those students are spectacular talents -- whether it's organizing, writing, book arts, fundraising, grant writing, they somehow manage to blow me away every time. It's an honor to work with them.

Why are U of A students and graduates so fierce in their loyalty to their school?

Oh man. You are going to get me all fired up! First, we're a football school, and a good one. Alabama fans are loud, obnoxious, brash, and accustomed to winning. So there's an element of pride that comes with that which trickles down to just about everything. It's overblown, it's a carnival, and it's just football, but it's also the identity of the town. There's not much happening down here outside of football, and so that is part of our culture. On the flipside of that, one of the beauties of being in a town like this is that you can pretty much do anything / start anything. You can start a reading series. You can start an art kitchen. You can start a small press. You can form a band for one-night-only and play at the local bar. And people will show up! And be supportive! It's the best.

Now, when it comes to the MFA program and the writers that come out of it, we perceive ourselves as underdogs. We're not Iowa. We're not Columbia. We're not in a hip place, therefore so many people are hesitant to move to Alabama. I remember a potential student e-mailing me and saying that she's originally from New York but now lives in Philadelphia and hates it because there's nothing to do there. It was clear that folks like that are not 'Roll Tide material': you come to Alabama to write -- there's a "diva check at the border," as Kellie Wells says. As a result, all of the writers in Tuscaloosa are extremely close: the majority of us are not from here and so we stick together, go to the same bars, hang out at each other's houses. I always find it funny when writers / editors ask 'do you know so-and-so? They live in Tuscaloosa too.' These are the people I play darts with, eat barbecue with, watch football with, dance with, kiss while drunk, help move. Our individual victories are everyone else's victories, and what's good for one of us is good for all of us. We're the cool kids at AWP who have buttons with secret meanings. We produce one of the coolest journals on the planet in Black Warrior Review. You'll be hard-pressed to find a lit journal out there right now without a mention of Tuscaloosa or University of Alabama in the Contributors Notes. And goddammit, we're nice too! RTR here we are, holler at your litgroup.

How is the track jacket collection?

Fantastic! Thanks for asking. It is way too hot in Alabama for track jackets most days. I just bought a new one the other day. It's an Alabama one that I had never seen before. That brings the total up to 34, which, of course, will make 33-obsessed xTx unhappy, but I'm sure I'll retire one come fall. I can go an entire Monday / Wednesday / Friday teaching schedule without repeating once. It melts my students' brains. The one I am wearing in my author photo over there is probably my favorite.

What do you love most about your writing?

I'll say what I love most about writing & what I hope to achieve. I love the fact that you can string together a bunch of words, and at a smaller level letters, and at an even smaller level black lines on a page and make someone feel something. That blows my mind every single time. That the dude who goes 'mmm' at a reading (you know that dude!) is going 'mmm' at a reading! That you can read something and get excited or all fluttery. So cool. I will say that everything I publish is going to be part of 'something I have written', so I have to make sure that it is something that I am incredibly proud of. I like knowing that, and I like that it pushes me to not take any shortcuts and to be a fierce editor of my work. I like the amount of time I spend on things and I like the emotion that I put into it. It warms my heart when people recognize that. I love how much fun I have while writing: the crafting of something, the tinkering.

Chapter 20: A Happy Childhood

Splattering finger paint across the carpet of my bedroom, laughing as the colors morphed into an ugly green; regretting this after my easel was taken from me and stored in our attic. Crashing my childhood bicycle into a parked car; never wanting to get on a four-wheeled vehicle again. My father hovering over my curled-up body, fist clenched and face red but completely unable to bring himself to strike me; promising myself to pay him back with undying loyalty.

* * *

We all remember moments of our childhood, and we each remember them differently. The thing, though, is that it's damn near impossible for us to recall these memories in full: more often than not, they come off fragmented, and we only remember tiny bits and pieces that we found significant while having the experiences. Of course, there are some things we remember better than others, but the truth is that we can never remember everything: we just aren't hard-wired that way.

And with different forms come different techniques. I recently saw The Tree of Life, and what struck me most was how Malick had crafted a narrative around shots that seemed very much to be in the dramatic present. What was brilliant, though, was that these scenes were actually being "remembered" by Sean Penn's character. So instead of relying on flashbacks to tell the most significant parts of the narrative, Malick lets the inherent tension of the character's childhood set the tension in a very bare-boned, stripped down manner: close, cropped shots of character's faces; extended moments of silence; jump cuts that do little to indicate the passage of time. Although the movie is flawed, this fragmentation is an absolutely beautiful deviation from linear story-telling, and Malick has asked his audience to do some of the work on their own.

Cinema allows for this type of presentation; we writers, though, do not have the luxury of showing things. It's impossible for us to conjure up visual clues that accurate representations in the way that films can. I'm sure some might disagree with me here, but the truth is that the nature of our medium requires us to use descriptive words that conjure up different images with every one of our readers. This means that we have to be a bit more creative when we're trying to indicate .

Which brings me to "A Happy Childhood," one of my favorite chapter's in Lidia's book. What struck me in this chapter was the repetition. Let's look at the first section, titled "I am 6":

"My friend Katie in the water my friend Christie in the water Phantom Lake Bath and Tennis Club and summer is every day every single day in the water we swim in the morning we swim in the daytime we swim in the afternoon we swim at night we swim every day we eat rainbow popsicles we eat fudgesicles we eat creamsicles we go and go underwater laps hold your breath back and forth and back again three times no boys we stay underwater swim goggles look at each other blow your air out sit on the bottom we dive from the low dive we dive from the high dive we find pennies at the bottom of the deep end we laugh and laugh we race at swim meets in evening we race we win and win little gold medals beautiful blue ribbons we dive off of starting blocks we fly in the air we enter the water with glee of girl splashing" (p. 27).

When you first read this section, you probably thought, "Oh, how cool." Maybe you thought about how "lyrical" it sounded, or how "fun" it was to read. Maybe you thought about it for longer. I'm going to assume you didn't, because I'd like to think about how sophisticated this style of writing is.

Because I'm the kind of person that has a hard-on for grammar and usage abstractions (T.M.I.?) and a self-admitted addict of lyrical prose, I'd like to call attention to three things Lidia's done here: first, she's jammed a bunch of dependant clauses together; second, she's repeating words and phrases in the same subject-verb-object pattern; third, the only indisputable qualifying adjective is in the title. On their own, these types of usage would look sloppy and "wrong," but by combining them Lidia is painting a certain type of effect over her reader. These small fragments start building upon one another, and by the time you've finished them you've made your own evaluative opinion of Lidia's more blissful childhood memories. How can you not get to the last line ("I want to belong to something besides family") and not feel an awe-inspiring sense of pleasure? And while all this is going on, she's mimicking the way young children speak. Mind. Blown.

I know, I know -- these deviations are relatively simple ones, and Lidia's not the first person to use these three techniques. But she's definitely the only person out there combining these abstractions to tell a story that's distinctly hers. I firmly believe that every story worth telling has already been told; if that's true, the only thing writers have at their disposal is style. Ownership of our stories isn't guaranteed, but is instead earned through careful craftsmanship and attention to detail. And Lidia is owning the ever-loving shit out of these stories: people have gone swimming and have eaten popsicles before, but not like this.

You know what's so awesome about all this, though? This could be the exact opposite of what Lidia was trying to accomplish. Maybe you think that's a bad thing. I, for one, think that it doesn't matter at all: what's so beautiful about writing is that nothing is ever closed to interpretation. The nature of this discourse allows for an infinite number of interpretations, and although we're working with literature here, nothing can ever truly be "literal" -- there are just too many people thinking too many different things.

Sure, by this point of Chronology of Water, we've gotten to know Lidia and her past really well. That's all very awesome, but that's not what excites me about this book. Lidia's used a number of different narrative techniques to make distinctions between particular eras of her life, and she's using them so infrequently and so sporadically that you can't even establish a specific pattern. And that's why you can't put this book down: Lidia has you second-guessing yourself over and over; she's introduced patterns to you, then wholly disrupted them; zooming her lens in and then immediately zooming out so you're constantly on your toes. She's making you think and she's making you work, and if you're anything like me, you're incredibly thankful for this.

What I love about this section, though, is how brilliantly Lidia owns her childhood. It makes me think about how I can be better at owning the things I've cognitively filed away.

* * *

When I think about my childhood, I always seem to think about it in a very cause-and-effect nature. Maybe it's because of my Catholic upbringing; maybe it's because I'm naturally a guilt-ridden person. Regardless, that's the way I remember things: the constant unforgettable details, followed by the ways I've rationalized them.

I've been rambling for quite some time now. What I ask you is the following: How do you remember your childhood? To you tend to define it with qualifying adjectives like "happy" or "tormented"? Do you find it easy to write about your youth, or is it difficult? Are happier memories easier to write?

Uncommon Ways of Seeing the World

I like giveaways. Anyone who comments on a Tiny Hardcore post during the month of July will be entered into a drawing to receive a lifetime subscription to Tiny Hardcore Press. That means you will receive a free copy of every book we publish as long as we are publishing books and there are some awesome, awesome books on the horizon. You want to get in on this.

I love interesting, intimate, and unexpected descriptions when I read because in the hands of a great writer, I see the world in different ways. Today, I want to talk about Brian’s uncommon ability to work with description throughout So You Know It’s Me. This book probably affected me most in how it showed me the world in different ways. The narrative that emerges from these essays takes place in a college town, Tuscaloosa, Alabama but the way this story is told and the kinds of descriptions Brian uses make you think that this story, this mystery, is taking place in a whole new world.

Brian’s finest descriptions come when he is speaking directly to the unnamed woman he is writing to about how he sees her. There is such tenderness and generosity of spirit and at times even eroticism in how he sees her and understands her, probably in ways she is unable to see or understand herself. The longing in those descriptions pulls at me terribly. That is not a bad thing.

When he sees her at the UA rec center, Brian writes:

It is because you believe in movement without movement. It is because you want to move your legs up and down like pistons -- no, not pistons, as that would conjure up images of machinery and mechanism and you are neither of these things: you are human, toned. You are not of the machine: you are its operator. You are the one who makes the sloping roller ramps beneath the pedal links slide back and forth like marbles down a chute of a game I played as a child, when exercise was part of existing, throwing my body into leaves, chasing my neighbor around the backyard because that was the game that we played, because that is what was expected of us.

There is so much going on in that passage -- the body as a machine, the elliptical machine as a childhood game, these descriptions evoking a memory that not only reveals how he sees her but how she makes him see himself, what she makes him unearth from within himself.

Then, at Barnes and Noble, the unnamed woman is sitting at a table in the café.

I would’ve come over to you, to the table near the window where you sat, but I would have no place to put my drink­ -- it would’ve left a watery broken ring on the table, and I could not put you through that again: those nights where the boys with their parents’ bank cards bought you drinks they thought you liked because they were drinks you pretended to like­ -- they were too red, too sweet, they curled your tongue like a thin paperback in a back pocket, though I would not describe your tongue this way: you know the story of Lennon and Chapman and Salinger and that is something I don’t want you to think about: about blood, about The Dakota, about autographs.

I love this passage for the tone, the cadence of it, the way it works at the language level with each word connecting to the next in an unexpected way. I’ve never thought of a curled tongue as a paperback book but when I read this passage, I find it to be a lovely, apt description. I can see the pink curl of flesh as clearly as I see the curved pages of a book in a back pocket. This book contains many such gorgeous images.

Later in the book, Brian sees his unnamed woman at an intersection:

My view of you was blurry­ -- the type of blur evident when all is in motion: mothers moving in quickly to place kisses on the cheek, everyone quickly turning their heads when hearing the word ‘sister’, hearing a song, hearing a name that is similar to their name.

These essays originally appeared on Craiglist so the words, themselves, were fleeting, a blur. As I read this description, I thought about the glimpses we catch of people, the blurs of human bodies in motion. What Brian captures here is everything that can go through your mind when you see someone you long for from a distance. This passage put me there on the street corner, holding that same gaze. I love when writing makes me feel immersed in a scene.

In a parking garage, Brian thinks about how she once said his name:

You said my name once, before you knew it was my name. You knew the weight it carried, the touch of the tongue to the roof of your mouth briefly, pausing for a second before forcing the hot air out.

The physicality here and the perfect description of the tiny moments that go into the saying of a name are what captivated me. As a writer, Brian’s ability to see the world in such an intimate way has really helped me think about how I can break down anything from a breath to the speaking of a word to an affection shared by two people in more beautiful, unique ways.

Toward the end of the book, Brian thinks about cooking with his Missed Connections woman in his kitchen.

If I told you that they took handfuls of soil and cupped them in their hands like water and spread them out in empty gaps, would you think of the time we made dinner together, rolling the dough into circles, flattening everything yet being mindful of the spreading out, the melting together. Would you remember the cutting of the city into cubes, the streets into lines­ -- would you remember spilling the oil, spilling the white of a cracked egg, watching it slide across the vinyl like a ghost, like our bodies if we danced while the yeast rose and the edges burned.

This is another passage where I thought about cadence and the unexpected transitions from one word to the next as well as the images those words evoked. There’s a scene at the end of the short film Logorama where the city is overtaken by oil and the black stuff starts flooding the street grid almost exactly the way Brian describes the spilling of oil and egg here. I was also drawn to the rising yeast and burned edges because these are such specific choices. To take the breaking of bread and make that into something so poetic, almost musical, is what makes the whole of So You Know It’s Me so entrancing.

* * *

What descriptive moments did you enjoy most in So You Know It’s Me? What are some of your favorite descriptions from other books? What is a good description for you? Talk to me. Let me know it’s you.

Flash In All Its Blinding Possibility (Part 1?)

I was a little hesitant to choose They Could No Longer Contain Themselves to feature for July, not because I'm hesitant about the writing in any regard. The book astounds on so many levels in that regard. Each writer brings something really incredible to every page of this book. But because it's yet another collection of flash fiction, and I don't want to pigeonhole myself. Next month, I'll likely snag a novel or if another short fiction collection, then longer form. But, while we're on the topic, I wanted to talk about flash a bit.

Flash seems to be new to a lot of people. Even I didn't really know of its existence as a "thing" until later in undergrad, around '04-'05. To me, it was a natural fit. As a writer, I've always hovered between fiction and poetry, so when my professor introduced me to flash fiction as a form, it was simply that I had finally found a space in which I felt comfortable. It was a form that let me stretch and blend and write the sort of cross-genre play I've always known as a sweet spot.

When people come to my Vouched Books table, I get asked "What is flash fiction?" a lot when I point them to a book like Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young, We Know What We Are by Mary Hamilton, or Cut Through the Bone. I start basic, "It's writing, usually narrative however loosely, usually under 2,000 words. The word count shifts a bit depending on who you're talking to--some believe 500 is the limit, others 1000, etc."

After that, it gets murky. One of the things I really love about They Could No Longer Contain Themselves is how well it highlights the possibility of the form. The book's jacket copy says it best, "The uncontainability of the writers and characters in each of these remarkable collections suggest the exuberance of the flash fiction form itself, including the way in which, despite its small size, it pushes past its own borders and into the territory of something larger and impossible to confine."

And its true: in this book, you have the singsong, surrealism in Lovelace's "Coffee Pot Tree," to the simple, sparse realism of Mary Miller's "Misled." People often ask what my favorite kind of flash fiction is, and I never really know what to say. Last time someone asked, I told them if you don't know what you're reading flash fiction or prose poetry, you're probably reading good flash fiction. But that's not necessarily true either. I would never consider Miller's work "prose poetry," but her work remains some of my favorite of the form. I don't know what constitutes "good" flash fiction. What constitutes a good novel? What constitutes a good poem?

I've come across a lot of people the past couple years who seem to think flash fiction needs a definition, something by which to judge it against not only other flash fiction, but by other genres. This whole concept baffles me. But usually, these people don't really even seem to know they're calling for this definition. To me, it exists as subtext beneath other conversations regarding how much "bad" flash fiction is out there, how people are growing tired of the "fad" of flash fiction.

Yes. Both of these things are true. There is a lot of bad flash out there. There's a lot of bad poetry, too. A lot of bad novels. These people indict the entire form based on its demerits, but yet refuse to see its enormous possibility. No one challenges the novel anymore, nor do they attempt to box it into some tidy definition. Despite their enormous differences, Blake Butler's There Is No Year is considered just as much a novel as Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice; there is no great debate regarding the form.

People seem uncomfortable by flash because it exists to them as something new, but of course, it's nothing new. Sean Lovelace at times quips about the late Jesus Christ being one of the forerunners of the flash fiction form, citing his parables. Hemingway played with flash. Widely regarded as a prose poet, I've heard debate about Russell Edson's role as a flash fictioneer.

Which is perhaps another reason why there is debate, this underlying uncomfort. The need for clear lines, clear labels. The question hangs loose: why is Edson considered a prose poet and not a surrealist flash fiction writer? With such a wide definition, what's to stop a novelist who writes with a particularly poetic flair from writing a "novel-length narrative prose poem?" Why is this poetic piece that doesn't necessarily have a clear narrative arc considered flash fiction? The form hovers on this strange plane that seems to upset prior systems in a way that makes people want to put it in a box.

Of course, to put it into a box, like all forms of art or writing, is to kill the form altogether. Where would the novel be if public outcry declared Ulysses something else? Where would poetry be if the world called bullshit on vers libre?

I guess I'm out of thoughts. I mean, I have more thoughts on the subject, but they don't fit neatly into this ranting.

I want to say how sick I am of people blaming the current "fad" of flash fiction on people's attention spans. I want to say how sick I am of people seeing flash fiction as a fad. I want to say how sick I am of writers who seem to think flash fiction is an "easy" form to write. I want to say how sick I am of the publishers who are willing to publish scrap-rate flash fiction. I want to say how these things ruin the form, but that's of course not true. Just because publishers publish shitty novels doesn't mean the novel is a shitty form. And the same goes for any genre or form, really. Why such scrutiny for flash?

But now, I'm sick of what I have to say. I want to hear what you have to say. How do you define flash fiction? What do you think of it? Do you have a favorite style of flash--more poetic, more narrative, more surreal? Do you think it is a silly thing, a playground for half-baked short story ideas? Do you think people should just write what they want to write without thought of form or label?

Chapter 19: The Less Than Merry Pranksters

I suppose you could call me an Oregon Writer. I live a good five minutes from the U of O campus, although I never studied at U of O. There is a bronze statue of Ken Kesey reading to children in downtown Eugene, where I live, where this particular chapter of The Chronology of Water takes place.

The chapter revolves around author Lidia Yuknavitch participating in a graduate writing workshop in which 13 people -- twelve "last ditch disciples and me" -- worked on a collective novel with the writer superstar Ken Kesey (pg. 113).

I chose to write on this chapter because I was going to write about being a writer here, and Ken Kesey, and yadda yadda yadda, but what I want to write about now is followers at the heels of greatness, and what we learn, how we as damaged specimens of the human race flock to these larger-than-life personalities to come to understand something, only to find ourselves nursing an aching and overflowing heart, namely this great person's often aching and overflowing alcoholic heart. This seems a common story, the acolyte helping the drunken prophet home so he can barf into his bed. That, and I also wanted to write about miracles and "reverse miracles,” a phrase Ms. Yuknavitch coins in this chapter to describe a young man collapsing after his first toke of the joint christened the collaborative effort of the group. A beautiful little phrase that will remain with me.

This moment is where the chapter takes off from its tentative beginning in the apartment of her friend, Meredith, for now we have become initiated into the less than merry pranksters ourselves. It quickly transforms into a litany of excess: “Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms” (pg. 119). There is something wonderfully mundane about all of this, especially when she repeats it later, a sort of cheeky acknowledgment of how boring psychedelia can really be sometimes, but there is also some of that very real rubbernecker joy of those of us who have grown up on the myth of the sixties, reliving it, and somehow reliving it through another sister rubbernecker who makes it all the more appetizing.

The excess described in this chapter is the excess of an ending, of a person coming to a close and inviting thirteen strangers to the funeral. These could be any thirteen people, but they have been chosen. Lidia is literally dragged to the meeting by her friend Meredith, who is in it, which makes it all the more of a mystical commingling, that she should not even be attending the U of O, not even be in the writer’s program when she takes this class. That she is the thirteenth member. She has set herself out to be the odd one out, the unlucky thirteen, but also something new, a potentially exciting and dynamic force. Which I am sure is very much how it was at the time. The bond she suggests between herself and Kesey as parents suffering from the death of their children, newborn or otherwise, as drunks suffering from the horror of themselves, as a faint hope, that perhaps she can save this man from himself and in so doing nurture in him another masterpiece, that this great man who is drifting away is very tenderly handing his legacy off to her as a second father, makes for a touching chapter, although she makes a point of treating offhandedly the most tender moment in it:

“”I’ve seen a lot of writers come and go. You’ve got the stuff. It’s in your hands. What are you going to do next?

“I opened my eyes and looked at my hands. They looked extremely dumb.

“'Next?' I said.

“'You know, in your life. What’s next?'” (122)

There is plenty of tender description, of Kesey, his smell, even his constant Vodka consumption is dealt with lovingly, but it’s that he gives her this option, when she thought she had no options, that he takes all that he means to her, all that his name and his books mean to her, and uses them to help give her a way out from digging her own grave, that she does not have to be the zombie she perceives herself to be, but can be something more, something sublime as he is: “You’ve got the stuff. It’s in your hands.”  This is a miraculous statement, or a statement that can produce miracles at least.

What I always find most fascinating is the cult, how this person who is just a person becomes a name with a person attached, and how this person becomes a hypnotic force and how this person becomes a kind of magician who can alter and shape our lives. We have all had persons who have somehow shaped our trajectory. We have walked into walls for years on end, and then someone to whom we’ve given a power says to us that there are no walls, and then we are free to walk through them. Or you might not have, but this is what I see Mr. Kesey doing for Lidia, and it is a gift he gives her. He has given her the gift of self-respect. His broken-down life and his love have opened up the possibility for this discussion between them, and rather than exploit it as many a worse human being might have, he uses this connection to help her, to give her the words she needs, to profess his faith in her.

As for the other members of the class, they are treated as a kind of lamenting fog that follows the great man from room to room, and it’s the small statements she says about them that make them all the more intriguing, that one became the group’s “Judas” and another a cop. This is part of the tragedy of greatness as well, that we lose ourselves in it, that a person could become so large, that everyone around him or her ceases to exist. Of course, there was a part of me that got off on the anecdotal star-fucking quality of it all as well, e.g. “Kesey was the best liar I ever met in my life.” That is a wonderful little phrase that encompasses so many potential myths surrounding the man. Makes me think of Oscar Wilde and his statement that fiction was a “beautiful untruth,” that our favorite prophets are always charlatans. It is lovely to talk this way about the truly great, and lovely to read others speaking in this way.

I have always been enamored of writers who seemed charlatans but aware that they were nothing more than charlatans even while midposture on the pages of posterity. Hunter S. Thompson and Graham Greene are the first to come to mind for some reason, perhaps because they were both journalists and seemed to have learned a little bit of hamming-it-up-ery from their earlier profession. But both of these are also notorious drunks, like our Mr. Kesey from this chapter, and so many of our favorite modernist and proto-post-modernist favorites. I remember being a young boy and saying to myself that I wasn’t going to end up that way, “because it’s been done and done to death,” like a bad haircut that was once fashionable. But now, some years later, I’ve become a little more forgiving of all those lost and pathetic figures who wrote those remarkable books that I once read with such impassioned reverence.

Writing is an interesting craft because it would seem that if a person is to learn to write remarkable prose he must learn to live, but that in learning to write remarkable prose so many of our favorite writers become incapable of living. There’s an amazing book by the notorious editor Malcolm Cowley (who discovered both Faulker and Kerouac) called Exile’s Return, in which he describes his generation going off to WWI and many remarkable descriptions of the authors he met, especially, Joyce, Proust, and Hemingway. Joyce comes off as just a man who needs a letter sent but has become overwhelmed by this simple task.  And then later, “In Joyce the will had developed immoderately; in Proust it seemed almost to be atrophied. Not only his passions but his merest whims were stronger than his desire to control them, and he dispassionately watched himself doing silly things -- it was almost as if the living Marcel Proust were an unpleasant but fascinating visitor in the house of his mind.”

* * *

Who are our idols? Why do we follow them? What can they offer us? Who has changed your life? How did they do it?

This Is Tiny Hardcore Press

I started a small press rather accidentally.  The term small press is, perhaps, a bit inaccurate. I started a micropress. You would need a special piece of ocular equipment to see us in the landscape of publishers but I would not have it any other way. Tiny Hardcore Press is a very small publishing concern producing very small books. When people receive our books in the mail, they sometimes write me and say things like, “I didn’t know the book would be so small.” The “Tiny” in Tiny Hardcore Press is literal. Our books will fit in your pocket or your purse or your hand. They will most definitely fit in your heart.

I wanted to publish tiny, hardcore books. I also love the words tiny and hardcore. They are fine words. The books I wanted to publish would be small in stature but grand in reach and spirit. I’ve published two books so far, books I will be featuring here this month—Normally Special, by xTx and So You Know It’s Me by Brian Oliu and I think they are both small in stature and grand in reach. Normally Special is in its third printing and So You Know It’s Me is about to go into its second printing.

When I read both of these manuscripts, I knew, immediately, that I wanted to publish them because I felt something as I read every single page. I felt something true and deep. That is the reaction I am looking for when I read submissions. That is the reaction I had to every book and writer Tiny Hardcore will be publishing for the next two years when you will see books from Brandi Wells who is up next, Robb Todd, James Tadd Adcox, Sean Doyle, Alana Noel Voth, Scott McClanahan, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Casey Hannan, Letitia Moffitt, and an anthology featuring fiction from Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale, and Amber Sparks.

The first book I will be featuring this month is So You Know It’s Me, a collection of lyric essays by Brian Oliu that were posted on the Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connections board over the course of 45 days. On the 45th day, in accordance to Craigslist policy, the essays began to erase themselves. I actually read the essays as they were originally posted and I was intrigued by how a writer was putting his art in such an unexpected place. I kept wanting to see what Brian would write next and when the essays were gone, their absence was felt. When Brian sent me his manuscript, I loved how the essays worked as a whole, how they worked in concert to create a book I hope you will fall in love with too.

There is a real poetry to Craiglist. I love to read Casual Encounters and Missed Connections boards for major cities because you have an unfiltered opportunity to see how desperately lonely so many people are. People post to these boards hoping they will find someone they saw walking down the street or in line at a movie theatre or out there in the world where we are all strangers and not strangers. They post hoping they can meet someone who will come over late at night and satisfy a desire for companionship or sex or some fetish they are only comfortable talking about within the safety of the Craigslist interface, a blank screen with black letters, completely stripped of artifice. There are times when I think Craigslist is, at once, the loneliest and most hopeful place in the world even though it really isn’t a place in the world at all. The Internet is a strange thing.

As I read Brian’s essays, I saw a man reaching out for connection and there was such startling beauty in his words, a beauty that was even more pronounced against the chaotic noise of everything else that goes on via Craigslist. He dissects every moment in these essays so intimately. At times, I wanted to look away because the moments felt too private, too sacred for strangers to hold. In each essay he not only speaks to this mysterious woman he is trying to reach, he reveals pieces of himself, a scar on his arm, how he wrote his name inside his childhood books, how he drew faces as a child, always hideous, so much more, creating his history for us breathlessly, beautifully. This is a book with lines like, “Yes -- we must shove dead girls in our mouths, swallow them, have them speak for us by not speaking,” lines that make you want to shove the book itself into your mouth to let it speak for you because it wields such lovely, uncommon language.

Over the next month I’ll feature interviews with both Brian Oliu and xTx, excerpts from their books, guest posts and I hope we’ll have a great conversation about lovely, uncommon writing from two lovely, uncommon writers.