Considered Slantwise: A Review of Joan Fiset's How It Was in Scotland

If you want to see the Pleiades in the night sky, you must not look at it directly or all you will see is a faint smudge. But shift your gaze a little one way or the other, and all seven stars become clear. Much the same approach works when reading the poems of Joan Fiset in How It Was in Scotland. If you try to meet them head on, you won’t see clearly. But look to the left or to the right… 

Paintings by Noah Saterstrom, which accompany Fiset’s poems and to which she responds—more often than not obliquely—in this hybrid collection are also best viewed from an angle. The paintings are renderings of photographs from Saterstrom’s family albums and, like Fiset’s poetry, seem somehow incomplete, not quite finished. Often the people’s faces are smeared, and the settings softened so that they feel familiar, but not entirely so. Together, the text and the visual work in a way that does not reveal the connection unless they are considered slantwise.

Take, for example, a two-line poem that appears about halfway through the book:

a man kept calling Lucinda
up and down the stairs

The painting that accompanies this couplet shows a young girl in a blue dress and a white apron standing outside near the corner of a red building. Behind her, the scene is a bleary landscape reminiscent, perhaps, of Kansas with what could be a grain elevator in the distance. Her face is featureless except for the suggestion of a mouth and eyes. She has a deep shadow behind her and is wearing red shoes. Is this Lucinda?

That sort of question, that sort of correspondence between image and language is central to our reading. Even if, as in the case above, there is not an evident relationship, the fact that each poem—save the last, which is a variation of the first—has been paired with a painting, that they present themselves in the same way each time—poem on the left, painting on the right—suggests we are meant to take them in together, in union, halves of a whole.

There is also a thread of a narrative in the volume, an interconnectedness, as if we are turning the pages of a family album and seeing scenes changed by time, recalling them barely. Fiset’s poems capture those relationships and, in their spare way reveal the meaning of the memory. Two poems in particular stand out as exemplars.

In one, a young man poses in the unnatural way high school graduates are twisted for their important portrait. He wears a jacket and tie and looks away from the camera. Fiset captures both this moment and the uncertainty of the boy’s future:

voices croon from across the river
he gathers stray language
inside his hands

should words approach
blue eyes close

to silence
like the room

In the other poem, she expresses the grief of a man in a gray suit, head bent and hands folded, looking at a grave:

later
hands held
below the minute
seconds
understand

Other images of grave sites and mourners prompt Fiset to additional musings on death and loss, while photos of families dressed in bright spring colors invoke thoughts of life, rebirth, joy. Next to a picture of a mother and three children, all dressed in red, she happily declares:

this is summer
this is years and years

over the lake
returns so blue

look together into it
dreaming the hummingbirds home

Two of the children in that painting appear again in other guises and, perhaps, at different ages, helping to stitch together the collection as a continuous but not necessarily linear history. In some instances, though, the history, the lineage, is mysterious, as if there were secrets the poet has discovered. A man standing next to his car outside of a motel looking at a boy who may be about to climb into the back seat or has just emerged is depicted in two lines

faint sketch of a man
rarely mentioned

leaving us to wonder if this is the man we’re looking at, and, if so, just who is he and why is he rarely mentioned?

The only named character in the book, Lucinda, makes a second appearance several pages after we initially meet her. She is dressed in the same outfit, but her hair is braided in this one, and she’s carrying a book. The dark shadow of her photographer can be seen on the wall next to her. As is the case in the first poem, this one raises more questions about the girl than provides answers and seems to hint at her being ill-suited for this place:

Lucinda’s thirst
lengthened out to a ruler
to measure the kitchen inch by inch
no one moved to wipe up the mess
no one said a single word

In an interview published in Tarpaulin Sky magazine, Fiset explains that her writing is oftentimes an unconscious process, one that “is capable of calling forth, translating, and transforming ‘news’ from the unconscious in relation to lived experience—what one witnesses externally as well as internally. When form and content become one a synthesis and integration have occurred that can shock us into a deeply satisfying crucial kind of knowing, a fierce recognition that, for me, often cannot be explained.”

By focusing her attention on the Saterstrom paintings, Fiset is forced to translate very specific lives and experiences which may seem somewhat counter to the unconscious approach she describes, and yet the poems that make up this collection reflect the synthesis of form and content that shock us into a fierce recognition. Just as we might see ourselves in the blurry images of a family photo, so, too, might we find something vaguely familiar in Fiset’s poems which, like whispers or snatches of overheard conversation, trigger our curiosity and memory. The strength of How It Was with Scotland is that the poet and the painter take us to places we think we remember but which are ultimately unknowable.

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Death, Women, and Dead Women: A Conversation between Cathy Ulrich and Lindsay Lerman

Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere (Clash Books), and Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You (Okay Donkey Press), recently talked writing, intent, and audience.

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Ulrich: My first question is (kind of an obvious one!): This novel focuses on a woman grieving her husband. What led you to write a book about this topic?

Lerman: Okay, so, what led me to write a book about a grieving woman? The simple answer is that I found a character I liked and she happened to be a woman whose life was pretty suddenly devoid of meaning. The more complicated answer is that I’ve always been fascinated by grief and how it suspends our ability to do the work of following social rules and norms. We just get consumed by it — it takes over — and overnight we can go from being someone who is always polite and mild-mannered and self-sacrificing to being someone who just can’t do it anymore, who wonders what all those niceties really do, what they’re for, what the cost of adhering to them might be. A grief story like the one I wrote also opens up questions about identity and meaning and purpose. It’s no accident that my book features a hetero (or presumably hetero) woman who no longer has the one thing good girls and women are supposed to have — a man — and that this fact results in her realizing that she no longer has scripts to follow. (I think this is compounded by the devastation and destruction of the natural world around her — the sense that we’re on the brink of something that is making all scripts suspect and possibly useless.) She tries to follow other scripts throughout the book, but they don’t seem to be working for her. She’s adrift. She has to ask herself why she has been who she’s been. Mourning and grieving are natural opportunities for this, and we can take them if we see them for what they are.

Now I want to ask you: what led you to writing about dead women and girls?

Ulrich: I love this answer — about how grief changes people and what society expects from women are really interesting kicking-off points for a story like this!

What led me to writing what I’ve been calling (for lack of a more clever name) the Murdered Ladies stories was basically this whole trope of “a woman’s death sets the plot in motion.” You see that in fiction a lot, and it’s a good trope, don’t get me wrong! Starting a story with a murder is a really powerful way to hook a reader and really delve into things like grief and crime and societal expectations. But a lot of things focus on the killer, whether it be finding the killer or understanding their motivations, and that, just, to me, isn’t interesting. I’ve never found killers interesting. They just take things away; they don’t create. I’m much more interested in creation, in finding lost things, in stories that have been left untold. So these stories are a way for me to do just that: find lost women, tell their stories, “create” them, as it were.

Your answer brought up an interesting point for me. In your book, Claire turns to two old friends, it seems, for comfort, but perhaps she is also looking for a way to become — again — the woman that society expects her to be. Do you think she completely understands her motivations here?

Lerman: I love that you thought of your book as an opportunity to “create” the murdered women who are often erased (or simply absent) in murder stories. In the book, I can feel how seriously you took them as individuals, as actual protagonists with complicated lives, not just plot devices. I tried to make sure the men in my book were taken seriously as more than mere plot points (to begin answering your question), but Claire needed to be the focus, so there was only so much space I could give them. (Funny to think that I use a dead man to set the plot in motion for my book.) I don’t think Claire fully understands what she’s doing when she turns to men in the book. Her life is suddenly devoid of meaning (or at least it seems this way to her), and it makes a kind of sense that she would turn to men to find meaning. It’s so complicated being constituted by others’ understandings of us. It can be positive — I can feel and understand that people think of me as kind and smart and self-sacrificing, and that can help me continually reshape myself to be those things (smart, kind, etc.). The darker side of that, especially for girls and women, is the possibility of only being “real” in relation to male desire. I think this is something that Claire slowly comes to understand throughout the book, but at the beginning, when she’s letting herself be drawn in by them, she doesn’t see it clearly, can’t articulate it, but I think she feels ill-at-ease about it.

Now that I’ve realized that I used a death to set the plot in motion (though my dead person doesn’t really disappear), I wonder if you were ever tempted to fall back on the conventions and write a few sections or chapters that featured the surviving loved ones or friends of the murdered ladies in bigger ways. Or did you always know you wanted to focus on the erased, the invisible, the dead? 

Ulrich: These stories were each written as stand-alone flash fiction pieces. Though some were intentionally written to be part of this collection — once I knew it was going to really exist — I still went in to every story thinking of it as its own separate thing. So each story has its own focus, unconnected with the others. Some do focus more on this or that person, whether it be a family member, or a girl at a frat party, or a queen, but I think (I hope!) that focus works in service of each piece on its own merits.

Your book, speaking of focus, really sticks to the three main characters: Claire, Andrew and Luke (and the specter of John that haunts them all). Other characters make appearances, but the focus stays with this trio. Had you ever considered enlarging the cast of characters, or did you always want this connection between them to be the spotlight of the book?

Lerman: I did have another character in the book, early on in the book’s life, but I ended up cutting him out. It felt too crowded with another life in the book. I realized it was best for the book to have a tight focus, for the narrative to have an almost bottled quality. I was kinda sad to let that character go — it sort of felt like I was killing him off, haha — but ultimately, just having the trio felt right.

I was re-reading some parts of your book today and thinking about place. My book has only just come out, but people are starting to notice the attention I pay to climate (and ecological catastrophe) in it, and although the desert — the place — is crucial, I think I understand the book to be kind of place-less. What about your book? There’s no clear “setting” for yours. Was this intentional? Is it a result of the book growing out of flash fiction?

Ulrich: These stories take place in all sorts of different locations. Some are technically set in Montana — one in particular is based on a real-life murder that happened in a nearby town — but “place” in these stories isn’t important because they really are things that could happen anywhere. I do think of them, though, as being American murders, if that makes sense. I keep thinking of writing a “murdered tourist” story and having it set elsewhere, but I haven’t found the words for it yet.

I don’t really focus on place much in any of my writing. I’ve lived in Montana my whole life, but I love traveling, and I’ve never felt as connected to the land as I know some of my fellow Montanans do. So for my writing, I think, connecting it to “place” would be really unnatural, because I don’t feel that connection myself!

And I was planning to follow up with the climate catastrophe aspect of your book — I love how the characters go on like usual, because what else can you do, but sometimes they stop and think about the awful situation they are in. How dire is the situation for them? 

Lerman: What a complex question! I think the characters in my book don’t know how dire the situation is for them, like the rest of us. They let themselves believe they’ll keep being as lucky as they’ve been. (They can still afford to eat, they have roofs over their heads, and though they know it likely won’t last forever, they don’t let themselves really KNOW this.) This echoes what we see happening now. Those in power have no reason to believe they’ll be forced to go without anything, those of us barely managing to hang on know we might have to go without, maybe even soon, but we don’t know how to convince those in power to do something about it, and the many who are forced to go without (food, shelter, health care, safety) are pushed aside. We are really resilient creatures. We can carry on like normal in the worst of circumstances. This is both a tremendous strength and a devastating, terrible weakness.

I’d like to ask you kind of a meta question, if you’re up for it. I can think of a lot of people I’d like to give your book to, people who’ve never stopped to ask why they are offered the stories they’re offered — stories in which the women and girls are murdered and disappeared and otherwise tossed aside — and I wonder what they would think of your book. Are there people that you hope your book reaches? People who you hope will find it meaningful or challenging?

Ulrich: This is a great question, and I’m not sure I can answer it without getting myself in trouble! I can think of, specifically, a person in my family who tends to blame women when they have been victimized (“if she hadn’t been wearing that,” “in my day, girls didn’t go to bars alone,” “why did she get in the car with him,” etc.) who could really benefit from reading these stories, but 1) they won’t read them; 2) even if they did, they’d miss the point anyway. So I would love for my book to reach people like that and get them thinking, but … I don’t know that it would.

And to turn that point back on you — Claire, I’ve seen you mention in interviews, has really bought into that “disappearing into a relationship” standard. Are there people you would like to have read your book and take a second look at themselves and their ideas on women and relationships?

Lerman: It’s a rough truth, I think, that the people who might need access to a work of feminist art (to really broadly categorize what we “do” in our writing) might be some of the least likely to have access to it. Next week I have a meeting with a translator who has expressed interest in translating my book into Turkish, which is really exciting (I used to live in Turkey), but also deeply depressing. Turkey has atrocious female literacy rates. The people who might need a book (and not just my book — any book) to help them think through the conditions of their existence simply cannot read them. But that said, I worked hard to make my book feel accessible and approachable, despite the heaviness. And it was important to me that it reflected real life for more than just the bourgeoisie, though certainly some of the characters in the book might be approaching petit-bourgeoisie status. I hoped that its brevity might attract some on-the-fence readers who could be lured into thinking about identity, ecological catastrophe, feminism, etc., even if they don’t typically find themselves thinking about those things. All I can really say is that I hope people who sit with it find it meaningful in some way. 

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A Conversation with Poet and Translator Deborah Woodard

Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star, 2006) Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks, including Hunter Mnemonics (hemel press, 2008), which was illustrated by artist Heide Hinrichs. Her poetry has appeared in Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013), Filter, Handsome, Gargoyle, Shake the Tree, Zoland Poetry, and elsewhere. She has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from Italian in The Dragonfly, A Selection of Poems: 1953-1981(Chelsea Editions, 2009), Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015) and Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018). Deborah teaches at Hugo House in Seattle.

In this interview, Deborah Woodard discusses her recent translation of Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary, a collection of the Italian poet’s early experiments in prose, as well as her own practice of poetry that often engages in oblique forms of translation.

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In Obtuse Diary, Amelia Rosselli refers to clarity as “a fake lake.” For me, the term “obtuse” conjures high school geometry, and I picture an angle moving toward the horizontal. The common use of the adjective is dull or slow, so the very idea of an obtuse diary is curious. How do you understand Rosselli’s use of the term?

The persona Rosselli develops in Obtuse Diary is obtuse, or slow-witted, in the sense that her development has been delayed by personal trauma that also had a distinctly public side. Rosselli was born in exile in Paris in 1930 to anti-fascist activist parents, Marion Cave (British) and Carlo Rosselli (Italian) who had fled Mussolini’s Italy. In 1937, her father and her uncle (Nello Rosselli) were assassinated by Mussolini’s operatives. Although Amelia’s time in Larchmont, New York, where Marion and her children eventually found refuge for the duration of the war, was stable and even happy, the trauma of her father’s death was a wound that never healed. When she settled in Italy after the war, first in Florence and then permanently in Rome, Rosselli was starting from scratch. She was the daughter and niece of heroes of the resistance, but she was also a rather isolated young woman, the ugly duckling who was, in truth, the swan.

In my view, Rosselli’s obtuseness was her way of resisting a post-war world that’s broken, but also shallow and materialistic. Coming up against these corrupt veneers renders her dim. “Clarity is a fake lake.” No way to see oneself clear through this mess. So instead, she envelops herself in protective dullness, or numbness. At the same time, she comprehends all too clearly: “She didn’t want to know that she was the target of many, and of the laughter of so many: she was unable to discern in the silence of other hidden ones a too-real furor of her own.”

You’ve been translating Rosselli’s poetry over the course of many years. What draws you to her work, and to the practice of translation? Your own work as a poet is often engaged in oblique forms of translation, moving among different discourse worlds or inhabiting borrowed texts.

Yes, I agree that I’ve always tended toward oblique forms of translation in my own work. That’s a really good insight, Eva. I feel fortunate that I also was able to be an actual translator, thanks to Rosselli. I stumbled upon her work, more or less by accident. I pulled her first collection, Variazioni belliche (War Variations) from a bundle of books a friend sent me from Italy, discards from her own library, that I’d stowed in a sideboard. I was looking for a translation project. Initially, I put the book back under the sideboard, but then I gave it a second look, and felt drawn to its extreme hermeticism. What made the poetry difficult, was also its allure. I never solved the mystery of Rosselli’s verse, and so I never moved on from translating her. Roberta Antognini and I have recently started work on Documento, Rosselli’s longest collection. After that, who knows?

Your most recent book of poems, No Finis; Triangle Testimonies, 1911, uses transcripts of the trial in which Triangle Shirtwaist owners were ultimately acquitted of murder. Your focus is on the aggressive cross-examination of workers, most of whom were young women who were not native speakers of English.

Each poem is a set of interrogations, fixated on details of doors and windows, keys and locks, a relentless questioning broken only by the workers’ own muddled recall of trauma. The poems are quite moving, the difficulty of speaking contrasted with the defense attorney’s insistence on answers. What drew you to evoke this horrific event, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire that killed 146 workers, from the standpoint of the trial?

I’d been trying to write about the American labor movement. My mother had worked as a labor organizer, and both my parents were socialists. I’m still trying to figure out the labor book, if, indeed, it’s a single collection. I mean, I say American labor, but part of what I’ve written so far takes place in Denmark, as I was attempting to collage and reconstitute an unfinished manuscript on economics by my father. The juiciest bits for my purposes took place in Denmark, oddly enough. Anyway, I was always somewhat aware of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, as a touchstone, and I started reading about it. Then, in 2011, I was in New York City—actually, for a Rosselli conference—and I went to NYU’s centennial exhibit on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. It was held on the first floor of the Brown Building, the site of the fire. At that exhibit, I learned of Cornell’s online archives of the fire, including the transcript of the trial of the factory owners. I considered other ways to address the tragedy—but the transcript pulled me in, and I ended up focusing on that. Then, with illustrations added by John Burgess, the sequence became a book. The poems, or playlets, as I think of them, seem to be a good length for bookstore and pop-up performances.

The trial revolves around a locked door and whether or not a key was hung beside it. Hence, the focus on locks and keys. I see the witnesses as empowered, despite the manipulations of Max Steuer, the defense attorney—himself an immigrant, though from an earlier wave of migration—who was able to adroitly switch up and manipulate linguistic registers. Though not likely a conscious strategy, and certainly erratic in nature, the witnesses’ linguistic glitches and digressions become a mode of resistance. They can delay answering questions and, at times, avoid them altogether. They aren’t reliable or helpful witnesses, as they’re befuddled (obtuse, like Rosselli’s narrator). My hope is that the playlet-poems can be performed in more than one way, and that the witnesses can win some of the time.

Borrowed Tales is a collection of prose poems that, while pilfering from diverse sources, including McGuffey Readers, case histories, biographies, and art installations, are not retellings but new and strange narratives.

I’d love to hear how you work with sources, using the sequence Gordon and Martha as an example. In this work, Gordon and Martha are siblings, and Martha is a quite daring graffiti artist. It’s a marvelous sequence—dizzying and inventive in its conjuring of Martha’s creative flamboyance and her “iridescent ambivalence.”

The names of your characters, Gordon and Martha, are nods to the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, known for his practice of removing sections from buildings slated for demolition, and documenting his interventions in photographs and films. Your work, though, is not about the artist, although images of abandoned buildings abound as we follow Martha marking space: her “arrows directed the eye, embedded themselves in sinking doorways.”

I am trying to figure the relation between Matta-Clark and your fictional graffiti artist Martha, and I am tempted to make a connection between Matta-Clark’s cuts and the graffiti artist’s ‘burning’ of walls – or between cutting and tagging. (“Tags covered what they did not own.”) Am I overreaching? How did you arrive at the character of Martha?

Well, though this wasn’t the plan, Borrowed Tales teems with children and young adults. Even Hamlet and Ophelia are probably rather young. Gordon and Martha radiate a light-hearted sunny energy, despite their trafficking in the grimy art of graffiti and Martha becoming a vampire at the end of the sequence. (I had a dream about vampires on the subway.) Gordon and Martha speak to my positive feelings about the brother and sister bond. There’s great loyalty between them, and I love it when Gordon says that “He knew his sister Martha was a genius.” Martha is the prime mover and principal artist and Gordon readily accepts this.

Glad that you like “iridescent ambivalence,” and please do overreach a bit when it comes to Matta-Clark and his techniques! I had already settled on the name “Martha” as I’d had a dream about one of my godson’s younger sisters, Martha, being pushed in her carriage over a little bridge, in, perhaps, Central Park. Given that dream, when I scissored apart “Gordon” and “Matta,” “Matta” was destined to become Martha. Under other circumstances, those syllables could have turned into, say, Mattie. But the die was cast. I must say that it was odd to learn, down the road, that Gordon Matta-Clark had a twin brother.

In the cosmology of Borrowed Tales, Gordon and Martha are the children of a woman named Lorna. I based Lorna on an actual person, a student of my father’s at Goddard College and, later, my sometimes babysitter. Lorna had given up a baby for adoption. After the death of my mother when I was ten, I moved to New York with my brother, to live with my father and stepmother. Lorna was in New York, working as a waitress. She brought me packets of Saltines from the diner where she worked. I felt that we had each suffered a loss, and that these losses couldn’t be talked about. They were taboo. I always wondered what happened to Lorna, and so she landed her own section in Borrowed Tales. She has given up Gordon but appears to be raising Martha. Somehow, Martha finds Gordon and they form an allegiance, but they never speak of Lorna, their mother. That’s taboo, though we don’t know why. What Gordon and Martha have in common beyond their sibling status is their penchant for creating and inhabiting imaginary worlds. They do so with considerable panache.

There are many wonderful moments in “Gordon and Martha,” but I’d like to ask you about one particular passage. At a certain point in Martha’s evolution as a graffiti artist, she ceases to tag. You write:

Martha’s early tags had influenced the hands of other writers. The tags were like cups of tea made up ahead of time that had grown cold.

The image of pouring tea—so cozy, domestic, a small gesture—is in stark contrast to the practice of tagging, often done in harrowing circumstances, and so central to the graffiti artist’s identity.

Martha seems to have come to the limits of what she could accomplish with tagging. So she turns exclusively to burners, or murals. As for the tea, it’s an odd image, I agree. It was probably my tea, to be honest, as, when one cuts images and notation into a poem, who knows what will persist. Such as a cup of tea grown cold. However, if I’d tried to think about what a young graffiti artist’s beverage of choice might be, it could have been cliché. Red Bull? Let me digress by saying that I love seeing hardboiled detectives in U.K. police procedurals put up the kettle for tea.

Graffiti art is also considered defacement and “bad” writing, so this brings me to your collection Plato’s Bad Horse. The book’s title alludes to Plato’s image of the soul as a charioteer trying to steer a pair of horses, one sensible and one impulsive.

The title poem raises the question of unreliable or ill-formed memories: “My memories have become too burred / to be of use, like horses that cannot be ridden.” In a later section of the book, you reflect on “mnemata-driven recitations,” spurred by the discovery, after your father’s death, of a manuscript in which he discusses memory devices and argues that they played a role in the writing of the gospels. You write: “Poems that had remained in draft for more than a decade, stalled by the gaps in my memory, began to emerge as I opened myself up to the repetition and variation of a few key images.” 

I am fascinated by this attempt to transform memory fragments into memory devices. I’d love to hear about your process of working with memories – described as “useless” in the title poem but in later poems appear and reappear as support beams.

In the following passage, you refer to the search for mnemata:

I had my own notes: guideposts, ditches of dark water in the snow.That day, I was going to buy some blue teal silk,so perhaps the mnemata could be bolts of cloth as well,……or in the basement,the wicker basket of gray clothespins….

The clothespins took on the gray of temple pigeons.  

Did your exploration of mnemata-driven structuring devices in Plato’s Bad Horse influence later poems? I’m thinking, for example, of your repetition and re-purposing of images in Borrowed Tales.

As a collection, Plato’s Bad Horse includes older ways of composing while ushering in the new. You’re focusing in on the most important aspect of the collection for me—namely, the start of collage in my practice.

My father, a professor of psychology and the son of a Presbyterian minister, had been writing a book about the gospels for some time. I learned what a book meant emotionally and materially through his living within the promise of his evolving work, a psychological study that wove together what he’d learned as a child with what he’d dedicated himself to as an adult. After his death, I kept rereading his unfinished manuscript. However, though my father wrote quite lucidly and directly, I found it hard to track the text, no matter how many times I read it. This went on for a number of years. It was quite frustrating.

What did sink in for me was that a mnemonic was a memory device. It could have been something like beads on a string that a story teller would finger, rather like rosary beads, in order to jog his memory, or he could click his fingernails together, or something like that (reminiscent of what people are doing at poetry readings these days!). I hypothesized that anything could function as a memory device: as a series of guideposts.

Consequently, I took up a pair of scissors, photocopied my worksheets so as not to destroy the originals, and put everything through a simple slice-and-dice collage process that I’d learned from the late Kathleen Fraser, with whom I studied for a brief but influential time at a writing conference in Santa Cruz.

Here’s the exercise I learned from Fraser. Take a piece of writing, generally typed, fold it in half and then scissor down the central fold and between the lines. Turn over all the half lines, so you can’t read them. They’ll resemble the little strips of paper one pulls from fortune cookies. Next, take a new sheet of paper and, selecting two half lines at random, tape them together to form a new line. Continue until all the half lines are taped to the paper. Then type up your new piece. Voila!

I remember Kathleen Fraser saying that she wanted to go home and put all the poems of hers she’d “never liked” through this process. This is what I did with my drafts. Paradoxically, splintering the drafts enabled ideas to cohere and psychic material to take more fully embodied form. I’m so grateful to my students, my second teachers, in respect to collage. Unbidden, they started revising their cut-ups, carefully teasing out narrative, shaping lines, and refining imagery. Revision was the missing link.

The mnemonics in the latter half of Plato’s Bad Horse and all of Borrowed Tales were created through this collage plus extensive revision. I also used it to compress and augment the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire trial transcript; though I didn’t cut lines in half, I added in my own material more sparingly, and I often restored narrative sequences. One thing that I haven’t mentioned in regard to this practice is that it tends to shorten and tighten texts. When I type up a worksheet of taped half lines, I select from it, going fairly quickly so as not to overthink. The trial runs to hundreds of pages, so condensing was key.

My last question is about your poem “Ghismonda in Calabria: A Tentative Libretto.” Ghismonda is a figure from Boccaccio’s Decameron, but you’ve placed your characters, including a reader and a translator, in contemporary Calabria. The narrator says, “Translation, my mind wandered, was not / that different from the stop-start of the Metro.” In this poem, are you reflecting on your own experience as a translator of Italian? A frequently quoted line from George Steiner is “Every language is a world.” How has your experience of Italian shaped your own creative work in English?

Overall, translating Rosselli has made me a more experimental poet. She writes in Hospital Series: “Life is a vast experiment for some, too /void the earth the whole into its knees / piercing lances and persuaded anecdotes, I sow you / world clasped by the laurel.” Lances are pierced and anecdotes persuaded. This opens up possibilities right there. Rosselli’s oddities have a certain heft. In one of my mnemonic poems in Plato’s Bad Horse, I wrote: “Some haystack it was, munching hay.” It never occurred to me before, but that line may be indebted to Rosselli’s. Both her lines and my own here give me a certain boost, though I can’t really tell you why.

Yes, I took a stab at writing about translating in “Ghismonda in Calabria.” The poem—which is not collaged, but which works with fragments found in my worksheets as another approach to accepting fragmentation—translates Boccaccio’s Ghismonda into a modern Ghismonda, or “G.” I was, in fact, helping the actual G (not her real initial) with a translation of an article. It was so much fun working with her in her airy study in Piazza di Bologna (which is in Rome, not Calabria. The place names make the poem challenging to track, I admit). I hadn’t been translating all that long at the time. To be able to work with “G” to bring a few paragraphs into focus in English did open up a world to me. As we were working, G’s daughter, darted into the room to model a series of bathing suits: “When we’re done, we crack the blinds, / we shift our chairs. We watch her daughter’s / rapid-fire change of bathing suits.” The translator is always auditioning new garb, seeking new ways to tweak the target language and to let the original text shine forth.

Rosselli is an incredible mentor. She can make a bank shot and yet somehow she is completely lucid, too. And she can write about the same themes over and over again without getting stale. How does she accomplish this? These are the questions that keep me translating her.

Degrees of Difficulty: An Interview with Julie Justicz

Jan English Leary: I met Julie in 2011 in a novel workshop we both attended and since then we have continued to exchange manuscripts. I learned that years earlier we’d just missed overlapping at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we both received MFAs. Over these past years, I have watched this novel grow and deepen. Julie is a brave writer, who throws out pages I would be proud to claim as mine, someone who digs deep, always challenging herself to find rich insights, compelling situations, and beautiful language. Her work is both dynamically plotted and psychologically complex, her characters appealing yet flawed, utterly believable. I am thrilled that her beautiful novel is at last coming out. It is all the more rich for the long gestation.

Your novel brings to mind the Tolstoy line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This book is about a family coping with the very specific challenge of a disabled child and also about how all parents struggle to raise children and allow them to grow up and individuate. I know that you originally wanted to focus on the four humors of the blood: air, fire, earth, water as indicators of personality. How did this concept inform your novel?

Julie Justicz: Jan, thanks so much for your kind introduction here. Our friendship, as you note, started in a novel workshop in 2011 and has continued over the past eight years in our own small writing group. Most of our time together has been spent discussing manuscripts and/yet I feel so close to you! In sharing our writing—especially early work that is vulnerable and raw–we serve a part of our soul. Thanks for being a caring and smart editor and a trusted friend. And thanks for doing this interview.

The early version of my novel was, as you remember, structured around the Four Humors—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—which according to Hippocrates and his heirs governed a person’s temperament—sanguine (upbeat, adventurous), phlegmatic (calm and unassuming), melancholic (quiet, depressive), and choleric (angry), depending on the balance/imbalance of humors. I’d started my novel in the first-person perspective of Ivy, the only daughter and oldest child in the Novotny family. But after writing several chapters in her voice, I found she came off rather angry, a bit brash and dismissive of her family. I wondered about her parents, her brothers . . . how would their experiences differ from Ivy’s? So, I experimented with the humors: that is, I wrote through four point of view characters, each dominated by a particular humor. That helped me complicate and then complete the story. In the end, I kept the four different voices—two parents and two kids—but tossed out the Four Humors as a structuring tool; they’d become unnecessary scaffolding by the time I finished the novel.

Leary: Your novel has four points of view: the two parents, Perry and Caroline, and two of their children, Ivy and Hugo. You did a great job of balancing the points of view, of making the novel focus on a family’s response to having a child with severe developmental issues. Was it hard to find that balance? Was one point of view harder to find and to maintain? Did one character fight to take over?

Justicz: I wrote in Ivy’s first-person perspective in the beginning; I had several chapters in her voice before I tried any other point of view. So, it’s probably understandable that she dominated the narrative through three or four drafts of the novel. I had to push her back, toss out some of her scenes, even a few chapters, and then rewrite her sections in a third-person perspective to get the balance I was seeking. Perry, the father, came quickly; I understood his “game face on and best foot forward” attitude. Caroline, the mother, and Hugo, the middle child, were harder for me to capture and to give full expression. I needed to find a way to show the mother’s melancholia, thwarted career desires, suppressed anger and still make her sympathetic. I felt judgmental about her and I had to go deeper into her character to find empathy and fully humanize her. And Hugo remained a cipher through many rewrites—the quiet middle child, not rocking the boat, perhaps a little too perfect to be true? How then to make him real? That took some time.

Leary: There are four points of view but five major characters. Benjamin, the youngest child, being almost completely non-verbal, appears on the page but doesn’t have a point of view. You do a beautiful job of describing him, giving him humanity and beauty. What were the challenges of creating this character?

Justicz: Benjamin, a boy born with profound disabilities, only makes one sound—“guh,”—which he uses to communicate with his family. I experimented with finding a narrative voice for him but what I wrote seemed too lyrical and didn’t jibe with his lived experience. Nonetheless, wordless Ben is the heart of his family and the needle in the heart of his family. I tried to show his needs, idiosyncrasies, desires; he is someone who literally jumps for joy, screams with delight, and gets frustrated when he cannot share his excitement or express his anger. He also feels happiest when he is with his beloved brother, Hugo. Because he doesn’t speak, I had to use Ben’s family–the four point of view narrators–to reveal his complexity. Ben’s parents and siblings live with him, care for him, and love him. They also have the responsibility of finding their own way in life, fulfilling their wants and needs and dreams, apart from Ben. If they can. What does this cost?

Leary: Having seen earlier drafts of your novel, I know that you wrote and then discarded some really wonderful material. I admire that nerve to shed what is both beautifully written and compelling. Is your process generally one of writing big and cutting back or was that particularly true of this novel?

Justicz: Because this is my first novel, I was learning a great deal as I wrote—through trial and a lot of error. I didn’t know anything about structure—I was putting ink on paper and persevering. I needed a lot of material to make a book and I plugged away. Turns out that many of the pages did not do much to advance the story. But I didn’t know what story I was telling—and what I could chuck out—until I reached the end. I also had the privilege of working with a smart editor, Marc Estrin at Fomite, who told me several times to rework the final section of the novel. I kept offering him minor changes that were not enough. Keep at it, he’d say. When I finally lopped off the last 100 pages and rewrote the ending entirely, I had what I needed.

Leary: I love the title Degrees of Difficulty. Everyone in that family faces a very specific level of difficulty. I also know that you considered other titles. How did you come to choose this one?

Justicz: I decided on Degrees of Difficulty after living with another title for several years. My editor pushed me to find a new title that referenced diving and somehow referenced the family. “Degree of difficulty” refers to a rating scale of the complexity of an athlete’s maneuver. Hugo is a champion diver, who channels his emotions into a strict and rigorous training regimen. So, the title is a direct reference to his sport and his physical achievement. The title is also a play on words, referring to the various struggles that every member of the Novotny family encounters. I like the notion that a degree of difficulty in athletics—a quantitative rating—is always multiplied by another number . . . a qualitative assessment of performance. So how hard are the various challenges each family member faces—and how do they manage these challenges? With humor? With anger? With grace?

Leary: Not to dwell on the influence of your own life, but I know that there are similarities to your family of origin, that you had a brother with disabilities. What are the challenges of writing fiction that is based, in part, on your family? Did you feel that the desire to tell a good story competed with a need to get the facts straight? How did you free yourself to write about people you know? Is it in the act of embellishing that you find the freedom or are you anchored by the kernel of truth?

Justicz: Wow, there are so many thought-provoking questions you’ve raised here. Yes, the novel had its roots in my family of origin. My fictional Ben has the same disabilities as my youngest brother Robert, who was born with partial monosomy 21. One of the first stories I wrote for my MFA program was about a young boy with disabilities and his relationship with two siblings. I tapped into some of my own feelings as a sibling—namely a profound sense of family loyalty, an incredibly deep and abiding love for my disabled brother, and, to be honest, a good deal of resentment, too. The resentment shone brightest in that story. Coming back to it years later as a starting point for my novel, I realized that I would need to add the voices of the other family members to give the story more breathing room.

Apart from Ben—who was based on Robert, the other characters in the novel are amalgamations. I used personal experiences and emotions to feed the fiction, if that makes sense. I had to give myself permission to embellish, exaggerate, make things up—and I had to ask my family to try to understand that my writing is not about recreating our experience or laying blame; it’s about me exploring the emotional truth that I carry, that may be nothing like their truth. What’s that saying? All of it is true; none of it happened.

Leary: How did you decide to have diving be a major activity for Hugo? And when did you land on the idea that Ivy would become an endocrinologist? You do a great job of showing people at work, a builder, an academic, a physician, a lifeguard. What is the importance, for you, of showing work in a character’s life?

Justicz: I knew I wanted Hugo to be an incredibly skilled athlete whose physical appearance would differ dramatically from Ben’s. I’m not sure why I settled on diving except that I swam in high school and I remember being fixated by the incredible feats of our divers. We swimmers were all about endurance, a group of knuckleheads packed into six lanes and churning out lap after lap after lap while staring at the black line. The divers, though, were athletes and artists.

You asked about jobs. I suppose I wanted/needed each of my characters to have a gravitational pull away from homelife. I made Ivy a reproductive endocrinologist because I liked how it would highlight her reluctance to have children of her own even as she spent every minute of her day helping other people conceive. For Caroline and Perry, I found jobs that were, I suppose, inapposite—one deeply cerebral, one much more physical. I analyzed late Shakespearean plays for Caroline and explored new home construction for Perry. That part of writing fiction is fun for me. . .it allows for digression and exploration and yes, procrastination.

Leary: Could you talk about what you’re working on now?

Justicz: A second novel—I’m thinking of calling it the The Time-traveling Crawdad’s Wife.

Change: Wisdom from the Acients—and from Chinese Teens

Dr. Martha Franks, professor at St. John’s College, taught Western historical literature abroad to Chinese high school students, from 2011-2014, in a course with the theme of ‘change.’

She worked through a Socratic method of engaging the students in conversation and carrying out the entire semester through class discussions. This was somewhat of a challenge as the students in her classroom were not used to speaking up in class. She also simultaneously educated herself by reading several classic works from Chinese history, so she was learning cross-culturally along with the students.

Here’s my interview with Dr. Franks about her experience.

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Cristina Deptula: What is St. John’s College’s educational philosophy? Why does it focus on discussions and questions? What sorts of academic programs is it known for? 

Martha C. Franks: St. John’s College believes that we learn by talking together about the great creative works of the human spirit. The college is committed to the idea that classic original texts offer foundational insights about ourselves and our society and that students should form their own opinions of these works rather than being told by textbooks and lectures what to think about them. Discussions and questions are the way to enter these works because the conversation among human ideas is not something to absorb from a distance – it should be joined with the passionate interest the comes from listening and responding to the original voices of inspired minds. Having joined the conversation that brought us to where we are, students can contribute with confidence to the further conversations that are likely to shape our future.

St. John’s has only one program of teaching; that is, discussions about great works. Under this broad program, undergraduates concentrate on the great books of the Western world. There are two graduate programs at the College. One, the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, looks at the same works as the undergraduate program, while another, the Eastern Classics program, takes the St. John’s approach toward classics of China, India and Japan. Non-degree offerings in the summer offer occasions to apply the St. John’s approach in looking at film, fine art, music (including opera) and at books that have not always been recognized as part of the canon, but may deserve such recognition.

The St. John’s College program grew from radical criticism of the structure of liberal arts education in the early 20th century. The concerns that the College sought to address then are perhaps even more relevant today, when liberal arts education is challenged by exclusively STEM-based or narrow vocational education. Anyone who wishes to learn more about the St. John’s program can, of course, consult the College’s website.

CD: If you could do the semester in China over again, what would you change? 

MCF: Not much. I might have a few different choices of exactly what books to read. The only real difference is that, if I were to return, I would be able to show more confidence that an approach that I loved myself was something that Chinese students would also love. Conversation is a human thing. It’s how many of us learn best. It was wonderful to be part of a conversation that, while sometimes surprising because of the different backgrounds of the participants, was like all serious conversation in the delight of exchanging ideas.

CD: Could you describe classroom etiquette and culture in China vs. the USA (what you’ve experienced and where you teach)? 

MCF: Chinese students were not used to talking in class. They had a hard time believing that I genuinely wanted to hear what they had to say. Although they did not complain, they also doubted that expressing their ideas would lead to learning. It took some time before they entered into conversation without being self-conscious. Once that began to happen, however, they were quick to feel the curiosity and joy of their minds at work, taking them places that they could only go on their own. It was lovely to see. American students sometimes come at conversation from the opposite direction. They are familiar with raising their voices but must get used to the skill of listening to responses and building on them. After a while together, though, I did not see a difference in the conversations that developed in China and America.

CD: What did the students relate to the most in the books you all read, and what confused them the most? 

MCF: The students were quick to feel and empathize with human beings in the situations that the great books address—war, matters of friendship, loyalty and love, the search for justice and the endurance of pain. They were deeply interested in how to understand science as a human endeavor—what difference do science and technology make in the experience of living a life?

The most puzzling topic for Chinese students was religion. They did not know what to make of struggles over religious doctrine. That conversation will take some work.

CD: Should we teach a traditional canon? What would a ‘global literary canon’ look like? Who would decide what’s in the global canon, and how would they make those decisions? 

MCF: The experiment of St. John’s College’s great books program, which has been going on for almost eighty years, has shown that an education based on conversations around great works of the human spirit can open and free minds, as well as being amazingly fun. It’s a harder question to try to identify exactly which books belong on a great books list. A few are always at the center of a Western canon—Homer, Euclid, Plato, Shakespeare—but most of the rest have their advocates and opponents. Conversation about that list is always going on and the list changes with different sensibilities, especially as one comes to more recent works. It has been wonderful to be part of the evolution of the St. John’s list to include the voices of women and minorities speaking to the human experience from points of view that were for too long too often missing from the conversation. When a global list comes about the conversation will grow again. The dream is to include all points of view so that humanity is fully heard from.

CD: How are our societies influenced by our culture’s foundational literature, even when many of us haven’t read our traditional books? 

MCF: Attitudes and ideas fill the air we breathe, whether we are aware of them or not. For example, in America it seems obvious that the goal of society is to promote freedom. That attitude didn’t come from nowhere. It was proposed and articulated by particular people—John Stuart Mill, for one – who were contributing new ideas to a conversation about human purposes. For many centuries the participants in that conversation had seemed to agree that the goal of society was not to promote freedom but to uphold virtue and order even at the cost of freedom. We understand our present debates between liberals and conservatives if we have in mind the earlier conversation that shaped our shared traditions. Only then can we see what has been at stake in that clash of ideas and form a personal opinion about why we have chosen as we have.

In cultures with different traditional conversations the focus on freedom that Americans take for granted looks different and can seem dangerous, even though the impulse toward freedom is something that is present in every human community and is not strange to Eastern thinkers. That situation is another reason why working to create a single, global conversation is so important. Attitudes and ideas that have been unconsciously absorbed and never examined can result in misunderstandings and distrust, whereas listening to each other’s conversations can show how the same human problems are always present. We must work to understand our own foundational ideas better, which will make it possible to feel the human reasonableness of another culture’s foundational ideas.

CD: Did you think that Chinese society was influenced by their foundational books? More so than the USA? What surprised you the most about their foundational works? 

MCF: Yes, I believe that Chinese society has been influenced by its foundational books. Students are taught to read Tang era poetry and are aware, but often not really familiar with, classical authors such as Kongzi (Confucius) and Mengzi (Mencius). However, China’s relation to its own literary tradition is an especially interesting case because of the overlay of the Western ideology of Marxism. Nevertheless, as China grows cautiously away from a Marxist economy, it has been developing what it calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Those “Chinese characteristics” are not defined but they must be related to China’s pride in its five-thousand-year history of civilization, a pride that is deeper than any political dogma. Confucius has been increasingly re-established and celebrated in China, with his emphasis on ritual and humaneness. No doubt there will be hesitations along the way, but I believe that China will find its way into a modern, uniquely Chinese re-assertion of Confucian humaneness that will be in conversation with the Western notion of the humanities.

It’s hard to say which culture is more influenced by its foundational works—that would be a lifetime’s study. If there is truth in the sketch I have offered here, that the canon of Western culture has developed into a focus on freedom, whereas Eastern culture has more often emphasized virtue and order, then both are pointing to fundamental human impulses that will continue to converse in all and each of us.

What surprised me most in studying Eastern classics was recognizing this struggle that I had seen in the Western canon too between the desire and need for freedom, especially in the mind, and the necessity of discipline. It’s a human problem and we can help each other with it.

CD: What sorts of ancient Western concepts did the Chinese students relate to, and which were mystifying to them? 

MCF: The students related to all matters of our common humanity, which was wonderful for all of us. It was great to feel that we were people together, trying to figure out how to live in this bewildering world. We could converse and understand each other.

Some of our cultural prejudices were different. In America, there is a saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”  In the East, there is a saying “it is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered.” So the students were more reluctant to talk than their American counterparts (although some of this was due to second language issues), and disliked disagreement more.

Religion was mystifying to them.  They had no experience of it and did not know how to understand what it was in the West.  When we read the Iliad they wondered if the gods of Greece were what religion still looked like.  When we tried to read some of the texts of early Christianity they were simply bewildered and did not talk at all.

CD: What would you say you learned from Chinese culture and history? What do they emphasize that the Western world could learn from? 

MCF: As I gave my Chinese students Western classics to read, I also read Eastern classics as a way of empathizing from the other direction with their exploration of an entirely different culture. The picture in China is complicated, in that Marxism is a Western idea, and the desire to catch up with the West technologically is a powerful force in China, which means that Western ideas can generate a mix of desire and resentment.  Many of my students did not know very much about their own cultural past, although they were proud of China’s five thousand years of civilization.

The chief thing that I learned, or at least meditated on a great deal, was this picture of Chinese identity arising somehow from those five thousand years, even though governments and cultural sensibilities evolved and changed enormously in that length of time. It is a vision of identity that has less to do with particular ideals and ideologies, and more to do with a sense of living within deep time.

I also came to appreciate and admire the combination of delicacy and strength in Chinese art and poetry. Classic Eastern texts like The Dream of the Red Chamber are gentle and sensitive to a degree that a person can feel lost in fragile beauty.  The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by contrast, is a warrior tale of relentless war, although it too contains moments of gentleness and sensitivity. I think the West, and perhaps all of us humans, could spend more time seeing beauty.

CD: What makes a literary work a classic? Why should we still teach the traditional canon? What about efforts to update or diversify it?

MCF: A classic work is one that can be read again and again and never be exhausted of meaning and engagement. As member of the faculty of St. John’s College, a school that reads great books as the center of the curriculum, I have read Homer and Plato and Augustine and Shakespeare many times. Every time I read these books I find more in them that speaks to my present life as well as to my mind and heart.

We need to teach these books because of that experience of how inexhaustible they are.  As I watch college students reading them, I am glad—sometimes thinking of my Chinese students—to offer them the proud, compelling gifts of their human heritage.

Greatness is certainly not confined to any particular culture, gender or any such false separations of the human experience. Sadly, the practical reality of the dominating tendency of our species is that women and many cultures were not allowed to produce the works of profound beauty that we needed from them. When such works are found, either in the past or the present, they become part of the canon.

CD: Do you feel that modern Chinese people are still influenced by the values in their classic literature? What about modern Americans, is our culture and literary world still influenced by thinking in the traditional Western ‘great books?’

MCF: Yes to both questions.  Even when people are not aware of how these deep structures to their culture influence them, the influence is there. Part of the value of reading the canon is to notice those influences working. A reader discovers in their original form as new ideas things that the reader realizes s/he had previously unthinkingly accepted as if obviously true. From that changed relationship with these ideas, the ideas can be reassessed.  The reader may continue to think them true, but now they feel true in a fuller, surer way.

In my class on American law in China, for example, we discussed the line in the American Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal….”  The conversation ranged fearlessly over questions of gender, creation and the definition of equality.  By the end of that conversation there was both agreement and disagreement, but both were articulated and could be considered in the open.  The conversation will undoubtedly continue for all of us.

CD: Would you recommend teaching abroad in China? Do you feel that you grew through the experience? 

MCF: Yes again. Physical distance and the change of culture has a similar effect of allowing a person to look carefully at themselves and notice the things that they might previously have accepted unthinkingly. Reading great books is like traveling to the past, while traveling more literally provides a different kind of dislocation. Both are valuable to understanding who you are.

CD: Could you teach this way in the US? How much freedom do teachers have in other countries to create and influence curriculum? 

MCF: I was very lucky to have gone to China exactly when I did, when there was a flowering of experiments in progressive education. We had a good deal of freedom to create a curriculum. Some of those experiments are still going on, but China, as I describe in my book, is conflicted about the value of a liberal arts education. For decades, China concentrated on a STEM education, that is, one focused on math and science. Recently that has changed, as some have argued that the liberal arts should be taught as a source of creativity for China. Others, however, are against that change, concerned that the liberal arts are foolish luxuries and can also be subversive politically.

The same conflict is going on in the United States, as many liberal arts colleges are struggling. It would be a shame if liberal arts declines in the United States just as it arises in China. For me, the liberal arts display the full range of what it is to be human.  We all need that.

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Dr. Martha Franks’ Books Without Borders is available here from Respondeo Publishing.

The Shock of the Election: Ruth Danon and Martin Ott in Conversation

Ruth Danon and Martin Ott engaged in a cross country conversation about their new books, which, quite coincidentally both took on the difficult period before during and after the 2016 election.

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Martin Ott: Ruth, I have now read Word Has It a couple of times and I marvel at the apparent simplicity of some of poems but the complexity of the layering in them and strands that weave throughout, along with the structure of the different sections of your book. Would you mind providing insights into your narrative strategy for Word Has It?

Ruth Danon: Thank you, Martin, for such a good question. I’m not sure that “strategy” is the word I would use. In my work almost everything is a discovery – that is to say I don’t plan in advance. Some of what happens is a consequence of the working method I’ve adopted in the last 5 years or so. I try to write a small piece every day. Sometimes I’ll write a whole series of little texts that connect. The “word” poems were like that. Sometimes a poem will lead me to something I want to pursue. That explains divination in the last section.

The narrative structure emerged after Yuyutsu Sharma, the Nepali poet, who scouts for Nirala, asked me for a book. I headed to my house in the country, with a pile of poems and no idea what to do with them. I sat on the enclosed porch with the printed-out poems, and tried to understand what I had. This was summer 2016 and we were in the anxious period before the election. Many poems had a kind of foreboding in them. Other poems had a focus on the domestic. Bird poems seemed connected to the foreboding poems. I began to feel that I had been tracking something, not fully aware of what I was doing. I made piles that suggested a narrative progression. Then came the shock of the election. I had been moving poems around and writing new ones, struggling with what they implied. I saw that I was tracking what it was like to live through events as they unfolded. The poems were pushing towards the violence that erupts in the two final pieces about the Pulse nightclub massacre.

RD: That leads me to my first question. In your book, Fake News Poems, you operate, it seems, from a similar need to bear witness to what has been happening during this terrible time in our history. I’m curious as to whether you determined your constraint ahead of time or whether you found yourself writing these poems based on headlines and then just kept at it. I’m also curious about your working method and the state of mind that governed the way you approached the problem of writing political poems without succumbing to polemic, one of the many aspects of this work that I admire.

MO: Fake News Poems was an idea I had in a time when I and many other writers were having difficulty finding their voices just before the inauguration of President Trump. The concept of 52 headlines, 52 weeks, 52 poems was something I had at the beginning but I was also hyper-aware that the book needed to cover a range of topics: social, cultural, scientific, and political in order to not be one note. I also integrated parts of my life and my own struggles even I tried to capture the temperature of our country. The book explores the subject of truth more broadly than Trump, and he pops in and out of poems like a mythical creature almost. The best political poetry is like the best poetry in that it explores topics and uncovers mysteries in the muck instead of trumpeting certainties. In these poems, I also learn a little bit about the world and myself.

MO: Both of us have been writing for a number of years with multiple books. What challenges do you face as a mid-career poet in a landscape that seems to reward and celebrate new poets and their work?

RD: I admire and envy the new voices coming along who garner so much attention. I also welcome the opportunity to reflect on my own long relationship to poetry. I cannot think of a time in my life when I did not write. But until recently it did not seem to me that it was a “career.” Writing was something I did. I couldn’t live happily without writing. But it wasn’t a “profession.” Teaching was my profession. I did it well and I loved the methods I created. Developing those method felt like creating a living poem.

In grad school a number of people had told me to take my writing “seriously.” That was hard for me. In so many ways I did everything wrong. My first book came out in 1990. Then no book for a long time. In 2000 I got very sick and when I emerged from 8 years of illness and complications I had a different attitude. I knew I had to take writing seriously. I finished what became Limitless Tiny Boat. Soon after I was asked by Nirala for a book. That’s how Word Has It came into being. So now what? The next book concerns me more than competition from the young. The writing is what’s important. The challenge is to figure out where to go next, how to write something that genuinely matters to me.

RD:I wanted to return to your previous answer and ask you what did you learn about yourself and the world by writing Fake News Poems?

MO: My previous three books of poetry were similarly constructed and I wanted to take a departure from the work I’d done before, to take a few risks and push myself outside of my comfort zone. After the 2016 election, I found it near-impossible to write poetry without the anger ebbing through my work and I decided to use Fake News Poems as a way to navigate through my emotions, to open myself to the possibilities of headlines, instead of seething for an entire year. My own personal life also came into focus as these dynamics leapt into these poems, almost unbidden.

Freed of my normal writing process, I also discovered that wordplay and humor that I readily deployed in my personal life was accessible in this book of poetry. One news headline, “It’s Time to Do Nothing About Guns” from The National Review, I decided to transform into a surreal homage to guns and gun culture, replacing our children with firearms. I also explored my love of reading and writing science fiction, imagining workers trapped in large vending machines of multinational corporations, the tragicomic impact of technology in our loves, and a robot president finding his place as an entertainer in a Disney theme park.

One thing I struggle with as a writer working outside of academia is community. I’ve tried hard to build long-distance relationships via social media and attending conferences such as AWP as a way to feel closer to writers I admire and their work.

MO: What has teaching done for you to connect you more closely with poetry?

RD: I’m taking the question in two ways. I think you’re asking how teaching and poetry intersect. You are also asking about the relationship between teaching and the world of poetry. In other words, has academia provided me with a writing community?

Teaching has taught me a lot about poetry. I first taught creative writing at a community college in Connecticut. My students were Vietnam Veterans and mothers on welfare. I gave them an assignment. They went home and did it and came back with the most awful cliché ridden productions. I was in despair. I was reading Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and I decided to have students write in class using the simple constraints Koch used with children. It worked! The students wrote wonderfully. I learned the usefulness of language and time as constraints. I’m now out of academia (a forced exit) and teaching completely on my own terms. I can focus on what interests me. Lately I’ve been thinking about lineation and its relationship to meaning. I recently re-discovered the brilliance of Robert Frost’s poetry. I hadn’t studied him since graduate school and never focused on the tricks he plays with line breaks and caesura. Teaching takes me outside of my usual paths of literary influence.

About community. Whatever community I have has come outside of academia, often through private teaching, informal writing groups, or social media. When my NYU job ended I had the good fortune of moving to Beacon, where community seems a bit easier to find. It’s easy to imagine that elsewhere writers are living rich lives involving endless gatherings of like-minded people drinking sherry at academic gatherings. Maybe there are happy writers living perfect lives. My academic life wasn’t like that. Life outside of academia is far richer than life inside.

A conversation like this makes me want to invite you to dinner right away. How about a little cross-country vacation?

Now, seriously, one last question.

RD: One aspect of your work that I admire (you allude to it in your last response) is how much of the world you bring you bring into your poems.. In your work you refer to your military experience. I wonder how the military prepared you (or not) for poetry. I expect you were quite young when you entered the military. Did you have ideas about writing or being a writer before then or was it something that came later?

MO: Thanks for allowing me to reminisce about my time in the Army. My experiences in the military were not common, I think. I was a linguist and interrogator. My friends in military intelligence discussed books and music, and one, Peter, provided me a reading list, like an instructor, when he saw the gaps in my education from growing up in a small town in Michigan. These books I devoured during these transformative years changed my life for the better, and opened up many doors and windows to a larger world.

When my active duty ended, I weighed several options in the intelligence community, and decided, ultimately, to attend the University of Michigan, where I got a BA in English and took my first creative writing classes. I’ve been blessed to make my living writing, as a copywriter and marketing communications professional, along with a colorful second career writing projects for film and TV, publishing novels and a short story collection, and always poetry, the medium I return to time and time again.

Ruth, I adore road trips and I may end up on your doorstep one night for dinner. Please look me up if you are ever in Los Angeles. It’s been a pleasure to get to know you and your writing better.

The Light Source: An Interview with Kim Magowan

I met Kim Magowan in late 2014. We both entered a Sixfold fiction contest. If you don’t know it, it’s a contest in which the winners are selected by the various writers who enter work into the contest. Stories are submitted anonymously, and voting takes place over three rounds, each writer randomly assigned six stories per round. Kim was assigned my story during one of those rounds. Kim was one of the few readers who left me detailed feedback, and her comments were insightful and generous. If you’ve never submitted to Sixfold, let me tell you, this is a rarity. Somehow, despite all the voters who said things like, I kid you not, that they wished the protagonist of my story would drive off a cliff and die, I ended up winning that contest, and I emailed Kim after to take her up on reading an edited version of the story. We hit it off, and we’ve been sending each other our drafts ever since. Since July of 2017, we’ve been collaboratively writing a short story collection together.

The story Kim submitted in that Sixfold contest was the opening chapter from her debut novel, The Light Source (7.13 Books). Kim is also the author of the short story collection, Undoing, which was winner of the 2017 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Indiana Review, New World Writing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many other venues. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019. She is fiction editor of Pithead Chapel. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. www.kimmagowan.com

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Michelle Ross: The Light Source began as a few individual, but linked, short stories and at some point you made a conscious decision to expand the grouping with the intention of shaping them into a novel. Which stories/chapters had you written already when you made that decision? What was the first chapter you wrote after you decided you were working on the novel? And how did knowing it was now a novel change the writing process or did it?

Kim Magowan: I feel like my process with the novel is textbook “what not to do”! I wrote the book all out of order. The first section I drafted was the Beth chapter, Chapter 3, when I was in graduate school, around when the chapter takes place (1994). I saw it as a stand-alone story. Soon after, I wrote the Heather chapter (Chapter 2). In 2011, when at long last I became serious about writing, I dusted off those two stories and substantially revised them. That same year I went to my 25th high school reunion, and afterwards wrote the Mamie chapter (Chapter 6). Once that was drafted, I wrote the Porter chapter (Chapter 4)—he was my villain, he needed to tell his side of the story. All this time I believed I was writing a bunch of linked short stories, along the lines of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, but I was becoming increasingly uneasy. For one, both the Mamie story and Porter story are really long, and for two, the Porter story was too profane to publish. It was my favorite thing I’d written to date, but I knew it didn’t really work as a stand-alone story. Around this time (2012), an agent contacted me to ask if I was working in a novel, and I realized (duh!) of course I was—kicking and screaming, denying it all the way. So in the next 5 weeks, when I was in New Orleans with my family, I slapped together a first draft of both the Julie chapter (Chapter 7) and the Ian chapter (Chapter 1). It was the most intensive writing experience of my life—I wrote about 70 pages in 5 weeks. In the next few years I added material, mostly to the Julie chapter. I cut a chapter that seemed too Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the others,” though that’s the opening story to my Undoing collection (and if you read “When in Rome,” you’ll see I never bothered to change the character names, so Julie has a cameo appearance). The Pam chapter (Chapter 5) came last. Unfortunately I suspect the only way I can write a novel is in this Homer Simpson “Doh!” backdoor way. I am too intimidated to write a NOVEL (oh my) unless I fall into it accidentally.

MR: Probably my favorite chapter is the Heather chapter. A lot of that chapter is Heather strolling through memories—of Julie over the years, but also of Heather’s family and her own life—but at the same time, the chapter/story feels grounded in the present because Heather is physically strolling around Amsterdam as she broods and you do such an amazing job of bringing that place to life. Writing that particular chapter in the way you did seems now like such a natural, inevitable choice. How else do you pull off so much meandering into backstory unless the character is presently meandering through space, right? Is this something you were thinking about as you wrote the chapter?

KM: Thank you! I like that chapter too. Heather is my favorite character. She captured my imagination early on. I got loads of nice rejection letters for that story before The Gettysburg Review published it, and I think it kept getting rejected because nothing really happens—Heather writes a letter and ruminates. Amsterdam, for me, is the perfect setting for deep-dive introspection that isn’t necessarily productive. It’s a beautiful city and also a decadent city. My memories of Amsterdam are a weird combination of precise and smeary. I needed Heather to be in a place where she felt lost, far away from Julie, trying to get her bearings, sifting through a past made complicated because of Julie’s denial and Heather’s collusion. Heather feels alone, even when she isn’t physically alone (she makes a friend but a friend who doesn’t speak her languages). A lot of my novel is about watching—characters are always watching each other, particularly observing Julie. Amsterdam for me is the essence of a voyeuristic city.

MR: There is a lot of voyeurism in your novel, but it’s largely a kind of claustrophobic voyeurism in that this is a group of friends studying and commenting on each other over the years, much in the way that families often do. There are quite a few moments in the novel when one of them says something about Julie or Heather to others in the group along the lines of “You know Julie…” or “You know Heather…” There can be something comforting in people thinking they know you, but on the other hand, it can be stifling and annoying as hell. While this novel is on one level a love story between two people, on another level, it’s a story of the dynamics between a large group of friends, the kind of group that operates much like a family, yes?

KM: Yes, absolutely—when I (inarticulately) describe my book, I say it’s about love and friendship. I went to boarding school, and your point feels absolutely true to me—one’s friends are like family, in both positive and negative ways. There’s this kind of intimate knowledge boarding school friends have of each other, and like family members, they know exactly how to wound. Beth refers to this precision wounding in her chapter as “many small splinters that embed themselves under our skin.” I tried to capture their intimacy by shorthand—for instance, through the obnoxious ways they “tease” each other, and the nicknames they have. They love each other but annoy each other. They think they have each other entirely figured out; they get a lot wrong. In different ways Heather and Julie both experience that group knowledge as stifling. Heather is regarded as the cavalier slut (for years none of them realize she’s deeply in love), and Julie is the good girl/ homecoming queen (if boarding schools had homecoming queens; they’re too patrician). It’s very hard for outsiders to break in to this kind of closed loop. Porter legitimately sees Julie’s friends as exclusionary.

MR: The Pam chapter is another favorite of mine. It’s tiny compared to the other chapters/stories, but Pam is no less realized than other characters in the novel, and it’s a perfect little story that reveals much about Heather. In choosing peripheral characters for the novel, did you plan out in any way what you thought these chapters needed to accomplish within the novel? Or did these characters and their stories come about more accidentally?

KM: I wrote the Pam chapter after I cut the Emily chapter (and threw that one into my Undoing collection). I decided Emily was too peripheral, but I wanted to insert a character who was an outsider, not part of this incestuous, warm knot of boarding school friends. Also, I wanted a tempering perspective on Heather. Mostly the reader experiences Heather as lovelorn, so I wanted an example of her treating a partner cavalierly. Heather is honest with Pam, but nonetheless she hurts her badly (even if Heather points out later that heartbreak is an inevitable risk of falling in love). Pam is my way of showing that Heather also has some blood on her hands.

MR: Was any particular character easier or more difficult to inhabit than the others?

KM: Strangely enough, Porter was very easy for me to inhabit. He’s the bad guy of the novel, but I felt like I completely understood him—I was channeling his voice. That chapter was the most fun to write. I needed to lay out clues that Porter was ignoring or misinterpreting. He’s a smart guy, but he misconstrues what he sees.

MR: We don’t hear Julie’s voice until the end of the novel. All that time we’ve gotten all these different characters’ versions of Julie, so when she finally speaks, it’s a little bit startling, in a good way, to finally get into her head. What’s more is that you do something different in Julie’s chapter with time. The other chapters in the novel move chronologically through time, each chapter occupying a distinct moment in time somewhere from 1994 to 2013. Julie’s chapter is composed of slices of 1994, 1997, 2006, 2012, and 2013, so we’re not only getting a present-time Julie, we’re getting the various Julies of the past as well. Would you talk about this choice to break the pattern of time in this way and to save all of Julie’s sections for last?

KM: Along with Heather, Julie’s the main character, but Heather is so open, and Julie is the opposite: closed and guarded. I needed her story to come at the end. I knew that choice was risky. She is not someone the reader is inclined to sympathize with by that point in the novel. My goal was not to make Julie likeable (frankly, I get very impatient with that adjective! I could give a crap about “likeable”), but to make her comprehensible. There are, as you say, various Julies, so I didn’t feel like I could write the 2012-13 version of her and leave it at that. I needed to show what she was thinking and feeling at earlier stages in the novel: why she chooses Heather, why she bails. The Julie chapter begins right where the Beth chapter ends—Beth sees Heather and Julie talking on the beach. I wanted to dramatize that conversation. Again, that was a chapter I wrote all out of order. I feel like I should attach a warning label: do not follow my madwoman, counter-productive process! The first part I wrote was the kitchen scene where Julie talks to Heather and their twins. Then I wrote the section where Julie has coffee with Porter, then a first section I later cut, then the ending. But I had to keep going back to that chapter and filling in more material, trying to flesh out Julie’s character, to clarify why she made her often problematic choices. I made her suffer more: the scene with her husband Rob was a later addition. So was the trampoline scene, because my novel was a love story missing a scene of Heather and Julie actually being a couple, in love, but struggling and at odds. The chapter originally began in 1986, when Ian, Julie, Heather, and Beth are in high school. I cut that section (it was leaden) late in my revision process, after Leland Cheuk had accepted the novel and I was doing a final tighten/ compression.

MR: Your story collection, Undoing, also contains several linked stories and you’ve written a few more linked stories since then. Why do you think you find yourself returning to particular characters again and again? Are you thinking about them between writing those stories or do they come back to you out of the blue?

KM: Ha! This goes back to what I said regarding your first question—the only way I can write a novel is to back into it, unawares. Either of those linked sets of stories (the Laurel ones, the Ben and Miriam ones) could have easily turned into a novel. This year I wrote yet another Laurel story and yet another Ben and Miriam story. Those characters have a hold on me; I know a lot more about them then I put on the page. But who the hell has the time to write a novel? And yes, I think about them in between writing about them, and I write about them when those thoughts get so brim-full they overflow. I may well end up writing a novel about them, but it will be entirely against my will.

MR: How would you compare the process of putting together the novel versus the story collection? Is there some metaphor that suitably encapsulates the different experiences?

KM: Oh man, the processes for me are so entirely different! With the short story collection, the big challenge was getting the story sequence right (though of course, as you and I have laughed and wailed over, no one seems to read short story collections in sequence, so so much for all those hair-tearing hours!). But I could yank any story I had doubts about, so the short story collection process appeals to the perfectionist in me. With a novel, you can’t just toss a chapter, because it holds up scaffolding. Revising novels is more frustrating and laborious. I kept imagining Tim Gunn from Project Runway, when he’s shaking his head over some godawful jumpsuit or ball gown and dictates, “Make it work.” A metaphor? I’d say putting together a story collection is like curating a museum show, figuring out which paintings belong in which rooms and how to light them. Putting together a novel is like being a 15th century cartographer who constantly has to adjust the map of the globe: “Oh shit, there’s a continent there. Must move everything around to make room for that new continent.” There are lots of smudgy eraser marks all over the novel map; it’s much less pristine.

MR: I asked you this question before in another interview when your story collection, Undoing, was published. Will you list ten words that encapsulate The Light Source?

KM: Friendship

Voyeurism

Denial

Betrayal

Trojan Horse

“Addiction”

Charades

Forgiveness

Circles

Light

MR: Why did you put addiction in quotation marks?

KM: I was thinking about one of my characters who identifies as a sex addict, and another character scoffs— she has no patience for that characterization, she believes it’s a way of letting himself off the hook. And I suppose the scare quotes represent for me a broader theme in my novel, a complicated relationship between abjection and accountability. Addicts are under a compulsion, whereas “addicts” persuade themselves they are under a compulsion. Sidenote: when you asked me for ten words, I resisted the urge to look up our last interview, but I bet Addiction was on my list for ten words about Undoing, and I bet there were no scare quotes around it. In an interview George Saunders said he consistently writes about class struggle, and that he doesn’t feel like he chooses that subject: it’s hardwired. There are certainly themes and plots I find myself returning to again and again.

MR: Finally, what’s one of your favorite lines from your novel?

KM: The Heather chapter is the prettiest, I think—the most pull-quotable. This bit is the essence of that chapter, because it shows Heather’s longing for Julie but also her frustration: “Last summer I read my little cousin Lucie a myth about a Greek girl who, unable to settle for having her god-lover only at night, against his warnings burns his fur cape and consequently loses him. ‘Why are you crying?’ Lucie asked me, and I couldn’t say, because I know how Psyche feels; because I want to burn that fucking cloak of fur.” Sidenote: I’ve always been fascinated by the Psyche myth, because it shows what is sexist about quest stories. Male characters go on quests and receive a reward—the princess, the crown. Female characters quest to retrieve what has been lost or stolen from them. On that note, I also like this line from the Porter chapter: “To some degree, all lovers are time machine conjurers, seeking to recover and to repair the past.”