What Does It Mean To Be Good? To Change?

Any rift in habit jolts us into consciousness. We’re not allowed to get comfortable — not that we were before.

Anna Meister, alumna of the MFA writing program at NYU and a former Goldwater Writing Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of As If, a Glass Poetry Chapbook Series August 2018 publication. Meister frames her poems in couplets, each poem untitled save for an asterisk, implying that the entire collection is one poem titled As If and each individual is a part of the whole. The choice to use couplets reinforces the inherent dichotomy in her subject matter: changing vs. staying the same; embracing vs. resisting; good vs. bad; meaning vs. meaninglessness. As Shira Erlichman puts it in her blurb for the chapbook, as if vs. as is.

Meister seamlessly takes us through the stages of change, depression, and self-love with poignant verse in her chapbook As If, a small but necessary book of the up-and-coming generation. This whole book — in both its diction and its themes — feels entirely relevant. There is a sense that the speaker’s struggles are societal, and a product of the pressures on her generation. She doesn’t shy from the mundane or the common: “Open Excel and tighten as trash / piles up in cover letter hell. As if / there’s a point to it all. Bent diploma, itchy eyes.” Instead, she uses the common as a means of revealing her frustrations and her truth.

Meister’s first poem opens with the main tension in the series: “Tell me the difference between / a change and an end […] my knuckles go white at the word open.” The speaker is fighting change, forcing her closing fist tighter. We know, off the bat, that the speaker is unhappy yet stubborn.

She asks, “What does deserve mean?” As someone who’s been in this position — depressed and wanting to change but resisting — I’ve thought about the meaning of the word deserve. It’s a bullshit word. No one deserves anything. You can work hard and fail or succeed, but to say that you deserve to succeed or that you don’t deserve to fail is entitled. Life doesn’t work like that. People are born how they’re born and bad things happen to good people.

What separates Meister’s poetry from any other verse with a what’s-the-point, nihilistic attitude is how comfortable the poet is with the colloquial. And how comfortable the speaker is with challenging her views despite her stubbornness. As If is stripped of that MFA snobbery that often seems to aim to exclude. The speaker doesn’t claim to know anything that we don’t, and doesn’t profess any holier-than-thou statements. The diction, too, is grounded. Take the title; it’s no coincidence that the phrase ‘as if’ seems shallow — it’s the catchphrase of the shallow character Cher from Clueless. Yet having an approachable slang phrase as the title invites us in, and from there we are guided into Meister’s deeper societal insights. The speaker in the poem is anything but shallow, despite the fact that she is modern and undoubtedly of this world.

In the third poem, the speaker states: “I ask to be good but don’t / know the taste.” So the speaker’s flirting with the idea of deserve; maybe you’re not entitled to anything even if you’re good, but being good may be enriching in and of itself. Maybe if you’re good you’ll allow yourself to be happier, because you’ll feel like that happiness is deserved. This line of thinking shows progress in the speaker. Still, the speaker’s questioning is flawed. When asking what it means to be good, she wonders, What does it taste like? (much like in the 9th poem, where she writes, “As if time can have / a taste”). Yet the desire to taste it is missing the point — it’s indulgent, focused on pleasure, on the senses, when the focus should be elsewhere — but where? The arc of this book is the speaker’s imperfect progress, which is accurate to life. She recognizes her issue, fights change, changes involuntarily, and overall, tries to be okay.

By the middle of the collection, the speaker’s attempt at goodness falters, warps: “Pills twist in my stomach as I repeat the good I know. I grow / less interested in salt, the wiped-down sink, sounds made by children.” The enjambment of the lines: “I grow / less interested…” illustrates the difficulty of positive change and the natural inclination of the speaker toward apathy after the overwhelmingness of depression and anxiety.

Further in the chapbook Meister weaves themes of longing and love — “all the ways we cheated death.” The speaker realizes that these bodily desires are coping mechanisms that inevitably distract her from positive change and from the goodness she desires, but still: these are her habits, and she clings to them as they push her under.

But does the speaker ever reach her goal? Does she embrace positive change, does she give in to being ‘good’? She realizes her sadness is “sewn-in,” that it’s out of her control, like “life / as a bunch of plants it’s not [her] job to water.” By the end of the collection, she seems to come out of her depression and into an acceptance of herself: “The mundane feels marvelous / when there’s no quicksand… More recently, a hallway always / brightly lit as if we didn’t deserve the dark… I have given myself permission to be / a monster in little ways.” She redefines her narrow idea of personhood, finally accepting the fact of mixed morality. However dissatisfying that may be, since Meister writes, “I don’t know what I’d hoped for.”

This book doesn’t have a clean ending, and that wouldn’t be appropriate; if it was a clean ending, it would be a lie, or the speaker would be dead. She’s still alive, changing, and dealing with those changes through to the end. To go back to her initial frustration: “Tell me the difference between / a change and an end,” the answer is that there’s no finality in change. Having a working mind and the clear intelligence that this speaker conveys ensures constant, inevitable change. This book is about change, yes, but it’s also about the frustrations and eventual begrudging acceptance of being alive all through the complex lens of hoping for joy, which makes its pages a haven for everyone who’s not dead yet.

An Interview with Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson is the author of debut short story collection FEN as well as her first novel, Everything Under. The East Anglia native currently lives and writes in Oxford, England, after earning her Master’s in Creative Writing at Oxford University. She won the AM Heath Prize in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Berlin Prize that same year. Her first novel, Everything Under, has been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. I spoke with her over e-mail about FEN and Everything Under, her creative process, and going from writing short stories to writing full novels.

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A. Poythress: I’ve been reading Peter Orner’s Am I Alone Here? for my writers on writers class with Patricia McNair, and in it he says, “finishing is agony because you know you will never again read this book for the first time”. I know I felt that way when reading FEN. I put off finishing the last three pages because I didn’t want it to be over. Are there any books like that for you?

Daisy Johnson: I love that, almost elegiac, feeling. I’m pleased that FEN did that to you. The Bone People by Keri Hulme made me feel that way, I think, because I felt as if I was a different reader after I’d finished it, saw the world in a different way. Also a lot of Stephen King because of those shock, gasp moments. I’ll never forget the first time I read The Shining.

AP: Place plays such a pivotal role in FEN. How could it not? The fen becomes a character in its own. How did you develop this characterisation?

DJ: The characterisation was there already because it is the way I feel about that land. I grew up there so my memories of it are tainted by those strange teenage years. I did really want the land to feel like a character in its own right though, I think maybe that’s where there are so many stories about language in the collection: I wanted it to feel as if the land could speak. I tried to develop it by intensify a few characteristics the fen has: it’s flatness, the fact that it used to be under water, it’s isolation from other places. 

AP: Do you think that specific small town claustrophobia felt in FEN is a universal feeling for all small towns? Or particularly locked into East Anglia/Eastern England?

DJ: I think it’s probably something that everyone in small towns feels at one moment or another. I imagine in the States, or Australia for example, you must feel it even more because there is simply great distances between places. I think what is specific about FEN is that these are characters who, because of who they are, really feel the isolation; a lot of them are teenagers who can’t drive and if they could would have nowhere to go anyway. The rest of them are trapped for other reasons and I think their claustrophobia comes from this, from knowing that they will probably always feel this way.

AP: When I first started reading “Starver”, I sat back with some overwhelming feeling that told me pay attention. Why did you decide to start FEN off with “Starver”?

DJ: Starver was actually the first story I wrote. I had been working on and off on a novel and I needed the immediate gratification of a story, the joy of actually finishing something. I think it, also, is a good introduction to the collection, to the landscape. The protagonist, is an observer, a quiet watcher and she — I hope — invites the readers in, shows them what they might expect in this strange, weird place.

AP: How long did it take you to figure out the order of the short stories in FEN?

DJ: It took a while. I tried a lot of different orders based on themes in the stories or the similarities in characters. One of the difficulties was trying to read the collection as a first time reader would. In the end I think the collection is based, loosely, on age. The women in the second half — after the long middle story — are a little older, a little more isolated.

AP: The Guardian review of FEN describes you as having “restraint of [your] language”. I must wholeheartedly agree. Yours are not the lengthy short stories of yesteryear. Was that restraint a natural style or a difficult and deliberate choice?

DJ: It is probably both just the way I write and also a consequence of the sort of short story writer’s I was reading. Writers such as Sarah Hall and Kelly Link.

One of the things I love about short stories is how little can be left out, how much exists in the gaps and the spaces.

AP: Would you consider FEN a horror collection?

DJ: That’s an interesting question. Particularly as my third book, which I’m in the early stages of, is a horror novel. Writing FEN didn’t frighten me the way writing this one did. I spend a lot of time jumping at noises in the house or writing by the back door so I have a good exit strategy. But I think FEN and everything else I write shares tropes of horror; those beats of unease that gradually grow and grow until they’re unbearable, that way of putting characters up against something and seeing how they deal with it.

AP: In both “The Hunt” and “The Cull”, it’s the men who hunt the foxes while the women come to live with them. Is there a deliberate relationship between women and animals as co-conspirators while men and animals are seemingly natural enemies?

DJ: I think a lot of the collection focuses on characters that are otherwise often silenced and that this is why there seems a relationship between the women and the animals. In the collection they are given a voice and the ways they use this voice are often a violent retaliation. A lot of the collection is about taking or stealing language, about trying to gain autonomy and often the men come out worse.

AP: I’ve seen many reviews compare FEN to works by Angela Carter. How do you feel about this comparison?

DJ: It’s obviously a great honour to be compared to someone like Angela Carter. She did things that no one else was doing at the time and her short stories are fireworks of weirdness. However I am always, I think, a little flinty when the comparison comes up. There are so many fantastic female short story writers doing amazing weird things and I think we need to make sure we are reading them, are comparing ourselves to them. I was not reading Carter when I was writing FEN, I was reading pretty much solely contemporary short story writers.

AP: Did you always believe you would write short stories? Personally, I always thought I’d write novels that would change the world, but more and more lately, short stories have consumed me.

DJ: I am a child of the creative writing workshop so my first encounter with writing was the short story. I understand that urge though; while studying I was always working on a novel in my spare time. It was only, really, in writing FEN that my love for short stories became fully fledged. A good short story can, I think, change the world in the way a novel can.

AP: Once a reader finishes FEN, it seems almost like a novel as opposed to a collection of short stories. Possibly my ignorance is showing — I read anthologies instead of published collections more often than not, and novels more often than most — but that surprised me. Was this an intentional choice or incidental?

DJ: It was intentional. I wanted — to add to the feeling of claustrophobia — to set all the stories in one, imaginary, town. The characters rarely encounter themselves but they frequent the same pub, hear the same anecdotes. I wanted the reader to come to know this place, to believe that it was somewhere where strange things happened.

I do think, though, that short story collections that are not linked can certainly feel novel-like. One of my favourite things about reading collections — which you get in a very different way with anthologies — seeing the links, the things the writer returns to again and again, the way they have structured the collection to lead us through these links.

AP: Do you feel FEN is a feminist story collection? Or just a collection that happens to centre on the female?

DJ: In the same way as, I suppose, everything I write will have threads and threats of horror in them I think everything will also be feminist. What, though, do we mean by that? That the writing will focus equally, if not more, on women as well as men? That the female characters will not be limited to roles as the girlfriends and wives and mothers of more interesting male protagonists? Sarah Hall was once asked why she wrote so many female characters and she replied that she would stop doing it when they stopped asking that question. I feel the same way. No one calls out writers for having too many male characters.  

AP: You said in an interview with The Guardian, “I didn’t write thinking that it would ever be published”. I think a lot of writers feel, or at least start off feeling, that way. But what compelled you to write these stories if you didn’t think they would be shared?

DJ: Good question. I suppose the same reason any of us do creative things in our spare time. For me reading was certainly the beginning, a joy of literature, a curiosity in seeing if I could do what my favourite writers were doing. I will say, also, that I am a guilt ridden worker. My degrees were churned on the back of guilt and a lot of what I have written is spurned on by it too. Also, though I certainly wasn’t convinced of their publication, the stories were being shared with those around me, particularly the other writers on my MA.

AP: Has your process for writing your new novel changed from how you wrote FEN? Does anything feel easier? Do you feel more pressure?

DJ: Oh god! My second book, Everything Under, which is out next year, has been the bane of my life. Is that too extreme? It’s been a hard slog, four years from conception to copy edits. A lot of time spent weeping in cafes and at my desk. There are probably enough words cut from this novel to make up three more. I love it now but I didn’t always love it. I hope everyone will love it too! And yes, of course, there was that old pressure in knowing that short stories were well and good but the novel was the important thing and I had to write one to start to make a living.

However: my third book is a novel and so far it’s a joy. I float to my desk. On good days I can write 5,000 words. I’ve learnt, of course, from FEN and Everything Under, I’m hopefully making less editing work later. I also think though that some books, as with some stories, are just harder to write. They need to be harder.

AP: You said in American Short Fiction, “Maybe that is the landscape I like writing about: where it’s so quiet you can hear the strangeness you might not in other places notice”. I don’t have a question about this — I just think it’s profound and speaks to why I like writing about isolated settings as well.

DJ: I live in Oxford now and it’s always what I notice when I go to visit my parents who still live close to the fens and very much in the middle of nowhere. It’s so quiet until it’s not! That strange switch from the quiet of the day to the hunting, noisy night.

AP: I know you stated that while reading FEN, you read collections primarily written by women. Is this the same for your current project?

DJ: I think I tend to read more by women anyway but yes there were a couple of books I returned to while writing Everything Under. Evie Wylde’s All the Birds Singing, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Weathering by Lucy Wood. I also read quite a bit of Alice Oswald’s poetry. Everything Under is an Oedipus rewrite so I also read books that rewrote in that way. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is fantastic and I would really recommend The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

AP: You say writing “seemed accidental” in American Short Fiction. I think all writers who are voracious readers first feel that way — I know I certainly do. Do you have a certain “how-to” guide for your writing? Stephen King says, “write every day,” but does that work for you?

DJ: I try and not over think it. It’s easy to get caught up in the ritual of writing and then not to write anything. That I suppose is my how-to guide: just do it. At the start of a project don’t think about publishers, agents, magazines, competitions, editing: just write.

There are some things that I’ve learnt work best for me though. Writing a lot is a good one but also having days off, giving the project time to work itself out in your head, feeling that wonderful anticipation of going back to it growing. Carrying a notebook around, particularly on those days but all the time, letting the work compost and gestate, allowing it to change and mutate. Changing where you write, being adaptable. I love my desk and the quiet house when no one else is there but sometimes that’s a bit much. Cafes are good, pubs with happy hours you can work towards are better! Finding other writers to write across the table from was quite momentous for me. Their hands are moving so fast so you keep yours moving too. Each project is different so it’s feeling your way forward, groping around until you find what works.

AP: Do you try to limit yourself to one project at a time? I know personally if I work on too many things at once, I end up jumping ship and never finishing anything.

DJ: I agree. I have very bad memory and working on more than one project makes my brain feel very mushy. I’ve got better, though, at editing one project while writing another. I think the processes are different enough to do both. 

AP: I now have a list of authors a mile long to consider because of past interviews of yours. Who else are you currently reading/obsessing over?

DJ: I’m having a good reading time. I really enjoyed The Good People by Hannah Kent. I haven’t read much sci-fi but V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic was really great. I’m also, while writing a couple of new short stories, rereading some of my favourites: the Sex and Death anthology is really wonderful.

Despite myself — I was wary — I also liked My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent whose amazing writing definitely saved this from being another book by a man about a girl being abused.

My to read list is also rather massive. I’ve just discovered Anne Enright who has changed my life, I’m also really looking forward to: All Rivers Run Free by Natasha Carthew which is out next year and a lot of the books that were longlisted or shortlisted for the Booker including Elmet by Fiona Mozley and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

AP: I found FEN because I was wandering around a bookstore café and the cover design called out to me as being stark and creepy — just the mood I was in for reading. Then I got hooked. Are there any books that have been like that for you?

DJ: I came to the US this year and this happened to me a couple of times in bookshops. Seeing amazing covers and sneaking them up to the counter before I could stop myself. A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume got me because it has a fox on the front and I can never resist foxes, I really enjoyed that. Communion Town by Sam Thompson was another book that really drew me in by the look of it. 

AP: “Daisy Johnson was born in 1990.” Every time I see that, I feel both hopeful and despondent. I was born in 1991 and all I can hope is to one day have a collection half as good as yours out. Do you see other people our age and younger performing and producing and get inspired or feel the push to do more?

DJ: I can’t wait to read your collection! Yes of course. I get jealous all the time, sometimes or prizes etc but mostly of other people’s writing that is doing something I would like to do.

Though there’s a balance to find in productive jealousy and the sort that just makes you feel a bit sad.

AP: What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you? The most FEN-like thing?

DJ: I’ve always been a bit of a weird sleeper. I used to sleep walk (or run actually I think) around my room when I was younger and it’s only got worse as I’ve got older. The story in “The Cull” of a woman waking and thinking she has a fox on her chest happened to me. Sharing a room with my sister at Christmas apparently she woke up and I was walking around her bed shining a phone light and saying: they’re here, they’re here. She won’t share a room with me anymore. My partner, however, doesn’t have a choice. I’ve woken him screaming or shouting that there’s something on his shoulder. It comes in waves, right now I’m not even dreaming, and I’m sure it can be attributed to many things but it always feels, in the middle of the night, as if there actually are things in the room. On the bad nights I leave a light on. On the really bad nights I get paralysis in my mouth and hands, won’t be able to feel myself moving even though I’m told later I said things I don’t remember.

AP: I think you would do well in this class, Writers on Writers. We have to do what you seemed to while writing — see how a writer does what they do, think analytically with one finger on our own writing. Any tips for someone going from academic learning to this new way of reading?

DJ: That’s tricky. I suppose read authors whose writing you feel is similar to your own in some way, read for pleasure but with half an eye on what you like and, perhaps more importantly, what you don’t like. Don’t read at your desk because then it will feel like work and really you are trying to read like someone who has just picked this book up for fun. Talk to other people about the books your reading, share them, see what people agree and disagree with about them. Steal, steal ideas and lines and characters. You can always cut them later or you can make them your own enough no one will notice. 

AP: Did you always know you wanted to Be A Writer?

DJ: I couldn’t do very much else which made it easier I suppose. I was good at all the subjects no one is supposed to be good at. Art, Drama and English Literature. Luckily my parents were really supportive, they never would have suggested I did anything other than what I wanted to. I’m also good at dog walking and recommending books.

AP: Sometimes you feel a story deep down in your bones. Did you know FEN would be made up of connected short stories when you set out to write it?

DJ: No that was a thought that came later, perhaps about half way through writing the stories. I always knew all the stories would be set in the same landscape but not that they would be so linked.

AP: Is writing and completing a novel more difficult than short stories? Do you feel the short story mentality creeping in, sometimes?

DJ: I love that image. Short stories are creepers, getting into your head, they stay with you. I think what I learnt from FEN is that the way I wrote short stories and novels are similar in many ways. I’m a messy drafter and my editing is often more like rewriting. Rewriting a short story is obviously a lot easier than rewriting a 70,000 word novel. A short story I’m working on always feels different, somehow, in my head. I can hold it all in my mind in a way you can only really do with bits of a novel.

Still I think the rules are the same. Don’t worry about your first draft, think about your character arc, read aloud, edit freely and madly and a bit wildly.

AP: And now for a silly one: If there was some sort of worldwide calamity and you could only save two books from being wiped out of existence, which would they be and why?

DJ: Such a good question! We have something over here called Desert Island Discs that I think you would enjoy…. There is one book that I read when I was a teenager and that has stuck with me. I buy it every time I go into a charity shop because I give it away so often. It’s called Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg. I’d definitely carry that around in my pocket during the apocalypse. I think maybe some poetry would be a good end-of-the-world read. Sharon Olds or Robin Robertson.

AP: What was your final process for Everything Under?

DJ: The final few months of working on Everything Under were a strange time. I think often writers spend so long with a piece of work that it is easy to forget anyone else is ever going to read it. The editing process had been mostly entire rewrites, tens of thousands of discarded words, but towards the end it was small line edits, moving punctuation around, reading each sentence out loud to see if it worked.

AP: And how did you feel when you learned that Everything Under was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize?

DJ: The day I found out about the Booker Longlist I was babysitting for some friends. My editor phoned and said she had something to tell me and could I go somewhere private. I immediately thought something awful had happened. She told me what had happened and I danced around the garden screaming.

AP: I know Everything Under has just come out, but are you still working on your third novel?

DJ: Amidst the madness there is, as ever, writing to be done. To get back to my desk after a busy day is calming, to bury myself in the story once more. Except that the next book I’m working on is a horror novel set in Yorkshire and writing the scary bits disrupts my sleep, makes me sleep walk. I’m hoping that is a good sign.

AP: Thank you so much again for agreeing to be my interviewee. I’ve been telling as many people as will listen to read FEN, so hopefully this interview will push them to do it. I’m so, so excited for your novel, Everything Under, and everything else you produce in the future.

DJ: Thanks so much Amanda!

I Appear To Be Having a Human Emotion: A Review of Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things

I’m not a crier. Not at all. It’s a matter of principle. And self-control. I’ve been accused of being emotionally constipated on more than one occasion; it’s usually my mother leveling those accusations. Cries have to sneak up on me from behind and surprise me, conking me over the head. And so when I reached the final act of Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett, at the scene where our protagonist, Jessa, breaks in to her childhood home to care for her grieving and traumatized mother—bathing her, holding her, literally picking her up off of the floor—I was startled to note that tears had begun dripping off the tip of my nose and onto the page. The book had enticed me with it’s strangeness and it’s hilarity, but had come round behind and made me feel things. Sneaky.

I began by laughing and delighting in the weird, breathtakingly specific world created by the taxidermy shop, the run-down and odd Central Florida town, and the Morton family home. In the middle part of the novel my emotions morphed into a prurient, morbid fascination at the slow-motion disaster underway amongst this cast of characters. And by the end I was aching for everyone in the story. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a story in which grief and childhood and how we are loved and damaged by our loved ones are more devastatingly examined. I certainly can’t think of one. It got me right in my soft, meaty bits.

Everyone is awful and wonderful: so human that the book aches with it. At one point Jessa’s mother remarks that: “It’s hard to talk about the ugly parts. How we can be that terrible and still worthy of love.” This feels right. This feels like so much of the point. Everyone is fucked up but everyone is trying so hard. And there’s a real beauty and tenderness in that trying.

There’s also a very specific kind of beauty in the unvarnished realness with this the place of the novel is rendered. It’s so specific and so evocative. I can smell the beer, the unwashed hair, the fried chicken, the roadkill. I can feel the heavy, Florida heat and hear the crickets. The Morton house is like every house I spent any measure of time in as a child. I admit I have no prior context for gators, but the writing is sure enough that I don’t need one to see and smell and hear it all. Nothing in this world is gleaming and moneyed and perfect—nothing is heightened to the unreality of wishful thinking you often find in fiction—it is lime buildup on the shower heads, and crumbs rubbed in to old carpets, and water drunk hot and chemical tasting from a hose. Wash cloths are faded. Clothes are dirty. Bodies have stretch marks and fat and skin tags and blackheads and odors.

On the surface Mostly Dead Things is a story in two tracks. One: a family headed by Jessa—an emotionally unavailable Floridian taxidermist and frustrated lesbian who inherited the family business—dealing with the aftermath and grief of the father’s suicide, the grieving mother’s madcap, sexed taxidermy art, and the abandonment by Brynn—Jessa’s sister in law and also the only woman she, or her brother, have ever really loved. Two: the story of how the family got to that point.

Mostly Dead Things brings the dead things early. “How we slice the skin:” is how the novel opens, and what follows with a detailed description of how one might prep a dead animal carcass for preserving and taxidermy. And the “dead things” in the novel do start as the animals in the family taxidermy shop being worked over by Jessa and her dad, and even at times her brother and her niece and nephew and mother. And the detail with which the act of taxidermy is described is right on the money—trust me, I’m an (amateur) taxidermist. But soon the dead things are the grieving family, their intimacy and love (“Our intimacy was an uprooted plant, shriveled and withered.”), Jessa herself (“Nostalgia carved out my insides, padding my bones until my limbs stuck, splayed. Frozen in time, refusing to live.”), and those lost to them.

And still this novel about loss and pain and actual dead things ends on a hopeful note. A pretty odd one, involving two siblings giving a trio of taxidermied peacocks a beer-soaked “Viking funeral” at the gator-infested lake in the local park, but a hopeful one. Or maybe a human one. And damnit it made me cry (just a tiny bit) again.

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett is out with Tin House Books in June of this year (2019). I promise: it will surprise you.

"I think Truth is a kind of purpose": Elizabeth Powell & Terese Svoboda in Conversation

Terese Svoboda: Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of J. Crew Catalogues has Wolfgang, a failed photojournalist-turned-fashion-photographer; describe the motivations of the two models in great sensuous detail for a shoot he is conducting. “Perhaps this is your first kitchen together, the first time you’ve ever shared a kitchen, and you’ve just made love while cartoons played in the background.” Meanwhile the male model has an erection, one of the women is thinking about hunger — and sex — while the photographer conjures up another scenario about smoking endless joints with the women in a cabin. Thus begins this piercingly accurate confection of a novel about desire. Did you write short stories as a warm-up to this, or were your books of poetry preparation? If so, how?

Elizabeth Powell: At one point in time all of the fiction I was writing was determined to be something else, something hybrid and poetic. The novel was all my poetry’s idea. My poetry is always right there looking over my shoulder. The lyric is mighty. But, yes, the novel started out as a short story that I published in Black Warrior Review. I couldn’t let go of the characters, they still had some investigating into the human heart and soul to do. Wolfgang, in particular, was insistent, and kept turning up in my prose. He is very roughly inspired by a photographer cousin of mine who passed away. I tried to continue my conversation with my cousin about image after his death in my own writing, not only as a way to grieve, but to continue on the relationship beyond the constrictions of time.

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Elizabeth Powell: Your prose is so gorgeous, so resoundingly meticulous, lyrical. How does your work as a poet inform your prose writing? You are so prolific in many genres: What do you think it is about your creative process that feels so comfortable in many different genres?

Terese Svoboda: Fearlessness. That’s the prime requirement for all poets, the strength of mind to know that not every inspiration is going to thrive in a quatrain, that you need a lot of tools for the myriad of materials that arrive. The requirement for genre-switching is that whatever the material, the words will need a lot of pushing around, something that the poet is used to. I’m always satisfied, I’m always failing.

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Terese Svoboda:  “Beauty, Helene thought as she tapped on Wolfgang’s window, was a measure of some sort of purpose.” Is this a belief the author shares?

Elizabeth Powell: I’m interested in what beauty’s purpose is, why we use beauty as a way to get what we want or make others do what we want. Of course, there are cultural ideas about beauty. The natural world of flowers, for instance, has much to tell us about beauty and its uses. I’m interested in that in general, but here I’m more interested in what does beauty with a capital B have to say, that old fashioned cousin of capital T truth. I was thinking about Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I think Truth is a kind of purpose. I was also thinking about Keats’ poem “Endymion,” about the quandary that human beauty does pass into nothingness and ashes and dust. I was thinking about the idea of beauty being as Keats’ says “Full of Sweet Dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

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Elizabeth Powell: Why the American West? The desert over time? What was the creative spark that inspired the book’s breadth and intensity of subject?

Terese Svoboda: Written over 25 years, the book’s spark was slow in coming. I wrote only two stories after I found the title about ten years ago, one of which was “Major Long Talks to His Horse,” which explains how the region became known as the Great American Desert. My formative years were spent in that desert, near the mysterious Nebraska Sandhills where water was always a topic. The pivot sprinkler came into use in the 1960s and revolutionized the climate and what could be grown. I have land there now and I’ve seen the corn turn blue and disappear back into the earth during a drought. Farmers think a lot about the future.

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Terese Svoboda: You mentions Pessoa, and Pound — a send-up of Pound as the subject of an Apple Think Different ad. These are not references that bestsellers evoke. We poets applaud this, but so many won’t understand. Does that matter?

Elizabeth Powell: I think it is incumbent upon people of all stripes to look up things they don’t know. I think Pessoa and Pound should be part of a general knowledge, and if not, then should be obtained through looking up. Does looking up stuff you don’t know matter? It depends upon what kind of world you want to live in and create for the future generations. When I wrote that, I was thinking about the Apple Think Different campaign where they use revolutionary thinkers like Gandhi and Einstein as a way to peddle their wares. That happens all the time in America, this capitalistic thievery of ideas as a way to make money or deceive someone into a desire that comes from a place of insecurity and emotional deadness. If you recall, part of that Think Different campaign was “To the Crazy Ones”, meaning if you want to think outside the box and become a legendary and revolutionary thinker, you should buy Apple products, which are ways to produce work, not ways to think in original terms. The novel references Pound and Pessoa as a way to mimic what the campaign itself is doing: Look at how you might become a crazy, brilliant person if you buy some shit that is very expensive, but will supposedly make you a better human. That desire, to be part of an equation that is trying to pull you into a magical place that is really a void.

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Elizabeth Powell: Did the ideas of Westward Expansion and the so-called American dream figure in at all?

Terese Svoboda: Whatever group overcame the Clovis people surely had a dream of expansion. Manifest Destiny warranted Major Long’s expedition, even if he denigrated the area with his nomenclature. Homesteaders exchanged the dream of riches in owning free land for the reality of its almost unimaginable difficulties. By the time the Dust Bowl descended, the homesteaders had endured enough. The land blew away and with it, the dream. Now, despite market forces and pollution, the very poor farmers left hold on to the dream that they live as their parents did, close to the land.With regard to the Anthropocene future of America — we need a better dream. After all, that’s not a rising sun in the West, it’s one that’s setting.

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Terese Svoboda: “Wolfgang continued to mine for some image of Helene that would express all the lingering beauty of the past as it incubated into the present.” This being a Rilkean ambition, what are you writing now?

Elizabeth Powell: I love how Rilke, in Letters to the Young Poet presses us as writers and humans to live the questions fully. Living the questions is the life and is the art, both of which use the past as a kind of incubator for the present. The past is beautiful because it is part of the question that reveals the present, the future.

I have just completed my third collection of poems and hybrid essays called “Atomizer”, which will be coming out in 2020. That book addresses questions surrounding love in the age of technology, online dating, and movement toward oligarchy. The work is in discussion with a favorite book of mine by French philosopher Alain Badiou called In Praise of Love. And because it is about love it is about the senses, the sensual. Scent looms large in the book vis a vis perfumery and my long history with perfume.

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Elizabeth Powell: Place is often a character in a work of fiction. In what ways do you see place as emblematic of character in your book?

Terese Svoboda: Water, and its lack, is central to nearly all the stories. Having something immoveable at the heart of a collection, a protagonist or at least a minor character that is silent, like the old man and the sea until the shark shows, best chiaroscuros the petty human endeavors that play out against it. But place in the book, that is to say, environment, is actually not immoveable, it is just as permeable and malleable and poisonable as our varying relationship to it, especially with regard to how it is shared. I have the characters reacting to what becomes a dynamic environment, a character. People forget that and think the earth’s always the same, no matter what they do to it.

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Terese Svoboda: I’ve directed a little, and worked on commercials, and I was very impressed at your ability to capture the experience. You have the actors in a sort of repertory model, so they appear in a series of shoots, each with its own narrative, a kind of lyric poem really in which many elements are left open yet are linked. Have you been involved in commercial film shoots?

Elizabeth Powell: I have not. My daughter, however, is a commercial model and television host, and I have appeared on her show and observed all the camera operators. Her work in the fashion industry comes from a family interest in image in poetry, art, life.

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Elizabeth Powell: Both my novel and your last story, “Pink Pyramid,” broker in the idea of dreams and their effect on not only the individual, but also the collective consciousness of history and with the present moment of now. What role/effect do you think dreaming has on history and place?

Terese Svoboda: I believe Trump never dreamt of being President — but Putin did. Without someone standing in a field envisioning a plant, nothing gets grown or built. Dreaming your sweetheart pulling up her blouse engenders population. But dreams are meant to fade and be replaced by others, hence their mark on particular times and places — except for prophetic (inspirational?) dreams, e.g. Vladimir Klebnikov’s dream in “The Radio Wall” that imagines television in the 1920s. But that is falling into the tech trap that dreams are all about enlarging our material footprint on the planet. Other dreams – our collective unconsciousness — of talking to animals or of breathing like a tree help us rethink our present and our relationship with other life. In my own writing, I’ve heavily invested in dreams. Tin God began as a persistent dream that I used in a poem, then a short story, and eventually a novel, pitting the 16th century against the present, in alternating chapters.

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Terese Svoboda: Did you start with the literal image of a catalogue page and enlarge it, or you discover the imagery through the characters?

Elizabeth Powell: I started out by thinking about what it meant that I liked looking at catalogues so much. Was it the image of the person or the image and how it related to the surroundings in the photograph? One of my grandfathers was a freelance photographer for Life magazine, and I spent a lot of time during my childhood studying books of photography, especially The Family of Man a book from a 1955 photography exhibit curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art department of photography. It was a seminal book for me, very influential to me as a poet and a person. Since then I have always loved the interchange between image and narrative that occurs in the photographed. Catalogues are narratives used to sell something. I wanted to co-opt that device as a way to let the spiritual and material worlds collide. Creation is in some ways the action of the spiritual and the material colliding, which then goes on to create narrative. It’s a commentary on the idea of taking pictures of things that don’t really exist to make them exist. That idea is a cousin to the idea of photographing something that exists mostly to be photographed. I’m a huge fan of Don DeLillo’s work. Your question makes me think of a section of White Noise that discusses this idea, a section that heavily influenced my writing:

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

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Elizabeth Powell: “Camp Clovis” seems to me a kind of cousin to “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Have you been influenced by her at all?

Terese Svoboda: Not particularly, although as the eldest of nine children, I adored her stories about family life and the mundane horrors of motherhood. “Camp Clovis” came out of a belief that a child’s preoccupations in the summer must be universal and timeless, and from living in South Sudan for a year, relegated to the status of a child in a materially-challenged environment.

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Terese Svoboda: I was certain that Wolfgang would have a heart attack chasing after the model on the beach. Was it hard to determine an end point for the book?

Elizabeth Powell: The end point always had the beach in mind. The beach as an image is always representative of leave taking and arriving from a destination. There is a kind of violence that the beach represents, who is coming? Who is going? Are we safe in this terrible, wonderful beauty? And then sometimes one looks at the sunrise and the sunset from the beach as a meditative stance, as a way to understand the opening and closing of the day, beginning and end. Moreover, the beach is part of the photoshoot narrative, so the conclusion logically leads imagistically back to the beach.

All the Faces Made of Wax: A Review of Edward Carey's Little

Edward Carey’s extraordinary novel Little follows Marie, an abandoned oddity whose small and spare physical presence sparks remarks like “little minor monster in a child’s dress” and “little bold face.” With a haunting cast of peripheral characters and a scattering of unsettling illustrations, Carey brilliantly animates the goings on within the tiny and seemingly inconsequential corners of a very dangerous world, namely Paris during the burgeoning French Revolution.

The book proceeds in decade-long chunks and covers the span of nearly ninety years. The resulting work is both claustrophobic and immense, delving deep and personal into unseen moments in history while never shying away from the darkness of obsession or the sweet sadness of love.

The novel begins as Marie, or “Little,” finds herself learning to become an apprentice to a doctor whose specialty is crafting wax models of human organs for academic purposes. As the doctor begins to set up a business of casting wax heads, Marie learns how to create representations of people through molding likenesses and drawing. She’s the one behind the illustrations within the text, which punctuate her experiences with a startling approach towards reality.

From the very first chapter, every moment that passes is a step further away from security for Marie. She does not live a happy life, nor does she find true kindness from any corner of her mostly miserable existence. Instead, she finds her agency and her power through creating representations of people, representations that refuse to be influenced by anger or vanity or even the ever-growing pressures of political power. Her skill is a dangerous one in a world in which everyone seems to be telling themselves stories about how the world works, while constantly failing to truly understand it.

The peripheral characters of Little can often read as petty and somewhat grubby, but they come to life in their wretched specificity. Because they are presented through the lens of Marie, they are always understood as human and always understood as dangerous. Faithful to her gift, Marie’s perspective never falters. She is singular in the way that she sees people and the world they inhabit. She does not make monsters out of people, though the people around her may behave monstrously.

The crime of seeing only fragments of a person’s humanity is one that is perpetuated by everyone in the book but the protagonist. Whether on the streets of Berne, in a tailor’s house in Paris, the halls of Versailles, or the creaking monstrosity that had once been a monkey hotel, Little documents the slow fading of humanity, both as an interior movement and as a response to exterior forces, featuring wax figures who are treated as if they are something worth seeing and people who are treated as if they are not.

Little asks what it means to capture a person’s image and what a person’s image can represent. It wonders what it means to strip others down to their parts and illustrates the varied behavior that people will justify when they see others as objects or monsters or threats.

In the end, the book itself serves as a solution to the question that it poses. Though Marie maintains a point of view that is ignored by all around her within the story, the text itself delivers her story in a way that makes her humanity impossible to ignore. Because she remains so singular in her perspective, she is, in a strange way, protected from the world’s machinations. Though she is never understood by anyone in the story, she is understood by the reader. Through the clever machinations of Little, Marie’s story is one that has been told in full.

Fake News Poems: An Enactment of the Role Art Plays In Our Bizarre Cultural Moment

On August 31, 2018, CNN anchor John Berman used a simple Radiohead lyric to punctuate one of his close-up soliloquies: “This is really happening.” Berman quoted these four words from “Idioteque,” an arguably lesser-known song from Kid A, released in the year 2000. From Thom Yorke’s pen to John Berman’s lips, the lyric is a message of reassurance and foreboding for consumers of American news.

Berman was not simply flexing his memory for alternative lyrics; he was nodding to art and its role in our culture—to filter reality; to help us see and believe the truth. Art is called to bear witness to the dystopian logic of a president who tells his followers, gathered at a rally of support, not to believe their eyes and ears, not to believe the news.

Martin Ott’s poetry book Fake News Poems – 2017 Year in Review – 52 Weeks, 52 Headlines, 52 Poems is an enactment of the role art plays in our bizarre cultural moment. Ott’s fourth collection of poetry, published by BlazeVOX Books on March 15, 2019, is a work of undeniable attention to these strange days.

The title contains Ott’s conceit. Each poem responds to one of the 52 headlines that form the table of contents. Sources are as varied as a Mondoweiss cartoon, Fox News and CNN headlines, and papers of record, including The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The poems are arranged in weekly order throughout the year 2017.

Inventive in language and form, Ott calls the work “prose poems disassembled into verse.” The free verse lines are surprising, both muscular and flexible. They run long, then align in a block of prose, and then fall into short couplets or tercets. Ott’s use of internal rhyme is sparse and surprising. His themes are recursive, and the engaged reader can follow a theme through its fabulously dizzying course.

These poems retell, reframe, and recast the news of our world until it is as pervasive as a cockroach nesting in your skull. The cockroach appears in a Washington Post headline dated February 7, 2017, and becomes a metaphor for the “collective dread about the terrorist in our head.”

The first poem in the collection introduces a major theme of automation, inspired by a January 2 headline story on counterfeit library patrons created by renegade librarians to borrow and save beloved library books. The villain is automated book culling software, running its “tired algorithm of popularity.”

The final poem is a reconsideration of the automation theme. The hapless hero of a December 26 headline story is a man who assaults an ATM when it gives him more cash than requested, “a matter of principle and principal.”

Early in the year, the speaker recounts how librarians asserted their intellect on artificial intelligence. By the final poem, the assertion takes a more visceral and hopeless form:

There was no scenario where he would beat
the machine. It would calculate and enervate
his wealth. It would replace all his brethren
and commodify his health. Because it could
not make mistakes any fault would be his.

Between these bookend poems, the theme of automation extends to absurd stories about spying microwaves, dolls accused of espionage, and microchipped employees. The theme twists again when Mother Nature is the threat, and humans remain duty-bound to our tools, like the man mowing his lawn during a tornado, because “Grass has an agenda, / too.”

Truth in poem makes the unbelievable more believable. At least it fills a bit of the void left by the 24-hour news cycle. Either way, there is meaning to be found in these poems, from this poet, who scans the static for clear notes and reports in an unfailing, unflinching voice.

Appearing beneath the dystopian headlines, there is the speaker’s family, realigning after the fracture of divorce. The family is an artifact, alchemized through these poems. Parents vie for popularity. The children carry on with failed driver’s exams and successful basketball games, but the father fears the “pull of darkness,” found in the poignant consideration of a headline about the eclipse of August 21, 2017.

Readers of Ott’s 2013 poetry debut and De Novo prize winner Captive will be familiar with the “teenage interrogator” who appears again in Fake News Poems. These poems seem less tethered to the author’s lived experience than Ott’s earlier work, but the impulse to discover and define truth remains. Perhaps a poet, with the line’s expansive arsenal, is best equipped to interrogate the news.

There is much to appreciate in Ott’s new book, including various and unexpected takes on isolation, automation, mortality, invasion, escape, and politics. If the news is a riddle, a reflecting pool, a bunch of lies, or a hidden truth, Fake News Poems may be our best chance of making sense of it.

A World in Every Sentence

A rabbit who is really a penguin lives in a nest of quarks under the sink, reading Bridget Jones’s Diary and whispering the secrets of the universe through the walls at night. That is the first, and one of the more straightforward stories in David Atkinson’s Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from My Pockets While I Sleep. The book forces readers to adopt whole new worlds with every sentence. Drills spit spheres filled with human brains; Hot-Wheels set saves lives; patio tables are fabricated from old waffles. Roses are Red is composed of more than a hundred pieces of fiction, few longer than a page and a half, and each of them is a radical reading experience.

Each story has its own logic, but they share the ability to subvert expectations. Every sentence in Roses are Red is a discovery, often humorous in its departure from what should follow from the sentence before. In “Frog Legs are Good Though It’s Hard to Get a Grip to Bite if They Aren’t Dead First,” for example, we find this:

Personally, I think throwing me in a Turkish malachite polisher prison was downright unjustified. You can tell me that’s all specified in subsection seventy-three, eighty-two six bis of the Napoleonic bro code, but we both know that “bis” is an imaginary number anyway. I won’t be fooled by Algebra again, not after that run-in with those bat-plastic-pants salesmen. I never should have trusted anyone smoking a cigar, let alone three of them.

This process of subversion continues relentlessly throughout the book. The reader experiences the constant joy of discovery and the exhaustion that comes with it.

But the stories in Atkinson’s collection are not mere word salads. Each story is indeed a story. A first pass at reading might not yield much insight into the world of the piece, but there is a world in there. An example of this might be “Himmler’s Hidden Alien Civil War Gold Caused that Detroit Pawnshop Storage Locker to Lose its International Real Estate Flipping License.” In the piece, History Channel documentaries about the Nazi’s bleed into polluted algae beds via corroded internet cables, giving rise to zombie clones of Eva Braun, Hitler’s companion and, briefly, wife. Fortunately, the zombie apocalypse is averted due to the Eva zombies’ aversion to spray cheese and the fortuitous “Easy Cheese World Subsidy Initiative of 2013.” The piece is as strange and unpredictable as any in the book. Still, it both participates in and critiques the zombie genre. It is on one hand an indulgent romp, and on the other a spotlight on absurdity.

The key to Atkinson’s success in these pieces is specificity. Each new concept, each reference, each break in continuity is not a whimsical departure but an exact movement that makes the piece feel intentional and crafted. In one story, a character has taken out a want ad for an RV trailer which needs to transport “a couple thousand pounds of pornographic Space Ghost collectible silver half dollar coins.” To finance the ad, the narrator had to sell “one complete collection of ballpark hot dogs partially eaten by significant Yankees infielders of the eighties.” Colorado, as a setting, has a distinct presence across the collection as well. Denver and its suburb Lakewood appear on numerous occasions, as do small towns like Glenwood Springs. These locations make Roses are Red feel real, rooted in a specific place. They also have the flavor of inside jokes, which made references that I didn’t understand feel more stable. If I didn’t get where a story went, then perhaps the story was for someone else. Specificity makes the leaps in logic in this book feel purposeful. The reader can feel safe in the writer’s hands, knowing that they’re on a journey, even if the destination is one of bemused wonder.

The tangled path of Atkinson’s work can still yield results. Few books have made me laugh as much as this one — not in amusement, but in surprise. Atkinson so relentlessly subverts expectation that every sentence bears the potential for genuine discovery. The stories in this collection are often hard to parse, but there is emotional depth for those who care to seek it. My favorite story in the collection was also one of the longest. “Ideas: Where to Get Them and What to Do When They Won’t Leave” is a literalized metaphor in which a writer’s ideas manifest as unwelcome visitors. The writer attempts to drive them away by embarking on ambitious artistic undertaking with them. Often, the ideas are turned off by the writer’s eagerness for commitment and are driven away. But sometimes, they stick around. The story captures the melancholy that comes from a new idea falling short, as well as the quite hope of the ones that stick around.

The ideas that inspire a work of art are often ideas that artists have a relationship with for years. No matter the form, an artist may toil for a long time before an idea matures into their vision. Roses are Red has the air of that kind of object. There are hundreds of distinct stories in the collection, many of them challenging. Still, they all bear the mark of obsessive experimentation, of fun had trying something strange and new, and the purity of making something for one’s self, though other’s might also find satisfaction in it.