The Letters In Your Novel: An Interview with Brooks Sterritt, author of THE HISTORY OF AMERICA IN MY LIFETIME

Stuart: I think about our conversation in San Antonio after the Clementine Was Right show. We were talking about how realism can sometimes mean what people don’t do anymore. Tao Lin & etc. used g-chats in their writing when people were still g-chatting. Those writers were, in many ways, mocked for their realism. But by the time Sally Rooney & etc. write g-chats into their fictions, nobody uses g-chat anymore. Because it’s over, it somehow seems realer in the novel than when it was real in real life. Is Realism the future, or is Realism a memory?

But I really want to start with a personal incident. It happened after I finished your book. There are so many letters in your novel. So many glyphs. They are a source of comfort and anxiety for your Subject. They move the plot along. You write about the backward C, the Claudian letter. You write “again, a connection to previous symbols was apparent, though the logic of their transformation escaped me.” Or, “the shape of the driver’s name calmed me.” How does the shape of a name calm you…

Brooks: …speaking of letters, your title is great. Jenny in Corona. The four Ns. I’m sure you’ve thought about that.

Stuart: Your title is great, too. The History of America in My Lifetime. One of those titles where you feel like you had it early on.

Brooks: I had it early on. It was a working title for so long that I ended up keeping it.

Stuart: So I was walking in Andersonville thinking about the Wallace Stevens poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” I stopped at one of those Free Libraries. Inside the library was a book called Criticism of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ and I was like, holy shit! I looked up. I looked around and over my shoulder. Who was watching me right then? Who is watching me right now? Am I, too, a Subject from Bevacqua’s film in Brooks’ book? Are we in the same film? I won’t soon forget that moment. Or answer these questions. And then I was thinking about how coincidence…

Brooks: …synchronicity…

Stuart: …exactly, yes. This is always happening to the Subject. Letters seem to cover him, in the sense they both cover for him and they are the raw materials of his impersonation. Like one of those old definitions of film. The film of death: “a layer of skin covering the eye and obscuring the vision of a dying person.” Used in Tristram Shandy: “The film forsook his eye for a moment.” So here’s my first question: are we being followed?

Brooks: The feeling of being monitored has been my experience for many years. Films like Gene Hackman’s The Conversation, or that moment in Enemy of the State, with Gene Hackman and Will Smith. The satellites that can read the language off a dime. That was made up at the time, but now it seems quaint. We’ve assumed for a long while our phones are being tapped. Not that anyone’s watching me specifically, which could happen at any time, of course. All of this seems negative, perhaps, but I like to think about the spiritual side to being watched, too. Encountering a book in a Free Library, like you did, or a person, at the right time. Maybe in that sense, we hope we’re being watched. We hope someone’s looking out for us.

This reminds me of the ending of Jenny in Corona. Your idea of “another person” who is just like me. You write, “remember that time I told you not to meet another me? I think I’m another me now.” Imagine yourself being watched. It turns you into another you.

Stuart: Did you ever think your Subject was anything but another him? As a reader, I sometimes felt like he didn’t have his own agency. “As a film subject he was one of the best I’ve ever seen.” He was ready to be in his film, ready for the novel’s structure, ready for the novel’s letters.

Brooks: Well, I don’t think anyone sets out to write a novel where the protagonist has no agency. I wanted it to be propulsive and if anything keeps him going it’s the search for truth, for mystery. In the end, he’s not just one guy. I’m not one guy. I mean, obviously I’m one person. But depending on the situation, we’re multiple and competing subject positions and desires. Why do you think he didn’t have agency? It feels like we must, right, otherwise we’d give up.

Stuart: The Subject starts off with friends, the relationship with Blanche, day-to-day stuff. But then his journey gets exponentially stranger. What does lived experience feel like today? We know multiple collapses are always already happening, but we still tweet, or boil water for tea. Climate change isn’t really happening anymore, it’s over. So climate change fiction is Realism. I think of this Elizabeth Bruenig-ish line when I’m on Zoom: everything will be OK, just worse and worse.

Brooks: I think that’s really perceptive. How the novel starts from real life, and then drifts. What happens to you, when you set out. How much of your life are you using. How bound do you think you are to yourself?

Stuart: Were you bound to yourself?

Brooks: Not really. There are memories I dig through. But then on the page I change it so it’s not mine. Reading your work, I think this is different for you. Like your setting, your Queens, you can’t have it start raining frogs. I mean, you could.

Stuart: They’ve rained a lot of stuff on Queens, so why not frogs. Makes me think of something Poirier said about Dreiser in A World Elsewhere, that no matter how much you write “Chicago” you can never really write down “Chicago.” As a writer deeply connected to place, I love that challenge, a pillar of failure to ascend. A History is different because you’re not in Queens, or Los Angeles, or Chicago; or you’re in all those places. You’re everywhere because they’re watching.

Brooks: Surveillance is a social problem, but it’s also now just part of our place. There are novels by some chance that manage to cause social change, which is great. There are novels which expose evil, which is great. There are novels that through their perfect form reveal how messy the world is by contrast. I try to connect the strands and deliver an experience. I believe in truth. I think it exists. But in the novel it’s pretty hard to find it. What do you find yourself driving toward. Epiphany, conclusion, growth, change?

Stuart: To me, Jenny has a very ambiguous ending. Some readers told me otherwise, even took other sides, which I found so inspiring. I’ve always been interested in human relationships being endless. You’re never going to get resolution, or if you do, the other person might not. Why would a novelist be interested in resolution. In The History, the movie is over, in some way, but also not resolved. You feel like the Subject could star in this film again. Have you seen Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere? He’s riding the sports car around in circles. He’s made it. I thought about that at the end of your book.

Brooks: You might be on to something with Somewhere. Or in Even Dwarfs Started Small…

Stuart: …now that’s a title…

Brooks: …this early Werner Herzog film. They tie the steering wheel of this old jalopy to one side and a bunch of people are chasing it and it goes round and round, makes a rut in the dirt. Do you believe in Realism?

Stuart: I do. I don’t know about raining frogs. Which I think is a pretty good benchmark. I can’t write a traditional magic realism sentence. I don’t think you can either.

Brooks: You just write: It’s raining frogs.

Stuart: But what about your second sentence. You know that Didion thing. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. By the second sentence, it’s all over.”

Brooks: Do you want it to be over after raining frogs? Or does something happen next. Before I could define magical realism, I’d have to know what realism is.

Stuart: Realism is getting a turkey from the bank on Christmas.

Brooks: I think you’re more magically realistic than you’re admitting to. You wouldn’t make it rain frogs, okay, but what about in Kafka’s Amerika. The Statue of Liberty holds not a torch, but a sword. Taking liberties with the Statue of Liberty. That’s Realism. What are you bound to? What are you willing to shake up?

Stuart: I can’t start with a straight world. To me raining frogs is a straight world. I must start in the wrong world, where it rains rain. I hold close this idea attributed to Hemingway or Stein, that after the horrors of the First World War words like truth and beauty and honor and especially hope didn’t mean anything as words anymore, as concepts. And I feel that way, right now, I think most of us do. Hope is for the prizewinners, and more executive power to them, but leave me in the ruins of legislative gridlock.

Brooks: Your book conveys a sense of love and hope and truth, without using those words. There’s emotional heft. I think you’re tied up in all these things you think you’re refusing. A lot of writers I love, Lydia Davis or Don DeLillo come to mind, are accused of lack of emotions. Wry! Arch! Cerebral! Cold! I don’t find them cold. There are certain emotions we think we’re avoiding in contemporary writing, but our devotion to the writing means they come through whether we want them to or not.

Stuart: I want to quote a block of text from your novel.

“Bevacqua’s words produced the effect of a puzzle piece fitting into place. Not the final piece, not the penultimate, not even close, but the puzzle piece whose arrival suggested what part of the final image might look like. A single vast, expanding text, consisting of all language produced in America—this text, in a sense, was America itself. America, its history, its language would be unreadable, at least to an individual.”

That’s very moving. Whitmanesque. And it reminded me of the spiritual exit available, what you hinted at earlier, from the doomsday message effortlessly rerunning in our brains. It also reminded me of something we once talked about at the Hopleaf, how Twitter is an endless scroll that can never have the same two eyes on it at the same time.

Brooks: Bulk data collection.

Stuart: I got this hopeful feeling from the block text.

Brooks: I hope so. If it’s all there, there’s possibility there. Call me crazy but we could use data for helping people instead of exploiting them, not only to sell stuff but to deliver what’s actually needed. There’s this line of Francis Bacon’s I find fascinating: at one point he claimed his goal was to capture “the history of Europe in his lifetime” in a single image. Impossible, obviously.

Speaking of raining frogs, I have to ask you about the DeNiro passages in Jenny in Corona. Here is the line: “A co-worker who is obsessed with the 200 movies DeNiro may or may not have filmed between 1974-1976.” Please elaborate.

Stuart: Maybe that’s my theory of Realism.

Brooks: It’s the kind of Realism I can get behind. It sort of reminded me of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville, featuring a guy in Hollywood who discovers something hidden in every film. Or earlier in your book, when the grandmother says, “this is the oldest church in America,” and Ty says, “she was wrong, but I still believe her.” That’s Realism. The 200 films he may or may not have filmed, that’s realism. So why DeNiro?

Stuart: Why not?

Brooks: What resonates?

Stuart: Someone said to me once, “you remind me a lot of a young Bobby D” and that person went on to do a series of horrible things to me. But I still love them. They were always surprised I thought they were hurting me so much.

Brooks: They’re always surprised, aren’t they. I’m reading Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, and the first half is a lightly fictionalized account of her relationship with Philip Roth. It’s neutrally delivered—she’s going along with it—and there’s a moment where she says, “I don’t know if this is good for me.” And the Roth character says, “do you think down the line this is going to damage you?” Love and pain are obviously concerns of yours, and I like the way they’re handled. It’s emotionally hard to read some of your stories. They’re really well rendered. But DeNiro…

Stuart: Bobby D.

Brooks: What would it take. The 200 films.

Stuart: I want to see those movies.

Brooks: It reminds me of Fassbender, who did 40 films in 40 whatever, drug-fueled years. He died young. It’s an alternate history. The lost films reveal something about the films DeNiro could have made.

Stuart: We have nothing. But at least we also don’t have the lost films.

Brooks: It’s something, isn’t it? Lost films have always interested me.

Stuart: They’re so important in The History…

Brooks: Maybe those 200 films gain their potency from the mere fact of being lost.

Stuart: Blanche leaves the Subject, but she also leaves him Glenn Gould’s recording of Brahms’ late piano pieces. They had a kind of one-night-stand, the Brahms was playing, and that’s what he was able to hold on to. He wasn’t able to hold on to her.

Brooks: Your reading makes me see that section in a more positive light. He takes the record away.

Stuart: In other places you write:

“a fragment isn’t merely something that appears unfinished. The very idea presumes the existence of some sort of whole. Choosing to stop therefore meant the work had arrived at completion.”

And this related moment, about paper shredding:

“The next time I fed a piece of paper into the shredder, it hit me. Shredding felt nearly as good as watching a Bevacqua fragment. What I did was mindless, but it accomplished what I was sure the creation of art accomplished: it allowed me to stop thinking.”

How many films did Bevacuqa make?

Brooks: More than the lost films of DeNiro?

Stuart: I don’t feel like fragments are having a very good run right now. Lauren Oyler picks on this really well in Fake Accounts. Anything can be a fragment, sugar! Just type something half-baked, hit return a few times and, voila, fragmentary writing. But that’s not what a fragment is.

Brooks: No, it’s not. Really, it’s the opposite of that. That’s like a whole and taking pieces out. For me fragments go back to German Romanticism and ruin obsession. Making a “whole” fragment is a cool thing. Like the Brahms pieces. Intermezzos. Ten in-between things. I mean, if you found an arm at the bottom of the ocean, yeah, there’s your fragment. But you have to be dedicated to the form. You have to sink that low.

Stuart: I want this popular idea right now to go away: the world is screwed, therefore my work is a fragment.

Brooks: In that sense fragment is just a synonym for choppy. Which is not the same. For me it comes down to being pro-form or anti-form. Formlessness has to be patterned and arranged. Even chaos is ordered.

Stuart: I wanted to read one more passage, keeping in mind your “single vast expanding text that would be unreadable.”

“Things must circulate—the interstate highway system, the blood in Eisenhower’s failing body—circulation, but no conclusion: once you’re a star of a Bevaqua film, there’s no way out.”

Circulation, the circle, the record on the turntable…

Brooks: …I’m fascinated with those movements. The highway system is tied to surveillance, and of course the circulation of capital. It must flow. A Cosmopolis thing. After 9/11 there was a huge panic and Bush came on TV and said, please go shopping. In the pandemic Trump and Biden said, please go shopping.

Stuart: And there’s no way out. You can’t square the circle, unless you’re on television.

Brooks: We’ve talked about Lauren Binet’s book HHhH. He calls it an infranovel, infared meaning “having a wavelength just greater than the red end of the spectrum.” He says he uses all of the resources of the novel except for one: fiction.

Stuart: That feels like exactly where I want to go.

Brooks: When you use your life as material, is it material, or is it different?

Stuart: Paul Valéry’s confession that he couldn’t write a novel because he couldn’t write the sentence: “The Marquee went out at 5.” Do you want to write, “Last year, they went out for an hour,” or does it get better if you delete last year, if you delete an hour, and you just write, They went out.

Brooks: IRL, deleting last year would be a great idea. 

Stuart: Everything becomes exact when you forget about time.

Brooks: In fiction there’s an obsession with giving information. Why not 4:58? Why not 5:02. Blue eyes, green eyes, 5’8, 6’3.

Stuart: It needs to be said that “taking all of the fiction out of your fiction” takes time. It took me a long time to write Jenny in Corona, it took me a long time to finish my new book.

Brooks: Took me too long to write mine.

Stuart: The next one will be faster.

Brooks: Let’s tell ourselves that.

Stuart: You write, “I never had a master plan, or any other kind of plan, really. I had merely embarked upon a course of action whose every contour pushed me forward in a way I couldn’t control.”

Brooks: When I hear you read that, it sounds like it’s about writing.

Stuart: Usually true of true sentences.

Brooks: For sure.

Stuart: I’ve noticed this funny yet profound thing that as I get older, I must write more about the lived experience of writing, because I’ve just spent so much time living the experience of writing.

Brooks: There are authors who write about being a writer, but then others who write about the process of creation. I’m interested in the latter.

Stuart: Roth feared, or maybe he was happy about it in his retirement, that the novel would become more and more specialized. So why not write about being a writer. Do it for the other writers. There aren’t a lot of them out there. Contrary to the received opinion there are more writers than ever.

An Element of Blank: Cynie Cory Reviews TENSION : RUPTURE by Cutter Streeby and Michael Haight

Tension : Rupture is a hybrid collaboration of poems and paintings by Cutter Streeby and Michael Haight whose borders dissolve into liminalities. The performance is often hypnotic and dreamlike, an Aurora Borealis whose shapes and colors shift across the page. Tension : Rupture asks the reader to participate in the interstitial spaces where the drama of the poem/paintings unfold. Here, the reader becomes the third collaborator as she deep dives into the re/construction of history. This mindscape is precisely where memory and self (identity) are interrogated. The triumph of Tension : Rupture is also its subject: performance.

As a title, Tension : Rupture, behaves as a poem within a poem, in the sense that it both reveals and mirrors the collection’s form and content; specifically, its dramatic unfolding and ambiguity. Its architectonics create an impending action. If we look more closely, we see a gathering of moments between the action of undoing and the undoing itself. (Think pin pulled from a grenade.) The juxtaposition of its discordant words is set to discharge. It is the space around the colon that charges the moment. The colon is the force that propels a thought or word forward. “Tension” is disrupted by white space which halts the action that the colon creates. Time elasticates. This is a profound moment of violence. The title further subverts our expectations by creating the action of holding together that which is falling apart.

When Hamlet is poised to say his soliloquy(s) the audience is compelled to listen because we sense that 1) he will reveal a point of action that will further the plot and/or 2) that he will reveal himself. Shakespeare complicates this dramatic structure by inviting the audience to eavesdrop (participate) on Hamlet’s soliloquy(s) thereby creating the unexpected interlocutor. We are compelled to listen to the Dane’s inner workings because they are both inner and workings. This is similarly so in the Streeby/Haight book where private also meets public. Hamlet’s words reveal, in real time, the intimate action of self-interrogation as does the interface of Streeby and Haight’s collision.

The shared liminalities reveal both the violence of the collision of text and self/alterity and in exploring/excavating this history. We may think of this book as a poetics of trauma as we may also see Hamlet as a play of trauma. Yet in Hamlet, one may argue, there is no redemption. Here, in this intertextual world of unmerciful searching for identity, one has the sense that Streeby wishes he could circumvent words altogether – one feels and sees the pressure placed on meaning – because words do not “say to say”: they do not and cannot alone tell the truth. In their tireless pursuit of truth telling, Streeby and Haight use the page not so much as canvas but as twilight, where the gaps between light and dark and between memory and imagination are places of ruin and revelation.

Sketches

An angler delivering fish
into glorious day
draws them down listlessly;
his cigarette smoke fading over yellow irises
bending into a mist.

---

A tarmac raker straightens from his work
to lean into a breeze and pick out blessings:
atavistic phantoms like snow unseen
over a backwater;
a world away beyond the cones, the heat,
the endless bullying of engines . . .

---

May flower falling to a dirty stream
stirs the bones of an idea:
a note in the mythology
of someone looking on,
someone seemingly forgotten.

---

Author’s Note: The poems were first published in a now defunct poetry magazine/anthology called Decanto in 2012.

On Influence: A Conversation with Edward Schwarzschild

Brian Phillip Whalen: You were such an influential mentor to me, so naturally I’m thinking about things my mentors and teachers have said to me over the years. You always told me, “no news is no news,” which kept me in balance as I was submitting work, waiting to hear from editors/publishers, or applying for academic jobs. Of all the things we talked about over the years that probably doesn’t seem like the one that would stick with me. As teachers I think we never know what our students will remember, what will help them—and when. Is there any advice your own mentors told you that has stuck with you?

Edward Schwarzschild: I feel blessed by the teachers and mentors I’ve found—or did they find me? The circumstances seem so improbable. I was fortunate to meet Grace Paley several times, to study with Tobias Wolff, to teach alongside John Gregory Brown and Carrie Brown. The wisdom they offered almost always applied both to writing and living. Paley saying, “You know more than you think you know, you know?” Wolff speaking of how you don’t get over certain struggles; instead, you learn how to carry them with you. The Browns demonstrating daily how two writers can get married, build a family, and continue to craft beautiful fiction.

Even when you were a student, you struck me as a teacher. You were already teaching me, that’s for sure.  What have you discovered about the subject of mentors now that you’re leading more workshops full-time?

BPW: I still get a magical feeling in the workshops I teach, if there's a particular quality to the light one day or if it's raining and we're all wet and drinking hot coffee, huddled together around a workshop table, reading and sharing stories. I tell my students, "This moment is something you'll remember 20 years from now." I don’t recall what I learned from any particular workshop I’ve been in—nothing I could put my finger on, I mean—but I still feel the camaraderie and support. I often think about Paul Cody, my first writing teacher, sitting at the head of a conference table with a scarf wrapped around his neck, on the second floor of Demarest Hall in college. Paul once had us sit on the floor in a circle, and he read us a fairytale, pausing to show us the pictures like a kindergarten class. It sounds ridiculous, but it was amazing, an homage to the way we first hear stories. That experience was more powerful than any writing lesson. The magic of story-telling.

ES: I was a pre-med student at Cornell. One of my friends was taking a creative writing workshop, so I signed up for it, too. The professor, Dan McCall, saw something in my stories and I saw something in him—a kind of life, a devotion to writing, a way to be in the world that wouldn’t involve medical school. More than particular words he said or wrote, I remember the encouragement he offered at a crucial time in my life and the reverence in his voice when he talked about the books—Melville, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Hemingway— that had changed his life.

BPW: That passion is contagious. I still teach authors I first read back in Paul’s workshops. There’s something special about that cycle. Sharing the gift of life-changing stories that were once shared with us.

ES: I remember a seminar during your time at UAlbany in which we wrestled with the poetry and memoirs of Nick Flynn. It was an inspiration to see his influence on your writing unfold in that space. When I think about my own responses to Flynn—especially Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking is the Bomb—what I’m drawn to is how powerfully his work shaped my writing of nonfiction. I found something in his fragments, his swirling chronology, his weaving together of voices that I couldn’t help but incorporate in the essays I wrote about myself, my family, and, in one instance, about Flynn himself. It was the kind of influence that felt conscious—I was very aware that Flynn had inspired what I was doing—and unavoidable. Finding him and being influenced by him was very much a joyful experience. It felt like a gift that you and I shared.

And yet I don’t feel Flynn’s influence on my fiction, even though I was writing fiction while reading him. It feels to me when I’ve tried to draw upon Flynn’s work in my fiction, it hasn’t worked out so well. In those instances, I’ve had to retrace my steps and return, in a somewhat mercenary way, to other voices. In the case of my latest novel, In Security, those voices came from various genres and forms, from Richard Russo to Ted Conover to Franz Wright to Peter Orner to Elmore Leonard and on and on. It wasn’t that I needed to be influenced by fiction writers in order to write fiction, but the qualities in Flynn that fed my nonfiction—the nonlinearity, fragmentation, and polyvocality—stymied my fiction, at least so far.

BPW: You have such a wonderful ability to tell a linear story in your fiction, weaving in backstory to achieve the depths and multi-vocality you mention in Flynn’s nonfiction. I think there are writers of fiction who certainly play with form and time in successful ways, but it seems to me that Flynn’s distinctive style—fragmentation, collage, achronology—lends itself especially well to the telling of true stories. Rita Dove once wrote that life is “ragged” and “loose ends are the rule”—which is to say, there’s often a lot of stitching and sense-making to memoir because the material is endless, endless ways to put it together. And often not putting it together beautifully—ragged ends, visible seams—can be the most evocative way to tell a true story. I learned that from reading Flynn.

But Flynn’s influence on my own writing is less about imitating him than it is about the ways in which reading his work has allowed me the courage to experiment with my own voice—to take risks in my writing. He gives me the courage to “follow my own weirdness” (to borrow a phrase from Annie Dillard) because of the risks he took—and continues to take—in his writing.

ES: What you say about my ability to tell a “linear story” cracks me up a bit. I mean, yes, it seems that’s what I aspire to do, yet the process couldn’t be less linear. How did you go about making the structural decisions in your collection Semiotic Love [Stories]? What do you see as the chief influences for those risky, brief stories?

BPW: For the micro fiction in the book, it was Lynne Tillman telling me to “start small again” after I wrote a few short-shorts for her workshop. I don’t think I’d have tried those shorts if I hadn’t been reading Lydia Davis (who taught my first PhD workshop) and Michael Martone, whose work returned me to the pleasures of re-reading Borges and Barthelme and certain Oulipo writings—and Yasunari Kawabata, who I read in college. I think of Jim Harrison’s prose poems, too, and Mary Robison’s hilarious, and devastating, novel Why Did I Ever, composed of mini chapters/fragments that she originally wrote on postcards (to overcome writer’s block).

Anne Carson’s book Short Talks was influential on the book, structurally—and formally. Her way of taking something singular, small, and turning it, like blown glass, into something so deeply meaningful, and how all her prose poems stand on their own while thematically binding the book as a whole. Semiotic Love [Stories] opens with a story called “The Father Bell,” about death and memory. The rest of the book explores a variety of losses and regrets—but it’s the ringing of the bell in the first story, the incipient loss, that sets the tone for what follows, that resonates with the themes and storylines in the rest of the book. I’d like to think my reader still hears the echo of that opening bell when they read the final line of the last story in my collection.

I know you have a manuscript in the works, and that you’re doing extensive research for it. How’s it coming?

ES:  I can’t talk in detail about the new novel-in-progress (superstitious, I suppose). I’m more than a few years in and the work doesn’t feel linear at all, though I wish it were and hope the final product will be. It’s at a stage now where it feels capacious enough to include everything—black hole science, World War I history, the trauma of exile, whatever I see at the dog park in the mornings, and more—but, at its heart, it’s inevitably a novel obsessed with brotherhood and loss, as I am these days.

Some of the writers who inspired my foray into somewhat immersive research were Ted Conover (Newjack), Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), James Agee and Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), and maybe most of all John Berger and his Into Their Labours trilogy (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag).

BPW: Your inclination to do research is inspiring—and what you consider as research, letting dog parks and your brother’s death influence your work. Your essay about moonlighting as a TSA agent to research In Security is delightful, and other autobiographical elements worked their way into that novel (like your tennis hobby). Are you going to do some radical thing with the new novel, or a future book, like Denis Johnson did in Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond, and become a literary investigative journalist?

ES: I definitely like that idea—but at the moment, the answer is no. Aside from a fellowship I did in Germany that made important research for the project possible. Would I take a parttime job in an observatory for a while if I could? I’m sure the answer is yes, but there aren’t too many functioning observatories around Albany these days, and I’d really need to spend time in an observatory from around 1910, not 2021. I wouldn’t mind working in a painter’s studio for a while. That might actually be do-able.

BPS: You and I are both comfortable allowing our experiences, and our fascinations/obsessions, to influence our fictive imagination. I wonder if that’s another reason we got along so well as mentor and mentee, even though our prose, the way we tell our stories, is so different. The novel I’m revising takes place in a homeless shelter in the Midwest. It’s based loosely on my time working with AmeriCorps, after I got my MFA. There’s also stuff about the arctic in the book, because I’m obsessed with the far north (maybe because I moved not long ago to the deep south, a kind of reactive longing) and what it would be like to be an explorer or a scientist, to live that life. I recently read Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. I’d gladly hop on a schooner and sail to Melville Bay with you if you’re looking for your next research adventure.

ES: We all know on some level that an understanding of working lives is essential to so much great art. Working for the TSA at Albany International Airport as a Transportation Security Officer-in-training was fascinating, and inspiring. I may not have appreciated work experience when I was younger, taking odd jobs that ranged from gardener to gravedigger to kennel cleaner to file organizer to knife salesman. Later in life, with a stable career in place (fingers crossed), it’s a blessing to step into another work space for a while. It offers extraordinary material, day after day of telling details. Such experiences might also function like meditation. For me, stepping into another job lifted me outside my patterns of thinking, encouraged me to focus on and appreciate anew the present moment. Of course, a job in the security realm heightens one’s attention to the “now” to an extreme extent, but I think stepping into other jobs would still have a similar meditative effect. 

In other words, I’ll keep you posted about the schooner.

The Sky's Hand In You: A Review of Katie Farris's A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving

How to summarize the end of life that has become such a concrete possibility that every moment is infused with the question: will one survive or not? How to diffuse this in poetry? In A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, Katie Farris graciously and bravely erases the boundary between the artist and the theme, offering her body as the site for meaning-making.

I go to the world with my tongue out
and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys

in the lock,
a six-inch scar instead of a nipple.

“This scene has a door / I cannot close,” Farris shares concerning a cancer patient’s condition. The personal stakes couldn't be higher. Yet, the poet’s body is entrusted with an additional responsibility: to carry the poetry for as long as it can. The poet wishes “to train myself to find in the midst of hell what isn't hell.”

The motif of training recurs here, as if, instead of merely focusing on the cure, one is called upon to take advantage of one’s vulnerability to further one’s capacity to generate warmth for others. On the sharp edge of mortality, one creates beauty out of one’s very impermanence. “I was no longer hungry: everything was everything; the roots in my skull shifted and I/ lay down beneath my own branches.”

And the other side of the mirror: the love, grief and hope that accompany illness. In the opening poem, Farris explains,

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world,
to offer poems of love to a burning world.

With tenderness and compassion, the poet observes the loved ones’ tension and despair:

how pain enters
their face
like a hand hunting
inside a
puppet

In the end, the poems become the interface between the suffering of the author and her partner and the world’s suffering on their behalf, an exchange rendered resonant through the reader’s recognition of our shared mortality. “And whom / can I tell how much I want to live? I want to live.” Miraculously, it is the reader to whom the poet addresses her plea.

Does suffering enlighten, and would one chose to be enlightened in this way? So often in our living and dying, the choice is not offered.

The sky always
has its hand in you,
as if you were a puppet,

through your ears down
your throat in to your
lungs…

The inspiring, inventive title itself offers a polyphony of meanings. The work is the net whose weaving will catch the body, so that the body may continue to weave this beautiful work. But also:

I will need a rope
to let me down into the earth.
I’ve hidden others
strategically around the globe,
a net to catch
my body in its weaving.

Step by step, the poet takes us through diagnosis, chemo, surgery, and the beginnings of recovery. “Three drains, five scans, twenty thousand dollars!” This account buzzes with immense humanity, and the urgent intensity of Kafka’s Hunger Artist whose proofs the writer was still correcting on his deathbed.

I’m delighted that Katie Farris’ full-length collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, titled after one of the poems here, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2023. May the poet continue to stand in that forest for many years, bringing us her most illuminating work.

Actor: A Flash Fiction by S.S. Mandani

The snake made its appearance soon after the usual pool maintenance checkup. An orange band choked its neck—printed it dangerous. A line of black ink, puddled with scales, its stomach arched above the water, limp. Seemingly dead. An amphibious thespian, the kind that eats the labeled yogurt in the fridge at work, only to act stumped when questioned. Myths speak of this serpent. The bad omen type. The family, sheltering itself, resurfaced later that night. LED water light on, they found the silhouette squirming, expecting some kind of standing O. A Technicolor spectrum of blue ripples, they let it perform through the night, witnessing its climax. No clapping, no. Their teal-mirror eyes were applause enough.

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Author's Note: "Actor" was my first publication almost a decade ago at TheEEEL from tNY Press (formerly theNewerYork). This was of course a big deal for me. While it was a small piece, having my writing accepted for publication and paired with custom art was incredibly validating. I had finally felt one notch closer to feeling like I was a writer.

A Review of Paula Coomer's Somebody Should Have Scolded the Girl

Paula Coomer adopts a unique approach to character in her magnificent collection of short stories, Somebody Should Have Scolded The Girl (Fawkes Press, 2019). Anyone familiar, or even those unfamiliar, with the stoic and unapologetic nature of the Midwesterner will appreciate the attitude of these folks. They don’t walk around walls; they don’t climb over them; they just push straight on through.

Setting most of her stories in small-town Indiana, in places “where Petty’s Fork meets Cabin Branch at the Granite Boulder betw. A Black Oak and a Sugar Tree apart from the Sugar Bush,” the geography is almost as colorful as the people themselves. These outsiders make no excuses for their behavior.

The time is the 1970s, and the issues, ironically, are not at all distant from the issues of today. There is a failed war, women are second-class citizens, inflation is high, and poverty and racism rule the majority of this country. In spite of all of this, Mercy Grace discovers that the bunkhouse she wishes to build can be built by women. Her old friend E-Z returns to town just in time to help her. Mercy Grace tells E-Z, “At first I thought I’d do it for hired hands, for the boys who right now are coming back from overseas in droves, but just about the moment I saw you had driven up, I decided I want women to build it.” And E-Z replies, “What’s the big deal about that? It’s not like no women in this country never built a building. How many chicken coops you build in your life? How many you seen built?”

Coomer’s women can do anything they set their minds to do, and they often do it with a skillful turn of phrase. Their self-esteem, however, as Coomer recognizes is true for many women, often does not match their capabilities. A young girl considers a sexual rendevous with a stranger and reflects, “An ache lower in her belly rises in an instant, tries to tell her that what she feels is small, inferior, like she’s a blank page and Stetson’s a walking dictionary.”

Chipper is an adolescent boy of mixed race. His father has told him that he “should be proud of his parents’ inter-racial marriage, and particularly of his mother. It was brave in the 1970s to marry someone from another race in the United States, especially since some states had only recently made it legal.” Trying to discover who he is after the unfortunate death of his Black father, and looking for some adventure before attending college, Chipper joins a friend to ride out west to pick grapefruit. When he extends his trip on his own, riding the rails and exposing himself to the other side of life, Chipper is thrust into a new reality around the campfire.

In the title story, Marlette’s day begins at 4:30. “Cows to milk, eggs to fry, sack lunches to make.” The fact that Marlette’s life is filled with keeping a house for her husband and children, along with the daily tasks of a farm with animals, does not mean that her intelligent, albeit uneducated mind is not always thinking. When she hears on the news that a famous woman poet has committed suicide, “Marlette guesses somebody should have scolded the girl early on for expecting too much of herself and of life.” But Marlette isn’t finished. She goes to some interesting lengths to find out about this woman poet who has piqued her curiosity.

The final story in Coomer’s collection traces the incredible couple of years in the life of Charlotte Dodge. This woman gives new meaning to spirit and tenacity. She wastes no time complaining about the misfortunes in her life. Although she does wonder about them in the diary she writes that no one will ever read. With a husband in prison for statutory rape, a newborn daughter in the ICU, a farm and home to support, no one could blame Charlotte for complaining. Instead she writes, “The priest said that I  need to see a counselor, that I have too much, too much, too much on my plate for any one human. I hate the idea of that. It makes me feel weak.” And we begin to believe that no matter what befalls Charlotte Dodge, she will prevail.

These characters all have important life lessons to teach us, if we will only listen to them. As Coomer comments wisely in her acknowledgements, “Next time you feel inclined to make fun of a hillbilly woman, don’t. Give her a bouquet of flowers instead.”