A Few Words on Corey Mesler’s Notes Toward the Story & Other Stories

Appreciation for the female form, in many manifestations. Appreciation for language. A cunning wit and endearing style. Boundless creativity. The presence of a well-read author who makes an original contribution. That about sums it up.

Don’t ask me why Mesler, who has both novels and poetry collections published in addition to story collections, has not gained larger distribution in terms of a big agent and a major book deal with wide distribution, but yet again I find myself grateful for the risks independent and academic publishers are willing to take.

What we have with Mesler’s new collection is exactly the kind of gathered stories I like to read — varied in style, theme, and content. Elegant and guttural. Full of the flavor of life and the lyrical beauty of literary work. More sensuous but similarly ironic to Vonnegut. More accessible than Roland Barthes for those who like story more than essay, but also as comfortingly aching in elegant prose as a latter-day Nabokov — with the same sort of flair for unexpected language combinations and a symphonic melody of sounds rendered together like a culminating force. Mesler’s work has been compared to Brautigan, but I sense metafictional traces of John Barth, too — as well as what I’ve always found to be the enjoyably surreal facets of many excellent early T.C. Boyle stories.

Coincidentally, this is also exactly the kind of story collection I like to read from a male writer, if we let gender play a role in this discussion. The men in these stories enjoy women. Frankly, I like that.

Not to be sexist, but when I read a book with powerful sexy female characters and that book has been written by a man, I am almost tempted to check his pants to verify gender. To gilt-edged frame him. To send him up with a parade. Were he not married, I’d likely ask for a phone number or a sample life-primer to allow distribution to less fortunate men in airports. Certainly, Mesler excels with longing — in many of Mesler’s stories, specifically, female longing plays a part — but what I enjoy is that he explores not just the act of wanting — but also the fulfillment of feminine desires. Three cheers for that!

The story that opens this collection entitled “Monster,” for example, discusses a woman with a cheating husband who decides to stop her pattern of sadness and violation via having her own affair; before she can consummate this however, her husband comes home, discovers her intent, and treats her violently until she is rescued (and later sexually satisfied) by the “Monster” in the story, who is an unusually large, well-endowed, yet ugly man. There are so many things I love about this story — the breaking of patterns. The story beyond the story. The idea of an ugly man as a monster who is large yet possesses such tenderness that he allows the smaller woman all sexual power in the story.

I really enjoyed the collection’s experimental title piece as well, “Notes Toward the Story,” since it is a wonderfully escalating narrative that moves skillfully between the author composing notes for a desired fiction and the undesired but progressive authorial reality entering relentlessly through these notes. Mesler applies his humor and savvy here too.

If I had all day, we could talk about the themes this collection houses, the sweet piece about two twin sisters who dye their shadows because it’s sexy (and communicate with a strange sort of ESP), or the meaning of the minimalist near flash “Strangers In Love,” where Mesler applies a more distant style yet still makes relationship commentary.  We could talk about these or any of the stories in this collection. That’s why it is so good.  It really doesn’t matter where you open this book; all of it is smart, funny, appealing, well-written — the kind of book you keep hoping to buy and sometimes feel disappointed to realize you are not holding. This is why reading people, thinking people, should buy this book — because that sort of disappointment is terrible and recurrent in a lot of collections out there, but not part of Mesler’s gathered offerings.

I Don’t Know How to Describe the Book: Tim Kinsella's The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense

“‘I hate The DaVinci Code and its stupid exclamatory big-string swells every thousand words.’

He nodded.

She repeated herself, ‘Yeah.'”

I have had an on and off again fascination with Tim Kinsella for years. I think of him as a sort of indie-rock Werner Herzog, and that might be totally off base, but that is sort of what I think of him as. First as the singer of Cap’n Jazz and then in Joan of Arc he delighted and annoyed me with a great songs that held in them the potential to be be unsatisfying and annoying. They (I’m talking more about Joan of Arc than Cap’n Jazz) also had something literary about them and like the other notable Cap’n Jazz spin-off, Promise Ring, the lyrics had something ee cummings-esque about them. Here are two of my favorite Joan of Arc songs, feel free to listen to either of them as a soundtrack to the rest of this review.

“I Love a Woman (Who Loves Me)”

“Post-Coitus Rock”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this might just be one of the best novels of the year. I probably haven’t read the other novels that could be up for this honor, and this is a pretty flawed best novel of the year, but I think it’s still that good and, even with the problems I’ll mention later, it manages to transcend those flaws to be a very satisfying novel.

First, the book looks amazing. Aesthetically, featherproof has put out another fine looking book. Possibly their best yet. It’s mass-market size (but comfortable mass market size (were there people out there really complaining about mass markets being too uncomfortable? (this little aside has nothing to do with this book but with a way big publishers tried to market the new size books a few years ago))), but with trade paper-back quality, and even a kind of pretentious detail of the price of the novel written on the upper-right hand corner of the first page in a way that makes it look like it had been written with a pencil. You know like an used or independent bookstore might do. It was a little detail I loved when I first saw it and showed to Karen multiple times, each time thinking it was something new I was sharing with her. Oops.

Second, there is no description anywhere on the book about what to expect. Just the kind of catchy title and a blurb from Dennis Cooper. This scared me a little bit. I generally find that books Dennis Cooper blurbs turn out to be ‘shocking’ in a way that bores me the same way that looking at teenage goth kids in their scary get-ups bore me. Fortunately this book isn’t shocking and doesn’t try to be.

Third? I don’t know how to describe the book. I want to thrust it in to peoples’ hands and tell them to read it, but I’m afraid that if I gush over it the book won’t live up to expectations. I was expecting a fairly pretentious book that would humor me in the balls-out way it danced around pretensions. This is a novel for gosh-sakes by a guy who for one of his albums filled the CD booklet with a photo montage of him(?) and his hip looking friends dressed up from scenes of Godard’s Weekend. I was expecting the literary equivalent of that. Nope. It didn’t turn out to be that either.

I’ve been putting off writing this review for a while now. I don’t know how to gush appropriately. Things I think of saying could come off wrong.

I’ll put off gushing for another paragraph and say what is bad about the book. The book is over-written at times. It can be wordy in the way a good editor might have been able to control a bit. It also gets a little, um, well-wordy in an intellectual sense at times to, for example a seventeen year-old (I think that is her age, she’s in high school still) can have this scene:

“Still, it had been a while since it first occurred to Sarah Ann that her MySpace profile no longer reflected the her she thought herself to be. Social networking was obviously little more than the sunny cultural inversion of terror cells, the final clinging to some sense of community or belonging that the last stages of consumer Capitalism would allow. and the habit had been knocked to the back of her mind, so only occasionally did she cringe, recalling the state of her identity as she left if projected to the world. But, she did cringe.”

and later in a scene between her and an older character:

“. . . ‘he put on some Fleetwood Mac, but I told him I wouldn’t dance to that Clinton music.’

Gus nodded.

‘The stupid neoliberal conception of freedom, the self-absorbed, unchecked ego, that’s what opened the door for this corporate fascism. It allowed everyone to assume it’s their right to have opinions about everything, when there are, in fact, facts in the world,’ she went on. ‘Facts are not disputable.’

Gus rubbed the back of his neck, ‘I kind of like Fleetwood Mac,’ he said quietly.”

When Kinsella has an intelligent angry teenager making this Adbusters like critiques there is something charming about them. They might be overwrought arguments that make you roll your eyes but an angry alienated kid in the Midwest making those comments seems almost nostalgic to me, and it fits into the very anti-intellectual atmosphere of this book. This book isn’t about people who equate social networking to late capitalism terror cells, and they aren’t the type of people who would watch one of the Twin Towers burning from across the street and think, “This is a spectacle of late capitalism’s own demise” (what kind of fucking twat would think that, right?). This is a book about some unremarkable people and their pretty shitty lives… which I’ll use to segue into the next paragraph where I’m going to make the comparison I’ve been dreading making. . . .

This is a shitty lower middle class version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, or The Corrections about people who we might actually know from our own shitty little towns. I’m not saying this is a Franzen knock-off, but it’s the same basic premise. Three siblings return home and see each other for the first time in years at their grandmother’s funeral. The eldest was a cool guy, the kind of guy who drove a Firebird and listened to The Who and probably had a comb in his back pocket who know works a menial factory job to support his family. The middle child is a woman in her mid-thirties who has just hung up her stripper boots and now slings drinks at the club she used to dance at, and the youngest son is a recovering addict who lives caught up in perpetual twelve steps (his addiction happens to be getting the shit beaten out of him in fights, his character being a weird mixture of Fight Club and Infinite Jest). Intersplicing the present and back stories of the three siblings are the stories of a few other characters who help flush out the novel and give it some offbeat color. I was going to say something about these characters but it would give away a bit too much of how the novel unfolds. And I believe novels should be let to unfold in the way the writers mean for them to unfold and not be ruined by (in)competent reviewers.

I compared this to The Corrections, but this is the family that lives on the other side of the tracks to Franzen’s dysfunctional family and who would have beaten the shit out of The Corrections kids when they were in school.

I’m hoping this review will be good enough to get someone to try to read this novel and hopefully get some enjoyment out of it. Or hate it and then blame me for steering them wrong.

There Is a Book I Turn To Sometimes When I Want To Live In Desire: Rosa Shand's The Gravity of Sunlight

It’s called The Gravity of Sunlight. I often find myself rereading it almost by accident. I flip to the passage I want, and fifty pages later, I can’t put the book down until I finish it again.

I bought my copy in Prague, where I taught English for a year after college, seven years ago now. I was buying a book or two a week then, reading the first few pages and making my decisions based on how deeply the sentences took root. I knew nothing about publishers or publishing. I hadn’t published, but I was starting a novel that I am still working on now, set in Prague and following a year in the life of an American expatriate.

The Gravity of Sunlight is by an author I still know almost nothing about (though I wish I knew more), Rosa Shand. It is set in Uganda just before, and then as, Idi Imin takes power. You can feel the politics in the atmosphere like the electrical charge before a lightning storm. A storm about to the hit the small community of expats that the novel centers around.

Prague is nothing like Uganda, and the expats I knew and the characters I was writing about are hardly similar to the characters in Shand’s book, but the experience of being somewhere very different from the place you came from — an experience most of us share in one way or another — is acutely felt: both the love and fear of that place, both the possibilities and constrictions that such a difference presents.

In The Gravity of Sunlight, Agnes is married to a didactic missionary who works at the local university. He’s an “intellectual” and a bore, who believes she can “will” herself to love him. They have a family (three children), and mostly shared ideals, and at one point they needed each other to escape. But now, of course, the situation has changed. Now Agnes is full of longing for someone else, something else, and is surrounded by potential objects of affection. The novel opens with her attraction to a European man; she has dreams about an African who was once her employee and now has followed her to her new home; there is a woman she may be in love with.

About the ex-employee: “Odinga made an art of the minimum gesture that would catch her attention. . . . At the moment he would know, to the centimeter, where she was. He need only come around to where the bedroom window faced. He would never call or knock. He preferred to let her catch his shadow — it was the fine art of the continent. . . . It would actually be a great release — she accepted now — when Odinga was safely away at Megan’s house. She’d be free of her absurd self-consciousness.”

I can’t remember what I felt reading the book for the first time, but as revisions of my novel spiraled out of control, I thought of The Gravity of Sunlight often. I am telling you: at points, you can hardly breathe for all the desire Agnes feels; it’s like you’re at the bottom of the ocean and you’re holding your breath because if you let it out, the world you are immersed in will crush you. I wanted my characters, and my readers, to feel that way, and I looked carefully at the dreams and reservations Agnes has, where she gives in and what she gives up, the feeling that her longing is more powerful than anything else.

And Africa. “He preferred to let her catch his shadow — it was the fine art of the continent.” The longing for Africa goes beyond characters and story. It seems the book’s longing; when you put down The Gravity of Sunlight, you miss Africa and feel as if you must return there as soon as you can. Because the Uganda of The Gravity of Sunlight is the only place all that desire is possible, and at the end of the novel that Uganda is gone. That, to me, is a book, the only place where something — a feeling, a way of life, a story — is possible.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is a rebellion against the standardisation of literature.

Making space for literature is a challenge. Aside from finding the physical spaces required to store your ever-mounting collection of books, it can also be a challenge to create the mental space required to really relax and enjoy a book. This issue is only exacerbated online. In virtual space, literature really has to fight for your attention. Often, it can feel like the reader is privileging a story or poem by choosing it over an infinity of others. Some have concluded that conventional literature does not function in a web browser: the distractions are too great.

I wish to propose that the problem is not necessarily the literature, but the spaces we create for it.

The majority of virtual space is ordered in series of familiar patterns. Nearly every English language webpage follows the structure of a traditional book, where one reads from left to right and top to bottom. The web page commonly asks you to scroll up and down, but hardly ever side to side. This remains true even in cases where webpages have little to no text. There is an assumed freedom in knowing that a blog entry can never be too long, an issue can never be too filled. Virtual spaces are seemingly infinite.

Due to this expanse, much web-based information is presented as comprehensively categorised and fragmented. On many websites, one topic or article can be spread across plural webpages. It is increasingly rare to find two distinct articles occupying one virtual space.

In this online architecture, there is no navigational freedom. Interaction is guided and ordered.

However, there can be space for resistance. In an attempt to demonstrate this, we can look to Ana C. and Richard Chiem’s Oh No Everything is Wet Now (Magic Helicopter Press, 2011).

Ana and Richard are both young, highly successful writers. Both edit journals -- Ana: New Wave Vomit; Richard: Vertebrae -- and both have forthcoming debut books -- Ana: Baby Babe (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012); Richard: You Private Person (Scrambler Books, 2012). They are well liked within the online community, but (as yet) relatively unknown outside of it.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is their first collaborative project. The e-book is introduced as a novella (a historically disruptive form) despite being a collection of flash fiction and poetry. Magic Helicopter’s home page encourages us to both "follow" and "unfollow" the lines. These dichotomies in definition and suggestion help to shape the unorthodox approach required to encounter the novella.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now opposes all established conventions on the ordering of virtual space. Magic Helicopter Press has created an environment that demands exploration. The novella has consciously chosen to refuse the ease of expositional space, demanding that we engage with the book. Rather than deter the reader, the disorientation generates a curiosity.

I believe that the architecture behind this virtual space can expose some missed opportunities in online literature. Rather than continually attempting to emulate printed journals, Oh No Everything is Wet Now demonstrates how to seize the potential afforded to us by the Internet.

There is no correct way to read this "book". All of its content is presented to us at once. The webpage consciously affirms the decision to waste virtual space, using empty expanses that have been designed to inconvenience us. These areas must be navigated through to reach the literature. Rather than have their content reveal itself, Ana and Richard demand that it must be sought out. This is unheard of in traditional web architecture.

Our simulated journey around the webpage is reflected in the novella’s content, much of which is made up of YouTube videos. The clips show the novella’s authors on an ambling, playful journey of their own. The videos hide loading bars, which is surprisingly unnerving. One quickly gathers that these videos are not to be consumed, they occupy a permanent position is the make up of this virtual space; they are immediately relevant to the rest of the web page. The variation in their sizing suggests a knowing playfulness in the sophisticated architecture, drawing further attention to how presentation informs content.

Setting can broadly split the videos: interior/exterior. The internal clips see one, or both authors sitting still, reading in flat monotone. However, when Ana and Richard take us outside, they become enthused and playful.

By creating a distinction between the private and public sphere, the authors draw attention to flawed assumptions over online literature. The mobility of a book is no longer unrivalled. Wifi internet and affordable laptops have placed the computer in a central and uniting position between the working and social, private and public, interior and exterior.

Ana and Richard play on these disruptions by inverting classical standards. It is the interior, private Ana and Richard who present themselves very seriously: these are artists, responsible for addressing the viewer / reader on the other side of the screen. We become aware of looking in on them, putting us in the role of voyeur. In one section, this is reflexively acknowledged, as Richard is shown watching MDMA Films’ Bebe Zeva whilst narrating the experience.

However, the exterior, public, Ana and Richard act childishly. Their literature becomes a lived experience, a more plausible collaboration. It is a game that we are invited to become complicit in.

In his HTML Giant review, Matthew Simmons refers to the page as a collage (another technique that has been classically connected to the concept of resistance). His observation is acute. Within this architecture, content is frequently layered over other content. Some areas are packed tightly together whilst other spaces sit barren. The most sophisticated collage technique though, is Ana and Richard’s embrace of multi-media. It is here that Oh No Everything is Wet Now breaks most definitively from literature’s traditional, discrete language of virtual space.

Texts within the e-book are presented as screenshots of a word processor. Rather than making the text seem inadequate in comparison to video, this non-professional presentation lets the text seem raw and anonymous when compared to the videos. Their inclusion compounds our new awareness of being influenced by methods of presentation. By establishing a dialog between videos and texts, Ana and Richard create a resistance that suggests the accompanying words are barely an alternative, thus liberating literature from both the page and word processor.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is a rebellion against the standardisation of literature. The collaborative relationship between Ana and Richard drives the novella, without managing to be expositional. We learn nothing of these two central figures. Instead, we join them on an absent procession.

If resistance is not possible through interaction, we may strive towards it in our creation of content. Oh No Everything is Wet Now demonstrates how the Internet affords us the tools for innovation in modern literature. It is down to us how we use them.

An Interview with Ander Monson

Ander Monson and I grew up in the same small community that separates the United States from Canada. I think the title of his new book of poems, The Available World, published in July 2010 by Sarabande Books, is fitting, as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan seems so unavailable to the rest of the world. Ander was kind enough to answer a few question on TAW during his winter break from teaching at the University of Arizona.

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Jeni Jobst: Give me a one-sentence description of The Available World.

Ander Monson: One big constantly-expanding and -contracting ball. I realize that’s not much of a sentence, but then I’ve never been good at those.

JJ: Why was the “paintball” cover chosen?

AM: The Ball of Paint (actually not a Paint Ball — there’s a difference which gets elucidated in Vanishing Point, in which the Ball of Paint features significantly — though I see that it’s credited as “paintball” in the front matter of TAW, which is actually just a function of what I named the file before I understood the distinction, and in this way it carries its own record of error) is an amazing image, isn’t it? There’s one poem at least that refers specifically to it in TAW, but mostly I loved how the image suggests a cosmology, which is something the book wants to talk about or enact too. It also echoes the shape of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (see also “ball” on the Vanishing Point website, and the idea of muchness and availability. I also dig how it connects the two books, which came out within a couple months of each other in 2010. This networking happened with Other Electricities and Vacationland too.

JJ: You’ve mentioned in a previous interview with The Adirondack Review that you like the topic of isolation. Other than what you told them, about underlying tension surfacing, do you feel isolated? Did you, in the U.P.? Does it matter where one lives?

AM: I’m not sure exactly what I meant by that (it was a while ago; brains change; it’s all flux, which is one of the nice things about thinking/being/writing), actually. But isolation has been and continues to be an important force of my writing process. It’s certainly everywhere in my books, particularly in Vacationland and my essay “I Have Been Thinking About Snow,” both the page and the video version. I think that every artist feels isolated. There’s a reason why most of us who are drawn to making art are outsiders in one way or another. I suspect you have to engage in that kind of retreat from the world in order to see the thing from enough distance to want to talk about or iterate or engage with it in language or image. I find that even the sort of self-imposed isolation of several hours of silence, that is, me not talking, often starts to build up a tension in me that often leads to a burst of writing. Certainly growing up in the U. P. I felt isolated. For me it’s an isolating place. That’s a function of the culture and the weather (and the weather makes the culture, or draws those with a predisposition, maybe, to isolation from other cold climes and isolated, wild places), and much more so when I was growing up than it probably is now (the Internet is a sort of leveler). Even more so, I suspect, for my father, and my father’s father, before the bridge was built to connect the peninsulas. I’m sure that one can find isolation in the flux of big cities too (there’s lots written about that sort of anonymity), and wherever, but Upper Michigan’s isolation seems particular, and particularly interesting.

JJ: Does the title indicate that knowledge of what’s available in the world only enhances your love of isolation?

AM: There’s definitely an interplay in the poems between availability and isolation. It’s a tension, sure, and in my view that’s one of the plots of the book: muchness and diminishing. They crest and trough, a sort of zero sum game. I don’t think that the poems have a collective thesis, exactly, but that they are different ways of exploring a particular digital / analog world and worldview from the perspective of availability and isolation, among other entry points.

JJ: Many of the poems in TAW are “sermons.” Does your love of sermon rhetoric stem from personal religious experience?

AM: You know, I wish I’d had a more interesting religious upbringing. I grew up Presbyterian-Congregationalist in Houghton, which is to say largely unreligious. I remember my pastor saying “well, if there is a God” at one point, and me thinking, hmmm. The sermons I remember were mostly dull, hardly a reason to come to church. I liked the singing and the lemon bars and the pot lucks, but stopped right about when I was confirmed. My interest in the sermon comes out of living in Alabama (I went to grad school there) and being around the culture of the Baptist church, which is a whole lot more exciting. I don’t have any real belief in it, exactly, but the shapes of their services, or the services of, say, some Pentecostals — there’s real fire there. You can feel the rhetoric in your body: that’s what good rhetoric should do: affect the body. I can see a version of myself growing up in a church that was either more demonstrative and performative, or else more invested in its own mystery (like Catholicism or maybe Mormonism) and how that might have held me more closely. So I learned to love the sermon, and I thought well, why not repurpose the sermon, as best I could, for poetry?

JJ: Your “armless brother” pops up more than once in this collection. Why? Do you have an armless brother?

AM: The armless brother character showed up first in Other Electricities, and he showed up in Vacationland, and to a much smaller extent, in one of the essays in Neck Deep. I am not fully sure why he still draws me, but he does. He came from a line I wrote in a failed poem (maybe a story, I don’t remember) in an undergraduate workshop, I think. It didn’t work out in the poem/story, but he became a character of interest in the constellation of my work. I do have a brother, but he has arms.

JJ: How long does it take you to write a poem?

AM: It depends a lot. There are a few poems in the book that were written in more or less a sitting — an hour or two. Sometimes you get lucky. All of them started with a burst of generative something, and then sat, sometimes for five years, at the back of my mind somewhere, undergoing occasional revisions. Most of them went through somewhere between a dozen and twenty drafts. Nearly all of them that were published in journals or wherever were significantly rewritten for the book. One of them, “For Orts,” became a sestina between its publication in Beloit Poetry Journal and its final home in the book. Well, by final home I suppose I mean temporary home. You never know where they’ll end up.

JJ: With what poet do you feel most akin?

AM: You know, I don’t really feel like I’m part of a tradition, or feel a real kinship with a lot of poets. That’s probably willfully naive to say, but it’s true. There are real echoes of A. R. Ammons in TAW, I think, but only some of his work. I have a weird connection with the work of Simone Muench, a poet whose chapbook New Michigan Press, the small press I run, published a ways back. I remember reading her poems and them making my mouth go wow in a familiar way, and recognizing something there. I’m in the middle of reading Julie Paegle’s torch song tango choir which is quite lovely. I read slowly because it’s really working for me, so it tends to give rise to my own language. And Nick Lantz’s We Don’t Know We Don’t Know. I read a lot of poetry, actually, maybe unsurprisingly. Albert Goldbarth’s Opticks, though I wouldn’t put myself in the same league as his work at all. What he does is beyond my comprehension and amazing in its own way, though some of our interests align. There’s so much out there, much of it a crapfest, but some of it remarkable. It’s one of the reasons I continue to edit my small press and my magazine: to stay connected to what others are doing in the world, and to try to publish the work that gets me hot.

JJ: What’s next?

AM: Writing-wise I’m in the midst of a collection of short essays (<750 words as of this writing, though that constraint may go) that start as poems written in response to things (texts, objects, images, conversations, whatever) found in some way in libraries. I imagine it being published as cards in a box, designed to be tucked into books as something for the next reader to find, a nod to the histories and futures of books as objects.

An Interview with B.J. Hollars

BJ Hollars likes tea. All kinds of tea. Has one entire kitchen cupboard jammed full of chamomile and green and white and Sleepy Time and citrus and black teas — and he’s really nice about sharing. It must be the tea that makes him one of the hardest working writers I have ever met. He rises at five in the morning to get started before his computer, then heads to campus to teach a full course load, then gets home to edit one of three anthologies, work on a novel, edit a few short stories, finish his grading­ — and he still somehow finds time to visit the gym, walk the dog, watch reruns of his favorite TV shows, and throw the occasional backyard barbeque. Oh, and his first child is due any day now. Hollars is also one of the most humble, happy, and approachable writers I have ever met. Maybe it’s the tea.

Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Hollars is the author of Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and is at work on another Alabama-themed book of nonfiction. He is also the editor of You Must Be This Tall To Ride (Writer’s Digest Books, 2009),  Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings (Pressgang, 2012) and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). His writings can be found, well, all over the place: North American Review, American Short Fiction online, Barrelhouse, Mid-American Review, Fugue, Faultline, The Southest Review, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Hobart, among others. I recently caught up with him over a virtual cup of tea to ask a few questions about his most recent work, a chapbook entitled In Defense of Monsters published by Origami Zoo Press.

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Megan Paonessa: Congrats on your new chapbook, In Defense of Monsters. I remember when you began this project, it was partly meant to demonstrate to a group of composition students that a case can be made for anything whatsoever — even Bigfoot — if one can write a strong enough argument. I recognize in these essays lessons I would teach my own students: how to use a counter-argument to strengthen a claim, how to introduce research with a signal phrase, etc. When did your chapbook’s opening essay, “In Defense of Sasquatch” stop being a teacher’s experiment and start taking on a life of its own?

B.J. Hollars: That’s a really great question, and to be honest, I’m not sure when it expanded beyond the classroom. Sasquatch simply held me hostage, would not let me go until I’d proved him back into existence. It was funny, wandering the University of Alabama’s Gorgas Library in search of proof of Sasquatch. I left that library with a two foot tall stack of Sasquatch books, but none of them got me much closer to the truth. When I stumbled upon Arizona State University’s “The State of Observed Species Report,” I think the essay began to gain traction. The report kept careful count of the number of species that vanish and are discovered each year, and the fluctuation of species was simply startling to me. Sasquatch no longer seemed like such an impossibility given the thousands of other species that emerge from the wilds each and every year.

MP: Your essays ask us to question the moment logic took over imagination and disallowed us to believe in monsters. The narrator is persistent in this respect, heaping eyewitness accounts upon legends upon history upon statistical representations of otherwise unbelievable claims proved fact. Outwardly, the narrator presents a logical argument for the existence of monsters. Why was it important to you to make a valid case for these monsters?

BH: I often fear humankind is too quick to lump all of the “unknowns” into the realm of impossibilities. It’s simply easier for the human mind to conceive of a reality it’s more comfortable with. Thomas Jefferson is a great example of a scientific mind willing to dream beyond the stifling boundaries of “scientific certainties.” In 1796, Jefferson examined some unknown bones and dreamed them into a giant American lion. They actually belonged to a giant ground sloth, though this wouldn’t be made clear for many years. I’ve always admired Jefferson for his ability to see the world differently, even when he was wrong. He didn’t view America as a land of limitations, but rather, a place of possibilities.

MP: Sounds like your next project should be about Jefferson!

So, your narrator believes in monsters — or wants, at the very least, for us readers to entertain the idea of their existence. But let’s assume the narrator’s voice and the author’s voice are not one in the same. On some level, don’t you-as-author need to jerry-rig the essays in order for the stories to come alive in their most successful ways?

BH: Ha. Perhaps jerry-rigging is the proper phrase for what I’m trying to do. Do I take some liberties of logic? You bet. But what makes these essays unique (I hope), is that they’re wholly grounded in scientific fact. I try to rely less on fringe science and moreso on national studies, such as ASU’s “The State of Observed Species Report” mentioned above. I try to keep an open-mind in order to pry the reader’s mind open as well. One can certaintly challenge my conclusions, but its far more difficult to refute the facts. This is why I’m careful to include a Works Cited page at the end of each essay. I want the reader to see what I see.

MP: A few notable writers have written mock-essays in the past — I’m thinking of Jorge Luis Borges in Labyrinths, or even your mentor’s book Michael Martone by Michael Martone — stories that the turn the idea of fiction on its head by posing themselves as nonfiction. Are you interested in this overlap? What is the appeal of writing a fictional piece posing as nonfiction?

BH: Good question, and I suppose the answer to it is rooted in the assumption that I consider these essays fictional. I’m not sure I do. I’m quite familiar with many fictional forms that pose as nonfiction (the literary equivalent of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, perhaps, though far less menacing), but I’m not sure that’s what I intended to do with these essays. I really am trying to talk straight about monsters, but, as you mention above, I’m simultaneously employing the vehicle of “monsters” to talk about imagination as well. There’s a link — however precarious — between monsters and the extinction of imagination. To write off monsters like Sasquatch and Nessie is one more giant leap down an already constricting pathway. I think imagination is paramont to creativity and maybe monsters play a role here, too. Why not let them be the cure to an ordinary life? We need to be capable of dreaming of Bigfoot prints in order to find our way back to a pathway of imagination.

MP: You’re a fan of monsters. You’ve gone to a Bigfoot convention or two, perhaps in the same way Trekkies and Gamers go to their respective functions, or perhaps more for research — but I don’t think you came back cynical, in an informant sort of way. In fact, you seemed sympathetic. Are you? Do you think these convention attendees need essays like yours to exist?

BH: Another great question, and you’re right — I did come back from the Bigfoot Conference quite sympathetic to my fellow Squatches. This sympathy, I think, came as a result of my understanding that the people who attend Bigfoot conferences are not necessarily die-hard believers as I’d assumed. In fact, the people in attendence were far more skeptical than I imagined. Most of the conference’s presentations were grounded in science, and many of the debates revolved around what form of science might best prove or disprove the case for Bigfoot.

I recently shared my chapbook with a few of my friends in the Bigfoot world, and I’m still waiting for a reaction. Squatchers are quite protective of Bigfoot; they’ve grown weary of the world thinking they’re crazy for even considering the possibility that a 600-pound hairy beast may, in fact, roam the wilds of America.  I’m not sure if they “need,” my defenses of monsters, but I like to think of myself as an ally to their cause. But in the end, monsters are only the half of it. I’m defending imagination as well.

MP: I’m a fan of any writer that pushes the imagination — so thanks for your work, BJ!

Bring Down the Little Birds: Carmen Giménez Smith On Mothering Art, Work, and Everything Else

The first thing I need to say is that after reading this book I felt like I totally needed Carmen to be my best friend. Not in a silly BFF way, but in a professional way — because it is really, really difficult to make 30-year-old life decisions (dating, marriage, children) when all I’ve got so far is an MA and one book from a small press (not that I’m complaining). Still, if I were to apply next year to PhD programs, I’d be in my mid-thirties by the time I even thought about going on the job market — and even if I did get a job, I feel like those first few not-tenured-yet years are no time to have babies. So, my first question for Carmen is below:

Molly Gaudry: What’s a woman to do?

Carmen Giménez Smith: A woman should do what she can to ensure that she achieves her ambitions, and ensure that she has agency in the world. My life often requires nips and tucks to achieve this, but I’m a much happier person than I would be if I operated under the cultural assumptions about womanhood and motherhood. I find fulfillment in the insane range of experience in my life, including my job, my creative work, my curatorial work and my mothering. I can’t say there are tried and true strategies for fulfillment though. I try not to compromise and I try to compromise. I try not to do too much and I do too much. I try to be mindful, but I am often mindless.

Ugh, but I don’t want to seem like I have some kind of answer because in so many ways, my life constantly feels precarious. At the moment, I owe two essays that I can’t seem to end, I’m waiting for an important phone call that’s stressing me out, my daughter might be coming down with a cold, my house looks like it’s been robbed and I have a lot of grading to do. I still wouldn’t trade it. I think you probably know what to do, in fact, you have a plan. When I was in my early 30s, I was a hot mess. I didn’t have a book, and I was phoning it in lifewise. I think you’re doing quite well!

MG: “Hot mess” is awesome. Also awesome is your book, and the language you use, the moments of meditation and revelation that unfold and unfold as your narrative progresses. While we’ll definitely talk about language more, I wonder if you would be willing to unpack the following excerpt for us and maybe also tell us more about these specific (or abstract) dreams:

“The days divided into two: working and mothering. The third part, which is me, lives in my dreams.”

CGS: I think there’s a weird thing that happens to time when you don’t have much time to yourself. I feel like I’m constantly writing and thinking about writing throughout the day, and that’s the third part of my day, and it’s simultaneous.

MG: What role do notebooks play in your daily “writing and thinking about writing”? And when did you start keeping them?

CGS:  I have tons of notebooks, and I use them a lot. I started keeping them about ten years ago. I write whatever comes to my mind and I do a lot of revision in them, but I also write directions and to do lists and recipes in them, so they don’t have any clear narrative or system at work. In fact, I carry three notebooks at a time, so I’m often digging around looking for where I wrote something down. The reason I carry three is that they each have a nature or a quality. I guess I don’t want to not write something down if the notebook isn’t right for it. Unfortunately, that’s not the weirdest thing about me.

MG: Structurally, your book reminds me of Carole Maso’s AVA. I’m interested to know what books or writers influenced, inspired, or otherwise impacted Bring Down the Little Birds. 

CGS: I love Carole Maso, and I think she probably was in the backdrop of influence, but also Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, Lia Purpura’s Increase, Jenny Boully’s The Body and John D’Agata’s Halls of Fame. Another big influence was Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. Her frankness about the complex feelings she had about her mothering gave me the courage to really put it all out there.

I read so many books about mothers, mothering, but every book that I read ended up through the filter of my mothering, of the book. I have pages and pages of notes from other texts that I read at the time that didn’t make it into the book.

The book started as a lyric essay, my first real attempt, and I realized that I wanted to keep going with it, and I wanted to write about my mom and everything she was going through. The book was very much written in the moment, so it was cathartic. I had notebooks and notebooks of stuff that I thought might end up in the book. I have a file on my computer called “Mothering Fragments (the original title of the book) Orphans,” and its pages of passages that I cut out of the book.

At a certain point, I began to juggle the different fragments so that there was resonance within the shorter moments and in order to create more chronology and more arc. The idea for the imaginary notebooks was a suggestion from both my husband and from Kevin McIlvoy.

I learned a lot about structure writing that book, and there are a few things I’d have done differently, but I suppose that’s the life of a writer. I’ll do it better the next time.

MG: Can we talk about lyric essays? It seems that they’re a sort of hybrid form, in that they are both poetry and essay. Do you consider yourself a poet mostly? Will you write more lyric essays in the future? 

CGS: I’m at work on a couple of projects with a lyric essay component, although I’m also trying my hand at straight NF. I’m trained as a poet, so I think of myself primarily as a poet with a deep curiosity and respect for what can happen in NF. When I was young, I wanted to be a journalist, and I got derailed into this stuff!

One of the books I’m working on is about television and the other is about failure. There’s a lot of intersection there. I also want to write about body weight, like an Arcades Project about fat asses, but that’s in the conception phase.

MG: What about the structure? What did you learn? Or, what did this book teach you about structure that your previous titles didn’t? 

CGS: Bring Down the Little Birds was the first book with a large-scale structure I had to deal with, and after I wrote it, I was able to return to a book of linked poems that I had been working on for ages and knew a lot more about how to order it.  I can’t describe exactly what it is I learned except maybe being very aware of how a writer gives and withholds and how this pattern can be really exciting and dynamic. The first book I wrote was a collection of poems, and I really relied on other people to help me order it, but BDTLB was such a huge undertaking, I really had to do a lot of the work on my own. I had to learn to define what felt instinctual so I could apply it throughout the book.

Although each book is unique, I do find myself, as I’m working on new NF books, returning to some of the strategies for writing that I used in writing BDTLB. I really resisted the fragment, but now I’m going with it because I can remember that the fragment was a great drafting strategy. I’m writing shorter passages or sections that may or may not become longer because this can be generative. And I’m trying not to worry about structure or redundancy at earlier stages, which helps me just generate, something I really struggle with.

When all is said and done, the book is chronological, a really traditional narrative form. Maybe the chronology has a little more in common with Mrs. Dalloway than with War and Peace, but by laying down that structure as a scaffold, I had latitude.

MG: You have a new book that has just been released, right? Can you tell us about it? 

CGS: My book, The City She Was, was recently published by the Center for Literary Publishing. I’ve been writing nonfiction lately and thinking a lot about the books that make a book, and The City She Was’s bibliography contains Ovid, Mandelstam, Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines, Grimms’ fairy tales, Francesca Woodman and Allen Ginsberg. The book began as an homage to Ovid’s poems of exile. Later, I began to think about an exile within an exile, about what living in a city can be like and how much I miss living in the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, so it’s a bit of a love poem to home.

I just received the galleys for my next book, which won the Juniper Prize last year. It’s called Goodbye, Flicker, and I’d been working on the book for ten years before I sent it out, so it’s surreal to see it finally come together. University of Massachusetts brings it out in April of this year.

MG: What’s next for you? 

CGS: Right now, I’m working on two nonfiction projects, a collection of essays (many of them about squander and decision theory) and another one about TV. Poetrywise, I’m working on a final draft for a book of poems University of Arizona is publishing in 2013, a bit of a tribute to second wave feminism called Gender Fables. I’m also starting a new book about memory and family, and Alzheimer’s.